I hadn't known what time it was in two years. It was hard to wait when you didn't know how long you had. In a weird way I felt like I was on vacation. But there was work to be done.
Each of us was getting ready, adding in baby bottle drips to our modest stockpile. Plenty to look at, at least. Hooks to hold up all scraps we found, flowers and wires growing through the floor, holes pasted over with anything, metal turning into deep blue. A dull pastel as you came in, worn tile on the wall, ripped plastic shower curtain stuck to the window with army tape. And through it a calm ocean, eternity of restraint. You wouldn't have suspected the world was so close to ruin.
Two figures stood before a missing wall, real working shutters on the ground and "Pour le rêve" written in the dust. Broken glass popping underfoot, walking over busted doors to get to the real one. Shovels set up for a shelter but all we had to bury ourselves in was sand. Despite some sporadic precautions, everyone knew this place wasn't going to do us much good once the end hit. So what were they doing here? Japanese on the walls and Spanish on the ceilings, communication breaking down. Jule appearing for the occasion. She only spoke English when she had to.
"You come for end of world?"
She could tell they were cool or she wouldn't be talking to them. Green in the head and on their clothes. They looked like twins, but only because everything on them matched, like twins who were still children. They were new.
"Welcome," Jule said. Why was she trusting them just because they looked interesting? It was the worst practice. I glared at them just to even things out.
The girl came up and made some hand signs, using them to say "We - trust - you - by - God - we - seek - we - feel - you.? Then with her voice she said "Got lost."
"What your names?"
"Maria and Z."
"And where you come from?"
Z was standing with her now too. Watching like he got something useful out of everybody. He tossed his green dreads and laughed. "A sad childhood, like everyone." They were in.
+
Jule took them in to the torture room. It was called the torture room because Calc practiced his drums in there. She gave them some scraps and the grand tour...down the wide-open barriers, the brief mouse maze. Rooms unused, rooms we'd forgotten about. Some rooms devoted to nothing but trash, our own landfill we had to live with. She led them through a human-sized hole in the wall that they had to lift their legs up to get through and stopped just on the other side to point out a walled honeycomb of tiny glass cells making up a larger cabinet framed in light pink plastic like a toy box. Inside each cell was a different supply: a compass, a condom... And then, through a cardboard tunnel and up the stair, turn right, you'd find the lab.
The lab...blue science, makeshift medicine...converted from a storage room into pink walls - whoever'd found it before us. Tools we didn't know the use for, parts saved from hospital dumpsters and Biohazard bins. A hammer like a bird's beak, stringy gauze like a spiderweb, malformed metals, shape and sharpness hinting at their use. Magnetic tubing coiling upward on a ternary coat rack. A kid's chemistry set, pretend solutions, surgical texts forming tables. A safety station had been set up next door, long abandoned. We'd already taken what we could use from it, but the place was uninhabitable, even by our standards.
I stood, idle notebook in my grasp, looking out on the station. Airplane trails showed through the window, heading up and down, and below me doors that were all French and shattered like breaking out of a mold. I imagined former tenants smashing through them in their escape. How much better it must feel to run outside to safety than in.
Calc sat on the floor below, arranging a few of his personal items. Matches, medical packaging, a surgeon's knife. It took a while watching him to realize what he was preparing was a meal. Among historical newspapers turning into toilet paper, headlines illegible through slang. Food wrapping, half-used everything, garbage or what was becoming garbage. Light was reflected through dirt in the tile. Looked like it'd be so easy to clean it, but who was going to? He washed the knife in toothpaste, then set it back down on the floor.
"Calc, what's 286 divided by 13?" I asked.
He told me and I wrote it down. "Calories," I said. "What's the square root of pi minus 9?"
"-7.2279954854. Why?"
I smiled. "Just wanted to see if you could do it."
"Fuck you."
Jule was washing in the ocean. I could see her through the safe window. When she came in she sat down before us and said "My teeth hurt."
"Might be time to invest in a toothbrush," I told her.
"I do, it's not enough," she whined.
I motioned at her with the notebook. "It's all this sugar you've been picking up. We're not going to be going to any dentist. Stop with the sugar. We can't afford sugar."
"Sugar's all we have," she said.
+
I had an idea it was evening when sun no longer hit the interior walls and the others had come in. Outside it was getting cold and inside it was getting colder. We gathered in the east stairwell. Z spoke Biblically. Calc came in like sleepwalking and started a fire.
"You don't really think the world's going to end..."
Outside people were living in houses, like normal. They were doing what they always did. In here shelves housed KFMs and KAPs, potassium iodide and medicine droppers. We were better prepared for the worst.
Jule was talking now. "It's paranoia."
Calc held fire on a stick. He said that it was happening already. That the kids would be the first to go, like miners' canaries. They'd see. Everything familiar lost to the big machine in tear gas crowds.
"Why are my eyes watering?" he asked, it seemed of Jule.
"Maybe you're crying."
Calc put the fire down. "Am I crying?" he asked no one, his voice only now beginning to tremble.
Before sleep I crept down to the cupboards, and only as I came up upon the empty shelves was I able to admit how hungry I was. I'd wanted the orange but Maria had gotten to it first. Garbage was empty and world was dark. There wouldn't be anything new till tomorrow. For some reason this felt much worse than it was, so that I sat down and just couldn't get up. Then I wished I could starve for weeks, grieved that this was not even the sort of tragedy that could be profound, that you got something out of suffering through. It was just a night.
+
In the morning I settle down into a nest of wires braided into dysfunction, on a floor sprinkled with shards of glass. Jule is walking around barefoot. I feel like I should tell her not to, but I know she won't listen to me. I tell her anyway. She doesn't listen. She curls up in the corner of the room and starts reading intently the nutrition information on one piece of trash after another. She's as good as asleep to us, so that Z and I are the only ones in the room.
"Puzzle's almost done," I say. "They just need to make a piece that will fit with something so twisted." Z's decoding a scrap of styrofoam. I realize this is the first time I've spoken to him.
"Did you do that?" he says in distinct syllables, each one stressed as much as the other.
I look behind me to where he's looking, at a graffiti mural bursting open with metal flowers on a giant egg, cracks in the walls betraying its two dimensions. Why he should assume it was me, when there are others living here, and many more before us...
"No," I say, turning back to him. "I'm not an artist."
"Ah," he sighs. "Me neither. But it's an important job. We need more beautiful pictures."
"Pictures? The world's about to end. We have more practical matters to worry about."
"What are your worries?" he asks, looking me up and down. I notice I haven't done anything all day.
"I'm not that worried," I say.
We both think of something for me to do.
"Maybe you should be an artist."
"No." He's looking for some explanation so I give him one. "Why strive for any great goal when we all might die soon anyway?"
"We all always might."
"Oh that's really some consolation," I tell him.
He's still decoding and smiling as though the speculations of this conversation couldn't interrupt any of his normal routines of action. "This stuff was invented by the dinosaurs. Their innovations getting dusty. When the old tech is finally set off..." he says, then pauses so long I almost don't care what he's going to finish with. "...Kind of an anticlimax."
We'd been hearing the forecasts since before I'd been born. As a kid I'd hoped that when the world blew up it would be when I was doing homework, or about to give a speech in class. Now I wished for it more and more of the time.
"Goodnight," Calc said coming in, dragging a loose mattress in from the other room. He dropped it with a bounce on top of some clutter and went back into the other room for a moment.
As he left Jule got up without looking down, as if the two were hooked up remotely. She looked determined moving forward, paused to maneuver around me, and stepped barefoot on the glass. I cannot replicate the sound she made, but I can imitate it. It was something like "Aaaeeeerrgmmmmmm," and she landed softly on the mattress Calc had moved there.
"Shit," Z and I said in unison, though his was more one of concern while mine was just shock.
But she didn't even pause, just made the sound as she kept walking, and then she was silent, trying to make us think nothing could get to her. And maybe nothing could.
+
I try to busy myself with cooking, but I can't get the fire started. The next day I take up interior decoration, but when I ask no one can tell anything's been changed. There must be a use for me here. Can't I do anything?
"Need help?" I'm asking Z while he works trying to build some machine I don't know the use for. I can tell this is going to turn out to be the kind of help that makes everything take much longer and the finished product not as good.
Instead I bring myself outside. I do the dishes in the sea and afterward go for a walk. At first just scaling the long government fence that surrounds our home. White picket in better times. Then once it ends I keep following where I think it would have gone. A straight line through other buildings - other objects that used to work, everything broken and impotent now. Nothing doing any good.
I come back in through the first room and Maria is in there. All she does is silently prepare, stacking crates of army paste and sewing protective costumes from material she goes out and gets during the days. I'm nonsensically comforted by the sound of the thread running through the crinkly fabric, to sleep almost.
I haven't seen Jule in a while. Actually a week, I think. The building isn't very big - I don't know where she could be.
Her voice was in my head, so it's what I expected to hear when Z came in and said, "Get the blood up from the reservoir."
I laughed at the contrast. "You alright there?" he asked.
"Yeah, but it doesn't sound like she is..."
He had every right to be concerned. I'd been dreaming up, computer-generating ways I could finish myself before the end struck. But at that moment my preoccupation turned stale. I'd figured it out. It didn't make sense why I should have to feel good. It didn't matter to the world, didn't change reality.
And now I did hear Jule, crying out from the other room, panicked voices consoling her. She was telling us something about pain. She said she didn't trust them. That there was nothing they could do for her. Then for the first time since I'd been here, we were making a trip to the hospital.
+
Waiting room upon waiting room... None of us knew where to go. I felt like I was killing her with my stupidity. We carried her, each of us taking a side. I had my arm around her back with Calc so I could feel how skinny she really was.
When we found it we put her on the table. She crumpled the paper beneath her like fresh grass. I imagined us all somewhere far away. When the doctor came in, she reached down and revealed her leg.
The doctor didn't have any reaction, but the rest of us hadn't seen anything like this yet.
"Oh, Jule," I murmured.
But then I wished I hadn't said anything cause she looked ashamed, like what had happened to her was her fault. I remembered the glass.
Doctor inspected her silently for a moment, keeping in her opinion which we all desperately wanted to know. She held her leg like a golf club. Then she said, "I'm afraid we're very late with this one."
"I don't understand," Maria said, looking at Jule.
"Just say what you mean," she said.
"We're going to have to remove your leg."
Jule made a new expression that seemed to change the whole shape of her face, like just by the doctor's words she had become a different kind of person.
Maria's face changed too, but slower. "No way," she said once she got it. "No way, we get you out of here."
"You're in the best hands with us," the doctor scolded. She got louder as we left the room. "This is serious!" her voice echoed down the hall.
We were bringing Jule back across thin carpet, maneuvering through dying crowds, shoving our way into the elevator...and before we even made it down, I had a thought that felt forbidden. Why should she care about her leg when we're all going to die soon anyway?
+
We're all up there, in the lab. Jule stretched out on a thin shelf, Calc and Maria cleaning her, among horseshoes and broken mirrors, a comforting bucket of stolen medicines. Everything looked so dirty, Maria's green dreads reminded me of mold just then, even though she looked pretty. Jule lay like an ancient statue, or a model for one, moving as little as possible. The others brought up the leg and a syringe. Then they said to her, ?You do it.? She injected herself with something green, then ate some pills that looked metal. Then they all sat around and told her how great they thought she was.
"Jule, you a beautiful woman. You deserve great life and you will once get."
"The goddess of the apocalypse..."
"We love you, Julia," Calc said easily.
They looked at me.
"Yeah, what they said," I told her from the doorway. The smile I gave her felt physically painful, and her expression didn't change.
I left as soon as they started burning leaves and dancing around her.
Heading down the crooked hall I could see it was almost dark out. In a room I claimed as mine I sobbed alone, watching the sunny day end and not being able to do a thing about it.
+
For a long time she stayed anchored to the lab, gazing at the glass-covered sea and crying out when she wanted something. And sometimes she just cried, animal wails we could not comprehend. But mostly she was silent and concentrative, as if working on something inside herself that no one else could reach. She got instructions on how to breathe. We brought her food and things to do. Two more trips to the medical warehouse went by. And after we let her leave her place on the shelf she still stayed, huddled like a worm under the mildew ceiling, till the others brought her out and only then did she realize that she could walk.
No one was in agreement on whether the leaves had anything to do with it, but before the season's change her malady had begun to evaporate. The mark divided into spots that resembled old bruises. We assailed her with science and religion, so like reverse gunfire her wounds cleared up; the colors on her leg went white. For the first time in my life I didn't hate technology. We could all see what the doctor said, that she was going to be alright. She would die intact.
+
Past a yellow sunrise up from the coast, almost too far away to see a black castle-factory, from miniature abandoned cities, our own ghost town became visible again. The day was silent so far, like allowing for whatever needed to happen.
I was taking care of Jule today, not that she needed taking care of, but she didn't need not to be so I brought her in some pills and oranges, sat with her through far-away test blasts, each of us barely making out the benign puffs that beat like an awkward drum as I cleaned her and wrapped her back up.
"Thanks," she said in a way that made it seem true even though it wasn't an opinion. Then she asked, ?What time is it??
I smiled and said I didn't know.
Only when I left to gather more supplies did it occur to me how far away the future was. No matter the time, it just didn't exist. For me and Jule, we prepared for it, working constantly to prevent another infection with whatever moments we had left. And I knew that I'd been wrong. That it did matter what happened to her, just today, or any day. Everything mattered as long as it was still happening. I gathered the iodine and gauze among the mess, and an empty Easter basket and an old valentine just for the hell of it. I didn't want to let go of anything.
+
That night I'm on a mattress in the torture room, but I can't sleep so I get up, shuffling through complete darkness into the next few rooms. I stop and stand in each of them, smiling at the cool breeze that finds its way in through poorly-covered windows. I feel like I'm somewhere far away, and yet this is my home. This is where I should be. I come to the last room on the floor and stop before I go inside.
Jule is inside masturbating. I hear her facing the other way, jerking and whimpering, crying almost, like she has more on her mind than her body again. She sounds so lonely I wonder if I should go in there, if she would want me to. I think about when I would have wanted someone to, just about anyone at the time so maybe she could accept me, but then there were also times when I just needed to be alone, to where I wouldn't even have acknowledged anyone's presence if they tried. I listen some more and decide that she doesn't want me to, but that I want to so much that I'm going to go in there anyway, despite what she wants. That I don't care what she wants, and how I could convince her that I'm what she wants and how happy we'd be together, until I realize she's not alone after all. There is Calc now too, making noise, probably impregnating someone I should be loving like a sister if at all. And it's better this way, I know. There's nothing I want enough to take it from someone else. Not because it's wrong, because I really don't care enough, about anything. And I think it's fitting then, that I'll die.
+
That morning I didn't even have a chance to wake up. I was already sleep-running through the rooms, looking for the others. I must have fallen asleep about 5 minutes ago.
When I get downstairs Z is there, looking straight up. When he sees me he runs over. He grabs me by the shoulders and shouts.
"They're exploding bombs in the sky!"
I run outside to look up and see but I've already heard the blasts right above us, so that I'm having trouble hearing anything else. It doesn't sound like the recordings, or my nightmares. People everywhere must be surprised. But we saw it coming from miles away.
I'm worried about Jule, can't find her now. I'm standing on the grey shoreline, bent under an orange sky. Calc is crouched at the very edge, facing the horizon. I want to call out to him but it's too loud. I want to ask him what he's going to do. Instead I watch him stand olympic with his arms outstretched, hesitating one moment. In that moment he looks back at me, smiling as he dives forward into still water and starts to swim.
