9

In the kitchen Michelle killed cockroaches with her bare hands. She’d become immune to it. Every morning they were there, scuttling across the counter, seeking refuge in the slats of the plastic dish rack. The only weapons handy were the dollar-store glasses prone to shattering, and so Michelle began bringing her hands down on them with a slap so hard it pulverized them, it juiced them. Her hand would go warm and tingle, vibrations rising up her shoulder. She would turn on the faucet and rinse the tiny carcasses from her palm. The big ones, the baby ones they called tweedlebugs—she smacked them all to death.

I Am Killing Roaches! Michelle hollered. With My Bare Hands! Michelle needed a witness. To both her bravery and the mundane horror of her life.

Michelle’s studio was full of bugs. Michelle thought perhaps the government should visit her apartment and investigate, maybe there was something they could learn about sustaining life, because the bugs had learned to work it out. Invaders, but still. Jungle bugs, stowaways on ships, on trucks driven up from the tropics. They would emerge from nowhere, alarming Michelle. One looked like a feather, it had a million wispy legs floating its slinky body across the linoleum. It was almost beautiful, except it made her throat close and her eyes water. When Michelle killed it, its legs shriveled away and it became just another stain on the kitchen floor.

Beetles fat as tanks waddled from cracks in the walls, sturdy, shiny beetles that looked fake, like a gag beetle you’d scare a coworker with. Or a robot bug plodding toward you by remote control. Michelle screamed. If she killed the beetle she would hear its body crunch. Her arms rolled with goose bumps.

Michelle grabbed a glass and captured the formidable beetle. She released it in the alley below, knowing that it would only find its way back inside.

On the first day of the end of the world, Michelle got out of bed, walked into the kitchen, and smacked some roaches. She dumped a half-empty champagne flute swampy with dead fruit flies into the drain. She made coffee. Michelle made her coffee camp-style, tucking a filter into a plastic cone and hovering it over a mug. She knew she needed to buy a coffee machine or a French press or something, but she’d been scared to spend the money. Michelle wondered if things would perhaps become free now that the world was going to end. Would people become very greedy or very generous? Michelle could imagine manufacturers succumbing to an insanity of scarcity, raising their prices and padding their mortality with profit. She could also imagine them shrugging a cosmic oh-fucking-well and releasing their inventory, allowing the world to take whatever it wanted.

If Michelle had only a bit more time left to be in the world, she wanted to stop worrying about money. The relief of that possibility, never before considered, shone over her head like a new sun. Imagine, to stop worrying about money! Michelle was born into such anxiety, it had been her placenta, the water breaking between her mother’s legs, dollars and coins scattered on the ground. They’ll nickel and dime ya to death was a phrase Michelle was acquainted with. No heirlooms, no property or fortune to be passed on to her. Michelle received bitter chips of wisdom from her mothers instead. Money goes to money, like cash was a carousel and Michelle’s people did not have a ticket to ride. Just as easy to marry a rich man as a poor man. The advice seemed to contradict. If money went to money, then a poor girl would find it difficult to find a moneyed man to marry, no? There were no rich men in Chelsea. Indeed, in Chelsea, Massachusetts, it was just as easy to become an unwed teenage mother with a jobless baby daddy as it was to marry anyone, period. Anyway, if rich people sucked so bad, why was Michelle being encouraged to marry one?

Here at the end of the world, Michelle was suddenly over poverty. The shield she had welded around her heart to protect herself from the pain of it was corroding like rust in the rain. It had felt so strong, but there in the apocalypse kitchen Michelle felt it flimsy as a floppy disk—so much philosophy, political analysis, rebellious identity, and liquored intoxication just to stave off the simple scary sadness of being broke. Michelle began to cry. The anxiety of being poor and not understanding how to not be. Learning she would die so soon had cracked Michelle’s bravado. Her hand holding the plastic coffee thing over a mug, she fed slow gulps of boiling water to the grounds. Still hungover, spacey, tired, not caffeinated, in that honest pocket, a tender, beaten place, not yet inflated with the day’s efforts, Michelle felt the broken reality of her life. She was not her mothers, but she was in fact her mothers’ daughter, valorizing a struggle that was breaking her down.

A decade spent in the downtrodden underground had warped Michelle’s ambitions. In a place where powerless people fought over who had the least amount of power, Michelle had applied herself to the acquisition of hardship. People bragged about and competed for who had it the worst. Whose parents were brokest, whose PTSD the most damaging. “Calling people out on their shit” was a worthwhile way to pass the time. Michelle wanted her last days to be of a higher quality. She knew that she would likely leave the world as broke—broker—than she had entered it, but she was through pretending she was somehow the better for it, had chosen a superior mode of existence rather than been assigned a losing lotto ticket of economics and genetics at birth and then written a love story about it. She also thought she would think about trying to stop drinking.

Michelle took a shower. The news of the coming calamity had not impacted water purification, the plumbing that snaked through her building and out beneath the street, tubing off—where? Where did Michelle’s water come from? Where did it go when it spiraled down the drain? The world would end before Michelle had the chance to understand how it had ever worked. Outside the rotted bathroom window the freeway whizzed with cars. Tiny cars, zippy electric things propelled by their batteries, plus some older ones buzzing on compost and then, every so often, a lumbering antique wheezed by, gargling gasoline.

Michelle often read news articles that explored how the poor, in their ignorance, destroyed their own environments, be they Los Angelenos torching their neighborhood grocery stores or South Americans slashing their rain forests. The poor inherited the archaic systems of the rich as the rich moved on to better ways of life the poor could not afford. And so the poor drove their gasoline hand-me-downs, sold away their corner of the earth and ate the last endangered sea turtle. Michelle imagined the poor would be blamed for the earth’s catastrophe, the way gay people and artists got blamed for gentrification when people in suits came to town and the landlords jacked up the rent.

A crash happened on the freeway below, a battery car driven straight into the wall. It looked like a television show. Michelle realized she only ever saw cars crash on television. After the one car crashed, another car, gas powered, crashed beside it. It didn’t need to crash, it’s like it was inspired. It simply followed suit, swirling the wheel and aiming itself into the wall. It took three cars crashed on the bank of the freeway, accordioned and steaming, for Michelle to realize she was witnessing suicides. She turned off her shower and climbed out of the tub. Michelle felt the urge to return to the window, to gawk at the spectacle of the fire, but also to convince herself of what was happening because it felt unreal. The smoke streamed down her nose and clutched at her throat, choking her. She did not return to the window. She would probably begin seeing lots of car crashes, she thought.

Michelle moved through her bathroom gingerly, as if through a haunted house. It felt like she could trip an unseen wire and cause the roof to collapse or a car to burst through her walls. The wail of fire trucks and ambulances pierced the air. She zipped herself into a dress perhaps originally worn by a stewardess for an airline that went bankrupt in 1971. It was Creamsicle orange and woven from polyester so dense it could stop a bullet. It had a weird mock-turtleneck neckline, golden buttons angling down the torso, and box pleats. The second she zipped herself into it Michelle’s armpits began to stink. She pulled her hair into a bun atop her head. She looked like a waitress on Star Trek: Enterprise.

Michelle boiled a pot of pasta and plopped a chunk of margarine into the tangled noodles. She walked the food into the bedroom, something she normally avoided lest the roaches follow and climb through her hair as she slept. She settled onto the floor with her pasta and coffee, her back against the bed. On the television, planes smacked into buildings in an unrecognizable country, perhaps somewhere in Eastern Europe. The planes on the television dropped burning to the ground, the image synced with the smell of smoking automobiles coming in through the rotted bathroom window. All over the world, wherever there were streets, people were running through them. Wherever there were buildings, people were leaping from them. Or blowing them up. The world was a sandcastle doomed to the tide. Why not experience the release of demolition? Buildings vaporized, became a rolling cloud of debris, curling through the streets like a sideways mushroom cloud. It looked like a monster approaching, the shockwave footsteps of a giant lizard. The people who survived it stood stunned and dusted in the street, shit in their hair, speaking to news cameras with the glaze of shock upon them.

Michelle thought it was irresponsible of the journalists to speak to these victims. They needed medical attention, ambulances, all of them. Michelle did not want to watch these people. They looked like they’d had strokes, how they could hardly speak, their twitching faces and their stammer. Michelle chewed her pasta. The TV was so staticky she could barely see the footage of people suiciding from bridges and towers. They were pixels merging into pixels. Michelle began to cry. At the idea of their fear, the moment when they understood they were about to die, even though they had chosen it, that moment when they were both alive and dead, there had to be a split second of instinctive regret, it made Michelle weep with spooky grief. The mock turtleneck of her polyester dress absorbed her tears like a parched landscape. Her hangover was powerful, she was all jangled nerves. She lay down on the floor and cried, the bowl of pasta on her stomach. The phone rang, and it was one of her mothers.

Have you seen the planes? Kym wanted to know. No one ever wanted to talk to Kym about television but today all anyone could do was watch and comment. It was her time to shine. The one in Ukraine? The one in Ohio?

Not The One In Ohio.

Oh my god. And the people, did you see them jumping in New York and in London?

I Saw New York, Not London.

Kym had been tuned in for hours. The carnage filled her with fear, yes, and sadness, of course, but also with an odd satisfaction. She knew something like this would happen. She knew it would get too bad, was getting too bad, had gotten too bad. People could not become incapacitated from their food and water, from the rays conjured to enliven cell phones and tiny gadgets, from computers. Think of all the computers, the dead computers piled upon each other, leaching poison into the earth and the water table. Think of all the new computers, millions and millions being birthed each day by third world women wearing gloves and masks to keep the deathiness of the machines off them, good luck, fat chance. People could not be gasping for air in the very air of their time and not have a solution dealt out to them eventually. A terrible solution for a terrible problem. It was a cancer. People were a cancer on their very own body and like a cancer they would band together and kill, cell after cell. Kym expressed this into her telephone, a true landline, a thick wire curling from a heavy receiver. The phone had been manufactured in the 1980s, it was safe.

Michelle thought Kym’s metaphors were a little off, but her mom was stoned and Michelle got the general gist.

It’s True, Michelle said simply. You Were Right. Michelle was prone on the floor, the phone jammed into her ear, the television rolling its loop of destruction. There’s A Lot I Don’t Understand, Michelle began, I Don’t Know If It’s Because I Actually Have A Bit Of A Hangover, I’m Not Going To Lie—

You out late last night?

No, I Don’t Go Out. I Stay In And Watch Friends. I Rent Movies. I Sleep A Lot. I’m Working On A Scrapbook Project That Is Taking Up A Lot Of My Time.

You writing another book?

Yeah, Michelle lied. It’s Just In My Head Right Now. I Have To Write It There First And Then Put It On The Computer.

You should write a screenplay, Kym suggested. Being in Los Angeles and everything.

Yeah, Michelle said. Well, Being In Los Angeles And Everything There Are Already A Lot Of People Writing Screenplays.

What’s the book about?

Um, It’s About A Crack-Smoking, Aging Psych Nurse In New England.

Whoa, Kym said. I’m not going to tell your mother that. What happens to her?

I’m Still Sorting It Out, Michelle said, distracted by a woman on the television. Her face was smeared with probably blood. On the black-and-white television it looked like chocolate, like fake blood, Karo Syrup and food coloring. But Michelle presumed it was, in fact, real blood. The woman’s mouth was open in a scream.

You might not get to finish it now, Kym said practically. I mean, how long does it take to write a book?

I Don’t Know, A Year? It Depends?

Kym was quiet, considering. You could do it. There’s that National Book Writing Month, right? Where everyone writes a book in thirty days? You might do it. I’d forget about publishing, though. It might not be worth it to go through the trouble of putting out a book if we’re all going to die the day after it comes out, you know? Kym’s voice had a certain crushed quality to it. She kept the phone jammed between her head and a throw pillow, her throat bent around the receiver.

Will You Explain What Is Happening? Michelle asked. Because I’m Confused.

The planet’s dead, Kym said, cheerfully. You know, the ocean keeps rising and it’s so awful, it’s full of computers. And the weather patterns have changed and the hurricanes are getting so much worse, there’s a chain of tsunamis somewhere out in the middle of the ocean and they’re just going to take out most of Southeast Asia sometime this year, and the drinkable water is all but gone, there are all those water riots, we had some this year, not New England we but America we, I think maybe you had some down in Los Angeles—

Michelle bristled at being lumped into Los Angeles we, but bit her tongue. On the television screen the news guy cried so hard his face was wet.

—and basically, you know, there’s no food, everyone has cancer, right, there’s no clean power so every time you turn on your lights you’re killing something that hasn’t already been killed while most things have already been killed, right, there’s the food shortage because there’s a land shortage because the land, the soil, is so dirty, dirty dirt, right, you know what I mean, and the nukes that got exploded last year I mean that whole region is just gone now and then there are all the nukes underneath everything and in the actual ocean, there are nukes getting exploded in the sea, can you imagine, that would make a big wave, right, and the chemical compounds being created in the ocean, these totally new, really bad chemicals are being manufactured sort of organically, well not organically because it’s not organic, what’s in the ocean, but the chemicals we dumped there are coming together and creating these totally new chemical compounds no one understands—

I Saw It! Michelle gasped. I Saw The Ocean, Here In LA, With This Smoke Coming Off It—

Yeah, it’ll kill you, stay away from it, not that you can, really, I mean, not in California right, you live right on the ocean, we do too, we’ll probably all keel over before the month is up, but the idea is that we’re all doomed, really doomed, and you know human nature is so terrible, once things get worse they’re going to really get worse, like science-fiction worse, people eating each other and I don’t know, looting, yeah, but looting who cares about looting it’s going to be total anarchy, just very abusive, a very abusive environment on earth once everything gets so bad, no gas no water no food, just total collapse. Kym laughed. We finally have something that all the world’s governments can agree on. Everyone wants to die. This whole world has a death wish, it’s always had a death wish, it makes sense, it does, it’s just sad. It was a nice place. When I was young we still had animals, we had, you know, land, with trees and grass, that wasn’t so long ago. It’s stunning how quickly things went bad. We had zoos. You and Kyle never even got to go to a zoo.

No? Michelle asked. When I Was Very Little? She had a memory of animals in a pen, small beige furred things, but she couldn’t be sure if it was a memory or a wish or a dream.

There were still some around but they were really pathetic. I mean, zoos have always been pathetic I think, but they got so bad when the animals began getting sick. Animals know, Kym said. Animals know. Watch. I bet the cats will start to die off. The domestic animals, the pets. They know.

Her conversation with Kym was growing wider and more tiring. She arranged for Wendy to call her when she returned from work. Michelle killed the telephone and returned to the TV. The plane crashes were beginning to run together, swoop crash explode, swoop crash explode. Michelle wondered how it felt to steer the planes into the buildings. The planes entered as if into water, a liquid column, smooth. Then the blooming fire, a flaring burst against the sky. Again and again they ran it, until it looked beautiful. Michelle turned the sound off. It was a ballet. It was stop-motion photography of a milk drop or a bullet coring an apple.

Beatrice phoned next. I don’t think I’m going to stay open today, she said simply. It doesn’t feel safe. Or respectful, selling things. Michelle felt a bolt of love for Beatrice. For being such a high-strung hippie, for keeping a junkyard of books open on that slick strip of commerce. For crying all the time. It’s a day for us to be with other people, she said sniffily. Michelle hung up. She was thrilled to not have to go to work.

Kyle picked her up in his Honda Civic, which made creaking, tweeting bird noises as it drove. Squeak, Squeak, Michelle made puppet noises at Kyle, pushing her chirping hands at him as he aimed the car into the sole In-N-Out Burger that had remained open all day. A giant American flag had been draped across the dead trees that ringed the drive-through. What did America have to do with it? Michelle wondered. Were people going to die as Americans rather than as earthlings? Michelle braced herself for a surge of nationalism. Suicide and patriotism, people feeding themselves to the lions with the stars and stripes clenched in their teeth? Michelle realized the end of the world might actually be profoundly tedious. That story hadn’t occurred to her.

Michelle knew that the In-N-Out Burger workers made more than minimum wage and, thus, were making more per hour than she was making at the bookstore, with benefits. Perhaps it was time to investigate the fast-food industry. It was stable, she noted, she’d just gone through Cowshwitz and had seen the gears churning. Unless the cows started dying off before they could be slaughtered, Michelle figured the burger shacks would stay in business longest of all. And even if the cows did begin dying in the mysterious mass deaths that had claimed all the other species, Michelle bet the companies would still sell the meat. People needed food and everyone was going to die now anyway. Michelle anticipated a severe drop in safety standards.

I Wonder If I Should Get A Job At In-N-Out, Michelle wondered aloud.

You’ve got to write a screenplay, Kyle said robustly. Kyle was wicked optimistic. Not even the pending apocalypse could challenge the fantasy he’d concocted for his sister. Michelle would write a screenplay and he would inherit his crazed boss’s successful casting agency. No longer bullied by his narcissistic overlord, he would proudly reject projects that dealt in stereotypes. No more Latina maids and gay hairdressers. The fat best friend would get the man unless the man in fact wanted another man. Kyle dreamed of these future days while being abused by his boss, vacuuming up the chipped glass of another ashtray shattered against the wall in a fit of rage. Kyle’s boss didn’t even smoke. She kept ashtrays around to express her anger.

The previous day, before everything changed, Kyle had been auditioning a roomful of young African American actresses vying for the role of a crack whore in a fake independent—meaning, a film with the aesthetic of an independent but with the content and budget of the studio producing it. Kyle’s stomach twisted tighter each time a woman entered his office wearing ridiculous, humiliating clothing—mismatched platform shoes, shirts stained with food, the poky outlines of their braless nipples. They had given it their all, every one of them, and this depressed Kyle even more because the part was awful, they were all too good for the shitty little film, but that was life, that was the life they had all signed up for, there in Los Angeles. Kyle had signed up to cast shitty, offensive films and these actresses had signed up to embody them and they were all in it together. Kyle adopted the persona of a weary faggot who knew their plight well, yet also knew better than to presume he could know what it was to walk in their shoes, the mismatched Lucite stilettos of a brilliant black actress fated to spend the end-times portraying stumbling crack whores in crappy movies.

Michelle didn’t know how she and her brother would make this leap from the assistant and the barely employable to Hollywood sibling power duo before the world ended, but Michelle loved what her brother saw in her. Had they been born into a life of privilege, if Michelle had been able to identify and then believe in all the options that were out there, then yes, maybe she would be able to clamber out of the ghetto that her brokenness and queerness and political affiliations had kept her in. But deep in her heart Michelle did not believe that the world was so open to her, and so she sniffed out jobs that paid single digits an hour and every job she scored felt like a huge scam, like she had tricked the employers into thinking she was someone else—a college graduate perhaps, a clean person, a person with a rich wardrobe who did not kill cockroaches with her bare hands.

Michelle and Kyle sat on the sectional sofa in his North Hollywood one bedroom, packages from In-N-Out Burger nestled in their arms, the greasy steam opening the pores in their faces like a trash facial. They put french fries into their mouths and watched the world fall apart. Kyle had cable and a better TV and Michelle could now see how blue the skies were, how brightly the flames curled out from buildings, like solar flares shooting off the surface of the sun. The people leaping from high dark windows were people, not pixels. They sat and watched and watched. Eventually, they shut it off. They agreed that it was too much, it had been on for hours and the networks were just milking everyone’s anxiety, it was sick—there was nothing new to show but they were desperate to keep us there, watching.

Michelle was hooked. One newscaster, stationed in Geneva, kept promising that some buildings were about to blow up and Michelle wanted to see it happen. She knew that there was something really wrong with her desire to keep watching. She was in the grips of a detached fascination. She wanted the images on the television to wear her down so she could truly feel whatever it felt like to truly feel what was happening. Surely this alarmed, rubbernecking interest was not what she should be feeling. She was supposed to be feeling something a few layers down, something authentic and meaningful. Michelle feared she was not having an authentic experience of the beginning of the end of the world. She was having a deeply authentic experience of inauthenticity.

The shots of New York City had rattled her the most. It was hard matching up the city she’d visited so many times with this chaotic landscape of rolling debris clouds and screaming, scorched humans. It was like watching Blade Runner and looking for Los Angeles. New York was like one of those asteroid-hits-earth films. Kyle poked at the remote, finally settling on a film about a plucky lady alcoholic who gets sent to rehab and eventually comes to understand that she truly is an alcoholic, and then she finds love—real, sober-person love—and she dumps her British party-man boyfriend to be with her new recovery soul mate. When it was very late, Michelle was scared to go to sleep, to leave Kyle awake on the sectional. He had such problems with anxiety and Michelle was sure he would sit up all night in front of the plasma television, watching suicides and having panic attacks. Which is exactly what he did.