The End’s endless summer was relentless, made us peel from anywhere we sat. It followed us into every corner, every moment.
Nothing stayed white in all that heat. No such feeling as clean anymore as the streets stayed spattered, the chemical contagion and evaporations continued.
Viruses spread through tap water. Norwalk and rota. C Difficile. The lake water was overrun with flushed prescriptions, antibiotic residue passed through urine. Bacterial defense mechanisms strengthened, developed immunities we could not. The treatment system was caught off guard, unprepared for the imbalance of bad medicine. Gastrointestinal outbreaks came in waves, stomach and intestinal linings in constant distress. They said it could take years to develop the right water treatment. It was something they’d never prepared for. We didn’t have years to wait, so instead we learned to collect rainwater between rations handed out in jugs outside City Hall. It was the first thing we had to start lining up for. We were told it was from an emergency stockpile, that we had to use it sparingly.
We were told the city wasn’t sure how long supplies would last, or whether other cities would be able to help. The problem was everywhere, they said, and some places were worse off already. Niagara Falls was over, decimated; that place hadn’t been running on anything but illusion anyway. No one was really surprised to hear the news.
Here, the rations weren’t enough. Unwilling to let go of old comforts, people wanted to shower, bathe, cook, clean, so they used the tap water despite the risks, smearing their floors and counters and bodies with germs, never understanding how viruses spread. “If we can’t see it, then it can’t be real,” their collective conscious confirmed. Induce vomiting. Cramps, bloating, diarrhea, nausea, fever. Secondary symptoms: paranoia. The city’s corneas had turned the colour of viscera, its winds a deep beige. Grains of contamination stained everything and anything you touched was coated in microscopic illness, flecks of shit and puke.
We forgot what it felt like to be anything but filthy. Clean wasn’t even a concept anymore. Eventually we also forgot about television and glossy magazines and newspapers. Forgot about shopping for new clothing or shoes or records. Forgot about apples, oranges, plums, about peaches and fresh red peppers. Forgot about money and the luxury of new things.
But we remembered scarcity. Understood it, finally, through the standard-issue care packages, brown sacks of whatever could be spared, not just water now but thin bars of soap, bandaids, tampons, peanut butter sometimes, or canned beans. We heard food supplies came from emergency reserves that would eventually run out. We heard no answers about what would happen after that.
City grocery stores only had about three days’ worth of food at the best of times; shelves here stayed empty, doors locked, lights off.
We heard some cities were better off than others, though; that Montreal still had electricity fifty percent of the time, that some European cities like Paris had set up community kitchens in city squares where they had massive cookouts over bonfires.
But Montreal was too far and Paris was only a rumour, so we stayed with what we knew. I just dealt with it all in my usual way anyway: by staying drunk, scavenging pills. Kept my hand out constantly even though I knew it would make me sick again in a few days.
Everyone was floating around then. No one knew what to do. The roads were always lined up, jammed with people leaving, thinking that if they got out, got somewhere open and northern, it would all be okay.
But smaller towns weren’t helping out the big cities much. They weren’t even letting newcomers in. People were driving north, hoping to be saved, and being told to turn around. No one had enough to share. Whole neighbourhood blocks succumbed to spontaneous combustion.
The rest of us just crashed around, too sick and uneasy to stay settled, believing that we’d all be led somewhere else at some point soon. I was okay with this, used to the in-between. The feeling I used to call “figuring things out” became the norm.
Confession: we’d been waiting for the world to end. Believed it would be Our Time. We—meaning us, our friends, our familiar faces—believed ourselves to be ready for this, whatever that meant. Remember, it was a scene. A cult of death teasers. What had started with Valium continued with Shit Kitten, who rose up to fill the gap on the circuit after Valium’s decomposition. Shit Kitten showed us how to spend nights lighting fires at the backs of our throats.
There was—still is—a guy named Tooth. Not a nickname; something he always insisted was more serious than that, a name he’d picked for himself when he joined Shit Kitten, the band’s philosophy being that we all have two choices: be what the world decides you’ll be, or be what you want to be, and he wanted to be Tooth and his singer was Rattail. Self-made, Tooth called it.
We were drinking outside the back door of the Mission when he asked me if I ever thought of myself that way, but I didn’t really know how to answer because everything he talked about sounded too much like being alive and I only knew deconstruction. I felt embarrassed then, like Tooth would feel too much of a distance between us to keep talking to me, but he did keep talking, about how Shit Kitten doesn’t think of what they do as songwriting, that they instead create inverted rituals, channel confessions that don’t come from the band but from the audience.
“We want to rip you all apart, starting from your insides.” I remember that exact phrase because he took out a ballpoint pen and wrote those words on the white toe of my black high tops.
It sounded like a bad thing but Tooth said it wasn’t, that it was communal. When people go see a band they’re all there for the same reasons. Shows are ritualistic. Remove the sound but keep the movement and you’re witnessing something tribal. A new force in the room.
Tooth took my hand in his mouth. The fire in my throat had made me manic so I let him take my tongue, too. His teeth were stunted yellow cubes, lips reluctant around mine even though his hand tugged at the back of my bra.
After he’d told me all about himself it was time to go back in, time for the show to start. I’d given him nothing except a little tongue, but still he wanted me to follow him into the Mission. We stood up and the alley swerved. The fire’s flames were licking all the way down my esophagus. “Whatever happens, Shit Kitten’s taking all our fans with us. You’re in the club now,” he said.
Inside, Aimee stood tall in electric blue heels. Bare legs and a mini in November. Above her ankle was a scratch that could have been dirt. She let me climb on her back so I could see the stage over the heads of mutant boys. She shivered under me every time my hair poked into the back of her neck. I breathed for her through the oval of my mouth as Shit Kitten drew a ritual around us, built a song called “PostApoc” up and up until we believed its presence would blanket us. People leaned back on their heels, daring to faint into the absolute faith in what they were hearing: that The End would be easy, especially if you wanted it to be.
“It’s my body and I’ll die if I want to,” the band sang. And we answered back, because we wanted it, had been feeling it teem in the heat and repression for years. Even though the city was quivering all around us, we felt far away from it, felt like if it touched us we were ready anyway.
It’s my body and I’ll die if I want to.