The Apocalypse Reader (12 page)

I NO LONGER dream about the crane operator. Not, in any case, the way I did, as a shepherd of souls, or Virgil, or Charon. I dream about Zachary Holle.

I WAS EATING some meat Travis got in trade for a book he'd foraged-he's a good provider, already-and I bit down hard on a bone. Something crunched inside my jaw and I tasted blood and found one of my teeth alongside my tongue. I did not tell Zachary, who might have worried that I was sick, since that's one of the signs, though I was sure that this time it was just an accident. I spit it out into my hand and put it in my pocket. Later I washed it and considered. I wanted to give it to Zachary. I wanted to give it to Travis, too. Finally I gave it to Travis. The sickness didn't even seem to cross his mind. He immediately went and found a little bag somewhere, to put my tooth in, and hung it around his neck.

When I see how happy he is about it I feel guilty that I even considered giving it to Zachary.

ONE MORNING COMING home I see some early riser sitting outside her house. I consider taking a detour around her, but decide against it. There is no rule against fucking the crane operator, though nobody, to my knowledge, has ever done it. But maybe everyone has done it, keeping it a secret. Someday I will ask Zachary. Or not.

She is leaning back against a great, tilted slab of reinforced concrete from which the metal writhed stilly against the flamingo light. She stares at me as I pass and I lift my hand to her. Then it occurs to me that she might be dead, which makes my waving hand feel strange. Well, it's someone else's concern if she is.

When I push the rug aside, I see Travis is not in his bed. Right away I begin hurrying around the hut, pushing on the carpets hung on the walls as if he were likely to be standing behind one, waiting for me, for hours maybe. "Where are you Travis, where are you," I chant.

Guilty for what?

Well.

I leave and walk quickly around the neighborhood. My neighbors look at me pass and I consider asking if they have seen Travis but I decide not to. I go as far as the embankment over the fire. I already know Travis is not here, though it used to be his favorite place to go. I see Zachary shoving at something in the fire with a charred push broom, its bristles burned off. He does not see me. It is strange to look at him from this distance again; it's the view I had of him when he was a stranger, so now, for a moment, he seems like a stranger again and I think of the two rosettes of hair around his soft nipples and am shocked.

I hurry back. The woman is no longer leaning on her slab. Either someone came with a cart or she was alive all along and I have a reputation. I don't care. I am happy thinking Travis will be home now. More and more he will disappear on some boy business and I will have to let him.

But he is not there.

I try to make some gruel but I keep forgetting to stir it, so it hardens into a great fist on the end of the spoon. I gnaw at it a little but it's foul burned on the outside, grainy and gummy inside. So I sit down outside our hut and just wait. I look back and forth, first toward the huts of my neighbors and the smoke and the black arm of the crane, then toward downtown where we don't go.

It is midday when I see him coming out of Loss's hut. I stand up. As he comes up the tilted slab of flooring between our huts I stretch out my hand to him. He springs up without my help, but then, since I don't withdraw my hand, he stops and reluctantly extends a bulky arm, shaking back the cuff. Even so I have to root around inside it for his hand.

I feel something cold and bristly.

"Hook!" I let go and push back the sleeve. The smell of dishonesty rises. There is the dog's leg, small, dark, and stiff. Its wrist extends back into Travis' sleeve.

"Travis!"

"What?" says Travis, smirking.

"What were you doing with Loss?" I say instead. I find that I am shaking.

"Fucking," he says, proud and mean. He's quoting me, though I'm not sure he knows it, even if there is a lilt of mockery in his voice.

Then he starts to cry. Oh, thank hook.

Choking, he hunches to hide his face. I know it's terrible for him to cry, and especially to let me see him cry right now, when he is being magnificent. But for now, I can still comfort him, even for this, the shame of having a mother. I put my arms right around him and pick him up, as if he were still a little boy. He presses his face against my shoulder, sobbing. His arms are bunched up between us, and the dog's paw jabs into my cheek. I turn my head and kiss its darling, darling little pads.

SIXTEEN SMALL
APOCALYPSES

Lucy Corin

STORY

1. FIRST I responded in the way I thought he wanted me to respond and then I heard what it was he said, which I was not sure how I felt about after all, and have now forgotten. 2. Then she notices that if she agrees with the woman, the woman will assume they have both read the article, and she can watch the esteem growing in the woman's eyes the more silent she becomes. 3. When he was a boy in
The Pied Piper
, cast as a witch who had one early scene and one late scene, in the first scene the Pied Piper said a line from the late scene, so he pictured the line in the script, white next to his in yellow highlight, and as he pronounced the line that followed it-his line, as he saw it-all the rats' eyes went shifty but everyone proceeded directly to the end of the play from there, and even the kids who never made it to the stage took their curtain call responsibly. 4. Later, she was thinking how weird it would be to be a horse and to have a crop hit you behind the saddle out of nowhere.

BOATS

WHEN ANNIE WAS a child, her mother explained her gift and burden: that what she saw was not what others saw. "You know better than that," she told her daughter. "You know better than
them
," she said. Growing up, Annie felt isolated and misunderstood.

Walking by the water a man said to her: "Look at that boat." There was no boat in the ocean that she could see, but he sounded sincere.

Later, another man, this one with a hat, said, "Look at that boat," and this time she did see a boat; it was exactly as he said. But as soon as he said it the boat seemed truer than any boat she'd seen before with her own eyes only.

"Watch it," said her mother, on the phone. Annie stared at her kitchen cabinetry, and saw her mother deep in the glossy paint.

Later, she was eating an enormous salad at an outdoor cafe by the harbor. Every few bites she bent under the table to rearrange a folded napkin under one of its three feet. Soon, she added a bottle cap under a second foot. The third foot hovered. Then, she scooched the table around on the cement. She took another few bites of the salad and it loomed like a mountain in front of her. She could see her knees through the mottled glass tabletop. The top wobbled in its white metal frame. She looked around, feeling the edges of panic. Everyone seemed happy as bunnies. Bunches ate, clinking glasses. Annie turned sharply in her chair, this way, and then the other way. A few people looked up. Her breath felt like a train. More people looked up. A boat went by. It was a harbor and still she could only see one boat. It went by, sails gushing, and by the time she couldn't see it anymore everyone in the cafe had turned to watch her as item by item, signposts, trashcans, pedestrians, and then plank by plank the pier, disappeared, until she was sitting with her salad in a desert at the ocean surrounded by nothing but suspended eyes.

NIGHT AND DAY

I DRIVE BY a motel when I need anything from the other side of town. Town's built like an hourglass, and there's a big lit sun shining from the motel sign. They put all the houses down here and all the stuff up there, so if I'm going to get anything I have to go by it. That's a pun.

In this motel, pets are okay. There's a parking lot around it, and a rising hill of grass around that, like the bank of a moat. Wait until it really starts raining!

An hourglass. Figures. Because of time.

So I drive by, and this time it's day, with the sun over the sun. I see a woman's head doing a swivel, like behind the bank she's riding in a bumper car in a parking space. There's a dog on a leash: I can't see the dog, but I know it's there behind the land. This is suspicious, or prophetic, seeing someone's head but not whatever makes it do the things it does.

Then at night ... I tell you ... the sun at night. It's not right. It's a symptom. It cancels everything out. But if I want anything, it's down that road.

Night, day. I think about getting by. I don't know what to do. It's hard to tell if I get any sleep. I feel pressure to do one thing or another. Sometimes I look up and say "Give me a sign!" but of course I'm kidding. It's only a matter of time before something blows.

PHONE

ALL THE Boys across the courtyard have girlfriends. This boy on the phone on the porch in springtime is letting his voice move, light as a leaf in a river. He's saying, "It's like I'm only me when I'm around you." He's twirling a piece of grass between his thumb and forefinger, watching its head spin. "You're the only one who knows," he's saying. "I know you won't tell anyone."

Dim through the walls behind him his friends are playing their guitars without the amplifiers and laughing with daiquiris. He is secret from everyone, especially the girl on the phone. It's obvious to anyone paying attention. When the earth shakes and the dust of the rest of the world rises from the lawn, when the posts that hold the roof above him snap, he feels no more misty and no less certain than he had the moment before. He still says, "I love you" into the phone, and believes it the same. The girl on the phone, who always felt afraid he might not love her, feels the earth turning to powder as he says the words, and thinks, "This must mean he really loves me," and in the next instant thinks, "It doesn't count!" and by the next moment the end of the world has already happened. The telephone and the amplifier dot hillsides on opposite ends of the universe. The boy's eyelashes flutter and spin like a blown dandelion. The girl's fingernails sparkle in shards.

STAR CHART

WE TOOK A day trip to San Francisco and I wanted dim sum, which I've never gotten to eat, but my uncle basically ordered only shrimp and one pork thing and the pork thing was so divine I just haven't had anything like it-it was so cinnamon-y and had puffy white bun stuff around it. Like a cake you might make. But all the rest was one delicious yet almost identical shrimp thing after another. My uncle sensed a bit of boredom with the shrimp from us girls. He said, "I just wanted to show you what I like."

He's a glassblower and he makes a lot of fish to sell. He also scuba dives and goes on fly-fishing trips and deep-sea fishing trips. He also collects fish figures, mostly realistic ones. One time when I was visiting he was swimming and got stung by a whole mass of jellyfish and came back to the house covered in whip marks, but he was so quiet, and just sat there while my aunt put meat tenderizer on him that I didn't really see that he was in any pain. In Chinatown I liked the tea shops and candy shops, not to eat (my uncle enjoys the dried octopus snacks) so much as to wonder at. All those categories of things and I can't remember any of the names just that there was a lot. My cousin bought a silk haltertop, "for clubbing if he'll let me out of the house" and I bought a cotton robe. She's the blonde and I'm the brunette. Then we went to the aquarium.

"Sturgeon! Yum!" I have never been to an aquarium with someone who wanted to eat everything. Then on the way back to the cabin we picked up Dungeness crabs and clams and mussels and my uncle made that San Francisco-style stew with sourdough for dinner. We ate outside. I hardly ever look at the sky, but my uncle looked up, crossing his legs and sipping his wine. My uncle was getting pretty drunk, which at first comes off like he's a little pleased with himself, lightening up (he's a big guy) but pretty soon his psychology starts rumbling. He went into his bags and got out a star chart. I don't know anything about stars. He came back out and said, "Speaking of child abuse ..." and my cousin got up from the table and went inside and came back with an extra shirt to put on. He said, "Remember how we used to look at the stars?" and my cousin said, "Dad, put the chart away," and put the shirt on. He kept not letting up on the subject. I couldn't tell what he wanted me to do, if it was a test involving whether or not I'd think the star chart was cool. I cleared some dishes and he followed me into the kitchen with the star chart. It was yellow, with two parts that revolved in relation to each other.