The Cabin at the End of the World(69)

I pitch the staff behind Leonard. It bounces once and plows into the end table with the yellow-shaded lamp, which tumbles and crashes to the floor. I tell you, Andrew and Eric, I’m sorry.

I will never pick up that weapon again. This, at least, has been promised to me. Leonard’s face is unrecognizable as having once been a face. His white shirt is only white in spots. I am dizzy but not dizzy enough to be on the floor, but that’s where I am now, on my hands and knees. I pull out his mesh mask from his back pocket and stuff it in mine. Going for the mask is as inexplicable as it is instinctual. Then I root around under Leonard’s chair. I find a tooth and I twitch and flick it away as though I’d accidentally picked up a poisonous spider. Drops of warm blood drip from Leonard onto my head, neck, and arms. I cough and wretch and keep searching the floor until I find the remote control for the television.

I stand up behind Leonard. My limbs are tremulous from overexertion, like I’d just finished a hard workout. Leonard’s hair is matted and dark with blood and mashed scalp. I tear up, but the tears aren’t for him, not really. Andrew and Eric gawk at Leonard and then at me. I am sorry for your blank, blood-sweat-and-tears-stained faces. I am sorry for everything. Eric looks at me like I’m about to give an answer. Andrew lifts and lowers the sledgehammer weapon indecisively, moving it like a clock’s pendulum.

I wipe each hand on my jeans, careful to swap hands with the remote and not drop it. As my arm raises on its own, a mechanical arm full of wires and gears that function and perform their duties in secret, I tell you, Andrew and Eric, I have to turn the volume on but you don’t have to listen and you don’t have to look at the screen, either. My thumb unmutes the TV without having to search the bloodied remote for the correct button.

On the terrible screen, the one always filled with apocalypses big and small, breaking news has already interrupted the bird flu program. On the terrible, awful screen is the smoking wreckage of an airplane. The smoke is thick and the deepest black, a writhing toxic column that billows and expands into a cloud, a mass, a tumor in the sky. Quick cut to an aerial shot of the crash site and debris is scattered in the grassy field like confetti. Quick cut to another wrecked plane cratered in the middle of another field. There is more black smoke, and within its hypnotic undulations I know there is a message. Then a cutaway to another downed plane, its pieces floating in an ocean only a few hundred feet offshore. The plane’s tail section is intact and breaches the surface like the fin of a leviathan. Silver panels from the fuselage bob serenely in the blue waves. If left alone they will sink, and I imagine them becoming part of a reef, a habitat, a new ecosystem, but of course that won’t happen. Life isn’t the promise.

Eric stands and backs away from the couch so he can better see the television. He still has Wen in his arms. The paper-towel pad taped to the back of his head hangs loosely and is about to fall off. He says what Leonard said yesterday: the skies will fall and crash to the earth like pieces of glass, and then the final, everlasting darkness will descend over humanity.

I want to tell you, Eric, to stop saying the words Leonard said. They are not Leonard’s words to begin with. The four of us were given them and you cannot trust who gave them to us. I want to tell you, Eric, to ignore the words and the planes and the blood. I want to lie to you, Eric, and say that you and Andrew can leave the cabin and everything will be all right.

I tell you, Andrew and Eric, we should leave now. We shouldn’t spend one more second in this place. I don’t tell you I am the last of the four and I am next and it will be a relief when it happens. Maybe the truth is the end has already been happening long before we arrived at the cabin and what we’re seeing, what we’ve been seeing, is not the fireworks of the world’s denouement but the final flickering sparks of our afterword.

The commentator says they have confirmation of as many as seven airplanes having crashed without warning, without issuing distress calls, amid fears and increasing speculation there may have been a coordinated cyberattack on the planes’ flight management systems. TSA has yet to issue a statement. Airports around the globe are canceling flights—

Andrew swings the sledgehammer, punching a hole in the middle of the television screen. The hole is as black as the smoke spewing from the planes.





This Is the End





Seven


Andrew and Eric


We can’t go on. We stare at the television. The hole in the screen is a porthole in a sunken boat. It’s an open mouth ringed in rows of small, asymmetrical, jagged teeth and it once spoke of unimaginable places and things. It’s a wound, one from which the blackest ichor will begin flowing. It’s a telescopic view of the universe before stars, or after.

In the new silence of the cabin, Andrew only hears his own breathing and the quickened metronome of his heartbeat. He imagines bashing the television and frame with the gore-stained hammer until there’s nothing left to bash and until he’s beaten back the icy tendrils of doubt.

Eric stares at the screen as though he is afraid to look elsewhere; the very act of staring is a talisman that already failed to protect us. He has Wen in his arms and he sways in rhythm with the frenzied buzz of flies echoing from inside the hole. Only one of us ever hears and sees these flies just as only one of us saw a figure in light.

Eric silently tells Wen he will not put her down or ask Andrew to hold her until after we leave the cabin, even though his arms are tiring. Then he says, “We should go right now.” Is he only saying this because Sabrina suggests we should leave? He closes his eyes and he sees planes falling like drops of rain from a darkening sky.