The Cabin at the End of the World(74)

Andrew says, “Talk to me. How are you doing, Eric? Need me to carry her for a bit?”

Eric shakes his head not as an answer but at the uncanny timing of Andrew’s inquiries. He needs to tell Andrew what he believes might need to be done. The might is still there within him, like a crumb of conscience in an unrepentantly guilty person, but it is shrinking. He says, “I know I’m injured. Concussed. Not thinking straight. But—”

“But what?”

We continue to walk together. Our feet grind into the road at different rhythms, leaving two separate paths of footprints in the dirt.

Eric says, “This might be real. I think it’s happening.”

“It. Tell me what it is that’s happening.” Andrew wants Eric to quit obliquely referring to the others’ proposal of choice and apocalyptic consequence. If Eric can be made to spell it out in detail and stop with the midwestern, polite vagueness—like how people discuss but not-discuss a serious illness in the family—then Eric might understand how irrational it all is. Andrew, too, would benefit from having the illogic of what the others are proffering reinforced. In these dimming, implausible hours, he is not immune to doubt.

Eric feels like he’s being made to answer his Sunday school teacher’s how heavy question all over again. He cannot explain how heavy this is. Andrew should know; he’s supposed to know.

Eric has too much he wants to say at once and is unable to organize it all. What’s happening to us is this big unwieldy thing in his head, changing form and shape with each passing second. There’s no beginning at the beginning, so he says, “Those planes all crashing and crashing when they did, at the same time. Leonard said they would fall from the sky.”

“No. He didn’t say that.”

“Yes, he did.”

“He never said anything about planes. Did he ever say the word planes?”

“No, but—”

“Leonard said the sky would fall into pieces. He didn’t say planes. Like a scam psychic, he made a general statement, one culturally associated with end-of-theworld stories, essentially saying the sky is falling, and he let you fill in the details. What if we’d turned on the news and saw a skyscraper collapsing? That means the sky is falling into pieces, right? Or how about a monsoon or a nasty hailstorm; one could argue either of those would be closer to a literal interpretation of the sky is falling. Or it could’ve been a mass die-off of birds, or chunks of falling satellite or, I don’t know, space stations, goddamn Skylab 2.0 plummeting to Earth . . . whatever. Metaphorically, you can retrofit almost anything to—”

“Come on, Andrew, it’s not much of a metaphorical leap from sky to planes. The planes literally fell out of the sky and in pieces. He said ‘pieces.’”

“Frankly, so what?” Andrew pauses and flashes on the images of the wrecked planes, and he remembers the fear coursing through his nerves like a rabies virus, and then his giving in to the impulse to destroy the television so he wouldn’t see them anymore. With as much of the voice of reason as he can muster, he adds, “Planes crash all the time.”

“All the time? Yes, they just drop like leaves in the fall. We’re always having to look up and take cover and—”

“All right, an exaggeration, but only a slight one. Crashes do happen frequently. It’s a numbers game: there are thousands and thousands of planes all over the world in the air at any given time. The day before we drove up here that little pond hopper crashed into a house in Duxbury.”

“Yes, fine, but this is different than a little two-seater going down. These were commercial airplanes all crashing at the same time. You smashed the TV, but it sounded like there were more planes, maybe even all the ones in the air, and crashing right after Leonard was killed.”

“You know, it’s only occurring to me now that that’s not true, either.”

“What’s not true?”

“The planes crashing after Leonard was killed. Think about the timeline here: the planes had to have crashed before Leonard died, probably at least twenty minutes or so before.”

“What are you talking about?”

“If the planes had crashed at the exact moment Leonard died, the news wouldn’t have had enough time to gather and air the footage we saw.”

“Video is practically instant now. Everyone has a camera.”

“They weren’t broadcasting phone videos, certainly not the fly-over footage of wreckage, that plane in the ocean especially. Those crashes had to have happened before Sabrina killed Leonard.”

“I guess so, maybe, but that’s not the point. I mean, are you quibbling over the timing?”

“The timing is pretty important, don’t you think?”

“Yes, of course, because everything Leonard said would happen did happen, and it happened each time after one of them was killed. You really think everything we’ve seen, everything we’ve been through has been a coincidence?”

Andrew says, “I do,” as more of an affirmation to himself. “They knew about the Alaskan earthquake before they came to the cabin and then, yes, that second quake and tsunami hit was coincidental. But then they knew the preprogrammed, scheduled bird flu show would be on the next morning and had it timed to the minute with their watches, and then—”