Everyone Says That at the End of the World Read online

  EVERYONE

  SAYS THAT

  AT THE END

  OF THE

  WORLD

  EVERYONE

  SAYS THAT

  AT THE END

  OF THE

  WORLD

  OWEN EGERTON

  SOFT SKULL PRESS

  AN IMPRINT OF COUNTERPOINT

  To Jodi

  I wrote a book for you.

  Copyright © 2013 Owen Egerton

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in Publication is available.

  ISBN 978-1-59376-555-2

  Cover design by Elke Barter

  Interior design by Neuwirth & Associates

  Soft Skull Press

  An Imprint of Counterpoint

  1919 Fifth Street

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.softskull.com

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  Once upon a time,

  in one of the time periods,

  an explosion of light came.

  And ruined the oceans.

  And turned the air to lava.

  The end.

  —Arden, age 7

  Contents

  2,732,841 DAYS BEFORE THE END OF THE WORLD

  9,502 DAYS

  Fuck balls

  Mysteries

  8,753 DAYS

  Every moment, a universe

  5,476 DAYS

  Chlorine and cologne

  Everything happens

  4,365 DAYS

  Like a dog can sense earthquakes

  A little over half his height

  763 DAYS

  Too much want

  Little Tick Clicky

  4 DAYS

  A hard, heavy dawn

  KRST

  Until what?

  Sleepy, weepy, sleepy

  Eber you ara

  Pumpy pumpy . . . smiley smiley

  Fist-size piece of strength

  There I am

  Hole of light

  Cruel to the cat

  Choose a faith

  You’re flying, child. Your tits look great.

  Can I help you?

  Buttered

  Same source as the wound

  No time for certainty

  Behind every good saint

  Baby simply

  Shit Walk

  Finger closer

  Wicks trimmed

  Go shower

  Holy fuck

  3 DAYS

  The nail won’t fail

  Mingus would approve

  Every feather, every bone

  Something had changed

  Name’s Jim Edwards

  Hard to think with all the sirens

  Oh my God! Nutria!

  I can’t do this

  It was going to

  Fingers of God

  Chewed

  Roll in the dust

  Moldy soccer balls

  To his knees

  A simple arrow

  What a rat bastard

  Do you want to miss this?

  Austin

  Four-hundred-gallon vat of puffed wheat

  The sky declaring war

  Skiing and ice wine

  Night-black skin

  Don’t be silly, Rica

  Pretty fucking amazing

  Where the hell?

  The air was sweet, the world was crunchy

  Something very else

  Wheezing the whole time

  Past Jesus Pick

  2 DAYS

  Kindness

  Dick-mobile

  The edges of the world exploded

  My wife wouldn’t kill a roach

  Cruel beliefs

  Jesus-18

  Poverty sucks as much as wealth

  I’ve been gone for years

  Christian Heaven Domes

  The perfect reward for enlightenment

  Desire

  Hook in his chest

  Stay awake!

  A bed?

  No words

  White, red, black . . .

  Larger Than Life

  Squid

  No longer labeled

  Filled his heart with sawdust

  Only on Christmas

  This place will kill us

  Yelling, pacing, preaching

  Facts every time

  In a day. In a decade.

  Bacon

  Jesuses

  Hell in North Dakota

  He’s dead. We’re not.

  If you’re going to go bear, go grizzly

  Wrinkle in the soul

  Giggle giggle

  All Christian, all the time

  Are you live?

  Brendan’s blood

  I have touched fire

  Fooled by time

  Most wonderful man alive

  Old-fashioned prayer

  Exploded with white

  Pissant town

  Dot in the dirt

  Her daughter’s hair

  Diluted . . . eternal

  Right

  Death and change

  THE LAST DAY

  I won’t meet your baby

  Better than coffee

  Now would be the time

  Home-desire

  Moments from a family

  On the last day

  Fire taking her body

  Sky to touch

  Whole life pushing

  Volcanoes

  He wasn’t he

  I actually get it

  As each claw

  To be born

  Austin died

  Shelter

  We won’t miss the show

  Baby mewed

  To hide away

  In this case it’s true

  Space coffins

  Physics, faith, and love

  Nothing at all

  Floated and blurred

  Giant orange head

  Ameyn

  Acknowledgments

  2,732,841

  DAYS BEFORE

  THE END OF THE

  WORLD

  POP

  9,502

  DAYS

  Fuck balls

  THE FIRST DROPS of rain were the heaviest, falling in broad, solitary beads. Awesomely destructive, if you were an ant. The boy, who had been meditatively lost in the ants’ comings and goings for that past hour, looked up to the black clouds, a drop hitting his face like God’s spit. It would be a downpour—a rush of water from the hot Texas skies. He looked back down at the pile, the rain puncturing the grainy surface. Already lines of black ants were erupting from out of the hill only to be thumped by fresh drops. He leaned over the pile, blocking the rain.

  “Fuck balls!” he said.

  It was his father’s expression and it felt powerful. Often his father, working through the night on some vague, nonsensical problem involving numbers and frustration and something called quarks, would hurl “fuck balls” up from the basement.

  The rain was falling in full now, soaking through the boy’s shirt and turning the dusty yard into a rust-colored swamp. Even using his body as an umbrella, the rain was melting the anthill. A fist of panic squeeze
d the boy.

  The boy had no particular affection for ants. His mother considered them enemies—using bleach and store-bought poisons to rid them from the kitchen and cursing their persistent colonization of the backyard. She would grimace to see her son working to actually preserve these pests. His father never noticed the ants. They were too large. His mother asserted that he was blind to anything larger than an atom. “Milton,” she had once told her son. “If it can be seen, your father can’t see it.”

  On any other day, Milton might have just watched the ants drown, perhaps even cheered their demise. But something about that day—about the weight of the drops, about the singed scent of ozone in the air, about the tone in his mother’s voice as she sent him out to play an hour earlier, and how she had touched his face for a long moment before corralling him out the back door—made the boy feel that to abandon these ants would be a crime.

  Without a clear plan, Milton dug both his hands into the pile and scooped up as many ants as he could carry. He glanced at the inner caverns of the mound filled with manic ants carrying plump white larva in their pinchers, then rushed for the shelter of the outer awning of the kitchen door.

  The ants began biting before he took his second step.

  “Fuck balls!” Nasty pin pokes of pain. The ants crawled from his hands up his thin arms, administering stings with a zealous rage. By the door sat an empty water bowl, once belonging to a family cat that had long since forsaken the family. The boy dropped his fists of ants and dirt into the bowl, but hundreds still clung to him. “FUCK BALLS!” the boy yelled, hopping up and down and wiggling his arms frantically.

  “Fuck, fuck fuck balls!” he said, itching at his already welting arms.

  The kitchen door opened. Milton nearly stumbled back into the rain.

  His father stood, silent and staring. He wore the outfit he taught in—white short-sleeve button-down shirt with a navy-blue tie decorated with the emblem of his alma mater, Rice University. He was a thin man—tall with fingers that twitched at the end of his lanky arms. He looked at his son with confusion.

  “The ants are biting me,” Milton said.

  His father stepped back and let the boy slog in. Milton ran to the sink and plunged his arms under the faucet.

  I was trying to save you, he thought as the last of the tiny black dots spiraled down the drain. He turned off the water. In the new silence, the house felt strange, a new strange. He turned to see his father standing on the other side of the kitchen staring at him.

  “Where’s mom?” he asked.

  His father walked to the fridge. “I’m going to make eggs for dinner.”

  “Mom’s not here?”

  “She left,” he said into the innards of the fridge. “Maybe waffles and eggs.”

  “She left?”

  “Hot damn, we don’t have any eggs.” He closed the fridge, leaning his back against the door. “Not even eggs.” He let his body slide down to the floor, sitting with his legs curled into themselves.

  Milton watched his father with curiosity, wondering whether the man would cry. He’d never seen him cry.

  “Look, she’s gone,” his father finally said. “Which is bad. But look, I’ve told you before, this world is one of countless worlds. Okay? Every quantum event creates a new world. Each world a page in a book with a billion pages. Got the image?”

  The boy nodded.

  “No, you don’t. You don’t, because if you did, you wouldn’t be looking like that, all stunned and beat up.” He rapped his knuckle on the lime-green linoleum. “Listen. Okay? Mathematically speaking, every possible outcome is happening right now. Each page a possibility that is not just possible but existing. Countless parallel worlds with slight and drastic differences.” He wasn’t looking at the boy. Instead his eyes seemed focused on the floor between his legs. “A world where oceans are acid, another world with no oxygen, another where you were never born, and a world—a world right next to us, closer than our skin—a world where she never left.” Outside the downpour petered down to occasional drops hitting the kitchen window in a rhythmless series. His father looked up at him, his eyes clear. “So in our world she leaves. But she doesn’t always leave. Doesn’t that help? It does, doesn’t it?”

  The boy was watching four ants crawl in from under the back door, black ships on a massive sea of lime green. What drove them? What in the world could they hope to find? Milton hated them with all his heart.

  Mysteries

  “SEE THE LIGHTS, Rica?” Her father knelt beside her and pointed out across the dark desert scrub. “Just over the mountain.”

  She watched them move. Small balls of light dashing in zigzags. One slowed, then shot upward. One faded in and out. One glowed an off-white blue, another slightly green.

  “They’re just headlights,” her mother said, holding Rica’s younger brother’s hand. “I’m taking him to the potty. Meet you at the car.”

  “Never seen headlights bounce,” her father said to Rica once her mother had gone. One light chased another, the two zipping up and down and across the horizon like squirrels in a tree.

  “They look happy,” she said.

  “I told you Texas wasn’t so bad,” he said with a chuckle.

  “What are they?”

  “Mysteries,” he said. “Mystery lights. People have been seeing them here for more than a century. No one knows what they are.”

  Two of the lights darted together, circling each other in a bright-blue glow.

  “They’re dancing,” Rica whispered.

  8,753

  DAYS

  Every moment, a universe

  HIS FATHER, BREATH bitter with coffee, shook him awake. “Wake up, Milton. I want to show you something. Look out the window.”

  The boy, still half asleep, tried to sit up, but his father placed a hand on his shoulder and pushed him back down. “I have to tell you something first. Nothing I’ll repeat. You ask me about it tomorrow, I’ll call you a liar, hear me?”

  The boy nodded. His father’s sweaty face twitched toward the window.

  “I don’t know what they are, but they’re better than us and they’re alive.” He nodded to the boy, his eyes wide. “The whole department knows, but no one will talk about it. We make side comments to each other, knowing looks, but we never just say it. It’s like a dirty family secret that everyone knows and no one will talk about. Understand?”

  “What’s outside, Dad?”

  “Remember all those worlds? All those countless worlds? They’re not just parallel. Not just a near-endless book. That’s too small an image. It’s more like a sphere, each point an endless book. A ball of endless books! But you understand. No, don’t try. But get this. Every moment—each microsecond—is really another world. A new world exactly like the last moment’s world but with the changes of the moment. Every moment, a universe.”

  His father stared down at him for a moment. Milton knew he was waiting for a nod of comprehension. But he didn’t comprehend. His father grunted and grabbed a half-filled water glass from the boy’s bedside table.

  “In one world this glass is falling.” He let the glass go. It fell to the floor, shattering. “In the next world the glass is broken on the floor. See? So experiencing time is just moving from one world to the next and to the next and to the next.” He grinned at his son, then raised his head, glancing out the window and quickly ducking down. “Jesus!”

  “What?”

  He stared back at his son. “So we, just by being alive, travel through the many worlds. But we have no control. We move through in one direction, along one path. Just one book, page by page. We’re not so much traveling as falling. Falling through the pages. Or maybe we’re motionless and the pages fall through us. Is that it?”

  He paused, and the boy wondered if he was supposed to answer.

  “The thing is, Milton,” he said after a beat. “They, those things out there, can move wherever they want. Any direction, any book, any page. They don’t fall. They float.”r />
  He took a deep breath. “Do you get it?”

  Milton nodded.

  “Of course you don’t get it,” his father said. “But you will. You’ll see.” He glanced toward the window. “Go ahead.”

  Milton sat up, keeping his eyes on his father.

  “Look!”

  The boy turned to the window. There was a man in the yard. Near the back, underneath the dead pecan tree. Naked. No hair or genitals. Just skin—tight, smooth, and nearly blue in the moonlight. Not a man. Something different, the boy thought. A non-man. Under the tree, his body swayed like a corpse moved by the wind.

  “What does he want, Milton? What the hell could he want?”

  Milton looked back to his father and he could see now that his father did want an answer, but he had nothing.

  “They follow me, Milton. They watch me. Like goddamn ghosts.”

  Milton looked back to the yard and startled back. The Non-Man’s face was an inch from the window, staring in at them with unblinking black eyes, his mouth opened in a silent, screaming gasp.

  5,476

  DAYS

  Chlorine and cologne

  RICA WAS THIRTEEN years old when she first considered that what is could have been otherwise. When she was five, she hadn’t questioned her parents’ move from L.A. to Plano, a suburban community on the outskirts of Dallas. But as she entered her teens and her body became a pubescent battlefield of bumps and blood, she examined her life and imagined what might have been had her parents raised her by the Pacific Ocean, in the capital of the entertainment world, instead of an outpost on the plains of Texas, whose cultural highlights included Chili’s restaurants and a dozen suburban shopping malls.

  As that summer had approached and Plano sank into a roasting, sticky suck, Rica found her changing body releasing sweat in ever-creative ways, her pores opening and closing like a chorus of suffocating guppies. She begged her parents to fly her to California to visit her cousin Cece.

  The two weeks in Santa Monica were a heady introduction to her teen years—eyeliner experiments, late-night beach concerts, strawberry-banana wine coolers snuck from her aunt’s fridge. Cece dismissed Rica’s own modest, one-piece swimsuits and replaced them with low-cut bikinis. She instructed Rica on how to revel in the stares, how to meet a boy’s eyes with coy confidence, how to enjoy her expanding attributes.