Everyone Says That at the End of the World Read online

  Later she drove the stretch of road between Mundi House and Milton’s home, Milton beside her, pointing the way. A nearly wordless drive across the Congress Avenue Bridge, across Barton Springs to South First Street, passing vegetarian cafés and all-night Mexican restaurants, down Annie, with its cracked sidewalks and oak tree awnings and shoe-scarfed telephone wires, passing hundred-year-old shacks with third-generation inhabitants, purple-painted houses with year-round Christmas lights, and day-old hipster mansions. Finally pulling up to an unkempt, one-story home Milton had inherited from his father.

  They sat on cheap lawn furniture in Milton’s backyard by the dead pecan and shared a bottle of wine and bag of microwave popcorn. She told him stories and he told her facts. She confessed her recent heartbreak with Dante, leaving out some of the steamier kitchen-floor antics. He told her that dark matter made up over three-quarters of the universe.

  “So we don’t even know what most of the universe is made of?” she asked.

  “That’s about it.”

  She hummed and reached for more popcorn. “That answers a lot of questions.”

  Little Tick Clicky

  THE HERMIT CRAB’S shell was shiny blue green. He had one large purple claw and one small brown claw. His shell was smaller than a man’s fist but larger than a lump of charcoal. He lived in a plastic aquarium with forty-seven other hermit crabs in a sidewalk tourist store in Fort Lauderdale, Florida. He didn’t know he was in Florida. He didn’t know he was for sale. He did know that the water dish was empty. It had been for some time. It was hot.

  No matter which direction he crawled, the hermit crab soon came to a point across which he could see but could not move. He could not fathom why. In one direction, past an endless, nearly nude parade of young Spring-Breakers, he could see the blue and white of the ocean surf. He crawled in that direction more than any other, scratching at the unseen barrier and wishing for salt and water. He vaguely wondered why he could see what he could never have. What a bizarre way to design a world.

  He did not think much. He was thirsty. A thirst so encompassing it left room for little else. Eight of the crabs in the aquarium were dead. He sensed that he might be sharing a similar fate.

  Then, from seemingly nowhere, five towers of peach-white flesh surrounded him and closed in. A hand smelling of sunblock and tequila lifted him in a direction he had not formerly been aware of—up. It blew his mind. So much so that he forgot about thirst.

  “How much for this blue and green one?”

  She was an Evergreen grad school poet who had not written a poem in over a year. Thin and pale and wearing a bikini as if it were punishment.

  “Will they let me take him on a plane?” She puckered up at the crab. “You’re my new boyfriend, yes, you are.” The hermit crab saw her lips. They were a threat. He clicked his purple claw in defense.

  “Click, Clicky. Oh, little Tick Clicky,” the poet cooed.

  Click retreated into his shell, hiding as best as he could.

  “Can I get a cage or box? And a water bowl! Hermit crabs like water, right?”

  Click had an extraordinary destiny awaiting him. He had no idea.

  4

  DAYS

  A hard, heavy dawn

  “FATHER.”

  With each stroke through the cool green waters Milton exhaled the same word.

  “Father.”

  Milton was not a strong swimmer. With his sprawling arms and legs he more often than not resembled a drowning giraffe. He swam Barton Springs, an expansive Austin limestone pool bookended on either end by the mild, murky Barton Creek and shaded by ancient live oaks growing from its grassy shores. Milton avoided the slick shallow limestone floor to the west end of the springs and the tug of the east-end overflow chute. Instead he splashed in circles near the south wall.

  “Father.”

  The word had new connotations. Milton had tried to be thrilled, tried to be supportive. Tried to think as he supposed a father-to-be would think. But the act was brittle and beginning to show stress fractures. Behind every crack were questions: Would he have to get a full-time job? Find health insurance? Open a bank account? Shave? The child was still five months from entering the world proper, but Milton could already feel its demanding presence.

  “Father.”

  A smiling face broke the water’s surface beside him and took in a large breath.

  “My God, I just got buzzed by a bass the size of my arm!” Roy sucked in more air and disappeared again. This was Roy’s habit, filling his lungs and diving deep, returning minutes later with stories of shy sunfish and translucent salamanders hiding in a jungle of ten-foot-high water weeds.

  Milton swam to the edge and pulled himself up onto the concrete sidewalk lining the pool, his hair and beard matted to his head like an abundant clump of brown seaweed. He sat, legs dangling in the water, and gazed about the grounds.

  Who here could be a parent? Not the beauties, their brown perfect bodies too full of sex and sunlight to ever submit to something as mundane as parenting. How about the round man practicing Tae Kwon Do as if in a slow-motion battle with a swarm of wasps, or the homeless woman who came each day at dawn with a pile of out-of-date high school textbooks? Or the petite lesbian couple with complementary back tattoos of flying blackbirds that fit together like a jigsaw puzzle? Would they make a kid’s lunch, drop off a child at soccer practice, change a diaper?

  No. Milton was convinced that the great majority of reproduction was accomplished by the bored men and women of the world, the lonely cubicle dwellers and lost suburbanites who believed, in some unexamined way, that having a child would give their lives meaning. His father had a child and Milton could honestly say his father’s life meant nothing.

  Roy suddenly appeared in the waters at Milton’s feet. “What’s it called when you stick a hand inside a catfish’s mouth and pull it to land? Fisting?”

  “Noodling.”

  “I knew fisting wasn’t right.”

  As Roy climbed the corroding ladder, a redheaded woman in a hemp bikini bottom and nothing else strolled past. Roy smiled and sat beside Milton.

  “Oh, the breasts of this place,” Roy said. “The variety! The small ones with all that fierce authority, the round lethargic ones, even the reticent, long-faced ones. All so good!” With both hands, he brushed the water out of his curly hair. “Too many breasts are begging in this world. Pleading for attention, approval, a valid credit card number. But these breasts, the breasts of Barton Springs, ask for nothing. They’re not out for me to see, you know? But they don’t mind me seeing either. They simply are. Like pairs of plump Buddhas in full lotus position, bouncing along in happy meditation. I could learn a lot from the chests of Austin women.”

  “I don’t want to be a dad, Roy.”

  “Okay,” Roy said with a slow nod. “I’ll do it. Rica’s always liked me better than you anyway.”

  “It feels like it’s all just happening to me. I didn’t ask for this. It’s like I didn’t do it. I mean, I know I did it. But I didn’t mean to do this. I’m going to be a horrible dad. I’m not wired for fathering.”

  Roy smiled. “I can promise you something, Milt. You’re going to love this baby. You just will.”

  Milton pulled his beard and shook his head. He leaned forward and let gravity pull him into the water. The water, usually brisk, felt warm and welcoming. With his awkward strokes, he paddled to the center of the pool and treaded water.

  Roy was a friend. Milton’s closest. They had been brothers of a kind since the day Milton squeezed the pink end of a pencil from Roy’s throat over ten years before.

  Milton had been there when Roy had tried to eat fifty Cadbury eggs in a twist on Cool Hand Luke and had almost died from sugar shock.

  Roy had been there when Milton had been put on university probation for smuggling an industrial-size bag of Golden Grahams from the dorm cafeteria.

  Milton had been there when Roy had attempted to launch a rocket with a squirrel inside. The sq
uirrel was unharmed. Roy lost the tip of his left pinky.

  Roy had been there when Milton spent half his freshman scholarship on the head of a Bigfoot he’d seen advertised in Greensheet. The boys waited four breathless days to receive the package. Finally it arrived and they locked themselves into their dorm room and closed the blinds. In awed silence, they cut the cardboard top, carefully dug through the Styrofoam nuggets, and found a large glass jar. Inside the jar was a hairy, teeth-baring, slightly decomposing head floating in a thick yellow liquid.

  “Ah shit,” said Roy, kicking the box and spilling the Styrofoam.

  “What shit?” Milton said. “Look at that. Bigfoot.”

  “It’s a dog head, Milt.”

  “Are you kidding? That’s Bigfoot. A young one, yes. But most definitely Bigfoot.”

  “It’s a dog head.”

  “Have you ever seen a Bigfoot?” Milton nearly yelled.

  “Have you?”

  “I’m looking at one in a jar right now!”

  “Well, Bigfoot looks a hell of a lot like a sheepdog. Agreed?”

  “Agreed.”

  Roy was loyal and smart, but Milton knew that today Roy was wrong. Parents don’t always love their children.

  In the center of the Springs, Milton spit some warm water from his mouth and thought about his mother. More accurately, he thought of her absence. Her empty dresser with bare wire hangers, the gaps on the shelves where her romance paperbacks had been pried from between her husband’s physics textbooks like stray bricks from a wall, her rose-scented shampoo—the half-filled bottle remaining in the corner of his father’s shower until the day he died.

  Milton let his body sink under the surface. A few bubbles skirted past.

  Surely, thirty-two years ago some smiling friend had said to his mother and to his father, “You’re going to love this baby. You just will.”

  He let himself sink deeper into the green glow, past the stripes of sunlight, dancing straws of amber. The temperature felt more like a lukewarm bath than a natural pool. The truth, he knew and hated, was that he hoped that Rica would have a miscarriage. A blameless abortion. Then things could remain just as they are. How easy would it be to not have a child on the way? Not have that lifetime of new demands gathering on the immediate horizon like a hard, heavy dawn? He despised the wish even as he acknowledged it. With this one thought he knew he was proving to be as poor a father as his own, and his child had yet to utter a cry.

  The weeds and his hair, swaying in half speed, surrounded him. The water was hot now. Milton was just registering this as abnormal when a bubble, the size of a softball, floated from below him. Then another, just as large. Then a herd of bubbles of all sizes raced past him and to the surface. Milton pushed upward and into the air.

  The water was more than hot; it was scalding.

  He scanned the surface churning with bubbles, the steam rising like escaped souls, and the dissolving plant matter floating in a green-brown froth. Blisters flared to red life up and down his arms. He splashed in panic, a mouthful of water burning his tongue, his throat. He could see Roy standing and staring.

  A small girl in a pink bathing suit teetered at the end of the diving board. Why wasn’t someone grabbing her, why weren’t people screaming, why wasn’t she backing away from the dead fish and snakes floating to the bubbling surface? Milton yelled, his voice ragged with pain. “The water is boiling! Stop! St—” Something grabbed his ankle and yanked. His face sank below the water, his throat filling with burn, the water cooking his skin. Down by his feet, clouded by bubbles and mud, was a face he knew. Blank and pale blue. The face from his backyard. The man—the Non-Man—who had stood beneath the pecan tree swaying and staring at him and his father. Now, here below him clutching his ankle. A voice, muted and calm, whispered in Milton’s head. You don’t have much time.

  Milton screamed into the water as the hand pulled him down into the boiling black green.

  KRST

  “THERE’S NO QUESTION that the time has come, the time is more nigh than ever! Remember what Jesus said? You see the figs ripen on the tree and you know the season. I mean those fat figs are about to fall on their own! But they won’t fall because the workers are here to pick them! That’s us, people! You, the listeners at home. We are his workers. The workers are few, but the harvest is rich!

  “Yes, we play some rocking tunes, here. And I’d like to think ol’ Van Sturgeon gets you laughing every so often. But more than that, I get you ready. Ready for the day! That’s the goal of all of us at KRST.

  “Now it’s clear that movements in the Middle East are exactly, I mean exactly, what John describes in Revelations. It’s scary how right he was two thousand years ago. That’s God, people!

  “Want more prophecy? Facebook. Yep. Do you know how your little Facebook works? Do you? You think you’re safe because you put a little ‘I love Jesus’ thing on that page of yours? You are wrong. Dead wrong. You are not a name on the Internet. You are a number. And Revelations tells us that many will be marked with the number of the Beast. And that only those marked will be able to buy and sell. Can I buy and sell on the Internet? I cannot. I will not. I will not allow Facebook and Amazon and Apple to give me a number! That’s how they do it! It’s a number! So they can allow me to buy and sell! So they can track what I buy and sell. The powers of darkness love it, they love it, when you buy your Christian music and posters and books on the computer. They love your money. They love you lining up to get your number.

  “Did you think it would be obvious? Did you think the Beast would have a red tail and pointy horns? Did you?”

  Until what?

  “SHIT, MILTON!” ROY was pounding on Milton’s back. Milton coughed, expelling green water all over the sidewalk beside the Springs. A small crowd was gathered around him, staring down. His skin was not peeling, his arms not blistering.

  “You okay?” Roy was asking. “You got caught in the weeds.”

  “Four days,” Milton coughed out.

  “Not even four minutes, dude,” a lifeguard said. “Your buddy here dove in and got you.”

  “We only have four days.”

  “Four days until what?”

  Milton shook his head. He stared past the people to the rippling waters. A man was doing the breaststroke, the girl in the pink bathing suit laughing on his back.

  “Something not very good,” Milton said.

  Sleepy, weepy, sleepy

  RICA LOVED THE warm quiet of the kitchen before opening, being alone in the first light sneaking through the windows, preparing spices, slicing vegetables—the muted blade rhythmically kissing the cutting board. She moved slower today. At four months, Rica was well past the queasy mornings of her early pregnancy, but she found that more and more of her energy was being redirected to her ever-expanding belly. Her body was changing, her small frame thickening by the day and making the kitchen a tighter fit each morning.

  Mundi House customers started to arrive at seven, asking for coffee and ginger-spiced tea. Some received their drinks and dashed out the door, but most sat and added to the soft morning hum. Rica watched them from her small kitchen. The girl in the corner laughing into Hemingway. The pretty boy arriving red-eyed and asking that Advil be crushed into his coffee. The two old men cutting the corners from postcards. “We’re starting our own coaster company,” Rica heard them tell Jeppy.

  The soup took most of the morning to develop its flavor. Rica knew this. She understood how a tomato tastes when it swims and steams with a single white onion, how a potato lumbering into the water disturbs the privacy and changes the mood. Pepper sneaks in almost unnoticed, then whistles from within, while salt stings the water before disappearing. Everything flavors everything.

  The presence of the playwright scribbling by the back wall touches the talk of the carpenter and his two friends. The tone of their conversations makes its way over to the two girls in the corner; the girls move closer and whisper. The way they lean is noticed by the playwright, and i
t bends his words. All stewed in the soul that bubbles through the floorboards. Soul soup.

  Rica believed the richest element of any soup was its cauldron. A cauldron remembers. It allows soups to soak into its iron, and then gives flavors back to each new creation. The café’s walls and tables and chairs were the same. They absorbed the souls. Even the coffee mugs remembered words whispered over their chipped rims.

  When Rica finished preparing her soup, she let it sit and helped Jeppy collect dishes from the morning rush. In the back garden an old woman sat sipping hot tea and watching the finches scuttle from tree to tree. When a train passed she watched that, too. Rica knew her, she came to Mundi House often. Rica liked the wrinkles of her skin. Like an unmade bed, she thought. She noticed the old woman looking up each time someone entered the garden.

  “Waiting for somebody?” Rica asked.

  “Yes,” she said. Her voice was soft, like a wet leaf. “I’m waiting for Death.”

  “Death?” Rica asked. “As in dying?”

  “Just a visit today.” The old woman smiled.

  Rica smiled back. “Will you know him?” she asked.

  “Oh, yes,” the old woman said. “Can’t help but know him.”

  Rica carried the dishes inside. More regulars arrived. Kaz, famous for his tattoo-canvased body and the tiny horns protruding from his scalp, rode up on his bicycle.

  “Where’d you get the horns, man?” Rica had once heard a fan ask.

  “Magic, son. The strong, good kind.”

  Jules came in shortly after ten. She drank yerba matés with mint and organized sex-toy Tupperware parties on her laptop. She had once told Rica that she could spend hours imagining complete strangers in the throes of orgasm. Nothing made her happier, especially if the stranger seemed sad or overstressed. Rica thought that was one of the most generous things she had ever heard.