The Last New Year (12 page)

On my third cup of punch I finish telling her about the
journey. I watch her closely as I do so, this second time taking less effort as
my thoughts are more organized from the first telling to Pearl and the kid.

We sit across each other at the small table.
Em's
been nibbling on a Milky Way starting at about my
encounter with the Ginger Arsonist, and when the third bowling ball lands less
than two (five, really) feet away from me, her eyes are huge and I nearly
forget what I'm talking about. But I get through it and when it ends with me
entering the kitchen (I judiciously leave out the part where I made my initial
discovery) she sighs loudly and laughs. She puts a hand over her mouth.

"I'm sorry,"
Em
says
around the hand. "I am so sorry.
Your roommate, that
poor girl's mother.
It's not funny at all. It's terrible and tragic. I
can't believe what we're in the middle of."

I take a pretzel. "It's ok, I think. It's not like
we're not all heading toward tragedy anyway."

"More like tragedy is heading toward us."

I suppose that's true.

There is a disorganized thudding down the stairs, and a peal
of giggling that reveals itself to be a tall, disheveled man with shoulder
length brown hair and a patchy beard. He's wearing a toga made from a
bedspread. From beneath it a form wiggles around.

"Is there food?" Matt says.

"Food!" the bedspread echoes. A hand emerges from
one of the folds.
A silver ring with a green stone.
Following the hand is a small girl with brown hair in a bathrobe. She smiles at
me.

"Is this him?" Crystal says to her.

"Yep."
She says.

Crystal looks at me, nods, possibly approves. Matt grabs two
pigs in a blanket and shoves them into his mouth.

"So how's the end of the world coming?" He
blankets
piggily
.

"I don't know. I haven't been watching,"
Em
says. "I've been cordoning myself off from the sex
symphony you guys were composing upstairs."

"Some of my best work," Matt responds, wrapping a
smirking Crystal in one arm while rustling a handful of tortilla chips with the
other. "I'm
gonna
go check the TV."

The two exit the kitchen and a few seconds later I hear the
faint hiss of static.

"I don't know if they're going to get anything,"
Em
says. "It was pretty spotty a couple of hours
ago."

"Why do you and Crystal wear the same ring?" I
ask. I realize this is largely irrelevant, but I find that curiosity is another
state of being that has mustered itself from the depths in her presence.

She looks surprised, "Oh, that's a weird thing to
notice. Are you Sherlock Holmes' cousin or something?" She spreads her
fingers, looks at the ring. "It's a Best Friends thing. We bought them at
a boardwalk souvenir shop when we went to the beach last year."

"We might," she says thoughtfully, "have been
drunk. Not that it matters and I'm certainly glad it wasn't tattoos. Ask Matt
to show you the one he got, but don't if you don't want to see his butt."

I laugh. "I won't. I'm sure it's great, but that's
ok."

We sit in silence for a moment. I try not to look at her for
too long, my instincts telling me to avoid the creep gaze overrides the urgency
of the situation. I find, however, that when I glance at her she's looking at
me with a serious expression. The TV has changed to what sounds like a sitcom. Canned
laughter filters into the kitchen.

"Are you scared?"
Em
asks suddenly.

I pause in mid-chew,
then
swallow
as I think about it. "Yes," I say finally, "I am. I haven't
really thought about it all day, what with everything, but now that I am not
focused on a goal: Yeah, I'm scared. I don't want it to be over."

She nods.

"But I've sort of been following Zee's philosophy, that
it's not so bad if everyone else is going too. I think what's scared me about dying
before is the thought of the world going on without me. The story keeps being
told only I'm not in it. Not that I'm all that important, but thinking about
the stuff I'll miss out on, and the people who will forget about me ever
existing is kind of," I struggle for the right word, fail to find it but
go with: "Existentially off-putting."

She smiles, "I can see how it would be."

"How about you?"
I ask.

"Of course I am," her eyes are suddenly looking
into a distance over my shoulder. "My mom died when I was just a baby, and
I used to think, growing up, how it would be when I meet her again. My family's
not really religious—"

"Lucky you."

"—but I kind of felt for a long time that you had to go
somewhere after you die. Like, there's no way that this thing that makes up my
being could just not exist. And so if it was still going to exist, it must
exist somewhere and maybe everyone goes to the same place. But I was a kid,
then."

"And now?"
I reach across
the table
for a Snickers
. She intercepts, takes my
hand. My insides light up like a pinball machine.

"Now, I think this might be it. That dying might be
falling asleep without any dreams and never waking up. No peace, no punishment,
no nothing. Just.
Nothing."

She squeezes my hand. I say, quietly, "There are worse
things than nothing."

She looks at me with her big grey eyes. "I'm glad you
were able to make it here. I kind of lost hope a few times."

"Me too."
I squeeze back.

From the living room: "Can somebody bring me a handful
of Three Musketeers?"

It's down to the last hour or so, now. I don't need
anything else to eat, so I run to the bathroom to take a leak and check my
teeth, breath and hair. All more or less in order, but I take a swig of
Listerine anyway. Under the circumstances I doubt anyone will care.

When I emerge from the bathroom,
Em
sits on the edge of the couch, watching an emergency broadcast system screen as
Matt and Crystal make out on the couch. The TV alternates from a low buzzing
noise to a tinny pre-recorded voice that I can't really make out. I think
probably some thoughtful employee must have set up the screen inexpertly before
they bugged out.

Em
puts out a hand and I take it.
She starts to lead me up the stairs.

"It was nice meeting you guys." I say to the
writhing forms on the couch.

"
Mmhm
"

"Yeah you too."

At the top of the stairs, we go me to a door. She opens it
and we're in a medium sized bedroom, decorated sparsely, but it looks comfy
enough. Three things stand out: A large and overfilled book case, two windowed
doors leading to a balcony, and, of course, her bed, a big four poster, hastily
made.

She faces me, looking up at me. She's close but not too
close, and I can smell the girly aspects of the room mixed with her own light
scent like folded laundry.

"So," she says, not huskily at all.

I am highly aware of the cliché we've walked into here, but
I follow the script.
"So."

"I thought we could spend the rest of the night up
here."

"What about your friends?"

"We already had a good cry and agreed that goodbyes
were for suckers. So it's fine. I love them both in their weird ways, and I've
made peace with everyone I need to."

"Your dad?"

"When I got off the phone with him, he said he was
going to finish changing the oil in his car. I guess we all have ways to
cope."

"Well, that's good."

We stand there for a moment in silence. Not awkward silence
either, just silence. And then the next part of the script:

"So are you going to kiss me or not?"

"I was considering it."
He said, with mock
coyness
.
Blech
.

"Well," She rolls her eyes, "Get a move on.
We don't have that much time. Say cheese or get out of the photo booth."

And like that, the script is broken and I laugh and kiss
her. And she kisses me, and we melt together in this dim room on the last night
on earth.

Afterward, we are on the balcony, sitting on a rocking
lounger, wrapped in a blanket. I feel her hip pressed into me. Her head is on
my shoulder. I turn my head slightly and feel her hair move against my cheek.

In the distance, from this vantage, I can just make out a
slight tinge of orange in the sky. Whether we like it or not, whether we choose
to accept it, at this point there is no denying that it's on its way. I did
some math earlier on the street and given the circumference of the earth and
the amount of time it has to traverse it (24,859.82 / 24) that the wall of fire
is moving at approximately 1000 miles an hour. So being able to see it means
that it will be here pretty damn soon.

She stirs, "You know, I was thinking about this whole
business."

I kiss her head, "Yeah?"

"Yeah," She sits up and looks at me, "I was
thinking: We don't really know what this is all about. I mean, it's obviously
not natural, at least nobody can explain it, so that must mean someone or
something is causing it."

"Sure, I guess."

"So why do we assume that it's just going to kill us?
Nobody's been able to reach anyone on the other side of it. The nuke didn't
stop it."

I chuckle. "What?" She asks. I shake my head and
motion for her to continue.

"Well what if it's not a killer wall of fire? What if
it's like a crucible. You know, like those really hot ovens that separate gold
from base metals? What if we go through the fire and come out the other side
even better?
As purer beings."

"I suppose it's possible."

"It's probably not likely, I know," She says. She
runs her hand through my hair. "But if it is that, will you meet up with
me on the other side?"

"I can't imagine a better you than
the
you
that you are."

She tweaks my nose. "How sweet, dumbass," she
says. She sighs. "I wish we had more time."

"Well, like you say, we could have plenty of time. We
just don't know."

She nods. The orange light has become more intense. It's
getting close now.

I kiss her. "No matter what, I'm glad I met you. I wish
it could have been sooner, but maybe this is how it was supposed to be."

"We don't have time to get tired of each other. I won't
ever be sick of you leaving the cap off the toothpaste."

"And I won't get mad at you for leaving wet towels on
the floor."

"Not rinsing your cereal bowl."

"Cutting your toenails in bed."

"Leaving the oven light on."

"Used tampons in the bathroom trash."

"GROSS!" She screams, and elbows me in the
shoulder.
"Too far, sir!
Much
too far."
Suddenly, she kisses me deeply, hungrily, pulling me
close with her palms pressed to my cheeks. I feel and taste tears running down
her face as we drink each other in. If there is any fairness to life at all, I
think, this moment will last forever.

It doesn't. After a long time, we part, and she looks at me.
I suddenly notice there are ashes in the air. Tears inscribe canals on her
cheeks. I brush across them with my thumb. She laughs and sniffles.

She leans back into the lounger next to me. Close and yet
never close enough.

The fire is almost upon us now. I can actually see it, above
the roofs of the houses that stretch out toward what used to be a black, starry
sky. The flames undulate and bulge in a terrible, ceaseless rhythm. In the
distance I can hear screams of people realizing that it is almost
time
.

I realize it too, but I don't scream. Instead, as our doom
or our salvation approaches in an ever accelerating line of the unknown, I take
her hand. She takes mine in both of hers.

I turn my head slowly, and it's like when we first met. I am
lost in her eyes, in the vastness and depth of them, in the life and death and
past and future they represent. And in them, I see, as my skin begins to
prickle with heat, as the air flows hot into my lungs.

I see her waiting for me beyond the red and yellow dance of
the flames.