The World Ends at Five & Other Stories (4 page)

Once everyone is finished and I’ve finally stopped trying to pick up any more rice, my boyfriend’s mother clears the table and the rest of us rise from our seats. I thank my boyfriend’s parents as he escorts me
out,
all the way out, back to his car.

“I’m sorry,” I mumble.

“For what?” he asks as he slides into the driver’s seat. He’s not looking at me, which I take as a bad sign.

“I don’t know. Not being genuine enough, I guess.”

Now he does turn and look at me. “Aren’t you at all interested in your heritage?”

I feel as if a dark pit has opened in my stomach as I think over his question. “Why does it mean so much to you?” I ask him.

“It’s important!”

“Why?”

“Because it’ll die out if we don’t hold onto it!”

“And?” I don’t mean to sound cruel, which I know I do. But I honestly don’t see the point. “You won’t die from lack of it, will you?” I ask. He just stares, so I go on. “Maybe the culture can’t live without you, but you can choose to live without the culture.
Because.
. . Because if you live for the culture and not for yourself, it’ll kill you.”

He starts the car and drives me home without speaking another word.

Days later I still haven’t heard from him, so I assume it’s over. It’s just as well, I suppose. We never would’ve agreed on what kind of wedding to have or how to raise a family. My friends and co-workers commiserate and I’m over it pretty quickly.

On the news, the underwater ruins are being hauled to the surface. I wonder what my mother would have thought. I consider calling my father; I haven’t spoken to him in over a month. Then I decide he probably wouldn’t be interested in discussing this particular news report.

I think about my mother, all the things she knew and loved, all the things that are now lost. I wonder if natural selection extends to entire countries and cultures, if there is a reason for some traditions to die. Or if it is simply the fault of people like me, determined to exist as they are and not be dictated to by the past. Either way, the outcome is the same.
One day
historians will wonder what became of us, and the answer will be that it took more than one person to end the society by abandoning it, while it would only have taken one person’s willingness to remember for it to continue.

And me, I remember my mother’s kimono. It was a washed-out, frayed and tattered thing, over-worn to one faded non-color. But once it had been shining, beautiful. Just like my mother.

The World Ends at Five

“Fifteen minutes until the end of the world,” she announced as she sailed by. I glanced at my watch. 4:45 on the nose. I decided I should go rinse out my coffee mug; the drink was cold now anyway from spending a day untouched on my desk.

I glanced at the big black monitors that lined the walls as I walked. Lots of flashing red, some yellow, a very little green. I didn’t even bother to stop and read any of them more closely. What would be the point this late in the game?

In the kitchenette I washed my cup and dried it with a paper towel, then toted it back to where my desk crouched amid others on the open floor. “Ten minutes,” she said as she slipped past, now going the other way.

“Give it a rest,” I muttered. Ten minutes, sure. But they’d be the longest ten minutes.

I got back to my desk and skimmed my e-mail. Most of it wasn’t worth worrying about. I closed the program and shut down my computer. Along the walls, the monitors began to beep a five-minute warning, just as my phone rang. I scowled at the number displayed on the ID. An advertiser. Well, he could wait too.

A low roar began to build around the two-minute mark. I expected people to start screaming with the anticipation, but everyone was eerily calm. Well, I was calm, why shouldn’t they be?

The beeping from the monitors became more insistent, until finally the sound bled into one long, high-pitched shriek. We watched the last four seconds count down with our breath stopped in our lungs.

Everything went black.

“Is it over?” I heard someone ask a moment later, in a voice a little louder than a whisper.

“It’s over,” I said.

Back-up lighting
snicked
on in a cascade starting at one end of the floor and working towards the other. People blinked and squinted and wondered.

I picked up my bag. “See you tomorrow,” I said to no one in particular.

“Same time, different world,” she said brightly as she brushed by me on my way out.

I think she enjoys her job a little too much.

I’ve been doing this for almost a decade now. I don’t know why. It’s just what I’m designed to do. I am a Constructor, working for The Originator. I build worlds.

And then, after months or even years of work, we tear them apart again.

The early ones were feeble, not at all well thought out. There were very few people in them and only blurs of color that suggested an environment: flat expanses of green grass, the far away smudges of a darker green for trees.
Blue skies without the depth of clouds.

The people were painted with the same broad strokes: color, gender, perhaps one major personality trait. But like the paintings of a child, the details were lacking, and the faces were only blurs.

The Originator has left a stack of file folders on my desk. We’ve long since come to the place where every new world builds on one or more that came before it.
Nothing new under the sun, as they say.
The folders contain different aspects that The Originator wants to use in the construction of the next realm. Ah, this building—it shows up in a lot of our worlds. And this house, too. These are pre-fab sets now, quick and easy to throw together, which makes my job a lot easier. Slap a little new paint on, move a room or two and we’re all set.

The people are harder. It takes a lot of them to fill a world, and every one of them has to be different. Many of them are similar, but we can’t use the same ones over and over or else someone will notice, and then we’re in real trouble.

I sit down and begin making phone calls to farm out the duties. We’ve got several vendors now who know the job backwards and forwards. This world will be a big one, and Ames will be able to supply us with a population in about nine months time. Cree Industries will begin planning and zoning work and will have working models to show us in a couple weeks.

She walks in just as I sit back to take a break. “This’ll be a big one,” she says with a broad smile. The bigger they are, after all, the better they break apart.

I glance up at the monitors. The world we’re deconstructing today is a small one, existing only of one town and a few hundred people.
Short story territory.
Not that that makes it any easier for me. We put just as much work into the little stuff as the big.
More, in fact, because the little worlds require much more attention to detail.

Barton Crossing. That’s today’s world’s name.
In Rhode Island.
I recall the research, what the “real” Rhode Island consists of. But that’s not my domain, and we’re not doing the real Rhode Island any harm in any case.

I call up on my computer a list of details: a coastal village with a standing population of 2200 that swells in summer, primarily fishermen and summer tourist traps like inns and trinket shops. A lighthouse stands on the north shore of town.

I pull up a persona file at random. Old Mrs.
Bennis
makes homemade fudge and sells it from the store she’s run for ages, continuing even after her husband of 46 years passed away three years ago. Her three children have tried in vain to get her to retire, but Audrey
Bennis
won’t hear of it. She’s got a lot of life in her yet. So she thinks.

I sigh and check the clock.
10:23. Barton Crossing, Rhode Island,
has less than seven hours left in its short history.

I call up the chosen disaster. She’s selected an old-fashioned hurricane to wipe the town off the map. A damn shame, but there are worse ways to go, and I’ve seen them all.

I bring up Barton Crossing on my screen, a shot of the lighthouse and coastline. The sky looks clear, but it’s windy already, the waves shattering over the rocks. I pick up my phone and call the prep department.

“How are you handling it?” I ask, more for the formality since I already have a pretty good idea of what they’re doing.

“News media,” Fred says. “You’ll see the reporters out in their slickers soon if you keep watching.”

“No thanks.” I hang up and click away from the image of Barton Crossing’s lighthouse, over to a quieter Main Street lined with a family-run hardware store and a Market Basket grocery.

Main Street. I hate the name, but the design team uses it again and again, like some kind of inside joke.

The people on Barton Crossing’s Main Street seem placid enough as they stroll the sidewalks. It’s late summer there now, the kids just back in school, light sweaters beginning to appear amidst the tshirts. I find myself admiring the crew’s work as I notice the worn wood fronts of shops, the faded and peeling paint, here and there a missing roof shingle. Things the people of Barton Crossing take for granted. Well, doesn’t everyone assume the world they live in will always be there? Only people like me know the difference. Only people like me will miss it when it’s gone.

A day full of meetings about the new construction—the designers want to call it
Pickery
, but we have yet to get approval from The Originator on that—and I return to my desk to find Barton Crossing, Rhode Island, in the throes of a full-force storm.

“
Pickery
is a stupid name,” she says, stopping next to my desk.

“Take it up with Creative,” I tell her, and she storms off. I know she’s just pissed because Barton Crossing isn’t big enough to provide much entertainment as it’s being reduced to nothing.

The town is now visible through all the front windows of the office. It always happens this way; she always wants a front-row seat. I, for one, hate
it,
hate being in the middle of it all. I never spent any time in Barton Crossing; why should I start now, at its end?

The clouds are low and heavy, the color of dark steel. We can hear the wind shriek and roar, and I instinctively squint against it, even though it cannot touch me. And even though I cannot feel the wind, I am cold.

The houses are shut tight against what’s coming. All the shops on Main are abandoned. Nothing living moves in the streets of Barton Crossing.

Suddenly Dean stands up at the desk facing mine and yells across at me, “The phone!”

“Huh?”
I jump, startled out of my thoughts.
Then I realize my phone is ringing. I pick it up.

“Yeah?”

“
Pickery
is out. It’s
Betheau
.”

“Spell it,” I say, pulling a Post-it towards me and grabbing a pen.

A loud ripping sound, as if the hand of God has come down and grabbed a clump of earth, cuts through my concentration, and I have to ask the new world’s name again to make sure I wrote it down correctly.

“
Betheau
. What is it, French?”

“Louisiana.”

“Ah.”

By the time I hang up, the lighthouse has long since vanished, as have the seafront houses. Main Street is under almost three feet of water.

I check my watch. There’s almost two more hours to go. I feel a headache coming on.

The contractors are whining about having to work in a swamp. I’m not crazy about it, either, since it means additional insurance costs and a lot of extra paperwork. On the other hand,
Betheau
, Louisiana, has gone from being a major city to a plantation house that requires far fewer people, and people are much harder to construct. So in the end we’re still saving a bundle.

Wardrobe, meanwhile, has been whipped into
a frenzy
. They thought they’d be doing period dress, but it turns out that
Betheau
is to be a modern day sort of place—although what “modern day” is, exactly, I’m not really sure anymore. Now the creative department has had to scrap a load of material and design work and start over.

It’s amazing how all this can happen in such a short period of time. The Originator’s mind changes and presto! A whole new concept that requires us to start over from
square
one.

Meanwhile, Barton Crossing, Rhode Island, still has 24 minutes of breath in her lungs. I don’t look out the window anymore, not since seeing the black Labrador dog-paddling its way through the streets in an effort to find sanctuary. How long could it swim, I wondered. And what happened when it reached the border of fiction and found it could not step over into reality? What happened when it realized it was doomed?

“Your heart’s too soft for this work,” she says. I look up at where she stands by my desk, her over—
lipsticked
mouth pulled into a grimly satisfied smile. She looks like she’s won something. A bet, maybe.

“I build things,” I tell her.

“And I take them apart.”

I nod. It has always been the way of things. I am where the stories start, and she is where they end. And every day is just like this.

But does it have to be?

An inkling of an idea begins to burrow into my brain. Why? Why do we take these places apart when The Originator is done with them? Are they doing anyone any harm by existing? It isn’t as if the fictional space is limited, after all. There’s room for everyone.

She’s still standing next to my desk, her smile gone now,
her
eyes narrow as she peers at me. She had read my expression—I’m a lousy poker player—and now she wants to read my thoughts.

I try to smile through my preoccupation. “Twenty minutes,” I say. Even to my own ears, my voice sounds hollow.

She makes a sound similar to
humph
and strides off.

“Twenty minutes,” I repeat to myself. “Twenty minutes to save Barton Crossing.”

After walking the floor in what I hope is a nonchalant fashion, checking to make sure she’s really gone and not just spying on me from behind something, I turn my steps and walk past the row of windows to the Machine Room. This is the heart of our deconstructive forces. This is where hurricanes, rains of fire, and other elementals are powered. It’s a huge room, full of lights and screens and wires, and I have no idea how it works.

I hesitate. If I do this now, they may have time to stop me and finish the job on Barton Crossing. But if I don’t do this now, if I wait, there won’t be enough of the town left to save to make it worth the effort.
Or the risk.

I go to the first console. The screen shows nothing but waves, huge waves, crashing over what is left of Barton Crossing’s shoreline. No one needs this, I think. No one ever sees this part after they close the book.

I look at the sliding levers that line the long black board; it looks like a stereo equalizer, and many of the settings are high, up past the red line. I place my fingertips on several of the levers and ease them down in unison. On the screen, the waves fall back. They become mere swells again.

Already I’m aware of the silence outside on the floor, followed by the low humming of questioning murmurs. I look at the Machine Room door, still open, and go to shut it. There’s a bolt, so I lock myself in.

They’ll just finish the job another day, I tell myself. And that could be true. I’m not convinced that The Originator can be reasoned with, and I don’t know The Originator’s own reasoning for demolishing worlds when a story is finished. But I’ve come to realization that I cannot continue investing myself in building what
is only destined to be destroyed
.