The Ends, page 25
‘It’s incredible, really. I think that’s why it’s quieter. I think some people have gone there, to try and, I don’t know.’
‘To die. For good.’
‘Maybe, yes.’
‘Do that many people really want to die?’ she asks.
‘I don’t know.’
‘I mean, if they’re sick, maybe.’ She looks at me, but doesn’t realize I catch her. Her eyes, so quickly passing over me it’s barely registrable. ‘But everybody else, they want to live, right? So why are they going?’
‘Maybe they’re not. Maybe they’re dying one last time.’
‘One last time.’
‘If you knew you could, one last time, and have most of your life left. If somebody made it to fifty, and they could lose decades by resetting where they were, who they were; and then the Anomaly would be gone, it would be like it had never even been here in the first place. Like a blip.’
‘Maybe.’
‘Would you?’ I ask her.
‘I’m in this one now. I got saved, I’ve got to make this one last. Would I die again? End up back with my mom and dad? No.’ She doesn’t speak for a moment then, and I know why: she is processing what I have already thought. That everybody who is in a death loop, that loop would end. Her parents’ factory would end with tens of hanging souls, with gunshots and poison and actual finality, and they will likely never even know. She would come back, they would all die, that would be it. She would be left there, with the blood around her, the bodies, and she would never recover from it.
If we didn’t have the loop, how would we ever recover?
‘So this means that when you die,’ she starts to say, and I cut her off.
‘If I’m inside the Anomaly, I come back. If I’m not. Well.’
‘But you come back sick.’
‘Yes.’
‘But you’ll live another thirty years.’
‘Something like that. Maybe. Assuming the virus behaves the same.’ I have wondered, but this is not the time for it, if the virus cells die and are reborn, if there’s something about the Anomaly that’s tweaked it. Not in every case, but in mine, maybe. I feel like I’m prodigious, when others died so fast, and here I am, clinging on to life. Clinging on, fingers peeling slowly away from the carapace.
‘And that doesn’t appeal to you?’
I would come back, in my home in Los Angeles. Birdie would be gone; and maybe I would come to understand that she was never really there in the first place. Maybe I would still go looking for her, find her. Work it out. Rebecca would be gone, still; and the pain of that would still feel so fresh. I would look for Birdie, but not far, because I would want to know what caused her to leave, where she had gone. I would be young, and in love with her, or with the idea of her, or the idea of what we were; and our shared grief propelling us – no, dragging us, against everything inside us that said to curl up and sob and wait, but we were dragged into the Anomaly, into the future. Without that, without Birdie, without Rebecca – without the time I have spent in my grief, and out of it, if you ever truly come out of it. And I wouldn’t have left, finally, eventually. I wouldn’t have adventured, and met Rhonda, and met Rhonda again, and seen this version of the world on this path to this place.
I would still be sick. There’s no cure, not for any of it. Maybe it would be faster, more brutal. Maybe I would infect more people: my sickness spreading as my end came. Maybe I would be the thing that killed the rest of the world. Free of the Anomaly, suddenly, and then here it comes: the virus, the weapon, back to finish us off.
And then also: if I were to come back, loop again, I would not have had this, any of this; my last gasp.
I would not have Pettersen.
‘No,’ I say, finally. ‘I don’t think that’s what I want. No.’
‘So what do you want?’ she asks.
We are on the South Bank. Where the steps go down to the old market, where the landscape is blotted by towers of ego, where tramlines swoop off, running alongside the river and under the river, both of them, like twin snakes, wrapped around each other. Constraining. We are there when the blood comes, and like a flood. I wonder, as I collapse, how much the body can lose. Is that how people finally die, is that it, actually; that they have lost enough, that there is no way back from this, because all of what we are is spilled out and all over this, over ourselves, semi-permeable; can my pores not simply open enough and drink it back in, like a hungry mouth held under a tap, lapping at it, trying not to spill a drop?
35
It’s still not over. It’s never over. I am in the bed that Rhonda was in, and she’s been looking after me; but she’s not here now, as I wake up, as I drag myself out from the pink-tinged covers, to the bathroom, and I wash myself, caked-on blood under the shower, my body gasping for the water, and I drink it, my mouth open, my head tilted back, drinking from the faucet. I get out, into the comparative cool of the room, the chill of an air-conditioning system that somehow still works, presumably hundreds of thousands of hours since it was last serviced. I dress in clothes that have been left for me on the chair, I know that they must have been left for me, because they’re laid out, and it’s the sort of thing Rhonda would do. I dress in them, the khakis and pales, a white shirt and sports coat, pale socks, loafers. Like that broken example of humanity in the basement, I think, looking at myself, smoothing over the hair softened by the water here, by the antibacterial hospital pump-soap that smells distinctly of rubbing alcohol. I leave the room, calling Rhonda’s name, but she doesn’t answer, and my voice echoes in these corridors. So then, the elevator down, to the lobby, and I get out into that space, and I call her again. There’s a clock on the wall, hardwired, one of those with a little thing of the date that ticks over, and I don’t know if it’s right – I can’t imagine it accounts for leap years, which means it’s probably off, probably; not that dates really mean anything any more, not really. Or at least not yet – but it’s been a day, that’s all. And I am not dead. I head to the exit when I hear her voice, through the PA system. Clearing her throat before she speaks, some relic of another time entirely.
‘Are you dangerous?’ she asks.
‘No,’ I say, a reaction. I am not. I freeze. I look around. There’s a speaker, a camera. She’s in the basement, watching on the old security monitors. ‘I’ve found where you’ve been keeping Pettersen,’ she says. There’s no anger or disappointment in her voice, it’s curiously flat. I look at one of the cameras. Try and hold my gaze on it.
‘Okay,’ I say.
‘Were you going to kill him?’
I shake my head. ‘No, absolutely not.’
‘Do you even have a plan?’
‘No.’
‘They’ll be looking for him. His family, his wives. He’s got soldiers, right? Guards, whatever.’
‘An army,’ I say.
‘An army.’ She’s quiet for a while. As if she’s waiting for me to pull back on this, to cancel the plan. Set him free, let him run out into the wild, we’ll all be fine. There’ll be no repercussions.
‘I want to see this through,’ I say. ‘I don’t know what that means, but I want to see it through. I’m dying, I want to die. He’s dying, just much slower, and I want him to know that he’s going to die. I don’t want to kill him, I just want him to know. I want him to understand that he’s done, and gone, and that what he’s done, created, whatever, the world that he’s made: it means nothing. Like in a horror film where the last person alive wants the bad guy to know that they lost, wants to see them watch somebody survive them. I want him to know that he was wrong: that the world has survived him.’ I slump against the wall, because it’s a relief, to be able to say this stuff. ‘I don’t want to kill him. There’s so much terror in the world, and so much terrible stuff, and I just want to know that there’s some penance for it. I don’t want him to be in pain, I don’t want to hurt him. He changed his tactic, he pivoted, and he succeeded. He conned the world, and he won. I want him to lose, Rhonda. More than that, no, no: I want him to know that he lost, and that there is only one way for him, in the end. The same as all of us.’ I shut my eyes. I wonder if she can tell that I’m being honest, if that’s coming across. ‘Are you there?’ I ask her.
‘Yes,’ she says.
‘I toyed, you know, with giving him this. What I’ve got, cutting our palms and doing blood brothers, or spitting in his mouth, or making him, I don’t know. Drink my blood, like some fucking parasite, and then he would die of it. That’s how far gone I am, Rhonda. I thought about that, but that’s murder, and I don’t have that in me. There are people, and when bad people die, they said – I remember this, from before the Anomaly came, after some of the suicides – well, good, glad that they’re dead. As if their death meant less to those who loved them. They were mentally ill, or they were radicalized, or they were just desperate for something that they didn’t have, but their deaths didn’t mean less. They were people, and they died, and it was tragic. They couldn’t be helped. My father was sick. He had to have been sick. But that didn’t mean I wanted him to die. I don’t want to kill Pettersen. I don’t want Birdie to suffer, I don’t want his children to suffer. I don’t want anybody sad, or lost, or torn away from themselves or their loved ones. I don’t want pain, I want the pain to end. But I want him to know what it feels like. I want him to know that he was wrong. That this isn’t infinite, it isn’t our destiny, we don’t have control, or mastery, that we’re not the ultimate. That he isn’t.’
The door at the end of the hallway, the one that leads downstairs, opens, and Rhonda’s standing there, listening to me in person. I look at her. ‘I want to die, and I want to know, when I die, that he understands: that he will die, one day, and that this is all over, and will be all over. And he was wrong. That we will go back to how we were before.’
She listens, and she nods. She’s a kid, really, but she looks as if she absolutely understands. How rare it is to understand; to listen, to understand.
‘They’re looking for him,’ she says. I don’t know how to reply. ‘There are a lot of men with guns out there. His army. I went for a walk, it didn’t feel very safe.’
‘No,’ I say, agreeing with her.
‘It’s in the newspaper, which, I don’t know, does he print that? It’s all about him, anyway. They know he’s somewhere, because apparently there’s a chamber where he reappears when he’s dead. The room he was in when the Anomaly came, he’s turned it into this sort of panic room thing, that’s what it seems like.’
‘Oh.’
‘And he’s not there, so they know he’s still alive.’ She seems afraid, genuinely afraid. Like I don’t know that I’ve seen her before. ‘There are a lot of them, Theo. They’re looking everywhere, they’re really turning the city over. They’ll find him.’
‘London’s big.’
‘They’re here. There’s this.’ She pulls a folded piece of paper from her back pocket. A picture, hand-drawn, beautiful, really, artistic. The work of a portrait artist, albeit not a very talented one: a crude early sketch, but clearly me, clearly my face. ‘So I don’t know, Theo. They’ll find you, I think, and him, and me.’ Terror. That’s what makes her look so young. It’s not a look people often have. I remember seeing it on Birdie’s face, when Rebecca— ‘I don’t want to die, Theo. They’ll find him, and they’ll kill us.’
‘I don’t know what to do,’ I say.
‘Send him back. They’ll stop looking, and we’ll have the time to run. Look,’ she says, ‘come on,’ and she holds the door as I go to it, and we go down, to the basement; and there, Pettersen’s room, and she says, ‘He’s fine in there, I’ve fed him,’ like he’s a pet rat, and then we go through another door, and another, down a corridor that runs the length of this entire building. A door with a keypad that she’s smashed apart, she tells me, sheepishly – as if I’m going to disapprove – and then to larger doors, and a button she mashes with her hand as she walks past. A grille lifts, and there’s the ambulance bay. One of the vehicles opened, the back doors wide, and the inside rifled through. She holds out the keys. ‘I found these,’ she says, ‘so we should use it.’
‘Use it.’
‘Take it. Go to wherever we can. We send him back, we go wherever. If the Anomaly’s leaving, I don’t know, we go there. Eventually, probably, won’t we be outside it or whatever?’
‘Send him back. We can’t just let him go, he’ll get them, the soldiers. He’ll tell them.’
‘If he makes his way back, to the house, he won’t remember.’
I realize what she’s saying. ‘No,’ I say, ‘we can’t.’
‘It’s not that bad! He’ll come back!’
‘It’s murder,’ I say, but even that feels weak. He won’t die. He won’t feel it, won’t remember it. The repercussions are few.
‘But we can’t stay here,’ she says.
‘I need to think,’ I say, and I walk away from the ambulance bay, past his door – he throws himself at the window, and he stares at me, and I think I see, in his eyes, the frantic madness of somebody who understands what we’re discussing, who knows what we’re thinking about doing to him.
In the lobby, I stare through the doors at people, walking past for the first time; and I lock the doors, hide at the back as they peer through the glass, unable to see me, clearly wondering what’s going on in here, back there, downstairs, upstairs, a hospital waiting to be explored.
36
I talk to Pettersen. I ask him what he wants. He is on the floor, tired, eating soup by drinking it straight from the bowl. Remarkable how quickly we go feral. He answers, red tomato dripping from his chin. ‘I want to go home,’ he says. ‘I want to be allowed to get the fuck out of here,’ and the soup spits as he speaks, blowing out from his lips. His voice having lost some of the refined accent he’s cultivated: here, he sounds normal, like anybody else. Just a man.
‘But what do you want? In the bigger picture, I mean. In the scale of things, when this is all said and done. What’s your endgame?’
‘You know, you’re a nasty piece of fucking work,’ he says. He contemplates, and then delivers, his next lines as if they will shake me to my core. ‘I see you, you know. I see deep inside you. Your weakness, your self-worth. I was just like you, a man just like you. I was sad, and I was depressed, and I did things. I could have died.’ His story is a mesh of lies, twisted and warped. That changed when he became famous, when he started printing it for posterity. Print makes things tangible; an audience makes them permanent. And so his story solidified, and he uses it now: the way he talks to the lonely, the lost, the searching. Finding common ground; trying to turn me; to radicalize me. ‘I was no stranger to pain, and I see that pain, in you. Do you feel it? Because there’s freedom, you know. In accepting that the Anomaly is here to save us. God, to be free of the shackles of permanence! Have you accepted it yet? You strike me as a man who simply hasn’t. Not can’t, but won’t.’ He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, and pushes himself to standing. ‘Let me— Take me, back to my house. And I can help you, you get me? I can help you turn this all around.’ He holds out his hand for me to shake, a vestige of the old world.
‘The Anomaly is leaving,’ I say. ‘You’re an infection, that’s all. And one day, you’ll be cured. Gone for good.’
He fixes me in the eyes, and he stares, and then he jabs his finger at me, as if to punctuate his words. ‘Nasty man,’ he says. ‘You nasty, nasty man, you can’t possibly know that,’ and he rants, and I understand entirely: I don’t want him to die, to reset; I want to watch him know the truth. I want to witness him as he understands: that he’s the same as everybody else, not better, not worse especially. Not special, and his knowledge, his house of lies, they’re not a gift, they’re not marking him out as a prophet. I want him to see that.
But I am dying. I am dying. I do not know how many more fits – is that even what they are? Eruptions, more like – I have left.
I go to leave him, and there’s a banging from upstairs, almost perfectly timed with my shutting the door on Pettersen. Hammering, more like; and then I hear Rhonda, running down the stairs, her boots thumping—
‘We have to go,’ she says, ‘they’re here.’
‘The soldiers?’
‘We have to go,’ she says again, and then she’s at the bottom of the stairs, and she grabs my arm, and she starts to pull me away from Pettersen’s prison. Upstairs, the rattling of the doors; and then the smashing of glass, I picture a brick, hurled.
‘I can’t,’ I say. I only have this, I think, before I die; I have this one thing left. ‘I don’t want to leave him.’
She stares at me. The scuffing of soft-soled shoes on the treated floors above us. ‘We take him, then.’
‘What?’
‘In the ambulance. We take him. I can drive, he goes in the back with you.’
‘You can’t drive an ambulance,’ I say, ‘I’ll do it,’ but she shakes her head.
‘If you have a thing, what do you call it, an episode, then we crash, and we die. I can drive.’ She opens the door to Pettersen’s room. ‘Come on,’ she says, ‘help me.’
We grab him. We move him, and he starts to shout, to yell, that he’s a prisoner, trapped here; so Rhonda grabs some gauze and shoves it into his mouth, and we strong-arm him to the ambulance she’s prepared. We strap him to the bed in there, tight straps, and I sit in the back with him, and she shuts the doors, and I think, for a moment, that they’ll catch us; but then she starts the engine, and I hear the big metal doors retracting, and the car moves, that silent rumble, that pinging charge of the sol2r panels as the light hits us, and she says, muffled, ‘Hope you’re all right back there,’ and I reply, we are, panic in Pettersen’s eyes, his mouth unable to scream, but I know he would if he could. And we drive, and we drive, and I see nothing, really, out of the rear doors of the ambulance. Just the streets that I knew once, vaguely; as we leave the city, and then the land turns from grey to green.
Rhonda laughs, and the sirens blare, briefly. Nobody follows us, nobody chases us, this is not that story. That is not how stories end any more, not with a chase, not with the world bearing down as everything explodes.
