The Ends, page 27
There’s a little camper van, this old Renault, converted and converted, power supply to power supply, and I’m amazed that it still works, but it must; and there’s a man at the back, making coffee from a little flask with his wife. They are dressed for walking, like this is a life that they understand: up the hill, down the hill. In the back of the van, two boys tumble and fight and play, grinning, sleepless. The man stares at me, and he’s got this smile across his face like he’s almost drunk.
‘It’s working,’ he says, ‘fucking hell, this is working.’
‘What?’
‘The, the, the Anomaly. It’s— Here.’ He thrusts a little radio towards me. I listen, through crackly static, to a voice speaking German. Excitable barking, the man on the report clearly thrilled.
‘What’s he saying?’
‘He’s saying— Hang on, this bit, Don’t be afraid, you don’t need to be afraid any more, something like that. And then, Reports from Zugspitze, that’s a mountain, in Germany, reports from there that people are out of the Anomaly, somehow. On the other side of it. It’s fucking gone! It’s fucking gone, it’s amazing.’ He runs his hand through his hair. ‘It’ll be here soon enough. Germany now, so what, a few hours? What’s the time difference?’
‘Two,’ I say. ‘Is that how it works?’
‘Who the fuck knows,’ he says. That big grin again. ‘We’re here until it does, I reckon.’ He looks at his little family. So complete here in this moment. ‘No sense in going anywhere. There’s walks, there’s coffee. Might as well kick back, make a trip of it. You want a coffee?’ He leans back, pours me a cup from the flask. ‘It’s real coffee,’ he says, ‘this is real Ugandan coffee, there’s a microclimate pod there, they made it, and it costs an arm and a leg, so watch it, don’t let the rain water it down, yeah?’
‘Thank you,’ I say.
‘No problem.’ He grins, then turns back to his family. There’s a story here, I know. We all have stories. They are here, the kids are young.
I drink the coffee.
This might be the last cup I drink.
My insides are churning. Like they know. That subtle undercurrent: hunger, almost. Burbling away, and knowing, utterly knowing, that it is coming.
‘What do we do?’ Rhonda asks.
I say, shout, yell, ‘We go back down and get Pettersen.’
So we turn away from the revellers – that’s the feeling, this intense sense of excitement – and walk back down the hill, the water rushing back with us, lapping at our heels, faster than we can walk.
The back of the ambulance is broken open; the gurney toppled.
Pettersen is nowhere to be seen.
40
Rhonda shouldn’t be here. This isn’t fair on her. I say to her, as we sit, as I try and work out what happens next, that she should leave.
‘Where would I go?’ she asks. ‘You said I was—’ And she describes herself, as I described the older version of her. Like this rebel who never grew up. This person who was absolutely, utterly in control of themselves, of who they were, are, who they always would be. A person who begins at a fixed point, and that point never shifts, and neither does the person. So the person is unflappably themselves, their path is written. There is a track and they are fastened to it. Rhonda is the person, the track, the path. I can see her older self in the younger, and vice versa. ‘So where would I go?’
‘You would go anywhere,’ I say, ‘do anything. I don’t think being here—’
‘What do you want?’
‘I want to die,’ I say.
‘And Pettersen?’
‘Fuck him,’ I reply. ‘He’s gone.’
‘Okay then.’ She smiles, and she takes my hand. ‘Let’s go, old man. Let’s get you dead.’
41
The top of the hill, the mountain, whatever this thing is, it’s swarming even more by the time we reascend; by the time we’ve eaten sandwiches and tinned mandarin segments, and climbed up, slower, slower. As we reach the top I can feel my lungs thrumming. My clothes, the fifth – sixth? seventh? – change since we began this journey, and they are clinging to me now, sweat that tricks me into thinking it’s blood for a moment. Damp to my back, and the rain, the drizzle until we ascend, and then it’s pulsing, lashing, water that comes in thick sheets. But there’s a celebratory sense, a sense of something ending and beginning simultaneously. These people here, and us, trying to witness something that’s brought us to an end, and restarted us. And my end— My end will be sometime, I pray now, I don’t want to live this over again— The people drinking, and laughing. A sign, written in thick bold mud on cardboard: Fuck off, and don’t come back.
Because what was this? How will we ever unpack it? How will people, moving forward, onward, picking up and rebuilding, how will they ever reconcile what’s happened to them with what life is actually like? I think, in this moment, that it feels like a hoax. Like the days when it arrived: when the chaos set in, and we hid, and the reports felt like they were going to be revealed as something other. A story, a strange piece of narrative. An experiment that draped the world in terror, The War of the Worlds on the wireless radios of the past, pushed to a degree that nobody would be comfortable with.
My grandmother, my Yiayia Elena, telling me stories of my grandfather, of Cormac the Explorer, as he went off to the stars and never came back; and how when he was a child, he had been obsessed with old science fiction, with stories of places and creatures and beings and presences other than this.
He left her. He abandoned her, just like people do. She needed him, she was suffering, and she needed him; and he still left. He thought she was dying, or dead, and still: he sat there on his spaceship, and he did something he felt was more important. His priorities so fucked up, and the world thinks of him as this hero, one of the first who tried; but the reality is, he wasn’t. He was a weak little man who the world will never understand.
But this is not his story. It isn’t a story where there’s an antagonist waiting to be offed; the antagonist is here, yes, but he won’t be killed, he will simply be allowed to ultimately die, which would have happened anyway but I will get to look into his eyes as he understands the truth, that his world is built on lies, and always was, and those lies have crumbled. It isn’t one where there’s a love story, because the woman I loved left me, and then I found her, but she was gone, there was no coming back, there was no second chance. It isn’t one where I find a cure, because there is no cure; there is a sickness that pervades, that sits and waits, that nearly died out but still lives inside me, and there are no scientists or specialists or last-minute cures for it, or ways to keep it at bay, this is not that sort of story. It isn’t a story about my daughter, where I find some way to bend the mechanics of reality, to bring her back somehow, or to make the pain of what happened to her any less. It isn’t one where Rhonda asks me to adopt her, or where she gives me some answer to something that I have been wanting, some great quest for a truth that only she can provide, some quest that ends with her opening the treasure chest, F#, E, A#7, B7, the music that plays when you open the treasure chest to find the jewel, the power, the ability that allows you to continue. It isn’t a story about me finding some truth about myself, where I begin afraid and end less afraid, as I am still afraid, and I will always be afraid, until I die, until that moment; because maybe I will be back, maybe I won’t, but either way there’s something so deeply unknowable, so unfathomably mysterious, that fear is the only option I have left, really. This is not a story about Pettersen, or people like him, men like him, who try to bend the world to their will, to their way of thinking.
It is not a story about people at all, not really; about their beginnings and their endings, their circles and cycles. This is not a story about chaos, about order, about trying to fathom the universe out; there is nothing to be fathomed, as best I can tell. This isn’t a story about faith, as some have it, and some do not; and some preach it, and some do not; and some believe it, and some do not. It’s not a story about the discovery of something in space, about spaceships and science and science fiction; about a creature, a life form, a being, something the size of an entire solar system, maybe, pulsing and pulsating through the stars, swallowing planets whole – I remember Galactus, from old comic books, this god that ate entire planets, and the herald that preceded them, the Silver Surfer, riding through the cosmos – this is not that story, I do not know what the Anomaly is, and I don’t think that I ever will.
I don’t think it matters. Maybe this is a first-contact story; but even if it is, it’s about us, primarily. If we met something, if we met an alien presence, we should learn who we are. We should take something from it that helps us to grow. Anything that feels like our world is getting larger, or smaller, expanding or exploding or compressing or condensing, anything like that: we should take from it. Move forward. Keep moving forward.
This is a story about time, because there is not enough of it, and yet also somehow too much of it; and I am rushing, pushing, to try and move through it before it is gone, or before it is taken, or I am. Time, enough to do some things, enough to do nothing, not nearly enough for everything. Cross your fingers, and hope. And now, some of these people celebrate: drinking, drugs, waiting, singing, singing these songs I haven’t heard in years, songs that exist as part of something more global as a memory than local, that transcend the individual. Imagine what it takes to reach that point? To become something more than the individual? Here they are, the songs, sung by these voices, out of tune with each other, losing the melody, finding it again. Butchering it and somehow, in that butchering, rendering it perfect.
I say to Rhonda that I want to sit, to paint this, and I do. She helps me to a little outcrop, uncomfortable but who cares, really. She hands me my notebook, and I start to draw it all out: the lines, the frame first, of the peaks, and the clouds, and then the people, as shapes, formless, like a mass. One shape, really, all of them. The clouds, closer, heavier. Actually weighed down, struggling under the weight of what they’re unleashing. The torrent soaking the pages, so Rhonda leans over and provides some cover for it. I say that the pages are waterproof, that the booklet, it’s one that Birdie got me way back, designed for – ha! – permanence, nothing lost, nothing erased. She doesn’t listen, or doesn’t hear, or doesn’t pay attention, anyway, she stays there, her arms sheltering the paper. She tells me it’s good as I draw, and I think that she might be right: because the people aren’t people here, not yet, they are a surface, they are a coating. They are a part of the land, and the land goes on and off, and the sky, about to rain, is punctured by the peaks in the distance. The signs above the heads of the people collapsing into, I don’t know, degrading. Falling apart in their hands. Part of the land, the cardboard degrading, turning to mulch, mulch into mud, mud into this grass, barren and patchy and sunburned, the soil turned to grit, unable to drink the water, so it runs. There will be a flood, I’m sure, somewhere; the landscape giving way, avalanche and landslip. This place has had tragedies, there will be more, there will always be more. But I draw, hand making the lines. Keep your fingers as a tripod, and follow the fingers, and your heart, and your eyes. A perfect tripod. The people, the land, the sky; and the Anomaly.
Imagine it, that this sky is all of it. Draw the sharp darkness of it, the dark lines, slashes, jagged slashes, deep fucking scores across the sky. Blue ink of its tendrils, its contrails, its tendrils. What would it be like to be in the heart of this storm, to see it? Is it different, how is it? The picture, charcoal-grey, but every colour— And the red, now, on my finger. Drawing it in, the blood running down to my nail. Along the wood, along the lead, to the page. Like: a tattoo, an inscription, a feathered quill, a fountain pen, a deep red thread being drawn through fabric that’s designed to last forever. The red runs across the page, flows down, and I think of the artists who spent their careers working in inks, red and black and grey, those three colours alone, there is nothing that cannot be drawn – achieved – with those three colours. White paper, red ink. The grooves from the pencil perfect gutters for the flow, and it’s as if I have intended this: blood from the lines between fingernail and flesh, blood from the cracked skin of my knuckles. Blood from my eyes, running down my face, and my hands, my eyes, all red. I think of stigmata; of statues of the Virgin Mary, bleeding as people worship at their feet.
Rhonda urges me to keep going, but the pencil is slipping from my hand, and she shouts something to some of the other people – help us, please – and they come over, with their signs, and their disposable waterproof sheaths, and they start crowding, asking what we need. She tells me to keep drawing, and I do, my hand slippery, wipe the blood on my clothes; and feel, through the clothes, the blood soaking back the other way. Nowhere to wipe it, nowhere that’s clean. The people asking if I’m sick, and she tells them, but we are nearly fucking over, so they stay because what’s the risk, really. The drawing, the hills, the mountains, the valleys. The far off, and the further off, imagined, really. The sky there, and the ink, and the— I stare at it, looking up. Past the rain. Past the darkness. My eyes are bloody, my eyes are weeping, they are— But up there, up there is nothing and everything. I imagine: seeing the angels coming from the heavens, in the days of the old testaments, stories without words, seeing myself dragged to a light, seeing the darkness and nothingness that’s swallowed everybody who went into it, that’s broken everybody who tried to come out. It is leaving.
Everybody else here is staring at me, at Rhonda, to allow me to finish this one piece of drawing, this art, my final. My hand working automatically, I don’t know what it’s doing. It won’t reach the edges— Rhonda screams at me that Pettersen is here, bumbling about, totally fucking lost, and I look at him, and he’s a bit away from the rest of the people, over at an edge; and he’s howling, about to throw himself off, but I can tell he simply doesn’t have it, the guts, the strength, the fortitude, whatever it takes to understand the actual power of your own life and death, he is missing that entirely. I watch him, and he turns back, and I’m sure he sees us, all of us, standing here, and that makes me laugh, spitting blood— The light, the line of the sky, the clouds, they’re parted. Sunlight there, and I realize – from here, eyes darkened – that the quality of the light is totally, utterly different. We got used to it, that’s what I said, what we all said. We got used to it, like watching a film. Everything toned slightly off, askew, and yet here, suddenly, the light past, the near-far off, is different. Clear, like— Breathable, clean air, breathable air. The light moves, a wave, washing over the land, and the land – the scrub – it’s green again, in the wake. Like: it’s reborn, made anew. Green plants, shrubs, grass. The rock glinting with a freshness, and the landscape seeming to shift. Rain bends light, light refracts, everything can look different in the rain, but it feels so tangible! Pettersen stands there, and he sways, and he’s about to leap, maybe, or telling himself that he can, as the wave hits him, crashes over him.
I wondered what it would look like: it is something pulled through water, that slight tugging of the edges of a substance designed to be permeated. It sucks around Pettersen, then plops back into place, and he is outside it, finally: gasping, heaving in air, an air that his lungs are not built to take. The light had been different, the air had been different. He is standing there on grass, as flowers spiral and curl around his ankles, growing in this bucolic future. And the others here turn and look, and eyes widen, lighten. This is really happening, the man with the van says, he holds his wife and kids tight, and he stares at it; and he’s crying, and Rhonda’s crying, and I feel my insides. They lurch, and blood comes. I feel myself draining, this is horrifying. The worst moment, the worst image, and yet: it is happening. I put down the drawing, the blood covering the page, soaking through every page, every grooved pencil mark, every etch lined with it, stained with it. Dyed. My guts, my legs. The pores, can you imagine feeling your pores? Actually feeling them as they seep? That is how it feels, as the light scrapes along the landscape, like a shaver, a thin sharp blade. How long since I shaved last? Those pores, fit to burst. Hairs pushed out for blood. The Anomaly scraping the landscape, dragging itself away. Everything popping out of it, and the green, the light, the blue of the sky, as blue as it was just painted, as blue as if it was just created. The people turn and look, all of them, they’re not on me any more, even Rhonda looking away, which I understand – and I say to her, ‘Don’t look at me, look away from me, there’s no —’ But the words are done, there’s not a single new word from my mouth, it doesn’t exist.
The notebook falls from my hands, I feel my muscles done, gone, blood gone from them, blood gone from my bones and my skin, pooling on the floor, the palest red, like washing a small cut under a tap, running the water and the water runs pink until the water runs clear. I am sinking, my body a mulch, a puddle. There is so much blood, blood like I have never seen, blood like has never existed. It is extravagant, to feel like this, to be this utterly broken and gone, the last person on Earth with this sickness, maybe, certainly the last who hasn’t yet died from it, and I made it, I fucking made it, careening towards death as the thing sweeps towards us. Then it passes, the grass so verdant, the land so clean, and I feel my lungs, collapsed, full of mess, as they can’t breathe anyway, let alone this clean, clear air, this clear, clear land.
I fall to the ground, it passes over me, it feels like fingers plucking at my skin, pulling, tugging, the tiniest sense of being ushered through and into something else. A splinter being pulled, that relief; a spot popped, a boil lanced. Sitting on a counter as my mother picked grit from my knee with a needle: a sense of something being taken, being left complete, empty, clean. That absolute relief, that’s what it is, relief. I am on the ground, I am on the ground, the grass is so clean.
