I Know the End

“The world is ending.”

“You always say that.”

A dark cloud hangs over the lake. It looks heavy. Slightly green. That’s no regular storm. We’re in your car. The seat heaters are on. I can feel my legs humming as the warmth seeps into my clothes, my skin. I hug my backpack tightly to my chest.

“I mean it this time,” I say.

You flip through radio channels. All you get is static. You used to say you could hear voices in the white noise. Isn’t that how people communicate with ghosts? Mother. Winter. Rotten. Home. You strung them together, as if there was a coherent sentence amongst the fractured words. Sometimes I heard them, too. You always loved a puzzle. Love a puzzle. I keep forgetting that right now you love puzzles. The lightning cracking over the lake, the way we see it parked at the top of the hill, the waves crashing under our tires hundreds of feet below, reminds me of one of your favourite puzzles. A thousand pieces. You’d slap my hand away whenever I’d try to help, said you hated it when I hovered because I always hovered. A raindrop smacks against the window shield, big and hard like it couldn’t wait to burst.

“How will a thunderstorm kill us all?” you ask, annoyed but trying to mask it.

“It’s not a thunderstorm.”

“How do you know?”

“I don’t. I just… I have a feeling that something’s wrong.”

You try not to laugh but I can see the cracks around your lips deepening. I don’t know why you stayed with me for so long. Everything I said started an argument. Maybe you just liked to scream. I know I did. Crying makes me feel weak when it doesn’t have a purpose. Sometimes I think I egged you on so you would yell at me and I could feel that release. But tonight you don’t push me.

The rain is coming down now. It’s bleeding into the car. Water pools at my feet. I can feel my toes pruning. “What would you do if you died?” I ask. “Right now.” The water’s up to our waists. You look at me, long and steady. Maybe this is how you wanted to go. It’s up to our chins, filling our mouths. Before I drown I feel along the sides of the leather seat. I find a dime.

“I don’t think I could do anything if I died.”

“What?”

“You asked what I would do if I died. I’d be dead. I think the point is that I couldn’t do anything anymore.” We’re in my room lying on my bed. The grey faux fur blanket you got me for my birthday is underneath us, my legs gliding over it every so often to feel its softness. You hate that I never wash it, but I tell you all the time that I don’t know how and I don’t want to ruin it. The fur will get all matted, I’ll probably find clumps of my own hair embedded into the fabric, it’ll never feel as good as it does right now.

“But what if you become a ghost?” I ask. “Or, when your soul is leaving your body, God comes out of nowhere and gives you the choice to start your life over? And if you don’t then you just cease to exist. Your spirit, your mind, everything. Gone.” I roll the dime between my fingers as I look at you. The dim lights in my room barely catch your delicate features, your eyes appear like empty sockets, your hair is indistinguishable from the blanket. The only thing I can clearly see is your teeth. A werewolf brought out by the moon.

“I don’t want to live forever,” you reply.

I want to ask if you’ll take me with you into oblivion but I know you won’t respond. If you do choose to say anything at all, I know you’ll tell me I sound like a John Green book. Sometimes I wish I never told you all the things I liked as a teenager. For some reason you think I’m incapable of outgrowing Teen Wolf and Justin Bieber. I jokingly said I was regressing and you said it’s not regression if I’m already perpetually thirteen so I told you that you were being mean and then I felt bad for talking like a child. You listened to Bon Iver before they had a song with Taylor Swift so I guess that makes you more mature than me. I didn’t even know Bon Iver was a band and not the name of one guy.

“I think being possessed by a demon would be the worst way to go,” I say. I watch the man in the corner of my room while I speak. He’s always there. He’s followed me from home to home. He used to run up and down the stairs at night while I was sleeping. I’d wake up my parents and make them check the house from basement to attic, call the police if they must, because he’s here and he’s going to get me. My mom would rock me back and forth. My dad would tell me I was right. Somehow I always ended back in my own bed, the man still on the loose. I created an escape plan from my room—out the window, onto the roof of the porch, climb down the lattice into the backyard, make a break for the corner store at the top of the street. Hope he isn’t faster than me. If taking the screen off the window was too noisy I could always hide in the closet. But what if, in his rampage, he couldn’t find me, and he killed my family instead? I’d have to listen to the whole thing. I’ve resigned myself to self-sacrifice.

I may be personally haunted but your house is, too. I told you this when I first saw it. Tall trees with knotted and wrinkled trunks dug their claws into the dry earth. Shutters encased windows in a death grip but couldn’t fully conceal the yellow glow. Words spoken in whispers, with lips to ears, need hiding don’t they? Sometimes the air in the house felt claustrophobic, like I was choking on conversations that weren’t meant for me. I think the secrets gave me tinnitus.

I read an article in Cosmopolitan about a famous priest who performed exorcisms. He said that demons loved negative energy. Unhappy bodies were easier to claim. I think we’re both breeding grounds for monsters. At least I acknowledge what plagues me. At least I’ll be ready for it when it happens.

“I think it would be embarrassing to have something evil inside of you and you don’t even know it and it makes you do terrible things,” I continue. “Even if you’re not conscious and even if it kills you after, everyone would have seen you while you were possessed. What if that’s the last thing your mom remembers about you? What if it makes you murder people? What if it lets you go, you don’t even die, and now you have to live with all the destruction it caused?”

“You watch too many movies,” you say.

“People make movies out of real life experiences, you know.”

“You sound like your dad.”

I hate that. I love my mom. I don’t mind being my mom. I don’t want to be my dad. I showed you the tinfoil hats Dad made when he thought the rapture was coming. He had the whole thing planned: we’d get in the van, drive to a commune in the mountains—I think they were somewhere in British Columbia—and wear our hats so the alien beams couldn’t scramble our brains. Or was it radiation from microwaves? I can’t remember. Dad still thinks cellphones can give you brain cancer, so maybe it had something to do with telephone poles and wires. He made the hats when we were really young and technology wasn’t as good as it is now. Mom only told us about it when we were older, said she didn’t want to complicate our childhoods. She held onto the hats, maybe to prove that she wasn’t lying, because isn’t saying “tinfoil hats” just a way to express that someone believes in conspiracy theories? That’s what you asked me, at least. I just wanted to point out the irony in my dad being an anti-communist who wants to live on a commune. You took the hats.

I still love you here. The moon, the man, my room. You bare your teeth. I wrap myself around you. Your claws dig into my back. If you had ripped my throat out I wouldn’t have minded. I don’t know why. I don’t have a reason. I was small in your company. I put the dime in your pocket.

“You sound like your mom,” I say.

I know this will get under your skin the way you get under mine. We’re at a concert but still find ways to argue over the haunting music. I thought it was funny that when we watched Lady Bird you related to it more than I did. You loved your mother but she was cruel. I think we both liked chasing unrequited love.

“We’re bad people,” you reply.

I look at you. Your puckered face is illuminated by the red and blue stage lights. Don’t red and blue make purple? Your laundry smelled of lilac. Your birth stone was amethyst. Like an Aquarius, you were aloof and distant. Your feelings were buried under a sheath of irony. I wish I had eroded your iron. You told me horoscopes were nonsense but asked me to read you yours every week. I still read yours before mine out of habit. It’s the only way I can feel like I know what’s happening to you. What happened to you. Because this is the last time I saw you.

Guitars swell. Symbols crash. You sing along, your raspy cry an eerie suspension over the oppressive crowd. You turn to me. The lines of your expression are soft, your fangs shaven.

The faces around us start melting. The music putters and disintegrates. Bodies drop to the ground. You smile at me. I think about the birthmark on your scalp. I think about your little sister. Was she with us? Sometimes it felt like we were raising her together. I know I like to get ahead of myself. I create realities that don’t exist. We both decided pills couldn’t fix our corroded brain chemistries. You still hated my fantasies, but I knew a small part of you believed them.

I think about the first time you showed me your room. I’m not ready to let you go. You’re walking backwards. The first time you hurt my feelings. The second time, when you hurt them on purpose. Please tell me where you’re going. Lights flicker and fall from the ceiling. Wires spark at your feet. I wanted to keep this memory intact but you’re taking it away from me. Please tell me where you went.

I chase after you.

You are consumed by shadows.

Please. I don’t want to forget this one.

“There’s a pain in my stomach.”

I’m sitting in a hospital bed. You’re sitting in my garden.

“I thought it was your ribs,” you say.

“It’s my gallbladder,” I reply.

“It’s your kidney stones.”

You take a bite of an apple. You lie on your back, face to the sun. Glowing. Angelic.

“I think I have internal bleeding.”

It starts to rain. You hold out your tongue to catch the drops. The water makes the colour of the grass leak from their blades. It dyes your skin green. Serpentine.

“You should sleep it off.”

“But I’ll die.”

“This apple is rotten.”

You throw it to the ground. It rolls under your car seat as you sit with your feet on the pedals. We’re parked at the edge of the cliff, but you’re still ready to slam down on the gas before I can jump out of the car.

“I mean it this time,” I say.

No, no, no. We’ve been here before. The storm is coming in.

“If I had to die,” you say, “I’d want a tornado to take me. People always talk about tornados picking up houses and cows and cars and they get lost forever. They’re probably not lost, just thrown to the ground miles away, splattered, splintered, unrecognizable. I like to think that it would take me somewhere, though. If I’m going to die, I at least want to see something nobody else has. And then I’ll meet the earth again and break apart and nobody will know that it’s me.”

I don’t remember this. Were you ever vulnerable with me? Your voice is gentle. Maybe this is just the way I always wished your voice would sound. A cyclone whips into form over the lake.

“You know how you said you could conjure things by writing them down?” you ask. “I think I can do that, too.”

Wind rattles the car, rips the doors off their hinges.

You kiss me.

You taste like metal.

In my mouth—

—a dime.

I wake up with water in my lungs. Facedown in the pool, pretending to be dead, waiting for you to notice me. You limply kick my bloated corpse but make no move to rescue me. You jump in the water, knees to your chest. I’m tossed away by your wake. You got bored of my game.

“Who killed you this time?” you tease. I wonder if you regret saying that now. I wonder if you regret anything.

 I lift my head up. The night air feels good in my aching lungs. I think I held my breath for ten minutes. I don’t know if that’s possible. “I told you,” I respond. “We’re all dying.”

“There is no apocalypse.”

“Yes there is. It’s in my room.”

A light turns on. We look up at my window, illuminated. Everything is ordinary.

“How does it start?”

“I watch a scary commercial,” I say. “Something about a movie where a babysitter gets murdered by a big man and he calls the house a lot. It came out on my birthday. That’s when I knew I was cursed.”

The TV flicks on in my room. It’s all static.

“Where do I fit into all this?” you ask.

“Instigator. Collateral damage.”

We tread water silently for a moment.

“I’m sorry,” you say. This, I know, is all me.

The air becomes loud. It’s something more than insects and owls and rats. Maybe it’s a plane. Maybe it’s my tinnitus. A beam of light shoots across the sky. It looks like the call of a lighthouse. It’s beckoning.

“Did you see that?” I ask.

“I miss you.” Me again. What did you really say?

“Something’s wrong.”

“I’m sorry.”

“We should go.”

“I miss you.”

You weren’t kind but I remember you kindly. My ears are screaming. My stomach drops. Something has shifted. A ray of sun begins opening over your head. Maybe I was the unkind one. I never went to therapy. I was needy. But you punished me. You are swallowed in a white light. All I see are your eyes. They look like moons. We weren’t so different. That scared you. I look away. I know what’s happening. I told you so. I hate to say that I told you so but I did. You don’t reach out for me. I hear the TV in my room explode.

It’s quiet. Trees have stopped moving. I am floating on my back. You’ve disappeared. You didn’t take me with you. If I cried right now, would you be ashamed of me? I look down at the bottom of the pool. It is covered in dimes.