The End of the Age is Upon Us

This story was first published in American Short Fiction.

Leah, I forgot to tell you about the gravity and how I felt it! When we took the van this afternoon, just you + me, the whole way I heard the hum, like when you walk into the house and sense a television is on? Electricity at the fringes. I looked up but I couldn't see the ship—she was invisible, tucked into the ice-tail. Still, I could feel the lift, first time ever. Science proves there are all kinds of gravities. Moon ache makes tides. The comet calls us. In two days, we'll get on the scales and they'll say 0.

It was strange to drive to the university to post the Final Offer because of the brush fires in the foothills near the freeway. They made such a bright yellow hem in the hillside. I think California is going to die right after we do. Gray smoke mottled the sky, the sun on a dimmer. I stared into it, dared the sun to blind me, but it didn't, so I won. Then snowflakes of ash flurried around the van, but you weren't scared because you had your Bible, the one that you highlighted so much in yellow and orange and green marker that it looked like the flag of some weird African country. In the passenger seat, you tucked your feet underneath you, pushed your glasses up and read from the unboring part. "I will show wonders in heaven above and earth beneath, blood and fire and vapor of smoke," you said. "The Sun shall be turned into darkness and the moon into blood." It was like the Bible was a movie that we were watching and also living in, like costars.

I parked the van at the student center and dumbly paid the parking meter, even though soon there will be galaxies between us and parking tickets. Inside the center, I was surprised at how young the other containers were, newer than us even, coral pink and bronze, like they'd been buffed and waxed and stored in a garage. I guess I've gotten used to being surrounded by later models, like Old Margaret and Darwin and Bo. The students stared at us in our black tunics and cropped hair, and I could tell their eye machines made you anxious so I stared back at them until they swiveled off. I wanted to shout Don't you know what's happening? This planet is about to get recycled!!!!!!! But I didn't. It would take way too long to explain. Besides, we didn't bring the overhead projector.

I took out Bo's flyer and pinned it to a bulletin board quilted with countless notices of human irrelevancy. THIS IS OUR FINAL OFFER, the flyer read, in Bo's chunky handwriting. Civilization is about to be Spaced Under. UFO's Will Take Us to the Next Evolutionary Level. Join Us!

You made a dent in your facepart. "Bo messed up," you said. "UFOs doesn't need an apostrophe."

Leah, you are so Next Level.

I've known it ever since I found you street-side in Salt Lake City, with your retriever, Rocket, testing his leash and your blonde hair caked into rope. (It looks so much better short!) You were a seeker, your crummy backpack crammed with books from every religion. Right there on the sidewalk, in front of the Tabernacle, you skimmed the I Ching and cast coins onto the front of your paisley skirt. See how much I remember? It took me an hour to build up the velocity to enter your atmosphere. Your facepart was weathered and lovely, like you'd faced a solar wind your entire life. A hoop pierced your eyebrow. The two tiny bites in the skin looked maybe infected but adorable.

I handed you our card.

Do you want to know what happens next? Come to a Total Overcomers Anonymous Meeting!

You cleaned a fingernail with the corner.

"What happens next is you buy me lunch," you said and I took you to burgers. You left Rocket outside, tied to a banister with twine, and you tried not to show your hunger, but your arm ringed the plate. I fell so hard, my knee bouncing under the table, even though I knew feelings add weight to our containers. You told me about your Mormon family, how your older brother went AWOL on his mission in Brazil, how then your mother had an affair and everything splintered from there. I couldn't wait to rescue you, to give you shelter and real family. I know it was awful when Bo made you leave Rocket behind but that was a necessary shedding. Don't tell me feelings are hard to give up! The most difficult thing I've ever done was lie with you on Bo's mattress and not touch because Bo wanted us to "learn to be neutral." While we lay there, every religion moved through me. If these letters can prove anything to you it's that I was never neutral.

At the student center, a male vessel got up from his entrance desk and came at you from behind, so I let myself come between you both. "Excuse me," he said. "Are you students? Because you need to be a student here to post flyers." His vessel featured a brown ponytail and flip-flops and a T-shirt that said "Alpha Chi Or Die," which made me think that maybe he knew something we didn't. A can of soda rose to his mouthpart.

"This is very important for students to know," I explained.

"Well, there are rules and I'm the rule guy," he said. "Can I see some ID?"

"Don't you want to hear about the Final Offer?" I said.

"This UFO caca?" he said, ripping down the flyer and crumpling it to a tight ball. Then he belched and took a three-point shot with it into the trash.

"That was totally unnecessary," I said.

His eye machines swerved between us. "And what's up with the twinky getup?" To himself, he muttered, "This fucking state, land o' the freaks."

"Who's the freak?" you said, unblinking, so beautiful.

Back in the van, we closed our eyes, put our tuning forks to our heads, and asked the Next Level what to do. Return to headquarters, I heard, but I didn't want to end you + me. "Right now?" I asked with inside words. "Can't I spend more time with Leah?" Then I swiveled my eye machines and saw you looking into the minivan beside us in the parking lot. The sliding door was open and those two twin babies, new vessels, fresh from the manufacturer, grabbed the air in the backseat. Their mother bent over them and sniffed their hair suspiciously like, Who's been smoking? and you waved to them in a tiny way. But the mother saw you and swung the sliding door shut.

Finish your work, the Next Level returned and so I drove. According to my stopwatch, it had been one hundred and twenty minutes since we had launched from Rancho Santa Fe, and we still hadn't picked up the fuel for the space jump. At the Shopping Zone, a cashier vessel with a bumpy facepart scanned our big jars of applesauce and case of pudding and jugs of vodka. "Looks like a party," he said, "Can I come?"

I wanted to say, The invitations were given out 2,000 years ago!

"The invitations were given out 2,000 years ago!" I said.

"No need to shout, dude," he said.

"I wasn't shouting," I said.

"Lady," the cashier vessel asked you, "this guy doesn't have you against your will or anything, does he?"

You unsheathed your smile and bagged.

But I could tell something was wrong. Later, you stared at the brush fires and hugged your legs to your chest. Your Bible lay on the floor of the van, under the applesauce case. I didn't speak because I didn't want to bang your frequency.

"Michael, do you ever have doubts?" you asked softly, to the dashboard, when we got back. This close, I could see the dots on your brow where the ring once went in. This close, your facepart was a sun that I couldn't look into.

"Doubts?" I said.

"Doubts about the Gate," you said. "About us going."

Leah, we all have Spirits, memories and hopes and feelings rattling in our containers like sneakers in a dryer. I know my Spirit List is long—you, mainly, then my father, then Boulder and my old beta-tester job. . .These Spirits make the doubts about the Gate, and doubts will tether you to the earth to endure the recycling. To fit through the window in the sky, Bo teaches, you have to let go of everything that you are carrying. Nobody said it would be easy to get the scales to 0.

"Spirits make doubts—," I said, but you said "Never mind," and suddenly you were light years away.

Inside the mansion, you walked straight to the Spirit Room to decontaminate, which I thought was a good idea. I took the grocery bags to the kitchen and hovered in front of the computers, each one blinking "Red Alert! Hale Bopp is coming!" in an important font. I could hear Brian in the den recording his testimony for the camera, talking about Beyond Human. He calls it a screenplay but it is 422 pages long, and I think that's more like a Bible plus explosions. He crammed in everything—Bo's emergency landing on the planet, how the away team created Jesus and the other vessels, and what happens after the long war of earth living is finally over. It's so big Brian bound it with six-inch screws. Brian found us in Portland where he made industrial films until his wife was mauled in a zoo-related thing. From the den, I heard him say to the camera, "Death is only the twist on page 27."

Bo came into the kitchen, in his purple tracksuit, and perched on a stool. On the countertop, three neat rows of white pills lined up on newspaper, and he began to feed them into the spiky mouth of a pill-crusher. I'm always honored to be alone in Bo's orbit. It's selfish I know—I get all his gravity that way. His silver hair bristled like a boot-brush, and his green eye machines watched me arrange the applesauce. He placed his old baby hand on top of mine.

"Did you get everything?" Bo asked with his soft voice.

Bo is mostly soft voice now. Last month, Old Margaret whispered to me that his vessel, the one he's been piloting for sixty-six years, is collapsing from cancer, which is why we have to leave now, while he's still strong enough to lead us through the space jump. "I had cancer before I met him," Old Margaret told me, her hand on her breast chassis. "I had them cut it out and give it to me in a jar," she said. "What did it look like?" I asked. She thought for a bit. "Like creamed corn," she said. (Ick. Old Margaret is out there.)

"Everything," I said to Bo and felt his gravity surge.

"That's good, Michael," he said and patted my hand. Then his fingers squeezed. "Such a beautiful container."

I think Bo likes me more than the others because most of us have old containers or fat ones like Old Margaret's or Darwin's, and he prefers the stylings of newer ones, like mine. Next to you, I'm the newest, and Bo likes boy models. While he favored me, I decided to ask my question, the big question. Could I share a bunk with you for the departure? "Yes" would mean you and I would climb the sky ladder together, rung to rung. I was so nervous I vibrated.

"Your attachment to Leah is getting worse," Bo said, shaking his facepart. "I'm very disappointed." It was as if he'd taken a hammer to my container and pounded. "My answer is no."

I went to the laundry room and collapsed on my bunk, pulling big Gs of grief. I cried into my pillowcase for eight minutes and twenty five seconds. I turned on the dryers to cover my noise. I don't want to be alone, not for now, not for as long as it will take to traverse the universe. Leah, am I with you in the Spirit Room? Are you feeling the same? Are you feeling at all?

When I was done leaking, I put the pillowcase in the washing machine with two cups of bleach. I got it clean.

Leah, I woke up this morning and decided that I would not feel anything for you. When we all came together at 3 a.m. for our vitamins, I took off my glasses so I didn't see you and swallowed in the dark. During brain exercises, from 8:36 am to 10:36 am, I finished my crosswords without thinking about you once. I wrote our report about the human encounters from yesterday and didn't mention your questions or your doubts. At 10:54 am, I drank my protein formula and ate a cinnamon roll and more vitamins, but I didn't look at your vitamin cup.

Then the doorbell rang and Darwin rushed into the kitchen, already sweating and puffing. Rushing is hard for him because he has an XXL container. "Someone's at the front door," he said.

A visitor! I got so excited because I thought it might be Jesus. Bo says that Jesus, the Total Overcomer, might surprise us one day but that he won't look like Jesus. He'll have a smooth face and black eyes and a giant head to hold all available knowledge. I thought of the last visitors we had, those two Mormon missionaries? In their starched shirts and nametags and backpacks, they reminded you of home. I could tell because your facepart looked abandoned. They saw all of us in our tunics together and wondered if we were a family reunion happening. "Do you want to find out about your family's eternal salvation?" they asked from the doorstep and Bo said, "Do you?" Their faceparts twisted in confusion and the younger one asked, "Are you guys vampires?" and we started to clap to show our unity and our not-vampire-ness. Good times.

I heard the knock on the door as I climbed the front stairs to see out the cathedral window, the only window that isn't covered with tinfoil. (I don't know why Bo let that one be the only one, but I think because it was because it was too hard to put the tinfoil there.)

Through the window, I saw an older female container chewing the pad of her thumb with a pound cake on a plastic tray under her arm. She wore a winter coat, but Bo never mentioned a winter coat on Jesus.

"May I help you?" Bo asked when he opened the door, a white tunic draped loose on his vessel.

The older woman straightened up and peered at all of us gathered in the foyer in the dimness. It must be wonderful to see thirty-nine people with the same haircut and clothing, like the biggest Math Team ever.

"I'm here to speak to my daughter," she said.

"You daughter isn't here," Bo said calmly.

"How do you know?"

"There are no daughters here," Bo answered. "Only Overcomers."

"Leah, are you there?" she called inside. "It's me, it's Mom."

I couldn't help it, but I looked at you, at the threshold to the living room. Your facepart was still. You didn't make any expression go. The woman saw me and followed my eye machines to you.

"Oh my God, Leah," the woman said. "What have they done to you?"

"I'm sorry, we have to affairs to attend to," Bo said, even though all we had to do was more brain exercises. He tried to close the door but your mother wedged her sneaker at the base.

"I don't know who you are or what this is about, but you can't hold her here," she said. "I'll call the police the minute you shut this door."

Bo turned and we cleared a space between you and him.

"Leah, do you know this person?" he asked.

Honestly, Leah, I didn't know if you would be strong enough to shed your attachment, right there in front of us. I wondered if I would be strong enough. But we have to let go and release even the best human memories. Like your mother. Like you + me, after the burgers. Remember how we walked up the ramp of the Visitors' Center in Salt Lake to the lame planetarium the Mormons made there? We sat on the benches and peered up at the planets and you said, "I feel like an alien on earth, do you ever feel like an alien?" And I explained about how our souls drove our vessels like cars until they were jalopies, and how Bo would open the Gate for our souls to Level Up. You'd heard so many explanations in your life you were skeptical. But your backpack was heavy, so heavy and confusing, wasn't it? And you showed the day after for the Q & A with Bo, and the morning after for our idling van, in a field outside of the city. You said, "I want to walk through the door of my life," and Bo said, "This way."

But you came with Rocket on his leash. You had to leave him.

You wept so much your facepart looked plastic.

See Leah, I do it too. Human love is remembering.

"Leah, do you want to go with this person?" Bo asked in the foyer.

Your mother held out her cake. "Please, Baby, I brought your favorite," she said. "Please, it took me years to find you."

And I watched you shake your head. No.

I felt warm in my chest, the way gas in the universe collapses together and forms a hot star from nothing. Then your mother broke down, shot exhaust from her mouthpart. She dropped the pound cake, which probably once tasted good but not anymore. Bo closed the door and turned the lock. I could still hear her crying when we began to clap.

Can I tell you something? When I was seventeen, I thought maybe I was Jesus. I created my own religion where the saints were the animals of my block. I believed the clouds of feeding sparrows were the face of God. On my recorder, I composed psalms for the squirrels. I slept in the basement of my father's house, a house in a neighborhood of bullies. At night a gray tomcat with chewed-up ears and one brave fang came to my window. His emerald eyes transfixed me. I let him crawl into bed, where he kneaded the blankets on top of me and curled into sleep, his purr a throaty rumble. This was my holy visitation. During school, a new Bible wrote itself in the close ruled pages of my notebook.

Then one night I found the tomcat at my window, dazed and bloody, one ear blown away to pink tissue. Bits of a firecracker's paper wrapper lay matted in his fur. He pressed against the screen of my window but refused to come in, refused to let me touch him. He had come to me to die. Have you ever watched something surrender its vessel, Leah? I vigiled for two days with water and food that the tomcat didn't eat until, finally, his brilliant eyes shallowed and I was inconsolable, just like you were with Rocket. My father thought I'd lost my mind. He called my mother in Phoenix for help. She asked to speak to me. "I have died for the smallest things," I told her. "Put your father back on the phone," she said.

I saw that our skin is an envelope, ready to be opened.

I knew that the next time I found God, I would go with him when he ascended.

I told myself I would not feel anything today but I feel again. All these possible worlds—every place, every person, is a planet, charging with life.

It was midnight and tomb-time when I heard your steps outside. I rose from my bunk, peeled a corner of tinfoil from the laundry room window and saw you, past the tennis court and the dumpster, at the edge of the pool. I thought you were about to dive in, all dressed. But you stood still with your secret while the lights from underwater—Bo liked to keep the pool lights on as a beacon for the comet—wrinkled and skittered across your body.

Why were you alone, without a check partner? I thought about Bo's counsel on the white board—"Major Offenses: Having likes and dislikes, Trusting your own judgment, Using your own mind "—and I knew I had to rescue you from your thoughts. Which was also a thought but the right kind. I lifted the window. In the quiet, I slid myself through it (practice for tomorrow) and snuck out to you because I wanted to know your secret. I wanted to be the one to hear it. I wanted to tell one too.

The bougainvillea flowers supernova'd into pink and red along the path. A warm wind brushed the palms. I came beside you and said, "What's wrong, Leah? What is it?" There are no mirrors in the house, but if there were mirrors you would be able to see how your eyes have bags under them, bruisy quarter-moons.

You said, "Look up – what do you see, Michael?"

The clouds were gone and left a wide litter of stars. I was surprised that I still couldn't make out the ship or the comet now, but Bo reminds us that human eyes are foreign and cheaply made. I cranked my head back and took your hand and laced your fingers with my fingers. It was wonderful and strange since I had not felt someone else's skin for three years, since I joined up. Your container was so revved, like the hood of the van after one of our thousand mile drives.

"Our last night on earth," I said.

I had no thoughts when I kissed you except: I am not thinking, finally I am not thinking. I crashed through your atmosphere and landed in a place I already loved.

"What are you doing?" you said and pulled away. As you did, I saw Bo at the back door, his old baby hands at his sides. His facepart was stern and cold under the door light, the way my father looked at me when he saw the tomcat dying and I wouldn't let a vet visit, like I wanted the grief, sought it out. . . No more remembering. Bo's gravity pulled us. Air ran quickly through his nostrils as if he'd come from a jog. His scalp was newly shaved smooth, scored with nicks.

"Go immediately to your rooms," Bo said to us. "I will be there promptly."

What I didn't get to tell you: these aren't your only letters. Last year, when we lived in the earth-ship made of dirt and Coke cans in New Mexico, letters with your name on them came every month to our P.O. Box, and it was my job to check the mail. When I opened them, they were boring. "Christmas this year was lonely without you," your mother wrote, almost every time. "I miss you and love you and want you to come home. Call me collect from anywhere and I will come get you." There were dozens of these letters, at every holiday and birthday. There was even one from Brazil, from your brother. I read them and threw them away.

Bo just left and he almost found my letters to you tonight! Once I got back to the laundry room, he came in right after and told me that the Earth gravity has addicted me to human behavior and that he wasn't sure that I would make the window any longer. He searched my entire room – under the mattress, my dresser, even inside my suitcase for tomorrow. (But not in the lint filter of the dryer!) He knew I was hiding something somewhere and that I was having my own thoughts. Then he sat beside me and put his hand on my thigh and squeezed and said that I would have to work as dispatcher tomorrow, which is like doing the dishes except with people's containers. I wouldn't get to see you at all.

I am still so nervous. I felt like I was about to shed in front of him. I took out my tuning fork from my pocket and consulted the Next Level but there was no broadcast. I spent some time practicing my telepathy with you, except you don't seem to want to transmit. I'll leave you alone.

Leah, I'm writing you from the nursery, in the dark, because I don't have much time. This whole morning I have been running around the house like a crazy person. Helping fifteen people shed is not easy. Brian is supposed to be the Departure Captain but all he did was give me the plastic bags and told me that I needed to make sure each person had eaten their medicine and shed their container entirely before going onto the next person. But that's hard because I'm distracted because you're not here and because some of the containers backfire and puke a little when they shed.

Old Margaret told me that you went with your new check partner Ladonna to get more applesauce (people had been snacking!). But you're still not home yet and it's almost noon. Where are you? Reading the greeting cards like you love to do? Watering the plants in some parking lot?

I came to the nursery because it was your favorite room and because it is where babies were once and they are weightless. You told me once you could hear the space wind from here. Four containers that were Thomas and David and Claire and Julie are still in the bunks around me because I already did this room. I figure they're at the ionosphere, maybe further. Their suitcases sit next to me on the floor. Through the wall, I can hear Bo doing his testimony for the camera, the last one. "It is time to Level Up," he says. "The end of the age is upon us." I still have the fifteen plastic bags in my hands from the first departures. They have condensation because breath becomes water when you shed inside them. I have to take them to the dumpster—Bo does not want us to recycle them.

Writing this, I wonder how long the window in the sky will stay open, and if we can still hold each other even if we cross through at different times or if that is just me being stupid. When I lived in Boulder, resurrecting computers, I felt I had no windows. Now there are many and they are open. Still, Bo says it is possible to miss our rendezvous and then we drift in the vacuum, like space trash. I sit here, trying to hear the space wind. But I have to stop, somebody's knock

Leah, I screwed up. Brian came to the nursery. He had a whole bunch of wet towels in his hand and said he'd been "cleaning up after me."

"Why?" I asked.

"Go upstairs," he said.

So I surfed the wall-to-wall carpeting to the upstairs, where Bo and Old Margaret clustered around a bunk in the guest bedroom. I knew then I was in trouble. Darwin stretched out there, streamlined for his XXL container: hands at his side and Nike swoosh for velocity. Darwin was one of Bo's favorites. He had been with Bo for two decades and even had his testicles erased in Mexico, like Bo had done, because of the drag.

Bo pointed to Darwin's chest. It rose and fell, rose and fell, a bad bellows, and yellow puke spilled from his mouth onto the sheet, which Brian then mopped it up with a towel. I must have taken the plastic bag off too soon, before Darwin was done shedding. Bo and Old Margaret stepped away and I knew my responsibility. I pressed my hand to his mouth and pinched his nose and stared at the bellows to make it stop. But we all knew that I had banged his timing. Darwin is space trash now.

I felt sick to my stomach. I thought the insides of my container were going to come out my mouthpart. But Bo put his old baby hand on the back of my neck—it was so warm and wrinkling—and said, "Don't take on his weight, Michael." All of the sudden, I remembered why I need Bo. Because Bo doesn't let any weight hold him to the Earth at all.

This is my last letter to you, but it is more like inside words. When I came downstairs, I saw Brian close the door to the laundry room. The towels he carried were missing. "What are you doing?" I asked and Brian said, "I'm doing the laundry."

I know I have twenty-four minutes until the washer cycle is finished and then comes the dryer and that will ruin every letter to you I've written. But Brian makes me stay in the kitchen because we're ready for the next fifteen to make the jump. And that means us.

Brian has set out the bowls of pudding +/or applesauce along with baggies of Bo's powder next to them. Plastic cups full of the vodka we bought checker the kitchen table. Old Margaret gives me a piece of paper that she printed with The Routine: Eat two teaspoons to make room for the powder and stir. Then drink.

"Wait," Brian says. "Shouldn't we wait for Ladonna? For Leah?"

Your name is a comet streaking.

Bo shakes his head.

Everyone empties out of the kitchen. Silently, they go to their rooms to eat their powder and drink their vodka and shed. My job as dispatcher is over. Bo remains in the room, gauging me. He knows how much waiting I'm capable of. He blinks his eyes catlike and slow, the whole of understanding inside him.

I leave mechanically to the laundry room, to my bunk. The washer thumps with a full load. But there, at the base of my bunk, is your suitcase! The one covered in glow-in-the-dark star stickers! I feel so happy. You convinced Bo to let us jump together! Even if you aren't here yet, I know that you will be with me, on the bunk above, your feet on the sky ladder right behind mine. I remember, together in the nursery, you told me that we were made of the same matter as stars. By the pool, our matter folded, densed up. I will never forget your surface.

I set my applesauce and powder down and go to the dryer to collect my letters. I wrap them in a shoelace and open your suitcase to sneak them in.

But your valise is empty. There is nothing inside except a page ripped from the Upanishads, something you could spare.

"I'm not coming back, Michael," you wrote. "There is nothing in the sky."

Bo says that when a star explodes, it leaves behind the darkest energy in the universe. My eyes leak, the last of what's inside me.

This is what it took to get me to 0.

Bo is at the door. He spoons my dose into my mouth and I don't stop him. The applesauce tastes bitter and gritty, like ashes suspended in mud. Bo pushes me flat, so I rest, while his old baby hands run over me. Then I hear the hum, soft at first but soon it is in my jaw, like my head is pressed against the generator of the ship rending space. Leah, vanisher, you will never know this. When you look up, you will not see us, not the comet, only the tail. Not the thing, only the going. Then the hum shatters my container, the hum is the blood in my ears and it slows and slows and Bo with a plastic bag in his