Forever, in Pieces Read online

  Perhaps all these things will come to pass.

  But not today. Today, the Furnishings continue to send messengers when they aren’t sending warriors, and the messengers bear troubling threats. They claim that the chairs hear stirrings in the fog, voices coalescing in the reaches outside human perception.

  They claim the appliances are coming soon.

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  One Unheard Message

  Hello, Jasmine, is it? My name is Cara and I’d like to make an . . . um . . . appointment with you. It’s not for me, actually. I don’t want you to get the wrong impression, even though your ad says that couples are welcome. It’s for my husband. I really don’t know how this is done. See, it’s an . . . unusual situation we’re in. My husband and I, I mean. Your ad says you’re ‘open to new experiences,’ and I really hope that’s the truth, because I don’t know what else to do at this point.

  “My husband, Erik, he’s . . . well . . . he’s . . . ill, and has been for a long time. Six years. He’s got a genetic disorder, nothing communicable, nothing that you need to worry about taking home with you. But . . . but I’ve . . . we’ve . . . been dealing with it for six years.

  “Anyway, I need you to give Erik some of your time. I just . . . I can’t. I can’t anymore. Not now. He’s not . . . he’s not covered in seeping sores or anything like that. It’s just . . . I don’t know. I can’t.

  “I mean, when he was first diagnosed, he was only thirty-five. He ran half-marathons. He loved to ski. He had just been promoted to managing editor of the website he worked for. A non-profit. They did grassroots organizing for animal welfare causes.

  “He was still Erik then. Bright eyes. A smile that old women trusted with their hearts and young women trusted with their beds. Soft hands that touched me just when I needed it, just where I needed it. A mind . . . a mind so sharp but so delicate. He . . . he had . . . a light. He used to sing to birds and squirrels in the yard, and I’d laugh at him because it seemed so . . . childish, I guess, but not. It was really more like . . . he saw something magical in the world where I saw . . . nothing.

  “But then Erik started . . . dissolving. He was tired all the time. He couldn’t maintain his balance. His vision blurred. Eventually, the doctors told him he’d better start preparing.

  “For a while, we were okay. I helped him dress and I helped him walk, and the light, the light still glowed. But a time came when he couldn’t get out of bed anymore. And he couldn’t eat unless I liquefied his food. And he couldn’t clean himself, in or out of the bathroom. And the light . . . the light flickered and it disappeared and I . . . I couldn’t . . . I can’t . . . I can’t look at him anymore without seeing the darkness now. I see an open grave, a dark, bottomless, open grave where Erik once was.

  “I thought that by now his body would be so far beyond repair that he wouldn’t care about it anymore. I thought he was all broken soul, tattered mind. But last week he asked if we could make love one more time, one last time. He said he just wants to feel a woman again. And . . . and I couldn’t say yes. I couldn’t. And I know. I know I’m a terrible person. I know I don’t ever deserve to love or be loved after this, but . . . but I just can’t. Because he’s not the same man and I’m not the same woman. I look in those once shining eyes and I see acceptance in defeat and it makes me hate the universe and hate God and hate Erik for forcing me to know, to absolutely know, how insignificant, how transient, even the best things are.

  “And yet, Jasmine . . .

  “And yet . . . I still love him.

  “Even if no one could believe me.

  “So . . . I’d like to make an appointment.”

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  May Old Acquaintance Be Forgot

  A thousand frozen stars rushed by Dan’s upturned face as he stared at the enormous digital numerals. 11:47 and flashing ever closer. A drunk girl stumbled into his shoulder and burped a mostly incoherent “Sorry.” Dan smiled. Thirteen more minutes until the second end of the world.

  The night was a perfect epilogue: snow whirling in the air, cameras flashing in every direction, bands playing in the square, lights refracting in the storm, laughter sliding through every conversation. Everyone here to celebrate. Everyone here to stare, transfixed, as a glowing sphere dropped a few feet. Everyone here to hug and kiss and sing out an homage to hope and renewal. It was all so meaningless. It was all so beautiful.

  Air horns echoed through the steel canyons. The snow began falling harder.

  11:48.

  Dan loved this celebration despite himself. In another life he had swum in champagne promises and the abandon of the great Next: next week, next year, next time—the Next would always be better, the Next was always the dream of everything possible. But Next never arrived and reality, taking its place, proved to be only a diminutive slice of hope’s many reveries. But for just this one evening, the future seemed more powerful than its brooding siblings.

  Of course, Dan wasn’t here to join in the party. He wasn’t here to dance or drink or cheer the midnight stroke. He was here to choose the new alphas. From them, all things might rise again. It was his sacred duty to choose and to instruct, to nurture and to act as father to these lost children.

  A single streak of lightning shot across the heavens. People in the crowd pointed. It was beginning, though they didn’t know it.

  11:49.

  So many were going to die. So many had died once before. And Dan could only save two. It hardly seemed fair. There were others like himself across the globe—six more, supposedly—but that only meant fourteen would survive in total. Fourteen to be shaped and to begin the cycle again; fourteen to become myth and legend. The new Adams. The new Eves. Human clay.

  A few lucky ones might also be suckled by animals and enter into a feral existence. They, too, would rebuild, but at a much slower rate than the ones Dan and his chosen counterparts would foster. The man in the white suit had said that such a thing happened before. Remus and Romulus, Enkidu, Cain: all the progeny of wilderness.

  A group of teenagers hustled by, whooping for no other reason than to hear the sound of vitality crash against a sterile sky.

  Dan looked up at the huge ball, blazing mock triumphantly on its spire, the head of God impaled on a pike. He couldn’t help but feel a strange satisfaction.

  11:50.

  On a winter night during the age of decaying wonder—the Second World War—Dan first met the man in the white suit. Dan was forty-three then and his two sons had been killed only a month before. Both of them had given their lives—a mere five days apart—while dodging fire and lead on Pacific islands he’d never heard of. After receiving the news, his wife entered into a self-induced catatonia, her thoughts perpetually locked behind the bars on her boys’ uniform sleeves. Dan tried to comfort her, tried to stroke her hair and knead her shoulders, but it was a fruitless effort, like mining for sunshine. She was removed from all help; she was lost to an iron solace that no one could penetrate.

  So Dan had spent much of his free time during the war sitting in bars, contemplating suicide. He had passed out on park benches and street corners more often than he cared to admit. It was on one of those nights, when he was pushing himself to yet another blackout, that the man in the white suit approached Dan with his peculiar offer.

  Utterly nondescript, without a wrinkle or a scar or any mark of distinction that a sketch artist might use to separate him from the billowing mass of the ordinary, the man in the white suit drifted onto a barstool beside Dan all those years ago and began talking about cycles and creation and the motion of water in a drain. He never introduced himself. He never shook Dan’s hand or smiled or frowned or indicated that emotion flowed through his unremarkably average words. He was there and not there.

  Several arcs of lightning spread across the snow-filled firmament, criss-crossing and connecting as if forming a basal circulatory system for some celestial being.

  11:53.

  Dan’s hands
began to sweat. A pop punk band was finishing a song in the distance. Applause. A television personality’s voice. More picture-taking. More honking and rattling. Under seven minutes until the second end.

  Back in the bar, in another lifetime, the man in the white suit had said he’d been watching Dan. He said that he knew Dan was sinking; he said he had lost two daughters and understood the trenches of despair a grieving father might drown in; he said he was going to give Dan an opportunity to slip out of his existence. Under other circumstances, Dan would have walked away or slung a few jagged epithets at the man. Maybe even swung a fist at the guy’s jaw. But he didn’t. He didn’t do any of it because he wanted what this man had. He wanted anonymous wisdom.

  So Dan simply said “Well, alright” and waited.

  The man in the white suit nodded, stood, patted Dan’s shoulder, told him that he was now a father again, and collapsed on the crusted bar floor. Massive coronary embolism. No identification. No money. No history. No future. John Doe eternal.

  A kid to Dan’s left snaked a flask out of his jacket and took a pull.

  11:55.

  Dozens of lightning flashes now—the clouds hemorrhaging crisp blue electricity. Everyone began looking up, through the glowing flakes. Everywhere in the world necks were strained toward the stars.

  It drew ever closer. The time for remembrance lengthened.

  For two weeks after the man in the white suit had patted him, Dan remained ignorant of his destiny. Then an envelope arrived. Within it was an ancient photograph of the man in the white suit standing beside three other terminally unexceptional people—a man and two women. All four were dressed in Victorian-styled suits and dresses, the kind which Dan had seen stashed away in his grandparents’ closet when he was a boy. On the backside was written a date: June 2, 1872. Impossible. The man in the bar hadn’t been more than fifty. If the date was correct, then he was actually close to—or even more than—one hundred years old. Absolutely impossible. Dan threw the photo in the trash and tried to turn a blind eye to the wormhole in which he was freefalling. It was just a bizarre prank. Maybe a game of some sort. In either case, he had no interest in participating.

  But then came the outside thoughts, and he couldn’t ignore them quite as easily.

  11:57.

  Only three more loops.

  All cameras pointed up. All thoughts drifted into the storm—now a tangle of crackling tentacles and virgin glitter. The hair on Dan’s neck stood on end; the charge was building.

  A couple in ridiculous plastic top-hats stood beside him. One of them blubbered something about global warming. Dan laughed. If only it was that simple.

  The foreign thoughts had seeped into Dan’s subconscious over a period of several months. They grew organically, sprouting from his own thoughts and his own ideas, but branching off in unlikely directions. They rewrote what he knew as truth. At first, he believed his sanity was crumbling; multiple human histories, eternal periods of waxing and wasting, immortality and masquerading as gods—these were the domain of comic books and pulp novels. Eventually, though, as the decades breezed by and Dan failed to develop gray hair, liver spots, varicose veins or even memory lapses, he came to accept the thoughts. His wife died, his friends died, everything fell into ruin except himself. He had been cursed by the man in the white suit.

  It was due to the thoughts, due to the curse, that he knew it would all end tonight. He knew he would select two and carry them away, to a safe location in a cave or perhaps a woodland. As they developed, he would teach them to hunt and to ignite fires and to dream about a life after death, even if none existed. As their children and their grandchildren and their grandchildren’s children aged, he would introduce agriculture and pottery, animal husbandry and knowledge of the stars. Centuries would pass. He would help them manipulate metal and foster absurd explanations as to how the earth was created; he would incite wars among them and force them to build stronger edifices; he would set in motion all the life in the world, so that it would—again and again and again—collapse into dust. He would be an excellent father.

  11:59.

  So close now.

  Everyone stared at the spectacular doom overhead. No one was watching the clock tick up or the timer tick down. Except Dan. He wanted to see the ball fall just once more. A sign of certitude—true beginning, true ending, true hope, true hopelessness. A lie. A magical lie.

  The sky was growing brighter, sharper, more piercing.

  11:59:50.

  The apathetic and the ignorant tore their eyes from the mystery above and chanted the countdown.

  11:59:51.

  Nosebleeds. Everywhere at once. Some gushing, some a mere trickle. Dan sniffed. It was expected.

  11:59:52.

  Pressure radiating from the temples, from the base of the skull. Not throbbing. More like a vise slowly cranking shut, squeezing tighter and tighter, bursting arteries and snapping bone.

  11:59:53.

  The countdown chant had sputtered out. Someone to Dan’s left vomited.

  11:59:54.

  Dan clenched his teeth. Almost here. Almost done. Almost begun. The pressure built. Reason was erased; the packed city square let loose a collective groan.

  11:59:55.

  Dan crouched. He held his balled hands to his forehead. The pain was worse than he had imagined. Had he been able to wonder at that moment, he would have questioned whether his experience was the same as everyone else’s. Not that it mattered.

  11:59:56.

  More vomit, this time splattering onto Dan’s jacket. Blood streamed from his nose. He would deal with it later.

  11:59:57.

  The crackling sky bore down upon the earth; the pressure mounted.

  11:59:58.

  Screaming. Shouting. Cursing God, cursing Allah, cursing the absence of both.

  11:59:59.

  One last glimpse of this place. One last taste of these people.

  12:00.

  Silence. Complete silence for a second. One absolute moment with a reprieve from chaos and struggle. Then, the first cry. It was complete.

  Dan stood and wiped his nose on his sleeve. The bleeding was slowing. No one else was standing.

  He surveyed the square. Electricity had vanished from the air, but the blizzard remained. Cascades of sparkle swept over the city and down, down to the pavement where there rested more than a million fresh, clean, healthy babies. Many struggled to extricate themselves from their bulky winter coats, now more smothering than warming.

  Dan stepped carefully among them. Cries and gasps and gurgling noises erupted from every direction. His sanity strained under the wailing, navel-piercing screams of the newborns, all confused and freezing. Snow was burying them, filling their eyes, icing over their nostrils and mouths. A serrated wind cut across the square. Over and over, the giant screen above flashed an excited animation of the new year, no booth controller now able to move time along.

  Now, here it was—the decision.

  It didn’t matter which two he chose. Not really. So long as they could procreate, genetics would work its marvelous trick of diversity.

  Moving through the rapidly piling snow, he found one wrapped in a purple boa, with a small, neon orange purse lying beside it. Probably a girl. He scooped her from off the ground and checked to make sure. Yes. His daughter.

  Entangled with her clothes was a black pea-coat in which laid another. With his free hand, Dan picked it up and inspected it. A boy. His son.

  He laid both of them in the coat, bound them in its snug confines, then lifted the bundle and cradled it to his chest. They cried briefly, but soon relaxed, Dan’s warm heartbeat fooling them into believing that their life ahead might be better than the fate of a chilled, desolate square.

  He loved neither of them. Not yet. In fact, at the moment, he felt nothing. Maybe it would develop. Maybe it would just take a while. A week. A month. A year. An eternity. Maybe.

  In any case, it was time to go, to move to the undevelope
d places. Power would soon fail in the city, anyway.

  Dan had done his job. He had gathered his pair. The new dawn was in his arms.

  As far as he was concerned, ravens and rats could pick clean the rest.

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  Birth Day

  The waiting room was suffused with the drone of a thousand flies, all buzzing as one inside the vending machine that flickered in the corner. Darkness peered through the row of windows along the far wall and an impotent breeze tinged by lavender and ammonia wheezed from the ventilation duct overhead. James could still taste the putrefied tang of the outdated tuna sandwich he’d eaten in the cafeteria. The evening was alive with subtle signifiers of death and decay. Of course, James thought, how could it be any other way? I’m sitting in a goddamned hospital. The whole place is a temple to our fragility and our inevitable degeneration. Death is in the mortar.

  He sighed and ran a hand across his forehead. It came away covered in a sheen of lukewarm sweat and cutaneous oil. A Dr. Hooker was paged to the cardiac unit.

  Two young women walked by the room, a cloud of silver mylar balloons trailing in their wake. Most of the balloons read “It’s a Girl!” in brilliant fluorescent pink lettering.

  James stared at them and wondered if the baby they were visiting had been premature or if it had its umbilical cord coiled around its neck. Probably not. It was probably healthy and pink and gurgling happily in a someone’s arms. He studied his watch mindlessly. It had been almost forty-five minutes since they’d wheeled Dawn into surgery. Routine procedure, they’d said. We do it all the time, they’d said. One small incision and you’ll be parents, they’d said. James knew they weren’t lying. Caesarean births were common. Only a microscopic fraction of women died during the operation and the resulting babies were generally as healthy as any other. The risks were minimal, at best. And yet, James couldn’t shake the anxiety that made hammer falls in his bowels. Something was not quite right. Something didn’t make sense.