Grief: Five Stories of Apocalyptic Loss Read online

  "Oh Lizzy," Sam returned the embrace warmly, pretzel she'd been munching held awkwardly in one hand. "Oh god I'm so glad you're here." She stepped back, holding her friend by the shoulders, concern scrawled across her face. "How are you doing?"

  "Oh god, it's nothing," Elizabeth shook her head. "I'm just mad at George. He's been in such a... I don't know, mood lately. I mean, I'm glad he's snapped out of his 'bleak pit of despair', but since then he hasn't been able to take anything seriously. This party is the only thing in weeks that he's seemed actually enthusiastic about. Where's Pete?"

  "Church," Sam said with a half laugh in her voice. "He's one of those that got really religious all of the sudden, if you know what I mean. He refused to even talk about coming to the party, so I just left him with his new prayer-buddies and flew out myself. Ross picked me up at the airport a few days ago."

  "Huh, Pete?" Elizabeth mused. "That's odd. A few of my coworkers became really religious a few weeks ago too. I don't know, it's such a weird trend."

  "It came out of the blue for Pete," Sam shook her head. "I'd expect him to want to go out with a bang, not a hymnal."

  "That's awful," Elizabeth said with a laugh, pushing Sam away. "Anyway, it's not that I don't miss everybody and don't relish the opportunity to see everyone every year, but... priorities, you know? We've been having these parties since we were practically kids, but now we're adults and we have our own busy lives. I mean we bought these tickets for Blue Man almost a month ago, and we were FINALLY going to have a night to ourselves, but no, here we are."

  "Oh god Lizzy, I'm so sorry."

  "Oh no! No no, don't cry! You'll ruin your mascara! It's the Blue Man Group! What's wrong?"

  "I... I just don't think I can help you. I don't think we have enough time?" Sam reached over and pulled a paper towel off of the nearby roll, dabbing at her eyes and sniffing a bit. "Okay. I'm-I'm going to get back to the party, Liz."

  "Okay," Elizabeth nodded, more than glad to put the disturbing exchange out of mind. "I'm going to go freshen up and I'll be out there with you shortly."

  ***

  The bathroom stank of frantic and recent sex. "Oh god," Elizabeth gasped, closing the door as quickly as she'd opened it, wringing her hands with slight revulsion. The parties her friends typically threw were wholesome because her friends were wholesome. Aside from the occasional joint smoking and binge drinking, she couldn't imagine that any of them would do something as daring as slip into the bathroom for a quick fuck in the middle of a party.

  What should she do? Her hand wavered, reaching for the doorknob again. Should... should she let it air out? Should she tell someone? Her hand fell back to her side as she turned and walked back past the parlor to the stairs. The second floor bathroom. Yes. Let someone else discover and... and deal with the first floor.

  ***

  She still felt somewhat uneasy as she let herself into the upstairs bathroom. It was still difficult to believe her peers' wild uncharacteristic behavior. Unsteady hands splashed cool water back up into her face, though it didn't make her feel much better. She stared into the mirror for a long tense moment, desperately holding back the anxiety bubbling up from beneath her skin, filtering through her blood, threatening to escape out through her mouth in the form of a wordless scream.

  Eyes squinched shut, she deliberately slowed her breathing, taking in long deep breaths through her nose, holding the air in her lungs before letting it out slowly between her lips. It seemed to be working, it seemed to be calming her down.

  Elizabeth opened her eyes and locked gazes with her reflection in the mirror. Everything was okay. She was okay. She'd go down, rejoin the party, and enjoy the company of Sam and Ross and all the other friends she hadn't seen in almost a year.

  As her gaze fell it locked onto traces of white powder standing out clearly against the black marble counter-top. She brushed her fingertips across the granular substance, sniffing it before bringing it to her lips and tasting its bitterness.

  Cocaine? Was someone doing coke up in the second floor bathroom? Sex in the first floor bathroom, coke in the second, pot smoking in the parlor... what was this? The parties were never like this. Sure, sometimes Bill or George or Dave drank a little, and sometimes Mark or Bill or Jeremy would sneak out to their cars to smoke a joint, but it was never like this, never so open. Her calmness fled, the anxiety returning with increased urgency, and she all but ran out the door. She'd find George. He'd... he'd know what to do. He'd take care of things. He always took care of things. He always took care of her.

  ***

  "George!" Elizabeth, almost stumbling down the stairs, ran up to her fiancé and grabbed him by the arm. "George, oh god George. It's too much, George. I don't... sex in the bathroom, someone doing coke upstairs, pot in the parlor, what's wrong with people?"

  "Oh Liz." George was slurring. "I'm sorry baby. Nothing I can do. You know?"

  Her gaze fixated on the glass in his hand, amber liquid sloshing over ice cubes as he moved to hold her. She pulled away, eyes wide, mouth agape.

  "George! Are you... you're drinking?"

  George held the glass up, squinting at it as if deliberating. "Yes," he spoke with great care. "I do believe I am drinking."

  "Five years sober and now you start drinking?" Elizabeth was livid. It was all... all too much, but this, THIS was something she could focus on. "Oh my god I can't believe that you would just throw away--"

  "GODDAMMIT!" The glass shattered against the wall, light dancing off of flying shards, a damp spot slowly dripping down the wall. "I can't do this." He grabbed her by the upper arm, tight enough to leave a bruise.

  "Ouch! Stop, you're hurting me. I don't know what's going on." Feeling weak and unsteady, Elizabeth let George lead her away towards the television, the others in the room watching with a mixture of contempt and sympathy. "You throwing away your sobriety, the drugs, the way people are acting-"

  "Yes you do, honey," George squinted to examine with drunken seriousness the universal remote that he'd picked up from the mantle. "This is it. This is the end."

  "It's just a slip. George... you can get back on the wagon. We can get through this."

  "That's not what I'm talking about, Liz. You know that it isn't." He fumbled with the remote, first muting the stereo, then turning up the volume on the television.

  "...riots continue in metropolitan areas, and we expect them to continue right up until the end. Doctor Schmidt, am I correct in assuming that there's some sort of relationship between the lower than expected suicide rates and the higher than anticipated level of rioting that we're seeing?"

  "No, please, I don't want to watch this," Elizabeth said, her voice suddenly very small and quiet. She tried to pull away, but George yanked her back, forcing her to face the television screen.

  The camera cut to a tired looking bald man in a cheap suit, subtitles on the screen proclaiming him Doctor Henry Schmidt, smaller lettering underneath naming him a professor of sociology at NYU. "Oh, definitely, uh, John. It's a definite reverse correlation. In fact, those typify two of the stages of grief – depression in the case of suicide, and anger in the case of the rioters – though I would imagine that in the case of the latter we're also seeing a degree of opportunism. That could be seen as a sign of denial – we're well past the point where the acquisition of material possessions is going to matter."

  "Please, don't make me watch this." A pleading note had crept into Elizabeth's voice, but George was resolute, holding her fast. She tried to pull away, only to find that Sam standing by her side, blocking off her escape. "You need to see this, Lizzy."

  "For those of you just joining us," the anchor continued, "We're running with a skeleton crew here at CNN, and we're going to stay on the air as long as we can."

  "Going about your routine as if nothing has changed is another stress-reaction," the professor interjected, and the camera swung back towards him, taking a moment to focus. "A form of denial, perhaps. Routine as a bulwark against the nihilistic
impulse to give in and let go."

  "What do you recommend that our viewers do, Professor? What's the healthy way to cope with a loss of this scale?"

  "I don't think that it matters."

  Elizabeth gave a last mighty tug, pulling away from George and almost dislocating her arm in the process. She fled the parlor in tears.

  "Liz--" Sam began, only to be stopped by George's firm hand on her shoulder.

  "Let... let her go," he managed. "She. She needs this. There's nothing more that we can do for her."

  ***

  Elizabeth ran away from the eyes watching her, away from the sheer vulgarity of the television treating the matter like just another day's events, away from the drug use and the violence and up the stairs. The first bedroom she tried was, blissfully, unoccupied, and she collapsed into a sobbing heap on the bed.

  After her tears had subsided she sat very still, listening to the sounds of the party below. The music was loud, as was the laughter, but it seemed to have a certain forced quality to it – a ragged edge sharp enough to draw blood. She shivered, drawing her knees to her chest.

  She held them tighter as heavy footfalls approached her door, moved past, and entered the room next to hers. Through the thin walls separating them she heard a feminine giggle, followed by the low baritone of a man's voice. She tried hard not to identify the responding girlish query as coming from Sam, and equally hard not to identify the voice of the man that was, even now, probably well on his way to undressing her.

  Still, any distraction was a welcome one. Anything that wasn't directly related to the situation at hand, the betrayal she felt at the uncharacteristic behavior of her friends, that she could focus on instead of the anxiety threatening to once more well up, spill out of her mouth and consume her, leaving behind nothing but bone and ash. The sounds next-door had grown quieter, more furtive – the sound of someone shifting, the bed creaking, punctuated by the occasional sigh or intake of breath.

  A light knock on her own door startled her. "Yes?" she asked with a sniffle, surprised at the weakness in her voice. "Yes?" she repeated, this time with a bit more resolve.

  The door opened a slice. "Elizabeth?" Ross asked, opening the door slightly wider, slipping inside and closing it behind himself. She scooted back on the bed into a sitting position, pulling the covers up around herself. She didn't want to see him. She didn't want to see anybody.

  "I'm fine, Ross." Hearing a bit more frost in her voice than she intended, she softened a bit, looking away from him and towards the window. She could see the distant glow of the city, a warm orange not of electric lights, but of fire. She looked swiftly away, at the floor. "I'm fine."

  "It's okay." He sat on the bed next to her.

  "I'm not stupid, you know."

  "I know, sweetie."

  "I know what's going on. I know it's... it's the end of everything. The end of the world. Everyone acts like I'm crazy or stupid, like I can't understand what's happening just because I'm not drawing into myself like George was, or because I'm not freaking out or hiding in a church or throwing myself into... into drugs or oblivion or whatever like everybody expects. I'm fine."

  "No." Ross shook his head. "Honey, you're not."

  "I'm fine, really."

  "No." Ross lay back next to her, fingers laced across his abdomen, eyes half closed. "You're not fine. Nobody's fine. We're all going to die. Soon."

  "I said I--"

  Ross continued speaking as if she hadn't interrupted him. "You're going to die. I'm going to die. George is going to die. Your parents are going to die. Everybody is going to die. There will be no survivors. There will be no more humanity. There will be no more art, no more literature, no more history. You remember how we used to get drunk and bitch about the government and how future archaeologists wound ponder the fall of our empires and laugh at the folly of modern man? That isn't going to happen. If life ever returns to this planet, if civilization ever grows anew, it will take so long to establish itself that even our plastics will have degraded."

  "Stop it--"

  "It's all going away, Elizabeth, and nothing we do now matters. Checking the locks before you leave, feeding your cat, making sure George doesn't drink. Every habit, every social proscription, none of it matters. Next door two people are fucking. They're not using a condom. It doesn't matter because no child will be born, and even if one of them has a STD they'll be dead long before any symptoms show up. You are going to die, everyone you've ever loved is going to die, and no one will ever know."

  "Why are you saying these things?" Elizabeth sobbed. "I told you I KNOW!"

  "You don't know. You think it, but you don't get it." Ross closed his eyes. "Downstairs, they know. They know that nothing matters, because within the next twenty-four hours everyone will be dead. They've accepted this. They've come to terms with the fact that, for today, for the rest of human history, no actions have consequences. And you know what? You're not even bringing them down, because you don't matter anymore."

  Elizabeth wanted to argue. She had always hated that matter-of-fact way that Ross had about himself, always hated the way he'd start to lecture rather than converse. She hated how he could lie there, so calm and self assured, so at-fucking-peace with his fate. The hate and anxiety swirled around one another inside her, turning the pit of her chest into a ball of molten lead, threatening to overwhelm her, to drag her down, to smother her in a frustrated rage.

  Ross sat up on one elbow, watching her intently. "Let go. Let it go, Liz. Let it out, feel it, ride the wave of your despair. You've spent your life in such tight control." His words were soothing, yet they enraged her further. She felt for a moment unable to tear herself away from the sound of his voice, from the smug look on his face. "You had to be strong for George while he was depressed to keep him alive, and couldn't grieve for yourself with the rest of the planet. It's okay, now. You can lose yourself. You don't have to be strong. It doesn't matter."

  The ball of rage in her belly erupted at this and she was suddenly in motion, transforming emotional energy into kinetic as she thrust a balled-up fist into Ross's surprised face. He recoiled, falling off the bed, and Elizabeth screamed her anger, frustration, and fear as she bounded off the bed and out the door, into the hall.

  ***

  "It doesn't matter." She snarled to herself through clenched teeth as she stomped barefoot along the carpet, stopping before the next room, where the couple inside had halted in their lovemaking at her earlier cry. "IT DOESN'T MATTER!" She screamed, pounding against the door once with the side of her fist before continuing down the hall. "Doesn't fucking matter, you're goddamn right it doesn't matter." She repeated the mantra all the way down the stairs, the words echoing louder and louder inside her skull with every step.

  The kitchen had become a wreck in her absence. Plates had been smashed, glasses shattered, cabinet doors ripped from their hinges, and a bag of pretzels had been ripped open, its contents scattered across the floor. Bloodied hand-prints marred the once-clean white surfaces of the refrigerator, and smears on the ground indicated that at least one bloodied person had crawled out into the hallway. Elizabeth slowed as she neared the blood, seemingly fascinated with it, stopping to drag the her index fingernail through the red smear on the refrigerator, leaving a clean trail where the drying fluid was scraped away.

  She turned on heel, leaving the devastation of the kitchen behind her, the fury in her belly replaced by a detached sense of wonder. Its heat had spread from the pit of her gut, up into her chest, to radiate through her body to the tips of her fingers and the tips of her toes. She felt that, surely, her skin must be radiating heat.

  ***

  "Doesn't matter," she whispered as she entered the parlor. Several of the lamps had been knocked aside or shattered. Others still gave off their dim warmth, bathing some sections of the parlor in a reddish gold light, while leaving others in shadow. The television had been knocked from the wall to dangle inches from the ground by a cable, dead static flickering
across its surface.

  Her friends, wise ones who'd arrived with an attitude she'd only just started to appreciate, inhabited the dim light and soothing darkness. Some were huddled alone with their thoughts, others gathered in small clusters, talking and laughing or weeping. To Elizabeth it all seemed to meld into a steady if discordant murmur of almost understood conversation, punctuated by the grunts and sighs of someone fucking in the darkness. The acrid stench of pot smoke lay heavily in the air, and she didn't think it strange when someone passed her a pipe, simply taking a hit before passing it off again.

  "George?" she asked, looking into the shadows, not seeing her fiancé. Shapes moved and writhed about her, and she realized that what she had first taken to be couples locked together in desperate passion weren't so distinctive – bodies intertwined indistinctly, becoming a single organism comprised of smooth flesh, grasping hands, and gasping mouthes. Some couples or singlets sat on the periphery, watching and enjoying their own pleasures, but it seemed that the bulk of the party's guests had joined together in some sort of frenzied mass of ravenous sexual contact.

  The sounds of passion grew distant and Elizabeth felt a graying at the edges of her vision, a light-headedness, as she recognized the faces amid the sea of flesh, her friends and companions, those she'd known for years, and she felt herself falling, falling--

  Gentle hands caught her, carried her, pulled her towards the center of the mass while she made a token effort to refuse, to push away, to keep her skirt down and her blouse buttoned. "Doesn't... fucking... matter," she groaned in what might have been misinterpreted as passion as the hands slid over her arms, her breasts, between her legs.

  She found herself turned, moving, writhing with the mass, becoming a part of it, until she wasn't much sure where her skin ended and someone else's began, and she felt less of an urge to try with every passing heartbeat. It wasn't pleasure – it wasn't not pleasure – but something else, something almost painfully intense, and it was more than she could handle – but what was 'she'? Where was 'she'? Her identity, her sense of self, was slipping away, but she didn't particularly mind. She didn't mind anything; shit did not matter.