The night is chilly; the fireplace is stuffed with burning chairs, yet their room feels only slightly warm. Dinner was a few cans of chicken broth and tinned green beans found in the kitchen. Tablecloths and towels are used as bedsheets as a freak Arctic cold front lands upon them pre-dawn. They cluster together like January blue jays roosting inside a stump, and still they wake up freezing. But for the first time in seven days the sky is silent. Across the Capilano Canyon they see the snow-crested mountains of our childhoods reduced to black cinders and stone.The next day is spent driving lazy-8's through the old neighborhood's tangled lariat of roads, seeing only charred stumps, melted patio furniture, and metal globs that were once sportscars. My friends cry and make fruitless attempts at salvage. Wendy finds the skeletons of the two ostriches and hands Linus the femurs. "It's nearly sundown," Karen says. "Let's hit the darn."
Their minivans hairpin down the black streets, the interiors smoky with the scent of itty-bitty salvaged mementos—a pair of Adidas ROM shoes; a Snoopy trophy; a framed photo of Liam Gallagher; a Becel margarine tub full of emeralds and Richard's asbestos astronaut suit.
On Cleveland Dam, they park at the west end and walk to its center, as promised, I hover invisibly above the silent spillway. The reservoir behind the dam is slightly below runoff level and algae within the water has loaned it an otherworldly shamrock sheen. The dam's road is smooth and glistening from a freak rainstorm and is seemingly paved with diamonds.
Quietly, everybody follows Karen onto the dam. For the first time in weeks she hears voices. "It's almost sundown," Karen says, "Kneel."
"I'm not kneeling," Hamilton says.
"Then don't," Richard says, and the group ignores Hamilton and kneels.
Hamilton stands with his arms crossed, watching the group and feeling like Noel Coward at a gauche cocktail party, and then he remembers his past year of madness with Pam, the drugs, the mania, his rebirth as the Last of the Famous International Playboys—Petula Clark, Brasilia, Le Cote Basque, Jackson Pollock, Linda Bird Johnson, and gimlet martinis—the ideas and images of a clean, sophisticated, and plausible future long vanished. My head is now clean, he thinks. My veins are clean, but the world is soiled.
Pam watches him from the corner of her eye. Poor Hamilton— Hamilton who has always felt unsophisticated having grown up so far away from the centers of metropolitan glamour. But Pam knows of the blankness at the core of that world, and she's aware thatthrough her, Hamilton has learned this, too. She thinks back on the past crazy year on drugs and then the miracle of becoming clean. She looks at the city's skeleton through the charred forest. If this is the world, then take it. I hated Milan. I hated catwalks. I bated my face for taking me the places it did. Let the insects fight for the remains. "Hamilton, get over here," she calls.
Hamilton shakes his head. "I can't."
"You knelt at Jared's memorial service, didn't you?" Hamilton nods. "Then you can bloody well kneel here." Hamilton comes, kneels beside Pamela, and looks up at the sky.
Linus clacks together the ostrich femurs and the noise rattles comfortably across the spillway and into the canyon below. Jane squeals and then falls silent.
And so it's here, on this dam, where this group, for the first time since the beginning of their lonely year, align their thoughts on the Great Beyond. This is where I enter. Linus clacks the femurs together: clack clack.
"I'm back." I appear before them, hovering slightly above the spillway.
"Jared!"
"What are we going to do, Jared?" Megan wails.
"Guys—hey—don't freak out. You think you've been forsaken— that the opportunity for holiness is gone, but this isn't true. Time is over; the world is gone.
"You've got just one option left. You blew it this year, but you can make good. As I said, there's still Plan B."
34 STOP BREATHING
I want to squish my friends into my heart, as though they could help me grout a troublesome crack. They wonder, How did life ever come to this? They're not bozos; they know everything's over. They're naked parachutists waiting be pushed out of the plane and into the sky. Such is birth.
A warm sooty wind blows up the dam's face, its dark dead confetti floating through me, then shining. I'm a wall of light. "Guys! Feel the air," I say. "Across your skin. It's like icing sugar. So sweet. And feel the charged wind in your lungs—it does feel like the end of the world, doesn't it? Come on—drag your butts up. Huddle! And while you're at it, look at all the water pouring down the spillway—it's like melted lime Jell-O. And hear the water growl—like a cougar inside an unlocked cage. Oh! And remember that night at Linda Jermyn's party? Remember when we found that TV set in the alley and brought it here and hucked it off the edge." My friends stand up and circle around me as I hover above the commotion.
"Correction, Jare," Hamilton says, "I'm the one who did the actual hucking. If I remember correctly, you and Richard were off on the sidelines sniveling."
"You wish, Hamilton," Richard says. "I sweet talked the RCMP into thinking you'd thrown a half-melted ice swan off the edge. I mean, they saw you throw something. Jared and Pam were horking in the rhododendrons over by the parking lot."
"It was that home-brew of yours, Jared," Pam says. "It was like Liquid Plague. It's the absolute sickest I've ever felt. Even worse than methadone. And you were so sick that night, Jared—so sick that you couldn't even hit on me."
Ping! At this moment a phenomenon in the sky captures my friends' awe and attention—a web of shooting stars now visible through a parting hole in the sky—a crosshatched ceiling of shooting stars as hasn't been seen on Earth since 1703 in the southern part of the African continent.
"Look at the sky," Linus says. "This is so Day of the Triffids."
"Everything's a light show for sixteen-year-olds, isn't it?" Richard says.
Even with all the hoo-haw and thunder of the past week, my friends find wonder and ahhhs in the spectacle. Young Jane reaches up to the sky as though it were a wise and generous person and not merely light. Jane, the planet's newest genius, is counting stars, her brain already advanced beyond mere numbers.
Warm, slightly stinky air, like air pushed forward by a subway car, sweet and full of adventure, whooshes over us. "And here we are all these years later," I say, "at the end of the world and the end of time."
"How fucking ironic," Hamilton says.
"Oh, come on, Hamilton," I say, "get some drama out of this. I mean, all of you noticed how 'time' feels so different here at the world's end—how weird it is to live with no clocks or seasons or rhythms or schedules. And you're all correct, too—time is a totally human idea—without people, time vanishes. Infinity and zero become the same thing.""Gee," Hamilton says.
"Why just before all this happened," I say, pointing out the brightly lit black suburban dust, "nobody we knew had a second of free time remaining. All of it was frittered away on being productive, advancing careers and being all-round efficient. Each new advance made by 'progress' created its own accelerating warping effect that made your lives here on earth feel even smaller and shorter and more crazed. And now … no time at all."
"Hey—" Wendy says.
"What?" I ask.
"Nothing. I just wanted to stop Hamilton from making some cynical crack."
"It's okay, Wendy," I say. "It's nice to think back on old times and be with old friends. I mean, we were all so lucky living when and where we did. There was no Vietnam. Childhood dragged on forever. Gasoline, cars, and potato chips were cheap and plenty. If we wanted to hop a jet to fly anywhere on Earth, we could. We could believe in anything we wanted. Shit—we could wear a San Diego Chicken costume down Marine Drive while carrying a bloody rubber head of Richard Nixon if we wanted—that would have been just fine. And we all went to school. And we weren't in jail. Wow." The stars are suddenly stained pink as a tiny waft of chemical residue from a long exploded Yokohama paint factory passes over.