“What do you mean, ‘

At least we think we do

’?” I asked.

“Oh, nothing,” he said, and chuckled, again. “It’s just—my colleagues and I, we’ve had our telescopes trained at the sky for a long time. A long time. A lot of telescopes. If someone was out there… if those

laser cannons

were out there… I think we would have seen them. Maybe. You know? But governments don’t listen to scientists. They never have. And like I said, there are a lot of things we just don’t know. Like how it’s possible that billions of souls could instantly be transported to another location within our physical plane. That would seem to defy the laws of physics. But there’s always more. If we know one thing, it’s that there’s always more.”

“Do you believe in God, Paul?” Sara Grace asked.

He brushed away the wispy brown hair from his receding hairline. “I’m not really sure,” he said, after a long pause. “I can’t one hundred percent rule out the existence of a deity. I would say, at this point, that it strikes me as a very low possibility.”

“Hmm,” she said. “Hmm.” She was thinking deeply about all this.

I was thinking about the empty skies.

“We should probably keep moving,” I said. “Next check in is in twenty-three minutes.”

• • • •

Sara Grace was wrong, though.

We weren’t like everyone else. Everyone else was supposed to go about their business, pretending like the end of the world wasn’t right around the corner.

But for us, it was the opposite. It was all we thought about, day and night. Because the only way that we could do what we were doing—the obscene, revolting, monstrous thing we were doing—was to remind ourselves constantly that this was not Real Life. None of this had anything to do with reality. For us, life as we knew it was already over.

The end was nigh, except it had already come and gone.

Otherwise it was too terrible. You couldn’t live with that kind of thing. That horror. That brutality. That inhumanity. You had to disconnect. You had to turn off.

And another thing, too. Everyone else was supposed to maintain their same old routines. See the same people. Say the same things. But thanks to some random lottery, the two of us—people who never would have had any particular reason to meet—we’d been thrown together into the most intense experience of our lives.

So for us everything had changed. And they were the ones who changed it.

• • • •

Last week—which seemed like another lifetime—when the enforcing first began, we’d each had our own kind of breakdown.

For Sara Grace, it was when she enforced a nineteen-year-old girl who’d showed up in the city looking for her mother. The girl had been put up for adoption as an infant, had never met her biological mom, and now she was afraid she’d never have the chance. “What if I get to the paradise planet, and everyone looks different, we’re all in different bodies, we all have amnesia, whatever, nothing is the same. I’ll never find her. I just had to take a chance,” she’d said. (Sara Grace recounted this whole thing to me later, sobbing so hard she could hardly talk.)

“Maybe,” the girl had said, “maybe all this time she’s been wondering about me, too. What happened to me. How I look. How I grew up. All I have is her name. There’s a lot of people with her name here. I was just going to go down the phonebook and see what I can find. I think, when I hear her voice, I’ll know.”

“She said that,” Sara Grace screamed and hiccupped at me, crying hysterically, the tears and snot running down her face and mixing together in her mouth. “She said, ‘

When I hear her voice, I’ll know

.’ Just like that.”

Sara Grace’s own mother had passed away two years before, dead of breast cancer at age 53, nine months before Sara Grace applied for nursing school.

This meant one of two things.

The first possibility was that Sara Grace’s mother would never make it to Planet Xyrxiconia, because only those who were alive and breathing at the moment of transition—the moment the laser cannons fired—would be reincarnated in this distant place.

The second possibility was that she was already on Planet X, that all our lost loved ones from eon after eon were already there, that they’d gone before us to prepare the way and would be there to greet us when we arrived.

The aliens had been somewhat unclear on this point, perhaps intentionally.

All we could do was wait and see.

For me, the breakdown was when I had a talk with my brother. He told me he was going to North Carolina. His ex-wife lived there now, with their kid, who was only three; she’d moved back there to be near her family when the marriage fell apart. My brother kept saying maybe he should have tried harder, maybe

they

should have tried harder, maybe they could have made it work. In the face of everything, whatever stupid arguments they’d had, those just didn’t really matter anymore, did they? She was the love of his life—she’d always been—and that was his son, and if these were the last days of his life on Earth he was going to spend it with the two of them.

He cried as he told me this and I cried too.

I should have enforced him.

But I couldn’t. How could I? My own brother?

I should have called for backup. I should have called Sara Grace.

But I didn’t.

On the off-fucking-chance that there was a paradise planet, I wanted to spend eternity there with my brother. And his wife. And their kid. So I let him go.

Other people’s brothers weren’t so lucky. And that’s how I knew that no one was actually headed to paradise.

Because if there is a heaven, that’s not how it works.

I stood on the Brooklyn Bridge for a long time after that, staring off into the distance. I stood there with the wind in my face and the roar and groan and exhaust of traffic to my back. It was chaotic, loud. The water yawned hungrily below. The reason I couldn’t enforce my brother was the same reason I couldn’t jump.

Some ragged, wild-eyed guy showed up after a while and stood beside me. We were quiet, companions in misery.

“You know what I think is funny?” he said after a while.

“What’s that?”

“All these bridges. All these tall buildings. All these train tracks. So inviting.”

“What do you mean?”

“They never even tried to make it difficult. It’s like all along, they’ve just been saying, ‘

Go ahead, we dare you

.’”

“I guess I don’t understand.”

“They said ‘

Don’t do this, don’t do that

.’ But somehow… I dunno. I get the feeling I’m doing them a favor. Anyway, sister, good luck to you. Wherever you end up.”

He jumped and disappeared into the waves below.

When I was a kid, my grandma used to say: “Cassie, if all your friends jumped off the Brooklyn Bridge, would you do it too?”

I know, I know, everyone’s grandparents said that. Sometimes our parents said it as well, echoing the lectures they’d been hearing since childhood themselves.

You have to think for yourself; that’s what it meant. Someone has to stand up. Someone has to refuse to follow the crowd.

I didn’t jump. I didn’t do it too. Instead, I went home and sat in the bath and drank until I couldn’t see straight.

The next day at headquarters, they handed out thousands of bottles of Xanax. After that it all got a whole lot easier.

• • • •

It was 9:17 p.m. on Wednesday… almost the end of the world.

We met at headquarters to go over the numbers. We’d had an okay day, but our stats were still down. Everyone’s stats were down.