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 PlayboysPetula Clark, Brasilia, Le Cote Basque, Jackson Pollock, Linda Bird Johnson, and gimlet martinisthe 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.
"Guysheydon'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 lungsit does feel like the end of the world, doesn't it? Come ondrag your butts up. Huddle! And while you're at it, look at all the water pouring down the spillwayit's like melted lime Jell-O. And hear the water growllike 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, Jaredso sick that you couldn't even hit on me."
Ping! At this moment a phenomenon in the sky captures my friends' awe and attentiona web of shooting stars now visible through a parting hole in the skya 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 endhow weird it is to live with no clocks or seasons or rhythms or schedules. And you're all correct, tootime is a totally human ideawithout 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. Shitwe could wear a San Diego Chicken costume down Marine Drive while carrying a bloody rubber head of Richard Nixon if we wantedthat 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.
"I remember running through the neighborhood in little more than a jockstrap. I remember being able to read Life magazine and making up my own mind on politics. I remember being in a car and thinking of a road map of North America and knowing that if I chose, I could drive anywhere. All of that time and all of that tranquillity, freedom and abundance. Amazing. The sweet and effortless nodule of freedom we all sharedit was a fine idea. It was, in its own unglamorous way, the goal of all of human historythe wars, the genius, the madness, the beauty and the griefit was all to reach ever farther unclouded points on which to stand and view and think and evolve and understand ever farther and farther and, well, farther. Progress is real. Destiny is real. You are real." The pink passes on."And so that's why we're all here tonighttodaywhatever day it is: Thursdaysix weeks from now1954three days agoone million B.C. It's all the same. I mean, I know you're wondering what was wrong with the way you were living your lives in the first place what your Jimmy Stewart-esque crisis wasand I know you're wondering why you had to spend the past year the way you did. You say your lives weren't in crisis, but you know deep down they were. I was up there hearing you."