“Er . . . don’t be afraid,” I said, not very convincingly.
“I wanted to go so high I could touch the sky,” the little girl said. “Mommy said don’t go so high, you’ll flip right over. But I did anyway, and now I can’t get back down!”
“That’s . . . inconvenient,” I mumbled. I realized I was immediately trying to distance myself from the girl. There was nothing I could do for her. She was on a swing twenty feet away from me, but she might as well have been on the moon. I started to make preparations to extricate myself from my precarious position.
“My name is Dawnie,” the girl on the moon said.
“Uh . . . hello.”
I slipped the 7-Up bottle into my pants.
“I’m a big girl. I’m five,” the girl on the moon said.
“Uh . . . okay.”
I started to haul myself up along the rope.
“So do you know what time it is?” Dawnie asked. “Mommy said two minutes, then we’re going home, ’cause I’ve got these groceries to put away. Except I don’t know how long two minutes is.”
And I faltered.
I thought of the woman with the Kroger bags, and that’s when then the loss of all the lives in the world crashed over me; that unfortunate woman’s life, but also the life of the girl on the swing, the life of a mother and the life of a child, the lives of lovers and broken hearts, your life and mine. Lives tumbling across the floor like pearls from a string you had broken, rolling around the house and then disappearing. The death of the world is a frequently returning phenomenon, but even the most visionary philosophers could not have foreseen how it had happened this time. Yesterday I woke up with you in my arms, kissed the spot between your breasts where your heart was, and you had been mine. Now I was hanging like an anchor from the bottom of the world, and the world had come to a stop.
Bubbles revived visibly after I used a straw to suck the water that had sloshed from the cistern and collected on the toilet ceiling and siphoned it into a rinsed-out 7-Up bottle. Next, I sawed the legs off the pine dining table, pulled panels from the hole in the kitchen ceiling and lifted the doors from their hinges. After my struggle to climb in through the window, the walkway was a piece of cake. Working my way up over banisters and landings, I hauled myself to the ground floor; a wobbly tower of mattresses and sofas then took me to the door of the apartment building.
How my heart crashed to my feet at the prospect of having to make my way through that upside-down world, dangling from a ceiling of groaning roots and foundations! But my wish to save the little girl was greater. The first hurdle I took by shoving the longest bookshelves between the railings of the playground fence and nailing them to the doorpost. Across came the tabletop, and behold: The first few yards of my scaffolding were a fact. I worked for hours and hours. My platform of window ledges and shelves, of mirror frames and doors continued to grow; from the stairs to the hanging fence, from the hanging fence to the hanging oak, from the hanging oak to the hanging swings, all of my possessions strung together into a footbridge across the emptiness. Working like this, my hands created a perfect reflection of what had become of my life. Maybe that was the reason I wanted to save the girclass="underline" Crawling around an upturned world, I tried to convince myself that it was the world that stood on its head, not me.
By the time I rope-knotted the carpet-covered drainpipes to the blue frame of the swing set, lowered the attic ladder, and told Dawnie to climb toward me, the sun had risen to the horizon and the sky was red as blood.
Dawnie lifted her full moon face up at me. “I’m scared,” she said quietly.
I was on my stomach, arms wrapped around the frame, the ladder an extension of my reaching hands. “I won’t let go.”
Dawnie hesitated. “Are you really, really, really sure?”
“No. Yes.”
“You said no.”
“Yes.”
“But couldn’t we . . .”
“No.”
“But couldn’t we . . .”
“No, Dawnie. Climb up.”
Very, very, very carefully, Dawnie moved her hands higher up along the chains and stood on the swing. She looked at the ladder with fear and revulsion, as if she was afraid to leave the swing behind, as if she wanted to swing some more, back and forth, back and forth between what was behind her and what was ahead. Then she made a decision, placed her foot on the bottom rung and scurried up the ladder, quick and feather-light.
Later, when the sun soared up behind the horizon, we stared out of the living room window at the theatre of Earth’s vomit in the atmosphere. Dawnie stared with unabated wide eyes over the edge of her woolen blanket, Bubbles floated with unabated melancholy in the pure water and I unabatedly mourned my previous life, which had fallen over the edge of the world along with everything else. We heard explosions in the distance and the air was heavy with a burning smell that had nowhere else to go than to spread out against the Earth’s surface. Most fires extinguished themselves as buildings broke off and crashed into the abyss, dragging grey plumes of smoke behind them like falling comets.
“And mountains, are they falling, too?” Dawnie asked, a bit dreamily.
She had entertained herself by throwing houseplants out the window, but it had soon bored her to watch them disappear into the universe. Dawnie was young enough to take to a new normality without much trouble. I wasn’t. In mounting despair, I had been trying to get some news about the catastrophe, but besides the cell phone network and the Internet, all radio waves seemed to have disappeared as well.
“I think it’s raining boulders there right now,” I said.
“How about volcanoes?”
“I guess the fire runs out of them. Dead-straight pillars of lava, all the way into space.”
Dawnie looked suspicious. “But won’t that make the Earth run out?”
I hadn’t considered that.
Were you looking at the same view outside when I did, at the same upside-down world, and did you feel the same bewilderment I felt? Of all the people in the world, why had you called me immediately after the world had come to an end? And why not sooner? Why not all those times when it still mattered? Twice before I had lost love, one to another man and one to indifference, but neither of those loves had been as fundamental and natural as my love for you. If I woke up during the night and missed the weight that had dented the mattress beside me, I was terrified about you getting all too enraptured and wrapped up in the nightlife. And if you crawled into bed just before dawn, drunk and exhausted and instantly asleep, I would lie awake beside you trying not to smell other men on your breath. And so my fear of you leaving me created premature lovesickness: I missed your body as it was lying beside me; I yearned for your touch as your arm was resting on my chest, making the memory of it even more real and my heartache even worse. It felt like I had already lost you.
A downpour of falling stars drew lines across the sunken darkness: the last breaths of objects that had been on Earth this morning and were now falling back into the atmosphere. A fireworks display of thousands of dying things. I watched breathlessly, afraid to make a wish.
After a while I noticed that Dawnie was still awake.
“Mommy is a falling star, too,” she mumbled.
I realized she might very well be right.
The world hadn’t been on its head for a full day before a general consensus had been reached about how survivors communicated their survivaclass="underline" by hanging white sheets or curtains from their windows and chimneys. They constituted the first independent link in a uniform chain of interweaved rope bridges and gangways, stringing itself out in the days after the disaster like a spider web.
My hope that I could leave Dawnie with relatives soon evaporated. When I asked her where her father lived, she answered, “At Grandma’s.”