It makes sense he would pick her, not just because she’s closer to his age than anyone other than the little kids, not just because she’s hot, but because she was his babysitter, and that’s the closest thing we’ve got to a teacher. (Hot for a teacher, there’s another cliché you know pretty well.) She broke the rules for him, let him stay up after his bedtime, let him watch horror movies even after the nightmares started, the ones from God about the end of the world, and there’s something intoxicating about that, breaking the rules together, sneaking around together in the dark, sharing a secret. Secrets breed.
Write dangerous, you said, when you gave us the journals, told us to write what we felt and what we feared, no sanitized shit about proms and puppies. You called them journals, not diaries, because diaries are for little girls, and you promised they would be for our eyes only. Make the page a repository for your soul, you told us, but when I showed you the page about how you tasted and what my heart did when you spelled words on my neck with your tongue, you told me don’t be a fucking idiot and never write any of this down, and never even bothered to say if it was good.
I did what I was told. I didn’t tell anyone. Even after you traded me in for that sophomore who wrote a love poem in her own menstrual blood, I didn’t write any of it down. I learned my lesson about that. Never write down what actually matters. Never tell.
Even so, I still thought I might be a writer someday. If I had the time. If anything worth writing about ever happened to me. And here I am, witness to the end of the world, nothing to do but can fruit and record the fall of civilization and the mourning song of my heart or whatever, and the only thing I’ve bothered to write are my little collection of shitpaper letters to all you pieces of shit. There’s nothing in here I want to record, and nothing out there that I can bring back by writing about it. What I want is to lie on a couch and watch TV.
You told us TV would turn us into passive consumers of other people’s words and we should take a sledgehammer to the screen, impose our creative will on the world, creation via destruction, raze our brain-washed, consumerist, capitalist, shallow, pimple-popping lives to the ground and build from scorched earth; you told us no one ever died wishing they had watched more TV, but I will. I wish I’d watched more Friends reruns and had made a dent in the list of Boring-Sounding Shows I’m Tired of Admitting I Don’t Watch. I can picture how you probably died (pierced in the jugular by exploding glass while you begged the mirror for help with your comb-over), but I’m already forgetting what the Real Housewives look like. I told you once that I thought soap operas were the most realistic form of storytelling, because they never stopped at happily ever after, they never stopped at all, and you laughed like I was making a joke, and I guess now the joke is on me because they stopped along with everything else.
There’s nothing left out there now. That’s what they say over the radio, although mostly, now, they don’t say much of anything. Occasionally, through the static, we pick up someone crying.
There’s nothing left out there and it’s insane to hope that there is, and we all agree on that—except when it’s time to put someone out. And then we pretend it’s not a death sentence, just an alternative life choice. Anything could be out there, we say. She didn’t like it in here, not enough to follow the rules and do as she was told, so maybe she’ll find something she likes better.
Maybe, if Theresa Babbage preferred not to fuck a teenager, if, unlike you, that didn’t turn her on, if she pretended Isaac’s proposal was a question rather than a command and politely declined, then that was her choice, and maybe, after a few nights out there in the waste and wild, she won’t regret it.
It’s not execution, Isaac said last night, after he locked the gates behind her. Not even punishment. Simply the smart policing of a peaceful community. Go along to get along, or get out.
She said he was fucking crazy. She said what about feminism and Hilary Clinton and MTV and how does a kid born in the twenty-first century buy any of this crap, the world hasn’t worked like that for two thousand years, and he said that the world was gone, and that a lot of things hadn’t happened for two thousand years, and he didn’t have to come right out and say I am the light of the world for us to know what he was getting at.
She probably thought her sisters would go with her, but she should have known better. She couldn’t have imagined I would go with her, but she might have expected me to say goodbye. She didn’t know how I feel about goodbyes.
She didn’t tell me she was going to refuse him, or I would have talked her out of it. I would have told her about doing the things you need to do, about how to endure, about what it takes to be the girl who stays. I could have told her what it feels like to be left alone, but she didn’t ask, and now they’ve pushed her out the door without warm clothes or food or any fucking idea how to take care of herself, because while the rest of us were preparing for the end by learning to shoot and make soap and forage for mushrooms, she was babysitting the future messiah, and now she’s probably dead. I still have my laptop. The battery’s long dead, of course, but sometimes I like to watch the blank screen, and imagine what used to be.
Even before, I liked to watch static, especially when I hurt. I liked the dead roar of it, the way you could squint into the wild and waste, almost believing that if you tried hard enough, you could resolve chaos into order, that somewhere, hiding between the squiggly lines, was a face, a voice, a world.
I want the picture back; I want it all back. I want trashy reality shows and late night infomercials and Saturday morning cartoons. I want my MTV. I want Chinese take-out and a greasy-fingered remote; I want sick days that pass in a haze of talk show rumbles and game show hosts; I want Luke and Laura to reunite and As the World Turns to come back from the dead; I want fat men with their skinny wives and hospitals where everyone is beautiful and dripping with sex and only boring people die; I want tornado hunters and competitive eaters and Sunday morning televangelists and even that fucking ice queen on Fox News. I want back all those afternoons that I spent with you in your car and your office and that skeezy hotel, because I could have spent them at home with a bag of Doritos and Oprah and Boy Meets World and now, when I lie in my bunk and pretend to sleep, breathing stale air, tuning out snores, fingering my knife and wondering if one day I’ll wake up and decide to use it, I could play back all those episodes in my head, be my own laugh track, remember scripted lines and symmetrical faces, instead of you. I want oblivion, like the rest of you get to have, out there; I want not to be the one left behind when everyone else is gone.
I want. I want. I want. I’m sounding like a child again, aren’t I? Like a whiny brat who thinks bad things only happen to bad people and gods play fair.
Not that I would call Isaac a whiny brat, or an ignorant kid, or delusional or pathetic, simply because he believes that we were saved because we deserved to be, that death is punishment and life reward, that we can remember what we choose to remember and forget the rest, that because he saved us once, our lives are forever in his hands. There are no teachers anymore, and even if there were, you can’t teach the savior of mankind—God’s chosen vessel—anything he doesn’t want to know. So you see, this particular brave new world has no place for you. This is a world where children take whatever they want, and the rest of us live with what’s left.