How the World Ends (2 page)

Chapter Two – A Meeting

Jonah

My workdays are broken up clearly into several sections: get out the door, get on the bus, get on the train, get off the train, walk to the office, sit in the office, leave the office, walk to the train, get on the train, get off the train, get on the bus, get off the bus, walk in the door.

Lather, rinse. Repeat as necessary.

I step off the train and feel the crunch of the leftover salt from winter under my feet. They keep these platforms layered until June in a thick blanket of crystalline nodules to preclude any liability for injuries due to ice underfoot. While I appreciate the preventative measure, I can’t help but look down at my black leather brogues. I have to walk just over a mile to get to the office, and the salt will no doubt work itself into the leather and rot these shoes out before I can save enough to buy a new pair. Everything is an expense, a line item to be tallied and kept track of.

The crowd looks like a sea of heads that I am floating six inches above. I see a few faces at the same level as mine – other tall men and some women wearing heels. I try not to get jostled too much for not hurrying. Why should I hurry when it’ll just wear out my shoes faster? I keep my head raised, trying not looking at my feet as if I have been defeated. I attempt to retain some semblance of my individuality, but it’s no use: we’re all just a bunch of cattle, anxious to make it out into the field and chew on yesterday’s grass.

Out the door of the station, and I immediately speed up to my normal walking pace (to hell with the shoes, I’ll use the credit card) cutting perpendicular to the stream of people heading across the road and make for a small staircase that leads to an alleyway and eventually opens onto an old parking lot, cutting out nearly two blocks of walking in the crowd. I run up the stairs, an old habit from sports training on hills, and keep my eyes peeled for urine puddles. The holes in my footwear seem a lot larger as I hold my breath against the foul stench and walk on the sides of my feet to avoid getting wet. I don’t know why drunken idiots like to pee here; personally, I would much rather do it where I didn’t have to stand in a pool of someone else’s piss as well.

I reach the top of the stairs and force myself to exhale a bit before breathing in. Then it’s across the parking lot, over the street, and through a courtyard with the wind whipping through it. I shiver and pull on my gloves, trying not to bow too much to the wind, telling myself that it's way colder in January, when you feel naked against the repressive blowing. In those days, I walked with numb fingers and toes even with a quick pace to try and stay warm. The least I can do is walk straight and tall in the relative warmth of late spring.

There’s a line-up of people at the corner coffee shop that runs out the door down the sidewalk. A couple of beggars jingle change in empty cups as they intercept people as they are coming outside. It’s a good strategy, really, since many people have a few coins left over from their purchase and appreciate a way to assuage their inner guilt at sharing the planet with those less fortunate. Or is that simply my guilt? It’s hard for me to tell, since I almost never have change in my pocket, and when I do I always remember the urine in the alley by the stairs and wonder if it’s the guy in front of me now who pissed it out.

I reach into my pocket and feel the twenty dollars in there – the Tuesday rarity – and think about how good a coffee and doughnut would be. I hesitate for a second before I join the line, which will probably require a good ten minutes of standing in before I get served. I put my hand further down and notice the round, smooth stone. I don’t move for a moment, and just then everything seems still, there at the edge of the sidewalk between two office buildings and the street.

There seems to be a slight flicker of movement at the edge of my vision and it seems like the light of the morning has suddenly winked out, as if a storm is approaching. The crowd grows quieter, but the people are still standing as they were before, talking with each other and shuffling slowly towards the door. The jingle of coins from the cups is momentarily gone, as though they have been emptied without the beggars knowing it. It only lasts a second, and then it’s gone, and time resumes.

I hear a voice from behind me say, “Did you bring my twenty bucks?”

I turn around to see a filthy black man with a long beard, standing there, wearing an old grey coat. He has his hands at his sides, not outstretched like a beggar’s, but more like a soldier, standing at attention. His, blind, milky white eyes bore into me with a clarity that is almost other-worldly.

“Excuse me?” I reply, taken aback by this intrusion into my self-induced routine of seclusion from the crowd around me.

“You can keep the money, but I’ll be needing that rock back.”

I don’t know what to say, so I reach into my pocket and pull out the small stone, holding it on my palm towards him.

“It looks like a regular stone,” he says, looking straight at me. “But it contains the rarest of gems.”

“How did you know I had this stone in my pocket?” I ask. “Have you been following me?”

The man, who seems less shabby now, even somewhat noble in his worn clothes, lowers his head slightly, as if to exam the stone in my outstretched hand.

“No, Jonah,” he says quietly. “I been waiting for you to come back to me, and I can’t wait no longer. All them others have failed and there’s only this one itty bitty chance to get back what we gonna lose.”

“Huh?” I say as I squint in reaction to this calm, yet strange proclamation. “One chance for what? Who are you? How do you know my name? Why are you following me?”

“My name’s Michael,” he replies, slowly. “And I ain’t been following you. I been waiting here for you and you came to me. I just had to put myself in your path, so to speak. And today you got to do exactly what I says, no matter what it sounds like.”

He raises his hand before I can speak. “Don’t go to work today, it won’t be worth your while. Go to the top of that building over there,” he says, pointing at a church across the street, “and meet my friend. He needs your help, today, I am afraid.”

And with that he lifts up his face with a solemn look in his empty eyes, saying, “Don’t you be scared of what you gonna lose, Jonah. Be strong for them as gotta be saved before it’s too late.”

I don’t reply. I don’t know what to say to this man who seems to know things that he shouldn’t. I want to say that he’s a lunatic, or that I pity his blindness. I want to believe he’s just a crazy old man, but for some strange reason, I don’t; I feel somehow that he pities me.

“I have to go to work,” I say, lacking anything better. “Here's your rock, now leave me alone.”

I shake the stone a little on my open hand.

“I don’t want that thing back yet,” he answers quietly, wrapping my fingers around it with his own. “It belongs in the hilt of a powerful blade. Powerful! Don’t you see? But I ain’t got it done yet. You see, today I’m a travellin’ blacksmith, forging my tools.”

He smiles with a mouth full of pearly-white teeth. “And don’t even ask me what I’m gonna be tomorrow, ‘cause I don’t even know myself, yet.”

“Whatever,” I say, squinting, and turning away from him, striding through the coffee line.

“Change your mind soon, son, and I’ll see you in the basement,” calls Michael after me.

I don't turn around. I just keep walking and pretend he was never there.

Chapter Three – Another Meeting

Jonah

I walk quickly the rest of the way to work. It’s only a few blocks but it seems much further, now my routine has been interrupted. I’m shaken by the encounter, wondering what it meant, and then only a few moments later almost disbelieving that it even happened at all.

I have to go to work. I have to pay the bills and do what I do, that’s the right thing, now more than ever.

I work as a writer for a science and technology journal, and we occupy the second floor of a large downtown office building. I go through the glass doors of the lobby and climb the stairs to the second floor. My cubicle is across the room, on the far side, next to where the windows are. I begin to move towards it, wondering why the rest of the crowded space seems so quiet, muffled even. It is as if an invisible blanket has been draped over everything, muting the normal clicking and talking that one usually associates with a busy office.

There’s something wrong with my desk: it has a cardboard box on it, with my photo of Rachel and the kids on the top, sticking out at an odd angle. Their smiles, coming out of the black and white photo, puncture all my illusions about what this place is. Looking out from that glass and frame, she knows that I don’t belong here. The photo was taken six months ago, but she knows.

My wife has an uncanny ability to foresee events; she has often predicted my professional demise at the hands of the merciless editors here. They pay no attention, she says, to the quality of my work, but only to its immediate saleability. I didn't like that idea when I first heard it, but I now guess that she is right. My attempts to focus on technology from a purely scientific angle merely serve to irritate the advertising mechanisms that rely on shelf-available products and their related hype to churn ad-ratio dollars.

Looking at the box, I realize I have failed to be anything but blind, and she had known, had tried to warn me of it. In the glass of the photo frame I see the reflection of the human resources manager standing behind me.

“Excuse me, Jonah,” she says, smiling almost seductively. “If you would kindly step into my office...”

She gestures towards the frosted glass office that is traditionally known as the “war room” where group planning sessions and strategy meetings are held.

Her
new
office, then.

I look her over with my head at a slight angle. Her name is Sally, and she’s worked here for about six months. She hasn’t been at work for a couple of weeks because her mother died in a car accident.

The office staff are completely silent. They should be; I was the first full-time writer here. Back then this magazine was completely reliant on my knowledge, on my ability to interpret science in a way that they could understand. But things change in six or seven years – technology especially. I should have known better, and I stand here guessing that I have missed my chance to move with it. I decide that I don’t want to be in this cubicle anymore anyways; I don’t belong in this box.

I have to leave.

“I am sorry about your loss of your mother, Sally.” I say, closing my eyes.

I open them again and turn back towards the door. “Goodbye everyone.”

The silence is overwhelmingly respectful. I stand for a few moments, letting them stare at me, wondering at the finality of it all, as if I’ve missed something obvious, and I suppose that indeed I have – for quite some time.

I stalk back to the door, back down the steps, out the glass entrance.

I stand there wondering why I didn’t listen to Michael, five minutes earlier.

The morning air is still fresh, but a strange mist seems to be closing in, and I can no longer see the sky as it was earlier. The smell of rain rolls off a thickening, cloudy breeze making its way through the city. As if a presence has come out from its hiding, to observe, to bear witness, perhaps to coerce...

Something clicks in my brain then, something about being out of time or being late for something. I can’t think exactly why it seems important to hurry anywhere, since I have just lost my job. The impending fiscal doom I have brought down around myself and my family ought to outweigh any other disturbance, but it is there nonetheless: an urge to be somewhere else. It is as if a presence has sprung out from the unspoken silences of back alleys and the clamour of the city as it attempts to express its unhappiness.

A presence that seems to speak to me from the cloud.

The end is near.

I run.

I run with the madness of the damned and the clumsiness and drunken luck of the uncaring. The streets are oddly empty, and traffic lights are strangely green for longer than normal, and suddenly I am back at the coffee shop, in the very same spot where I had been standing several minutes before.

The line for coffee is gone, as if the patrons have dissipated into the fog. The mist is thick and growing thicker as the breeze becomes a whirling tempest, making a sudden calamity of the quiet morning from before. I turn to look up where Michael motioned to earlier.

The church is no longer there.

I turn all the way around, searching the suddenly unfamiliar landscape for the church.
But wait
, I think to myself,
the church was what didn’t belong
. I had never seen it before Michael pointed me to it. In all the years I have walked this route to the office, I have never seen that church. So why do I care if it isn’t there anymore, when it never was there to begin with? Which seems more unnatural, that fact that it appeared, or that it’s gone, and replaced with a plain brick building?

A voice, distant, fighting to be heard against the wind, suddenly calls down from high above, so soft against the howl of the wind that I can’t make out any words. Still looking up, I continue to turn back and forth, trying to discern the figure through the fog and mist. The voice is coming from the top of the brick building. It is the voice of a small child, desperately calling out in an attempt to be heard.

The brick building has a fire-escape on its alley side with an old fashioned ladder rusted in the down position. The bottom rung of it is around shoulder height, and I pull myself up, hooking my feet beside my fingers and hanging upside down before I reach up for the next rung. I feel the skin pinch between my wedding band and the rusted metal. The entire structure is somewhat dampened by the mist and fog, swirling through the alley, yet I do not feel threatened by the slippery bars. I am not afraid of heights, having spent my childhood climbing corn silos and the tallest trees I could find.