Defying Doomsday, page 16
When you wake, you are lying on the floor. The harness sits in a shredded heap next to you. Latch, crouched by your side, looms. His shoulders never seemed so broad. His thighs balloon against his jeans. You feel weak. Your shirt feels loose. It droops off your arms and pools around your torso. Latch, however, looks ready, not merely to climb a mountain, but toss it on his broad back and march it around the world. It’s as though what muscle you’ve gained over the decades has been stolen from you and packed onto his mighty and beautiful body.
You scuttle away from Latch. He reaches for you but you’re somehow fast enough to evade his grasp. You struggle to get your feet under you.
“Caleb, don’t panic.” He’s barely touched you, but you rocket to a stand. His strength must be super-human. “You’re just tapped out and, knowing you, massively misperceiving our relative sizes. That’s all. You’ll be yourself in a couple of hours.”
He wraps his arms around you. They feel like a vice around your chest but they look relaxed and thin, not the massive tree trunks they must be when he flexes them.
“Seriously? I can see you just fine.” You break away too easily. Maybe he let go. “I can’t be here with you.”
“I don’t think you should be alone right now.” He takes a step towards you. The perfect light that follows him highlights every muscle on his body.
“I’m fine. It’s not always about muscle dysmorphia.” You back your way out the door. “I just need to be alone for a while.”
The shame of being so small and weak can be hard to deal with. Right now, you don’t want to be seen by anyone. You scramble out the door.
“Call me. Anytime you want. If you need anything. Please, just call.” Latch’s words are echoes from down the hall.
You huddle in a seat at the end of a subway car. Everyone seems to have their moment staring at you with a sneer before looking away with revulsion. It’s a relief when you barricade yourself in your apartment.
Despair pins you in bed. Not even the automatic urge to lift can get you out of bed, much less the apartment. It’s a couple of days before you remember again that shirts stretch and relax. Even the ones that feel unconscionably tight in the morning develop a little play in the sleeves by the afternoon.
This is hardly your first meltdown. They always take a couple of days before the fear of shrivelling even further overtakes the despair of being weak and small. However, the fading is getting quicker and quicker. This time, when you turn on the bedroom light for the first time in three days, the room is blurry, but you’re barely here. You cast no shadow and your gaze solidifies your chest of drawers through your forearms.
Your indistinct blob of a phone slips through your hands at first. However, it becomes substantial under your gaze and you call the only person you can think of.
“Um … Latch?” Words dribble out of you. After your meltdown in front of him, you’re not sure he will ever want to talk to you again. “I need … can you…”
“I’ll be right over.”
“No, um—“ Latch hangs up before you can get anything else out.
Your apartment is a blurry mess. The idea Latch will see this sends you into a tidying frenzy. You take off the shirt you’ve worn for days and put on a clean shirt you make opaque and crisp. Unaccountably, it strangles you even though it’s been whole days since you’ve even seen a weight or eaten. Despite everything that’s happened, the shirt squeezes your shoulders and stretches across your chest, back and arms.
By the time the doorbell rings, your clothes have all been stowed in a laundry hamper or a closet. Dishes have been washed. Bottles of protein powder have been hidden in the pantry. Your living room has never been so tidy. Books sit in the bookshelves not on the floor. Sofa cushions rest exactly in their proper places. For the first time in months, you can see the surface of the coffee table. Your apartment looks as sharp and as opaque as it did before the fading became a thing.
You open the door. Latch’s eyes widen. His words catch in his throat, leaving his jaw hanging. Like you, he’s too dark to actually pale but, as blood drains from his face, his attempt is heroic.
He grabs your forearms. His stare sweeps up and down your body. Your jeans grow distinct, but you don’t.
“Can’t do it.” Latch is out of breath. “You’re so far gone. Need to see more of you to have a chance.”
You shake your head as you back up. He follows you into your apartment then closes the door behind him.
“Oh.” You sit on the sofa, and run your hands over your scalp. It’s past time to shave. Might as well go to oblivion clean shaven. “I’m sorry I called you over for nothing.”
“Caleb.” If only the incredulity in Latch’s voice could bring you back. “Even if your body were something to be ashamed of—which it’s not—plenty of guys see you without a shirt on in the locker room, right?”
“Sure, but I don’t care about them.” You shrug. “You, on the other hand… Maybe there’s nothing to me besides the illusion generated by a tight T-shirt. If I take my shirt off, you’ll see what a fraud I am.”
“OhGodOhGodOhGod.” Again and again, he taps the palm of one hand with the back of the other. His eyes shut and he swallows hard before he opens them again. “This is so not the time for a conversation about our relationship.”
“Relationship?” You furrow your brow. “We don’t have a relationship.”
“Not if you don’t take off your shirt, we don’t, because you’ll be dead.” He leans into you. “I’m not even going to try to convince you that how you look in a T-shirt isn’t an illusion, Caleb, but I’d really like the relationship conversation with you. Please, Caleb, just do this for me. How you look is the least interesting thing about you.”
You peer up at him. He stands over you, but he’s not overwhelming. Latch does not have a chest that needs its own time zone and, as much as he loves watching football, he doesn’t play. As you settle into the calm of your impending death, you get that his skeleton is large enough that he can’t pack on enough muscle mass to be a bulging powerhouse. That’s just what you keep creating in your mind from a set of broad shoulders, a trim waist, and oddly perfect lighting.
His face looks concerned. The calculation of whether he can force the T-shirt off you grinds behind his eyes. Whatever the answer, though, he simply waits for you to do something. He’s talked you into his experiment and, even if it went disastrously, he’s still the first person you called. You’d like that conversation with him. That means, though, your T-shirt has to come off. You have to show him what you actually look like, and it’s not the illusion a tight T-shirt implies.
The T-shirt fights back at first. Crossing your arms to grab the hem flares your lats. The shirt you’d expected to be loose was already snug to begin with. This just makes it dig into you as you pull it over your head. You’re sure you look ridiculous as you stand then wriggle and twist for the minute it takes to get the shirt off, but Latch doesn’t laugh.
The shirt is still in your hand when his gaze lacerates you. His arms nestle your waist. The two of you stand motionless, staring at each other, for what seems like days. When you are opaque again, when the shadow you cast on the floor is as sharp and defined as the coffee table, he shakes his head and blinks a few times.
“Nothing wrong with that.” He makes an appraising gaze of your torso, his arms now folded across his chest. “I wouldn’t mind seeing that again.”
“Thank you. I—“
“Catch me—“
Latch collapses and you catch him before he hits the coffee table. You shift your grip so that he lies across your arms then, gingerly, you lower him onto the sofa. He takes up most of its length. He’s lighter than you expected. Then again, you’re always surprised when the strength you seem to show in the fantasyland that is the gym crosses over into real life.
You sit on the coffee table, watching the slow rise and fall of his chest. Even now, the lighting in the room seems to have shifted to accommodate his new position.
* * *
Even though you both know better, he asks you out to the theatre and you accept. It’s a production of The Human Comedy, after all. It’s pretty much never produced and you’ve wanted to see this on stage since you were a kid. This is a production that fulfils the promise you heard in the show’s cast album. The audience laughs and applauds at all the right places. Their massed attention keeps the sets and actors solid and opaque. Before, during, and after the show, you are both perfect gentlemen with each other. Even in bed.
Your experiments are going better, you suppose. At least iron cubes now reconstruct as something metallic, if not cubic. The result still kind of looks like breakfast. Latch’s work shows more promise which is why, you tell yourself, you find yourself back in Latch’s lab, caged again in the contraption that, weeks ago, convinced you that you had the body of a spindly teenager too weak to bench even an empty bar.
Latch flicks the switch and you brace. Outlines of ghostly lab benches and computers from the other side of the wall overlay the solid lab benches and computers here.
“How do you feel?” The expression on his face smacks of fear.
“A little weak. A little small.” You hold up a hand to stop him when he reaches to unstrap you from the harness. “But I’ve been more intimidated by you before.”
It’s not a good idea for you two to date each other. Eventually, he’ll become too annoyed at how you constantly misperceive yourself to deal with you. Maybe, one day, his mere existence will cow you so much that the despair will finally get to you. However, he’s sweet and smart and you two have far too much in common.
Besides, the rate of the fading is increasing every day. Unless someone figures out what’s going on, one day, super-perceivers won’t be enough to keep the world in existence. You don’t want to be alone when the world fades away, and you don’t think he does either.
“Latch.” You can’t look at him. “There’s a production of The Golden Apple coming up.”
Again, another lost gem you thought you’d never see in your lifetime. Something about the end of the world makes artistic directors program shows that only diehards can love.
“Really? Where? I saw a concert version once.”
“The Berkshires.”
“Well, we gotta plan a weekend trip or something.”
You were planning to see it anyway. It might as well be with the one other person who will appreciate it.
Slowly, what’s on the other side of the wall gains heft and solidity. The visual contradiction of what’s there overlapping with what’s here becomes a bit much for you and you squeeze your eyes shut. Computers and benches from the other side, though, remain in your gaze. Whatever Latch’s contraption is doing, it doesn’t just spread your attention over an area, but one physically isolated from you. There seems to be a lot of attenuation even over the few feet to the wall, though, given how slowly things are returning. It’s still a step towards making sure farmland doesn’t disappear overnight.
Minutes pass and your legs start to shake. A chill passes through your body. You’re not infinite capacity. No one is, but you’re higher than many, if not most. You’re nowhere near tapped out and you know that, but you know what you’re like when you are. What courses through you is more fear than exhaustion.
“Say the word, Caleb, and I’ll pull the plug on the trial.”
It’s hard to shake your head in the harness but you do anyway. “No, keep going. I’m fine.”
“Thank you, Caleb.”
A large hand with slim fingers works its way into your grasp. Its warmth seems to spread up your arm and through the rest of your body. The fear racing through you ebbs. Your mind clears a little and, in this age where attention has become important, you can see your way to using more of your capacity.
The hand grips yours firmly, but not too firmly. You can let go anytime you want, but you don’t.
9
Five Thousand Squares
By Maree Kimberley
It started with a crack. I suppose that's why no one heard it, except for Micha. She was always awake at 4 am, her “pain prime time”.
Soft pings from my connector finally woke me at 5:30 am. I rolled onto my side and battled my fatigue-clogged brain to see a scroll of Micha’s messages flowing down my wallscreen.
Are you awake?
I can feel rumbles.
Water’s coming.
Wake up, Kaye!
Pack food, clothes etc and get over here now.
Bring all your meds!!
I winced as I dragged my body into a semi-upright position and scowled at the wallscreen. Water? Why is she going on about water? The rain stopped yesterday.
The first glimmer of dawn filtered through the window. I slumped back onto the bed and pressed my palms into my face to muffle my morning groans. I didn’t like the sound of them to disturb the morning quiet.
The peace.
The silence.
Too much silence.
I lifted my palms from my face, and listened.
No birds.
No magpie warble, no mynah bird squabble, no cockatoo screech. No raucous caw from the scavenging crows feasting on my back neighbour’s overflowing bin. Not a single kookaburra laugh.
Nothing, except a faint gurgle, like the last swirl of dishwater vanishing down a plughole. I scrolled back through Micha’s messages, to the first one sent at 4:06.
Are you awake? My hip’s telling me something is up. My knee agrees.
Micha’s body spoke to her in throbs and stabs. My body had its own tricky methods: a gripping fatigue that pinned me to the bed. As I scrolled through the messages, I fought the tight bands of exhaustion that wound around the inside of my skull and pressed into the soft folds of my brain.
I had to get up.
Rouse Tilda and Ren.
Pack the bags.
Get us all in the sola-bub and get to Micha’s before the deluge she sensed was coming meant there’d be no way out at all.
Adrenalin failed to kick in so I had to go through the usual rigmarole of rotating ankle joints and bending knees and clenching and unclenching my fists to rid my body of stiffness.
“Tilda…” I croaked.
I cleared my throat and tried again. “Tilda! Ren! Get here now!”
No response, of course. They automatically screened out any Mum-pings from their connectors. And pings from their friends were, I assumed, non-existent. The apocalypse itself could not raise teenagers out of bed at this hour. My body protested, too, no matter how much I tried to kid it into thinking that now really was a good time to get up.
I grimaced and grabbed the sheets to get some purchase while I pushed my head up off the bed. “Tilda! Ren!”
The silence sat in my ears, cavernous and unearthly.
Just get up, just get up. I repeated the mantra in my head as I rolled onto my side, pressed my fist into the mattress to steady myself and pushed my body upright. My feet rested on the timber floorboards. When I stood, razor blades of pain sliced through the balls of my feet. I gritted my teeth and hobbled to the toilet. Two minutes to rid my body of waste and recollect the details of the plan Micha and I had constructed, dissected and perfected over the years. Two minutes to review the angles considered, the threats posed and dismissed, the hours spent going over all contingencies. We were a couple of women aged before our time by an unwelcome disease that attacked our joints, swelled our limbs and twisted our bones. But, fuck it, we were nothing if not survivors.
I washed my hands and looked at my reflection. A too-goddamned-early glaze dulled my eyes.
“Well, woman,” I ran my fingers through my hair and flicked the greys that came out onto the floor, “this is it.”
The important thing was to pace myself, not an easy task when Micha’s pings flowed with increasing urgency.
Are you on your way?
Did you remember the spare chargers?
Double-check the list!
These bloody kids won’t listen to a word I say.
Should I send them down to the street to see what happens? *jokes*
No, really.
Jesus, Kaye are you on your way?
I pinged back. Yep, don't stress. Getting organised.
We’d run a drill last week, so at least everything was in the right place. I dressed as fast as I could and sat on the edge of the bed to lace up my boots, then headed to the kitchen to pack boxes into the wheeled market bags. The old tartan vinyl had seen better days but it was more or less waterproof.
Clothes.
Lenses.
Meds.
Hypos.
Batteries. (They took some tracking down, but I’d found them at a warehouse rummage. Those old-time survivalists knew a thing or two.)
Another ping.
You got about thirty minutes. Hope your arses are just about out that door.
I stretched my arms up, spread my palms, slowed the breathing I realised was gathering pace into hyperventilation territory.
“Do. Not. Fucking. Panic.”
Going as fast as I can. I pinged back. Be on our way soon.
I relaxed my shoulders and stamped my boots as loud as I could down the timber-floored hallway. I flung open Tilda’s door then Ren’s. The doors whacked against the walls, a one-two punch combo.
“Ren!” I dragged the doona off and flung it to the floor. “This is not a drill.”
He blinked up at me. When he read the expression on my face, his lip quivered.
“You got three minutes to dress and grab anything you can’t live without.” I hurried across the hallway to Tilda’s room but she was already out of bed pulling on jeans and boots.
“You heard?”
She nodded.
“Front door in four minutes.”
