How to Find Peace at the End of the World Read online

  How to Find Peace at the End of the World

  by

  Saro Yen

  7:30 AM. I lie in bed expecting a call from my fiancée in five minutes.

  I hold in my mind an image of our perfect day:

  My car is parked in the lot at work and we’re sitting on the hood like in the movies. They sky is just graying to dusk. My work is near Hobby airport, right on a landing vector. We’re watching jet freighters as they pass a few hundred feet overhead, their curved, unpainted bellies mirroring the ground below and we try to pick out where we might be in the distorted map of the business park.

  We’re lying there watching airplanes but talking, quixotically, of sailing. Sailing away and not coming back for a long time. We talk about what kind of ship, what supplies we’d need, what we would take along with us.

  Another airliner comes in and we shiver not at the noise, the vibration, but at our shared fantasy.

  Flying is trifle thing: neither of us find it particularly romantic.

  But sailing holds so much promise. While for her it’s an escape from an ordinary life, for me it’s a last chance that I’ll never need to grow up.

  That’s my perfect day now. It happened sometime before she left for law school in Dallas. It was before she found a job in Dallas after graduating. Before all the long, late night calls and the early morning calls and the video conferencing and the LDR psychosis. Before all of the shuttling back and forth between different cities separated by a five hour car trip—the odometer on my Honda would have already flipped back around were it not digital.

  I’ve come to setting the alarm a bit early, ever since she asked me if I thought she was my wake-up call. What she really meant was that she didn’t like me sounding groggy. What she really meant was to ask was: why wasn’t I already awake and waiting for her call? The idea is that I should be anticipating these calls so much out of my love for her, and because we haven’t talked for so long, about seven and a half hours. It’s our only time to talk before work. Don’t even get me started on my failure to ever call her before she calls me.

  Things will change in April when we finally get hitched. About damn time, everyone keeps saying. I’d tried to change things sooner but the job market is terrible. After we get married, I’m just going to quit and go for broke two hundred and fifty miles up north in Dallas.

  Until then Amy, my fiancée, wants us to be better about communication. I’ve gotten better, over the time we’ve been living separately, at sounding awake when I’ve just been woken up. She worries about this imaginary strain the distance is causing between us. I can’t say that I share that worry. She calls every morning at 7:35. Then she calls at eight, in case I’ve gone back for sleep. She calls after lunch. She calls after work. She calls each night before bed. I’ve gotten used to it. The snooze feature is so nice. I drift back to sleep.

  9:00 AM. I wake up groggy. Irritable. Totally blacked out. I pry open the crusty eye that isn’t smushed into my pillow. Through the haze I make out an 8 and think dammit. Presentation’s at 9. Just have to wing it. Then the 8 resolves into a 9.

  I bolt upright-Fuck!-and scramble towards the bathroom, grabbing my pants from yesterday. I swipe at the beer stain, knowing that this is futile. I lose precious minutes grabbing another pair of slacks.

  I try threading my belt through the loops while brushing my teeth and composing a text message. Traffic. Phon dying. Sory. I write, hoping the semi-cryptic nature of the message might absolve me somehow. I keep brushing in the closet while looping an arm through the single shirt still on the hangar.

  I dial Amy, annoyed. I head back to the sink and while the line rings I realize how irrational it is to be annoyed that Amy didn’t wake me up to go to my own damn job.

  “Hello-”

  “Iff anyfing wron-”

  “You’ve reached the voicemail of Amy Seager, junior partner specializing in-”

  I hang up on her voicemail and spit into the sink.

  9:10 AM. I bolt out of the front door having added toothpaste splatter to the beer stains on my pants, but nothing for it. I’m so very late.

  It’s another balmy winter day in Texas. The road looks semi-wet like it rained but I doubt it did.

  I locate my car on the driveway, the way I’d left it. Hmm. Or close. I do remember doing a slightly better job of parking than in the scene that greets me. I’d had a few drinks last night. Just a few. Or so I’d thought. The car is slanted across the driveway and its front wheels are on the lawn, the tires pushing up the new sod.

  Something seems off. When I go around the corner that the garage makes with the front entrance, I realize what it is.

  “Fuck.”

  The entire back end of my car is smashed. Skid marks painted where the offending car had jumped onto my driveway, had impacted the rear bumper pushing it onto my lawn. How the hell did this not wake me up? The skid marks continue and my eyes snap down the road. There’s a truck embedded in the lawn four doors down. It’s run up the curb and smashed the retaining wall. Smoke shoots up from the crumpled hood. I run down the street propelled partially by an instinctual urge to help but mostly by an urge to kick the ass of whoever is inside the cab of that truck.

  Midway to the car an urgent feeling stops me in my tracks and I stand there looking up and down the street of the quiet subdivision I’d just recently decided to buy in. I decided that buying might be a good move on, you know, proposing to the love of my life.

  Six doors the other way is a set of lawn care gear all scattered about haphazardly as if their users had simply vanished. The leaf blower is lying in the street, still on, purring sheets of oily purple smoke. On the adjacent lawn the big green riding mower is hunkered midway through a gap between the brick retaining walls. The white truck and open tool cage is simply sitting there, driverless. Further down, the door to a house stands open, edging disturbingly back and forth in the wind. I look the other way, past the crashed pickup and notice the garbage truck. What makes sense: they usually come at the same time as the lawn people. What doesn’t: the truck is simply idling there, something I’ve never seen a garbage truck do for more than the ten seconds it takes for the robotic arm to pick up the black trash bins. It’s sitting there, but what’s more the robotic arm is making a sort of whining sound as it’s halfway with putting one of the black bins down or lifting it up. Simply stuck midway.

  There must be a rational explanation for this. Think. Think. Haha. I know. It’s still a dream. I’m dreaming. I slap myself and the slap resounds down a street that’s much too quiet. While it’s a quiet street, it’s my first house and sort of close to the freeway. I listen for the usual sound of traffic and don’t hear much of anything. I get down to feel the rough texture of the asphalt. I walk to the neighbor’s rolled up paper and read the headline.

  I’m awake. I’ve got to be awake.

  Am I going crazy?

  My mind reaches for and finds a rational explanation: an evacuation. Just like accidents with uninsured motorists, evacs are just a part of life living on the gulf coast. While they don’t come every week, you know about them. Twenty miles in any direction you’ll find some of the largest refineries in the world making all sorts of fuels and plastics and what not. My stomach drops. I stop breathing, or try to as I reach the pickup truck. Empty. I begin to head back immediately, quick walking. What am I breathing in right now? If it’s that bad, how could I have been left behind? A sudden image of the local police in their respirators going door to door and knocking as I snoozed in bed, still drunk and slobbering, flashes through my mind. I cough and take another rationed sip of air as I get in my car. Inside I gasp for breath. It should be safer in h
ere, right? Sealed?

  I paw at my phone. I’m still getting WIFI and Internet. I pull I the local news feed: nothing. Strange, the last post is this morning at 7:35. Mornings are usually busier on the feed. I call the office. No answer. I call somebody else at the office. No answer. Boss. No answer. Amy. Nope. Some emergency and I’ve been fucking left behind.

  In frustration I fling the phone across the cabin of my car, much harder than I intend, and it smashes into pieces against the side column, its cover and battery banging of somewhere I don’t know. Fuck, I say as I rear up out of my seat to find all the pieces, realizing that it was still a good working phone, and that in a crises like the one flashing in my mind it might be my only lifeline.

  9:30 AM. This is weird. Everything is really starting to creep me out now. I’ve called Amy again. I’ve called mom and dad. No answer. My brother. No. I’m about five miles from home and the streets are deserted. Not mid-day deserted, but end of the world type deserted.

  It’s like one of those movies where the main character is in a coma or something and wakes up and the world is over, except I’m looking at my phone and it’s showing the correct date, the date after yesterday’s date. The only thing I can think of that’s similar is the Hurricane Rita evacuation, except without people: there are cars everywhere, but not standing in straight line like in a traffic jam, but all crushed together like their drivers suddenly disappeared and they simply kept going until crashing. There are cars left and right going down the local roads, stuck in street signs or wrapped around light poles or protruding from storefronts. There are cars simply puttered to a stop against the walls of offices and stores, their wheels idly turning.

  I’m beginning to think it might not be an evacuation. But then, what? God, I must be going crazy because the only other options are Rapture and Alien Abduction. I got my phone back together but Fuck ME I can’t call out because my SIM chip went flying into another dimension or something. Another dimension. Another dimension. I can’t help but think of all this Twilight Zone crap. Okay. Calm. I need to calm myself. I wish I could use my phone. I wish Amy would pick up. What I’d give to know she’s OK. Maybe she is. Maybe whatever this thing is is local. It happened locally and Amy up there in Dallas is just fine.

  I screech to a stop in front of work. What the fuck. Most people get here about the time I’m waking and it shows. It could only be then, must be they simply vaporized or something. Poof. The building looks assaulted from all sides, all entrances. Cars are stacked upon others in the parking lot. My boss’s Super Duty sits stuck out of the lobby, all the dark polarized glass shattered around it.

  I stop and sit in my idle car. I know I have to go inside. I have to find out if anybody is in there. If anybody needs help. I park near the door to the lobby. On getting out I see that my boss’s monster truck, thirty-three inch tires and lift and all is still sputtering. As I get closer I hear this awful screeching noise. I put my shirt over my nose and mouth and edge towards the cab of the pickup, reminded of the eerie scene that greeted me this morning. I’m almost half expecting to see him slumped over the wheel. Almost hoping. Instead there’s nothing. The car’s in drive and it’s stuck against a hefty interior pillar of the office. The car’s been lifted slightly on one side and one of the front tires is making the squealing against the stone floor of the front lobby. I open the door to the truck and shift it into park and turn off the engine. I take the keys and go around back and out of a morbid curiosity open the bed cover and the cover rises slowly on its hydraulic hinges. It really does look like a coffin, but I don’t find anything in the bed except for tool boxes and rope and some jerricans of water or gas. A can’s been loosened, probably by the truck “jumping” the front steps and lies tipped on its side.

  Something shifts in the distance and my heart leaps. “Hello?” I call out, hoping to hear the faintest report. I shut the bed cover and the door to the cab and make my way toward the noise. I round the high counter of the receptionist’s desk. There’s a cup of coffee still on the desk. Carol’s sweater is still draped on the seat back. Her great aunt Marnie knitted it for her.

  Would she have evacuated and left her favorite sweater here? Or would she have brought it along thinking it might get cold sometime in the journey. My mind is screaming out wild theories inside my body, which is calmly proceeding. I use the scenario of a chemical release and evacuation to calm my nerves. Surely whatever chemical sludge I’m breathing out can eventually be purged with intensive care. It’s been diluted so much by the air. They just had everybody leave as a precaution. Everyone except me, of course. Every other soul.

  I realize why my theory makes everything seem crazier: evacuations are never this total. Even during Rita, when they thought we were going to get smacked by the mother of all storms, there were still those die hard stay at homes. Things must be really bleak. In my mind I’m already making plans to get the Hell out as quick as I can. I throw glances back to my boss’s pickup truck. My car’s probably leaking: I’d smelled gas on the way over. And there’s the Beast, my boss’s car, the key still in the ignition. How did that make sense? What? Did the National Guard come in and make him leave by gunpoint, drag him away even before he could turn off the engine? I shake the line of questioning out of my head before it goes somewhere I don’t like. I make up my mind even before I go upstairs to check for others: I’m taking the Beast when I get back down and I’m high tailing it out of here.

  “Hello!” I yell as I make my way around the receptionist’s to the stairs. The sound I’d heard had come from the balcony seating on the raised area of the lobby. It’s usually our favorite spot to eat sack lunches we bring from home, the sun coming in through large slanted windows on the roof that open out onto a peaceful corporate park.

  I slow down on the top steps, edging my eyes over them. I crouch, almost instinctively and huddle besides the railing. I don’t know why. I peek over the top step and rake my eyes over the scene before me: just the upper balcony seating area. Chairs, tables, and everywhere the somewhat disturbing signs of morning rituals interrupted, the coffee with little stick stirrers leaning inside, donuts on plates.

  I hear a ping and a sizzle and my eyes flash over to the counter from where the sound came. The coffee maker. I could smell it on walking in but my senses had been blunted by the exhaust from the Beast’s idling engine. Now the odor of burning coffee fills my nostrils. The last dregs of liquid in the morning coffee had evaporated with a sizzle long ago. The sounds had been the tortured groans of the metal and glass coffee pot warping on the heating element.

  Relieved, I straighten up. Something, possibly habit from having done it so many times before, compels me to walk across the seating area to the counter and flip the coffee maker off.

  Phone. I need a phone. Or I need to find my SIM chip.

  I walk back downstairs to my busted car. I root around inside. Just when I’m starting to lose hope, starting to feel the paranoid suspicion that it had flown out the open window, into some inaccessible crevice, or possibly even into another dimension, my hand chances upon something plasticky and slick and I retrieve my card from under my passenger’s seat. I put the sim chip back in my reassembled phone and turn it on, hoping and sigh with relief as the network connects again. I call Amy. Nothing. I leave a message. “Hey babe. I don’t know what’s going on. Houston looks like a warzone. Was there an emergency? Toxic? Did we evacuate? I don’t know. I woke up late today. I’m coming up there where you are I’m thinking. I hope at least you get my message. Call me when you can. I love you babe. Kisses.”

  I turn the phone off and stow it in my pocket, gingerly. Backups. I need backups. I go into scavenge and hoarding mode. I get like this each time a hurricane forms in the gulf. I have more MRE’s in an unused upstairs closet than ten of your run of the mill natural disasters can deplete. I make a note to go back for those. I know the office has a loaner phone pool, the same phone as mine. I head back upstairs wondering how I’m going to get into the badge locked pa
rt of the building. I’m surprised to find the green light on the badge reader is still on. Power. I swipe my card and hear that usual click, except now it resounds in a sinister way. Maybe it’s because the office inside is dark. I know what that means. The lights are set to motion detectors, a “green” energy saving measure the company instituted just recently. It means not even a mouse has farted in the office for at least thirty minutes.

  I walk towards the tech room passing cubicles on either side. The computers are still on, humming away, screen saver darkened screens. Warm cups of coffee on the table. Donuts on little wax paper plates. I double check the cubicles of the guys I usually go to lunch with. Terry’s keys are still on his table. So are Matt’s. I head towards the office where we were supposed to be meeting our client. Nothing. Ha! Right? My boss’s car is sticking out of the front of the building and I’m checking to see if our client meeting is going on?

  No. That’s not it. I have to find something out. I head into the conference room. The room is empty. The ledgers for the meeting aren’t even in their places as Carol puts them beforehand. The meeting was scheduled for 8:30 AM. It means the emergency must have happened some time well before then. I go back to my own desk where I’d left my computer on from the day before. I log in. I open my email. The last message to our group inbox was received at 7:35 AM.

  I go to the tech room. Great, the door is closed and nobody’s manning the station. The lights are on inside, though.

  What if all this blows over tomorrow? What if they all come back to a smashed tech room window because I shit my pants for no reason?