I erupt from the dark, crushing tunnel into a flash of light and noise. A new kind of air surrounds me, dry and cold, as they wipe the last smears of home off my skin. I feel a sharp pain as they snip something, and suddenly I am less. I am no one but myself, tiny and feeble and utterly alone. I am lifted and swung through great heights across yawning distances, and given to Her. She wraps around me, so much bigger and softer than I ever imagined from inside, and I strain my eyes open. I see Her. She is immense, cosmic. She is the world. The world smiles down on me, and when She speaks it’s the voice of God, vast and resonant with meaning, but words unknowable, ringing gibberish in my blank white mind.
She says—
I am in a dark, crooked room, gathering medical supplies and loading them into boxes. A small crew of civilian recruits are with me on this salvage, all of them handpicked by Colonel Rosso except one. One of them picked herself. One of them saw a look in my eyes and worried. One of them wants to save me.
‘Did you hear that?’ Julie says, glancing around.
‘No,’ I reply instantly and keep loading.
‘I did,’ Nora says, brushing her frizzy curls out of her eyes. ‘Pear, maybe we should—’
‘We’re fine. We scoped it out, we’re secure. Just work.’
They watch me constantly, tensed like hospital orderlies, ready to intervene. It changes nothing. I won’t endanger them but I’ll still find a way. When I’m alone, when no one’s looking, I’ll do it. I’ll make it happen. They keep trying and trying but the beauty of their love only drives me deeper. Why can’t they understand it’s too late?
A noise. I hear it now. A rumble of footsteps up the staircase, a chorus of groans. Are Julie’s ears so much more sensitive or have I stopped listening? I pick up my shotgun and turn—
No, I blurt into the middle of the vision. Not this. This isn’t what I want to see.
To my surprise, everything halts. Perry looks up at me, the voice in the sky. ‘These are my memories, remember? You’re the guest here. If you don’t want to see it, you can spit it out.’
This is a shock. The memory has come unscripted. Am I having a conversation with the very mind I’m digesting? I don’t know how much of this is actually Perry and how much is just me, but I’m swept along.
We should be seeing your life! I shout down at him. Not this! Why would you want your last thought to be a replay of your dirty, meaningless death?
‘You think death isn’t meaningful?’ he retorts, chambering a round in his shotgun. Julie and the others wait in their positions like background props, fidgeting impatiently. ‘Wouldn’t you want to remember yours if you could? How else are you going to reverse-engineer yourself into something new?’
Something new?
‘Of course, you dumb corpse.’ He puts his eye to the sights and makes a slow scan of the room, holding for a moment on Berg. ‘There are a thousand kinds of life and death across the whole metaphysical spectrum, not to mention the metaphorical. You don’t want to stay dead for the rest of your life, do you?’
Well, no . . .
‘Then relax, and let me do what I need to do.’
I swallow the lump in my throat and say, Okay . . .
—pick up my shotgun and turn, just as the thundering footfalls reach our floor. The door blows open and they burst inside, roaring. We shoot them, we shoot them, we shoot them, but there are too many, and they’re fast. I crouch over Julie, shielding her as best I can.
No. Oh God. This is not what I wanted.
A tall skinny one is suddenly behind me, grabbing my legs. I fall and hit the table and my vision flashes red. Everything is wrong, but as the red fades to black I still allow an exultant shout, one last selfish orgasm before I go to sleep for ever:
Finally. Finally!
And then—
*
‘Perry.’ A jab in my ribs. ‘Perry!’
‘What?’
‘Don’t you go to sleep on me now.’
I open my eyes. An hour of sun glaring through my closed lids has faded all the colours of the world to bluish grey, like an old movie poster in a dying local video store. I turn my head to look at her. She smiles wickedly and jabs me again. ‘Never mind. Go ahead and sleep.’
Beyond her face I see the looming white posts of the Stadium roof arches, and beyond that, the deep cerulean sky. I slowly alternate my focus between her and the sky, letting her face blur into a peach-and-gold cloud, then refocusing it.
‘What?’ she says.
‘Tell me something hopeful.’
‘What kind of hopeful?’
I sit up, crossing my arms over my knees. I look out at the surrounding city, the crumbling buildings, the empty streets and the lonely sky, clean and blue and deathly quiet without its white-sketching airplanes.
‘Tell me this isn’t the end of the world.’
She lies there for a minute, looking up at the sky. Then she sits up and pulls one of her earbuds out of her tangled blonde hair. She gently plugs it into my ear.
