End of the world house, p.21
End of the World House, page 21
Her fingers hovered over the phone as she tried to decide what to say back.
— 17 —
“I thought this project was dead,” Bertie moaned, as she and Danzy walked into a conference room that had been booked on their behalf sometime late the night before. The local business illustrations, yet again. “Or finished, anyway.”
Danzy sat down heavily and sighed. “It was both. But someone on high”—here, she pointed upward, like an angel indicating heaven in Renaissance portraiture—“decided to resurrect it.”
“Why does this always happen with the worst assignments? They come back and back and back.”
“Nothing outlasts… small business marketing.”
“I mean, if they wanted us to draw more options, they could’ve just said so. I don’t see why we have to talk about it for half an hour.”
Just then the videoconference clicked into focus, and Susan appeared, her bathrobe a maroon chenille, and her expression every bit as irritated as Bertie and Danzy’s.
“I know,” she said. “Don’t tell me: this meeting could’ve been an email.”
“Wait, so you didn’t call it, either?” Bertie asked.
“It just showed up on my calendar this morning. It was actually the exact same event as our kickoff meeting, if you looked close. I thought maybe it was a glitch.”
“But you came anyway?”
Susan rearranged her bathrobe dismissively. “I’m paid by the hour.”
“Can I ask you something?” Bertie said.
“I guess.”
“Is that, like, a fashion statement?”
“What?”
“The bathrobes.”
“The what?”
“You know, you’re always wearing these bathrobes. Why do you have so many?”
“I don’t.” Susan flushed. “I have this one. I only wear it when it’s cold. Jeez, I didn’t know you were paying such close attention.”
Danzy touched Bertie’s arm. “Bertie.”
“No, I’m sorry, I just—” She brushed off Danzy’s hand. “You have that one? But what about, like, all the other ones?”
“I don’t have other ones. Why would I spend my money on that?”
“You—” Bertie looked at Danzy, her forehead creased, but Danzy seemed confused. “Really? I wasn’t trying to be a jerk, I was just curious.”
“Whatever.” Susan raised her eyebrows, and the sound of her typing came through the speakers. Bertie imagined an email being sent to someone. A chat message full of OMG OMG. “Let’s just get through this.”
“I’m really not—” Bertie said, but Danzy shook her head.
“So,” Danzy said. “Here’s the list I’ve been working on. A baker—maybe cupcakes, or is that too played out? Either way. Um, a garden store employee. A mechanic. A barista. And what do you think about an organic farmer? Sheep’s cheese or something?”
“Sounds good to me,” said Susan briskly. “Do you want me to get started on copy for those now, or wait till you’ve done some illustrations that I can riff from?”
Bertie sat and watched them tossing ideas back and forth, discussing the endless marketing job as if she weren’t even there. Susan’s dog, Herb, came and sat down next to her, panting into the camera. He seemed perfectly healthy. No more limp, no uncanny wisdom in his eyes. He stared straight at Bertie, his face pulled into a doggie smile. Bertie felt dizzy. Her mouth tasted like metal.
“Okay?” Danzy nudged her in the ribs. “You’ll take the garden store and the coffee shop? Three of each.”
“Sure,” she said. Her voice echoed strangely in her ears.
How many times had Bertie drawn the dinosaur as a barista? Dozens. Hundreds. She would give him an apron with a chain store–adjacent logo, and show him rendering a stegosaurus in latte foam. She could have him pulling out a chair for a customer with his tiny arms, or sweating over the milk steamer, tongue stuck out between his sharp teeth. Nothing I do, she thought, matters in the slightest. Even if the versions she drew today were masterful, moving, the marketing equivalent of a Beethoven symphony, she would have to draw another one later, and then another and another. The world would keep spinning its exact same direction.
She got a text from Dylan.
SECRET TIME
I couldn’t wait anymore
I got us tickets to Paris
Bertie stared at her phone as Danzy and Susan hashed out the due dates.
Wow, what?? she sent back.
Yeah!! And a day at the Louvre, just like u wanted
She asked, Do you want me to pay you back
And he said, Of course, lol
He went on, Didn’t want u to think I was too scared to do it
She: I didn’t really think that
He: Good bc I’m not scared in the slightest, u should remember
Bertie threw down her phone. “What is happening today?” she muttered.
Danzy glanced at her, then smiled and waved goodbye to Susan, who disappeared with a flash into the blackness of the screen.
“You, dude,” Danzy said. “You’re happening.”
* * *
At lunch, Bertie eluded Danzy and sat by herself with a fresh notebook, drawing picture after picture of Kate. She was in a fever now, picking at a salad and soup and sketching the tired bags under Kate’s eyes as she was awakened each morning in the End of the World House by a murder of crows. The crows perched in the trees outside her bedroom window, cawing, and when she tried to sleep on the dusty couch in the living room, they flew around and found her there. Bertie took a spoonful of soup, and Kate moved from room to room, rattling the doors in their frames, struggling either to get out or to keep someone from getting in.
Bertie tried to be pleased about Dylan and the tickets to Paris. But it was such a strange thing for him to do. Usually he didn’t even make dinner reservations without double-confirming that she was free, and now he had booked an international flight, a museum, presumably a hotel. Bertie’s mom once told her that her dad had proposed to her on their first date, and she’d been so creeped out that she wouldn’t see him again for a year. So what changed? Bertie had asked, but her mom was always vague. He apologized, she said, and when Bertie replied that it didn’t seem sufficient, she’d said, Well, he seemed sincere.
Kate, in her drawings, tucked herself into the corner of the sofa with a blanket wrapped around her shoulders, staring out the window at three crows hopping around on the hood of her car. Where was cartoon Bertie? real Bertie wondered. She ought to have been there with a shotgun, bracing Kate up with a mug of whiskey. But she couldn’t put herself in the room. By now, even that other Bertie had begun to feel like an interloper: someone standing between her and Kate. They were together, being hounded. They were both confused about how they’d ended up in the places they were in.
She thought: What are the good things about Dylan? He always bought her tacos. He made decent breakfast, when they had the time. He thought Dunkin’ Donuts coffee was worth drinking, which she didn’t agree with but was nonetheless charmed by. Her phone buzzed, but it was just a news alert: there was a new crack in the Antarctic ice shelf, and someone at CNN had set up a countdown clock to help the general public appreciate how soon it was projected to break off the continent and raise sea levels by ten inches, at least. Maybe there would be a tidal wave: it was apparently possible. Bertie imagined a wall of water coming at downtown San Francisco, all the tourists huddled up in the SF logo sweatshirts they’d hastily purchased at nearby gift shops because they thought that coming to California meant that they could just pack shorts. She saw it all the time. Their eyes so miserable in the mist and gloom that the advancing of a giant wave would seem less frightening than inevitable, a hundred simultaneous memento mori social media posts going out about how the coldest winter they ever spent was this summer, right here, right now. Dylan would find that funny. He hated the way the tourists clogged up the roads around Fisherman’s Wharf.
Over margaritas, once, she and Kate had agreed that in the case of an apocalypse-level event, if there was enough advance warning, they’d both dress up really goth, with thick black eyeliner, and stand together, faces powdered pale and turned towards the storm. But wait. When could that have been? They never drank margaritas in high school: margarita mix, maybe, but not actual good ones, since Bertie’s household lacked a decent blender and Kate’s mom wasn’t quite cool enough with underage drinking to allow more than half a glass of white dinner wine.
Was it that time she visited, whenever that was? The day that Danzy met her? Bertie couldn’t remember, but the vision she had of herself, licking salt off the rim of the glass, seemed too serene to belong to a person reconnecting with someone after the passage of many years. Wasn’t there always a warming up period? Friendship was not like riding a bike. You could forget how to do it. You could spend too much time apart. That was why she didn’t want Kate to move to L.A.
What? Bertie thought. Kate was already in L.A. Definitely. Probably. She rubbed her face until it went red, then put her lunch tray on the conveyor belt that brought all the dishes back to the kitchen, to a staff of washers and dryers she’d never seen, and who might, for all she knew, be robots. The ultimate contract employees. She went and told Danzy she didn’t feel well and was going home early to take a nap. “Frankly, I think that’s a good idea,” Danzy said. “You’re being extremely weird today, and Hiro’s kind of on the warpath. If you’ve got some exotic flu, he won’t be happy if you share.”
“Jeez, I swear, I’ve seen Susan in like a million different bathrobes!”
“You really haven’t. But anyway, who cares?”
Bertie grabbed her coat and laptop, not even bothering to shut it down in her hurry to go. Each door she passed through, beeping her name badge against the electronic locks, was like another step outside her body. The great ka-thunk of each door closing behind her like the ka-thunk of that body falling to the floor.
Outside, things were better but no less strange. Instead of going home, she stopped to look up when the next shuttle to the city left, and from where; by speed-walking, she was able to catch it, and settle into a window seat a few rows back. “Headed up to Frisco, huh?” asked the shuttle driver. He was an older man, the kind who liked to flirt with young women because he knew they wouldn’t take him seriously, and also wouldn’t have the confidence to tell him to stop. She was probably just at the edge of his age range. Bertie smiled and shrugged. “Yeah,” he said, agreeing with himself. “We used to call it Frisco. Still can’t get used to anything else. It just sounds right.” The bus hissed as the suspension system kicked in, and pulled out onto the South Bay streets, and then the highway. Already, at two p.m., the traffic was at a standstill. “Used to work down by the Wharf,” the driver continued, looking at Bertie in the rearview mirror. She glanced around at the other people on the shuttle, but they were all wearing headphones. Even the policeman, stationed at the front of the bus—this was a new thing, wasn’t it? Why did it feel like the police were always getting closer?—was bobbing his head in time with some private rhythm. He had on sunglasses, too: no eyes.
“You got a fellow up there in the city?” the driver asked.
“I’m just going to get some work done while we drive,” said Bertie. She opened her laptop, but since her own headphones were still on her desk in the office, left in the rush, it was the most she could do to dissuade further conversation.
“You know, it’s funny,” the driver chuckled to himself. “I keep getting older, but you all stay the same age.” He flicked his eyes, Bertie was relieved to note, back to the road in front of him, the endless sea of taillights disappearing into the fog. “All you kids running around, ruling the world. You don’t ever seem to learn.”
“Learn what?” Bertie silently cursed herself for engaging, but she couldn’t help it. “Please enlighten me.”
“Oh, it’s all just work, work, work with you kids. Not the way we did it in my time. We took some hours out of the day to live a little.”
“People tell you a lot about their personal lives, do they?”
“Some do, some do.” The man winked in the mirror. “But let me tell you, I can see a lot just by paying attention. And I know, if I could live my life again, I wouldn’t do it the way you all do. Over and over, always the same. Not for all the money in the world.”
“No one would live their life over again if they had the choice,” Bertie said. Normally she would’ve just ignored him, but today his words drilled into her brain, with unearned significance. Maybe she was getting a migraine. “That sounds horrible.”
“I don’t know. Some would. You could make different decisions, if you wanted to.”
“Well, I don’t.” Was that true? She couldn’t really be sure, but she wasn’t about to voice doubts to this man.
Through the windshield of a nearby car, Bertie saw a woman carrying on a conversation with no one, twisting and twisting her radio dial, while in front of her, another woman in a black sedan was painting her nails on the steering wheel. A man one lane over was singing, passionately. Each car its own universe, a microcosmic example of how to live through this moment, on this stretch of road. As much infinity as anyone really needed.
The shuttle driver said something then, so softly Bertie didn’t catch it. Just the last few words, which sounded like: “… when she comes.”
“Wait, who?” she asked.
“She’s coming back around for sure, mm-hmm.”
“Sir?” said Bertie.
“What’s that?”
“You’re just—uh. Never mind.”
To her relief, he began whistling “She’ll Be Coming ’Round the Mountain,” occasionally muttering more of the lines, and at last turning his attention to the road. Bertie, shaken, leaned her cheek against the cold Plexiglas of the window. The weather was unusually bad, not just cloudy but full of thunderheads, white on top of gray, so it looked like bits had been erased from the sky. Bertie knew that, to paint it right, the white clouds wouldn’t just be white, but white with blue and purple and yellow. But they looked blank. As if pieces were falling out of the universe in some predictable pattern.
When the bus stopped a few blocks from Dylan’s apartment, Bertie hustled down with a terse “Thank you,” making sure not to look either the driver or the cop in the face. She checked her phone: it was only four, which meant Dylan wouldn’t reasonably be home for a few more hours, but she walked straight to his door anyhow, and buzzed. Why don’t I have a key yet? She wondered. I have a drawer, but no key. I’m going to have to pay to sit in some coffee shop.
Instead, to her surprise, he buzzed her up and opened the door, saying, “Bert!” as if he had expected her. “You finally got here.”
“Uh,” she replied. What did he mean by that? “The traffic was bad.”
“Ha. Yes. It’s always bad, isn’t it?”
“Pretty much.”
He inspected her closely, seeming nervous. “Well,” he said. “Good things come to those who wait, I guess.” He held up her sketchbook, taken out of her drawer. “We can discuss this, now that you’re here. That’ll be fun.”
As he dangled it in front of her, Bertie grabbed for the book, but Dylan evaded her, and flipped it open to the most recent pages. If he’d just asked, she would have gladly shown it to him, but now she did not want him looking inside. A shard of something cracked off within her, leaving an emptiness, like the space behind the clouds; a piece falling free.
“Is there something you want to tell me about this?” he asked her. “Like why you’re drawing the same person a million times? No, actually, don’t bother.” He leaned in. “I knew you would feel it, eventually.”
“I—” She fumbled with her words. “I’m doing a graphic novel. That’s one of the characters.”
“Oh, hmm, sure.”
“No, really. She’s based on my friend…” Within her, fingers grasped for a cliff’s edge. She was falling over. It was already too late. Too late, she thought, again. But for what?
Dylan sighed. “I know who she is.”
“You do?” Bertie saw a picnic table, a pile of meat. Images, here and gone. She worried she might be about to pass out.
“She’s Kate. The Kate you don’t want to see in Los Angeles. The Kate you haven’t spoken to in years.”
Haven’t I? “Why were you digging around in my drawer?”
“That’s a pretty good dodge, but it won’t work.”
“I’m not cheating on you, if that’s what you think.”
“But you sort of are? You weren’t sick last night.”
“That’s not what cheating is.”
“You’re lying, though. You’re lying to me. Your mind is full of secrets.” He tapped her on the forehead, and she flinched. Then he massaged the tense line of his jaw.
Bertie grabbed the notebook from him and sat down on the couch, clutching the book to her chest. All day things had been going wrong, she’d been going wrong, and now Dylan’s skin was covered in a film of sweat. He looked seasick, taking on a green tint. He tried to smile, but it came out strained. A serial killer face, she thought, like Ted Bundy might wear when he wanted to imitate human emotion. But of course that wasn’t fair. She was the one who had lied.
Why did she come here? She couldn’t remember.
“Are we going to Paris?” she asked.
“Of course we are,” Dylan confirmed. “The great getaway. We’re going to lock ourselves to bridges out of romance.”
“That’s—not what people do.”
“That’s not what a love lock is? Two people, tethered together forever, the old ball and chain?”
“What’s happening?” Bertie whispered. She opened the sketchbook and flipped through a few pages so quickly, it looked like Kate was shaking her head in warning. To the left, to the right, eyes wide. Like someone running away from a monster in a story. He’s right behind you. But he was, in fact, in front of her.
