End of the world house, p.24
End of the World House, page 24
Well.
Bertie closed her eyes. She counted to ten, letting the tears drop down her cheeks and off her chin, trying to keep her breath even. Once more she imagined herself on the back of a rocket, departing from Earth, whipping through a space so cold it burned and peeled her fingers away from the metal. She was so used to holding on that it hurt just to think about. But what if she didn’t? What if she just let go?
Before either of them could speak again, they heard footsteps coming down the hall. Rapid, pattering like rain.
“Bertie!” Dylan turned a corner and ran towards them, his face panicked, his cheeks red. “Oh my God,” he said. “I found you. Thank God.” He stopped and rested his hands on his knees, crouching and panting. Then he saw Kate, and he startled. “Oh, shit, she’s here.” As if he’d known her all his life.
“I remember you, now,” Kate said, getting pale. “I knew I’d seen your face before. You were in the courtyard, weren’t you?”
Bertie paused. Something was shimmering between Kate and Dylan, and she didn’t like it. Smoke in the distance. Barbecue. Dylan grabbed Bertie’s hand, and in her surprise, she let him. Feeling the warmth shared back and forth between them from the moment they touched, until she pulled her hand away. Dylan flexed his empty fingers and winced.
Then, suddenly, she knew.
Bertie turned to Kate. “You were the one. Who wanted us apart.” She spun back to Dylan. “It was her. You were doing your good deed for her. Not Javier at all.” Why can’t you just let me be? Kate had asked, as they stood at the threshold of the museum. Not so different from what she’d said in defense of her move to Los Angeles. It’s not about you, okay? Sometimes I just want to make my own decisions.
From the start, Dylan had refused to look for her. Dylan, who could skip the tracks of time, had said he couldn’t, or wouldn’t, find Kate.
“I was just annoyed with you,” Kate said softly, now. “That morning, outside the museum, I just wanted to get you off my back. It’s just something people say.” She licked her dry lips, and Bertie could hear the echo of it. Let me be. “I didn’t think anything would actually come of it.”
“Why were you happy to see me then?” Bertie asked. “Here, I mean. What did you think was going to happen?”
Kate sighed. “I thought—” She stopped, and tugged on her lip, and Bertie understood. She had already chosen to stay, long before Bertie showed up. Before Bertie gave up her life for her. “I thought you came to say goodbye.”
Bertie’s head swam. She looked at Dylan. “And did you know?” she asked. “That she was here the whole time?”
He looked ashen. “Not exactly, no. I thought I was just giving her a break from you, while we hung out. Remember,” he tilted his head towards Bertie, “I didn’t know you’d ever figure out what was happening. I had no reason to want her gone forever. But then, when you did figure it out, I just… didn’t press the issue. I didn’t understand why she was gone. Letting her stay gone seemed like the easiest way to keep us together.”
“So if we’d just looked for her when I wanted to, I could’ve maybe… convinced her… I don’t know. I would have had more time.”
“Bunny,” Kate said. “No.”
“If you’d listened to me,” Bertie went on, to Dylan.
He closed his eyes.
“You would have been so mad if I’d told you,” he said. “I wanted to, I really did. But I never seemed to find the moment.”
“Why not at least try, though?” Bertie asked.
And he just shook his head again.
“I wanted to make you happy.”
Which was the stupidest, truest thing.
The earth had begun to vibrate, Bertie thought, but then she realized it was just her body, angry and sweaty, on the verge of passing out. She strained to hear any sound from outside the museum—a car, a bird, the wind—but there was only the hum of the radiator and the slam of her pulse in her eardrums. Why had she ever even wanted to come here? To see art. To see someone else’s inspiration, but in its worst, its least natural form. The point being not that it was beautiful, but that it was chosen.
She said, “I just—” and reached out a hand. The nearest painting was a giant illuminated image of rebel angels falling to earth, which seemed appropriate. “You’re both just—” She shook her head, then pressed her palm into the center of the painting. “You’re both terrible.”
Again there came the same soft ding, and this time when the doors of the elevator opened, Bertie threw herself into the arms of two women who stood there waiting. Both of them with a familiar face, but neither of them the woman she knew. They caught her, and the doors slid shut. Behind them, Kate and Dylan could only watch her go.
— 21 —
When she woke up, it was raining. Sheets of water fell against the window, uninterrupted by the gargoyled stone overhang, and blown irregularly by heavy gusts of wind. Bertie lay on her back. She didn’t often sleep that way—she was a side sleeper, and being on her back made her feel like a corpse. Now, though, she sank into the expensive mattress, weighed down by the comforter and radiant with the heat of her own body.
Out in the hall, she heard a door open and close, a muffled conversation taking place. She thought, I don’t have to get up. I don’t have to do anything. On the bedside table by her head, her phone buzzed, and she picked it up to see a push alert from the airline: her plane was due for an on-time departure at ten p.m., and she was invited to check in. It was only nine in the morning, and the whole day stretched out in front of her, so long as the hotel would store her baggage after she checked out.
Bertie picked up the landline beside her and called down to room service, ordering a pot of coffee, brewed fresh, and an omelet with green onion and chèvre, plus a side of fries. There was no fruit on the menu, since fresh fruit was still hard to come by: all of it either shriveled by drought, or poisoned by the lingering radiation from a dirty bomb. But her hunger was greasier than that, anyway. Eggs and bread, potatoes and oil. Bertie rolled onto her side and dozed until she heard a knock on the door, and when she hopped up to unlock it, an efficient young woman rolled the tray into her room and stayed just long enough to receive her signature on the bill. The rain got heavier as Bertie plucked the silver dome off the top of her breakfast, and she went to the window to watch a river of water flow down the street, everything pixelated by the storm.
What will you do today? she wondered. Will you tour the Catacombs, so you can stay dry? Rain and bones. Rivers and stones. She dipped a fry in ketchup. Or will you take a taxi to Montmartre and spend your last day in Paris drinking wine in a café, pretending to be artistic? Maybe you could even smoke. There was something alluring about that, contrasting the heavy rain with a mouth of fire. Bertie yawned. She was still sleepy.
The coffee was good. It wasn’t easy to find plain black coffee in Paris, she’d discovered: there was espresso, and sometimes a French press, but rarely just a regular pot of the sort she was accustomed to. The one she set each night so it would be ready when she woke up in the morning, now that beans were available again. There were benefits to going home. Here, the coffeepot had been covered in cling wrap before being set on the room service tray, and it cost seven euros, but it was worth it as a treat, so much better than the pod machine that was provided in the room, gratis.
When she thought of home, the bottom fell out of her stomach, all the way down to the end of time, but she turned away from it, back to the ceramic cup in her hand, the low morning light.
There was really only one thing she could do today. But she didn’t want to think about that yet, either. Instead, after eating, she took a long, luxurious shower, shaving her legs and deep conditioning her hair before blowing it dry in front of the mirror, so it was stick straight and staticky warm. She folded all her clothes into her suitcase except one pair of black jeans and a cozy sweater—not too heavy, but not scratchy, either. A black-and-white chevron knit, made fisherman style, which smelled ever so faintly of campfire. Bertie twisted her hair into one long strand and let it fall over her shoulder. Her packing done, she curled up on the bed in her socks, and looked out the window until she could no longer deny that her time in the room was over.
* * *
“Bon matin,” the concierge wished her, after he accepted her suitcase. She’d settled the bill. Her taxi would depart from outside the lobby at seven p.m., allowing her a generous amount of time to reach the airport and then her gate. She took the umbrella he offered on loan, and opened it above her in the street. Immediately the rain hit the nylon like a shower of coins. The air was cold, and Bertie could feel it condensing on her nose and cheeks as she started to walk. She knew the way. There was only one way.
She stopped at a familiar café for a hot chocolate with whipped cream. Across the street a group of three women streamed into another restaurant, shaking rain out of their hair beneath the awning before they were lost behind the fogged-up windows. Cars whisked by in the street, sending up sheets of water, but the pedestrians all seemed unbothered. It was the middle of the work week. They were all heading for the office, or dropping children off at school, tapping something into their phones, as they walked a path so familiar it was burned into their brains, and they could follow it without thought or worry.
The streets looked different in the day than they had the night before, when she left the museum, hurried along by a pair of silent women in her best friend’s body (which: Get your own face, Bertie had thought. How could they be what Kate chose? Wasn’t it just a form of escape? Of running away, with just yourself for company? Wasn’t all time just no time? They reminded her of the people she saw in San Francisco, rolling the tinted windows up in their cars as they drove past the tent cities that kept blooming up, bigger and bolder, everywhere), and then fell to her knees on the pavement, as the topiary maze behind the Louvre shifted its shadows towards her in the moonlight.
Bertie wiped the last bit of chocolate and cream from the bottom of her cup with a pointer finger, and put the finger in her mouth. The strange Kates had not given her any message, or even spoken, they had simply taken her—away from the Kate she assumed was her own, away from the art—shoes clicking briskly down the hallways once they left the elevator. As her Kate and Dylan got farther away, Bertie felt alone in a way she hadn’t for a long time. The museum door closed after her with a soft click, and when she picked herself up and looked, she could see nothing behind it but empty space. An occasional light from some alarm or system blinked from a box on the wall. She smelled the air. There was nothing special. Mown grass, mud, and a city sweating oil, but that was all.
Walking through the park, she’d passed a pair of dark figures pressed together in the trees, laughing sweetly, and had hurried away from them before they realized she was there.
Beside her in the café, a man jostled for space with his elbow, as if willing her out of existence. Bertie set aside her cup and threw down some change for the waitress, which she knew was not required in Paris but couldn’t convince herself was actually unnecessary. She’d spent too many years in coffee shops, waiting for the barista to turn around and make eye contact before putting a dollar bill in the tip jar. Anyway, she was going home tonight. The Americanness she’d been so keen to shed at the beginning of her trip could slide back over her and take its natural place, glowing over her skin. She should get warmed up for being crude again, taking up space. Soon she would be driving to work in the morning, nosing her car into a crowded lane as assholes behind her leaned on their horns and frantically flashed their brights to spook her.
She left the café and walked to the river, where she stopped to lean over the wall and look at the water. So many bridges. Along the road, a few of the braver tradesmen were opening up shop, unlocking their green wooden carts full of paperback books and Toulouse-Lautrec prints and stashing the plastic rain cloths out of sight, then setting out Eiffel Tower key chains along the edges, wherever they’d stand. Below the Pont des Arts, the Seine was also green, a tugboat chugging along and leaving a veil of wake. Today Bertie would be approaching the Louvre from the opposite side, walking through the back instead of going around to the Rue de Rivoli. It felt a little like sneaking, but she held her umbrella up protectively and continued anyway.
The Cour Napoléon was full of people, separated into several lines—one extending back to the street, and another switchbacking several times in front of the glass pyramid. After inspecting the various instructional signs, Bertie chose the longest line and stood in it. There were no familiar faces in the crowd. Every few minutes, someone would arrive and brandish a printed piece of paper at a tall male guard, entreating him to let them in the third and shortest line, but invariably he diverted them to the longer line, with Bertie. The grumbling was general. It was still raining, not quite so hard. People were swathed in cheap translucent ponchos, and a pair of children were wandering around selling umbrellas that said: Paris, je t’aime.
At ten o’clock, Bertie’s line moved forwards past the ticket counters, where she purchased a one-day pass and walked down the spiral staircase into the belly of the museum, the arterial center that let you choose your path, your destiny. She turned towards the Denon Wing. (No bank of elevators this time. That was interesting.) Did she like the Mona Lisa because it had been ingrained in her mind since birth, or because it was well made? She decided not to care. The room was already packed with tourists raising their phones above their heads to get an unimpeded shot, and in the crush, the tiny portrait looked less imposing in its beauty, more like a trinket or icon being worshipped into pieces. It looked vulnerable, which of course it was. She knew from art school that the painting had been stored for many years in a bathing salon at the Château de Fontainebleau, and it seemed entirely possible to Bertie that in that time the steam had peeled something away. She saw some resemblance to a soft-boiled egg. Everything bleeding together across circumstance and across time; a concept that was always the same, no matter how often it was reproduced.
She wandered for four hours. She looked at Raphael’s Saint George slaying a dragon (The monster is right behind you), and at three fat angels surrounded by flowers, labeled The Triumph of Love. (Bertie, do you hear me? I said, I love you.) She looked at a marble death mask, a king painted in the guise of a saint, a woman being drowned in a deluge while a man tried to pull himself out by her hair. What she saw most of all were the other people moving through the museum like a river, endlessly replenished. There were so many of them, and tomorrow there would be more. The art, the same. The people, different. Two men walked by her holding hands, one wearing a sweater the color of wine and the other a blue suit jacket over a gray T-shirt.
All the babies that day seemed to be wrapped in the same white cotton, which was printed all over with stars or hearts or whales or birds, and strapped tightly to their mothers’ chests.
When she was done, she left. It was so easy. Outside, the rain had stopped. She hung her umbrella from her elbow, and went to a café fifteen minutes or so away, where a waiter came outside and wiped a chair dry before seating her there and bringing a menu, never once asking her preference, inside or out. The air was fresh and wet. Bertie ordered a white wine and a pâté with salad, something she knew she could not reproduce back home without a lot of effort. She also ordered hot tea to brace her up after the hours of walking and admiring. Occasionally passersby looked at her out of the corners of their eyes, and she ignored their appraising glances. How had she ended up here, in Paris, all by herself? She knew the answer but couldn’t explain it. The path was still a mystery.
The wine went quickly to her head. Paris, she thought, was the place you went for romance. The place to be with the person you loved most in the world. Sitting in her still-moist chair, Bertie laughed quietly to herself, and appreciated that the other customers—all of them tourists, sitting outside at the rain-dappled tables—pretended not to notice. She had lost everything, but she found she didn’t mind. She minded her parents being gone. But the rest—not so much. She would always mind the loss of those two people who had seen her feet when they were baby feet, her fingers when they were small enough to bite off with ease. Her parents were the only ones who knew her well enough to imagine what her own baby might look like, and with them gone, Bertie had stopped trying to imagine it herself, but now she thought about it again, and the thought was: maybe. A little Bertie, iterating always. There were so many ways to live forever, and also none.
She walked by the Seine, and through the streets, up and down hills. She ate a pastry and wandered through a much-trampled garden; the paths flattened by feet, the beds by rain. There were enormous signs up, advertising the skeleton of a dinosaur. She walked for so long that it took her by surprise when her phone buzzed in her pocket, alerting her that it was time to go back to the hotel. She hadn’t noticed the sun getting low. She had to hurry, her lungs burning as she speed-walked through the Latin Quarter, and arrived with frazzled hair back in the lobby, with only minutes to spare.
“Merci,” the concierge said when she handed him the borrowed umbrella. He was a different concierge than had been on shift in the morning, and he took the umbrella delicately, with his fingertips, as if it might infect him. “Also, mademoiselle, a package arrived for you.”
“For me?”
“Oui.” He nodded his head in acknowledgment and swept behind a door, emerging with a thick manila envelope, which he handed to her before turning away.
To Bertie, the envelope said, and she shoved it carefully into her purse. The taxi was already there.
“Il vous attends,” the concierge suggested. He wheeled out her suitcase. He is waiting for you. Bertie shivered as she stepped into the cab, but the driver was anonymous, and promptly agreed to take her to the airport. As they drove, her fingers caressed the edge of the envelope. Finally, she opened it.
