End of the world house, p.8
End of the World House, page 8
She would make coffee. She would put on clean underpants. It would all be okay, and they would have a lovely time, after eating tartes aux pommes. This seemed like a convincing order of events, but for some reason Bertie was still jumpy when she walked back out into the bedroom, wrapped up in a hotel towel. Digging around on the floor for her bra, she knocked a glass coaster off the bedside table, which thudded harmlessly to the floor and spooked her as badly as if it had shattered.
“Is it over?” Kate turned and moaned, half asleep. Then she opened her eyes and stared at Bertie, whites as big as dinner plates. “Oh, there you are. I thought I’d lost you.”
“I think you’re maybe still dreaming,” Bertie said.
Kate nodded and ran a hand over her face, smudging it left and right and then smacking her own cheek. “Can we have coffee?” she asked. “Is that still a thing?”
“It’s still a thing.”
“Thank God.”
“And amen, and everything.”
As Kate slowly poured herself out of bed, Bertie fussed with the coffee pod machine, almost forgetting to put water into the back and catching herself at the last moment before probably burning the plastic thingamajig to bits.
“Oh, Lord,” said Kate. She was inspecting herself in the mirror, pulling her hair from side to side and sucking in her cheeks. “Why do I feel like death?”
“I think we must’ve really tied one on last night.”
“Ugh, who says that? ‘Tied one on’? Are you my dad?”
“Well, you know what I mean.” Bertie thrust a cup of coffee into Kate’s hands. “Here. Drink this and be nice again.”
“I’m always nice. It’s my one flaw: I’m much too nice.”
With coffee in hand, the two of them sat in grim silence, sipping. Finally, Kate looked over at Bertie and asked, “Did you make me mad last night?”
“I honestly can’t remember,” said Bertie. “But I kind of wanted to ask you the same thing.”
“That’s weird. Because I kind of feel mad, but I’m not mad, you know? There’s nothing to be mad about.”
“Then I forgive you,” said Bertie. And Kate rolled her eyes and replied, “Well, thanks.” Bertie didn’t really feel mad anymore, anyway. She mostly felt scared, though she could find no more reason for her fear than for Kate’s anger.
At last, Kate finished her coffee and jumped in the shower; she always complained that Bertie used up the hot water, but she had the skill of taking very short showers anyway, claiming or perhaps bragging that she’d been educated in the ways of the perpetual California drought. Today, though, she lingered in the bathroom. Bertie had time to file her nails with the crappy hotel amenities nail file, and even to tighten a button on her white shirt with the crappy hotel sewing kit. She was busy admiring her handiwork when Kate came out, and the fluorescent light above the sink illuminated how terrible and obviously lavender the thread she’d chosen actually was.
“I thought you’d died in there,” Bertie said.
“Just about,” Kate agreed. “I almost fell back asleep.”
“Maybe—” Bertie hesitated. “What do you think about the idea of skipping the museum? See a movie? I mean, we’re both pretty wiped, and how do we even know that guy wasn’t just pulling our leg?”
“No, come on,” said Kate. Her hair was puffy and smooth from the blow dryer. “He promised. We promised. We’re supposed to have lunch with him at noon, and he said he would bring sandwiches.”
Bertie’s heart sank, though she tried to hide it. Kate really seemed to like Javier, although she couldn’t for the life of her figure out why. “French sandwiches or, like, peanut butter?”
“Baguettes. Ham and tomato and cheese. Maybe pesto. Something extremely unhealthy.”
And since this did in fact sound quite good, Bertie allowed herself to be dragged from the room by Kate’s insistent tide. Neither of them remembered to check the weather, so neither grabbed an umbrella; the doorman offered them one from the hotel’s stash as they walked out the door, but it was so heavy, the women decided it would be better to let their coats get damp than to lug something as large as a broadsword all around the museum.
* * *
It was a fresh day, light and alert despite the rain. On the street, women wore smart jackets with the belts tied around their waists instead of being buckled; they were still in high-heeled shoes, though some had admitted the mild defeat of high-heeled boots. Men wore suit jackets, and seemed to repel the weather with their state of mind. Kate and Bertie ran down the block to their favorite café, where there were no inside tables available, so they stood at the bar. Both ordered espresso and tartes aux pommes, though in retrospect Bertie wished she’d gotten something else. An almond croissant, an egg sandwich; it was a bad habit of hers to order with Kate out of nervousness about her own rotten French. Not for the first time, she regretted her failure to study up before they arrived and refresh what she remembered from high school: a few more useful phrases, some vocabulary, maybe just a whiff of grammar. ‘Où est la salle de bains’ only got a person so far. Kate insisted she was doing well, but Bertie wasn’t sure she believed her.
“I kind of like this city in the rain,” Kate said. She leaned against the bar and picked at her tarte, eating it slowly so they could maintain their claim on the space. Around them, the café grew more and more crowded, and as people streamed in, Kate and Bertie made a sport of watching their glasses fog up. Large round lenses made the wearers look like cartoon robots, with console elements instead of organs. Small ones made them look like ghosts.
They ate silently, and each ordered a second espresso, earning a withering look from a pair of businessmen waiting nearby to take their place. Across the street, a line of schoolchildren in yellow slickers entered a different café, and through the misty window you could see them throw off their coats and begin to run around, probably screaming. Kate made a quick nod towards the businessmen with her chin.
“What do you think they’d say,” she asked, “if they knew we were going to get a private viewing of their precious Louvre today? What did Javier call it?”
“Oh, right. The crown jewel of French culture?”
“I think it might have been the crown jewel of culture, period.”
“Well, either way, those guys wouldn’t like it. They would consider our vulgar American ways a blight on the landscape of their sophistication.”
“Which is possibly true.”
“Oh, it’s definitely true,” said Bertie. She had noticed that, even in the midst of a global crisis, Americans became indignant whenever international news turned away from them. Other countries could be blown to kingdom come and it was a distant tragedy, but in America, even a brief reluctance to thrive was something that could not be borne, a state of affairs so despicable that it required twenty-four-hour news coverage and analysis. Perhaps it wasn’t only for safety that so many nations had closed their borders and gone into a media blackout; maybe everyone just finally got sick of them. So much wound licking: it did get gross.
“Still,” she said, “better us than them.”
In the distance, smoke rose from a neighborhood on the outskirts of the city; one of the less fashionable arrondissements which had been taken over by Algerian, Syrian, and Italian immigrants after the beginning of the recent crises. Bertie hadn’t heard about any new bombing taking place—in fact, the news in the past few days had been so ordinary, so mundane, that she couldn’t quite remember any of it—but the smoke could’ve come from something previously undetonated, a non-nuclear mortar that dug its way into a crumbling building and waited. If so, they’d know soon enough: it would show up on a TV screen, or a passerby’s phone, some shrieking app.
For now, though, there was still the possibility that it was a campfire in someone’s backyard, or a grill on which some man or woman was cooking a bloody morning steak. In the café across the street, one child grabbed a croissant from another and stuffed the whole thing into her mouth. Maybe, at the end of the world, there was no value greater than hunger; no reason greater than your own desire. Did she believe that? No. Yes. Maybe.
Kate took her hand and squeezed it.
“Oh, hi,” Bertie said. And they got up to walk over to the museum.
— 7 —
The courtyard was almost empty; the museum was closed. A man and a woman fed bread to a flock of industrious pigeons, and occasionally the pigeons would feel some hazard in the air and fly off to roost on the heads of the horses cast in bronze at the top of the arch. Water still flowed through the fountain, though God knew why; there were water shortages in many European cities, and although this water was probably recirculated through the fountain again and again, some percentage of it must have evaporated with every spray, only to be replenished from Paris’s meager reservoirs. In the Bay Area, all the fountains had stood empty for more than a year, or else had been turned into desert planters, filled with a mixture of sand and loam.
The women ran into the Cour Napoléon in the nick of time, their hair pasted around their ears from the rain, but their hearts triumphant. The hangover they’d both woken up with was wearing off, too.
“Sweet shivering Jesus,” said Bertie. “I hope they actually let us in.”
“Don’t worry,” said Kate. “There’s a secret knock. It’s very James Bond.”
They hurried towards the large glass pyramid, past a glowering group of men, one of whom—his nose long, his hair lank—stepped into Bertie’s path so his shoulder rammed hers, then shouted after her, “Regardez òu vous allez, putain!”
“Et ta mère, asshole!” she screamed.
“Whoa,” said Kate. “Where’d you learn that?”
Bertie rubbed her shoulder. The air smelled like nickels. “Well. My boss wasn’t very excited I was going on this trip, but when I told him I’d already bought the tickets, he taught me how to say three things, and that was the third one.”
“Okay, I know the bathroom thing is the second one, but what was first?”
“Je ne comprends pas le français. Which I don’t, very much.”
“Useful.” Kate nodded in appreciation. “Covers pretty much all of the essentials in life.”
“Except food,” said Bertie. “And for that, there is pointing.”
Almost before they knocked on the door, a small woman in a guard outfit propped it open for them with her foot. “Avec Javier?” she asked, and Kate agreed. “Ah, uh, oui.” They slipped by. The guard glared past them to a father and daughter who were trying to follow Bertie and Kate into the bright, glassine entryway of the Louvre, and slammed the door in their faces. She locked it, pointedly, then scuttled off.
“God,” said Kate. “Do you feel like we just got locked in?”
“I mean, technically, we did,” Bertie replied.
“Helpful.”
“Yeah…” Bertie indicated the glass all around them. “But I bet there are plenty of heavy things in here we could throw through a window if we really needed to.”
They wandered down the steps, down the hall, idling between the wings; Bertie kept glancing over her shoulder and noticed Kate doing the same, even though there was nothing there. A distant crash made both women jump, but afterwards the room went quiet, and they laughed at themselves, nervously.
It was a beautiful museum. Everywhere they looked, the walls were plush with images, colors, so much so that the paintings seemed about to spring to life. And some of the statues, too, if you looked closely at them, appeared to breathe—just subtly—in and out, until you were forced to look away lest one of them break character and scratch its nose. Javier had promised that the magic of an empty Louvre was the way it allowed you to look at all the art unimpeded; but somehow it felt like the other way around.
“Just a reminder,” Bertie said, leaning her chin on Kate’s shoulder, “I wanted to go to a movie today.”
“In Soviet Russia,” Kate murmured, “movie watches you.”
Rolling her eyes, Bertie turned to walk farther into the Denon Wing, but she miscalculated her step and accidentally backed into a sign directing viewers to the Mona Lisa; as it brushed her arm, she shrieked.
“Jesus,” said Kate.
“Sorry.” Bertie put one hand over her heart, steadying the wobbly sign with the other. “Sorry. Let’s just—um, let’s see something pretty.”
“Or sharp.”
“Or heavy.”
“Preferably all of those things at once.”
They continued down the hall with a new sense of purpose, collecting a list of objects that could be used in case of emergency to inflict blunt-force trauma on the windows—small sculptures thrown, large sculptures pushed, and the cache of armor Bertie was fairly sure existed somewhere, pulled off its display to be worn and wielded while jumping free—and when the list was sufficiently long, they checked how soon it would be lunchtime. Not soon enough.
“Should we just hang out for a couple of hours next to Winged Victory?” asked Bertie. “We could lie down on the floor and worship her, while also napping. Or—whoa.” She ducked. “What the hell?” A bird had flown right past her head.
“Was that a pigeon?” asked Kate. They could hear the bird’s wings whisk the air up near the ceiling as it flitted in and out of sight, silken feathers beating madly against the plaster.
“No, it was like, a sparrow maybe, or—hey!” Another one veered between the women; this time its boomerang shape revealed it as a swallow. The birds darted up and down, skimming just over the floor and then swooping back towards the crown molding. They started chattering to each other, too, making a sound that was less a song and more an animated form of Morse code. Bertie thought of the parakeet she’d had as a child, a small blue-and-green creature who’d been caught by a cat when she took it outside to hop in the grass. Before that, it had talked to itself—or maybe to Bertie—for hours, twittering and clicking, occasionally interrupting its own running commentary with a scream. Several times it had vomited millet onto her hand, and her father told her this was a parakeet’s highest gesture of friendship: sharing.
“Oh my God, this is wild,” said Kate. “They must’ve come in with us.”
“Aren’t they endangered?” Bertie watched the birds disappear down the hallway, hair prickling up on the back of her neck. An ineloquent longing overtook her. “What are they doing here?”
“Maybe we found the last ones.”
“Or they found us.”
“Yeah, or maybe they live here,” Kate suggested.
“And what, pick up snacks in the café?”
“They transmute fruit paintings into live fruit.” Kate gestured to a picture beside them, in which a king’s table had been rendered in oils, replete with grapes and melon and ham. A monkey stood over the food with a proprietary grimace on his face, and—Bertie noticed, with a jolt—he was, in fact, waving off a bird as it dove towards a pile of strawberries with the grim purpose of a tiny bombardier.
It almost had the feeling of a message—something Bertie had been searching for, with no success, ever since her parents died. But before she could get a closer look, Bertie realized Kate was already halfway down the hall, and ran to catch up with her, footsteps clattering through the empty, soundless space.
* * *
For a while, the pair of them had shared a good group of friends in the Bay Area, who they used to see almost every weekend. South Bay friends crashing on couches up in the city, and city friends coming south to escape their hangovers and drive down to Santa Cruz to watch the roller coasters from the boardwalk; everyone occasionally sleeping with everyone else. They took coffee and salami sandwiches to the redwoods for hikes that either went too long, making everyone grumpy, or were abandoned preemptively, with the would-be hikers sitting twenty feet off trail in too-big boots, smoking pot and looking at the sky through the treetops. They wandered around downtown and ended up in dive-y bars, including a Mexican place with a mariachi band and extra-strong margaritas, which felt magical when they stumbled inside, but ended up closing the next weekend for massive health code violations.
There had been months, even years, that passed this way. Bertie would go to work all week, slowly coming to understand which of her outfits did not constitute business attire (a sheer T-shirt that showed her bra under harsh fluorescent lighting, for instance, or a skirt that rode up a little too high when she climbed the glass stairs to the micro kitchen) and adjusting for it with a cardigan she kept at her desk for emergencies. She finished projects, and let others fall by the wayside after they lost buy-in from key stakeholders, developing an uncanny sense for which ones would end up this way, then carefully calibrating the effort she put into them so she’d look proactive and diligent while in fact spending up to two hours each day reading webcomics on her computer. She grew expert at flicking between browser tabs when someone walked up behind her, even though everyone else was fucking around too, scouring the internet for the names of their respective friends and frenemies. It was considered polite to pretend.
On Fridays she took a weekend bag to the office and caught a ride to the Caltrain station in time to make the five-thirty northbound to the city. You could drink on the train, so Bertie often swiped a couple of beers from the office TGIF party to share with whomever she rode up with: alcohol on public transit felt illicit even though it wasn’t, people smiling together as they sipped, like so many kids up past their bedtime. It took time for Bertie to get tired of all this performative drinking, and even more time for people to stop smiling at one another. A suspicion that set in slowly, and then tightened its grip till they all had white knuckles.
There was a period in which all Bertie and Kate’s Jewish friends moved to Israel, which turned out to be a mistake but seemed pretty reasonable at the time. Their Black friends were the first to stop making north-south pilgrimages across the Bay, not wanting to draw attention to themselves with open containers; Bertie remembered getting indignant on their behalf, and then sort of forgetting about it. Because what could she do? The mood had changed by that point, anyway. It was before the major bombing campaigns, but in retrospect the signs of disaster were already there. Like when the fascistic Mississippi mayor tried to secede his town from the union, or when the last summer ice melted in the Arctic, and a beloved British nature documentarian committed suicide. Everyone started to hunker down. They were busy with work, and some people had begun having families, too, so they stayed home with their kids on the weekends, which made sense. People evaporated, though only by about fifty percent: they still existed as texts and likes and shares. Like ghosts, showing up at a séance by way of knocking over your teacup.
