I Saw It! Michelle gasped. I Saw The Ocean, Here In LA, With This Smoke Coming Off It—
Yeah, it’ll kill you, stay away from it, not that you can, really, I mean, not in California right, you live right on the ocean, we do too, we’ll probably all keel over before the month is up, but the idea is that we’re all doomed, really doomed, and you know human nature is so terrible, once things get worse they’re going to really get worse, like science-fiction worse, people eating each other and I don’t know, looting, yeah, but looting who cares about looting it’s going to be total anarchy, just very abusive, a very abusive environment on earth once everything gets so bad, no gas no water no food, just total collapse. Kym laughed. We finally have something that all the world’s governments can agree on. Everyone wants to die. This whole world has a death wish, it’s always had a death wish, it makes sense, it does, it’s just sad. It was a nice place. When I was young we still had animals, we had, you know, land, with trees and grass, that wasn’t so long ago. It’s stunning how quickly things went bad. We had zoos. You and Kyle never even got to go to a zoo.
No? Michelle asked. When I Was Very Little? She had a memory of animals in a pen, small beige furred things, but she couldn’t be sure if it was a memory or a wish or a dream.
There were still some around but they were really pathetic. I mean, zoos have always been pathetic I think, but they got so bad when the animals began getting sick. Animals know, Kym said. Animals know. Watch. I bet the cats will start to die off. The domestic animals, the pets. They know.
Her conversation with Kym was growing wider and more tiring. She arranged for Wendy to call her when she returned from work. Michelle killed the telephone and returned to the TV. The plane crashes were beginning to run together, swoop crash explode, swoop crash explode. Michelle wondered how it felt to steer the planes into the buildings. The planes entered as if into water, a liquid column, smooth. Then the blooming fire, a flaring burst against the sky. Again and again they ran it, until it looked beautiful. Michelle turned the sound off. It was a ballet. It was stop-motion photography of a milk drop or a bullet coring an apple.
Beatrice phoned next. I don’t think I’m going to stay open today, she said simply. It doesn’t feel safe. Or respectful, selling things. Michelle felt a bolt of love for Beatrice. For being such a high-strung hippie, for keeping a junkyard of books open on that slick strip of commerce. For crying all the time. It’s a day for us to be with other people, she said sniffily. Michelle hung up. She was thrilled to not have to go to work.
Kyle picked her up in his Honda Civic, which made creaking, tweeting bird noises as it drove. Squeak, Squeak, Michelle made puppet noises at Kyle, pushing her chirping hands at him as he aimed the car into the sole In-N-Out Burger that had remained open all day. A giant American flag had been draped across the dead trees that ringed the drive-through. What did America have to do with it? Michelle wondered. Were people going to die as Americans rather than as earthlings? Michelle braced herself for a surge of nationalism. Suicide and patriotism, people feeding themselves to the lions with the stars and stripes clenched in their teeth? Michelle realized the end of the world might actually be profoundly tedious. That story hadn’t occurred to her.
Michelle knew that the In-N-Out Burger workers made more than minimum wage and, thus, were making more per hour than she was making at the bookstore, with benefits. Perhaps it was time to investigate the fast-food industry. It was stable, she noted, she’d just gone through Cowshwitz and had seen the gears churning. Unless the cows started dying off before they could be slaughtered, Michelle figured the burger shacks would stay in business longest of all. And even if the cows did begin dying in the mysterious mass deaths that had claimed all the other species, Michelle bet the companies would still sell the meat. People needed food and everyone was going to die now anyway. Michelle anticipated a severe drop in safety standards.
I Wonder If I Should Get A Job At In-N-Out, Michelle wondered aloud.
You’ve got to write a screenplay, Kyle said robustly. Kyle was wicked optimistic. Not even the pending apocalypse could challenge the fantasy he’d concocted for his sister. Michelle would write a screenplay and he would inherit his crazed boss’s successful casting agency. No longer bullied by his narcissistic overlord, he would proudly reject projects that dealt in stereotypes. No more Latina maids and gay hairdressers. The fat best friend would get the man unless the man in fact wanted another man. Kyle dreamed of these future days while being abused by his boss, vacuuming up the chipped glass of another ashtray shattered against the wall in a fit of rage. Kyle’s boss didn’t even smoke. She kept ashtrays around to express her anger.
The previous day, before everything changed, Kyle had been auditioning a roomful of young African American actresses vying for the role of a crack whore in a fake independent — meaning, a film with the aesthetic of an independent but with the content and budget of the studio producing it. Kyle’s stomach twisted tighter each time a woman entered his office wearing ridiculous, humiliating clothing — mismatched platform shoes, shirts stained with food, the poky outlines of their braless nipples. They had given it their all, every one of them, and this depressed Kyle even more because the part was awful, they were all too good for the shitty little film, but that was life, that was the life they had all signed up for, there in Los Angeles. Kyle had signed up to cast shitty, offensive films and these actresses had signed up to embody them and they were all in it together. Kyle adopted the persona of a weary faggot who knew their plight well, yet also knew better than to presume he could know what it was to walk in their shoes, the mismatched Lucite stilettos of a brilliant black actress fated to spend the end-times portraying stumbling crack whores in crappy movies.
Michelle didn’t know how she and her brother would make this leap from the assistant and the barely employable to Hollywood sibling power duo before the world ended, but Michelle loved what her brother saw in her. Had they been born into a life of privilege, if Michelle had been able to identify and then believe in all the options that were out there, then yes, maybe she would be able to clamber out of the ghetto that her brokenness and queerness and political affiliations had kept her in. But deep in her heart Michelle did not believe that the world was so open to her, and so she sniffed out jobs that paid single digits an hour and every job she scored felt like a huge scam, like she had tricked the employers into thinking she was someone else — a college graduate perhaps, a clean person, a person with a rich wardrobe who did not kill cockroaches with her bare hands.