Songs for the End of the World Read online

  “We were really looking forward to seeing you. Noah especially. You’re always the main attraction around here.” There was a small, plaintive note in her voice that he always found moving. Growing up, his kid sister had been a whirlwind of a girl who shouted down bullies, raced Lasers at sailing camp, and liked to face any fear by tackling it head-on. But ever since Sarah had shown up on his and Dory’s doorstep, wan and fragile and fresh off a plane from Bolivia, she hadn’t coped well with last-minute changes or any implication that Elliot would fail to keep his promises. Eight years after her return, she remained solitary and tentative, leading a life confined by routine and running even minor decisions past him, like which movie to watch or whether she should get a haircut. A watercolour version of who she used to be. Things had been better, though, since she had Noah.

  “Sorry,” Elliot said, “I’m sick.”

  “You’re never sick,” she said, worried now. “Do you need anything?”

  “No, it’s not that bad.” He couldn’t seem to form the words to tell her the truth. “Just a sore throat, but I figured better safe than sorry, these days.” His voice started to catch, but he turned it into a cough. “Have you heard about this virus?”

  “It’s practically all I can think about,” said Sarah. In the background, Elliot could hear Noah tunelessly singing a song about brushing his teeth. “It reminds me of the stuff we used to talk about at Living Tree. You know, plagues, wars. End times.” Living Tree was what she had left behind in Bolivia, a communal farm run by a quasi-religious group of the same name. Though Living Tree purported to believe in harmony and radical equality, the reality turned out to be closer to an ascetic sort of doomsday cult, run by leaders who didn’t seem to have a problem with personal enrichment. Sarah had mostly looked after the children until she became disillusioned enough to return home. “Actually, I started a new rug last night.”

  Making rag rugs was her particular outlet for anxiety. They used to make them on the farm—apparently to sell to tourists, though Elliot suspected it was really to keep the unhappy young people distracted with some kind of busywork.

  “Perfect. I have a tiny strip of bare floor between the red one and the blue one.”

  Sarah gave a little chuckle: a mere acknowledgement that laughter was called for. “You’re sure you’re okay?”

  “I hope so,” he said. To let Sarah know about his exposure would be to commit it to the record, to confess his own mortality in a way he feared would destabilize them both. “Can I talk to Noah?”

  “Yeah, here he is. Can you keep him going for a while? I need to drain this pasta.”

  Elliot said hi to Noah and listened to his nephew’s meandering monologue about the things that mattered to him—the funny joke that a boy named Deshawn had told at daycare and an account of the goings-on of some cartoon fox on television. And even as he struggled to follow along, it occurred to Elliot that if he had to leave the world, there was nothing he would miss more than this: Noah’s lisped conversation, with Sarah’s loving annotations piping up in the background.

  Quarantine Day Three

  As night fell on the third day of his enforced staycation, Elliot began to feel less like the lucky one who might be spared and more like the one left behind to suffer alone—until he almost believed that succumbing to the virus might be a relief. He scrolled through his phone looking for photos of his friends and wondered why he so rarely used his camera. And when he couldn’t find their faces, he let himself cry for them in earnest: great, wracking sobs that left him gulping for air.

  Jejo was the joker, the social glue in their little clique. Cameron was a father to three little girls and a top-flight investment consultant who made money management seem wholesome instead of sordid. Lucas had started at the club at the same time as Elliot and had made a joking mission of finding him a girlfriend. And then the master, who had brought them all together. His wife was dead, too. They had two grown children who lived in California. Elliot wondered how long it would be before the children announced the school was closing for good.

  He stared at the walls until he had memorized each crack and flaw, every hole imperfectly plugged and plastered over. All the renters who had come before had left their marks. Elliot had never taken pains with his apartment, which meant that the only thing on the walls was a free calendar from the Chinese restaurant around the corner. All at once he understood the value of decorating. He dug out a folder of Noah’s daycare drawings and taped up a few of them with little rolled buttons of duct tape pressed underneath the corners. A blue scribble. A brown scribble. A scribble with all the colours. He felt himself breathing easier.

  Quarantine Day Five

  It turned out there was a limit to the ceaseless enjoyment television could provide, and that limit was eight to ten hours daily for five days straight. Elliot could no longer tell if the glazed and empty feeling he had came from grief or from sitcoms, and he found himself yearning for a book. He only had a few—fewer than he probably would have had if his mother hadn’t commented on it the first time his parents stopped by. On that occasion, he’d told her that Dory got all the books in the divorce and that he didn’t need to read anymore now that he was an armed pawn of the military-industrial complex. What Elliot didn’t mention was that he had a library card and he knew how to use it. But now he saw the value of having books on hand and ordered some novels online—though no matter which category he browsed, the site kept recommending a book called How to Avoid the Plague, a perversely ironic suggestion that he ignored, especially once he realized the ad was sponsored by Dory’s publishing company.

  He found himself spending more time online than he usually did, following the headlines and the sports recaps. He was sitting at his computer that night when an email arrived in his inbox.

  Hi Elliot. Hope you’re doing okay. JKG

  The display name associated with the email address was the same as the signoff. JKG. Elliot’s first thought was that it came from his friend Jejo. Jejo Galang. Maybe he had a middle initial that Elliot didn’t know about. But Jejo was dead. All of his friends were.

  He also knew that JK was a shorthand for just kidding, though it was hard to see how that might apply. It could be a message from someone on the force, if his supervisor had let the news leak. Or it was possible that Johnny, an elderly neighbour on the first floor, had seen the quarantine notice. At any rate, Elliot was glad his predicament seemed to be eliciting sympathy rather than fear. He wasn’t sure he trusted himself to react the same way.

  Quarantine Day Six

  Then Elliot ordered a treadmill. He set it up in front of the window and jogged on it while watching the city, imagining the feel of the breeze on his skin. Ever since he could remember, he had wanted to run, to jump, to move, to not stay still. It had been aggravating for his parents—both academic, sedentary types—to have to deal with his restlessness when he was a child. Gretchen detested anything to do with sports, and though Frank was less opposed, he was bewildered by the passion roused by team loyalty.

  Out on the street, there was not yet any outward sign that things had changed. The sidewalks were swarming with teens and joggers and well-dressed women carrying small dogs or briefcases, clopping their way to lunch. Elliot turned up the speed on the treadmill and continued watching the street scene as though the sight alone was proof of the blessed persistence of the commonplace. New York was the first spot where he felt he could linger longer than the time it would take to settle in. The churning pace, the relentless to and fro through the city’s hubs, the very buildings rising to pen him in. It was a place that never stopped moving, which was why he knew he would stay.

  * * *

  —

  Quarantine Day Seven

  A week into his quarantine, Sarah called in the evening with an unusual urgency in her voice.

  “I think your ex is on the news,” she said.

  “Dory?” Elliot�
�s ex-wife was Sarah’s boss, but he’d made it known that she was never to be mentioned unless strictly necessary, which it almost never was.

  “No, not Dory. Keisha Delille,” said Sarah. “Remember her? She’s one of the experts telling us how we’re all going to die.”

  “You’re paraphrasing, right?”

  “Barely.” His sister sounded a bit breathless. “Worst of all, I believe her. She still sounds like a genius.” Keisha had been a great favourite of hers until the breakup, after which point Sarah had toed the party line.

  “What’s she really saying?” Elliot switched on his television and flipped through the channels until he saw Keisha’s face above a caption that read Keisha Delille, Associate Director of Infection Control, Methodist Morningside Hospital.

  “From what we understand so far, this virus may be twice as contagious as the average seasonal flu and significantly more deadly. Today, researchers confirmed it as a novel coronavirus.” Her voice was softer than he remembered.

  “Can you believe she ever went out with me?” he said. The first time he’d made Keisha smile was still one of his best memories from college. He hadn’t thought he had a shot with the statuesque black girl with the waist-length box braids, but for some reason she’d found him funny. Keisha had garnered attention at Lansdowne as the middle blocker on the volleyball team and for having the highest GPA in her pre-med program. She was the first person he’d met who’d actually grown up in New York City. Apparently, she had come back.

  “People never really leave us,” said Sarah. “Don’t you find?”

  He thought of his friends and his memories of them, thick as ghosts. “Are you talking about social media?” But he knew she wasn’t. Sarah had once run into a high school acquaintance on a Jerusalem side street, and for a while this experience had convinced her that everything was connected and that the world was a place that would always take care of her. Though presumably she had given up that idea around the time she realized Living Tree had co-opted her free will as well as four years of her life.

  “Well, sure,” said his sister. “But what I meant was that our lives have a way of getting bound up with those of the people we’ve known. Like heavenly bodies caught in one another’s orbit. Even once you go your separate ways, it’s hard to get fully disentangled.”

  “I believe in moving on,” said Elliot. “Going forward. Not looking back.” But that was what had led to his mistake with Dory. Marriage had been the obvious next step in their relationship, and taking it was nothing more than getting on with things. He now understood what a terrible attitude that was to adopt towards your own life.

  “Easier said than done.” Sarah’s voice dropped. “Remember Jericho? I found myself thinking about him again the other day. Wondering if he’s okay now.”

  Elliot blinked. She hadn’t mentioned that name since she was at college. It was after the business with Jericho that his sister had lost some of the single-minded certainty she’d been born with, first joining the Women’s Kindness Alliance, then Meditation for Marxists, then the Interfaith Collective, before finally moving to Bolivia with her new Living Tree friends, in pursuit of community, or maybe seeking answers to questions that Elliot could only guess at. “People leave,” he said. “We’re just bad at letting them go.”

  “Keisha Delille,” mused Sarah before hanging up. “I wonder if she still hates you.”

  * * *

  —

  The way things had gone with Keisha was not all that different from how things went with the women who followed, except for Dory. Elliot met women, dated them, and liked them well enough—sometimes he even liked them a lot—but before long he always concluded that there was someone else out there who would like them more, or do better by them somehow. And once he realized he wasn’t the right man for them, he never saw the point of carrying on. In his experience, breakups just got harder the longer you put them off.

  Sarah’s take was that he was just afraid of commitment. The night he’d finally signed the divorce papers from Dory, his sister had insisted on hiring a babysitter and taking Elliot out to get drunk. After the bar closed, they went back to his apartment to finish off whatever liquor he had, and while downing horrific shots of Cointreau and Amaretto from his now-ex-wife’s cocktail trolley, he listened to Sarah expound with hazardous new liberty on the real seeds of his divorce. Since Dory had left him for another woman—someone he had actually known since childhood; the daughter of one of their parents’ colleagues at the university—Elliot didn’t think fault-finding was strictly necessary, but when Sarah had a theory she was not to be derailed from sharing it.

  “See, Dory never really needed you,” she explained. “Not like the other women who’ve fallen in love with you. That’s why you felt okay promising to never let her down.”

  “No, I like people counting on me,” he slurred. “I’m a cop, remember? That’s what I do, I help people.” He overturned his glass on the table, and it made a closed, hollow sound.

  Sarah had smirked. “But never the same person twice.”

  It was possible she was right.

  Quarantine Day Ten

  As the days passed, what had started out as panic and dread and a singular sense of his own mortality had turned into embarrassment at having to acknowledge his probable survival. But even allowing his thoughts to tend that way seemed like tempting fate. So Elliot continued to avoid reaching out to the families of his friends, or anyone else he knew, instead living like a ghost who had not yet passed over to the other side. He almost smiled thinking of how shocked Bryce would be by all the crying he’d been doing.

  * * *

  —

  “Are you still coming for dinner tomorrow?” Sarah asked. Elliot could hear reggae music playing in the background, and the dull clack of dishes in the sink. “I’m making lentils and okra.”

  “I thought you loved me.”

  “Fine. I’ll make brisket. I asked Daddy for the recipe last week.”

  “Dad’s disappointment dinner?” Frank always served his one specialty whenever he and Gretchen tried to sway their children from decisions not to their liking. They’d dined on brisket when Elliot had signed up for the police academy, when Sarah had come home with packets of Living Tree literature, and again when she’d dropped out of graduate school to work on the farm. “It’s actually pretty tempting without the side dish of crushing remorse.”

  “We’ll skip that part. I’ll substitute some sisterly love.”

  “I wish I could,” he said, trying to keep his voice casual, “but I had to switch some shifts around.”

  “Darn it,” said his sister. There was the sucking sound of water draining. “Noah says we haven’t seen you in two weeks. But I told him it couldn’t be that long.”

  Sarah was so busy, or at any rate harried enough by her own life, that Elliot had hoped she wouldn’t notice just how often he’d been putting off his visits. The last thing he wanted was for her to look at a calendar. “Let me talk to him.”

  They put on the video chat, and Noah and Elliot chatted for ten minutes in the fond, distracted way common to small children and the people who love them. When they hung up, his apartment fairly echoed with emptiness.

  Talking to his nephew always made Elliot wonder if having a child with Dory would have changed anything—if it would have changed him into the kind of person she could have kept on loving, after all. Becoming an uncle had made him realize there were parts of himself that had been lying dormant since his own childhood: silliness being foremost, but also an optimism that was innocent rather than willful—felt rather than contended.

  And Noah, in the everyday modern miracle of how he arrived on the planet, sometimes led Elliot to think of his sperm donations in college, after his breakup with Keisha in sophomore year. It was the quickest money he’d ever made—enough for a nice used car. Elliot hadn’t thought much about it before Sa
rah revealed she’d gotten pregnant via donor sperm. He’d never told Dory about his donations, which had been for research purposes only. Yet sometimes the thought that he might have helped bring some strange and funny child into the world struck him as a good thing, even though his parents viewed his donations as a thoughtless mistake, one they were generous enough never to mention.

  * * *

  —

  Another email came that day.

  Hi again. Sorry for writing out of nowhere, but I wasn’t sure how else to reach you. I meant to say I’d love the chance to sit down and talk some time. JKG

  Elliot started typing Who is this? But he deleted it. If it was a hoax or a spammer, better not to respond. And if it was a ghost, well, surely it would write again. He’d watched enough horror movies to know: ghosts always came back.

  Quarantine Day Fourteen

  Elliot saw Keisha on the nightly news again. Though he had begun his quarantine with only the vaguest sense of an illness circulating the city, it was no longer possible to avoid knowing about the mystery virus that had already infected over two thousand New York City residents in the span of a month. It had a name now: ARAMIS. Acute Respiratory and Muscular Inflammatory Syndrome.

  Keisha was standing on the same hospital steps where she’d been interviewed before. She was holding something out for the cameras as the anchor set up the clip in voiceover: “The authorities are taking the unprecedented step of releasing a photo of someone who may be infectious.” There was a particular intonation Elliot had noticed the news anchors using when reporting on the virus. Concerned, but not quite crossing over into panic.

  “We’re having trouble locating a person of interest from the first infection site,” Keisha was saying. The photo was a dark, blown-up snapshot, flapping slightly in the wind. A trio of pretty girls in black dresses, with two of the faces blurred and a large yellow arrow superimposed above the group, pointing to an Asian girl with tousled hair and flashbulb eyes, red as a rabbit’s. It looked like it had been taken inside cipolla, the restaurant that was now well-known as ground zero for the spread of the disease in New York City. “Her name might be Nicky or Naomi, and she was working as a server on the evening of Friday, July 31. Unfortunately, the restaurant’s records were all destroyed in a recent fire.”