Instinctively they looked up.
At the red sky, like molten slag. At the fiery wisps that fell like hot rain drops through the atmosphere. At the gigantic ball of flame that kept coming closer and closer that blotted out the universe.
They lowered their watering eyes. It hurt to look. They started walking along the street. It was very warm.
“December,” Richard said. “It’s like the tropics.”
As they walked along in silence, he thought of the tropics, of the poles, of all the world’s countries he would never see. Of all the things he would never do.
Like hold Mary in his arms and tell her, as the world was ending, that he loved her very much and was not afraid.
“Never,” he said, feeling himself go rigid with frustration.
“What?” Norman said.
“Nothing. Nothing.”
As they walked, Richard felt something heavy in his jacket pocket. It bumped against his side. He reached in and drew out the object.
“What’s that?” Norman asked.
“Charlie’s gun,” Richard said. “I took it last night so nobody else would get hurt.”
His laughter was harsh.
“So nobody else would get hurt,” he said bitterly. “Jesus, I ought to be on the stage.”
He was about to throw it away when he changed his mind. He slid it back into his pocket.
“I may need it,” he said.
Norman wasn’t listening.
“Thank God nobody stole my car. Oh . . . !”
Somebody had thrown a rock through the windshield.
“What’s the difference?” Richard said.
“I . . . none, I suppose.”
They got into the front seat and brushed the glass off the cushion. It was stuffy in the car. Richard pulled off his jacket and threw it out. He put the gun in his side pants pocket.
As Norman drove downtown, they passed people in the street.
Some were running around wildly, as if they were searching for something. Some were fighting with each other. Strewn all over the sidewalks were bodies of people who had leaped from windows and been struck down by speeding cars. Buildings were on fire, windows shattered from the explosions of unlit gas jets.
There were people looting stores.
“What’s the matter with them?” Norman asked, miserably. “Is that how they want to spend their last day?”
“Maybe that’s how they spent their whole life,” Richard answered.
He leaned against the door and gazed at the people they passed. Some of them waved at him. Some cursed and spat. A few threw things at the speeding car.
“People die the way they lived,” he said. “Some good, some bad.”
“Look out!”
Norman cried out as a car came careening down the street on the wrong side. Men and women hung out of the window shouting and singing and waving bottles.
Norman twisted the wheel violently and they missed the car by inches.
“Are they crazy!” he said.
Richard looked out through the back window. He saw the car skid, saw it get out of control and go crashing into a store front and turn over on its side, the wheels spinning crazily.
He turned back front without speaking. Norman kept looking ahead grimly, his hands on the wheel, white and tense.
Another intersection.
A car came speeding across their path. Norman jammed on the brakes with a gasp. They crashed against the dashboard, getting their breath knocked out.
Then, before Norman could get the car started again, a gang of teenage boys with knives and clubs came dashing into the intersection. They’d been chasing the other car. Now they changed direction and flung themselves at the car that held Norman and Richard.
Norman threw the car into first and gunned across the street.
A boy jumped on the back of the car. Another tried for the running board, missed and went spinning over the street. Another jumped on the running board and grabbed the door handle. He slashed at Richard with a knife.
“Gonna kill ya bastids!” yelled the boy. “Sonsabitches!”
He slashed again and tore open the back of the seat as Richard jerked his shoulder to the side.
“Get out of here!” Norman screamed, trying to watch the boy and the street ahead at the same time.
The boy tried to open the door as the car wove wildly up Broadway. He slashed again but the car’s motion made him miss.
“I’ll get ya!” he screamed in a fury of brainless hate.
Richard tried to open the door and knock the boy off, but he couldn’t. The boy’s twisted white face thrust in through the window. He raised his knife.
Richard had the gun now. He shot the boy in the face.
The boy flung back from the car with a dying howl and landed like a sack of rocks. He bounced once, his left leg kicked and then he lay still.
Richard twisted around.
The boy on the back was still hanging on, his crazed face pressed against the back window. Richard saw his mouth moving as the boy cursed.
“Shake him off!” he said.
Norman headed for the sidewalk, then suddenly veered back into the street. The boy hung on. Norman did it again. The boy still clung to the back.
Then on the third time he lost his grip and went off. He tried to run along the street but his momentum was too great and he went leaping over the curb and crashing into a plate glass window, arms stuck up in front of him to ward off the blow.
They sat in the car, breathing heavily. They didn’t talk for a long while. Richard flung the gun out the window and watched it clatter on the concrete and bounce off a hydrant. Norman started to say something about it, then stopped.
The car turned onto Fifth Avenue and started downtown at sixty miles an hour. There weren’t many cars.
They passed churches. People were packed inside them. They overflowed out onto the steps.
“Poor fools,” Richard muttered, his hands still shaking.
Norman took a deep breath.
“I wish I was a poor fool,” he said. “A poor fool who could believe in something.”
“Maybe,” Richard said. Then he added, “I’d rather spend the last day believing what I think is true.”
“The last day,” Norman said, “I . . .”
He shook his head. “I can’t believe it,” he said. “I read the papers. I see that . . . thing up there. I know it’s going to happen. But, God! The end?”
He looked at Richard for a split second.
“Nothing afterward?” he said.
Richard said, “I don’t know.”
—
At 14th Street, Norman drove to the East Side, then sped across the Manhattan Bridge. He didn’t stop for anything, driving around bodies and wrecked cars. Once he drove over a body and Richard saw his face twitch as the wheel rolled over the dead man’s leg.
“They’re all lucky,” Richard said. “Luckier than we are.”
They stopped in front of Norman’s house in downtown Brooklyn. Some kids were playing ball in the street. They didn’t seem to realize what was happening. Their shouts sounded very loud in the silent street. Richard wondered if their parents knew where the children were. Or cared.
Norman was looking at him.
“Well . . . ?” he started to say.
Richard felt his stomach muscles tightening. He couldn’t answer.
“Would you . . . like to come in for a minute?” Norman asked.
Richard shook his head.
“No,” he said. “I better get home. I . . . should see her. My mother, I mean.”
“Oh.”
Norman nodded. Then he straightened up. He forced a momentary calm over himself.
“For what it’s worth, Dick,” he said, “I consider you my
best friend and . . .”
He faltered. He reached out and gripped Richard’s hand. Then he pushed out of the car, leaving the keys in the ignition.
“So long,” he said hurriedly.
Richard watched his friend run around the car and move for the apartment house. When he had almost reached the door, Richard called out.
“Norm!”
Norman stopped and turned. The two of them looked at each other. All the years they had known each other seemed to flicker between them.
Then Richard managed to smile. He touched his forehead in a last salute.
“So long, Norm,” he said.
Norman didn’t smile. He pushed through the door and was gone.
Richard looked at the door for a long time. He started the motor. Then he turned it off again thinking that Norman’s parents might not be home.
After a while he started it again and began the trip home.
As he drove, he kept thinking.
The closer he got to the end, the less he wanted to face it. He wanted to end it now. Before the hysterics started.
Sleeping pills, he decided. It was the best way. He had some at home. He hoped there were enough left. There might not be any left in the corner drug store. There’d been a rush for sleeping pills during those last few days. Entire families took them together.
He reached the house without event. Overhead the sky was an incandescent crimson. He felt the heat on his face like waves from a distant oven. He breathed in the heated air.
He unlocked the front door and walked in slowly.
I’ll probably find her in the front room, he thought. Surrounded by her books, praying, exhorting invisible powers to succor her as the world prepared to fry itself.
She wasn’t in the front room.
He searched the house. And, as he did so, his heart began to beat quickly and when he knew she really wasn’t there he felt a great hollow feeling in his stomach. He knew that his talk about not wanting to see her had been just talk. He loved her. And she was the only one left now.
He searched for a note in her room, in his, in the living room.
“Mom,” he said, “Mom, where are you?”
He found the note in the kitchen. He picked it up from the table.
Richard, Darling.
I’m at your sister’s house. Please come there. Don’t make me spend the last day without you. Don’t make me leave this world without seeing your dear face again. Please.
The last day.
There it was in black and white. And, of all people, it had been his mother to write down the words. She who had always been so skeptical of his taste for material science. Now admitting that science’s last prediction.
Because she couldn’t doubt anymore. Because the sky was filled with flaming evidence and no one could doubt anymore.
The whole world going. The staggering detail of evolutions and revolutions, of strifes and clashes, of endless continuities of centuries streaming back into the clouded past, of rocks and trees and animals and men. All to pass. In a flash, in a moment. The pride, the vanity of man’s world incinerated by a freak of astronomical disorder.
What point was there to all of it then? None, none at all. Because it was all ending.
He got some sleeping pills from the medicine cabinet and left. He drove to his sister’s house thinking about his mother as he passed through the streets littered with everything from empty bottles to dead people.
If only he didn’t dread the thought of arguing with his mother on this last day. Of disputing with her about her God and her conviction.
He made up his mind not to argue. He’d force himself to make their last day a peaceful one. He would accept her simple devotion and not hack at her faith anymore.
The front door was locked at Grace’s house. He rang the bell and, after a moment, heard hurried steps inside.
He heard Ray shout inside, “Don’t open it Mom! It may be that gang again!”
“It’s Richard, I know it is!” his mother called back.
Then the door was open and she was embracing him and crying happily.
He didn’t speak. Finally he said softly, “Hello Mom.”
—
His niece Doris played all afternoon in the front room while Grace and Ray sat motionless in the living room looking at her.
If I were with Mary, Richard kept thinking. If only we were together today. Then he thought they might have had children. And he would have to sit like Grace and know that the few years his child had lived would be its only years.
The sky grew brighter as evening approached. It flowed with violent crimson currents. Doris stood quietly at the window and looked at it. She hadn’t laughed all day or cried. And Richard thought to himself—she knows.
And thought too that at any moment his mother would ask them all to pray together. To sit and read the Bible and hope for divine charity.
But she didn’t say anything. She smiled. She made supper. Richard stood with her in the kitchen as she made supper.
“I may not wait,” he told her. “I . . . may take sleeping pills.”
“Are you afraid, son?” she asked.
“Everybody is afraid,” he said.
She shook her head. “Not everybody,” she said.
Now, he thought, it’s coming. That smug look, the opening line.
She gave him a dish with the vegetable and they all sat down to eat.
During supper none of them spoke except to ask for food. Doris never spoke once. Richard sat looking at her from across the table.
He thought about the night before. The crazy drinking, the fighting, the carnal abuses. He thought of Charlie dead in the bathtub. Of the apartment in Manhattan. Of Spencer driving himself into a frenzy of lust at the climax of his life. Of the boy lying dead in the New York gutter with a bullet in his brain.
They all seemed very far away. He could almost believe it had all never happened. Could almost believe that this was just another evening meal with his family.
Except for the cherry glow that filled the sky and flooded in through the windows like an aura from some fantastic fireplace.
Near the end of the meal Grace went and got a box. She sat down at the table with it and opened it. She took out white pills. Doris looked at her, her large eyes searching.
“This is dessert,” Grace told her. “We’re all going to have white candy for dessert.”
“Is it peppermint?” Doris asked.
“Yes,” Grace said. “It’s peppermint.”
Richard felt his scalp crawling as Grace put pills in front of Doris. In front of Ray.
“We haven’t enough for all of us,” she said to Richard.
“I have my own,” he said.
“Have you enough for Mom?” she asked.
“I won’t need any,” her mother said.
In his tenseness, Richard almost shouted at her. Shouted—Oh stop being so damned noble! But he held himself. He stared in fascinated horror at Doris holding the pills in her small hand.
“This isn’t peppermint,” she said. “Momma this isn’t . . .”
“Yes it is.” Grace took a deep breath. “Eat it, darling.”
Doris put one in her mouth. She made a face. Then she spit it into her palm.
“It isn’t peppermint,” she said, upset.
Grace threw up her hand and buried her teeth in the white knuckles. Her eyes moved frantically to Ray.
“Eat it, Doris,” Ray said. “Eat it, it’s good.”
Doris started to cry. “No, I don’t like it.”
“Eat it!”
Ray turned away suddenly, his body shaking. Richard tried to think of some way to make her eat the pills but he couldn’t.
Then his mother spoke.
“We’ll play a game, Doris,” she said. ?
??We’ll see if you can swallow all the candy before I count ten. If you do I’ll give you a dollar.”
Doris sniffed. “A dollar?” she said.
Richard’s mother nodded.
“One,” she said.
Doris didn’t move.
“Two,” said Richard’s mother. “A dollar?”
“Yes, darling. Three, four, hurry up.”
Doris reached for the pills.
“Five . . . six . . . seven . . .”
Grace had her eyes shut tightly. Her cheeks were white.
“Nine . . . ten . . .”
Richard’s mother smiled but her lips trembled and there was a glistening in her eyes.
“There,” she said cheerfully. “You’ve won the game.”
Grace suddenly put pills into her mouth and swallowed them in fast succession. She looked at Ray. He reached out one trembling hand and swallowed his pills. Richard put his hand in his pocket for his pills but took it out again. He didn’t want his mother to watch him take them.
Doris got sleepy almost immediately. She yawned and couldn’t keep her eyes open. Ray picked her up and she rested against his shoulder, her small arms around his neck. Grace got up and the three of them went back into the bedroom.
Richard sat there while his mother went back and said goodbye to them. He sat staring at the white table cloth and the remains of food.
When his mother came back she smiled at him.
“Help me with the dishes,” she said.
“The . . . ?” he started. Then he stopped. What difference did it make what they did?
He stood with her in the redlit kitchen, feeling a sense of sharp unreality as he dried the dishes they would never use again and put them in the closet that would be no more in a matter of hours.
He kept thinking about Ray and Grace in the bedroom. Finally he left the kitchen without a word and went back. He opened the door and looked in. He looked at the three of them for a long time. Then he shut the door again and walked slowly back to the kitchen. He stared at his mother.
“They’re . . .”
“All right,” his mother said.
“Why didn’t you say anything to them?” he asked her. “How come you let them do it without saying anything?”
“Richard,” she said, “everyone has to make his own way on this day. No one can tell others what to do. Doris was their child.”