“CHRISTMAS” BELONGS TO THE OLD WORLD.
The caption remained constant while a series of images flashed by, each one representing the world of the past: a Walmart superstore, a man on a riding lawn mower, the White House, the Dallas Cowboys cheerleaders, a rapper whose name Laurie didn’t know, a pizza she couldn’t bear to look at, a handsome man and an elegant woman sharing a candlelit dinner, a European cathedral, a jet fighter, a crowded beach, a mother nursing an infant.
THE OLD WORLD IS GONE. IT DISAPPEARED THREE YEARS AGO.
In G.R. PowerPoints, the Rapture was illustrated by photos from which particular individuals had been clumsily deleted. Some of the Photoshopped people were famous; others were of more local interest. One picture in this series had been taken by Laurie, a candid snapshot of Jill and Jen Sussman on an apple-picking expedition when they were ten years old. Jill was grinning and holding up a shiny red apple. The Jen-shaped space beside her was empty, a pale gray blob ringed by brilliant autumnal colors.
WE BELONG TO THE NEW WORLD.
Familiar faces filled the screen, one after the other, the entire, unsmiling membership of the Mapleton Chapter. Meg appeared near the end, along with the other Trainees, and Laurie squeezed her leg in congratulations.
WE ARE LIVING REMINDERS.
Two male Watchers stood on a train platform, staring at a well-dressed businessman who was trying to pretend they weren’t there.
WE WON’T LET THEM FORGET.
A pair of female Watchers accompanied a young mother down the street as she pushed her baby in a stroller.
WE WILL WAIT AND WATCH AND PROVE OURSELVES WORTHY.
The same two pictures reappeared, with the Watchers obliterated, conspicuous by their absence.
THIS TIME WE WON’T BE FORGOTTEN.
A clock, the second hand ticking.
IT WON’T BE LONG NOW.
A worried-looking man gazed at them from the wall. He was middle-aged, a bit puffy, not particularly handsome.
THIS IS PHIL CROWTHER. PHIL IS A MARTYR.
Phil’s face was replaced by that of a younger man, bearded, with the burning eyes of a fanatic.
JASON FALZONE IS A MARTYR, TOO.
Laurie shook her head. Poor boy. He was hardly older than her own son.
WE ARE ALL PREPARED TO BE MARTYRS.
Laurie wondered how Meg was taking this, but couldn’t read her expression. They’d talked about Jason’s murder and understood the danger they were in every time they left the compound. Nonetheless, there was something about the word martyr that gave her chills.
WE SMOKE TO PROCLAIM OUR FAITH.
An image of a cigarette appeared on the wall, a white and tan cylinder floating over a stark black background.
LET US SMOKE.
A woman in the front row opened a fresh pack and passed it around the room. One by one, the women of Blue House lit up and exhaled, reminding themselves that time was running out, and that they weren’t afraid.
* * *
THE GIRLS slept late, leaving Kevin to fend for himself for a good part of the morning. He listened to the radio for a while, but the cheerful holiday music grated on him, a depressing reminder of busier and happier Christmases past. It was better to turn it off, to read his newspaper and drink his coffee in silence, to pretend that it was just an ordinary morning.
Evan Balzer, he thought, the name floating up, unbidden, from the swamp of his middle-aged memory. That’s how he did it.
Balzer was an old college friend, a quiet, watchful guy who’d lived on Kevin’s floor sophomore year. He mostly kept to himself, but spring semester he and Kevin had the same Econ lecture class; they got into the habit of studying together a couple of nights a week, and then heading out for a few beers and a plate of wings when they were finished.
Balzer was a fun guy to hang out with—he was smart, wryly funny, full of opinions—but hard to get to know on a personal level. He talked fluently about politics and movies and music, but clammed up like a P.O.W. if anyone asked about his family or his life before college. It took months before he trusted Kevin enough to share a little about his past.
Some people have interesting crappy childhoods, but Balzer’s was just plain crappy—a father who walked out when he was two, a mother who was a hopeless drunk but pretty enough that there was usually a man or two hanging around, though rarely for very long. Out of necessity, Balzer learned to take care of himself at an early age—if he didn’t cook or shop or do the laundry, then it probably wasn’t going to get done. Somehow he also managed to excel in school, getting good enough grades to earn a full scholarship at Rutgers, though he still had to bus tables at Bennigan’s to keep himself afloat.
Kevin marveled at his friend’s resilience, his ability to thrive in the face of adversity. It made him realize how lucky he’d been by comparison, growing up in a stable, reasonably happy family that had more than enough love and money to go around. He’d gone through the first two decades of his life taking it for granted that everything would always be okay, that he could only fall so far before someone would catch him and set him back on his feet. Balzer had never assumed that for a minute; he knew for a fact that it was possible to fall and just keep falling, that people like him couldn’t afford a moment’s weakness, a single big mistake.
Though they remained close until graduation, Kevin never succeeded in convincing Balzer to come home with him for Thanksgiving or Christmas. It was a shame, because Balzer had broken off contact with his mother—he claimed to not even know where she was living—and never had any plans of his own for the holidays, except to spend them alone in the tiny off-campus apartment he’d rented at the beginning of junior year, hoping to save a little money by cooking his own meals.
“Don’t worry about me,” he always told Kevin. “I’ll be fine.”
“What are you gonna do?”
“Nothing much. Just read, I guess. Watch TV. The usual.”
“The usual? But it’s Christmas.”
Balzer shrugged. “Not if I don’t want it to be.”
On some level, Kevin admired Balzer’s stubbornness, his refusal to accept what he saw as charity, even from a good friend. But it didn’t make him feel any better about his inability to help. He’d be home, sitting at the crowded table with his big extended family, everyone talking and laughing and chowing down, when, out of nowhere, he’d be struck by a sudden, bleak vision of Balzer alone in his cell-like apartment, eating ramen noodles with the shades pulled down.
Balzer headed off to law school right after they graduated, and he and Kevin eventually fell out of touch. Sitting in his kitchen on Christmas morning, Kevin thought it might be interesting to look him up on Facebook, find out what he’d been up to for the past twenty years. Maybe he’d be married by now, maybe a father, living the full, happy life he’d been denied in his youth, allowing himself to love and be loved in return. Maybe he’d appreciate the irony if Kevin confessed that he was now the one hiding from the holidays, employing the Balzer Method with pretty good results.
But then the girls came down and he forgot about his old friend, because all at once it really did feel like Christmas, and they had things to do—stockings to empty and presents to unwrap. Aimee thought it would be nice to have some music, so Kevin turned the radio back on. The carols seemed fine this time, corny and familiar and somehow reassuring, the way they were supposed to be.
There weren’t all that many presents under the tree—at least not like there used to be back when the kids were little and it took most of the morning to open them all—but the girls didn’t seem to mind. They took their time with each gift, studying the box and removing the paper with great deliberation, as if you got extra points for neatness. They tried on the clothing right there in the living room, modeling shirts and sweaters over their pajama tops—in Aimee’s case, a precariously thin sleeveless T-shirt—telling each other how great they looked, even making a big deal over stuff like warm socks and fuzzy slippers, having such a good time th
at Kevin wished he’d gotten a few more gifts for both of them, just to prolong the fun.
“Cool!” Aimee said, tugging on the woolen hat Kevin had found at Mike’s Sporting Goods, the kind with goofy-looking earflaps that snapped beneath the chin. She wore it low on her forehead, almost level with her eyebrows, but it looked good on her all the same, just like everything else. “I can use one of these.”
She got up from the couch, her arms unfolding as she approached, and gave him a thank-you hug. She did this after every gift, to the point where it had become a kind of joke, a rhythmic punctuation to the proceedings. It was a little easier for him now that her skimpy morning ensemble had been augmented by a new sweater, a scarf, the hat, and a pair of mittens.
“You guys are so sweet to me,” she said, and for a second, Kevin thought she might start to cry. “I can’t remember the last time I had such a nice Christmas.”
Kevin got a few things, too, though only after suffering through the usual round of complaints about how hard it was to buy presents for a man his age, as if adult males were completely self-sufficient beings, as if a penis and a five o’clock shadow were all they would ever need to get by. Jill gave him a biography about the early years of Teddy Roosevelt, and Aimee got him a pair of spring-loaded hand exercisers, because she knew he liked to work out. The girls also presented him with two identical packages, dense little objects wrapped in silver paper. Inside the one from Jill was a novelty mug that proclaimed him #1 DAD.
“Wow,” he said. “Thanks. I knew I was in the top ten, but I didn’t think I’d made it all the way to number one.”
Aimee’s mug was exactly the same, except that this one was labeled WORLD’S BEST MAYOR.
“We should celebrate Christmas more often,” he said. “It’s good for my self-esteem.”
The girls started cleaning up after that, gathering the used wrapping paper and discarded packaging, jamming the debris into a plastic garbage bag. Kevin pointed at the solitary gift under the tree, a little box tied with ribbon that looked like it might contain jewelry.
“What about that one?”
Jill looked up. There was a red adhesive bow plastered to her scalp, making her look like a large, troubled baby.
“It’s for Mom,” she said, watching him closely. “In case she stops by.”
Kevin nodded, as if this made perfect sense to him.
“That’s really thoughtful,” he told her.
* * *
THEY RANG Gary’s doorbell but no one answered. Meg shrugged and took a seat on the cold concrete stoop, content to wait in plain sight for her ex-fiancé to return from wherever he happened to be on Christmas morning. Laurie sat down beside her, doing her best to ignore the dull sense of dread that had plagued her since they’d set out from Ginkgo Street. She didn’t want to be here, and she didn’t want to go to the next stop on their itinerary, either.
Unfortunately, their instructions were clear. It was their job to visit their loved ones, to do what they could to disrupt the cozy rhythms and rituals of the holiday. Laurie could see the point of this in the grand scheme of things: If the G.R. had one essential mission, it was to resist the so-called Return to Normalcy, the day-to-day process of forgetting the Rapture, or, at the very least, of consigning it to the past, treating it as a part of the ongoing fabric of human history, rather than the cataclysm that had brought history to an end.
It wasn’t that the G.R. had anything special against Christmas—they disliked holidays across the board—nor were they enemies of Jesus Christ, as many people mistakenly assumed. The Jesus issue was a little confusing, Laurie had to admit that. She’d struggled with it herself before joining, puzzled by the way the G.R. seemed to embrace so many elements of Christian theology—the Rapture and Tribulation, of course, but also the inherent sinfulness of humanity, and the certainty of the Final Judgment—while completely ignoring the figure of Jesus himself. Generally speaking, they were much more focused on God the Father, the jealous Old Testament deity who demanded blind obedience and tested the loyalty of his followers in cruelly inventive ways.
It had taken Laurie a long time to figure this out, and she still wasn’t sure if she’d gotten it right. The G.R. wasn’t big on spelling out its creed; it had no priests or ministers, no scripture, and no formal system of instruction. It was a lifestyle, not a religion, an ongoing improvisation rooted in the conviction that the post-Rapture world demanded a new way of living, free from the old, discredited forms—no more marriage, no more families, no more consumerism, no more politics, no more conventional religion, no more mindless entertainment. Those days were done. All that remained for humanity was to hunker down and await the inevitable.
It was a sunny morning, much colder out than it looked, Magazine Street as still and silent as a photograph. Though he supposedly earned a good salary right out of business school, Gary was still living like a student, sharing the top floor of a shabby two-family house with two other guys, both of whom also had girlfriends. Weekends were crazy there, Meg had explained, so many people having sex in such a small space. And if you didn’t do it, if you weren’t in the mood or whatever, you almost felt like you were violating the terms of the lease.
They must have sat on the porch for a half hour before they saw another soul, a crabby old guy out walking his shivering chihuahua. The man glared at them and muttered something that Laurie couldn’t quite hear, though she was pretty sure it wasn’t Merry Christmas. Until she’d joined the G.R., she’d never really understood just how rude people could be, how free they felt to abuse and insult total strangers.
A few minutes after that a car turned onto Magazine from Grapevine, a sleek dark vehicle that looked like a shrunken SUV. Laurie could sense Meg’s excitement as it approached, and her disappointment as it rumbled past. She was all keyed up about seeing Gary, despite Laurie’s many warnings not to expect too much from the encounter. Meg was going to have to learn for herself what Laurie had figured out over the summer—that it was better to leave well enough alone, to avoid unnecessary encounters with the people you’d left behind, to not keep poking at that sore tooth with the tip of your tongue. Not because you didn’t love them anymore, but because you did, and because that love was useless now, just another dull ache in your phantom limb.
* * *
NORA HAD been training herself not to think too much about her kids. Not because she wanted to forget them—not at all—but because she wanted to remember them more accurately. For the same reason, she tried not to look too often at old photographs or videos. What happened in both cases was that you only remembered what you already knew, the same trusty handful of occasions and impressions. Erin was so stubborn. Jeremy had a clown at his party. She had such fine flyaway hair. He sure liked applesauce. After a while, these scraps hardened into a kind of official narrative that crowded out thousands of equally valid memories, shunting the losers to some cluttered basement storage area in her brain.
What she’d discovered recently was that these leftover memories were much more likely to surface if she wasn’t straining to retrieve them, if they were simply allowed to emerge of their own accord in the normal course of the day. Biking was an especially fruitful activity in this regard, the perfect retrieval engine, her conscious mind occupied by a multitude of simple tasks—scanning the road, checking the speedometer, monitoring her breathing and the direction of the wind—the unconscious part left free to wander. Sometimes it didn’t go far: There were rides when she just kept singing the same scrap of an old song over and over—Shareef don’t like it! Rockin’ the Casbah, Rock the Casbah!—or wondering why her legs felt so dead and heavy. But then there were those magical days when something just clicked, and all kinds of amazing stuff started popping into her head, little lost treasures from the past—Jeremy coming downstairs one morning in yellow pajamas that had fit the night before, but now seemed a full size too small; tiny Erin looking panicked, then delighted, then panicked again as she nibbled on her first sour cream and onion
potato chip. The way his eyebrows turned lighter in the summer. The way her thumb looked after she’d been sucking it all night, pink and wrinkled, decades older than the rest of her. It was all there, locked in a vault, an immense fortune from which Nora could make only small, all-too-infrequent withdrawals.
She was supposed to go to her sister’s to open presents and eat a late breakfast of omelettes and bacon, but she called Karen and told her to go ahead without her. She said she was a bit under the weather, but thought she’d be okay with a little extra sleep.
“I’ll just meet you at Mom’s this afternoon.”
“You sure?” She could hear the suspicion in Karen’s voice, her almost uncanny ability to sense concealment or evasion. She must be a formidable parent. “Is there anything I can do? You want me to come over?”
“I’ll be fine,” Nora assured her. “Just enjoy the day. I’ll see you later, okay?”
* * *
SOMETIMES, WHEN she waited too long in the cold, Laurie drifted into a kind of fugue state, losing track of where she was and what she was doing. It was a defense mechanism, a surprisingly effective way of blocking out physical discomfort and anxiety, though also a bit scary, since it seemed like the first step on the road to freezing to death.
She must have spaced out like that on Gary’s front stoop—they’d been sitting there for quite a while—because she didn’t register the fact that a car had pulled up in front of the house until the people inside it were climbing out, by which point Meg was already in motion, heading down the steps and striding across the dead brown lawn with an urgency that was almost alarming after such a protracted interlude of calm.
The driver circled around the hood of the car—it was a sporty little Lexus, freshly washed and gleaming in the wan winter sunlight—and took his place at the side of the woman who’d just vacated the passenger seat. He was tall and handsome in his camel-hair overcoat, and Laurie’s brain had thawed out just enough to recognize him as Gary, whose confident, smiling face she’d seen numerous times in Meg’s Memory Book. The woman seemed vaguely familiar as well. Both of them stared at Meg with expressions that combined varying degrees of pity and astonishment, but when Gary finally spoke, all Laurie heard in his voice was a note of weary annoyance.