All the Ways the World Can End Page 11

  I’d started this project way before Dad’s diagnosis. When I was in sixth grade we did a unit on Chernobyl and Three Mile Island. I asked Dad if I could use a corner of his shed for a “science project.” I set it up as a little diorama and took a picture for the class, but nobody was as enthralled with the bunker as I was. As I kept adding to it, I just made sure everything could be folded up or stuffed into corners and under tarps. Dad didn’t seem to mind. And when I showed it to Julian, all he said was something pretentious about needing to get an interior designer in to add some color. Neither of them really understood how important this bunker had become to me. I came in here at least once a week to bring in a can of beans or a pack of batteries. Sometimes just to lie on the floor and feel the earth under me. It was no longer about where to go in case of nuclear annihilation or bioterrorism. It was where to go to escape today.

  Today was fanged and fiery and wrong in five million different ways. I needed to thrash out my mom, dad, Julian, Lowenstein, and perhaps the entire San Francisco Bay.

  I checked the shed’s lock again—five taps with the right pointer finger, five taps with the left. I turned off the naked lightbulb and let my eyes adjust to the gray world of streetlights coming through the miniature window. Then I stood in the middle of the room, scrunched my hands into two fists, and started pounding for real.

  Nobody could interrupt me this time. I socked myself in the head fifty times without stopping. Grunting and grimacing, I sounded like a wild boar and the sides of my head felt like they were caving in. I paused for exactly five breaths and then started in for fifty more. I was going for five hundred this time. At my next breath break, my right pinky was bleeding and too stubborn to bend. Everything from the wrist down was on fire and everything from the neck up was made of lead. But I had to keep going. I gnarled my cooperating fingers into lumps and went back in. Fifty blows just above my ears. Breath. Fifty on the top of my skull. Breath. Fifty on the back by that ridge. Breath. Fifty on my forehead and face and anywhere my hands could make contact. Pounding, pounding.

  Until I was lying on the shed floor, letting everything rattle inside me. I felt exhausted but semi-triumphant. My jaw was drooping. My face felt hollow. My fingers were crumpled and limp.

  After a few minutes of panting, I heard Mom’s car pull into the driveway. I let myself in through the back door and got up to the bathroom to rinse my face and hands before she called, “Lenny? You eat yet, hon?”

  It was almost 10:30, and I was woozy but famished. “Coming!” I answered. My voice sounded froggy. Echoing in my bruised skull.

  When I lurched through the kitchen door, Mom was humming and making piles on the dining room table—stuffed manila folders, thick textbooks, her laptop, two plastic bags of take-out.

  “I stopped at Kaling Me Softly,” she said. “Ordered way too much but I didn’t know what you’d want.” Kaling Me Softly was a vegan fusion café near the hospital that had posters in the window promising a new world of health and vigor by way of seaweed.

  “Thanks,” I said limply. Everything she opened smelled like farts.

  Mom tried to remember her order: “Cashew tempeh ball. Seaweed slaw. I think one of these comes with rice.” I just shoveled stuff into my mouth without tasting. My hands were shaking too much and the whole world was pulsating.

  Mom was telling me about how healthy everyone was in Asia because of their connection to the rice paddies, but I noticed she didn’t eat a single grain of rice. She was slowly unwrapping chopsticks and sipping some organically sustainable fermented-tea drink priced at $7.95.

  “This is very odd tasting. You want to try?” she offered.

  I shook my head no. Or maybe I meant to, but instead I just stared and thought I was shaking my head because it was so hard to feel solid.

  Mom put down her drink and tugged at my hand. My hand happened to be scooping mung beans into my mouth. So we both watched the beans rain down on the table and then laughed awkwardly.

  “You okay?” Mom asked. “I mean, I know that’s a stupid question. Of course you’re not okay. But, are you … how are you?”

  I wondered what she saw. Whether I smelled like burnt rubber from smashing my insides together or if the whites of my eyes looked too white. Secretly, I was glad she noticed something was going on. But there was no way I could explain what.

  “I’m okay. Just a lot. Show goes up next weekend.”

  “Ooooh yes!” Mom said. “You got Dad and me tickets, right?”

  “I … will.” I didn’t know if she was saying it just to be nice or if she really thought Dad could sit in a wooden auditorium chair while I had a dancegasm on stage.

  “Really looking forward to it,” Mom said. She took one of the take-out containers, sniffed it, and then put it to the side. “Well, I guess I should get crackin’, huh? Have this report due for the governor’s commission tomorrow at ten and I have to analyze forty-five immigrant testimonials. Also have to call Em and just see how she’s doing. Do you mind if I play a little Streisand to keep me motivated?”

  “Go for it,” I said. Then I pushed the rest of my seaweed into a little mountain and announced I had a ton of homework to do. Which was true even if I had no intention of doing it. I just couldn’t pretend that trigonometry mattered or that anything was calculable. I needed to look at the reports I’d downloaded about gamma knife therapy, drug trial waivers, sun swelling, and this horrifying disease called Kazakhstan sleeping sickness. Also, I had Dr. Ganesh’s note and diagram folded into a small disk in my pocket, and I had to kiss it and tuck it away in my emergency suitcase upstairs.

  I went up and locked my bedroom door. Then I lay on my belly and shimmied under the lip of my bed to retrieve my suitcase. I’d waterproofed the outside with spray and put a combination lock on it three years ago.

  Eighteen to the right.

  Twenty-three to the left.

  Zero.

  Which took me a while to configure, but eighteen divided by two was the same as three to the second power. And zero was the period on the end of that sentence. Also the empty hole we were all falling into.

  Inside the middle section of the suitcase, there were journals and salt pills arranged in rows. The pockets were the most vital, though. That’s where I stowed all the things that meant too much to me. I unzipped carefully, took everything out, and lined it up on my floor. I’d done an inventory just a week ago, so I knew the tally by heart. Still, it felt soothing to count again.

  1. Thirty-nine empty jam packets from my breakfasts with Julian at the Unicorn Diner. Because Julian was born on December 27, I’d purposely collected twelve strawberries and twenty-seven mixed berries.

  2. Two ticket stubs from Avenging Everything—the last movie I’d gone to see with Dad. It really had no plot except for an angry bike messenger delivering the wrong packages, but Dad and I would see anything for the sake of a tub of popcorn.

  3. Twenty-five pill bottles that were supposed to hold his magical cure but were collecting dust unmagically on the lazy Susan downstairs. There were some pills rattling around in a few of them, proving their uselessness.

  4. A prescription for Xanax that Mom got my doctor to write two years ago because she thought I was washing my hands too much. I’d told her I filled it. As if that would solve anything.

  5. Eleven pages of notes I’d taken on blood moons, surveillance techniques, and West Nile virus.

  6. Three form letters I’d gotten back from Stephen Hawking, Al Gore, and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. My letter-writing campaign had really bombed. I’d written to Hawking about the Higgs boson/quantum-fluctuation theory. I’d asked Al Gore for his opinion on seafront real estate. The CDC was maybe a little overambitious. I calculated how much water and space they’d save if they removed all public water fountains (open drains for disease) in the tristate area and then drafted a petition for them to endorse. Everybody wrote back something to the effect of Your concern is my concern, but I’m not that concerned about i
t at the moment.

  7. Forty-one photographs of Ambrosia Steinhart in a padded envelope.

  I rarely looked at these photos, and nobody in my family knew I had them. They’d lived in our hall cabinet for the first fifteen years of my life, along with two defunct humidifiers, three bundles of National Geographics, and four shelves stuffed with moisturizers, cotton balls, and appliance manuals. Emma had found the pictures a few years ago, one rainy afternoon when we were making tampon tiaras.

  “Agh!” she screeched. “Lenny, do you know who this is?”

  “No.”

  “This is Dad’s infamous ex-lover.” She said that last word so slowly I could feel it ripple through me.

  “Stop it,” I said, even though I knew Emma was right. It was actually common knowledge in the Rosenthal-Hermann household that Ambrosia was Dad’s girlfriend before he met Mom. They all went to college together. Apparently, Ambrosia was a punk performance artist and she and my dad smoked lots of weed and drove a van cross-country with two pennies, a guitar, and a dream. She was ravishing—wide, mischievous eyes, dark hair down to her butt, and heart-shaped lips. She claimed to be related to Dee Dee Ramone. The story goes that my dad proposed to her in a tent by the Michigan dunes.

  She said yes, and also that she was pregnant—with their poetry professor’s baby.

  Mom swooped in while Dad was nursing his wounded heart. They graduated. Took things slowly. She went to law school in Chicago. He did the Peace Corps and taught in a one-room schoolhouse in Nepal. They met up again in New York five years later and leased an apartment month by month. It was very careful, their love. Their first pet was a goldfish named Airplane. They each bought their own groceries for the first year of living together.

  And then, without telling anyone, my mom bought a red chiffon dress at Saks, my dad rented a top hat and tails, and they got married at city hall on a snowy Wednesday in December. Both of them said it was “the smartest thing I ever did.”

  The mystery and passion of Ambrosia Steinhart haunted me, though. She was a reminder of what could’ve been. Her sexuality was so loud and unafraid and I wanted to hate her, but really I envied her. Most of the pictures were taken either on the beach or with some D.C. monument in the background. Ambrosia was always laughing—in a pair of ragged overalls, kicking up sand; splashing in the crest of a wave; flipping the bird at the Lincoln Memorial. There were also a few nudies. Her body sprawled on a rumpled bedsheet; another in the grass. Her sparkly eyes and pubic Bermuda triangle were like three smudges in the white expanse of her milky skin.

  I checked my bedroom door. Locked and relocked it ten times. Not that Mom could hear me sifting through these sexy pictures silently. But I felt so guilty looking at them. I wanted to empty my body and fill it up with Ambrosia’s—her curves, her wild hair, her fiery self-righteousness. She made me feel hot and daring.

  I pulled my faded T-shirt down just enough to poke out my left shoulder and pouted my lips. Then I got my phone off my bed and snapped a selfie. It looked nothing like Ambrosia, of course. More like a close-up of my scrawny bicep and freckle patch. But I liked the way my nose faded into the background and I did have a halfway decent mole on my chin.

  I studied Ambrosia’s body again. She looked like a strutting peacock, expanding in every direction. I tried posing again—this time arching my back and spreading my arms like wings. Snap. Then I got my camera to balance on my bookshelf and took some more. Snap, snap. With just my reading lamp on, the shadows made it pretty eerie.

  Next I dove into Ambrosia’s eyes—so gleeful and flirty. She knew she was making everyone near her excited, riling up the world. For this, a little cosmetic enhancement was needed. I tiptoed across the hall and raided Emma’s closet for her Vincent Davicci Luminescence kit. (Emma spent two summers as a department store “skin consultant.”) After sneaking back into my room, I swiped on a layer of Shimmering Stardust eye shadow and outlined my lids with brightener.

  Snap.

  For my lips I drew on Bruised Berry followed by Lickalicious GlossyGirl. Then I sucked in my cheeks so hard, I let out an unintended whistle.

  Snap, snap, snap.

  Puckered, petulant, slightly ajar with a hint of tongue.

  Snap, snap.

  If I was imitating Ambrosia, I reasoned, maybe it was just a game.

  Except I knew exactly what I was doing.

  And I couldn’t blame it on the kale or my crushing headache or any other external influence. I was as close to sound as I’d ever be and I knew this was wrong. I should’ve stopped before I even started. But I had no time for morals or tact. Everyone was either in love or dying or both. The earth was cracking open in fault lines too big to measure on any seismic scale, and people were dropping into deep inexplicable slumberfests because they knew it had to be safer in the unconscious.

  I snapped. I snapped more of my neck, my earlobe, my eyelids. I snapped a shot of my left kidney with just the edge of my Hello Kitty underwear. I snapped one of my hands clutching my not-quite size 34B boobs, trying on Ambrosia’s What? Who, me? look.

  I couldn’t blame it on the ozone. Or on Stephen Hawking’s aloofness. It was all me. It was me, snapping and snapping. It was me who knew all along what I was going to do with those semi-sultry lips. It was me who looked through all those selfies, picked out the sexiest ones, and sent them to Dr. Radhakrishnan Ganesh. One by one.

  Shaking, not thinking. Thinking, trying not to think. Typing again, just, Are you there?

  No response. I kept looking at my dark phone screen, as if it would give me some answer. I hadn’t even thought through what I wanted him to do.

  Sorry. That was a mistake, I wrote.

  No response again.

  Are you on tomorrow?

  Still nothing.

  I tossed my phone on the bed. I had to get out of here and throw away everything. The photos, the jam packets, the tickets, the letters, the pill bottles that didn’t or shouldn’t or couldn’t save anybody. I stuffed it all back into the suitcase, put on the padlock, and shoved it under my bed. I wanted to light it all on fire and do a high dive into the flames. I opened my door to see if I could at least get it out to my bunker and bury it under the mulch.

  Mom had turned her music up way too high. I heard Barbra crooning, People who need peeeeeople. She sounded more woeful than I remembered. Kind of like an abandoned puppy. Then the band underneath her faded out, but a muted yowling kept going.

  That’s when I realized it wasn’t Barbra Streisand making that mournful noise; it was my mom. Naomi Rosenthal-Hermann, age forty-eight, an untrained singer sitting at her dining room table in front of an insurmountable pile of work, wondering how she got here, how she could survive as a widow, how this all would end, how her heart could possibly break more.

  At least, that’s what it sounded like to me.

  Designer Pathogens and Bioterrorism

  Fun facts!

  • “You can download the gene sequence for smallpox or the 1918 flu virus from the Internet.” (Nick Bostrom, The Atlantic, 2012)

  • Half of Hollywood is walking around with bioweapons in their lips. Botox—which is actually a neurotoxic protein produced by the bacterium Clostridium botulinum—is one wrinkle away from botulism. Which is fatal.

  • It’s just some DNA tweaking and we’ll be dealing with bubonic plague possibilities—which, I recently heard was not imported to the US by rats, even though they eat, sleep, and make love in garbage. (Not sure rats can “make love,” but sounds better than “rat sex.”)

  • At the same time, genetically engineered bacteria—aka adjuvants—boost the human immune response and help prevent fun icks like pertussis, cholera, and HPV. So if we want to have any hope of stopping AIDS, heart disease, MS, and cancer, don’t we have to design new pathogens?

  Chapter 12

  YOUCA WEAVE MOW

  Text number fourteen, sent at 7:03 a.m.:

  Hi Dr. G this is Eleanor Rosenthal-Hermann. I dropped my phone in a puddle
and had to replace it. So nothing that you may have gotten from my number in the past twenty-four hours was really from me. Is this still you?

  It had been over nine hours since I sent the last seminaked picture of myself to Dr. Ganesh. Still no word back. I’d spent the first part of the night listening to Mom sob downstairs, being too chickenshit to do anything to comfort her. Then I spent an hour or so trying to figure out if my phone could tell me whether a sent text had been viewed. I fell asleep around three in the morning, while reading my notes for the social studies midterm I’d forgotten about until then and listening to a podcast about space colonization.

  Text number fifteen, sent at 7:08 a.m.:

  Hello, this sounds crazy but I know another Dr. Ganesh. If you got a strange set of texts late last night, they were for him.

  Text number sixteen, sent at 7:09 a.m.:

  The other Dr. Ganesh I know teaches photography so that’s why I had to send him pictures. They were an assignment.

  By the time I dumped myself in a shower, got dressed, and went downstairs, Mom was at the kitchen table, already back from a brisk jog in her BAD sweat suit. Only, when I looked down I saw she wasn’t wearing any pants. Her legs looked way too bony.

  “Is this … intentional?” I asked.

  “Ha!” Mom boomed. “I started to get in the shower and then I realized I really needed some coffee.” She raised her BEST MOM EVER mug at me. “Cheers!”

  Whatever I’d heard leaking out of her the night before was gone. She’d swept it up, ironed it out, mopped the tears, and pulled her bob back into two perky pigtails.