When We're Over (Alejandro Eduarte)

WHEN WE'RE OVER

Alejandro Eduarte 

Mari wanted to call her sister, but she decided to wait until morning. She sat on her bed, her hand above the phone - her sister Rubi’s number typed into the keypad - waiting to press the green button. Tomorrow, December 31st, Rubi would publish her first book. Rubi had lived her life as a writer and ecologist, who believed that every moment we spent alive - inside or outside, in the city or in the country, in a book or staring somewhere else, we were reading the world. Mari thought she was out of her mind. For Mari, reading only took place in a book, or within something printed - she wanted to completely absorb and parse through every feeling, not read about someone else doing it. After Rubi had told her the book idea, Mari had insisted to her over the phone many times: But don’t you think most people would say that reading is just in a book? After this, Rubi always sighed, and stayed silent for a while. Mari, I didn’t ask for your critique. Mari would reply, I love you, but I don’t know what you’re doing. Rubi would always say, that’s why I write.

Mari shut her eyes and turned off her phone light, which showed the time as 11:58. Through the window rang a police siren, somebody pounding on the pavement as they ran down the block, and a faint bass noise that rattled her window frame. Mari rocked back and forth, and rubbed her hands over her eyes, wanting all the sound to stop.

It began to crackle with rain. Rain was one thing Mari didn’t mind, and wanted its thrum to envelop her, so she settled into her bed as it covered all of her other fears. Mari thought about her sister, and what she might be worried about tonight. After a minute, at midnight, all the other sounds in her vicinity except the rain - the siren, the footsteps, the bass - cut out with a violent popping noise. She opened her eyes as the arresting sound rang in her ear, and her body suddenly seemed heavier against her own will, so that instead of checking out the window, she sank into bed and the dream came to her.

In Mari’s dream, she saw herself driving in her small, gray Subaru. Along a road about ten miles outside of her town (she knew because she could see the mountains back in her rearview mirror) she drove furiously down the road. Mari couldn’t stop to think about where she was going, and looked around. On both sides of the two-lane road were dark, early-morning fields, lit by a five a.m. sun. Mari looked in the seat next to her and there lay bags of trail mix and chips, and she knew she had planned this journey to go long. Above her the sky was a blanket of gray - splotches of dark and light all flowing together, but no clouds. It seemed to be like one of those old paintings of swirls and spirals where each part looked like it moved.

No music ran through the speakers, so she reached to the dial and blues rang to life. Mari’s hand shook on the wheel. She drove straight on the road for what felt like hours; there were no exits or turnarounds on the endless expanse, and the sky and the fields stayed the same the whole time and swayed lightly with the wind. Mari breathed in and out through the tall grass surrounding her - and it was as if she no longer completely belonged to just her body, but as if her breath determined the path of the world. She inhaled, the plants swayed to the left, and as she exhaled, they fell to the right.

Mari began to think she should have a child next to her. She imagined looking in the passenger seat and seeing a little girl, maybe six or seven years old - Mari could imagine her in her exact resemblance: golden-brown skin, frizzy hair up in a bun, soft maroon eyes. She realized that having a child accompany her along a journey like this meant they could either be on the run or heading somewhere to witness something. As much as she tried to make herself see the happy possibilities of a child, Mari thought that something unreachable, a destiny unknown, prickly, dark, and all-consuming - a destiny that would drag her through the holes of the earth or throw her up into the sky - was headed her way. She thought about Rubi and herself, how they sat together in their father’s old car when they were six or seven and gazed out the window together on road trips like this into the city.

Up ahead, the bridge to New York City rang clearly against the fog. Along the side of the gray road, she spotted a scraggly old man who held a sign: SOON WE WILL READ NO MORE. The message was scrawled in thick Sharpie, that, as soon as Mari squinted her eyes towards it, began to melt and slowly drip down the sign and onto the ground. She didn’t want to take her eyes off of it, but she had to keep along the road.

The city seemed empty. She was the only car on the road. Mari scanned the intersection up ahead, and directed herself over the Hudson, realizing the small distance between herself and the river was only held by some brick on a bridge. As she crossed the bridge quickly, her stomach began to ache and rattle, but she pressed on. Her car went on the decline, dropping her into the street. Through the downtown streets that loomed open and wide, the cold air blew in and out like a colossal tsunami at her window. She passed cars on each side of the road, parked haphazardly along the whole length of the street.

With a blink, Mari was suddenly a block from Times Square. She heard the booming voice of an old man coming from the square, and she saw a mass of people run haphazardly towards something in the center of the lights and electric signs. At the corner of the block, she parked her car. She knew Rubi lived close, in an apartment that rose above the square, but saved it for later, then set off for the big voice.

The old man’s voice emanated from every speaker on the block. He was old, near his nineties, and his image took up all the screens in the square. Levitating in the middle of the air, high enough so everybody could look up to it, was a crystal ball, just like it was New Year’s Eve. In a way, it was: hordes of people that Mari bumped up against, everybody focused towards the center, looking up, all within Times Square. This crystal ball was spiky, supported by nothing except the air, and emanated a deep orange - it shined through the glass, and pulsed with light every second or so. It took Mari a moment to realize the pulses perfectly timed to her breath. She leaned in, and shook, so she forced her eyes back to the giant screens.

On the screens, the old man was reciting a page of scripture with unintelligible words. All around, small groups huddled around what Mari sensed were holy texts of every sort, their heads down, and they shivered and turned the pages of the books slowly, like they were about to lose each and every page to the wind. To her left stood a young child, in a fuzzy purple coat, who looked exactly like the child she wanted to have in the car next to her, and beside her was her mother, holding her hand as she swiped tears from her eyes. “Miss, what’s wrong?” asked Mari as she leaned over to grab her attention. The woman locked her eyes, and she stared at her as if she were on fire: mouth open, eyes pried open, too terrified to move. Mari crouched down to the little girl’s level, and caught a glint in her eyes, and froze. At that moment, thunder cracked, and rain loosed from the sky. All the sounds around her, like before, when she had been awake, all the screams and footsteps and booms and voices, cut away, and all that was left was the rain again. People’s mouths moved like they were screaming and no sound came out as they ran to join the giant crowd.

The whole time, Mari stared at the girl, who resembled a younger version of herself. In her expression was wonder, and knowledge that no matter what, they could not change anything. There was the meaning of the end of the world, if that’s where they were: the untouchable thing, across the crowd, between the pauses of the prophet beaming above her and the places on the street that the light in the giant orange ball didn’t touch - Mari and this young girl’s sight of one another. Mari reached in to embrace her, and with force, her mother grabbed the girl away from Mari and set off down the street.

In the aftermath of the stare, for a moment, there was pure silence. The thunderous rain completely halted, for just a second, and time froze around Mari until it came back with a force.

The rain again pounded down from the gray, open sky, and Mari extended her hand out. Black, sticky drops hit her palm - and she felt it glob along her skin, not bounce off as quickly as water should. Mari raced her eyes across her hand and realized that what was falling was ink.

She hastily grabbed the printed map out of her pocket, and where there was once printed blue ink for the rivers, green ink for the roads, red ink for the state lines, and black ink for all the other text on the map, there was nothing. A blank piece of paper.

Somebody in the hysteria dropped a holy book on the ground, and all it held was blank pages. No title appeared on the book, but the cover - an embossed cross - was still intact. Mari began to hyperventilate as she stared at the book flayed on the ground. A mass of people bumped into her as she stared and was afraid to look around at what else might be lost.

Around her, the rain poured and stuck onto everything. Every piece of printed text was eviscerated. There were no labels on the street signs, and on the ground, all the lane markers had disappeared. As she looked up, people ran to the corners, cried over their books, ripped out the pages.

Mari realized she had to get back to her car. People’s screams accompanied her - an old woman threw a Molotov cocktail into a car parked five feet from Mari and clambered on top of it, tears coming from his face. When Mari looked closer, the tears were a midnight black.

She hurried herself away from the street, struggling to walk, and in front of her, a young man fell down and as the rain fell on him, his body began to disintegrate, melting into ink. Soon, the same thing befell everybody around her. People, from their feet up, began to liquefy into ink, and as others saw what happened and ran away, they fell and disintegrated like water balloons that hit the pavement. Mari knew it wasn’t real but couldn’t move. She stayed still and heard only the ink-rain.

From the giant screens in Times Square, the man had gone - but the screens stayed on, as did the lights - amidst the gray sky that breathed and the orange ball that kept pulsing ahead of the strangest event Mari had ever imagined. Mari was the only one left in the street intact.

She thought that this would be the best time for the dead to finally climb up from the bottom of the earth, for some holy being to finally appear, but there was nothing, only silence. It was the New Year after all.

The last thought Mari had was: This would be my sister’s worst nightmare.

Mari woke up. She was back in her apartment, which lay on the second floor above the hardware store and gas station that was the newest structure in her town of barely a thousand residents, an hour and twenty minutes west of New York City. Most everybody who lived in the town was old: retired teachers, judges, and preachers, who needed to get away from other people and let the silence of life in the town waft through them.

Outside, it was raining. She lay in bed, terrified to move an inch. She slowly propped herself up and reached toward the small table at the foot of her bed to click on her phone, where she opened the document where she wrote every one of her dreams after she fell out of them and into the world again. Once she scrolled to the bottom, she let the whole dream tumble out of her into the document.

She set her phone back on the table, closed her eyes, and inhaled. For a moment she could black it all out, timing her breath to the rain, distancing herself from her power and the sound in the dream, when on her sharpest exhale, her phone erupted with a sharp buzz and its light glinted on. Mari stared at the light, petrified, as the phone vibrated on the table. She clambered over and grabbed her phone: it was her sister.

On the other end of the line, Rubi’s breath shuddered so much it was almost rhythmic.

Mari asked, “Rubi?”

Rubi replied. “Mari, tell me I’m not crazy.”

Mari waited a second before any words could come out. “It depends on what you’re gonna say, though.”

“I opened a copy of my book this morning and there was nothing on any of the pages.”

Mari froze. “But that’s one book, did you check the others?” she asked.

“None of them have anything.”

Mari’s hand shuddered so much that she had to move the phone away, but lifted it back to her ear.

Rubi continued: “No title page, no page numbers, no pages, no acknowledgements, nothing. The only thing that’s left is the title on the side.”

Mari’s whole body froze. Rubi felt the shock waves of silence through the phone.

Mari asked: “Rubi, is it raining?”

“What?”

“Is it raining where you are?”

“Yeah.”

Mari’s whole body tensed up.

“Rubi, I’m on my way. I’m gonna call you in the car but I have to come see you.”

“Mari, you’re scaring me.”

“I’ll be back with you in a minute, okay?” Mari’s voice nearly broke as she stuffed her things into a bag - her journal, her phone charger, water bottle. She tried to think if there was anything else she’d need for what might be the end of the world. She thought of the child, of who’d await her, of what was happening, and what in the hell she was going to do.

As Mari turned off all the lights and stumbled to the hallway, a furious, fast knock came at her front door. All the air between her and the door suddenly felt like an insurmountable wall of fog. She stopped in her tracks and inched towards the door even though she wished with every step she could stop moving, until she peeked through. On the other side was Charles, her landlord, a 70-something retired mechanic who ran the gas station downstairs and gave her an extension last week when she was late for rent. He had smiled and said, “you’ll pay me back later.”

Mari stood behind the door. “Charles?”

“Mari, dear, what’s happened?”

“What do you mean, Charles?”

“Everything…. I think every… text, or word, or written…. It’s all gone.”

“I don’t know what that means, but I have to go, okay? You have to let me get out.”

Mari breathed deeply and coaxed open the door. The old man had tears in his eyes, and she locked with them, and knew what she had to do.

As they drove in the city’s direction, the road looked the same as in the dream.

On the two-lane road, Mari and Charles’ car was the only one in their lane, heading into the city. A seemingly endless line of cars was stalled in the opposite lane. They drove past green signs that used to mark the number of miles away from the cities, now all blank. On the dash of the car, the electronic gas monitor still lit up - everything electronic still functioned.

Mari dialed Rubi on the phone.

“Mari? How far out are you?”

“I’m half an hour away. Rubi, there are tons of people leaving the city on the road. Do you think we should take a shortcut somewhere? Like, is it safe to be on the main roads?”

“We?”

Mari glanced at Charles.

“I brought Charles.”

            “Your landlord, Mari? What are you thinking?”

            “I don’t know! I don’t know.” Mari slammed on the horn despite the open road ahead of her. Charles stared straight ahead.

            “Go the normal way. Meet me upstairs. Be quick, okay? Please.”

            “I love you, Rubi.”

            The phone hung up.

She and Charles had barely said anything to one another. In the distance Mari looked upwards, and again, with the gray, moving texture of the sky, every small detail of the dream was correct. She began to pant, but it was as if the sky breathed with her, the gray clouds shifting with every inhale and exhale.

            “You know, I always thought the world would end this way.” Charles laughed. “This is what I always thought of as the future, everything being wordless and futuristic and like we’d live in caves or underground tunnels and never read anything at all. The world would all be holograms, and we’d press a button and have the world at our fingers.”

            “Yeah? And what do you think of it now?” Mari wiped a tear from her eye.

            “I don’t really know what could happen to everything. I mean, I run the store, what happens to all the cash? Or the blueprints to all the new buildings anywhere? Or the old manuscripts? Or the diaries? All the notes anybody’s ever taken, or the books.”

            “Rubi was supposed to publish a book today.”

            Charles asked, “About what?”

            “How… how every moment, or whatever, that we have in the world, is about reading.”

            Charles looked mystified. “Are you serious?”

Mari snapped. “Why would I lie right now?”

Charles sat a moment, then replied as he stared out the window at the endless road ahead. “God be with her.”

            “Is this God?”

“What do you think?” Charles asked.”

“I don’t know, this might make me a believer after all.”

            Charles took a moment before he decided she was serious, then laughed and laughed and Mari began to as well, and she looked over at him, and the sky fell away, and just like the young girl she’d seen in her dream, everything about the world she wanted to read and know was between their eyes.

            “I don’t know how anything is going to work anymore,” confessed Mari.

            “I don’t either.”

            As the bridge broke out ahead of Mari, she stared at it and rolled the windows down. The rain stopped a moment before. Outside came the sounds of birds, and leaves bristling, and waves hitting the rocks on the river’s shore, and as they proceeded down the first street, the whole world seemed to go silent. She noticed everything. On the street, people on the sidewalks slammed their front doors and others walked, arms out and open, laughing, breathing in the newfound freedom of being beyond any life they ever imagined. Any history they had to hold onto was gone. The list of things lost forever was to be endless - hospital notes, family photographs, receipts, artwork by young children. Charles reached into his wallet hand and let a heavy stack of bills, which were now just green slabs of paper, disintegrate and flutter in the wind.

            “What if this is our way of changing for the better?” Mari asked.

            “I mean, it’s nice to think about,” Charles replied absentmindedly, his head still out the window. “But there’s things you forget. I mean, come on, how are you gonna know anymore when you go into the grocery store, or something, tomorrow what anything is?”

            “You just look. You open the things on the counter or the freezer or the aisle or whatever, and you just look at them.”

            “And other stuff, too, you know, is gone. I mean, what about all the survival stories? Or guides on how to survive?”

Mari sat with what he’d said. Mari looked over at him and looked back, then turned to park at the corner a block from Times Square. The side streets felt so deserted, like everybody on the road had been headed towards Mari and Charles’ town, to barrel their own way into the long unknown, under the hope to find something there, beyond reason.

There came no sound from the square where she had died in the dream last night. Even if she hadn’t disintegrated into ink, everything else around her died, and wasn’t that almost the same thing? And yet, she had woken up. In the dream her body controlled everything - her breath synched to the rain, to the nature around her - but now the same event was happening for real, and she was just an observer taking the same path. She imagined a great beast waiting there for her - the ink rain, the inevitable dark puddles everybody was reduced to - that only if she stepped into the vicinity of the square, the world would break open. But no noise came through - no booming prophet, no footsteps, no rain, and Mari felt in her chest that something had shifted. She had lived through it once before.

Mari asked Charles: “You said the world would end, but it’s not over.” And in that moment, Mari felt, somehow, the weight of the dream fall off of her.

            Mari and Charles ducked back into the lobby of Rubi’s apartment and made their way up the stairs. Mari glanced at him to ensure he could get up all the way.

            They exited the stairwell and found Rubi’s door in the hallway. The print of the apartment numbers - printed on a slab of wood next to each door - had all disappeared, but Mari knew it was the last one on the left side. She called her sister’s name and knocked on the door.

            Rubi moved her bare feet across the apartment and opened the door. As it opened, Rubi, in a long, flowy dress and her hair and face frizzy, stood and looked at Mari, and she scanned her body up and down as Mari waited for them to lock eyes.

            “Get in here right now.” Mari came in right away and Charles followed.

Around Rubi’s apartment, empty copies of her books were scattered around - on the counters, on the floor, on tables.

“I have no idea what is happening or what to do or where to go or what to eat or anything. I feel like I’m losing my mind.”

“I’m here for you, okay?” Mari pleaded with Rubi.

“Can you still write?” Charles wondered.

“Right here.” Rubi picked up a piece of paper and it had the date: December 31, 2019, scrawled on it in pen.

“Oh, my god.”

Mari looked out the window onto Times Square as a pocket of a hundred people stood in the middle as a gigantic, silent audience watched on. Their voices moved in song but Mari could hear nothing, and then she hoisted the window open and it came flooding through. There was no man on the screens, but there was the New Year’s Eve ball, and it lit up orange.

“Mari, what are we gonna do?” Rubi asked.

“Um, we’re gonna stay here. No leaving.”

“With Charles, too?”

“Yes.” Mari replied firmly. Mari saw Rubi pacing, lost in her own head and inability to conceive what comes next. “This is our home now, okay?”

“Like it used to be.” Rubi replied. “But nothing is the same, Mari. My life is completely over. My book…” Rubi worried.

“Hey, stop. You’re still here. You’re alive, I’m alive, Charles is, too.”

“Why are you so in your right mind, Mari?”

Mari collected herself and looked at Charles.

“Rubi, I have something to tell you.”

“Yeah?”

“I had some dream…”

“You dreamt what, Mari?”

“Of this. Exactly this.”

Charles looked at her knowingly, and felt Mari find her footing.

“Tell me right now,” said Rubi.

And so she did.

That night the three of them sat outside the window overlooking Times Square. Each of them thought about what brought them here, about everything that was lost and where all the words and ink went, but for some reason, they didn’t ask why.

            Rubi remarked, “I feel like I’m waiting for something to blow up. But it’s all gone.”

            It was a strange scene, the three of them that night. Night settled down and over the radio they heard every type of thing people lost being slowly recited. Presidents issued statements, callers decried it as a catastrophe and yelled over who could have been responsible for this. Charles cracked jokes and Rubi laughed at the futility as Mari ignored them to write every detail of that day on her phone. Mari and Rubi had been apart for so long, living in different places, but after this inexplicable thing, they were finally together. Tonight, they could delay the terror. Maybe this was their current utopia, until people inevitably began to worry about themselves - but for now, the three people in that room felt like the only people alive.

Mari picked up Rubi’s book - lined on the side was the title in silver: “When We’re Over” - opened the green and blue cover, and rested her hand over the page before she began to write.

Rubi looked over and widened her eyes in horror: “Mari, what are you doing in my book?”

“I’m writing.”

Charles watched the two of them, together once more.

            Rubi grabbed for the book and said, “Let me see, Mari.”

In the book, Mari wrote “I love you”, and drew a heart around it. Rubi held the book open, her eyes frozen, and she and Mari, for the first time in so many years, locked eyes, and this was the answer to everything, and if they could have stayed together in this way forever it would have been enough to repair everything between them, and it was, then Mari came towards Rubi and wrapped her arms and embraced her - as Mari breathed in, so did Rubi, and as she breathed out, so did Rubi, so that they were one body, one mass of indestructible flesh, for that moment.

Charles inched toward the window, and on the gigantic video screens of the square, he and the thousands who stood, awaiting the countdown, watched everything Mari had seen in her dream, and suddenly, they knew. The countdown proceeded but nobody said a word. As the clock hit zero, and 2020 began, instead of “New York, New York”, the sound of rain came through the massive speakers. After a moment of silence, the crowd began to bellow “New York, New York” together, the loudest it’s ever been, and, on the thousands of pieces of confetti that rained down, they grabbed them from the air, and scribbled the first words of new human history, dropping the pieces in the street before they left the mass of new life and began their way back home.

AUTHOR’S NOTE

The apocalypse I created works on an intellectual level and a personal one: the evaporation of all text reads as a theoretical apocalypse - about the loss of history and daily life it would entail - but also about the character of Mari being transformed by her apocalyptic vision, which she experiences alone, then coming into the real world with her sister and the man who accompanies her on her journey, and not being alone. I wanted to resist the idea of a violent, destructive ending and place the destructive elements in the middle of the piece to deal with the emotional question of how we live in a post-apocalyptic world. I chose to include the concept of the cosmic sign (the rain) and depict Mari as a visionary who conceals her vision until the very end. I referenced Sontag’s idea from “Imagination of Disaster” about humans living through their own deaths as I developed Mari’s dream. The specific scene of Mari’s dream came to me as I reflected on what apocalypses would scare me - as a writer and reader, I took the idea of printed text disappearing to some strange extremes that signify the ways in which we would lose our bodies as well as our histories in this apocalyptic event. Then, the second half of the story, once Mari is awake and experiences the apocalypse in reality, was a mix of the cozy apocalypse trope and my goal to give Mari back a sense of herself while in a world where the people around her lost their hope (particularly, her writer sister). One part of the world has ended, but other parts remain. Throughout, I played with the image of New Year’s Eve in Times Square to add some human texture to the trope of mass gathering/panic in a city during the apocalypse, and also to symbolize the restart of human society due to a total lack of written history.

The title of the story, “When We’re Over”, is the same as the character Rubi’s book. I wanted this title to provoke a question about defining the apocalypse, and what happens next. I took inspiration from the structure of von Trier’s “Melancholia”, where the first half is iconographic, and hopefully disturbing, centering around one woman, then the second part of the piece involves the sister character and clarifies the intentions of both. In my story, I left out any explicit divine motivation or intervention behind the apocalyptic elements, but instead wanted to explore the quieter human effects of this apocalypse without a question of cause. For this reason, I also left out much of the potential angle about technology usurping printed text/books or other “traditional knowledge”. In this context, the scariest thing is not knowing a cause. This throws the question of where to go or who to hold on to into relevance, and to choose hope and connection (which I coded through the lens of human eye contact) at the end means to be immersed in the fear but find a way out.