Away We Go (5 page)

DREAMS OF THE END

Noah knows the comet will hit.

In his final moments, he sits down to write a story.

But the blank sheets of paper taunt him.

To put words on paper is not a problem.

But the
right
words?

It used to be said that the Bible was the greatest book ever written. A myopically western-centric view, but, arrogance aside, the boldness of the claim, that is what appeals to Noah.

The libraries of the world are full of ancient books, populated by Gods and Heroes.

Are all these books holy, or are none of them?

Noah suspects the latter.

The blank pages on his desk leer at him.

His problem, he realizes, is that he wants to write a holy book, yet does not believe in the possibility of holiness. And if there is no possibility of holiness, why bother writing at all?

The answer to his question strikes him as suddenly as an accident.

He must write to save himself.

A YEAR BEFORE THE CATACLYSMIC, FIERY, KIND OF CLICHÉD END OF ALL THINGS (OR NOT)

THE END TIME IS YOUR TIME

Alice has always been trying to save me.

The bus to Westing was full of newsies from recovery centers all across Virginia.

I had a window seat, and Alice had the aisle seat right beside me. I was pretending to be asleep so I wouldn't have to exchange pleasantries, be pleasant.

The ride was long and bumpy, the outside world a thin windowpane away, which I would occasionally peek at, but there were soldiers on our bus, soldiers with guns. One of the soldiers sat across the aisle from Alice and me. He was in his early twenties, with faint blond wisps for a mustache and a rifle in his hands.

Alice reached out a hand. “Hi,” she said, with a wide smile. “I'm Alice Witaker. I'm very pleased to meet you. What's your name?”

He stared at her like she had three heads.

“Not supposed to speak to you,” he said finally. “You're cute and all, but I got my orders, and it's nothing personal or anything.”

“Oh,” Alice said, her hand wavering in the air. “Oh, okay. I understand. I wouldn't want you to get in trouble.”

“It's nothing personal or anything,” the soldier said, and turned away.

Alice looked crestfallen, so I pretended to wake up from my pretend sleep. I offered her my hand.

“Lucky for you I have no such orders,” I said. “I'm Noah Falls.”

Alice took my hand. “How was your nap, Noah Falls?” she asked, the hint of a reproach in her voice.

“It involved lots of sheep, Alice Witaker,” I said.

“Are your dreams often farm-themed, Noah Falls?”

“Aren't yours?”

She cracked a smile.

“I'll take that as a yes,” she said.

It was thanks to Alice that, soon after I arrived at Westing, I learned the world was going to end in a year's time. She dragged me to Bullsworth 112, where I sat in a circle of desks and listened to Morgan, president of the Believers, tell us about the comet Apep, her eyes wide and distant.

“—a mile wide,” she was saying, “traveling thirty thousand miles per hour. It'll release as much energy as a one-million-megaton bomb.”

She didn't mention the AwayWeKnow science articles in which NASA scientists put the odds of impact at one in ten thousand.

She said instead, that we shouldn't trust what we read on AwayWeKnow. After all, if kids knew the truth, they'd panic. Only two things can stand in the way of panic—belief, or ignorance.

“These are our last days. So what do we do? We live our lives as if the world depends on our actions. We be better people. We manifest a better reality. This is our test, our trial.”

I could've filled in the rest for her. These last days are our tribulation, our means of lending our passing some semblance of meaning, our moment of self-definition in the light of the fires of Armageddon or whatever.

The fact that there was a chance the whole world,
everything anyone ever did, might end so
stupidly
—not a good chance, but still a chance—was all the proof I needed that there were no better realities to manifest, no great trials and tribulations. You just waited and waited to run into some shitty accident of nature. A rock, a germ, a falling tree. An apocalyptic asteroid that would destroy all life as you know it. A banana peel.

I tugged at the sleeve of Alice's dress.

She ignored me.

I continued tugging.

Finally, she sighed to let me know that I had prevailed, as I had known I would.

“Do you think,” I whispered, “that our esteemed president has considered that the odds of The Great Cliché hitting the earth are about the same as winning big in Vegas and blowing it on—ha—blow, hookers, and penile enhancement? I believe in believing in nothing, but if you must believe in something, why not Vegas?”

“‘The Great Cliché'
,
” she echoed. “Oh my God, you can't even take the end of the world seriously.”

“I am very serious about not taking anything seriously,” I confirmed.

She studied me for a moment, with a doctor's unnerving intensity, before settling on a diagnosis: “You,” she said, “are a
troll
.”

I could hardly believe my ears. Girl picked up some Internet lingo, courtesy of AwayWeGo, and now insisted on transposing it to real-life situations, mainly those involving me.

“You're a
sheep,
” I whispered, and instantly felt bad, wanted to take it back.

She rolled her eyes. “You and your sheep, Noah Falls.”

“I have a dream, that one day, we will be judged, not on the
basis of which farm animals we have in our dreams, but on how we choose to spend perfectly decent Friday nights.”

“Troll,” she reiterated, in case I hadn't gotten it the first time.

Just then the door to the room swung open, revealing a group of boys.

“Welcome, welcome!” Morgan said with grating enthusiasm as they picked their noisy way to the outskirts of our circle. We made room for them, and Morgan resumed her spiel, but after a few minutes, one of the newcomers proceeded to raise his hand. His hair was long, tied back into a ponytail. He wore an A-shirt that revealed painfully skinny arms. His three friends snickered to themselves as Ponytail fidgeted in his seat, waving his hand this way and that.

“I have a question. Miss! Miss President. Madame President!”

Morgan looked startled. “Yes?” she said, in a surprisingly meek voice.

“Madame President,” he said. “You've been talking about belief and making things manifest, right? Well, see, what I was wondering, me and my friends—can we believe ourselves into bed with a girl? Believe and make it manifest? Is that how this thing works?”

“Because,” another of the boys piped in, “and I intend no disrespect to this noble organization or its professed goals, but, personally, I would much rather expend my energies toward that eventuality, especially in light of the apparent imminence of the world's end.”

“He's a virgin,” Ponytail said of his friend. “You can tell by the way he talks.”

The Believers put their warm, fuzzy feelings about manifesting better realities in honor of killer comets to the side for the moment to tell the four intruders that “We're trying to
do something useful with our lives, so if you don't like it, go die in a ditch.”

“No, you know what? These guys have converted me,” Ponytail said. “We manifest our realities, so I guess my sister died 'cause she's a little bitch. Only a bitch dies from organ failure when she's thirteen, right?”

The meeting was beginning to look more and more like a future crime scene. I grabbed Alice's hand and dragged her toward the door. Morgan, practically in tears, barred our path, hastily offering us a small bucket full of pins that read “BELIEVERS: The End Time Is Your Time.”

As I took a pin I noticed a red mark on the side of Morgan's neck. Who'd put it there? Had she lectured him on the power of “Positive Actualization” in the face of the apocalypse? Why wasn't he here, manifesting a reality that involved standing up for her?

“Thank you for the pin,” I said.

Any desire to challenge Morgan was gone.

She just wanted to
believe
she added up to something so she could sleep easier, because going away was a lonely business, and yes, it made you feel better to think the world was going away with you. Who could blame Morgan, really, for wanting to sleep easier?

That was why you had to choose the right bedtime stories. The director with her grand convocation day speeches about Westing's singular purpose. The students working in the library, doing research for teachers, volunteering, going to clubs, whispering theories about where the sick kids go, whispering that tertiary care clinics involving bathing and grooming support were just a cover-up for secret government labs where mad scientists cut Bobby Fisher from econ into pieces in order
to cure PPV and save the rest of us, like in this AwayWeWatch flick called
The Treatment Program.
They pretended that the outside world wasn't actively trying to forget us, hadn't boxed us in, limited our Internet access to a grand total of one site, limited our cell phone communication to calling kids who lived down the hall from us, even as our parents sent us letters and micro-transactions through AwayWeGame in the form of Pirate World booty or Age of Rome florins. Most of all, kids pretended all of this
stuff,
these
activities
they did, the grades they got, actually mattered.

SILVERWARE IN THE SKY

An hour or two after the Believer meeting, Alice and I had one of those which-way-should-the-toilet-paper-go arguments where the toilet paper is a metaphor for. Pretty. Much.
Everything.
We were in the gardens behind Galloway
,
bickering like a married couple even though we'd only known each other for a week.

It began with the stars.

Her: You've
never
seen the Big Dipper?

Me: I don't really get the name.

Her: The name?

Me: What the hell. Is a
dipper
. Do you mean spoon? The big spoon in the sky?

Her: Why are you so mad?

Me: Because—waste of a night, Alice. And now you want to talk about imaginary silverware in the sky.

Her: You need people, Noah. You need hope and friends and something to do other than drink and whatever else I saw you doing the other night, and I'm sorry if spending an evening with a friend and a bunch of people who want to make the most of the time that they have was so
dreadful—

Me: You don't actually
believe
that shit? (I couldn't resist.)

Her: And what if I did believe that, as you say,
shit
? Would it be so terribly bad, Noah? To have some hope? And some friends? And something to do other than drink? It's like Director Bajwa said on convocation day—you wouldn't know, seeing as you weren't there—

Me: Ha. Ouch.

Her: —we have a purpose, here.

Me: I get it, you want me to seize the day, grab life by the horns. But the Big Dipper is just a bunch of burning gas and you know what, Alice? Grabbing the bull by the horns is actually a really bad idea, unless you're a professional bull wrangler. And even then, given the mortality rate of professional bull wrangling, I would suggest looking into other career options. I hear floristry is booming.

Her: You're being impossible.

Her: Who knows how many more months we have, Noah? How many more months
I
have? So if we care about someone, or think we could learn to care—

Me: We've known each other for, like, a week, Alice.

Her: I know. I'm—I'm sorry. I'm just scared. I didn't mean to—I don't want to pressure you. It's just that we don't have, who knows how much time we have. . . .

I should've told her that time wasn't the issue. Our week might as well have been a year. But I'd lost my parents, I'd lost Alex, and I needed an anchor. I needed someone to need me, to lend me weight, I needed a reason not to simply disappear, Great Cliché or no.

Me: I'm going for a run.

The faster I ran, the more I ached, the easier it was to pretend that I was a physical thing, that I had weight and solidity,
a body,
and that this body had somewhere to run away to, that it was worth running at all.

Westing News

Transcript of Director Bajwa's Convocation Address at Westing Academy

(cont. from page 1)

Every day, we face renewed criticism of our cause. We here at Westing try to shield our students from these realities because we want to give you a semblance of normalcy. But these well-meaning intentions should not contribute to a warped understanding of the world in which you reside. To paraphrase Representative Gilbert from California, quoted this morning in the
New York Times
: Why waste millions upon millions of taxpayer dollars educating a handful of kids who'll never work and never pay taxes?

We are here because we believe the value of an education is not based on utility to society. Westing is an experiment founded on the notion that the value of an education is in its ability to elevate and liberate the soul. We seek to transform the recovery process, fostering partnerships with AwayWeGo to facilitate connections and interpersonal learning while at Westing, and a local, stringently vetted tertiary clinic to ensure the best possible hospice experience post-Westing.

There are many who want to bury this, bury
all of you
as quickly and efficiently as possible. Many who would send you to glorified internment camps, prisons, because there are too many of you, because it is too expensive to provide for you, or so they say. We are the voice that says no, for there are Michelangelos here. There are Sapphos here. But we need your cooperation. You must work. You must produce. And you must stay within these walls. You must contribute to the success of the Westing experiment, so that someday, all youths in recovery will have the quality of life you now enjoy. ◼