Page 179 of The End of the World As We Know It

“Oh,” she said. She had just lit the final candle, yet she kept her arm hovering above them as if she’d made some mistake and was considering how to correct it. “We do. It’s just that I thought the candles would be a nice touch. They make this feel more ceremonial.Would you prefer I turn the lights on? I’ve got permission this evening because of your visit.”

He smiled as he set his linen napkin in his lap. “No, it’s fine. The candles are lovely,” he told her.

“I also have music,” she said. She went over to one corner of the room, where a small record player sat on a console. A stack of 45s stood in a small tower nearby. She began to riffle through them, reciting the song titles and artists’ names as she did so: “I’ve got ‘Yellow Submarine’ by the Beatles, and ‘Crying’ by Roy Orbison, and ‘Baby, Can You Dig Your Man?’ by Larry Underwood, and—”

“No music. Please. Come sit. Let’s eat.”

She had baked fresh bread and made a salad and prepared a stew, which was delicious if a bit hot for such a warm summer evening. She poured him a glass of red wine from a ceramic jug, then poured herself a cup of water. The wine tasted overly fruity, and Zarah explained that they made their own—that there was a whole garden in the back field where they hollowed out coconuts and filled them with raisins and sugar until they fermented in the ground.

“Sometimes the deer find them and get drunk,” she told him. “Have you ever seen a drunk deer? They just sort of amble around in the road and sometimes come right up to the houses. You can walk right up and pet one if it’s drunk enough, though I don’t suggest you do that to any of the bucks.” With her hands, she mimed having an invisible set of antlers rising up from her head. Then she peered down at the suitcase that stood beside his chair. “This is a good town. No one is going to steal your things, Mr. Cree. You don’t have to carry that everywhere you go.”

“Yes, I do,” he said.

“What’s in it?” she asked.

“Humanity’s future.”

“Oh,” she said, and her voice was suddenly very small.

He smiled and nodded, and happened to glimpse his book behindher on the counter. She caught him looking and quickly glanced down at her half-eaten plate, visibly embarrassed.

“Have you read it?” he asked.

“Seven times.”

“Wow. Seven? Really?”

“It’s terribly frightening.”

He got up from the table and went over to the counter. His book, the one that started it all, was covered in plastic film and had a library sticker on the spine. He opened it and looked at the copyright page. “Hey. First edition,” he said. It had a real dollar value, if that meant anything anymore.

“Did you really foresee all of those things? Everything that happened?”

He closed the book and returned to his chair. It was a question he was asked all the time, which he found strange, since the people who always asked it were also true believers.

“It was my first novel,” he said. “I woke up from a nap one afternoon with the sentences burning in my brain. I went to my typewriter and it was like the words were burning through my fingertips, too. I wrote furiously over a few months’ time. It felt like I was channeling some divine intercept, a language from another world.”

“From God?”

“Well, I don’t know about that,” he said, and he nodded at the gold cross Zarah wore around her neck on a chain. “I’ve never been a religious man.”

“Not even after all that’s happened?”

He smiled without humor. He was still staring at that gold cross around her neck. “Did you ever think how funny it is, the symbol of the cross?”

Absently, she reached up and fingered the charm at her throat. “How so?”

“It’s the tool by which your supposed savior was brutally murdered.That’s like having a loved one beaten to death with a hammer, only to kneel and pray to the hammer.”

The look on Zarah’s face told him he had once again gone too far.

“I’m sorry,” he quickly amended. “I shouldn’t have said that. It was crass. And you’re correct, Zarah—there are plenty of stories of God speaking in mysterious ways in the Bible, so who’s to say you’re wrong and I’m right?”

“That’s true,” she said. “But the Bible can be left up to interpretation. Your book, however…”

He nodded, blotting the corners of his mouth with his napkin. “Yes,” he said. “My book is pretty specific.”

“You’re aprophet, Mr. Cree. You foresaw everything that happened—the superflu accidentally released in the Mojave Desert, the descriptions of death and dying, the events in Colorado. There was once even a traveler who came through here who spoke of nuclear destruction in Las Vegas, just like you’d written about. Your novel even mentions the shared dreams that some people claimed to have had of Abagail Freemantle, the old woman in Nebraska.”