The End Has Come

All of it now seems like a dream from which she has awakened. God’s voice is a new day. God’s voice is a curtain rising.

THE NEW WORLD CAN BEGIN, says God, and His voice is a bell tolling a new day. Now Robert is gone and everyone is gone and it’s only her, her alone — thirteen years old and the last person in the world, alone at last with the God she’s waited on for so long.

YOU ARE WHOLE NOW AND THE WORLD CAN BEGIN, says God, His voice like deep glorious bells tolling.

And Pea whispers, “What do you mean?”

WORK, CHILD. IT IS TIME TO GET TO WORK.

A shiver of joy rushes through her. Yes of course. Yes it is time to get to work.

She turns away from the outskirts fence and starts to make her brisk way back to the city.

* * *

Yesterday morning everybody died. Everybody had heard the word of God in their ear, for all of their lives, everybody except for Pea. God some years ago had begun telling the people of the world when and how they were to “go through,” and yesterday everybody obeyed. Now only Pea is left, and she makes her way back through the world that has been left behind, back toward the barren city, feeling stronger and stronger, surer and surer with each step, more powerful as she goes.

Because at last God is speaking to her too. No — not to her too. To her, only.

CHILD, He says, and she stops and closes her eyes and tilts her head back as if to receive the glow of the sun.

EVERYTHING IS BROKEN.

Pea feels a rush of unease. Broken? She wrinkles her brow and blinks. The word is frightening, and she isn’t sure what He means. But God only says BROKEN again, a note of heavy grief coating His mighty voice.

Broken.

When she re-enters the city limits she sees at once what He means. It is not that everybody is dead, and that the world is empty. The world has always been broken, that’s what Pea can see now — it’s always been broken, and Pea has never noticed it before.

She continues to walk, this way and that, turning left or right at the intersections, stepping around the empty vehicles and under the awnings of empty shops. God does not tell her where to go. She wanders of her own will. Broken. She finds herself standing under the shadow of a skinny brown tree in a small traffic island in the dead center of the city. She sees how small the world is, how small it always has been. The world she had thought of as complicated and enormous — the whole world! — now feels pint-sized, a toy landscape. A simple grid.

And it’s broken. The buildings are decrepit. The buildings are tall and glass walled, but they are tilting and the glass is streaked and stained. Doorway beams sag. Cornices are jagged at their edges, where bits of stone have fallen away. The statues of the founders, which stand slightly tilted here and there, presiding over deserted street corners, are rusted, covered in bird shit.

The world that Pea has always loved, the only world she has ever known, is revealed to her as it always has been: worn and old.

LET US BEGIN.

“Begin — begin to what?”

But God just repeats Himself: LET US BEGIN.

Pea smiles. It’s a tiny little smile, almost a giggle, and after all Pea is still a child — for all that she has experienced and is experiencing now, Pea is just a kid. Last week she was running around the yards, arguing with her parents, alternating giddy wildness with sulky preteen irritation. Just last night Robert snuck into her bedroom and confessed his crush, and would have kissed her, had she let him.

Another life — another time.

CHILD — DEAR CHILD —

It’s not a command. God is not insisting. It is a loving suggestion, a sweet urging. There is only one answer. To begin. And so Pea begins.

Let’s call this the morning of the first day.

Pea surveys the leaning brown towers one by one. She stops across the road from Building 32. She remembers her friend Arno, who lived here. She was a funny sweet girl, with big laughing eyes. (Dead now. Everyone is dead.) The building is empty. The door hangs half open. A pane of glass in one of the first-floor apartments is cracked down the middle like a lightning bolt.

As Pea watches, a drift of rust comes loose from a fifth-floor balcony and tumbles down like dirty snow, all the way to the ground.

MY CHILD . . . says God, and she blinks and then begins:

She stares at the unsightly brick pile of Building 32, and then with a surge of that same unexpected power she felt when Robert attacked her, she holds up her hands toward the building, palms out and fingers splayed, and the structure begins to crumble — slowly first, brick by brick, pane by pane, and then faster, stones and sheets of glass sliding down and smashing down, the foundation collapsing inward layer by layer with a series of reverberant booms. Pea gives a girlish gasp and brings her hands up to her mouth, in awe of what’s happening, astonished by the beautiful devastation she has wrought.