The End

  Mats Strandberg

  The End

  Translation by Judith Kiros

  Prologue

  The beginning of the end (May 27)

  My legs feel oddly numb as I follow the stream of students into the hallway. There are people everywhere, and more and more phones ringing. Everyone’s raising their voices, trying to be heard. Some people are already crying. But I can’t feel a thing. It’s as if I’m watching everything from afar. It doesn’t bother me. I can even calmly come to the conclusion that this must be a defense mechanism, and I should be grateful for it.

  Tilda picks up after the first ring.

  “Are you at school?” I ask.

  “No,” she says. “I was on my way from the pool when I heard. I’m almost back home.”

  “I’m on my way.”

  “Hurry.”

  I promise her I will. Just before I end the call, I hear her let out a soft sob.

  Farther down, in one of the other hallways, someone screams. I try to go online; it’s too busy. Hampus says something to me, but I can’t hear him.

  As I pass a window, I feel the warmth of the day through my thin shirt. Out there, the sun is shining; the trees are almost unnaturally green. It’s still early in the morning.

  My first class had just started when the principal popped his head into the classroom, waving at our math teacher, Mr. Andersson. They’d whispered in the hallway. I could see them when I leaned forward. The door to the classroom next to ours burst open. I heard footsteps and muffled voices. I stared down at the test Mr. Andersson had just handed over, the final one for the term. Phones started going off. My thoughts raced—Terrorist attack? War?—but I never could have guessed what Mr. Andersson would come back into the classroom to tell us. His hands shook as he polished his glasses, stalling for time.

  I reach the lobby. Scan the crowd for Johannes. I can’t see him anywhere. Around me, people are crying, loudly and openly. Seeing them just makes it all feel even more surreal. But there are others who seem to react more like me. Who’ve shut down. When I meet their eyes, it’s like we’re glimpsing each other in a dream.

  Someone runs straight into me, a girl in a graduation cap. She drops everything in her arms. A closed laptop lands on the floor with a loud crack, and I hear something smash. Papers fan out across the floor. Pens roll across the tile.

  “Shit, sorry,” I say, bending down to help her.

  But she’s already gone. Only a trace of her sweet perfume lingers in the air.

  I straighten up. Glance at the laptop. Feel a surge of panic. The voices around me fill the air, pressing against my eardrums, draining the air of oxygen. The lobby has never felt so small.

  I make my way outside. It’s full of voices, too, but at least it’s easier to breathe out here. There isn’t a cloud in the sky, only the azure emptiness above me.

  It’s out there.

  The thought sneaks up on me, and I already know that the sky will never look the same to me again.

  My phone vibrates in my hand. My mom Judette’s face fills the screen.

  Her new apartment is only a few blocks away from school. I start running, weaving between groups of students, the soles of my shoes slapping against the asphalt. Birds are chirping noisily. The air is full of right-before-summer-break smells: lilacs, damp grass, dust in the morning shade. A car’s stopped, its rear wheel backed onto the curb, the radio blaring. I recognize the prime minister’s voice but can’t make out the words.

  I run on. A dad is on his way to the playground with his daughter. He listens intently as she rambles about a robot that can transform into a cat. I look at the dad. Wonder if he knows what’s happening. I hope not. I hope he’ll stay blissfully ignorant for at least a few more minutes. They disappear out of sight as I turn the corner and see the antique pink three-story brick building and cross the parking lot, where the worn Toyota Judette bought last week is sitting.

  The smell of the stairway is still unfamiliar to me. I climb the stairs two at a time until I reach the top floor, unlock the front door, and step into the hallway, which is still full of cardboard boxes. The television is on in the living room.

  “Simon!” Judette shouts, getting up from the sofa. She’s still in her bathrobe.

  I turn to the TV, where a government press conference is taking place. Cameras are snapping. It looks as if the prime minister’s been up all night.

  “You’ve heard the news?” Judette asks, uncertain.

  “Yeah.”

  She hugs me. That protective dream feeling threatens to dissolve. I want to stay in her arms. I want to feel small. I want her to promise me that everything is going to be all right, and I want to not give a shit that it would be the biggest lie ever told.

  There’s only one thing I want more than that.

  “Stina’s on her way,” Judette says.

  I pull away. “I have to go to Tilda’s. Where are your car keys?”

  “You can’t drive by yourself,” she says automatically.

  “I’m pretty sure the police won’t be checking people’s licenses today.”

  As soon as the words pass my lips, the reality of what’s happening hits. An abyss opens up, threatening to swallow me whole.

  Judette lays a cool hand against my cheek. “Sweetie, I understand. But we need to be together, to talk about this.”

  “I’ll be right back. I promise.”

  She opens her mouth to object, but I race back to the hall and find the car keys in the pocket of her jacket. Judette calls out behind me. My name’s cut off as the front door slams shut. The keys jangle in my hand as I run down the stairs and back across the parking lot. Judette’s still shouting from the balcony as I jump into the Toyota’s driver’s seat, buckle the seat belt, and start the engine. Pull out onto the road.

  My heart is pounding so hard. I have pins and needles in my fingers, in my face. This is my first time driving alone. I shouldn’t be driving at all right now.

  My phone vibrates. Judette, of course. I put it on the passenger seat, where it continues to buzz like a small, furious animal. I drive along the railroad tracks, pass the train station. A crowd’s gathered on the street outside. They’re watching the skies. A couple of girls in their twenties are laughing hysterically.

  I see something move out of the corner of my eye, and the tires squeal as I slam on the brakes. An old man glares at me from the crosswalk.

  My phone vibrates again. My mom Stina is on the screen this time. I shift gears, carefully easing on the clutch and pressing down on the accelerator. The car jerks forward. I wish I could have taken Stina’s automatic instead.

  I force myself to focus. When I stop at a red light at the edge of the center of town, I see a woman leaning over her steering wheel on the other side of the intersection. It looks like she’s crying. In the car next to hers, a man in a suit is staring blankly ahead. He doesn’t seem to notice the light turning green. The cars behind him honk furiously. I keep driving, past the exit to the old industrial park, North Gate, continuing along the highway until I turn in to the row of houses where Tilda lives with her parents.

  The flowers are blooming, and there are trampolines and colorful swing sets everywhere. Chalk hopscotch grids line the sidewalks.

  The children who live here will never grow up.

  The thought makes the muscles in my chest contract.

  Emma is never going to . . .

  I push away the thought about my sister.

  I can finally see the white wooden house, one of the largest in the neighborhood. The red van with the FIRST KLAS, INC. logo is still parked in the driveway. On a regular morning, Tilda’s dad would have left for work hours ago. Caroline’s car is nowhere to be seen.

  I park on the street. Leave my phone on th
e passenger’s seat. Stina’s calling me again.

  Klas opens the door before I even ring the bell. He’s wearing his stained work pants, the ones with reflective stripes. His arms, fat and muscular, burst from a tight T-shirt with the same company logo as the one on van stamped across the chest—a cartoon man holding a dripping cement trowel, grinning from underneath a jauntily angled cap. But the real Klas isn’t smiling. He’s pale beneath his stubble and his eyes bug out slightly, as if the pressure inside his head has ratcheted up.

  “Hello, son,” he says, and gives me one of his awkward hugs, slapping me hard on the back. “Good God, huh?”

  “Yeah,” I say. “Good God.”

  “They’re saying three and a half months.”

  “Yeah.”

  We stand there awkwardly. I can feel the seconds ticking away, one after the other. How many seconds are three and a half months?

  “She’s in her room,” Klas says at last.

  I slip off my shoes near the door and run upstairs. The door to Tilda’s room is open.

  She’s at the window. Sunlight makes the copper in her dark hair shimmer. She turns as I come in, looking at me with those pale eyes that change color depending on her surroundings, just like water.

  “Everything looks so normal,” she says.

  “I know.”

  “And soon it’ll all be gone.”

  I don’t know how to respond.

  Her open laptop is on the bed. A muted news broadcast is streaming. The American president stands by a podium in front of blue drapes. WHITE HOUSE CONFIRMS. It occurs to me that it’s still the middle of the night over there. Quick glimpses from similar press conferences in Russia, England, Iran. They cut to an interview with the Secretary-General of the UN. I wonder what it’s like in Dominica, if Judette’s family are watching the same images.

  “You’re shaking,” Tilda says quietly, stroking my newly shaved head.

  I wake up, as if from a trance, and wrap my arms around her. Finally. She leans her forehead against my chest. Her hair is still damp, and I inhale the smell of chlorine and shampoo. Tilda’s smell.

  “It might not happen,” she says. “It might just pass right by us. There’s a small chance.”

  I don’t want to say what I’m thinking. That they wouldn’t have told us unless they were sure.

  “Or they could come up with some way to fix it,” she continues. “Maybe they’ll . . . build a giant trampoline or something.”

  I laugh. It comes out more like a sob. Maybe it is.

  “I’m so fucking scared,” she says.

  “Me too.”

  Tilda looks up at me. She’s so beautiful it hurts.

  She can’t die.

  We kiss. The world outside disappears, shrinks until all that’s left is our mouths, our bodies. Tilda locks the door carefully so that Klas won’t hear it downstairs. I move behind her and unzip her hoodie, kiss her shoulders, tasting the chlorine that never leaves her skin completely, stroke her stomach under her white top. Then I remove that, too. Unhook her bra. I need to feel her skin against my own, as many square inches as possible.

  She spreads her blanket across the floor, like we usually do when we aren’t alone in the house. Tilda’s bed is too loud.

  “I didn’t bring protection,” I admit reluctantly as I get undressed.

  “Does that even matter anymore?” Tilda says.

  We look at each other. The world outside the room makes itself known again. I have to force it away, so I kiss her entire body, explore her like it’s the first time.

  Eventually, she grows impatient and pulls me close, throws her legs around my waist, leads me in.

  Whenever one of us risks making too much noise, we silence each other with new kisses. Afterward, Tilda rests her head on my arm. Her back is to me, and she’s breathing heavily. It sounds like she’s drifted off. My eyes travel over the trophies and statues above the bed. Medals with pins pushed through their colorful ribbons. A clipping from the local paper. Tilda is wearing her swimming cap in the picture, laughing under a headline that calls her “up-and-coming.”

  Tilda’s wall of inspiration is full of photos. Competitions all over the country. Swim camps in Denmark, Italy, the Netherlands. Her old friend Lucinda is in most of the pictures taken before last fall.

  My eyes linger on a picture from last winter’s St. Lucia Celebration. The hall, including the swimming pool, is black. Tilda is wearing a crown of candles on her head. The flames are reflected on the dark surface of the pool. She smiles like a maniac at the camera to hide how heavy the billowing robe is in the water. She never shows how much she sacrifices for this life, how much work goes into it maintaining it. I don’t know anyone as determined as Tilda. She knows exactly where she’s going. Me, I get good grades, but I still haven’t figured out what I want to be. The endless number of options is paralyzing. How am I supposed to know what I want to do in ten years? In twenty? In fifty?

  But I don’t have to decide anymore.

  The pins and needles are back.

  Don’t think about it.

  I roll onto my side, putting my free arm around Tilda, and raise my head a little to kiss her cheek.

  But she’s not sleeping. She’s watching the laptop on the bed. Notifications pour into the corner of the screen. Everyone wants to know where she is. If she’s heard what’s happening. The news shows pictures from rural India. Crying women stretch their arms out toward the sky.

  I close my eyes.

  “I love you,” I say.

  “Me too,” says Tilda, without turning around.

  The End

  4 WEEKS, 5 DAYS LEFT

  NAME: LUCINDA

  TELLUS #0392811002

  POST 0001

  Idon’t know a thing about whoever’s reading this. I really mean nothing.

  You might be a creature who looks like me. You might be something beyond my wildest imaginings.

  In movies and on TV, extraterrestrials are almost always almost-people. Something derived from us, only with some small difference: Lizard skin. A pair of extra eyes on their foreheads. Tiny bodies with giant heads. Does any of that sound like you?

  Can you even call it “extraterrestrial” when there’s no more Earth?

  Of course, the most likely scenario is that you don’t exist. And if against all odds you do, how will you understand me? The TellUs app has a language key, a digital Rosetta stone encoded with a few hundred human languages. Hopefully, it makes it possible for you to read the diary entries we write, to decode all the audio files that transform into text before they’re broadcast into space. But how are you supposed to understand anything beyond just the words? I mean, as I’m writing this, I’ve got a live broadcast playing in another window on my screen. The American president is giving a speech. (I don’t even want to mention his name, that’s how much I hate him. You’ll hear enough about him from other people.) He’s in the Oval Office in the White House, his hands folded on the desk in front of him, the American flag in the background. His opening line was “My fellow Americans.” I can tell you these things, but what does it actually tell you? How do I explain how difficult it is to really believe what’s going on? I still haven’t gotten used to associating this scene with anything but thousands of movies and TV shows. In them, the presidents are usually handsome, dignified, reassuring. Everything the real president isn’t. (These scenes are usually about aliens that have come to blow up Manhattan and then get thoroughly defeated. I apologize. We’ve usually assumed that you would want to colonize, enslave, or exterminate us. Probably because certain members of the human race have done this very thing to other members of the human race. I don’t know if you study psychology, but around here, we call it “projecting.”)

  The president’s speech confirms what all sensible people have understood by this summer. The final calculations have been made. There’s no longer any room for doubt. In just over one month, it’s all really over. We even have a specific time. September 16 at 4:12
a.m. (Swedish time), the comet called Foxworth enters the Earth’s atmosphere. The air beneath it will become ten times hotter than the surface of the sun. Everything in the comet’s path will be destroyed before it finally slams into the northwest coast of Africa, near the Canary Islands. The atmosphere will burn, and the sky will fill with light, brighter than anything we’ve ever seen. The shock wave will reach us in perfect silence, because it moves faster than the speed of sound. A couple of minutes after impact, the seas will turn into steam and the mountains will boil. Four billion years of evolution, suddenly gone. And there’s nothing we can do about it.

  That’s not how the president chooses to put it. He doesn’t talk about the details of how we’re going to die, doesn’t address the rumor that the Earth’s crust might ripple and hurl us all into space.

  Instead, he talks about “staying at home, being with your loved ones,” and I wonder what that’s like for all the people who haven’t got “loved ones” to stay at home with.

  It’s been a couple of months since we found out the comet was coming—the news broke on May 27. The world hasn’t been the same since. Everything we took for granted fell apart in just a few days. People stopped going to work. Schools shut down. The stock market collapsed. All trade ceased after just a few days. Money became useless. Travelers fought to get a seat on the last flights home. The roads were clogged with traffic.

  The chaos was particularly bad during that period. New wars erupted out of nowhere, while old conflicts ended overnight. No one knew which rules applied anymore. And the worst of it happened in the places with the most social inequality. The oppressed masses had less to lose. They revolted. Occupied the palaces of the wealthy and plundered the luxury boutiques. In more democratic societies, it was easier for the citizens to stand united.

  Here in Sweden, we’ve found our way back to some semblance of normalcy. Even though nothing is the same, surprisingly many things actually work.

  Naturally, not everyone thinks Foxworth is going to hit us. One of the comet deniers is being interviewed on the news as I write this. He has that same impatient, ironic air they all seem to share—a preemptive I told you so attitude. And in some ways, I understand them. The fact that we haven’t spotted a comet this size years before seems incredible. It’s enormous, hundreds of miles across, but also dark and murky, and it came creeping up on us in such a far-flung orbit that the last time it closed in on us, there were no humans to notice it. It turns out that despite all our instruments and technological advancements, we haven’t kept a close eye on the space around us. There’s been a lot of debate about that this summer. Who are we supposed to blame? Why didn’t the scientists get more funding? Who is the guiltiest? As if that matters anymore. The risk that a comet would exterminate us was so extremely improbable that no one took it seriously. On the other hand, the chance that life would evolve on this planet and that we’d become its rulers was even smaller. In an infinite universe with infinite possibilities, everything that happens is improbable.