Fault Lines
originally published in Issue 3 of Wizards in Space
I’m on Jamie’s doorstep in Seattle the weekend the asteroid is supposed to hit, drawing in deep breaths of the cool, wet air, trying to calm myself. I knew he had a new place up here, but I was expecting an apartment like mine. This is a real house, an adult house with a driveway and a garage and an upstairs. I should be happy for him, I think, because this means he’s doing well, but first I have to recalibrate because this is not at all what I imagined.
Our mother worried when Jamie and I moved to the West Coast — “You’re living on fault lines” — but the relocation never troubled me. If a truly dangerous earthquake were going to hit either of us, I’m sure Smith would have included it in his theory.
In the upper branches of family lore, James Marlborough Smith is remembered for three reasons: he saved my great-great-great-grandmother from the inferno that destroyed their home in Ireland, he brought her to America, and he incepted Smith’s End Theory. These are entirely separate from our mother’s reasons for branding us with his name, which she only told us after we’d left for college; she needed to make some kind of familial penance for marrying a Jewish boy.
I let the piney air drift over my shoulders, and I run through my rationale again. I am here because I haven’t seen Jamie in a long time. I am here because I need a weekend away from the Berkeley campus. I am here because I miss him. They’re all true, to some degree, and my chest constricts when I calculate that it’s been about six months since I last saw him. Bad twin, I think, picturing the sparse emails and Facebook messages we’ve sent each other in that time. Jamie always replies faster than I do.
The door opens before I can ring the bell and, although it swings into the house, I still step back. There will always be an element of looking at Jamie that feels like looking into a mirror, and it’s especially powerful after so much time apart. His smile is puzzled, but his blue eyes are bright.
“Why are you standing in the rain?” he asks. “Come in.”
He spreads his arms when I cross the threshold, and I let him hug me. He smells different, more like cologne than the tinge of Dove soap I remember. He’s wearing his trademark T-shirt/button-down/hoodie ensemble, and that, at least, is familiar.
“How are you?” Jamie asks when I pull out of the hug. Upon closer inspection, I can see that he’s starting to look more like our father than ever, with lines crinkling around his eyes and a paunch gathering around his waist.
“I’m doing well,” I say, lifting my hair off my shoulders and taking in the kitchen around me. There are more appliances than would fit in my kitchen, and everything is white or chrome or glass. I crane my neck; in the next room, there’s a wall composed almost entirely of windows. “And so are you, apparently.”
He grins. “Do you like the house?”
“It’s not what I was expecting,” I say. He takes my jacket as I shrug out of it. “I thought you’d have one like mine. But it’s very nice, yes. Way ahead of the usual bachelor pad.”
“Not quite a bachelor pad,” he says, and I remember, with a rush of embarrassment, that according to Facebook, he’s been in a relationship for a while now.
“Nick went to get dinner,” he continues, hanging my jacket on a peg by the door. “I told him Chinese — I figured pork fried rice was still a safe option for you.”
I nod, and he adds, “I think you’ll like him. He’s really excited to meet you. Ever since we moved in, he’s been like, ‘When can we have your sister over? When can I meet her?’”
“Nick lives here?” I ask, and my stomach clenches when he nods. It’s strange to remember that, at various intervals in his life, people have been closer to Jamie than I have. For a while, he was dating a girl named Sara, who I never met, and there were a couple of people before her, and I guess now there’s Nick.
Jamie and I were both shy growing up, but while his shyness was limited to strangers, mine extended as far as my own parents. “I worry about Marley,” I remember overhearing at nine years old. “Her teachers say she won’t talk to anyone but Jamie,” my mother went on, and my aunt Clara nodded sympathetically. “And Jamie sticks to her like a barnacle. He won’t let her out of his sight.”
“Have them put in separate classes,” Clara advised. “They’ve got to learn eventually.”
My mother sighed. “I’m afraid she’ll shut down.”
“You should get her tested,” said Clara. “If she’s so uncommunicative. And you know how she latches onto things for months at a time, like the fossils—”
“Wolves,” my mother interrupted. “It’s wolves now.”
“Or wolves, whatever. She develops those obsessions, and she’s uncommunicative, and she hasn’t made eye contact with me since she was a newborn. You should get her tested.”
In the end, we both got tested. I refused to do it without Jamie. We discovered that I’m on the autism spectrum, and Jamie isn’t on the spectrum at all.
“What is Nick like?” I ask, because Jamie once told me that people like when you ask about their significant others. I learned that Sara liked skiing, small dogs, superhero movies, and sashimi.
“Nick is very sweet,” says Jamie. He beckons and nods toward the room with the wall of windows. “Come on, I’ll show you around.” I follow him, and he continues, “Nick’s stubborn, like you, but he’s laid-back, like me. He likes cooking and old books and fixing stuff and weird weather. He’s fascinated by natural disasters. I think you’ll get along.”
“Does he know about the asteroid?” I ask, and Jamie turns, silhouetted against the rain-mottled windows. His brow furrows, and I begin weaving a tiny braid into my hair. A roll of thunder clears its throat.
“The asteroid?” he repeats, and when I glance up his head is cocked.
“Yeah,” I say, eyes on the section of hair I’m braiding. “An asteroid is supposed to hit California tonight. An impact event shall occur in the late hours of 1 March 2014, on the central West Coast, when an asteroid collides with the Earth.”
“Smith’s End?” asks Jamie. I nod.
“You’re still writing about that, right? For your dissertation?”
I nod again. “It’s going well. It’s almost done, I think.”
“How long is it now?”
“Sixty-four pages.”
“And you’re proving … what, again?”
I finish one little braid and embark on another. “I’m discussing the cultural impact of and rationale behind apocalypse theories, in general. That humans came so far so quickly because they were never meant to have much of a history. We only occupy the last sixty seconds of the evolutionary clock, you know. And no other species has made the kinds of advances we’ve made in such a short amount of time — so it’s meant to be, see? We did a lot because we weren’t meant to have much time to do it.”
Smith’s End Theory declares that “humanity’s time will be finished and the clock will reset itself, thus relieved of the human burden,” and goes on to describe a solar blackout in the summer of 2016 that will obliterate us. But unlike the rest of the theories my dissertation covers, Smith’s End has no weak link. The Mayan calendar resets itself, like any other calendar. Terence McKenna invented his own scientific process to predict world events that had already occurred when he tried to test the I Ching. The Hopis published their prophecy too late to call it a prediction. Last weekend passed with no sign of the Vikings’ Ragnarök. Even Nostradamus was too vague for his own good. But since its inception in 1904, Smith’s End has predicted the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, the Tunguska event in 1908, the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, Hurricane Katrina, the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, and the Nisqually earthquake in 2011. It’s impossible to refute its accuracy so far.
Jamie nods, lowering the shades of the tall windows. Outside, it’s getting darker.
I can pinpoint the moment I latched onto Smith’s End Theory. Although I knew for most of my senior year of high school that Jamie and I would split up for college — he’d been accepted early at Cornell, and I’d gotten into UC Berkeley — orientation still found me woefully underprepared to interact on my own. I could recite my name, where I was from, and some of my interests, but when it came to anything deeper than that, I choked. Often I can’t formulate a response to people’s questions in an amount of time that’s considered normal, and when that happens I’ve found that they’re likely to give up talking to me.
During one icebreaker at Berkeley, a girl named Jasmine asked what the most unusual thing about me was. After several seconds of watching me flounder, she began to turn away from me. She was the only person to approach me during this exercise, and my stomach dropped as I watched her interest fade. So I cleaved to the most elementary part of myself and blurted, “My great-great-great-grandfather predicted the apocalypse.”
She stopped, and a strange gratification flooded through me. “I’m named after him,” I continued, and she met my eyes. I looked away, but kept talking; I explained the entire theory, and when she asked me to sit with her at dinner later, I said yes. That night I called Jamie, the only person in the family who put up with the long, fuzzy silences that punctuated my phone calls, and told him that I’d made a friend.
Jasmine and I didn’t stay in touch the rest of freshman year, but that was okay with me. I was busy collecting other theories and measuring their accuracy against Smith’s End, marveling at the amount of missed marks in predictive apocalyptic science, and trying to figure out why, exactly, these theories kept being produced. After studying them for almost eight years, I think I’ve finally got it: We want to know how much time we have left so we can measure how much to accomplish before then. We want to pace ourselves, but we also need a deadline to hang over our heads to pressure us into doing it all. For example, this spring I’ll finish my dissertation. The next two years will be dedicated to getting it recognized and published, and then it’ll be 2016.
Jamie asked once if it bothered me that trusting Smith’s End meant resigning myself to the idea that I’d be dead before I hit thirty. “It would bother me,” he said. I disagreed. I watched Jamie cycle through practically a dozen career ideas when we were younger — astronaut, veterinarian, pilot, etc., until he finally settled on web designer when we hit college — but I never felt anything like that. Nothing drove me in a particular direction, toward a particular path. When I imagined the future, it always looked barren, menacing. It demanded I fill it with something, but offered no inkling as to what. Even when I enrolled at Berkeley, I had no idea what to study. It wasn’t until I began researching Smith’s End that I started considering cultural anthropology, and it felt like something had clicked into place — this was the reason why I had never been able to consider my post-academic future. If Smith’s End checked out, I wouldn’t have one.
“What does your professor think of it?” Jamie asks. A stroke of lightning flashes outside, and I turn away. I don’t like lightning. Its unpredictability puts me on edge, and I’m grateful that Jamie has already closed the shades.
“She thinks it’s a good idea.” Petra didn’t think it was such a good idea when I came into her office three years ago and talked for two hours about only Smith’s End Theory, but after a lot of arguing and pleading and locking horns, we agreed that the analysis of apocalypse theories as a cross-cultural phenomenon would make for a much more substantial topic.
“Do you think you can prove it right?” Jamie asks, pausing in the doorway of the living room.
“Of course. After the asteroid hits, the only thing left on the list is the solar blackout in 2016. And if the rest have happened just like Smith said they would, why wouldn’t the last one follow suit? It makes sense. And of course we won’t really know until 2016, if you want to get technical, but there won’t be a concrete reason for people to doubt it anymore.”
“That does make sense,” Jamie agrees. Another shock of lightning flickers behind the shades. “Do you want to see upstairs?”
“Sure.”
“Will Berkeley still be standing after this asteroid hits?” he asks, leading me up the staircase.
I shrug. “If not, I’ll get published somewhere else.”
“I guess that’s true,” he says. “You know how grad school works better than I do.”
Jamie was offered three jobs in his first few months out of college. I’ve never asked him, but I’m almost positive he’s never felt the crippling aimlessness I used to feel when I considered how I’d fill the rest of my life.
“This is the guest room,” he says, flipping on the lights of the room closest to the stairs. “I found some of the flannel sheets you like and put those on the bed for you. And I picked up some lavender soap and shampoo, too, in case you didn’t like the ones we have.”
“Thank you,” I say, turning off the lights. “Where’s your room?”
“Across the hall,” he says. “Bathroom’s there,” he adds, pointing.
“Then where’s Nick’s room?” I ask, and it’s only when he squints at me that I realize my mistake.
I try not to think about their sharing a bed. The idea of someone else’s skin on mine makes me cringe, and the idea of sleeping on sheets that are damp with someone else’s sweat repulses me to the point that I want to take a shower to cleanse myself of the thought. I wouldn’t say that I admire Jamie for being able to do it, exactly, but I’m impressed, in a horrified sort of way.
The sound of a rising garage door chafes at my ears, and Jamie’s eyes crinkle again as his smile blooms. “Come on,” he says. “Nick’s home.”
I trail after him, working another tiny braid into my hair. This is the first of Jamie’s serious significant others that I’ve met; I’m unsure of the protocol. Nick will probably want to shake my hand or hug me, and I’m not okay with that.
Nick’s opening paper bags of Chinese food on the kitchen island, and he looks up and grins when Jamie and I come in. He’s tall, thinner than Jamie, with olive skin and hair that’s a lighter brown than ours. His jaw is sharp, his chin almost triangular, but his smile looks genuine. I smile back, tentatively, without meeting his eyes.
“Marley?” he says, approaching me. “Hi. I’m Nick. It’s nice to finally meet you.”
“Hello.” I flick a glance toward Jamie, who’s still in the doorway, watching the two of us. He nods, and I nod back, comforted, until I realize that he’s not nodding at me.
“Jamie says you’re not cool with, like, touching or anything, so I won’t shake your hand, but I just want to say ... welcome to our home.” He scoops a handful of soy sauce packets out of the bottom of the bag and almost drops them, clipping his elbow on the counter as he recovers. “Jamie, you forgot to tell me to order egg rolls, but I got them anyway. Figured you’d want some.”
“Bless you,” says Jamie, sliding out of the doorway and opening one of the cabinets behind Nick. He takes out three plates, and as he’s pulling utensils from a drawer, he kisses Nick hello. Their lips don’t meet for long, but as I watch, hanging back against the refrigerator, I wonder, briefly, what it must be like to care that much for someone. To be able to guess what that person is thinking or feeling, whether it’s about something as big as a dissertation or as small as an order of egg rolls.
“Can you help Nick bring the food to the table?” Jamie asks, crossing past me to the dining room, and I nod, picking up two cartons. Nick smiles at me across the island. I look away.
“Jamie says you’re working on your thesis,” he says, grabbing a couple more boxes. “What are you writing about?”
“Apocalypse theories as a cross-cultural phenomenon, and the rationales thereof.”
“Do you talk about the one you and Jamie are named after?” he asks, and I turn just enough to see him. He’s balancing four containers in his hands, and I meet his eyes for a split second before glancing away. “Smith’s End?”
“Yes,” I say.
“I want to hear all about it,” he says, carrying the boxes into the dining room. “Jamie says you’re practically an expert on apocalypse theories, so tell me everything.”
And I do, because it’s easy not to look at him when I have a meal to concentrate on, and I have Jamie across the table if I need a break from talking, and I have sixty-four pages of information to work with, and Nick is a good, quiet listener.
While Nick’s doing the dishes, Jamie makes the two of us lavender chamomile tea, his with honey, mine without, and lights the fireplace in the living room. Fireplaces are the antitheses of lightning; they calm me down, keep me centered. The one in our living room was my go-to mood equalizer when we were younger.
“What do you think of Nick?” Jamie asks, chasing the words with a swallow of tea. “You seem to get along pretty well.”
I nod, turning the mug in my hands. “I like him. He’s ... considerate.”
“He is,” Jamie agrees. “He wanted to make a good impression on you.”
“He did.”
“Well, good,” says Jamie, “because he’ll probably be around for a while.”
“Until 2016?” I ask, and he smiles. In the next room, Nick’s voice cuts through the running water, singing a Jason Mraz song. Jamie loves Jason Mraz.
“I hope so,” says Jamie. “I’d want him with me at the end of the world.”
I sip my tea. There’s a moment filled with only the sounds of the fire before Jamie adds, “He might be, uh, a permanent part of my life.”
“Are you going to marry him?” I ask, pausing with the tea halfway to my lips. Marriage has always struck me as a pointless concept; our parents’ marriage, albeit intact, has never seemed like a matter of joy or fulfillment. I prefer to commit myself to ideas. I’ve found I can count on those in a way I can’t count on people.
“I’d like to,” says Jamie, eyes on the fire. “But I wanted to make sure you got along with him first, because, you know, it wouldn’t work out if you didn’t.”
If Nick becomes a fixture in Jamie’s life, he’ll take my position as the person Jamie cares about the most. I splay the fingers of one hand and pull them into a fist. Jamie is arguably the only person I really care about. Without him to ground me, I imagine myself floundering. I set my mug on the glass coffee table and begin to braid my hair.
“Marley?” Jamie asks. In the kitchen, Nick switches to Michael Jackson, whom Jamie hates.
I nod. Even if they get married, I’ll only have to put up with it for two years, and I’ll be busy revising my dissertation for most of that time anyway.
“Okay,” I say, although I know it sounds flat. “That sounds nice.”
“I know it’s a change,” he says. “But you can see how much he means to me, right?”
I understand how much Jamie means to me, and I understand, to some extent, what I mean to Jamie. I know that he cares about me because he buys the right sheets, and he remembers which foods I like and which textures I don’t, and he puts away his phone to give me his full attention, and he knows to light a fire before I ask, and he shuts the shades before the lightning even begins. Nick and Jamie clearly care about each other — they kiss and sleep in the same bed, and Nick remembers the egg rolls, and Jamie puts up with his singing. But I don’t care that much about anyone but Jamie, because Jamie is the only person who has ever made the effort to communicate the way that I do.
“I don’t know,” I tell Jamie. “But you should do what makes you happy, I guess.” I finish another braid and finish my tea, feeling the weight of his gaze on me. “Can you turn on the news?”
He acquiesces, and I lean forward, eager for an update. It’s ten o’clock, so there are a couple more “late hours” to go, but I figure any time between now and midnight is fair game for this asteroid.
There’s nothing yet, so I tell Jamie I’m going to bed. I consider bringing my mug to the kitchen, but I can still hear Nick belting outdated music, so I leave it on the coffee table for Jamie to take care of. I have spent most of my life feeling like I am among the wrong people, speaking the wrong language, but this is the first time I have felt that way around Jamie, and it makes me ache in a way I don’t have the words to express.
~
I don’t sleep easily with the anticipation of the asteroid boiling in my stomach, but I doze off eventually. In the morning, I wake up disoriented, the flannel sheets having fooled me into thinking I’m in my bed in California. I flounder for a few seconds before I remember: I’m in Jamie’s guest room, in Seattle, because of the asteroid.
The asteroid. I fumble around in bed for my phone—I sleep with it because I like waking up to its vibration because all of its alarm tones are too jarring — and check my messages. I don’t know who I’m expecting — my mother, maybe, or Petra — but nobody has tried to contact me to ask if I’m okay. This could mean that (a) nobody cares whether I’m all right or not, except Jamie, who knows that I am, and/or (b) the asteroid hasn’t hit.
But it has to have hit.
I pull on a hoodie and pad downstairs to turn on the TV. An asteroid hitting California would be national news, even if it were a small one. But I flip through station after station, and there is nothing. Tensions are pulsing between Russia and Ukraine, there are flash floods ravaging parts of California, but there is no evidence of an asteroid.
My hands begin to shake as they weave through my hair. Smith’s End clearly states that it would hit on March 1, 2014. There’s no room for interpretation; this isn’t like the Mayans. Smith was using the same calendar in 1904 that we’re using today. If this asteroid didn’t hit, then the theory is no longer true. If the theory is no longer true, I have an entire life sprawling ahead of me that is suddenly, horrifyingly blank.
My mug is still on the coffee table from last night, and I pick it up to steady my hands, but it reminds me of Jamie and Nick, and I think that yes, ideas can fail you just as easily as people.
I press the cool ceramic mug to my forehead and my cheeks, but it does nothing to calm me down. I would light a fire, but I don’t know where Jamie keeps his matches or his lighter, and it is this helplessness in the face of something so simple that drives me to hurl the mug against the concrete fireplace.
The sound of shattering is louder than I expect in the quiet house, and it stings my ears. I feel myself begin to disintegrate, and when Jamie comes downstairs a few minutes later, I’m crying in the corner of the couch as Chris Cuomo discusses Crimea on CNN, squeezing my fingernails into my palms in short, urgent pulses.
“Marley,” he says softly, sitting next to me. “It’s okay, Marley, I’m right here.”
I squeeze my hands harder and shake my head. “What am I going to do?”
“You’ll figure something out,” he soothes. “You can talk to your advisor.”
I don’t say anything. Petra won’t say I told you so, but whatever she does say will be spoken with patronizing eyes, eyes that will say You should have known better. Without Smith’s End to provide a conclusion, my thesis’s direction is weak at best. With all those years open, ripe for more knowledge, for progress—who knows what humanity can achieve with all that time. But with the maw of the future yawning before me, I disagree with Jamie more than ever: it is infinitely more comforting to know your expiration date.
Jamie picks up a strand of my hair and begins to braid it, and I sniffle, trying to smooth my breathing. “I’m so sorry, Marley,” he murmurs. I dig my fingernails into my palms and hold them there as I inhale, loosening my grip as I push the air out.
By the time Nick comes downstairs, I have pulled myself together and Jamie has picked up the ceramic shards and lit a fire. I can’t look at him, not after explaining how foolproof the theory was last night. It’s only when he drifts two fingers through Jamie’s hair as he passes by that I remember that Nick is the first person with whom Jamie would have chosen to spend Smith’s outcome.
“Will you be okay going back to Berkeley?” Jamie asks over a new mug of tea, watching me gaze into the fire. “Do you want me to come with you?”
I shake my head. It’s bad enough that he and Nick have seen me come apart, after I explained to Nick last night how infallible everything seemed. I pull my arms tight across my chest and curl my hands into tight fists. I don’t want to stay here, with Nick hovering in my periphery, not when I know that I’m facing a lot more than two years of their future now.
I don’t want to leave Jamie. I need someone to believe in me while I get back on my feet, and Petra isn’t going to do that for me. But if Jamie comes, he’ll have to leave eventually. He has something tethering him here now; he isn’t at my beck and call anymore.
I don’t know if I can stand to watch Jamie leave me behind for Nick.
“Are you sure?” says Jamie.
I nod. “I should go soon,” I say. “It’s a long drive.”
“It’s not a problem to come with you,” he pushes. I stretch one hand and squeeze it closed. If he comes, he will leave, and I don’t know how I can deal with that.
“I’ll be okay.”
“Okay,” he says, and he lets me finish my tea in silence.
He hugs me hard before I leave, harder than I’m comfortable with. I squeeze him tight too, and I try to make the embrace say thank you and I love you and goodbye because I know I’m not good at saying any of those things.
I watch Nick squirm, hands in his pockets, when I let go of Jamie. I thrust my own hands in the pockets of my cardigan, hunching my shoulders. “Can I...?” he asks, but he doesn’t finish the sentence. “It was really nice to have you here,” he says. “I hope you come back soon.”
I nod, squeezing my fists shut in my pockets, and he nods too.
Jamie carries my suitcase outside, and tells me to call him if I need anything. “Anything,” he repeats, shoving the suitcase into the passenger seat. “If you need me to drop everything and come down to Berkeley, I’ll do that.”
“I know,” I say. “I’ll call you when I get home, okay?”
“Okay,” he says, and he hugs me one more time before I drive away.
The drive to Seattle took thirteen hours, and I’m bracing myself for thirteen more full of anguish. I turn on the radio in the vain hope of hearing some overlooked news report — maybe it’s taken this long to figure out what has happened, or to identify the mass as an asteroid, or to research Smith’s End and realize that there was a way to see this coming. But I spend five and a half hours switching among different stations, and although no one reports anything along the lines of an asteroid, I keep it on just in case. It makes me feel a little less alone.
The six-hour mark is approaching when I catch a fuzzy Seattle station in the middle of a broadcast about an earthquake, and everything inside me freezes at the words six-point-nine.
I swerve to the shoulder of the highway and paw through my purse for my phone. All I can see is that wall of windows shattering; all I can think is Jamie, Jamie, Jamie.
The phone rings, goes to voicemail. My fingernails bite into my palms.
If I lose Jamie, I lose the only person who knows how to translate me to the rest of the world. I lose the only other speaker of my language.
I call him again, dizzy at the prospect of both of my tethers coming undone. If I have no Smith’s End, and no Jamie, and all these years to fill on my own —
There’s a breath on the other end of the line, and my chest catches.
“He’s okay,” says Nick from four hundred miles away, and the flood of relief is so sweeping that for a moment I can’t see, can’t breathe. I stay on the shoulder of the road as my lungs begin to work again, smoothing myself out, and then I ask, “Are you?”
© 2019 Hannah Lamarre
Our mother worried when Jamie and I moved to the West Coast — “You’re living on fault lines” — but the relocation never troubled me. If a truly dangerous earthquake were going to hit either of us, I’m sure Smith would have included it in his theory.
In the upper branches of family lore, James Marlborough Smith is remembered for three reasons: he saved my great-great-great-grandmother from the inferno that destroyed their home in Ireland, he brought her to America, and he incepted Smith’s End Theory. These are entirely separate from our mother’s reasons for branding us with his name, which she only told us after we’d left for college; she needed to make some kind of familial penance for marrying a Jewish boy.
I let the piney air drift over my shoulders, and I run through my rationale again. I am here because I haven’t seen Jamie in a long time. I am here because I need a weekend away from the Berkeley campus. I am here because I miss him. They’re all true, to some degree, and my chest constricts when I calculate that it’s been about six months since I last saw him. Bad twin, I think, picturing the sparse emails and Facebook messages we’ve sent each other in that time. Jamie always replies faster than I do.
The door opens before I can ring the bell and, although it swings into the house, I still step back. There will always be an element of looking at Jamie that feels like looking into a mirror, and it’s especially powerful after so much time apart. His smile is puzzled, but his blue eyes are bright.
“Why are you standing in the rain?” he asks. “Come in.”
He spreads his arms when I cross the threshold, and I let him hug me. He smells different, more like cologne than the tinge of Dove soap I remember. He’s wearing his trademark T-shirt/button-down/hoodie ensemble, and that, at least, is familiar.
“How are you?” Jamie asks when I pull out of the hug. Upon closer inspection, I can see that he’s starting to look more like our father than ever, with lines crinkling around his eyes and a paunch gathering around his waist.
“I’m doing well,” I say, lifting my hair off my shoulders and taking in the kitchen around me. There are more appliances than would fit in my kitchen, and everything is white or chrome or glass. I crane my neck; in the next room, there’s a wall composed almost entirely of windows. “And so are you, apparently.”
He grins. “Do you like the house?”
“It’s not what I was expecting,” I say. He takes my jacket as I shrug out of it. “I thought you’d have one like mine. But it’s very nice, yes. Way ahead of the usual bachelor pad.”
“Not quite a bachelor pad,” he says, and I remember, with a rush of embarrassment, that according to Facebook, he’s been in a relationship for a while now.
“Nick went to get dinner,” he continues, hanging my jacket on a peg by the door. “I told him Chinese — I figured pork fried rice was still a safe option for you.”
I nod, and he adds, “I think you’ll like him. He’s really excited to meet you. Ever since we moved in, he’s been like, ‘When can we have your sister over? When can I meet her?’”
“Nick lives here?” I ask, and my stomach clenches when he nods. It’s strange to remember that, at various intervals in his life, people have been closer to Jamie than I have. For a while, he was dating a girl named Sara, who I never met, and there were a couple of people before her, and I guess now there’s Nick.
Jamie and I were both shy growing up, but while his shyness was limited to strangers, mine extended as far as my own parents. “I worry about Marley,” I remember overhearing at nine years old. “Her teachers say she won’t talk to anyone but Jamie,” my mother went on, and my aunt Clara nodded sympathetically. “And Jamie sticks to her like a barnacle. He won’t let her out of his sight.”
“Have them put in separate classes,” Clara advised. “They’ve got to learn eventually.”
My mother sighed. “I’m afraid she’ll shut down.”
“You should get her tested,” said Clara. “If she’s so uncommunicative. And you know how she latches onto things for months at a time, like the fossils—”
“Wolves,” my mother interrupted. “It’s wolves now.”
“Or wolves, whatever. She develops those obsessions, and she’s uncommunicative, and she hasn’t made eye contact with me since she was a newborn. You should get her tested.”
In the end, we both got tested. I refused to do it without Jamie. We discovered that I’m on the autism spectrum, and Jamie isn’t on the spectrum at all.
“What is Nick like?” I ask, because Jamie once told me that people like when you ask about their significant others. I learned that Sara liked skiing, small dogs, superhero movies, and sashimi.
“Nick is very sweet,” says Jamie. He beckons and nods toward the room with the wall of windows. “Come on, I’ll show you around.” I follow him, and he continues, “Nick’s stubborn, like you, but he’s laid-back, like me. He likes cooking and old books and fixing stuff and weird weather. He’s fascinated by natural disasters. I think you’ll get along.”
“Does he know about the asteroid?” I ask, and Jamie turns, silhouetted against the rain-mottled windows. His brow furrows, and I begin weaving a tiny braid into my hair. A roll of thunder clears its throat.
“The asteroid?” he repeats, and when I glance up his head is cocked.
“Yeah,” I say, eyes on the section of hair I’m braiding. “An asteroid is supposed to hit California tonight. An impact event shall occur in the late hours of 1 March 2014, on the central West Coast, when an asteroid collides with the Earth.”
“Smith’s End?” asks Jamie. I nod.
“You’re still writing about that, right? For your dissertation?”
I nod again. “It’s going well. It’s almost done, I think.”
“How long is it now?”
“Sixty-four pages.”
“And you’re proving … what, again?”
I finish one little braid and embark on another. “I’m discussing the cultural impact of and rationale behind apocalypse theories, in general. That humans came so far so quickly because they were never meant to have much of a history. We only occupy the last sixty seconds of the evolutionary clock, you know. And no other species has made the kinds of advances we’ve made in such a short amount of time — so it’s meant to be, see? We did a lot because we weren’t meant to have much time to do it.”
Smith’s End Theory declares that “humanity’s time will be finished and the clock will reset itself, thus relieved of the human burden,” and goes on to describe a solar blackout in the summer of 2016 that will obliterate us. But unlike the rest of the theories my dissertation covers, Smith’s End has no weak link. The Mayan calendar resets itself, like any other calendar. Terence McKenna invented his own scientific process to predict world events that had already occurred when he tried to test the I Ching. The Hopis published their prophecy too late to call it a prediction. Last weekend passed with no sign of the Vikings’ Ragnarök. Even Nostradamus was too vague for his own good. But since its inception in 1904, Smith’s End has predicted the San Francisco earthquake in 1906, the Tunguska event in 1908, the Tangshan earthquake in 1976, Hurricane Katrina, the eruption of Eyjafjallajökull in 2010, and the Nisqually earthquake in 2011. It’s impossible to refute its accuracy so far.
Jamie nods, lowering the shades of the tall windows. Outside, it’s getting darker.
I can pinpoint the moment I latched onto Smith’s End Theory. Although I knew for most of my senior year of high school that Jamie and I would split up for college — he’d been accepted early at Cornell, and I’d gotten into UC Berkeley — orientation still found me woefully underprepared to interact on my own. I could recite my name, where I was from, and some of my interests, but when it came to anything deeper than that, I choked. Often I can’t formulate a response to people’s questions in an amount of time that’s considered normal, and when that happens I’ve found that they’re likely to give up talking to me.
During one icebreaker at Berkeley, a girl named Jasmine asked what the most unusual thing about me was. After several seconds of watching me flounder, she began to turn away from me. She was the only person to approach me during this exercise, and my stomach dropped as I watched her interest fade. So I cleaved to the most elementary part of myself and blurted, “My great-great-great-grandfather predicted the apocalypse.”
She stopped, and a strange gratification flooded through me. “I’m named after him,” I continued, and she met my eyes. I looked away, but kept talking; I explained the entire theory, and when she asked me to sit with her at dinner later, I said yes. That night I called Jamie, the only person in the family who put up with the long, fuzzy silences that punctuated my phone calls, and told him that I’d made a friend.
Jasmine and I didn’t stay in touch the rest of freshman year, but that was okay with me. I was busy collecting other theories and measuring their accuracy against Smith’s End, marveling at the amount of missed marks in predictive apocalyptic science, and trying to figure out why, exactly, these theories kept being produced. After studying them for almost eight years, I think I’ve finally got it: We want to know how much time we have left so we can measure how much to accomplish before then. We want to pace ourselves, but we also need a deadline to hang over our heads to pressure us into doing it all. For example, this spring I’ll finish my dissertation. The next two years will be dedicated to getting it recognized and published, and then it’ll be 2016.
Jamie asked once if it bothered me that trusting Smith’s End meant resigning myself to the idea that I’d be dead before I hit thirty. “It would bother me,” he said. I disagreed. I watched Jamie cycle through practically a dozen career ideas when we were younger — astronaut, veterinarian, pilot, etc., until he finally settled on web designer when we hit college — but I never felt anything like that. Nothing drove me in a particular direction, toward a particular path. When I imagined the future, it always looked barren, menacing. It demanded I fill it with something, but offered no inkling as to what. Even when I enrolled at Berkeley, I had no idea what to study. It wasn’t until I began researching Smith’s End that I started considering cultural anthropology, and it felt like something had clicked into place — this was the reason why I had never been able to consider my post-academic future. If Smith’s End checked out, I wouldn’t have one.
“What does your professor think of it?” Jamie asks. A stroke of lightning flashes outside, and I turn away. I don’t like lightning. Its unpredictability puts me on edge, and I’m grateful that Jamie has already closed the shades.
“She thinks it’s a good idea.” Petra didn’t think it was such a good idea when I came into her office three years ago and talked for two hours about only Smith’s End Theory, but after a lot of arguing and pleading and locking horns, we agreed that the analysis of apocalypse theories as a cross-cultural phenomenon would make for a much more substantial topic.
“Do you think you can prove it right?” Jamie asks, pausing in the doorway of the living room.
“Of course. After the asteroid hits, the only thing left on the list is the solar blackout in 2016. And if the rest have happened just like Smith said they would, why wouldn’t the last one follow suit? It makes sense. And of course we won’t really know until 2016, if you want to get technical, but there won’t be a concrete reason for people to doubt it anymore.”
“That does make sense,” Jamie agrees. Another shock of lightning flickers behind the shades. “Do you want to see upstairs?”
“Sure.”
“Will Berkeley still be standing after this asteroid hits?” he asks, leading me up the staircase.
I shrug. “If not, I’ll get published somewhere else.”
“I guess that’s true,” he says. “You know how grad school works better than I do.”
Jamie was offered three jobs in his first few months out of college. I’ve never asked him, but I’m almost positive he’s never felt the crippling aimlessness I used to feel when I considered how I’d fill the rest of my life.
“This is the guest room,” he says, flipping on the lights of the room closest to the stairs. “I found some of the flannel sheets you like and put those on the bed for you. And I picked up some lavender soap and shampoo, too, in case you didn’t like the ones we have.”
“Thank you,” I say, turning off the lights. “Where’s your room?”
“Across the hall,” he says. “Bathroom’s there,” he adds, pointing.
“Then where’s Nick’s room?” I ask, and it’s only when he squints at me that I realize my mistake.
I try not to think about their sharing a bed. The idea of someone else’s skin on mine makes me cringe, and the idea of sleeping on sheets that are damp with someone else’s sweat repulses me to the point that I want to take a shower to cleanse myself of the thought. I wouldn’t say that I admire Jamie for being able to do it, exactly, but I’m impressed, in a horrified sort of way.
The sound of a rising garage door chafes at my ears, and Jamie’s eyes crinkle again as his smile blooms. “Come on,” he says. “Nick’s home.”
I trail after him, working another tiny braid into my hair. This is the first of Jamie’s serious significant others that I’ve met; I’m unsure of the protocol. Nick will probably want to shake my hand or hug me, and I’m not okay with that.
Nick’s opening paper bags of Chinese food on the kitchen island, and he looks up and grins when Jamie and I come in. He’s tall, thinner than Jamie, with olive skin and hair that’s a lighter brown than ours. His jaw is sharp, his chin almost triangular, but his smile looks genuine. I smile back, tentatively, without meeting his eyes.
“Marley?” he says, approaching me. “Hi. I’m Nick. It’s nice to finally meet you.”
“Hello.” I flick a glance toward Jamie, who’s still in the doorway, watching the two of us. He nods, and I nod back, comforted, until I realize that he’s not nodding at me.
“Jamie says you’re not cool with, like, touching or anything, so I won’t shake your hand, but I just want to say ... welcome to our home.” He scoops a handful of soy sauce packets out of the bottom of the bag and almost drops them, clipping his elbow on the counter as he recovers. “Jamie, you forgot to tell me to order egg rolls, but I got them anyway. Figured you’d want some.”
“Bless you,” says Jamie, sliding out of the doorway and opening one of the cabinets behind Nick. He takes out three plates, and as he’s pulling utensils from a drawer, he kisses Nick hello. Their lips don’t meet for long, but as I watch, hanging back against the refrigerator, I wonder, briefly, what it must be like to care that much for someone. To be able to guess what that person is thinking or feeling, whether it’s about something as big as a dissertation or as small as an order of egg rolls.
“Can you help Nick bring the food to the table?” Jamie asks, crossing past me to the dining room, and I nod, picking up two cartons. Nick smiles at me across the island. I look away.
“Jamie says you’re working on your thesis,” he says, grabbing a couple more boxes. “What are you writing about?”
“Apocalypse theories as a cross-cultural phenomenon, and the rationales thereof.”
“Do you talk about the one you and Jamie are named after?” he asks, and I turn just enough to see him. He’s balancing four containers in his hands, and I meet his eyes for a split second before glancing away. “Smith’s End?”
“Yes,” I say.
“I want to hear all about it,” he says, carrying the boxes into the dining room. “Jamie says you’re practically an expert on apocalypse theories, so tell me everything.”
And I do, because it’s easy not to look at him when I have a meal to concentrate on, and I have Jamie across the table if I need a break from talking, and I have sixty-four pages of information to work with, and Nick is a good, quiet listener.
While Nick’s doing the dishes, Jamie makes the two of us lavender chamomile tea, his with honey, mine without, and lights the fireplace in the living room. Fireplaces are the antitheses of lightning; they calm me down, keep me centered. The one in our living room was my go-to mood equalizer when we were younger.
“What do you think of Nick?” Jamie asks, chasing the words with a swallow of tea. “You seem to get along pretty well.”
I nod, turning the mug in my hands. “I like him. He’s ... considerate.”
“He is,” Jamie agrees. “He wanted to make a good impression on you.”
“He did.”
“Well, good,” says Jamie, “because he’ll probably be around for a while.”
“Until 2016?” I ask, and he smiles. In the next room, Nick’s voice cuts through the running water, singing a Jason Mraz song. Jamie loves Jason Mraz.
“I hope so,” says Jamie. “I’d want him with me at the end of the world.”
I sip my tea. There’s a moment filled with only the sounds of the fire before Jamie adds, “He might be, uh, a permanent part of my life.”
“Are you going to marry him?” I ask, pausing with the tea halfway to my lips. Marriage has always struck me as a pointless concept; our parents’ marriage, albeit intact, has never seemed like a matter of joy or fulfillment. I prefer to commit myself to ideas. I’ve found I can count on those in a way I can’t count on people.
“I’d like to,” says Jamie, eyes on the fire. “But I wanted to make sure you got along with him first, because, you know, it wouldn’t work out if you didn’t.”
If Nick becomes a fixture in Jamie’s life, he’ll take my position as the person Jamie cares about the most. I splay the fingers of one hand and pull them into a fist. Jamie is arguably the only person I really care about. Without him to ground me, I imagine myself floundering. I set my mug on the glass coffee table and begin to braid my hair.
“Marley?” Jamie asks. In the kitchen, Nick switches to Michael Jackson, whom Jamie hates.
I nod. Even if they get married, I’ll only have to put up with it for two years, and I’ll be busy revising my dissertation for most of that time anyway.
“Okay,” I say, although I know it sounds flat. “That sounds nice.”
“I know it’s a change,” he says. “But you can see how much he means to me, right?”
I understand how much Jamie means to me, and I understand, to some extent, what I mean to Jamie. I know that he cares about me because he buys the right sheets, and he remembers which foods I like and which textures I don’t, and he puts away his phone to give me his full attention, and he knows to light a fire before I ask, and he shuts the shades before the lightning even begins. Nick and Jamie clearly care about each other — they kiss and sleep in the same bed, and Nick remembers the egg rolls, and Jamie puts up with his singing. But I don’t care that much about anyone but Jamie, because Jamie is the only person who has ever made the effort to communicate the way that I do.
“I don’t know,” I tell Jamie. “But you should do what makes you happy, I guess.” I finish another braid and finish my tea, feeling the weight of his gaze on me. “Can you turn on the news?”
He acquiesces, and I lean forward, eager for an update. It’s ten o’clock, so there are a couple more “late hours” to go, but I figure any time between now and midnight is fair game for this asteroid.
There’s nothing yet, so I tell Jamie I’m going to bed. I consider bringing my mug to the kitchen, but I can still hear Nick belting outdated music, so I leave it on the coffee table for Jamie to take care of. I have spent most of my life feeling like I am among the wrong people, speaking the wrong language, but this is the first time I have felt that way around Jamie, and it makes me ache in a way I don’t have the words to express.
~
I don’t sleep easily with the anticipation of the asteroid boiling in my stomach, but I doze off eventually. In the morning, I wake up disoriented, the flannel sheets having fooled me into thinking I’m in my bed in California. I flounder for a few seconds before I remember: I’m in Jamie’s guest room, in Seattle, because of the asteroid.
The asteroid. I fumble around in bed for my phone—I sleep with it because I like waking up to its vibration because all of its alarm tones are too jarring — and check my messages. I don’t know who I’m expecting — my mother, maybe, or Petra — but nobody has tried to contact me to ask if I’m okay. This could mean that (a) nobody cares whether I’m all right or not, except Jamie, who knows that I am, and/or (b) the asteroid hasn’t hit.
But it has to have hit.
I pull on a hoodie and pad downstairs to turn on the TV. An asteroid hitting California would be national news, even if it were a small one. But I flip through station after station, and there is nothing. Tensions are pulsing between Russia and Ukraine, there are flash floods ravaging parts of California, but there is no evidence of an asteroid.
My hands begin to shake as they weave through my hair. Smith’s End clearly states that it would hit on March 1, 2014. There’s no room for interpretation; this isn’t like the Mayans. Smith was using the same calendar in 1904 that we’re using today. If this asteroid didn’t hit, then the theory is no longer true. If the theory is no longer true, I have an entire life sprawling ahead of me that is suddenly, horrifyingly blank.
My mug is still on the coffee table from last night, and I pick it up to steady my hands, but it reminds me of Jamie and Nick, and I think that yes, ideas can fail you just as easily as people.
I press the cool ceramic mug to my forehead and my cheeks, but it does nothing to calm me down. I would light a fire, but I don’t know where Jamie keeps his matches or his lighter, and it is this helplessness in the face of something so simple that drives me to hurl the mug against the concrete fireplace.
The sound of shattering is louder than I expect in the quiet house, and it stings my ears. I feel myself begin to disintegrate, and when Jamie comes downstairs a few minutes later, I’m crying in the corner of the couch as Chris Cuomo discusses Crimea on CNN, squeezing my fingernails into my palms in short, urgent pulses.
“Marley,” he says softly, sitting next to me. “It’s okay, Marley, I’m right here.”
I squeeze my hands harder and shake my head. “What am I going to do?”
“You’ll figure something out,” he soothes. “You can talk to your advisor.”
I don’t say anything. Petra won’t say I told you so, but whatever she does say will be spoken with patronizing eyes, eyes that will say You should have known better. Without Smith’s End to provide a conclusion, my thesis’s direction is weak at best. With all those years open, ripe for more knowledge, for progress—who knows what humanity can achieve with all that time. But with the maw of the future yawning before me, I disagree with Jamie more than ever: it is infinitely more comforting to know your expiration date.
Jamie picks up a strand of my hair and begins to braid it, and I sniffle, trying to smooth my breathing. “I’m so sorry, Marley,” he murmurs. I dig my fingernails into my palms and hold them there as I inhale, loosening my grip as I push the air out.
By the time Nick comes downstairs, I have pulled myself together and Jamie has picked up the ceramic shards and lit a fire. I can’t look at him, not after explaining how foolproof the theory was last night. It’s only when he drifts two fingers through Jamie’s hair as he passes by that I remember that Nick is the first person with whom Jamie would have chosen to spend Smith’s outcome.
“Will you be okay going back to Berkeley?” Jamie asks over a new mug of tea, watching me gaze into the fire. “Do you want me to come with you?”
I shake my head. It’s bad enough that he and Nick have seen me come apart, after I explained to Nick last night how infallible everything seemed. I pull my arms tight across my chest and curl my hands into tight fists. I don’t want to stay here, with Nick hovering in my periphery, not when I know that I’m facing a lot more than two years of their future now.
I don’t want to leave Jamie. I need someone to believe in me while I get back on my feet, and Petra isn’t going to do that for me. But if Jamie comes, he’ll have to leave eventually. He has something tethering him here now; he isn’t at my beck and call anymore.
I don’t know if I can stand to watch Jamie leave me behind for Nick.
“Are you sure?” says Jamie.
I nod. “I should go soon,” I say. “It’s a long drive.”
“It’s not a problem to come with you,” he pushes. I stretch one hand and squeeze it closed. If he comes, he will leave, and I don’t know how I can deal with that.
“I’ll be okay.”
“Okay,” he says, and he lets me finish my tea in silence.
He hugs me hard before I leave, harder than I’m comfortable with. I squeeze him tight too, and I try to make the embrace say thank you and I love you and goodbye because I know I’m not good at saying any of those things.
I watch Nick squirm, hands in his pockets, when I let go of Jamie. I thrust my own hands in the pockets of my cardigan, hunching my shoulders. “Can I...?” he asks, but he doesn’t finish the sentence. “It was really nice to have you here,” he says. “I hope you come back soon.”
I nod, squeezing my fists shut in my pockets, and he nods too.
Jamie carries my suitcase outside, and tells me to call him if I need anything. “Anything,” he repeats, shoving the suitcase into the passenger seat. “If you need me to drop everything and come down to Berkeley, I’ll do that.”
“I know,” I say. “I’ll call you when I get home, okay?”
“Okay,” he says, and he hugs me one more time before I drive away.
The drive to Seattle took thirteen hours, and I’m bracing myself for thirteen more full of anguish. I turn on the radio in the vain hope of hearing some overlooked news report — maybe it’s taken this long to figure out what has happened, or to identify the mass as an asteroid, or to research Smith’s End and realize that there was a way to see this coming. But I spend five and a half hours switching among different stations, and although no one reports anything along the lines of an asteroid, I keep it on just in case. It makes me feel a little less alone.
The six-hour mark is approaching when I catch a fuzzy Seattle station in the middle of a broadcast about an earthquake, and everything inside me freezes at the words six-point-nine.
I swerve to the shoulder of the highway and paw through my purse for my phone. All I can see is that wall of windows shattering; all I can think is Jamie, Jamie, Jamie.
The phone rings, goes to voicemail. My fingernails bite into my palms.
If I lose Jamie, I lose the only person who knows how to translate me to the rest of the world. I lose the only other speaker of my language.
I call him again, dizzy at the prospect of both of my tethers coming undone. If I have no Smith’s End, and no Jamie, and all these years to fill on my own —
There’s a breath on the other end of the line, and my chest catches.
“He’s okay,” says Nick from four hundred miles away, and the flood of relief is so sweeping that for a moment I can’t see, can’t breathe. I stay on the shoulder of the road as my lungs begin to work again, smoothing myself out, and then I ask, “Are you?”
© 2019 Hannah Lamarre