The End Has Come Read Online Free PDF Page B

burning your sinuses instead. I never was a city girl: Mama was right about that, in the end. Right about me, and right about him .
    Felix. Fucking Felix-from-fucking-San-Francisco, Mama always said. He has nothing to give you but heartbreak, Grecia. What are you thinking?
    You can hate someone who’s dead, can’t you? And some place — it’s the same thing. You even feel the same guilt, saying it.
    There’s nothing left now. The rain has stopped, and a bare skeleton of a city remains. I borrow Mahesh’s binoculars, stand in the prow and look out across the bay, and every time the sight turns my stomach. There’s a few cement pylons clinging to the hills, tangles of steel, and slabs and slabs of white concrete broken and pocked like a sponge. Just north of us, the frame of the Bridge still arcs out toward Yerba Buena, but then it disappears. Down into the black water, its eerie stillness turned iridescent by the sun, like a puddle of oil. There’s life returning to Oakland, or at least scavengers; late at night, you can see the lights bobbing through the ruins south of the port. But San Francisco is still and quiet.
    And here, on a container ship grounded in the Oakland Outer Harbor, I have this recurring dream.
    I’m stepping out into the courtyard behind the tiny theatre in the Mission where Felix rigs the lighting. Or I’m standing on the fire escape outside our kitchen window, at the top of a Victorian row house that no one bothered to paint properly — the layers of trim lost in a uniform pastel pink, like the chalk they give you to cure an upset stomach. Or I’m cresting one of the hills — Potrero, walking home from the theatre, my arms laden with groceries or costumes that need repair — and I half-expect to meet a monster on the other side. I half-expect to find the end of the world, the whole city sliding down a sheer cliff into nothingness, just ocean as far as the eye can see.
    And in the dream, I’m right. There’s nothing on the other side of the threshold. No downhill street, no rows of homogenous-hued Victorians marching like lemmings toward the freeway and the sea. No murals of goddesses and butterflies or undulating koi fish over the overflowing dumpsters behind a Chinese café. Just gray static, like the analog television in our bedroom that collected stacks of unpaid bills. There’s a faint ringing in my ears, a buzzing sound like fat garbage flies.
    Does it count as a recurring dream when it’s the only one you have? I think I ask myself this question every time, just before I wake up.
    Two
    “Again,” Lena says. “Please.”
    Coming out of the immersion is excruciating, like all my senses are being slowly dragged across sandpaper. My eyes water as I peel away the visor, and for a moment the inside of the shipping container vanishes, and I’m caught again in the gray world of the immersion — scentless, colorless, the only sound the faint static prickle in my earphones. The coolness along my left side tells me the container’s sliding door is open, letting in light and the clear, dry air that smells like absolutely nothing. I blink the tears away, and Lena looks up from her computer screen.
    “Let’s do it again, please.”
    On the table in the other end of the container, she has her own set of pieces laid out. Compression gloves, the hood with its broad blue-tinged visor, and yards of rubber-coated wires to link the suit and a miscellaneous suite of suction cups back to her computer. Her dark hair, damp with sweat, is flopping out of her barrette. I see the traces of gritty saline paste at her temples, which means she’s been trying to record again. Which means the flicker of memory I felt inside the immersion, the lapping rhythm that may have been waves and the roughness of something against my palm — steel? concrete? — belonged to her.
    “Give me a second.” I sit up slowly, feeling the blood rush to my head. My legs feel asleep below the knee. “I felt