The World of the End Read Online Free PDF

home, eats dinner, showers, watches TV, and crawls into bed. At eleven she shuts off the light and falls asleep in three minutes flat.
    Ann’s robotic life afforded her no pleasure, stimulation, or satisfaction, but she refused to allow the dreariness to deflate her. Lacking an alternative, she simply continued living. It was so decreed, and she complied with dull obedience. The same dull obedience she showed when told by the director of the hospital that she had been promoted to head nurse. She didn’t bat an eyelash at the news of her promotion or the small pay raise. A simple calculation revealed that she would, barring a miracle, pay off the monstrous mortgage on her small house by the age of sixty.
    When Ann turned forty, the miracle arrived. A complication during surgery left an elderly woman, who had been in her care for six months, in a vegetative state. The woman, Hanna, had taken the possibility of complications into account, and had told Ann that if she were to emerge from the surgery, held in this world by the thread of life support, she should wait no more than a month. If, after that, she saw no changes, she should disconnect her from the tubes and turn off the machines. A moment before entering the Operating Room, she smiled and patted Ann’s hand as though she knew that her life would end with the touch of the scalpel as it carved the tumor from her brain. Ann spent every spare minute of the next thirty days by her side, coaxing her back to life. On the thirty-first day, she gathered herself and went to see the hospital director, laying out the story of the old woman who had no next of kin. The director weighed the matter and said he trusted her instincts. At 12:45 that afternoon, Ann, in the presence of two doctors and three nurses, disconnected her from life support, kissed her on the forehead, and left to go eat her egg-and-potato salad sandwich. Two days later, for the first time, she attended a patient’s funeral, alongside a rabbi, and a lawyer who came over to her afterwards and informed her that the deceased had left her a palatial house in Kfar Shmaryahu. Ann stared at the lawyer till he smiled and said that Hanna had lost her family in the Holocaust and had not borne children. Ann knew the details. Hanna had told her everything, aside from the will and the fortune.
    After checking her options, Ann sold Hanna’s house and covered her own mortgage, surprised to see that there was a hefty sum still left over in the account. Then she started to save. Each month she deposited the excess from her salary in a savings account along with the inheritance money. Her future plans did not involve traveling around the world or laying the foundations of her dream house; her sole desire was to ensure financial independence through the prairies of old age. Dependence disgusted her. (Over the years she also cultivated a cautious distaste for love and its legions, convinced that the matter was nothing more than an ensnarement meant to deny people their independence.) To her dismay, she learned with time that her new job responsibilities called for counseling and other skills she had never considered acquiring. She read several books about bereavement, fished out a few hollow clichés, and kneaded them into a single truth. Over time, she learned to polish her words, lending them a professional gleam. Listening to her, the widowers-to-be were under the impression they were being counseled by a woman deeply familiar with the workings of the unconscious mind. They were unaware that her arguments had been drafted in the distant realms of her imagination, and that, more importantly, she had been profoundly changed.
    Hanna’s death heralded the start of a new chapter in Ann’s life. She embraced the burden of disconnecting people from life support and, along with that, slowly relinquished her grip on revenge—she had nursed enough of the infirm back to life; now was the time to send her patients to the kingdom of