Entering school with his phone in his pocket, Dev was reminded of that morning’s shower weirdness because the lights overhead were doing it, too, flickering in a way neurotypicals only noticed when a tube was getting ready to burn out. Dev saw that flickering all the time, the dark bands rippling back and forth like an old-fashioned barber pole. It had taken him a long time to tune them out without actually closing his eyes. Suggesting he just not look right at them wasn’t the answer because they were lights, which meant shadows, meaning Dev could see the flicker everywhere he looked, not just at the tubes themselves. So he’d have to concentrate on something else while he unfocused his eyes, the flickering muted in the overall blur.
But before the whatever, Dev found the flickering fluorescents newly distracting. As with the shower that morning, the changes had a decidedly nonrandom quality to them, as if someone somewhere was turning a dial, tuning it, looking for a station just on the edge of being out of range. It was starting to give him a headache when Dev noticed that the phone in his pocket had begun vibrating against his thigh not so much in sync as it was in opposition, as if trying to cancel out whatever was going on with the fluorescent lights overhead.
As he looked around to see if anyone else was noticing, he realized that his pending headache had been canceled. Not so, however, for his classmates. There, a pair of hands rubbing temples to either side; there, the eraser end of a pencil massaging a forehead between the eyes. Another rested her head on her desk; another rolled his neck and shoulders. A cupped hand holding up a head; a pair of arms hugging their stomach. Each oblivious to the others. Each a frog in its own pot of water as the temperature ticked up a degree at a time.
He tried telling his mom about it when she came to pick him up after school, but she’d been distracted, checking her mirrors obsessively before backing up. By the time they were on the road homeward and she asked, “What were you trying to tell me before?” Dev was already lying across the back seat, trying to keep another panic attack at bay.
68
So how do you spend the end of the world—or the end of people at least? Pandora, for her part, had always leaned in the direction of amplification. If she was sad, she listened to sad songs to italicize her sadness, letting herself wallow in it. Her theory for this behavior was inherited from her father, who generally suffered through colds, avoiding over-the-counter medications, which he referred to as “symptom hiders” because all they did was postpone the suffering under the guise of relief.
“Get it over with,” that was Roger’s advice.
Pandora had challenged him for prescribing antidepressants to some of his clients, which seemed hypocritical, under the circumstances. But then she’d had to deal with an unmedicated Gladys during a panic attack, at which point her father’s judgment seemed more provisional.
“Sometimes,” Roger said, “letting a symptom play out to its conclusion is suboptimal.”
Thus, Pandora came to appreciate the distinction between merely sad and clinically depressed: the former was fit for wallowing in while the latter, left untreated, could lead to a coroner’s report.
What Pandora was feeling about the imminent demise of the species—in addition to hungover—was complicated. And so she waited in the truck outside the Golden Heart assisted dying facility, blowing off school because, well, why not? Once GH was open to visitors, she proceeded to visit, figuring if anyplace had gotten endings down cold, it was the Golden Heart. Individually, at least.
Poking her head into her grandmother’s room, Pandora noticed that they were back, sitting in a vase on Gladys’s windowsill. She’d scolded staff before about leaving the forget-me-nots that mysteriously appeared in her grandmother’s room but stopped when Gladys hinted that they might be from a secret admirer, real, remembered, or imaginary.
The vase was centered upon the inside ledge, where the cut flowers it held could catch the lengthening day’s light. Not for the flowers’ good; they were slowly dying, not unlike the woman they’d been given to. No, the placement was to help brighten things up for that same woman, as if she still was in there, somewhere, enough to appreciate them.
The first time, Pandora had thrown a fit: forget-me-nots in the dementia wing? Now, they were just another thing that happened around there, like death and dying. Plus, Gladys seemed to like them, so screw it.
Pandora looked around the room until she found the gratuitous memory board. She wanted to see if anyone had scrawled a cartoon mushroom cloud next to the date. Nope. And then she noticed that her grandmother’s eyes were open.
“Hey, Gram,” she said.
“Hey, Gram,” Gladys repeated, as cognizant of the words’ meaning as your average parrot. Soon enough, none of that was going to matter.
Before it happened, Pandora’s phone began humming. The vibration spread across the xylophone of her rib cage, playing scales. She ignored it. The only thing in the room—and the world—was this woman she’d come to die next to. She’d timed it like this. She had just enough time to say, “I love you,” and kiss her grandmother on the forehead as the old woman echoed it back.
“Love you . . .”
00:00:00:00
The racket of falling bodies drew Pandora out into the hallway, where she found the able-bodied staff dead and their demented charges looking confused but not necessarily any more than they had moments earlier. In her haste to investigate, she hadn’t thought to check on Gladys, in part because she expected her grandmother to be dead—just as she herself had expected to be dead. But Pandora was very much alive, as were the other residents in her grandmother’s condition, and when she returned to Gladys’s room, so was she, sitting upright in bed, her head pivoting, decidedly more confused—but also more mobile—than she had been earlier.
Stunned, Pandora plopped back into the guest chair where she’d been keeping her ongoing vigil. She looked at the flowers and then at the woman who’d forgotten what forget-me-nots were, along with her own granddaughter. She spoke aloud the words that were in her head, namely: “WTF,” but using the spelled-out version.
“Don’t swear,” Gladys said, smacking the nearest hand she could reach.
“Hey!” Pandora said, pulling away, prepared to strike back out of reflex, but then stopped. “He-ey,” she said, softer and more slowly.
She looked at her grandmother’s eyes. They didn’t sparkle like they had, back when her granddaughter had first visited, but they also weren’t as vacant as they’d been either. Pandora held up a finger like she’d seen a doctor do while performing a routine exam. Gladys’s eyes tracked it as it moved.
“Do you know who I am?” Pandora asked.
The old woman struggled. Shrugged her shoulders. Her condition had improved, but not as much as her granddaughter might hope. But then: “Pandora?” the old woman said, her eyes widened. She looked down at her hands as if they weren’t hers. “How old am I?” she asked.
Pandora shrugged, unsure if the question had any objective meaning anymore. “How old do you want to be?” she asked.
Based on what she’d read in George’s “Read Me” file, the loaded gun the military-industrial complex had handed over to their misanthropic baby was some ultrasonic weapon that fried the part of the brain targeted by anesthetics. The antidote available to Buzz to spare its target demographic had been a noise-canceling antisignal broadcast through their phones, if they were lucky enough to have them at the time. She’d been one of the spared—why, she didn’t know—and the ultrasonics that zapped everybody else’s consciousness seemed to have blown the cobwebs out of Gladys’s—partly at least.