Ascension, a Homecoming

I stared at my mother in stunned silence during the moments after her statement to me, after she hung up the phone and turned to me. I had turned fourteen years old three days prior. We sat in my room, the walls painted lime green and covered in the remnants of a childhood marked by innocence and naivete. My mother, worn from her four children and an alcoholic husband, brushed her faded hair out of her face and said these words to me, trusting in my maturity, relying on my ability to stay calm.

“You have to stay alive, in order for all of us to die.”

She said this plainly, as if she had known the arrangement before they told her. Within my body was captured the secret of death, the antidote to immortality, as it were.

“You’re going to die? Mom? What am I supposed to do when everyone is dead? What will be left?”

My mother told me the truth, they would all die, soon. I would be left behind, a sacrifice for the fires, one life to persist for many, many merciful deaths. I went to my room and sat, I took out the Russian nesting dolls that sat in my drawer and stared at the iterations of a woman, one by one, laid out next to each other as we all sat within the four walls of a silent house.

I didn’t yet know when or how, I would have to suffer. But I knew that my sacrifice (or lack thereof) was simple and easy, the resolution to every superhero movie or YA novel or sci-fi saga: one life in exchange for many, this was, of course, the logical solution. For the greater good. I would live, so they could die. Where would I be, where will I go, once they have left, what will I do with this antidote? I hold the secret of death within my form, the medical world says, within my infinite planes of smooth flesh and churning carbon there lies the sacrifice, the guarantee.

They had said for years that the end was coming, but now the apocalypse was taking a real shape, outside of the conspiracy theorists of YouTube and clickbait videos on Facebook: soon the identity of the self would fade for humanity, their smiles would slide off of their faces and their form would be irrevocably altered in the profound silence of death, this is what the world of philosophy predicted (science had been given up months ago). A metaphysical apocalypse, nobody could stock up enough food or create a vaccine for this. But I would stay. In order for every single soul to run away, to drip off of the bodies that held them, I must exist and continue to exist. For my parents, grandparents, brothers, and sisters to die, I would have to live. And my blood ran cold in my veins, knowing what lay ahead.

I spent the next couple of days talking to therapists and doctors and philosophers alike. My immortality was suddenly assumed and studied extensively. My friends weren’t allowed to see me: in order to make everything simpler I was kept alone, with my russian nesting dolls, my books, and my dog, Milo, for company. Outside of my lime green room with the posters and Milo, the world continued to panic and prepare for the painful disintegration of identity. I stared outside my bedroom window at my neighbors TV, CNN glowing beneath the foggy orange air, illuminated by a street light, the bulb of which would soon burn out. The news anchors and talking heads were dressed up professionally, smiling and accepting of their merciful, quiet deaths. In between clips of warfare in other countries and caution tape outside of a suburban house, I saw the same picture of my face flash on the screen. It was a portrait from eighth grade picture day, two periods before Kaleb had told me he wanted to be my boyfriend, the day I wore the red shirt and my mother braided my hair. I sat there for one more week, Milo on my bed, specialists filing in and out, before the dripping began.

My father was the first of our family to go, I heard my mother crying downstairs one Sunday morning after the lawn mower turned off and he tramped inside. When I walked into my living room, my father lay in a heap on the carpet. In the puddle of self around him, I could see his hazel eyes and wrinkled skin in the wetness, flattened and detached, confused and layered atop the crumbs and dog hair. This is why I must live. In order for the souls of the earth to receive this mercy and this detachment, I must persist, among the moisture, the coming flames, the dripping life around me. As my mother cried and I rubbed her back, as my siblings grabbed rags to soak up my father, I stared into the two-dimensional eye on the floor of our living room, considering the new perspective of my father, the once-lively face and presentation reduced to a static image. Milo whined at the top of the stairs, he was hungry, and alone. And outside, rain fell on leaves, blurring the green landscape into a foggy gesture of possibility, or probability.

In the following weeks, I saw different newscasters on my neighbors television at night. Then there was no Fox News, no MSNBC, no HGTV or Comedy Central and then the television stopped turning on: there were no neighbors. One day, the tomato plant in the corner of my windowsill began to drip green onto the hardwood floors. I threw it out the window, for the rain to wash away. Two weeks became three, a month, two months. After the family camping trip, I was quietly informed that my three siblings had gone together, in their sleep. My mother burned their sheets and blankets, stained with their image, their eyes and ears and small hands. I cried, and I wondered if, despite what all the philosophers said, I was melting with everyone else.

The apocalypse was messy. Once it was only my mother and I left in the house, we talked about it at the kitchen table. She let me leave my room after a few months, possibly because it was almost over, or maybe because her last days were becoming lonely ones.

“I can’t see how it’s efficient, leaving all of these bodies around.” It was like she was wondering who designed the end of times, and who gave them the certification to do so.

“They aren’t themselves. Those aren’t bodies.” I replied.

“You know much better than I do, of course.” She sipped her tea. “Bizarre...our perception of them stays the same. Their beauty slides off of their faces like someone left out tomato soup too long.” She put the cup down, pushing it away across the dusty table. “I feel nauseous.”

My mother walked upstairs to take a nap, while I sat down to read my book. She came back downstairs after a minute, and told me that Milo had gone.

Three days later, she was one of the last to succumb. She was sweeping the porch in the sunlight and came inside, stumbling into my arms. I looked into her eyes, already beginning to slide and melt down her wrinkled cheeks. I laid her fading form on the doormat, her brittle nails and dark eyes clutching me. How could this be mercy? I thought frantically, recalling her words and the directions of the philosophers three months before, as tears streamed down my cheeks and mixed with her identity that dripped all over my legs, the carpet, her soft t-shirt. But as she faded further from me and movement ceased within her chest, I could see the peace within her: unidentified, free, and again transcendental. Her features lay in a Picasso-esque collage across the entryway, her left eye against the wall in the corner, her right eye by my foot, her nose further away, her mouth thin and two dimensional next to her empty head. With my sacrifice, she was gone, and I was alone. The TV did not turn on, the electricity had a week left, cars had not moved for weeks.

I stopped eating, and I drank only a few sips a day – liquid reminded me of death. I had been told to wait, at least four months, until there was no sign of anyone left. I kept the curtains drawn, determined to wait as long as possible, to carry out my duty until the last moment. I read in the dark, growing pale and thin, my lips chapped and body rejecting food, rejecting itself, rejecting my eyes that were still affixed to my face, my identity that persisted despite the rain and the wind outside. I was painfully myself, aware of every passing minute, aware of the stain on the carpet where my father floated away from the earth.

Now, I open the door. It creaks, unprepared for movement and touch. I step onto an overgrown porch, gazing upon an autumn sunset. The leaves shine with the red and orange of fall in New England, but glimmer of other colors, new and more complex, hidden behind the three dimensionality of my front yard. My mouth falls open as I look upon the menacing nature in front of me. I see puddles in the road, in the cars parked in driveways, faces and hair and teeth smiling up at me, wet and crude to my lonely eyes. Somewhere, a radio echoes the hollow sound of a piano, curling around the trees: I recognize it as a sonata by Beethoven. The owner must have left it on.

I walk with soft feet towards the road, fallen leaves shining underneath my toes. My chest tightens as I realize the scene looks foggier than before, blurred at the edges, beginning to reveal something more.

I walk and I stare at the deer that are hung from the saplings lining the road, they still drip fresh eyes and tawny fur towards the asphalt.

I walk and with heavy eyes I see that there is nothing left. The bright sky is empty as the sun sets, and there is not a single person left in this universe. The weight of defamiliarization, unrecognition, misidentification weighs upon my cheeks, my scalp.

I walk and I feel a lukewarm fire licking at my thin legs, singeing my fingertips, fire in the trees, fire in my eyes.

Forgetting myself, I call out to my mother as I fall. She catches me as I stumble into her arms, laying the fading form on the doormat. It is mercy.