They corner me a quarter of the way into my evening walk. I’ve been tracing this route since the first week of lockdown; now, in week five, my soles can pull me through it in my sleep. These habits are innocuous enough in isolation. And yet I can’t contain that air of doom, the anxiety throbbing underneath it all. I see myself shuffling through my neighborhood like those fleeing pixels that become Pacman’s lunch, gliding down the same old tunnels to no escape.
I’m entering one such tunnel, a sort of wooded path forking off a driveway, when I hear a hello at my heels. I turn, squinting in the glare of early sunset. It’s three women: an older woman and two young women. A mother and daughters, teacher and students? Leader and disciples? They approach, this strange trinity, asking if they can give me a “presentation” on the Passover. Lucky for them I say yes because I’m a poor practitioner of saying no. (Do I emit a heathen look? Hare Krishnas like to stop me on the street.)
The young woman with glasses plucks a clear file out of nowhere, its sleeves choked with laminated pages. They’re covered in big print, late 90s graphics; words like Fire and Pestilence shouting in bold. For a moment I wonder if I’ve enrolled in less of a crash course and more of the full curriculum, only I’m trapped here between them and the sun and she has begun to quiz me on prophecy.
What do you know about what is to come? Nothing, I say. The other women look on, assessing me or her. There are writings that tell us, she says. Long-ago writings we can turn to for help.
She starts talking about Christ and blood and bread. These are things I expect from an explanation of the Passover, but soon it is clear she has bigger goals in mind. She tells me the apocalypse is a prolonged affair; a tortured birthing. Once begun, nothing on this good earth can stop it. (Have you ever given birth? She smiles when I say no, satisfied I cannot contest her metaphor.) She tells me that the wheels are turning, that these times of trouble will be the last.
But there were such times before, I say. Decades on decades of famine and war, earthquake and flood. The threads of history are knotted with them. She blinks. But don’t you agree it’s all gotten worse? I say I cannot know that because I have not lived in all those other times. Mentioning nothing of pestilence, she asks if I think the world will end in fire. To this I reply, eventually, yes, there is the sun entering its red giant phase some five billion years from now and annihilating everything it touches. But the end is happening now, insists the older woman. People are looking to colonize other planets, running away from what we’ve done here. As she speaks I grind my heel into the scarred concrete, wondering how deep the fissures go, how odd that we never think about it. But then we never ask that of drains either; it is enough that they swallow what we cannot bear. How far down do they go, how fiercely does the earth swear vengeance on us?
The threat of nuclear war is at its height, the young woman reminds me. Nation against nation, kingdom against kingdom. The older woman nods, as though this is indisputable proof that it is now her long-ago writings refer to. We know about meteors and chemical weapons and the warming of the climate. What did they know of fire, back then, those people who didn’t have science? Of course they had science! I splutter. Yes, of course they wrote about comets even if they did not entirely appreciate what they were. Yes, they knew about fire, real fire, the world-shaking kind, the way we knew about all the things that meant us harm even if we had not yet given them a name; the way we wrote on our maps here there be monsters, which is just another way of saying I am frightened by the limitlessness of this place where I exist.
The young woman brings out her Bible, opening it to a drawing of several apocalyptic scenes occurring at once: cities crumbling under gargantuan waves, a mass of locusts darkening the air, lightning tearing down through the clouds. She flashes me some passages foretelling destruction for the world and salvation for those who bear the seal of God, so certain in her stack of answers. I try to imagine what underlies that certainty. I imagine faith as a thing coiled in your inner ear, like the organ that controls balance. Faith: the confidence in what awaits you. The sense of something blooming in a place you have never seen.
But who am I to draw this gulf between us? The truth is I know about faith. No, not faith; something more embedded than reflex, more bone-deep than belief. Hinduism venerates knowledge, refusing to tolerate any disrespect of the written word. I’d say I’m not one for superstition, and yet I always apologize to a book when I stumble over it. My mouth still goes to make the prayer.
The truth is I’m not her enemy or her skeptic. It’s just that we diverge in our ideas of disaster. Her version is all tones of terror, solemn pronouncements from above and below. Not a mewling little end, a petering out. The kind of end visible already in the shrinking of our shorelines, the growing rifts in our communities, accelerated by people in high towers making decisions that kill us.
Well? I realize the women are staring at me. Wouldn’t you like to receive the seal of God? The young woman who hadn’t spoken hands me some black and white pamphlets printed in low-grade ink. Each is formed of an A4 sheet, folded unevenly as if in haste. THE CLOCK IS TICKING!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! exclaims the first page, beside blurry clipart of a clock and a summary of our impending doom. At the bottom is another statement in bold, flanked by a list of church services: disbelief is the real disease. let Jesus do the healing.
They’d played a long game to simply hand me some propaganda. I’m almost about to tell them this, but when I look up the trio are gone. I remember that I hadn’t seen which house they’d come out from, or whether they’d emerged from the line of trees bordering the cul-de-sac that now looks far denser than I’d thought. But then how could they have come up behind me, and are there any paths out this way apart from mine? All I can see is the sun glowering onto the grass by my feet, and for a moment I picture it splitting open the ground, magma boiling up through the cracks; taking me and the world down with it.
Anuja Mitra lives in Aotearoa New Zealand. Her prose has appeared in publications including Cordite, Lamplight, and the anthologies Year’s Best Aotearoa New Zealand Science Fiction & Fantasy (Vol 4) and A Clear Dawn: New Asian Voices from Aotearoa New Zealand.
Twitter: @anuja_m9
Linktree: @anuja_m9