The Cabin at the End of the World Page 11

  The Aleutians are a chain of volcanic islands stretching across the Bering Sea, with some of the islands belonging to both Alaska and, at its western extremes, Russia. Eric and Andrew researched booking an Alaskan cruise that would navigate by some of the larger islands but they gave up when the opportunity to adopt a child materialized quicker than they’d planned.

  The U.S. National Tsunami Warning Center has issued a cautionary advisory to British Columbia, Canada, and over one thousand miles of coast along the American Pacific Northwest including the cities of Seattle and Portland. However, the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center issued its strongest warning to the islands of Hawaii. Residents and tourists on the north-facing coastlines are under a mandatory evacuation order and are to seek higher ground immediately.

  Andrew says, “Is this what we’re supposed to see?”

  “It is. You don’t get it yet?

  “No. I don’t.”

  “I explained to all of you that if you didn’t choose to make a sacrifice, the oceans will rise and cities will drown. I used those exact words: the cities will drown.” Leonard slowly and loudly enunciates and points at the television. His patient tone and calm demeanor he employs whenever addressing Andrew, Wen, or Eric cracks and anger oozes out. Or is it panic? It’s difficult to tell the difference. “You remember me telling you that, right? You said you understood what I was telling you.”

  Eric vaguely recalls Leonard saying something about drowning cities along with a list of other threats, but he doesn’t remember them.

  Andrew says, “Yes, I remember, but this doesn’t mean anything, this—”

  “No! No more.” He points the remote control at Andrew. “I’ve been very patient with you but now you have to watch and listen.” Leonard closes his eyes, shakes his head, and shrugs his shoulders as if to say I’m trying my best to make everything go smoothly. He points at the TV again. “I shouldn’t yell, I know you’re scared of me, of us, but please. Watch.”

  The network cuts to an interviewer and interviewee digitally separated on the screen. The woman on the right is a spokesperson for the Pacific Tsunami Warning Center. She explains that there are nearly two dozen tsunami detection buoys in the Northern Pacific, with a cluster tracing the perimeter of the northern Ring of Fire, which is only a hundred miles or so from the epicenter of this earthquake. The data they’ve received points to a sizable wave of fifteen to twenty feet in height headed south toward the Hawaiian islands. The newscaster cuts in to announce that a tsunami has made landfall. As the audio of the interview continues, its video is banished to the lower right corner. A feed from a beach resort on the Hawaiian island of Kauai fills the center of the screen. It’s unclear if this is live or taped. In Hawaii it’s a bright, beautiful day. Small tufts of clouds are afterthoughts in the wide sky. The sand is golden and the palm leaves are green. The hotel pool is crystal blue and empty. The resort has already been evacuated. A swell of water gray with foam and sand, speckled with dark soil, palm fronds, and other debris, rushes up the length of the beach, overwhelms the pool and courtyard, swallowing chairs and tables, pushing into cabanas and the hotel’s lower-level rooms. The channel cuts to other videos from smaller towns and from the less-traveled and populated Northwestern or Leeward Islands; the greedy waves capsize small boats, swamp marinas, wipe out decks and docks, and wash out seaside roads.

  While acknowledging beach erosion and the damage to property will be extensive, the spokesperson talks about the success of their early warning detection system as they had plenty of lead time to evacuate the coasts and low-lying areas of the affected Hawaiian islands. It’s early but no injuries or fatalities have been reported.

  Andrew says, “Hey—”

  Eric interrupts with, “Don’t. Just don’t,” because he knows what Andrew wants to say, is going to say.

  Andrew grits his teeth, shakes the hair out of his eyes, and says it, anyway. “This is some doomsday you have going there. So how about you let us go now?”

  Leonard doesn’t respond.

  “Let Eric and Wen go, at least. I’ll stay and we can discuss apocalyptic themes and cultural traumas of the twenty-first century all you want. Just let them go.”

  Adriane hurries into the bathroom, shuts the door, and turns the sink on full blast. There are lower sounds buried under the rush of water. Eric can’t tell if she’s crying and/or talking to herself.

  Sabrina says, “I don’t understand. This isn’t—” She stops in midsentence, walks over to Leonard’s side of the room, and taps his arm. “Leonard?”

  “I know, but keep watching. We’re supposed to keep watching.”

  Eric says, “How long?”

  “Until we see what we’re supposed to see. Until we see what was shown to us.” Leonard sounds unsure, even desperate. He chances a quick look at Eric and then Andrew before intently staring at the TV again, willing it to play the images in his head, whatever they are.

  The station replays the flooding of the resort, which is the most dramatic footage to have aired. The talking heads repeat the same numbers and timelines. Eric is about to ask if they can change the channel back to a show for Wen when there’s a rough cut away from the various Hawaiian video feeds to the lead broadcaster. He doesn’t say anything and has a finger in his ear. He doesn’t know he’s on-air. He recovers and announces that a second massive earthquake has struck in the Pacific, registering at 8.6 on the Richter scale. The epicenter is only seventy miles off the coast of Oregon in what’s called the Cascadia Subduction Zone, an area scientists have long feared would produce a catastrophic earthquake.

  Leonard shouts, “This is it! This is it!” He turns and for a moment he has an I-got-exactly-what-I-wanted-for-my-birthday smile on his face, which quickly landslides into the pained look of a reluctant witness. “You didn’t stop it from happening and you could’ve. You were supposed to make a sacrifice. When you didn’t, we were forced to make one for you, and now, the consequences. You could’ve stopped this—”

  Sabrina is standing and facing the TV. She says, “No, no, no . . .”

  Adriane explodes out of the bathroom, her face red and dripping wet. “It’s happening? Is it really fucking happening? Oh, Jesus God . . .”

  Leonard continues talking to Eric, Andrew, and Wen, but he watches the screen. His eyes shimmer with tears. He says, “I’m sorry, that’s not fair of me. Of course I mean to say we, not you. We could’ve stopped it but we didn’t. We failed. We are in this together. All of us. I’m sorry. This is hard, this is impossible; I keep saying that but it’s true. And we didn’t stop this. We’re too late.”

  Sabrina, Adriane, and Leonard talk and they ask questions; some are rhetorical and some are impossible to answer. They share reactions, looks, and nods of support, nonverbal confirmation that what is happening on the rectangular, one-inch-thick screen is real. Eric strains to block them out and hear what is being said on the news but the cabin is all shouts and exclamations, everything muddying in the echo chamber of his throbbing head.

  The room pauses to take a collective breath long enough for one of the seismologists to posit the earthquake in the Aleutian Islands triggered this second quake, which lasted for almost five minutes. Given the proximity of the epicenter, people along the coast will only have minutes to seek higher ground before a tsunami reaches shore. Given the size and duration of the quake, damaged infrastructure and buildings will make it difficult to impossible in some low-lying areas for any sort of mass evacuation to occur in time. Another scientist estimates a tsunami triggered by a quake of this magnitude and proximity to shore as being anywhere from twenty to fifty feet tall, and the wave would be kilometers long so that the initial and sudden surge in sea level would continue for the entire length and duration of that wave, pushing all that water inland. She suggests residents immediately seek areas that are eighty to one hundred feet above sea level; the fifty-foot-tall bluffs along the coastline likely won’t be a safe enough height.

  The lead newscaster interrupts
the split-screen discussion, announcing a tsunami has indeed struck the Oregon shoreline and they have video footage from Cannon Beach. He warns the images they are about to show are disturbing.

  The video plays; a shaky, handheld wide shot of the beach, which is dotted with large rocks jutting out like shark fins from its flat sand and shallow low-tide water. The rocks are as black as shadow, giving them an uncanny, otherworldly feel, like looking at frozen pieces of space-time. One rock dwarfs the others, looming in the center of the shot, big enough to be its own mountain, big enough that it should sink through the sand and to the center of the earth.

  Adriane says, “Shit, that’s The Goonies rock! Remember that movie?” She smiles widely and stares at Eric and Andrew, apparently waiting for some sort of response or validation from them. “Come on, you’ve all seen that movie, yeah? The kid solves a clue with that big fucking rock or the rocks around it.”

  “It’s called Haystack Rock,” Sabrina says. “Almost two hundred fifty feet tall. I was there last summer. My best friend from college lives in Portland. It’s a beautiful spot.”

  A blast of wind crackles through the speakers. There are people still on the beach, some of them a great distance away and some at the rocks and the eerily receded water. They are small digital avatars of actual people, blips of bathing suit colors on blurry legs. A guy off-camera, impossible to tell how far away he is, shouts, “Come on. Let’s go.” The owner of the smartphone, a woman, says, “I know. Okay, we’re going. We’re going. I promise.” But she isn’t going. She and the camera stay in their same spot.

  Adriane walks into the middle of the room, points at the TV, and says, “Holy shit, this is what I saw.”

  Leonard nods his head and narrows his eyes, but in an exaggerated manner, as though he’s pretending to listen, pretending to deeply consider what she says.

  Sabrina backs away from the TV and mumbles something Eric thinks is, “Not what I saw.”

  Adriane laughs. “I saw this exact fucking thing and I thought I was crazy, you know, because of The Goonies rock. I really did. There was one night last week I stayed up all night drinking black tea and I was out of milk but I kept drinking it because I didn’t want to go back asleep and see the goddamn Goonies rock get swamped again.” She looks excitedly around the room. “Only crazy people keep having tidal wave nightmares with people getting swallowed up at the fucking Goonies rock, right?” She laughs again, demonstrating what her going crazy would sound like. “Love that stupid movie. Still do. No matter what people say about it now.”

  As Adriane talks there’s shouting on and off the screen, and a flash of an angry guy wearing black sunglasses and a white tank top. The camera finally starts moving away from Haystack Rock, which slowly recedes into the horizon, a horizon growing in height and coming toward the camera. There are faraway, small-in-volume screams that sound canned, and loud ones that are close, that could be in the cabin with them, and there are cries and shouts of run and help. A blue wall rises, its darker blue frosted with white contrasts with the indifference of the light blue sky. Those small digital blips of people down by the rocks are running but they are slow. Some of the small blips are smaller than others.

  Sabrina walks in front of Wen, blocking her view of the TV. “Do you want to play in your room instead of watching this? Did you bring any toys? I’d like to see them. Will you show me?”

  Leonard says, “Sabrina, not now. You know they have to see—”

  She snaps at him. “Nope. Wen doesn’t. She does not have to see anything more.”

  “Sabrina . . .”

  “She’s seen enough, don’t you think? You can let them watch. Fine. But she’s done. I’m done. And I’m taking her out of here. Come on, Wen. Show me your room and your toys, please.” She tries a smile, but it crumbles, unable to hold up the rest of her face. She reaches out a hand toward Wen.

  Shouts and screams coming from the TV speakers grow louder as if making up for lost horrors.

  Eric says, “Maybe that’s a good idea, Wen.” He says it before thinking and wishes he could take it back as soon as he says it.

  Wen says, “No! I’m staying,” shakes her head violently, and leans into Andrew.

  “You’re not going anywhere. I love you,” Andrew says. “What’s happening on TV doesn’t prove or mean anything. But don’t watch. Okay?”

  Haystack Rock shrinks into the rising ocean, momentarily fulfilling a geological pledge made eons ago. The shark fin rocks are gone. The people-blips who were running up the beach are gone and so is most of the beach.

  The sunlight flashes brightly into the cabin again and Eric is washed away.

  Four

  Andrew and Eric

  After Sabrina takes the remote and finally changes the channel from the coverage of the devastating northern Pacific earthquake and tsunami to the Cartoon Network, Andrew suggests Wen sit with Eric. He says it’s because Eric needs some Wen-time right now, which is true, but Andrew also wants to be left alone to work at the restraints without her leaning on or otherwise drawing attention to him.

  Wen watches Adventure Time while sitting cross-legged on top of Eric’s feet. In this episode Lumpy Space Princess argues with her parents and screams about a spilled can of beans. Adventure Time will later become other cartoons, some Andrew and Eric have seen before and some they haven’t.

  During a commercial, Leonard says to them, “You will be given the same choice again. This choice is a gift. Not all gifts are easy to accept. The most important gifts are often the ones we wish with all our hearts to refuse. Tomorrow morning you can make the difficult, selfless choice of sacrifice and save the world. Or you can again choose for the clock to move another minute closer to permanent midnight like it did this afternoon. For the rest of today and tonight, we’ll tend to your needs within reason, and we’ll otherwise leave you be, let you reflect and talk it over with each other.” He repeats this, without pause. The retelling matches word for word, inflection for inflection.

  Further shaken by the horrific and uncannily prophesied images broadcast on the news, and their sounds—the immutable roar of the surging ocean, the screams crackling through the speakers, tin-canned and somehow more authentic because their volume and desperation could not be reproduced digitally without modulation—and with the last of the fading afternoon’s sunlight forcing his eyes closed, Eric again worries at the memory of the figure in light he did or didn’t see.

  Andrew says, “We don’t need to wait until tomorrow morning and we’re never going to change our minds.”

  Leonard retreats into the kitchen. He opens the refrigerator and cabinets. He asks if anyone is hungry. No one answers. He says, “I’m going to grill up the chicken in a little bit. We all need to eat. You have to eat. No one makes good decisions when they are hungry.”

  Sabrina asks if anyone has seen a mop and/or floor cleaner. She roots around under the kitchen sink and emerges with a plastic bottle of amber liquid. She soon finds a yellow bucket and a large green sponge in the cellar. She scrubs the bloodstained floor with mixed results.

  Adriane stacks the three homemade weapons next to the woodburning stove. She spends more than an hour cleaning them with warm water, a dab of dishwashing detergent, and hand towels. After, she rescues the kitchen table from the edge of the basement stairs and puts it back in its old spot. One of the legs is bent and loose, making the table wobbly. She jams the book Eric was reading—the one about a kid going missing—under the leg for stability. It’s not the right size. She tries again with Andrew’s book of critical essays and it’s a better fit.

  Andrew and Eric remain tied to their chairs throughout the afternoon and into early evening. The only constants are the cartoons and the flurry of cabin cleaning and kitchen prep. They do not speak other than to check in with Wen: “Are you hungry? Are you okay? Do you need to go to the bathroom? Do you want to nap? Take a break from watching TV? You just tell us, okay? We love you.” They mostly retreat inside their heads; panic and their v
arying discomforts from injuries and the physical trial of a constant sitting position within restraints interrupt their inner dialogues, their increasingly hopeless plans and fantasies of escape.

  The sun sinks into the forest beyond the front door of the west-facing cabin. The gaudy glow of the television screen is the only source of light until the three others turn on the lamps and light fixtures. The wagon wheel bulbs above their heads are tinted yellow with age. Cobwebs link the bulbs and the spokes of the wooden frame.

  The weaker artificial light is trapped inside the cabin. It quickly grows too dark outside to see Redmond from within the glow of the common room. The color and the topography of the blanket cover for his body are not visible and there’s only a vague sense of something there, dumbly occupying space on the deck. It’s as though he isn’t there at all, like a decaying cultural memory of a deep, dark historical past (a something that happened to someone else; those someone elses are always so hapless, aren’t they?), one we actively wish to forget even as we claim to acknowledge the danger of forgetting.

  Leonard announces he is going to turn on the grill and cook the chicken. He says it like he’s reading the first steps of the how-to manual for the bizarre evening ahead. He walks over to Wen and gently plucks her from Eric’s feet. She does not resist. Andrew and Eric shout and tell Leonard to leave her alone, to not touch her, responses as automatic as they are feckless. Leonard says she will be fine and she is just going to sit with him on the couch while her dads use the bathroom to wash up for dinner. Then he asks Wen if them going to the bathroom is a good idea, and shouldn’t everyone wash their hands before they eat? She is adrift on Leonard’s lap, positioned like a ventriloquist’s dummy. She squirms and slouches, obviously trying to slide off his lap. He readjusts her. He tells Andrew and Eric that they will not try anything stupid while their legs are untied. He says, “We’ve reached a critical point, the point of no return, and you must cooperate.” It’s less what he says but how he says it. Adriane retrieves the dual-ended weapon, the largest one, the one that cratered Redmond’s chest, and leans it against the couch next to Leonard and Wen.