The Cabin at the End of the World Read online

  Redmond stands dumbly in front of the slider doors with the heading of the curtain in his hands, the rest pooling around his feet and ankles. His fingers are lost inside the thick loops through which the rod is supposed to pass.

  “Forget the curtain. It’s time,” Leonard says.

  Redmond doesn’t respond with a joke. He drops the curtain, walks back into the center of the room, and stands with the others. The four of them make a line across the room. Seeing them together in their button-down shirts and jeans makes Wen afraid all over again. How they are dressed must mean something important but no one has explained why and maybe they’ll never explain why.

  Andrew says, “Wait, hold on, time for what? Keep talking to us. We’ll listen. We are listening . . .”

  Leonard smiles weakly. “Wen asked me earlier if the four of us were friends. I did not lie to her then and I will not lie to you now, not ever. I don’t know if I can say that Sabrina, Adriane, and Redmond are my friends exactly. But I trust in them and I believe in them. They’re regular everyday people like me—”

  Andrew mutters but loud enough to be heard, “Fucking hell, someone save us from all the everyday people.” His pleading tone from a moment ago disappears, and he sounds angry, like Professor Daddy, which is what she and Eric teasingly call him when he lectures about minor infractions that include abandoning glasses of water or juice boxes on the windowsills, leaving cereal bowls half filled with milk next to the kitchen sink, and not replacing the toilet paper roll after one is spun down to the cardboard tube.

  Leonard stammers and fumbles through “—and regular just like you.”

  Redmond laughs.

  Leonard twists left and right as though looking to fellow actors who have forgotten a line or cue. “Let me start by telling you the four of us didn’t meet each other in person for the first time until this morning.”

  The three others nod. Sabrina has her arms crossed, and she swirls tiny circles on the floor with a foot. Redmond has his hands behind his back and his jaw clenched tight. Adriane’s face swaps into and out of an odd smile or a snarl and a wince at a punch she sees coming.

  “Look, Leonard, just let us go and we won’t call the police or anything, we won’t, okay? I promise . . .”

  “As you’ve heard, we’re all from different parts of the country and we didn’t know each other before”—Leonard holds his arms out—“before this. We didn’t even know that each other existed before last Monday. 11:50 p.m. I know the exact time my life changed forever. That’s when I first got the message. They got the message, too. The same message. We were called and are united by a common vision, which has now become a command we cannot ignore.”

  Andrew thrashes around in his chair.

  Eric says, “Stop, just stop, please. Please, God, whatever this is. Stop . . .”

  Wen wishes she had the small shovel in her hands. She wishes the TV were still on. She wishes she could stop shaking. She gets up and scrambles behind Andrew’s chair.

  “Wen, I’m sorry, I really am, but it’s important that you hear this, too. What you decide is as important as what your dads decide.”

  Andrew shouts, “Don’t talk to her! Don’t say anything to her!”

  Eric calls out to Wen and tells her that she’ll be okay, that everything will be all right. The white wad of paper towel as big as a movie screen on the back of his head has a bright red bull’s-eye. She feels terrible that she went behind Andrew’s chair and not Eric’s but she doesn’t move.

  Leonard says, “The four of us are here to prevent the apocalypse. We—and by we I mean everyone in this cabin—can stop it from happening but only with your help. In fact, it’s more than help. Ultimately, whether the world ends or doesn’t end is entirely up to you three. I know it’s a horrible burden, believe me, I do. I didn’t want to believe it, either, when I first got the message. I tried to ignore it.” Leonard looks to the others and they nod their heads, and the world’s quietest yes escapes from someone’s mouth. “I didn’t want it to be true. But I was quickly made to see it was the truth and this was what was going to happen whether or not I wanted it to, whether or not I thought it was fair.”

  “We are not going to listen to this,” Eric says.

  “The message is clear, and we are the messengers, or a mechanism through which the message must pass.”

  Leonard breaks the line of the four and steps forward, putting himself between Eric and Andrew. He’s bigger than all the others combined and he’s bigger than the cabin itself; a conflicting, confounding size that only a child could ever equate with innate, implacable gentleness. Wen remembers being held in his arms while Daddy Andrew fought with Redmond. To her shame, she remembers feeling safe.

  Wen says, “Please leave us alone, Leonard. Please go away and I’ll still be your friend.”

  Leonard blinks hard and rapidly and lets out a percussive, deep breath. He starts talking and as he talks, he doesn’t look at Eric, Andrew, or Wen, despite having moved closer to them and crouching to their level.

  Andrew

  If Leonard again insists the four of them are regular, everyday people—as though everyday people have nothing but love in their hearts and are always reasonable and have never committed atrocities in the name of their self-proclaimed everydayness—Andrew is going to scream until he can’t scream anymore. He gets it; of course they are regular people. That message (there are regular people and there are others) is loud, clear, and received to the point where Andrew is beginning to think he may have seen or met each one of them before, with the strongest, nagging don’t-I-know-you? vibe coming from the loathsome Redmond.

  Leonard says, “Your family must choose to willingly sacrifice one of your three in order to prevent the apocalypse. After you make what I know is an impossible choice, you must then kill whoever it is you choose. If you fail to make the choice or fail to follow through with the sacrifice, the world will end. The three of you will live but the rest of humanity, seven billion plus, will perish.” Leonard’s mannerless, reading-the-high-school-morning-announcements tone becomes the breathless impassioned entreaty of a zealot. “And you will only live long enough to witness the horror of the end of everything and be left to wander the devastated planet alone, permanently and cosmically alone.”

  Andrew anticipated some form of unhinged, hateful, quasi-fundamentalist-Christian, cult manifesto, but he did not expect this. He is so flummoxed and terrified he has difficulty processing exactly what Leonard is saying, and the implications and permutations of possible future outcomes to be determined in part by what he and Eric say and do next are as irretrievable as the quarks of a smashed atom. Andrew briefly imagines he, Eric, and Wen holding hands and walking through a postapocalyptic landscape, specifically the blasted and burnt ruins of Cambridge and Boston: ash-gray sky, Storrow Drive’s footbridges collapsed onto soot-topped cars, steel girders curled like a dead insect’s legs, buildings and brownstones reduced to brick piles of burning rubble, the Charles River black, motionless, and choked with debris. He turns away from the image and away from Leonard, twisting his head as far as it will go, but not enough so that he can see Wen hiding behind his chair. He wants to tell her to cover her ears and ignore Leonard’s poisonous words even though he knows it would be impossible for anyone to do so.

  Eric says, “Leonard, you don’t have to do this. You don’t. This, whatever this is, isn’t you. It doesn’t have to be. We haven’t done anything to deserve this.”

  Leonard still won’t look directly at Andrew or Eric or Wen. His gaze is somewhere over their heads, on a secret spot of the cabin door, under their chairs, spying a shard of glass on the kitchen linoleum that managed to escape his broom, the yellow lamp lying crookedly on its side. “I agree that you haven’t done anything wrong or bad to deserve this burden. You haven’t. I can’t make that clear enough. Perhaps you are being chosen, like we were chosen, because you’re strong enough to make the decision that needs to be made to stave off the ruination of humanity. I th
ink that’s the way to look at this, Eric.”

  Despite the terror of this continuing assault and the pain and discomfort with which Eric clearly suffers, he turns his head and says to Andrew, “That’s thoughtful of them to give us the proper way to look at this.”

  Andrew laughs the cynical, mocking one-note plosive of the death row inmate. Waves of love and pride for Eric surge with righteous anger and defiance, yet he knows feeling strong and emboldened isn’t enough to rid his family of the four intruders. It’s not enough to break him free from his chair.

  “Please don’t kill us,” Wen whispers from behind Andrew. The quaver in her voice is the worst thing he’s ever heard, without a close second. Andrew renews his struggles against the ropes. His wrists burn as he flexes, twists, and contorts.

  Leonard drops to one knee and leans forward, finally making eye contact. “We are not going to kill you, Wen, and we aren’t going to kill your parents. We aren’t. Aside from what we had to do to enter the cabin and get you to listen to what we had to say, we are not going to lay another finger on any of you. That is a promise. We’ll help make you as comfortable as you can be—but you have to stay here in the cabin with us—until you choose or the allotted time you have to choose runs out.”

  “And how long is—”

  Leonard speaks over Eric, “Not long, not long at all. Time is running out on the world, on us. Look, we’re not here to hurt you.”

  Redmond interrupts with, “If we wanted to hurt you, we would’ve used duct tape instead of rope. Believe me.”

  Leonard continues as though Redmond didn’t speak. “You have to understand; we cannot and will not choose who is sacrificed for you and as importantly, we cannot act for you, either. It doesn’t—it won’t work that way. You must choose who is to be sacrificed and you must physically perform the act. Like I said, we are here to make sure the message is heard and understood.”

  Redmond says, “Hey, have one of them repeat all this back to you,” and makes circular motions with his right hand.

  Sabrina says, “Redmond, just shut up, all right?”

  “What. I’m not being a wiseass. Have them prove they heard you, understood you, Leonard. We have to make sure they get what we’re saying here, that we’re serious. This is real, man. We’re not making this shit up. Who would make something like this up?” Redmond talks fast and his Boston accent is clear and authentic unlike the exaggerated one from earlier.

  Andrew ping-pongs from wanting to say the magic words that would defuse what’s happening, to being compliant with the hope they’ll leave Wen alone, if not him and Eric, to wanting to ensure the four of them hear and know his mocking, disdain, and hatred for who they are, for who they’re choosing to be. He says, “We have to kill one of us or the world will end. We get it. And we already know our answer.”

  Adriane breaks from the line, reaches out, and taps Leonard’s shoulder. “Let them take a minute to, I don’t know, let it all sink in, get over the shock. This is pretty messed up, right?”

  “Yeah, okay.” Leonard nods his head, stands up, and backs away until he is between Sabrina and Redmond.

  Sabrina steps forward and as she does so, it occurs to Andrew that this is how groups like theirs operate, how they brainwash, how they infect with their virulent, recursive beliefs, how they get what they want. The moment one member stops talking the next steps in to present the same concepts but spun slightly to sound less threatening, the original spiel repackaged inside a more palatable Trojan horse. The second speaker is friendlier than the first, more rational, and so is the third speaker, and the fourth, and the next and the next, and their bolus of ideologies begins to make sense and becomes familiar, becomes an affirmation of what was already there hidden inside your own head.

  Sabrina says, “We wish it wasn’t this way, but there’s nothing we can do to change it. I know it all sounds crazy, batshit crazy, but you have to somehow trust us. We’re going to trust you’ll make the right decision, of course.”

  Andrew says, “Of course.” He strains to reach out to Wen with his tied hands. His bruised, abraded knuckles and his swollen fingers throb. If he manages to touch her, pinch her shorts or shirt between his fingers, maybe she’ll figure out he wants her to help untie the rope if she can do so without being seen by the others. Andrew brushes the back of his left hand against her. She scoots back and away from him quickly, as though startled. He wiggles his fat and laggard fingers, desperate to somehow communicate untie me. Her hands do not fall upon the ropes or on his wrists.

  Leonard looks at his watch again and says, “I’m afraid we don’t have much time before you have to choose. That’s, um, our fault for taking so long to get in here, and then Eric’s unfortunate injury that we did not want or intend to happen, not at all, I swear, and it put us behind where we wanted to be by now. So now we’re running out—”

  Andrew lifts his head, shakes the hair out of his eyes, and says, “We’re not choosing anyone. We’re not sacrificing anyone. Not now, not ever.”

  Leonard closes his eyes and is otherwise expressionless. Redmond laughs dismissively and folds his arms across his chest. Adriane bows her head and lets her arms fall to her side and dangle limply.

  Sabrina clasps her hands together, her eyes widen, and her mouth drops open, dumbfounded, heartbroken. “Even if it means the death of everyone else in the world?”

  Andrew wants to believe there’s an opening, a crack, through which he and Eric (it would’ve most certainly been Eric if he hadn’t sustained a concussion) could talk the four out of whatever they have planned after he reiterates their answer to this lunacy is of course no. However, Andrew is not good at mollifying, at saying what people want to hear. He excels at saying what he wants people to hear. That is not the same as telling-it-like-it-is, a folksy descriptor that is spin for being an entitled asshole. It’s more like he tells-it-like-it-should-be backed with an impeccably logical through-line. He has no trouble speaking in front of a lecture hall, from his position of authority and expert, and his students both fear and adore him for it. Department and faculty meetings are trickier for him to navigate without hurting feelings and angering misguided and perhaps well-intended colleagues.

  Andrew opts for the unvarnished truth: “Yes. Even if I believed the world was at stake, which I don’t, that’s what it means. I would watch the world die a hundred times over before . . .” and he doesn’t finish because he doesn’t want to finish.

  “Christ.” Redmond returns to the couch and picks up his weapon, weighs it in his hands. “Fucking waste of time. They’re never going to choose to do this. I don’t blame ’em. Who would ever choose to—”

  “Shut your goddamn mouth!” Adriane increases volume with each syllable. She storms around the room mumbling, “Oh, man. Oh, man, we’re so screwed . . .”

  Leonard says her name and reaches for her left elbow.

  Adriane slaps him away and rubs her arms like she’s freezing. She pivots, takes two quick steps to Eric, anchors her hands on the chair’s armrests, and sticks her face only inches away from his. “We heard from Andrew. Come on, Eric, what do you say? Huh? You have to believe us.”

  Eric winces at her closeness and volume. He shakes his head slowly, side to side, his paper-towel dressing pad a limp white flag.

  Wen mumbles, “Leave Daddy alone,” from behind Andrew.

  “He’s going to say the same thing I said! Get out of his face!” He shakes the hair out of his eyes. Sitting as tall as he can with his pointed chin held up and out, he dares any one of the four to come as close to him as Adriane is to Eric. If one of them does, he’ll head-butt the person at the bridge of their nose.

  Adriane’s panic twitches below her eyes and tugs at the corners of her mouth. “We’re not fucking around. You don’t think we’re not sacrificing anything to be here? We dropped our lives and came all the way out there for this, man. Came out here for you. We had to. Unlike you, we had no choice. You have to believe us. You have to.” She pushes off the
armrests and straightens up.

  Eric takes a deep breath and says, “We are not choosing anyone, we will never choose anyone. We will not hurt each other or anyone else. I cannot be more clear on that. We cannot be more clear. So that means you’re going to let us go and then you’re going to leave and then—”

  Leonard claps his hands once, as loud as a slamming door. “Okay, you need to listen to this part, too. I’ve been shown exactly what will happen if you choose not to make a sacrifice. We’ve all been shown.” He spreads his arms out wide across the cabin.

  Adriane bites the back of her knuckles, shrinks away from Eric and off into the kitchen. She circles around her weapon.

  “I’ve been made to watch the end, over and over. Since last Monday. It started as a nightmare and whenever I closed my eyes, the end was there, and as we got closer to this day, the visions started happening when I was awake. I couldn’t escape it. I didn’t want to believe it. I thought there might be something wrong with me but the visions were so strong and so specific, so real—” Leonard pauses and wipes his face. “Sabrina, Adriane, and Redmond all saw the same things, too. They saw the exact same things I was seeing. And we were led to each other and we were led here. I don’t think you’re getting that we don’t want to be here, don’t want any of this to happen, but we have no choice. The choice is yours.”

  Sabrina stands behind Leonard with her weapon in her hands. Andrew didn’t see when she retrieved it. He tries to get his breathing under control; he cannot let fear totally shut him down. His stiff fingers renew their frantic waving at Wen and stretching toward the knots out of reach. Andrew considers arching his back and pushing off with the balls of his feet until he flips himself and the chair backward to crash to the floor. Maybe the fall would somehow loosen his restraints. The longest of shots, but it might be his only chance.

  Andrew shouts to be heard over Leonard. The shouting doesn’t stop Leonard from speaking.