Etiquette for the End of the World

chapter Fourteen





On the morning of December 21, 2012, as people all over the world watched for signs of the long foretold global disaster, Tess and Richie were making eggs Benedict. Jason was already away with his mother and her family for the Christmas holidays. Richie and Tess decided they were going to celebrate all day long, instead of sitting around worrying.

They went for a long walk in Central Park in the snow. When they came back, Victor was on the door. They sat with him in the lobby and talked about snow—how cold it was, how deep it could get. They went upstairs and unplugged their computers and the wireless router, even though they felt slightly stupid doing it. (What would unplugging matter, if the whole grid went down?) Then Tess and Richie spent the rest of the afternoon and night drinking champagne and making love, occasionally turning the TV to CNN, especially between 6:00 and 7:00 p.m. (according to the Twelve Twenty-one-ers, the end-time on the east coast of the United States was supposed to be 6:11 p.m.)

They woke up the next day around eleven. Tess rolled over and, taking a deep breath, reached out to turn on the radio. No big news—everything seemed normal. They turned on the TV. No emergency broadcasts. Just the normal programming, which was mostly sports.

Richie started pulling on his pants, looking around for his shirt. “I’m going out to get The Times,” he told her.

Tess decided to plug her computer back in. Of course it was possible the stuff just didn’t work as fast, and the little bugs were still coming down the pike, but what the hell. The second she connected to the internet she saw she had an email from her brother asking her to Skype him when she got up. She emailed him back to see if he was available.

“Hi, Stuart,” she waved at his head, once she could see him. Tess did not really like Skyping: because of the camera angle you could never look the other person in the eye, which she found disconcerting. But she had seen Stuart so little over the past year that she appreciated seeing his face in any form. Especially today, the day after the world, apparently, did not end!

“I’ve got news. Nancy wanted to be on the call too.” Oh, wow, Tess figured, the baby must have been born early! But Stuart said, “Can you believe it, they finally telephoned me this morning. Talk about a day late and a dollar short! Nothing like the U.S. government for efficiency.”

“Forget the politics, Stuart, and tell me what they said.”

“Tess, get this: the stuff was a dud. Orbus is either completely out of his mind, or his scientists were, or both.”

“But what if … maybe we just killed the sample, exposing it to heat, and whatever else, after it left Orbus’s lab. Maybe it’s only our vial that was a dud.”

“No, listen,” Stuart was chuckling, and Tess could see Nancy behind him in the room. She was huge, looked ready to drop. She was smiling and waving. “My gal who knows the guy at the NSA lab said they basically just made really tiny dung beetles.”

“What?” said Tess.

“The stuff’s is active all right. But apparently these nano-beetles just want to eat dirt, not computer circuits. They are thinking Orbus may have a fortune in a new cleaning product, if he could get it past the FSA—that’s the British version of the FDA.”

“That’s insane. I wonder if Orbus knows by now that something is wrong.”

“Who knows,” replied Stuart. “That guy is going to be under surveillance for the rest of his life, if he’s not already locked up. Okay, we gotta run—we’re meeting Nancy’s folks. I just wanted to see your face when I told you.”

“Thanks for everything, Stuart.”

“Bye, sis. Merry Christmas.”

Tess greeted Richie at the door with Stuart’s news, and they hugged, and laughed, and then started teasing each other for believing such a crazy thing could ever have been possible. Still, they searched the internet for reports of earthquakes, volcanoes erupting, comets falling to earth, terrorist attacks. There were no major disasters, it seems, anywhere in the world.

Tess called Harriet in Mexico.

“Tess, are you there? Are you okay? Well, stay inside anyway. Carlos and Ana and I have enough supplies to last for five years—I may never come home. Maybe it was all a plot to get people to buy bottled water. Tess, guess what? I can do the stairs, up and down. Carlos has to watch me, but still …”

For once, Harriet cut the call short. After ten minutes, she said, “I’m still nervous about being on the phone, Tess, and besides I have to go, Margie and Will are coming by on their way out of the country … . Apparently Will broke one of those crystal skulls and he’s heading for the hills!”



Tess and Richie could not stop looking at the news on TV. “You can feel the letdown in the media,” Richie said with a wry smile. “The reporters are filling the air with ‘what might have happened.’”

“Funny thing is,” Tess said, “I feel kind of let down too. Isn’t that weird? It wasn’t like I wanted the world to come to an end, but it did make—”

“It made us focus on the important things,” finished Richie.

“Do you think that’s why people jump out of planes?” Tess wondered.

“I guess. But if you jump out of a plane, it’s sort of like purposely setting your house on fire and then putting it out, if you know what I mean.”

“I do,” said Tess, snuggling happily up under his beard.

They took their coffee and the papers and got back in bed. Tess, who had slept only about five hours, started to doze off. Maybe she and Dakota would finally stop having earthquake dreams now.

“Hey, Tess, look at this.” Richie said suddenly. He folded the newspaper twice, creased it, and handed it to Tess, so she could read it without sitting up:



MEXICO CITY, Mexico — The world’s anthropological community was shocked when a relatively minor earthquake (4.2 on the Richter scale) that occurred early on the morning of December 21 caused the famous Aztec Calendar Stone—otherwise known as the Sun Stone, or the “Sun of the Five Eras”—to fall from its pedestal, where it has rested against the wall at the Museo Nacional del Antropologia since the museum’s opening in 1964. The 24-ton disk-shaped artifact crashed onto the floor of the museum, where it cracked into several pieces. Luckily, the museum had not yet opened for the day; there were no injuries reported. The stone was 12 feet in diameter and 3 feet thick. There was no other damage reported in the area. Experts are looking into possible causes of the strange accident.



***



Two weeks later Ginny and Bill were lolling on the couch, and Tess and Richie were curled up in the chair-lounge he had made her for one of her Christmas presents. It was the most amazing thing Tess had ever sat on—or rather sat in. It was shaped a little like an old-fashioned bathtub; it allowed two people to cuddle perfectly, while they could also sit apart in it just as comfortably. Jason was looking at a book while lying in the backseat of the Cyclops—his favorite spot in the apartment—with Carmichael sleeping on his stomach.

Ginny and Bill had come over for a celebratory “the world did not end” brunch, and they had all eaten so many blueberry and banana pancakes (a specialty of Richie’s—wonders never cease!) that they were lying around in a pleasantly satiated stupor. When the phone rang, Tess almost didn’t get up to answer—she was so cozily ensconced in the chair with Richie—but as Nancy was due any minute, she forced herself to propel her body out of the most comfortable chair in the world to see who it was.

“That’s weird,” Tess said, looking at the caller ID display on the phone, “it looks like it’s someone from Brown Hill. Do you think it’s for you? On a Saturday?” She started toward Ginny with the phone but Ginny gave her a mischievous smile and shook her head no.

“Is this Tess Eliot?” It was a woman. The voice had a confident ring to it.

“Yes?”

“The Tess Eliot who wrote Etiquette for the End of the World?”

“Um … yes?”

“This is Deborah Keller. I work with Ginny Bach? She gave me a copy of the book and Tess, we all just love it. We’ve had a preliminary talk with Dakota Flores over at WOOSH, and I think she’s amenable to our expanding into commercial markets, with you listed as the author. We think it could really sell. We especially like your last chapter, “Twelve Rules to Live and Die By.”

Tess tried to catch up to what was happening. “Wait. You mean, you want to publish it, even though the world didn’t end?”

“Tess, the world is always ending, don’t you know that? Can you come in sometime soon for a meeting? We need to talk.”

“Any time you like,” Tess said with a smile.





Etiquette For the End of the World

By Tess Eliot