John Dies at the End

“James or Jack or something.”

I said, “Well-dressed guy. Probably gonna be a doctor or something.”

John looked at me, then at Amy then at me again. He said, “He, uh, had a nice ass, too.”

Amy turned, rolled her eyes and we piled into the elevator. We rode up and moved her stuff to her tiny dorm room. And so, for the second time, I said good-bye to Amy and for the second time was sure it was going to be forever. We hugged and I wished her good fortune about a dozen times. Finally I broke off and headed for the hall, sure that I had succeeded, thinking that if you love someone you do have to set them free and that I had done just that, for the good of all. And juuuuust as I was almost out of grabbing range Amy snagged the back of my shirt with a fist and turned me around. She said, “Uh, thank you for helping me move.”

“You said that already. No problem.” She looked like she had something else to say. Quite a bit else, in fact.

John said, “Yeah, it’s not a big deal for me to lift heavy objects. I’m sort of used to it, if you know what I mean.”

I held up a hand to silence him. “John—”

“Of course I’m talking about my penis.”

I said to Amy, “Ignore him. His penis is just like everybody else’s.”

Amy said, “I was just gonna ask you if—”

“You’ve never seen my penis!” bellowed John. “I’d show it right now, to everybody here. If we had time.”

I turned on him. “If we had time? What?”

“Because, well, if you want to look at my penis, you’d better have a whole afternoon, buddy! You best have five or six hours to take it all in, lest its majesty escape you!”

Before I could stop her, Amy said, “That doesn’t make any sense.”

“It would make sense if you could see it!” shouted John, plainly agitated. “It would be making loooooong sense, honey!”

“John, just calm down, okay.” I gestured down the hall. “Go wait by the elevator.”

He didn’t move. From behind me, I heard Amy say, “Do you want to get engaged?”

And there it was. I had a sinking feeling, visualized a moth flapping toward a blowtorch. I tried to think of the best, most soothing way to turn her down and said, “Sure.”

John looked at his watch. “Well, congratulations. Now we gotta roll. If we leave now there’ll still be enough light to get in some basketball.”

THE DAY WAS so hot it stank. Asphalt baked under our shoes, bodies rustled against one another dancing to the irregular PAP PAP PAP beat of a basketball smacking the pavement. I backed toward the hoop, about where the free-throw line would be if we had played on an actual court rather than this giant cracked piece of playground sandpaper. I spun, jumped, threw up a shot that was doomed the moment it left my fingers.

John snatched the rebound, spun, jumped, slammed. He pumped his fist in victory. “Ring it up! Two hundred seventy-four to one thirty-seven!” In John’s game, each shot is worth one hundred and thirty-seven points. “If I had a dime for every basket I made today, you’d still suck!”

I tracked down the loose ball and handed it to John. In this game, like life, scoring means you get to keep the ball. He dribbled twice, glanced up over my shoulder, and froze. I saw the expression on his face and turned. John squinted and asked, “Was that there before?”

It was a black sphere, floating just over the weeds at courtside. It was gleaming and about three feet wide, looking like a giant hovering eight ball. John strode over to it and I heard him say, “You can sort of see into it. I think I see people.”

He bent over and picked up a broken chunk of concrete. He lobbed it at the sphere, which swallowed it noiselessly. John looked over his shoulder at me and said, “Hole to another dimension, I bet. Wanna go through?”

“After this point.”

John got the ball and dribbled behind the cracks and bundles of weeds we called the three-point line. I knew from the look in his eyes that he was going to take the shot. As soon as the ball left his hands I was bounding toward the rim, that subconscious gauge in the back of my mind already telling me it was a miss off the backboard. It clanged, I leapt. I scooped the rebound from the air one-handed and before John could recover into defense I turned and hooked a shot that ripped prettily through the net.

“Like a drop in the bucket, baby,” I said. “Splash!”

“Damn.” John said, hands on his hips, chest heaving. “Your game be chubby today.” He said this in such a way so that “chubby” rhymed with “today.”

“Tied at two seventy-four, Monster Dave.”

He retrieved the ball from the grass, then heaved a chest pass at me that missed badly. I turned to watch the ball go and, sure enough, saw it hit the black sphere and disappear just like the piece of concrete had.

“Whoops,” said John. “I tossed our ball into another universe.”

“You wanna go home?”

“Yeah, just let me get my ball.”

He walked over to the sphere and peered into it. He lifted a leg and stuck it through, then ducked in and soon it was just his left leg sticking out of this floating ball. He pulled it through and he was gone. I sighed, looked at my watch and wandered toward the spherical portal. I knew he wasn’t coming back until I at least poked my head through, so I bent over and pushed my way in.

The air on the other side was at least thirty degrees cooler. I stepped out, realizing as I did that I was emerging from a white sphere on this side, brilliant as sunlit snow. I stepped out onto a basketball court that itself was not terribly different than the one we had left. But the world was changed nonetheless. The sun was gone. The overcast sky was an unnatural ceiling of tar-flavored cotton candy and the air had a vague farty smell.

I scanned the landscape and saw other small differences. The park in Undisclosed had been in a polished neighborhood, Victorian houses and carpet lawns. Here the houses looked empty and forgotten, windows smashed, weeds overgrowing, rusting mailboxes. The yellowing white house nearest to us had a single nonsense word spray-painted across the front:

BLOODWORMS.

A dry wind blew, bringing with it that vague sulfur stench once again. I saw John standing nearby, looking up at the rim of one of the half dozen goals that bordered the court.

He said, “Where you been? I’ve been walking around for two hours.”

“Time must move differently here. I came right after you.”

“That’s always your excuse.”

I said, “At least it’s cooler here.”

“No nets here, though.” He was right, the naked rims stood silently over us like very tall, thin and largely ineffective sentries. He said, “This one’s regulation but a couple of those other goals are bent on the rims. Must be a lot of dunking in this world.”

There was a tinkling sound from behind us. Glass breaking. We both turned. A bone-thin woman dressed in rags stumbled toward us. She had feebly hurled a glass jar at us that crashed twenty feet short on the pavement. Her eyes were swollen in amazement, a bony finger aimed right at us.

“Y-y-y-you!!” she screeched. “Unstained! Unstained! How!?!?” Her left arm was missing, ending just above her elbow in a jagged stump, as if it had simply rotted off. Her screaming was suddenly cut short when four beings I can only describe as some kind of flying baboons descended on her, beating her savagely with clubs. They hauled her unconscious body into the sky. We watched them fly away, saw they weren’t coming back for us. We exchanged a look, then shot free throws to see who would start with the ball.

John won. We played for a bit but the game wasn’t that much fun. It was the wind. That steady, rotten wind that blew constantly from the south and brought with it faint sounds of screaming and an insectile shrieking noise; it drove every outside shot off the mark by a couple of inches. Soon we both abandoned three-point shots, which brought the game under the hoop. That was John’s domain. His three-inch height advantage gave him a series of rebounds and easy layups, quickly giving him a 548-point lead. Sweat stung my eyes as I drove under the hoop once