being. Then she introduces Adam to the idea by giving him a bite of the fruit.
God punishes Adam and Eve for their transgression by kicking them out of Paradise and introducing death into the world. And there you have it: the first apocalypse, Eros and Thanatos all tied up in one neat little bundle, and it’s all Eve’s fault.
No wonder feminists don’t like that story. It’s a pretty corrosive view of female sexuality when you think about it.
Coincidentally, perhaps, one of my favourite end-of-the-world stories involves some astronauts who fall into a time warp; when they get out they learn that all the men are dead. The women have done pretty well for themselves in the meantime. They no longer need men to reproduce and they’ve set up a society that seems to work okay without men—better in fact than our messy two-sex societies ever have.
But do the men stay out of it?
They do not. They’re men, after all, and they’re driven by their need for sexual dominance. It’s genetically encoded so to speak, and it’s not long before they’re trying to turn this Eden into another fallen world. It’s sex that does it, violent male sex-rape, actually. In other words, sex that’s more about the violence than the sex.
And certainly nothing to do with love.
Which, when you think about it, is a pretty corrosive view of male sexuality. The more things change the more they stay the same, I guess.
Wyndham, though.
Wyndham heads out on the porch around three. He’s got some tonic. He’s got some gin. It’s what he does now. He doesn’t know where the woman is, doesn’t have strong feelings on the issue either way.
He’s been sitting there for hours when she joins him. Wyndham doesn’t know what time it is, but the air has that hazy underwater quality that comes around twilight. Darkness is starting to pool under the trees, the crickets are tuning up, and it’s so peaceful that for a moment Wyndham can almost forget that it’s the end of the world.
Then the screen door claps shut behind the woman. Wyndham can tell right away that she’s done something to herself, though he couldn’t tell you for sure what it is: that magic women do, he guesses. His wife used to do it, too. She always looked good to him, but sometimes she looked just flat-out amazing. Some powder, a little blush. Lipstick. You know.
And he appreciates the effort. He does. He’s flattered even. She’s an attractive woman. Intelligent, too.
The truth is, though, he’s just not interested.
She sits beside him, and all the time she’s talking. And though she doesn’t say it in so many words, what she’s talking about is Re-Populating the World and Re-establishing Western Civilization. She’s talking about Duty. She’s talking about it because that’s what you’re supposed to talk about at times like this. But underneath that is sex. And underneath that, way down, is loneliness—and he has some sympathy for that, Wyndham does. After a while, she touches Wyndham, but he’s got nothing. He might as well be dead down there.
“What’s wrong with you?” she says.
Wyndham doesn’t know how to answer her. He doesn’t know how to tell her that the end of the world isn’t about any of that stuff. The end of the world is about something else, he doesn’t have a word for it.
So, anyway, Wyndham’s wife.
She has another book on her night stand, too. She doesn’t read it every night, only on Sundays. But the week before the end of the world the story she was reading was the story of Job.
You know the story, right?
It goes like this: God and Satan—the Adversary, anyway; that’s probably the better translation—make a wager. They want to see just how much shit God’s most faithful servant will eat before he renounces his faith. The servant’s name is Job. So they make the wager, and God starts feeding Job shit. Takes his riches, takes his cattle, takes his health. Deprives him of his friends. On and on. Finally—and this is the part that always got to Wyndham —God takes Job’s children.
Let me clarify: In this context “takes” should be read as “kills.”
You with me on this? Like Krakatoa, a volcanic island that used to exist between Java and Sumatra. On August 27, 1883, Krakatoa exploded, spewing ash fifty miles into the sky and vomiting up five cubic miles of rock. The concussion was heard 3000 miles away. It created tsunamis towering 120 feet in the air. Imagine all that water crashing down on the flimsy villages that lined the shores of Java and Sumatra.
Thirty thousand people died.
Every single one of them had a name.
Job’s kids. Dead. Just like 30,000 nameless Javanese.
As for Job? He keeps shovelling down the shit. He will not renounce God. He keeps the faith. And he’s rewarded: God gives him back his riches, his cattle. God restores his health, and sends him friends. God replaces his kids. Pay attention: Word choice is important in an end-of-the-world story.
I said “replaces,” not “restores.”
The other kids? They stay dead, gone, non-functioning, erased forever from the Earth, just like the dinosaurs and the 12 million undesirables incinerated by the Nazis and the 500,000 slaughtered in Rwanda and the 1.7 million murdered in Cambodia and the 60 million immolated in the Middle Passage.
That merry prankster God.
That jokester.
That’s what the end of the world is about, Wyndham wants to say. The rest is just details.
By this point the woman (You want her to have a name? She deserves one, don’t you think?) has started to weep softly. Wyndham gets to his feet and goes into the dark kitchen for another glass. Then he comes back out to the porch and makes a gin and tonic. He sits beside her and presses the cool glass upon her. It’s all he knows to do.
“Here,” he says. “Drink this. It’ll help.”
SONG BEFORE SUNSET
by David Grigga
David Grigg is the author of just a handful of stories, which were published between 1976 and 1985. This story, the first he ever had accepted for publication, first appeared in the anthology
Grigg says that the seed of the story was a line in Chekhov’s “Three Sisters” where Tuzenbach says (of one of the sisters), “Fancy being able to play so exquisitely, and yet having nobody, nobody at all to appreciate it!” It was this sad irony of wasted talent that started Grigg thinking about how the very talented might cope—or not cope—once our civilization was no more. If, as Grigg says, culture is an epiphenomenon of civilization, without civilization, would culture be entirely irrelevant?
It took him three weeks to find the sledgehammer. He was hunting rats among the broken concrete and rusted metal of an ancient supermarket. The sun was beginning to descend over the jagged horizons of the city,
