The World of the End Read online

  Ben examined his body. A warm wave washed over him as he considered the thought that in less than an hour he would see Marian, and probably the rest of his family. When he heard the Announcer call his name, his heart shifted gears, keenly aware that she waited on the other side of the doors.

  As the last of the names was called, Ben was first to his feet, his eyes boring into the white double doors as if the intensity of his stare alone could pry them open, his hands rubbing one another in mounting joy, his body alive with surging enthusiasm. Another minute passed before everyone realized the magnitude of the moment, calling at the doors excitedly, huddling and pushing as though only some of them would be allowed to leave. Ben turned his head and was about to hammer the guy next to him, who was relentlessly jostling for position, when the doors opened with a soft wheeze. Turning back around, his eyes widened, his smile shriveled, and the tremor that had been coursing through his body went limp.

  3

  A Spot of Bother

  Ann hated the world. Not with a burning jealousy, not with raging passion, and certainly not with much interest. No, her hatred was moderate, calm, and accepting. From a young age, she had understood that she could see people but they did not see her. The world blatantly ignored her. Waitresses forgot to wait on her in restaurants, receptionists continued to talk on the phone in her presence, and everyone cut her in line at the movies, post office, and supermarket. At ten, she came to terms with society’s attitude toward her presence, accepting her inferiority as a congenital aspect of her personality. The understanding that her most striking characteristic had developed in her mother’s womb helped explain the relief that coursed through her as she examined her dwarfish reflection in the bathroom mirror and whispered, with equanimity, “inferior.”

  The diminutive, mouse-faced woman blamed no one for her condition. She had always believed that she was unnecessary to the world, conducting a clandestine affair of what she believed to be mutual animosity. “Why argue with the truth?” she thought, remembering the dark days of her youth in a rundown orphanage. At eight, the kindhearted orphanage director turned to her with a yellowing picture of a couple on their wedding night and asked if she recognized the young bride and groom.

  “The two ugliest people in the world,” the girl scowled and spat. The director, appalled, informed her that those were her parents and that they had been killed in a car accident a year after she was born, not long after they moved from England to Israel, but Ann, smiling, said it was too bad they weren’t killed much earlier, and then she ripped the picture to shreds.

  The director took the melancholy child under her wing, privately meeting with her in her office every day for three months, befriending her and soothing the embittered girl’s self-hatred with positive reinforcement. Yet just when it seemed that the child had finally begun to like herself, the director made an awful mistake. She left her office door open while speaking to a close friend on the phone. “I have no idea why she bothers to go on living,” Ann overheard her say, “her existence is flat-out pointless.” The troubled girl had no way of knowing that the director was referring to Anita, a battered woman who had, for the twentieth time, returned to the now-loving arms of her husband. Certain she had been referring to her, Ann avoided the soul-lighting smiles of the director and other staff members, convinced that her parents had taken their own lives because they were unable to stomach their revolting daughter. The accident story, she was sure, had been concocted by the pitying hypocrite who spared her feelings and insisted on protecting her from the cruel truth.

  Ann excelled in school, she reckoned, because life had taken no interest in her, and while her classmates dedicated their lives to wooing the boy with all the right bulges, she sat on her bed, shut her eyes, and tried to disappear. She never took this tactic to its extreme end, fearing that her body would go undiscovered and be left to rot in the fields where the scavenging birds would find her, pick out her eyes, and feast on her innards.

  Ann was certain she belonged to a rare strain of human, the kind that was supposed to be born invisible but, due to a biological fluke, had emerged barely noticeable, stuck between two phases of existence, making their lives far more complicated than that of their peers. It goes without saying that she was the last girl in her class to require a tampon, further proof that nature, in its own way, ignored her. When at fifteen she felt the first drops of blood trickle between her legs, she looked down, then up, stuck her tongue out, and groaned, “I don’t need any favors from you.”

  Late puberty did not rattle her apathy toward boys. In her mind, the opposite sex was childish, brute, swaggering, competitive, garish, selfish, stupid, hairy, and repugnant. In the same vein, she saw her own gender as talkative, annoying, gossipy, compulsive, self-absorbed, and shallow.

  The college scholarships, which came in droves, only served as kindling for her raging self-hatred. She reasoned that they were part of the education system’s overarching conspiracy to convince her that she was not worthless. Her loathing for the world played a crucial role in her choice of career. On the threshold of adulthood, she vowed to spend her life avenging the glaring injustices done to her: She would dedicate herself to healing the sick, forcing them to continue to suffer the bland burden of existence. Hating people, she sought with all her might to prolong their lives. All those who, in their blindness, stamped her inferiority with their approval could live forever as far as she was concerned. She privately congratulated herself on devising such an insidious scheme, which no one in the world could recognize.

  Upon completion of her studies, summa cum laude, she joined the nursing staff of a private hospital in Tel Aviv and, within a month’s time, even got used to the nickname her jealous coworkers gave her. “Anntipathy” felt great elation when the nurses watched in awe as she, a glum loner, cared lovingly for her patients. They failed to piece together the two jagged edges of her personality. The more she exhibited her intolerance for her coworkers, the more her shining attentiveness to her patients’ needs skyrocketed. Although she never exchanged so much as a “good morning” with her colleagues, she chatted incessantly with her patients, smiling and doting on them. The staff, failing to break through her chilly wall of estrangement, decided that her unblemished professionalism was yet further proof that she lacked any type of life beyond the hospital walls. Still, they struggled to make sense of this strange woman in their midst. She was the first to volunteer to cover for a coworker and, over eight long years, she had never once taken a day off. She had been sick on eight different occasions, but she had still come in, scooting between the beds as her body burned with fever.

  Ann was desperately invested in her patients’ rehabilitation, sending them back to their lives with a sly smile. Deep down, she knew that their praise, which bordered on adulation, was nothing more than the natural and temporary condition of a dependent person. Every time one of her patients checked out of the ward, she felt like an inconsequential servant. So long as they were in good health, they were the same people who cut her in line, walked all over her, ignored her.

  For her existence to be palpable, theirs had to be in jeopardy. In her eyes, that was the root of inferiority—to be seen, not as a human being but as a service provider. A hefty middle-aged patient dealt her the worst blow when, after two months of constant care, he passed her on the street without so much as a nod. She laughed at the sound of hundreds of patients’ voices reverberating in her ears, pledging to stay in touch, to come by and visit from time to time. Not one had kept their word. They had all managed to forget. She no longer held a grudge. She just learned to ignore them to nearly the same extent that they ignored her, pretending to be human.

  She wakes at five, showers, has coffee, leaves the house at five forty-five, gets on the bus at five fifty, arrives at the hospital at six twenty, puts on her white uniform, reads the night’s charts till seven, then attends to her patients till one, at which point she has lunch—the same two triangles of egg-and-potato salad sandw
ich with a glass of mineral water—and at one thirty, returns to the ward till six, tending to her patients, new and old, galloping like a possessed woman from room to room, solving all problems, calling the right doctor when necessary, and filling out the daily chart ten minutes before leaving the hospital. At six twenty in the evening she boards the bus. At six fifty she gets off, basking in the time she allows herself to roam the streets. At eight, she returns home, eats dinner, showers, watches TV, and crawls into bed. At eleven she shuts off the light and falls asleep in three minutes flat.

  Ann’s robotic life afforded her no pleasure, stimulation, or satisfaction, but she refused to allow the dreariness to deflate her. Lacking an alternative, she simply continued living. It was so decreed, and she complied with dull obedience. The same dull obedience she showed when told by the director of the hospital that she had been promoted to head nurse. She didn’t bat an eyelash at the news of her promotion or the small pay raise. A simple calculation revealed that she would, barring a miracle, pay off the monstrous mortgage on her small house by the age of sixty.

  When Ann turned forty, the miracle arrived. A complication during surgery left an elderly woman, who had been in her care for six months, in a vegetative state. The woman, Hanna, had taken the possibility of complications into account, and had told Ann that if she were to emerge from the surgery, held in this world by the thread of life support, she should wait no more than a month. If, after that, she saw no changes, she should disconnect her from the tubes and turn off the machines. A moment before entering the Operating Room, she smiled and patted Ann’s hand as though she knew that her life would end with the touch of the scalpel as it carved the tumor from her brain. Ann spent every spare minute of the next thirty days by her side, coaxing her back to life. On the thirty-first day, she gathered herself and went to see the hospital director, laying out the story of the old woman who had no next of kin. The director weighed the matter and said he trusted her instincts. At 12:45 that afternoon, Ann, in the presence of two doctors and three nurses, disconnected her from life support, kissed her on the forehead, and left to go eat her egg-and-potato salad sandwich. Two days later, for the first time, she attended a patient’s funeral, alongside a rabbi, and a lawyer who came over to her afterwards and informed her that the deceased had left her a palatial house in Kfar Shmaryahu. Ann stared at the lawyer till he smiled and said that Hanna had lost her family in the Holocaust and had not borne children. Ann knew the details. Hanna had told her everything, aside from the will and the fortune.

  After checking her options, Ann sold Hanna’s house and covered her own mortgage, surprised to see that there was a hefty sum still left over in the account. Then she started to save. Each month she deposited the excess from her salary in a savings account along with the inheritance money. Her future plans did not involve traveling around the world or laying the foundations of her dream house; her sole desire was to ensure financial independence through the prairies of old age. Dependence disgusted her. (Over the years she also cultivated a cautious distaste for love and its legions, convinced that the matter was nothing more than an ensnarement meant to deny people their independence.) To her dismay, she learned with time that her new job responsibilities called for counseling and other skills she had never considered acquiring. She read several books about bereavement, fished out a few hollow clichés, and kneaded them into a single truth. Over time, she learned to polish her words, lending them a professional gleam. Listening to her, the widowers-to-be were under the impression they were being counseled by a woman deeply familiar with the workings of the unconscious mind. They were unaware that her arguments had been drafted in the distant realms of her imagination, and that, more importantly, she had been profoundly changed.

  Hanna’s death heralded the start of a new chapter in Ann’s life. She embraced the burden of disconnecting people from life support and, along with that, slowly relinquished her grip on revenge—she had nursed enough of the infirm back to life; now was the time to send her patients to the kingdom of eternal rest. Hanna taught her something about human kindness and, had she stayed alive, she would surely have said “hi” as she passed her on the street. Ann felt she owed her a favor in return, and asked the hospital director to be charged with caring for the patients on life support.

  Ten years passed as Ann eased the comatose into even deeper sleep. During that time, her reputation grew until, at age forty-six, after her forty-ninth departed patient, she decided that she would retire after one hundred. The director of the hospital, perhaps assuming that round numbers hint at rationality, agreed to her terms: the hundredth deceased patient would ring the freedom bells for the “Angel of Death.” He even promised her an enhanced pension package and took an interest in her post-career plans.

  She shrugged and said, “All my life I’ve cared for others; when I retire I’ll care for myself.” Beyond a vague feeling in her gut, she had no idea what that meant. But then, two years later, she came across the health club and felt her stomach twist into knots. The Spot. During that year, Ann feverishly surveyed several candidates. Each lingering glance she allowed herself made the rest of her walk home an uncomfortably wet affair. The following year, she chose her Romeo, the man whose name she didn’t know, who wreaked havoc inside her. The harder she tried to banish him from her mind, the more entrenched he became. Those five intoxicating minutes in front of the health club window so dominated her mind that only as she stared at the wall at night, a moment before disconnecting herself from the animated world, was she able to recognize her menacing addiction.

  With each new morning came fresh denial. She sailed past the window without so much as a glance in the direction of the orphaned machines, emerging empowered and inoculated against the club’s clawing gravity. But one December day, when her guard was down, just as she was contemplating how to convince the relatives of a comatose patient to authorize his inevitable transformation, the Spot emerged in her mind, sprouting into reality, spreading the dark gravitational force of physical attraction, a corrupting power that yearned to drag her headlong into the thick of a wild frenzy, pulling her face-to-face with a beautiful, sculpted body, which scrubbed her senses clean of all thoughts beyond the small drops of sweat that slid down an athletic chest, over the hard boxes of his stomach, pausing for an interlude at his belly button and thieving their way directly down the wet slopes of her desire, slipping under the elastic band of her panties, making it difficult to walk. He turned around, steel and flesh melding as his bottom rhythmically rose and fell, and Ann’s pupils were riveted to the image, refusing to believe that winter could bring such throbbing heat, as she hid under an increasingly concave umbrella, letting, at last, the cascading water wash the scum from her feverish mind. Ann ran for her life. The umbrella flew out of her slippery hand and bounded gracefully over a stretch of film-coated puddles. When the nurse’s feet came to a stop in front of her door, she knew she was sick. Out of work for four days on account of the flu, a collaboration of the pouring rain and the Spot, she vowed, on the fifth day, to shake the addiction.

  For a full grueling week, she came home from the hospital and didn’t dare raise her eyes as she passed the health club, pushing her feet past the Spot, repressing the familiar sensations of pleasure. On the eighth day, she allowed herself a glance. Once again, six months passed during which Ann succumbed to the Spot and returned to her sordid ways. Luckily, her frozen features masked her private turmoil. One time, in the eye of a sexual storm, she met a colleague from the oncology ward and was able to hold an agreeable conversation, as though her athlete’s tongue wasn’t lapping at her insides, shocking her to the core. Although Ann enjoyed every moment, she never grew accustomed to the notion of the stranger inside of her, and deduced that her sudden licentiousness was a result of the deep change within her—from an inferior, invisible woman to a woman who controlled the fate of others, a woman treated with reverence by those around her, a woman who, despite her continued adherence to her most exceptional c
haracteristic, spread fear among the young nurses that joined the staff. These days they looked at her admiringly, most assuredly noticing her existence. Now that her humanity had been confirmed, her body started to seek out her femininity and found it in the world of make-believe—Ann’s favorite fantasy entailed a slightly different take on Sleeping Beauty: The handsome man from the health club, who has fallen into a vegetative state after an accident, is cared for by the devoted nurse. She tries to bring him back to life in every way, but when there is no other choice, she puts her hands on the plug and brings her lips to his in farewell. The patient opens his blue eyes, draws her close, and thanks her in the most appropriate manner. Ann fed off the fantasy for months, enriching it with speculation regarding her dreamy partner’s life. One time, he’s an accomplished scientist conducting complex experiments in his lab; another time he’s an impulsive artist overflowing with fresh ideas; but at all times, he’s a shy lover who has eyes for her and her alone. The first time she saw him from the Spot, she swore her allegiance. A year later, her mate was still the one. Soon she would unplug her hundredth patient and get a life, which would, one way or another, involve her athlete. Maybe she’d even summon the courage to walk straight through the door of the terrifying place and ask to sign up for a membership. She laughed and dismissed her frivolity as nothing more than a ridiculous fantasy. Ann loved no one, certainly not a nameless sweaty someone. And the Spot? The Spot sat on the rift between true and false. When she was overexcited she told herself that her athlete played but a minor role in the creation of her fantasy, and that if he didn’t exist, she’d find a substitute.