Hell and Other Terrible Things that Might Happen in the Future

It’s not the apocalypse yet.

 
Now, September’s heat nowhere near breaking, I don’t mind the Georgia weather so much as what it makes me think about.

Our Honda’s AC blows warm air all the way down our hill, and my neck sticks to the headrest. My husband Tim waves to each neighbor: the couple who fights, the middle-aged man clipping his jalapeño plants, the artist whose yard is piled with scrap metal. They love him already. Even the couple pauses their shouting and waves back.

Since we moved from White Plains for his residency, I’m starting to worry about hell. He thinks I’m taking the Christianity around here too personally, but that’s easy for him to say. If, as the church signs here tell me, hell is real, then while I burn, WASP-y, baptized Tim is going to be up there among the angels.

Our neighborhood overlooks a steep ravine thick with kudzu, live oaks, and bamboo stands.

“How often you think these houses fall down the cliff?” I ask. It is hard to imagine that bamboo will be enough to stop their sliding.

“Happy Wednesday to you, too.”

I drive him to the hospital so I can have the car. As if I’ve got anywhere important to be between 6 p.m. and 6 a.m. Or whenever.

I used to buy and return props for commercial photoshoots. I had a tag gun for reattaching the price tag to whatever got photographed. One time, I bought and returned 24 midcentury wine racks in 48 hours. I carried so many bags their handles pressed deep white lines in my skin, and then I left the stores with nothing. I have tried, sort of, to find photographers here. But I am not working. Instead, I move what furniture we own to different positions in the room, then move it back.  

We follow a bumper sticker marked with a thick black cross. If this offends you now, it reads, how will you feel when you stand before it in judgment?

Tim reaches across the gearshift and taps my thigh. “Nothing but heaven for you, babe,” he snorts. “I promise.”

I can’t tell which is worse. That, after the month we’ve lived here, he still thinks I’m joking, or if he thinks pushing ahead with the joke will lighten my mood.

When we got engaged after a couple years together, my great aunt Rivka asked why I was sticking with Tim. I insisted we could always laugh together. That didn’t convince her as a reason to marry out.

We cruise the main street of town, its flat, brown river hidden from view behind a grassy levee. Half the storefronts are empty.

“Callie from work,” he says, about a nurse I’ve met, “wants to know if you’re interested in line dancing.”

“Should I be?” I take the bypass road. It’s hard not to picture the way Callie laughs at Tim’s jokes, her eye skin crinkling.

“Come on, Soph. You have to do something. Callie and her friends really like you.”

“If by really like you mean pity the damned, maybe.”

“Jesus Christ.”

“Exactly,” I say.

I gun it through every yellow, but at the last intersection before the hospital we hit a red. I measure the distance between where we are and the light, and zip past a slow cruising Pontiac. There are only inches between our nose and the intersection, but I make it, first in line.

The man in the lane to my left mouths Sweet move. His arm, straight to the wheel, appears tattooed, until the thick bands twist and curl around his muscles.

I brush Tim’s shoulder. “That dude has a snake on his arm.”

The light turns and the man zips ahead of us, before Tim has a chance to look. “Sure, Sophie,” he says.

Last week he treated a snakebite and Callie told him that even though taking up snakes is illegal in Georgia, we’re only 15 miles away from a church that handles them. I have to believe great aunt Rivka would appreciate the righteousness, if not the theological details. You don’t keep the traditions, you’re not anything, she always says, and that’s no way to be.  

She never talks about her childhood, but what she hid from in those Bavarian cellars was something my cousins and I inhaled before we knew its name. We were supposed to carry it with us always, a great evil against which we could define ourselves, our lives a proud reminder of how our people had survived. My cousins were all about that, going to Israel and wearing their names in gold-plated Hebrew on their chests. But it didn’t click for me. I felt like any old American white girl. You had to be careful with your drink at parties and Mrs. Shaw would give you detention for a smirk. But other than that, there wasn’t much in my young life that needed surviving.

At the hospital, I watch Tim’s broad shoulders until the door slides closed. He never looks back, and each day this worries me more. Like that door is something more permanent that sneaks between us. Between his world, where literal lives are saved, and mine.

I peel away from the hospital, and part of me knows I should do Callie’s class. Make some friends, get involved. But the whole drive home, I’m looking at the other drivers’ arms. The man with the snake is long gone, but I can’t unsee it moving against his skin—languid, coiling, dark.

She snaps her fingers and sings with so much certainty that if she is unserious about hell, it is only because she does not see the place in her future.

For the next month, I try to get to know my new home. I sign up for a library card and place a hold on the first book of the dystopian YA trilogy that, Tim tells me, Callie’s book club is about to read. I check out a different book on Pentecostal Christianity, and a documentary about medical personnel in Iraq. I do this walking path my neighbor told me about, along the river below where we live. Trumpet flowers choke the crumbling stanchions of a collapsed railroad bridge. Bright tents dot the woods. The vagrant men who live there fish the river. I go to Hobby Lobby a few times. It feels like the tiny Noah from the Build Your Own Ark kit stares accusingly, like how could I think his OT salvation has anything to do with me.  

It doesn’t stop being warm. Most nights, while Tim is at work, I pour a bowl of Shredded Wheat and eat on the screened porch.                       

At our wedding, one year ago, great aunt Rivka clutched my arm across a buffet table, and screeched that the secret to a long marriage is going to bed together. As I rest my empty cereal bowl on the wooden crate we use as a table, I can feel how my great aunt, the refugee who first kissed her husband—child’s play!—in the basement of a heroic farmer’s barn, and was still married to him seven decades and three countries later, might have been right.

Lights flicker across the sleeping valley. Across town, Tim and Callie move toward the urgent cries of someone dying, someone giving birth, someone whose bones have broken.

I get my computer and surf the web for a while, reading the blogs of strangers, trying to decide if I should buy the new Aimee Mann album based on what they say. I Google “commercial photography northwest Georgia” and “making friends as a grownup” and “Jewish equivalent of handling snakes.” An ad pops up for a Christian dating site. I click in and set up a skeleton profile. It’ll be something to laugh about, I tell myself.

Great aunt Rivka, if she were here, could crush this rationalization between two bony fingers. But she’s too hard of hearing to talk on the phone, and in any case, she’s asleep.

On the dating site, I call myself Holly. Tim’s not even halfway through his rotation when the messages start rolling in.

I answer a back-to-the-land dude and a man that lives across the Alabama line. The man in Alabama asks me if I’d rather vacation at the beach or the mountains. The back-to-the-lander wants at least five daughters. He will refuse to pollute them with school. He will feed them yard goat and chickens. The killing days, he says, will be hard on the daughters, but it is never too early to learn that this mortal life is only a waystation on the road to true redemption.

 

A few days later, as sun leaks between our miniblinds, I slide my hand under Tim’s pajama bottoms again, and again, he pushes my hand away. “I haven’t been asleep two hours,” he snaps. “Please.” The dating sight does not become a joke between us. I do not mention it all.

I start the YA novel. The main character has to fight other kids to save her family, or something. She’s smart and nervy and good with a bow. I go back to Hobby Lobby a few more times. I still can’t pull the trigger on the furniture kit. Someone bought the Ark kit and Ol’ “My Bible, Not Yours” Noah hasn’t been restocked. This doesn’t make me feel any better.

Around Thanksgiving, Callie calls our house. “I’m not taking no for an answer,” she says. “Tuesday at six. The Methodist church.”

She’s waiting in the parking lot, smooth blond hair hanging neatly around her freckled face. “It’s good to see you out,” she claims, then hugs me, opens the church door, and answers a phone call in what seems like one motion. No doubt she could find and pierce my vein in seconds.

The woman leading the dance class wears a tie-dye shirt and knee-length track shorts. Everyone, including Callie, is wearing sneakers. I look down at my black thrifted Tony Lamas. It is only now, in November, cool enough for boots, and I’d been excited to break them out. But their stomp sounds wrong in a room of soft swishes.

“Step forward, hold, then bump your hip,” says the teacher. “Come on, ladies. Bump it.” Callie spins beside me, her hips shifting easily in rhythm. The song is contemporary Christian. Callie knows every word, and sings. She commits bigtime to her hip bumps.

The ladies spin and kick through a few pop-country numbers, and an old doo-wop song I remember from great aunt Rivka’s ballroom dance events at the JCC in White Plains. 

Before class ends, the instructor promises a special treat, a new version she’s worked up of “This Little Light of Mine.”

“You can snap your fingers,” says the instructor, “every time we do the step-touches.” She sways from her right sneaker to her left, waving and snapping her fingers. “Snap to show God’s love.” 

I follow the dance through the first two walls. But when the class turns to the back of the room, I lose it. I have a hard time stepping and snapping my fingers at the same time. I spin too early, and collide with Callie, who jumps back like I’m contagious.

It’s only a split second, but her blue eyes narrow, and I can see her storing my awkwardness away. I wonder how she’ll make fun of me at the hospital, if she’ll do physical comedy. If Tim will try to hold back his giggles or just belly laugh. The moment passes, but I know what I saw. She snaps her fingers and sings with so much certainty that if she is unserious about hell, it is only because she does not see the place in her future. 

I stop reading the YA novel. The main character reminds me too much of Callie—her get-it-done quality, how all the boys love her. Instead, I log in to the dating site and write to the man who lives in Alabama. I am relieved to learn he does not believe in salvation. When it comes to end times, he’s not counting on rapture. He brags of a shipping container, buried on his land, stocked with venison and Berrettas. We make a plan for the second week of December, when Tim will be at the hospital. He reveals that his given name is Seth, that third son of Eden, the one fated for neither sacrifice nor curses. But he asks me to call him, as it reads on his profile, Stone.

As he steers along the road that edges his pasture, I wonder what kind of survivalist is so willing to open his compound to a strange woman.

The road to Stone’s house curls past a power plant and a logging operation. I get stuck behind a logging truck, and the timber trembles in its bindings.

Not many lots sit directly on the road, but the houses I do see are beginning to decorate for Christmas. Wise men huddle by mailboxes. Deflated Santas lie dormant in yards, the grass still green beneath their flopping limbs. In one lawn, a trampoline has been turned on its side, and I can make out green light cords that form a Star of Bethlehem.

Stone prunes his hedges as I drive up. He does not stop his work to greet me. I park and check my mascara in the rear view.

“Glad you came this way,” he says, when I am close enough to see more silver in his stubble than I expected. “Please do come in.”

Great aunt Rivka would pretend to vomit in her oatmeal if she heard me say this, but it isn’t until I’m following Stone into his house that I admit I’m on some kind of date. That maybe I should have told someone where I was going. But who? Callie, her crystal blue eyes focused in judgement?

 Stone’s house is decorated well. It’s masculine, all leather sofas and plaid throw blankets and mounted antler racks.

“I never met a woman from New York,” he says. “I’ll bet you love smoked salmon. I know, I know, politically incorrect. But do you?”

I nod.

“I knew it!” Stone points out the kitchen window. “Got my own smoker out there.”

The house is cabin-style, open plan. It’s lighter here than I expected—Central Time, I guess—and Stone lives far enough from the road that he doesn’t shade his windows. I can see his property, which slopes gently toward pine woods.

“Can I see the land?”

He scans my skirt and thin tights. “We’ll drive it,” he says. “Like the boots, by the way.”

“Thanks.” 

His truck is boxy and old, blue and cream like you might see in the movies. As he steers along the road that edges his pasture, I wonder what kind of survivalist is so willing to open his compound to a strange woman. A lonely one, maybe? One who’s betting on the apocalypse, sure, but also wants some decent company when it comes, or until it happens?

I start to talk about this procedure I heard about for amputee veterans. They attach arms or whatever from recently deceased bodies, thread them through new blood and bone so the limb can actually move. “Prosthetic, but not, you know?”

“That’s something,” he says. “You work in healthcare?”

“Sure do,” I say. I don’t remember everything I put on that profile, but this seems to satisfy him.

He pulls over by a small creek behind the pasture. I’m already out of the truck before I notice the headstones. Most of them are old, tilted and mossy and smooth. One glistens, though, cut fresh from pink granite.

“Used to be a church here,” he says. “Julia always loved the spot.”

I can make out the letters on her shiny stone now. Beloved Wife, the death date three years past.

“Doesn’t feel right to have her on the World Wide Web personal,” he says. “But I’m not trying to keep any secrets. As they say,” he wings his arms wide, “an open book.”

I don’t have a story to tell in return, so I ask more questions. Lupus. A woman who once raced barrels rocking out her last days in a chair. She didn’t lose her spirit, he tells me. She raged about it at first, refusing to give up the horses, but then a peace came about her and she found them new homes. Stone stopped riding, he told me, after she was gone. Now the bunker takes up most of his time.

“Can I see it?” I say. A part of me knows that hell-bound or not, good wives don’t follow strange men into remote shipping containers. But another part of me wins out. The part that has felt miles from worthiness for months.

“You bet,” he says. We get back in the truck.

On the other side of the pasture, the land rises in front of us. Small metal chimneys jut from the earth. Stone parks by a brown storm door, which is only a little bit camouflaged in the grass.

“Oh,” I say. “You, just, like, go in it.”

Stone nods. “That’s the idea.” 

The bunker, like the house, is more stylish than I expect. Maybe it’s the neatness of it. Each rifle in its place on the rack. Gleaming wooden shelves, so long he must have built them, lined with cans and jars. Strips of jerky hanging like abstract art. Sacks of grain.

A metal box in a far dark corner comes into focus. “What’s in the safe?”

“Seeds.”

The bunker is not, ultimately, that interesting, and Stone must sense this. So we resurface, bringing up two camp chairs and a bottle of Jim Beam Devil’s Cut. He offers me the first sip and we sit in quiet. It’s early evening, though the light has only lost a little of its gold.

I don’t know what to say, so I tell the story of how, earlier in the week, I saw a feral cat fight with a golden fox. I could tell the cat from the fox by their colors, but still, as they grappled and rolled through the bamboo hedge, their bodies joined into something strange. I was frozen as they shrieked and clawed, unable to help or look away. It’s the kind of story you tell on a date, I realize, when you’re trying to feel out the chemistry. No point to it, not really, no real information being shared, but on a good date that kind of story will feel important. Full of meaning or something. Stone is still and attentive and maybe we’re doing all right. When he offers to cook up some steaks, I can already taste how the iron will fortify me.

He stows the camp chairs back in the bunker, though I doubt they’d be stolen. It’s not the apocalypse yet. We cross the pasture again, this time in easy silence. A black SUV is parked behind mine. Something nice, maybe an Audi. By the time we pull up, a young man approaches Stone’s truck.

“Colton,” says Stone. “You’re down early.”

I don’t know what I expected when I saw the car, but not this, clearly a father and son who are nothing but happy to see each other. Stone practically jumps from the cab and they hug for a long time. It looks like a real hug, the kind that makes you feel sheltered against all possible disaster. I’ll admit that Tim and I have hugged like that, before Georgia, when we were closer. I’ll admit that, in all my concern about hell and great aunt Rivka and Callie, I’ve also been slackening my limbs, refusing to give back.

They part and Stone beckons me. I don’t know why I’m still in the truck, other than feeling a real intimacy where I don’t belong.

“This is Holly,” says Stone. I look behind me. Colton lifts his brows, like he’s been on a few fraudulent online dates himself. “She’s joining us for dinner.”

It’s warm out, but I can still feel the winter in the light, how it sprays gold over Stone’s property. You know night is coming, and that makes it brighter, somehow.

“You’re great,” I say. “Just really, really nice.”

“Oh balls,” says Stone. “Here it comes. I talked about her too much, didn’t I?”

“No,” I say. “I mean, maybe, but not how you think. This is all on me.” I don’t know how to tell Stone that I’m not jealous of his wife but of him, for having loved her so well and so long. “It’s only that it’s getting late,” I say instead. “I have to go. Take care.”

Colton’s SUV is behind me, but we are all parked on grass, and I circle through it to get back to the road. I can see the sky smeared pink and orange in my rearview. Twenty minutes up the road, in Georgia, time is one hour ahead. I want Tim to know where I’ve been. I don’t want to laugh. I want to fight, because maybe that might wake and change us. I’m pushing 30 over the limit. I don’t know if catching up is possible.