Mars in Retrograde. Chapter 23.

A little chain of daisies.

I’ve brought you as far as I can. You’re on your own now, kid.

The end will be violent and obvious, Shepherd Maya had said. Rising tides, biblical famine, indiscriminate catastrophe, and the people will do nothing, sink into their ignorant evil and die for it. Marshall is far enough now from her voice and its empty promises to see that he disagrees. Sure, lots of people will die, and many of them will have pretended till the very end that they were exempt for whatever reason they can muster–they donated to a link they found an Instagram story or they never got into fast fashion or they were vegan but critical of PETA as an organization. Many such cases. But what about the good? Not the kind before, but the kind that will be done after. When all the rules collapse and citizens are reduced to humans strung together by only a common humanity. Strangers catching each other for no reason other than they saw someone falling and their arms are reaching out before they can consider their own mortality. The boat someone could use to flee but instead uses to ferry the damned to a safe shore. The woman on a pilgrimage who doles out her meager resources to a stray dog biting at her heels. Loving one another despite the evil every person is capable of.

What of them? Those don’t sound like endings at all to Marshall. They sound like doors to something better. There seems to be a knocking on the door now, an imminent change. The kind of change a person could spend his whole life preparing for and still never really know what to do when it arrives. It takes heart to answer that door with or without fear.

Knock, knock. Who is it?

---

Each of them heard the news separately. Jamie, of course, saw it at an angle on a silent television screen.

Beaver, in the handful of minutes in which he’d started settling into the disaster of Lana’s old house which had been heavily vandalized in her absence, hacked the cable lines and got himself some free TV. He was flipping through the channels looking for the Sopranos when Marshall’s face appeared on the news. He was ready to go and waiting on the porch sipping cider by the time Jamie pulled up.

Lana had walked into town after she left the diner. A butch lesbian couple took her in. She had been staying across the street from Clive’s Bar. If she hadn’t been maintaining her sobriety, she might have found herself in that bar when Marshall was drinking himself into oblivion. Instead, she held herself together. There was a life brewing inside of her and she’d never created anything before. The promise of a child carried the same weight as her silent promise to live without drugs.

The lesbians didn’t do cable, abstained from phones, the internet. So Lana heard about the hostage standoff later than the rest. Saw it on the newspaper on a bench outside, and she’d barely finished the headline before she started walking. When Jamie pulled up alongside her shivering frame, she got in without question.

“But…” Marshall snivels. He can’t stop crying. “What about…all of it? I thought you’d all given up on me. On all of this.”

Beaver shrugs. “Gave up on our lives back there, too. There wasn’t nothing left for me in that town. There’s no you there. No brother like you, Marshall.”

“I didn’t know what the hell I was doing,” Lana says. “I told the lesbians that I was just catching my breath and then I’d keep moving north, but I’ve never been a planner. I couldn’t figure out nothing without you, Marshall. I saw this racist guy smoking outside the bar and didn’t have anyone to hold me back from kickin’ his teeth in.”

Marshall swallows some mucus. “But I would have kicked his teeth in too.”

“But with compassion,” Lana explains. “You’d bash his face in and somehow he’d learn somethin’ from it. I beat him up and that just made him hate women more than he already did.”

Jamie hasn’t stopped touching Marshall since he sat down. He must be tracing warm grooves into him, marking him with gentle erosion. He can’t imagine a world where they ever have to pull apart and be separate things again. He removes one hand only to grab something from the counter and hand it to Marshall, placing it like a child in his lap.

His breath catches. He pulls a tentative finger across the worn red cover. Opens it to the first two pages. The wet smile that contorts his face into something stupidly giddy. Crude watercolor paintings of Jamie in blurry but vivid hues peering up at him like messages from another life. Little vignettes of a boy he loves. With his shoulders hunched, self-conscious on the playground. The back of his head bobbing on the bus. The next several pages are also Jamie. Older, with his elbows on the counter of the Quik-Mart, his soft smile brighter than the TV screens blurred to obscurity above his head. Leaning against the truck in the parking lot cupping a cigarette against the wind with the palm of his hand. His head on Lana’s shoulder by a bonfire. There are paintings of other stuff too, these tiny worlds Marshall felt called to capture in his pages, but mostly they are Jamie, dutifully recorded moments of love from afar, dated all the way up to the year Marshall turned sixteen and retired the brush for reasons known and buried.

“You’ve always been looking out for me,” Jamie says quietly against his ear. “My family didn’t miss me. I guess I hardly missed them either. But I missed you the moment I left, Marshall. Missed all of you, factually. You three are my family now. I shouldn’t have left this family when they were in need.”

“Corny lookin’ ass,” says Lana.

“So what’s the plan?” Beaver asks, peering around the corner at Dick who is grilling some burgers for them. “How are we breaking out of here? More fire?”

Marshall wipes his face with his sleeves. Tucks, tenderly, the paintings of Jamie into his backpack. “I haven’t really thought about it. I was just gonna hold out until the police got bored and gave up or whatever.”

Lana frowns. “I don’t know, dude, the pigs were getting real antsy out there. Lots of walkie talkie chatter and oinking about something weird going on. I don’t know if they’re getting ready to bust in here and take you out but it felt like something was about to happen.”

“Something weird?”

Beaver purses his lips. “They were being real secretive. Especially those FBI guys. They were lookin’ mighty nervous.”

“Lana, you see anything about that virus or whatever?” Jamie asks.

Lana frowns. “Virus? No, I didn’t see shit. When I say those lesbians were off the grid, I mean like Shepherd Maya levels of off the grid. They were awesome. But now that you mention it, there were some nerdy lookin’ guys I passed on the side of the road peeping the sky with a telescope in the middle of the day. Probably unrelated.”

Marshall’s mouth puckers like an asshole. He feels like he is missing something very obvious. “J, what virus?”

Jamie’s face releases a smattering of contradictory utterances and then settles somewhere neutral. “Well, it kinda seems like maybe there’s some societal collapse happening. Or maybe it already sorta did collapse while we were in the, uh, cult that we were in.”

Marshall feels an entire hallway worth of doors unlock in the corridors of his mind. “What kind of end of the world are we talking about? What’s this virus do? Zombify? We lookin’ at mushroom domination? Plant revolt? Or are we throwing up bile until we die, is it termination of the human race? Moreover, what sort of response are we seeing from world organizations, because if WHO and the CDC aren’t reacting then we’re really gonna see–”

Jamie places a gentle hand on his forearm and Marshall’s dick gets hard. He really would have gone on forever probably and not in an anxious way. It’s just that he’s got his backpack and it’s been waiting for a moment like this. His backpack has been waiting for something to make sense, to be of real use. Is this it?

“I don’t know anything,” Jamie says. “It might just be like the last one, quarantine until everyone gets restless enough that they just pretend it’s all over and go back to normal or fist fight each other about vaccinations and autism or whatever. But, I don’t know. Something felt different. There was a sense of…decay. On the roads, in the store. I don’t know if we’re clawing our way out of this one.”

Marshall bites his lip and peers over the counter. The horde of sleek SUVs that were purchased with money that was stolen from teaching kids music or giving black people clean drinking water are still there in their semi circle formation around the perimeter of the small parking lot. There are maybe a dozen cops and a handful of FBI agents. Mostly white men, but a couple of women too who maybe even have higher kill counts than the guys, in the name of progress and feminism or whatever. They lean against their expensive cars and sip on coffees and stare at their phones, probably thinking about how they can kill Beaver with one thousand bullets and somehow get away with it. They’re nonchalant but there is a sort of urgency to it. The way their thumbs swipe viciously against their screens, tapping their feet like they got somewhere else to be, necks bent up toward the sky like they’re waiting for some signal to announce that society has politely but officially collapsed and it’s time to fall into chaos and disorder.

He returns to the smattering of people on the floor. Dick carries out plates of burgers and fries. Beaver slurps at his Coca-Cola like it might be the last soda he would ever taste, which was probable. Marshall chews on his thoughts and his meat and turns over the possibilities and skips mental stones across a deep lake. Jamie hadn’t taken his hand away from Marshall’s arm and is tracing little messages across the forest of dark hairs and tiny freckles. He says a lot and nothing at all.

“Okay,” Marshall says finally. “Here’s what we’re gonna do.”

Marshall tells Dick that he’s free to go but he already knew that. He’d just been entertaining the whole thing because June believed in Marshall or because he had nothing better to do. Besides, he kind of lives at the Diner or something? It’s unclear. He just goes back to cooking or mopping or whatever it is he does.

It’s high noon outside and the light crashing through the windows has no opinion about the world at large, has nothing to say about the humans ravaging their own humanity. Jamie digs through the storage room in the back of the diner and returns with a box of candles, the birthday kind that Dick would stick into a pie or a cupcake or a ribeye steak for a customer’s birthday. It’s pretty rare that a person would celebrate their miraculous birth at a run down diner so the box is pretty full. In the kitchen, Marshall arranges nine candles in a loose circle, sticking them into sesame seed buns to hold them upright. Lana lights a match on the stove and then brings each candle to flame.

They stand silently around this hasty vigil in a contemplative silence. Marshall looks at each candle and sees a branching web of possibilities in each, all containing their own corridors of doors that may or may not exist and everything that might have happened if Marshall was not who he was. He feels a sort of peace wash over him. Everything happens the way it has happened and there will always be more doors to crash through or to open and close tentatively or to walk through slowly with someone’s hand in his.

Jamie snakes his arm around his waist and squeezes reassuringly.

Marshall clears his throat. “Though each of these candles represents a person I have…killed, I do not mourn them and I release any guilt or shame I have held for their deaths into the flame.”

Beaver trains his eye on one particular flame and does just that.

“These candles are instead for those people who came to me for help and received it. Even though it took something from me each time I did it, I would do it all again just to know that a kid is better off without a cruel person’s thumb crushing them into dirt.”

Lana pulls Beaver close and he rests his head just above her stomach where it is only just beginning to swell with the idea of life, where it will thrive in a body that is cared for and where it will exit into a place where only love blooms into lovely flowers.

“And these candles are for me. For the boy who did things he never quite understood only for other people. I’m sorry that no one knew how to care for you, buddy. I wish I could show you that care is not an obligation but a gift. A gift that some beautiful people will share with you someday. It won’t look anything like you imagine. It will be much more beautiful than that. It will turn you into a flower.”

Jamie hooks his arm through Lana’s elbow and they connect like that, a little chain of daisies full of grief and wonder and a strange sense of freedom.

“I hope that somewhere out there, all these bodies I drained are feeding trees beneath the dirt somewhere. And I hope that those kids who turned to dirt turned to flowers too. I hope they found the space to show their beauty and stretch toward the sunlight. I hope what I did gave them time to prepare for the end. I hope they are free.”

The tall boy in his big clothes with a dense pack strapped to his shoulders bends forward and uses his breath to extinguish each candle one at a time until the room is swallowed by darkness. It’s there, in the hush of the kitchen with only slivers of light worming through the thick gray, that Marshall can truly see that he too is free. He can do whatever the fuck he wants, because he wants to do it. And so he does.

They clean up their vigil with haste, all the death turned to waste in the garbage can. Beaver, removing his helmet with an air of finality, approaches Dick at the counter and says, “I won’t be needing this anymore. For your kitchen.” He offers up the pot as if appeasing a deity.

Dick takes the worn, unwashed thing between two thick fingers, holds it up to the light. The paint is all chipped, rust subsuming any remaining hint of metal. He says, “I can’t cook with this.”

But Beaver is already walking away with Lana toward the storage room to pack up as much food as they can fit into their bags. The cops outside are staring at their screens and then checking their cars and then pacing impatiently. Marshall and Jamie hold each other for a long time on the floor. Marshall is annoyed that he can’t fuck his boyfriend right now. Jamie sits in his lap with his head on Marshall’s shoulder, the fuzz of his scalp tickling Marshall’s neck. He kisses the boy’s head over and over and says, “Are you really with me?”

“Mhm,” Jamie mutters.

“I think we can do anything we want,” Marshall replies.

Jamie lifts his head and grins. “What do you wanna do?”

Oh, how a few words from a pretty boy can unlock a heart. How being granted freedom can taste so sweet. It’s nice to hear it, but Marshall had already decided to give it to himself.

“I wanna go to pretty places and kiss you on the face and the butt and never hurt another living thing,” he says. “How about you?”

Jamie looks up toward the ceiling, maybe imagining that they can sprout wings like pretty angels and fly wherever. “I wanna start a garden by the ocean and make good soups for y’all and jerk you off in summer heat.”

Marshall kisses his man and their lips say much more than their words, as they always have. No language could ever compare to the way two men touch each other tenderly and hotly.

“I don’t think that truck is going anywhere this time,” Jamie mutters.

Marshall shrugs. “Whatever. I’m in no rush. We’ll get where we’re going when we get there.”

---

Marshall steps out into the hot sun and the cops are packing up their cars with haste, dumping coffees into the weeds, dropping their badges in front of their SUV tires to be crushed. The FBI agents are already peeling out of the parking lot toward some unknown apocalyptic horizon. The air stinks of smoke and societal reform. The earth throbs with rebirth.

Marshall walks up to a girl cop who is hitting her phone with her fists in an attempt to make it work. “Hey,” he says, “the guy is fine in there. We’re just gonna head out.”

She looks up briefly with a furrowed brow and returns to hitting her phone. “Okay, whatever,” she says.

“What’s the deal?” Marshall pushes. “End of the world, or?”

She nods. “I guess so. Those FBI guys are dicks. They were getting off on sharing all of the horrors unfolding knowing they’ve got secret bunkers to go hide in while I, Pam Buck, have nowhere to go at all!”

“I don’t really care about you,” Marshall says. “What did they say about the horrors?”

Pam Buck launches her phone across the freeway into the woods. It’s a good throw, she could have maybe played baseball or tossed javelins at the Olympics instead of becoming a cop. But, well, things happen the way they happen.

“Uh, not sure, really. Sounds like a mess. There was an asteroid that landed in Florida or something? It was carrying a virus unrelated to the one that’s already going around but it looks like the first one came from the melting Arctic icebergs and the two viruses together are even worse. Like, maybe zombie vibes. The asteroid might have also come from an alien spacecraft but NASA shut down so answers are not looking promising. The double supervirus couldn’t be contained so governments are just closing up shop and letting stuff fall apart. And there’s some nuclear war happening somewhere. I think.”

“Cool,” Marshall says. Apocalypse grab bag. “Enjoy the end, Pam Buck.”

Pam Buck gets into her sleek car and drives away and then they are alone in the parking lot. It’s warm for December. Marshall can’t be sure of the date but it might be Christmas. He can’t imagine a lovelier gift than this, the comfort of what he knows: the end of all things. They’ve got a few more hours of daylight before they’ll have to make camp and he’s going to set his tent far off from Lana and Beaver’s so he can fuck his boyfriend really hard.

Jamie tries the truck, but the engine is a brick. They strap their bags to their bodies, their tents to their backs. Missouri stretches out like a sleepy yawn in every direction. Smoke rises from the back of the diner where Dick cooks for no one. In the diner’s filthy window, June has returned, maybe slipped back in the moment she left–time is doing its thing right this moment with all these convergences layering atop each other like colored sand in a tacky jar so it’s possible June has always been in the window, always will be. She’s waving at them, the expression on her face obscured by the frost on the glass, beckoning them inside. Which they aren’t planning on doing anyway but then the smoke begins rising from the stacks in a further hurry, turning black. There’s a slight quiver beneath their feet, as though the earth is beginning to yawn. The quiver turns to a tremor then a quake, as the smoke spills like dragon breath into the winter day. Together, they take one small step as the pavement begins to crack and splinter, slabs of concrete tilting like shards of ice being pulled beneath cerulean waves. All at once, or perhaps very slowly, Dick’s diner begins to descend into the earth, rumbling like a freight train headed somewhere very important. Dick keeps on cooking and June keeps on waving and it is sort of sad, but also like watching a long movie with the correct ending. Like a hasty wound, the mottled earth closes quickly, an efficient scab removing Dick’s diner from this plane or possibly holding it close forever. Then it’s done.

Marshall spits. Beaver applauds. They turn back to the road that beckons them onward.

“So,” Lana says with clear eyes and bright skin and perfectly messy hair, “where are we headed?”

Marshall nods. “Stick to the original plan, yeah? We head northwest. Find somewhere to settle by the ocean. Do whatever the fuck we want.”

“Can we get horses?” Beaver asks. “And cows and pigs and chickens and goats and rabbits and sheep and dogs and cats and beavers and foxes and deer and other animals as well?”

“Sure.” Marshall knocks on the kid’s helmet affirmatively. “Whatever the fuck we want.”

“And if we run into any end of the world stuff?” Lana presses.

The world is turning at its normal pace as everything finally settles into primacy. The horizons feel endless.

“Well.” Marshall turns his big frame toward the horizon of his choice. “We run into any end of the world stuff, I got everything we might need on my big, sweaty back. And the rest, we can figure out as it comes.”

In the distance, already cars are screeching, smoke rising, guns unleashing, expensive spaceships like sleek war missiles taking off, careening toward the expanse of further isolation beyond the atmosphere. They leave trails of soft white exhaust in their wake, marking their exit from common humanity, becoming something else, something alien. Down on the earth, things will explode until they don’t need to explode anymore.

How terrified the people are of the ensuing chaos that they become the chaos! Can’t they see? Marshall wants to take them, each person in a line of eight billion people, from Truck Willis to Shepherd Maya, and shake them until they are human again and they can see everything. The only thing there is to fear is what the fear makes them do, how it grips their difficult soul and begs them to do terrible things to avoid other terrible things. It is not humanity that is cruel and evil in itself but that it continues to build itself up to be something with order, that all it has been striving toward are neat blocks of towering glass buildings and law firms and invisible stock markets and dog obedience school and a gay man’s right to frack the earth for all its got and the ability to control every aspect of being a complex living thing. All Marshall has ever wanted is to make them all see what he sees: that the manic need for absolute order can only breed disorder. And that is the beauty of all of it ending now.

The collapse will return everything to the way it is supposed to be. The billboards will rust, sinking beneath the hunger of the kudzu. The bones of the buildings will groan and buckle like old bodies. The TV’s will have nothing to say for their attempts to urge compliance. A phone will never ring again, there is nothing to be advertised but survival. There will be death and it will be sad, but there always has been death and it always has been sad. There will be killing and it will cause pain but there has always been killing and pain has always reminded the people of their fragile bodies and gorgeous humanity.

Marshall could pen a thesis on the perfection of societal collapse but he will not because the universities and all their guarded wealth have become obsolete in an instant. He will not because they are living it now and they’ll either see it or they won’t. He sees it. That his fear of the world ending was never fear but desire, as if the two things have ever been different. Desire for something terrible and necessary to uproot all of the institutions that hold them each in cages with thin bars, and fear that it would not happen in his lifetime.

The end is here and it is simple: the cages lifted, the bars rusted, the people are free to see what they will become without blue light and insurance and gym memberships and lawn signs. It might be good and it might be bad, but that’s it. It’s up to the people now to decide what they will be. It’s up to Marshall to decide the kind of person he will be at the end of the world.

Ah! How endings so often feel like beginnings. Untamed, unwatched and unbothered, Marshall gathers his loved ones close and they march forward at their own pace.

Previous chapter. Next ch—oh. That’s it. Ouch.

Acknowledgments and reflections.

Table of Contents.

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