Songs for the End of the World - Saleema Nawaz Page 0,3
as freely as water from an open tap. When he stopped bothering to wipe his eyes, his cheeks dried with a salty film that made them feel papery and exposed.
He heated up a can of baked beans and called Sarah to cancel, bracing himself for her disappointment.
“We were really looking forward to seeing you. Noah especially. You’re always the main attraction around here.” There was a small, plaintive note in her voice that he always found moving. Growing up, his kid sister had been a whirlwind of a girl who shouted down bullies, raced Lasers at sailing camp, and liked to face any fear by tackling it head-on. But ever since Sarah had shown up on his and Dory’s doorstep, wan and fragile and fresh off a plane from Bolivia, she hadn’t coped well with last-minute changes or any implication that Elliot would fail to keep his promises. Eight years after her return, she remained solitary and tentative, leading a life confined by routine and running even minor decisions past him, like which movie to watch or whether she should get a haircut. A watercolour version of who she used to be. Things had been better, though, since she had Noah.
“Sorry,” Elliot said, “I’m sick.”
“You’re never sick,” she said, worried now. “Do you need anything?”
“No, it’s not that bad.” He couldn’t seem to form the words to tell her the truth. “Just a sore throat, but I figured better safe than sorry, these days.” His voice started to catch, but he turned it into a cough. “Have you heard about this virus?”
“It’s practically all I can think about,” said Sarah. In the background, Elliot could hear Noah tunelessly singing a song about brushing his teeth. “It reminds me of the stuff we used to talk about at Living Tree. You know, plagues, wars. End times.” Living Tree was what she had left behind in Bolivia, a communal farm run by a quasi-religious group of the same name. Though Living Tree purported to believe in harmony and radical equality, the reality turned out to be closer to an ascetic sort of doomsday cult, run by leaders who didn’t seem to have a problem with personal enrichment. Sarah had mostly looked after the children until she became disillusioned enough to return home. “Actually, I started a new rug last night.”
Making rag rugs was her particular outlet for anxiety. They used to make them on the farm—apparently to sell to tourists, though Elliot suspected it was really to keep the unhappy young people distracted with some kind of busywork.
“Perfect. I have a tiny strip of bare floor between the red one and the blue one.”
Sarah gave a little chuckle: a mere acknowledgement that laughter was called for. “You’re sure you’re okay?”
“I hope so,” he said. To let Sarah know about his exposure would be to commit it to the record, to confess his own mortality in a way he feared would destabilize them both. “Can I talk to Noah?”
“Yeah, here he is. Can you keep him going for a while? I need to drain this pasta.”
Elliot said hi to Noah and listened to his nephew’s meandering monologue about the things that mattered to him—the funny joke that a boy named Deshawn had told at daycare and an account of the goings-on of some cartoon fox on television. And even as he struggled to follow along, it occurred to Elliot that if he had to leave the world, there was nothing he would miss more than this: Noah’s lisped conversation, with Sarah’s loving annotations piping up in the background.
Quarantine Day Three
As night fell on the third day of his enforced staycation, Elliot began to feel less like the lucky one who might be spared and more like the one left behind to suffer alone—until he almost believed that succumbing to the virus might be a relief. He scrolled through his phone looking for photos of his friends and wondered why he so rarely used his camera. And when he couldn’t find their faces, he let himself cry for them in earnest: great, wracking sobs that left him gulping for air.
Jejo was the joker, the social glue in their little clique. Cameron was a father to three little girls and a top-flight investment consultant who made money management seem wholesome instead of sordid. Lucas had started at the club at the same time as Elliot and had made a joking mission of finding him a girlfriend. And then the master, who had brought them all