Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever by Justin Taylor Page B

trembling hands she called me a whole string of bad names and curled up on the floor with it, beside the couch. She cried into the ball she’d made of herself and once I tried to stroke her hair but she wouldn’t be touched so I just sat down close toher and fired up the game. Eventually she fell asleep and her breathing is the only sound in this room, along with the tiny sexual slaps of my thumbs on the plastic buttons.
    Snow again. I lose. This game is designed to end, not to be beaten; I doubt they even programmed a graphic for the YOU WIN screen. Once you hit level eighteen the pieces are falling almost quicker than hand-eye coordination can trace, and it can go faster and faster. It outlasts you.
    I play again and at level eighteen reach a sort of ecstasy of self-and-game where we are as close to becoming one being as we ever will and this lasts some amount of time and then ends. Snow again. I enter my initials on the high-score screen, ranked number one. The list erases every time you shut the Nintendo off.
    Outside the window there is a fiery brightness that fills the world, a limitless wave, jellying up the street towards us.
    When people think about the Apocalypse they imagine knowing what it is that will bring them down. Ask the shades of Hiroshima about that one. The assumption of knowledge is one part of the fantasy of mastery, by which I mean the hope against all damned hope of survival. I never thought about what time of year the End might come, but looking back, I guess I always figured it would be in the crush of summer. And I was right.
    I watch Jennie, whom sleep has loosened from her furious ball. She is stretched out across the floor, and how beautiful she is. I wish the world wouldn’t end before we could make up and die holding each other.
    I glance out the window at the bright wall. It seems closer, but slower. I notice the watch on my wrist and the clock on the TV have both gone to 88:88. I wonder what that means, if it tips the scales in my mind concerning who/Who is responsible. When it occurs to me that Jennie will most likely die in her sleep I almost wake her but then I don’t. I am calmed by watching her steady breathing and there isn’t time to reconcile anyway, what with the way she gets when she’s sulking. I’m going to let her sleep through it, through whatever exactly is out the front window, reclaiming the driveway, the sidewalk not dissolved but disappeared. For all its luminosity, the wall is not painful to look upon—it is oddly soothing. It leaves no trace or shadow of what is behind or within. It is perfectly opaque. I see it the same way that Jennie sees the Scriptures, and also like Jennie, I get madder and sadder and madder again, but I won’t look away.

A HOUSE IN OUR ARMS
    W e made it to New York.
    That’s how we put it when we talk about it with each other, even though it means something different to each of us, and even though we’re both pretty used to it by now. I came straight from school, worked some crap jobs, then landed a decent one. It’s at a hedge fund and I hate it, at least theoretically. In practice I find the more time I spend doing it the less I feel one way or the other. It’s just what I’m doing, what I do. I work with nice enough people. They started me out as an assistant but I’m already almost a junior manager. Who knows where I might wind up if I stick around?
    Leah stayed on in our college town, waitressing and getting fired from waitressing. When she got tired of that she moved home for a while, then traveled. Europe of course, and the Far East. Now she’s studying sculpture. She talks aboutgetting “my MFA,” as if dropping by the school to pick up something she left there, maybe a coat.
    We never dated, of course, but what we had—there’s no exact name for it—was well understood and envied within our circle. I mean the other guys sometimes would ask me what it was like to go to bed with her. She was the recently turned lesbian