Jax Cassidy

Unresolved

10.

EMERGENCY. NUCLEAR MISSLE INCOMING. TEN MINUTES UNTIL IMPACT. SEEK SHELTER NOW. THIS IS NOT A DRILL. The alert message is accompanied by the long, repeating vibration and blaring alarm from every single cell phone. Not long after, the air-raid sirens went off. Are still going off. Across the country, everyone reacts differently. Screams. Sobs. Silence. 

9.

I am taking shelter in a Walgreen’s bathroom. The last moments of my life, of all our lives, and here I am, pissing. I don’t bother washing my hands. “Let it Snow,” the Michael Bublé version, is still playing through the overhead speakers. There’s someone else in here, too. An employee, stuck spending her final moments cleaning the toilets. She’s crying. On the phone with her mother. Exchanging goodbyes and I love yous. Now they are praying together. Dear God. Grant me the serenity. I hadn’t even thought about making any final calls. That probably makes me a bad son. Though we haven’t talked in over a year, I call my mother. 

8.

My mother doesn’t answer the phone. The employee is now wiping the bathroom mirror. Tears fall from her cheeks into the porcelain sink. 

“You know there’s no point, right?” I say. “You don’t need to clean that anymore.”

She turns to look at me. If the nuke wasn’t about to kill me, her glare would. “I know I don’t. But it’s something to do. Something to think about other than…”

She cannot finish her sentence. I don’t push any further. 

I try dialing my mother again. It rings and rings and rings again. Then to voicemail. 

“How long do we have left?” the employee asks.

“I’m not sure.” I don’t want to check the time.

“How fast do missiles travel?”

“I’m not sure.”

She restocks the toilet paper rolls. 

7. 

I try to remember all of my lasts. Last meal. Last movie I watched, or book I read. Last photo I took. Last time I had sex. Last dog I pet. I’ve collected my answers. 

• Salad, because of course I chose now to start being healthier.

• Home Alone. A holiday tradition.

• The Handmaid’s Tale, by Margaret Atwood, for a Feminist Lit course I took in college.

• A flower. It turned out blurry.

• Unsure.

• A Chocolate Labrador named Ransom, who I met outside of my apartment building.

I wonder about the employee, what her lasts were. I can only hope they are more meaningful than mine. I like to think she ordered pizza last night, splurging on as many toppings as she wanted. Maybe she watched her favorite movie while she ate. Maybe she lives with her boyfriend, or girlfriend, and they had the most passionate sex of their lives. Maybe they took a picture together this morning, enjoying a warm cup of coffee, not too bitter, not too sweet. Maybe she hugged her dog and kissed her lover before leaving for her last shift. Maybe. 

6. 

“I just bought a planner,” the employee says. She’s sitting across from me now, leaning against a stall.

“What?”

“A monthly planner, like a calendar. I bought one a couple weeks ago for the New Year. I get so scatterbrained

sometimes and forget things. I was going to be more organized. It has little rainbows on the front.”

“Sounds cute,” I say. 

“It would have been.”

My phone vibrates, and at first, I think it’s my mom. I clear my throat, knowing she might not recognize me now by voice. But, it’s just a Facebook notification. I’ve been tagged, along with 77 others, in a goodbye post from a girl I was friends with in high school. God is calling us home. I pray that I see y’all in Heaven. If there were a Heaven, she surely wouldn’t see me there. 

“What was your New Year’s Resolution?” the employee asks. 

“I didn’t make one,” I say. “I stopped doing those a while back.”

“Why?”

“I never followed through. Just figured it wasn’t worth the pressure.”

“That’s sad.”

“What’s yours, then?”

“Be more optimistic.”  

5. 

The speakers are now playing “Wonderful Christmas Time.” The employee is responding to messages on her phone, presumably from loved ones, and my mother has still not called me back. Maybe this is for the best. If she called, I don’t know which version of me she would want to talk to. The one I have created, or the one I left behind. I realize, more than anything, I just want to hear her say my name. 

There’s no one else I can contact. My father is dead, blissfully unaware of the end of the world.  He got to go out on his own terms. I’m almost jealous. I glance at the bottle of toilet bowl cleaner in the yellow supply cart and wonder if that would be a better way to die.

4. 

“Can I ask you something?” the employee says. 

“Might as well.”

“What are you doing in here?”

“What are any of us doing here?”

“No,” she says, “I mean, what are you doing in here, specifically? The Women’s bathroom?”

I pause. I was hoping she wouldn’t have noticed. 

“You were coming out of the stall when I came in to clean, before the sirens.”

“Does it really matter anymore?” I ask. 

“I guess not. I was just curious.”

I debate if it’s worth it or not. Though, I suppose, I would like to go out with honesty. Full transparency.

I lift up my shirt. She looks at my chest, at the two scars that underline my pectorals the way red ink underlines a misspelling. 

I let my shirt fall. “I had another operation scheduled for March. I still use the Women’s bathroom because I guess I don’t feel like I’m allowed to use the Men’s until I have the other part. Until I’m complete.”

“Oh.” The employee picks at her fingernails. 

“And Men’s Rooms are fucking disgusting.”

The employee laughs. “Hey, I try my best to clean it. It’s not my fault y’all can’t aim.”

I smile when I realize she has said “y’all.” 

3. 

“Maybe it’s a drill,” the employee says.

“The alert said it wasn’t.”

“But maybe it is. Maybe it was a mistake. False alarm. Or a really poorly thought-out social experiment.”

“Maybe,” I say, and though I don’t truly believe it, a part of me wants to. “There. New Year’s Resolution achieved.”

2.

The employee sits next to me now. Her fingers tap anxiously against her knee. 

“I realized I never asked your name,” I say. I must have been so caught up in myself, in the apocalypse, that common courtesy flew out the window. 

“Maggie,” she says. “I left my nametag at home.”

I shake my head and half-laugh at the odds. 

“What’s so funny?” she asks, almost defensively. 

“Nothing,” I say. In another life, we shared a name. “That’s a good name.”

“What’s yours?”

“Mason.”

“That’s a good name, too.”

“Thank you,” I say. “I chose it myself.”

1.

The store is playing “Silent Night.” I’ve given up on hearing from my mother. She’ll never know the man I hoped to become. Maggie and I sit in silence, waiting for the end. We do not know what is happening outside this bathroom, outside this store, but we know we are together in the end. Neither of us will have to die alone. I only wish Maggie could have died with her boyfriend or girlfriend or dog or mother, instead of a sad, pathetic, unfinished man like me. 

The bathroom starts shaking, and we know. Overhead, a screaming whistle gets louder and louder as it gets closer and closer. Maggie grabs my hand. I squeeze hers. 

“I’m glad I knew you,” she says. I’m glad she knew me too, the real me, if only fleetingly.

My phone rings. Mom.

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