I Want to Be Left Behind
(Page 2 of 4)
May - June 2008
by Brenda Peterson, from Orion
For a moment I considered not engaging in this loopy, no-exit dialogue. But we had a lot of time and a pup on our hands. It was April; perhaps Passover and Easter were on my neighbor’s mind. After a particularly chill and rain-soaked winter, spring seemed a resurrection with its blizzards of cherry blossoms along our boardwalk, its tulip trees and bursting scarlet rhododendron bushes. “Listen, George,” I began. “Why are you so, well, cheerful about the end of the earth?”
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This gave him a moment’s pause. Then he said, with some chagrin, “You can’t blame us born-agains for wanting at last to get our heavenly rewards. We’ve waited thousands of years.”
His dark eyes flashed a fire I’d seen in my childhood, in preachers’ faces at the tent revivals where sinners dramatically fainted, from either the heat or the paroxysm of their inner demons. It always was bewildering to witness usually straitlaced adults flail about speaking gibberish and then transform again into upstanding believers just in time for the potluck.
As I watched our seal pup settle back into his vigilant scanning of the waves, his belly rising and falling in the deep drafts of breath that only the very young of any species seem to enjoy, I persisted. “Why would you want this world to end, George? What’s the hurry?”
I could see my neighbor studying me as if I were the pup, as if he already had passed me in the slow sinner’s lane on the freeway to the apocalypse. “The hurry is that right now we see signs and wonders proving that the end times are upon us,” he said. “We’ve got holy wars, globalization, Israel’s military power, Islamic terrorists, and even global warming.” This last sign he pronounced brightly, as if our climate was gleefully graduating into a hot time in the old world.
I felt claustrophobic in the grip of my neighbor’s intensity. I wondered if my restlessness was anything like the anxiety fundamentalists seem to feel about the world, as if they’re trapped by the gravity of their sins. Perhaps to Rapture hopefuls, global warming signals that our world has become what they always suspected—hell, the “fire next time.” Perhaps the Rapture prophecy is a biblical lullaby to calm their environmental terrors. As one of my family assured me, “There are no drowning polar bears and melting ice caps where I’m going.”
“Sandwich, George?” I rummaged in my backpack for a pimento cheese sandwich. Though I’ve backslid from my mother’s Southern Baptist religion, I carry on her fabulous food rituals.
My neighbor shook his head. Not to be put off, he said, “I’m afraid you’ll have a rough time of it here during the tribulations.”
“Don’t you love any of us who will suffer in those tribulations?” I asked. “Those of us you’ll leave behind?”
George took my arm a little too tightly. “But you could come with us, you know.” George was closing in, just as surely as the tide was rising, the surf coming closer to our pup’s whiskered snout. I politely disengaged. I was a little worried. It had been 12 hours since the discovery of this pup. In a few hours it would be high tide again. Where was the mother?