End Times Tango

"The apocalypse is always scheduled for next Tuesday."

— James Randi

 Wally Kennet woke up and was aware that before him was nothing that he had ever seen before. Unspeakably massive, unknowably vast, was a throne of sorts, rendered in the radioactive gas of a nebula that was as wide across as the Milky Way itself. Seated in the throne was a being beyond anything his feeble human mind could describe. Its eyes glowed like protostars, but it was anything but human in shape. Rather, it appeared to be some sort of massive column or obelisk, but with appendages vaguely like arms and legs. There were other beings around it, and behind the throne itself were things that hid in the absence of light. They filled him with horror, and he chose not to look at them. 

 That this incredible spectacle lay before him was the doing of his neighbor, Ted Beacon, who was beside him, cowering in spirit. Neither of them had bodies in the traditional sense anymore. They were both stripped bare and floated like grains of sand before the magnificence of the sun, perhaps kept from coming apart into atoms by the power of those glowing eyes, which burrowed into their minds and saw all.

 Wally Kennet, like many Americans, had a problem with his neighbors. The Beacons were, at first glance, when they moved in, a very nice and typical family. A mom, a dad, two kids, and the family dog. When Ted and Marti moved in on Juniper Avenue, they were welcomed by the Kennets and the other neighbors, too, as was expected. For a short time, after the Beacons arrived and were getting settled, the Kennets maintained their usual, somewhat busy daily routine and waved when they saw their new neighbors, but kept to themselves.

It was Timmy Kennet who started all this, though inadvertently. He was kicking his soccer ball in the backyard when Randy Beacon asked if he wanted someone to kick around with. Timmy couldn’t know that he was opening the floodgates, but then, how could anyone blame such a sweet-natured kid for what happened next, especially when it had innocuous beginnings like two similarly aged boys playing outside.

 Ted came out one day, while the boys were playing one-on-one, and called Randy inside. “They’re delivering the shed, and I don’t want you getting in the way.” The boy nodded and ran in to get a drink. Wally stood from pulling weeds in the garden, interested as any neighbor, when someone had something big and unwieldy delivered. He called Timmy in and then took a moment to step across to the fence their properties shared and get—as Diane’s father Hank would say—lightly acquainted.

 Ted smiled and moved across his own side yard and reached a hand across the fence. Nothing after that was the same.

 The thing in the monstrous throne spoke in both their heads. Wally Kennet decided that he was probably dead and all that remained was his spirit or something, but other than the immensity of the view before him, he wasn’t all that impressed. He guessed that, without his human sensory organs to freak out at the scale, he was pretty much impervious. He understood what this was, at least in part. Early on, he had attended Sunday school and knew about God. Before he reached age nine, he had decided that “God” was a way to make people feel guilty for the things they did wrong. It was a means to control people. He never guessed that it could be a real thing, but then, life hadn’t introduced him to Ted Beacon until just before the end. Ted, for whom everything anyone of a religious bent said, was absolutely and unalteringly infallible and true, had probably expected this. If Wally had eyes, he would have rolled them.

 “TELL YOUR TALE.” The voice from the throne said in their heads. It brooked no refusal, and so, Wally Kennet recounted the last story of his conscious life.

 “It all started with a handshake,” he told the entity. Ted floated nearby, silent and contrite.

 They had hardly unclasped hands when Ted Beacon asked the first of many annoying questions. 

 “If you died today, neighbor, would you go to Heaven or Hell?” 

 Aside from the preposterous problems associated with people who actually thought Heaven and Hell were real places, Wally truthfully thought that such a question was a horrible invasion of a person’s (his) internal and private life. The Kennets were not church people, it was true, but what they thought, believed, or who they worshipped was no one else’s business. As Wally described the incident to the thing in the throne nebula and the shapes that surrounded it, though, he considered that he may have been a little wrong.

 Wally was tempted in the moment to tell Ted exactly what he was thinking, he admitted, but decided that was not a good way to start being neighbors. And anyway, maybe Ted Beacon was joking. They lived in the Bible Belt, and such things were common and commonly mocked.

 “We really don’t think about the world in that way,” Wally said, trying to find a polite and noncommittal response. It was then that Ted Beacon had unloaded, as if from a script, with all the relevant references from both Old and New Testaments, all the reasons that Wally and his family were doomed and destined for the fiery pit of hell. He then invited them to the church that the Beacon family attended regularly on every Sunday morning and evening, Wednesday (for Bible and Prayer meeting), Thursday for the family fellowship, and every other Saturday for worship and praise singing.

 After quite a long invitation, during which Wally really did think that Ted Beacon might ask him to kneel in prayer, Wally just smiled and blew past it all and said, “What do you do for a living, Ted?”

 Diane later told him that it wasn’t the wrong thing to do, entirely, but he ought to have been a little more thoughtful about it. Saying something like, “I appreciate the invite, we’ll consider it,” would have been more polite and taken the pressure off. He hadn’t argued with her, but if Diane had been talking to Marti Beacon across the fence, maybe things would have been different.

 “I pray for my life,” Ted Beacon had responded. “And with the End Times coming, you had better pray for yours and your family’s.”

 “IS THIS CORRECT?” The entity didn’t visibly move—didn’t appear to have anything like a mouth—but Wally felt the force of its gaze move from his spirit or whatever was left of him to Ted.

 “Yes, Father!” he cried. “I tried to save him from your oncoming wrath!”

 There was a moment of silence, and then Wally felt the gaze return onto him, and he continued his tale.

 So, the next few weeks were a little tense. The boys played in the yard sometimes, but the Kennets made sure that they weren’t available on Sundays or the other days that the Beacons might try to invite them to church.

 It was a month or two into their new, strange arrangement that Ted came over and knocked on the front door. Wally was home on his lunch break, eating a sandwich in the living room and reading through the newspaper, which showed that the Midwest was under attack by huge locusts.

 “It’s time! It’s happening!” Ted was yelling through the door when Wally went to it and opened it. 

“What are you talking about?” Wally was perturbed, but some of it was actually about the locusts more than Ted.

 Ted, visibly sweating and shaking, but with a look of rapture on his face, said, “It’s time, it’s happening, as St. John prophesied in the Book of Revelation!” He was so excited that he could hardly calm himself to speak coherently. Wally felt somewhat worried by the man’s state and invited Ted inside, offered him a glass of water, and a seat at the dining room table. Ted took a few sips, coughed, and then started ranting again.

 “It’s as the Bible says. Signs of the End Times. The asteroid, the volcano, the locusts. They’re not attacking the fields or the grass, they’re attacking the people!”

 It was true, too, at least fundamentally. An asteroid the size of a Volkswagen Beetle had impacted in Wyoming, near Yellowstone, and appeared to cause the supervolcano to erupt. It wasn’t a profound, continent-ending blast, but a burble, but it had filled the sky with a massive, dark, and smoky column that was rapidly covering the earth with the help of prevailing winds. That’s when the locusts had come, and yes, it was being said that they were huge and that they were biting people.

 “The Fifth Trumpet!” Ted took another sip of water and wiped his forehead with his sleeve.

 “WAS IT?” The entity in the chair turned to Ted again. 

 “No.”

 Wally knew that science could—and had—explained all of this, of course, which is to say that there were scientific explanations that accounted for each event separately. That they had all happened in rapid succession seemed to cause some uproar in the groups that focused on eschatological themes, but Wally wasn’t given to that kind of thinking.

 In fact, it wasn’t ever quite the End Times, Wally knew. Always predicted, always imminent, never quite fulfilled. Rational people knew this well, and Wally had lived with the quiet assumption that most people were, in fact, generally rational. He had long assumed that rational people were immune to the fiery potency of blind belief, though it now seemed as though he was wrong about that. It didn’t help that, as he and Ted spoke, Wally heard something large hit the front window, which shook his own certainty for just a moment.

Later that day, while he was weeding in the garden, he saw something large on his grill. It took him several seconds to understand what he was seeing. The creature had the basic silhouette of a grasshopper, but it was the size of a crow and was dark, olive green. It gave him quite a shock, and he briefly wondered what it would be like if the skies were full of these monsters. When he got closer to it, hoping to snap a photo, it flew away without attacking him.

 Ted, though, continued to maintain that this was the fifth trumpet and that the seals were being opened by the angels and that the tribulations were happening now and that the Rapture, in which all the believers would be sucked up into heaven in an event that made Wally think of a giant Hoover in the sky, would begin any moment. 

 Once again, Wally seemed to have some memory of his childhood, or perhaps a class he took in college, in which the entirety of the Revelation of Saint John was totted up to a man in exile, eating magic mushrooms and writing about the persecution of Christians by Emperor Nero. These apocalyptic “revelations” were yet to happen in his time. They were vengeful prophecies that were going to happen, at least in the writer’s mind, very soon in his own life. Even if it actually was somehow the End Times right now, Wally reflected, the Rapture was supposed to happen long before any of the tribulations began, assuming that the book was taken literally. This was enough to cast the whole thing into doubt, for Wally and he never believed it to begin with. It seemed to fill Ted with the brittle fear of having been left out of the plans.

 Once Ted was calm again, they spoke for a while, but Wally used needing to get back to work as an excuse to cut the chat short. Once in his office, he did some research online. He found a graphic that had been put together by some church or another, but that was, for all its touching inefficacy, nevertheless quite readable. The first event, as he thought, was the Rapture, which, if it had happened already, didn’t cause a fuss at all. It also made him wonder about Ted and people like the Beacons, who were desperate, almost salivating, excited for the epoch of terror to begin. 

 The events, as proclaimed in this graphic, happened in this order: The Rapture (a subtitle said, ‘believers taken to heaven.’); then the judgement seat of Christ, which happened in Heaven, amongst those raptured, (he assumed); then the tribulation, in which the AntiChrist rises to power and there are seven years of horror on Earth. Then, the Millennium. Christ returns to earth with all his assorted (and pre-sorted) believers and rules the world for a thousand years. Then, the Great White Throne of Judgement.

 That last part, Wally reflected, might have something to it. He felt the sun-like eyes of the entity on the throne grow more intense on his spirit, and so he continued.

 It wasn’t that he wanted to argue with Ted. He genuinely felt bad about the stress that the man had heaped on himself (or that had been heaped on him by his church). Yes, the world did seem to have some issues that looked like what was written in the Bible, but also, it was all out of order, and Wally felt that he owed it to Ted, to his family, to try to help ease the tension. Diane said it was futile. She maintained that people like the Beacons were dyed-in-the-wool and had likely been indoctrinated to take all this literally from a very young age. She implied that it was a job of Sisyphus-like proportions. Wally argued that one of the Beacon children might actually need and benefit from a broader worldview. So Wally called on Ted in a strange reversal of the kind of door-knocking, let’s-talk-about-God behavior, the irony of which he was still feeling keenly in this new, spiritual form.

 The being on the throne again looked at Ted’s spirit. Wally could sense, if he could not exactly see, Ted assent to the truth of the story so far. Then it gazed back at Wally, and he started the last part of his tale.

 He had gone next door with what he felt were good intentions. He knew that it was futile from the outset. Diane was always right about these things, but he felt he could not ignore his conscience on the matter. 

Ted was receptive, at least in that he welcomed Wally and listened, or appeared to listen intently. But Wally soon got the idea that nothing he was saying, none of the research, none of the thought and intention, was making a dent. Ted had gotten up in the middle of this effort, made a call, and stayed on the phone for a long time. Wally overheard Ted speaking with someone he called Pastor Judd. Then he came back, looking sweaty and peaked and not altogether well. He was wearing a coat, too heavy and thick for the time of year.

 Ted said, “I’m sorry.” He opened his coat, and Wally saw a complex series of wires and sticks of what looked like explosives. He suddenly realized that the rest of the Beacons were standing around him. Young Randy was holding a soccer ball that Wally recognized as his own son’s. They all had strange, sad, but determined faces. Marti was holding her children close, and all of them were weeping openly. When the flash happened, Wally understood that he needed to get away fast.

 And then, they were here, floating in front of this unbearably huge being.

 “MURDER.” It said and turned its gaze back on Ted’s spirit. Ted did something that Wally understood was the emotional equivalent of sobbing, as done without a corporeal form. “Yes,” he squeaked.

 Wally suddenly had the sense that behind them—whatever behind meant in this scenario—was a crushing press of other spirits, jostling to see the forthcoming verdict. The dark things that moved behind the throne moved in excited anticipation, too, and he suddenly understood that they were this reality’s version of bailiffs, here to drag away the one who was judged guilty. Ted, whether by his own volition, such as it was, or by the immense glare of those sun-like eyes, had corroborated Wally’s story. He was so desperate, so eager for the End Times, for the Rapture, and so enthralled by Pastor Judd (whoever that was, Wally still didn’t know), that he had engaged in suicide bombing.

 Whatever allowed him to see the event, Wally had watched from outside and above Ted’s house, and he could see through the roof of the Beacon home. Ted engaged the bomb and was blown apart by fire and pressure. His wife, Marti, his son Randy, their older daughter, and their family dog, Butchy, were all vaporized in that moment. As was Wally. The Kennet house was partially destroyed by the blast, but somehow, miraculously (though not in the literal sense of that word, he assumed), Diane and Timmy were not hurt. 

 The verdict came quickly and with little fanfare. Ted turned toward Wally, and Wally felt a genuine, sincere rush of regret and remorse from him. Some of that might have been from the loss (murder) of his own family, but Wally accepted it. Then the things made of darkness beyond the throne sent deep black tendrils and drew Ted’s spirit toward their gaping, light-swallowing maws. Wally felt a stab of panic as he witnessed this. This meant that Ted Beacon was about to be ingested by the universe for his crimes. He knew that this would involve, among other things, crushing gravity and being stretched out into light-years-long tendrils before it was over. 

 Then the being on the throne looked back at Wally. There was no word, now. The glance was so potent, and yet he had a sense that had he physical eyes, there would always be two spots in his vision from those burning orbs. 

 Wally Kennet woke up in one of the red plastic Adirondack chairs by the garden in his side yard. Timmy was sitting with a little boy whom Wally didn’t immediately recognize. The boy had straight black hair and a smiling face. 

“You know what I mean?”

 Wally glanced over at the man in the other chair beside him. He was caught for a moment without knowing who the man was or what it was that he had been saying. He glanced around nervously, expecting to see that a blast had demolished most of his house. It was fine. Diane walked through the garden with another woman, laughing together at a private joke. She gave him an affectionate wink as they went by. Both were sipping from tall glasses of something that looked frosty and delicious to Wally.

 ‘You okay, Wal?” He looked over at Andy Kuang and had to shake his head a bit to get the glaring, sun-like eyes out of his mind. 

“Yeah. I’m so sorry, Andy. I think I dozed off there.”

 “All good,” Andy said. “That’s why I said we ought to go sit in the shade and have a few beers to cool off. It’s going to be a hot one, I think.”

As they walked around to the shady part of the backyard, they passed Wally’s grill. Andy didn’t see the absurdly large, dark green grasshopper-like thing sitting on it, preening itself. 

Wally did see it, but he pretended not to notice and followed his neighbor to the backyard.