Laura Beth Kujawa
We Will Wait for the End in This Airbnb
I will not say the duration of our stay. I feel confident that we have violated the terms of service, exceeded our welcome. We have eaten through the private stashes in locked cabinets. Busted into marked-off bedrooms. We dress in underwear that is not ours, look at little herds of grandchildren in gilded frames. We have broken things—lots. Four stars.
It doesn’t rain anymore. It doesn’t snow or hail. No wads of ice dropping from nowhere, making holes in windshields, bringing slate down from roofs. They used to skitter across the grass when they fell. They came with gnarly thunderstorms. We still have those, strangely, but for all the noise, now there’s no product.
We should call them something new, the thunderstorms. Fractured, porcelain cracks of light across a yellowing sky. The house still shakes with electrical impact, but that heavy, stale-house smell that settled through the rooms before the clouds broke—I miss it. A long inhale before a cough. Something comes loose. But no rain.
And the dog would pant. Fishy, thick breath. My sister called it “lowtide.” She sat with that dog through all the storms, cradling her long black body on the floor and taking all that smell in without comment. When the weather had cleared, they untangled themselves. A passing terror for Shag, a minor inconvenience for Kate.
Shag always pants now. Kate doesn’t sit with her anymore—there isn’t any point. The two of them once knitted together, a pile of limbs. She would never get up.
Shag wanders from room to room. Shag pants. Shag falls down. Shag gets up. Shag wanders.
Kate also wanders, but doesn’t pant.
We do not know why we cannot float. In the first days, we were jealous of the ones who could. People spun and dove and hovered like astronauts, launching themselves off ceiling beams after levitated gummy bears and grapes. The power still worked, the satellites, the cell service, the high-speed internet—and we took the simulcast footage and video calls in stride. Signals tied us to each other, all of us marooned inside separate houses and buildings—four walls and a floor was all it took. Some weren’t lucky, of course, and drifted straight up into the sky. When we lost sight of them from our windows, we believed they might return to us; there were several astrophysicists on the news who were very optimistic. This selective, choosy gravity could be revived, a jump to a dying battery.
It has occurred to me that we may not have enough water—not enough to survive. Still, the lake and the pond hem us in. Water, water everywhere. Unreachable. We hear the paddleboards slap against the dock, the churn of tide against the sand. Shag is slowing, her breath worse than ever. Our lips split, urine burned orange, and we don’t dare crack a window. Is it better outside, or in?
We’re still getting it from underground. Purifying it from the sewers, or charcoal filters. Aquifers. Plumbing a perched water table. A union of dentists and oil barons and swimming pool cleaners brought together for one common purpose. An assembly line, they bore through rock and soil, suck them dry, and dilute it all with fluoride and chlorine.
Maybe there were people in the water treatment plant when it happened. Maybe they live there now. I hope it’s nice if they do—that they’ve made it nice for themselves. I like to think that someone is still there, selfish as that may be. Eyes glued to pipes. Catching water like jewels in the air with their fingers and toes and tongue, skimming the drops by the sip. We lower our lips to the faucet and catch anything we miss in a saucepan for later. Mouth to mouth. We will keep each other alive.
Maybe I could write to them. I could push a note down the drain, I suppose, though I don’t know what it would meet along the way. Mats of hair and skin. Condoms. Fatbergs. Animals and plants. More people? There’s a hole in the water cycle. I cannot fill it.
I am glad I am with Shag and Kate. I am glad that we wake together and sleep together. For a while we tried to sleep more than we really needed to—there was comfort in blocking out the light. In the moments before closed eyes began to open, we made-believed the smell of coffee downstairs, and the sounds of spoons. Slap-crack of shell against skillet. Sizzle.
Now, I am glad I am not with them—with our parents. I think that would have been worse, somehow, to be loved during all of this. I make-believe them both gone, and they are.
At night I find traces of them on me like lint. Or wool pills. I brush them away.
Little babies must still be arriving, even now. I remember seeing those reports when it first started: couples, ménages à trois, clumps of bodies moving together without pressure to stay on the ground. Orgies. No longer tethered to a bed or a floor or a shower or a table or a chair or a rug or a desk or a closet or a car. They called it the Last Great Baby Boom. So did we. It has gone full circle now, funny and then not and then funny again. Sometimes we laugh. The woman who owned the place had instructed that we find a hide-a-key artfully disguised as a lilypad in the koi pond. This seemed absurd to me—I must have lifted all of the little green rubbery things before finding the right one. The pond was like bathwater. Bubbling, aerated. It climbed my sleeve, veining up the seams. Kate was concerned about the fish—still is. This can’t be good for them. I’m not sure how the fish are faring—if they have already been pulled into the air and drowned. We might have missed it. It’s a small comfort to know that they might have died long before hitting the clouds.
There is some novelty to surviving. There is some novelty to the banisters, the rows of wine fridges, the fringed carpets, the tubs like pearlescent sinkholes. It was more novel when we first arrived, suitcases and coolers and canoes piled high in the foyer, but I try my best to be pragmatic about this. Spilt milk and all that.
Kate and I had the pack-horse job—Dad had split things between the van and the sedan, and he and Mom were going to come straight from work. He would loop from his office across town to hers, and they would drive to meet us at the lake. We would spend six nights at the ridiculously expensive beach house, sunning and swimming and sleeping in, then head back home. I remember that the long crystal segments of the chandelier swayed, just slightly, as Kate and I unloaded. Shag sniffed every corner gleefully, tail motorized, gathering up the bouquet of former occupants.
There are picture, awning, floor-to-ceiling, and casement views, a whole solarium of suncatchers and mirrors. An unsteady panorama. Panes and panes and panes of glass. We see too much.
Just after the sun sets, the house glows gray with the last of the lake’s buffeting, reflected waves, and we feel ourselves start to sink. The rush of current around our ears. Pinpricks of cold raising goosebumps on our shins. We will drink and drink and bubbles will peep from our lips, rising in columns, like stairs. Let us surface from this. Let us go, or be taken. I wish only to be buoyant.