Psalms for the End of the World

by Cole Haddon

The newscaster with the deep, reassuring voice says, ‘It now appears that sometime yesterday morning, the Soviet Union exploded a thermonuclear device some two and a half miles over the Arctic Sea island of Novaya Zemlya,’ and the man sitting on the mustard-coloured couch, crystal tumbler of Canadian Club in one hand and an RCA Wireless Wizard in the other, decides unequivocally that the truest words ever scribbled on a page were ‘All the world’s a stage’, because none of this bullshit is real.

Ralph Beckermann is standing in front of his own television, the electric glow of the newscaster’s face quavering across his face. Jones and Ralph bought the same Victor colour television on a joint Saturday outing to Woolworth an hour before three Jack and Cokes prompted Ralph to confess he was enjoying regular sexual congress with his sister-in-law every Tuesday evening instead of bowling like he tells Peggy.

Hank is sleeping with Ralph’s wife, Peggy. Hank’s wife, Elaine, made a pass at Jones three weeks ago at Kellogg’s as Gracie pretended not to take notice, and Jones knows none of this ritualized stupidity is real, this Norman Rockwell-shoved-through-a-sausage grinder-with-sex-and-six-shooters-and-manifest-destiny crap, no matter how good the Manhattan ad-men and politicians in Washington are at selling it to Americans. But hey, at least the whiskey is good.

Jones leans back and tosses his napkin on the counter, never taking his eyes off her. He’s scrutinizing her, the way the thrill of her studies can illuminate her every feature anew, but also like this is the last time he’s ever going to see her and he doesn’t want to forget a single detail because, he knows, this is probably the last time he’s ever going to see her and he doesn’t want to forget a single detail.

Gracie doesn’t move. At all. She’s been waiting for him to ask her out for at least a month, probably longer, and Jones knows it. Or, he should have. He should’ve spent every second he had with her even if none of this is real. Shakespeare thought we’re nothing more than actors, and maybe that should’ve been enough. Why couldn’t it be enough for Jones? Maybe because actors know they’re playing parts written for them . . .

Jones slips his fedora on, smiles at Gracie one last time, and walks out without looking back again because he knows he would change his mind if he did; he would take the stage with her and play the part and dance the part and sing the part and love her until the curtains dropped and the show closed for good. And so, it takes everything in Jones not to go back to Gracie, to tell her the truth about the trick that’s been played on her, what she really is and what he really is, and hope she can forgive him – because this is all his fault.

He does not know what to fill this hollow space with except rage, and the rage festers and grows for weeks and months until his friend tells him there is a concert, European music, a Brit who claims to not be from this world, who says he fell here from the stars, and this Moonman, Ali’s friend Atik insists, this Moonman will help him. Or, at the very least, give Ali a break from talking so much about Bertha.

His name means Servant of the Giver of Victory, and so a part of him has always known he would give his life for Allah. He needs no other reason to convince himself to do this than the American situation comedy about six New York friends that he’s been watching for nearly thirty-eight hours straight now, a hallucinatory marathon of Western excess and sexual depravity that surely must offend every good Muslim.

The shape that the Creator of the Universe, the One, the Eternal Refuge has chosen to inhabit in order to communicate with Abdul Fattah uses its tiny teeth to pick up another piece of lettuce and carries it back to its cage while Abdul Fattah, a devoted Muslim ready to die in a conflagration of fire, bodies, and shrieking terror, continues his work on the explosive device that the piebald Dutch rabbit he used to call Freddie told him to build.

3) As always, pray for Britannia. But also, as there are numerous council elections upcoming, pray for our candidates who will, if elected, help return this country to a more Biblical course free of European interference and the Jew.

A bombing? Twenty-three people dead? None of this makes sense, and the fact that none of it is real doesn’t make it any easier. The results will all be the same, if Montrose has his way. Jones didn’t do it, he knows he didn’t do it, but that girl, the humming waitress, whoever she is, she seemed so convinced she knew him, maybe even felt something for him – as inexplicable as this would be – and that makes everything else feel a little less certain, like Jones is going loopy, and maybe he is, because right now Montrose and his FBI agents and who knows who else are looking for him, hunting with every resource available to them here and elsewhere – elsewhere being the bigger problem – and yet all he can think about is the waitress.

But it is Bertrand’s eyes that startle Xavier the most, because they do not seem to recognize the boy – no, man – of seventeen years standing before him. They blink, confused, like pools of trembling grey water. ‘Father,’ Xavier says. ‘It is I. Your son.’ Bertrand turns, a large and heavy key in his hand. He relocks his studio’s door with it, and returns it to its pocket, where he gives it two quick pats to make certain it is safe and sound. And then he laboriously descends the stairs, careful not to touch Xavier. ‘You are no son of mine,’ he says, muttering as he passes. Virginie Lambriquet is dead, and Xavier, her only son, her one true God, truly is an orphan.

Amityville 1920 His arms and legs are belted to the white metal bed frame, nobody has checked on him in hours even though he’s hoarse from calling for their help, and he’s soiled himself twice during their long absence. But it’s snowing outside, big, heavy flakes that fall quickly past the bars of his window with suicidal grace, and so Edmund smiles because he has loved snow since he was a child, especially at Christmastime

‘Who are you?’ Edmund asks him. ‘I would like to discuss the events of September 16th,’ the Irishman says, opening his valise with smooth efficiency. ‘I’m tired of talking about it,’ Edmund says. A parade of policemen and doctors has been passing through this room for nearly six weeks now, ever since he turned himself in in Hamilton. He doesn’t even remember why he was in Canada any more. Was there a match? When they arrested him, he was wearing two different business suits, one on top of the other, and, beneath both of these, his tennis costume. He told them he had to be prepared for a match at all times. Did that really happen? ‘Christ, I have to shit again. Get that fat bastard back in here.’

I ask you again, did you do it?’ Edmund has been asking himself this for weeks, ever since Robbie convinced him to turn himself in. Yes, it was a match, he remembers now. A charity event for war orphans. That’s why he was there. ‘I . . . I get confused,’ he says.

mick motherfucking fuck – fuck you! – you hear me?’ ‘Who, Mr Fischer?’ the Irishman says. Edmund continues to cry. ‘Who?’ ‘The Almighty, all right?’ Edmund says between his convulsions and heaving sobs. ‘When I prayed, he came to me. He spoke to me through – all right? – through the air, and I said, “Yes, Lord, yes, I will do thy bidding,” and I tried, I-I did, but what the fuck is wrong with God? How many people did I help kill again?’

Saint-Règle 1780 He was assured it could never happen, that the terms of his contract precluded it, and so there remained only one possibility – his beloved wife Virginie, his everything, had cuckolded him. Of course, she denied this when accused, but he knew better, even if he could not explain to her how he knew this.

and that was when the first crack appeared in the foundation of Bertrand’s mind. He began to question everything, from his choice of gender and skin colour, to the biography with which he had entered this world. Perhaps nothing baffled him more than why he had selected Saint-Règle as his ultimate destination.

periods in which to enjoy the eternal years of his retirement. Now the decision seems arbitrary, and perhaps it was, perhaps there is as much meaning in how he got here as he applied to his First Life. How he squandered it. And now this Second Life, this parody of a life, is all he has left to show for

‘What are these? What are they? Tell me!’ Bertrand has been in this body too long. It has become enfeebled like his mind. He has developed a soul, as these unwitting fools call it. Thus, it is impossible not to sympathize with the boy. ‘None of it is real, none of it,’ he says, forcefully dragging his voice out of whatever dark pit into which it has retreated. He will lie with the truth. ‘They are but things in my head. I-I see things. Things I cannot escape.

His contract with Plurality stipulates that – barring violation of said contract on his part – he cannot be subjected to undue duress, physical pain, torture, etcetera. This should be enough for him to be released and relocated elsewhere in the French Empire or, given the circumstances, a similar epoch. But his contract also stipulates that he cannot disrupt the integrity of an Earth model by revealing certain truths to the actors who occupy it, which his paintings most certainly have. Because of this, a man with two different-coloured eyes arrives one day and asks him to hold a small black sphere until Bertrand begins to forget Xavier and Virginie and their life at the chateau and even himse

The space around him erupts into twinkling green light, a tree of green light actually, like thousands of branches, except these branches don’t end like they do on a real tree, dead-ending at their tips. Instead, these branches find other branches and connect again and again and again. ‘Pretty neat, huh?’ Dickie turns slowly, taking it all in, waving his hands through the tree that’s there but not really. An illusion of some sort. His smile must take up half his face. ‘What is it?’ ‘Possibilities,’ the man says. But Dickie doesn’t follow, so the man gets that look on his face that adults get when they’re trying to work out ways to make children understand things they’re never going to understand anyway. ‘Do you like who you are, Jack?’ Dickie looks away. ‘Not really,’ he says. ‘What if you could be whatever you wanted to be?’ ‘Is that what it’s like where you’re from?’ The man doesn’t answer. ‘You mustn’t be from Earth, then,’ Dickie says.

‘This isn’t the first time he’s done this, you know.’ ‘There have been other . . . bombs?’ Gracie says. Montrose nods solemnly, which is really just his resting expression. She thinks she might throw up again. ‘Oh. Oh God. Where?’ He fake-purses his lips again. ‘Where is not the correct interrogative.’

His first life as Xavier Lambriquet had brimmed with love. His mother, Virginie, transformed their familial misfortune into joy and warmth. His second life, nameless and rotten, was filled with hatred for self and cowardice because he could have ended his suffering at any time. A monk gave him hope of a third life, a better one if he could find the way, and he called this cycle saṃsāra. Birth, suffering, death, rebirth. The Wheel of Time. But the monk was wrong. Xavier’s wheel is going to shatter on this mountainside tonight. He had two lives, one made Heaven by his mother, the other made Hell by his own hand, and the third to come will be spent in the belly of whatever animal is now circling him.

Gaspard Saint-Règle 1780 The removals company has been at it all day, boxing up Bertrand’s paintings, bearing the crates down the stairs, and loading wagon after wagon with the curious freight until struts groan in protest. He spent a small fortune preserving his brother-in-law’s demented genius – if it is, in fact, genius – and he hopes Virginie will not be disappointed in him for doing so.

Gaspard shakes his head. ‘Tell me what this concerns,’ he says, sitting. ‘Bertrand Lambriquet signed a contract that defined the range of his behaviour in this world,’ Barbaroux says, positioning himself across from Gaspard in the other chair. ‘He chose to violate certain proscriptions by describing through his artworks another world – one incongruous with this one.’ ‘Another world?’ Gaspard says, confused.

‘These artworks, which he carefully hid from me – and which only come to my attention many years from now when they are exhibited in Paris – must be destroyed.’ ‘You speak of the future?’ Gaspard says, interrupting again. ‘I apologize, but I truly do not understand.’ ‘The pieces you asked Monsieur Weisweiler to sell have already been dealt with, as has Monsieur Weisweiler,’ Barbaroux says. ‘Dealt with?’ Gaspard feels the blood drain from his face. ‘You mean . . . ?’

The ball hums. Something . . . malevolent radiates from it. ‘What is that?’ Gaspard asks. ‘There is a proper term for it, but I find human beings comprehend manifestation best,’ Barbaroux says. ‘Many of my functions are severely limited here. Safeguards, designed to protect you from me.’

And the Wheel of Time turns, still slowly at first, and as the children grow, faster and faster. The desire for answers feels less important now, especially when the grandchildren begin to bear children of their own. Xavier rarely thinks of Kye Gompa any more, or why he came here, or his father and the paintings that drove him mad, because he is surrounded by so much love; who he was before he arrived, the hate and loathing that festered and grew like a cancer inside him, now feels like a nightmare from which he has finally awoken. And then the Mongols return.

Graf slides into the car’s front seat, directly in front of Reinhold, and greets him with a polite but brusque nod. ‘I salute you, Herr Gottschald,’ he says without a trace of irony. ‘You possess excellent taste.’ Three days later, Reinhold is ordered by gunpoint onto a train bound for Buchenwald. Nobody ever tells him what happened to Magda.

Angelique is here to keep playing her games with him, but why did the Company send her? It’s overkill, to say the least, like putting J. Edgar Hoover on the tail of a pickpocket. Unless whatever has happened is so bad that the Company can’t take any risks. Which means whatever Montrose thinks Jones did is definitely that bad. ‘I presume you have information for me,’ he says at length.

‘Let’s stick with the vernacular of this world, and call him the Bug—’ ‘Who?’ ‘Whoever MasterControl thinks you really are.’

‘They don’t call them bugs here yet, not for several decades still,’ he says. ‘I always appreciated your attention to detail,’ she says. Her eyes narrow, becoming serious. ‘Somebody has altered their form here – who knows, maybe even a customer – to make themselves look like you to MasterControl. They put you on like a Halloween costume to frame you, Bobby.’ She means somebody has dressed themselves in a skinsuit of Robert Jones, just like Angelique poured herself that stunning body she’s wearing. MasterControl – Montrose – thinks this digitally manipulated skinsuit, this doppelgänger, is him. ‘From Inside the System?’ he says, because such a thing shouldn’t be possible.

There should be no way for somebody to rewrite code from Inside, he knows that, especially not an actor – a dummy as they’re more commonly referred to Outside the System – and access to the models from the Outside is strictly limited and filtered through overlapping security programs to prevent biological error – which is just a technical way of saying sabotage. He shakes his head because, no, no, no, because this is ridiculous. The Company has somehow messed up.

‘The System is endogenously self-modifying to ensure multi-directional integration across more than 27,000 models—’ Jones says. ‘Thirty-one thousand,’ Angelique says, correcting him. ‘Thirty-one thousand and twelve models as of today, to be precise. A whole constellation of worlds, of possibilities.

Jones tries to hide his surprise, but the knowledge that something he built and set in motion, a mockery of reality more boundless than the reaches of space and time, has continued despite his absence disturbs him more than he expected it would.

There are men waiting outside these parked cars. One of them is Montrose, MasterControl by another name, a tool the System’s central processing unit will use to relentlessly and tirelessy hunt and destroy the malware it has identified as Jones.

But these are not his thoughts, he knows; they’re the product of cultural programming that tells him who he is in this Second Life, what he is here in the United States of 1962 – an upper-middle-class white male who can manhandle his neighbour’s wife if he wants, who can snap a sultry bitch’s neck if he needs to – and this programming, woven so thoroughly into his identity matrix, is impossible to ignore without tremendous effort. It’s always there.

‘I just want my life back!’ ‘Your biological body was recycled—’ ‘I meant, this life!’ Angelique smiles wickedly. ‘There’s only one way that will ever happen,’ she says. ‘Find the Bug . . . and smash it.’

as soon as he gets his hand on the knob, he sees two FBI agents in the next car, trying to control a woman who’s struggling even though they’re big guys and one of them has a Remington pump-action shotgun in the hand that he’s not using to control her. They shove her up against the window, and that’s when Jones sees who it is. He turns to go back the way he came, leaving the diner waitress to take care of herself.

Abdul Fattah gets his hand on the remote detonator that Iblis is holding. He depresses the trigger, the world erupts into screaming flames and screeching electronics that sound like Transformers violently fornicating, and he and Iblis are blown backwards, through the door, into a dirty Parisian alley that shatters into a cornfield worked by oxen and sweaty Chinamen, that shatters into the top deck of a British bus filled with hippies dressed in flowery shirts and corduroy, that shatters into an outdoor Catholic Mass attended by half-naked men and women with red-brown skin, that shatters into Antarctic ice as the sun rises, that shatters into and then through what seems like hundreds of floors of a skyscraper until the basement shatters into a harbour filled with primitive boats and singing men covered in tribal tattoos, that shatters into a great black planet surrounded by a churning wheel of stars and for a moment he lingers here until it, too, shatters into howling blackness and, finally, silence. No, the absence of silence.

Long ago, when time still meant something to Xavier, he was told by a monk he would find no answers at Kye Gompa. This was true. He found questions instead, and the questions gave shape to his reality, and the questions ultimately helped him escape the Wheel of Time. Another monk asked Xavier who he was, when Xavier still conceived of himself as a single person and not part of a continuum stretching backwards and forwards and even sideways through what only appeared to be time, before he became unmoored from this temporal illusion and set loose like a shapeless spectre to freely navigate its unmapped byways and channels, but Xavier did not know who he was then. If Xavier were asked this question again today, he could finally answer, ‘Free at last, I am free at last.’

KEISHA ANGELA LeCHANCE. All right then. African-American, twenty-six years old, five feet seven inches and 149 pounds, and born in Detroit, Michigan. Maybe she should visit Michigan, to experience it for herself, but what’s the point? She can recall a difficult childhood there in vivid detail – her childhood now, thanks to modifications to her memory – the enormous houses in Indian Village that made her hate how poor she and her family were.

this woman whose name he doesn’t even know but whom he jumped out of a train after all the same, is convinced he’s telling the truth about his innocence, and that makes her one of roughly 3,100,000,000 residents of this specific Earth model, customers and actors, whom he can say that about.

The Perception Algorithm dictates that perceived reality – perceived reality being just a fancy way of describing day-to-day life inside the now thirty-plus-thousand Earth models like this one – is locked in a reflexive, in some ways even tidal relationship with artistic expression. Because of this, both objective and subjective reality can directly affect and alter – even reshape – perceived reality here, just as the Earth and moon have done to each other through the ages. Centuries of aesthetes were right, even if they couldn’t prove it themselves – popular culture quite literally changes the world.

Her head turns, and she finally locks eyes with Jones. ‘When I first met you, I felt like how Newton must have when he watched that apple fall in his mom’s garden. It was like I-I-I discovered gravity. Like I’d discovered the thing, the thing that made it all make sense.’

and the thought that he got to experience that love, that he might have even felt something in return and now has no memory of it, no echo of it lingering somewhere inside him, is crushing.

It’s not lost on her that after growing up with dreams of travelling to space, today surrounded by stars and bathed in the radiant blue of a planet few have ever seen from more than 10,000 metres, all she can think about now is being back on Earth with her family.

Human beings had been warned about this for decades, but, as it turns out, the climatologists were wrong. Their numbers were too conservative. Earth’s climate is in full revolt years sooner than they expected, and suddenly billionaire Sergio Harkavy’s ambitious dream of colonizing Mars, of liberating humankind from the only home it’s ever known and thereby ensuring its survival for millennia to come, doesn’t seem as outrageous as it did when he first announced SpaceNEXT’s inception nearly a decade ago.

The savages did not depart after this. Instead, more arrived like swarming roaches. It is on the following day, the third and final day of this nightmare, that the Thracian with two different-coloured eyes appears and kneels beside Nazarius, shows him a small carnelian cameo of a profile, and asks him if he has seen this man, this man who may have been dressed like a Roman or a Goth – or perhaps neither – in or around the horreum before or after the explosion.