The Way the World Ends (Warmer, #1)

by Jess Walter

Jeremiah comes into the common area with a broom and cleaning supplies. “I’m so sorry for all of this,” Anna says. “It’s fine,” says Jeremiah as he picks up the pieces of a broken wine bottle. “If we can just get this all cleaned up before my boss comes in.” “We should’ve been more considerate,” Anna says. “It’s really fine,” Jeremiah says. “I’m glad you had fun.” Fun. Jesus. Jeremiah pauses with the broom. “But can I ask you something?” “Of course,” she says. “Is it really as bad as you made it sound last night?” Anna tries to figure out how to explain last night—the collision of middle adulthood and the current, depressing state of politics, and of the world, her own late thirties, and Bashir and the Molson-Reid Axiom to the Golden Rule, and getting a middle-aged haircut and her eggs dying—all of it. “I think we are at a stressful time in our lives, and I guess we all felt the need to cut loose a little,” Anna says. “I’m not talking about what happened here,” Jeremiah says. “I mean what you were talking about. You all just sounded so hopeless. I went home last night and I couldn’t sleep, thinking that word over and over, hopeless, and about how you think we’re all doomed and that people are an infection and babies destroy the planet and how everything we do makes it worse, the corrupt politicians and businesspeople looting the world as it falls apart.”