On the day my mother died, I sat by her bedside and read the Psalms. The room was quiet — the need for machines had passed — save for the sound of my voice and my mother’s labored breathing. Outside her room, the hospital went about its business: Lunch trays were delivered, nurses conferred, a television played too loudly down the corridor. Out there, time passed in its usual, unremarkable way. In her room, my mother and I had stepped off time’s familiar track.
Everything inessential vanished in her final hours. I read the Psalms because they comforted her. I told her I loved her. She squeezed my hand, which, in that afternoon when she was no longer able to speak, was as profound an expression of love as any words had ever been. When she died hours later, I knew that on the other side of her hospital room door there awaited, at least for me, an altered world.
The subject of this essay is apocalypse, and so I have begun with an ending. If you have lost a deeply beloved, then you have experienced the obliterating finality of death, that catastrophe in the small universe of an individual life. The loss also brings a realization: The “worst thing” that could happen is no longer a future projection; it has exploded into the present.
Apocalypse is generally understood as a future event: widespread suffering, extinctions, various iterations of end-time destruction gunning for us from some tomorrow. Out there, in the vast, unknowable not-yet, apocalypse roars. It paralyzes us with fear, deadens us into numbness or provokes us to hysteria. We are powerless in its face.
But what if we could change our relationship with the end by shifting our perspective on it? The first step might be dwelling more profoundly in the here and now where our crises amass, rather than focusing on the boogeyman future. We already know something about how to do this: We are creatures of loss; we have confronted, or will confront, the “worst things” in the real time of our lives. There is a precedent, then, for how, in this moment, we might collectively approach the apocalyptic worst things. While our beloved still lives, there is possibility: We can give her our attention; we can hold her hand.
I won’t downplay the current horrors — tens of thousands dead in Gaza, conflict in Ukraine, the high-stakes presidential election on the horizon — or imply that all will turn out right. The novels in this essay don’t do that either. Instead, they suggest new ways of seeing: a shift to deeper present-time awareness, even wonder, as the times grow ever more dire. The theologian Catherine Keller calls this “apocalyptic mindfulness.” “A cloud of roiling possibility seems to reveal itself,” she writes in “Facing Apocalypse” (2021). “It guarantees no happy ending. It may, however, enhance the uncertain chance of better outcomes.”
Many of our end-time notions are inflected by the biblical Book of Revelation. Its phantasmagoric visions and lurid scenes of destruction have thoroughly infiltrated Western talk of the end: the Four Horsemen, the beast we call the Antichrist (though Revelation doesn’t use the term), fires, plagues and raging pestilence. It may come as a surprise, then, that apokalypsis, the Greek word for “revelation,” means not “ending” but “unveiling.” As Keller writes, “It means not closure but dis-closure — that is, opening. A chance to open our eyes?” But, to what?
In Ling Ma’s novel “Severance” (2018), newly pregnant Candace Chen wanders a near-deserted New York City in the midst of a pandemic caused by a disease called Shen Fever. The majority of the city’s residents have fled or become “fevered,” a zombielike state that leaves victims stuck on repeat: a family endlessly setting the table and saying grace; a saleswoman, her jaw half eaten by decay, folding and refolding polo shirts at an abandoned Juicy Couture store on Fifth Avenue. The fevered are the least threatening zombies imaginable: so busy with their mindless performance of mundane tasks that they don’t notice the living. Ma has a knack for nuanced satire.
Candace sticks around because she’s got nowhere else to go; she’s the orphaned child of Chinese immigrants who died years before. Inexplicably, and perhaps somewhat to her dismay, she remains virus-free. As the pandemic shuts down the city, she doggedly persists with her job in the Bibles department at Spectra, a book production company: “I clicked Send, knowing it was fruitless,” she says. When public transportation stops entirely, she moves into her office on the 32nd floor, overlooking an empty Times Square.
It doesn’t take long to understand that a vast grief underlies Candace’s workaholic paralysis. So intense is her mourning for her parents that for a while the pandemic hardly registers. She needs to hold on to something, even pointless work at Spectra. The office setting is no coincidence: In some sense, Candace, too, is fevered, and her job’s rote repetition is a kind of anesthetic.
The dull but familiar grind of late-capitalist working life acts as a numbing agent, or perhaps a blindfold. When work dries up because the rest of the world is no longer at its desk, Candace rambles around the city utterly alone, taking pictures of derelict buildings that she posts on a blog she calls “NY Ghost.” One afternoon she enters a flooded subway station. “You couldn’t even see the water beneath all the garbage,” Ma writes. “The deeper you tunneled down, the bigger the sound, echoed and magnified by the enclosed space, until this primordial slurp was all that existed.” Grieving Candace is adrift, her internal landscape aligned with the desolation of the external world.
Published two years before the Covid pandemic, “Severance” offers an eerily prescient description of a nation shocked and exhausted. For so many, 2020 was a kind of apocalyptic unveiling. The pandemic revealed the fault lines in our health care and our schools, as well as the fact that so many of us were living in perpetual economic precarity. Then there were the deaths, which as a country we have hardly begun to mourn. Painfully and all at once, we understood the fragility of the systems we relied on, and the instability of our own lives.
Yet alongside the devastation there was transient beauty: In many places, air and water quality improved during lockdown and wildlife resurged. Health-care and essential workers were acknowledged and more respected; we realized the extent of our dependence on one another. If only for a little while, we were thrown into Keller’s “apocalyptic mindfulness.” But the eye snapped shut. We “recovered,” and, like Candace, we find ourselves once again in a collective disquiet, punctuated by bouts of terror as we contemplate the future.
On the final afternoon of her wandering, Candace ventures into the same Juicy Couture store she’d photographed weeks before. Ominously, the fevered saleswoman has been bludgeoned to death. Candace’s unborn child seems frightened too: “The baby moved inside of me, fluttering frantically.” Candace leaves Manhattan through the Lincoln Tunnel in a yellow taxi she’s commandeered from a fevered driver. She joins a band of survivors led by a creepy zealot named Bob, a former I.T. guy who wears a brace for carpal tunnel syndrome, that most banal of white-collar work maladies. They journey to the Chicago suburbs to homestead in a deserted mall. (I told you Ma has a knack for satire.)
In this semi-cult, Candace’s grief intensifies. She begins to have visions of her mother, who warns her that she and her unborn baby aren’t safe with Bob. Candace’s mother is right. Bob has a penchant for shooting the fevered in the head if he encounters them when he and the others go “stalking” for food and supplies. We squirm at these killings, even if the victims are not quite alive, at least not in the usual sense. Bob’s violent demagoguery opens Candace’s eyes to her metaphorically fevered state, and as we look into the mirror the novel holds up to us, we begin to wonder about our relationship to our own beleaguered world.
At last, Candace’s fever breaks and, fully alive, she escapes Bob and the others in a Nissan stolen from the group’s mini-fleet. She drives into once grand Chicago, swerving to avoid abandoned cars clogging Milwaukee Avenue. Finally, she runs out of gas. “Up ahead there’s a massive littered river, planked by an elaborate, wrought-iron red bridge,” she recounts. “Beyond the bridge is more skyline, more city. I get out and start walking.”
The “end” for Candace and her baby is not, in fact, an ending, but rather, an awakening that follows revelation.
If “Severance” chronicles its protagonist’s end-time stirrings from the stupor of grief, Jenny Offill’s novel “Weather” (2020) is its manic cousin, a diaristic account of climate anxiety. Narrated in the first person, aggressively present tense and composed of short chapters that leap from association to observation, the book is like a panicked brain in overdrive.
“Weather”’s protagonist, Lizzie, works as a university librarian in New York City. Her former professor, Sylvia, a climate change expert, finagled the gig for her though Lizzie isn’t really qualified. “Years ago, I was her grad student,” Lizzie explains, “but then I gave up on it. She used to check in on me sometimes to see if I was still squandering my promise. The answer was always yes.”
Lizzie is all wry self-deprecation. As the book progresses, we understand that she is less an underachiever than an empath, so often overwhelmed that her focus scrambles. Or perhaps it’s that she is deeply attentive to things we try to ignore. Her experience of the world is the opposite of Candace’s near-impenetrable grief. Lizzie is porous. Too much gets in: grave news about the environment, the plights of relative strangers — like kindly Mr. Jimmy, a car-service owner being run out of business by Uber. Lizzie “helps” by taking Mr. Jimmy’s car to various appointments, though she can’t afford it and the traffic makes her late.
The novel doesn’t so much unfold as tumble out over the course of a turbulent year that encompasses Donald Trump’s election in 2016. After Trump’s win, tensions rise in Lizzie’s Brooklyn neighborhood. Even Mr. Jimmy is spewing casual vitriol about Middle Eastern people and car bombs. Lizzie’s husband, Ben, retreats to the couch, to read a “giant history of war.” And I haven’t even mentioned Henry, Lizzie’s depressive, recovering-addict brother, who meets a woman, marries and has a baby, all at whiplash speed. When the marriage implodes, Henry winds up on Lizzie and Ben’s couch, using again and barely able to parent his daughter.
For Lizzie, as for most of us, personal and collective catastrophes run parallel. Her vision of the future grows ever darker. She talks to Sylvia about buying land somewhere cooler, where Eli, her young son, and Iris, her newborn niece, might fare better in 30 years or so. “Do you really think you can protect them? In 2047?” Sylvia asks.
“I look at her,” Lizzie thinks. “Because until this moment, I did, I did somehow think this.” The realization of her helplessness is unbearable, but Lizzie knows she must bear it: This bleak state of affairs is her son’s inheritance.
Lizzie is gripped by grief and despair — she spends far too much time on doomsday prepper websites — both complicated responses to a planet in the midst of radical, damaging change. “In a world of mortal beings,” Keller writes in “Facing Apocalypse,” “it would seem that without some work of mourning, responsibility for that world cannot develop.” Lizzie’s sense of loss and futility is wrenching, but her response attaches her that much more deeply to this world. Her anxiety is acute because the time in which to act is limited and shot through with urgency.
Lizzie experiences her moment as unprecedented; her end-time sensibility suggests an analogy, albeit to a starkly different context. The Apostle Paul also understood himself to be living through an extraordinary rupture in time. Paul’s zeal to spread the Gospel through the ancient world was fueled by his conviction that ordinary time, and life, had been profoundly derailed by Christ’s crucifixion, and was soon to end with his imminent Second Coming. Paul believed he was living in an in-between time that the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has aptly called “the time that remains,” a phrase borrowed from Paul’s letter to the fledgling church at Corinth. “The time is short,” Paul wrote. “From now on those who have wives should live as if they do not; those who mourn, as if they did not; those who are happy, as if they were not.”
The old world and its rules had not yet passed away but the prospect of Christ’s return cast an altering light on the present, highlighting the impermanence of all things. Everything was revealed to be in flux and therefore subject to reversals and change.
In “Weather,” Lizzie’s frazzled report from the event horizon of impending disaster, the time that remains means that moments are more precious, less bound by previous rules of engagement and more open to radically new ones. Near the end of the novel, Henry reclaims his sobriety, and Lizzie finds renewed, if melancholic, love for this imperiled world. She wants to find a new way to engage, even as she is uncertain what that might be. “There’s the idea in the different traditions. Of the veil,” Lizzie says. “What if we were to tear through it?” The image recalls Keller’s apokalypsis — a revelatory “dis-closure.”
Jesmyn Ward’s “Salvage the Bones” (2011) takes a very different approach to apocalypse. The novel is set over 12 days, before and just after Hurricane Katrina strikes the Gulf Coast. The 15-year-old narrator, Esch, her father and three brothers live in the Mississippi Delta, outside a coastal town Ward calls Bois Sauvage. Unlike other characters we have encountered, Ward’s need no awakening; and time is far too short for existential anxiety or long-term planning.
The novel opens as China, a pit bull belonging to Esch’s brother Skeetah, is giving birth. Moody, commanding China is the love of Skeetah’s young life and as vivid as any human character in the book. “What China is doing is fighting, like she was born to do,” Ward writes. “Fight our shoes, fight other dogs, fight these puppies that are reaching for the outside, blind and wet.” Skeetah hopes to sell China’s puppies for big money. Enough to send his older brother, Randall, to basketball camp, where, the family hopes, he’ll be noticed by college scouts. Enough, perhaps, to help Esch take care of her baby. Esch is pregnant, though not far enough along to show, and she is in love with the baby’s father, her brother Randall’s friend Manny, who keeps her a secret and won’t kiss her on the mouth.
The novel is full of mothers: mothers to be, absent mothers (Esch’s mother died in childbirth years before), animal mothers, even mythical mothers (Esch is fixated on the avenging Medea, whom she’s read about in school). And, of course, Mother Nature is flying across the gulf, heading straight for Bois Sauvage. Mothers in this novel are makers and destroyers. In some cases, they are also unprepared to occupy the role; they are in jeopardy or else the circumstances of their motherhood run afoul of certain proprieties.
Esch’s pregnancy isn’t easy. It may also be hard for readers to accept: Esch is in dire financial straits and young enough to scandalize some of us. Does the prospect of her motherhood elicit the same empathy as Lizzie’s or Candace’s? Whose children do we think of as the hope for the future when the end is nigh? Which mothers are most valued in the collective perception? Not, generally speaking, an impoverished Black girl barely into her teens.
Ward’s concerns are with those who will bear the brunt of the coming storms, both natural and metaphoric, on the page and in the world. Esch and her family face Katrina with nothing besides a few canned goods they’ve scared up, and some plywood nailed over the doors and windows. Esch herself is the sort of vulnerable person Scripture might refer to as “the least of these.” Each time I read the novel, my mind leaps to the biblical Mary, mother of Jesus, a poor, brown, teenage girl who gave birth in a barn because no safer provision was made for her. In that story, the life least protected turns out to be the most essential.
So it is in “Salvage the Bones”: Esch and her unborn child, along with fighting China and her puppies, are the beating heart of this universe. Here, Esch considers which animals flee before a coming storm: “Maybe the bigger animals do,” she reflects. “Maybe the small don’t run. Maybe the small pause on their branches, the pine-lined earth, nose up, catch that coming storm air that would smell like salt to them, like salt and clean burning fire, and they prepare like us.”
With “the small,” or those treated as such, as focal points, Ward’s novel is also an indictment. It’s true that Katrina was a natural disaster, but its effects were preventable, or might have been mitigated. Most of us remember the levees breaking. The disaster’s aftermath — thousands, mostly poor, stranded without food or water; critically ill patients dying in storm-ravaged hospitals; desperate, unarmed civilians shot by police officers — was entirely the fault of humans.
We might extend Ward’s insight to end-time crises in general, in which other Esches are similarly left with the greater share of suffering. We may not be able to reverse the crises themselves, but we can intervene in the devastation they cause, and to whom.
We have been down a harrowing road; there isn’t much comfort here. But perhaps at this critical juncture in our human story, it is not comfort that will aid us most. Perhaps what will aid us most is to enter more fully into discomfort. To awaken to our grief, like Candace. To try to tear through the veil, like Lizzie. In this way we might begin to believe that the future is not foreclosed upon, whatever it might look like.
I leave us with Esch’s declaration of hope at the end of Ward’s novel. Esch’s family has survived, but Skeetah is searching for China, who disappeared in the storm: “He will look into the future and see her emerge into the circle of his fire, beaten dirty by the hurricane so she doesn’t gleam anymore … dull but alive, alive, alive.”
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