TEMI OH

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Is it possible to want something so much that the force of your longing pulls taut the fabric of reality until it bursts? Our father had imagined the end of the world so often that, for a while, he believed that he caused it.

 

It was a couple of months before we discovered the extent of his prepping. It began the summer before, with tinned cans and non-perishables, rice, pasta shells and powdered milk, puce tubs of pickled cabbage. My sisters and I re.turned home from school one day in September to find him cooking venison stew on his new rocket stove, a bright tower of propane canisters spilling from rain-spattered Amazon boxes piled on the porch. He made Faraday cages from aluminium cans. He rigged the house with alarms. Stockpiled hunting knives and hatchets. By spring, we weren’t allowed to drink the tap water in case it was poisoned.

 

In February, he built a bunker. A utilitarian monstrosity. We watched from our kitchen window as it was lowered into the ground. Inside were hastily assembled bunk beds, a compost toilet and medical supplies: ventilators, iodine pills and collected codeine. We were instructed to participate in drills that could happen at any hour—although usually at the smallest. Tannic taste of adrenaline as the doomsday alarm dredged us from sleep with its urgent mechanical bawling, all the lights off and Dad shouting. We’d fumble blindly for our dressing gowns and jackets, then run. Sometimes our bedroom doors would be locked, and we’d have to find another way out. I would climb out of the window and clamber down the trellis. Land, bruised and shin-scratched, in the shrubs below, just a few seconds left to sprint down the weed-choked garden path.

 

We were urged to bring something we loved. The first time, I’d dashed back to get Digit from her dog crate, but it had been empty, and I’d run about the house with a torch, tears in my eyes, calling her name until I saw her retinas flash at the bottom of the garden. Dad had shouted at me for the delay. In the real thing, like us, she would have to run or die.

 

By the fifth time, we only brought our phones. Not that they ever worked once he closed the airlock.

 

Some nights, I wake up and I’m still there. The February chill, shafts of grass like glass snapping under our heels. The doppler of the siren as we ran. Dad standing sentinel at the end of the garden, looking as if he’d been there since the start of time. The figures of his Casio luminous. Six minutes, he would say. Four minutes. Three. He’d smile if it was less than three. His teeth piano keys in the moonlight.

 

Chantale would always glance over her shoulder at the neighbours’ houses, the glass eyes of their unlit windows, their bedrooms quiet as tombs, and ask the same question every time.

 

‘If this was the real thing… ?’

 

‘If this was the real thing, would they be… ?’

 

‘Dead?’

 

‘Yes.’

 

Then we’d lie on our bunk beds in the dim glow of the propane lantern and discuss it. Weeks of fallout, millions dead. Poisoned rivers, bellied fish floating like Coke bottles downstream. We’d survive, of course. We’d emerge to raid the abandoned shopping malls. Tanice fantasized about pulling designer clothes off the deserted racks at Harrods. ‘They won’t cost anything,’ she’d say.

 

‘They won’t be worth anything,’ Aaliyah would remind her. ‘You think the corpses will care how fashionable you are?’ But Tanice would shake her head and smile at the thought of white-knuckling it through the nuclear winter in Max Mara mink. Chantale, who was seven, would tell stories of moving into the Natural History Museum, playing hide-and-seek among the dust-veiled bones of dinosaurs.

 

Dad would laugh. It was never a nightmare for him. I realize this only now. It was a dream. The Mintons, victorious. Persistent as roaches.

 

In my memories of those nights, Mum was almost never there. And when she was, she was stonily silent. She’d dry swallow a sleeping pill and slip into unconsciousness. By spring, she had stopped coming at all. If this disappointed our dad, he tried not to show it. His behaviour intensified. He began paying careful attention to the movement of celestial bodies. Particularly Hero, a rogue planet set to swing past Earth that summer. He took lessons in bushcraft. One weekend, he told us that we were only allowed to eat food that we had foraged or killed.

 

In the weeks leading up to June, there were drills almost every night.

 

Of course, when it actually happened, it was nothing like the drills. There was no time to grab the things we loved, no hope of making it to the bunker.

 

Dad had been right about some of it. He had imagined the squeal of tyres, the polyphonic clamour of car alarms, dogs howling, birds splattering across the pavements. A strangled ringing from the blood vessels in our ears. He hadn’t imagined it would be beautiful, though. Hadn’t defined the particular colour of the sky, feathered with auroras and chrome-coloured clouds, an awful light.

 

Almost everything that I didn’t live through, I would learn later from witness reports and testimonies. I have examined everything in its entirety, more than once. Some things I can only imagine. Like my father’s expression the morning it happened. His gaze drawn up by the sound. Red capillaries scissoring the whites of his eyes. Reflexive terror, confusion, realization, then—hadn’t he dreamed of this? Hadn’t he numbered our days?—finally, smiling, delight.