Apocalypse vs. Routine Theme Analysis

What is he so worried about? It's always been the end of the world. What did we have this century? World War I, the influenza, the depression, World War II, concentration camps, the atomic bomb. Now he's scared about a computer glitch? A blackout? Let's go about our business. We'll enjoy our hot chocolate with Baileys. He knows what he's missing and can come in here whenever he likes.

“I worked for the state, back when the state took care of its own. Like you, I had grand and noble responsibilities to all, but I still had to deal with individuals. I'm sure you know the difficulty. Sometimes those two things can be at cross purposes, say, when one child is a bit behind, maybe keeping the others from moving on. What should you do? Ignore the child? I found that I had no choice in the matter as soon as I started seeing the class as more important than the student, the children were lost, I was lost. Nothing was grand, nothing was noble. Do you understand what I'm saying? […] Anything named Central doesn't even know what you look like. I do, and I'm watching you to see that you make the right decision here.”

He waved us through.

“I write it all down, everything that's gone on with the farms too. Families being scattered, friends making enemies just so as to stay alive. I've kept dry paper and each night I write down what happened during the day. I'll write about you tonight, what you taught me but also what you are, making money on other people's losses. People won't take notice of it now, but I'm keeping the pages safe till that time they become ready for the truth. There's no way I'd ever burn my writing or allow it to get wet, regardless of what comes.”

[Jenna]’s exactly the kind of romantic that's got no instinct to make it. She's fighting the tree, fighting the rain, fighting me, and her whole purpose in life is to record every indignity.

I'm imagining the person who finds me. […] She does what has to be done and keeps a smile through it all, a sincere one. She helps me up onto an old wooden work-table where she's made thousands of meals for her family, cuts open my pants carefully, just enough so she can see the wound. She's all business, taking care of me. I look around. It's a farmer's kitchen, shelves lined with bottles of pickled vegetables stored for harsh weather (and still not all eaten, even now, because she's planned so well). She'll have the exact right topical to wash me up, some secret her family’s used for a hundred years. There’ll be a metal bucket full of fresh sunflowers by the sink. […] And this woman, she's so glad to see me. She's waited patiently through all these months of hunger and rain for me to crawl ashore.

Sometimes when she's not here I try to dissolve into this one feeling of missing her and it pushes away everything else—this guy going through our stuff, the virus. It's not uncomfortable missing her, actually, and with him down there leering at me with his glazed glassy eyes and bloody mouth and nose, concentrating on her and our future is the only way to believe this will pass. It's like wanting her to be here makes me forget she's not.

It was on a street of townhouses that had these identical miniaturized plantation facades. Unnecessary double staircases curved four steps up, and a tiny useless balcony over the front door was held up by plaster pillars. Most of these had had their back walls blasted off from one of the explosions […]

I was about to call rescue to tell them to seal the place against looters, when I saw her standing in a bedroom. Little Margo, wearing all this tough yellow gear. She was stealing again, like when we met, jamming useless objects into her fire suit. I hadn't clipped anything since conning my way into verification, but I could still enjoy watching someone else do it, especially her.

Most evacuees don't learn. They try to start over someplace exciting (a target) or temperate (subject to floods, fires or earthquakes). Or they identified this month's most thermal politically neutral region. They assume they're not going to have to pack again. Even though it may be the third or fourth time for some of them, they're still completely tweaked with relocation fever. Full of piss and, as the expression goes, vinegar. They take their first steps around their new home and get confidence; make friends, buy appliances, plant tomatoes. You want to shake them: Do you really think this time it's going to be different?

The reason Juliet chose us, it turned out, is we're heterosexual. Voters are fine about ignoring her personal life, to a point. Since the various media outlets forced them to read endlessly about her night crawls, which usually involves some variation of the women we danced through to get to her, they want variety of gender. In the first month, she dressed me up in rubber and had me fuck her on the main stage of just about every flesh club in her constituency—the million-dollar landscaped one in the cities and the back-road barns in the country. […] In the old days, the candidate had to eat a lot of doughnuts to get their message through, but Juliet 's calculations about the addition of us to her entourage were correct.

It's not that long a hike, they're not that heavy, my system is fine. I load all the bundles onto my back and head us through the woods, to our community. He's following me at a petulant distance behind me, carrying nothing. I refuse to wait for him now and I'm marching through the forest, winding along the widest paths I can find. I hope he's thinking how wrong he is about my bones, but the fact is he's probably thinking about what extra food he can scam away from some of the other elders at mealtime. He is, after all, a growing boy.

My years as an unambitious bottom feeder were just productive enough to keep my criminal record within acceptable ranges for any position in the new regime. If asked, I will tell [Karuna] that it was never a conscious wish to become a criminal. It was an apocalyptic choice. I’m not so morally resurrected that I mean it was a choice with apocalyptic consequences; I mean it was a good choice for the apocalypse, but now I'm ready and eager to go back to work toward happier times.

They each quietly wished they'd splurged for the extra day trip to see a live one in Japan. No matter what, you want an explosion, especially when you're going to die. […]

An innocent symbol of destruction, like the sun. My doctor encourages me to meditate on the natural world. Get lost in it and find yourself, like she's selling me a three-week safari. I humor her every now and then by trying one of these exercises because she also prescribes the serious bone-curdling meds when I need them.

So I study the hill, let it tell me the earth is round, filled with elaborate, molten plumbing. All this will allegedly lead to inner reliance and, eventually, clean detachment from the body—just what the doctor ordered.

Suddenly I'm being carried down the steps of the bus, supported at my shoulders and my knees. Outside, I look up into my father's eyes. You've never seen a color like this, like a bucket of summer peas. I relax into it, like my doctor told me to. For a moment, I feel that space she's always talking about, like I'm holding on to this world by a string. I hold it and let it go, hold it and let it go. When I let it go, when I close my eyes, I drift, but when I open them he's looking at me with the sun behind him and I'm holding on.

Everyone supports a different limb so the skin won't tear. We all learn so much about treatment from each other.

I suddenly realized that it's better here with him than anywhere I've been. I want to apologize for my fifteenth year. I'm ready to live like this. I want to tell him that I'm going to stay and take care of him.

He inhales deeply, summoning his powers. His hands come slowly down, working from my forehead to my chin and back again, pressing a current of air tight between us. I see it rushing across my face. Slowly, he lowers his fingertips near my skin till I can feel their heat on my cheeks and then, without a sound, without the slightest incantation, he closes my eyes.