Alan Sincic

I grew up in a threadbare middle class suburb not unlike the one depicted in the story – little cinderblock houses on the outskirts of Orlando. Now and again there’d be an event to shake us out of the nest and into the open air. Two moments in particular stand out. I was maybe five or six. One morning my parents – in the dark, a good hour before dawn – bundled us all, the four of us kids, still in pajamas and half-asleep, into the VW van for a drive. Not to any place familiar, or nearby, or that we’d ever talked about, no, but simply away. They’d flattened the rear seats to fit us all, each in a sleeping bag, side by side. Through the whole of it they whispered so’s not to awaken us, but I could hear in the tone their voice (the tunefulness, the little jokes) that this was a good thing, this whatever-it-was we were so busy about. Thrilling is what it was – the chill wind at the window, the stars, the snug of the bedding and the rush of the road and, under it all, the whole of the earth. I felt as if we were not so much running away from home as running – with our home – away to where nobody had ever been before. I dozed off. Woke up. Dozed off again. At dawn we rolled to a stop on the beach, climbed up onto the roof of the van and into the salt of the air to watch, against the red of the sky on the far side of the bay, the launch of a rocket. Tucked up into the tip of the rocket was a man who wore (or so I was told) a puffy white suit that swallowed him whole. A marshmallow’s what he was, in a hover there up over the flame. Talk about a marvel.

The other moment – again, when I was quite small – occurred in the aftermath of a hurricane. All night the storm blew. We slept and woke and slept again. Finally at dawn the wind stopped. This is the moment I remember. Not the storm or the damage or the reports on TV, but the strange choreography of that one event: all the neighbors stepping out of their houses at the same time, as if summoned by God or some invisible force to abandon their boxes and, with no particular purpose in mind, mingle. Nobody called a meeting. There was no barn to be raised or fire to fight or speaker to cheer. To look on together, to look on with wonder – that was the only charge.

So. If you want the flavor of how I felt as I wrote the story, there you have it. And with it, perhaps, a clue to how to read what you encounter here. In The End Of The World, with its almost dreamlike sequence of events, we’re at one remove from the calculations that shape the typical slice-of-life story. The setting is familiar enough, and taken as individual snapshots, without reference to the odd dilemma they find themselves in, each character behaves in a familiar way – the wife who rags the husband about the stove, the kids who bicker over toys, the man who birddogs the shapely neighbor. It’s when we assemble them all together onstage at the same time that things begin to get a bit weird. It’s as if we snipped a picture from each of a dozen different magazines and then shook them out onto a giant canvas.

A canvas -- if only it were as simple as that. Think of how painters levitate us up over a scene so that, in a single glance, we take in the whole countryside. The gestalt, right? We’re invited to linger, there, at the right hand of God. Because the painter freezes time we can study, at our leisure, scene after scene in whatever order we choose. In a panorama by, say, one of the Flemish masters, you can jump at random from street to roof, stable to pond -- Hausfrau, hunter, priest. There’s the hayrick. Over yonder the hillside. Back now to the man behind the plow. You can take a week to puzzle out the meaning (as in Hieronymus Bosch) or, complements of Pieter Bruegel the Elder, simply enjoy the show.

Pity the poor writer. The painter invites us to skate across the perfectly preserved surface of a single moment. The writer? He’s gotta pick his way through this enormous pile of word pictures, weigh them, lay them out in a sequence, fit them up onto the rails and then deploy them, single file, one at a time, in a rattle round the bend like boxcars on a train. Only after the train has traveled the entire length of itself can we begin to picture the whole. We wave at the caboose, try to remember back to what came before, and – only then -- glide up into position for the God’s-eye view. This is that “moment of transport” in the traditional short story – the reveal, the vista, the epiphany – when everything that came before seems to fall magically into place.

But not every story offers up a moment of magic. When the epiphany evaporates, or fails to appear at the appropriate place, we turn elsewhere for a solution. After all, a story’s an equation, right? For every equation a solution. As readers we’re trained to follow the sequence of events in search of the underlying order, the connection between the parts. If there seems to be no connection, or if the connection strikes us as illogical or implausible or odd, we latch onto character. Where is the hero whose progress we can follow from moment to moment? We seem to be out of luck in a story like this. The erstwhile protagonist (Jack) is more like a supporting player, a shoulder for the camera to rest on. The other characters buzz along, not quite aimlessly, but without any powerful purpose. The third person narrator hovers at one remove. It’s as if we’re left to our own devices.

Almost, but not quite. There’s at least a hint of something coherent here. The actors coalesce, for example, around a single event. We might be tempted to call it a tragedy, but in tragedy, characters make choices that lead to their doom. The characters here have no consequential choices to make. The doom is a given. They do, however, have agency within the tiny cosmos they inhabit -- that kingdom the length of an arm. Even as the enterprise as a whole collapses around them, they attend – with a kind of quiet of fury – to the business of life.

Okay. So something to cling to in this shipwreck of a story. But there’s more. Or at least the hint of something more, a vacancy with a shape of its own. It’s as if we swim through a debris field stirred by an invisible hand. There’s a current that carries us onward, but what’s become of that governing intelligence we’ve come to expect from all the hundreds of stories we’ve read in the past? It seems the navigator’s as lost as we are, or, like the voice of God from out the whirlwind in the Book of Job, so full of non sequitur and riddle he’s forgotten what the original question was.

Not so very satisfying, is it? Maddening even. But (at the very least) we’ve found a vantage point from which to view the story as a whole. Not a solution, no, but a yearning for one. It’s this yearning for order that gives the story its shape, a yearning that emerges, not from the characters themselves, who (strange as it seems) go about their business, but from the invisible voice of the narrator and, at a second remove, from us. We yearn to make sense of what we see. Kind of like life, no?

The ship goes down. Here’s the captain, beside us in the water, the both of us fighting for a breath, not a speck of land in sight. All ceremony aside, the only question in the here-and-now worth asking is simply this: do you know how to swim?