The Rain at the End of the World

by Dale Bailey

            They drove north, into ever-falling rain.  Rain slanted out of the evening sky and spattered against the windshield where the humming wipers slapped it away.  Rain streamed from the highway to carve twisted runnels in the gravelled berm.  Rain drops beaded up along the windows and rolled swiftly away as the slipstream caught them up.  All about them, only the rain, and to fill the voiceless silence, the sounds of tires against wet pavement and rain drumming with insistent fingers all about the car.  And in these sounds, Melissa heard another sound, a child’s voice, repeating a scrap of some old nursery rhyme:  rain, rain go away, come again some other day.

            For forty-nine days, nothing but rain, everywhere, all across the United States, in Canada, in Mexico, in Brazil, in England and France and Germany, in Somalia and South Africa, in the People’s Republic of China.  It was raining all around the world.  Rivers of water flowed out of the sky, tides rose and streams swelled, crops rotted like flesh in the fields. 

            Weathermen were apologetic.  “Rain,” they said during the five day forecast.  “Just rain.”  Statesmen expressed alarm, scientists confusion.  Religious fanatics built arks.  And Melissa--who once, in a year she could barely remember, had fantasized making love in the rain--Melissa saw her life swept away in the rain.  They drove north, to the mountain cabin--three rooms for her and Stuart, her husband.  And all about them the unceasing rain.

            Melissa sighed and studied the book she had tried to read as they drove east out of Knoxville that afternoon.  A failed effort, that, defeated by the swaying car.  She glanced at Stuart and almost spoke, but what could she say?  The silence was a wall between them; they’d lost the rhythm of conversation.  They hadn’t exchanged a word since they had changed highways at Wytheville, when Stuart snapped at her for smoking.

            Staring at him now, Melissa thought he was changing, a subtle transformation that had begun--when? days ago? weeks? who could say?--sometime during the endless period after the clouds rolled in and rain began to descend like doom from the heavy sky.  In the dash lights, his once ruddy features were ghastly and pale, like the features of a corpse.  Pasty flesh stretched taut across the angular planes of his skull; his mouth compressed into a white line.  Shadow rippled across his tense features, across his hairline, retreating from a sharp widow’s peak though he was only thirty-five.

            “Do you have to stare at me?” he said.  “Why don’t you read your book?”

            “It’s getting dark.”

            “Turn on the light then.”

            “I don’t want to read.  It was making me sick.”

            Stuart shrugged and hunched closer over the wheel.

            Melissa looked away.

            At first, it had been refreshing, the rain, lancing out of the afternoon sky as she drove home from her art history class.  She parked the car and stood in the yard, staring up at the gray sky, at lightning incandescent in swollen cloud bellies.  Rain poured down, spattering her cheeks and eyelids, running fresh into her open mouth, plastering her garments close against her flesh.

            By the thirteenth day--she had gone back by then and added them up, the endless days of unrelenting rain--the haunted look began to show in Stuart’s eyes.  His voice grew harsh and strained as discordant music, as it did when she tested his patience with minutiae.  That was his word for it:  minutiae, pronounced in that gently mocking way he had perfected in the two years since the baby.  Not mean, for Stuart was anything but mean; just teasing.  “Just teasing,” he always said, and then his lips would shape that word again:  minutiae, meaning all the silly trivia that were her life--her gardening, her reading, her occasional class.

            By this time the pressure had begun to tell on them all.  You could see it in the faces of the newscasters on CNN, in the haunted vacancies behind the weary eyes of the scientists on the Sunday talk shows--vacancies of ignorance and despair.  How could they account for this rain that fell simultaneously over every square inch of the planet?  How could anyone?  By this time--the thirteenth day--you could detect the frayed edges of hysteria and fear.  Evangelists intoned portentously that the Rapture was at hand.  Certain government experiments had gone awry, a neighbor, who had a friend whose brother-in-law worked at Oak Ridge national labs, confided ominously; flying saucers had been sighted over an airbase in Arizona.

            On the twenty-seventh day--a Saturday, and by this time everyone was keeping count--Stuart walked about the house with the stiff-kneed gait of an automaton, jerkily pacing from window to window, shading his eyes as he peered out into the gloom and falling rain.

            “Why don’t you call Jim?” Melissa had said.  “See if he wants to do something.  Get out of here before you go crazy.”  Or drive me crazy, she thought, but didn’t say it.  She was reading Harper’s and smoking a Marlboro Light--a habit she had picked up two years ago, after the miscarriage.  She had always planned to quit, but she somehow never did.  It was too easy to smoke, at home alone.  Stuart had discouraged her from going back to teaching.  Take some time for yourself, he had said.  And why not?  They didn’t need the money now that Stuart had made partner.  And it would have been too hard to be around kids.

            “I don’t want to call Jim,” Stuart had said.  He peered out into the rain.  “I wish you’d quit smoking.  It stinks up the whole house.”

            “I know,” she said.  And she had tried.  But as soon as she quit, she started putting on weight, and Stuart didn’t like that either, so what was she to do?  Smoke.

            Now, driving through rain across the ridges separating Virginia and West Virginia, she fumbled in her purse for a cigarette.  The flame of the lighter threw Stuart’s angular face into relief, highlighting a ghostly network of lines and shadows that brooded in the hollows around his eyes and beneath his cheeks.  For a moment, before the flame blinked out and darkness rushed back into the car, she knew what he would look like when he was old.  But he was handsome still, she thought, distinguished even, with the first hint of gray in his dark hair.

            Still handsome after twelve years, still the same Stuart.  He had noticed her at a time when few men did, had made her feel beautiful and alive, as if she shared his color and energy, his arrogant charm.  And just then, leaning over beside her in freshman composition, he had been boyishly vulnerable.  “Look,” he’d said, “I’m not very good at this kind of stuff.  Do you think you can help me?” 

            That was a long time ago, but the old Stuart was still there; sometimes she could see vulnerability peeking through the cool and distant resolve he had woven about himself after the baby.  She had talked about adoption for a while and she had seen it then--the ghost of that insecurity in the hard curve of his jaw, in the brazen tone of his voice.  As if the miscarriage had been his fault.        

            She cracked her window and blew smoke into the downpour.  Stuart coughed theatrically.

            “Leave it alone, Stuart,” she said.

            Stuart grimaced.  He flipped on the radio and searched for a station with one hand.  Most of the stations had gone off the air by now, same as the television networks.  Why, no one could be certain.

            Hysteria, Melissa suspected.  The government had shut them down to prevent hysteria.  In the last week or two news reports had become increasingly disturbing, often bizarre:  floods of epic proportions in the Mississippi and Ohio River valleys and just about everywhere else, roving gangs in the sodden streets, doom cults who practiced human sacrifice to appease angry weather gods, videotapes of the giant toadstool forest that had erupted over miles and miles of empty western territory.  In many places, money was no longer good.  People had taken to bartering for canned food, gasoline, cigarettes. 

            By day thirty-six, Stuart had himself begun to stock up on gasoline and the non-perishable food crammed into the back of the Jeep.  He had wanted to buy a gun, but Melissa had drawn the line there; the world might retreat into savagery, but she would have no part of it.  At night, the two of them sat without speaking in the living room while the rain beat against the roof.  They watched the news on television, and then--on the forty-second day of rain, when the airwaves rang with commentary about surpassing Noah--the cable went dead.  Every channel blank, empty, gray.  The cable company didn’t answer; radio news reported that television had gone out simultaneously across the country; and then, one by one over the next few days, the radio stations themselves started to go.  Without warning or explanation they simply disappeared, static on the empty dial.

            Stuart refused to give up; every hour he turned on the radio and spun through the frequencies.  Static, more static, an occasional lunatic babbling (but who was a lunatic now, Melissa wondered, now that the whole world had gone insane?), more static.  But the static had a message, too:  Roads are washing away, the static said, bridges are being obliterated.  The world as we know it is being re-made.

            Now, driving, Stuart spun through the channels again, FM and then AM.  Static and static and then a voice:  calm, rational, a woman’s cultured voice in an echoing studio that sounded far, far away.

            They paused, listening:

            “It’s over,” the woman was saying.

            And the interviewer, a man, his voice flat:  “What’s over?  What do you mean?”

            “The entire world, the civilization that men have built over the last two-thousand years, since Homer and the Greeks, since earlier--”

            “For Christ’s sake,” Stuart said, stabbing at the radio; Melissa reached out to stop him, thinking that anything, even lunacy, was better than this silence that had grown up between them in the last years and which seemed now, in the silent car, more oppressive than it ever had.

            “Please,” she said, and sighing, Stuart relented.

            “--apocalypse,” the man was saying.  “The world is to be utterly destroyed, is that what you’re saying?”

            “Not at all.  Not destroyed.  Recreated, refashioned, renewed--whatever.”

            “Like the Noah story?  God is displeased with what we’ve made of ourselves.”

            “Not with what we’ve made,” the woman said.  “With what you’ve made.”

            A lengthy pause followed, so lengthy that Melissa for a moment thought they had lost the station, and then the man spoke again.  She realized that he had been trying to puzzle out the woman’s odd distinction, and having failed, had chosen to ignore it.  He said:  “What you’re saying, though, is that God is out there.  And He is angry.”

            “No, no,” the woman said.  “She is.”

            “Christ,” Stuart said, and this time he did punch the search button.  The radio cycled through a station or two of static and hit on yet another active channel.  The strains of Credence Clearwater Revival filled the car--”Who’ll Stop the Rain?,” and that joke had been old three weeks ago.  He shut off the radio.

            All along, he had been this way, refusing to acknowledge the reality of their situation.  All along, he had continued to work, shuffling files and depositions though the courts had all but ground to a halt.  It was as if he believed he could make the world over as it had been, simply by ignoring the rain.  But by yesterday--day forty-eight--the pressure had truly begun to tell on him.  Melissa could see it in his panicked eyes.

            That day, in the silent house with Stuart gone to work, Melissa stood by the window and looked out across the yard at toadstools, like bowing acolytes to the rain.  Pasty fungoid stalks, cold and rubbery as dead flesh, had everywhere nosed their way out of the earth and spread their caps beneath the poisoned sky.

            Melissa went about the house on soft feet; she shut curtains in the living room, closed blinds in the office, lowered shades in the bedroom.  All about the house she went, shuttering and lowering and closing, walling away the rain.

            When Stuart came home that afternoon, his hair was plastered flat against his skull and his eyes glowered from dark hollows.

            “How was your day?” she said.  She stood at the top of the stairs, in the door to the kitchen, holding a pot.

            He stood below, on the landing, one hand in the pocket of his rain-slick jacket, the other grasping the leather briefcase she had given him for Christmas last year.  “Fine,” he said.

            That was what he always said.  The conversation was as ritualized as some ancient religious ceremony.  And so she said, “What did you do today?”

            “Nothing.”

            That was fine, too, that was formula.  She turned away.  She didn’t care what he’d done all day any more than he cared what she’d done.  She didn’t care about flow charts and tax law and office politics any more than he cared about her garden or her classes or any of the hundred things she did to fill the empty days.  That was how it was--even though the rain had begun to erase the world they had known, to sweep away without discrimination the tax laws and the flow charts, and the gardens and art classes, too.

            But that night--the forty-eighth night of a rain that would never end--that night was different.  In the kitchen, as she placed the pot on the stove, she heard his footsteps squeak across the linoleum.  He was behind her.  She smelled his cologne, weak beneath the moist earthwormy stench of the rain.  She turned and he was standing there, a droplet of rain poised at the end of his nose.  Rain dripped off his slicker and pooled on the linoleum floor.  Rain flattened his hair against his skull.

            “Stuart?” she said.

            The briefcase slipped from his fingers.  Rain glistened on his cheeks and in his eyes.  The other hand came out of his pocket, extending towards her. 

            Toadstools, pale and spongy against his pale and spongy flesh, as colorless as the pasty skin of some cave-dwelling amphibian, extruded from his fist.  Toadstools, spotted and poisonous, dangled from between his fingers.

            “Toadstools are growing in the yard,” he said.

            “I know.”

            “We have to get to higher ground.”

            “It won’t be any different there,” she said.  She had a vision of the mountain cabin, three rooms, and all about them the entombing rain. 

            “It’s raining all around the world,” she said.

            He turned away.  The toadstools dropped from his fingers as he left the room.  Melissa stared at the fungoid stalks, cold and colorless as dead flesh against the linoleum.  She shuddered when she picked them up.

            And so this morning, on the forty-ninth morning, they had fled at last.  The highways were virtually abandoned; occasionally four-wheel drives zipped past, flying harried in either direction, driven by panicked, pasty-looking men.  In fields to either side of the road, lakes, ponds, seas swelled and grew.  Mushrooms sprouted at the horizon, overshadowing the trees; on hilly slopes they saw houses and barns decaying beneath masses of putrid mold.  Three times the pavement had disappeared before them, submerged; three times Stuart had dropped the Jeep into four-wheel drive and edged forward, fearing sinkholes and washouts; three times their luck had held and they had emerged to wet pavement once again.

            They fled east, up 81 to 77, north into West Virginia and the Appalachians.  They had a cabin there, near a ski resort in Raleigh County.  Melissa remembered when they had bought it a year ago.  When Stuart had bought it; he hadn’t consulted her. He had come home late one day, clutching the papers, his eyes wild and feverish.  “I used the money,” he had announced, “I made a down-payment on a cabin and two acres of woodland.”  Something cold and hateful pierced her then.  Stuart had spent the money, the baby’s money, and the spending came like the icy needle-probe of reality: 

            There was no baby.  There would not ever be one.

            Now, on the forty-ninth day, they fled northward into night, seeking higher ground, but the rain stayed with them, omnipresent and eternal.  It fell out of the sky in solid sheets, flowing over the black pavement and soaking Stuart when he pulled over to refill the tank from the gas cans strapped in the back of the Jeep.  Cursing, he would climb back inside and crank the heat to its highest setting, and each time Melissa would remember her long-ago fantasy of making love in the rain.  She took a last drag from the cigarette and let the wind have it, watching in the mirror as it tumbled away, extinguished by the rain.

            Sodium lights appeared, lining the highway.  Ahead, a mountain loomed dark against the gray sky.  The road rose to meet it, rose, and rose, and plunged down toward a granite wall.  A tunnel--the second one since Wytheville--opened up before them at the last moment, and Melissa clenched her fists, fearing washouts, fearing cave-ins.  Then they were inside, the sound of the rain disappearing as they crossed under the mountain and into West Virginia.  Bars of shadow and light flashed across Stuart’s face and the hum of tires against dry pavement filled the car.  The wipers scraped against the dry windshield, back and forth, back and forth, and then they emerged from the tunnel into a shifting wall of rain.

            “Christ,” Stuart said.  “Do you think it’ll ever stop?  Do you think it’ll rain forever?”

            She looked away, out the window, into the falling rain, and that rag of nursery rhyme returned to her.  “Rain, rain go away,” she said.  “Come again some other day.”

            Night closed in around them.  Mountains rose above the road like the shoulders of giants, black against the black sky.  Melissa smoked her last cigarette.  Far ahead, huddled high against an arm of the ridge, Melissa saw a sprinkle of lights, all that remained of a once-bustling town.  The cabin lay farther north, isolated still higher in the mountains.  Three rooms, Stuart, and all about them the besieging rain.

            At last, the lights came up around them. 

            “Would you look at that?” Stuart said, pointing.

            She saw it then, as well, a blazing Texaco sign towering above the highway.  Beyond it stretched a strip of hotels, gas stations, and fast-food restaurants--most of them dark, abandoned.

            “It could be a trap,” Stuart said, “to lure in the unwary.”

            She sighed.

            “We should have bought that gun.”

            “No guns,” she said.

            “We’ll have to risk it.  If they have gas, we could top off the tank, refill our cans.  Maybe they’ll have kerosene.”

            Without another word, he exited to the strip, passed the boarded-up ruins of fast-food restaurants and hotels, and stopped the Jeep beneath the canopy by the Texaco’s islands.  She watched as he studied the parking lot suspiciously; he put her in mind of some frightened forest creature, and she had the disquieting thought that men weren’t so far removed from the jungle.  Satisfied at last, he killed the engine; the noise of the rain grew louder, almost deafening, drowning out her thoughts.  She opened the door and stood, stretching.

            “I’m going to the restroom,” she said, without turning; she heard the pump come on, gasoline gush into the tank.

            “You want anything from inside?” he asked.

            “Get me a coke and a pack of cigarettes.” 

            The bathrooms were across the parking lot, through the downpour.  Melissa shrugged on her rain coat, slipped the hood over her head, and darted across the pavement, one arm cocked ineffectually above her, warding off the rain.  The interior of the restroom stank of urine and bleach; mold had begun to blossom here, sodden, cancerous roses along the base of the dry-wall.  A trash can overflowed in one corner.  Melissa’s nose wrinkled in disgust as she covered the toilet seat with toilet paper. 

            When she returned, Stuart was waiting in the Jeep.

            “Can you believe it,” he said.  “He took money, good old-fashioned American money.  Fool.”

            “You get my stuff?”

            He gestured at the dash.  A can of Diet Coke waited there, sweating condensation.

            “What about my cigarettes?”

            “I didn’t get them.  We have to be careful now.  Who knows when we’ll be able to see a doctor again?”

            “Jesus, Stuart.”  Melissa got out and slammed the door.  She walked to the tiny shop.  The attendant sat behind the register, his feet propped against the counter, reading a novel which he placed face-down when the door chimed behind her.

            “What can I do for you?” he said.

            “Pack of Marlboro Lights, please.”

            He shook his head as he pulled the cigarettes from an overhead rack.  “Shouldn’t smoke, lady.  Bad for you.”

            “I’ve given up sun-bathing to compensate.”

            The attendant laughed.

            She looked up at him, a young man, not handsome, with flesh the color and texture of the toadstools she had scraped off the kitchen floor.  Flesh like Stuart’s flesh, in the midst of that subtle change of his.

            But nice eyes, she decided.  Clear eyes, blue, the color of water.  Eyes like the baby might have had.  And this thought moved her to say something--anything, just to make contact.  “Think it’ll ever stop raining?”

            “Who knows?  Maybe it’s a good thing.  Cleansing.”

            “You think?”

            “Who knows?  Wash the whole world away, we’ll start again.  Rain’s okay by me.”

            “Me, too,” she said, and now she thought again of the fragment of radio program.  Is God out there? the host had wanted to know.  And is He angry?

            She is, the woman had replied.  She is.

            Melissa’s hand stole over her belly, where the baby, her baby, had grown and died.  Abruptly, the crazed logic of the idea, its simple clarity and beauty, seized her up:  This was the world they had made, she thought, men like Stuart, this world of machines and noise, this world of simple tasteless things.  This is the world that is being washed away.  Their world.

            Outside, Stuart began to blow the horn.  The sound came to her, discordant, importunate.  Melissa glanced out at the Jeep, at Stuart, impatient behind the steering wheel, anxious to be off, anxious to get to higher ground.  Three rooms in the mountains, just three.  She and Stuart and all about them the imprisoning rain.  It fell still, beyond the roof over the fuel islands, blowing out of the sky in sheets, dancing against the pavement, chasing neon reflections of the Texaco sign across black puddles.

            “Lady?  You okay?  Miss?”

            “Missus,” she said, out of habit.  She turned to face him. 

            “You okay?”

            “I’m fine, just distracted that’s all.”

            The horn blew again.

            “Nice guy.”

            “Not really.  He tries to be, sometimes.”      

            The horn again.  Impatiently.

            “You better go.”

            “Yeah.”  She dug in her purse for money.

            “Forget it.  Like it means anything now, right?”

            She hesitated.  “Thanks, then.”

            “You’re welcome.  Be careful.  Who knows what the roads are like in the mountains.”

            She nodded and stepped out into moist air.  Stuart had gotten out of the Jeep.  He stood by the open door, his flesh orange and spongy beneath the street lights, his arms crossed against his chest.  He stared at her impatiently, beyond him only darkness, only rain.  Water fell from the night sky, against the gleaming pavement, the buildings, the shining neon Texaco sign.  Against everything, washing it all away.

            “Hurry up,” Stuart said.

            And she said, without even realizing she was going to say it, “I’m not coming.  You go ahead.”  When she said it, she was suffused suddenly with warmth and excitement and life, a sensation of release, as if a hard knot of emotion, drawn tight in her chest through long years, had suddenly loosened.

            “What?” Stuart said.  “What are you talking about?”

            Melissa didn’t answer.  She walked past Stuart and the Jeep, stopping at the edge of the canopy that sheltered the fuel islands.  She shrugged out of the rain coat, let it drop to the pavement behind her.  Ignoring Stuart, she lined up the tips of her toes against the hard clear edge of the pavement where it was wet, where the roof left off and the rain began.

            Stuart said, “Melissa?  Melissa?”

            But Melissa didn’t answer.  She stepped out into a world that was ending, into a gently falling rain.  It poured down over her, cool and refreshing against her cheeks and lips and hair, caressing her with the hands of a lover. 

First published in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction.  July 1999:  42-53.  Copyright © 2003 by Dale Bailey.  All rights reserved.