She takes the smoking hand-rolled from the glass ashtray and draws it to her mouth, slowly, as if she's practicing for a competition. Watching her you'd think she has nothing but time, and then she goes on like this, convinced we're sitting at the end of the world.
"Everyone can feel it," she says, allowing the smoke to curl around her face. "You can see it in them."
"Really?"
I turn onto my back.
"Don't do that," she says. "You know it too."
"What do I know?"
"That everyone's holding their breath."
"It's all the same," I say.
"What do you mean?"
"If the world ends or not."
"If." She laughs, and kisses the side of my face. The press of her lips is like a trigger, causing my eyes to close.
"That's nice of you to say," she tells me.
I'm not sure what she means.
"Do you remember when I came here tonight?" I ask her.
"Don't you?"
"No."
"You people are pretty fucked up aren't you?"
"You people?"
She ignores me, and turns onto her back.
"It wasn't so long ago, when you arrived," she says.
"I ate an insect tonight," I mutter. My thoughts are hard, round things, dropping one after another, like stones falling on a flat surface.
"Oh?"
"In the back room of the bar you sent me to. To meet Taylor."
"I didn't send you to any bar."
"No? But I remember that."
"That was Daphne."
Panic grips my stomach like a cold hand; if this girl isn't Daphne, who am I in bed with?
"I was bored with Daphne," she goes on, and the panic recedes. "From tonight I'm Pandora."
"Seems like a lot of girls are changing their names lately," I say.
"Don't talk about other girls," she tells me. "I don't want to hear about other girls."
"Alright."
"Anyway I think if you can't even remember how you got here you're in no shape to worry about something as meaningless as a name."
"You're probably right."
"Everything is fragmenting. That's one of the signs of the end. No straight lines, no completed arcs. That's why I'm Pandora. You know that story right?"
"Refresh my memory."
"It's a sad story."
"Your stories seem to be."
"Don't judge. This is only the second one you've heard. You need three for a pattern."
"Three," I say, and I am on my side. She's lying next to me, the light from the window touching the curve of her shoulder and her naked hip.
"Twice is just coincidence," she answers.
I sit up and put my hand on her side. She stabs out the end of her hand-rolled and stretches her arms above her head.
"How did I get here?" I ask her.
"You walked, I think."
"I mean in bed with you."
"I asked."
It sounds reasonable enough.
"Now I feel like telling a story. So shut up and listen."
I do as I'm told, and hear her moving closer, and the mattress straining beneath her weight. She doesn't come close enough to touch me, but the heat of her body is like a warm compress.
"The gods were tired. I guess they had a right to be. They'd created the world and everything in it, and then they created man. They wanted a break, but men have the bad habit of dying, and the gods realized that if things didn't change they'd never get any rest. Instead, they'd be at creation forever, replacing all the dead men with new ones. They thought it would be much simpler if they gave men a way to replace themselves, so they created woman, and the first woman was named Pandora."
She lays a hand on my stomach, and I find that my eyes are closed again. I focus on the sound of her voice. It isn't beautiful, but alone in the darkness it isn't hard to listen to.
"Not all of the gods were happy about this. The god of the day, whose job was to bring light into the world with the turning of the sun, was angry. He believed that if men were given the power to create themselves, they'd stop worshipping him. So in secret he worked a flaw into Pandora, one that would be passed on to every subsequent generation."
"What flaw?"
"Curiousity."
"That's not such a bad flaw."
"It is when you also seal the end of creation into a small box, give it to a curious girl and tell her never to open it."
"Which he did."
"Which he did. He told the other gods it was a birthday present for all women, a keepsake to remember them by, and he sent it with Pandora to earth."
"What an asshole."
"I don't know. I think maybe he was doing us a favour. Now shut up, because this is where the story gets interesting. Pandora kept the box on a necklace and hid it between her breasts. It was a small thing, black, and very ornately carved. She often admired it, looking at it when no one else was around, fingering the ebony latch, and wondering what was inside, what kind of present was fit for a god to give.
"She knew that she shouldn't think about it, that it was willful of her even to imagine what might be inside; the god of the day had told her never to open it and she owed him, along with all the other gods, her life and the lives of her children. She did her best not to think of it, but she couldn't help herself – the flaw of curiousity was ingrained too deeply.
"But Pandora was clever, and she thought she saw a way to learn what was in the box while still obeying the word of the god; she must never open it, but what if someone else did? The god hadn't said anything about that, and surely a god would tell her everything she needed to know. So one night Pandora left the box out, on a dresser in the bedroom she shared with her husband. Coming home he saw it there, and asked her what it was. She told him it was a gift from the gods and watched him pick it up.
"I like to picture the two of them together in that moment, right before the thing was done, when they still had the choice not to do it."
The feel of her hand on my stomach is uncomfortably warm. I shift away slightly, and she removes it.
"But then I think that there never was a choice," she continues. "That box was always going to be opened."
"You don't believe in alternate endings?" I ask her.
"What, like in a parallel universe?"
"Like that, yeah."
"No," she says.
"What about the outsiders?"
"The outsiders?" There is something strange in her voice now, a hint of amusement, a stress she placed on the word 'the' that I don't understand.
"Yeah," I answer.
"They may be from outside, but once they're here they're here. Right?"
"I guess. Anyway, what was in the box?"
"Nothing."
"Nothing?"
"That's right."
"Well that's a disappointment. I was expecting a plague of locusts or something."
"No, you don't understand. Nothing was inside it. Nothing, the possibility of nothing. They opened the box and saw nothing, emptiness. They saw the end of things, and that sight marked them. It went deep into their hearts, so deep that through them, and through their children and their children's children, it remains in all of us, the fear of nothing, of the end."
"You mean the fear of death."
"More than that, the knowledge that everything ends. Not just our lives, but everything, this world, our universe."
"That's a shitty birthday present."
"Yes it is," she says, her voice softening. She suddenly sounds like a child, talking to herself in the night. "The end of the world isn't an explosion. It's not emptiness. It's just going to be a pile of useless, leftover parts. Parts that don't fit together anymore, lying around in a dead universe. Fragments."
"I think it'll be like a blank page," I say.
"Can you see it?" she asks me, suddenly sitting upright. She looks at me with an odd intensity.
"I can't see anything. A
nd anyway I think that's a horrible story to tell before bed."
"It is a horrible story," she says, lying down again. "Obviously written by a man."