The Job at the End of the World by Ray Nayler

Author:Ray Nayler
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Tor Publishing Group

* * *

On the flight home I found myself thinking of the time I had stayed in the ruins of paradise.

Hurricanes do strange things. In fact, all disasters have a strange way about them. They destroy entire cities but leave one or two buildings standing, almost untouched. It’s as if they want to leave us with something to compare their destruction to. A control subject for their experiment in ruination. Over my thirty years, I’ve seen houses lifted into the air whole by a tornado and set down whole a few hundred yards away, with no more damage inside than a few chairs knocked over and a broken glass in the kitchen sink. I’ve seen a stand of trees as green and alive as any untouched forest, filled with singed deer, their eyes glossy with terror, bordered on all sides by a waste of shattered black stumps. I’ve seen a yacht set on the roof of a five-story building so neatly that a crane plucked it off and set it back in the water, and its owner raised sail and tacked it away.

I’ve seen all of that. But what sticks in my mind most is the time in my first hurricane season, when we stayed in the ruins of paradise.

It was one of those all-inclusive beach resorts. The kind where you move from buffet to pool bar to lounge in a vacant rhythm. Where you spend weeks forgetting the world beyond white-sand beaches, palm trees, the glistening surfaces of pools and wet skin and sea.

Not the kind of place I, or anyone I worked with, had ever been to in our lives.

It wasn’t the whole resort that was spared: it was just a wedge of it, a set of bungalows that had suffered nothing more than a few cracked windows when the storm came through. By a trick of the landscape, the storm surge had not reached them, either.

The rest of the tiny island was gone—nothing left but splinters and rags.

The company we worked for moved us into the resort on generator power. It made sense: these were some of the only buildings standing. At most sites we would stay at some motel outside the destroyed area and commute to our cleanup area. But here, on the island, there was no such place.

The staff of the resort lived in the buildings, too. They were seasonal hires from all over the world, flown in on guest-worker programs. They had nothing to go back to yet, so they were happy to finish out the season and keep making money.

The company ships brought supplies into a quay a mile away. We spent our days clearing debris, surveying, beginning to rebuild. But we spent our evenings in the light of tiki torches, eating toothpick-skewered delicacies off the buffet, and swimming in the ocean under the stars. The rest of the world was gone, we could imagine. Maybe not only this island—maybe all of it.

We were there for months as the insurance companies delayed and haggled and we cleared and built.

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