I

Tom Riley woke up at six in the morning because that is what he had done for eighteen years when the steel mill whistle blew. The whistle did not blow today. There was no whistle. There was only the sound of the radiator clanking and the sound of his own breathing and the sound of a house that was too quiet because his son was not in the next room.

He lay on his back and looked at the ceiling. The ceiling had a crack in it that ran from the corner to the light fixture. He had meant to fix it for two years. He would not fix it.

He got up. He went to the kitchen. He made coffee. He sat at the table and drank the coffee and looked at the wall. On the wall was a calendar with a picture of a trout. The calendar said October. It had said October for three months.

His phone rang. It was Linda.

"Mike's inhaler is empty," she said. She did not say hello. She never said hello anymore.

"I'll get him one," Tom said.

"You said that last month."

"I'll get him one this month."

"Fine."

The phone went dead. Tom sat at the table and drank his coffee and looked at the crack in the ceiling.

He had been looking for work for eleven days. Eleven days of filling out forms on computers at the public library. Eleven days of men half his age looking at him like he was a piece of machinery they didn't need anymore. Which, he supposed, is exactly what he was.

II

The woman at the door wore a NASA jacket. Blue with white letters. She looked out of place in Tom's kitchen, like a actress who had walked onto the wrong set.

"Mr. Riley?" she said. "I'm Dr. Sarah Chen. From NASA."

Tom stood in the doorway of his kitchen and looked at her. He had not had a visitor in six months. "NASA."

"Yes. We're conducting a DNA sampling program. We'd like to collect a sample from you."

"Why me?"

"Your genetic profile matches several markers we're looking for. It's nothing unusual—about three percent of the population would qualify."

She explained it in words that meant almost nothing to him. Dimensional避难. A shelter in a smaller universe. The universe was changing, she said, and space was losing a dimension, and they needed to prepare.

Tom listened. He nodded at the right times. He did not understand most of what she said.

"Will I get paid for this?" he asked.

"Yes. There is a compensation stipend."

"How much?"

"Five thousand dollars."

Tom looked at her. Five thousand dollars was a lot of money in a town where the hardware store had closed and the gas station had become a vacant lot.

"Okay," he said. "What do I have to do?"

III

The facility in the Nevada desert was bigger than anything Tom had ever seen. White buildings stretched across the flat land like a city made of paper. There were thousands of people there—scientists in lab coats, soldiers in uniform, technicians with clipboards.

Dr. Chen took him to Building C, which was where the DNA samples were processed. They ran a test that took twenty minutes. While they waited, Tom sat on a metal chair in a waiting room that smelled of antiseptic and looked at the other people waiting.

A woman in her forties with a baby on her hip. A young man with tattoos on his arms who was staring at the floor. An old man who was humming to himself.

"The universe is ending," the old man said to Tom, without looking at him. "Can you believe it? They're telling us the world is ending."

"I heard," Tom said.

"Do you believe them?"

Tom thought about it. He thought about Dr. Chen in her NASA jacket standing in his kitchen. He thought about five thousand dollars. He thought about Mike's inhaler.

"I don't know," he said.

The results came back. Tom was called into a small office where Dr. Chen sat at a desk with a computer in front of her. She looked at the screen. She looked at Tom.

"Your sample has been logged," she said. "You will be notified if further action is required."

That was it. That was the whole conversation.

Two weeks passed. Tom lived in a dormitory room with six other men, none of whom he talked to. He ate meals in a cafeteria that served food that was edible and nothing more. He watched television in a common room that no one else used.

Then the list was posted.

One thousand names. The one thousand people selected for the dimensional shelter program. Tom walked to the bulletin board in Building C's main hallway and looked at the list. He looked at it three times. His name was not on it.

He found Dr. Chen in her office. She was on the phone. She ended the call and looked at him.

"My name isn't on the list," Tom said.

Dr. Chen sighed. It was a professional sigh, the sigh of someone who had had this conversation many times. "Mr. Riley, the final selection was based on a combination of genetic diversity and knowledge structure. Your DNA was valuable, but—"

"So I'm not going?"

"The program requires a specific balance of skills. Engineers, scientists, medical professionals—"

"I operated machinery for eighteen years. I fixed things."

"I understand."

"Understand what?" Tom said. "Understand that I drove four hundred miles to come here, and I'm not going anywhere?"

Dr. Chen looked at him for a moment. Then she looked down at her desk. "I'm sorry, Mr. Riley."

IV

Tom went home. He drove his old truck back to Ohio through the desert and then through the plains and then through the countryside, and he thought about nothing the whole way. That was his gift: the ability to think about nothing when everything around him was falling apart.

He sat in his backyard on a wooden chair that had belonged to his father. The chair was old and the wood was cracked, but it held him.

The sky was a strange color. Not blue. Not gray. A color he had no name for. It was the color of something that was becoming something else.

He reached into his pocket and found a cigarette. The last one. He lit it with a match and watched the smoke rise.

His phone was in his other pocket. He thought about calling Linda. He thought about calling Mike. But what would he say? Hey, the sky is turning into a painting. Hey, the world is ending and I wasn't good enough to be saved.

He put the phone back in his pocket.

The houses across the street began to flatten. Not collapse. Not explode. Flatten. Like someone was pressing them with an iron. The brick became a drawing of brick. The windows became a drawing of windows. The lawn became a green patch on a piece of paper.

Tom took another drag of his cigarette. He watched the sky become a painting of a sky.

"Alright," he said.

And that was it. That was the last thing Tom Riley said. The cigarette burned down to his fingers. He let it drop. He sat in the wooden chair and watched the world become flat, and he did not cry, and he did not pray, and he did not think about anything at all.