This is the Way the World Ends

by James Morrow

  Fade-in on a man seated at a desk. He wears a business suit and is flanked by American flags. During his speech the camera dollies forward and a subtitle tells us that this is Robert Wengernook, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.

  WENGERNOOK: As one of the officials charged with implementing America’s defense strategy, I know where our security lies. We must prove to the Soviets that they can never succeed in their ugly schemes for winning a nuclear war…The key to our security is deterrence. The key to our deterrence is civil defense. And the key to our civil defense is a technology developed by Eschatological Enterprises…If you’ve already bought that scopas suit—wear it. If you haven’t—well, don’t you think you owe it to yourself and to your country’s future? Remember, deterrence is only as good as the people it protects.

  Fade-out.

  In the screening room of Unlimited, Ltd., Phil Murcheson of Eschatological Enterprises blew cigarette smoke into Robert Wengernook’s projected face.

  “He looks nervous,” said Murcheson as the tail leader of the thirty-second spot rolled out of the film gate and began flapping around on the take-up reel.

  “Intense, we thought.” Dave Valentine, Creative Associate at Unlimited, Ltd., shut off the projector. “He looked intense to us.”

  “Nervous.”

  “He needed a cigarette,” said Valentine.

  “You’ll notice a big difference when it’s transferred to tape,” said Lou Marquand, Assistant Creative Associate. “Film is high resolution, right? It’s not his medium. Wengernook is definitely low-res iconography.”

  “Nervous as a cat,” said Murcheson. “This is not a man I would want leading me into battle, and our customers won’t want him either.”

  “I hate to fail you like this, Phil,” said Valentine. “I can’t tell you the pain I’m experiencing right now.”

  Murcheson lit a fresh Pall Mall. “Look, what you did is okay for the six o’clock news, the Rise and Shine show, the Sunday morning evangelists. No problem. But this country has a Super Bowl coming up in a couple of months. This is not a Super Bowl presence you’re giving me here, Dave.”

  Valentine began jumping up and down. “Hold on, Phil! Concept time! Hold on! Here comes the egg…now the sperm…direct hit! Insemination! You’ll love this. It has action, a medieval knight, and a sex-role reversal.”

  “I like the knight. Sex-role reversal?”

  “We’re on top of it. Eighty-five percent of male viewers enjoy sex-role reversals, as long as you keep the threat factor in harness.”

  “Okay. But life is short—need I remind you? The Super Bowl, Dave.”

  “Phil, you’ll have it in time for the goddamn Army-Navy game.”

  Robert Wengernook proved a far more persuasive scopas suit salesman than anyone at Eschatological Enterprises had anticipated. Seven seconds after the commercial was aired for the first time, John Frostig’s phone rang. It was the chairman of the Wildgrove Board of Selectmen; he wanted two adult units and three child-size ones. No sooner had John replaced the receiver when the phone jangled again. The principal of Wildgrove High School required seven suits.

  By Thanksgiving, John had supplemented his panel truck with a factory showroom, the Civil Defense Stop, open every night till nine.

  America was becoming a safe, white country. From sea to shining sea, citizens began wearing their civil defenses as a matter of daily routine. Cheerfully they mastered the arts of eating, sleeping, working, and playing in perpetual preparedness for warheads. Not only did the suits promise survival in times of nuclear exchange, they also discouraged muggings and rapes.

  Spin-off industries flourished. Rare was the entrepreneur who could not turn a profit from dry-cleaning scopas suits or adorning them with sashes, plumes, jewels, and decorative inlays. Little girls placing orders with Santa Claus commonly requested scaled-down scopas suits for their dolls. Patches bloomed everywhere, woven from fireproof thread: TRACY LIVES HERE…WHICH WAY TO THE FRONT?…HAUTE PROTECTION CIVILE…DETERRENCE IN PROGRESS.

  Fade-in on a village somewhere in medieval Europe. A gang of fat, bearded brigands is running amuck, setting the peasants’ huts on fire. Women and children flee in panic. Men are cut down by the brigands’ spears, axes, and swords.

  NARRATOR (voice-over): The threat. It’s always been there. It always will be. Wherever you find freedom, you find forces seeking to destroy it.

  A helmeted knight enters the village on a white charger. His armor catches the glow of the burning huts. He dismounts, draws his sword, and falls upon the brigands. Their weapons prove useless against breastplate and mail.

  NARRATOR: But for every threat, there is a defense. In ancient times, body armor deflected swords. Today, scopas suits deflect blast, heat, and fallout.

  As the victorious knight removes his helmet, his armor is magically transformed into a particularly svelte scopas suit. Surprise: the knight is a woman. She swirls her head, sending luscious blond hair in all directions. The background dissolves. A suburban living room emerges in its place. The woman’s husband rushes over, children trailing behind.

  DAD: Marge, you did it! You saw our Eschatological representative!

  MOM: Deterrence is only as good as the people it protects, Stan.

  DAD: I’m so glad we had that talk.

  Fade-out.

  When Justine Paxton saw the thirty-second spot during the Army-Navy game, she concluded that she could have done a better Mom than the woman who played the part.

  Her acting teacher agreed.

  One bitter December morning, as George sat at his work table putting the final cuts in a stencil, he was enveloped by a sense of well-being. The feeling seemed to originate from outside his body. He turned.

  The specter stood in the middle of the shop, veil up, smiling. A handbag dangled from her black-shrouded arm. She glanced longingly at Design No. 7034, rendered in South African granite. The granite was blacker than her eyes, the blackest of the black, as Arthur Crippen called it.

  “My name is Nadine Covington,” she said. How smooth her voice, how young.

  “Why have you been spying on me?”

  “Not spying. Appreciating. You are a good man, George Paxton, a saint in a business swarming with ghouls.” Although she had no trace of a foreign accent, she spoke as if English were an unfamiliar language. “I am honored to meet you.”

  Sensations of peace and contentment continued to flow from the specter to George. “This is a service business,” he said. “The product comes second. We must be as sensitive as any funeral parlor director—it’s amazing what people have on their minds when they come in here. The idea is to make the customer feel good about his choice, even if it’s the cheapest.”

  “You’re skillful at that.” Nadine went to an electric heater and began massaging the winter out of her finger bones.

  “No memorial will take away grief, ma’am, but it can help.” George had not drawn such pleasure from the sheer act of talking since he was three. “I’ll tell you what gets me upset, though. It’s when people buy, er, you know”—what to call them?—“guilt stones.” (That sounded right.) “I’m thinking of…well, I won’t say his name, but he treated that kid of his like junk. And then, after the boy drowns, what does this guy do? Has us order a four thousand dollar model of the Taj Mahal.”

  “I must give you your task,” said Nadine. “An ordinary commission—not a guilt stone. I need an epitaph, and something to put it on.”

  “Is this a pre-need?” he asked.

  “A what?”

  “Do you want the stone for yourself?”

  “No. Some people very close to me are dying…my parents.”

  “I’m sorry.” Good God—how old were her parents?

  “The stone must endure,” she said.

  “We carry the best bonded granites.”

  “I fancy this material.” Nadine caressed the South African sample, which was polished to a mirror brilliance. “I can see my face in it.”<
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  “Our stones have extreme density—they can take the most detailed carving. Also low porosity—no moisture gets inside, ever. The guarantee is unconditional, valid to you, your heirs, and your assignees. If a crack appears, even a hairline, you get a new monument, free.”

  “I have no heirs or assignees. My real concern is the epitaph. I want…eloquence.”

  “Eloquence?” said George lightly. “Really? But why, ma’am? I mean, it’s not like it’s going to be carved in stone or anything…That’s a little joke we have around here.” He reached into the shelves above his work table and pulled out a plastic binder containing twenty sample epitaphs, typed, double spaced. It began with Number One, IN OUR HEARTS YOU LIVE FOREVER, followed by ASLEEP IN THE ARMS OF JESUS, then I AM THE RESURRECTION AND THE LIFE, all the way through Number Twenty, GOD IS LOVE. He handed the epitaphs to the old woman, who studied them with pursed lips.

  “No, no,” she insisted, tapping the paper. “There’s no honesty here. I want you to write it.”

  “I don’t write epitaphs, ma’am, I inscribe them.”

  “Show me how,” said Nadine, lifting the utility knife off the work table.

  As George took the knife from her, her thumb strayed across the blade. At first he thought she was unharmed—but no, her ancient flesh had split. Violently he sucked in a mouthful of air, and then she expirated with equal vigor. For several seconds they continued to co-breathe in this manner, George neglecting to exhale, Nadine to inhale.

  The old woman’s blood was black. Black as her eyes. Black as South African granite. It had a sulphurous smell.

  “Would you like a bandage?” he asked.

  “Please.” She sucked her thumb.

  His nervous fingers returned to the shelves where the epitaphs were kept and procured a tin box. He punished himself by biting his inner cheeks. Way to go, George. Always be sure to draw blood—best way to firm up a sale.

  Ripping the tabs from the bandage, Nadine wrapped it around her black, burning wound.

  A rubber stencil spanned George’s work table. He sliced some final touches into the inscription. IN LOVING MEMORY OF GRACE LOQUATCH…THE HAMMER GROWS SILENT. Grace Loquatch’s birth and death dates followed. She had been a carpenter. The epitaph was her sister’s inspiration.

  Black blood? What awful disease had Mrs. Covington contracted?

  He affixed the stencil to Grace Loquatch’s monument, Design No. 4306 on Vermont blue-gray. Using a hoist-and-chain he transported it across the shop, a job that if necessary he could have accomplished with his bare hands. Grace Loquatch’s immortality moved past three droning electric heaters, the mounted pencil drafts awaiting customer approval, and several shipping crates filled with uninscribed stones from the great quarries of Canada and Vermont.

  “Then we have your self-hatred stones,” he said. (Self-hatred stones? Yes, that wasn’t a bad term for them.) “The customer uses them to take revenge on himself for never having gotten around to being alive, know what I’m saying? Yesterday we buried…a woman. She came here as soon as the doctor told her about the lung tumors. ‘For once I want to do something really nice for myself,’ she said. So we worked up this special thing, all sorts of flowers and birds. Angels. Job took twice as long as usual, but I didn’t want to charge extra, she had enough problems. I brought the pencil draft into her hospital room. She said, ‘It’s beautiful.’ Then she said, ‘I don’t deserve it.’”

  George maneuvered the stone inside the chamber of the ABC Electric Automatic Sandblaster, closed the door, and turned on the motor. Sharp splinters of noise filled the air. Nadine watched in fascination as the jet of aluminum oxide gushed down the hose and spewed forth. The abrasive grains ricocheted off the rubber stencil; others slipped through the incisions, hitting the granite and biting deep. Corundum dust engulfed the stone like fog.

  “A person would not last long in there,” Nadine observed after George shut the sandblaster down. “You’d be turned to bone.”

  “Unless you were wearing a scopas suit.” He entered the chamber and peeled away the stencil. Now and forever the stone said, GRACE LOQUATCH…THE HAMMER GROWS SILENT. He ran his fingers along the excellent dry wounds.

  “You and I may be the only people in Wildgrove not wearing scopas suits, George.”

  “My wife and kid don’t have any either.” He hauled the monument out of the chamber. “For some of us, seven thousand dollars is a lot of money. I sure wish Holly had a suit. She’s in nursery school.”

  “The Sunflower Nursery School,” said Nadine. “I go over there sometimes. It’s my hobby, you might say—watching children play. Holly is very bright, isn’t she? And decent. Yesterday the class painted rocks. Holly helped the children who didn’t know how.”

  “Really? I wish I’d been there. Do you ever baby-sit, Mrs. Covington?”

  “I would be happy and grateful to baby-sit for your daughter. Are you certain you want her to have a scopas suit?”

  “Of course.”

  “I’ll strike a bargain with you. Do this task—write an epitaph for my parents—and I’ll see to it that Holly gets a scopas suit, free of charge.”

  “Free?”

  “Free.”

  “I don’t even know your parents.”

  “Pretend they are your parents, not mine.”

  “My parents are dead.”

  “What does it say on their headstones?”

  “Nothing. Names and dates. I’m a Unitarian.”

  “What should it say?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Let’s begin with your mother.”

  “Huh?”

  “Your mother. What was she like?”

  “You want me to tell you about my mother?”

  “Please.”

  “My mother,” George began. “Well…certainly my mother should have been happier. She was always running herself down, always trumpeting her faults—kind of an inverse boaster, I guess. She had diabetes, but I think it was the high standards that killed her.” Had he been storing up these ideas, waiting for Mrs. Covington’s questions? “I loved her very much. She was better than she knew, and—”

  “‘Better than she knew,’” Nadine intoned. “There, you’ve done it—that fits my mother exactly! ‘She was better than she knew.’ I love it.”

  “For an epitaph?”

  “Let’s discuss your father.”

  “A simpler person than my mother. Very likely he was the most unselfish man on earth.”

  “Tell me more.”

  “I think of him as always smiling. He smiled even when he was unhappy. They should have paid him a lot of money for being so nice. His job was pointless. He never found out what he was doing here. His car didn’t run right.”

  “‘Never found out what he was doing here…’ My, my, that’s quite perfect—Dad is just like that. Your epitaph-writing talents are extraordinary, young man. You’ve earned that suit twice over. So, how much for the finished stone?”

  “Seven hundred and fifty dollars plus tax. We usually ask for half-payment down and the balance when your monument is ready.”

  Nadine opened her handbag and drew out a roll of withered bills. “I don’t want change,” she said, depositing nine hundred dollars in George’s palm. She squeezed his hand. Her skin was vital and warm, not at all the clammy membrane of a ghost. “And I don’t want a sales contract, either. We must trust each other.”

  “Come back on Monday and you can approve the pencil draft. We should select a lettering style now, though.” I do trust her, George thought.

  “Any style you like will be fine. It’s the message that must be right. At the top, simply, ‘She was better than she knew.’”

  “No name?”

  “I’ll know who’s buried there. At the bottom, ‘He never found out—’”

  “‘He never found out what he was doing here.’”

  “Precisely.”

  “What about dates?”

  “We needn’t trouble ourselves with
dates.”

  From her handbag Nadine produced a large, tattered map, unfolding it atop Grace Loquatch’s stone. George recognized the waterfront district of Boston—full color, fine detail, all the key buildings illustrated in overhead views. The paper was disintegrating along the creases. Entire warehouses had fallen into the holes.

  “This particular scopas suit store isn’t easy to find,” she said. “And today your average cartographer doesn’t even bother with some of these little streets.” She pointed to a vacant space on Moonburn Alley. “Here’s your destination—Theophilus Carter’s establishment, the Mad Tea Party he calls it. I’ll tell him to expect you this Saturday. Professor Carter is a tailor, a hatter, a furrier…an inventor. He makes extraordinary things for human bodies.”

  She started to leave, paused, and scurried up to George, kissing him softly on the cheek. “I’m so pleased you’re the way you are,” she whispered. “It was lovely talking with you.”

  “I enjoyed it too, ma’am, most assuredly.”

  “Fare thee well, George.”

  “Good-bye.”

  On her way out of the shop, Nadine hesitated by the South African monument. “She was better than she knew,” she mumbled, evidently projecting the words onto the granite. When the black gleam caught her eyes, George was certain he saw tears.

  CHAPTER 4

  In Which Our Hero Is Asked to Sign a Most Unusual Sales Contract

  Saturday. The big day. George the small-town artisan had little affection for Boston, with its self-importance and its arrogantly unlabeled streets, their plan evidently derived from a fallen wad of spaghetti. He trusted that Mrs. Covington’s map would see him through the worst of it.

  “I’m going to the waterfront today,” he told Justine. Husband and wife were snuggled together, basking in the afterglow. The chatter of cartoon squirrels and the giggles of animated elves blared into the bedroom. Working in cosmopolitan and distant Los Angeles, were the creators of these virginal diversions, George wondered, aware of the enormous quantity of screwing that their products brought about in the hinterlands of Massachusetts? “There’s a new memorial on Snape’s Hill. Arthur asked me to check it out. We might order one for the showroom.”