This is the Way the World Ends

by James Morrow

  Sverre narrowed the focal length, bringing the glowing mass of Boston into view. Confused sea gulls soared through the skies above the harbor. They were on fire. He closed his right eye and opened his left, which was made of gutta-percha. There, that was better, no burning gulls. Each evening Sverre would remove his rubber eye, soak it in gin, and replace it, whereupon the alcohol would seep into his brain, giving him a unique and copacetic high. In these troubled times, it was the only way he could get to sleep.

  Although Sverre could monitor places as remote as India and Argentina, he could not see what was happening on his own ship. For this he relied on his executive officer. “Mister Grass,” he growled into the intercom, “bring me a status report.”

  It would take Lieutenant Grass several minutes to reach the periscope room. Time for a drink. Time for two. Sverre yanked a bottle from his claw-hammer coat, poured gin into a Styrofoam cup. Black fur thrived on the sides of his stovepipe hat. Dark, silky hairs sprouted along his cheeks, rushing down his jaw and coming together in great torrents of beard.

  A stanza of poetry jumped spontaneously into his mind. Grabbing a booklet called The MK-49 Torpedo: Repairs and Servicing, he turned it over and scribbled:

  Midgard’s serpent now unfurled

  Its circuit round the mortal world.

  When Jormungandr shakes its coils

  The slimy ocean swirls and boils.

  Lieutenant Grass came in, brass buttons sparkling, white uniform croaking softly with starch. His freckles looked newly polished. He loved the Navy.

  Sverre crossed out the stanza. “Can we leave this ghastly place?”

  “They pulled the man free an hour ago,” said the exec. “He’s in surgery.”

  “Surgery? Hell. I’m not delivering any corpses, that’s not how my orders read. Prognosis?”

  “Fair. The bullet probably would have finished him, but it went through some kid’s scopas suit first. He’s a strong fellow—carved tombstones for a living.”

  “Tombstones?”

  “Yeah.”

  “What do they want with him?”

  “Beats me, Captain.”

  “Contaminated?”

  “Over two hundred and fifty rads, the needle said.”

  “Got any more bad news, as long as you’re here? Tell me the ward can’t handle another case.”

  “Well, they’re still treating Wengernook and Tarmac, but even after Paxton’s admitted they won’t be near capacity. This is a fine boat they gave you, sir.”

  Sverre contacted the control room and ordered the diving officer to bring them around. “Take her down, Mister Sparks. Two hundred feet.”

  “I’m curious, sir,” said Lieutenant Grass. “When they picked up Paxton, he was at ground zero—right in the crater. A crazy place to be, wouldn’t you say? What do you suppose he was doing there?”

  Turning his good eye to the periscope, the captain watched the red, boiling waters of Boston Harbor splash across the deck. “He was doing what we’re doing,” said Sverre. “Trying to get home.”

  “Facts,” a woman said. “You need facts, Mr. Paxton. Facts will steady your mind.”

  George became conscious of several varieties of pain. He concluded, with mixed emotions, that he was still alive. Despite the bullet from John Frostig, the thermonuclear bomb, and his keen desire to be dead, he had evidently not yet left the world—unless, of course, the blurry creature standing near him was an angel.

  “Facts. You are in the radiation ward aboard US Navy submarine SSBN 713 City of New York, out of McMurdo Station. Displacement—thirty-four thousand tons submerged. Draft—sixty-five feet. Delivery system—thirty-six tubes loaded with Multiprong missiles. Warheads—W-76 reentry vehicles, eight per bus, five hundred kilotons each.”

  Fever coursed through George’s body. His brow oozed sweat. His bowels ached. His stomach churned sour milk. Barbed wire flossed his brain.

  “There is a document,” she said. “The McMurdo Sound Agreement. Six names appear in it. You are all being evacuated to the Ross Ice Shelf.”

  George suddenly realized why the angel was so fuzzy. He was inside a plastic tent. She was outside.

  “Aurhgh,” George responded. Two marbles seemed to be lodged in his throat. As if to diagnose the problem, he inserted his fingers. The back of his hand was covered with purple spots. His gums were bleeding.

  “Your benefactor is Operation Erebus. When they rescued you, there was a bullet in your stomach and a scopas suit in your arms. The bullet came out last week. The suit is now in the cabin you will occupy if and when your convalescence begins.”

  Why is my head so cold? George wondered. Your head is cold because you are hairless, his fingertips revealed. You are as bald as a slab of South African granite.

  “Final fact. For the last six days you have been unconscious, during which interval you passed from the prodromal phase of radiation sickness through the latency phase and into the life-or-death phase. And that’s your situation. I’m sorry it’s not better.”

  Beyond his physical pains lay additional anguish, emotions that rested on him like the stones with which his New England ancestors had pressed witches to death. There was a stone for loss, a stone for fear, a stone for Holly, a stone for—

  “I have a wife,” he said. Four words, four swallows of acid. A coughing fit possessed him, and he expectorated onto the pillow case. Dots of blood were suspended in the sputum. “And a daughter,” he rasped. “I’m supposed to tell her a story about an elf who casts a golden shadow.” He struggled to sit up, collapsed in a heap of pain and fatigue. “Ice shelf? Submarine? You mean—under the water? Why are there purple spots on my hands? What’s in my throat?”

  “The spots indicate intradermal bleeding. The things in your throat are infected tonsils. My name is Morning Valcourt. I’m a psychotherapist, and I intend to help you.”

  George coughed, less severely than before. He vibrated with fever. His lungs felt as bloated as unmilked udders.

  After strapping a surgical mask over her face, Dr. Valcourt pushed back a corner of the tent and entered.

  One glance was enough to disprove George’s angel theory. A silk kimono enveloped a body that was decidedly secular. The woman’s eyes were a saturated blue-green, her hair thick and red like the coils in the electric heaters back at the Crippen Monument Works. Six days unconscious, is that what she said? Then he had missed his Monday appointment with Mrs. Covington.

  “What you must realize…just after you were evacuated, another warhead found its target. Direct hit.” She came closer, her mask pulsing with her breaths. “Nobody except you got out of Wildgrove. Do you understand?”

  His dislike of Dr. Valcourt was not far from disgust. How did she know whether anybody got out? What right had she to speak of such things?

  She pulled away and stepped backward, so that the plastic veil parted and then dropped, walling them off from each other once again.

  “Please kill me,” he said, quoting the Wildgrove burn victims as calmly as if asking for a glass of water.

  Dr. Valcourt paced behind the milky tent. She seemed to emanate from an unfocused movie projector. “My job is not to kill you, but to cure you.”

  “Of radiation sickness?”

  “Of shame. Survivor’s guilt, it’s called. To live through a disaster like this, where so many died—it’s a terrible burden on your psyche.”

  “Where are we going?”

  “Home.”

  “Wildgrove?”

  “Antarctica.”

  “Please leave me alone.”

  “Here’s a straight opinion for you, Mr. Paxton. That’s something you won’t often get from a psychotherapist—especially from a survivor’s guilt specialist—so listen carefully. I think you have a duty to learn why your name is in the McMurdo Sound Agreement. After you have found out—do what you will. Eat, drink, and be merry—or curse God, and die. I don’t especially care which.”

  There were footsteps, and the distasteful psy
chotherapist melted away…

  Curse God, and die. In the Book of Job, the Lord’s most pious follower is subjected to a kind of wager between God and Satan. With God’s sponsorship, Satan inflicts on Job everything short of a thermonuclear warhead. Job loses his oxen, sheep, camels, she-asses, servants, sons, and health.

  “Curse God, and die,” his wife advises. Job is sitting on ashes at the time.

  “My bowels boil, and rest not,” complains Job, who does not have the proverbial patience of Job. “I am a brother to jackals, and a companion to ostriches. My skin is black, and falleth from me, and my bones are burned with the heat. Therefore is my harp turned to mourning, and my pipe into the voice of them that weep.”

  Curse God, and die. To George it seemed like remarkably sage and relevant advice.

  If one had to say something good about acute radiation sickness, it would be this: either it kills you or it doesn’t. Knowing that success was a distinct possibility, the medical staff of the City of New York got busy. They cultured George’s mucus, blood, and stool, then loaded him up with appropriate antibiotics. They stuck a tube in his arm and gave him a new set of white blood cells. They bathed him in antiseptic solutions every twelve hours, shampooed him with chlorhexidine gluconate every twenty-four hours, and trimmed his fingernails and toenails every other day.

  To the end of his life, George would be haunted by the notion that the onslaught of gamma rays had planted the seeds of God-knew-what diseases, but the United States Navy was still within its rights when they pronounced him well. His fever broke, his hair grew back, his purple spots vanished, his tonsils shrank, his lungs drained, his gums stopped bleeding, his platelet and white cell counts became exemplary. The paramedics assured him that he had inhaled very little fallout and that, thanks to his precipitous departure from ground zero via Operation Erebus, his cumulative dose had been well under three hundred rads.

  “More like two hundred and eighty rads, if you want my opinion,” said the medical officer, a lieutenant senior-grade named Brust. “You’re in great shape, believe me. There’s only one thing we couldn’t fix.”

  “Oh?” said George.

  “Your secondary spermatocytes are failing to become spermatids.” Dr. Brust was a small, tubby man with a face so incongruously gaunt it seemed to be on its own separate diet. “Blame the radiation.”

  “What are you talking about?” George asked.

  “You’re sterile,” said Dr. Brust evenly.

  “Sterile?”

  “Sterile as a mule.” Black stains covered Brust’s surgical gown. “I can’t imagine that it would make much difference to you at this point.”

  “My wife and I were planning…” George closed his eyes.

  “Didn’t they tell you about your wife?”

  “Yes.” When he opened his eyes, he saw only his tears.

  “I wouldn’t worry about my gonads if I were you,” said Dr. Brust. “You’re lucky to be alive.”

  They moved George out of the radiation unit into an ordinary sick bay.

  “You in the McMurdo Sound Agreement?” asked the patient in the next bed, a long, nervous, weasel-bodied man with an expression so intense George could not look at it without squinting.

  “Yes. George Paxton. You in it too?”

  “At the top of the list. Love to lean over and shake your hand, friend, but I’ve got this tube up my silo.”

  “Me too.”

  “Ever hear of Robert Wengernook?”

  “Haven’t I seen you on television?”

  “Ah, another one of those,” said Wengernook with mock distress. “Here I am in the goddamn D-O-D, and everybody thinks of me as the guy who does the scopas suit commercials. For my hobby, I’m the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.”

  “My wife always wanted to be in a scopas suit commercial. The one with the lady knight.”

  “Really? Your wife was in that? Small world.”

  “No, she wanted to be. She would have been right for it too, because Justine was very pretty, everybody thought so. They say a warhead got her.”

  “You’ve got to believe me, George, I really thought the suits were good.” Wengernook’s twitchy fingers knitted themselves into elaborate sculptures. His tongue, which was remarkably long, darted in and out like a chameleon’s. “I guess it’s Japan’s way of getting back at us.”

  “For Hiroshima?”

  “I was thinking more of import quotas.” He lit a cigarette, puffed. “God, this is all so awful. You might suppose that on a submarine there wouldn’t be much to remind a man of his family, but that’s not true. I’ll see some fire extinguisher, and that gets me picturing the one I gave Janet last Christmas. You wouldn’t think a fire extinguisher would have such emotionalism attached to it.”

  “I’d like to talk about something else.”

  “Same here.”

  But the tomb inscriber and the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs had nothing more to say to each other.

  At the end of the week they transferred George to a cabin more suggestive of a civilian ocean liner than of a military vessel. The luxury suffocated him. He wanted Justine to be there, making fun of the kitschy floral wallpaper and reveling in the cornucopia that was the City of New York’s galley—eggs Benedict breakfasts, steamer clam lunches, lobster dinners—all served up by cheerful, redfaced enlisted men who seemed to be auditioning for jobs in some unimaginably swank hotel. He wanted Holly to be there, delighting in the tank of live sea horses and giving them her favorite names, the ones she had already bestowed on dozens of dolls and stuffed animals. These names, for some reason, were Jennifer, Suzy, Jeremiah, Alfred, and Margaret.

  And so, despite posh surroundings and great food, George still felt himself a brother to jackals. His pipe was still turned into the voice of them that weep. Sometimes he smashed things until his knuckles bled. The Navy sent a seaman third-class around to clean up the mess. At other times he contemplated his closet, where Holly’s golden scopas suit and its shattered glove hung as if on a gibbet. He stared at the suit for hours at a time.

  It would have saved her life, he told himself, although he suspected this was not true.

  “I should have tried harder,” he moaned aloud at odd moments.

  A small bubble of consolation occasionally drifted into his thoughts. If death were as final and anesthetic as he had been taught, then his family had at least been granted the salvation of nothingness. Justine could not now be mourning the death of her daughter. Holly could not now be wondering whether all this chaos somehow precluded her getting a Mary Merlin doll for Christmas. Thank God for oblivion, ran his Unitarian prayer.

  The knock on George’s door had the brisk, impatient cadence of a person accustomed to getting his way.

  “It’s open.” George sat on a plush divan reading the Book of Job for the third time that week. Once again he was finding the drama cruel and absurd.

  A military man entered. His uniform, curiously, was of the United States Air Force. His presence on a Navy submarine entailed the incongruity of a rabbi in a cathedral.

  “You’re evacuee Paxton, aren’t you?”

  George closed the Bible and said yes. The Air Force refugee approached, arm poised for a mandatory handshake. He was constructed of massive shoulders, a rough rock-like head, a formidable trunk, and limbs of simian length. A flurry of decorations and service ribbons hung from his breast opposite a nameplate that read TARMAC.

  “Major General Roger ‘Brat’ Tarmac,” the refugee said in a large, wholesome voice. Shaking hands with Brat Tarmac was a workout. “Deputy Chief of Staff for Retargeting, Strategic Air Command. I was in downtown Omaha when the Cossacks came. Had to do my Christmas shopping some time, right? So there I am, buying my sister’s kid this clown, when quick-as-shit a warhead goes off behind me, and the next thing I know I’m in the Navy. It’s all so crazy. The clown needed batteries—that was going to be my next stop. I keep telling myself, ‘Br
at, face facts. You’ll never see those people again—your sister’s a casualty.’ I say that, and I don’t believe it. She was a pilot. Like me. Flew strategic interceptors. Jesus. Incredible.”

  George had never taken so immediate a liking to anyone before. Brat Tarmac was the sort of handsome, athletic soldier ten-year-old boys wanted for fathers, a fantasy to which George, at age thirty-five, was not entirely immune.

  “Coffee?” George offered.

  “Affirmative,” said the general.

  Obtaining coffee aboard the City of New York was a simple matter of walking up to your cabin’s vending machine and pushing some buttons. “Cream and sugar?”

  “Black. In a dirty mug, eh? No frills for us bomber jockeys.”

  A Styrofoam cup caught the stream. George’s hand made a spider over the rim, and he carried the coffee to his guest.

  “So far I’ve managed to locate all the Erebus personnel but that evangelist, Sparrow.” Brat sucked coffee across his leathery lips. “We’ll be working with a pretty broad spectrum of talent. Wengernook is—”

  “I met him in the sick bay.”

  “Impressive guy, huh?”

  “Nervous.”

  “Intense. He should quit smoking. Then we’ve got Brian Overwhite of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and you’ll never guess who they stuck in the cabin next to yours.”

  “Who?”

  “William Randstable. Remember when he beat that Cossack at chess? He was only seven or something.”

  “I don’t follow chess.”

  “It was a big propaganda thing for us. The kid worked at one of those think tanks for a while, then they put him on missile accuracy over at Sugar Brook or someplace. All in all it’s a pretty classy act our President’s putting together down in Antarctica. In a few days they’ll be calling the whole team together—after they run us through this survivor’s guilt crap—so we can chart out our options. God, I hope they’ve got a crisis relocation effort going. I can’t bear to think of this turning into a high civilian-casualty thing.”