This is the Way the World Ends

by James Morrow

  “Brat, those aren’t people in that parade!” said George. “Don’t you understand?”

  The Hatter cackled.

  Brat ate the soggy crumpet. “In any event, it’s this flying shop of yours that really interests me. I’m trying to hook up with the other survivors. Can you run me over to the mainland?”

  “Most ambitious, General,” said Theophilus. “You can’t make deals with extinction, but you can make deals with me. To wit—help us with tonight’s labors, and I shall fly you wherever you want.”

  A hospital gurney displayed the topography of a sheeted female corpse. Approaching, the Hatter uncovered her. She was Oriental and, considering her water-logged condition, quite beautiful.

  “Born in the twelfth century. Southeast Asia, the Khmer Empire. These eyes once beheld the Angkor Wat temple complex for the royal phallic cult. Imagine—a royal phallic cult once existed in medieval Cambodia!”

  “Have you no respect for the dead?” snapped George, restoring the sheet.

  “I have nothing but respect for the dead,” said the Hatter. “Why do you think I work so hard on the parade? Night and day—my monument to the invalidated past. You know about monuments.”

  “This is lunatic’s business!” said George. He made a fist but could not decide what to do with it. “Disgusting! She isn’t from the twelfth century, she’s just another victim of radiation or hunger or—”

  “Actually, I find the whole thing rather sane,” said Brat.

  “Sane? Sane? Call me sane, will you?” screamed the Hatter. “They called the Joint Chiefs of Staff sane! They called the National Security Council sane!”

  He went to his Z-1000 computer, arching his fingers over the keyboard as if playing a concerto.

  “Mostly it’s the supporting cast of history who wash up here, but sometimes we get a star. On Sunday I found Nostradamus, that brilliant, courageous, plague-fighting scholar of the Renaissance. What I wouldn’t give for Hitler. I can change the past, you see—I can improve it. Last night Joan of Arc burned ten priests at the stake. If I had Hitler, I’d make him Jewish. Spermatids, George? Was that your wish? Little baby sperm? You’ve come to the right place.”

  “I have to see a fertility expert.”

  “I am one. I can make you as fertile as an alley cat.”

  The Hatter dashed into a dark alcove, its entrance flanked by two dressmaker’s dummies, headless and skinny. Seconds later he emerged holding a crumbling, mossy hunk of bark. A white mushroom—robust, symmetrical, and shaped like a church bell—clung to the wood. “Behold your friend and mine, Agaricus cameroonis.”

  “Toadstools can be poison, I hear,” said George.

  “Thermonuclear mushrooms cause sterility, Cameroon mushrooms cure it. Or, to be technical, Cameroon mushrooms promote spermatid production in irradiated seminiferous tubules. This fact has been known since 2015 A.D.”

  “I don’t believe you.”

  “Have you a choice?”

  George’s bullet wound was thumping crazily now. Why couldn’t Mrs. Covington’s magic lantern show have been more explicit on this matter? A simple slide of him devouring a Cameroon mushroom—was that too much to ask? Why did the post-exchange environment involve so damn many decisions?

  “Walk through our forest on a moonlit night,” said the Hatter, “and with luck you’ll spot Agaricus cameroonis lifting his wan head through the crevice in a rotting log. But don’t expect to see him there the next day, for at the first blush of dawn he slips back into his palace of decay and hides. You’re looking at a rare one, George, a collector’s item. You aren’t going to find this fellow in your local drug store.”

  “All right. I’ll eat it.”

  “Nope. Sorry. Bad idea.” Theophilus thrust the Agaricus cameroonis under his morning coat. “You don’t really want children. They make a lot of noise, they spill their milk, they leave their crayons all over the place.”

  “Please…”

  “First you must answer the question.” He rubbed the concealed fungus.

  “What question?”

  “Ah—what question? Good question.”

  “Maybe he means the question about the raven and the writing desk,” said Brat.

  “Yes! That’s it!” said the Hatter. “Nobody has figured that one out!”

  Nobody except Dr. William Randstable, thought George, struggling to avoid a grin.

  “Beyond their expertise in spermatid production,” said the Hatter, “Cameroon mushrooms make marvelous soup and terrific—”

  “A raven is like a writing desk,” said George, “because Poe wrote on both.”

  “What did you say?”

  “I said a raven is like a writing desk”—he paused for dramatic effect—“because Poe wrote on both.”

  The Hatter huffed and puffed like Rumpelstiltskin hearing the miller’s daughter say, “Is your name Rumpelstiltskin?” He did a manic little dance, smashing his high-button shoes into the floor.

  “You must promise to name all the children after me,” he said as he pulled the Agaricus cameroonis from his coat.

  “All but the first,” said George.

  He tore the mushroom from its bark, thrust it in his mouth. The meat trembled on his tongue, and he chewed. It tasted like what it was, mushroom flesh, tangy, succulent, damp. A soft buzz traveled from his stomach to his gonads. As he closed his eyes, his mind overflowed with his psychic museum—pictures of his forthcoming family thriving in the timefolds. Aubrey and her siblings romped through a tropical paradise. Glow-faced boys devoured uncontaminated fruit. Lithe girls swam in clean waves.

  Nostradamus was on to something, Mrs. Covington had said.

  “Is that it?” George asked. “Am I fertile now?”

  “No,” said the Hatter.

  “But soon—right?”

  “Nope. Sorry.”

  “You said I’d be an alley cat.”

  “Spermatids do you no good until they enter your epididymis, where they can mature, grow tails, acquire motility, and learn the facts of life. Unfortunately, your Spermatids will be too feeble for that.”

  “Too feeble?”

  “Weak as newborn babes.”

  “Can I help them?”

  “Perhaps.”

  “How?”

  “The South Pole.”

  “The what?”

  “The magnetic forces at the South Pole have been known to steer spermatids on their proper course.”

  “The South Pole—in Antarctica?”

  “This sounds like bushwa to me,” said Brat. “I’d be careful if I were you, Paxton.”

  “Stand on the exact endpoint of the earth’s axis for one full minute,” said Theophilus with the imperial confidence of a contract bridge champion sitting down to a game of go fish, “and the next day you’ll be able to book passage for four hundred million sperm at a time.”

  “Paxton just ate a mushroom,” said Sverre, squinting into Periscope Number One.

  “Why?” asked Morning.

  “To cure his sterility,” said Sverre. “State of the art medicine, circa 2015.”

  “He’s been wanting a family.”

  “If there’s justice in this world, he’ll get a noose.”

  “I believe he’s innocent.”

  “You love him, don’t you?”

  “No.” She nudged Sverre away from the eyepiece and focused on her beloved.

  He was crossing the plaza, Brat on one side, the MAD Hatter on the other. They cut through the spastic parade and approached the river, its dark surface swept by moonbeams and wisps of fog.

  “I seem to recall that sex was something quite special,” said Sverre. “Had I lived, I would have been a devotee of sex.”

  “Sex was something quite special,” Morning confirmed. How perfect George looked as he moved down the concrete steps and jumped onto the Hatter’s barge—how right was the sweat on his brow, how correct the cords of his muscles.

  Sverre noted her wistful smile. “What is it like, Dr. V
alcourt?”

  “It?”

  “Having red blood. Living.”

  “Ambiguous.”

  The captain pointed to the long black scab on his forearm. “Then it is in every way better than unadmittance.”

  Removing his stovepipe hat, he blew on the fur and watched it tremble. A memory dragged itself forward like a dying animal. He clutched at it. Intimations of mortality. A blur. Something to do with love. Love for a parent? A child? Sharper now. A wife. He would have been married. Christine? No, Kristin…Kristin who? He couldn’t recall her last name. Kristin the pretty ensign. She would have been crazy about amusement parks. He saw her on a merry-go-round. Kristin, lovely Kristin, astride a wooden horse, going merrily around, singing, laughing.

  Dissolving…

  He reached out with his spindly fingers, stroked Morning’s cheek. “You are a woman of great passion. I felt that when I hired you.” A tear formed in his right eye, a drop of gin in his left, and he pulled away. “Don’t worry, I won’t call you to my bed. I am more honorable than that.”

  And less potent, he thought.

  The bottle had wrecked him. His Number One Periscope did not go up.

  “You must understand—Paxton is my patient,” said Morning, tightening her grip on the scope handle. “I cured him. Naturally I want him to have ambitions.”

  Pacing furiously around the room, Sverre attempted to coax additional Kristin images out of his brain—a fruitless enterprise, as he knew it would be—then returned to Morning and asked, “Where are they now?”

  “On a barge,” she reported. “They’re collecting war dead. The Hatter is frustrated. He wants all of history in his parade, and he’s afraid that it will always be…”

  “Incomplete!” wailed the Hatter. “Lord knows I try, but there’s a limit to what one man can do.”

  The fugitives crouched in the stem and surveyed the night’s catch. Theophilus had made them fishers of men; under the influence of George’s muscled arms, four corpses had risen from the river. Droplets speckled their brine-cured flesh. Grave robbing, George realized—whether the violated medium was earth or water—was a damning, unholy enterprise, blasphemous even by Unitarian standards.

  “A fine haul, no doubt about it,” said the Hatter, misreading George’s dazed look. “Still, we have a long way to go.”

  According to Theophilus, they had retrieved a former patient of Sigmund Freud’s, a gladiator whose highly entertaining death had occurred in 56 B.C., a clerk employed by the Bank of Amsterdam from 1610 to 1629, and a Viking.

  A resurrected galley slave poled the barge forward. Blind marble houses glided by. Bridges passed overhead, dark arching shapes that put George in mind of his vulture.

  “Do you realize I don’t have a single subject of the Pharaoh Akhnaton? Not one.” Bubbles of sweat dotted the Hatter’s forehead. “The Arabian Caliphate and Abu Bakr? Nobody. The Gupta Court of fourth-century India? Zero!” Lunging forward, he grabbed George’s shirt, bunching the material in his fists. “And victims? Don’t remind me! There’s a severe victim shortage in this city, I can tell you. Yes, I’ve got Napoleon covered, and the Trojan War, but what about the Young Turk Revolution of 1908? The Opium Wars of 1839 to 1842? The Crusades, for Christ’s sake! Don’t even talk to me about the Crusades!”

  The Hatter took the tiller and steered them toward a concrete pier. The moonstruck water threw bright, dancing sine waves on the steps leading up to the street.

  “This is where you get off,” he announced as the galley slave moored the barge.

  “You promised to take me to the mainland!” Brat protested.

  A fearsome drumming echoed through the marble city, as if a rain made of shrapnel and bones were felling on its streets.

  “I lied,” said the Hatter.

  “You what?” screamed Brat.

  “Something wrong with your hearing, General? I’ve got a root back at the shop that cures deafness. I lied. Folks around here don’t like the idea of your war crimes going unpunished. They’re coming, gentlemen. I wouldn’t want to guess what they’ll do when they arrive, but it’s certain to include tearing you limb from limb. You’ll wish you’d taken your chances with the court.”

  “I was going to take my chances with the court!” said George. The drumming grew louder. Footfalls, he concluded—the clogs, galoshes, pumps, sandals, and buskins of Professor Carter’s citizens. “I’m innocent!”

  “Innocent, eh? Then why is the world over?”

  “You gave me spermatids, and now you’re going to have me killed?” asked George.

  Theophilus jumped onto the pier. “It’s the post-exchange environment. Nobody behaves rationally any more.”

  As the mob rumbled forward, Brat drew Holly’s pistol and aimed it at the Hatter’s chest. “Call off your dogs, Carter! Call them off, or I’ll shoot!”

  “There’s a logic to what you’re saying,” said Theophilus, “but, being insane, I cannot grasp it.”

  Whereupon George, out of motives he would never fully comprehend, snatched the pistol from Brat and hurled it toward the front of the barge. The weapon glanced off the gladiator’s head, plopping into the dark gray river and vanishing instantly.

  “What’s happening?” Morning asked.

  “Your lover just saved the Hatter’s life,” Sverre replied, leaning away from the eyepiece. “Oh, and something else.”

  “Yes?”

  “They’re in a lot of trouble with history.”

  Up and down the crippled, dawn-lit avenues the bewildered defendants ran, Theophilus’s citizens in frantic pursuit, a booming cloud of invalidated peasants, princes, beggars, scholars, scientists, farmers, clerics, and soldiers. Every time George looked back, he noticed a different category of pre-nuclear weapon. The macabre rattle of spears, swords, muskets, and battle axes filled his ears, mixing with the mob’s computer-generated howls. These things are just puppets, he reminded himself—they cannot harm me. He could understand the post-exchange environment being horrible and depressing, but did it also have to be ludicrous?

  As the defendants reached the main gate, a fat citizen with teeth like barbed wire popped out of a turret and, ever beholden to the Z-1000, cried, “I am not garbage!”

  Stomping mushrooms under their boots, George and Brat ran beyond the walls, through the ravine, across the field of megaliths. Marsh gases hit them like a fist. Spears flew past. As the defendants charged into the muck, tiny fireballs began choking the sky. George glanced over his shoulder. The citizens had deployed a weapon of singular malevolence. Puppets, he recited again. Puppets, they’re just puppets. The flaming arrows fell everywhere, hissing against the silt, setting the dead grass on fire. The air thickened with a smell akin to unadmitted blood. A brawny officer from Genghis Khan’s army, dressed in what looked like the plating of some particularly vile and stupid dinosaur, sent a fireball sizzling over George’s scalp.

  Directly ahead lay the submarine, wallowing in the rising tide. George rejoiced to see that the amidships hatch was still ajar. Or am I hallucinating? he wondered. No, it really looked open. There was definitely a chance they would succeed in getting themselves recaptured by Operation Erebus.

  But the swamp, George learned, was in conspiracy with the invalidated past. It seized his boots, holding him fast with its dark paste. Brat, he saw, was also stuck, rooted to the island like a tree, writhing and raging. The clockwork mob slogged forward, spears poised, swords waving, flesh slipping from their faces like ill-fitting masks, so that each citizen soon wore a skull’s persistent smile.

  Craning his jeopardized neck, George fixed on the hull, and it was at this critical moment in his fortunes, when death-by-history seemed a foregone conclusion, that all eighteen port-side missile doors suddenly flew open, their oil-soaked hinges making no sound. Instantly the ship took on the appearance of a medieval parapet. Olaf Sverre’s navy, armed with scopas suit guns, came streaming out of the hatches, Peach and Cobb in the lead, their chubby faces split by smirks. Oh,
brave, splendid men, thought George, you will all receive medals for this. Taking cover behind the battlements, the unadmitted sailors aimed their lovely Colt .45 pistols, their beautiful twelve-gauge shotguns, and their gorgeous HK 91 assault rifles.

  Sverre stood atop the sail, his frame tall and sharp against the reddening sky, his stovepipe hat cocked toward the sunrise. A loud, unintelligible noise came from his mouth, a sound that George hoped and prayed was an order to open fire.

  Targeted by hands that had been alive for barely two hundred and fifty days, the bullets flew in all directions, but even so random a salvo was enough to drop half the citizens. Relays and motors spurted from busted flesh. Bodies hit the swamp, flopping, wriggling, plastering themselves with silt. A broken samurai rolled up to George’s knees. Its cries evoked a phonograph needle skidding along the surface of a record.

  The surviving citizens retaliated. Spears smashed uselessly into the hull, sling-tossed rocks bounced off the missile doors like hail encountering a tin roof. Sverre—oh, excellent soldier, glorious hero—ordered a second salvo. Fifty more died, but history had not yet learned the meaning of defeat. The citizens kept coming. Burning arrows suffused the swamp with smoke and otherworldly light. George felt a trembling in his recently resuscitated…

  Gonads, thought Sverre. This fight is doing something to my gonads. (Keep it going, men! Let’s get more smoke over there to the left, more chaos to the right, bring up the heavy artillery—I want trumpets, drums, banners, flying earth, explosions of many colors!) When he once again called for fire, he realized that remembered passions were now coursing through his ducts and veins, as if they had been waiting for the proper stimuli. How subtle were the uses of pitched battle! In his mind he left the field, the better to savor the rare and precious images.

  Yes, it was all quite clear. He would have invited Kristin the pretty ensign to Barbados, and they would have made love in the open water—a steamy night, smooth breezes, insects and birds surrounding them with primordial jazz. (Did he propose to her that same weekend? Yes, most likely.) Excited by the fabulous souvenir, Sverre’s penis now assumed heroic proportions, pushing against his trousers, eager to get into the world. Oh, how he wished his life had happened, the Caribbean part if nothing else. Unadmittance was so unfair. No wonder he drank.