by James Morrow
‘Easy, little Jew. It will not sting you.’
‘With all respect, Monsieur’ – raising his cap, Jacob stalked forward – ‘I have my doubts.’
He swatted the wasp to the floor and stomped it past recognition.
‘Why were you certain it would not have stung me?’ the boy asked.
‘I foresaw you smashing it first.’
Jacob replaced his cap, secured it by stuffing his curls beneath the sweatband. ‘Will this baby kill my mother?’
‘Your mother will live to see seventy. Furthermore, Truman will defeat Dewey, forecasts to the contrary.’
‘You are truly blessed, Monsieur.’
The prophet thought: a likely lad. He appreciates my talent, he does not hide his religion, he is quick with his cap. If my show can astonish a fellow so sharp, it is certain to set the rabble on their oversized ears.
‘Tell me, Master Jacob,’ said Nostradamus, opening a walnut coffer and removing a contraption of metal and glass, ‘would you like to see the future?’
‘Very much so.’
Nostradamus carried the machine to his writing desk. The boy’s lips quivered. His eyes expanded.
‘You are right to be awestruck, for the man who contrived this device is the most wonderful person of our age. Quick, who is the most wonderful person of our age?’
‘You, my lord.’
The prophet alternately grinned and scowled. ‘The most wonderful person of our age is Leonardo of Vinci, who alone knew what expression each saint wore when dining with Christ.’
‘I have heard of Leonardo of Milan.’
‘Of Milan, yes. Of Florence, of Rome, of Vinci. But he ended his days in France – Amboise, the manor of Clos-Lucé. I was at his deathbed. With his final breath he bequeathed to me this picturecannon, as he called it. Monsieur Leonardo loved cannons. He loved all weapons. Happily, this cannon fires no ball.’
Mastering his astonishment, Jacob approached the writing desk. The machine was a tin box with a chimney on top. From one side jutted a tube holding a brass ring in which sat a sparkling crystal disk.
‘I was no older than you when the great man summoned me to Amboise. That was in . . . 1518, during my first schooling. Leonardo had heard of my gift. At Avignon they called me the Little Astrologer. I was frightened. Here was he, the illustrious Leonardo – Premier Peintre, Architecte et Méchanicien du Roi. And here was I – a boy of fifteen, burdened with peculiar powers. As it turned out, he fell in love with me, but that is another story.
‘He showed me some drawings – our world in its final days, shattered by storms and floods. “Is this how God will contrive for His Creation to end?” he asked me. Brother Francesco translated. “No,” I replied. “I did not think so,” he confessed.
‘I told him how our world would end. “It will not be an act of God or Nature,” I explained, “but a conflagration of human design.” He painted what I described – fireballs hurled from great spears that had in turn been catapulted from the backs of iron whales. The renderings were perfect, as if plucked directly from my brain. He did them on glass.
‘Odd – but of the hundred awful scenes I recounted, only four seemed to vex Leonardo. They all involved vultures. “Are you certain that vultures will be part of this war?” he asked again and again. “Quite certain,” I always answered. “I was once visited by a vulture,” he would say. I could not imagine what he meant.
‘The old man had in mind a great public spectacle. He wanted first to exhibit his holocaust paintings in Rome. Then we were to tour the countryside, finally the whole continent – taking the capitals by storm, dazzling rabble and rich men alike, warning them of the terrible future, filling our pockets with their coins.’
The portrait under which Nostradamus stood shimmered with the grace of its subject. Within the gilded frame, a woman smiled subtly.
‘The old man never got out of France,’ Nostradamus continued wistfully. ‘But I shall. Pope Julius himself will marvel at these masterworks – this I vow.’ The prophet clapped his hands. ‘We need a white wall, boy. Take down this picture here – another gift from Leonardo. In a few centuries it will be worth an unimaginable amount of money. Little good that does me.’
Why a white wall? Jacob wondered. If this wizard means to perform some magic, would not a black wall be more suitable?
The boy removed the smiling woman. Even in the feeble candlelight, the exposed wall was as shockingly white as the winding sheet in which his father had been buried. Perhaps white was good for wizardry after all.
Nostradamus lifted a door in the side of the picture-cannon, revealing a small oil lamp, which he lit. Smoke wandered out of the chimney. ‘Believe me, Master Jacob, there is no sorcery in this machine, but only the divine reason with which God filled Leonardo to overflowing. You have heard of the camera obscura? Leonardo managed to turn one inside out. This part here – the aperture. Here – the plano-convex lens, ground from purest beryl.’ The prophet inserted the first painting. ‘This business also requires darkness.’
Jacob snuffed the candles, one by one, and night fell upon the study like a succession of blows. The boy looked at the wall. What he saw made him dizzy and afraid.
‘Dear God – it’s what Christians call the devil’s work!’ A vast vision had appeared, many times the size of the smiling woman. Where does it come from? he wondered. Instinctively he turned toward the picture-cannon. ‘But the painting you put in there was so small!’
Jacob fixed on the vision. No less stunning than its size was its substance, a swollen, smoking, demon-spawned, self-propelled spear. ‘Will it really destroy the world?’ he asked.
‘Not by itself. There will be thousands like it, in many varieties.’ Nostradamus glanced at his parchment script. ‘This Satanic lance is a Soviet SS-60 missile,’ he read. ‘Land-based. Intercontinental. Multiple warheads. Do you understand?’
‘No.’
The candle in the picture-cannon flickered. Shadows trembled along the shaft of the missile.
Nostradamus projected painting number two. ‘This iron fish is a fleet ballistic missile submarine,’ he read. ‘The dorsal scales will flip back, and the spears will fly to their targets using inertial guidance.’
‘How can a fish have spears inside it and not die?’ asked the boy.
Nostradamus projected painting number three. ‘From hell’s hearth, a thermonuclear fireball—’
‘Is that Latin?’
‘I am confounding you, Jacob. It will be best, I can see, not to begin with the weapons. These pictures need a tale to accompany them, am I right?’
‘Tell me a tale,’ said the boy.
Nostradamus sorted through the paintings, chose one, projected it. A vulture. Hunched, ragged, sallow-eyed, carrion-bloated.
‘This is about a vulture, a war, and a man named George Paxton. A common man in many respects, but also perhaps a hero, entrapped in Fortuna’s wheel and sent on a series of frightening and fantastic adventures.’
The prophet projected another painting. A bearded man standing by a gravestone.
‘Until he saw the three children in white . . .’
BOOK ONE
Those Who Favor Fire
CHAPTER ONE
In Which Our Hero Is Introduced and Taught the True Facts Concerning Strategic Doctrine and Civil Defense
Until he saw the three children in white, George Paxton’s life had gone just about perfectly.
Born in the middle of the twentieth century to generous and loving parents, people of New England stock so pure it was found only in northeast Vermont, he came to manhood in the tepid bosom of the Unitarian Church. It was an unadorned, New England sort of faith. Unitarians rejected miracles, worshiped reason, denied the divinity of Jesus Christ, and had serious doubts about the divinity of God. George grew up believing that this was the most plausible of all possible worlds.
By the time he was thirty-five he had been blessed with an adorable daughter, a wife who always looked as if she had
just come from doing something dangerous and lewd, and a cozy cottage perched on stilts above a lake. He was in good health, and he knew how to prevent many life-threatening diseases through a diet predicated on trace metals. George took inordinate pleasure in ordinary things. Hot coffee gave him fits of rapture. If there was a good movie on television that night, he would spend the day whistling.
He had even outmaneuvered the philosophers. A seminal discovery of the twentieth century was that a man could live a life overflowing with advantages and still be obliquely unhappy. Despair, the philosophers called it. But the coin of George Paxton’s life had happiness stamped on both sides – no despair for George. Individuals so fortunate were scarce in those days. You could have sold tickets to George Paxton.
Now it must be allowed that not everyone in his situation would have shared his contentment. Not everyone would have found fulfillment in putting words on cemetery monuments. For George, however, inscribing monuments was a calling, not simply a job. He was in the tomb profession. He kept a scrapbook of the great ones: the sarcophagus of Alexander, the shrine to Mausolus at Halicarnassus, the Medici tomb at San Lorenzo, the pyramid of Cheops. Don’t you get depressed being around gravestones all day? people asked him. No, he replied. Gravestones, he knew, were educational media, teaching that life has limits: don’t set your sights too high.
Occasionally his wife accused him of laziness. ‘I wish you would go out and get yourself some ambition,’ Justine would say. But George’s world satisfied him – the pace, the simplicity, the muscles he acquired from lifting granite.
And then they came, the three children in white, jumping out of the back of John Frostig’s panel truck and sprinting toward the sample stones that spread outward from the foundation of the Crippen Monument Works. The stones were closely spaced, as in a cemetery for dwarves. ‘Floor models,’ George’s boss liked to call them. ‘Want to take one out for a spin?’ the boss would quip.
Sitting near the smeared and sooty window of the front office, George watched as the white children leapfrogged over the stones. Their suits – trim, one-piece affairs cinched by utility belts and topped with globular helmets – afforded complete mobility. Each child wore a pistol. The leapfrogging boys looked ready for the bottom of the ocean, the inside of a volcano, a Martian sandstorm, a plague of bees, anything.
Briefcase in tow, John climbed out of the driver’s seat. A painting of a white suit decorated the side of the truck, accompanied by the words PERPETUAL SECURITY SCOPAS SUITS . . . JOHN FROSTIG, PRESIDENT . . . WILDGROVE, MASSACHUSETTS . . . 555–7043. The president of Perpetual Security Scopas Suits marched toward the office exuding the sort of nervous energy and insatiable ambition that made George feel there are worse things in life than being satisfied with what you have.
Entering, John imposed his rump on a stool, balanced the briefcase on his knees.
‘Has someone died?’ George asked.
‘Died? Nope, sorry, you won’t sell me anything today, buddy-buddy.’ John’s friendship with George had been primarily John’s idea. ‘No tombs today.’
George swiveled away from the window. A swivel chair, a rolltop desk, a naughty calendar, a patina of dust, the stool on which John sat – these formed the sum total of Arthur Crippen’s office. Arthur was not there. He never appeared before noon, rarely before 2 P.M. Just then it was 3:30. Arthur was doubtless at the Lizard Lounge, a bar administering to the broken hopes and failed ambitions of the town’s shopkeepers.
‘Look out the window, buddy-buddy. What do you see?’
George pivoted. The children had begun a science fiction game, laser-zapping each other with their pistols, using the monuments for cover. ‘White children,’ he reported.
‘Safe children. There’s a war coming, George, a bad one. It’s inevitable, what with both sides having so many land-based, first-strike ICBMs. Soon we’ll all be living in scopas suits. That’s S-C-O-P-A-S, as in Self-Contained Post-Attack Survival. Just five weeks I’ve had this franchise, and already I’ve sold two dozen units without once leaving the borders of our fair hamlet. The company tells us to operate under any name we like, so I’m Perpetual Security Scopas Suits. I thought that up myself – Perpetual Security Scopas Suits. Like it?’
‘I can’t see why the Russians would want to bomb Wildgrove,’ said George the Unitarian. He was what his church had made him, a naive skeptic.
‘You don’t know jackshit about strategic doctrine, do you? Ever hear of a counterforce strike? The enemy wants to wipe out America’s war-waging capability. Well, Wildgrove is part of that war-waging capability. We’ve got food, clothing, gasoline, trucks, people – many things of military value. All the apples we grow here could prove decisive during the intra-war period.’
‘Well, if they ever do drop their bombs, I imagine we’ll all die before we know what hit us.’
‘That’s pretty pessimistic of you, buddy-buddy, and furthermore it’s not true. Put on a scopas suit, and you won’t be able to avoid surviving.’
John opened his briefcase, took out a crisply printed form headed ESCHATOLOGICAL ENTERPRISES – WE DO CIVIL DEFENSE RIGHT. George knew about sales contracts; you could not acquire a stone from the Crippen Monument Works without signing one.
‘Eschatological – doesn’t sound very Japanese, does it?’ said John. ‘Don’t worry. Right now all the units might come from Osaka, but next month there’ll be a plant in Detroit and another in Palo Alto. Hell, talk about being in the right place with the right product at the right time. Greatest thing since the rubber. A smart bunch of bastards, those Eschatological people, a bunch of shrewd—’
‘This isn’t my kind of thing.’
‘The price wouldn’t shock you.’
‘Sorry, John—’
‘Begin simple – that’s what I tell everybody. One or two units, expand later. Do the kids first. The smaller the suit, the lower the cost. Your daughter—’
‘Holly is four.’
‘Wise decision, truly wise. I must tell you, it puts a lump right smack in the middle of my throat. Now, the way I figure it, the warheads won’t arrive for two years. Yeah, I know, the world’s going to hell in a slant-eyed Honda, but smart money still says two years. So you’ll need something that will fit Holly when she’s six, right? Normally we’d be talking over seven thousand pictures of George Washington, but for you, buddy-buddy, let’s make it sixty-five ninety-five plus tax.’
‘That’s more than I take home in . . . I don’t know, four months. Five. I’ll have to say no to this.’
The suit salesman hammered the contract with his extended index finger. ‘You think we’re talking cash on the barrelhead? We’re talking installments on the barrelhead, teeny tiny installments.’ The finger skated across a pocket calculator. ‘Figuring a five percent sales tax and an annual interest rate of eighteen percent or one-point-five per month, we can amortize the loan through a constant monthly payment of three hundred and forty-five dollars and seventy-one cents, so in two years you’ll own little Holly’s unit free and clear. You probably spend that much on beer.’
George took the contract, attempted to read it, but the words refused to resolve into clear meanings. Holly liked to draw. She produced an average of four crayon sketches a day. Their refrigerator displayed one that looked exactly like George – exactly.
On the other hand, if a war occurred of the sort John was predicting, it wouldn’t matter how much art schools cost.
‘Do you happen to have the kind for a six-year-old with you? I mean . . . I’m just wondering what they look like.’
John’s nod was smug. ‘When you work for Perpetual Security, George, you’re prepared for anything.’
They left the office and wove through the tiny cemetery. Most of the stones embodied a macabre optimism; there was nothing inscribed on them. First came the Protestant district, then the Catholic section, finally the Jewish neighborhood. John opened the back of his truck and hoisted himself into the dark cavity, where several dozen scopas suits
of varying sizes hung like commuters packed into a subway. George noticed one suit intended for a dog, another for a baby.
To the casual observer it might have suggested a nineteenth-century body-snatching scene, two men hauling a limp and pallid shape through a graveyard. First George – short, muscular, with rough-hewn features attempting to reclaim themselves from a scrub-brush beard and a jungle of hair. Then John – tall, clean-shaven, aggressively handsome, self-consciously suave. The white children followed them into the office. John and George arranged the little scopas suit on the swivel chair. George struggled to recall the names of the Frostig boys. The youngest was in the same nursery school as Holly and had once murdered the hamsters. Rickie – was that his name? Nathan?
‘Mr Paxton wants to see your units,’ John announced grandly, lining up his sons like army recruits. ‘Gary, show him your cranial gear.’
The fifteen-year-old removed his dinosaur-egg helmet. He had inherited his father’s disconcerting good looks. ‘Upon sensing the detonation,’ Gary recited, ‘the phones shut down – hence, no ruptured eardrums from blast overpressures. As for the fireball, the wraparound Lexan screen guards against flashblindness and retinal scorching.’
‘Excellent, Gary.’
‘Thank you, sir.’
John went to his second son. ‘Lance, Mr Paxton wants to know about the fabric.’
When Lance removed his helmet, George recognized the ten-year-old he had once caught spraying WALTERS BITES THE BIG ONE on a headstone Toby Walters had ordered for his dead mother. Lance looked middle-childy – casual, unassuming. He tugged on his front zipper, making a V-shaped part and revealing a sweat shirt emblazoned with the logo of a rock group called Sperm. ‘Alternating layers of Winco Synthefill VII, Celanese Fortrel Arcticguard Polyester, and activated charcoal,’ he chanted, folding back one flap to display the lining. ‘In terms of initial ionizing radiation and subsequent fallout, the protection factor is a big one thousand, shielding you from a cumulative dose of up to two hundred thousand rads. As for . . . as for . . .’ The boy twitched and turned red.