This Is the Way the World Ends (S.F. MASTERWORKS)

by James Morrow

  ‘That would make a good epitaph. I keep wondering how they feel about being dead.’

  ‘Your wife and daughter?’

  ‘Yes, And the others.’

  ‘You wonder how they feel—?’

  ‘About being dead. That’s crazy, isn’t it?’

  ‘Do you think it’s crazy?’

  ‘They’re dead. They don’t feel anything about it . . . Sverre said there are pockets of survivors.’

  ‘No doubt.’

  ‘You don’t suppose—?’

  ‘No, I don’t.’

  ‘I just thought—’

  ‘You entered the bomb crater, right? And then your neighbor shot you?’

  George chomped on his lower lip. ‘I ended up on the ground. Next thing I knew, a vulture was hovering over me.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘A vulture. A large black vulture – big as one of those flying dinosaurs, you know, the pterodactyls.’

  ‘The pterodactyls were not dinosaurs.’ She issued a succinct, intellectual frown. ‘Close enough. This is not the first time a vulture has entered the annals of psychotherapy. The species once haunted the great Leonardo.’

  ‘Leonardo da Vinci?’ George asked.

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘I have one of his paintings.’

  ‘You believe that you own an original Leonardo?’

  ‘I do own one. I keep it in my cabin.’

  She gave her eyes a quick toss to the left, as if to say, Well, we have our work cut out for us, don’t we, you lunatic, and stood up. Her stiff and forbidding gray suit was like a whole-body chastity belt.

  She walked to a bookcase stuffed with volumes on brain diseases. Her office reconciled the rational and the primal – an anatomy chart, a Navaho tapestry, a ceramic brain, a Hindu god, a biofeedback rig, an obsidian knife that had last seen employment in a human sacrifice. She removed a slender volume, flashed the title – Sigmund Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality – opened it. ‘When Leonardo was a baby,’ she said, ‘a vulture swooped down to his cradle and massaged his lips with its tail. Or so he believed. Did your vulture do that?’

  ‘My vulture?’

  ‘The one that appeared at ground zero.’

  ‘Are you saying it was a hallucination?’

  ‘Do you think it was a hallucination?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ George was not forming a very positive first impression of psychotherapy. ‘My vulture did not massage my lips,’ he reported.

  ‘Leonardo, it seems, was illegitimate. He and his mother had an intense relationship – much kissing and pampering.’ She hugged a phantom baby. ‘You must understand that, in ancient times, maternity cults commonly centered on vultures. The Egyptians believed it was a species without males, inseminated by the winds. Through the vulture fantasy, Leonardo was confessing to a sexually charged relationship with his mother – or so Freud theorized. The tail prying open the lips. The insertion.’

  ‘I thought we were going to talk about my problems,’ said George.

  She slammed the book shut with the suddenness of a steel trap being sprung. ‘On Monday your immersion in death begins,’ she announced evenly.

  George took out his wallet and removed a rectangle from its blurry plastic envelope. ‘Do me a favor? Hide this where I can’t find it.’ He set the rectangle on the desk. ‘I keep looking at it.’

  The therapist picked up Holly’s picture – her official class photograph from the Sunflower Nursery School – and placed it in her top desk drawer.

  While Holly’s nursery school picture had been a wellspring of grief – ‘unendurable’ was his therapist’s word, the perfect word, for his loss – the portrait of himself, Aubrey, and Morning was another matter entirely. He looked at it whenever he could, testing it under different kinds of light, memorizing each brush stroke. On Saturday afternoon he looked at it for so long that he lost track of time, consequently arriving several minutes late for the screening of Sergei Bondarchuk’s lengthy film adaptation of War and Peace.

  Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky were walking through the woods. ‘If evil men can work together to get what they want,’ said the narrator, ‘then so can good men, to get what they want.’

  George enjoyed the battles of Schoengraben and Austerlitz. The lines of infantrymen stretched on and on, far beyond the reach of the camera’s lens.

  When the lights came up for the first intermission, he saw that the only people in the little theater were himself, an enlisted man, Randstable, and – shifting now in the row ahead, turning to face George – an older gentleman who, with his bushy beard and substantial abdomen, might have found employment as Santa Claus’s stunt double.

  ‘Hello, friend.’ When Santa Claus smiled, his beard expanded like a peacock’s tail.

  ‘Are you an Erebus evacuee?’ George asked.

  ‘Brian Overwhite,’ said Santa, nodding. ‘US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.’

  ‘I’d heard you were aboard.’

  ‘My ticket for Geneva had just arrived – we were about to begin the STABLE III talks – when this war . . . incredible, isn’t it? The mind isn’t built for such things. Nuclear exchanges. Failed deterrence. STABLE III would have put tough limits on missile throw-weight and anti-satellite weapons – that was my hope, anyway.’

  ‘I’m George Paxton.’ He went to shake Overwhite’s hand. A sling cradled the negotiator’s right arm. ‘Were you in one of the battles?’

  ‘No – two unreasonable ensigns came after me. Cousins.’

  ‘I know who you mean.’

  ‘They said, “You’ve spent your life controlling other people’s arms, and now we’re going to control yours!” So they broke it. Snapped the damn ulna. I reported the incident to Lieutenant Grass. Now get this – the man laughed at me. That’s right. He laughed.’

  ‘There seems to be some kind of resentment against us,’ said George. ‘Take me, for example. I was placed in a torpedo tube.’

  ‘Resentment? Yeah, I guess that’s the word for it.’ Overwhite scratched his cast, as if trying to relieve an itch. ‘Tell me, George, which do you fear more, the gamma rays or the betas?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The gammas go shooting right through you, zip, zip, but the betas ride in on the food you eat and the air you breathe.’ Overwhite reached under his beard and caressed his throat. ‘The buildup in the thyroid is what you’ve got to watch for. The betas go for the thyroid, especially with the children. It’s a terrible thing when they won’t even let you negotiate a simple goddamn arms control agreement.’

  George wished that War and Peace would start again. ‘Good movie, huh?’

  ‘I can see your viewpoint. Eight hours of mongrel film technique in the service of murky Soviet propaganda, and yet there’s much to admire – the energetic grandeur, the meticulous Tolstoyan ambience.’ Overwhite massaged his elbow. ‘Cancer almost never forms in the elbows.’

  ‘Not much of a turnout,’ said George.

  ‘These enlisted men, all they want is Clint Eastwood and tits.’ Overwhite interlaced his fingers. ‘Cancer doesn’t bother with the fingers, either, not as a rule.’ He rubbed his chest. ‘In general, we needn’t worry about breast cancer.’

  Later that afternoon, the Russians fled from the Battle of Borodino, Andrei died of his wounds, the Grand Army occupied Moscow, Napoleon suffered his calamitous retreat, and Pierre ended up with the vital and appealing Natasha Rostov.

  Morning Valcourt is probably quite vital and appealing, George decided, once you get to know her.

  From the perspective of the average consumer, psychotherapists in the second half of the twentieth century were an overpaid population. A hundred dollars an hour seemed a high price for the privilege of being listened to. What people don’t realize, Morning thought, is that I never stop working, night or day. When I’m having lunch, I’m working. I dream about my patients.

  She sat down in the middle of the periscope room and arranged her lunch.
A thermos of skim milk, a cucumber sandwich. She wanted to lose five pounds by the end of the voyage. Her Defense Department patient came to mind. Wengernook. All those feelings – he actually saw his wife die of radiation sickness – and no vocabulary for them. He talks about ballistic missile defenses. And Randstable, rambling on about inertial guidance and his old ‘think tank.’ He confuses systems analysis with thought. And the arms controller. Poor Overwhite, riddled with nonexistent tumors. Repression . . .

  She finished her lunch, stuffed the refuse into the garbage scoop.

  And Paxton. Why does he look at me that way? It’s not sex, not entirely. He wants something else from me.

  The door hissed open.

  George knew that, as a Unitarian, he was not competent to deal with metaphysical commodities, including prophetic glass paintings. He had decided to approach the situation on the theory that his Leonardo did not spell out an inevitable fate but, rather, a possible future, something that he could make happen through diligence and creativity. I shall not let Leonardo and Nostradamus and Holly’s stepsister down, he had resolved. I shall woo Morning Valcourt, make myself fascinating to her, fall in love with her, convince her to become my wife.

  ‘You and I have a lot in common,’ he said, entering the periscope room. ‘Did you know that selling tombstones is quite similar to psychotherapy? I would talk to people about their troubles.’

  ‘We’re the talking cure,’ she said tonelessly.

  ‘For example, we had guilt stones. Also self-hatred stones.’

  ‘Oh.’

  He saw that he had been misinterpreting her face. The odd tilt of her mouth came not from snarling but from speaking so much truth, while the sharp flare of her nostrils traced to sensitivity rather than snobbery. He twisted his wedding ring. Forgive me, Justine.

  ‘I want you to see a fire,’ she said.

  ‘A fire? I got enough of that at Wildgrove.’ All business, this woman.

  ‘Wildgrove was nothing.’ She led him toward Periscope Number One. ‘Odessa had the distinction of being the last city to receive a warhead. It was attacked five days ago by the strategic submarine Atlanta. It’s still burning.’

  ‘Odessa? You mean . . . they hit Russia’s cities after all? They didn’t just go for the missile bases?’

  ‘Basic nuclear strategy. We took out their fixed silos, but they thought we were after their cities, so they went after our cities, and . . . quid pro quo.’

  George pressed his eyes against the soft rubber viewfinder. A frantic orange haze appeared. He adjusted the focus. Odessa vibrated with flames. Inky smoke filled the heavens. ‘Fabrics, insulation, oil stores, polymers – there’s plenty to keep it going,’ Morning narrated. ‘The survivors must inhale a demon’s breath of dioxins and furans.’

  ‘You know so much, Dr Valcourt,’ he said in what he hoped was a seductive tone. The periscope room, he decided, was a lousy environment for making romance bloom. He would have to take her on a date. Would the movies be best? The bowling alley? The casino?

  She pulled on the periscope handle, aiming the device at the continent where the United States of America had once been located. Fires. Back to the Soviet Union. Fires. America. City fires. Oil well fires. Coal seam fires. Grassland fires. Peat marsh fires. Forest fires. A pall of mist hung in the air, black as the blood of Nadine Covington and Ensign Peach. The Northern Hemisphere was wrapped in soot.

  That night – Monday night – George dreamed he was made of smoke. His smoke legs would not let him walk. He could hold nothing in his smoke hands.

  Then came Tuesday. The periscope room again.

  ‘Can you tell me what day it is, George?’ she asked.

  Was it his imagination, or were her questions getting increasingly pointless? ‘The tenth of January. I’ve been aboard three weeks.’

  ‘Good. But out there it’s the beginning of July.’

  ‘Out where?’

  ‘In the world.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘Time is ruined, George – one of the many effects of nuclear war that nobody quite anticipated. All those fundamental particles being annihilated – time gets twisted and folded. A minute passes in here, but out there it might be an hour, a day, or a week.’

  ‘Folded?’

  ‘Like a Chinese screen. Post-exchange physics – something even Einstein didn’t foresee. In local regions of the quantum-dynamics fabric, space is taking on the role of time, and vice versa. According to our best evidence, there are only two places where the old ways of counting time still work. This ship is one of them. Antarctica is the other. Are you upset?’

  He recalled the book he used to read Holly, Carrie of Cape Cod, full of clams and hermit crabs. I am a hermit crab, he decided. Place a blowtorch against my shell, I won’t feel it. Scratch me – no pain. ‘If time is crinkled, then time is crinkled,’ he said. ‘We hermit crabs can take anything.’

  ‘You what crabs?’

  ‘Hermit crabs.’

  ‘Yes. Hermit crabs. Good,’ Morning said. ‘Hermit crabs seek out shells because they want to survive,’ she added thoughtfully.

  ‘Hermit crabs believe in the future,’ his therapist concluded.

  She’s starting to care about me, he thought. Should I show her my Leonardo? (Look, Dr Valcourt – you and I are destined to marry and have babies!) No. Not yet – she won’t understand. It might come across as a joke, or a symptom of survivor’s guilt, or a weird seduction attempt.

  ‘Jocotepec, Mexico,’ she said.

  He leaned toward the eyepiece, twisted the focus knob.

  ‘Today,’ she said, ‘we’re going to deal with ice.’

  A crowd of peasants stood on a frozen lake. Soot walled over the sky. Cold rain fell. The survivors’ teeth vibrated, plumes of breath gushed out. They wore rags. Many went barefoot – blue ankles, missing toes. Faithlessly they huddled around a limp and sputtering fire.

  ‘I thought you said July.’

  ‘July. High noon. Those people are freezing to death. Blame the urban conflagrations. There’s so much smoke in the air that ordinary sunlight is being absorbed. Right now the average worldwide temperature is minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit. The soot cap migrates with the climate. In April it crossed the equator, sending ice storms through the Amazon basin. Photosynthesis has been shut down, the earth’s vegetation mantle is crumbling. For many years, this was an unanticipated effect of nuclear holocaust. Then, shortly before the war, certain scientists foresaw it. Sundeath syndrome.’

  She tugged on the periscope handle. Rigid corpses littered the planet like the outpourings of some crazed taxidermist. Unable to penetrate the ice-sealed rivers and ponds, many wanderers were dying of thirst. Under bruise-purple skies a starving French farmer clawed at the iron ground with bloody fingers, seeking to exhume the potato he knew was there. At last he lifted the precious object from the dirt, staring at it stupidly. George rejoiced at the humble victory. Now eat it! The farmer fainted and toppled over, soon becoming as stiff as the stone angel that George used to sell under the name Design No. 4335.

  Wednesday.

  ‘Fourteen months have passed,’ said Morning. ‘It is September. The strategic submarines have put to port. The soot has settled. Light can get through. Sundeath syndrome has run its course.’

  ‘Thank God.’

  ‘Don’t thank anybody. This light is malignant.’ Morning closed her eyes. ‘The high-yield airbursts created oxides of nitrogen that have shredded the earth’s ozone buffer. Ultraviolet sunshine is gushing down. What does it all mean?’ Her sigh was shrill, piercing. ‘Famine,’ she said.

  George hated being difficult at this point in their courtship, but he couldn’t help asking, ‘Is this really the way to cure me?’

  ‘Yes,’ she said, as if that settled the matter. ‘Last year’s harvest was a disaster. The frozen ground could not receive seeds – those few crops that were planted emerged into a spring laden with smog and acid showers. This year’s harvest will be worse – roots reachi
ng into eroded soil, leaves seared by the ultraviolet. And there is another enemy . . .’

  The locusts rolled across the Iowa com fields in a vast insatiable carpet, stripping the crop to its vegetal bones, devouring the botanic carrion.

  ‘The post-exchange environment is utopia for insects. Their enemies the birds have succumbed to radiation. Stores of carbaryl and malathion have been destroyed. The omnipresent corpses are perfect breeding places. So what will our hungry survivors do? Forage? Nuts and berries are fast disappearing. Dig shellfish? Radioactive rainouts have contaminated coastal waters. Hunt? Not if the game is dying out . . .’

  She pivoted the periscope. A rabbit pelt hung on a mass of rabbit bones. The pelt took a hop and collapsed.

  ‘Not if the tiny creatures that underwrite the earth’s food chains were killed when the ultraviolet hit the marshes and seas . . .’

  Can a walrus, paragon of things fat and full, look emaciated? This one did. Its eyes were sunken. Its ribs pushed against taut, sallow flesh that had been feeding on itself and now could feed no more.

  ‘Not if thousands of species are at risk because the ultraviolet has scarred their corneas . . .’

  A blind deer moved through the organic rubble that had been the woods of central Pennsylvania, pacing in crazed parabolas of misery and hunger. Poor deerie, George could hear Holly saying.

  ‘You know what comes next, don’t you? You know what people eat when they can no longer gather berries, hunt game, or harvest the seas?’

  Out in the timefolds, Italian office workers ate human corpses. Belgian mathematics professors murdered their colleagues and devoured their internal organs. Dave Valentine of Unlimited, Ltd, the agency that had produced the scopas suit commercials, stumbled through the ruins of Glen Cove, Long Island, with cannibalistic intent.

  The famine session left George quaking on the floor.

  Thursday.