by James Morrow
‘Five years have passed,’ said Morning. ‘And yet, in another sense, time has turned around. The modern and pristine city of Billings, Montana, has devolved into fourteenth-century London.’
She worked the focus knob.
‘It’s time we dealt with pestilence,’ she said.
No, no, he thought, it’s time we dealt with my magic lantern slide. It’s time we made wedding plans.
A brawny survivor in combat fatigues squatted near the entrance of a bomb shelter. He wore a surprisingly intact scopas suit and a fractured grin. A Heckler and Koch assault rifle rested on his camouflage-dappled knees. In the background, neatly stacked corpses formed a bulwark against intruders. George sensed that nuclear war was the best thing that had ever happened to this man.
‘His shelter contains an elaborate collection of canned soups,’ Morning explained. ‘He is hoping someone will try to steal it, so that he can shoot them. Before the war, bubonic plague was endemic among the rats of eleven states in the western United States.’
The lymph nodes in the survivor’s neck looked like subcutaneous golf balls. Morning pivoted the periscope. Montana trembled with rats. The roads were paved with unburied corpses.
‘If you were a disease – viral gastroenteritis or infectious hepatitis or amoebic dysentery – you could not ask for better conditions than planet Earth after nuclear war. The ultraviolet has suppressed your hosts’ immune systems. The omnipresent insects are carrying you far and wide. No pasteurized milk, no food refrigeration, no waste treatment, no inoculation programs – all these circumstances bode well.’
At each point of the compass, a new microorganism flourished. No death happened in the abstract. A particular Nigerian child died of cholera, sprawled across his mother’s lap in a brutal and unholy pietà. A particular Romanian machinist died of meningococcal meningitis, a particular Iranian school teacher of louse-borne typhus . . .
Friday.
‘Infertility,’ said Morning.
The word sounded neutral, clinical, non-threatening. Then he looked into the timefolds.
A Cambodian man and his wife sat in a village square and wept. ‘The radiation,’ Morning explained. ‘They’ll never have children.’
They should find the city with marble walls, George thought. Nostradamus foresaw this problem.
A Polish mother suffered a miscarriage. The specter of still-birth visited a family in Pakistan and another in Bolivia. The live births were worse. It was an era when thousands of children were required to face the world without such selective advantages as arms, legs, and cerebral cortices. ‘Mate an irradiated chromosome with another irradiated chromosome,’ Morning noted, ‘and no good will come of it.’
‘You must tell me something,’ said George, reeling with nausea. ‘Who will treat your survivor’s guilt?’
The therapist smoothed a wrinkle from her gray skirt and, in the weakest voice he had ever heard from her, said, ‘I don’t know.’
For moral reasons, the young Reverend Peter Sparrow declined to join the Saturday night gatherings of the Erebus Poker Club. Gambling, he knew, was Satan’s third favorite pastime, after sex and ecumenicalism. Lacking such convictions, the other evacuees gathered around the green felt table in the rattling, flashing heart of the Silver Dollar Casino.
Unsealing the deck, Brat Tarmac weeded out the jokers. He was down another five pounds, easily. ‘Ante up. This game is seven-card stud.’ The cards rippled through his hands. ‘Deuces wild.’
George said, ‘Today through the periscope I saw—’
‘You saw, you saw,’ said Brat, sneering. ‘Jack bets.’
‘One dollar,’ said Overwhite.
‘I’m out,’ said Wengernook.
‘Raise,’ said Randstable.
George said, ‘Morning showed me—’
‘We’ll take a vote,’ said Brat. ‘How many of us want to hear what Paxton saw through the periscope today?’
No one spoke. Brat dealt another round of up cards. ‘Ace bets.’
‘We saw it too,’ said Wengernook, quivering like an overbred dog. ‘Jesus.’
‘Sugar Brook built that scope,’ said Randstable, who had managed to make six poker chips stand on edge. ‘Not my department, though – the command-and-control guys.’
‘Three dollars,’ said Overwhite, reaching under his sling and checking himself for armpit tumors.
‘I have a question.’ George picked up the jokers, rubbed them together like a razor and strop. ‘If America and Russia knew about this sundeath syndrome, why did they work out plans for different kinds of attacks and so on?’
‘Well, you see, sundeath theory was based on incomplete models of the atmosphere,’ said Brat, clenching his teeth as if in great pain. ‘It all depends on dust particle size, the height of the smoke plumes, rainfall, factors like that.’
‘You have to take sundeath with a grain of salt,’ said Wengernook, pulling cigarettes and a risqué matchbook from his shirt. ‘It’s a pretty far-fetched idea.’
‘But it happened,’ said George. ‘Right on our planet.’
‘That’s just one particular case,’ said Wengernook. He struck a match. ‘In another sort of war, urban-industrial targets would not have been hit. You’d have fewer fires, less soot, no sundeath, and, and . . .’ He tried to make the flame connect with the end of his cigarette, could not manage it.
‘First ace bets,’ said Brat.
‘And a much more desirable outcome,’ said Wengernook.
‘I’ve got it!’ said Randstable. He grabbed one of the jokers from George and set it atop the six vertical chips.
‘Got what?’ asked George.
‘The solution!’ said Randstable.
‘To the war?’ asked George.
‘To the riddle.’ The joker shivered on its plastic pylons.
‘What riddle?’
‘Sverre’s riddle – why is a raven like a writing desk?’
‘Why?’
‘A raven is like a writing desk,’ said the ex-Wunderkind as his little bridge collapsed, ‘because Poe wrote on both.’
To and fro, warp and weft, the young black woman paced the shores of her private tropical paradise. The beach sparkled brilliantly, as if its sands were destined to become fine crystal goblets. Spiky pieces of sunlight shone in the tide pools. The surrounding sea was a blue liquid gem.
She was about thirty. She wore no clothes. Her excellent skin had the color and vibrancy of boiling fudge. When she stopped and sucked in a large helping of air, her splendid breasts floated upward like helium balloons released in celebration of some great athletic or political victory. George thought she was the most desirable woman he had ever seen.
A length of rope was embedded in the beach near a banyan tree. The beachcomber tore it free. Sunstruck grains showered down like sparks. The woman manipulated the rope, sculpting a grim shape from it. A noose emerged in her clever and despairing hands.
George tried to pull away from the periscope, but he could not break his own grip.
The last woman on earth walked up to the tree, tossed the rope over a branch, and, as the waves rolled in and the sun danced amid the tide pools, hanged herself by the neck. Her oscillating shadow was shaped like a star.
George sat down beneath the periscope and panted. ‘We’re through?’ he said, half inquiring, half asserting.
‘At this irrevocable point in history,’ said Morning, ‘not one human being exists anywhere – with the frail and tentative exception of this boat.’
The hermit crab had left his shell. He was a shivering mass of tender protoplasm. ‘Nobody can ride a mechanical horse.’
‘True.’
‘Or see the Big Dipper.’
‘Correct.’
‘Or take acting lessons.’
He was weeping now, copiously, and he could not tell whether his tears were for Justine, Holly, the Frenchman who had clawed the potato out of the ground, the Iranian school teacher who had died of louse-borne typhus, the last woman
on earth . . .
Morning knelt beside the hurt man. She hugged him and dried his tears.
He returned her embrace. His bullet wound throbbed like a castanet grafted to his stomach. As if to stop the spasms, he reached into his shirt. His fingers touched glass, and slowly he withdrew his Leonardo.
‘Look at this,’ he said, licking his tears. ‘It’s you. And me. And our child.’
‘I don’t understand. Are you an artist?’
‘I told you about it before. The painter was Leonardo da Vinci. You know – the man with the vulture complex.’
‘A forgery, right?’
‘An original Leonardo – inspired by the brilliant prophet Nostradamus. It predicts the future. See? Holly’s stepsister is coming. You’ll be the mother.’
She took the slide. Light ascended from the glass and ignited her blue-green eyes. ‘It really does look like me. Spooky.’
‘It’s you.’
‘And the child . . . ?’
‘If Justine had gotten pregnant again, we would have named the baby Aubrey. Have you ever had a child?’
‘No.’
‘They do all these amazing things.’
‘I’ve never been married. Aubrey?’
‘Aubrey Paxton.’
‘Pretty name.’
‘And there will be others. Aubrey’s brothers and sisters. Holly always wanted a sister.’
‘Why would anybody want to bring children into—?’
‘Into this world? I may not know about psychology or sundeath, Dr Valcourt, but I did learn something at the Crippen Monument Works. Our children will take whatever world they can get.’
‘You’re sterile.’
‘I have reason to believe the condition is not permanent.’
‘Next you’ll be saying we have the power to restore the race.’
Justine Paxton had frequently accused her husband of lacking ambition. She should hear what I’m about to say, he thought. ‘Maybe we do.’ (Maybe they did!) ‘Maybe it’s one of those unexpected effects of nuclear war you’re always talking about. Your own fertility is . . . ?’
‘No problems that I know about.’ She hefted the slide, ran her fingertips over the tiny bumps and furrows of paint. ‘Where did you get this thing?’
‘A civilian passenger. Nadine Covington. Her blood is black.’
‘Black?’
‘Like ink.’
‘I doubt that she can be trusted.’
‘I trust her.’
Without unlocking arms, they stood up. Again they embraced. George took his Leonardo back and departed with the words ‘restore the race’ ringing in his ears. There, you see, my poor, extinct Justine? You did not marry a lazy man after all.
Lieutenant Commander Olaf Sverre
of
SSBN 713 City of New York
United States Navy
Cordially Invites
GEORGE PAXTON
to a
Celebration Banquet
2000 Hours, 29 January
Main Mess Hall
The extinction of one’s own species is an event not easily comprehended. Only by using Periscope Number One privately, over and over, did George begin to grasp the contours of the event. He studied his planet for hours on end, rubbing his nose in oblivion. He even looked at the stars. Nothing. Nothing save the burned land, the poisoned water, the harsh stillness, the rare clam, the occasional roach, the intermittent swatch of grass, the clusters of salt-pickled corpses floating in the South Atlantic timefolds like barges of flesh.
Brian Overwhite was wrong. The human mind can accommodate anything. Some parents beat their children. Auschwitz. Sundeath. It’s just blood, the mind says. It’s only pain. It’s merely putting people into ovens. It’s simply the end of the world . . .
Long ago, George’s grandfather had died on the last day of June, an event that had plunged the family into a quandary. Should they hold the usual Fourth of July picnic? George’s grandfather loved the Fourth of July. He always built cherry-bomb-tipped skyrockets for the occasion, deploying them against a balsa wood model of Fort McHenry. During the battle, the family would sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ while toy frigates shot marbles at the ramparts and the cherry bombs detonated around a tattered little American flag.
The solution to the dilemma came from George’s Aunt Isabel. ‘Daddy would want us to celebrate,’ she asserted. ‘Daddy would be angry at us if we didn’t have a good time,’ she insisted.
The picnic happened, and with a vengeance. Horseshoes flew, beer flowed, banjos sang, chickens vanished without a trace, blueberry pies were reported missing in action, and rockets glared redly over Fort McHenry. Everyone agreed that Aunt Isabel had made the right decision.
And so it was that whenever Chief Petty Officer Rush brought the dinner menu around, George always checked off the most opulent and sauce-laden dishes. He began frequenting the Silver Dollar Casino, making wild, Scotch-inspired bets at the blackjack table. The invitation to Captain Sverre’s banquet sent waves of joyous anticipation – food! coffee! dessert! – through his body.
‘Your species would want you to celebrate,’ he told himself. ‘Your species would be angry at you if you didn’t have a good time,’ he decided.
Swathed in velvet drapes, lit by crystal chandeliers, the main mess hall of the City of New York proved just how tasteful and sophisticated defense spending could be. The banquet itself, by contrast, followed the gaudy lines of Imperial Rome, with an eye to Babylon and a nod to Gomorrah – gold plates, bejeweled goblets. The tablecloth was thick enough to blot a liter of priceless wine without leaving a drop. The serving staff – a dozen seamen and noncorns – patrolled the borders in their dress blues, pushing carts brimming with slabs of ham, planks of beef, heaps of bread, cauldrons of soup, and pots of satiny black coffee.
Ceramic dolphins held the place cards. George ended up between Overwhite and Reverend Sparrow – in the crossfire of a debate over the STABLE II treaty. (Evidently one of Sparrow’s broadcasts had figured decisively in the US Senate’s decision not to ratify this agreement.) Sadness and confusion enveloped his friends like gray scopas suits – the human extinction was not sitting well with them. Wengernook sucked on an unlit cigarette. Randstable built strange perpetual-motion devices out of the silverware and then knocked them over. Brat was down to about a hundred and thirty pounds. Overwhite’s beard looked mangy. Sparrow’s voluminous smile had wilted. They should all go see Mrs Covington, George decided. They should find out about their futures.
At the far end of the table Captain Sverre spoke with a civilian, a small, raffish fellow who managed to look youthful and eminent at the same time. Between remarks they stuffed themselves in gluttonous rivalry, Sverre favoring ham, the young man specializing in roast beef. Sverre’s gin bottle sat faithfully at his elbow. Gravy stains bloomed on the young man’s dark suit.
Brat was saying, ‘Personally, I think this race-loss business has been exaggerated. Psychotherapists like to be dramatic.’
Wengernook nodded in agreement. ‘The earth is really much more resilient than those periscope views suggest.’
The serving staff was well-meaning but graceless, dumping food on the table as if shoveling coal into the furnace of a tramp steamer. Champagne came forth in torrents. George drank enough to put music in the air and a pleasant buzz between his ears.
He had to admit it – Morning had not taken to the Aubrey Paxton idea with great enthusiasm. Just remember, he told himself, it’s a big step for a woman, having a kid, restarting a species. You must let the idea grow on her.
‘They don’t run very good movies on this ship,’ said Reverend Sparrow. ‘War and Peace, what a boring mess.’
‘What should they run, your old TV shows?’ sneered Overwhite.
‘Ever see King of Kings?’ said Sparrow. ‘It’s wonderful the way Orson Welles pronounces the T in “apostles.” ’ He placed George’s shoulder in a warm grip. ‘I’m still praying for you.’
‘That�
�s nice,’ said George.
As soon as dessert arrived – the evacuees could corrupt themselves with either German chocolate cake or lemon meringue pie – Sverre drew a carving knife from a ham and clanked it against his water glass. All eyes shot toward him. The serving staff scurried out of the hall.
‘Antarctica,’ whispered Randstable. ‘He’s going to tell us about Antarctica.’
‘Tonight’s banquet was advertised as a celebration,’ the captain began. ‘Dr Valcourt reports that, when we dock at McMurdo Station, six rational and competent survivors will disembark. We are here to rejoice in your cure. You have looked extinction in the face and lived. Operation Erebus will succeed.’
He set the carving knife on a linen napkin, poured gin into a gold goblet, drank.
‘Extinction. Such a sterile word, so Latin. What does it mean? When you kill a species, good guests, you do not simply kill its current members, you also kill the generation that lies dormant in its germ cells – and, thus, the generation that the descendants of those germ cells would have made, and the next generation, and the next. Extinction is an endless crime, quietly slaughtering all the lives that would have been. The human birth canal is the only way into human existence, gentlemen. There is no other port of entry.’
‘What is this guy, one of those warrior intellectuals?’ whispered Wengernook.
‘Lawrence of Arabia joins the Navy,’ said Brat.
Sverre took off his claw-hammer coat, tossed it on the floor, and rolled up his shirt sleeve.
‘At a certain moment in the great nuclear arms race, it became common knowledge that an extinction was in the offing. The universe trembled with the news. Your species mattered, gentlemen – more than you knew. The planets reeled, the trees wept, the rocks cried out. But from which place did the greatest anger issue? From the place that keeps my kind. We have always been with you, waiting to get in . . . and now the door has been shut.’
‘That keeps his what?’ said Brat.
‘His kind,’ said Overwhite.
‘Oh God,’ said Randstable.
‘Shut,’ repeated Sverre.
George’s bullet wound began to throb. Waiting to get in . . .
‘So great was our anger that, shortly before the war, we achieved a tenuous hold on life,’ said Sverre. ‘We even managed to insert ourselves into your affairs.’