by James Morrow
The tomb inscriber proved stronger than himself. He touched something soft, seized it. He yanked. Her silk-wrapped hand came forward, safe in his, but it was strangely, horribly weightless.
‘It wasn’t supposed to end this way!’ a voice shouted from out of the storm.
George stared at the awful object he was holding. The wrist was cut. A plastic tube poked through the crack. At the fractured elbow, ball bearings and copper wire protruded. The stump of the upper arm was a fountain of yellow hydraulic fluids; the technological blood gushed from rubber veins, spilled around steel bones, and dripped onto the Lazarev Ice Shelf.
Dressed in his diamond-patterned scopas suit, Theophilus Carter ambled into view. Icicles grew from his nostrils like tusks and drooped from the inside brim of his top hat like crystalline hair. His gloves were stuck to a teapot. In the murky distance, the lights of his itinerant shop (‘Remarkable Things for Human Bodies’) burned through the blizzard.
Again Theophilus said, ‘It wasn’t supposed to end this way . . .’
George hurled the puppet arm into the dark whistling pit, and when Holly’s double looked up at him he lost consciousness and collapsed on the ice.
CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
In Which Our Hero Crowns a Madman, Carves an Epitaph, and Sees a Constellation
Smells cut through his brain, forcing him into the world. Formaldehyde. Viscera. How different from the odorless continent, how different from the prophylactic City of New York. He was pleased to find himself on the MAD Hatter’s hospital gurney. Good. He’s planning to take me apart. He’s going to stuff me with circuits and pumps. I’ll become Plato or Julius Caesar or George Washington.
Like a speeding subway car, the laboratory vibrated and lurched, winds spurting through the cracks in its walls. The organs trembled in their jars, the severed arms bumped against the walls of their tanks, and the skeletons flounced on their ceiling hooks like chandeliers of bone.
Airborne.
The Hatter waddled over with a tea tray. He had shed his scopas suit, leaving himself attired in his morning coat and vest.
George tried to speak, but his vocal cords were iced up. He poured himself tea, drank. ‘I had no idea there was such cruelty in the world.’
‘Strange words from a convicted war criminal. Your loving bride wanted to give you a day of happiness, that’s all. We calculated we could sustain the drama for twelve hours. Call it cruelty if you like, deception, a ruse, though a ruse by any other name would smell as sweet. I call it a gift.’
‘She said she had made a deal,’ George protested.
‘With whom? Extinction? Stop living in a dream world. You can’t make deals with extinction – I told you that back in the city. The deal was with yours truly. Your bride gave me some free therapy, so I gave her a free automaton. The therapy proved useless, as we knew it would. Assured destruction is a hopeless disease.’
Rising from the gurney – his neck was stiff from Holly’s horsey ride – George followed the Hatter out of the laboratory and into the shop. A pile of scopas suit sales contracts lay on the counter. The mannequins’ shoulders pushed through their rotting costumes like cantaloupes tearing through grocery bags. The two men walked to the bellied window, leaned toward its congestion of hats. Theophilus traded his top hat for a bejeweled crown. George put on a homburg and stared at the birdless sky. Dark, bloated clouds floated by like plumes from the stacks of a weapons factory.
‘Ever since the war,’ said the Hatter, ‘your child has been a lot of random molecules. You knew that. You always knew that. All the King’s accountants and all the King’s lawyers couldn’t put . . . so I built her from scratch. Your wife gave me a nursery school photograph plus relevant data. The Big Dipper, everything. I programmed the reunion well, n’est-ce pas?’
The shop began to roll and pitch. The mannequins flapped their arms. Frantic tintinnabulations arose from the bells over the door.
‘Admit it, things went swimmingly,’ said the Hatter. ‘A bit mawkish for my tastes – yours, too, probably – but on the whole, swimmingly.’
George noticed how cadaverous Professor Carter had become. His pink hair was almost white, and his skin looked like stale cheese. The four-in-hand tie surrounded a neck as narrow and coarse as a loaf of French bread. Only one of his rabbit teeth remained, and it was black and cracked.
Stripping himself naked, the Hatter went to a mannequin dressed in royal regalia. ‘Help me with this, will you?’
Together they hauled down the coronation mantle, which was as heavy and bulky as an Oriental rug, and placed it around Theophilus’s tiny shoulders. Immediately he toppled under the weight. His crown fell off. ‘When you’re a king,’ he gasped, propping himself up on one elbow, ‘people are less likely to notice that you’re insane.’ Through a miracle of effort, he got into a sitting position. ‘One more favor.’ He petted the ermine on his capelet. ‘Crown me.’
George lowered the wonderful sparkling hat over Theophilus’s dead hair. ‘How do I look?’ the Hatter asked.
‘Splendid.’
He really did, in a way.
‘Off with their heads! Bring on the dancing girls! Turn away those petitioners! Maximize those strategic options!’
For nearly an hour he sat in the corner, raving quietly. George brought him tea.
‘Enhance that deterrence! Put Humpty-Dumpty together again! Let them eat cake!’
He motioned George over with his scepter. The tomb inscriber bent low. ‘Au revoir, my friend.’ The Hatter drank tea. ‘The odds, however, are against it.’
And then, slowly, graciously, as the shop settled onto the ground, Good King Theophilus began his long reign over nothing.
George stepped through the door. He held his lantern high. More immortal than Egypt’s pyramids, the Ice Palace of Justice rose against the verbose slopes of Mount Christchurch, pennants shivering, spires skewering black clouds. JUSTICE IS SERVED, the mountain said.
There was no storm here, only a mournful wind bearing the smoky odor of scopas suit insulation. Everywhere he glanced, from the bellied shop window to the limits of his light and beyond, the suits covered the glacial tongue like cocoons abandoned by some huge and over-propagated species of moth. He wanted to have some really profound response to the situation but could not manage it. So, he thought, this is it: no more people, not a one, no admitteds, no unadmitteds, nobody. My, my.
But then, growling mechanically, a Sno-Cat emerged from the gloom, stopping before the Mad Tea Party. An old woman got out, one arm bowed around her scopas suit helmet, the other gripping a cane made of ice. She scuttled forward.
‘Hello, George.’
‘Mrs Covington?’
‘This foolish glacier is almost as cold as your monument works.’ Bands of snow flashed through Nadine’s gray hair.
‘It’s good to see you again, ma’am.’ Despite the cold, the waves of well-being managed to reach him. ‘I was certain your little sailboat would be swamped.’
‘The documents barge picked me up.’
‘You saw the trial?’
‘I caught your part. Don’t worry, George, nothing you could have said would have changed the verdict . . . So, tell me, did Leonardo’s painting predict the future?’
‘I saw my daughter again.’ He fixed on the dark effluvium coming from the Cat’s tailpipe. ‘But it wasn’t her – it just seemed like her. You shouldn’t have raised my hopes.’
‘You raised your hopes.’
‘I went to that marble city like you said I should, and I found Professor Carter, and he made me fertile, and it didn’t matter.’
‘That’s the way things go in these post-exchange environments. Remember the good old days, when you wrote those epitaphs for me in Massachusetts? “She was better than she knew,” remember? “He never found out what he was doing here,” right?’ She pointed her ice cane toward the Cat. ‘It’s warm in the cab, and we have work to do.’
They drove past a dozen deserted ice limbos and ten thous
and bereft scopas suits. Once the Cat was atop the glacial tongue, Nadine headed for the eastern face of the nunatak and drove up the slope. Five ice-sealed corpses swung on their living gibbets.
The Cat stopped before Brat Tarmac’s remains. Drops of frozen blood hung from his bullet wounds like tears leaving blind eyes. George climbed to the roof, a hacksaw wrapped tightly in his glove. He peeled off the belt that held the general’s man-portable thermonuclear device, buckled it around his own waist. He went to work on the cable. The grinning blade groaned and shrieked. Brat tumbled to the roof. George laid him out carefully, as he had seen them do with the deceased at the Montefiore Funeral Home.
Nadine drove to the next tree. Overwhite’s beard was a fretwork of icicles and frost. George sawed him down.
Then Randstable. Sparrow. Wengernook, who looked nervous even in death.
After stacking the heavy, rigid bodies in the back of the Cat, he returned to Sparrow’s tree. Had his eyes tricked him? No, there it was, a little Bible, frozen solid. He picked it up.
Latitude: 79 degrees 38 minutes south.
Longitude: 169 degrees 15 minutes east.
Pushing up from the ice was a stone reminiscent of the megalith George had inspected at the Snape’s Hill Burial Grounds. On this spot, only eleven miles from supplies, Robert Falcon Scott had perished after failing to become the first human to reach the South Pole.
The inscribed monument left George with the impression that Scott felt worse about being bettered by a Norwegian than he did about starving to death.
‘Of course, he might just as easily have been born the Norwegian and Amundsen the Britisher,’ said Nadine, ‘in which case Scott would have been glad that Amundsen won.’
‘Not if Scott was Norwegian, no.’
‘Why?’
‘Because then a Britisher would have won.’
‘I don’t understand.’
A pick swayed from the rear door of the Cat. George assaulted the Ross Ice Shelf. Sub-zero winds bore away the sound of metal striking ice; white sparks shot into the air. Gradually the pit expanded until it was large enough to admit all five bodies. With Nadine’s help he lowered his friends into the darkness. ‘Do you hate them?’ he asked.
‘I hate their bad ideas,’ she replied.
‘We should say a few words.’
‘Go ahead.’
For ten minutes George struggled with the frozen Bible. Trying to open it was like trying to rip granite. At last he made a fissure slightly beyond the middle – on Ecclesiastes, a set of existential essays that had been included in the Bible by mistake. It was a favorite with Unitarians. Poor Reverend Sparrow would no doubt have preferred something more tumultuous – Ezekiel, Zephaniah, the Revelation – but this would have to do.
‘Wisdom is better than strength: nevertheless the poor man’s wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard,’ George read. ‘Wisdom is better than weapons of war: but one sinner destroyeth much good,’ he continued. ‘Dead flies cause the ointment of the perfumer to send forth a stinking savour: so doth a little folly outweigh wisdom and honor,’ he concluded.
‘That was very nice,’ said Nadine.
The tomb inscriber climbed into the grave, unzipped Reverend Sparrow’s suit, and placed the splayed book against his heart.
Once George was back on the surface, they filled in the hole with ice and snow, Nadine all the while reminiscing aloud about her husband Nathaniel, each nugget of memory receiving detailed review, Nathaniel Covington the poet, Nathaniel Covington the great lover.
From the Cat’s tool box the old woman procured a hammer and a chisel. It took George an hour to wipe the Scott Monument clean. Nadine held the lantern steady as he laid down his guidelines with chalk. Tongue pressed firmly against his mustache, he began to ply his trade.
The hammer pounded. The chisel danced.
He did a fine, professional job – Nadine said so. The characters all had serifs.
IN LOVING MEMORY
OF
PEOPLE
4,500,000 BC–AD 1995
THEY WERE BETTER THAN THEY KNEW
THEY NEVER FOUND OUT
WHAT THEY WERE DOING HERE
Later, as the old woman lay propped against a hummock, her voice fading, her flesh expiring, George asked, ‘Why did you entrap me?’
Nadine attempted to lever herself to her feet using her ice cane, thought better of the idea, settled back against the hummock. ‘If they hadn’t sent me to Wildgrove,’ she said softly, ‘they would have sent someone else. When I saw what name the McMurdo framers had picked, I volunteered.’ Mischief glinted in her eyes. ‘I wanted to see you as you were before the war. I had to meet you, George, touch you. And Holly.’ She moved her shriveled head toward him. ‘Look at me. Do you see it? My face, your face, my face . . .’
He did.
The old woman’s smile was a triumph of determination over materials. Missing teeth, weak face muscles, but still she beamed.
‘You’re my granddaughter, aren’t you?’ he said.
They fell into each other’s arms.
‘Holly was your mother,’ he said.
‘The only tolerable moments of my unadmittance came when I watched her at nursery school. I wish I’d gotten to baby-sit for her.’
‘And your father was . . . ?’
‘John Frostig’s youngest son.’
‘Rickie?’
‘Nickie.’
‘The hamster killer?’
‘He would have grown up.’
‘Just like Holly.’
‘You would have been proud of her, Grandfather.’
‘She always said she wanted to be an artist.’
‘She became a teacher. To the first graders she was Socrates and Mother Goose combined. There’s no way she could ever see all the good she did – more good than if she’d become an artist. She was better than she knew.’
‘I wonder if she ever got to see the Big Dipper.’
Nadine kissed his ragged beard. ‘I’m sure she would have.’
‘I’ll bet you’re a hell of a baby-sitter,’ he said.
‘A world beater.’
‘First grade?’ he said. ‘A worthy profession, don’t you think? Honorable. Challenging. Yes, that’s perfect. First grade . . . If you were to have an epitaph on your monument, what would it be?’
She coughed. ‘I don’t want an epitaph, or a monument either. We did not get in. Don’t pretend that we did.’
‘All right.’
They held hands, scopas glove pressed against scopas glove. Her rough and lovely cheek melted beneath his lips like butter. He saw her suit deflate slightly, felt tissues and bones leaving her glove. He stood up.
The MARCH Hare’s little missile clung parasitically to George’s waist. He unstrapped it. How did such things work? It needed a code – is that what the deputy prosecutor had said? – and a brass key.
Seizing the buckle, he whipped the belt around as if it were a sling. The bomb whistled. It struck the Scott Monument squarely. A stabilizer broke off, twirled away.
Again he smashed the weapon, and again he smashed it, and again – smashed it in the names of Morning Valcourt and Justine Paxton, smashed it while thinking of the nonexistent first-graders Holly had never taught – until the thing was nothing but springs, detonators, Styrofoam chunks, uranium-238 fragments, and deuterium core pieces strewn across the grave site, not much of a plowshare, but not much of a man-portable thermonuclear device either.
George looked at his granddaughter’s empty suit. He thought of Job. Satan lacked imagination. To crack a man’s faith, one need not resort to burning his flesh, ruining his finances, or any such obvious afflictions. One need only take a man’s species away from him.
There was laughter in Antarctica. Every ice crystal mocked him. The great crevasse of the Ross Ice Shelf spread through his mind. His granddaughter had wanted no monument. Very well, he thought, then I don’t want one either. The cold was like a disease. His bowels seemed frozen.
There was frost on his bones, sleet in his lungs. He looked up. The sky was dark – dark as unadmitted blood, dark as the crevasse that was his destination – and then, as his eyes adjusted, he saw stars, not the Big Dipper but the crisp hot lights that men had named the Southern Cross.
He got in the Cat, turned on the engine, and started across the young, disarmed planet.
EPILOGUE
Salon-de-Provence, France, 1554
‘Is that all?’ Jacob asked.
‘What do you mean, “Is that all”?’ said Nostradamus. ‘How could there be more?’
The prophet opened the picture-cannon and blew on the oil lamp. As the tall flame leaned away from the lens, the projected crevasse became blurry and pale. The flame flew into the ether, and with it went the Ross Ice Shelf.
‘I thought there might be more,’ said the boy.
He marched across the room, pulled back the drapes.
‘You don’t live here,’ said Nostradamus.
‘Sorry, Monsieur.’
Sunshine pulsed through the window. The boy closed his eyes and felt the rays hitting his lids, turning the world orange-red.
The prophet slammed his palm against the sash, opened the window. They stood together, man and boy, devouring the air, surprisingly hot for so early in the morning. Strings of sweat sparkled on their faces. Finches hopped amid the cherry trees.
‘Why did George drive into the crevasse?’ asked Jacob.
‘Why do you think?’
‘I suppose he was getting too cold. Is this truly the way the world will end?’
‘I wouldn’t be surprised.’
‘Then I’m glad I shall be dead first.’
A scream came through the floor. Jacob flinched.
‘Her pain will pass,’ said Nostradamus, squeezing the boy’s arm.