Toward the End of Time

by John Updike

  The deer are supposed to scent humans in the hair and flee in repugnance and terror. Another stratagem her Garden Club fellow-members urged upon Gloria was to have me urinate at critical spots on the lawn. It had to be male urine, a human buck’s scent. I obliged a little, by the euonymus hedge and near the birdbath, but the project was too undignified to be carried out systematically, in the winter cold. And the deer seemed unimpressed, or else after an initial repugnance she accustomed herself to the hostile tang in the air.

  The young fill a house with the smell of heavy late-morning sleep, and of nightsweats of fear as they confront life in all its branching possibility and need for decision. Menstrual fluid, epidermal oils, semen—all such effluvia in overflowing supply.

  If my wife were to die, I used to think that I would look up women from my past, residues of passionate affairs thirty years ago, but lately I have begun to think I would seek out only young whores, with tight lower bodies and long, exercise-hardened limbs, and put the problem of my erratic erections to them like a tricky tax matter laid before a well-paid accountant on a clean, bed-sized desk.

  Two days after Christmas, having been out looking for an excuse to fire Charlie’s last shell, I came into the living room still holding the gun. Roger and Marcia and Carolyn and Felix, who had been reading and burning my laboriously split logs, all pretended to scramble for cover behind the furniture, shouting, “We’re leaving, Pop! We’ll go!” They call me “Pop,” saving the more affectionate “Dad” for my former rival.

  When they did actually head south, two days before New Year’s Day, Roger offered me his thoughtful opinion that the week of constant woodsmoke from the chimney was what had kept the deer away. They would be back, he thought. He is the closest, academically, to their father, who has remarried and moved to Mexico, where the economy is sounder than in our fragmented, warhead-pocked States. Roger teaches cycles and is accustomed to making predictions.

  I woke in the middle of one of the first nights of the New Year—2020, a jeering staring number that once denoted perfect eyesight—stricken by dread: my professional usefulness over, my wife more of a disciplinarian than a comfort, my body a swamp in whose simmering depths a fatal infirmity must be brewing.

  And worse and somehow larger than any of these major concerns loomed my bad playing of a three-no-trump hand in a friendly game of bridge that evening with Grace and Stanley Wren. I allowed Grace to pull my stopper king of clubs from the board, and when I yielded the lead on a low heart trick she ran the clubs and set me; all I would have had to do, I saw clearly now, to hold on to the high club was to draw out the ace of diamonds, avoiding the unfortunate hearts. Bridge always churns me up with the recognition of my intellectual limits: for this reason I generally avoid playing, just as, years ago at U. Mass., repeatedly outplayed by nimble-headed computer nerds from Boston’s western suburbs, I gave up chess, which I had loved as a child back in Hammond Falls, playing opponents even more childish on 2 board set up on the oval rug braided of rags beside the cast-iron wood stove that heated the back end of the house. I liked all those areas—chess, science fiction, movies, comic strips— where my father in his grimy workclothes was a stranger.

  And always this nagging elderly need to urinate, besieging my groin as I lie trying to coax myself back into the sickly-sweet therapy of dreams. Dreams: there sex still revolves with surprising force, turning a phantom woman into a hairy moist center of desire hot as a star, and there excrement overflows the bowl like a fetid volcano, or I find myself, naked, obliged to defecate at a dinner party, in close proximity to the bejewelled hostess as I strive to maintain a polite conversation and she to ignore my rumbling, spurting bowels. Humiliated and self-disgusted, I awake, and from the bathroom window see that something has triggered the burglar floodlight to come on on the side of the house toward the sea—the back side, as I think of it.

  The light’s alarmist burning, spreading into the bedroom, had given me the false impression of approaching dawn. It really was still in the middle of the night. It had snowed some inches, and the fresh powder, I observed, was marked by several uneven lines of medium-size tracks—deer tracks.

  The creature’s habit is to set one foot behind the other to make almost a straight line of indentations, so that I am reminded of that little sharp-toothed wheel from my grandmother’s sewing box, with which she would trace a chain of perforations onto paper dress patterns. What wistful, twisting canker of hunger had driven the deer back to us? She had bestirred herself from the tent-shaped shelter of some great hemlock in a remote woods. Fresh snow seemed to drive the animal to risk proximity to the gun, the shouts, the golf balls. The tracks led to the front of the house, where there was nothing green save straggling rhododendrons, their long leaves rolled by the cold into dry cigar shapes, and pachysandra buried beneath a foot of icy white, and those leucothoë plantings that have never, I tell my wife, looked like anything but jungle weeds.

  God, how suddenly savage and ruthless Grace Wren seemed, running those clubs on me, cashing in even the five and the two for tricks! As if no friendship existed between us at all, as if we had never danced and flirted together, my lust coating us both in sweat. She had had a good pert figure before her bosom expanded and sank. She has stopped dyeing her hair, and the wiry, salt-and-pepper look is not unattractive. How stupid and vulnerable I was, without my stopper king! Perhaps this was my dream’s day-remnant—my humiliation as we sat elbow to elbow at the card table turned into a helpless outpour of foul-smelling excrement. I had played shittily. Oh, horrible! I tossed and turned beside my oblivious wife, feeling those deer tracks outside as a love letter I could not answer and replaying the bridge hand until, trying to remember if the queen of spades was in my hand or the dummy, I slipped from the great magician’s agitated sleeve into the false-bottomed box of sleep.

  A week ago, Henry, the younger of my wife’s sons, and his local girlfriend—an amazingly skinny, pale, supple redhead whose father runs a TV-and-VCR repair shop in Swamp-scott—and I ran down to pick up milk and orange juice and a bag of so-called Smart Food, popcorn flavored with cheddar cheese. Coming back up the hill, the Subaru, bought new last April, gripped the slick and sluggish road surface admirably, and I felt youthful, reliving teenage moments propelling the boatlike old family Plymouth through a Berkshire blizzard, back from a date that had steamed the car windows. My wife’s son, in a flourish of automotive showing-off, likes to back a car into our narrow two-car port, fashioned by the son of the previous owner from the wooden shell of an old greenhouse. For some reason, maybe to impress the skinny redhead, I thought I should do the same. Henry jumped out, in the exuberance and cockiness of youth, to help guide me. Distracted by his gesticulations, and driving in a bulky coat and clumsy boots, with the windows obscured by vapor, I rubbed the back of the Subaru against a white wooden inner wall of the old greenhouse. It was a subtle sensation but I knew disaster when I felt it.

  That side of the car was in shadow, and my stepson kept reassuring me, “It’s nothing, Pop, I don’t think it will even show,” but in the morning, with the sky pure blue and its light reflecting from the drifts of fresh snow as in a hall of mirrors, the damage was clear and extensive. Gloria was furious—as furious at me as she had been at the deer. Again, a helpless possession of hers, an ornament to her existence, had been chewed by a predator. “It’ll cost a fortune,” she told me, with diamond-hard satisfaction. “A thousand welders minimum.”

  She had won a point in our battle to the death. I was incompetent, senile. I couldn’t argue. And yet I had been somehow jostled into this abysmal mishap by the frisky young people who had accompanied me, whereas I could only blame myself for that badly played bridge hand.

  My wife and I know dozens of women and a number of men who seem content to devote hours of each day to the practice and perfection of their bridge. What is wrong with me, who resents the energy spent in development of a skill whose end product is a scribbled bridge pad, a set of scores fading into the void
? What doesn’t fade into the void? The rest of their lives these bridge players devote to the cultivation of their roses, the trimming of their hedges, the feeding of their faces, the tidying of their homes, the maintenance of contact with their children and grandchildren and socioeconomically identical acquaintances, the travelling to Florida and to Maine in the suitable seasons—all activities that leave no trace. What is wrong with me, that I want to leave a trace, by scribbling these disjunct and jumpy notes concerning my idle existence? Spoiling paper—no worse and no better than scribbling on a bridge pad.

  There is, among the indeterminacies, a universe in which, undeflected by my stepson’s overstimulating presence, I opted to drive the Subaru straight into the carport without a scratch or a dent. What would that universe be like? It would be one in which Gloria would have one less weapon, one less I-told-you-so, to wield against me. It would be like the one I am in, only with some other vexation crowding to the forefront of my brain—the tiny, conscious part, which floats on a primeval sea of hunger, sex, and semi-automatic bodily functions.

  I read last night about Neandert(h)al man. He has a history of sorts, it turns out. He was an evolutionary offshoot of slender Homo erectus, who migrated from Africa into Europe a million years ago or less. Though glaciers advanced and retreated, Europe was generally cold. Neanderthal (let’s keep the old-fashioned, pleasantly incorrect “h”) men developed the short, thick, conservative bodies of Arctic dwellers today. They were so strong that their muscles, knitted to our bones, would snap them. Their own bones are often found broken, perhaps in battle with giant elk, bison, and those long-horned extinct oxen called auroch (plural). Though the Neanderthals’ relics show some progress in flint-working, they evidently never got the idea of projectiles—no slings and arrows for them. They had to grapple with their prey close up, and the patterns of their broken bones correspond most closely to, of all contemporary professional groups, rodeo riders.

  Pre-Neanderthal men toppled hundreds of animals and thirty human colleagues into a cave in Spain three hundred thousand years ago; the first true Neanderthals date from seventy thousand years later. Fifty thousand years later still, glaciers so heavily descended upon Europe that the continent, for the next fifty thousand years, was empty, as far as the fossil record shows, of human beings. Think of it! Ten times the span of recorded human history pass, and men are squeezed from the European record of stones and bones. But evolution was not sleeping. When the glaciers retreated, the Neanderthal skeletons were more massive, and the hundred-thousand-year heyday of their subspecies began. They made fires. They buried their dead with flowers. They fabricated flint knives and dug postholes for wooden dwellings, but left no tools for stitching; they must have worn their animal hides untailored. They had big noses and receding chins and foreheads. Their skulls include the hyoid bone that indicates a voice box; cooperative hunting and the passing on of even crude practical skills demand some level of communication. The Neanderthal people left no art, unless one counts a polished tooth from a baby mammoth, possibly used as a shaman’s amulet. Shattered bones and skulls suggest that they practiced cannibalism.

  They co-existed for ten thousand years with Cro-Magnon men, men anatomically like us, who forty thousand years ago came into Europe from the Middle East with projectiles, sewing needles, improved hearths and shelters, and art. Neanderthal man slowly vanished; his last remains are found in southern Spain, a few jawbones and femurs and tools going back to about thirty thousand years before Christ. It never occurred to these harried, dwindling primitives to cross the Strait of Gibraltar into warmer Africa. They were a conservative, dull-witted, rather hapless crew, never very numerous—a few thousand at a time, roaming around in packs of about thirty. There is a slight slenderness to the later fossils that some paleoanthropologists take as evidence of interbreeding with Homo sapiens. Fat chance, say other paleoanthropologists; it was ever nothing but war, mutual abhorrence, and murder between the races. Most Neanderthal men died before they were half my present age. Some day I will be as forgotten, as dissolved back into the compacted silt, as your typical grunting, lusting, hungry, broken-boned Neanderthal man. I simply cannot believe it! And that is certainly stupid of me.

  I took the train to Boston yesterday, to conduct a little business at the old stand. The Lynn marshes were vast and virginal from the train windows—a brilliant arctic vista. In Boston the snow had already been translated to a dun-colored mush and an inhospitable shortage of parking space, even in the lots. My former partners at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise were cordial, but harried—competition is everywhere, stiffer than it used to be, and young blood is bubbling up through the firm, stressing the sclerotic arteries. The relaxed, discreet air that Boston money used to affect—in pointed contrast with noisy, obnoxious New York money—no longer obtains. Post-war, the numbers are down and the heat is up. I got out none too soon. I made my pile when it was a relatively easy effort.

  A number of secretaries have been hired since I left; my presence kindled no spark of deference or potential engagement in their moist, clear, searching eyes. I was out of their food chain. I played the cordial antique fool, the only role open to me. My business—a sizable municipal-bond redemption for my faithful old client Mrs. Fessenden, and some finicking mutual-fund readjustments for my own portfolio—was too quickly done. After respectfully observing how my old office has been cut into four “workstations” by frosted-glass partitions (Ned Partridge, a meddlesome technology groupie whom I was always itching to get fired as office manager, could scarcely contain his triumph), I had little to do but walk up the hill to the Athenaeum, graze on the English newspapers, and then make my way across the hill to Cambridge Street and through Charles River Park— every sidewalk and street awkwardly narrowed by heaped snow—to North Station and rather ignominiously catch the four o’clock train home. Boston had little use for me now.

  Two images from my expedition stuck in my craw:

  In North Station, a young woman, bundled against the weather in a long parka and a checked muffler, accidentally turned her face toward mine as she blew a bubble of bubble gum. The primitive man within me prickled at this casual uncalled-for protrusion of insolent mock-nakedness, a roundness out of her mouth pinker and more blatant than an exposed breast or penis, there in the chilly damp gloom of the station, which is a much drearier, barer place since the renovations that substituted Fleet Center for Boston Garden. At the same time, twenty-five years ago, they raised the platform to be level with the floors of the cheesy new plastic-seated cars, a handicapped-sensitive improvement which denies normal passengers the old jaunty sensation of swinging down into Boston. And they enlarged and enclosed the waiting area where we all used to stand in the fresh air, which was bracing after a day of inhaling recycled gases within our sealed office buildings. To discourage permanent perching by the homeless, they took out many of the friendly wooden benches in the station itself, which has been robbed of all its old shops save a diminished version of the fruit stand. There is no place where you can buy a candy bar. A sickening smell of hot cheese wafts everywhere from a pizzeria that has been installed at the end where the cretins who attend sporting events in Fleet Center might be tempted to coat their guts with fat and gluten. In this place, for decades a daily station of my pilgrimage, the young woman unthinkingly showed me her pink bubble, and then wolfed it back, seething with bacteria, into her oral cavity.

  And, secondly, on the ride home, gliding past the marshes, which were dark now, making the window into a mirror, I saw my own gazing eye, in three-quarters view, unexpectedly close in the black glass, watery and round, like the watchful dark orb of a deer. A deer eye, fearful and alert— hostile or neutral, I couldn’t quite tell. We cannot think or feel with the brain of another creature but we can see its eyes, those sensitive organs which the brain protrudes. My reflected face loomed inches from mine, the skin a dirty metallic color, skimming along in mid-air, transparent to the industrial shapes and receding lit windows, like the visage of
a spy from outer space, an evilly staring alter ego. It gave me a start, and forestalled the nap I had scheduled for myself, the fifteen minutes of sleep that mark the end of a commuter’s day and fortify him or her for an evening at home.

  Another foot of snow has fallen on top of the two feet already on the ground. I waded out across the front lawn to take down the Christmas lights that we run up on the flagpole as our part of the annual pretense that God descended to Earth in a baby’s body. The neighbors expect it. I’ve been told that even ships at sea—the lonely-looking oil tankers that, like long cardboard silhouettes on a slow string, edge into Salem Harbor—appreciate it. But my wife, who has strict ideas on many topics, says that nobody with any taste keeps lights up after Twelfth Night. Her father never did. Twelfth Night came and went, and there was no thaw in sight, so I seized this even mildly sunny day, the sun a white blur in a high thin cloud cover.

  Walking through snow up to my crotch turned out to be an ordeal almost comical in its severity—worse even than those childhood memories we distrust in hindsight, of eye-high drifts and tunnels from the front porch. My yard, where I amble back and forth in the summer practicing chip shots and setting up croquet wickets in anticipation of a visit from my grandchildren, had become huge, an antarctic continent. Every step sucked at my entire leg with the force of gravity on another, much larger, planet. My boots quickly filled with snow—a chilly, sticky sensation that came back to me from sixty years ago. Extracting my leg from each socket was like pulling a giant tooth. I wondered if the deer was watching and could hear my grunts, my laughter at my physical plight. Her velvety white-rimmed ears would prick, her eyes would show no more emotion than my own bulging eyes in the flickering black window of the commuter train. Suppose my heart decided to flip shut—to knock off for an eternity-long coffee break—at this moment. Would the deer come and sniff curiously, would the smell of my hair still frighten her, would the universe branch and carry me intact into another portion of endless space? Are the funnel vortices of black holes the passageways whereby we enter the afterlife?