Toward the End of Time

by John Updike

  I awake each night around four and after urinating in the bathroom have trouble sliding back into sleep. Some vague wedge of dread jams the process. Gloria, unlike Deirdre, snores, not loudly, usually, but with enough variety of pauses and syncopation to keep me listening. The bed seems a slant surface from which I might fall into an abyss. That acrophobic dream about leaving Boston had widened a crack in me. I used to get back into sleep by trying to remember the dreams I was having, but my dreams these days are repellent shambles of half-forgotten faces contorted by the stress of old predicaments—unwanted pregnancies, amorous alliances swelling out of control, professional reversals in the antiseptic offices on State Street, children’s clinging illnesses, the wounds and rebuffs they would bring home from school in tears, houses in Coverdale whose rugs and wallpaper are soaked in the acid humidity of domestic boredom and discontent, all shot through with a numbed but breathing version of the terror I felt in the basement with Milly’s unbuilt dollhouse. Dreaming, I am unhappy, and yet in morning light I resist waking, lying in bed, collapsing into another doze, long after Gloria’s footsteps have begun to make the house’s well-built endoskeleton of joists and studs and beams tremble with her energy.

  Walking down to the mailbox to pick up the Globe, I observe how freshly green leaves displace the forsythia’s confetti of yellow petals, and squint up at the new object that has appeared in our heavens. Like the halo of iridescence that sometimes appears among cirrus clouds, it needs noticing, its very vastness, out of all earthly scale, being a kind of concealment. It is at least twenty times wider than the moon that Newtonian mechanics has appointed to be Earth’s companion, and thrice again that than the abandoned honeycomb men placed in orbit before the cataclysmic war. This new moon, visible at night as a faintly luminous lariat slowly moving across the paralyzed sprinkle of stars, by daytime is imprinted on oxygen’s overarching blue like the trace of a cocktail glass, a sometimes silvery ring of pallor. It may have existed—theories run—in prehistory; it may have hovered over the dinosaur herds, the first amphibians, the dead continents before the seas evolved life-forms more complex than algae. It is a spaceship, that much is clear, from somewhere either in our galaxy or even from another galaxy, for its appearance in our sky indicates that, unless against long astronomical odds its origin is but a few light-years away, its makers and steerers have with an unthinkable technology cut through the physical knot of space-time—have found a way to travel from point to point by the power of the mind. That mind was an alien element in the material cosmos has long been intuitively recognized, but scientists only toward the end of the last millennium formulated its primal place among the forces of creation. The particles smaller than a quark, it was reluctantly proclaimed, are purely mathematical, that is to say, mental. Further, the cosmos is exquisitely constituted in all its chemical and atomic laws to provide enough duration and stability for the evolution of intelligent life. Until such intelligence exists, the universe in only the most preliminary sense exists, somewhat as a play or script exists in textual form as a precondition of its being acted, its sets knocked together, and its lighting projected in three dimensions.

  It has been abundantly shown by computer simulation that a universe less than fifteen billion years old and less than fifteen billion light-years across, containing fewer than a billion billion (1018) stars, would have been too small to produce carbon-based life. We—and algae and earthworms and angelfish—needed all those exploding supernovae to make the heavy elements; we needed all the dark matter to slow the pace of gravity so life could emerge. In a universe wherein the gravitational fine-structure constant would be 10-30 instead of, as it is, 10-40, everything would be 105 times smaller and 1010 times denser; our sun would be two kilometers across and burn with a hot blue light for a life of a single year. A planet equivalent to Earth would orbit this star once every twenty days and would rotate once every second, giving it two million days a year. But in the crowded, stronger-gravitied universe, stars would be tearing dark matter away from one another, and the planetary life-forms that might evolve—no bigger than bacteria in any case—would quickly perish. Sufficiently benign conditions require an initial density parameter set with an accuracy of one part in 1060. These are the odds against mind’s being a blind side-product of material forces: one in 1,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000, 000,000,000,000.

  And yet I am insufficiently reassured.

  The slender torus that floats beyond the clouds but lower than the moon shows that somewhere in the universe mind has triumphed over matter, instead of antagonistically coexisting with it as on our planet. But the minds, or giant mind, behind this perfectly circular intrusion into our skies do not, or does not, communicate. Inspection with telescopes, where such instruments have survived the war, discovers no surface features, except for areas of slightly higher smoothness that may be viewing ports. The pale ring hangs up there like a dead man’s open eye. Are we being studied as if by an ideally non-interactive zoologist suspended in a scent-proof cage above whooping, head-scratching tribes of chimpanzees? Or is it that there can be no more language between above and below than between a man and an underground nest of ants? Yet myrmecologists do communicate, in a fashion, with ant colonies, as does a small cruel boy who pokes a stick into one. We gaze upward at the staring ring and wait for the stick in our nest, the thrust of the Word beyond our poor words. It does not come. Only psychotics and publicity-seeking liars ever get abducted, and no detectable rays, from radio to gamma, emanate from the hovering spacecraft. Perhaps its projection here from the vastness of elsewhere consumed all its energy; perhaps it has simply nothing to say, having passed beyond the word-generating friction of ego-resistant space-time.

  So we go about our low business within our shattered civilization as if the enormous low-lustre torus were not there. Many maintain it is not there. Today it seemed to me fainter, more nearly melted into the blue, as if slowly giving up its inscrutable mission. Mass illusions are common throughout history, sometimes manifesting themselves in elaborate consensual detail. Yet my belief remains that the object— seven hundred kilometers in diameter by the best estimates—is real, though composed of a substance impalpable on Earth.

  The dread underlying my dreams may be surfacing in reality. There have been more sounds and signs of activity in the woods, now that half the trees are in fresh leaf, making a spotty curtain of green. Yesterday I heard hoots and thrashing sounds in the direction of the railroad tracks, and then a regular hammering too loud to be a metallobioform. I walked through the old hemlock planting, past the thick clump of snowdrops, its heavy-headed ground-breaking flowers melted away like their namesakes, with only a tiny hard green nub left as evidence. Everywhere on the forest floor the carpet of dead leaves is pierced by an oval, shiny, not quite symmetrical leaf—Massachusetts mayflower, I think, also called “false lily-of-the-valley.” And goutweed is springing up, and the miniature red leaf of burgeoning poison ivy. Out of sight of the house, wilderness begins. Dead branches are strewn underfoot; fallen dead trees lean at a slant on the still-living. Some sunken brush piles date from the reign of the previous owner, when he and his sons were young. Others, less settled and covered with needles and leaves, arose in my earlier, more vigorous days here. Ragged, tufted, littered granite escarpments divide the woods here into high and low land; trespassers seeking a way to the beach have worn a wandering path roughly parallel to the creek that creeps, trickling and twinkling, through the marsh that bounds our land. The escarpments make a series of bowls in which interlopers, usually youngsters, feel sheltered and hidden enough to suck on their cigarettes and six-packs, purchased a few steps away, across the tracks where the commuter trains hurtle. The voices and clatter arose from a bowl guarded from above by the spiky trunk of a long-toppled pine, and out of the sight of the tracks. I spied them from above—three young men with dark hair and what seemed heavy torsos clad only in thin white T-shirts, though the May air is cool, and promises rai
n.

  They looked up startled—the human face, a flashing signal in our eyes, even in the side of our vision, as vivid as a deer tail—when I descended, with an unavoidable snapping of dead wood. I felt naked without a gun, though I had no reason to suppose that they had guns.

  “Can I help you?” I asked—the standard proprietorial opener. I could feel my heart pumping, my blood rising in counter-aggressive reflex.

  The sarcasm escaped them. They looked at me mutely. They were not Americans of direct African descent but distinctly dusky. Portuguese and Spanish blood had in some nocturnal tropical byway swerved to add a Negro tinge to olive skin. Distrustful brown faces, with black eyes as lustrous and vulnerable and angry as Deirdre’s or the gelatinous orb that gazed back at me from the gliding train window last winter.

  I restated my question: “Are you aware that this is private property?” They had begun to build something, with no tools other than one rusty hammer, a coffee can full of nails, and a hacksaw pitifully ill-suited to cutting wood. It was hard to guess, from the few branches they had aligned and insecurely fastened together, what kind of structure was intended, here on a slightly raised knoll of land amid the creased granite boulders.

  “Who say?” one—the tallest—asked in turn.

  “I fear that I say,” I said. “These eleven acres are mine. If you doubt me, let’s go together and call the police.” Our little local downtown, with a blue-sided public telephone beside the convenience store, was not many steps away, across the railroad tracks. Haskells Crossing, our village is called; every crossing, on the B & M line between Gloucester and Boston, was named in the old days, and some of the names stuck, though the old Haskell estate has long been broken up into two-acre house lots. These boys had followed the tracks north, to a better life.

  Another of them snickered, but was enough uncertain of the decorum of the encounter to avert his face, so that he directed at the leafing forest floor his mumbly reply: “Yeah you do that. You go find them, mister. They just love to come runnin’, those police do.”

  The older, bigger one felt sufficiently on firm ground to offer a proposal. He spoke carefully. “We just want to make a little place here in case it rains.”

  “A little cozy place,” the other speaker said. He was trying, I gauged, to match my initial tone of sarcasm. He was the nimble-witted lawyer of the group.

  I was feeling ownership of this spot sliding out from under me. I looked at the third boy, the darkest and most slender; he seemed not much older than Kevin, and not as tall. “There is nothing cozy about this place,” I stated firmly to him. “From this time of year on, there are tons of insects. There is poison ivy and scratchy briars. At night there are bats.” My sense of it was they were city boys, out of Salem or Lynn but not all the way from Boston. “A few years ago,” I told them, “there were rabid raccoons; one bite would kill you.” Saying all this to the youngest gave me the courage to face the biggest and say in a voice artificially level, “I suggest you get off my land now.” My hand at my side did itch for a gun, even that borrowed .22 with which I had beheaded the chickadee fifty years ago.

  He said, expressionlessly, a surprising thing in reply: “Phil say you pay him rent.”

  “Phil? You know Phil?” I was as relieved as if Phil were a dear friend, to have a connection established between these youths and the adult world.

  The little lawyer, as if not wanting his client to speak for himself, interposed, “My older sister, she know Deirdre. She told her the land all empty.”

  “It is not empty,” I said. “I own it.” I shifted my ground, perhaps disastrously. “There’s lots of empty land, since the war.” I was conceding an abstract squatters’ rights, to entice them to go elsewhere.

  “Less lately,” the leader told me, with his deadpan facticity. His lips seemed stung and numbed by the words he was forced to utter. “Less now than there used to be. People movin’ around.”

  The youngest one, whom I had appealed to as an image of my touching, grateful grandson, with a sudden wide wave of one thin and limber arm gave a pronouncement almost poetic: “All these trees and dead rocks, they’re not doin’ anybody any good.”

  “They’re doing me good,” I told him in a grandpaternal tone. “Me and my wife. They’re part of our living space.”

  My tone, or this curious term, made the lawyer of the group snicker again, and then as if to cover up this lapse he pleaded, his widening eyes focused on my face and daring me to look away, “We was thinkin’ just a little watchin’ post for the summer. Cold weather come, nobody can use it, promise.”

  “Watching post? What would you watch?” This was my instinctive reply, but a wrong one. I should have instantly rebuffed the seasonal inroad. I was rusty at haggling.

  The older one smiled, or at least his blunt, numb appraisal of me and my potential as an obstacle softened. “A lot of stuff goin’ on” was his answer.

  “He means pedestrian traffic,” the lawyer said. “You may not know it, man, but tons of people use this path as a way to the water. We’d be doin’ you a favor. We’d be keepin’ people from gettin’ up to your house.”

  “All these favors for free?” I asked—another mistake, a sarcasm taken as a concession.

  “You said it,” the spokesman eagerly agreed, his eyes staying fixed on my face in a kind of shining impudence. “No charge, absolute protection. We’ll be makin’ the place more tidy, too. Cleanin’ up all this crap.”

  It was an area which I visited, as my physical activities became more restricted, no more than once or twice a year. When we first moved here, Gloria and I walked to the beach every week and roamed the woods stacking brush and planning bonfires. No more: this site was mine only by law. A litter of beer cans and plastic soda bottles had built up.

  The leader reached down and picked up the hammer. In his plump olive fist it became a weapon. He said to me stolidly, “You ask Deirdre and Phil.”

  “No,” I said, sounding prim and excited even in my own ears. “I will speak to my wife about this. And the police.”

  “Uh-huh.” “Sure.” “You go do that, mister.” All had spoken, to reinforce one another; the three boys drifted closer together to make a dense unit that, by some force of anti-gravity, propelled me, my face hot with anger and fear, back up the hill. As I climbed the slope, which was slippery with dead needles, my heart labored and raced. Around me in the fresh leaves raindrops began to tick. Rain would chase the interlopers away, was my cowardly consolation.

  But I did not, yesterday, describe the incident to Gloria. I did not want her to know more about Deirdre than she had already guessed. The house was healing. Even the useless old coffee-maker that had been stolen had reappeared in a lower kitchen cabinet, tucked behind the extra soup bowls. I did ask her, though, if she would like to borrow the shotgun back from the Pientas. I told her I had seen deer scat in the woods.

  Now in the suburban streets where some kind of order is still maintained, and even in the yards of those houses which are abandoned and boarded up or else burned-out shells, the vibrant magenta of crabapple outshouts the milder pink of flowering cherry, the dusky tint of redbud, and the diffident, sideways-drifting clouds of floating dogwood petals. The stunted old apple to the right of the driveway, much topped to keep it from intruding on the view, puts forth a scattered show of thin-skinned white tinged with pink, like an English child’s complexion. The lilac racemes, once tiny dry cones the color of dead grapeskins, are turning large and soft and pale. Nearer to the house, the fattening azalea buds are bright as candy hearts.

  However luxuriantly the crabapples down in the village are blooming, there is one in our side yard, toward the Kellys’, that is half dead. Gloria, in a dictatorial whirl restoring the order that I had let, in her absence, slide, asked me to cut it down. “Give it a chance,” I pleaded.

  “It’s had its chance,” she said. “Do it, or I’ll call the tree service and they’ll charge three hundred welders and another three hundred to feed it
into the chipper. You’re always complaining about money, here’s your chance to save some.”

  “Suppose I cut my own hand off.”

  “You won’t,” she said, in a tone of stern dissatisfaction.

  Reluctantly I descended into the dank and spidery basement, sharpened the chain saw link by link with a dull round file, and adjusted its tension with a wrench and screwdriver. It has taken me years to get the trick of this adjustment; the clamp on the blade is out of sight, so one must feel one’s way, as with sex or (I imagine) a root-canal job.

  Quick-moving spring clouds shuffled sunlight in and out of the cool breeze off the sea. Being half dead meant that the tree in its other half was alive, with a pathetic dutiful effort of sap and cell division pushing a scattering of buds toward the cloudy, gusty sky, even as the lower branches snapped off like a mummy’s fingers. As the saw—voracious and smooth-cutting in its first minutes, its bite juicy with fresh bar-oil— sliced off the dry lower limbs, I came to higher, smaller branches still moist, with green cambium, and I called Gloria over before I proceeded. She looked where I showed her the round wounds oozing water, and sighed: “Ben, you never pay attention, but every year we go through this. Some boy with the yard service cuts out the dead wood and we decide to let the rest go and see if the tree will thrive. But it doesn’t. It doesn’t thrive. Some bug is at it. Or it just isn’t happy in this spot; it’s never been happy. Too much salty wind, or the ledge is too close under the soil, or something. Cut it down. Now is the time. We’ll find something else that will be happier. Probably an evergreen—a Douglas fir or a blue spruce.” Seeing me still hesitate, with an expression on my face that must have been pained, she said, with one of the few smiles she has granted me since her return “Sweetie, you’re overidentifying. You can’t be sentimental if you’re going to maintain a property. Here’s your choice: let everything go to wrack and ruin so the value of the place drops to next to nothing, or else put this very unhappy crabapple out of its misery.”