Toward the End of Time

by John Updike

  As I tried to explain to my protégés, an explanation for the puzzling fact—puzzling to physicists more than to ordinary men, who can imagine it no other way—that time’s arrow moves in only one direction is that the initial singularity, the universe at the moment of the Big Bang, was utterly or almost utterly smooth, with the consistency of an orange pop-side, whereas the terminal singularity toward which all the billions of galaxies may raggedly collapse will be less smooth, or downright rough, like butter brickle ice cream.

  It makes sense: all those blazing suns, red and swollen or white and shrunken or yellow like our moderate own, blue and new or black and collapsed, madly spinning neutron stars or else all-swallowing black holes denser yet, not to mention planets and cinderlike planetoids and picturesque clouds of glowing gas and dark matter hypothetical or real and titanic streaming soups of neutrinos, could scarcely be expected to converge exactly upon a singularity smaller, by many orders of magnitude, than a pinhead. The Weyl curvature, in other words, was very very very near zero at the Big Bang, but will be much larger at the Big Crunch. But, I ignorantly wonder, how does time’s arrow know this, in our trifling immediate vicinity? What keeps it from spinning about like the arrow of a compass, jumping broken cups back on the table intact and restoring me, if not to a childhood self, to the suburban buck I was when still married to Perdita. On one busy summer day, as things worked out on everybody’s schedule, it fell to me to fuck three women— Perdita in the morning, since I was going off on a business trip and we liked to leave each other “topped up”; another, a pretty but futureless interne bond analyst, at lunch hour, in the Parker House, after room service had delivered some club sandwiches and iced tea; and the third in my hotel room in Houston, an overweight gum-chewing whore I picked up in the saddle-brown bar over whiskey and frijoles. Because she was a professional, I explained the situation frankly, and the sheer crassness of the explanation got me so excited that I wound up, to her drawled, grudgingly impressed compliments, coming twice. In all cases, my semen arrowed outward, into darkness, like the minutes of my manhood ticking away.

  This morning I alarmed myself. While shaving, without thinking, I began to shave my chin and the area below my lower lip before I did my upper lip. It was as if I had forgotten for a second how to be me. My shaving procedure is invaluable: soften whiskers with hot washcloth, lather bar in soap dish, shave right cheek and jaw first, then left, then upper lip, and lastly the tricky, knobby region of the chin, with its need to hold fast the lower lip with the upper teeth. I have cut myself more often in this region than any other, and save it for last. Suddenly I was tackling it out of sequence. My identity had been usurped by an alien who had not been briefed upon just this trifling detail; another hand than mine had taken over. It was as when a measurement is taken in the quantum realm of an electron’s position or momentum, and the wave function collapses and another universe floridly sprouts on the spot.

  All praise be to the holy Lord on this glorious day at the end of June. The sea is speckled with white crests—the manes of white stallions, the superstitious folk say, but for those of us sequestered in prayerful peacefulness on our island hill a divine sign of safety, as the scudding aftermath of a night blow strong enough to hold in their harbors the dragon-headed, square-sailed galley ships of the fair-faced demons from far Lothland. Rumors have arrived from across the narrow water between our fastness and the Munster mainland concerning attacks ever nearer. The seafaring fiends have no end of appetite and cruelty, to which Providence in its miraculous patience lends scope so as to accumulate un-gainsayable proofs toward the eternal damnation of their souls. The saintly monks of Lindisfarne, the makers and inscribes of magically beautiful codices, were stripped and tortured in June of the year 793 after our Lord’s birth of a meek virgin, and the raiders came again in 801 to set the buildings afire, and in 806 to kill scores more of helpless monks. St. Columcille’s fair lona has fallen with much massacre, and Inis Murray was quite destroyed, never to rise, in the second year of this our terrible ninth century. Glen-dalough, Clonfert, Clonmacnoise, and Kildare where none less than St. Brigit rules as high abbess above a holy gathering of both sexes—none could withstand the evil from the sea. The pirates with golden beards have penetrated even to PÁtraic is beloved Armagh and burned the blessed buildings to the ground. The horrors that God in His mercy permits! All to test the faithful, our learned abbot explains—to polish up the devoted to be sparkling angels in the ranks depleted by Satan and his defiant and banished legions.

  And still, he says, to ease the fear from the unshaven faces of the young among us, unlikely in the extreme it would be for the Lothlanders to seek out our remote and rocky island, poor as we are, thirty brothers and twice as many of sheep, nine goats and a single dutiful ram, two pair of oxen to drag the plow through our patch of low soil, and a pen of pigs for the bacon to trade (we eat no meat) and for the squealing when the rare strangers come up the lone flint path from the shingle beach. A man like me, unable to read a sign save that of the cross and the great dancing “X” which begins Christ’s name—Brother Guaire has shown me pages he has labored on in the scriptorium, glowing designs that dizzied me endeavoring to follow them down to the end of the knot, all in inks the everlasting colors of jewels—a man like me, thrust by a hard-hearted whore of a mother, before I had the makings of a memory, upon the bosom of the church, and raised by it within the charity of God to serve my betters, gifted though I was with naught but an encouraging way with dumb beasts and the herbs of the garden, such a man, his chief joy the simple smile of creation and one meatless meal a day, bran soaked in goat’s milk or sea bass with bread and uncooked beans, and the gratification of lying stretched cruciform on the dirt floor of his stone hut offering up his hunger and pain to the crucified God, such would not likely attract the fury of the marauding Antichrists from the lands to the north, where all is ice and bewhiskered sea-creatures with soulful eyes like those of men eternally condemned.

  The highest pasture on our stony island consists of grass tufts nibbled by the goats; below the upmost ledges in the growing season sheep graze broad-sloped shoulders of green, the winter lambs near the size of their mothers now and all still as gray boulders in the golden morning sun, heads lowered to feed. The occasional bleat of a lamb imagining himself lost drifts down. A pair of hawks whistle one to the other as they hang watchful in the wind. The herbs and medicinal flowers in their frothy rows nod about my knees—the yellows of the cowslips and feverfew, the purples of hyssop and lavender, the dainty useful greens of mint and cabbage. Brother Vergil before he wasted away of flying venom and the weakness of age explained his arrangement by the humors: here thyme and hyssop, warm and drying herbs, to clear phlegm; there burdock and figwort, cool and dry, to cleanse the sanguine system of gout and diarrhea; here senna and hellebore to purge with their heat the clogging of black bile that induces constipation and melancholy; and there rhubarb and dandelion to counteract with their cool moisture the hot and dry tempers inflicted by an excess of yellow bile. Garlic and basil, coriander and goldenseal—the mute plants do hold in their roots and stems and calyxes and corollas a thousand responses to the multitudinous gaps and imbalances the body in its turmoil poses. God through His vast kindness knots into all the crevices of His flowering creation the essential juices of His peace and love, according to the code declared by the wondrously variegated patterns of the flowers and leaves. Dried aerial parts yield decoctions and poultices no malady can resist. For headache, lavender and feverfew; for boils, a poultice from feverfew; for sore throats, infusions of coneflower roots or loosestrife blooms, added to tincture of astringent, phlegm-reducing herbs like silverweed; for hemorrhoids, ointment of pilewort—there is nothing amiss in our workings without cure in God’s garden. Even warrior’s wounds slowly vanish under applications of self-heal and purple-flowered comfrey, called knitbone by the simple folk. Before the birth of Christ, so gracious is God, He was busy revealing these secrets to the pagan Greeks, the king of
whose wisdom was named Aristotle. As I bend my back to the weeding of the aisles of my living church of silent adorers, I beg forgiveness for these many deaths by uprooting, for even weeds too humble to have a name no doubt contain properties that, knowingly extracted and combined, would join them to the chorus of cures. God created nothing to no purpose, though many purposes are yet hidden from us, to be revealed no doubt on the day when the living and the dead alike are summoned in their risen bodies to judgment, and all this finespun intricacy singing about us is revealed as but a filigreed shadow of the glorious true world prepared for His faithful. This day cannot be far off, the abbot says. Indeed, that eight centuries have been allowed to pass since our Lord gave Himself to torture and despair on the Cross would cause Paul and those other early saints to marvel at the fullness of time allowed obdurate Mankind for its own salvation. Those who study the mind of Heaven agree that the world must surely end before the year 1000, since a year of more digits than the Trinity would be a certain blasphemy.

  The pigs have started a sudden squealing in their pen of wattles and alder stakes. Looking toward the west, where our humped island like a sundial casts its shrinking morning shadow into the flickering silver of the endless western sea, a flock of sails in the fatal square shape has silently appeared. Slender, they sit on the bright sea with the symmetry of letters, the same dragonish upturn before the mast as after. Perhaps I have been the last to read them, rapt here among the rustle of the herbs, tending and gathering. Now my ears take in shouting from the direction of the abbot’s house and the round tower. I run to the cliffs edge and see fair-bearded men with sun flashing from their close-fitting helmets wading in squat armor onto the shingle despite the roughness of the waves. Some have already arrived in our midst. Shouting and pitiful cries rise to disturb the sheep on their high shoulders of meadow. Their bleating and the slow heartbeat of surf on the beach below all but drown the overheard thuds of struggle. Monks in their sackcloth make no more resistance to broadswords and battle-axes than slugs to the gardener’s knife. The careless growth at the cliffs edge clings with its cold dew and milkweed spittle as I hasten bare-legged away, casting aside my basket half full of fennel plucked for a meal that will now never be served. My stone hut’s beehive shape came into my mind but this sanctum for sleep and for prayer would offer no exit with a roaring demon crouching at the entrance. Beyond the lower walled edge, the cliff breaks away into crevices and shallow trickling caves where a man might outwait a storm. Gulls above circle and dip, curious over the stir but safely aloof. The chapel bell, costly iron that nigh sank the raft that brought it a week’s journey around Dingle, begins to ring madly as if to shatter its own Christian voice, jerked into clamor not by the pull of pious hands but by the mocking strength of a Norseman inflamed by mead and bloody plunder.

  I catch my breath behind the shoulder of the stone milking house. Through the chinks of its sloping wall, which release to my nostrils like a final scent of earth that of dung-spattered fresh hay, I spy smoke curling from beyond the oak chapel, the dairthech where so many times I saw the gleaming chalice lifted up amid the intertwining chanting of the brothers. I see that what is afire is the wide reed roof of the tech mor, where we were accustomed to eat and talk, not always without natural men’s gaiety, and those who could read would read at the tables, the leaves of parchment turning stiff as wind-filled sails. Now from the chapel’s entrance streams in gesticulating gobbets a parade of the longhaired fiends in their furs and leather breastplates. One holds aloft our precious chalice, its rim of silver filigree picked out with enamels the bright colors of sheep’s blood and noontime sky: the pattern would swirl beneath my eyes in the moment when Christ’s blood, sweet and strong as dark queen’s honey, was tilted into my lips by the abbot’s white hands. My gullet would feel the thick warmth of God’s inmost being.

  The Lothlander holding the chalice aloft now lowers it so that his comrades in pagan brutishness can spit into the pristine vessel and, as with a maiden helpless in their midst, perform worse desecrations from the low parts of their bodies. The great altar candlesticks and fine holy cloths and the cedarwood reliquary inlaid with precious metals and containing the bones of the hand of St. Finnian all flow forth on the stream of booty. The illuminated Gospels stored in a locked chest beneath the chapel lectern have been torn apart for the jewels in the covers, and the bright pages are scattered and trampled. It is a devilish sight that makes my innards sicken for more than myself. Brother Guaire! His knots undone! The thatch of the tech mór shows flags of orange flame, and the smoke from this and other fires dyes the scene like the dipping close of a cloud livid with thunder. In the murky tangle of horrors I see the abbot’s small head, pale and benign, being brandished on the end of a bearded fiend’s pike. The bodies of my brothers, naked and dismembered, are tumbled into the sacred well whose miraculous fresh waters, drawn from beneath the salt sea, had sustained our settlement here. God has forsaken us, to test our faith. The animals as they are led away, roped and hauled or driven with staves, bellow as if on the way to slaughter, but it is not the animals being slaughtered. They will live for yet a while. In this universe turned upside down the chickens ascend in a sprawling of feathers as if to join the gulls indifferently soaring above the havoc.

  And now a step sounds behind me. My enemy is come. He is young, though tall and shaggy in his armor. Fine-meshed iron mail covers a long-sleeved tunic of green wool heavy with salt spray. He seems newly minted in the foundry of battle; perhaps I will be the first man he has slain. I drive my eyes to seek his face. His helmet is a pointed brazen dome that extends to a flared nose guard. Golden hair flows to his red-caped shoulders from underneath his helmet. When he lifts his cinder-black battle-ax high in both arms, the curly fleece of his beard lifts to reveal the clasp of his cape—an iron face incised with round staring eyes, snakelike horns, and fangs: his god, the enemy and antithesis of my God. He utters some words in his musical heathen tongue. I crouch beneath him, lowering myself to make his ax travel a hand’s breadth farther to reach me. I hurry my thought through one last prayer to Christ; like my doom now will He tower above my resurrected flesh in judgment, in the blinding light of the life to come. Though I sleep a thousand thousand years, I tell myself, it will be to me as an instant. But there are still things of this life to see. The infidel’s dog-white teeth are bared. Terrors swarm out of his deep-socketed eyes like bees bringing home honey from the freckled pits of a tall blue foxglove. I see that the boy is as frightened as I. This instant of time toward which our lives have converged has two sides of terrible brightness. Killer and martyr participate equally in the sacrifice our Lord commands. Poison and medicine are the same extract. Darkness and light are one.

  Summer asks that we co-exist with too many other living creatures. The vegetable efflorescence depletes one’s morale. The sky loses color in the humid heat; the sea becomes a parking lot for sailboats. Orange daylilies lord it over the blowsy yards in the village; Queen Anne’s lace and Bouncing Bet brighten the meadows; daisies and chicory dot the ragged roadsides. A dead eviscerated frog appeared on our driveway: dropped by a crow, clumsy or sated? The mysteries of overplenteous life. I ventured into the buggy woods and found the full delegation, minus Doreen, in the hut, smoking cigarettes. “It keeps the mosquitoes down,” the biggest told me. He was José, I reminded myself.

  “How’s it going, gentlemen?” I asked the three.

  “A lot of kids goin’ to be tryin’ to come through here tomorrow,” the lawyer told me. He was Ray. Tomorrow was Independence Day. Haskells Crossing puts on a fireworks display that attracts masses from the village and beyond. Bare-chested Vikings, already drunk, lug coolers full of beer. No matter how repulsive and futureless these young males are, they always have girls with them, going along: it says something about our species. No man too bad not to attract a woman. If women were fastidious, the species would go extinct. Thug boyfriends pleasantly remind them of their thug fathers.

  “And what are you goi
ng to do about it?” I asked.

  The question was embarrassing. “Keep ’em in line,” Ray finally offered.

  “That’s all? You should charge the people to get by,” I told them.

  “You want that?”

  “What’s the point of being here if you don’t? Not so much they can’t pay; keep it within reason. Say, three welders a head, five for a couple. Children in arms can get in free,” I suggested.

  Ray, the little lawyer, asked, “This with your permission?”

  “Absolutely,” I said. “For a cut, of course.”

  “A cut? How much cut?”

  I hadn’t thought it through but proposed, “Twenty percent. One welder out of five. That’s not so much. How else are the people going to get to the fireworks?”

  “Supposin’ they say they won’t pay?” José asked. In his plump, seamless face his opaque black irises had a buttoned-on look, an extra protuberance that may have been an illusion produced by their brightness, their luxurious lacquer.

  I laughed. A laugh sounds sinister in the woods, dampered by the greenery. “You’re asking me that? A big tough guy like you? Maybe I should find some new protection.”

  “You’re sayin’ kill ’em if they don’t pay?”

  “That seems extreme. And probably counterproductive. What you want is a happy line of paying customers. But, listen, this is your party. I didn’t ask you to camp here, on my land. Let them pass if you want. You have bigger fish to fry, remember? How are you doing with my neighbors?”