Toward the End of Time

by John Updike

  Each waited for the other to speak.

  “Not so good, huh?” I said at last.

  “They comin’ around,” the lawyer lied.

  Manolete gestured suddenly. “They be sorry when we burn their houses down. Pfoom!”

  “We have a saying in business,” I told them. “Don’t kill the goose that lays the golden eggs.”

  Manolete, perhaps the brightest as well as the youngest, said in his abrupt, small-boy, explosive way, “Only eggs they layin’ is tellin’ us to get the hell off they fuckin’ property.”

  “Mr. and Mrs. Kelly,” Ray interposed, “were reasonable. We show them your letter. They say O.K., they’d contribute something, but only a part of what you paid, since they only have three acres to your eleven.”

  He was learning the language, I thought. “Tell them,” I said, “that that may be so but there are six of them and only two Turnbulls. Maybe mention casually that you would hate to see any of their children kidnapped; ransom costs a lot more than protection.”

  They took this in, the three brown faces in the sun-slit gloom of their fragile little shelter. José volunteered, “Those Dunhams, they didn’t come up with nothin’. They treated us like dirt. He has his own guns, the cocksucker said.”

  The Dunhams were a perfect couple, unless one considered childlessness a flaw. Their impeccable mock-colonial house, visible in winter, lay hidden in the leafy woods not two hundred yards from Gloria’s back garden. Athletic into their fifties, they matched like salt and pepper shakers. Both lithe, both forever smiling though faintly formal even in jogging outfits, their skins glowing with the same shade of suntan, their hair tinged with exactly the same becoming amount of gray, they came from old New England families with about the same amount of money and cachet. The world’s woes, and the woes that parenthood brings, had passed them by; there was a polished, impervious beauty about them that one itched to mar. Their only point of vulnerability was their animals. They had two prize Persian cats, a perfectly trimmed miniature poodle, and a piebald pony who grazed in summer in a little meadow carved from their section of the woods.

  “You might think about killing one of their cats,” I told the boys. “They let them out in the morning for exercise and to do their business in the shrubs. Just kill one, leave the body on the porch, and show up for collection the next day. You don’t have to admit to anything, just don’t deny it either. If they don’t pay up then, do the dog, that damned yappy poodle. The horse—before you kill him, get some spray paint and paint his side. If he holds still for it, paint in numbers your monthly charge. Like an invoice on legs.”

  In our box of artificial twilight, with its smells of tobacco smoke and sweaty mattress and pine needles masked by plywood, the boys broke into laughter at my wealth of malice.

  “Any ideas how we should handle Mrs. Lubbetts?” Ray asked.

  I was enjoying this. I loved these willing boys, so superior, in their readiness and accessibility, to my own grandsons.

  Pearl Lubbetts was a Jewish widow—Earl Lubbetts had made his pile in potato chips and packaged popcorn—who had taken on over the years the imperious, lockjawed, rough-and-ready manner of a Wasp matriarch. She was usually dressed in Wellingtons and muddy-kneed dungarees, directing teams of local workers on one or another project of excavation, forestry, resodding, or masonry. She had built a private sea-wall to protect her front lawn from the tides, and at a far corner of her property had constructed a modernist beach house which was, as it happened, the only structure in my seaward view, summer and winter. She had cleared the surrounding trees, so nothing impeded my sight line; with its bleached redwood siding and flat white Florida-style roof and its sundeck balustrade like a bone comb, it was an unignorable blot on my view. Metal and glass elements on the roof and walls—flashing, skylights, twirling vents, and complicated tin chimney guards— beamed irritating glints into my visual field, unanswerable emergency signals from the edge of the sea; no matter what the hour between sunrise and sunset, some reflective angle boldly bounced photons right through my windows into my retinas.

  “You could burn down her little beach house,” I suggested. “That should give her the idea that you are serious individuals. When you go to collect,” it occurred to me to add, “you might want to wear suits, or at least a jacket and tie. It makes a world of difference, credibilitywise.”

  The boys consulted with one another in silent glances. Triangles of white flickered beside their shifting irises.

  “Hey, how come you tellin’ us all this stuff?” Ray asked me.

  “I like you young fellas. I want you to succeed.”

  “What’s in it for you?”

  I let a beat of silence go by. “How about twenty percent?” I said.

  “Ten plenty,” José said.

  Ray’s eyes flicked sideways in surprise at being supplanted as negotiator.

  “Ten on the protection, twenty on the admission fees tomorrow,” I offered.

  Ray took back the role of spokesman. “How you know we not be cheatin’ you?” he asked.

  “The sad way things are in the world now, we all have to work through trust. I trust you, it’s that simple,” I told them.

  José, the biggest, was the one to rise, extend his broad but soft hand, and say, “It’s a deal.”

  iv. The Deaths

  INDEPENDENCE DAY: my American flag flapped noisily on the pole in an east wind off the sea. For a time it was tangled in its cord and twittered like an insect with one wing stuck on flypaper, until I loped across the lawn and lowered the striped and starred cloth and sent it back up the halyard free. Out there on the blue width of water, sailboats tilted in the morning breeze and sleek white stinkpots gathered on the evening calm to see the fireworks sent up from the public end of the beach. You could hear the sounds and music of beery parties already in progress. I wondered how my boys were doing collecting tolls along the path. Downtown, around the convenience store, white boys in droopy loose shirts and shorts and girls in tighter foxy duds watched the holiday seep away like spilled soda on hot concrete. The insouciance and innocence of our independence twinkled like a kind of sweat from their bare and freckled or honey-colored or mahogany limbs. Sometimes I think the thing I’ll mind about death is not so much not being alive but nc longer being an American. Even for the losers there is a liberation in the escape from divine order.

  In Gloria’s rose bed the blooms, so red and white and pink against the sea, are tired, their blown petals littering the smoothly mounded mulch of buckwheat hulls; but her back garden is profuse with odd-shaped flowers I cannot name. Yarrow? Artemisia? Snapdragons and nasturtiums in any case, nasturtiums with a curious flower-shaped blazon on their petals, the dirty tint of a tattoo. The clematis on the sunny side of the garden shed is amazing, clambering on its quick red stems up the lattice I had made and drenching the clapboards in a density of lush purple flowers banded like church vestments. Gloria cuts it down to a virtual stump every spring, and her faith is always rewarded.

  Within the garage, the barn swallows, so slow to start their nest, have in a few weeks’ time hatched their eggs. It happened today: the air was suddenly full of careening baby birds. They fly swervingly up and down, on the edge of control, like children first on a bicycle. There are three, and they rest from their adventure perched on the wooden gutter of the house as tightly together as if still packed in the nest, frightened by all the transparent space around them. Gloria and I had observed them, as we passed in and out of the garage, from the day they were hatchlings, blind mouths held preposterously wide open above the nest’s edge, their tiny bald bodies wholly devoted to the strain and distension of sudden post-ovum appetite. Tirelessly the dapper mother and father dipped back and forth across the lawn and shrub planting, harvesting invisible insects. In a mere two weeks the helpless and hideous babies have been fed into feathers and wingpower enough to be launched, blue-backed and roseate-bellied, as darting, dipping predators in their own right.

  The baby bi
rds had swiftly become complete, down to their flickering white-flecked swallowtails. For a time they will stay on our property, learning from their parents (how?) the fine points of survival, but the mud cup of a nest, given fibrous strength with grass wands and pine needles, has been emptied. How do birds teach birds, elephants elephants, without language? Even imitation implies a simian brain. In less than a month our babies will fly to Peru, and the dry brown leaves of the crabapple will accumulate in the open garage, and the thin breath of autumn dull the verdure. The asphalt of the driveway takes on a different texture then, and scrapes differently under our shoes. Our shadows are drier, more dilute, and an expectancy of closure flavors the shortening days when the swallows are no longer here. But for now they are still with us, holding a family seminar in mosquito-catching, and the Fourth of July fireworks burst into sight a second ahead of their muffled bangs, as viewed from our front yard, on the sea side, in the moon-bleached sky above the trees’ silent, merged, beseeching silhouettes.

  Gloria went in almost immediately, saying the mosquitoes were biting her to death. I stood on the flagpole platform as our bedroom lights came on and the air conditioner started to hum. The town fathers, whoever they were, had managed to scrape from their depleted budget a handsome display. There were types quite new to me—hovering white flares that shot out from a two-leaved orange butterfly shape and encircled it for some lingering seconds; a giant silent chrysanthemum whose rays were blue at the tips and gold at the source; drifting constellations of cold white twinklers; and several fireworks that unfolded from within their packet of chemical reactions a sharply violent color I had never seen in the sky before, thus spilled on blackness in transient splinters. Combusted salts of strontium, barium, sodium, magnesium, and mercurous chloride etched their signatures on the dark firmament, an infernal rainbow owing nothing to the sun. Gloria’s golden window clicked off just as the finale of overlapping bursts died away to a chorus of grateful toots from the assembled stinkpots. I felt chilled and bitten in the dark. Where was I to go? She hated it when I crept into bed and disturbed in her the fragile succession of steps whereby consciousness dissolves. As I turned away to tread the damp lawn, something rustled in the sunken area of wild roses beside the platform—where we had once thought to dig a swimming pool, a dream that lives only in our still calling it the “swimming-pool area”—and I sensed that another presence had been watching with me. The deer.

  And a week or less after this, by daytime, the giant dim torus in the sky, the ghostly watermark on the atmosphere’s depthless Crane’s blue, grew larger, moving toward Earth. Vast and then vaster, it stealthily expanded until its lambent rim touched the sea’s horizon and disappeared behind the treetops; it was encircling the visible platter of Earth; we were within it; our round planet was like a stake to its quoit. The torus’s blue hole, for these many months no wider than ten suns across, had swelled to become the empyrean itself; the upper edge of its “matter”—for matter is just what it seemed not to be—sank, distending, and lost itself, a line of faint pallor, behind the lateral stretch of distant, mountainous summer clouds. All the while a creamy, weightless sense of irreversible reassurance was flooding me. It was near noon; I had stepped out onto the lawn in obedience to an impulse. The young swallows were still careening, a bit wildly, about, but the other birds were hushed, as during a solar eclipse, with its out-of-sync dusk. I remembered standing on a hillside in the Berkshires under a shouting clarity of stars and seeing a comet through binoculars handed me by my father’s work-worn hand: a tailed ball of fuzz, not seeming to move at all.

  I would not die, I realized; all would be well. All the fleeting impressions I had ever received were preserved somewhere and could be replayed. All shadows would be wiped away, when light was everywhere and not confined to loci— stars, hot points, pinpricks in nothingness. But just the concept of light, born of combustion and atomic collision, was too harsh for the peace that was promised within the torus. All the shards of my spiritual being united—Perdita with Gloria; the old Hammond Falls house, poor in possessions but rich in meanings, with my present mansion, poor in meanings; my children with my stepchildren and they with my grandchildren and all the world’s uncomforted waifs. Time was a provision that would be rescinded; its tragedy was born of misperception, an upper limit of conceptual ability such as keeps the bee bumbling among the clover and the faithful dog trotting, loving but puzzled, at his master’s heels. (I have lived with dogs, though have none now. In Hammond Falls we had a mongrel called Skeezix and then a female successor, Daisy, who was part cocker spaniel; then Perdita and I kept a succession of golden retrievers as nursemaids for the children, and once bought, not cheaply, a bronze-colored Doberman who was run over by one of the last milk-delivery trucks operating in Massachusetts. Her back broken, Cleo writhed in the middle of the street for twenty minutes before a young town cop arrived to put a bullet in her skull; she writhed and yelped and kept begging us with her amber eyes to forgive her her misfortune, to still love her as she had loved us.)

  That the joy of creation, flowing through the generations of birds and bacteria, human beings and arboreal titans as they rise and fall, is not an illusion but an eternal basis, and that a heavenly economy to whose workings we are blind will redeem every one of our living moments and carry to completion each inkling of beatitude: such blissful certainty of universal reconciliation travelled like a great magnetic field across the depleted planet as it was passed, as in a magician’s trick, through the cosmic ring, which receded in the midnight skies above Australia and vanished, a faintly glowing ringlet, in the vicinity of the constellation Octans. By morning it had vanished from all but the most powerful telescopes.

  Everyone had seen it; everyone had felt it; yet news coverage of the event was spotty and diffident. Different people, interviewed, gave different times and durations for their mystical sensations. Exact words were hard to formulate. Scientists and psychologists were quick to jump into print with theories of mass hallucination powerful enough to affect even photographic plates. A growing school of opinion holds that the torus had never existed at all—had not hung in our heavens for years—or had been no more a three-dimensional phenomenon than the ring arond the moon on a foggy night. Doubt and mockery have become fashionable, on television talk shows and among schoolchildren. T-shirts appeared on the young, displaying the torus encircling a question mark, or diagonally barred to form the symbol for negation. Even among lovers, it was embarrassing to talk about the transcendent moment. Comparing notes elicited disturbing discrepancies. It is true, the memory of bliss fades, like that of pain. I write my description not ten days after the event in order to fix my own memory, but even so, doubt has crept in. What really did I feel? People are grotesquely suggestible, to facilitate sexual congress and tribal solidarity. I feel depleted and irritable, immersed in the poisonous and voracious growth of midsummer. Lately I wake twice a night to urinate, and sometimes there is only a dribble, and an icicle poke of pain in a nether recess of myself, a dark and inaccessible underside I have always preferred to pretend is not there.

  Gloria brings flowers indoors—nasturtiums in shades of orange and yellow overflow a fat stoneware bowl, and the velvet purple of clematis burns for a day or two on the mahogany table in the front hall, in a swirl-ribbed vase of a blue as pale as her eyes. A burst of baby’s breath hovers in a water tumbler placed on the dining-room table, between the silver quail.

  While she was off at aerobics, I went out into our woods to visit the boys from Lynn. Behind the barn I startled a deer; with a thrash that set my heart to thrashing he or she— a glimpse of russet flank, a flare of white tail swallowed by the foliage—bounded into the impenetrable area, thick with thorny greenbrier, this side of the Dunhams’ paddock. As I proceeded a bit farther, along a faint path my steps are wearing down the hill, I felt the heat of the creature’s great pelted body lingering in the air. Pieces of bright gray sky clambered overhead between the treetops.

  Only Dor
een was in the hut, reading a textbook edition, shortened and simplified for junior high students, of that twentieth-century master, John Grisham. She was a brainy girl, it occurred to me, who had put herself only for the time being on a low road. She was sizing life up, ready to experiment with it. Her stockinged feet were up on one wire chair while she sat in another, its metal grid softened by a dirty blanket folded into a pad. In the close heat of the cabin she had taken off her T-shirt and was bare-armed and bare-bellied in a white bra. My shadow, as I entered, dimmed the glimmer of the startling undergarment; her face lifted and also looked shady, smudged, a defensive sneer beclouding her lips. With an intentional gruffhess I asked her, “Where are your buddies?”

  “Out, doing deals. José and Ray got themselves suits like you said to.”

  “Does it make a difference?”

  “Seems to. They say the people treat them more like they treated Spin and Phil. They cough up.”

  “Good. Didn’t I say?”

  “They look pretty silly.”

  “To you.”

  Our silence was not as uncomfortable as I would have predicted. With a sigh I sat on a third chair and looked out the square window, to take my eyes from the freckled breadth of her bony upper chest, the glossy rounds of her shoulders like inverted china cups, the single navel-dented crease across her lean belly. The square held an abstraction, a silent still gnashing of sharp-edged leaves and broken rock-faces and stabbing branches and scrabbly shapes of light-soaked sky. The boys had reinforced the stick walls with inch-thick plywood nailed to the vertical members so as to provide a crackless, relatively smooth inner surface for their shelter. This added privacy had imposed a cost: though bugs and prying eyes were better repelled, so was fresh air; when the door to the screened addition was closed, as it was now, an unstirring damp heat was sealed in. I liked it. I have always preferred the closed to the overexposed, the stuffy bed to the stinging shower.