Toward the End of Time

by John Updike

  According to the book that proved such a soporific last night, the torus has a rhythm of appearance and disappearance over the aeons, like one of those comets whose elliptical orbits swing far out into interstellar space and by the old Newtonian laws predictably return to our sky. To generations its presence is evident and the source of omens, miracles, admonitions, and reassurances. People live by its wan light, sing its praises while they work, construe even their humblest bodily functions and pangs of pleasure and contrition as parts of a pattern the torus by its ideality establishes. Then it gradually dims, succumbing to mockery and disproof. The generations grow bored with repeating the pieties of their fathers; a cry for human freedom and self-expression rises against the skyey wedding ring, which has come to seem a shackle, or the lid of an oubliette. The chants, perhaps, drive it away. Since it never touches the planet with more than a sense, in certain transits, of global well-being, it can be ignored so thoroughly as to be practically nonexistent.

  The altars are slighted; the temples fall into mossy ruin. And yet an air of irresolution hangs in the emptiness. Public disorder increases. Telephone booths are vandalized; graffiti cover every stone surface consecrated to beauty and visual harmony. Children acquire guns and shoot each other as casually as images are flicked away on television; adults drown their disquiet and despair in alcohol. The world by itself is not enough; there must be another, to give this one meaning. And blood sacrifices are initiated by the tyrants who come to power in the resistless confusions and lassitude: giant drums and smoke pots call out to the red-streaked sky; drugged adolescents, chosen for their physical perfection, have their hearts cut out of their heaving chests by hooded priests wielding sea-green obsidian knives.

  Eventually, in its own time, the torus reappears. Personal sanity and public decency are restored, but always with seeds, smaller and darker than mouse turds, of discontent and resentment sealed within the social order. The new cycle has begun. Those cycles occupy far more time than was at first thought: millions of years, rather than thousands Time grinds the ruins of one epoch, its imperishable monuments, into a fine sand that seems an utter desert to the forebears of the next epoch as they emerge, hand in hand, their nakedness clothed in leaves, out of Eden. And always overhead, silently clamorous, imperiously silver and pure, the stars rotate and ever so minutely shift, forming new constellations, new arrangements in the sprawl of eventually dying sparks on the velvet display-cloth of space. The sea through the thinning trees wrinkles in red filaments that threadily reflect the bloated, never-setting sun.

  Walking back up the driveway, the Globe in hand, I glance to my left at the sourwood tree that Gloria planted ten years ago and am struck, hard, by its seasonal beauty—long oval leaves, deeply creased like peach-tree leaves, overlaid one upon the other in the lower branches to form a screen of crisscrossing scarlets and browns and freckled yellows and pinks and greens. Gloria has gone, yes, sour on this tree—it grew too eagerly for her taste, between the pears and the lilacs. It quickly towered over them, and heavy snows broke off its overextended branches, which then sprouted an awkward spray of secondary shoots. She even talks of cutting it down, after ten years of trial. The gardeners of the world are unsentimental about correcting mistakes. Perhaps I have for it a certain fellow-feeling. Uncherished, rarely glanced at, the sourwood is humming to itself a complex chorale of autumn colors and at the same time extending outwards, like so many long-boned feathery hands, its flowers, which are spent flowerets a third of an inch high organized into one-sided fanning racemes. It blooms even as it sheds.

  Then, around four this afternoon, when the sun was angled just right, I wandered into the seaward guest room— not the one I sleep in, overlooking the driveway circle—and was stunned by a window uniformly loaded, like a fabric pattern, with sunstruck butter-yellow hickory leaves. A window like an upright case of pure unfettered brightness.

  I see now too late that I have not paid the world enough attention—not given it enough credit. The radio, between the weather and the stock report, releases a strain from Schubert’s Drei Klavierstücke, a melody that keeps repeating, caressing itself in sheer serene joy, and I think of him and Mozart, dying young and yet each pouring out masterpieces to the last, rising higher and higher as their lives fall from them, blessing with their angelic ease the world that has reduced them to misery, to poverty, to the filth and fever and the final bed. My eyes cannot help watering, a sure sign of senility.

  Gloria has found herself, through the agency of FedEx and its omnivorous networks, a deerslayer. He comes to the house in a dusty green truck, splotched camouflage-style, and parks in the driveway or else down at the entrance to the dirt road, beyond the mailbox. I shuffled downstairs to meet him. He stood just inside the front door, on the Qum rug. He is a man about my age, a bit smaller and more wiry, but with that same dry flattened gray thinning hair and those same horny splotchy backs to his hands. His hands tremble from a history of drink or the beginning of Parkinson’s. Ht has crowded-together, brownish lower teeth and a lovely gentle voice. There is something holy about him. He talked to me of “signs,” meaning turds, in the woods, and of laying gossamer-thin blue threads across likely trails in the woods He described to me how a deer, once struck by an arrow, with bed down immediately in a nest of brambles and let itself be approached for the kill, since it does not associate the stunning, unhinging thing that has happened to it with human beings; it doesn’t have the circuitry to make the connection. This holy man is of the opinion that animals don’t feel pain at all as we do. They are of another, virtually pain-free order. He hunts them with a bow and arrow because of the sport—he is, like me, retired; more happily, it would seem: he once climbed poles and read electric meters for a living, which may have encouraged habits of stealth and quick observation—and because he and his wife love venison. I had never heard before of a woman liking venison, but, then, in many ways I am still innocent, especially about women. The two of them carve up the carcass and keep it in their freezer for years, like a couple in a fairytale hut. The archery season begins soon, in early November. He will set up a blind, in a likely spot, and stand motionless in it for hours, beginning at 5:00 a.m. What monk in a cold stone cell could do more to punish himself? He is another of Gloria’s saints. Her father was a saint of propriety; this man—named, like her father, John—a nature saint, blending selflessly with the trees, and brush, and rocks.

  His existence crowds my universe, diminishes it and me, yet I am curious to see what will forthcome.

  Speaking of masculinity, Red and Ken came to visit me, looking sheepish that they have not visited before. But the golf season had been active until a week or so ago, and they filled me in on the results of the Labor Day Weekend Four-Ball, the Fall Mixed Gambol (you had to play with somebody else’s wife, a source of endless titillation), the Senior Men’s Championship (over fifty-five), the Plimpton Super-Seniors (over seventy, named after Ed Plimpton, a Mass. Amateur Championship runner-up who had been a member of the club), the Columbus Day Best-Ball, and a new tournament scored by the Stableford system and named in honor of an assistant pro, Dale MacPhail, who had been killed in the war, obliterated in an Aleutian missile silo.

  I sat uneasily in the library with my visitors. Gloria hates it when I leak urine onto the silk-damask-covered seat cushion of my favorite wing chair; she keeps telling me how much the reupholstering will cost. I tried to strike the correct, hostly, jocular note, but Ken, with his silver hair and bristling black eyebrows, kept looking like an airline logo, a kind of human eagle, and falling into a silent stare, just the way on the golf course he will exasperatingly freeze over a putt or short chip. Red had brought his flip phone in his pocket and it kept ringing, so he would withdraw into the hall and murmur about a fish haul in some remote corner of the world—the Seychelles, say. It was hard for me to believe that I had ever experienced ecstasy in the company of these men.

  Yet, after they left, I was moved to walk through the kitchen to the back-hall
closet, where I keep my golf clubs, and to open the door. The masculine pungence of sweat-impregnated grips and often-worn leather shoes swept out at me; hundreds of hours of my life had left their redolent film on this equipment. I could smell the rubber inside the balls and the tough compressed wood of the tees and the marshy rankness of the wet turf I had trod through, especially the turf of the sixth fairway, where the geese all deposit their tubular green shit and the black-shelled turtles bask on the rocks among which a sliced drive raises a supple splash. I longed to be back inside the body of the robust ogre whc had left behind these smells.

  “So, when do you think?” Ken had said to me at last.

  “When what?”

  “When will you be back on the links?”

  “There’s a lotta good golf left in November, Benny boy,” Red contributed.

  “December, even, if there’s no snow,” said Ken, his aquiline stare softening to a teddy bear’s at the childish thought of snow.

  “Come on, use your heads,” I said. “I can just barely walk. Pee keeps bubbling out of me.”

  “You don’t need to walk,” said Ken. “We’ll all rent carts. All you need to do is swing the club. You tended to swing too hard anyway. Too hard, and too quick. Swing slow, like I do.”

  “I always said,” I said, “the day I can’t walk the course is the day I give up the game.”

  Red snorted impatiently. “You can walk next year. Ride the rest of this. Get off your ass, for Chrissake. You look like a dead mackerel.” His phone rang, or rattled, in his shirt pocket. He went out into the hall.” “Saludos, mi amigo muy caro!” we could hear him shout.

  It was hard for me to imagine my playing golf next summer. Another year, all those seasonal gears to turn, those heavy heavenly bodies to push into place. “Who’ve you been playing with?” I asked Ken.

  He blinked and stared straight ahead, as if looking for a vision of those other players on the backs of my uniform Winston Churchill. “Oh, we’ve had some nice games with Fred, his pacemaker seems to be getting less loud, and we had Les out for the Columbus Day Best-Ball, he hit the ball real well, he has a new driver with a magnesium head and a glass shaft, would you believe? Also, some of the younger members—Glenn Caniff and his buddies, you should see Glenn powder that pellet these days, and little Mel Spiegel-man, he doesn’t look like he has a muscle in his body, but, wow, when he winds up…”

  He trailed off, perhaps noticing the jealousy, the sadness his recital was inflicting upon me. I would be replaced, was being replaced, and would not even have a tournament named after me.

  So when they had disappeared down the driveway in Red’s Caravan I paid a memorial visit to my golf closet, and even took out the putter and thought of trying a few strokes on the big blue Tabriz in the living room. But it seemed too much trouble, and to refer to a self I had been quantum-jumped out of, into a new orbit.

  When his green truck appears in the driveway—he is scouting the territory, drawing up mental maps—I try to go out and greet the deerslayer. He tells me things about nature I didn’t know. One day he pointed out to me the ugly fungi that grow like monstrous tan brains on the lawn. He said, “Those are called hen-of-the-woods. They grow only in association with oak trees. Very delicious, cut and sliced and sautéed, or put into a spaghetti sauce. Soak it in salt water to get the dirt and insects out. Sometimes you find a salamander or two in there; they don’t do any harm. Here.” And with a black-handled pen-knife, the kind that men used to carry in their overall pockets back in Hammond Falls, John cut a tidy cube of white flesh out of the rumpled brown mass and handed it to me. It was heavier than I had expected, with a pleasant rubbery moisture, like a big art eraser. “Hen-of-the-woods. Not easy to find, and with all these oaks up here you’re surrounded. Tell your missus what I showed you, and she’ll be thrilled, I guarantee.”

  Is it my impotent hypersensitivity, or do men keep making overtures to my wife? Am I dead already?

  But in truth Gloria was disgusted by the idea, and didn’t even want the pieces I had nicely sliced, washed, and placed in a bowl, covered by Saran Wrap, in the refrigerator. To her, this piece of nature, grown beyond the realm of her garden, was impudent if not poisonous. I tasted a raw piece—it was bland at first, like a firmer tofu or a coconut meat less sweet and crisp, but then the aftertaste had a caustic kick that stayed with me, even after I washed it down with a glass of orange juice. “John says to sauté them in a little butter,” I said, but Gloria forbade it; she didn’t want her kitchen stunk up. Forbidding comes easier and easier to her. It is becoming her métier.

  When I venture outside, the sky rushes down at me through the oaks, which have blanketed the lawn and driveway with their leaves. In the woods and along 128, entirely bare trees are appearing: silvery sea-fans—dead or merely asleep, it is not easy to tell. Naked, they reveal their beseeching, striving shapes. The oak trees reach sideways, and the hickories up and down. The ashes are especially tragic in their clustered end-twigs, like snatching, clutching fingers, and the birches in their windswept huddled curves. The leaves were just a cover-up; these colorless warped skeletons are the truth.

  In my seaward view, as the sun nears noon, it transforms the sea into a sheet of unalloyed light, cruel to see. The line of the beach is visible through the trees. The autumn’s polychrome sinks toward a brittle rust, broken into a thousand dry facets of reflected sun. My eyes keep going to the charred scar where Mrs. Lubbetts’ beach house had been, like a tongue to a missing tooth. In the other direction, at night, the lights of Haskells Crossing come closer through the stripped trees, like the flashlights of a hunting party. The poor Lynn boys, if the metallobioforms had not shredded them, would have been exposed by this time of year like wood lice when a rotten log is overturned.

  On Halloween night, a new intensity of cold has swollen the stars overhead. No child comes to the house. It is too far off the beaten track; the driveway is too forbiddingly long. Gloria and I, faintly disconsolate, make ourselves sick by eating the candy corn and Reese’s Peanut Butter Cups we had laid in. Side by side on the green sofa, we watch a television documentary on the Old West. Still photos of vast stony vistas and of impassive bronze faces: Indian chiefs hounded to a humiliating surrender, after creekside massacres and epic marches through Dakota blizzards to a Canadian sanctuary where the distant queen’s providence declines to forestall starvation; they are driven back to a bitter treaty with the bearded Great White Father in Washington and the barren haven of the reservation. A heap of broken promises, and a pyramidal mountain of the skulls of bison spitefully slaughtered to cut the red man’s ground out from under him. Modern descendants of these routed Native Americans are interviewed in living color. With their ethnically correct long black hair and slow professorial voices, they expound their historical grievances expertly but less affectingly than the witness borne by the silent bronze faces which the triumphant republic, in token apology, placed on its coinage and postage stamps. The Sino-American Conflict, it came to me, could be seen as revenge administered by the Mongolian superpower of that Asian continent from which the North American aborigines had crossed the Bering land-bridge.

  We went to bed sickeningly awash with candy and guilt. I followed Gloria into the bedroom that was ours and has become hers. Shyly I watched her make her methodical way through the rites of flossing, toothbrushing, mouthwashing, and applying face cream. She inserted the gel-loaded plastic cooth-guards with which she keeps her teeth the valuable white that my mother had once, not insincerely, appraised as worth investing in. These plastic insertions, though transparent, push her lips out and give her a speech impediment that arouses me, the fraction of me that can still be aroused. A desolate helpless love, as for a child, came over me as she tidily inserted herself into the bed, preparing, with the uncapping of a small bottle smelling powerfully of banana, to replace the paint on her nails. All these rites, I see, are her way of trying to freeze and defeat time, as mine is the writing of these scattered sad paragraphs. Fut
ile, both exercises, but only in the long run. “Shall I stay?” I asked.

  “Why?”

  “Oh, for coziness. Because we both feel bad and embarrassed about the Indians.”

  “I do,” she conceded, “but realistically we just couldn’t let them have the entire country to run around in with their bows and arrows.”

  “They had learned to use guns. They were trying to learn our ways. Farming, going to church.” I was stalling, saying anything to postpone the moment of our parting.

  She had become intent upon her nails. She is her own innermost garden, needing incessant tending. I was intruding upon a precious moment of peaceful concentration; her pale eyebrows were knit in a small frown of unvoiced irritation.

  “I need a hug,” I said.

  “Ben. I am doing my nails. You’re making me make mistakes.”

  “I miss us” I told her.

  She knew what I meant, but did not look or speak. The tiny brush of chemical solvent made its way around the oval nail of her lefthand ring finger with its slim gold band. What would an interplanetary voyager understand of our little symbolic shackles and their invisible chains?

  “I can’t do the main thing,” I apologized, “but—”

  “You’ll get me and the bed all wet,” she said.

  Blushing, I finished, “I need to be touched. Somehow that show frightened me. That whole dreadful century, all that imperialism, and now everybody dead—the winners and losers, the cowboys and Indians, North, South, everybody. And no children in costume coming to the house. I was talking to Roberta today; Jennifer was going out trick-or-treating with Keith dressed as a bug, with those caps with bouncy antennae on springs. Irene told me that Olympe and Etienne got the idea of painting their faces white, that was their only disguise. A sort of portent in that, no? A few more years, they’ll hate me. The white grandfather.”