Toward the End of Time

by John Updike

  “Nobody hates you,” Gloria said, concentrating downward on her hands. “Everybody knows you can’t help what you are.”

  Hands—how I used to love my own hands. At the ages of twelve or thirteen, sexuality just beginning, and narcissism. Lying on my bed in my tiny dormered room in Hammond Falls, with its slant ceiling and Joe Namath poster, I would stare at my hands and flutter my fingers, and slowly twirl them in the dust-spangled air, the creased palms and freckled backs, and dive-bomb with them and soar, flaring one upward like a space rocket flattening into the stratosphere for its toss to the moon. I would ponder their articulation, their involuntary grace, their jointed sensitivity and prehensile strength. My fingerprints, unique in the world, in all those billions living and dying. When I asked—when that imperious voice enthroned at the back of my skull asked— my hands obediently became little dancing men, or firing pistols, or butterflies, or fists. They were always with me, the closest me I could see at will, without a mirror—emissaries my inner monarch would some day send out to grip and mold the world.

  “You won’t get wet,” I promised Gloria. “I’ll put on a fresh Depends—they’re quite well designed, actually. I’ve been doing the Kegel exercises, I can feel a difference, and sometime soon—”

  “Exactly,” Gloria said. “Sometime soon.” She held her face—shining with unabsorbed grease and protruding around the mouth like that of a beautiful buck-toothed ape—up to be kissed. Her eyes were shut; a little smile of expectancy on her pale lips anticipated my kiss, which descended upon her mouth like a hawk gliding down to take up a songbird or vole in its claws. Her face was a cold lake of grease, smelling medicinal.

  “Sometime soon,” she promised, “we’ll do something. It’s good you want to; you’re getting better. But now go to your room, please. Take a pill if you don’t think you can sleep.”

  I obeyed. It was pleasant enough in the guest room. The bed sheets were clean and cool, and the odd-angled shape in the far corner of the ceiling had acquired by now a guardian-angel quality, a boxed numen. I fell asleep upon the rumble of the eleven-ten train making the whole house quiver, woke once wet, and woke for good when the Times man swerved around the driveway. Dawn had yet to break, but a plump moon in the west bleached the bare November earth the white of a saint’s bone, a knuckle or splinter of scapula in its reliquary of chased electrum, burnished at the base by the hungry kisses of the worshipful.

  v. The Dahlia

  THIS PLANET supports but two life-forms— myself, and an immense fungus that has covered all but the stoniest of available land. The brownish, writhing, mounting formations aboveground are but a fraction of its mass, made up of microscopic hyphae that extend their network in all directions, knotting and interweaving into the mycelium that makes up the thallus, or undifferentiated body, of my immense companion in vitality. It does not speak, or visibly move, but it does undergo change, the telltale mark of an organism. Its protoplasm is in constant motion, streaming into the tips of the newer hyphae, draining from the older, which become vacuolated and turn pulpy and a darker, more velvety brown. Though the fungus is ultimately one substance, consistent and immortal, its hyphae do organize at times into compact masses that perform various functions—stromata, for instance, cushionlike forms that bear spores, and rhizoids, anchoring the thallus to the substrate, and septa, which more or less elaborately functior as valves controlling the flow of enzyme-liquefied starches sugars, celluloses, and lignins. Since the fungus possesses no chlorophyll, it depends for nutrition entirely upon the rotting organic matter in the substrate. Whence came this matter? Its particulars are a mystery, but one that certainly testifies to a deep prehistory upon the planet, deeper than the imagination can grasp. The ground beneath my feet is an abysmal well of time.

  I move about and eat of the fungus, tearing it with my hands. Its white, tan-skinned, at places freckled flesh is generally bland, sometimes sweet, rarely bitter. When it is bitter, or sour, I spit it out, and rinse my mouth with a cupped handful of the H2O that is mercifully abundant. Thank God for pure water, I think; but are such thanks tautological, since without water I would not be here to offer them? Life exists amid benign conditions, inevitably, since conditions elsewhere, malign, would never have spawned it.

  The fungus is everywhere, but not everywhere the same— far from it. In especially nutrition-rich stretches, it is mountainous, the hyphae so thickly interwoven as to have a leathery, though resilient, hardness underfoot, like a springy turf. In other, barer, colder regions, the fungus exists itself as a thin dry film across the rocks, in spots a mere stain, which a finger rubs off. I lick my finger then, for the fungus in this attenuated state is oddly tasty. There are grottoes, splotched and shadowy, where curved gills of a sweet, crisp mycelium form a cave of easeful comfort, and there are wind-troughed plains where rare upright conidiophores, brightly beaded with conidia, reward the wanderer with a pungent meat. A growth so vast and essentially amorphous at some point on its great surface folds and crests into every possible form— the stalked cauliflower of a tree, the flowing curves and protuberances of a reclining woman, the glimmering flatness of the sea. Everywhere, as I have said, it is edible, though my hands come away with broken fingernails from harvesting the stubborn delicacies in the crevices of rocks. The particularly delectable patches, wherein some secreted chemical such as lysergic acid induces a visionary sense of well-being, are maddeningly hard to distinguish, by outward appearance, from patches of the bland, somewhat rubbery daily fare. In general, one must either eat a great deal to arrive at a strikingly pleasurable mouthful, or else altogether refrain from eating until hunger renders any random handful delicious. The one promise the fungus makes is to be, however monotonously, there, day after day. Its evolution—the organic predecessors upon which its rhizoids feed—is mysterious, but not so basic a mystery, I dare say, as my own existence here, on this planet of all planets.

  I often wonder if the fungus has a consciousness. Not like mine, of course (I am clearly more elaborately differentiated, from toenails to eyelashes), but in some diffuse way comparable, compatible with its endlessly repetitive structure—a dim awareness, like the light-sensors of blue-eyed scallops, that exists at the probing, searching tips of the tireless hyphae. Does it, moreover, like me, or is its patient feeding of me, day after day, an indifferent accident, a heartless largesse spilled from its own blind, entirely self-absorbed life? At times, curled beneath its soft beige gills of thallic matter, I feel a kind of vaporous breath that hints of love. The perpetual silence seems to develop an almost audible node in which an urgent benevolence is held as in a clenched fist. Sometimes I find in the convolutions of a folded outcropping some strikingly anthropomorphic set of ridges and vesicles—another man, about to stand forth!—and sense a joke, a thinking comment, a wry salute from my ubiquitous co-inhabitant. Certainly its vast body is warmer in some spots than others, and exudes a language of smells—punky, pungent, musty, faintly fruity—that is inflected as if by an inner consideration, a hope of achieving communion. At moments it even gives me back, as if out of an armpit or a groin, my own odor of stale male sweat.

  John appeared today, in mid-afternoon in his green truck, to take his stand in the woods for a few hours. Hunting season has begun. Gloria was outside raking leaves. In my infirmity, she has to do it all herself this fall, except for the Saturdays when Jeremy can tear himself away from his computer classes and the aftermath of frat parties, including, he resentfully hints, a hungover and irritable girl in his bed. Gloria rakes up heaps of leaves and totes them off in bulging sheetfuls so heavy she staggers and stumbles in her slick-soled Wellingtons. She wears a red bandana and, when John pulled up, she put on a toothy smile that telegraphed happiness through the November drizzle even from my distant vantage at the guest-room window. Her face has a glow, from the vigorous exercise, as she puts down her burden and walks across the driveway to greet the gallant deerslayer. To me he seems, white-haired and stooped, with trembling hands, too old to warrant
such a girlish greeting, but then I reflect that he is my age, if not—can it be?—a few years younger. Despite my post-prostatic discomfort, I put on trousers and shoes and a shirt and make my way downstairs. Steps down, I have discovered, are more painful than steps up.

  I go outdoors, inhaling the heady liquor of oxygen and mist-filtered afternoon light. Only the ornamental bushes— forsythia, lilac—still cling to their leaves. John has a beautiful, unhurried grin, for all the defects of his lower teeth. His saintly patience slows all his facial movements, including the tongue and lip exertions of his careful, explanatory speech.

  Proudly he shows us the absurd panoply of his camouflage gear. He owns, stacked on the driver’s side of the truck, a variety of patterns and weights of costume. The splotches on one canvas jacket imitate the greenery of pine forest, and on another are painted the branches and coloring of deciduous trees in the fall. For today, he chooses a water-repellent Gore-Tex suit with a life-sized tree trunk prominent on the front. But before he puts it on, he shows us his bow—of gray metal, notched and calibrated like a gun, with a set of candy-colored sights embedded above the flat-faced grip, including a small tube that, when tightened, as he demonstrates, lights a tiny red light, for aiming in darkness. The string of the bow, as dark and plangent-looking as a harp string from Hell, has an incongruous tangle of fluff, like a gauzy pipe-cleaner, tied to it. “What’s the purpose of that?” I ask.

  “You know what they call that?” he asks in turn, chuckling. “A tarantula. It deadens the sound,” he explains. “If a deer hears the twang, it’ll drop down lower, as much as ten inches.” Dramatically, he illustrates the sudden defensive action with his own body. “It’ll ‘jump the string,’ as hunters say. Throws the shot totally off. The deer’s instinct, you see, when it hears anything, is to crouch down ready to spring.”

  From Gloria’s beaming expression she expected him, her miraculous savior, to complete the lesson by levitating into the air. “You’re aiming at a seven-inch circle,” John went on, equably addressing the two of us, though we stood some feet apart, estranged by my illness. His half-gloved fingers and thumbs described the imaginary target. “So you can imagine it throws you off if they hear the string.”

  In the interests of clarity, he bent his knees and became a deer, about to leap. It seemed a kind of courting dance he was doing. An arrow of pain pierced me down below, on the dark side of my abdominal depths, as I murmured, “Interesting.”

  He showed us his arrows—again, metallic and machined. “Grooved,” he explained, a finger lovingly tracing the groove. “For rigidity. Slow-motion movies show how a wood arrow, you can imagine with all that sudden pressure of release at the end, bends this way and that in flight, maybe six or seven times before it straightens out.” His hands showed how, flexing in and then out. “By the time it reaches its target it’s expended a lot of energy.”

  “But not these arrows,” Gloria prompted, eagerly.

  “No, ma’am,” he said, the “ma’am” conveying, in its odd formality, an ironic intimacy. “These fly true.”

  The drizzle was making the driveway asphalt shine and gave a film-noirish intensity to our conference. The sun was a golden smear in a coarse gray sky washed by blue stripes of watercolor. As I made feeble motions toward helping Gloria with the leaves, John set about dressing, first in the large green-and-brown mock-arboreal pants, then a jacket, and last an olive wool hat stiffened in front like the cap of a Swiss yodeler. You would think he would have looked absurd, a walking tree, but in truth he looked distinguished, younger than his years—a gentlemanly shaman off to blend with the forest.

  The light failed within an hour. Back in bed, I must have been napping when his truck drove off loudly into the darkness. As she set my dinner on a tray before me, Gloria moved with an abstracted grace, smiling to herself.

  “Did he get a deer?” I asked.

  “Of course not, not so soon. Not immediately. But he said he’ll be back in a few days. He’ll bring a fawn blat.”

  “A fawn what?”

  “Blat, apparently. It imitates the sound a fawn makes, so the mother comes.”

  “My God, how cruel. This is the cruellest guy I’ve ever met, and you seem to think he’s great.”

  “I don’t think that.” Yet the inward-directed smile could not be erased from her tense cheeks, the tucked corners of her lips. “He’s hopeful. He says that the signs are good.”

  “Signs.”

  “You know, darling. Signs. Intimations. He feels things.”

  “And I don’t, huh?”

  “Oh, Ben, you do, but everything you feel has to do with yourself. John feels things about others.”

  Where are the stars? The ancient legends describe the sky as full of stars, congregations of bright points that to unsophisticated eyes took on the forms of gods and godlike creatures—a centaur, a dragon, a bear, a whale. Our ancestors watched their sheep by starlight, and mariners steered their fragile ships upon the teeming sea by stars they knew by name and faithful location. Now the night sky presents a hazy slate, whose faint points of light can be confused with the small coagulations that float in the vitreous humor within the eyeball. Scientific apparatus less subjective than human sight reports that there is still a universe of mass and momentum out there in the dark, behind the closed closet door, so to speak, and science, though reluctant to admit the dimness, or visual negligibility, of the stars relative to their reported presence in their past, has tried to produce theories as to why this should be so. A general muffling of signals has been proposed, due to a cosmic moment of stasis. The universe after twenty-five billion years of inflation has reached the point where the Big Bang’s initial momentum is exactly equal to the total amount of matter and, like a ball at the apogee of its toss, it is momentarily at rest, a pause reflected in a heavenly brownout before a future surge in the other direction. The bloated, feeble state of our sun—the muddy color of brick and so swollen its arc subtends a third of the horizon— would seem to offer confirmation. We have entered, on the cosmic scale, a dull, declining time.

  Another proposal is that, through an unforeseen but perfectly well understood effect of quantum mechanics and its uncertainty principle, “virtual” particles, called into “being” with their anti-particles, for titanically small periods of time, are multiplying in the gravitational and electromagnetic fields that permeate “empty” space, exciting each other into existence in such numbers that space is becoming a semi-transparent gel, occluding protons from afar. The condition may be restricted to our galaxy, or the nearer portion of it. A third school of scientific thought holds simply that industrial pollution and the dust raised by the last war have thickened our planet’s atmosphere. But the war ended ten thousand revolutions of this planet ago, time for most dust to settle, and industrial production is still far from regaining pre-war levels. A fourth theory is that the ancients simply had better eyesight than we, or (a fifth theory) their astronomical descriptions were grossly exaggerated, to benefit the priestly hierarchy and its imbecilic royal puppets.

  Coming back in the late-afternoon dark from a visit to the dazzlingly lit spaces of the Beverly Hospital (the doctors say I am doing fine: my impotence, incontinence, pain, paranoia, depression, and sense of dislocation are all on track in the normal course of healing), we picked up in our headlights, to one side of the driveway, a man disguised as a tree. It was John, walking back to his truck after two hours of remaining motionless in his stand. Gloria push-buttoned the Infiniti window down and asked in a musical, sprightly, loving voice, “How did it go?”

  “It was quiet,” he admitted, with no hint of discouragement.

  “Our neighbor, Mrs. Lubbetts, told me on the phone she saw four of them, feasting on her junipers.”

  “Oh, they’re around,” he chimed back. “It’s just a question of time.”

  And what isn’t? I sullenly thought.

  The quiver of four aligned arrows on his back made him look like an anti-aircraft battery dr
aped in camouflage cloth. His wire-frame glasses seemed still to hold the light from our headlights. To make him aware of my presence, as I huddled there beside Gloria, desperate for a diaper change, I cleared my throat and asked, “Do the trinkets ever bother you? These bigger new ones can do a job on human beings, I hear.”

  He straightened, so his saintly smile was all I could see through Gloria’s rolled-down window. “I carry a spray; they mix it of sand and glue. One squirt of that and those darn critters don’t come near your feet again.”

  Gloria made the car seat bounce, this expertise excited her so. Her radiant hair, cut and tinted while I was suffering my hospital checkup, blazed filament by filament in the ambient glow of our headlights. Or was some cunning part of John’s armory giving off a secondary glow?

  “Smell that?” he said suddenly.

  “What?” she asked, breathless.

  “A buck. Right about here.”

  We were parked, our engine idling, at a spot on the driveway beside the sourwood tree, whose fallen leaves gave off, I had noticed, a rich, lusty smell of decay. But I didn’t want to argue. I wanted only to get back to the house and get out of my wet Depends.

  “There could be a buck?” Gloria asked, with a rising inflection.

  “Why not?” John asked in his slow voice. “This is the season. Fella I was shooting with over on Plum Island got a six-pointer whose nose was to the ground, following the scent of a doe. That’s what they do. Buck smells a doe, his brain can’t take in much else.”

  “How exciting!” Gloria exclaimed.

  “Wasn’t paying attention, that’s how he got shot,” John said, as if his nature lesson needed recapitulation.

  “I’m soaked,” I muttered at her side. “I’m miserable.” Reluctantly she moved the car up the driveway, nudging it along as if keeping step with the hunter walking up alone.