by John Updike
Next morning, shuffling down to pick up the Globe, I stopped by the sourwood to consider the odor in its vicinity. It was rank but, like the smell your finger brings away from probing the folds of your navel, or that your socks deliver when held beneath your nose at the end of a long day, not exactly unpleasant, because it is you.
It happened in my sleep, at dawn, when tender-faced ruminants inquisitively tread—nose extended like a fending hand in the dark—through the frost-whitened leaf mulch of the forest floor scarcely expecting, in the morning’s innocence, an enemy to be awake. But John had gone three weeks without his kill and had set his alarm to ring in the dark, in the middle of his faithful wife’s dreams. She rolled over, hearing him clump into his hunting boots, and fell back into a vision of venison.
I myself awoke to the sound of John and Gloria jubilating in mutually congratulatory murmurs down on the driveway. He had driven his green truck down the dirt road to collect the gutted carcass, then he had brought it back up to the house to show my wife his prize, the obscene fruit of their joint conspiracy. From my window I could see the deer’s body like a taut russet sack tossed into the square-ribbed flatbed along with the metal lattice of his treestand and some stray planks of lumber. The white of the throat couldn’t at first glance be distinguished from the big white-undersided tail. Heart thudding, I fumbled out of my sweated pajamas— never mind the soaked diaper, whose ammonia stung my eyes—and into yesterday’s corduroy trousers and moth-eaten wool sweater. Without the patience for socks, I stuck my naked feet into loafers and, moving faster than I had for months, grabbed the old parka, with its seams leaking down, hung on the hook nearest the kitchen door downstairs. The cold outside was misty, and felt like shackles on my bare ankles. The day was still too young to have acquired horizons.
Scarcely since our wedding day have I seen Gloria’s face aglow as it was beside the dusty, dented truck, with its lowered tailgate. Her bathrobe of purple chenille was clutched so tightly about her I knew she was wearing only a thin cotton nightie beneath. “He was crossing the old dirt road,” she burst out proudly to me, “right where John”—it made me shiver, the juices of affection and respect she managed to squeeze into the monosyllable—“had figured out the route up to our yard was.”
“She,” I said. “It’s a doe. It was a doe.”
“Right across beneath my stand,” John joined in. “A clean shot, the little downward angle suited me just fine, at about twenty feet.” His saintly face, with its shambly brown teeth and washed-out blue eyes, was unable to conceal, quite, his murderous pride. “Maybe she sensed my pulling the bow,” he went on. “She turned her head, to give me that seven-inch circle I spoke about. Zing! Right into the lungs. She didn’t get more than a hundred yards, and stopped breathing where she bedded down. She gave me this one long look, like I was coming to her assistance, and then lay down her pretty little head on the leaves. I didn’t have to use a second arrow. Depending on what gristle they pierce, they can be the devil to work out.”
I saw the wound now, a messy matted X. The dried blood blended in with her reddish-brown coat, its hairs glinting silver in the rising sun. From my angle the deer’s body stretched long as a lover’s beside you in bed. “How’d you get her up in the truck?” I asked.
“The old fireman’s squat-and-hoist,” he boasted, unable to control his grin. “Once you’ve removed the entrails, that cuts out a lot of the water and slop. Still, she weighs something over a hundred pounds, I can tell you. Luckily, it was near the road. Sometimes you wind up with a mile or so to drag out the carcass. I backed in the truck and hoisted. You try to take the weight on your legs and give a grunt out loud. That’s something we’ve learned from the Japanese, giving the power grunt.”
The deer’s head was toward me, on the lowered tailgate, as if to be fed something, her lips slightly drawn back, a lavender sliver of tongue visible. There were little crusts of blood around her black nostrils, relic of the bloody foam she breathed in her last minute. Her eyes were open, long-lashed, coffee-brown globules in which our oaks and tall white house set vertical reflections like tiny submerged fins. The short-haired barrel of her body, dented by the removal of its intestines and multiple stomachs and liver and lungs and heart, emitted in the frosty morning a vapor of relative warmth, like the winter sea, and a helpless strong animal smell, of dry hair and damp hide and the pellets released from her tidy anus in the sorry unravelling of death. From the inner corners of the deer’s eyes flowed two dark markings, like tear trails. But the consciousness that had protruded into the two bright, snuff-flecked eyes had moved on, into another cosmic space.
John stepped toward me, exuding his own scent, of patiently absorbed woods and a hint of bad breath—he must have been a pipe-smoker, once, to wear down those teeth like that—as if to claim my congratulations. Gloria beamed in a happy daze behind his mottled shoulders. In his bulky camouflage outfit, and his intricately shaped knit cap, with its stump of a bill, he seemed princely, a groom at a pre-Christian wedding. The deer was his bride. Or was she mine, and he and Gloria the blessed pair on this gala day? It seemed plain enough that among the four of us my affinity was with the deer. Her conical slender face, with its coarse rubbery muzzle and indelible tear trails, gazed toward me; I could see myself move, a reflected splinter wearing a parka and no socks, in the orb of dulling gel.
With a woman in love, for a time, you can do no wrong; then you reach a point where nothing you do is right. I had reached that point with Gloria a while ago and felt hardly a flicker of jealousy as she with grave sweetness—North Shore Lady Bountiful clad in naught but thin cotton beneath her regal purple robe—thanked the hunter over and over, pressing his trembling hands in both of hers.
Uneasily including me, John told us, “After I do the butchering, I’d like to present you folks with a fine venison steak. You choose the cut.”
Class lines reasserted themselves. We both stiffened at the offer. Did he mean for us to point out our preferred slice right on the still-steaming corpse? It would be like eating a large rat. Jointly we covered our refusal with the sauce of insistent mannerly gratitude, but we had refused his, in a sense, flesh. As he stepped out of his hunting gear and tree costume, he seemed shrunken, smaller in size and in mystery. He put up the trunk tailgate, bending the deer’s head back so that I winced. Ow.
For a million years (or so), we didn’t know what the stars were. Witnessed primarily by the sleepless, by watchful shepherds and sailors and the madmen who became the tribal seers, the slowly spinning spatter of lights reappeared overhead at sunset by we knew not what necessity; we gave the most prominent of them names, and wove stories to bind them together, but such exercise of our fancies drew us no closer to the astonishing truth of their gigantic circumferences, their unthinkable mass, their unbearable heat, their ghastly distance from us, and their lives of atomic turmoil, of incessant explosions and elemental mutations, fusing hydrogen nuclei to form the two-proton, two-neutron nuclei of helium, and then in the convulsions of a supernova pressing helium into carbon, oxygen, neon, and ultimately iron.
Discovery of the stars’ nature had to await the invention of telescopes and spectrographs, which came about only after the rise and fall of many barbaric empires, led by kings proclaimed by their priests to be earthly embodiments of God. Their warfare, and the erection of monuments suitable in their grandeur to God-men, sluggishly propelled technology forward, through the invention of wheeled chariots, stirrups and saddles, catapults and rams, moats and portcullises, pulleys and booms, gunpowder, steam engines, radios, telephones, hydrocarbon-burning engines that could propel vehicles along the ground and even into the air, and so forth to the point where, a hundred years ago, it was understood that beyond the stars that a shepherd or sailor sees at night lie, across vast deeps of emptiness, conglomerations of more stars. These, fuzzy in their first sightings, were first called nebulae, and then island universes, and now galaxies. The numbers are so grand and round as to seem mere fabulations:
a hundred billion stars in our own galaxy, a flattened spiral which is a hundred thousand light-years in diameter, and then a hundred billion galaxies beyond, of more or less the same size as our own. Such numbers numb us, else we would continually scream.
Scarcely fifty years ago—a mere wink in the history of our planet, a mere smothered yawn within the saga of our species—was it discovered that all the galaxies are rushing toward us at titanic speeds. Well, not all, for those the farthest away, at a distance of more than twenty-five billion years, are moving away, as a so-called “red shift” in their spectra inarguably reveals—which is to say, twenty-five billion years ago they were moving away. Now—but “now” makes no sense in cosmic terms. The farther we look, the more ancient is what we see. Inside this remote and ruddy ring of apparent recession there is a ring of stasis—of pause, of hesitation—twenty-four billion or so light-years away, and inside that the stars begin to scream blue. At first they murmur, but the nearer they are, the more distinctly and uniformly blue they are, since within a radius of five billion light-years we are looking into the relatively recent past. Some are rushing toward us at a considerable fraction of the speed of light.
It is clear what is happening: the universe is collapsing. The red shift on the periphery is very old news, testifying to a former expansion. There is much scientific speculation about the expansion. How did it happen? The collapse seems normal and inevitable: gravitational attraction, the most feeble but most relentless of the basic forces, is pulling everything home, to a singular core—a point, infinitely small and dense, of nothingness. But why did nothingness ever leave home, as it were? What placed the stars and galaxies, the quasars and black holes and oceans of neutrinos out there? Whence this inordinate amount of sparkling dust?
Out there—down there, up there—there must be or must have been, in the concentric rings of time, other souls. Indeed, the virtually infinite numerousness of heavenly bodies argues that somewhere, somewhen, I had or have an identical twin, amid a galaxy of brothers who resemble me closely. The odds are gigantically for it. Yet no proof has ever arrived. The distances have stifled with delay whatever radio signals or spaceships other populations might have launched. An impeccable silence hangs as answer to the great Who? Not that my twin would be any less puzzled than I—else he would not be my twin.
The long-range prospect appears clear. If the red-to-blue shift can be dated to plus or minus twenty-five billion years ago, the collapse will continue nearly that long before local effects can be observed. The background cosmic radiation of 2K° will rise to 3K°, it is estimated, in ten billion years. From this point the universe will halve its dimensions in three and a half billion years and keep accelerating. In ten billion more years, the background radiation will have risen to 300K°. This is still cold, too cold for even the toughest life forms, but our planet will slowly become unable to divest itself of heat. Our glaciers will melt, and then our oceans will evaporate. A mere forty million years later, the background radiation will match the temperature needed for the creation and sustenance of life; but life will have vanished on our scorched planet, if it has not already been engulfed by the expansion of the local sun into a red giant. The background radiation—the temperature of space—has risen to 300C°, or 572F°, and will continue to rise as the universe halves in dimension every few millions of years. The galaxies will have merged, but star collisions will still be rare, there is so much empty space to eat up. The night sky will begin to glow a dull red. In time it will turn yellow, then white. The universe will be a furnace, an oubliette with white-hot walls. All planetary atmospheres will have been stripped; all life-forms, however ingeniously evolved in their crannies and lightless depths, will be remorselessly incinerated. Unable to radiate their heat away, the stars will explode; space will become a hot plasma of compressing gas. The rate of change will enter a scale of hundreds of thousands of years, then mere thousands, then centuries, days, minutes, seconds, split-seconds. As the temperature climbs to billions of degrees, atomic nuclei will disintegrate. In the compression of matter, protons and neutrons will no longer exist; the thick soup of unbound quarks will weigh trillions of tons per thimbleful. Black holes, those hells of absolute density, will merge with one another. Not just matter but space itself, taking with it time, will be crushed out of existence, and I and my soulmate, my certain twin in the expanding dust of aeons and aeons ago, will be one or, to be exact, no one.
But can time end? Space can be obliterated with the matter that measures it, but can time excuse itself from the grammar of sequence? It was implies a present that still is. Can the fact of something—especially an entire universe, all 1087 particles of it, all 1050 tons of it—having existed be ever obliterated? Time, having taken the imprint of being, must endure like a sheet of paper that, though blank, bears a watermark in its fibers. The priests who, in their conical hats configured with stars and moons, continue to practice their grotesque trade on this doomed planet even into this age of scientific enlightenment have a saying in their archaic language: Our minds harry God from every covert, and yet he lives within. He is killed, and killed, and yet not.
My own mind quails. The blue shift is tens of billions of years from heating the interstellar space by so much as a degree Fahrenheit. I am safe in my nest of local conditions, on my hilltop in sight of the still-unevaporated ocean. Nevertheless, I am uneasy. All the vegetation in my view is gray, leafless. The sea has no color; its uniformity of surface, scarcely rippled, offers the very image of entropy. The firmament is heavy, a mere webbing of lambent mortar between giant clouds as shapeless and motionless as paving stones. Plagues stalk the scabs of land, perpetuated by microorganisms that understand only annihilation; and nations, too, all illusions of gloire and civilizing mission hopelessly decayed, compete like animals in a cage where food for only half of them is supplied. The very short view alone is bearable.
The woods between here and the beach are a solid leafless brown, a kind of giant moss. Morning engenders beneath its surface a thousand forked glints of illumined bare twigs, an electric crackle of white sunlight. The flat roof of Mrs. Lubbetts’ beach house forms the only note, a jarring one, of human habitation in the view.
Yesterday, or the day before—they do run together, the days—the air for the first time since last winter was so much colder than the sea that the water smoked: little cloudlets of vapor, in strips and vague zigzags, adhered to its surface until the sun warmed them out of existence. On such sunny dry days shrivelled leaves scrape and scutter almost deafeningly across the black asphalt of the driveway.
The world still holds leaves. Along 128, as Gloria drove me, “to get me out of myself,” on some errands of hers (sizing up the competition in the gifts trade, mostly) to the so-called North Shore Shopping Plaza—an inferno of tacky consumerism that I once visited with Deirdre, she looking like my young nurse, I looking like every other retired parasite upon the shattered economy—I noticed that among the mostly bare trees the willows still have kept lemonade-yellow tops, the lower, shaded leaves having fallen but these top leaves still sucking vitality from the ever more obliquely angled sun. I also saw along the highway that some strange trees (oaks, I think, of a special sort) have bleached almost white in turning and yet do not drop their leaves, rather like trees abruptly killed by lightning.
A strange hallucination: in walking down to pick up the Globe, with my gradually more vigorous stride, I made a mental note, rounding the first curve, to pick up the sizable branch that I had seen fall off the hickory tree. But no branch was there, and then I remembered that I had seen it fall in a dream, this morning before awaking. In my dream, I was looking out this window beside which I so often sit writing and saw the branch that most conspicuously hangs down slowly break away and fall. The sight made me happy, because the branch had long bothered me and now I had a less obstructed view of the sea, and of Misery Island and, beyond it, Baker’s, with its lighthouse and Methodist summer houses. The dream had been so vivid, and yet so mo
destly plausible, that I caught myself trying to act upon it in the “real” world of three dimensions and Greenwich time.
As the day that had begun so cold continued, the sea became absolutely silken, the same delicately rippling blue from shore to horizon, as if in two dimensions. It had perceptible threads in it—tiny “floats,” as textile manufacturers say—in diagonal rows, as in gabardine. The blue line of the South Shore also floated, admitting beneath itself a thin pale line of air the same faintly tawny color as the sky.
Coming back up the driveway, annoyed with the lilac and the forsythia for still being green, I touched a forsythia branch, and several of the leaves, narrow and pointed, fluttered to the ground. They came off at the lightest tug, twirling down to join the gaudier leaves of the sourwood, already matted in a mulch, compounded like chipwood, of scarlet and gold. I withdrew my hand in distaste. I had no wish to take Nature’s place, to usurp her lethal, cyclical prerogatives.
The Kegel exercises are coming well. I stand above the toilet bowl and think of all the oval toilet bowls I have gazed into since first learning to go pee-pee in that narrow country house shaken by the traffic on the road heading down into the chimneyed brick heart of Hammond Falls. Imagining myself a child again, I try to remind my puzzled, wounded body how to release the urethral sphincter and make a golden arc. There is a ghost in my machine that controls the valves. Ever more, I seem to locate him, somehow. Mind over matter: I feel such triumph, to be regaining this bit of my animal self. But I can brag about it only to Gloria, and not too often; her face shows impatience with my body. Christmas looms a month away, and she spends more time at her gift shop, leaving me to roam, cautiously, in the house.
