This is the Way the World Ends

by James Morrow

  George wished that War and Peace would start again. “Good movie, huh?”

  “I can see your viewpoint. Eight hours of mongrel film technique in the service of murky Soviet propaganda, and yet there’s much to admire—the energetic grandeur, the meticulous Tolstoyan ambience.” Overwhite massaged his elbow. “Cancer almost never forms in the elbows.”

  “Not much of a turnout,” said George.

  “These enlisted men, all they want is Clint Eastwood and tits.” Overwhite interlaced his fingers. “Cancer doesn’t bother with the fingers, either, not as a rule.” He rubbed his chest. “In general, we needn’t worry about breast cancer.”

  Later that afternoon, the Russians fled from the Battle of Borodino, Andrei died of his wounds, the Grand Army occupied Moscow, Napoleon suffered his calamitous retreat, and Pierre ended up with the vital and appealing Natasha Rostov.

  Morning Valcourt is probably quite vital and appealing, George decided, once you get to know her.

  From the perspective of the average consumer, psychotherapists in the second half of the twentieth century were an overpaid population. A hundred dollars an hour seemed a high price for the privilege of being listened to. What people don’t realize, Morning thought, is that I never stop working, night or day. When I’m having lunch, I’m working. I dream about my patients.

  She sat down in the middle of the periscope room and arranged her lunch. A thermos of skim milk, a cucumber sandwich. She wanted to lose five pounds by the end of the voyage. Her Defense Department patient came to mind. Wengernook. All those feelings—he actually saw his wife die of radiation sickness—and no vocabulary for them. He talks about ballistic missile defenses. And Randstable, rambling on about inertial guidance and his old “think tank.” He confuses systems analysis with thought. And the arms controller. Poor Overwhite, riddled with nonexistent tumors. Repression…

  She finished her lunch, stuffed the refuse into the garbage scoop.

  And Paxton. Why does he look at me that way? It’s not sex, not entirely. He wants something else from me.

  The door hissed open.

  George knew that, as a Unitarian, he was not competent to deal with metaphysical commodities, including prophetic glass paintings. He had decided to approach the situation on the theory that his Leonardo did not spell out an inevitable fate but, rather, a possible future, something that he could make happen through diligence and creativity. I shall not let Leonardo and Nostradamus and Holly’s stepsister down, he had resolved. I shall woo Morning Valcourt, make myself fascinating to her, fall in love with her, convince her to become my wife.

  “You and I have a lot in common,” he said, entering the periscope room. “Did you know that selling tombstones is quite similar to psychotherapy? I would talk to people about their troubles.”

  “We’re the talking cure,” she said tonelessly.

  “For example, we had guilt stones. Also self-hatred stones.”

  “Oh.”

  He saw that he had been misinterpreting her face. The odd tilt of her mouth came not from snarling but from speaking so much truth, while the sharp flare of her nostrils traced to sensitivity rather than snobbery. He twisted his wedding ring. Forgive me, Justine.

  “I want you to see a fire,” she said.

  “A fire? I got enough of that at Wildgrove.” All business, this woman.

  “Wildgrove was nothing.” She led him toward Periscope Number One. “Odessa had the distinction of being the last city to receive a warhead. It was attacked five days ago by the strategic submarine Atlanta. It’s still burning.”

  “Odessa? You mean…they hit Russia’s cities after all? They didn’t just go for the missile bases?”

  “Basic nuclear strategy. We took out their fixed silos, but they thought we were after their cities, so they went after our cities, and…quid pro quo.”

  George pressed his eyes against the soft rubber viewfinder. A frantic orange haze appeared. He adjusted the focus. Odessa vibrated with flames. Inky smoke filled the heavens. “Fabrics, insulation, oil stores, polymers—there’s plenty to keep it going,” Morning narrated. “The survivors must inhale a demon’s breath of dioxins and furans.”

  “You know so much, Dr. Valcourt,” he said in what he hoped was a seductive tone. The periscope room, he decided, was a lousy environment for making romance bloom. He would have to take her on a date. Would the movies be best? The bowling alley? The casino?

  She pulled on the periscope handle, aiming the device at the continent where the United States of America had once been located. Fires. Back to the Soviet Union. Fires. America. City fires. Oil well fires. Coal seam fires. Grassland fires. Peat marsh fires. Forest fires. A pall of mist hung in the air, black as the blood of Nadine Covington and Ensign Peach. The Northern Hemisphere was wrapped in soot.

  That night—Monday night—George dreamed he was made of smoke. His smoke legs would not let him walk. He could hold nothing in his smoke hands.

  Then came Tuesday. The periscope room again.

  “Can you tell me what day it is, George?” she asked.

  Was it his imagination, or were her questions getting increasingly pointless? “The tenth of January. I’ve been aboard three weeks.”

  “Good. But out there it’s the beginning of July.”

  “Out where?”

  “In the world.”

  “What?”

  “Time is ruined, George—one of the many effects of nuclear war that nobody quite anticipated. All those fundamental particles being annihilated—time gets twisted and folded. A minute passes in here, but out there it might be an hour, a day, or a week.”

  “Folded?”

  “Like a Chinese screen. Post-exchange physics—something even Einstein didn’t foresee. In local regions of the quantum-dynamics fabric, space is taking on the role of time, and vice versa. According to our best evidence, there are only two places where the old ways of counting time still work. This ship is one of them. Antarctica is the other. Are you upset?”

  He recalled the book he used to read Holly, Carrie of Cape Cod, full of clams and hermit crabs. I am a hermit crab, he decided. Place a blowtorch against my shell, I won’t feel it. Scratch me—no pain. “If time is crinkled, then time is crinkled,” he said. “We hermit crabs can take anything.”

  “You what crabs?”

  “Hermit crabs.”

  “Yes. Hermit crabs. Good,” Morning said. “Hermit crabs seek out shells because they want to survive,” she added thoughtfully.

  “Hermit crabs believe in the future,” his therapist concluded.

  She’s starting to care about me, he thought. Should I show her my Leonardo? (Look, Dr. Valcourt—you and I are destined to marry and have babies!) No. Not yet—she won’t understand. It might come across as a joke, or a symptom of survivor’s guilt, or a weird seduction attempt.

  “Jocotepec, Mexico,” she said.

  He leaned toward the eyepiece, twisted the focus knob.

  “Today,” she said, “we’re going to deal with ice.”

  A crowd of peasants stood on a frozen lake. Soot walled over the sky. Cold rain fell. The survivors’ teeth vibrated, plumes of breath gushed out. They wore rags. Many went barefoot—blue ankles, missing toes. Faithlessly they huddled around a limp and sputtering fire.

  “I thought you said July.”

  “July. High noon. Those people are freezing to death. Blame the urban conflagrations. There’s so much smoke in the air that ordinary sunlight is being absorbed. Right now the average worldwide temperature is minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit. The soot cap migrates with the climate. In April it crossed the equator, sending ice storms through the Amazon basin. Photosynthesis has been shut down, the earth’s vegetation mantle is crumbling. For many years, this was an unanticipated effect of nuclear holocaust. Then, shortly before the war, certain scientists foresaw it. Sundeath syndrome.”

  She tugged on the periscope handle. Rigid corpses littered the planet like the outpourings of some crazed taxidermist.
Unable to penetrate the ice-sealed rivers and ponds, many wanderers were dying of thirst. Under bruise-purple skies a starving French farmer clawed at the iron ground with bloody fingers, seeking to exhume the potato he knew was there. At last he lifted the precious object from the dirt, staring at it stupidly. George rejoiced at the humble victory. Now eat it! The farmer fainted and toppled over, soon becoming as stiff as the stone angel that George used to sell under the name Design No. 4335.

  Wednesday.

  “Fourteen months have passed,” said Morning. “It is September. The strategic submarines have put to port. The soot has settled. Light can get through. Sundeath syndrome has run its course.”

  “Thank God.”

  “Don’t thank anybody. This light is malignant.” Morning closed her eyes. “The high-yield airbursts created oxides of nitrogen that have shredded the earth’s ozone buffer. Ultraviolet sunshine is gushing down. What does it all mean?” Her sigh was shrill, piercing. “Famine,” she said.

  George hated being difficult at this point in their courtship, but he couldn’t help asking, “Is this really the way to cure me?”

  “Yes,” she said, as if that settled the matter. “Last year’s harvest was a disaster. The frozen ground could not receive seeds—those few crops that were planted emerged into a spring laden with smog and acid showers. This year’s harvest will be worse—roots reaching into eroded soil, leaves seared by the ultraviolet. And there is another enemy…”

  The locusts rolled across the Iowa com fields in a vast insatiable carpet, stripping the crop to its vegetal bones, devouring the botanic carrion.

  “The post-exchange environment is utopia for insects. Their enemies the birds have succumbed to radiation. Stores of carbaryl and malathion have been destroyed. The omnipresent corpses are perfect breeding places. So what will our hungry survivors do? Forage? Nuts and berries are fast disappearing. Dig shellfish? Radioactive rainouts have contaminated coastal waters. Hunt? Not if the game is dying out…”

  She pivoted the periscope. A rabbit pelt hung on a mass of rabbit bones. The pelt took a hop and collapsed.

  “Not if the tiny creatures that underwrite the earth’s food chains were killed when the ultraviolet hit the marshes and seas…”

  Can a walrus, paragon of things fat and full, look emaciated? This one did. Its eyes were sunken. Its ribs pushed against taut, sallow flesh that had been feeding on itself and now could feed no more.

  “Not if thousands of species are at risk because the ultraviolet has scarred their corneas…”

  A blind deer moved through the organic rubble that had been the woods of central Pennsylvania, pacing in crazed parabolas of misery and hunger. Poor deerie, George could hear Holly saying.

  “You know what comes next, don’t you? You know what people eat when they can no longer gather berries, hunt game, or harvest the seas?”

  Out in the timefolds, Italian office workers ate human corpses. Belgian mathematics professors murdered their colleagues and devoured their internal organs. Dave Valentine of Unlimited, Ltd, the agency that had produced the scopas suit commercials, stumbled through the ruins of Glen Cove, Long Island, with cannibalistic intent.

  The famine session left George quaking on the floor.

  Thursday.

  “Five years have passed,” said Morning. “And yet, in another sense, time has turned around. The modern and pristine city of Billings, Montana, has devolved into fourteenth-century London.”

  She worked the focus knob.

  “It’s time we dealt with pestilence,” she said.

  No, no, he thought, it’s time we dealt with my magic lantern slide. It’s time we made wedding plans.

  A brawny survivor in combat fatigues squatted near the entrance of a bomb shelter. He wore a surprisingly intact scopas suit and a fractured grin. A Heckler and Koch assault rifle rested on his camouflage-dappled knees. In the background, neatly stacked corpses formed a bulwark against intruders. George sensed that nuclear war was the best thing that had ever happened to this man.

  “His shelter contains an elaborate collection of canned soups,” Morning explained. “He is hoping someone will try to steal it, so that he can shoot them. Before the war, bubonic plague was endemic among the rats of eleven states in the western United States.”

  The lymph nodes in the survivor’s neck looked like subcutaneous golf balls. Morning pivoted the periscope. Montana trembled with rats. The roads were paved with unburied corpses.

  “If you were a disease—viral gastroenteritis or infectious hepatitis or amoebic dysentery—you could not ask for better conditions than planet Earth after nuclear war. The ultraviolet has suppressed your hosts’ immune systems. The omnipresent insects are carrying you far and wide. No pasteurized milk, no food refrigeration, no waste treatment, no inoculation programs—all these circumstances bode well.”

  At each point of the compass, a new microorganism flourished. No death happened in the abstract. A particular Nigerian child died of cholera, sprawled across his mother’s lap in a brutal and unholy pietà. A particular Romanian machinist died of meningococcal meningitis, a particular Iranian school teacher of louse-borne typhus…

  Friday.

  “Infertility,” said Morning.

  The word sounded neutral, clinical, non-threatening. Then he looked into the timefolds.

  A Cambodian man and his wife sat in a village square and wept. “The radiation,” Morning explained. “They’ll never have children.”

  They should find the city with marble walls, George thought. Nostradamus foresaw this problem.

  A Polish mother suffered a miscarriage. The specter of still-birth visited a family in Pakistan and another in Bolivia. The live births were worse. It was an era when thousands of children were required to face the world without such selective advantages as arms, legs, and cerebral cortices. “Mate an irradiated chromosome with another irradiated chromosome,” Morning noted, “and no good will come of it.”

  “You must tell me something,” said George, reeling with nausea. “Who will treat your survivor’s guilt?”

  The therapist smoothed a wrinkle from her gray skirt and, in the weakest voice he had ever heard from her, said, “I don’t know.”

  For moral reasons, the young Reverend Peter Sparrow declined to join the Saturday night gatherings of the Erebus Poker Club. Gambling, he knew, was Satan’s third favorite pastime, after sex and ecumenicalism. Lacking such convictions, the other evacuees gathered around the green felt table in the rattling, flashing heart of the Silver Dollar Casino.

  Unsealing the deck, Brat Tarmac weeded out the jokers. He was down another five pounds, easily. “Ante up. This game is seven-card stud.” The cards rippled through his hands. “Deuces wild.”

  George said, “Today through the periscope I saw—”

  “You saw, you saw,” said Brat, sneering. “Jack bets.”

  “One dollar,” said Overwhite.

  “I’m out,” said Wengernook.

  “Raise,” said Randstable.

  George said, “Morning showed me—”

  “We’ll take a vote,” said Brat. “How many of us want to hear what Paxton saw through the periscope today?”

  No one spoke. Brat dealt another round of up cards. “Ace bets.”

  “We saw it too,” said Wengernook, quivering like an overbred dog. “Jesus.”

  “Sugar Brook built that scope,” said Randstable, who had managed to make six poker chips stand on edge. “Not my department, though—the command-and-control guys.”

  “Three dollars,” said Overwhite, reaching under his sling and checking himself for armpit tumors.

  “I have a question.” George picked up the jokers, rubbed them together like a razor and strop. “If America and Russia knew about this sundeath syndrome, why did they work out plans for different kinds of attacks and so on?”

  “Well, you see, sundeath theory was based on incomplete models of the atmosphere,” said Brat, clenching his teeth as if in great pain.
“It all depends on dust particle size, the height of the smoke plumes, rainfall, factors like that.”

  “You have to take sundeath with a grain of salt,” said Wengernook, pulling cigarettes and a risqué matchbook from his shirt. “It’s a pretty far-fetched idea.”

  “But it happened,” said George. “Right on our planet.”

  “That’s just one particular case,” said Wengernook. He struck a match. “In another sort of war, urban-industrial targets would not have been hit. You’d have fewer fires, less soot, no sundeath, and, and…” He tried to make the flame connect with the end of his cigarette, could not manage it.

  “First ace bets,” said Brat.

  “And a much more desirable outcome,” said Wengernook.

  “I’ve got it!” said Randstable. He grabbed one of the jokers from George and set it atop the six vertical chips.

  “Got what?” asked George.

  “The solution!” said Randstable.

  “To the war?” asked George.

  “To the riddle.” The joker shivered on its plastic pylons.

  “What riddle?”

  “Sverre’s riddle—why is a raven like a writing desk?”

  “Why?”

  “A raven is like a writing desk,” said the ex-Wunderkind as his little bridge collapsed, “because Poe wrote on both.”

  To and fro, warp and weft, the young black woman paced the shores of her private tropical paradise. The beach sparkled brilliantly, as if its sands were destined to become fine crystal goblets. Spiky pieces of sunlight shone in the tide pools. The surrounding sea was a blue liquid gem.

  She was about thirty. She wore no clothes. Her excellent skin had the color and vibrancy of boiling fudge. When she stopped and sucked in a large helping of air, her splendid breasts floated upward like helium balloons released in celebration of some great athletic or political victory. George thought she was the most desirable woman he had ever seen.

  A length of rope was embedded in the beach near a banyan tree. The beachcomber tore it free. Sunstruck grains showered down like sparks. The woman manipulated the rope, sculpting a grim shape from it. A noose emerged in her clever and despairing hands.