This is the Way the World Ends

by James Morrow

  And now—memory bending back on itself, shards from youth, sacred frivolities: a stuffed octopus, a red bicycle, a stocky ceramic teapot, a clock that looked like a cat, the smell of rain, the caffeine air of fall. My best friend was named Sylvia, I think. I loved major league baseball. Yes, I would have been a fan, can you believe that? I got my first period at a Houston Astros game. I bled for the Astros, red blood.

  She described Astros who had never lived. 2003, that was to be their year. Last game of the World Series. Ninth inning. Down a run. Cristobal walks…Robin Arcadia comes up and…bang!

  “Thank you,” she said.

  “You’ve had quite a life,” he said.

  “Bet your ass.”

  He lay down beside her, shivering from the coldness she gave off and from the thought of what it meant. Sleep came instantly. His dream took him to a moss-muffled forest, all the great women there, Justine, Morning, his mother (SHE WAS BETTER THAN SHE KNEW), the four of them building a house (a cottage actually, on stilts above a lake), and then the children appeared, Holly, Aubrey, and a third child that Justine had gone off and had during the war, a boy.

  Waking, he realized that his eyelids were stuck together, and he feared that when he pulled them apart another pair would be lying beneath them, and beyond that, another. My wife is dying. There is nothing I can do. He heard the pops of the little muscles as he opened his eyes. The ceiling lights glowered at him. He turned over, saw the vacant depression in the mattress, and all the ice in Antarctica entered his heart.

  But then she limped into the cabin, feverish, shaking. Snow filled the creases of her scopas suit. Scrolls of ice hung from what remained of her hair.

  “You frightened me,” he said. “I thought—”

  “No. The second of May. I gained the continent on the second of May.”

  “You’ve been outside? It’s crazy for you to go outside.”

  “I made a deal.”

  “What?”

  “Hug me.”

  He did.

  “I’m going to say something strange,” she rasped. “No matter what it is, you won’t stop hugging me.”

  “I promise,” he said.

  “You’re going to see your daughter again. Holly.”

  He hugged her more tightly. “Holly is dead.”

  “I made a deal,” she said. “It will happen in a week. Sunday. Be ready.”

  “I don’t understand,” he said.

  “You will have half a day with her. Twelve hours. That’s not much. You can say no.”

  “I want this more than anything.”

  “All right. It’s done. Sunday. A twelve-hour visit, starting at noon. Remember—be ready.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “I made a deal.” Ice water drizzled from Morning’s body to the carpet.

  “The little girl in Leonardo’s painting, it wasn’t Aubrey?”

  “There is no Aubrey. It was—”

  “Holly?”

  “Yes.”

  “It looked just like her,” George said knowingly. “It had to be her.”

  “The painting predicted the future,” Morning confirmed. “Nostradamus saw correctly. Kiss me.”

  They went to the periscope room, Morning leaning on him all the way. Periscope Number One gazed unflinchingly across the continent. Up and down the Transantarctic Mountain Range, the McMurdo Sound Agreement took its toll, millions dissolving, deserted by their minds and bodies, leaving behind scopas suits in lieu of corpses.

  “I don’t want to watch this,” he said.

  “You’ve seen worse,” she said.

  He focused on the Ross Ice Shelf. The crater scooped out by the Battle of Wildgrove was but a footprint compared with the central crevasse. And then they came, marching proudly—those who preferred free will to the McMurdo Sound Agreement, friends holding hands, lovers locked together, women clutching children, children cuddling bears made of snow. In a vast white tide they hurled themselves over the ragged edge, platoons of unlived lives returning to the bedrock, generation upon generation losing the continent.

  “They were right to indict me,” he muttered.

  On a nearby nunatak a great bonfire flourished, flames against the snow, bright and red as an eye from the Midgard serpent. Led by Mother Mary Catherine, a hundred darkbloods moved toward the fire, each bearing an icon of ice. Warhead by warhead, delivery system by delivery system, the prosecution’s frozen arsenal was abolished. The Javelin cruise missile melted instantly. Then the Guardian Angel ICBM was salvoed. Next the Multiprong fizzled away, the MacArthur III, the Wasp-13 heavy bomber, the mine, the shell, the depth charge, the free-fall bomb. Cheers shook the glacier, and then the dancing started. Cocoa flooded into frigid throats, smiles brightened tired faces, and he saw that there was nothing like a clear, cold night of security destruction for bringing joy to an unadmitted heart.

  “Weaponless deterrence,” said George.

  “What?” said Morning.

  “A way to get rid of nuclear arsenals. Instead of missile deterring missile, factory deters factory. The Soviet and American strategists all see that any move toward rearmament on one side will be matched by the other side, until the world is back to mutual assured destruction. So nobody rearms.”

  “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “The knowledge of how to build them—that’s the real deterrent. I’m just beginning to understand.”

  “Sounds unstable.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Did I tell you about my best friend? Sylvia? She had the strangest laugh you ever heard.”

  Hour after hour they beheld the deaths, most anonymous, a few with names. Shawna Queen Jefferson evaporated while crossing the courtyard of the Ice Palace of Justice, her robe flapping in the wind like a great black wing. Alexander Aquinas went out attempting to preserve a copy of the verdict in a hole in one of the nunataks. As Gila Guizot began to fade, she grabbed her rifle and shot herself in the heart; liquid shadows rushed down the Antarctic National Police insignia on her breast. Jared Seldin, would-be star voyager, vaporized while crawling across the interior plateau trying to catch and befriend a baby penguin.

  And everywhere, the suits. Suits lying in the streets of the ice limbos like massacred Armenians, littering the nunataks like slaughtered Huguenots, piled up in the dry valleys like purged kulaks, suits on hummocks and suits on bergs, clean white fossils of the race that had never known a single warm day.

  A young woman stood on a berg calved from the Ross barrier. She paced back and forth, raised a trembling fist toward heaven. George had seen her during the trial, seated in the gallery, her gaze locked longingly on Aquinas. A screaming Antarctic gale whipped across the sea, throwing sub-zero water across the castaway’s white boat, slapping her cheeks, salting her eyes. Even during his therapy sessions George had not seen so much misery compacted into one face. It seemed almost a blessing when the McMurdo Sound Agreement finally caught up with this lost and lovesick girl.

  “I have never been dancing,” Morning said two days later.

  “We’ll fix that,” he replied.

  “Waltzing is nice, I hear.”

  “I can’t waltz.”

  “Me neither.”

  “Put on your waltzing clothes.”

  He left. He had no plan, but he was a good husband, and he would think of something.

  Silence enveloped the little movie theater, clinging to the walls, sinking into the seats. He entered the projection booth. The 16mm film cans were stacked in three wobbly towers. In the middle of the highest stack, sandwiched between Panic in the Year Zero and The End of August at the Hotel Ozone, he spotted what he wanted, the English-language version of Sergei Bondarchuk’s War and Peace, all eight cans’ worth. He threaded up one of the middle reels, popped on the amplifier, pushed the lever to Forward. The projector grunted and squealed. Out in the theater, the narrator, golden-throated Norman Rose, declared in a voice that seemed to belong to a doctor whose patients always
got well, “If evil men can work together to get what they want, then so can good men, to get what they want.” Moving to the audio patch panel, he began to experiment, plugging, unplugging, until at last the War and Peace sound-track roared through the ship’s intercom.

  He returned to Morning and said, “May I have this dance?”

  “Delighted,” she said and coughed. Her white silk kimono hung from her failing body.

  They went to the main mess hall. The noises and voices of War and Peace echoed off the marble columns, clattered amid the crystal chandeliers. After setting her on a velvet sofa, he pushed tables aside, flung chairs away, rolled back the carpet.

  Natasha Rostov and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky were waltzing now, Ludmilla Savelyeva as Natasha, Vyacheslav Tikhonov as Andrei, original film score by Vyacheslav Ovchinnikov conducting one of the Moscow symphony orchestras.

  George lifted his wife off the sofa and extended her arms. And they danced. A wise, benevolent god entered their blood, instructing them. Adeptly they revolved through the Russian palace, round and round, one two three, Ovchinnikov’s melody pouring through them, one two three, notes soaring, gleaming half notes, burnished quarter notes, then came the sixteenth notes, thin and silver, needles weaving airborne tapestries, one two three, and Morning was smiling, and the hall was hot, and now she was laughing, and it seemed as if the autumn-leaf red were back in her hair.

  “I’m so glad I married you,” she said.

  “Would it have lasted?” he asked.

  “Oh, yes,” she said. “Forever.”

  The waltz quickened. Love blossomed between Natasha and Andrei.

  “You’re good at dancing,” she said.

  “So are you,” he said.

  “The sex part was good, too.”

  “First-rate, I thought.”

  The orchestra reached full velocity. The notes burned as they struck the air.

  “I once heard that it’s great to have a dog jump in bed with you in the morning and lick your face,” she said.

  “That’s true,” he said.

  A dotted half note soared by, trailing fire.

  “Good-bye, husband,” she said.

  “I’ll miss you,” he said.

  Her bones turned to balsa wood, and she threw all of her remaining substance into a kiss. Painlessly she quit the world, became dust, less than dust, a mute vibration, a thing never christened, born, or conceived, a notion kept only in the frail memory of a man staggering across a mess hall in an ice-bound nuclear submarine, carrying a silk kimono and weeping like an orphan.

  CHAPTER 20

  In Which a Most Unusual Yuletide Is Celebrated, Including Presents and a Tree

  Each midnight he walked the carpeted corridors of the City of New York, master of an empty ship, his ears turned to the sound of his boots, hoping their thumps would lull him to sleep. Sometimes he heard pale whisperings issue from some dark alley or forgotten passageway, but when he investigated there was nothing. In this sunken and deserted city even George’s own hallucinations declined to keep him company.

  As dawn approached he would rub his eyes, force his face into a yawn, and collapse on the nearest bunk in a parody of exhaustion. Useless—Morpheus was not fooled. George stared at the ceiling, pawed at his blankets. And then, come noon, his teeth would begin grinding so briskly he expected to see sparks, and he knew that a new day was upon him. Did I dream? he would wonder. It pleased him to remember one, for this meant he had actually slept.

  “Be ready,” Morning had said.

  Monday, the tree. He went to the missile compartment and searched among the remaining specimens from Project Citrus, eventually finding the runt of the orchard, barely four feet high, perfect for his purposes, with frail branches and scrawny fruit—no question why it had not been among those selected for the honor of lynching a war criminal. He cut it down, bore it away, set it up in his cabin.

  Tuesday, the ornaments. After securing a hammer from the torpedo room lower deck, he ran through the ship smashing every bright and gaudy object he could find—gyros, compasses, gauges, valves, pumps. He collected the shards in a duffel bag.

  Wednesday and Thursday, the presents. His goal was ten. That seemed a substantial number for her to open, whereas twelve or fifteen would have smacked of overindulgence. He went to Sverre’s cabin and appropriated the white alabaster raven, the captain’s stovepipe hat, the globe, and an empty gin bottle. From the Silver Dollar Casino he took a stack of poker chips and a poster of a harlequin whose word balloon contained the rules for blackjack. He wrote the names of countries on the chips. The main galley yielded an assortment of utensils. He put them in a cardboard box, labeling it SUPER DUPER COOKING SET with a Navy-issue laundry marker. The library was a disappointment—not a single children’s book in the stacks. So he made one, transcribing the fable he had once improvised for her in which a bunny with Holly’s personality conquered self-doubt, learning to ride a two-wheeler bicycle. He illustrated it with stick figures.

  For the ninth gift, George devised a rag doll out of patches and swatches cut from commissioned officers’ uniforms. Its eyes were brass buttons.

  The final gift had been hanging in his closet for months.

  Half a day. So short. Best to trim the tree in advance. After all, she would have all those presents to unwrap and play with. For hooks he used the paper clips that held the pages of Captain Sverre’s bad poetry together. By Friday afternoon the former orange tree had become a cheerful mass of glittery, twisted armatures and curled, nameless metal.

  He beat the lid from a canned ham into a star. Christmas trees without stars on top were totally unacceptable. He moved the step-ladder into place…

  Why am I lying on the floor? he wondered. What am I doing staring at the ceiling? He glanced at the rivet-studded walls, the unfinished tree. I am lying on the floor because there is no point to anything. People are extinct.

  Midnight came. He stood up. “The point,” he said aloud, “is that Holly and I are not extinct.” He placed the star where it belonged.

  Saturday, the final preparations. He wrapped the ten gifts in aluminum foil and set them under the tree, stacking and restacking them in an effort to find the perfect arrangement.

  Sunday.

  Seven A.M.

  Round and round the Christmas tree he cut a path of nervousness and doubt, periodically stopping to rearrange the presents or reposition an ornament. She wouldn’t like the doll. She would start fussing. Something…

  Eight A.M. Nine A.M. Ten A.M.

  After Chester the cat had died, they had decided to give him a proper burial, complete with a little headstone inscribed CHESTER that George had prepared at the Crippen Monument Works from a stray scrap of granite. Holly hated the whole idea; she refused to attend the funeral and screamed at her parents for dreaming it up. But the very next day, just as George and Justine had predicted, she began telling everyone about the big event—the monument, the grave, the cardboard coffin from the veterinarian—and continued doing so for months…

  Eleven A.M.

  Justine had blown up a tarantula. This was really pretty funny when you thought about it…

  Noon.

  Outside the cabin: quick, trundling footsteps. Veins throbbed frantically in George’s neck and wrists, seeming almost to break free of his body. His bullet wound ached, and he breathed deeply. Dear God, make this a good day.

  A little girl ran into the cabin. Her feet cycled furiously. Her arms opened wide.

  “Daddy! Daddy!” Though raspy—a cold coming?—her voice still had the angelic tone that George had never heard in any child except his.

  “Holly!”

  They embraced, the child giggling and trilling, George weeping. She was warm. He wiped his eyes with his sleeve and blocked his incipient tears, Holly being too young to comprehend why anyone would weep out of happiness.

  “It’s so good to see you,” he said.

  “It’s so good to see you,” she said.

  The wa
r had taken its toll. Her hair looked like yarn. Her smile was interrupted by far more missing teeth than the predations of the tooth fairy alone could explain. She moved cringingly, with a slight limp. But her green eyes sparkled, her face was incandescent, she still had her wonderful compactness, and it was her, it was her!

  “Ahh—look at the tree!” Holly shouted.

  “Do you like it? You can actually eat those oranges.”

  “No thank you. It’s beautiful. It has a star on top. That reminds me of something.”

  “What?”

  “Those Halloween trees we used to put up.”

  “Yes. We hung rubber bats on them.”

  “And little pumpkins. They were so cute.”

  “I want us to have Christmas,” George said. “You did not get Christmas this year. This was because of the war.” He was always careful to speak in complete, grammatical sentences around her.

  “Daddy, I have something very sad to tell you. This is important.”

  “What?”

  “This is important. Mommy died.”

  “You are right. It’s very sad. The war killed her.”

  “I know that,” she said, mildly annoyed.

  “You gave her orange juice, didn’t you?”

  “She died anyway.”

  “Holly, Holly, it’s so good to have you here. See those presents down there?”

  “Are they for me?”

  “Yes. They’re all for you.”

  “All of them? All? Oh, Daddy, thank you, thank you. I’m so excited.”

  “Why don’t you start with this one?” he said, handing her the gin bottle. She sheared away the aluminum foil. “A flower vase,” he explained.

  “Later could we pick a flower?” she asked.

  “Of course.”

  Lunging for the big box, she stripped it bare. “That says, ‘Super Duper Cooking Set,’” her father explained.

  She pulled back the lid, took out the dishes, cups, saucers, pots, pans, kettles, and tureens. “Oh, Daddy, I love it, I love it. Will you play cooking with me?”