This is the Way the World Ends

by James Morrow

  “I think maybe we should finish the unwrapping.”

  “Then will you play with me?”

  “Of course.” Apprehensively he picked up the doll. “Try this.” She tore at the foil. “I know you wanted a Mary Merlin,” he said, “but I couldn’t find any.”

  “Couldn’t Santa Claus either?”

  “The stores were out of them.”

  “That’s okay.” Holly kissed the doll and stroked its hair. “I like her so much. Her name is Jennifer.”

  She put Jennifer to bed in a roasting pan from the Super Duper Cooking Set, covering her with a blanket of aluminum foil. Next George gave his daughter the white alabaster raven. She unwrapped it, named it Birdie, and laid it next to Jennifer. Soon the doll and the raven were fast asleep.

  “Be very quiet, Daddy.”

  “Okay.”

  “I want to pick out the next one.”

  “Sure.”

  She yanked the stovepipe hat from the pile, unwrapped it. Making no comment, she put it on and grinned her ragged, episodic grin. Now the bright cylinder caught her eye. Bits of foil took to the air. “Oh, a clown!” she said, unscrolling the harlequin poster. “He’s funny. I want to hang him up.” They taped the poster to a bulkhead.

  “And now you’ve got this one,” George said. Gleefully she ripped the foil. “It’s a story I once told you,” he explained. “A bunny wants to ride a two-wheeler bike, and—”

  “Read it to me.”

  Done.

  “Read it again.”

  He did.

  “Read it again.”

  “You’ve got another present over here.”

  “I’ll bet it’s a beach ball.” She pulled apart the wrapping, continued beaming even after the beach ball proved to be a globe. “What does it do?”

  “It shows us what the world is like. Well, it’s really a kind of game.”

  “Let’s play it.”

  “Okay. You need this thing over here.” He handed her the poker chips, and she unwrapped them. “You see, they have the names of countries on them. Everybody gets ten. Then you spin the globe like this, and you keep your eyes closed, and you put your finger out the way I’m doing. And if your finger stops on a country that’s the same as one of your chips, then you—”

  “Is that last present for me too?” Holly asked, removing her stovepipe hat and waving it toward the tree.

  “Yes. It’s from Santa Claus.”

  She freed her civil defense gear from its foil. “Oooh, a gold one. Pretty.”

  “It’s called a scopas suit.”

  “I know that.”

  “I thought you might like to dress up in it.”

  “Nice. What’s the matter with the glove?”

  “Something hit it.”

  “Let’s play tea party. I’ll be the sister. You be the visitor.”

  Holly distributed her new cooking things around the coffee table. She set out Sverre’s gin bottle, filling it with several tree ornaments that vaguely resembled flowers. The raven was invited, and the doll, and the visitor, and also the scopas suit, which Holly decided was a scarecrow. Everyone had invisible cake and gossamer ice cream. During the course of the afternoon, the scarecrow’s name went from Suzy to Margaret to Alfred.

  Later she played alone, giving Birdie, Jennifer, and Alfred their bottles, putting them in for their naps. Outside the submarine, the black of day gave way to the black of night.

  Father and daughter went to the galley and had Christmas dinner. The stale pretzels were scrumptious. They sneaked extra sugar into their cocoa.

  When they were back in the cabin, George said, “Holly, would you like a horsey ride?”

  “No.”

  He was grievously disappointed.

  Ten seconds later she said, “Give me a horsey ride.”

  For George it was to be a test. All previous horsey rides had ended with him insisting that he was too tired to continue. In truth he had been too bored. Each time, he had received the impression that there was no point at which Holly herself would end the ride, that she would more likely fall asleep in the saddle.

  She climbed atop his big equine shoulders, and he galloped down the corridor. The pressure on his spine was extraordinarily pleasant. Waving her stovepipe hat, she urged him on. “Turn…down here, Horsey…go through the door…that’s the way, Horsey.”

  Fifteen minutes passed. Horsey became bored. He thought: how can this be? Yet there it was, boredom. I shall keep going, he told himself. Nothing will stop this horsey ride, nothing.

  “This reminds me of something,” Holly said.

  “What?” Horsey asked.

  “That ride you put the money in. Back home. Oh, I wish we were home again, Daddy. I miss my kitty.”

  “Horsey is tired now,” he said. The lump in Horsey’s throat felt like a stuck walnut. “Horsey wants to go sleep in the stable.”

  “Can we play that game? The one with the world in it?”

  “Sure, honey.”

  Back in the cabin, they made a half-hearted attempt at playing the stupid game. Holly became frustrated and ornery. “How about another round of Bicycle Bunny?” he suggested.

  They read it in the bunk, huddled beneath blankets. After it was over, she said, “This book reminds me of something. Long ago, when I was very little, like three or something, you used to read me a book about the beach.”

  “Carrie of Cape Cod. We read it lots of times last fall.”

  “Remember the part about the Big Spoon?”

  “The Big Dipper. Yes.”

  “Could we go see the Big Dipper? I mean, now could we see it?”

  “All right,” he said, dragging her scopas suit away from the tea party, “But you’ll have to wear this. It’s cold out there.”

  “No, no, that’s Alfred Scarecrow!” she shrieked.

  “Here’s the deal, honey. If you don’t put this on, we can’t go see the Big Dipper. I’m going to wear one too.”

  “Birdie wants to come.”

  “Sure.”

  He girded his daughter against the elements. The suit fit perfectly. She looked adorable in it, her round, glowing face popping from the gold collar. To compensate for the bullet-shattered glove, he wrapped her hand in silk strips torn from the bedsheets.

  He scooped her up, carried her and Birdie through half a mile of corridor, pausing briefly to remove an electric lantern from a bulkhead and hook it around his wrist. Twenty risers spiraled from the navigation room to the first sail deck. At the door he stopped and said, “Honey, there’s something I want to ask.”

  “What?”

  “Do you know what’s happened to you?”

  “Yes, I know.”

  “What’s happened to you?”

  “I don’t want to tell you.”

  “Please tell me.”

  “You know what’s happened.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I died.”

  A thick stratum of snow covered the outside deck, sealing the missile doors. Ice flowed from the diving planes in silver sheets and drooped from the periscopes like the web of some monstrous Antarctic spider. Ragged bergs squeezed the hull from all sides, locking it tight against the barrier.

  “Oh, great!” Holly said. “It’s been snowing! Look, Daddy, it’s been snowing!”

  He did not want to tell her that it did not snow in Antarctica, that the crystals were simply redistributed by the winds.

  She looked up. The stars were sharp and bright. “Is it there? Can we see the Big Dipper?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “I think I see it.”

  “Honey, I just realized something. We’re in the Southern Hemisphere—”

  “Is that it?” she asked, thrusting her stubby, insulated fingers heavenward.

  He studied the sky. Amorphous clusters. Meaningless forms. “Yes, honey, I think that’s it.”

  “You’re just saying that! We can’t see the Big Dipper!”

  “I’m sorry, honey. I’m reall
y sorry. We’re too far south, and—”

  “It’s okay, Daddy. Put me down.” He lowered his arms, and she slid into the crusty snow. Groans filled the air as ice and hull ground against each other. “I love you, Daddy.”

  “I love you, too, Holly.”

  “Mommy couldn’t come,” she said softly.

  “Yes. That’s very sad.”

  “We couldn’t see the Big Dipper.”

  “Yes. That’s sad too.”

  A wind blew up, churning the snow, tossing iceballs against the sail. “Thank you for all the presents,” she said. “I love that doll. This has been a great Christmas.”

  “It’s been the best Christmas ever,” he said.

  “I have to go now.”

  “No! You can’t go!”

  “I really like that cooking set, and I had fun playing visitor with you. And thank you for Birdie. And be sure to take care of Jennifer. She gets her bottle at six o’clock midnight.”

  “Please stay, Holly! Please! You’re not allowed to go yet!” He ripped a gob of wolverine hair out of his parka hood. “I need to tell you a bedtime story. It’s about an elf who casts a golden shadow. Please! So one day the elf’s uncle asked him to—”

  “Good-bye, Daddy.”

  They hugged, squeezing so hard it should have hurt.

  “Please don’t go, Holly! Please!”

  “Good-bye, Daddy. I love you.”

  “Good-bye, darling. I love you so much. I love you so much.”

  She worked free of his grip, coasted bum-down along the hull as if it were a sliding board. Her stovepipe hat fell off. Now George could hear snow crunching under her little boots. The starlight caught her golden suit, so that a figure made of phosphor moved across the barrier toward Lazarev. She clutched Birdie tighter, ran faster, and was soon swallowed by the darkness and the gale.

  Vanity of vanities. George had actually believed he could save his species. And yet, despite the scale of his failure, he had not reverted to his old, unambitious ways. He expected things now. God owed him. Tirelessly, enterprisingly, he dashed across the Lazarev Ice Shelf. I’ll go to whomever Morning made that deal with, he thought. They’ll let me keep my child. They must.

  His lantern was strong, more than equal to an Antarctic blizzard, and he had no trouble keeping Holly in view. She was only four, and unsteady, and burdened with a scopas suit and Birdie. He called her name. The wind threw it back in his face. Bits of ice sailed past, pelting his forehead, slicing his cheeks. He wished that he were unadmitted, so that his memories would be fogged, but instead the images all boasted a brutal clarity: Holly’s first trip to the zoo, Holly being a bug for Halloween…

  The crevasses of Antarctica are predatory, hungry, lying in wait. Holly did not notice the great Novolazarevkaya Crevasse. One second she was running, the next she was gone, falling in a flash of golden scopas threads.

  George cursed the crevasse aloud, vowing to defeat it as totally as Sverre’s navy had defeated the invalidated past. Already he was at the brink, throwing himself on his stomach, extending his lantern arm. The beam spilled downward, illuminating flying whorls of snow and a child’s figure pressed against the wall, her boots frozen to a feeble lip of ice. George saw two frightened green eyes, heard whimpering. His muscles and tendons creaked, nearly tearing apart as he fought for an extra inch of reach.

  The tomb inscriber proved stronger than himself. He touched something soft, seized it. He yanked. Her silk-wrapped hand came forward, safe in his, but it was strangely, horribly weightless.

  “It wasn’t supposed to end this way!” a voice shouted from out of the storm.

  George stared at the awful object he was holding. The wrist was cut. A plastic tube poked through the crack. At the fractured elbow, ball bearings and copper wire protruded. The stump of the upper arm was a fountain of yellow hydraulic fluids; the technological blood gushed from rubber veins, spilled around steel bones, and dripped onto the Lazarev Ice Shelf.

  Dressed in his diamond-patterned scopas suit, Theophilus Carter ambled into view. Icicles grew from his nostrils like tusks and drooped from the inside brim of his top hat like crystalline hair. His gloves were stuck to a teapot. In the murky distance, the lights of his itinerant shop (“Remarkable Things for Human Bodies”) burned through the blizzard.

  Again Theophilus said, “It wasn’t supposed to end this way…”

  George hurled the puppet arm into the dark whistling pit, and when Holly’s double looked up at him he lost consciousness and collapsed on the ice.

  CHAPTER 21

  In Which Our Hero Crowns a Madman, Carves an Epitaph, and Sees a Constellation

  Smells cut through his brain, forcing him into the world. Formaldehyde. Viscera. How different from the odorless continent, how different from the prophylactic City of New York. He was pleased to find himself on the MAD Hatter’s hospital gurney. Good. He’s planning to take me apart. He’s going to stuff me with circuits and pumps. I’ll become Plato or Julius Caesar or George Washington.

  Like a speeding subway car, the laboratory vibrated and lurched, winds spurting through the cracks in its walls. The organs trembled in their jars, the severed arms bumped against the walls of their tanks, and the skeletons flounced on their ceiling hooks like chandeliers of bone.

  Airborne.

  The Hatter waddled over with a tea tray. He had shed his scopas suit, leaving himself attired in his morning coat and vest.

  George tried to speak, but his vocal cords were iced up. He poured himself tea, drank. “I had no idea there was such cruelty in the world.”

  “Strange words from a convicted war criminal. Your loving bride wanted to give you a day of happiness, that’s all. We calculated we could sustain the drama for twelve hours. Call it cruelty if you like, deception, a ruse, though a ruse by any other name would smell as sweet. I call it a gift.”

  “She said she had made a deal,” George protested.

  “With whom? Extinction? Stop living in a dream world. You can’t make deals with extinction—I told you that back in the city. The deal was with yours truly. Your bride gave me some free therapy, so I gave her a free automaton. The therapy proved useless, as we knew it would. Assured destruction is a hopeless disease.”

  Rising from the gurney—his neck was stiff from Holly’s horsey ride—George followed the Hatter out of the laboratory and into the shop. A pile of scopas suit sales contracts lay on the counter. The mannequins’ shoulders pushed through their rotting costumes like cantaloupes tearing through grocery bags. The two men walked to the bellied window, leaned toward its congestion of hats. Theophilus traded his top hat for a bejeweled crown. George put on a homburg and stared at the birdless sky. Dark, bloated clouds floated by like plumes from the stacks of a weapons factory.

  “Ever since the war,” said the Hatter, “your child has been a lot of random molecules. You knew that. You always knew that. All the King’s accountants and all the King’s lawyers couldn’t put…so I built her from scratch. Your wife gave me a nursery school photograph plus relevant data. The Big Dipper, everything. I programmed the reunion well, n’est-ce pas?”

  The shop began to roll and pitch. The mannequins flapped their arms. Frantic tintinnabulations arose from the bells over the door.

  “Admit it, things went swimmingly,” said the Hatter. “A bit mawkish for my tastes—yours, too, probably—but on the whole, swimmingly.”

  George noticed how cadaverous Professor Carter had become. His pink hair was almost white, and his skin looked like stale cheese. The four-in-hand tie surrounded a neck as narrow and coarse as a loaf of French bread. Only one of his rabbit teeth remained, and it was black and cracked.

  Stripping himself naked, the Hatter went to a mannequin dressed in royal regalia. “Help me with this, will you?”

  Together they hauled down the coronation mantle, which was as heavy and bulky as an Oriental rug, and placed it around Theophilus’s tiny shoulders. Immediately he toppled under the weight. His crown fell off. �
��When you’re a king,” he gasped, propping himself up on one elbow, “people are less likely to notice that you’re insane.” Through a miracle of effort, he got into a sitting position. “One more favor.” He petted the ermine on his capelet. “Crown me.”

  George lowered the wonderful sparkling hat over Theophilus’s dead hair. “How do I look?” the Hatter asked.

  “Splendid.”

  He really did, in a way.

  “Off with their heads! Bring on the dancing girls! Turn away those petitioners! Maximize those strategic options!”

  For nearly an hour he sat in the corner, raving quietly. George brought him tea.

  “Enhance that deterrence! Put Humpty-Dumpty together again! Let them eat cake!”

  He motioned George over with his scepter. The tomb inscriber bent low. “Au revoir, my friend.” The Hatter drank tea. “The odds, however, are against it.”

  And then, slowly, graciously, as the shop settled onto the ground, Good King Theophilus began his long reign over nothing.

  George stepped through the door. He held his lantern high. More immortal than Egypt’s pyramids, the Ice Palace of Justice rose against the verbose slopes of Mount Christchurch, pennants shivering, spires skewering black clouds. JUSTICE IS SERVED, the mountain said.

  There was no storm here, only a mournful wind bearing the smoky odor of scopas suit insulation. Everywhere he glanced, from the bellied shop window to the limits of his light and beyond, the suits covered the glacial tongue like cocoons abandoned by some huge and over-propagated species of moth. He wanted to have some really profound response to the situation but could not manage it. So, he thought, this is it: no more people, not a one, no admitteds, no unadmitteds, nobody. My, my.

  But then, growling mechanically, a Sno-Cat emerged from the gloom, stopping before the Mad Tea Party. An old woman got out, one arm bowed around her scopas suit helmet, the other gripping a cane made of ice. She scuttled forward.

  “Hello, George.”

  “Mrs. Covington?”

  “This foolish glacier is almost as cold as your monument works.” Bands of snow flashed through Nadine’s gray hair.

  “It’s good to see you again, ma’am.” Despite the cold, the waves of well-being managed to reach him. “I was certain your little sailboat would be swamped.”