This is the Way the World Ends

by James Morrow

  “The documents barge picked me up.”

  “You saw the trial?”

  “I caught your part. Don’t worry, George, nothing you could have said would have changed the verdict…So, tell me, did Leonardo’s painting predict the future?”

  “I saw my daughter again.” He fixed on the dark effluvium coming from the Cat’s tailpipe. “But it wasn’t her—it just seemed like her. You shouldn’t have raised my hopes.”

  “You raised your hopes.”

  “I went to that marble city like you said I should, and I found Professor Carter, and he made me fertile, and it didn’t matter.”

  “That’s the way things go in these post-exchange environments. Remember the good old days, when you wrote those epitaphs for me in Massachusetts? ‘She was better than she knew,’ remember? ‘He never found out what he was doing here,’ right?” She pointed her ice cane toward the Cat. “It’s warm in the cab, and we have work to do.”

  They drove past a dozen deserted ice limbos and ten thousand bereft scopas suits. Once the Cat was atop the glacial tongue, Nadine headed for the eastern face of the nunatak and drove up the slope. Five ice-sealed corpses swung on their living gibbets.

  The Cat stopped before Brat Tarmac’s remains. Drops of frozen blood hung from his bullet wounds like tears leaving blind eyes. George climbed to the roof, a hacksaw wrapped tightly in his glove. He peeled off the belt that held the general’s man-portable thermonuclear device, buckled it around his own waist. He went to work on the cable. The grinning blade groaned and shrieked. Brat tumbled to the roof. George laid him out carefully, as he had seen them do with the deceased at the Montefiore Funeral Home.

  Nadine drove to the next tree. Overwhite’s beard was a fretwork of icicles and frost. George sawed him down.

  Then Randstable. Sparrow. Wengernook, who looked nervous even in death.

  After stacking the heavy, rigid bodies in the back of the Cat, he returned to Sparrow’s tree. Had his eyes tricked him? No, there it was, a little Bible, frozen solid. He picked it up.

  Latitude: 79 degrees 38 minutes south.

  Longitude: 169 degrees 15 minutes east.

  Pushing up from the ice was a stone reminiscent of the megalith George had inspected at the Snape’s Hill Burial Grounds. On this spot, only eleven miles from supplies, Robert Falcon Scott had perished after failing to become the first human to reach the South Pole.

  The inscribed monument left George with the impression that Scott felt worse about being bettered by a Norwegian than he did about starving to death.

  “Of course, he might just as easily have been born the Norwegian and Amundsen the Britisher,” said Nadine, “in which case Scott would have been glad that Amundsen won.”

  “Not if Scott was Norwegian, no.”

  “Why?”

  “Because then a Britisher would have won.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  A pick swayed from the rear door of the Cat. George assaulted the Ross Ice Shelf. Sub-zero winds bore away the sound of metal striking ice; white sparks shot into the air. Gradually the pit expanded until it was large enough to admit all five bodies. With Nadine’s help he lowered his friends into the darkness. “Do you hate them?” he asked.

  “I hate their bad ideas,” she replied.

  “We should say a few words.”

  “Go ahead.”

  For ten minutes George struggled with the frozen Bible. Trying to open it was like trying to rip granite. At last he made a fissure slightly beyond the middle—on Ecclesiastes, a set of existential essays that had been included in the Bible by mistake. It was a favorite with Unitarians. Poor Reverend Sparrow would no doubt have preferred something more tumultuous—Ezekiel, Zephaniah, the Revelation—but this would have to do.

  “Wisdom is better than strength: nevertheless the poor man’s wisdom is despised, and his words are not heard,” George read. “Wisdom is better than weapons of war: but one sinner destroyeth much good,” he continued. “Dead flies cause the ointment of the perfumer to send forth a stinking savour: so doth a little folly outweigh wisdom and honor,” he concluded.

  “That was very nice,” said Nadine.

  The tomb inscriber climbed into the grave, unzipped Reverend Sparrow’s suit, and placed the splayed book against his heart.

  Once George was back on the surface, they filled in the hole with ice and snow, Nadine all the while reminiscing aloud about her husband Nathaniel, each nugget of memory receiving detailed review, Nathaniel Covington the poet, Nathaniel Covington the great lover.

  From the Cat’s tool box the old woman procured a hammer and a chisel. It took George an hour to wipe the Scott Monument clean. Nadine held the lantern steady as he laid down his guidelines with chalk. Tongue pressed firmly against his mustache, he began to ply his trade.

  The hammer pounded. The chisel danced.

  He did a fine, professional job—Nadine said so. The characters all had serifs.

  IN LOVING MEMORY

  OF

  PEOPLE

  4,500,000 B.C.—A.D. 1995

  THEY WERE BETTER THAN THEY KNEW

  THEY NEVER FOUND OUT

  WHAT THEY WERE DOING HERE

  Later, as the old woman lay propped against a hummock, her voice fading, her flesh expiring, George asked, “Why did you entrap me?”

  Nadine attempted to lever herself to her feet using her ice cane, thought better of the idea, settled back against the hummock. “If they hadn’t sent me to Wildgrove,” she said softly, “they would have sent someone else. When I saw what name the McMurdo framers had picked, I volunteered.” Mischief glinted in her eyes. “I wanted to see you as you were before the war. I had to meet you, George, touch you. And Holly.” She moved her shriveled head toward him. “Look at me. Do you see it? My face, your face, my face…”

  He did.

  The old woman’s smile was a triumph of determination over materials. Missing teeth, weak face muscles, but still she beamed.

  “You’re my granddaughter, aren’t you?” he said.

  They fell into each other’s arms.

  “Holly was your mother,” he said.

  “The only tolerable moments of my unadmittance came when I watched her at nursery school. I wish I’d gotten to baby-sit for her.”

  “And your father was…?”

  “John Frostig’s youngest son.”

  “Rickie?”

  “Nickie.”

  “The hamster killer?”

  “He would have grown up.”

  “Just like Holly.”

  “You would have been proud of her, Grandfather.”

  “She always said she wanted to be an artist.”

  “She became a teacher. To the first graders she was Socrates and Mother Goose combined. There’s no way she could ever see all the good she did—more good than if she’d become an artist. She was better than she knew.”

  “I wonder if she ever got to see the Big Dipper.”

  Nadine kissed his ragged beard. “I’m sure she would have.”

  “I’ll bet you’re a hell of a baby-sitter,” he said.

  “A world beater.”

  “First grade?” he said. “A worthy profession, don’t you think? Honorable. Challenging. Yes, that’s perfect. First grade…If you were to have an epitaph on your monument, what would it be?”

  She coughed. “I don’t want an epitaph, or a monument either. We did not get in. Don’t pretend that we did.”

  “All right.”

  They held hands, scopas glove pressed against scopas glove. Her rough and lovely cheek melted beneath his lips like butter. He saw her suit deflate slightly, felt tissues and bones leaving her glove. He stood up.

  The MARCH Hare’s little missile clung parasitically to George’s waist. He unstrapped it. How did such things work? It needed a code—is that what the deputy prosecutor had said?—and a brass key.

  Seizing the buckle, he whipped the belt around as if it were a sling. The bomb whistled. It struck the Sc
ott Monument squarely. A stabilizer broke off, twirled away.

  Again he smashed the weapon, and again he smashed it, and again—smashed it in the names of Morning Valcourt and Justine Paxton, smashed it while thinking of the nonexistent first-graders Holly had never taught—until the thing was nothing but springs, detonators, Styrofoam chunks, uranium-238 fragments, and deuterium core pieces strewn across the grave site, not much of a plowshare, but not much of a man-portable thermonuclear device either.

  George looked at his granddaughter’s empty suit. He thought of Job. Satan lacked imagination. To crack a man’s faith, one need not resort to burning his flesh, ruining his finances, or any such obvious afflictions. One need only take a man’s species away from him.

  There was laughter in Antarctica. Every ice crystal mocked him. The great crevasse of the Ross Ice Shelf spread through his mind. His granddaughter had wanted no monument. Very well, he thought, then I don’t want one either. The cold was like a disease. His bowels seemed frozen. There was frost on his bones, sleet in his lungs. He looked up. The sky was dark—dark as unadmitted blood, dark as the crevasse that was his destination—and then, as his eyes adjusted, he saw stars, not the Big Dipper but the crisp hot lights that men had named the Southern Cross.

  He got in the Cat, turned on the engine, and started across the young, disarmed planet.

  EPILOGUE

  Salon-de-Provence,

  France, 1554

  “Is that all?” Jacob asked.

  “What do you mean, ‘Is that all’?” said Nostradamus. “How could there be more?”

  The prophet opened the picture-cannon and blew on the oil lamp. As the tall flame leaned away from the lens, the projected crevasse became blurry and pale. The flame flew into the ether, and with it went the Ross Ice Shelf.

  “I thought there might be more,” said the boy.

  He marched across the room, pulled back the drapes.

  “You don’t live here,” said Nostradamus.

  “Sorry, Monsieur.”

  Sunshine pulsed through the window. The boy closed his eyes and felt the rays hitting his lids, turning the world orange-red.

  The prophet slammed his palm against the sash, opened the window. They stood together, man and boy, devouring the air, surprisingly hot for so early in the morning. Strings of sweat sparkled on their faces. Finches hopped amid the cherry trees.

  “Why did George drive into the crevasse?” asked Jacob.

  “Why do you think?”

  “I suppose he was getting too cold. Is this truly the way the world will end?”

  “I wouldn’t be surprised.”

  “Then I’m glad I shall be dead first.”

  A scream came through the floor. Jacob flinched.

  “Her pain will pass,” said Nostradamus, squeezing the boy’s arm.

  “I know,” Jacob gasped.

  “Concentrate on something else. The show—did you like it?”

  “Oh, yes, Monsieur.”

  “You truly liked it?”

  “Very much so.”

  “All of it?”

  “I might wish for fewer sad scenes, but—”

  “Listen to me,” said the prophet quickly. “You must go downstairs.” With his Malacca cane he pointed toward the door. “Find your mother. Hold her hand. Kiss her. Say, ‘I love you, Mother.’ Say, ‘You will bring forth a child soon, and Dr. Nostradamus has foreseen that it will be strong, and it will never get plague.’ Say to your mother, ‘Somehow, with God’s help, we shall manage.’ Tell her, ‘Spring is upon the earth, a fine time and place for a baby to disembark.’” Nostradamus winked. “When you have done this, return to me, and we shall talk. Are your shoulders strong?”

  “I think so.”

  “Strong enough to carry our picture-cannon from city to city, sometimes on an empty stomach, and in the rain?”

  “Oh, yes.”

  “And your wits—are they strong too? Strong enough to focus the cannon for me each evening and to project the paintings in the right order?”

  “Most certainly!”

  “Don’t ever get the order wrong.”

  “Not ever!”

  “God help you if you drop one. Your wage will be ten écus per week. I can envision nothing better at the moment. Naturally you will send them home.”

  The boy ran to the picture-cannon, patted the chimney with his fingertips. Hot, but not enough to burn. He lifted the miracle machine off the writing desk, rested it on his shoulder.

  “It’s not heavy at all, Monsieur.”

  A smile broke through the prophet’s beard. “You’ll think differently come winter. Remember—the order must always be right.”

  The boy set down the machine and ran for the door, his mind aglow with visions of Paris and Toulon. Or, for that matter, he thought, why not Rome, Valencia, Augsburg, London, Athens, Alexandria, Kiev, St Petersburg? Why not any of the glorious, unburned cities of the earth? Why not the City of New York, wherever that was?

  “Oh—and one more thing, Jacob,” said Nostradamus.

  “Yes, Monsieur?”

  The prophet raised his Malacca cane and traced a Southern Cross in the air.

  “Tell your mother that it’s going to be a girl.”