World's End

by T. C. Boyle

  Walter stood. He fumbled for a cigarette.

  John Wing kicked the coffee table. He kicked the wall. He launched a pillow into the kitchen as if it were a football splitting the uprights. “Answer me,” he said. “How could you do it?”

  Walter hated himself at that moment, oh yes indeed, and he felt bad to the bone. He lit that cigarette, let it dangle from his underlip like one of Belmondo’s, and blew the smoke in John Wing’s face. Then he lifted his leather jacket from the chair and sauntered out the door, shaky but somehow serene too. The door shut behind him and the wind caught him in the face. Squinting against the smoke of the cigarette, he straddled the Norton, gave it a kick that would have wrenched the leg off a John Wing, and obliterated the universe with a twist of the throttle.

  But now, of course, standing there in the hallway of a strange house in the waning minutes of the old year, aching to take a piss, surrounded by strange faces and bedeviled by fools and halfwits, he had his regrets. Jessica wouldn’t talk to him. (He must have called fifty times, must have sat out in front of her parents’ house on the Norton fifty more till John Wing stormed out and threatened to call the police.) Tom Crane wouldn’t talk to him either. Not yet, anyway. And while Hector had sat down and shared a pitcher of beer with him, he kept looking at him as if he’d developed a case of twentyfour-hour leprosy or something. Even Hesh and Lola blamed him. He’d begun to feel like a character in a country and western song, lost the most precious thing in my life, o lonesome me, and all the rest of it. Now, of course, now that he didn’t have her—couldn’t have her—he wanted her more than anything. Or did he?

  “And Mordor,” the jerk was saying, “what do you think that shit stands for, huh?”

  Just then the bathroom door swung open and Galadriel strutted out, shooting Walter a withering glance and lifting her nose as if she’d stepped in dogshit. Her brother—if indeed he was her brother—was too wound up to acknowledge her. He tightened his grip on Walter’s arm and leaned into him: “The good ol’ U.S. of A.,” he said. “That’s what.”

  So small a pill, half the size of an aspirin, and Walter was rushing with light. Jessica. The upturned nose, the leggy leg, the martyr in the kitchen: who needed her? He had Mardi, didn’t he? “Tell it to the gooks,” he said, staring the jerk down. Then he was in the bathroom, bolting the door behind him.

  In the mirror he saw eyes that were all pupil, a mustache in motion, hair parading around his ears. Balanced on his good foot, he flipped back the toilet seat with the toe of the other, but then missed his aim when the toilet unaccountably sprang up and danced across the room. He was zipping up when he noticed his grandmother. She was in the tub. Wearing a shower cap decorated with leaping pink, green and blue frogs. The water, soapy, dark as the Hudson, rose to her big tallowy naked breasts, which she rubbed from time to time with a washcloth. She didn’t say a word till he turned to leave. “Walter?” she called, as he shot back the bolt. “You didn’t forget to wash up, did you?”

  Out in the hallway, there was no draftee, no draftee’s sister. There were no cowboys in the kitchen. From the living room, however, there arose a clamor of shouts and razzing party horns, and when Walter got there he saw that all the strangers in the house were grinning, tossing confetti and pitching themselves deliriously into one another’s arms. “Happy New Yeeah!” shouted one of the cowboys. Blazing like an angel with the light, Walter strode into the midst of them, shouldering a smooching couple out of the way and arresting the arm of a guy in mirror sunglasses who was lifting a bottle of Jack Daniel’s to his lips. “Hey!” he shouted above the clatter of noisemakers and tinny horns, “you seen Mardi?”

  The guy was wearing a cutoff army jacket with pink suspenders and a Mickey Mouse T-shirt. He was older, maybe twenty-six, twenty-seven. He pushed back his shades and gave Walter a baggyeyed look. “Who?”

  Walter fended off an assault from the rear—a big horse of a girl with smeared lipstick and a conical paper hat raked over her eyes like a rhino’s horn came down hard on his plastic foot, belched an apology and shrieked “Happy Noooo Year!” in his face—and tried again. “Mardi Van Wart—you know, the girl I came with.”

  “Shit,” the guy shrugged, rubbing the bottle for comfort, “I don’t know nobody. I’m from New Jersey.”

  But the big girl was there now, lurching unsteadily before him. “Mardi?” she repeated in surprise, as if he’d asked for Jackie Kennedy or the Queen Mother. “She split.”

  The horns razzed in his ears. Everything was moving. He tried to control his voice. “Split?”

  “Uh-huh. Must of been an hour ago. With Joey Bisordi—you know Joey, right?—and I don’t know who all. For Times Square.” She paused, watching Walter’s face, then broke into a sloppy grin. “You know,” she said, with a shake of her uncontainable hips, “Noooo Year’s!”

  The year was about ten minutes old when Walter fired up the Norton, swung it away from the stoop and skidded back up the lawn. He was still rushing like a comet with the light, but there was a dark place inside of him too—as dark and forbidding as the back side of the moon—and it was growing. He felt like shit. Felt like he wanted to cry. No Jessica, no Mardi, no nothing. And fuck, it was cold. He dodged a diseased-looking azalea, rattled over something that scattered under the back wheel—bricks? firewood?—and then he was out on the road.

  Fine. But where was he? He passed up the first intersection and took the next instead, swinging into a long dark tunnel of stripped and twisted trees. He’d driven a mile or so, going too fast, clinging to the bends and accelerating out of them with a twist of the throttle, when he clattered across an old wooden bridge and came to a dead end. An iron chain thick as a boat hawser stretched across the mouth of the road. There were red and yellow reflectors mounted on the trees and a sign that read PRIVATE. He cursed out loud, wheeled the bike around and headed back up the road.

  He was thinking that if he could find the high school he’d be all right. (Sleepy Hollow. He remembered the place from school, when he’d played forward on the Peterskill basketball team—funky showers, a gymnasium that smelled of paste wax and sweat, a big old stone and brick building just off the main drag.) It was on Route 9, that much he knew. From there it was no more than twenty minutes to Peterskill and the Elbow. He was thinking he’d drop in and have a few beers with Hector maybe, or Herbert Pompey—drown his sorrow, bewail his fate, give them his side of the story over the pool table and a shot of something that would dim the raging light in his head—when, over the roar of the bike and the stinging rush of the wind, he became aware of a noise at his back. Deep-throated, whelming, omnipresent, it came at him like the rumble of toppling mountains, the blast of the hurricane. He turned his head.

  There behind him, issuing from the nowhere of the dead-end lane, was a platoon of motorcycles. Their headlights lit the night till the patchy blacktop road and the screen of naked tree trunks blazed like a stage set. Almost involuntarily, he slowed down. There must have been thirty of them, the roar growing steadily louder. He looked over his shoulder again. Was it the Disciples? The New York chapter of the Hell’s Angels? But what would they be doing out here?

  He didn’t have long to wonder, because in the next moment they were on him, cruising, the thunder of thirty big bikes beating like a fist in his chest. As he slowed to merge with them they came up on either side and he could see them now, raked back on their choppers, colors flapping in the dead night air. Two, six, eight, twelve: he was in the eye of the hurricane. The bikes stuttered and purred, they hammered, screamed, spat fire. Fourteen, eighteen, twenty.

  But wait: something was wrong. These weren’t Angels—they were hoary and decrepit, leather-faced, skin on bone, their raggedy yellow beards and piss-colored locks fanned back smooth in the glare of the headlights. It was coming to him—yes, yes—like the opening motif of a recurring nightmare, when an old geek swooped in ahead of him and the legend on his jacket leapt out at him like a face in the dark. THE APOSTATES, it read, in a band of hard
block letters above a winged death’s head, PETERSKILL. Yes. Walter turned his head to the left and there he was—the shrunken Dutchman, the imp, the sugarloaf hat clinging to his head in defiance of wind and logic both, the crude denim colors forced down over a baggy homespun shirt he might have looted from a museum. Yes. And the imp’s lips were moving: “Happy New Year, Walter,” he seemed to be saying over the din.

  Walter never hesitated. He jerked his head to the other side—his right side—and sure enough, his father was there, riding in tandem with him on a chopped Harley with flame decals spread like claws across the gas tank. The old man’s eyes were hidden behind antiquated goggles, the slick reddish fangs of his hair beat around his head. He gave Walter his profile, then turned to face him. There was a stink of exhaust, the rush of the air, the blast of the engines and a single attenuated moment in which the whole night was suspended between them. Then Walter’s father flashed a smile and repeated the dwarf’s benediction—“Happy New Year, Walter.” Walter couldn’t resist—he could feel the smile tugging at the corner of his mouth—when all of a sudden, without warning, his father reached out and gave him a shove.

  A shove.

  The night was black, the road deserted. Caught in the sick slashing parabola of disaster, Walter went down again, went down for the second time. It would have been better had he gone down on his right side, nothing there but plastic and leather, after all. But he didn’t. Oh, no. He went down on his left.

  Part II

  World’s End

  SIMEON: Like his Paw.

  PETER: Dead spit an’ image!

  SIMEON: Dog’ll eat dog!

  PETER: Ay-eh.

  —Eugene O’Neill,

  Desire Under the Elms

  The Hoodwinking of Sachoes

  This time the room was painted marigold yellow, and the doctor’s name was Perlmutter. Walter lay sedated in the comfortless crank-up bed while Hesh and Lola kept watch at his side and the hushed voices of the intercom whispered in his ear like the voices of the incorporeal dead. His left foot, the good one, was good no more.

  As he lay there, his face as composed as a sleeping child’s—not a mark on him, the hair swept back from his brow where Lola’s hand had rested, his lips parted and eyelids trembling in the deeps beyond consciousness—he was assailed by dreams. But this time everything was different, this time his dreams were free of mocking fathers, sententious grandmothers and carcasses stripped to the bone. He dreamed instead of an unpeopled landscape, misted and opaque, where sky and earth seemed to meld into one and the air was like a blanket pulled over his face. When he woke, smothering, Jessica was leaning over him.

  “Oh, Walter,” she moaned, a low rumble of grief rising up like gas from deep inside her. “Oh, Walter.” Her eyes were wet for some reason, and two sooty streaks of mascara traced the delicate flanges of her nose.

  Walter looked around the room in bewilderment, looked at the gleaming instruments, the IV bag suspended above him, the empty bed in the corner and the cold gray eye of the television mounted on the wall. He gazed on the chipper yellow of the wall itself, that uplifting, breakfast-nook yellow, and closed his eyes again. Jessica’s voice came to him out of the darkness. “Oh, Walter, Walter … I feel so bad for you.”

  Bad? For him? Why should she feel bad for him?

  This time he didn’t take her hand, press his lips to hers, fumble with the buttons of her blouse. He merely flashed open his eyes to give her a venomous look, a look of resentment and reproach, the look of the antihero on his way out the door; when he spoke, he barely moved his lips. “Go away,” he murmured. “I don’t need you.”

  Walter didn’t become fully aware of his predicament until late that afternoon, when, on waking to the hellish heat of his invalid’s room and a blur of snow across the window, he glanced up to see Huysterkark grinning and scraping his way into the room. Then, and only then, did he feel for his left foot—his favorite, his precious, his only foot—and understand that it was no longer a part of him. The image of the deserted landscape of his dream fused in that moment with the leering face of his father.

  “Well, well, well, well,” Huysterkark said, rubbing his hands together and grinning, grinning. “Mr. Van Brunt—Walter Van Brunt. Yes.” Clamped firmly between his right arm and chest as if it were a rolled-up copy of the Times was the new prosthetic foot. “Well,” Huysterkark beamed, drawing up a chair and crab-walking to the bed, “and how are we on this fine blizzardy afternoon?”

  How were we? There was no way to answer that question. We were panicked, in the throes of despair and denial. We were angry. “You, you—” Walter sputtered. “You took my, my only—” He found himself overwhelmed by self-pity and sorrow. “Son of a bitch,” he snarled, tears in his eyes. “You couldn’t save it? You couldn’t try?”

  The question hung between them. Snow drove at the windows. Dr. Rotifer to Emergency, Dr. Rotifer, crackled the intercom.

  “You’re a very lucky young man,” Huysterkark said finally, wagging his head and pressing a pensive finger to his blanched lips. His voice dropped and he extracted the foot from the nest of his underarm. “Lucky,” he whispered.

  Walter had been out for two days, Huysterkark informed him. When they’d got him into Emergency it was nearly dawn and he was frozen half to death. He was lucky to be alive. Lucky he hadn’t lost his fingers and nose to frostbite in the bargain. Did he think the staff here was incompetent? Or apathetic? Did he understand just how mangled that foot had been—comminuted fracture, ankle joint demolished, soft tissue mashed to pulp? Did he know how Doctors Yong, Ik and Perlmutter had worked over him for two and a half hours, trying to restore circulation, set fragmented bones, reattach blood vessels and nerves? He was lucky he hadn’t gone down someplace upstate or on the other side of the river—or what about in the Deep South or in Italy or Nebraska or some other godforsaken place where they didn’t have Hopkins-trained physicians like Yong and Ik and Perlmutter? Did he realize just how fortunate he was?

  Walter didn’t realize it, no, though he tried. Though he listened to Huysterkark’s voice sail through its range of expression, through the sforzando of intimidation to the allegro of thanksgiving and the bustling hearty brio of salesmanship. He could think of one thing only, and that was the unfairness of it all, the relentless, crippling, terrifying assault of history and predestination and lurking conscious fate that was aimed at him and him alone. It boiled in him till he closed his eyes and let Huysterkark do with him what he would, closed his eyes and fell back into his dream.

  It was on the afternoon of the third day that Mardi showed up. She’d abandoned the raccoon skin for a black velvet cape that sculpted her shoulders and hung from her like a shroud. Underneath it she was wearing blue jeans, painted cowgirl boots and a see-through blouse in a shade of pink that glowed like Broadway on a rainy night. And beads. Eight or ten strands of them. In the doorway behind her was a guy Walter had never seen before.

  There was the pain killer, the drowsy stuffiness of the room, the leaden sky with its angry black bands of cloud that stretched like bars across the window. “You poor thing,” she cooed, clacking across the linoleum to bend over him in a blast of perfume and briefly insert her tongue in his mouth. He could feel the nimbus of her hair framing his face, tendrils of sensation poking through the flat dead field of his pain, and despite himself experienced the first faint stirrings of arousal. Then she was straightening up, unfastening the clasp of the cape and indicating her companion with a jerk of her head. “This is Joey,” she said.

  Walter’s eyes cut to him like knives. Joey was in the room now, but he wasn’t looking at Walter. He was looking out the window. “Joey’s a musician,” Mardi said.

  Joey was dressed like Little Richard’s wardrobe designer, in three clashing paisleys and a Tillamook-colored cravat that fell to his waist. After a moment he stole a glance at Walter, laid out flat and footless in bed, and said “What’s happening, man?” without a hint of irony.

  Happeni
ng? What was happening? Mutilation, that’s what. Dismemberment. The reduction of the flesh, the drawing and quartering of the spirit, the metastasis of horror.

  “God,” Mardi said, perched on the bed now, the cape fallen open to reveal the see-through blouse and all there was to see beneath it, “if only you’d come with Joey and Richie and me the other night—down to Times Square, I mean. …” She didn’t finish the thought. Finishing the thought would have meant admitting the inadmissible. She settled for a pronouncement on the lack of proportion in the cosmos: “It’s just so bizarre.”

  To this point, Walter hadn’t uttered a word. He wanted to utter a few, though. He wanted to give vent to the outrage percolating inside him, wanted to ask her what she meant by leaving him in a house full of strangers while she trotted off to New York with this chinless fop in the Beatle boots and cheesy necktie, wanted to ask if she loved him still, if she’d have sex with him, if she’d shut the door and pull the shades and tell Joey to go take a hike, but her eyes went strange all of a sudden and he checked himself. Her slow gaze took in the length of him stretched supine on the bed, and then she turned to look him in the face. “Does it hurt?” she murmured.