James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

‘I’m curious, sir,’ said Lieutenant Grass. ‘When they picked up Paxton, he was at ground zero – right in the crater. A crazy place to be, wouldn’t you say? What do you suppose he was doing there?’

Turning his good eye to the periscope, the captain watched the red, boiling waters of Boston Harbor splash across the deck. ‘He was doing what we’re doing,’ said Sverre. ‘Trying to get home.’

‘Facts,’ a woman said. ‘You need facts, Mr Paxton. Facts will steady your mind.’

George became conscious of several varieties of pain. He concluded, with mixed emotions, that he was still alive. Despite the bullet from John Frostig, the thermonuclear bomb, and his keen desire to be dead, he had evidently not yet left the world – unless, of course, the blurry creature standing near him was an angel.

‘Facts. You are in the radiation ward aboard US Navy submarine SSBN 713 City of New York , out of McMurdo Station. Displacement – thirty-four thousand tons submerged. Draft – sixty-five feet. Delivery system – thirty-six tubes loaded with Multiprong missiles. Warheads – W-76 reentry vehicles, eight per bus, five hundred kilotons each.’

Fever coursed through George’s body. His brow oozed sweat. His bowels ached. His stomach churned sour milk. Barbed wire flossed his brain.

‘There is a document,’ she said. ‘The McMurdo Sound Agreement. Six names appear in it. You are all being evacuated to the Ross Ice Shelf.’

George suddenly realized why the angel was so fuzzy. He was inside a plastic tent. She was outside.

‘Aurhgh,’ George responded. Two marbles seemed to be lodged in his throat. As if to diagnose the problem, he inserted his fingers. The back of his hand was covered with purple spots. His gums were bleeding.

‘Your benefactor is Operation Erebus. When they rescued you, there was a bullet in your stomach and a scopas suit in your arms. The bullet came out last week. The suit is now in the cabin you will occupy if and when your convalescence begins.’

Why is my head so cold? George wondered. Your head is cold because you are hairless, his fingertips revealed. You are as bald as a slab of South African granite.

‘Final fact. For the last six days you have been unconscious, during which interval you passed from the prodromal phase of radiation sickness through the latency phase and into the life-or-death phase. And that’s your situation. I’m sorry it’s not better.’

Beyond his physical pains lay additional anguish, emotions that rested on him like the stones with which his New England ancestors had pressed witches to death. There was a stone for loss, a stone for fear, a stone for Holly, a stone for—

‘I have a wife,’ he said. Four words, four swallows of acid. A coughing fit possessed him, and he expectorated onto the pillow case. Dots of blood were suspended in the sputum. ‘And a daughter,’ he rasped. ‘I’m supposed to tell her a story about an elf who casts a golden shadow.’ He struggled to sit up, collapsed in a heap of pain and fatigue. ‘Ice shelf? Submarine? You mean – under the water? Why are there purple spots on my hands? What’s in my throat?’

‘The spots indicate intradermal bleeding. The things in your throat are infected tonsils. My name is Morning Valcourt. I’m a psychotherapist, and I intend to help you.’

George coughed, less severely than before. He vibrated with fever. His lungs felt as bloated as unmilked udders.

After strapping a surgical mask over her face, Dr Valcourt pushed back a corner of the tent and entered.

One glance was enough to disprove George’s angel theory. A silk kimono enveloped a body that was decidedly secular. The woman’s eyes were a saturated blue-green, her hair thick and red like the coils in the electric heaters back at the Crippen Monument Works. Six days unconscious, is that what she said? Then he had missed his Monday appointment with Mrs Covington.

‘What you must realize… just after you were evacuated, another warhead found its target. Direct hit.’ She came closer, her mask pulsing with her breaths. ‘Nobody except you got out of Wildgrove. Do you understand?’

His dislike of Dr Valcourt was not far from disgust. How did she know whether anybody got out? What right had she to speak of such things?

She pulled away and stepped backward, so that the plastic veil parted and then dropped, walling them off from each other once again.

‘Please kill me,’ he said, quoting the Wildgrove burn victims as calmly as if asking for a glass of water.

Dr Valcourt paced behind the milky tent. She seemed to emanate from an unfocused movie projector. ‘My job is not to kill you, but to cure you.’

‘Of radiation sickness?’

‘Of shame. Survivor’s guilt, it’s called. To live through a disaster like this, where so many died – it’s a terrible burden on your psyche.’

‘Where are we going?’

‘Home.’

‘Wildgrove?’

‘Antarctica.’

‘Please leave me alone.’

‘Here’s a straight opinion for you, Mr Paxton. That’s something you won’t often get from a psychotherapist – especially from a survivor’s guilt specialist – so listen carefully. I think you have a duty to learn why your name is in the McMurdo Sound Agreement. After you have found out – do what you will. Eat, drink, and be merry – or curse God, and die. I don’t especially care which.’

There were footsteps, and the distasteful psychotherapist melted away…

Curse God , and die . In the Book of Job, the Lord’s most pious follower is subjected to a kind of wager between God and Satan. With God’s sponsorship, Satan inflicts on Job everything short of a thermonuclear warhead. Job loses his oxen, sheep, camels, sheasses, servants, sons, and health.

‘Curse God, and die,’ his wife advises. Job is sitting on ashes at the time.

‘My bowels boil, and rest not,’ complains Job, who does not have the proverbial patience of Job. ‘I am a brother to jackals, and a companion to ostriches. My skin is black, and falleth from me, and my bones are burned with the heat. Therefore is my harp turned to mourning, and my pipe into the voice of them that weep.’

Curse God, and die . To George it seemed like remarkably sage and relevant advice.

If one had to say something good about acute radiation sickness, it would be this: either it kills you or it doesn’t. Knowing that success was a distinct possibility, the medical staff of the City of New York got busy. They cultured George’s mucus, blood, and stool, then loaded him up with appropriate antibiotics. They stuck a tube in his arm and gave him a new set of white blood cells. They bathed him in antiseptic solutions every twelve hours, shampooed him with chlorhexidine gluconate every twenty-four hours, and trimmed his fingernails and toenails every other day.

To the end of his life, George would be haunted by the notion that the onslaught of gamma rays had planted the seeds of God-knew-what diseases, but the United States Navy was still within its rights when they pronounced him well. His fever broke, his hair grew back, his purple spots vanished, his tonsils shrank, his lungs drained, his gums stopped bleeding, his platelet and white cell counts became exemplary. The paramedics assured him that he had inhaled very little fallout and that, thanks to his precipitous departure from ground zero via Operation Erebus, his cumulative dose had been well under three hundred rads.

‘More like two hundred and eighty rads, if you want my opinion,’ said the medical officer, a lieutenant senior-grade named Brust. ‘You’re in great shape, believe me. There’s only one thing we couldn’t fix.’

‘Oh?’ said George.

‘Your secondary spermatocytes are failing to become spermatids.’ Dr Brust was a small, tubby man with a face so incongruously gaunt it seemed to be on its own separate diet. ‘Blame the radiation.’