James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

‘What are you talking about?’ George asked.

‘You’re sterile,’ said Dr Brust evenly.

‘Sterile?’

‘Sterile as a mule.’ Black stains covered Brust’s surgical gown. ‘I can’t imagine that it would make much difference to you at this point.’

‘My wife and I were planning…’ George closed his eyes.

‘Didn’t they tell you about your wife?’

‘Yes.’ When he opened his eyes, he saw only his tears.

‘I wouldn’t worry about my gonads if I were you,’ said Dr Brust. ‘You’re lucky to be alive.’

They moved George out of the radiation unit into an ordinary sick bay.

‘You in the McMurdo Sound Agreement?’ asked the patient in the next bed, a long, nervous, weasel-bodied man with an expression so intense George could not look at it without squinting.

‘Yes. George Paxton. You in it too?’

‘At the top of the list. Love to lean over and shake your hand, friend, but I’ve got this tube up my silo.’

‘Me too.’

‘Ever hear of Robert Wengernook?’

‘Haven’t I seen you on television?’

‘Ah, another one of those ,’ said Wengernook with mock distress. ‘Here I am in the goddamn D-O-D, and everybody thinks of me as the guy who does the scopas suit commercials. For my hobby, I’m the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.’

‘My wife always wanted to be in a scopas suit commercial. The one with the lady knight.’

‘Really? Your wife was in that? Small world.’

‘No, she wanted to be. She would have been right for it too, because Justine was very pretty, everybody thought so. They say a warhead got her.’

‘You’ve got to believe me, George, I really thought the suits were good.’ Wengernook’s twitchy fingers knitted themselves into elaborate sculptures. His tongue, which was remarkably long, darted in and out like a chameleon’s. ‘I guess it’s Japan’s way of getting back at us.’

‘For Hiroshima?’

‘I was thinking more of import quotas.’ He lit a cigarette, puffed. ‘God, this is all so awful. You might suppose that on a submarine there wouldn’t be much to remind a man of his family, but that’s not true. I’ll see some fire extinguisher, and that gets me picturing the one I gave Janet last Christmas. You wouldn’t think a fire extinguisher would have such emotionalism attached to it.’

‘I’d like to talk about something else.’

‘Same here.’

But the tomb inscriber and the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs had nothing more to say to each other.

At the end of the week they transferred George to a cabin more suggestive of a civilian ocean liner than of a military vessel. The luxury suffocated him. He wanted Justine to be there, making fun of the kitschy floral wallpaper and reveling in the cornucopia that was the City of New York ’s galley – eggs Benedict breakfasts, steamer clam lunches, lobster dinners – all served up by cheerful, redfaced enlisted men who seemed to be auditioning for jobs in some unimaginably swank hotel. He wanted Holly to be there, delighting in the tank of live sea horses and giving them her favorite names, the ones she had already bestowed on dozens of dolls and stuffed animals. These names, for some reason, were Jennifer, Suzy, Jeremiah, Alfred, and Margaret.

And so, despite posh surroundings and great food, George still felt himself a brother to jackals. His pipe was still turned into the voice of them that weep. Sometimes he smashed things until his knuckles bled. The Navy sent a seaman third-class around to clean up the mess. At other times he contemplated his closet, where Holly’s golden scopas suit and its shattered glove hung as if on a gibbet. He stared at the suit for hours at a time.

It would have saved her life, he told himself, although he suspected this was not true.

‘I should have tried harder,’ he moaned aloud at odd moments.

A small bubble of consolation occasionally drifted into his thoughts. If death were as final and anesthetic as he had been taught, then his family had at least been granted the salvation of nothingness. Justine could not now be mourning the death of her daughter. Holly could not now be wondering whether all this chaos somehow precluded her getting a Mary Merlin doll for Christmas. Thank God for oblivion, ran his Unitarian prayer.

The knock on George’s door had the brisk, impatient cadence of a person accustomed to getting his way.

‘It’s open.’ George sat on a plush divan reading the Book of Job for the third time that week. Once again he was finding the drama cruel and absurd.

A military man entered. His uniform, curiously, was of the United States Air Force. His presence on a Navy submarine entailed the incongruity of a rabbi in a cathedral.

‘You’re evacuee Paxton, aren’t you?’

George closed the Bible and said yes. The Air Force refugee approached, arm poised for a mandatory handshake. He was constructed of massive shoulders, a rough rock-like head, a formidable trunk, and limbs of simian length. A flurry of decorations and service ribbons hung from his breast opposite a nameplate that read TARMAC.

‘Major General Roger “Brat” Tarmac,’ the refugee said in a large, wholesome voice. Shaking hands with Brat Tarmac was a workout. ‘Deputy Chief of Staff for Retargeting, Strategic Air Command. I was in downtown Omaha when the Cossacks came. Had to do my Christmas shopping some time, right? So there I am, buying my sister’s kid this clown , when quick-as-shit a warhead goes off behind me, and the next thing I know I’m in the Navy . It’s all so crazy. The clown needed batteries – that was going to be my next stop. I keep telling myself, “Brat, face facts. You’ll never see those people again – your sister’s a casualty.” I say that, and I don’t believe it. She was a pilot. Like me. Flew strategic interceptors. Jesus. Incredible.’

George had never taken so immediate a liking to anyone before. Brat Tarmac was the sort of handsome, athletic soldier ten-year-old boys wanted for fathers, a fantasy to which George, at age thirty-five, was not entirely immune.

‘Coffee?’ George offered.

‘Affirmative,’ said the general.

Obtaining coffee aboard the City of New York was a simple matter of walking up to your cabin’s vending machine and pushing some buttons. ‘Cream and sugar?’

‘Black. In a dirty mug, eh? No frills for us bomber jockeys.’

A Styrofoam cup caught the stream. George’s hand made a spider over the rim, and he carried the coffee to his guest.

‘So far I’ve managed to locate all the Erebus personnel but that evangelist, Sparrow.’ Brat sucked coffee across his leathery lips. ‘We’ll be working with a pretty broad spectrum of talent. Wengernook is—’

‘I met him in the sick bay.’

‘Impressive guy, huh?’

‘Nervous.’

‘Intense. He should quit smoking. Then we’ve got Brian Overwhite of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and you’ll never guess who they stuck in the cabin next to yours.’

‘Who?’

‘William Randstable. Remember when he beat that Cossack at chess? He was only seven or something.’

‘I don’t follow chess.’

‘It was a big propaganda thing for us. The kid worked at one of those think tanks for a while, then they put him on missile accuracy over at Sugar Brook or someplace. All in all it’s a pretty classy act our President’s putting together down in Antarctica. In a few days they’ll be calling the whole team together – after they run us through this survivor’s guilt crap – so we can chart out our options. God, I hope they’ve got a crisis relocation effort going. I can’t bear to think of this turning into a high civilian-casualty thing.’