James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

‘In what?’ asked George.

‘Don’t worry. You won’t be there for long,’ said Ensign Peach.

‘A minute at most,’ said Ensign Cobb.

‘And then – zowee, powee – off you go into the wild blue Atlantic!’

‘That’s the one with all the salt in it.’

‘Can you swim?’

‘Can you breathe water?’

Two facts entered George’s disorganized brain. He was afraid of these cousins. And they were dragging him down a corridor. He struggled. His muscles pulled in contradictory directions. Steam ducts and neon lights bounced by. He tried telling his captors they had no right to treat an Erebus evacuee this way, whereupon he discovered that Ensign Cobb’s sweaty hand was sealing his mouth.

The torpedo room was green and pocked with rivets. Muzak oozed through the air, countless strings performing ‘Anchors Aweigh.’ The ensigns hauled him up to Tube One, opened the little door. The chamber beyond, which reeked of brine and motor oil, suggested a womb in which man-portable thermonuclear devices were gestated.

Ensign Cobb held a copy of the McMurdo Sound Agreement before George’s uncoordinated eyes. It was a document of several hundred pages, bound with a spiral of barbed wire. He opened it and thrust Appendix C toward George. Appendix C was headed Scopas Suit Sales Contract .

‘That’s your signature, isn’t it?’ said Ensign Cobb.

‘Yes, but—’

‘Look, Mister Peach, he signed it!’

‘And with his own name, too!’

‘I’m a friend of General Tarmac’s,’ asserted George.

‘The MARCH Hare?’ said Ensign Cobb.

‘Right.’

‘Any friend of General Tarmac’s is an enemy of mine,’ said Ensign Peach.

‘Don’t forget to close your mouth,’ said Ensign Cobb.

‘Don’t forget to hold your nose.’

‘Don’t forget to write.’

‘We have always been with you—’

‘Waiting to get in.’

George swung at Cobb’s jaw. The connection was firm and noisy. Peach retaliated, planting a fist in the tomb inscriber’s stomach, thus awakening the dormant agony of his bullet wound.

I can take this, George said to himself after they had shoved him into Tube One and closed the door. I will not scream, Oblivion is what I wanted all along, and now here it is, oblivion, my good Unitarian friend.

The chill seeped into his flesh. His breaths echoed off the cylindrical walls. He decided that this was how his customers felt, snug in their caskets. Were they soothed knowing that a seven hundred and fifty dollar chunk of bonded granite sat overhead? He screamed. The reverberations knifed his eardrums.

He thought of the damage he had just inflicted on Peach. Had he seen correctly? Could it be? When he split the ensign’s lip, had black blood rushed out?

George wet his pajamas. The warmth was at once terrible and comforting. They had said this would take only a minute. Black blood. Just like Mrs Covington. An effect of the radiation? No, her visit to the Crippen Monument Works was before the war, wasn’t it? His wet pajamas grew cold.

Movies had always been fun, especially with Justine. Postmarital dates were the best kind. You could relax, and if there was no butter for the popcorn the world did not end. You sat there, bathed in conditioned air, waiting for the movie to start – any movie, it didn’t matter – like an astronaut in zero gravity, nothing pulling at you, no obligations…

The tube door opened. Someone grabbed his ankles and yanked him backward. The torpedo room smelled like burning hair, something he had not noticed before. The syrupy strings were now playing ‘Over There.’ George flexed his knees and stood up. Pain screwed through his shoulder bones.

A thirtyish man, handsome and stocky, dressed in an immaculate three-piece suit, grinned at him with what seemed like a surplus of teeth. His hair was auburn and abundant, like a well-nourished orangutan’s coat.

‘What happened to those ensigns?’ George asked. He stepped forward, scissoring his legs so as to hide his soggy crotch.

‘They had to go off watch, George,’ said his rescuer amiably. ‘I believe they just wanted to scare you.’

‘Whatever made them think that threatening to launch me into the ocean would scare me?’ The tomb inscriber laughed. His rescuer did not. George had never before met such a clean-shaven individual. It was as if all the man’s whisker follicles had been cauterized.

‘My grandfather was in the Navy,’ said the rescuer. His voice was like gourmet coffee, silky, layered. ‘Evidently it’s changed a lot since those days. These sailors have not received the Holy Spirit.’

George looked at his knuckles. They were speckled with a substance resembling tar. ‘Their blood is black.’

‘I’m not surprised,’ said the rescuer.

‘You in the Navy, too?’

‘Ever watch Christian television?’

‘Not a great deal.’

‘Last year Countdown to God’s Wrath – you’ve never caught it? – we had a consistently better rating than Gospel Sing-Along . We get two and a half tons of mail a week. The Lord is doing so many wonderful things.’

‘My wife always wanted to be on television.’

The evangelist extended a soft, pliant hand. ‘Reverend Peter Sparrow,’ he said. Taking Sparrow’s hand, George felt sustenance and comfort radiate from each finger. This was a very fine evacuee indeed.

‘Television is becoming God’s chosen medium these days, just the way Gutenberg’s press used to be,’ said the evangelist. ‘We’ve been running a lot of old movies on Countdown lately, to build up our audience, follow what I’m saying? You’ve got to start where people are at. Sure, maybe Ben-Hur isn’t such a great picture – I mean, leprosy doesn’t really look like that, it’s quite a bit worse – but then you can move them toward the better stuff, The Robe and Quo Vadis and so on.’

George coughed. The torpedo tube had probably contained several infectious diseases. ‘So we’re all going to Antarctica.’

‘Isn’t it wonderful how nuclear exchanges cannot touch Christians?’ said Sparrow. ‘I knew the Perfect Exile would be a time of joy, but I hadn’t realized how rapturous the joy would be. I’m about to see my family.’

‘They’re in Antarctica?’

‘They’re in the sky with Jesus.’

George glanced up.

‘May I ask you something?’ The evangelist touched George’s spotted knuckles. ‘Are you saved?’

‘Yes, you just saved me. I’m most grateful to you. If your program was still on, I’d watch it.’

‘I’m talking about your relationship with—’

‘My family died when the Russians blew up Wildgrove. Or so I’m told.’

Reverend Sparrow frowned. ‘The Hebrew prophets – Ezekiel, Jeremiah – they’re all batting a thousand, understand? The Perfect Exile, the Terrible Trial, the destruction of the temple at Jerusalem – they saw everything, right? You’re saved, George, or you wouldn’t be on this trip.’

‘I’m a Unitarian.’

‘I’m going to pray for you,’ said Reverend Sparrow firmly.

‘I appreciate it,’ said George, and he did.

In the days that followed, George’s grief took on a New England quality, becoming not so much an emotion as a job to do.

He tried to remember all those times when fatherhood had seemed a crushing burden. Moments when Holly’s screeching or stubbornness had brought him to the brink of child beating, moments when he felt as if his life had been stolen and replaced by a talkative iron ball chained to his ankle. But only cloying memories came. Holly putting her dollies to bed. Trying to feed the sick cat before it died. Singing to herself. Struggling to grasp the point of a knock-knock joke. She had never understood that proper knock-knock jokes are puns. Knock-knock, she would say. Who’s there? a four-year-old friend would ask. Jennifer (or Suzy or Jeremiah or Alfred or Margaret), Holly would reply.