James Morrow: This Is the Way the World Ends

Here, from their own mouths, the reasoning of the accused make them ridiculous in the face of the horror they have unleashed, but Morrow makes them also sympathetic and credible. Ultimately they seem to make George Paxton’s simple act of signing up to his complicity in the nuclear war merely trivial, until Morrow makes us face the fact that good men need only do nothing for evil consequences to rule the day. It is Paxton’s desperate need to save his daughter that makes him willing to sign, and his disenfranchisement from power that makes him unable to see the consequence. ‘Anybody would have done it,’ he says often, despairing, and he is right.

The Circus of Fear may have moved on from nuclear Armageddon and the Cold War is over, but the hackneyed acts the Circus performs remain the same. So although in its particular nightmare this book is of its moment, it surpasses that detail and still stands up, justifying its ghoulishly gleeful presence in the Masterwork class.

Doctor Michel de Nostredame, who could see the future, sat in his secret study, looking at how the world would end.

The end of the world was spread across the prophet’s writing desk – one hundred images of destruction, each painted on a piece of glass no larger than a Tarot card. With catlike caution he dealt out the brittle masterpieces, putting them in dramatic arrangements. Which should come first? he wondered. The iron whales? The ramparts of flame? The great self-propelled spears?

By late afternoon the paintings were properly sequenced, and Nostradamus made ready to compose the hundred commentaries that would accompany them. He opened the window, siphoned sweet air through his nostrils.

Tulip gardens. Sun-buttered fields of clover. Crisp, white cottages. A finch chirped amid the nectar-gorged blossoms of a cherry tree. Now, thought the prophet, if only a cat would come along and devour the finch alive, I could rise to the task at hand.

He consulted the finch’s future. No cats. The bird would die of old age.

He pulled a drape across the window, lit seven candles, dipped his crow quill in a skull filled with ink, and began to write. The gloom, morbid and relentless, inspired him. Like blood from a cut vein, words flowed from Nostradamus’s pen; the nib scrabbled across the parchment. Shortly before midnight he completed the final commentary. The painting in question showed a bearded man standing alone on a boundless plain of ice. And so our hero , wrote the prophet, last of the mortals, makes ready to fly into the bosom of our Lord. Such are the true facts of history yet to come .

The dark oak of the writing desk had turned the painting into a looking glass. Etched in the ice field were the prophet’s raven eyes, craggy nose, and black tumble of beard – a face his wife nevertheless loved. Anne is going to enter my study soon, he realized. She will tell me something most troublesome. A pregnant woman waits downstairs for me. The woman is in labor. The woman wants…

‘The woman wants my help,’ said Nostradamus to his wife after she had appeared in the study as predicted.

Anne Pons Gemmelle gave a meandering smile. ‘Sarah Mirabeau has come all the way from Tarascon.’

‘And her husband—?’

‘She has no husband.’

‘Reveal to Sarah Mirabeau that I foresee an easy birth, a robust little bastard, and happy destinies for all concerned. Reveal to her also that, if she troubles me further, I foresee myself losing my temper’ – the prophet brandished his Malacca cane – ‘and tossing her into the street.’

‘What do you really foresee?’

‘It is all rather murky.’

‘Sarah Mirabeau did not come to have her fortune told. She came—’

‘Because I am a physician? Inform her that a midwife would be more to the point.’

By closing her eyes and biting her tongue, Anne retained her good humor. ‘The Tarascon midwives will not attend a Jew,’ she said slowly.

‘Whereas I shall?’

‘I advised the woman that you have not been Jewish in years.’

‘Good! Did you show her my record of baptism? No, wait, I foresee you saying that you have—’

‘Already done so, and she was—’

‘Not convinced. Then you must tell this fornicator that I have never delivered a baby in my life. Tell her that the medicine I practice of late consists in removing creases from the faces of aging gentry.’

‘She is not a fornicator. One hundred days ago her husband was—’

‘Killed by the plague,’ anticipated the prophet.

‘The widow believes you could have cured him. “Only the divine Doctor Nostradamus can keep me alive today,” she said. “Only the hero of Aix and Lyons can bring me a healthy child.” Yes, she has heard of your victories over the Black Death.’

‘But not of my defeats? This Nostradamus she worships is not much of a Catholic, not much of a Jew, and not much of a miracle-maker – tell her that.’

‘We must show her Christian charity.’

‘We must show her my charity, nothing better. Your widow may, for tonight only, take to Madeleine’s bed. Madame Hozier, I am given to understand, is a competent midwife, I shall pay her five écus . If she objects either to the fee or to your widow’s heathenism, tell her that I shall forthwith cast her horoscope, and it will be the grimmest horoscope imaginable, full of poverty and ill health.’

Anne Pons Gemmelle scurried off, but the prophet’s privacy did not endure. He foresaw as much: a boy would wander into his secret study.

A boy wandered into his secret study.

‘You were about to give your name,’ said the prophet.

‘I was?’ The boy was fourteen, diminutive, olive-skinned, his curly black hair frothing from beneath a cloth cap.

‘Yes. Who are you?’ said the prophet.

‘They call me—’

‘Jacob Mirabeau, Your mother is in my daughter’s bedroom, giving birth. Tell me, lad, was the invitation that brings you to my private chambers printed on gold-leaf vellum or on ordinary paper?’

‘What?’

‘That was sarcasm. The coming thing. Mirabile dictu , what a reversal Bonaparte will suffer once he reaches Moscow!’

The boy yanked off his cap. ‘I know you! You are the one who sees what will happen. My mother collects your almanacs.’

‘Does she buy them, or does she merely find them lying around?’

‘She buys them.’

‘Would you care for a fig?’ Nostradamus asked cheerfully.

‘ Merci . My mother places great store in your predictions. She thinks you are God-touched.’

‘Opinion about me is divided. The Salon rabble think I am a Satanist or, worse, a Huguenot, or, worse still, a Jew.’

‘You are a Jew.’

‘We are quite a pair, lad. I can see your future, you can see my past.’

‘I am a Jew as well.’ The boy gobbled his fig.

‘Do not trumpet it. Being Jewish is not exactly the wave of the future, believe me. The Inquisition has not yet run its course, the Pope would have us in ghettos. Get yourself baptized, that is my counsel to you. Forget this whole enterprise of being a Jew.’

‘Can you see some piece of the future right now, Monsieur le Docteur, or must you stare at the constellations first?’

‘The stars are unconnected to my powers, little Jew.’

‘But you have an astrolabe.’

‘Also a brass bowl, a tripod, and a laurel branch. My readers expect a full complement of nonsense.’

‘What do you foresee at the moment?’ asked the boy, rolling a fig seed between his tongue and teeth.

‘You are up too late. Do you realize it is almost midnight?’

‘What else do you foresee?’