James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

‘Mrs Covington! I never expected to meet you here.’

‘It’s good to see you again, George.’

‘I did those pencil drafts we talked about.’ As usual, Mrs Covington’s presence filled him with well-being. ‘“She was better than she knew,” remember? “He never found out what he was doing here.” They looked pretty good. Design seven-oh-three-four. I guess they got burned up.’

‘We mustn’t dwell on Wildgrove,’ said Nadine. ‘I loved that town. The children. Nickie Frostig died in my arms. Blast wound.’ She gestured toward the glass slides. ‘Some people say these paintings show the future.’ Her raincoat looked wet and slimy, as if made of live eels. ‘Do you believe in prophecy?’

‘I’m a Unitarian, ma’am.’

‘They’ve been in my family for centuries – painted by Leonardo da Vinci during his last days. The seer Nostradamus – that brilliant, courageous, plague-fighting Renaissance scholar – dictated their content. Want to see the future, George?’

She inserted a new slide. A short, muscular, bearded man stood alone on a boundless plain of ice.

‘My goodness, I guess I really am going to Antarctica,’ he said.

She changed slides. George saw himself in the Silver Dollar Casino, playing poker with Randstable and Wengernook.

As the show continued, it proved far more varied and perplexing than the other such presentation he had seen that afternoon. Slide: George sitting at a banquet table, eating ham. Slide: Captain Sverre slashing his own forearm with a knife. Slide: the vulture again, devouring a dead penguin.

A happy family burst upon the wall – husband, wife, young child. They were dressed in scopas suits. The child’s suit was gold. Their various arms and torsos had fused in a complex hug. Their smiles threw back twice the brightness that the lantern flame provided.

No visual image, painted, photographed, or dreamed, had ever moved George so much as that adroitly rendered Leonardo. The child was Holly. Compared with this truth, his realization that the man was himself and that the woman was Dr Morning Valcourt seemed almost dull.

‘I know the man,’ said Nadine. ‘And I’ve seen the woman around here. But the child—’

‘It’s Holly!’ The future! Some people said these paintings showed the future!

‘Nobody except you got out of Wildgrove. Dr Valcourt told you that.’

‘But it looks like Holly.’

‘Exactly like her?’

‘Yes. Exactly. Perhaps not exactly . But… if it’s not Holly, then…’

Aubrey?

‘The sister we were going to give Holly?’ he asked.

‘Nobody except you got out of—’

All right. Not her sister. Who then? He studied Dr Valcourt’s glowing, flickering face. Though ill-equipped for smiling – he remembered her chilly persona, her brisk manner – she was doing an excellent job of it.

‘Holly’s stepsister? Dr Valcourt and I will marry and then have a baby girl?’

‘A reasonable interpretation.’

‘I’ll call her Aubrey.’

‘Lovely name. Do you like Dr Valcourt?’

‘Not at all.’ The wrong thing to say, he decided. ‘I’ll learn to like her.’ His bullet wound throbbed with excitement. ‘I’ll do anything to get Aubrey. Marry a snake.’

Nadine yanked the family portrait off the screen. ‘Evidently you will become a father again.’

He envisioned the Giant Ride mechanical horse from Sandy’s Sandwich Shop. Aubrey sat bouncing in the saddle, giggling, trilling. Horse. Donkey. Mule. Infertility… ‘No, that can’t be right either,’ he said. ‘I’m sterile as a mule. That’s what Dr Brust told me. My secondary spermatocytes… the radiation.’

Nadine projected a new slide. A man approached the gates of a fabulous white city. Its marble ramparts glowed beneath a skull-faced moon.

George saw that the pilgrim was himself.

‘Even in this age of chaos,’ said Nadine, ‘there are places one can go to have one’s fertility restored. The earth has its marble cities.’

After swaddling the glass slides in a US Navy bath towel, Nadine slipped them into the pocket of her raincoat. She opened the side of the magic lantern, blew out the flame, and lowered the hot device into a canvas duffel bag.

‘Let me help you with that,’ he said.

She seemed not to hear. Slinging the bundle over her shoulder, she hobbled into the corridor. He followed her up a long spiral staircase. So great was his obsession with the thought of Holly’s reincarnation – Aubrey Paxton, predicted by Nostradamus, painted by Leonardo da Vinci, fathered by George Paxton, borne by Morning Valcourt – that he was taken aback upon seeing that Nadine had led him to the deck of the surfaced submarine. The air was choked with puffs of dark vapor. Waves detonated along the speeding prow. The wind stung his cheeks; it tugged his hair like a comb in the hands of a vindictive parent. God! So cold!

An open sailboat bobbed beside the hull, Nadine sitting in the stern. After hoisting the sail, she reached into her raincoat and pulled out a magic lantern slide, placing her gloved hand over the painted surface to protect it from spray. George took it like a starving man receiving bread.

‘How can I find that city?’ he called.

‘I have no idea,’ she replied, casting off.

‘Was this Nostradamus any good?’

‘He was on to something.’

A great, ever-expanding wedge of ocean and air grew between them. George looked at his Leonardo – the detail was astonishing, like the circuits on a computer chip, and he was especially impressed by the firm, crisp contours of Aubrey’s beautiful face. The wind quickened. Sea water began dripping from his hair. He moved the painting away before it got wet, tucked it under his shirt. When he glanced toward the horizon, Nadine Covington’s sailboat had become a firm white sliver beating its way south toward the horse latitudes.

‘I had a happy childhood,’ said George at the beginning of his first treatment session.

‘Happy childhoods are overrated,’ his therapist replied.

When George first met her, he had found Morning Valcourt vaguely attractive, but now he saw that the surgical mask she wore during their encounter in the radiation unit had been covering cheeks littered with scab-like freckles, a nose that seemed always to be experiencing a stench, and a mouth perpetually poised on the brink of a snarl. Yet Leonardo had given her a warm smile… obviously an artist of formidable imagination.

‘I’ll be honest,’ she said. ‘Survivor’s guilt threatens its victims with sudden mental collapse. To prevent this, we must tear certain facts from the shadowland of denial, thrusting them into the daylight of consciousness.’

Could this pompous woman really be Aubrey’s mother? When would the warm smiling start?

‘Any trouble sleeping lately?’ she asked.

‘I used to suffer from somnambulism. A couple of ensigns cured me of that.’

‘What ensigns?’

‘Peach and Cobb. They said they’ve always been with me, waiting to get in.’

‘But you’re sleeping through the night?’

‘Yes.’

‘Losing weight?’

‘No.’

‘Bowels okay?’

‘Fine.’ It would take considerable ambition to fall in love with this woman.

‘I’ve been prescribing a lot of sedatives lately,’ she said, ‘but in your case I’d rather not. They found you clutching a golden scopas suit.’

‘I got it from an inventor. Professor Theophilus Carter. He made me sign a sales contract.’