James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

‘I know. A confession of complicity. I don’t approve of such things. Tell me what happened after you left Carter’s shop.’

George sucked air across his teeth, making the roots ache. He spoke of searing light and a mushroom cloud, of fires, wounds, black dust, and cries for water, of people needing burn wards that no longer existed. A desperate pause followed each image, so that the hour was nearly up by the time he got to the smashed Giant Ride horse. ‘She loved that stupid thing,’ he said. Scar tissue grew in his throat.

‘It’s unendurable, isn’t it?’

The tenderness in Morning’s voice caught him by surprise. ‘Unendurable,’ he repeated.

‘Chicago winters got awfully cold,’ she continued softly, ‘but I had lots of books in the apartment, shelves floor to ceiling, so we were quite snug, me and the cats. I used to put all the warm authors on the windward side – Emily Dickinson, Scott Fitzgerald. Henry James gives off his own draft. I lived a block from my little sister – a Methodist minister and in her own way a better therapist than I. We called Linda the white sheep of the family. All I want is to be able to bury her.’ Leonardo was right: Morning could smile. This was not the joyful smile of the mother in the portrait, however, but the brave, taut smile of someone fighting tears. ‘Linda was the best person I ever knew.’

‘That would make a good epitaph. I keep wondering how they feel about being dead.’

‘Your wife and daughter?’

‘Yes, And the others.’

‘You wonder how they feel—?’

‘About being dead. That’s crazy, isn’t it?’

‘Do you think it’s crazy?’

‘They’re dead. They don’t feel anything about it… Sverre said there are pockets of survivors.’

‘No doubt.’

‘You don’t suppose—?’

‘No, I don’t.’

‘I just thought—’

‘You entered the bomb crater, right? And then your neighbor shot you?’

George chomped on his lower lip. ‘I ended up on the ground. Next thing I knew, a vulture was hovering over me.’

‘A what?’

‘A vulture. A large black vulture – big as one of those flying dinosaurs, you know, the pterodactyls.’

‘The pterodactyls were not dinosaurs.’ She issued a succinct, intellectual frown. ‘Close enough. This is not the first time a vulture has entered the annals of psychotherapy. The species once haunted the great Leonardo.’

‘Leonardo da Vinci?’ George asked.

‘Yes.’

‘I have one of his paintings.’

‘You believe that you own an original Leonardo?’

‘I do own one. I keep it in my cabin.’

She gave her eyes a quick toss to the left, as if to say, Well, we have our work cut out for us, don’t we, you lunatic , and stood up. Her stiff and forbidding gray suit was like a whole-body chastity belt.

She walked to a bookcase stuffed with volumes on brain diseases. Her office reconciled the rational and the primal – an anatomy chart, a Navaho tapestry, a ceramic brain, a Hindu god, a biofeedback rig, an obsidian knife that had last seen employment in a human sacrifice. She removed a slender volume, flashed the title – Sigmund Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality – opened it. ‘When Leonardo was a baby,’ she said, ‘a vulture swooped down to his cradle and massaged his lips with its tail. Or so he believed. Did your vulture do that?’

‘My vulture?’

‘The one that appeared at ground zero.’

‘Are you saying it was a hallucination?’

‘Do you think it was a hallucination?’

‘I don’t know.’ George was not forming a very positive first impression of psychotherapy. ‘My vulture did not massage my lips,’ he reported.

‘Leonardo, it seems, was illegitimate. He and his mother had an intense relationship – much kissing and pampering.’ She hugged a phantom baby. ‘You must understand that, in ancient times, maternity cults commonly centered on vultures. The Egyptians believed it was a species without males, inseminated by the winds. Through the vulture fantasy, Leonardo was confessing to a sexually charged relationship with his mother – or so Freud theorized. The tail prying open the lips. The insertion.’

‘I thought we were going to talk about my problems,’ said George.

She slammed the book shut with the suddenness of a steel trap being sprung. ‘On Monday your immersion in death begins,’ she announced evenly.

George took out his wallet and removed a rectangle from its blurry plastic envelope. ‘Do me a favor? Hide this where I can’t find it.’ He set the rectangle on the desk. ‘I keep looking at it.’

The therapist picked up Holly’s picture – her official class photograph from the Sunflower Nursery School – and placed it in her top desk drawer.

While Holly’s nursery school picture had been a wellspring of grief – ‘unendurable’ was his therapist’s word, the perfect word, for his loss – the portrait of himself, Aubrey, and Morning was another matter entirely. He looked at it whenever he could, testing it under different kinds of light, memorizing each brush stroke. On Saturday afternoon he looked at it for so long that he lost track of time, consequently arriving several minutes late for the screening of Sergei Bondarchuk’s lengthy film adaptation of War and Peace .

Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky were walking through the woods. ‘If evil men can work together to get what they want,’ said the narrator, ‘then so can good men, to get what they want.’

George enjoyed the battles of Schoengraben and Austerlitz. The lines of infantrymen stretched on and on, far beyond the reach of the camera’s lens.

When the lights came up for the first intermission, he saw that the only people in the little theater were himself, an enlisted man, Randstable, and – shifting now in the row ahead, turning to face George – an older gentleman who, with his bushy beard and substantial abdomen, might have found employment as Santa Claus’s stunt double.

‘Hello, friend.’ When Santa Claus smiled, his beard expanded like a peacock’s tail.

‘Are you an Erebus evacuee?’ George asked.

‘Brian Overwhite,’ said Santa, nodding. ‘US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.’

‘I’d heard you were aboard.’

‘My ticket for Geneva had just arrived – we were about to begin the STABLE III talks – when this war… incredible, isn’t it? The mind isn’t built for such things. Nuclear exchanges. Failed deterrence. STABLE III would have put tough limits on missile throw-weight and anti-satellite weapons – that was my hope, anyway.’

‘I’m George Paxton.’ He went to shake Overwhite’s hand. A sling cradled the negotiator’s right arm. ‘Were you in one of the battles?’

‘No – two unreasonable ensigns came after me. Cousins.’

‘I know who you mean.’

‘They said, “You’ve spent your life controlling other people’s arms, and now we’re going to control yours!” So they broke it. Snapped the damn ulna. I reported the incident to Lieutenant Grass. Now get this – the man laughed at me. That’s right. He laughed .’

‘There seems to be some kind of resentment against us,’ said George. ‘Take me, for example. I was placed in a torpedo tube.’

‘Resentment? Yeah, I guess that’s the word for it.’ Overwhite scratched his cast, as if trying to relieve an itch. ‘Tell me, George, which do you fear more, the gamma rays or the betas?’

‘What?’

‘The gammas go shooting right through you, zip, zip, but the betas ride in on the food you eat and the air you breathe.’ Overwhite reached under his beard and caressed his throat. ‘The buildup in the thyroid is what you’ve got to watch for. The betas go for the thyroid, especially with the children. It’s a terrible thing when they won’t even let you negotiate a simple goddamn arms control agreement.’