James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

George wished that War and Peace would start again. ‘Good movie, huh?’

‘I can see your viewpoint. Eight hours of mongrel film technique in the service of murky Soviet propaganda, and yet there’s much to admire – the energetic grandeur, the meticulous Tolstoyan ambience.’ Overwhite massaged his elbow. ‘Cancer almost never forms in the elbows.’

‘Not much of a turnout,’ said George.

‘These enlisted men, all they want is Clint Eastwood and tits.’ Overwhite interlaced his fingers. ‘Cancer doesn’t bother with the fingers, either, not as a rule.’ He rubbed his chest. ‘In general, we needn’t worry about breast cancer.’

Later that afternoon, the Russians fled from the Battle of Borodino, Andrei died of his wounds, the Grand Army occupied Moscow, Napoleon suffered his calamitous retreat, and Pierre ended up with the vital and appealing Natasha Rostov.

Morning Valcourt is probably quite vital and appealing, George decided, once you get to know her.

From the perspective of the average consumer, psychotherapists in the second half of the twentieth century were an overpaid population. A hundred dollars an hour seemed a high price for the privilege of being listened to. What people don’t realize, Morning thought, is that I never stop working, night or day. When I’m having lunch, I’m working. I dream about my patients.

She sat down in the middle of the periscope room and arranged her lunch. A thermos of skim milk, a cucumber sandwich. She wanted to lose five pounds by the end of the voyage. Her Defense Department patient came to mind. Wengernook. All those feelings – he actually saw his wife die of radiation sickness – and no vocabulary for them. He talks about ballistic missile defenses. And Randstable, rambling on about inertial guidance and his old ‘think tank.’ He confuses systems analysis with thought. And the arms controller. Poor Overwhite, riddled with nonexistent tumors. Repression…

She finished her lunch, stuffed the refuse into the garbage scoop.

And Paxton. Why does he look at me that way? It’s not sex, not entirely. He wants something else from me.

The door hissed open.

George knew that, as a Unitarian, he was not competent to deal with metaphysical commodities, including prophetic glass paintings. He had decided to approach the situation on the theory that his Leonardo did not spell out an inevitable fate but, rather, a possible future, something that he could make happen through diligence and creativity. I shall not let Leonardo and Nostradamus and Holly’s stepsister down, he had resolved. I shall woo Morning Valcourt, make myself fascinating to her, fall in love with her, convince her to become my wife.

‘You and I have a lot in common,’ he said, entering the periscope room. ‘Did you know that selling tombstones is quite similar to psychotherapy? I would talk to people about their troubles.’

‘We’re the talking cure,’ she said tonelessly.

‘For example, we had guilt stones. Also self-hatred stones.’

‘Oh.’

He saw that he had been misinterpreting her face. The odd tilt of her mouth came not from snarling but from speaking so much truth, while the sharp flare of her nostrils traced to sensitivity rather than snobbery. He twisted his wedding ring. Forgive me, Justine.

‘I want you to see a fire,’ she said.

‘A fire? I got enough of that at Wildgrove.’ All business, this woman.

‘Wildgrove was nothing.’ She led him toward Periscope Number One. ‘Odessa had the distinction of being the last city to receive a warhead. It was attacked five days ago by the strategic submarine Atlanta . It’s still burning.’

‘Odessa? You mean… they hit Russia’s cities after all? They didn’t just go for the missile bases?’

‘Basic nuclear strategy. We took out their fixed silos, but they thought we were after their cities, so they went after our cities, and… quid pro quo .’

George pressed his eyes against the soft rubber viewfinder. A frantic orange haze appeared. He adjusted the focus. Odessa vibrated with flames. Inky smoke filled the heavens. ‘Fabrics, insulation, oil stores, polymers – there’s plenty to keep it going,’ Morning narrated. ‘The survivors must inhale a demon’s breath of dioxins and furans.’

‘You know so much, Dr Valcourt,’ he said in what he hoped was a seductive tone. The periscope room, he decided, was a lousy environment for making romance bloom. He would have to take her on a date. Would the movies be best? The bowling alley? The casino?

She pulled on the periscope handle, aiming the device at the continent where the United States of America had once been located. Fires. Back to the Soviet Union. Fires. America. City fires. Oil well fires. Coal seam fires. Grassland fires. Peat marsh fires. Forest fires. A pall of mist hung in the air, black as the blood of Nadine Covington and Ensign Peach. The Northern Hemisphere was wrapped in soot.

That night – Monday night – George dreamed he was made of smoke. His smoke legs would not let him walk. He could hold nothing in his smoke hands.

Then came Tuesday. The periscope room again.

‘Can you tell me what day it is, George?’ she asked.

Was it his imagination, or were her questions getting increasingly pointless? ‘The tenth of January. I’ve been aboard three weeks.’

‘Good. But out there it’s the beginning of July.’

‘Out where?’

‘In the world.’

‘What?’

‘Time is ruined, George – one of the many effects of nuclear war that nobody quite anticipated. All those fundamental particles being annihilated – time gets twisted and folded. A minute passes in here, but out there it might be an hour, a day, or a week.’

‘Folded?’

‘Like a Chinese screen. Post-exchange physics – something even Einstein didn’t foresee. In local regions of the quantum-dynamics fabric, space is taking on the role of time, and vice versa. According to our best evidence, there are only two places where the old ways of counting time still work. This ship is one of them. Antarctica is the other. Are you upset?’

He recalled the book he used to read Holly, Carrie of Cape Cod , full of clams and hermit crabs. I am a hermit crab, he decided. Place a blowtorch against my shell, I won’t feel it. Scratch me – no pain. ‘If time is crinkled, then time is crinkled,’ he said. ‘We hermit crabs can take anything.’

‘You what crabs?’

‘Hermit crabs.’

‘Yes. Hermit crabs. Good,’ Morning said. ‘Hermit crabs seek out shells because they want to survive,’ she added thoughtfully.

‘Hermit crabs believe in the future,’ his therapist concluded.

She’s starting to care about me, he thought. Should I show her my Leonardo? (Look, Dr Valcourt – you and I are destined to marry and have babies!) No. Not yet – she won’t understand. It might come across as a joke, or a symptom of survivor’s guilt, or a weird seduction attempt.

‘Jocotepec, Mexico,’ she said.

He leaned toward the eyepiece, twisted the focus knob.

‘Today,’ she said, ‘we’re going to deal with ice.’

A crowd of peasants stood on a frozen lake. Soot walled over the sky. Cold rain fell. The survivors’ teeth vibrated, plumes of breath gushed out. They wore rags. Many went barefoot – blue ankles, missing toes. Faithlessly they huddled around a limp and sputtering fire.

‘I thought you said July.’

‘July. High noon. Those people are freezing to death. Blame the urban conflagrations. There’s so much smoke in the air that ordinary sunlight is being absorbed. Right now the average worldwide temperature is minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit. The soot cap migrates with the climate. In April it crossed the equator, sending ice storms through the Amazon basin. Photosynthesis has been shut down, the earth’s vegetation mantle is crumbling. For many years, this was an unanticipated effect of nuclear holocaust. Then, shortly before the war, certain scientists foresaw it. Sundeath syndrome.’