James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

‘Three dollars,’ said Overwhite, reaching under his sling and checking himself for armpit tumors.

‘I have a question.’ George picked up the jokers, rubbed them together like a razor and strop. ‘If America and Russia knew about this sundeath syndrome, why did they work out plans for different kinds of attacks and so on?’

‘Well, you see, sundeath theory was based on incomplete models of the atmosphere,’ said Brat, clenching his teeth as if in great pain. ‘It all depends on dust particle size, the height of the smoke plumes, rainfall, factors like that.’

‘You have to take sundeath with a grain of salt,’ said Wengernook, pulling cigarettes and a risqué matchbook from his shirt. ‘It’s a pretty far-fetched idea.’

‘But it happened,’ said George. ‘Right on our planet.’

‘That’s just one particular case,’ said Wengernook. He struck a match. ‘In another sort of war, urban-industrial targets would not have been hit. You’d have fewer fires, less soot, no sundeath, and, and…’ He tried to make the flame connect with the end of his cigarette, could not manage it.

‘First ace bets,’ said Brat.

‘And a much more desirable outcome,’ said Wengernook.

‘I’ve got it!’ said Randstable. He grabbed one of the jokers from George and set it atop the six vertical chips.

‘Got what?’ asked George.

‘The solution!’ said Randstable.

‘To the war?’ asked George.

‘To the riddle.’ The joker shivered on its plastic pylons.

‘What riddle?’

‘Sverre’s riddle – why is a raven like a writing desk?’

‘Why?’

‘A raven is like a writing desk,’ said the ex-Wunderkind as his little bridge collapsed, ‘because Poe wrote on both.’

To and fro, warp and weft, the young black woman paced the shores of her private tropical paradise. The beach sparkled brilliantly, as if its sands were destined to become fine crystal goblets. Spiky pieces of sunlight shone in the tide pools. The surrounding sea was a blue liquid gem.

She was about thirty. She wore no clothes. Her excellent skin had the color and vibrancy of boiling fudge. When she stopped and sucked in a large helping of air, her splendid breasts floated upward like helium balloons released in celebration of some great athletic or political victory. George thought she was the most desirable woman he had ever seen.

A length of rope was embedded in the beach near a banyan tree. The beachcomber tore it free. Sunstruck grains showered down like sparks. The woman manipulated the rope, sculpting a grim shape from it. A noose emerged in her clever and despairing hands.

George tried to pull away from the periscope, but he could not break his own grip.

The last woman on earth walked up to the tree, tossed the rope over a branch, and, as the waves rolled in and the sun danced amid the tide pools, hanged herself by the neck. Her oscillating shadow was shaped like a star.

George sat down beneath the periscope and panted. ‘We’re through?’ he said, half inquiring, half asserting.

‘At this irrevocable point in history,’ said Morning, ‘not one human being exists anywhere – with the frail and tentative exception of this boat.’

The hermit crab had left his shell. He was a shivering mass of tender protoplasm. ‘Nobody can ride a mechanical horse.’

‘True.’

‘Or see the Big Dipper.’

‘Correct.’

‘Or take acting lessons.’

He was weeping now, copiously, and he could not tell whether his tears were for Justine, Holly, the Frenchman who had clawed the potato out of the ground, the Iranian school teacher who had died of louse-borne typhus, the last woman on earth…

Morning knelt beside the hurt man. She hugged him and dried his tears.

He returned her embrace. His bullet wound throbbed like a castanet grafted to his stomach. As if to stop the spasms, he reached into his shirt. His fingers touched glass, and slowly he withdrew his Leonardo.

‘Look at this,’ he said, licking his tears. ‘It’s you. And me. And our child.’

‘I don’t understand. Are you an artist?’

‘I told you about it before. The painter was Leonardo da Vinci. You know – the man with the vulture complex.’

‘A forgery, right?’

‘An original Leonardo – inspired by the brilliant prophet Nostradamus. It predicts the future. See? Holly’s stepsister is coming. You’ll be the mother.’

She took the slide. Light ascended from the glass and ignited her blue-green eyes. ‘It really does look like me. Spooky.’

‘It’s you.’

‘And the child…?’

‘If Justine had gotten pregnant again, we would have named the baby Aubrey. Have you ever had a child?’

‘No.’

‘They do all these amazing things.’

‘I’ve never been married. Aubrey?’

‘Aubrey Paxton.’

‘Pretty name.’

‘And there will be others. Aubrey’s brothers and sisters. Holly always wanted a sister.’

‘Why would anybody want to bring children into—?’

‘Into this world? I may not know about psychology or sundeath, Dr Valcourt, but I did learn something at the Crippen Monument Works. Our children will take whatever world they can get.’

‘You’re sterile.’

‘I have reason to believe the condition is not permanent.’

‘Next you’ll be saying we have the power to restore the race.’

Justine Paxton had frequently accused her husband of lacking ambition. She should hear what I’m about to say, he thought. ‘Maybe we do.’ (Maybe they did!) ‘Maybe it’s one of those unexpected effects of nuclear war you’re always talking about. Your own fertility is…?’

‘No problems that I know about.’ She hefted the slide, ran her fingertips over the tiny bumps and furrows of paint. ‘Where did you get this thing?’

‘A civilian passenger. Nadine Covington. Her blood is black.’

‘Black?’

‘Like ink.’

‘I doubt that she can be trusted.’

‘I trust her.’

Without unlocking arms, they stood up. Again they embraced. George took his Leonardo back and departed with the words ‘restore the race’ ringing in his ears. There, you see, my poor, extinct Justine? You did not marry a lazy man after all.

The extinction of one’s own species is an event not easily comprehended. Only by using Periscope Number One privately, over and over, did George begin to grasp the contours of the event. He studied his planet for hours on end, rubbing his nose in oblivion. He even looked at the stars. Nothing. Nothing save the burned land, the poisoned water, the harsh stillness, the rare clam, the occasional roach, the intermittent swatch of grass, the clusters of salt-pickled corpses floating in the South Atlantic timefolds like barges of flesh.

Brian Overwhite was wrong. The human mind can accommodate anything. Some parents beat their children. Auschwitz. Sundeath. It’s just blood, the mind says. It’s only pain. It’s merely putting people into ovens. It’s simply the end of the world…

Long ago, George’s grandfather had died on the last day of June, an event that had plunged the family into a quandary. Should they hold the usual Fourth of July picnic? George’s grandfather loved the Fourth of July. He always built cherry-bomb-tipped skyrockets for the occasion, deploying them against a balsa wood model of Fort McHenry. During the battle, the family would sing ‘The Star-Spangled Banner’ while toy frigates shot marbles at the ramparts and the cherry bombs detonated around a tattered little American flag.