James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

‘You must promise to name all the children after me,’ he said as he pulled the Agaricus cameroonis from his coat.

‘All but the first,’ said George.

He tore the mushroom from its bark, thrust it in his mouth. The meat trembled on his tongue, and he chewed. It tasted like what it was, mushroom flesh, tangy, succulent, damp. A soft buzz traveled from his stomach to his gonads. As he closed his eyes, his mind overflowed with his psychic museum – pictures of his forthcoming family thriving in the timefolds. Aubrey and her siblings romped through a tropical paradise. Glow-faced boys devoured uncontaminated fruit. Lithe girls swam in clean waves.

Nostradamus was on to something, Mrs Covington had said.

‘Is that it?’ George asked. ‘Am I fertile now?’

‘No,’ said the Hatter.

‘But soon – right?’

‘Nope. Sorry.’

‘You said I’d be an alley cat.’

‘Spermatids do you no good until they enter your epididymis, where they can mature, grow tails, acquire motility, and learn the facts of life. Unfortunately, your Spermatids will be too feeble for that.’

‘Too feeble?’

‘Weak as newborn babes.’

‘Can I help them?’

‘Perhaps.’

‘How?’

‘The South Pole.’

‘The what?’

‘The magnetic forces at the South Pole have been known to steer spermatids on their proper course.’

‘The South Pole – in Antarctica?’

‘This sounds like bushwa to me,’ said Brat. ‘I’d be careful if I were you, Paxton.’

‘Stand on the exact endpoint of the earth’s axis for one full minute,’ said Theophilus with the imperial confidence of a contract bridge champion sitting down to a game of go fish, ‘and the next day you’ll be able to book passage for four hundred million sperm at a time.’

‘Paxton just ate a mushroom,’ said Sverre, squinting into Periscope Number One.

‘Why?’ asked Morning.

‘To cure his sterility,’ said Sverre. ‘State of the art medicine, circa 2015.’

‘He’s been wanting a family.’

‘If there’s justice in this world, he’ll get a noose.’

‘I believe he’s innocent.’

‘You love him, don’t you?’

‘No.’ She nudged Sverre away from the eyepiece and focused on her beloved.

He was crossing the plaza, Brat on one side, the MAD Hatter on the other. They cut through the spastic parade and approached the river, its dark surface swept by moonbeams and wisps of fog.

‘I seem to recall that sex was something quite special,’ said Sverre. ‘Had I lived, I would have been a devotee of sex.’

‘Sex was something quite special,’ Morning confirmed. How perfect George looked as he moved down the concrete steps and jumped onto the Hatter’s barge – how right was the sweat on his brow, how correct the cords of his muscles.

Sverre noted her wistful smile. ‘What is it like, Dr Valcourt?’

‘It?’

‘Having red blood. Living.’

‘Ambiguous.’

The captain pointed to the long black scab on his forearm. ‘Then it is in every way better than unadmittance.’

Removing his stovepipe hat, he blew on the fur and watched it tremble. A memory dragged itself forward like a dying animal. He clutched at it. Intimations of mortality. A blur. Something to do with love. Love for a parent? A child? Sharper now. A wife. He would have been married. Christine? No, Kristin… Kristin who? He couldn’t recall her last name. Kristin the pretty ensign. She would have been crazy about amusement parks. He saw her on a merry-go-round. Kristin, lovely Kristin, astride a wooden horse, going merrily around, singing, laughing.

Dissolving…

He reached out with his spindly fingers, stroked Morning’s cheek. ‘You are a woman of great passion. I felt that when I hired you.’ A tear formed in his right eye, a drop of gin in his left, and he pulled away. ‘Don’t worry, I won’t call you to my bed. I am more honorable than that.’

And less potent, he thought.

The bottle had wrecked him. His Number One Periscope did not go up.

‘You must understand – Paxton is my patient,’ said Morning, tightening her grip on the scope handle. ‘I cured him. Naturally I want him to have ambitions.’

Pacing furiously around the room, Sverre attempted to coax additional Kristin images out of his brain – a fruitless enterprise, as he knew it would be – then returned to Morning and asked, ‘Where are they now?’

‘On a barge,’ she reported. ‘They’re collecting war dead. The Hatter is frustrated. He wants all of history in his parade, and he’s afraid that it will always be…’

‘Incomplete!’ wailed the Hatter. ‘Lord knows I try, but there’s a limit to what one man can do.’

The fugitives crouched in the stem and surveyed the night’s catch. Theophilus had made them fishers of men; under the influence of George’s muscled arms, four corpses had risen from the river. Droplets speckled their brine-cured flesh. Grave robbing, George realized – whether the violated medium was earth or water – was a damning, unholy enterprise, blasphemous even by Unitarian standards.

‘A fine haul, no doubt about it,’ said the Hatter, misreading George’s dazed look. ‘Still, we have a long way to go.’

According to Theophilus, they had retrieved a former patient of Sigmund Freud’s, a gladiator whose highly entertaining death had occurred in 56 BC, a clerk employed by the Bank of Amsterdam from 1610 to 1629, and a Viking.

A resurrected galley slave poled the barge forward. Blind marble houses glided by. Bridges passed overhead, dark arching shapes that put George in mind of his vulture.

‘Do you realize I don’t have a single subject of the Pharaoh Akhnaton? Not one.’ Bubbles of sweat dotted the Hatter’s forehead. ‘The Arabian Caliphate and Abu Bakr? Nobody. The Gupta Court of fourth-century India? Zero!’ Lunging forward, he grabbed George’s shirt, bunching the material in his fists. ‘And victims? Don’t remind me! There’s a severe victim shortage in this city, I can tell you. Yes, I’ve got Napoleon covered, and the Trojan War, but what about the Young Turk Revolution of 1908? The Opium Wars of 1839 to 1842? The Crusades, for Christ’s sake! Don’t even talk to me about the Crusades!’

The Hatter took the tiller and steered them toward a concrete pier. The moonstruck water threw bright, dancing sine waves on the steps leading up to the street.

‘This is where you get off,’ he announced as the galley slave moored the barge.

‘You promised to take me to the mainland!’ Brat protested.

A fearsome drumming echoed through the marble city, as if a rain made of shrapnel and bones were felling on its streets.

‘I lied,’ said the Hatter.

‘You what ?’ screamed Brat.

‘Something wrong with your hearing, General? I’ve got a root back at the shop that cures deafness. I lied. Folks around here don’t like the idea of your war crimes going unpunished. They’re coming, gentlemen. I wouldn’t want to guess what they’ll do when they arrive, but it’s certain to include tearing you limb from limb. You’ll wish you’d taken your chances with the court.’

‘I was going to take my chances with the court!’ said George. The drumming grew louder. Footfalls, he concluded – the clogs, galoshes, pumps, sandals, and buskins of Professor Carter’s citizens. ‘I’m innocent!’

‘Innocent, eh? Then why is the world over?’

‘You gave me spermatids, and now you’re going to have me killed?’ asked George.

Theophilus jumped onto the pier. ‘It’s the post-exchange environment. Nobody behaves rationally any more.’

As the mob rumbled forward, Brat drew Holly’s pistol and aimed it at the Hatter’s chest. ‘Call off your dogs, Carter! Call them off, or I’ll shoot!’