James Morrow: This Is the Way the World Ends

The prophet projected another painting. A bearded man standing by a gravestone.

‘Until he saw the three children in white…’

Until he saw the three children in white, George Paxton’s life had gone just about perfectly.

Born in the middle of the twentieth century to generous and loving parents, people of New England stock so pure it was found only in northeast Vermont, he came to manhood in the tepid bosom of the Unitarian Church. It was an unadorned, New England sort of faith. Unitarians rejected miracles, worshiped reason, denied the divinity of Jesus Christ, and had serious doubts about the divinity of God. George grew up believing that this was the most plausible of all possible worlds.

By the time he was thirty-five he had been blessed with an adorable daughter, a wife who always looked as if she had just come from doing something dangerous and lewd, and a cozy cottage perched on stilts above a lake. He was in good health, and he knew how to prevent many life-threatening diseases through a diet predicated on trace metals. George took inordinate pleasure in ordinary things. Hot coffee gave him fits of rapture. If there was a good movie on television that night, he would spend the day whistling.

He had even outmaneuvered the philosophers. A seminal discovery of the twentieth century was that a man could live a life overflowing with advantages and still be obliquely unhappy. Despair, the philosophers called it. But the coin of George Paxton’s life had happiness stamped on both sides – no despair for George. Individuals so fortunate were scarce in those days. You could have sold tickets to George Paxton.

Now it must be allowed that not everyone in his situation would have shared his contentment. Not everyone would have found fulfillment in putting words on cemetery monuments. For George, however, inscribing monuments was a calling, not simply a job. He was in the tomb profession. He kept a scrapbook of the great ones: the sarcophagus of Alexander, the shrine to Mausolus at Halicarnassus, the Medici tomb at San Lorenzo, the pyramid of Cheops. Don’t you get depressed being around gravestones all day? people asked him. No, he replied. Gravestones, he knew, were educational media, teaching that life has limits: don’t set your sights too high.

Occasionally his wife accused him of laziness. ‘I wish you would go out and get yourself some ambition,’ Justine would say. But George’s world satisfied him – the pace, the simplicity, the muscles he acquired from lifting granite.

And then they came, the three children in white, jumping out of the back of John Frostig’s panel truck and sprinting toward the sample stones that spread outward from the foundation of the Crippen Monument Works. The stones were closely spaced, as in a cemetery for dwarves. ‘Floor models,’ George’s boss liked to call them. ‘Want to take one out for a spin?’ the boss would quip.

Sitting near the smeared and sooty window of the front office, George watched as the white children leapfrogged over the stones. Their suits – trim, one-piece affairs cinched by utility belts and topped with globular helmets – afforded complete mobility. Each child wore a pistol. The leapfrogging boys looked ready for the bottom of the ocean, the inside of a volcano, a Martian sandstorm, a plague of bees, anything.

Briefcase in tow, John climbed out of the driver’s seat. A painting of a white suit decorated the side of the truck, accompanied by the words PERPETUAL SECURITY SCOPAS SUITS… JOHN FROSTIG, PRESIDENT… WILDGROVE, MASSACHUSETTS… 555–7043. The president of Perpetual Security Scopas Suits marched toward the office exuding the sort of nervous energy and insatiable ambition that made George feel there are worse things in life than being satisfied with what you have.

Entering, John imposed his rump on a stool, balanced the briefcase on his knees.

‘Has someone died?’ George asked.

‘Died? Nope, sorry, you won’t sell me anything today, buddy-buddy.’ John’s friendship with George had been primarily John’s idea. ‘No tombs today.’

George swiveled away from the window. A swivel chair, a rolltop desk, a naughty calendar, a patina of dust, the stool on which John sat – these formed the sum total of Arthur Crippen’s office. Arthur was not there. He never appeared before noon, rarely before 2 P.M. Just then it was 3:30. Arthur was doubtless at the Lizard Lounge, a bar administering to the broken hopes and failed ambitions of the town’s shopkeepers.

‘Look out the window, buddy-buddy. What do you see?’

George pivoted. The children had begun a science fiction game, laser-zapping each other with their pistols, using the monuments for cover. ‘White children,’ he reported.

‘Safe children. There’s a war coming, George, a bad one. It’s inevitable, what with both sides having so many land-based, first-strike ICBMs. Soon we’ll all be living in scopas suits. That’s S-C-O-P-A-S, as in Self-Contained Post-Attack Survival. Just five weeks I’ve had this franchise, and already I’ve sold two dozen units without once leaving the borders of our fair hamlet. The company tells us to operate under any name we like, so I’m Perpetual Security Scopas Suits. I thought that up myself – Perpetual Security Scopas Suits. Like it?’

‘I can’t see why the Russians would want to bomb Wildgrove,’ said George the Unitarian. He was what his church had made him, a naive skeptic.

‘You don’t know jackshit about strategic doctrine, do you? Ever hear of a counterforce strike? The enemy wants to wipe out America’s war-waging capability. Well, Wildgrove is part of that war-waging capability. We’ve got food, clothing, gasoline, trucks, people – many things of military value. All the apples we grow here could prove decisive during the intra-war period.’

‘Well, if they ever do drop their bombs, I imagine we’ll all die before we know what hit us.’

‘That’s pretty pessimistic of you, buddy-buddy, and furthermore it’s not true. Put on a scopas suit, and you won’t be able to avoid surviving.’

John opened his briefcase, took out a crisply printed form headed ESCHATOLOGICAL ENTERPRISES – WE DO CIVIL DEFENSE RIGHT. George knew about sales contracts; you could not acquire a stone from the Crippen Monument Works without signing one.

‘Eschatological – doesn’t sound very Japanese, does it?’ said John. ‘Don’t worry. Right now all the units might come from Osaka, but next month there’ll be a plant in Detroit and another in Palo Alto. Hell, talk about being in the right place with the right product at the right time. Greatest thing since the rubber. A smart bunch of bastards, those Eschatological people, a bunch of shrewd—’

‘This isn’t my kind of thing.’

‘The price wouldn’t shock you.’

‘Sorry, John—’

‘Begin simple – that’s what I tell everybody. One or two units, expand later. Do the kids first. The smaller the suit, the lower the cost. Your daughter—’

‘Holly is four.’

‘Wise decision, truly wise. I must tell you, it puts a lump right smack in the middle of my throat. Now, the way I figure it, the warheads won’t arrive for two years. Yeah, I know, the world’s going to hell in a slant-eyed Honda, but smart money still says two years. So you’ll need something that will fit Holly when she’s six, right? Normally we’d be talking over seven thousand pictures of George Washington, but for you, buddy-buddy, let’s make it sixty-five ninety-five plus tax.’

‘That’s more than I take home in… I don’t know, four months. Five. I’ll have to say no to this.’