James Morrow - This Is the Way the World Ends

Dawn came, dark, dismal.

‘I have hope,’ he said.

‘Lazarev is fourteen hundred miles away,’ she replied.

‘Hope for our family.’

Morning fired up the primus stove and began preparing coffee.

‘Yes, I know, it’s hard to imagine bringing the whole human species back,’ he said. ‘All that intermarriage – it gets messy, the genes degenerate or something. Still,’ he smiled, ‘Adam and Eve brought it off.’

‘I thought you were a Unitarian.’

‘All right, maybe it will be the last family – but it will be . Life is not nothing. Sverre can show us how to run the boat. We’ll take her out of here, away from all this ice and justice. We’ll get to someplace warm.’

Morning poured coffee into her expressionless mouth. She harvested ice flecks from her hair.

‘I’d like to know what you think,’ he said.

‘Do you want some coffee?’

‘No.’

She placed her chilled hands over the primus flame, moved them as if they were on a spit. ‘I think…’

‘Yes?’

His fianceé was at the most precise and unambiguous place on earth, yet she looked lost. ‘I think that we must get to Lazarev before we get to the Garden of Eden.’

‘Yes, but after Lazarev, we can try to become pregnant, and then—’

‘Men don’t want children, George, men want strategic options. Didn’t you lean anything at the trial?’

‘I want children. A child. Our child.’

‘You want Justine and Holly back.’

‘I want you and—’

Morning hurled a fistful of skua bones against the hard snow wall, slicing off his sentence. ‘Can’t you figure anything out on your own? Must it all be explained to you? In two days we’ll be flying over Skeidshoven Mountain. Do you know what Skeidshoven Mountain is, idiot?’

‘No.’

‘Yes, you do.’

I do not know what Skeidshoven Mountain is, he told himself, over and over. His bullet wound had not hurt so much since its inception. I do not know…

He knew. Oh, God, he knew. Damn you, Nostradamus, prince of frauds! And damn you as well, Leonardo, painter of lies!

He pulled the magic lantern slide from his breast pocket. His supposed wife smiled up at him, his alleged daughter still wore a merry face. With a quick slapping motion he rammed the glass rectangle against the floor. There was a sound like a nut encountering a nutcracker. It’s not everyone who gets to destroy a priceless Leonardo, he thought. And then his tears started, large and cold, as if an ice clock were ticking in his brain.

Morning removed her gloves and picked up a Leonardo sliver. It contained Aubrey’s head.

‘What is Skeidshoven Mountain?’ George asked. He knew.

She rested the sliver against her palm. ‘It’s where I…’

‘Yes?’

‘Gained the continent.’

She drew the glass across her flesh. Black blood rushed out. Clotting, it acquired the tormented contours and pinched skin of a weeping face.

‘On the second of May,’ she said, ‘a bright winter afternoon. I beheld my memories, and I had nothing. No children, no lovers, just a working knowlege of psychotherapy.’

Squeezing her eyelids together, she bottled up her tears.

Even with the frequent pauses for gulps and sighs, her story did not take long. Stowing away as the submarine left McMurdo Station… pretending to come aboard with Randstable… going to Sverre and convincing him that his prisoners were threatened with sudden mental collapse…

‘I wanted a life , George, not the dead dreams of those wretches in the limbos.’ Her tears escaped, hardening into thin bright glaciers before they could leave her face. ‘And I did it. I brought it off. You would never have loved a darkblood, but you loved me .’

She opened her eyes. He was gone…

I don’t understand the first thing about admitteds, Morning thought. I love this man, and I have no idea what matters to him.

She ran through the maze of ice-and-steel tunnels, following the flashlight beam, chasing his crackling footfalls and the shouts that rattled off the frozen surfaces of New Amundsen-Scott Station – howls of unfathomable sadness, curses targeted against God, and, most of all, over and over, a thousand echoing demands that the universe give him a child.

The sickness began in his spleen. Sverre could feel it corrupting the fat organ, rushing outward, pouring into his lymph, pressing toward the headwaters of his heart. He lay in his bunk for hours, days, powerless to stop the progress of his unadmittance, his mind wandering the foggy border between sleep and oblivion. His brain floated on dark, tarry fluids. Occasionally it showed him snatches of his beloved Kristin, more often an Antarctic crevasse, an ice tunnel to hell.

It was all in the McMurdo Sound Agreement. Sverre had been the first of his race to gain the continent, and so he would be the first to lose it. Ragnarok, he thought. World’s End. He was satisfied with his new verse. It did not rhyme; poetry need not rhyme. Yea, Thor struck Jormungandr the Midgard Serpent as it shot from the sea, and the worm’s last breath did blast the god and dry his blood, and next the mortal world itself did crack, locked in endless winter . Ragnarok – when all debts fall due, all legends climax. And so, pursuant to the legend, an Antarctic storm rushed through the boat, sea dragon’s breath prying back the hatches, whooshing down the corridors, crossing Sverre’s cabin. He drew his blankets tight, but the dragon’s breath still came; it squeezed his bones and turned his gutta-percha eye into a hailstone. His ears throbbed with the detonations of Jormungandr’s heart.

He awoke. The heart was a human fist, pounding at his cabin door.

Rolling out of bed, he was hit by the smell of himself, flesh marinated in alcohol and sweat. Gin, he knew, and gin alone, would get him to the door. He limped to his writing desk, found the bottle, shoved its mouth home. His intoxicated hand staggered across the desk, knocking over the ink pot, scattering pages of the Saga of Thor .

Behind the door two ghosts in scopas suits waited. They were rimmed with frost. One had an ice storm raging in its beard.

‘You’re out of uniform,’ Morning said, removing her helmet.

‘Dr Valcourt?’ He took a pull at the bottle.

‘From the Pole to Astrid Land by vulture in fifty-one hours,’ she said. ‘That must be a record, right? They’ll put us in National Geographic .’

‘Morning and I are in love,’ said George.

‘I know,’ said the captain.

Sverre walked forward, tripped. George bear-hugged him, and the gin bottle clattered to the floor. It was shocking how insubstantial the captain had become, his skin like paper, his beard the color and consistency of dead seaweed. The fugitives carried him to the bed, lowered him into the Sverre-shaped mold in his mattress. He asked for his poem and some gin. While Morning gathered up the papers from the writing desk, George retrieved the bottle.

‘I saw the executions,’ Sverre said. ‘Tarmac refused the hood. A real four-ball general…’ He coughed. ‘I would like to hear the Saga of Thor .’

Morning read the captain his poem.

‘That’s not bad, is it?’ said Sverre.

‘You would have been one heck of an epitaph writer,’ answered George.

‘Be honest now – is it any good?’

‘In your time you became a poet,’ Morning replied.

George lifted the white raven from Sverre’s writing desk, smoothed its alabaster feathers. Holly would have named it Birdie. ‘Sir, you’ve made certain efforts on my behalf,’ he said stiffly, ‘and I appreciate them.’

‘Your name should never have been in the indictment, Paxton.’ Sverre grinned, showing teeth that resembled Indian corn. ‘Be fruitful and multiply – both of you.’