James Morrow: This Is the Way the World Ends

April is the crudest month, never stopping, intent on causing May. George’s wife grew weak. A cough raged through her. The warm, ebony blood drained from her face, leaving it chalky and dry. Her hair became brittle. Odd noises rose from deep within her, wheezes and scrapings, sounds like burning cellophane.

Sometimes George would find her in the periscope room, hugging one of the machines, pressing it into the shank of her body until her vibrations stopped. She began staying in bed all day, breathing soggily, spitting up ink.

‘I want to talk,’ she said.

‘About what?’

‘My life.’

‘Won’t that make you sad?’ Slipping a second pillow under her heavy head, he could not help but notice the stale vapors coming from her mouth.

‘Yes.’ Black veins pulsed in her eyes.

He kissed his wife. ‘Let’s talk.’

‘Leaves keep occurring to me, autumn leaves, every type, red, yellow. I think I spent some time in Vermont. I would have liked primitive art – this is quite clear – and going into libraries and reading the book spines, so many of them, famous and obscure all jumbled together. Also, I never outgrew stuffed animals.’

Dispassionately she recalled her parents, murdered in their preschool years during the Battle of Corpus Christi. Helen would have been a bowling alley attendant, a cold woman, unhappy, mired in quasi-poverty and a pathological marriage. Hugh would have been a mechanic and also a self-pitying lout who wanted a son, someone he could shoot things with.

Happier thoughts now. Morning, the thoughtful, gushy school-girl, writing meaningful poems about dead birds, creating a craw-daddy farm in Parson’s Creek, scholarships piling up, the Jacob Bronowski Award for the Junior Displaying the Most Interest in Science, and other prizes with equally peculiar names, and they were hers – hers! – Hugh couldn’t take them away. She flourished in graduate school, taking the clinical psychology department by storm, then converted her Ph.D. into a lucrative practice. Guilt was her speciality.

She told George of her cases – wins, draws, losses. Phillip Cassidy, inhabited till death by seven personalities. Marcie Cremo, debrained by her own revolver. And the triumphs? asked George. Quite a few, answered Morning. (The trick, you see, was to be their friend, though they didn’t teach that at the University of Chicago.) Janet Hodges, fat and self-hating, but when they were finished she was a Rubens model, sensually plump, able to have unhappy love affairs just like anyone else. Willie Howard, age six, who didn’t talk, not a word, was thought to be brain-damaged, but then Morning got out the puppet with the three eyes, and it taught Willie how to speak Neptunian, and so Willie taught it English.

And now – memory bending back on itself, shards from youth, sacred frivolities: a stuffed octopus, a red bicycle, a stocky ceramic teapot, a clock that looked like a cat, the smell of rain, the caffeine air of fall. My best friend was named Sylvia, I think. I loved major league baseball. Yes, I would have been a fan, can you believe that? I got my first period at a Houston Astros game. I bled for the Astros, red blood.

She described Astros who had never lived. 2003, that was to be their year. Last game of the World Series. Ninth inning. Down a run. Cristobal walks… Robin Arcadia comes up and… bang!

‘Thank you,’ she said.

‘You’ve had quite a life,’ he said.

‘Bet your ass.’

He lay down beside her, shivering from the coldness she gave off and from the thought of what it meant. Sleep came instantly. His dream took him to a moss-muffled forest, all the great women there, Justine, Morning, his mother (SHE WAS BETTER THAN SHE KNEW), the four of them building a house (a cottage actually, on stilts above a lake), and then the children appeared, Holly, Aubrey, and a third child that Justine had gone off and had during the war, a boy.

Waking, he realized that his eyelids were stuck together, and he feared that when he pulled them apart another pair would be lying beneath them, and beyond that, another. My wife is dying. There is nothing I can do. He heard the pops of the little muscles as he opened his eyes. The ceiling lights glowered at him. He turned over, saw the vacant depression in the mattress, and all the ice in Antarctica entered his heart.

But then she limped into the cabin, feverish, shaking. Snow filled the creases of her scopas suit. Scrolls of ice hung from what remained of her hair.

‘You frightened me,’ he said. ‘I thought—’

‘No. The second of May. I gained the continent on the second of May.’

‘You’ve been outside? It’s crazy for you to go outside.’

‘I made a deal.’

‘What?’

‘Hug me.’

He did.

‘I’m going to say something strange,’ she rasped. ‘No matter what it is, you won’t stop hugging me.’

‘I promise,’ he said.

‘You’re going to see your daughter again. Holly.’

He hugged her more tightly. ‘Holly is dead.’

‘I made a deal,’ she said. ‘It will happen in a week. Sunday. Be ready.’

‘I don’t understand,’ he said.

‘You will have half a day with her. Twelve hours. That’s not much. You can say no.’

‘I want this more than anything.’

‘All right. It’s done. Sunday. A twelve-hour visit, starting at noon. Remember – be ready.’

‘I don’t understand.’

‘I made a deal.’ Ice water drizzled from Morning’s body to the carpet.

‘The little girl in Leonardo’s painting, it wasn’t Aubrey?’

‘There is no Aubrey. It was—’

‘Holly?’

‘Yes.’

‘It looked just like her,’ George said knowingly. ‘It had to be her.’

‘The painting predicted the future,’ Morning confirmed. ‘Nostradamus saw correctly. Kiss me.’

They went to the periscope room, Morning leaning on him all the way. Periscope Number One gazed unflinchingly across the continent. Up and down the Transantarctic Mountain Range, the McMurdo Sound Agreement took its toll, millions dissolving, deserted by their minds and bodies, leaving behind scopas suits in lieu of corpses.

‘I don’t want to watch this,’ he said.

‘You’ve seen worse,’ she said.

He focused on the Ross Ice Shelf. The crater scooped out by the Battle of Wildgrove was but a footprint compared with the central crevasse. And then they came, marching proudly – those who preferred free will to the McMurdo Sound Agreement, friends holding hands, lovers locked together, women clutching children, children cuddling bears made of snow. In a vast white tide they hurled themselves over the ragged edge, platoons of unlived lives returning to the bedrock, generation upon generation losing the continent.

‘They were right to indict me,’ he muttered.

On a nearby nunatak a great bonfire flourished, flames against the snow, bright and red as an eye from the Midgard serpent. Led by Mother Mary Catherine, a hundred darkbloods moved toward the fire, each bearing an icon of ice. Warhead by warhead, delivery system by delivery system, the prosecution’s frozen arsenal was abolished. The Javelin cruise missile melted instantly. Then the Guardian Angel ICBM was salvoed. Next the Multiprong fizzled away, the MacArthur III, the Wasp-13 heavy bomber, the mine, the shell, the depth charge, the free-fall bomb. Cheers shook the glacier, and then the dancing started. Cocoa flooded into frigid throats, smiles brightened tired faces, and he saw that there was nothing like a clear, cold night of security destruction for bringing joy to an unadmitted heart.