James Morrow: This Is the Way the World Ends

The crevasses of Antarctica are predatory, hungry, lying in wait. Holly did not notice the great Novolazarevkaya Crevasse. One second she was running, the next she was gone, falling in a flash of golden scopas threads.

George cursed the crevasse aloud, vowing to defeat it as totally as Sverre’s navy had defeated the invalidated past. Already he was at the brink, throwing himself on his stomach, extending his lantern arm. The beam spilled downward, illuminating flying whorls of snow and a child’s figure pressed against the wall, her boots frozen to a feeble lip of ice. George saw two frightened green eyes, heard whimpering. His muscles and tendons creaked, nearly tearing apart as he fought for an extra inch of reach.

The tomb inscriber proved stronger than himself. He touched something soft, seized it. He yanked. Her silk-wrapped hand came forward, safe in his, but it was strangely, horribly weightless.

‘It wasn’t supposed to end this way!’ a voice shouted from out of the storm.

George stared at the awful object he was holding. The wrist was cut. A plastic tube poked through the crack. At the fractured elbow, ball bearings and copper wire protruded. The stump of the upper arm was a fountain of yellow hydraulic fluids; the technological blood gushed from rubber veins, spilled around steel bones, and dripped onto the Lazarev Ice Shelf.

Dressed in his diamond-patterned scopas suit, Theophilus Carter ambled into view. Icicles grew from his nostrils like tusks and drooped from the inside brim of his top hat like crystalline hair. His gloves were stuck to a teapot. In the murky distance, the lights of his itinerant shop (‘Remarkable Things for Human Bodies’) burned through the blizzard.

Again Theophilus said, ‘It wasn’t supposed to end this way…’

George hurled the puppet arm into the dark whistling pit, and when Holly’s double looked up at him he lost consciousness and collapsed on the ice.

Smells cut through his brain, forcing him into the world. Formaldehyde. Viscera. How different from the odorless continent, how different from the prophylactic City of New York . He was pleased to find himself on the MAD Hatter’s hospital gurney. Good. He’s planning to take me apart. He’s going to stuff me with circuits and pumps. I’ll become Plato or Julius Caesar or George Washington.

Like a speeding subway car, the laboratory vibrated and lurched, winds spurting through the cracks in its walls. The organs trembled in their jars, the severed arms bumped against the walls of their tanks, and the skeletons flounced on their ceiling hooks like chandeliers of bone.

Airborne.

The Hatter waddled over with a tea tray. He had shed his scopas suit, leaving himself attired in his morning coat and vest.

George tried to speak, but his vocal cords were iced up. He poured himself tea, drank. ‘I had no idea there was such cruelty in the world.’

‘Strange words from a convicted war criminal. Your loving bride wanted to give you a day of happiness, that’s all. We calculated we could sustain the drama for twelve hours. Call it cruelty if you like, deception, a ruse, though a ruse by any other name would smell as sweet. I call it a gift.’

‘She said she had made a deal ,’ George protested.

‘With whom? Extinction? Stop living in a dream world. You can’t make deals with extinction – I told you that back in the city. The deal was with yours truly. Your bride gave me some free therapy, so I gave her a free automaton. The therapy proved useless, as we knew it would. Assured destruction is a hopeless disease.’

Rising from the gurney – his neck was stiff from Holly’s horsey ride – George followed the Hatter out of the laboratory and into the shop. A pile of scopas suit sales contracts lay on the counter. The mannequins’ shoulders pushed through their rotting costumes like cantaloupes tearing through grocery bags. The two men walked to the bellied window, leaned toward its congestion of hats. Theophilus traded his top hat for a bejeweled crown. George put on a homburg and stared at the birdless sky. Dark, bloated clouds floated by like plumes from the stacks of a weapons factory.

‘Ever since the war,’ said the Hatter, ‘your child has been a lot of random molecules. You knew that. You always knew that. All the King’s accountants and all the King’s lawyers couldn’t put… so I built her from scratch. Your wife gave me a nursery school photograph plus relevant data. The Big Dipper, everything. I programmed the reunion well, n’est-ce pas ?’

The shop began to roll and pitch. The mannequins flapped their arms. Frantic tintinnabulations arose from the bells over the door.

‘Admit it, things went swimmingly,’ said the Hatter. ‘A bit mawkish for my tastes – yours, too, probably – but on the whole, swimmingly.’

George noticed how cadaverous Professor Carter had become. His pink hair was almost white, and his skin looked like stale cheese. The four-in-hand tie surrounded a neck as narrow and coarse as a loaf of French bread. Only one of his rabbit teeth remained, and it was black and cracked.

Stripping himself naked, the Hatter went to a mannequin dressed in royal regalia. ‘Help me with this, will you?’

Together they hauled down the coronation mantle, which was as heavy and bulky as an Oriental rug, and placed it around Theophilus’s tiny shoulders. Immediately he toppled under the weight. His crown fell off. ‘When you’re a king,’ he gasped, propping himself up on one elbow, ‘people are less likely to notice that you’re insane.’ Through a miracle of effort, he got into a sitting position. ‘One more favor.’ He petted the ermine on his capelet. ‘Crown me.’

George lowered the wonderful sparkling hat over Theophilus’s dead hair. ‘How do I look?’ the Hatter asked.

‘Splendid.’

He really did, in a way.

‘Off with their heads! Bring on the dancing girls! Turn away those petitioners! Maximize those strategic options!’

For nearly an hour he sat in the corner, raving quietly. George brought him tea.

‘Enhance that deterrence! Put Humpty-Dumpty together again! Let them eat cake!’

He motioned George over with his scepter. The tomb inscriber bent low. ‘ Au revoir , my friend.’ The Hatter drank tea. ‘The odds, however, are against it.’

And then, slowly, graciously, as the shop settled onto the ground, Good King Theophilus began his long reign over nothing.

George stepped through the door. He held his lantern high. More immortal than Egypt’s pyramids, the Ice Palace of Justice rose against the verbose slopes of Mount Christchurch, pennants shivering, spires skewering black clouds. JUSTICE IS SERVED, the mountain said.

There was no storm here, only a mournful wind bearing the smoky odor of scopas suit insulation. Everywhere he glanced, from the bellied shop window to the limits of his light and beyond, the suits covered the glacial tongue like cocoons abandoned by some huge and over-propagated species of moth. He wanted to have some really profound response to the situation but could not manage it. So, he thought, this is it: no more people, not a one, no admitteds, no unadmitteds, nobody. My, my.

But then, growling mechanically, a Sno-Cat emerged from the gloom, stopping before the Mad Tea Party. An old woman got out, one arm bowed around her scopas suit helmet, the other gripping a cane made of ice. She scuttled forward.

‘Hello, George.’

‘Mrs Covington?’

‘This foolish glacier is almost as cold as your monument works.’ Bands of snow flashed through Nadine’s gray hair.