James Morrow: This Is the Way the World Ends

‘I wish I could see the Big Dipper,’ Holly said.

‘One night soon we’ll go out and look for it.’

‘Daddy, I have something important to say. This is important. Could we go out and look for it now?’

‘You don’t have any shoes on.’

‘Could you carry me?’

He seriously considered doing so. ‘It’s pretty cloudy tonight. I don’t think we could find it.’

‘Let’s try. Please.’

‘No, honey, it’s late,’ he said, extricating himself from her little finger. ‘We’ll look for it some other night. I’ll tell you a story instead.’

‘Goody.’

He started out with the grasshopper and the ant, then suddenly realized he didn’t like the ending, and so he ad-libbed his way through the chronicle of a clumsy bunny who wanted, more than anything, to be able to ride a two-wheeler bicycle. The bunny tried and tried and kept falling off, covering his fragile body with little bunny bruises. (The wind could hurl you three hundred feet, young Gary Frostig had said.) Then one day the rabbit hutch caught on fire. The determined bunny leaped on his two-wheeler, raced to the fire department, and saved the day.

‘I wish I could ride a two-wheeler,’ said Holly.

‘You’ll learn,’ said George.

‘I know that,’ said Holly, slightly annoyed. She closed the book. ‘It’s going to be a long world.’

Halloween was coming, the pumpkins were off their diets, and the little cemetery where George worked had acquired a ghost.

When he first glimpsed the specter, she was contemplating him through the front window of the Crippen Monument Works. Inside the office, barrel-bellied Jake Swann perused a sales contract – a big order set in motion on Columbus Day when Jake’s uncle had come home and shot all of his immediate family dead – and as the customer reached for the pen to write his signature, George looked up.

Spider webs and arabesques were scribbled on the window in frost. A blood-red October leaf was pasted to one pane. George and the specter locked eyes. While he sincerely doubted that the old woman was in fact a ghost – Unitarians did not believe in ghosts – her every aspect suggested a netherworld address. She wore a mourning ensemble, loose-fitting as a shroud: black cloth, black gloves, and black veil – raised. Her complexion had the greenish pallor of mold. Her frame displayed the jagged profile of a dead tree. When she smiled at him, jack-o’-lantern teeth appeared, and one of her eyelids collapsed in a wink.

Ice formed in George’s gut. His throat tightened like a sphincter.

‘You got the sniffles?’ asked Jake Swarm, a phlegmatic man who had not been noticeably affected by the prodigal loss of kin.

George took the contract, knitting his brow in a manner he thought appropriate to a tomb professional. Furtively, he glanced out the window. The specter was gone.

But later, as George was leaving the office, she reappeared, kneeling amid the sample stones. Mud spattered her mourning dress; the veil was down. He ducked behind Design No. 3295. The old woman stared at a wordless headstone for several minutes, as if reading an epitaph written in a medium only ghosts could perceive, then reached forward with black velvet fingers and stroked the granite surface of Design No. 6247, the one with the praying Saint Catherine on top. George considered speaking, but the remarks that suggested themselves – ‘That one has real value,’ ‘We also offer it in Oklahoma pink,’ ‘For whom are you in mourning?’ – seemed inappropriate.

Evening pressed softly on the Crippen Monument Works. The woman uncrooked her back, hobbled forward. ‘I have a task for you,’ she said. A spry voice inhabited her antique body. ‘You’ll learn of it soon.’

‘Have we met?’ he asked.

‘I have always been with you,’ she said, smiling, ‘waiting to get in,’ and then she vanished into the dusk.

As the week progressed, George noticed her a dozen more times – peering through the window, bending over a sample memorial, standing outside the decaying picket fence that enclosed the little cemetery.

Waiting to get in…?

On Halloween afternoon she watched from the weedcorrupted field on the other side of Hawthorne Street. She sat on the ground, a basket of apples in her lap. Her dark dress was covered with leaves; she appeared to be stuffed with them. Her weak and decimated teeth had to fight their way into each apple. George wondered why she had selected such an ambitious lunch. Some early trick-or-treaters came past: a witch, a devil, a cat, a preschooler from Venus, a ghoul. When the woman offered the children an apple, they shrieked gleefully and ran off, laughing all the way down Hawthorne Street. At the corner they stopped laughing but kept going, faster now, panting, sweating, trembling with terror, to the far end of Blackberry Avenue and beyond.

Fade-in on a man seated at a desk. He wears a business suit and is flanked by American flags. During his speech the camera dollies forward and a subtitle tells us that this is Robert Wengernook, Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs .

WENGERNOOK: As one of the officials charged with implementing America’s defense strategy, I know where our security lies. We must prove to the Soviets that they can never succeed in their ugly schemes for winning a nuclear war… The key to our security is deterrence. The key to our deterrence is civil defense. And the key to our civil defense is a technology developed by Eschatological Enterprises… If you’ve already bought that scopas suit – wear it. If you haven’t – well, don’t you think you owe it to yourself and to your country’s future? Remember, deterrence is only as good as the people it protects.

Fade-out .

In the screening room of Unlimited, Ltd., Phil Murcheson of Eschatological Enterprises blew cigarette smoke into Robert Wengernook’s projected face.

‘He looks nervous,’ said Murcheson as the tail leader of the thirty-second spot rolled out of the film gate and began flapping around on the take-up reel.

‘Intense, we thought.’ Dave Valentine, Creative Associate at Unlimited, Ltd., shut off the projector. ‘He looked intense to us.’

‘Nervous.’

‘He needed a cigarette,’ said Valentine.

‘You’ll notice a big difference when it’s transferred to tape,’ said Lou Marquand, Assistant Creative Associate. ‘Film is high resolution, right? It’s not his medium. Wengernook is definitely low-res iconography.’

‘Nervous as a cat,’ said Murcheson. ‘This is not a man I would want leading me into battle, and our customers won’t want him either.’

‘I hate to fail you like this, Phil,’ said Valentine. ‘I can’t tell you the pain I’m experiencing right now.’

Murcheson lit a fresh Pall Mall. ‘Look, what you did is okay for the six o’clock news, the Rise and Shine show, the Sunday morning evangelists. No problem. But this country has a Super Bowl coming up in a couple of months. This is not a Super Bowl presence you’re giving me here, Dave.’

Valentine began jumping up and down. ‘Hold on, Phil! Concept time! Hold on! Here comes the egg… now the sperm… direct hit! Insemination! You’ll love this. It has action, a medieval knight, and a sex-role reversal.’

‘I like the knight. Sex-role reversal?’

‘We’re on top of it. Eighty-five percent of male viewers enjoy sex-role reversals, as long as you keep the threat factor in harness.’

‘Okay. But life is short – need I remind you? The Super Bowl, Dave.’

‘Phil, you’ll have it in time for the goddamn Army-Navy game.’