T. Boyle - World's End

It was as if Walter had awakened from a long sleep, as if the past twenty-odd years were the illusion, and this — the dreams and visions, history and its pertinacity — the reality. He couldn’t be sure of anything any more. All the empirical underpinnings of the world — Boyle’s Law, Newtonian physics, doctrines of evolution and genetic inheritence, TV, gravity, the social contract, merde — had suddenly become suspect. His grandmother had been right all along. His grandmother — the fisherman’s wife, with the stockings fallen down around her ankles and her faintly mustachioed upper lip rising and falling in ceaseless incantation — had perceived the world more keenly than philosophers and presidents, pharmacists and ad men. She’d seen through the veil of Maya — seen the world for what it was — a haunted place, where anything could happen and nothing was as it seemed, where shadows had fangs and doom festered in the blood. Walter felt he might float off into space, explode like a sweet potato left too long in the oven, grow hair on his palms or turn to grape jelly. Why not? If there were apparitions, shadows on dark roadways, voices speaking in the rootless night, why not imps and goblins, God, St. Nick, UFOs and pukwidjinnies too?

He left the hospital on a sunstruck morning in August, and the first thing he did — before he had a beer or monster burger with pickle, relish, mayonnaise, mustard and three-star chili sauce, before he hustled Jessica up to his room above the kitchen to finish what he’d begun on the hard flat institutional bed in the East Wing — was this: he went back and read the inscription on the road sign, as the bare-foot specter of his father had advised him. Jessica drove. She wore a shift that was made of the filmy stuff of lingerie, she wore sandals, jewelry, makeup, perfume. Walter watched the trees flit by the window, one after another, in endless unbroken succession, a green so intense he had to shield his eyes; Jessica hummed along with the radio. She was effusive, lighthearted, gay and unconstrained; he was subdued and withdrawn. She prattled on about wedding plans, told jokes, fumbled with the gilt foil on the neck of the bottle of Móet et Chandon clenched between her thighs and filled him in on people they knew — Hector, Tom Crane, Susie Cats — as if he’d been gone a year. He didn’t have much to say.

The sign — the historical marker, that is — had barely been damaged by Walter’s assault on it. The stanchion was gouged where the footpeg had hit it and the whole thing was tilted back a degree or two so that the legend could most comfortably be perused from the lower branches of the maple across the street, but basically Walter was much more the worse for wear than the instrument of his mutilation. That much he could see from the car window as they pulled up on the shoulder. Emerging from the passenger side of Jessica’s VW like a crab shrugging off its shell, he braced himself on his crutches — every time he put his weight on the still-tender stump of his right leg it felt as if it were on fire — and hobbled up to decipher the sign that had become for him as momentous and mysterious as the Sinai tablets must have been for the tribes of Israel. He could have asked Jessica or Lola or Tom Crane to go have a look at it while he lay helpless in bed, tormented by the image of his father and the brutal commingling of dream and reality, but he preferred it this way. After all, he hadn’t hit a tree, mailbox, fireplug or lamppost, but a sign — symbol, token and signifier — yes, a sign, and it might as well have been inscribed with hieroglyphs for all the attention he’d paid it in the past. There was a message here. He yearned for enlightenment.

It was hot. The end of summer. Cars shot past with a suck of air. There was no blood, no oil slick on the road — just the sign, with its gouge. He read:

On this spot in 1693, Cadwallader Crane, leader of an armed uprising on Van Wart Manor, surrendered to authorities. He was hanged, along with co-conspirator Jeremy Mohonk, at Gallows Hill, Van Wartville, in 1694.

He read, but he was not enlightened. He stood there like a man of stone, conning it over, word by word. And then, after a long moment during which he cursed his dreams, his father and the state historical society, he swung around on his crutches and stumped back to the car.

At home — the world had shifted beneath his feet, changed as surely and irrevocably as if it had been hit by a comet or visited by a delegation of three-headed aliens from Alpha Centauri, and yet here all was the same, right down to the muted bands of sunlight that fell across the Turkish carpet like a benediction and the twin lamps with shades the color and texture of ancient parchment — Walter stood awkwardly in the middle of the cluttered den and gave himself up to Lola’s sinewy embrace. The paneled walls were still hung with the dim sepia photos of Lola’s parents in their Moldavian overcoats, galoshes and fur hats; the black-and-whites of Walter in his Little League uniform; the overexposed snapshot of Lola and Walter’s mother as high school girls, their hair long, arms entwined; and the turgid official portrait of Lenin that occupied the place of honor over the mantelpiece. The cane plant in the corner was still dead and the empty aquarium still crusted with a jagged layer of petrified sludge. On the bookshelves, amidst the faded spines and crumbling dust jackets of books that hadn’t been moved for as long as Walter could remember, crouched the ceramic tigers and elephants, the ivory rooks and knights and pawns he’d played with as a boy, all exactly as he’d left them on that distant morning of the potato pancakes. He’d been gone two weeks to the day. Everything was the same, and everything was changed. “Well,” Lola said. “Well. You’re back.”

Jessica stood beside him, fidgeting with her purse. She was wearing an embarrassed smile. Lola was smiling too, but her smile was worn and rueful. Walter, despite himself, found that he was smiling back at her. His wasn’t a comforting smile, though. He was too disoriented, too crushed by the ghost of the familiar that screamed like something choked in the bushes each time he glanced down at his right foot, to smile like an unconstrained and doting son. No, his smile was more a baring of the teeth.

Did he want something to eat? Lola wanted to know. A little borscht maybe? With some rye bread? Tea? Cookies? Did he want to sit down? Was it too warm? Should she turn on the fan? Hesh would be thrilled when he got home from work.

Walter didn’t want any borscht. Nor rye bread, tea or cookies either. It wasn’t too warm. The fan could rest. He looked forward to seeing Hesh. But for now — and here he gave Jessica a significant look — he just wanted to go up to bed. To rest, that is. He would not drink the champagne, he would not have a beer or monster burger and he would not engage in an act of love and affirmation with his fiancée. Instead, he would mount the stairs to his boyhood room like a soldier returned from battle, like a martyr, and he would draw the shades, stretch out on the bed and watch the shadows deepen toward night.

Next morning he awoke to the smell of potato pancakes, a smell that roused him like a slap in the face. He sat up in bed, seized with fear and loathing. The cycle was beginning again. Already his mother’s sorrowful eyes had begun to detach themselves from the gloom in the corner behind the bureau. A minute more and his grandmother would be looking over his shoulder and his father poking fun at him or delivering yet another cryptic message. It was intolerable. How many pounds of flesh did he have to sacrifice? How many limbs? He fumbled with the straps of the prosthesis, jerked on his clothes, seized the crutches and flung himself down the stairs like a hunted man.