T. Boyle - World's End

As she stood there in the dark room in that unhappy place, exuding a scent as wild and incorruptible as the spoor of the tree-dweller, the pouched one, the white beast that had lent it to her, chanting her ancient threnody and anointing her son’s flesh with the unguents and resins of the gods themselves, she glanced up to see a small, dark-eyed thing in the corner of the room, a woman, a white woman, her belly hard with child. She held those dark eyes a moment, and then turned back to her dead son.

Five months later, when the snow lay crusted on the ground, Neeltje went into labor. Her mother was there to help her, and there was a Yankee midwife too. Her father, the schout, wasn’t quite ready yet to set foot in that tainted house, and so had installed himself in the upper manor house as the guest of Vrouw Van Wart, who was once again mortifying her flesh in religious retreat. Jeremias sat before a fire in the outer room, his green-eyed nephew and adoptive father at his side, and listened to his wife’s cries of anguish. “Hush,” said Vrouw Cats from within. “There, there,” said the midwife.

At some point the cries reached a crescendo, then fell away to a silence thick as doom. There was a rustling of skirts, the scrape of clogs on the floorboards and a new cry, thin and resilient, a cry that had to adjust itself to the novelty of throat and voicebox, lungs and air. Vrouw Cats appeared in the doorway a moment later. “It’s a boy,” she said.

A boy. Jeremias stood and Staats rose to embrace him. “Congratulations, mijnzoon,” Staats said, drawing the pipe from his lips to hold him at arm’s length and gaze into his eyes. “And have you got a name yet for this prodigy?”

Jeremias felt lightheaded, giddy, felt as if he’d crossed the far boundaries of the little life he’d led up till now and entered onto a new and glorious plane of existence. “Oh, yes,” he murmured. “Yes: we’re going to call him Wouter.”

In another age, in a time when meat and bread came wrapped in plastic and cabbage appeared spontaneously between the kohlrabi and bok choy in the produce section of the supermarket, Walter Van Brunt found himself leaning up against a fieldstone fireplace in the house of a stranger, sipping warm Cold Duck from a wax cup and digesting a lunatic rap on the subject of Smaug the dragon’s relevance to the war in Southeast Asia (“Clearly, man — I mean how could Tolkien make it any clearer without slapping you in the face with it? — Smaug’s just a stand-in for Nixon, right?”). Walter was profoundly drunk, seminauseous, bombarded by angst and raked with regrets as with flying bullets, and he was simultaneously trying to get drunker, fend off the jerk who’d pinned him up against the fireplace and keep an eye out for Mardi. “Fiery breath!” shouted the jerk, who wore his hair in braids, exhaled his own fiery breath and had received his draft notice two days earlier. “And what do you think that’s all about, huh?”

Walter hadn’t the faintest idea. He swallowed the dregs of the Cold Duck, now flecked with bits of exfoliated wax, and felt the jerk’s grip on his forearm. “Napalm, brother,” the jerk whispered with a knowing shake of his head, “that’s what Tolkien’s talking about.”

Looking fearlessly into the draftee’s bloodshot eyes, Walter said he agreed with him a hundred percent, then shoved past him and made for the bathroom. On the way, he stepped over half a dozen recumbent bodies, snaked unsteadily through a maze of reeling, treacherous, arm-flailing dancers and very nearly lurched into a withered Christmas tree festooned with cigarette papers and the dangling, disconnected limbs of plastic dolls. Drums kneaded him like dough, guitars throbbed in his gut. Mardi was nowhere in sight.

It was New Year’s Eve, 1968, and this was the fifth or sixth house full of strangers to which Mardi had dragged him. By way of celebration. Somewhere on the dim periphery of the evening there’d been a suburban interior and someone’s gaping, tartar-toothed parents insisting they have a toddy, and then there was Mardi’s father saying “You will look in on the Strangs, won’t you? And the Hugleys?” and Mardi sneering “Sure, and we’ll stop in at the D.A.R. quilting bee too.” Then there was Cold Duck, $1.79 the bottle, Mexican pot that tasted as if it had been cured in Windex, the little striated pill Mardi had slipped him in the coffee shop where they’d stopped to get out of the cold, and houses, houses full of drunken, grinning, suspicious, long-toothed, dog-faced, silly-ass strangers. And now there was this place, with its dirty wood paneling, its unrelenting assault of Top Ten hits and its hermeneutical draftee. He didn’t even know where he was exactly — somewhere out in the hind end of Tarrytown or Sleepy Hollow, he guessed. At least that’s what it had looked like when Mardi, straddling the Norton and clinging to his back like a mountaineer pressed to a wind-sheared scarp, shouted “This is it!” and he’d shot right up on the lawn and skidded into the stone slab at the foot of the porch, no problem, you okay?

That was an hour ago. At least. Now he was looking for the bathroom. He fumbled into the kitchen, startling two guys in serapes and cowboy hats who were cleaning pot in a colander, and tore open the door to the broom closet. “Down the hall, man,” said the near cowboy in an accent right out of western Queens.

When finally he located the bathroom, he pulled back the door to find himself staring into the steamed-up eyes of a girl with frizzy hair and a pair of blue crepe bell bottoms puddled around her ankles; she lowered herself daintily to the toilet seat and gave him a look that would have corroded metal. “Sorry,” he mumbled, backing out the door like a crayfish feeling for its hole. The moment the door clicked shut, he felt a familiar grip on his arm and swung around to discover that he was standing toe-to-toe with the deluded draftee. “She’s really something, huh?” the jerk said, wiping something from his hands on the sleeves of Walter’s jacket.

“Who?” Walter said, knowing he should have let it drop. They were alone in the hallway. Music thumped from the direction of the living room, the Queens cowboys shared a laugh in the kitchen behind them. Walter was beginning to forget what Mardi looked like.

“My sister,” the draftee said. He couldn’t have been more than twenty, but with his beard and hair and the twisted maniacal leer that suddenly flamed up to disarrange his features, he might have been the ancient mariner himself, his hand fastened on the wedding guest’s sleeve. “In the crapper,” he added with a significant nod. “Doesn’t she remind you of Galadriel, you know — the elf princess? Like when Elrond gets it on? You know who I’m talking about, right?”

No, Walter didn’t know. And in any case, he’d stopped listening — perhaps, propped up against the wall with an ache in his bladder and a rushing, hissing spume of light rising like a heavy sea in his head, he even closed his eyes for a moment. He was thinking about Jessica and Tom Crane, Hector, Herbert Pompey — the people he should be with now, the people he couldn’t be with. He was thinking of that bleak cold Saturday afternoon three weeks back when the sun shone pale as milk through the worn curtains in the bedroom and Jessica, booted, gloved, wrapped and muffled from her sinewy higharched feet to the glowing turned-up tip of her Anglo-Saxon nose, had bent to kiss him as he lay caught between sleep and waking. “Where to?” he’d managed.

She was going Christmas shopping. Of course.

“So early?”

She laughed. It was half-past twelve. “How do you feel about a blender?” she called from the next room. “For your aunt Katrina?” He didn’t feel. His mouth was dry, he had to take a piss, and the lining of his brain seemed to have swollen overnight like dough in a pan. “I thought …” she murmured, and now she was talking to herself, feet beating a brisk tattoo to the door, the wheeze of the hinges, a breath of refrigerated air, and then her last words hanging suspended till the door shut softly behind her, “… frozen daiquiris and whatnot.”