John Updike - Toward the End of Time

I think the thieves were the kids I hear whooping and crashing in the woods, now that the weather is warming. Deirdre is certain it was Spin and Phil, “as a warning.”

“What would they warn us about? I’m a model member of their club, paid up until the end of March.”

“Ben, you’re such an innocent. People always want more, more. They keep going until there’s nothing left, until they’ve sucked you dry.”

The image recalled to me too vividly her past as a cock-sucking prostitute. She seemed to know Spin and Phil too well. I wanted to slap her, to knock that stubborn out-of-reach druggy daze out of her. Her lips looked swollen and moved stiffly, like those of a person in the cold, though the day was sunny, if cool-one of the first basking days, when an atavistic streak in the blood begs you to crawl up on a rock, old turtle, and let the sun soak through your shell.

Ken and Red asked me to go skiing with them. I said yes, though a little loath to leave Deirdre alone in the house all day-she has been acting so dangerous lately, with that reckless female self-disregard that presumably serves Nature’s need to throw DNA around but frays the hell out of male nerves. I dragged my skis and boots up from the cellar, where they rest in the little damp laundry room next to the chamber where the jagged ledge sits like an uninvited guest, a chthonic ghost. The cellar of this house is a century-and-a-half newer and several orders of magnitude more cheerful than that of the pre-Revolutionary house that I once occupied with Perdita and my five dependent children. My present basement savors of upper-class self-regard in the early 1900s. The same ample scale of construction that obtained in the householders’ summer living quarters was transposed, in a minor key, to a netherworld, for servants. There are foundations of pointed rust-tinged granite, partitions of white-painted brick, steam and waste pipes of cast-iron solidity, cobwebbed rooms devoted to the hobbies (woodworking, photography) of the sons of the previous owners. In the darkest and dampest of these-the old darkroom, its windows sealed with taped wallboard-I keep my skis. Since February a year ago, the last time I skied, the edges had rusted, I discovered. The windowless, subterranean damp had penetrated the weave of their canvas carrier, and atoms of oxygen had bonded with atoms of iron. Natural processes continue without our witnessing them: what stronger proof of our inconsequence? Bertrand Russell (I believe) spoke of human consciousness as an “epiphenomenon”-superficially there, a bubble thrown up by confluences in the blind tumble of mindless matter, like the vacuous brown curds whipped up by a fast-running brook.

We drove two hours north in Ken’s gray Audi. Red had to forgo the global conversations with which he regales his passengers in his hyperequipped Caravan. Ken wore his old pilot’s cap as we sailed up Route 93, through stretches of second- and third-growth woods and blank-sided industrial buildings-Reading, Wilmington, Andover-into New Hampshire. Above Concord, a lot of the condo developments wedged into the hillsides were charred shells. Abandoned when the flow of back-to-nature second-home buyers out of metropolitan Boston had been dried up by the disasters of the last decade, these standardized wooden villages had been sacked and set ablaze by the starving locals in their own back-to-nature movement. But Nature was slow to digest these mock-bucolic intrusions; the blue-brown hills with their precipitous rock outcroppings bore wide black scars festooned with tangled pipes and wiring. Electronic equipment had been one of the objects of the looting, but its value depended upon an electronic infrastructure that had been one of the first casualties of urban catastrophe and global underpopulation.

Loon Mountain was one of the few ski resorts still open for customers. The gondola had been closed for lack of Swiss replacement parts and the lift operators on duty had a bearded, furtive look. They seemed evil trolls, in their polychrome parkas and lumberjack shirts, mining the mountain with clanking, creaking ore-carts that went up full and came down empty. The overweight, pockmarked woman behind the ticket window asked to see my driver’s license in verification of my claim to the senior rate. “Sixty-six,” she said, having done the arithmetic with a frown. “O.K., sonny. What’s your secret? Cheeks like a baby’s. A mop of hair.” Her coarse attempt at flirtation made me wonder if she had scented Deirdre’s youthful body oils clinging to me, giving me an ungeriatric aura of sexual success. Ken and Red crowed at my blushes, and got their own senior tickets without challenge.

The conditions were lovely. The winter’s many snows, first falling in November, had created an eight-foot base, and snow-making had kept it replenished. The surface was scratchy with yet plenty of loose corn to turn on, and there were no lift lines. The crowds were eerily sparse. A few brats with snowboards gouged their rude arcs into the shining slopes and hurtled up and over the jumps that had been constructed for them, and a few of us fun-seeking retirees made our careful, controlled way down the trails. Actually, only Ken could be called careful; his stiff linked turns are executed with studied knee-dips and pole-plants. Red, who has never taken a lesson, sets his skis a foot apart and just heads with a whoop downhill, turning only when his gathering speed bounces his skis into the air. His scarlet ski-hat dwindles rapidly down through the granite-walled chutes and undulating mogul fields. His employees in Gloucester gave him as a joke Christmas present a silver windbreaker lettered EAT FISH ALL WEEK FOR GOD’S SAKE in big capitals and today he wore that over a turtleneck and a Shetland sweater of undyed wool.

I have a staid but furtively daredevil style. I try to think of my feet, the weight on first one and then the other, and of the inner edges, where all my weight and intricate, unseemly innards balance as if on a single ice-skate blade. But my skis, their rust sharpened away by a hunchbacked troll at the ski shop, tended to run out from under me and nearly snagged me into a fall or two, until I remembered that skiing is falling, a surrender to the unthinkable and the fearful. Then I began to fly, to feel my loosened weight gracefully check my speed as I turned, left and right and then left again, into the fall line. We rise as we age; the older we get, the longer and more treacherous the distance to the earth becomes. To a toddler, the ground is a playmate, a painless bottom-bump away.

My legs-the knees, the quadriceps-began after four or five runs to ache so much I kept braking and gasping, while Red’s hat vanished down below and Ken steadily, stiffly traversed his way out of sight. I was calling upon muscles that had been resting for a year. The years move into us; their cyclical motion is not their only motion. Pausing, gasping, I admired the sky, a bottomless gentian blue in which the two moons hung, their top hemispheres by some multi-cogged permutation of the celestial mechanism sunlit, so they looked like porous cookies being dunked in a translucent celestial brew. The valley with its twisting roads and stacked condos spread itself far below me, and at a bit more than eye level Mount Washington’s white crest gleamed above the intervening darker crests. Everything here in New Hampshire was dun and brown and blue; the clear air arrived at my senses with the sharpness of a dog’s bark, sounding somewhere unseen in the valley.

On the drive back, we were all three silent, stunned by so much unaccustomed fresh air and exercise. Our elderly proximity to death seemed a not unpleasant thing, shared in such companionable silence. The Audi’s cruise control pulled us steadily southward. Snow thinned into dirty crusts along Route 93. On the right, at Concord, the elongated gold dome of the state capitol caught the day’s declining light. Below Concord, at this hour, there used to be streams of headlights as the commuters returned to this low-tax haven from their daily raid on the coffers of “Taxachusetts.” Now that golden stream was reduced to a trickle, on a highway engineered for six times the traffic. The mountains around us shrank and lessened. The radio, tuned to a Boston station that advertised Music for Easy Listening, became less staticky and more languorous. Ken’s head, back in the pilot’s cap, snapped out of a nod; Red had grunted “Jesus!” and grabbed the wheel from him as the car drifted out of its lane. Ken was sheepish, but we too had been at fault, for falling into our private reveries and not keeping up a stimulating conversation. Ken pulled to the side to switch places with Red and, settling into the co-pilot’s seat, told us how through all the years he was flying he could never fall asleep as a passenger, no matter how jet-lagged. He knew too much, and kept listening knowledgeably to the engines for signs of trouble. Only when seated upright in the captain’s scientifically cushioned black chair, with stretches of cloud or dark ocean or settlement-spangled land miles beneath him, and the automatic pilot securely locked into the controls, would he irresistibly sink into dreamland.