John Updike - Toward the End of Time

Little sulky Keith and I are alike in this household: we are insider-outsiders, inside but not altogether in, excluded from the holy triangle of father-mother-infant. Keith and I are outer layers being shed, helpless neglected witnesses as Jennifer powerfully wields her spell, rewarding or dismissing those who court her favor. Roberta tells me that in the early mornings, or during the baby’s afternoon nap, Keith would make his silent way into her room and heap his toys- teddy bears, wooden trains, plastic telephones, metal dump trucks-into the baby’s crib, piling them on experimentally until her entire body, including her head, was covered. Tony has installed a lock on the door too high for Keith to reach.

They feed me well on these visits, and invite me to carve the roast chicken or pot roast as tribute to my seniority, my chiefdom; but I am always relieved to be off, out the door into my car with its heater and radio, as if escaping a discreditable past or removing my variable from an equation intricate enough without me.

Crocuses are up in the driveway circle, at a spot in the bed where sunlight reflected from the granite outcropping warms the earth. Their colors, purple and white, seem a bit vulgar and trite-determinedly Easterish-compared with the pristine and demure ivory of the drooping snowdrop heads, an especially large cluster of which still glows in the otherwise lifeless woods. The earth in Gloria’s beds looks friable, developing fissures as frost works out of the soil; a giant is heaving from underneath. The daylilies in the bed that I pass along the driveway are enough out of the earth to show a trifoliate, heraldic silhouette-pale-green fleurs-de-lys. The forsythia wands are lined with symmetrical buds, like saw teeth, but in this slow gray spring have not yet unsheathed their signal yellow flowers. Yesterday I spotted my first robin, strutting along the driveway’s gravel shoulder in his familiar dusty uniform, gawkily startled into flight by my approach: a stuffy bird, faintly pompous in its portly movements, spoiled by the too many songs and poems unaccountably devoted to him. I was more interested, returning up the driveway with my Globe , in two small tan birds, one with a faintly rosy head, whose names I didn’t know. They revolved in the net of the maple-leaf viburnum’s pale and brittle branches, performing a kind of leapfrog, one perching on a twig lower than the other and then the other flicking to take a place above the first: some kind of courtship dance, carried on with a diagrammatic rigor.

Nature’s background noise picks up: making the bed after tumbling a half-willing Deirdre in its sheets, and opening the window and its storm window a crack to let out our body smells, I heard a muffled thrumming that sounded too mechanical to be even a woodpecker’s bill attacking rotten wood. Purely inorganic creatures exist on this planet, as yet a mere underbrush to the flesh-and-blood, oxygen-breathing fauna but indisputably existent and evolving, biding their time as did our own mammalian ancestors during the long age of the dinosaurs. The microscopic first forms, it is conjectured, arose in city dumps, or more likely dumps attached to the perimeter of vast army bases or nuclear-fuel plants wherein a soup of spilled chemical and petroleum by-products was energized by low-level leaks of radioactivity. Metal particles smaller than iron filings fused, propelled into a self-sustaining reaction perhaps by the chemical activity of oxidation accidentally placed adjacent to a fortuitous mix of chemical influences. These tiny resultant creatures, with an anatomy much simpler than their organic equivalents, still possessed complexity enough for reproduction, in the soup of industrial waste. A ghost of intentionality, as it were, within their already refined and processed constituents enabled the metallobioforms to experiment with varieties of anatomy much more prolifically than the essentially conservative, ateleological DNA-dominated organisms. Within two centuries of their first lowly, unwitnessed emergence- which could scarcely have taken place before the Industrial Revolution and the invention of combustion-powered engines-there were metal species the size and weight of tree shrews and field mice, and two distinct phyla.

One phylum, the “oil-eaters,” “lives” off the traces of petroleum to be found on roadways, in asphalt and in natural upwellings of tar, and on beaches, both rocky and sandy, heavily affected by oil spills. The other, the “spark-eaters,” takes energy from electricity itself, as found in still functioning electric fences and cables, whether overhead or underground; like arachnid ticks, they penetrate the insulation and cling until sated. These metallic pests never need to sleep or mate; they are free to devote all their days to consumption, which includes the search for oils, natural and artificial, whereby their parts can be protected from corrosion, rust, and friction. The spread of their population seems limited only by the amount of material which mankind has used and discarded. Where a territory needs to be cleared for their access to some chemical resource, they quite mercilessly exterminate the local organic wildlife, leaving the shredded bodies to rot and attract organic predators, who are then themselves slain, from the feet up. The heads of some trilobite-sized species-resembling giant wood lice-are miniature chain saws.

Television commentators go through spells of alarm over the threat of these “pseudozoans,” since science predicts the evolution of ever larger and more voracious forms; this development seems remote, however, among the many more urgent issues of survival on our blasted, depopulated planet. The pseudozoans, or metallobioforms, or in popular parlance “trinkets,” seldom venture out of hiding in daylight. They keep to the dumps that fostered them and the oily, electricity-rich underground realms of cities, but lately have been spotted farther afield, in wilder areas. So perhaps it was a pseudozoan whose mechanical thrumming I heard, mistaking it for a sign of spring.

Now that April is here, Deirdre and I took Gloria’s mulch- buckwheat hulls and oak leaves, held down by boughs I hacked from a hemlock-off the rose bed, on the sea side, on a breezy Good Friday. Looking down the hill, toward the left of Mrs. Lubbetts’ house, we could see the spume of breaking waves on the beach, silently flashing up and drifting away. A seagull was suspended in mid-air, level with our eyes, its flight into the wind holding it motionless. Inside, our cheeks ruddy, we had rum in tea and felt more companionable than for days.

On Easter, she surprised me by wanting to go to church. She said it would be bad luck not to go. Thus Christianity, once an encompassing cathedral built on swords and crowns, holding philosophy in one transept and music in the other and all the humanity of Europe and the Americas in its nave, has died back to its roots of mindless superstition. We went to the nine o’clock service in the church of her childhood, a shabby United Something (Presbyterian and Methodist? Congregational and Reformed?) with windows that were half lozenges of clear glass and half sickly Biblical scenes from that furtive first-century world of violet and saffron robes and wistful, genteel Aryan faces wedded to the gesticulating poses of Jewish rabble-rousers. The high, airless space, with its creaking pews, smelled of camphor and beeswax and the gaseous excessive heat of a furnace stoked up once a week.

We had come to the children’s service, which was the one Deirdre remembered. Ten years ago she had been a girl of thirteen. Whereas I ten years ago was much as I am now, only with a thicker, browner head of hair and a five-days-a-week commuting habit. The children in the congregation rustled and prattled and squalled so that the voice of the young clergyperson, a woman with glossy Joan of Arc bangs and straight short sides, could hardly be heard. She read from Colossians 3 (“Set your affection on things above, not on things on the earth. For ye are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God”) and prettily embroidered the Resurrection story in John 20 into a woman’s story-the adventures in feeling and relatedness of Mary Magdalene.