John Updike - Toward the End of Time

Several days after my appointment, Dr. Chafetz called to say that the PSA test on my blood had come back with a reading of 11. He paused.

“Is that bad?” I asked.

“Not, not extremely bad,” he said, with his deferential hesitancy, a preppy near-stutter. “But it is high.”

“What’s considered normal?” I felt I was dragging information out of him. He was already deep in a medical crisis that hadn’t yet pulled me in, and down. My mind was darting about within the meagre facts, looking for a way out.

“Anything under four”, he said. “Even five asks for a second look.”

I held stubbornly silent, annoyed at his embarrassment on my behalf. Whose PSA count was this, mine or his?

He offered, “Your prostate didn’t feel unusually enlarged in my manual investigation. Or seem to have any rough spots.”

Seem to have? What was he doing up there-gathering vague impressions? “Well, O.K. What’s the next step?” I asked, so briskly his voice came out as not just deferential but boyishly scared. I was the Kapo, he the naked, shivering, doomed prisoner.

“A biopsy. In Boston. We have ties with an excellent man at MGH, a urologist. We’ll set you up with an appointment.”

Where did this “we” he was suddenly hiding behind come from? “What’s his name?”

“Carver.”

“It would be.” I laughed, encouragingly. I had to bring the boy through this.

“Dr. Andrew,” he, interrupted, went on.

“Handy Andy,” said I, irrepressible, unkillable, immortal

Hanging up, I wandered through the rooms of the house It was as if each had been given a scrubbing; a film of tin drearily familiar had been removed. The house appeared splendid, ample, priceless. It came to me as I passed through the rooms that I was and always had been a slightly different person in each one. In the dining room, with its torn an stained antique wallpaper of fantastical vistas through the ages-temples, grottoes, castles, cathedrals; Rome, Jerusalem, Athens, Nineveh; Alps and the Alhambra, snow peaks and spiky cypresses-and its standing platoon of Gloria’s shining mahogany antiques, I was courteous, host with lurking eighteenth-century graces and a grave gray-haired timbre. In the kitchen, where I microwaved a cup of water hot enough to soften up a teabag and extracted a low-sodium pretzel from the breadbox, I was Everyman, a stomach on legs, a trousered relic of the paleotechnological era when refrigerators and electric stoves still had weight and thick skins. In the dark little library I became a crabbed squire, a cranky country hobbyist, a nineteenth-century-minded custodian of uniform sets of Balzac and Dickens, O. Henry and Winston Churchill (the statesman, not the American novelist). In the living room, which I moved through on my way to the veranda, I was momentarily a breezy, translucent person, a debonair proprietor of mirrored and velvet-hung spaces carpeted by a single great rose-and-blue Tabriz; I became a throwback to a romantic time of gin parties and yachting, a light-hearted butterfly emerged from the narrow and dour chrysalis of that asphalt-shingled farmhouse lonely in its tilted field of drab winter stubble, on the edge of a dying industrial town. From Hammond Falls to Haskells Crossing: not much of a pilgrimage, really, considering that I had had nearly sixty-seven years to nudge my way along.

The out-of-doors, too, as I settled on the wicker sofa (which creaked under my new weight of dread), loomed with a defining distinctness, a dazzling room of another sort, in which I was an insignificant insect rapturously enrolled, for these brief bright instants of my life, in a churning, shining, chirping, birthing, singing, dying cosmic excess. From the quasars to the rainbow shimmer on my dragonfly wings, everything was an extravagance engraved upon the obsidian surface of an infrangible, eternal darkness.

My pulse fluttered. I felt girlish with my secret. I told Doreen before I told Gloria. Doreen couldn’t understand that it was a big deal yet; she had no idea where the prostate gland was and her whole face wrinkled with disgust when I told her. Gloria statuesquely enlarged at the news into the tragic grandeur of eventual widowhood. Long cast in the role of wife, she had endured years of dull lines, but now at last the part was proving worthy of her gifts. She foresaw her new, elevated status and wished to do nothing henceforth less than impeccably wifely and loving: I could see the determination written on her otherwise smooth, broad forehead. She would see me through to the next world and then take as her reward a singular dignity, no longer regent on behalf of a senescent male but queen absolute. She would pour forth the melody from the center of the stage.

The mornings have a nip to them now when I walk down for the Globe . Certain tall yellow-headed weeds-hawkweed, I think-have taken root in the cracks of the broken concrete drying-yard and I bend down to pull a few on my way, and throw them onto the burning pile as I pass. Since childhood I have loved this month-the flat dry taste of it, the brown-lawn look of it, bouncing the heat back up against your bare legs, and the lack of any importunate holiday marring the blank days on this side of Labor Day and the return to school

On Saturday Gloria directed Jeremy and me to dig up th Siberian iris that has flourished on the stony slope behin the two scrawny pear trees to the right of the driveway. We attacked the clump first with shovels, which met too mar stones, and then with the mattock, which I swung with powerful effect. Jeremy suddenly exclaimed and darted hand down to seize a garden snake liquidly wriggling away through the grass. The little snake’s undulant motion at the sheen of its polychrome scales were so beautiful it shocked us both to see that its tail end was mangled and raw, oozing muddy reptile blood. A shovel or the mattock in my hands had caught it, a blow from heedless Heaven, as it coiled in concealed innocence. Jeremy put the snake gently back into the grass and it slithered off with unimpaired fluency, but I thought that a snake was not a ribbon that could be snipped anywhere: it had an anatomy, intestines and an anus, and no more than I could it live long with its nether portion crushed. I hate it when our human attempts to inflict order upon the land bring death and pain and mutilation to these innocents, whose ancestors enjoyed the earth for tens of millions of years before the naked ape appeared with his technology and enraging awareness of his own sin. I blamed Gloria, for having us remove this harmless, thriving clump of iris because it offended her frosty, simplifying eyes. Who are we to say what is a weed or a pest? Now the pretty snake, stricken in its perfection, must lie in some crevice feeling its slender body dam and slowly fail; a glaze of nothingness will close upon the little jewel of its unblaming brain.

Working alongside Jeremy made me try to remember working beside my own father. He could do things, up to a point: hammer and nail, handle elementary wiring and plumbing. He worked for a time for a roofing contractor, and though he said the heights didn’t bother him he would come home complaining of how roofers cheated people, even the most trusting poor widow. He had a vegetable garden out back that he would stand in at the end of the day, and a workshed on one side of the garage full of aligned jars of screws and nails getting rusty. For a time he had a job on the floor of the GE factory in Pittsfield, but the monotony of assembly, he confessed one night at supper, made him physically sick. He went from job to job, with his poor skills, his indifferent attitude, his lack of a trade. We did complete a few projects together-a doghouse for Skeezix, a soapbox racer, with the number 9 in silver outlined in black-but generally he was too tired. He just wanted to sit in his brown armchair with the fake leather worn off the arms and watch television and have dinner brought to him. I vowed I would never get that tired in life.