John Updike - Toward the End of Time

My daughters and I walked out of the little green tract house in Lynnfield to admire their children, all four filthily absorbed in making a racetrack in the bare dirt by the fence.

Along Route 128 as I drove east, tawny stripes of hay nodded in the lowering sun. Grass wants to die, to grow tall and set seed and die. Keeping it short and green in a lawn is a cruel and unnatural act, pro-Gramineae activists keep reminding us, as they are dragged off and pummelled by representatives of the powerful pro-lawn forces-the mower manufacturers, the great seed-and-fertilizer combines. When I got out of the car in my driveway, an acorn pinged off the car roof and another struck me on the shoulder. The air was still summery and the sky the smooth blue of baked enamel, but the oak trees were letting go. Let go: natural philosophy in a nutshell.

Acorn shapes have been on my mind. My sinister locker-room encounter with Dr. Chafetz was but the lowest rung of a ladder of doctors I am climbing. Beyond the plump damp-handed urologist I have attained to a wiry radiologist, in his grizzled fifties but still exuberant over the wonders of technology, which accumulate even in times of social chaos. “Twenty, thirty years ago,” he tells me, “you would have been a sure-as-shootin’ candidate for prostatectomy-cut out the whole damn thing, and to hell with the surrounding tissue. Barbaric! They would saw away in there, in a sea of blood, and the patients would come out totally impotent and most likely peeing in their drawers for years, if they ever got sphincter control back. Now, with conformal radiotherapy, we shape the beam to the tumor exactly, and never even singe the colon or the bladder on either side. Precision! To the micron! They used to use only X-rays and some gamma rays to do the zapping-we’re getting cleaner, faster results with beams of protons. We’re not just killing these cells, Ben-we’re inducing them to kill themselves, by a process called apoptosis-that’s a-p-o-p-tosis -which the developing fetus uses to destroy embryonic gills, for instance. The body’s discarding and weeding all the time, all the time. Plus there’s all sorts of mop-up tricks you can do with radioactive implants and chemo. Prostate, for example”-the noun “cancer” had been dropped from the phrase-“by the nature of the beast is subject to a hormone therapy that produces an androgen blockade. Not quite a piece of cake, Ben, but close to it. A bagel, let’s say.”

Did I imagine it, or were more people calling me “Ben” since this crack in my health developed?

“Any questions, Ben? You’ve been following me?”

I hadn’t, quite. When I was back in college, and had a big exam coming up, the closer it came the less I could concentrate on the necessary books: they developed an anti-magnetism which repelled my hand when I reached for them. Each of the finite moments until the test seemed infinitely divisible, with always the next particle of time the one in which I would face reality and at last concentrate.

Particles of time are not infinitesimal; they accumulate. I never used to be conscious of any scum on my teeth, any more than I was aware of any body odor or need to bathe. Perdita and I, I believe, always smelled perfectly bland, if not sweet, to one another. Now I want to brush my teeth all the time, even when I have not eaten since the last brushing. And my neck-why is my neck so sweaty when I awake? Pillow, pajamas, collars-an invisible pollutant has settled on them all, moment by moment.

On the walk down to the mailbox, I notice that the stunted pears are showing ruddiness on their warty little cheeks. But the wild blueberries, which I try to persuade Jeremy to skip over with his whirring weed-whacker, are oddly slow, this August, to turn blue. Or else the birds and those deer are eating them as they ripen. Some ferns are turning a reticent shade of brown. The fall is almost here.

I will miss you, sweet pages blank each new day. Here, have not one line but two:

Now-yes, there is still a “now”-the maples hold arcs and crests of orange like bouquets shyly thrust forward by a massive green suitor, and the horse-chestnut leaves are wilting from the edges in, and a faintly winy blush hazes some of the trees I see from Route 128, as Gloria drives me by en route to one of my now-incessant medical appointments.

She has decided to rip up all the cosmos in her garden. With a tentative tenderness she asks me if I want to come outside and-not help, of course-merely watch. Each step I take has an attendant difficulty and pain that makes the world-the green of the lawn, the transparency of space, the resilient solidity of the life-permeated earth-perversely delicious. Everything tastes the way it did in childhood, of newness and effort; each surface presents a puzzling, inviting depth of possibility, of future time without end. The year has made less progress than I had expected in the nearly four weeks that I was off in the hospital, with a view of brick walls and the rusty tops of city sycamores.

I have resolved to spare this journal dedicated to the year’s passing any circumstantial account of the obscene operation that I have momentarily survived. It has left me incontinent for a while and impotent I fear forever. A soreness at the base of my bladder, a rasping burning lodged high in the seat of elimination (the devil’s lair, in old religious lore) remind me of the violence done my unruly flesh. The operation was, as the wiry radiologist predicted, a twenty-first-century miracle of directed radiation-raw protons, aimed to a micron’s tolerance by something called a delayed-focus laser-rather than the cheerful prostatectomic butchery of yore. Still, the negative effects and the factors of uncertainty are not as radically reduced as the celebrants of scientific advance would have you believe. Our bodies, which even in the year 2020 are the sole means by which “we”-we nobodies, so to speak-“live,” retain a mulish atavistic recalcitrance. To be human is still to be humbled by the flesh, to suffer and to die. There are now three of us in the house- Gloria, I, and my impending demise. Gloria’s eyes are bright with it; her utterances and gestures have an actressy crispness born of her awareness of this witnessing third party. Herself as widowed, as mournfully, bravely free, fills her mind much as the image of an idyllically happy married woman gives direction to the fantasies of a pubescent girl. She tries to be kinder, but in her enhanced vitality has more edges, which cut into my heightened sensitivity. Just being in her garish, painfully distinct and articulate presence has become arduous.

Of my hospital stay I chiefly remember the white, syrupy conspiracy of it all, like a ubiquitous, softly luminous ethereal lotion, and the eager complicity with which I entered into the therapeutic rituals, the obligatory indignities, the graciously shared disgrace. What an odd relief it is to shed all the roles and suits and formal pretenses life has asked of us and to become purely a body, whose most ignominious and flagrant detail is openly, coöperatively examined and discussed-cherished, even, as an infant’s toes and burps and turds are loved. Amid the pain and anxiety and helplessness, self-love holds a little orgy for itself. Others, solemn, in white, scurry in and out, vigorously participating in the indecencies, bestowing technical names upon the hitherto unspeakable. Not even the most wanton whore, unhinged like a puppet by her craving for cocaine, forgives you as much as the night nurse who takes away the bedpan. Smilingly she, in that phosphorescent hospital twilight wherein wink the multi-colored lights of multiple sleepless monitors, gazes down into your face and inserts into your mouth, like a technically improved nipple, the digital thermometer with its grainy plastic skin. In these crevices of the nightmare, a deep neediness is put to rest.