John Updike - Toward the End of Time

How many bodies were here going back to nature (as if they had ever left) I could not estimate. My rectum was screaming, affronted by the effort of getting down the hill, and I still had to climb back up before Gloria returned with radiant, plaque-free teeth and invigorated gums. Not more than two, I guessed. José and Ray doing night duty. Little Manolete I could not bear to include in the slaughter, in my mind’s eye. The metallobioforms had pulverized even the skulls; the tufts of shiny black hair scattered about like rabbit fur could have belonged to any of them but Doreen. I prayed-let’s call it that-that she had not been present at the strike, but as I turned to leave my eye caught a bit of blue cotton with a white band such as might hem bikini panties. Beneath her tomboyish garb she did use to surprise me with dainty pastel underthings. Bleak as our relationship was, I think I was beginning to amuse her, and she would plan for our next tryst. The greenish glint of her eyes, which would deepen when my rough old tongue had worked on her for a while, had gone back to earth.

But such underpants could have been left in the shack in the natural careless course of events. Many of the cloth fragments were stiff with brown dried blood, and there was no blood on the scrap of blue, I saw as I held it, rubbing its fine knit texture between finger and thumb.

As I stood there in the circle of the massacre-as geometrical as if drawn with a giant compass-I realized that the metal vermin might be underfoot, about to bring me down. As nimbly as my catheter and leg bag permitted, I danced to the edge and beyond, where the undergrowth was still unchewed, still messy with fallen sticks and greenbrier and wild woodland asters. Hurting and hobbled as I was, I fairly flew up the hill.

Why had the metallobioforms decided to clear this space? Or did they, in the tangle of fine copper wire which did for their brains, “decide” to do anything? Dampness, the friend of organic forms, was their enemy, and this little knoll was the driest spot in the immediate vicinity. The trinkets were limited in their range by the parasitic nature of their energy; the “spark-eating” pseudozoans had to cluster near electric wires or, in the cities, mass-transit third rails, and the “oil-eaters” required an abundance of spilled petroleum they were likely to find, in a backwater like Haskells Crossing, around the Amoco station. After clearing such a circular patch, they must have had to scuttle or slither out across the railroad tracks (where they could snack on the drippings of diesel fuel and brake lubricant on the ties) into our little downtown,. to replenish their exhausted energies. Many trinkets, like carrier aircraft whose missions took them just beyond the possibility of return, didn’t make it; their junky, rusting bodies-most no bigger than ladybugs, which they resembled in shape, without the playful spots-littered the underbrush. But the species seemed to be extending its range nevertheless, and to be penetrating woodlands when before the war only organic wildlife had been observed.

Even back on my own lawn, I kept nervously checking mi ankles and lifting my feet, imagining the remorseless, stinging bites gathering into a fiery buzz-saw force. Survivors describe, on television, an attack as like having one’s feet and then legs plunged into a meat-grinder. Such must have been the experience of heavy, laconic José and voluble Ray and little inky-eyed Manolete with his droll propensity for jerky, ambitious gestures. They had been the last people on Earth who had hoped to learn something from me. Had I been here to counsel them, they might all still be alive.

A wild wet late September storm outside: trees tossing and tousling in the struggle with air gone mad. Leaves’ pale undersides show in waves in the woods between my windows and the beach, and small fallen branches sodden with greenery litter the driveway at the front of the house, away from the sea, which Gloria calls the back. The oaks around the circle whistle and roar in their afflicted tops so that I expect to see one come crashing down or drop a giant torn limb. But this is no hurricane, just a friendly New England nor’easter; the wind relents just enough, like a disease that declines to kill us, playing with us to pass the time.

My catheter was removed a few days ago: a relief, in that the scaffolding of impedimenta in which I have been enclosed is thus reduced, but also an embarrassment, since it promoted me to diapers-Depends Adult Incontinence Pants. They get wet and heavy within an hour, and Gloria has tactfully set me up in the guest room with a rubber sheet over the mattress. I awake and change myself several times during the night; yet in the morning I am drowsily surprised by the transposition of our bedroom curtains and bookcase to the sparser, bleaker furnishings of the guest room. Its ceiling over in one corner is broken into a set of broad prismatic angles, to accommodate a short flight of steps on the third floor above, and I gaze, half awake, at this architectural disturbance as if it is a thing in itself, a crouching angular high shape sharing my space, malevolent but quiet, in lieu of a wife.

Gloria takes care of me but the house shakes with the irritable clicking and slamming of the partitions she has put up between us. She wants to keep dry. In my impotence I have ceased to be of any use. From her angle our relationship is all sufferance, and a noble non-complaining; she is earning stars in Heaven, as people used to say, and her virtue afflicts me with its hardness and glitter so that I cringe. What I loved about her in comparison with Perdita was this: lovemaking with Perdita mixed us up, the two of us, like a dark batter of flesh and desire, and rarely in the exactly correct proportions, so that one or the other of us felt cheated, and the other guilty, as if our sex should be a merger as precisely fair as the mixture of genes in our children; whereas with Gloria there was no confusion of responsibilities. I would use her, and she me, to achieve two distinct, unapologetic orgasms, sometimes simultaneous and sometimes not. This sexual clarity seemed worth laying down my life for-my respectability, my financial security, my children’s happiness. As it turned out, the price was less than I had feared; life went on, the world continued turning, as it would in the wake of this fierce September blow, broken limbs and all.

I keep getting out of bed to paddle from window to window, seeing the world drenched, feeling my diaper sag toward another changing. In my days of young fatherhood with Perdita we had a diaper service, which would take away each Monday an ammonia-rich, water-laden sack, and give us square bundles of fresh, dry, folded diapers instead. No such service now exists. What I remove now I put in a greer garbage bag that each Wednesday Gloria in the back of her station wagon carts down to the side of the road to take its place in some far-off landfill, for the delectation of future archaeologists. They will see us as faithful newspaper-readers and revellers in absorptive pads.

If I can no longer give her an orgasm with my stiff prick, my only use to Gloria is as a stiff corpse bequeathing to her liquid capital. In our feverish, catch-as-catch-can courtship, I more than once gave her an orgasm with my hand (in the movies) or foot (under a restaurant table) or with my mouth as she kneeled on a bed looking down like a mounded snow-woman with my head held firm between her melting thighs. But I fear that now she would find such resorts impossibly undignified for a woman of over sixty. I myself turned sixty-seven in the hospital, a quantum jump unobserved except by a touching shower of cartoony cards from my ten grandchildren, whose signatures ranged from Kevin’s maturely subdued ballpoint italic to a crayon scribble from Jennifer, her little slobbery hand no doubt bunchily held within Roberta’s.