John Updike - Toward the End of Time

The Mexican repossession of Texas, New Mexico, Ari zona, and lower California had been an item lately in the Globe , along with much else terrible-shootings in Dorchester, rapes in Mattapan-that had merely a literary relationship to me, sequestered in my own microcosmic geography and my seared, chastened body.

“It’s a network , so it can do any thing,” Gloria was going on, with a flash of her beautiful teeth and a toss of her ash-blond hair much like those (the flash, the toss) with which, twenty years ago, she could cap one of her-our, might I say?-triumphant sexual performances. She would coax up an erection through a trouser pocket of my gray suit in the middle of Symphony or, unzipping my fly, while we were driving home from Boston at midnight through the neon carnival of pre-war Route 1. “People say President Smith has already resigned, but there’s no way to tell.”

At times I dream I have an erection, with a mauve head like a rabbit’s heart, so hard and blood-stuffed a one it makes the veins in my throat sympathetically stiffen and swell; but when I awake and peek inside my soaked Depends, my poor prick is as red and flaccid as a rooster’s comb. How could so superfluous an appendage ever have served as the hub of my universe? The foolishness of life hits me, stunningly, as the last plausible shreds of my dream dissolve and the suburban houris conjured by my desire-Grace Wren, sucking; Muriel Kelly, splayed-withdraw their wisps of white flesh, but there is nothing to laugh about.

Still, I burn to see Phil by myself, to ask what happened to Deirdre.

I live on a planet where the vegetation is golden, gold in all its shades from red-brown to platinum-white, but all refulgent, towering, superabundant. Red veins of contrast course through its infinite foliations; sheets of orange twirl and tuck themselves into quilted caverns of rustling shadow; a rain of cast-off leaves twirls and twitters down on the same diagonal as the westering light from our proximate star. Gold on this planet rusts; the atoms of its element are eager to combine with the blue of oxygen, the green of vaporized sulfur. Out of gold’s volatile, ubiquitous substance are hewn and thrashed the beams of our homes, the thatch of our roofs, the bedding for our livestock. “Common as gold” is a phrase, and “gold poor.” Yet we do not despise the element, but bask in its superabundance, which crowds every surface to the verge of the sea, itself golden, imbued as it is with aureate salts. Stalked heaps of gold froth compete with the clouds in their cumulus, and make a ragged join with the sulfurous sky, which the daily floods of local starlight dye a deep, heavenly chartreuse. Theologians make of this an argument for the existence of God: if the vast sky were any color less soothing than green, our lovingly fabricated eyes would be burned blind.

Today Phil was waiting for me at the mailbox, his white FedEx truck parked at the entry to our dirt lane through the woods. The pond was having a jolly time reflecting the blazing wall of maples and birches along its edge. A duo of ducks jostled the reflection with their widening rings every time they took off and relanded, or with comic deftness tipped up their tails to grab a bite underwater.

“How’re ya doin’, Mr. Turnbull?” Phil asked me. The somber blue-gray uniform fitted him better than his brown suits had. “That’s some operation you’ve had, your wife’s been tellin’ me.”

I shagged. “They’ve got it down to a science now. A stream of pure protons, no bigger than a pencil lead, passes through the good cells and slices out the bad.”

“Still, there are lousy aftereffects, she was saying. Your missus and I did a lot of chitchat when you were in the hospital. She’s some swell lady, by the way. She knows her own mind and isn’t afraid to express it: that’s what I like in a dame.”

I had never heard Phil talk so much; in the old days Spin had done most of the talking. “She likes you, too,” I said. “She likes the way FedEx is going to take over and kill off all the anti-social elements and bring back the United States of America.”

“We-ell,” he said judiciously, with what I took to be official FedEx gravity; the corporations among their other roles have become the only teachers of deportment. “FedEx has got its competition.” His eyes were small and close together, but on the other hand they were a light contemplative gray, the color of a machine’s burnished underside, and were framed by unexpectedly long eyelashes. “But we’re getting a handle at least on everything east of the Mississippi. The strategy is to absorb the little carriers first, and let UPS come to us when it’s ready.” He moved closer; a sour male essence wafted from his jowls and armpits. “Between us, they’re working on a way to remote-control the trinkets, with radio signals; the little things’ brains are just a few transistors, after all. Once the kinks are out it’ll be the biggest thing in warfare since the taming of the horse.”

“And the invention of horseshoes and the stirrup,” I said. “Otherwise, warrior herdsmen couldn’t have ridden their horses for invasive distances.”

“You’re losin’ me.” He frowned. “Hey”-his little eyes crinkled in anticipation of the jab to come-“how’d the old dingle-dangle like being knocked out of commish? You were some hot ass-man, to hear Deirdre tell it.”

“Deirdre,” I said. “Exactly. Tell me about Deirdre. What’s happened to her? When Spin got killed, I was afraid-”

“Yeah, Spin,” Phil said. “That was real ugly. The kids did it with rocks. Rocks were all the little suckers had-real crude. But you know,” Phil went on, waxing philosophical, “Spin, great a guy as he was, led with his chin sometimes. Remember how he had to dress like some dandy all the time? That showed insecurity, knowing he was out there operating pretty much on his own. He didn’t have what this outfit”-he touched the insignia on his breast pocket-“has. Esprit de corps. The world like it is, you can’t go it alone. Impossible. They’ll eat you up. That’s what I told Deirdre. But the cunt, she don’t listen.”

The present tense was hopeful. “Where is she?” I asked.

He looked at me still humorously. “What you want with her now? Your dick’s just a memory, the way your missus tells it.”

“Gloria talks about it?”

“You know-in a very refined way. Like I say, she’s a class act. What I really appreciate, she’s got a head on her shoulders. She may not call a spade a spade, but she can dig a hole with the best of ’em, you know what I mean?”

People who have come up in the world become boring very quickly; everything they say is disguised bragging. He wanted to talk about his connection with Gloria, I wanted to talk about Deirdre. “You’re not telling me about Deirdre,” I said. “Did you and she, after she left me, live together?”

I tried to picture this oaf laying his sweaty sack of a body down beside hers with its slender bony back, its silken coating of fine flowing hair, and my anger was all at Deirdre, for allowing it, for giving away so cheaply what I had chosen to regard as precious. “For a while,” he casually admitted. Not only were Phil’s eyes small, but so were his ears-no bigger than teacup handles, and pressed tight into the spongy sides of the skull between the bulge of his shaven blue jowls and the bulge of his curly, springy hair. Between his hairline and his eyebrows there was little space for a forehead. “We palled around, she moved into my digs. But she’s restless, Ben.” When would everybody stop calling me Ben? I was not the world’s friend. “She wants to be”-his gesture took in the flaming pond, the walls of woods, the vast presiding illusion of a blue sky-“out there. She’s a whore, you know? She’ll lay for you, great, but then she’ll lay for the next guy. She doesn’t give a fuck, literally. She’s hooked on dope and this notion she has of freedom. I tried to beat the crap out of her a few times, but it didn’t take. She didn’t learn a thing. She’s like some wild animal, you know?”