William Gass - Middle C

The dent in the side of the can fit his shoe. He had nearly kicked one curve through its converse. There were two others, somewhere, under the slanting roof. Now and then their bruised aluminum would wink.

One’s worry that the human race might not endure has been succeeded by the fear it will survive.

Not yet. “Worry” was the wrong word. Too busy. Too ordinary. Too trivial. White rabbits worry. White rabbits dither. White rabbits scurry. Moreover, “our” was the opposite of “one.” “Our” was complicit and casually cozy. Who else has had this problem? This worry? Is it widespread enough to justify “our”? Possibly only Professor Joseph Skizzen owned up to it. The professor wasn’t wide; was short, slim, trim, fit, firm of tummy; wore a small sharp beard upon his chin below a thin precise line; and was quite noticeably alone in his opinions.

“Concern” suggested a state maintained with some constancy in our consciousness like low heat under a pan. When we worry, our thoughts rush hither and yon and then thither again like Alice’s rabbit. But when we are concerned, our thoughts sit quietly in a large chair and weigh the seat, configure the bottom of their bowl. Strictly speaking, though the designations are often misused, we can properly worry only about ourselves; language allows us, however, to have concerns for others. And he, Joseph Skizzen, as well as the rest of us alive right now, wouldn’t be around for Armageddon when it came, in any case. So not to worry.

An important kick was coming up. Keep it low. The box lay on its side and yawned.

Nevertheless, it would be prudent to remain concerned. For, like death, IT would come: Armageddon. There would be — without exaggeration — a series of catastrophes. As a consequence of the evil in man … —no mere virus, however virulent, was even a burnt match for our madness, our unconcern, our cruelty— … there would arise a race of champions, predators of humans: namely earthquakes, eruptions, tidal waves, tornados, typhoons, hurricanes, droughts — the magnificent seven. Floods, winds, fires, slides. The classical elements, only angry. Oceans would warm, the sky boil and burn, the ice cap melt, the seas rise. Rogue nations, like kids killing kids at their grammar school, would fire atomic — hydrogen — neutron bombs at one another. Smallpox would revive, or out of the African jungle would slide a virus no one understood. Though reptilian only in spirit, the disease would make us shed our skins like snakes and, naked to the nerves, we’d expire in a froth of red spit. Markets worldwide would crash as reckless cars on a speedway do, striking the wall and rebounding into one another, hurling pieces of themselves at the spectators in the stands. With money worthless — that last faith lost — the multitude would riot, race against race at first, God against God, the gots against the gimmes. Insects hardened by generations of chemicals would consume our food, weeds smother our fields, fire ants, killer bees sting us while we’re fleeing into refuge water, where, thrashing, we would drown, our pride a sodden wafer. Pestilence. War. Famine. A cataclysm of one kind or another — coming — making millions of migrants. Wearing out the roads. Foraging in the fields. Looting the villages. Raping boys and women. There’d be no tent cities, no Red Cross lunches, hay drops. Deserts would appear as suddenly as patches of crusty skin. Only the sun would feel their itch. Floods would sweep suddenly over all those newly arid lands as if invited by the beach. Forest fires would burn, like those in coal mines, for years, uttering smoke, making soot of speech, blackening every tree leaf ahead of their actual charring. Volcanoes would erupt in series, and mountains melt as though made of rock candy till the cities beneath them were caught inside the lava flow where they would appear to later eyes, if there were any eyes after, like peanuts in brittle. May earthquakes jelly the earth, Professor Skizzen hotly whispered. Let glaciers advance like motorboats, he bellowed, threatening a book with his fist. These convulsions would be a sign the parasites had killed their host, evils having eaten all they could; we’d hear a groan that was the going of the Holy Ghost; we’d see the last of life pissed away like beer from a carouse; we’d feel a shudder move deeply through this universe of dirt, rock, water, ice, and air, because after its long illness the earth would have finally died, its engine out of oil, its sky of light, winds unable to catch a breath, oceans only acid; we’d be witnessing a world that’s come to pieces bleeding searing steam from its many wounds; we’d hear it rattling its atoms around like dice in a cup before spilling randomly out through a split in the stratosphere, night and silence its place — well — not of rest — of disappearance. My wish be willed, he thought. Then this will be done, he whispered so no God could hear him. That justice may be served, he said to the four winds that raged in the corners of his attic.

His kick felt solid. The can bounced from the back of the box. That was a relief — as if he’d passed stool.

Well, we wouldn’t hear anything, see anything, feel anything, of course, because we — who were we, now? — would have perished. As we went into the ground we’d pass former fellows, previous persons, being flung forth — the Catacombs coughing up their bones. There’d be billions of corpses and no one to count them. No one to photograph weeping mothers for the evening news. No mothers, no news, at last. Human life on automatic pilot. Reruns till every inch of film flames. No more microwaves. The air would soften, ease, grow gentle, when the human frequencies fell silent. A few birds would float above the mess and look for eyes to peck — eyes still fresh and moist from wild surmise and well-meant weeping.

Our concern that the human race might not endure has been succeeded by the fear it will survive.

My concern … it’s my concern … alas … mine. My concern that mankind might not endure has been followed by the fear it will survive. Succeeded — succeeded — has been succeeded.

Professor Joseph Skizzen’s concern that the human race might not endure has been succeeded by his fear that it will survive.

The sentence had begun forming — as if it were going to be significant — during breakfast on a mild May morning many years ago. He could not remember the fruit or how it lay in the bowl of his spoon or how it tasted when it became mush in his mouth. As a music critic — a musicologist — as a philosopher of music — he was used to working with words; they held no special terrors for him; he thought of them simply as tools; they were not instruments like those in an orchestra, because he did not think of his books and essays as performances. His ideas, of course, needed them, but he didn’t dress up his thoughts like toffs or tarts and parade them about on the avenues. He could not remember the bread or roll either or whether they had a plate to themselves. He could not remember the nature of the day.

The sentence had simply passed through his ears and lodged in his head like a random bullet from a drive-by gang. Sorry, meant to shoot the little girl standing with her doll on the front stoop. Meant to shoot Grandma in the porch swing. Meant to shoot the geraniums through their pot. There was another sentence in the barrel. Sorry, meant to shoot you with something harmless, such as: “green oranges are picked when barely yellow and dyed orange to reassure consumers”—certainly not anything disturbing: the fear that the human race, etcet.

“Unripe oranges”? “Scarcely yellow”?

And of course, a word like “dyed” was disturbing, even in a sentence about dissembling, about misleading. Nothing was safe anymore. You could hug caution and try to prevent it from being thrown to vicious winds, but tides would overwhelm its NO SWIMMING signs nevertheless, while earth opened to let the timorous attitude fall, alive and alert as caution is, to the central fire.