This is the Way the World Ends (10 page)

There were footsteps, and the distasteful psychotherapist melted away . . .

Curse God
,
and die
. In the Book of Job, the Lord’s most pious follower is subjected to a kind of wager between God and Satan. With God’s sponsorship, Satan inflicts on Job everything short of a thermonuclear warhead. Job loses his oxen, sheep, camels, sheasses, servants, sons, and health.

‘Curse God, and die,’ his wife advises. Job is sitting on ashes at the time.

‘My bowels boil, and rest not,’ complains Job, who does not have the proverbial patience of Job. ‘I am a brother to jackals, and a companion to ostriches. My skin is black, and falleth from me, and my bones are burned with the heat. Therefore is my harp turned to mourning, and my pipe into the voice of them that weep.’

Curse God, and die
. To George it seemed like remarkably sage and relevant advice.

If one had to say something good about acute radiation sickness, it would be this: either it kills you or it doesn’t. Knowing that success was a distinct possibility, the medical staff of the
City of New York
got busy. They cultured George’s mucus, blood, and stool, then loaded him up with appropriate antibiotics. They stuck a tube in his arm and gave him a new set of white blood cells. They bathed him in antiseptic solutions every twelve hours, shampooed him with chlorhexidine gluconate every twenty-four hours, and trimmed his fingernails and toenails every other day.

To the end of his life, George would be haunted by the notion that the onslaught of gamma rays had planted the seeds of God-knew-what diseases, but the United States Navy was still within its rights when they pronounced him well. His fever broke, his hair grew back, his purple spots vanished, his tonsils shrank, his lungs drained, his gums stopped bleeding, his platelet and white cell counts became exemplary. The paramedics assured him that he had inhaled very little fallout and that, thanks to his precipitous departure from ground zero via Operation Erebus, his cumulative dose had been well under three hundred rads.

‘More like two hundred and eighty rads, if you want my opinion,’ said the medical officer, a lieutenant senior-grade named Brust. ‘You’re in great shape, believe me. There’s only one thing we couldn’t fix.’

‘Oh?’ said George.

‘Your secondary spermatocytes are failing to become spermatids.’ Dr Brust was a small, tubby man with a face so incongruously gaunt it seemed to be on its own separate diet. ‘Blame the radiation.’

‘What are you talking about?’ George asked.

‘You’re sterile,’ said Dr Brust evenly.

‘Sterile?’

‘Sterile as a mule.’ Black stains covered Brust’s surgical gown. ‘I can’t imagine that it would make much difference to you at this point.’

‘My wife and I were planning . . .’ George closed his eyes.

‘Didn’t they tell you about your wife?’

‘Yes.’ When he opened his eyes, he saw only his tears.

‘I wouldn’t worry about my gonads if I were you,’ said Dr Brust. ‘You’re lucky to be alive.’

They moved George out of the radiation unit into an ordinary sick bay.

‘You in the McMurdo Sound Agreement?’ asked the patient in the next bed, a long, nervous, weasel-bodied man with an expression so intense George could not look at it without squinting.

‘Yes. George Paxton. You in it too?’

‘At the top of the list. Love to lean over and shake your hand, friend, but I’ve got this tube up my silo.’

‘Me too.’

‘Ever hear of Robert Wengernook?’

‘Haven’t I seen you on television?’

‘Ah, another one of
those
,’ said Wengernook with mock distress. ‘Here I am in the goddamn D-O-D, and everybody thinks of me as the guy who does the scopas suit commercials. For my hobby, I’m the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs.’

‘My wife always wanted to be in a scopas suit commercial. The one with the lady knight.’

‘Really? Your wife was in that? Small world.’

‘No, she
wanted
to be. She would have been right for it too, because Justine was very pretty, everybody thought so. They say a warhead got her.’

‘You’ve got to believe me, George, I really thought the suits were good.’ Wengernook’s twitchy fingers knitted themselves into elaborate sculptures. His tongue, which was remarkably long, darted in and out like a chameleon’s. ‘I guess it’s Japan’s way of getting back at us.’

‘For Hiroshima?’

‘I was thinking more of import quotas.’ He lit a cigarette, puffed. ‘God, this is all so awful. You might suppose that on a submarine there wouldn’t be much to remind a man of his family, but that’s not true. I’ll see some fire extinguisher, and that gets me picturing the one I gave Janet last Christmas. You wouldn’t think a fire extinguisher would have such emotionalism attached to it.’

‘I’d like to talk about something else.’

‘Same here.’

But the tomb inscriber and the Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs had nothing more to say to each other.

At the end of the week they transferred George to a cabin more suggestive of a civilian ocean liner than of a military vessel. The luxury suffocated him. He wanted Justine to be there, making fun of the kitschy floral wallpaper and reveling in the cornucopia that was the
City of New York
’s galley – eggs Benedict breakfasts, steamer clam lunches, lobster dinners – all served up by cheerful, redfaced enlisted men who seemed to be auditioning for jobs in some unimaginably swank hotel. He wanted Holly to be there, delighting in the tank of live sea horses and giving them her favorite names, the ones she had already bestowed on dozens of dolls and stuffed animals. These names, for some reason, were Jennifer, Suzy, Jeremiah, Alfred, and Margaret.

And so, despite posh surroundings and great food, George still felt himself a brother to jackals. His pipe was still turned into the voice of them that weep. Sometimes he smashed things until his knuckles bled. The Navy sent a seaman third-class around to clean up the mess. At other times he contemplated his closet, where Holly’s golden scopas suit and its shattered glove hung as if on a gibbet. He stared at the suit for hours at a time.

It would have saved her life, he told himself, although he suspected this was not true.

‘I should have tried harder,’ he moaned aloud at odd moments.

A small bubble of consolation occasionally drifted into his thoughts. If death were as final and anesthetic as he had been taught, then his family had at least been granted the salvation of nothingness. Justine could not now be mourning the death of her daughter. Holly could not now be wondering whether all this chaos somehow precluded her getting a Mary Merlin doll for Christmas. Thank God for oblivion, ran his Unitarian prayer.

The knock on George’s door had the brisk, impatient cadence of a person accustomed to getting his way.

‘It’s open.’ George sat on a plush divan reading the Book of Job for the third time that week. Once again he was finding the drama cruel and absurd.

A military man entered. His uniform, curiously, was of the United States Air Force. His presence on a Navy submarine entailed the incongruity of a rabbi in a cathedral.

‘You’re evacuee Paxton, aren’t you?’

George closed the Bible and said yes. The Air Force refugee approached, arm poised for a mandatory handshake. He was constructed of massive shoulders, a rough rock-like head, a formidable trunk, and limbs of simian length. A flurry of decorations and service ribbons hung from his breast opposite a nameplate that read
TARMAC
.

‘Major General Roger “Brat” Tarmac,’ the refugee said in a large, wholesome voice. Shaking hands with Brat Tarmac was a workout. ‘Deputy Chief of Staff for Retargeting, Strategic Air Command. I was in downtown Omaha when the Cossacks came. Had to do my Christmas shopping some time, right? So there I am, buying my sister’s kid this
clown
, when quick-as-shit a warhead goes off behind me, and the next thing I know I’m in the
Navy
. It’s all so crazy. The clown needed batteries – that was going to be my next stop. I keep telling myself, “Brat, face facts. You’ll never see those people again – your sister’s a casualty.” I say that, and I don’t believe it. She was a pilot. Like me. Flew strategic interceptors. Jesus. Incredible.’

George had never taken so immediate a liking to anyone before. Brat Tarmac was the sort of handsome, athletic soldier ten-year-old boys wanted for fathers, a fantasy to which George, at age thirty-five, was not entirely immune.

‘Coffee?’ George offered.

‘Affirmative,’ said the general.

Obtaining coffee aboard the
City of New York
was a simple matter of walking up to your cabin’s vending machine and pushing some buttons. ‘Cream and sugar?’

‘Black. In a dirty mug, eh? No frills for us bomber jockeys.’

A Styrofoam cup caught the stream. George’s hand made a spider over the rim, and he carried the coffee to his guest.

‘So far I’ve managed to locate all the Erebus personnel but that evangelist, Sparrow.’ Brat sucked coffee across his leathery lips. ‘We’ll be working with a pretty broad spectrum of talent. Wengernook is—’

‘I met him in the sick bay.’

‘Impressive guy, huh?’

‘Nervous.’

‘Intense. He should quit smoking. Then we’ve got Brian Overwhite of the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and you’ll never guess who they stuck in the cabin next to yours.’

‘Who?’

‘William Randstable. Remember when he beat that Cossack at chess? He was only seven or something.’

‘I don’t follow chess.’

‘It was a big propaganda thing for us. The kid worked at one of those think tanks for a while, then they put him on missile accuracy over at Sugar Brook or someplace. All in all it’s a pretty classy act our President’s putting together down in Antarctica. In a few days they’ll be calling the whole team together – after they run us through this survivor’s guilt crap – so we can chart out our options. God, I hope they’ve got a crisis relocation effort going. I can’t bear to think of this turning into a high civilian-casualty thing.’

‘Why Antarctica?’

‘A big chunk of real estate, right? Hence, a high warhead-exhaustion factor. Excellent place for a command-and-control center. Looks like the Joint Chiefs thought of everything – I’m a good man with an ICBM, Wengernook knows what we should commit to the European theater, Randstable can probably maintain a decent R and D effort throughout, and Reverend Sparrow will do wonders for our morale. All right, all right, I’ll admit it. We should all just
admit
it, right? We’re scared. We’ve never done this before. The cheerleader and the quarterback. You must be dousing your drawers, what with your MARCH Plan on the line and everything. I’m a big supporter of MARCH, you know. Over at SAC they called me the MARCH Hare.’

‘
My
plan? I don’t have anything to do with the MARCH Plan, General Tarmac. I’d never heard of it until Professor Carter—’

‘Modulated Attacks in Response to Counterforce Hostilities – that’s not your baby?’

‘No.’

‘The SPASM, then. You’re one of the geniuses behind the SPASM.’

‘The SPASM?’

‘Single Plan for Aligning the Services of the Mili . . . er, what exactly are you
doing
on this team, Paxton?’

‘Wish I knew. Two weeks ago I signed a really strange scopas suit contract.’

‘Scopas suits? Hell, they don’t work. We ran tests.’

‘I have one that works. In my closet. It didn’t get. . . where it was supposed to go.’

‘You aren’t in the defense community? You aren’t at Sugar Brook or Lumen or anything?’

‘I inscribe tombstones.’

‘Tombstones?’

‘Lately I’ve been writing the epitaphs.’

‘Epitaphs? I hate to say this, Paxton, but they sure made a mistake evacuating
you
.’

‘I don’t want to be on the team. I just want to be dead.’

The MARCH Hare could think of no adequate response to this. ‘Dead?’ he said. He rubbed his hand across his hair, each strand of which was as straight and rigid as a sewing needle.

‘Dead?’ he said again. His waist was encircled by a utility belt from which hung an object that looked like a skyrocket. ‘Nice cabin you got here. Mine’s not bad, either. But then, the Navy always
did
have a sweet tooth, eh? I understand this boat hauls thirty-six E4 Multiprongs, all gassed up and loaded for Russian bear.’

George looked at the sea horse tank, studied the antics of Jennifer, Suzy, Jeremiah, Alfred, and Margaret. The previous day some babies had appeared. He could imagine Holly discovering them. The hallucinated sound of her oooooh’s and ahhhhh’s was like a jagged bronze bell implanted in his skull.

Brat got himself a second cup of coffee, drained it instantly, went for a third. ‘Epitaphs, you said? Hmmm, maybe they expect this fight to last so long we’ll all be needing a few well-chosen words over our heads. In any event, welcome to the show. We’ve got some tough decisions to make. Started your therapy?’

‘No. You?’

‘I suppose so. Mostly we just sit in Dr Valcourt’s cabin and palaver, for which the Navy evidently pays her the going rate. I tell her the main guilt I’ve got comes from not being at SAC when we retaliated.’ He grinned, forced a laugh. ‘Don’t let anybody kid you – our air-launched Javelin missiles are the finest a federal deficit can buy.’ His grin suddenly degenerated. He grabbed his mouth as if to forestall vomit. ‘Hell, I’m scared, Paxton.’

‘I don’t like Dr Valcourt.’

Brat took a deep breath. ‘Yeah, I know, kind of an ice cube, but I do enjoy our sessions. Maybe I’ll end up on the fun side of her pants some day.’ He crushed his Styrofoam cup. Coffee erupted over his fist. ‘Shit, wouldn’t you think they’d give us a few scenarios to mull over? You can be sure the
Cossack
generals aren’t sitting around in some goddamn submarine.’

Jeremiah Sea Horse and Margaret Sea Horse were kissing. ‘Have you ever noticed that when a four-year-old draws a human face, it’s always smiling?’ George asked. ‘At least, my four-year-old’s faces were always smiling. Her name was Holly.’