This is the Way the World Ends (15 page)

‘Today,’ she said, ‘we’re going to deal with ice.’

A crowd of peasants stood on a frozen lake. Soot walled over the sky. Cold rain fell. The survivors’ teeth vibrated, plumes of breath gushed out. They wore rags. Many went barefoot – blue ankles, missing toes. Faithlessly they huddled around a limp and sputtering fire.

‘I thought you said July.’

‘July. High noon. Those people are freezing to death. Blame the urban conflagrations. There’s so much smoke in the air that ordinary sunlight is being absorbed. Right now the average worldwide temperature is minus twenty degrees Fahrenheit. The soot cap migrates with the climate. In April it crossed the equator, sending ice storms through the Amazon basin. Photosynthesis has been shut down, the earth’s vegetation mantle is crumbling. For many years, this was an unanticipated effect of nuclear holocaust. Then, shortly before the war, certain scientists foresaw it. Sundeath syndrome.’

She tugged on the periscope handle. Rigid corpses littered the planet like the outpourings of some crazed taxidermist. Unable to penetrate the ice-sealed rivers and ponds, many wanderers were dying of thirst. Under bruise-purple skies a starving French farmer clawed at the iron ground with bloody fingers, seeking to exhume the potato he knew was there. At last he lifted the precious object from the dirt, staring at it stupidly. George rejoiced at the humble victory. Now eat it! The farmer fainted and toppled over, soon becoming as stiff as the stone angel that George used to sell under the name Design No. 4335.

Wednesday.

‘Fourteen months have passed,’ said Morning. ‘It is September. The strategic submarines have put to port. The soot has settled. Light can get through. Sundeath syndrome has run its course.’

‘Thank God.’

‘Don’t thank anybody. This light is malignant.’ Morning closed her eyes. ‘The high-yield airbursts created oxides of nitrogen that have shredded the earth’s ozone buffer. Ultraviolet sunshine is gushing down. What does it all mean?’ Her sigh was shrill, piercing. ‘Famine,’ she said.

George hated being difficult at this point in their courtship, but he couldn’t help asking, ‘Is this really the way to cure me?’

‘Yes,’ she said, as if that settled the matter. ‘Last year’s harvest was a disaster. The frozen ground could not receive seeds – those few crops that were planted emerged into a spring laden with smog and acid showers. This year’s harvest will be worse – roots reaching into eroded soil, leaves seared by the ultraviolet. And there is another enemy . . .’

The locusts rolled across the Iowa com fields in a vast insatiable carpet, stripping the crop to its vegetal bones, devouring the botanic carrion.

‘The post-exchange environment is utopia for insects. Their enemies the birds have succumbed to radiation. Stores of carbaryl and malathion have been destroyed. The omnipresent corpses are perfect breeding places. So what will our hungry survivors do? Forage? Nuts and berries are fast disappearing. Dig shellfish? Radioactive rainouts have contaminated coastal waters. Hunt? Not if the game is dying out . . .’

She pivoted the periscope. A rabbit pelt hung on a mass of rabbit bones. The pelt took a hop and collapsed.

‘Not if the tiny creatures that underwrite the earth’s food chains were killed when the ultraviolet hit the marshes and seas . . .’

Can a walrus, paragon of things fat and full, look emaciated? This one did. Its eyes were sunken. Its ribs pushed against taut, sallow flesh that had been feeding on itself and now could feed no more.

‘Not if thousands of species are at risk because the ultraviolet has scarred their corneas . . .’

A blind deer moved through the organic rubble that had been the woods of central Pennsylvania, pacing in crazed parabolas of misery and hunger. Poor deerie, George could hear Holly saying.

‘You know what comes next, don’t you? You know what people eat when they can no longer gather berries, hunt game, or harvest the seas?’

Out in the timefolds, Italian office workers ate human corpses. Belgian mathematics professors murdered their colleagues and devoured their internal organs. Dave Valentine of Unlimited, Ltd, the agency that had produced the scopas suit commercials, stumbled through the ruins of Glen Cove, Long Island, with cannibalistic intent.

The famine session left George quaking on the floor.

Thursday.

‘Five years have passed,’ said Morning. ‘And yet, in another sense, time has turned around. The modern and pristine city of Billings, Montana, has devolved into fourteenth-century London.’

She worked the focus knob.

‘It’s time we dealt with pestilence,’ she said.

No, no, he thought, it’s time we dealt with my magic lantern slide. It’s time we made wedding plans.

A brawny survivor in combat fatigues squatted near the entrance of a bomb shelter. He wore a surprisingly intact scopas suit and a fractured grin. A Heckler and Koch assault rifle rested on his camouflage-dappled knees. In the background, neatly stacked corpses formed a bulwark against intruders. George sensed that nuclear war was the best thing that had ever happened to this man.

‘His shelter contains an elaborate collection of canned soups,’ Morning explained. ‘He is hoping someone will try to steal it, so that he can shoot them. Before the war, bubonic plague was endemic among the rats of eleven states in the western United States.’

The lymph nodes in the survivor’s neck looked like subcutaneous golf balls. Morning pivoted the periscope. Montana trembled with rats. The roads were paved with unburied corpses.

‘If you were a disease – viral gastroenteritis or infectious hepatitis or amoebic dysentery – you could not ask for better conditions than planet Earth after nuclear war. The ultraviolet has suppressed your hosts’ immune systems. The omnipresent insects are carrying you far and wide. No pasteurized milk, no food refrigeration, no waste treatment, no inoculation programs – all these circumstances bode well.’

At each point of the compass, a new microorganism flourished. No death happened in the abstract. A particular Nigerian child died of cholera, sprawled across his mother’s lap in a brutal and unholy pietà. A particular Romanian machinist died of meningococcal meningitis, a particular Iranian school teacher of louse-borne typhus . . .

Friday.

‘Infertility,’ said Morning.

The word sounded neutral, clinical, non-threatening. Then he looked into the timefolds.

A Cambodian man and his wife sat in a village square and wept. ‘The radiation,’ Morning explained. ‘They’ll never have children.’

They should find the city with marble walls, George thought. Nostradamus foresaw this problem.

A Polish mother suffered a miscarriage. The specter of still-birth visited a family in Pakistan and another in Bolivia. The live births were worse. It was an era when thousands of children were required to face the world without such selective advantages as arms, legs, and cerebral cortices. ‘Mate an irradiated chromosome with another irradiated chromosome,’ Morning noted, ‘and no good will come of it.’

‘You must tell me something,’ said George, reeling with nausea. ‘Who will treat
your
survivor’s guilt?’

The therapist smoothed a wrinkle from her gray skirt and, in the weakest voice he had ever heard from her, said, ‘I don’t know.’

For moral reasons, the young Reverend Peter Sparrow declined to join the Saturday night gatherings of the Erebus Poker Club. Gambling, he knew, was Satan’s third favorite pastime, after sex and ecumenicalism. Lacking such convictions, the other evacuees gathered around the green felt table in the rattling, flashing heart of the Silver Dollar Casino.

Unsealing the deck, Brat Tarmac weeded out the jokers. He was down another five pounds, easily. ‘Ante up. This game is seven-card stud.’ The cards rippled through his hands. ‘Deuces wild.’

George said, ‘Today through the periscope I saw—’

‘You
saw
, you
saw
,’ said Brat, sneering. ‘Jack bets.’

‘One dollar,’ said Overwhite.

‘I’m out,’ said Wengernook.

‘Raise,’ said Randstable.

George said, ‘Morning showed me—’

‘We’ll take a vote,’ said Brat. ‘How many of us want to hear what Paxton saw through the periscope today?’

No one spoke. Brat dealt another round of up cards. ‘Ace bets.’

‘We saw it
too
,’ said Wengernook, quivering like an overbred dog. ‘Jesus.’

‘Sugar Brook built that scope,’ said Randstable, who had managed to make six poker chips stand on edge. ‘Not my department, though – the command-and-control guys.’

‘Three dollars,’ said Overwhite, reaching under his sling and checking himself for armpit tumors.

‘I have a question.’ George picked up the jokers, rubbed them together like a razor and strop. ‘If America and Russia knew about this sundeath syndrome, why did they work out plans for different kinds of attacks and so on?’

‘Well, you see, sundeath theory was based on incomplete models of the atmosphere,’ said Brat, clenching his teeth as if in great pain. ‘It all depends on dust particle size, the height of the smoke plumes, rainfall, factors like that.’

‘You have to take sundeath with a grain of salt,’ said Wengernook, pulling cigarettes and a risqué matchbook from his shirt. ‘It’s a pretty far-fetched idea.’

‘But it happened,’ said George. ‘Right on our planet.’

‘That’s just one particular case,’ said Wengernook. He struck a match. ‘In another sort of war, urban-industrial targets would not have been hit. You’d have fewer fires, less soot, no sundeath, and, and . . .’ He tried to make the flame connect with the end of his cigarette, could not manage it.

‘First ace bets,’ said Brat.

‘And a much more desirable outcome,’ said Wengernook.

‘I’ve got it!’ said Randstable. He grabbed one of the jokers from George and set it atop the six vertical chips.

‘Got what?’ asked George.

‘The solution!’ said Randstable.

‘To the war?’ asked George.

‘To the riddle.’ The joker shivered on its plastic pylons.

‘What riddle?’

‘Sverre’s riddle – why is a raven like a writing desk?’

‘Why?’

‘A raven is like a writing desk,’ said the ex-Wunderkind as his little bridge collapsed, ‘because Poe wrote on both.’

To and fro, warp and weft, the young black woman paced the shores of her private tropical paradise. The beach sparkled brilliantly, as if its sands were destined to become fine crystal goblets. Spiky pieces of sunlight shone in the tide pools. The surrounding sea was a blue liquid gem.

She was about thirty. She wore no clothes. Her excellent skin had the color and vibrancy of boiling fudge. When she stopped and sucked in a large helping of air, her splendid breasts floated upward like helium balloons released in celebration of some great athletic or political victory. George thought she was the most desirable woman he had ever seen.

A length of rope was embedded in the beach near a banyan tree. The beachcomber tore it free. Sunstruck grains showered down like sparks. The woman manipulated the rope, sculpting a grim shape from it. A noose emerged in her clever and despairing hands.

George tried to pull away from the periscope, but he could not break his own grip.

The last woman on earth walked up to the tree, tossed the rope over a branch, and, as the waves rolled in and the sun danced amid the tide pools, hanged herself by the neck. Her oscillating shadow was shaped like a star.

George sat down beneath the periscope and panted. ‘We’re through?’ he said, half inquiring, half asserting.

‘At this irrevocable point in history,’ said Morning, ‘not one human being exists anywhere – with the frail and tentative exception of this boat.’

The hermit crab had left his shell. He was a shivering mass of tender protoplasm. ‘Nobody can ride a mechanical horse.’

‘True.’

‘Or see the Big Dipper.’

‘Correct.’

‘Or take acting lessons.’

He was weeping now, copiously, and he could not tell whether his tears were for Justine, Holly, the Frenchman who had clawed the potato out of the ground, the Iranian school teacher who had died of louse-borne typhus, the last woman on earth . . .

Morning knelt beside the hurt man. She hugged him and dried his tears.

He returned her embrace. His bullet wound throbbed like a castanet grafted to his stomach. As if to stop the spasms, he reached into his shirt. His fingers touched glass, and slowly he withdrew his Leonardo.

‘Look at this,’ he said, licking his tears. ‘It’s you. And me. And our child.’

‘I don’t understand. Are you an artist?’

‘I told you about it before. The painter was Leonardo da Vinci. You know – the man with the vulture complex.’

‘A forgery, right?’

‘An original Leonardo – inspired by the brilliant prophet Nostradamus. It predicts the future. See? Holly’s stepsister is coming. You’ll be the mother.’

She took the slide. Light ascended from the glass and ignited her blue-green eyes. ‘It really does look like me. Spooky.’

‘It’s you.’

‘And the child . . . ?’

‘If Justine had gotten pregnant again, we would have named the baby Aubrey. Have you ever had a child?’

‘No.’

‘They do all these amazing things.’

‘I’ve never been married. Aubrey?’

‘Aubrey Paxton.’

‘Pretty name.’

‘And there will be others. Aubrey’s brothers and sisters. Holly always wanted a sister.’

‘Why would anybody want to bring children into—?’

‘Into
this
world? I may not know about psychology or sundeath, Dr Valcourt, but I did learn something at the Crippen Monument Works. Our children will take whatever world they can get.’

‘You’re sterile.’

‘I have reason to believe the condition is not permanent.’

‘Next you’ll be saying we have the power to restore the race.’

Justine Paxton had frequently accused her husband of lacking ambition. She should hear what I’m about to say, he thought. ‘Maybe we do.’ (Maybe they did!) ‘Maybe it’s one of those unexpected effects of nuclear war you’re always talking about. Your own fertility is . . . ?’

‘No problems that I know about.’ She hefted the slide, ran her fingertips over the tiny bumps and furrows of paint. ‘Where did you get this thing?’