Toward the End of Time (34 page)

My pulse fluttered. I felt girlish with my secret. I told Doreen before I told Gloria. Doreen couldn’t understand
that it was a big deal yet; she had no idea where the prostate gland was and her whole face wrinkled with disgust when I told her. Gloria statuesquely enlarged at the news into the tragic grandeur of eventual widowhood. Long cast in the role of wife, she had endured years of dull lines, but now at last the part was proving worthy of her gifts. She foresaw her new, elevated status and wished to do nothing henceforth less than impeccably wifely and loving: I could see the determination written on her otherwise smooth, broad forehead. She would see me through to the next world and then take as her reward a singular dignity, no longer regent on behalf of a senescent male but queen absolute. She would pour forth the melody from the center of the stage.

The mornings have a nip to them now when I walk down for the
Globe
. Certain tall yellow-headed weeds—hawkweed, I think—have taken root in the cracks of the broken concrete drying-yard and I bend down to pull a few on my way, and throw them onto the burning pile as I pass. Since childhood I have loved this month—the flat dry taste of it, the brown-lawn look of it, bouncing the heat back up against your bare legs, and the lack of any importunate holiday marring the blank days on this side of Labor Day and the return to school

On Saturday Gloria directed Jeremy and me to dig up th Siberian iris that has flourished on the stony slope behin the two scrawny pear trees to the right of the driveway. We attacked the clump first with shovels, which met too mar stones, and then with the mattock, which I swung with powerful effect. Jeremy suddenly exclaimed and darted hand down to seize a garden snake liquidly wriggling away through the grass. The little snake’s undulant motion at
the sheen of its polychrome scales were so beautiful it shocked us both to see that its tail end was mangled and raw, oozing muddy reptile blood. A shovel or the mattock in my hands had caught it, a blow from heedless Heaven, as it coiled in concealed innocence. Jeremy put the snake gently back into the grass and it slithered off with unimpaired fluency, but I thought that a snake was not a ribbon that could be snipped anywhere: it had an anatomy, intestines and an anus, and no more than I could it live long with its nether portion crushed. I hate it when our human attempts to inflict order upon the land bring death and pain and mutilation to these innocents, whose ancestors enjoyed the earth for tens of millions of years before the naked ape appeared with his technology and enraging awareness of his own sin. I blamed Gloria, for having us remove this harmless, thriving clump of iris because it offended her frosty, simplifying eyes. Who are we to say what is a weed or a pest? Now the pretty snake, stricken in its perfection, must lie in some crevice feeling its slender body dam and slowly fail; a glaze of nothingness will close upon the little jewel of its unblaming brain.

Working alongside Jeremy made me try to remember working beside my own father. He could do things, up to a point: hammer and nail, handle elementary wiring and plumbing. He worked for a time for a roofing contractor, and though he said the heights didn’t bother him he would come home complaining of how roofers cheated people, even the most trusting poor widow. He had a vegetable garden out back that he would stand in at the end of the day, and a workshed on one side of the garage full of aligned jars of screws and nails getting rusty. For a time he had a job on the floor of the GE factory in Pittsfield, but the monotony of assembly, he confessed one night at supper, made him
physically sick. He went from job to job, with his poor skills, his indifferent attitude, his lack of a trade. We did complete a few projects together—a doghouse for Skeezix, a soapbox racer, with the number 9 in silver outlined in black—but generally he was too tired. He just wanted to sit in his brown armchair with the fake leather worn off the arms and watch television and have dinner brought to him. I vowed I would never get that tired in life.

Last night I was in the bathroom when the commuter train thundered, louder it seemed than usual, along the tracks on the far edge of the woods. In a few months, when the leaves are down, I can see the golden windows flickeringly flowing by. I clenched with love of the muffled racket, an ecstatic sensation dating from my earliest intimations of traffic, of large things hurtling past on the road into the valley. I love thunder, too—the cascading and smashing first in the distance, like a strawberry box yielding to pressure, and then wildly, dangerously overhead, thumping the roof so the window sashes tremble in their sills and the thin clear panes shiver against their putty, and then the semi-satisfied, still irritable receding mutter, as the sated gutters gurgle.
Things passing safely by:
this intensely pleased me. Now perhaps I am the thing that is passing, my body a skin I am shedding, with resistance at some points of attachment.

The biopsy was neither painless nor painful. Giving myself the Fleet enema the night before and then again in the morning, on the cold bathroom floor while studying the underside of the sink and waiting for my bowels to feel revulsion, numbed my spirit to the humiliation of the ultrasound rectal probe and then the actual harvest of the tiny plugs of tissue—preceded, each one, by Dr. Carver’s murmured formula, “A little pinch.” A little pinch, a little pinch, and I was back in my street clothes striding, a bit tenderly, with tingling
empty bowels, up Cambridge Street to State, where the old gang at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise seemed friendlier than usual—perhaps my expectations of friendliness had been lowered. I felt myself as a perambulating bushel of defective innards, and they treated me with civility as an intelligence, a faded eminence.

The urologist had been a young man with a head of receding blond fuzz and a complexion that had taken a pink humidity from the underparts that were his specialty. He had a big-shouldered, stern Irish nurse who stayed with us and, while the snipping was going on beneath the discreet blue sheet, unexpectedly held my hand. It was one of the many impersonal mercies that descend upon us, I saw, when we weaken. Our host the world is extra polite, even effusive, when with relief it sees that we are at last about to leave.

But I had not weakened. I was no snake with a mangled tail. The tingling singed sensation at the upper tip of my rectum merely goaded me to brisker efficiency, more aggressive know-how. I was there to do some shifting in my and Mrs. Fessenden’s portfolios, plus some few others still in my care, away from cyclicals, which were in for a troubled time now that the Asian low-wage platforms were giving signs of revival amid the vast destruction, and into technicals—live-gene transplantation and atomic-scale miniaturization, possibilities that at last were emerging from the theoretical stage. The big windows looked down upon a Boston of slightly curved streets traced between blocks of brick-red rubble and commercial buildings abandoned— some so precipitously the windows had not been boarded up—after the dramatic population shrinkage. These empty blocks seemed from on high a great bowl of opportunity. We survivors were heirs to room for expansion, to a future of unpredictable possibilities loosed by die relaxation of order.
Evolutionary change proceeds through small isolated populations; widespread species tend to stagnate in their own success. We had been horseshoe crabs and crocodiles; now we were nimble niche mammals, ruthlessly thinned, rapidly developing hooves, lemur-large eyes, and specialized gizzards. I would not see it all happen but it was in the air, a kind of planetary expectancy vibrant above the rubble.

Gary Gray was the one who dealt with me. He seemed less wispy—indeed, he had developed a little pot belly, rather preeningly displayed in the logoed T-shirt which has become standard business wear for his generation. I still feel naked without a suit, though my suits in retirement are going stiff and shabby on their cedarwood hangers. “Where’s Ned, on vacation?” I asked.

“You could say that,” he said, and his sidelong glance did not encourage me to ask more. My heart leaped up gleefully, to think that Ned had come a cropper. One’s own rise offers a precarious happiness, shadowed as it is by the threat of reversal and others’ greater triumphs; but the downfall of another provides permanent satisfaction.

“I could say that, but it wouldn’t be the case?”

“Extended vacation would be the optimistic formulation.” Gary grayly smiled. “He got in the way of the number crunchers. He had too verbal a way of expressing himself.”

“And Pat? She was his assistant.”

“I know who
Pat
was,” he said, in an overemphatic, peevish manner that may have been a parodie declaration of his own sexual preferences. “She’s made a sideways jump, to Sturbridge, Morrissey, and Blaine. They promised her some accounts, and a cubicle of her own, if she’d take night courses in financial management.”

“She seemed very promising,” I said. “A people person” I have never understood homosexuals: they make their
choice, or have it biologically made for them, and then become very caustic and indignant about the party they have chosen not to attend—the party of breeders, of fertile male-female friction.

“She was a
tramp,”
Gary told me. “You can use this office. But all the transaction codes have been changed; there’s a hard-copy printout in one of the drawers. The crunchers don’t like their numbers used by outsiders, even cherished former insiders like yourself. She really made your heart go pitty-pat, didn’t she, Ben boy?”

He took his leer and his bellied-out logo (EXCREMENT OCCURS, it read) away. As I fiddled and fumbled my transactions into the data bank, I felt suspended in space, with my stinging tail, and a touch agoraphobic. I wanted to scuttle out of this cubicled brightness into a friendly dark crevice. More and more, off my own chronically paced property, I feel frightened and disoriented. Boston for forty years was my second home, but now it seemed hostile and featureless, a void beneath my feet.

This was true even of a golf game in Brookline which Red arranged with a member of the Country Club whom he knows. When Red picked me up in his Dodge Caravan, and began to talk on his cellular phone with Durban, South Africa, and then Perth, Australia—what fish there are on the planet are in the Southern Hemisphere, like sparkling snowflakes settling in a glass globe—I felt vaguely kidnapped. Fear raced at the back of my mind like the trickle of cold water that murmurs throughout the whole house when the rubber stopper in a water closet is imperfectly seated. Ken Dixon sat in the back seat, silent, whether from a wish not to interfere with Red’s loud, rambling discussion about evanescent schools of “product,” or because he, too, on my transmission frequency, heard the murmur of fear, of a fatal
leak in things that was draining the world of substance. The course—its limar outcroppings of black pudding-stone, its par-fives wandering past cliffs and up sand-bunkered slopes like metaphors of life’s dreamy, anfractuous journey— seemed hollowed out, a shared illusion composed of electrons and protons spinning in a space that was ninety-nine percent vacuum.

Our host was named Les, for Lester Trout, one of Red’s financial catches when he was trawling the Boston financial community for investors, before the war, in an enlarged freezing-and-packing plant. Les was a happy rich man, in shape and fine fettle. Golf had become his life; he attacked the course once a day in order to bring his handicap down from an eight to a seven, and next year a six. He uncoiled into the ball with a wonderful compact force; and after an especially successful shot would flash a predatory smile, inviting you to share his delight in his game.

On the par-three twelfth, I suffered a moment of delusion: I expected to see his nicely drawing nine-iron shot plunge through the elevated green as if through a drum of green paper or the scummy skin of a pond. But no, there was terra firma there, our ancient accretion of sedimented rock. The ball hopped, and stopped. I kept picturing how an orange forgotten at the back of the produce drawer in the refrigerator shrinks to a grayish-green orb that emits puffs of smoke like a pod of pollen.

My sense of unreality, as I moved through the veils of
maya
, helped me play a little better than usual; I felt indifferent to everything but returning myself to the matrix of my home surroundings—the curving driveway, the white house, the leafy woods, the kids in the woods, the deer, the wife, the flowers—and so swung easily, winning praise I
could hardly hear through the murmur of terror leakily running at the back of my brain.

I exaggerate. The dynamics of the match did burn through to me. I was partnered with our host, who with his expensively developed superiority was giving so many strokes to the rest of us that when he faltered—and he was bound to falter often, with a putt that lipped out or a drive that sucked too far left—the burden fell on me. Whenever the pretensions of our low-handicapper were punctured, it became a match of Red and Ken versus Ben. In my betranced state I held up better than when paired with Fred Hanover against these same two buddies. The three of us, equally strangers to this pudding-stone paradise, had a certain furtive solidarity, though I was the evil host’s ally. My distracted golf took on a quality I can only call coziness. The path the ball should follow was marked as if by broad troughs in the air; it was the reverse of that frequent agonizing feeling of a narrow correct path, a kind of razorback ridge which the ball keeps slipping down one side or the other of. Especially on the second side, beginning with pars on the short, blind tenth hole and the long eleventh with its sheer cliff and grassy transverse ditch, did I help my team; we wound up collecting two welders, which Les Trout tucked into his wallet as gleefully as if he had made another million.