World's End (12 page)

(So what if it was a regular and tedious trek out to or in from the road, made all the more tedious when the trekker was laden with bursting sacks of lentil flakes, pinto beans or bran pellets? The remoteness of the place had its advantages. A hero of the people and saint of the forest could expect few visitors, for example, or representatives of the duly constituted authorities of the county and township, like the assessor, inspectors from the Department of Building and Safety or the sheriff and his minions. Nor would he be much bothered by drummers, panhandlers, Avon ladies and Jehovah's Witnesses, as these, passing by on the road, would see only an infinity of trees, each one adumbrating the next. For the initiated, however, for his privileged guests, Tom Crane had provided the Packard hubcap. If you slowed in the vicinity of a certain diseased-looking elm that was one-tenth of a mile beyond a certain breached guardrail, and you recognized the hubcap depending from a nail driven into the trunk of that certain elm, you would park and walk in: Tom was at home. If the hubcap was on the ground, you needn't bother.)

Out on the road, Tom removed his deerskin gloves—one of sixteen pairs his father had inadvertently bequeathed him. He'd found them, some still wrapped in gift paper that featured snowmen and candy canes, while poking around in his father's bureau the week after his parents' first vacation in twenty years had been terminated by pilot error somewhere over San Juan. He stuffed the gloves inside the belt loop of his aviator's coat, slipped the all-but-useless flashlight in the back pocket of his bellbottoms, and removed the Packard hubcup from the tree. Then he blew on his hands and turned to address the long black shadow that stretched along the side of the road like the mouth of an unfathomable cave.

This was the Packard itself, a relic of the distant past, painted the color of sleep and forgetfulness and pitted with rust. Its windows were jammed open, the brakes were a memory and the floorboards had dissolved in a delicate tracery that left the pedals floating in space while the road moved beneath them like a conveyor belt. A genuine artifact, as revealing in its way of previous civilization as the arrowhead or potsherd, the old hulk had been unearthed the previous year in the shed out back of his grandfather's place. The elder Crane had owned a succession of Packards, and this, dating from the late forties, was the last of them. (“They went bad after the War,” the old man insisted, real vehemence inflating the flanges of his magnificent nose. “Junk. Nothing but junk.”) Now it was Tom's.

Working by rote, he struggled to lift and brace the hood and then remove the air filter. He was in the act of spraying ether into what he took in the darkness to be the carburetor when he first spotted the flying saucer. Trembling and luminous, it jerked violently across the sky, coming to an abrupt halt directly above him, where it hovered tentatively, as if looking for a place to land. Tom froze. He watched the thing without apprehension and with a keen sciential eye (it was saucer-shaped, all right, and emitting a pale, rinsed-out light), surprised, but only mildly. He believed in clairvoyance, reincarnation, astrology and the economic theories of Karl Marx, and as he stood there, he could feel his belief system opening up to include an unshakable faith in the existence of extraterrestrial life as well. Still, after ten minutes or so his neck began to go stiff, and he found himself wishing that this marvelous apparition would do something—spit flames, open up like an eye, turn to mud or jelly—anything but hover
interminably over his head. It was then that he reached surreptitiously for the flashlight he'd tucked in his back pocket, thinking in a vague way of signaling to the aliens in Morse code or something.

No sooner did he touch the flashlight, however, than the shadow of a great hand obliterated the alien spacecraft; when he released it, the wily aliens returned, hovering as before. He began to feel a little foolish. He stood there playing with the flashlight a minute more, then sent the saucer hurtling to its doom in the inky black reaches of space and turned back to the car. The old hulk started up with a volcanic roar and a brilliant explosion of blue flame from the carburetor; the saint of the forest hustled out to replace the air filter and slam the hood shut. And then he was off with a shriek of the steering wheel and a groan of the tires, off to pour his soul into the Dionysian frenzy of the concert.

The concert, which featured a well-known underground band whose members invested every nickel of their take in preferred stock, was held in Poughkeepsie, in the Vassar College gymnasium. Tom presented his ticket and shuffled through the doors with the rest of the sloe-eyed, hirsute, bead-rattling crowd, glad to get in out of the cold. He was unaware that Poughkeepsie was an Algonquin term meaning “safe harbor,” but then no one else in the crowd was aware of it either. In fact, there were few who had any grasp at all of the notion that history had preceded them. They knew, in an abstract way, about Thanksgiving and the pilgrims, about Washington, Lincoln, Hitler and John F. Kennedy, about the Depression—could their parents ever let them forget it?—and they dimly recalled the construction of the local shopping center in some distant formative epoch of their lives. But it was all disconnected, trivial, the sort of knowledge useful in the sixth grade for multiple-choice tests or for scoring the odd answer on a TV quiz show. What was real, what mattered, was the present. And in the present, they and they alone were ascendant—they'd invented sex, hair, marijuana and the electric guitar, and civilization began and ended with them.

Be that as it may, the saint of the forest entered the auditorium that night like a sloop coming in off a choppy sea. The cold wind at his back blew the scarf up around his ears like a luffing sail and a
full-body shiver shook him to the gunwales. He stamped and shuddered and quaked, his elbows flying out like quivering booms, as he inched forward, boxed in by shoulders and heads, by greatcoats, army jackets and fringed vests. There was the scent of cold air on upturned collars, trailing from scarves, caught in the vegetal explosion of hair, but it faded quickly, absorbed in the warmth of the crowd. A moment later he was in, the mob dispersing, the big electric heaters wafting tropical breezes, soft lights overhead, a murmur of voices rippling about him like wavelets lapping the pier.

All at once he felt it welling up in him, a sense of exhilaration, of love as pure as Himalayan snow, of brotherhood and communal joy akin to what Gandhi must have felt among the unwashed hordes of Delhi or Lahore. He'd been a hermit too long (it was almost two weeks now), too long out of contact with the energy of the people and the élan vital of the age. Besides, he hadn't been within two feet of a girl since September, when Amy Clutterbuck had let him hold her hand in a darkened movie house in Ithaca. And now he was surrounded by them.

Here a blonde, there a blonde, everywhere a blonde, blonde, he clucked to himself as he made his way to the bleachers and mounted the levels with big, pumping, awkward strides. God, this was great! The smells alone! Perfume, incense, pot, tobacco, Sen-Sen! He was nearly dizzy with excitement as he appropriated a seat midway up the near bleacher, flung himself onto the cold hard plank and coincidentally thrust his knees into the back of the girl in front of him. But it wasn't merely a thrust—the long shanks of his legs may as well have been spring-coiled, the fierce whittled bones of his kneecaps could have been knives—no, it was a savage piercing stab to the victim's kidneys that made her jerk upright in shock and swing around on him like a Harpy.

He saw a small white face devoured by hair, eyes like violets under glass, a crease of rage between a pair of perfect unplucked eyebrows. “What the fuck's the idea?” she spat, the force of the fricative stirring the very roots of his beard.

“I—I—I—” he began, as if he were about to sneeze. But then he got hold of himself and launched into an apology so profound, so heartfelt, fawning and all-reaching that it might have mollified Ho
Chi Minh himself. He concluded by offering a stick of gum. Which she accepted.

“Long legs, huh?” she said, showing her teeth in a rich little smile.

He nodded, the sharp Crane beak stabbing at the air and the ratty braid of his hair flapping at his collar. Was he from around here? she. wanted to know. No, he was from Peterskill, just quit school at Cornell—it was a real drag, did she know what he meant?—and had his own place now, really cool, out in the woods.

“Peterskill?” she yelped. “No kidding?” She was from Van Wartville herself. Yup, born and raised. Went to private school. She was at Bard now. Did he have a car?

He did.

She wouldn't mind going home for the weekend, maybe blowing off her Monday classes and getting her father to drive her back up. Would that be okay with him—a ride maybe?

He nodded till his neck began to ache, grinned so hard the corners of his mouth went numb. Sure, of course, no problem, any time. “I'm Tom Crane,” he said, holding out his hand.

She shook, and her hand was as cold as one of the innumerable, dumb-staring perch he'd cut open in Bio lab. “I'm Mardi,” she said.

He was about to say something inane, just to keep the conversation going, something like “I'm a Libra,” but just then the lights went down and the emcee announced the band. That was when things began to get peculiar. Because instead of the band, with their ragged hair and sneers, suddenly there was another character at the microphone—a dean or something, in suit and tie-announcing in a voice that was almost a yelp that there'd been an accident and asking for the crowd's cooperation. People began to look around them. A murmur went up. It seemed that someone—a gatecrasher—had attempted to slip in through one of the great long windows that ran the length of each wall and stood about twenty feet above the floor. The gatecrasher had climbed in, hung for a moment from the ledge and then dropped down into the crowd. Or so the dean explained.

The murmur became louder. Was he—a representative of the warmongering elite—asking them, the audience, the people, to turn in one of their own? To fink, rat, betray? Tom was thunderstruck. He
studied the crown of Mardi's head, the part of her hair, the slope of her shoulders, in growing outrage. But no. That wasn't it at all. The gatecrasher had been hurt. His ring had hung up on the window catch when he dropped to the floor: the ring, along with the finger it had encircled, had been torn from his hand. Would the audience take a minute to search for the finger so that it might be saved?

The murmur rose to a shout. They were on their feet now, and a great sound of shuffling and groaning pervaded the place, as of a vast herd in migratory movement; panic was writ on their faces. Somewhere out there, in a lap or handbag or ground beneath somebody's heel, was a bleeding finger, still-living flesh: it was enough to make you get down on all fours and bay like a hound. Tom felt sick, all the joy and exhilaration gone out of him like wind from a balloon. There was a general moaning and gnashing of teeth. “There's no cause for panic!” the dean was shouting through the microphone, but no one seemed to hear him.

Mardi had stood fixedly through all of this, one step down from the saint of the forest, her eyes scanning the crowd. Now she turned to him, fanning out her hair with a reflexive jerk of her neck, and there it was, the finger. It fell, like a pale grub, from the snarled web of her hair and dropped to the seat beside her. “There!” Tom shouted, pointing at the seat in horror and fascination. “There it is!” She glanced down. And up at him. The expression on her face—she wasn't appalled, disgusted, panicked, didn't scream or dance on her toes—was like nothing Tom had ever seen. Or no: it was feral. She was a cat and this bit of flesh was something she'd prized from a nest or a hole in a tree. A smile began to make its slow way across her lips, until amidst the confusion, the howls and the uneasy fits and starts of laughter with which the place reverberated like some chamber of doom, she was beaming at him. “We cannot start the concert,” the dean was shouting, but Mardi paid no attention. Still beaming, still holding Tom's eyes, she bent ever so slightly from the waist and flicked the finger into the shadowy maw of the bleacher.

It was as if Walter had awakened from a long sleep, as if the past twenty-odd years were the illusion, and this—the dreams and visions, history and its pertinacity—the reality. He couldn't be sure of anything any more. All the empirical underpinnings of the world—Boyle's Law, Newtonian physics, doctrines of evolution and genetic inheritence, TV, gravity, the social contract, merde—had suddenly become suspect. His grandmother had been right all along. His grandmother—the fisherman's wife, with the stockings fallen down around her ankles and her faintly mustachioed upper lip rising and falling in ceaseless incantation—had perceived the world more keenly than philosophers and presidents, pharmacists and ad men. She'd seen through the veil of Maya—seen the world for what it was—a haunted place, where anything could happen and nothing was as it seemed, where shadows had fangs and doom festered in the blood. Walter felt he might float off into space, explode like a sweet potato left too long in the oven, grow hair on his palms or turn to grape jelly. Why not? If there were apparitions, shadows on dark roadways, voices speaking in the rootless night, why not imps and goblins, God, St. Nick, UFOs and
pukwidjinnies
too?

He left the hospital on a sunstruck morning in August, and the first thing he did—before he had a beer or monster burger with pickle, relish, mayonnaise, mustard and three-star chili sauce, before he hustled Jessica up to his room above the kitchen to finish what he'd begun on the hard flat institutional bed in the East Wing—was this: he went back and read the inscription on the road sign, as the bare-foot
specter of his father had advised him. Jessica drove. She wore a shift that was made of the filmy stuff of lingerie, she wore sandals, jewelry, makeup, perfume. Walter watched the trees flit by the window, one after another, in endless unbroken succession, a green so intense he had to shield his eyes; Jessica hummed along with the radio. She was effusive, lighthearted, gay and unconstrained; he was subdued and withdrawn. She prattled on about wedding plans, told jokes, fumbled with the gilt foil on the neck of the bottle of Móet et Chandon clenched between her thighs and filled him in on people they knew—Hector, Tom Crane, Susie Cats—as if he'd been gone a year. He didn't have much to say.