This is the Way the World Ends Page 10

  “Throw-weight?”

  “Nine pounds.”

  Later that day, after the three Erebus evacuees were gone, Sverre ordered his officers and men to their main battle stations. The launch tubes were pressurized to match the outside ocean. The hatches opened. A small rocket in the rail of each Multiprong missile began to burn, boiling pools of water in the tubes. Steam built up, hurling the missiles to the surface, whereupon the main motors ignited. The stages fell away. Within fifteen minutes the warhead buses had scattered their sterile payloads across the Gulf of Mexico, from the Florida Keys to the vanished city of New Orleans.

  Like all Philadelphia-class fleet ballistic missile submarines, SSBN 713 City of New York held within its lowest decks a labyrinth of forgotten passageways and unmarked corridors. Leaving Sverre’s cabin, George realized that he and Brat were for the moment not on speaking terms—he could tell by the general’s sour face, his aloof gait—and so he ran ahead, soon finding himself in the submarine equivalent of a back alley. Naked light bulbs swung on brown cords like phosphorescent spiders. The air was murky and still. He became aware of the boat’s sound, a fitful hum. Under other conditions, getting lost this way would have upset him, but he was still feeling extraordinarily good about his strategic decision. Thanks to him, the men, women, and children of the Soviet Union had been spared a retaliatory strike—my monument to Holly, he thought, as glorious and firm as any block of granite.

  He pounded on doors. The echoes traveled up and down the empty corridor. He tested the latches. Every cabin was sealed as tight as the cottage-like tomb that the Sweetser family owned back in Rosehaven Cemetery. Fear weaved through his chest and bowels—a creeping conviction that Peach and Cobb would soon appear and inflict some new torture on him. Hell, anybody would have signed that ridiculous sales contract. Anybody. Black blood. Just like Mrs. Covington. Certain facts should not be thought about too much. I shall think about something else. Holly saved Russia…

  Beneath a nearby door, an orange glow advanced and retreated like surf. George approached, knocked.

  “Come in.”

  A female voice. Entering, he saw a monster. He stopped dead and thought, yes, they’re on the loose again, trying to intimidate me…

  It looked like a gigantic winged shark. The eyes shot blood, the nostrils flamed and smoked like the vents of a volcano.

  He had seen this species before.

  “Hello, George.”

  In the center of the cabin an old woman stood hunched over the sort of antique machine that, as he knew from taking Holly to the Boston Children’s Museum, was called a magic lantern. A cone of smoke-filled light spread toward the projected vulture. Shadows hovered above the woman’s nose and cheeks. She removed the vulture, slipped it under a stack of similar glass paintings.

  “Mrs. Covington! I never expected to meet you here.”

  “It’s good to see you again, George.”

  “I did those pencil drafts we talked about.” As usual, Mrs. Covington’s presence filled him with well-being. “‘She was better than she knew,’ remember? ‘He never found out what he was doing here.’ They looked pretty good. Design seven-oh-three-four. I guess they got burned up.”

  “We mustn’t dwell on Wildgrove,” said Nadine. “I loved that town. The children. Nickie Frostig died in my arms. Blast wound.” She gestured toward the glass slides. “Some people say these paintings show the future.” Her raincoat looked wet and slimy, as if made of live eels. “Do you believe in prophecy?”

  “I’m a Unitarian, ma’am.”

  “They’ve been in my family for centuries—painted by Leonardo da Vinci during his last days. The seer Nostradamus—that brilliant, courageous, plague-fighting Renaissance scholar—dictated their content. Want to see the future, George?”

  She inserted a new slide. A short, muscular, bearded man stood alone on a boundless plain of ice.

  “My goodness, I guess I really am going to Antarctica,” he said.

  She changed slides. George saw himself in the Silver Dollar Casino, playing poker with Randstable and Wengernook.

  As the show continued, it proved far more varied and perplexing than the other such presentation he had seen that afternoon. Slide: George sitting at a banquet table, eating ham. Slide: Captain Sverre slashing his own forearm with a knife. Slide: the vulture again, devouring a dead penguin.

  A happy family burst upon the wall—husband, wife, young child. They were dressed in scopas suits. The child’s suit was gold. Their various arms and torsos had fused in a complex hug. Their smiles threw back twice the brightness that the lantern flame provided.

  No visual image, painted, photographed, or dreamed, had ever moved George so much as that adroitly rendered Leonardo. The child was Holly. Compared with this truth, his realization that the man was himself and that the woman was Dr. Morning Valcourt seemed almost dull.

  “I know the man,” said Nadine. “And I’ve seen the woman around here. But the child—”

  “It’s Holly!” The future! Some people said these paintings showed the future!

  “Nobody except you got out of Wildgrove. Dr. Valcourt told you that.”

  “But it looks like Holly.”

  “Exactly like her?”

  “Yes. Exactly. Perhaps not exactly. But…if it’s not Holly, then…”

  Aubrey?

  “The sister we were going to give Holly?” he asked.

  “Nobody except you got out of—”

  All right. Not her sister. Who then? He studied Dr. Valcourt’s glowing, flickering face. Though ill-equipped for smiling—he remembered her chilly persona, her brisk manner—she was doing an excellent job of it.

  “Holly’s stepsister? Dr. Valcourt and I will marry and then have a baby girl?”

  “A reasonable interpretation.”

  “I’ll call her Aubrey.”

  “Lovely name. Do you like Dr. Valcourt?”

  “Not at all.” The wrong thing to say, he decided. “I’ll learn to like her.” His bullet wound throbbed with excitement. “I’ll do anything to get Aubrey. Marry a snake.”

  Nadine yanked the family portrait off the screen. “Evidently you will become a father again.”

  He envisioned the Giant Ride mechanical horse from Sandy’s Sandwich Shop. Aubrey sat bouncing in the saddle, giggling, trilling. Horse. Donkey. Mule. Infertility…“No, that can’t be right either,” he said. “I’m sterile as a mule. That’s what Dr. Brust told me. My secondary spermatocytes…the radiation.”

  Nadine projected a new slide. A man approached the gates of a fabulous white city. Its marble ramparts glowed beneath a skull-faced moon.

  George saw that the pilgrim was himself.

  “Even in this age of chaos,” said Nadine, “there are places one can go to have one’s fertility restored. The earth has its marble cities.”

  After swaddling the glass slides in a US Navy bath towel, Nadine slipped them into the pocket of her raincoat. She opened the side of the magic lantern, blew out the flame, and lowered the hot device into a canvas duffel bag.

  “Let me help you with that,” he said.

  She seemed not to hear. Slinging the bundle over her shoulder, she hobbled into the corridor. He followed her up a long spiral staircase. So great was his obsession with the thought of Holly’s reincarnation—Aubrey Paxton, predicted by Nostradamus, painted by Leonardo da Vinci, fathered by George Paxton, borne by Morning Valcourt—that he was taken aback upon seeing that Nadine had led him to the deck of the surfaced submarine. The air was choked with puffs of dark vapor. Waves detonated along the speeding prow. The wind stung his cheeks; it tugged his hair like a comb in the hands of a vindictive parent. God! So cold!

  An open sailboat bobbed beside the hull, Nadine sitting in the stern. After hoisting the sail, she reached into her raincoat and pulled out a magic lantern slide, placing her gloved hand over the painted surface to protect it from spray. George took it like a starving man receiving bread.

  “How can I find that
city?” he called.

  “I have no idea,” she replied, casting off.

  “Was this Nostradamus any good?”

  “He was on to something.”

  A great, ever-expanding wedge of ocean and air grew between them. George looked at his Leonardo—the detail was astonishing, like the circuits on a computer chip, and he was especially impressed by the firm, crisp contours of Aubrey’s beautiful face. The wind quickened. Sea water began dripping from his hair. He moved the painting away before it got wet, tucked it under his shirt. When he glanced toward the horizon, Nadine Covington’s sailboat had become a firm white sliver beating its way south toward the horse latitudes.

  CHAPTER 8

  In Which Our Hero Witnesses Some of the Many Surprising Effects of Nuclear War, Including Sundeath, Timefolds, and Unadmittance

  “I had a happy childhood,” said George at the beginning of his first treatment session.

  “Happy childhoods are overrated,” his therapist replied.

  When George first met her, he had found Morning Valcourt vaguely attractive, but now he saw that the surgical mask she wore during their encounter in the radiation unit had been covering cheeks littered with scab-like freckles, a nose that seemed always to be experiencing a stench, and a mouth perpetually poised on the brink of a snarl. Yet Leonardo had given her a warm smile…obviously an artist of formidable imagination.

  “I’ll be honest,” she said. “Survivor’s guilt threatens its victims with sudden mental collapse. To prevent this, we must tear certain facts from the shadowland of denial, thrusting them into the daylight of consciousness.”

  Could this pompous woman really be Aubrey’s mother? When would the warm smiling start?

  “Any trouble sleeping lately?” she asked.

  “I used to suffer from somnambulism. A couple of ensigns cured me of that.”

  “What ensigns?”

  “Peach and Cobb. They said they’ve always been with me, waiting to get in.”

  “But you’re sleeping through the night?”

  “Yes.”

  “Losing weight?”

  “No.”

  “Bowels okay?”

  “Fine.” It would take considerable ambition to fall in love with this woman.

  “I’ve been prescribing a lot of sedatives lately,” she said, “but in your case I’d rather not. They found you clutching a golden scopas suit.”

  “I got it from an inventor. Professor Theophilus Carter. He made me sign a sales contract.”

  “I know. A confession of complicity. I don’t approve of such things. Tell me what happened after you left Carter’s shop.”

  George sucked air across his teeth, making the roots ache. He spoke of searing light and a mushroom cloud, of fires, wounds, black dust, and cries for water, of people needing burn wards that no longer existed. A desperate pause followed each image, so that the hour was nearly up by the time he got to the smashed Giant Ride horse. “She loved that stupid thing,” he said. Scar tissue grew in his throat.

  “It’s unendurable, isn’t it?”

  The tenderness in Morning’s voice caught him by surprise. “Unendurable,” he repeated.

  “Chicago winters got awfully cold,” she continued softly, “but I had lots of books in the apartment, shelves floor to ceiling, so we were quite snug, me and the cats. I used to put all the warm authors on the windward side—Emily Dickinson, Scott Fitzgerald. Henry James gives off his own draft. I lived a block from my little sister—a Methodist minister and in her own way a better therapist than I. We called Linda the white sheep of the family. All I want is to be able to bury her.” Leonardo was right: Morning could smile. This was not the joyful smile of the mother in the portrait, however, but the brave, taut smile of someone fighting tears. “Linda was the best person I ever knew.”

  “That would make a good epitaph. I keep wondering how they feel about being dead.”

  “Your wife and daughter?”

  “Yes, And the others.”

  “You wonder how they feel—?”

  “About being dead. That’s crazy, isn’t it?”

  “Do you think it’s crazy?”

  “They’re dead. They don’t feel anything about it…Sverre said there are pockets of survivors.”

  “No doubt.”

  “You don’t suppose—?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “I just thought—”

  “You entered the bomb crater, right? And then your neighbor shot you?”

  George chomped on his lower lip. “I ended up on the ground. Next thing I knew, a vulture was hovering over me.”

  “A what?”

  “A vulture. A large black vulture—big as one of those flying dinosaurs, you know, the pterodactyls.”

  “The pterodactyls were not dinosaurs.” She issued a succinct, intellectual frown. “Close enough. This is not the first time a vulture has entered the annals of psychotherapy. The species once haunted the great Leonardo.”

  “Leonardo da Vinci?” George asked.

  “Yes.”

  “I have one of his paintings.”

  “You believe that you own an original Leonardo?”

  “I do own one. I keep it in my cabin.”

  She gave her eyes a quick toss to the left, as if to say, Well, we have our work cut out for us, don’t we, you lunatic, and stood up. Her stiff and forbidding gray suit was like a whole-body chastity belt.

  She walked to a bookcase stuffed with volumes on brain diseases. Her office reconciled the rational and the primal—an anatomy chart, a Navaho tapestry, a ceramic brain, a Hindu god, a biofeedback rig, an obsidian knife that had last seen employment in a human sacrifice. She removed a slender volume, flashed the title—Sigmund Freud’s Leonardo da Vinci: A Study in Psychosexuality—opened it. “When Leonardo was a baby,” she said, “a vulture swooped down to his cradle and massaged his lips with its tail. Or so he believed. Did your vulture do that?”

  “My vulture?”

  “The one that appeared at ground zero.”

  “Are you saying it was a hallucination?”

  “Do you think it was a hallucination?”

  “I don’t know.” George was not forming a very positive first impression of psychotherapy. “My vulture did not massage my lips,” he reported.

  “Leonardo, it seems, was illegitimate. He and his mother had an intense relationship—much kissing and pampering.” She hugged a phantom baby. “You must understand that, in ancient times, maternity cults commonly centered on vultures. The Egyptians believed it was a species without males, inseminated by the winds. Through the vulture fantasy, Leonardo was confessing to a sexually charged relationship with his mother—or so Freud theorized. The tail prying open the lips. The insertion.”

  “I thought we were going to talk about my problems,” said George.

  She slammed the book shut with the suddenness of a steel trap being sprung. “On Monday your immersion in death begins,” she announced evenly.

  George took out his wallet and removed a rectangle from its blurry plastic envelope. “Do me a favor? Hide this where I can’t find it.” He set the rectangle on the desk. “I keep looking at it.”

  The therapist picked up Holly’s picture—her official class photograph from the Sunflower Nursery School—and placed it in her top desk drawer.

  While Holly’s nursery school picture had been a wellspring of grief—“unendurable” was his therapist’s word, the perfect word, for his loss—the portrait of himself, Aubrey, and Morning was another matter entirely. He looked at it whenever he could, testing it under different kinds of light, memorizing each brush stroke. On Saturday afternoon he looked at it for so long that he lost track of time, consequently arriving several minutes late for the screening of Sergei Bondarchuk’s lengthy film adaptation of War and Peace.

  Pierre Bezukhov and Prince Andrei Bolkonsky were walking through the woods. “If evil men can work together to get what they want,” said the narrator, “then so can good men, to
get what they want.”

  George enjoyed the battles of Schoengraben and Austerlitz. The lines of infantrymen stretched on and on, far beyond the reach of the camera’s lens.

  When the lights came up for the first intermission, he saw that the only people in the little theater were himself, an enlisted man, Randstable, and—shifting now in the row ahead, turning to face George—an older gentleman who, with his bushy beard and substantial abdomen, might have found employment as Santa Claus’s stunt double.

  “Hello, friend.” When Santa Claus smiled, his beard expanded like a peacock’s tail.

  “Are you an Erebus evacuee?” George asked.

  “Brian Overwhite,” said Santa, nodding. “US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency.”

  “I’d heard you were aboard.”

  “My ticket for Geneva had just arrived—we were about to begin the STABLE III talks—when this war…incredible, isn’t it? The mind isn’t built for such things. Nuclear exchanges. Failed deterrence. STABLE III would have put tough limits on missile throw-weight and anti-satellite weapons—that was my hope, anyway.”

  “I’m George Paxton.” He went to shake Overwhite’s hand. A sling cradled the negotiator’s right arm. “Were you in one of the battles?”

  “No—two unreasonable ensigns came after me. Cousins.”

  “I know who you mean.”

  “They said, ‘You’ve spent your life controlling other people’s arms, and now we’re going to control yours!’ So they broke it. Snapped the damn ulna. I reported the incident to Lieutenant Grass. Now get this—the man laughed at me. That’s right. He laughed.”

  “There seems to be some kind of resentment against us,” said George. “Take me, for example. I was placed in a torpedo tube.”

  “Resentment? Yeah, I guess that’s the word for it.” Overwhite scratched his cast, as if trying to relieve an itch. “Tell me, George, which do you fear more, the gamma rays or the betas?”

  “What?”

  “The gammas go shooting right through you, zip, zip, but the betas ride in on the food you eat and the air you breathe.” Overwhite reached under his beard and caressed his throat. “The buildup in the thyroid is what you’ve got to watch for. The betas go for the thyroid, especially with the children. It’s a terrible thing when they won’t even let you negotiate a simple goddamn arms control agreement.”