This is the Way the World Ends (35 page)

She opened her eyes. He was gone . . .

I don’t understand the first thing about admitteds, Morning thought. I love this man, and I have no idea what matters to him.

She ran through the maze of ice-and-steel tunnels, following the flashlight beam, chasing his crackling footfalls and the shouts that rattled off the frozen surfaces of New Amundsen-Scott Station – howls of unfathomable sadness, curses targeted against God, and, most of all, over and over, a thousand echoing demands that the universe give him a child.

The sickness began in his spleen. Sverre could feel it corrupting the fat organ, rushing outward, pouring into his lymph, pressing toward the headwaters of his heart. He lay in his bunk for hours, days, powerless to stop the progress of his unadmittance, his mind wandering the foggy border between sleep and oblivion. His brain floated on dark, tarry fluids. Occasionally it showed him snatches of his beloved Kristin, more often an Antarctic crevasse, an ice tunnel to hell.

It was all in the McMurdo Sound Agreement. Sverre had been the first of his race to gain the continent, and so he would be the first to lose it. Ragnarok, he thought. World’s End. He was satisfied with his new verse. It did not rhyme; poetry need not rhyme.
Yea, Thor struck Jormungandr the Midgard Serpent as it shot from the sea, and the worm’s last breath did blast the god and dry his blood, and next the mortal world itself did crack, locked in endless winter
. Ragnarok – when all debts fall due, all legends climax. And so, pursuant to the legend, an Antarctic storm rushed through the boat, sea dragon’s breath prying back the hatches, whooshing down the corridors, crossing Sverre’s cabin. He drew his blankets tight, but the dragon’s breath still came; it squeezed his bones and turned his gutta-percha eye into a hailstone. His ears throbbed with the detonations of Jormungandr’s heart.

He awoke. The heart was a human fist, pounding at his cabin door.

Rolling out of bed, he was hit by the smell of himself, flesh marinated in alcohol and sweat. Gin, he knew, and gin alone, would get him to the door. He limped to his writing desk, found the bottle, shoved its mouth home. His intoxicated hand staggered across the desk, knocking over the ink pot, scattering pages of the
Saga of Thor
.

Behind the door two ghosts in scopas suits waited. They were rimmed with frost. One had an ice storm raging in its beard.

‘You’re out of uniform,’ Morning said, removing her helmet.

‘Dr Valcourt?’ He took a pull at the bottle.

‘From the Pole to Astrid Land by vulture in fifty-one hours,’ she said. ‘That must be a record, right? They’ll put us in
National Geographic
.’

‘Morning and I are in love,’ said George.

‘I know,’ said the captain.

Sverre walked forward, tripped. George bear-hugged him, and the gin bottle clattered to the floor. It was shocking how insubstantial the captain had become, his skin like paper, his beard the color and consistency of dead seaweed. The fugitives carried him to the bed, lowered him into the Sverre-shaped mold in his mattress. He asked for his poem and some gin. While Morning gathered up the papers from the writing desk, George retrieved the bottle.

‘I saw the executions,’ Sverre said. ‘Tarmac refused the hood. A real four-ball general . . .’ He coughed. ‘I would like to hear the
Saga of Thor
.’

Morning read the captain his poem.

‘That’s not bad, is it?’ said Sverre.

‘You would have been one heck of an epitaph writer,’ answered George.

‘Be honest now – is it any good?’

‘In your time you became a poet,’ Morning replied.

George lifted the white raven from Sverre’s writing desk, smoothed its alabaster feathers. Holly would have named it Birdie. ‘Sir, you’ve made certain efforts on my behalf,’ he said stiffly, ‘and I appreciate them.’

‘Your name should never have been in the indictment, Paxton.’ Sverre grinned, showing teeth that resembled Indian corn. ‘Be fruitful and multiply – both of you.’

Morning fired an unambiguous glance toward George: leave him his illusions. ‘My dear Lieutenant Commander Sverre,’ she said, ‘may I assume that you never mustered yourself out of the Navy? Are you still captain of the
City of New York?
’

The dying man could not stand, and so he sat on the altar, boots dangling against the silk antependium. At one time his voice could have filled the whole chapel, rocking it as would a hellfire sermon from Reverend Sparrow, but now the engaged couple had to lean forward to catch his words.

‘Dearly beloved, we are gathered together here in the sight of . . . whatever.’ A cough attacked, spinning him around. He flailed at the air, smacked his hand against a candlestick, sent it toppling. ‘Something, something. To join together this man and this woman in . . . something. Holy matrimony. Consecrated fornication. Something.’

He took the gin bottle from his coat and drank.

‘Do you, Morning Valcourt, take this man to be your lawfully wedded wife . . . husband . . . to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse . . . something . . . for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health, to love and to cherish . . . all that. . . till death do you part?’

‘I do.’

He coughed, and black blood came up.

‘And do you, George Paxton, take this woman to be your lawfully wedded wife, to have and to hold from this day forward, for better for worse, come locusts . . . gammas rays . . . come . . . never mind. Do you?’

‘I do.’

‘Forasmuch as you have consented together in wedlock, and have witnessed the same before God and the captain of this ship, I now pronounce you husband and wife.’

Husband and wife kissed. Their scopas suits came together, separating a few seconds later with a loud, rubbery
skluck
.

When Sverre smiled, black blood spilled over his teeth. ‘Tell your children to respect the Navy.’ He collapsed on the altar, muttered, ‘Look – she’s never been clearer. Look at Kristin, would you, flying up and down on that roller coaster, up and down, so . . . clear . . .’

They laid him out, opened his claw-hammer coat. Like an abused onion Sverre lost his layers, skin, muscle, viscera, veins, nerves, all sloughing from his bones, and then there was dust, and then there was nothing, nothing at all save a solitary gutta-percha eye.

The newlyweds gathered Sverre’s vacant coat into a bundle, brought it on deck, tossed it over the side. An ice floe slapped against the coat, pounding it into the depths of the bay. A flock of penguins watched from their rookeries. Dressed in their finest tuxedos, they had come for a wedding, only to find it superseded by a funeral. They stood dutifully on the cliffs, solemn as professional mourners, until the vulture came and, with fearsome squawks and a tumultuous beating of its wings, chased them away. It was the last George ever saw of the great unextinct beast, his feathered co-defendant, freak, fluke, ender of the world. Exhausted, famished – they had not known deep sleep or a true meal in two days – husband and wife returned to their bower. They went to the galley, a wonderland of kettles, and prepared their wedding feast, eating it on the spot. Apples and pears disappeared into ravenous mouths. Turkey drumsticks were consumed half raw. Corn went down frozen. They devoured their wedding cake in batter form.

Staggering into the corridor, the happy couple realized that they were over a hundred yards from any cabin. They looked at each other. A hundred yards, a hundred miles – no difference. They dropped to the floor and nuzzled. Like a lizard abandoning its skin, George slipped out of his scopas suit. He heard a grinding noise – snores, yes, but these were the snores of Morning Valcourt, hence, pleasing snores, subtle, intelligent. Quietly he studied his new wife, this great unadmitted psychotherapist, this brilliant vulture pilot, gleaning endless delight from her freckled, ice-scarred, beautiful, sleeping face . . .

When he awoke, the world had become an erotic film, the rug soft, the corridor warm, sweat accumulating inside his underwear like sweet balm, and there she was, freshly showered and dressed in silk pajamas emblazoned with the anchor insignia of the United States Navy, displaying herself in a provocative low-angle shot, offering a wet hand. He jumped to his feet and followed her down the corridor, glorying in the fragrance of her soggy hair, his erection moving before him like a bowsprit. He shivered with the hair-trigger sexuality of adolescence. Outside the executive officer’s cabin she kissed him with awkward desire.

‘I’m sweaty,’ he said.

‘I don’t care,’ she replied, leading him over the threshold.

The cabin was ablaze. How many candles? A hundred? A thousand? Candles lovingly arranged on the nightstand, the bureau, the floor, candles stuck in gin bottles and teacups, candles lined up along the headboard like the Constellation Midgard Serpent.

‘Are we having a séance?’ he asked.

She gasped and lost her smile. George bit his lower lip mercilessly, wincing at the pain.

‘I’m sorry. I—’

‘I thought you would like them,’ she said. Her eyes grew moist. ‘They’re supposed to be . . . romantic.’

‘I like them,’ he said hastily. ‘They’re fine.’

‘Look, George, I simply don’t know about these things.’

‘They’re
very
romantic.’

‘I’ve never done this before,’ she said.

‘Follow my lead.’

He placed his arms around her, massaged her shoulder blades. She did the same to him. He undid her top, working the wonderfully pliant buttons, tossed it onto the bed, the only place in the room where it would not catch fire. She mimicked him; his undershirt flew away. Though not large, her breasts still partook unmistakably of that inscrutable genre of sensuality, that religion of round altars, source of obsessions so intense that the males of his extinct species had been mystified and powerless, the females mystified and annoyed, and so he gawked, feeling that he owed the indulgence not only to himself but also to his dead gender, and then he kissed her nipples, which pushed out like brown shoots from soil, and within seconds she had picked up the cue and was kissing his.

He finished unclothing her. She reciprocated. They stood together in the flaming room.

‘You see, I have to put this in you.’ Ready to burst, he lowered her onto the bed.

‘So I’ve read.’ She laughed. ‘Do I put something in you? I forget.’

He entered her, sawed, released his eager sperm. He withdrew instantly.

‘Was that it?’ she asked.

‘The first time you drank coffee – you were probably nine or something – you didn’t like it, right?’

‘I was never nine.’

He pivoted, put his legs over the bed. A candle flame nipped at his ankle. ‘What we really need, I think’ – he stood up – ‘is for me to wash.’

He went to the adjoining shower, feeling like a general who had lost a battle but still retained high hopes for the war. Morning followed faithfully. They bathed each other, kissed wetly. She was so solid, so gloriously bone-filled – not at all what he expected of her race. He had heard of the psychology experiment in which a male rat is kept endlessly potent through a steady supply of new mates, and when he saw how the water changed her, rolling in glittery pebbles down her impossibly desirable sides, and then, a few moments later, when he saw how the sheets gathered around her thighs changed her yet again, he knew that he had found in Morning Valcourt an infinite source of arousal.

This time it was a screw of which both their sexes would have been proud. She began to grasp the crux of the matter, liquifying, trembling, reveling in the unfamiliar feelings. Memories of her canceled love life flooded back. He touched her with the same appreciative passion he had brought to creviced granite. Her orgasm was florid and long, driving him to analogous spasms. They napped, awoke, met again amid the little flames, Morning improvising now, initiating novelties, using her leased body to deny her unadmittance, and he realized that, when all was said and done, she had a greater aptitude for this than he. His pleasure was fuller than he had ever known it. Around the clock they subsisted on sex – napping, eating, breathing for its sake. They discovered uncharted orifices, claimed them; they invented lewd jokes, some verbal, some enacted with fingers and mouths; they drank each other, rutted, tried to make it dirty, then cosmic, so that on some occasions they fucked, on others they made love, ever mindful of the potential in new locations – the gaming tables, the chapel, the swimming pools, the main mess hall, her office. She got her period. They screwed on sheets soaked with black blood. His cock darkened. Their mutual maneuvers, their thrusts and archings, became gestures of defiance, acts that mocked the bad ideas, and as George’s seeds lashed their excellent tails and struggled through Morning’s eggless womb, the couple found themselves mentally cheering, thinking: try anyway, you wretched little bastards, be fruitful and multiply, for unto us a child will be born, you can do it, try.

CHAPTER NINETEEN

In Which Information Is Conveyed Suggesting that Nostradamus Saw the Truth and Leonardo da Vinci Painted It

April is the crudest month, never stopping, intent on causing May. George’s wife grew weak. A cough raged through her. The warm, ebony blood drained from her face, leaving it chalky and dry. Her hair became brittle. Odd noises rose from deep within her, wheezes and scrapings, sounds like burning cellophane.

Sometimes George would find her in the periscope room, hugging one of the machines, pressing it into the shank of her body until her vibrations stopped. She began staying in bed all day, breathing soggily, spitting up ink.

‘I want to talk,’ she said.

‘About what?’

‘My life.’

‘Won’t that make you sad?’ Slipping a second pillow under her heavy head, he could not help but notice the stale vapors coming from her mouth.

‘Yes.’ Black veins pulsed in her eyes.

He kissed his wife. ‘Let’s talk.’

‘Leaves keep occurring to me, autumn leaves, every type, red, yellow. I think I spent some time in Vermont. I would have liked primitive art – this is quite clear – and going into libraries and reading the book spines, so many of them, famous and obscure all jumbled together. Also, I never outgrew stuffed animals.’