Toward the End of Time (38 page)

The overlooked corners of the maps and time charts fascinate me—the so-called Dark Ages, for instance, from the fall of Rome to the year 1000. Not only do these centuries contain the unconscious (to its citizens) permutation of Roman institutions into pre-medieval simulacra, and the incongruous sunburst of Irish monasticism while the Saracens and Vikings were squeezing Europe to a terrified sliver, but in humble anonymous farmsteads and workshops technological leaps never dared by the theorizing, slave-bound ancients were at last executed—the crank and the horseshoe, the horse collar and the stirrup all first appear in, of all apparently Godforsaken centuries, the ninth. By the year 1000 the wheeled Saxon plow, wind and water mills, and three-field crop rotation were extending a carpet of tillage the sages of Greece and tyrants of Rome had never imagined. Perhaps now, in the decadent and half-destroyed world that spreads below my hilltop, similar technological seeds are germinating. Decadence, like destruction, has this to be said for it: it frees men up. Men die, but mankind is as tough and resilient as the living wood that groans and sighs outside my window.

A big white truck roars in the driveway, splashing to a stop. Gloria, her clogs swiftly clacking, goes to the door and there is a surprisingly long, even an intimate, exchange. Stiffly pushing out of bed, whose wrinkled, odorous sheets have become my loathsome second skin, I move to the window and look down, in time to see the FedEx man—or woman; the hair is intermediate—turn away and get back into the driver’s seat. He or she is tucking some sepia scrip into a leather billfold, and there is a thick leather triangle
belted beneath the dark-blue shirt. I call for Gloria to come upstairs; she finally obliges. Her radiant, intelligent, mature face, framed by cleverly tinted ash-blond hair, is as painful to look at as the sun.

“Was that something for me?” I croak.

“No, dear. For
me
, believe it or not.”

“What was it?”

“It was a transaction.”

“Obviously. What sort of transaction?”

“Well, I didn’t want to tell you, but FedEx collects a monthly fee now.”

“For what?”

Her already bright face brightened further. “For everything. For the utilities, and road maintenance, and our protection. FedEx is taking over a lot of what the government used to do but can’t. It’s like the Pony Express, taming the West.”

“Or Mussolini making the trains run on time.” The allusion went by her; the last war had made World War II as dim as a post-office mural. I asked, “What about the nice people I used to pay protection to? Spin and Phil, and then the boys from Lynn.”

“A bunch of pathetic thugs, darling. They’ve all gone out of business. FedEx is nationwide; they have a network that can put New England into touch with Chicago and California again. It’s a Godsend, really.”

“You sound like a commercial.”

“When something is an improvement, I’m not afraid to say so, unlike some grumpy old cynics I know. You just concentrate on keeping your diapers changed, and do your exercises.”

Kegel exercises—mental exercises designed to reactivate
the traumatized urethral sphincter. It was frustratingly difficult to locate with the mind those clusters of tiny muscles (there are two, one around the rectum and the other around the base of the penis) which we learn to manage not long after we learn to walk and talk, thus obtaining our ticket of admission to respectable human society. Well, I had fallen out of the club. And I had never known that Gloria regarded me as a cynic. In relation to what sunny philosophy of her own? In a marriage, as our flesh matters less, our opinions matter more. But I didn’t want to argue, I didn’t have the strength. I said, “It looked from the window as though he was packing a gun.”

“She. A very nice, competent young woman was driving the truck, Mr. Chauvinist. And yes, they do have to carry guns, with their new responsibilities. They need to defend themselves, and us, against anti-social elements. Those voices I kept hearing in the woods—I told FedEx about them, and sure enough they stopped.”

“They were children’s voices,” I said, her revelation touching some other muscles in me I didn’t know I had.

“They were trespassing voices,” Gloria said, irresistible in her clarity of purpose and conscience.

“Did it ever occur to you,” I asked her, “that
I
might be an anti-social element?”

“What you are is a very sick man who will get better if you do your exercises.”

“My trouble is,” I confessed, “I don’t even know if I’m doing them. I may be just tightening my stomach muscles.”

“Think prick,” she said. My fall has brought a new frankness to our relationship, a tonic simplicity as in those far off days when we knew upon meeting that, if we had smidgeon of privacy and ten minutes of time, we would
fuck, cementing our bond, nailing down our hotly contested stake in each other.
Think prick:
nothing cynical about that.

The house is cold now in the mornings and evenings, but Gloria won’t let me turn on the furnace. Her father, a rigid, pipe-puffing Connecticut squire, never touched the thermostat until All Saints’ Day, she says. By the same calendar he switched from whiskey-and-soda to gin-and-tonic on Memorial Day, and back again on Labor Day. Seersucker suits and tweeds moved in and out of his closet as systematically as changing the guard at Buckingham Palace, and he never took his Mercedes out of the garage without checking the oil. He was a saint of proper procedures. On the coldest days before All Saints’ Day, he would set a log fire in the Wilton living room, and they would all have tea, little Gloria’s chamomile in a flowered cup, Mommy and Daddy’s smoky Darjeeling poured from the blue-green pot with evil-looking long-tailed birds on it, and little cakes served on a tray by their faithful maid Mary, named after the mother of God. She had a pointed nose red at the tip, from the master’s love of a cold house, perhaps. When Gloria touches me her hands feel icy. I wonder if I am running a permanent fever, my body furious at how it has been invaded.

Opening the kitchen cabinet to get down a mug for my morning tea (common Lipton’s, in a tagged bag), I am blinded by sunlight and fear I might clumsily break something. The slant of sun is different, lower, now. We are past the equinox. The Earth is like a ship that has slightly changed course; we would not notice but that the sun warms the panelled wood of our cabin at a slightly different spot in the
grain as we dress for dinner. Last night, getting up to change my diaper, I saw the half-moon tipped halfway onto its back, and I made myself realize, in my drowsy gut, that the moon’s illumined half was turned toward the sun, which had plunged out of sight behind the Kellys’ trees hours ago, but in the slant direction from which the moon was lit. Two balls in the sky, one bright, one reflective: it’s that simple. We live among their orbits like dust mites in the works of a clock.

The storm gone northeast to Newfoundland, the weather is clear and calm. The sea has milky stripes of extra calm in it, and even the lobster boats on the far side of Cat Island look sharp and white and close. Twenty miles away, the shore of Hingham and Hull—where last July I could see fireworks go off, fuzzy and faint as comets—floats a sharp, detailed blue above a mirroring width of what seems sheer air.

Other optical illusions:

1. Shaving the other morning, I saw what seemed a giant bright-amber butterfly flapping frantically at my bathroom window, and only slowly realized that it was my stirred-up shaving water, into which I kept dipping my razor, reflecting electric light back into the window, semi-opaque at that newly shadowy 7:00 a.m. hour.

2. On the first day that I felt I had strength to walk down to the mailbox, I saw, as I shuffled (“One small step for a man …”) through the turn in the driveway, a long dark silhouette of something perched crookedly on the mailbox lid. My first thought was that a great bird, a crane or buzzard or pterodactyl, had alighted there; my next, that a package toe big to fit inside had been attached to the outside catch with rubber bands at a weird angle. Then, as I fearfully advanced I saw the shadow to be a piece of low hemlock limb intervening in my field of out-of-practice vision. It was always there. I had not taken this walk for seven weeks.

The vines in the woods—poison ivy and Virginia creeper— are beginning to redden, and the maples, each in its way. The tall red maple, so called, gradually turns a sober burgundy, while the more impulsive, larger-leaved sugar maple flashes into swathes of orange and a neon pink. The Norway maples planted downtown in the village will yield a clear yellow a bit duller than the hickories’. I saw from the car window as Gloria drove me to the Lahey Clinic in Danvers for some blood tests a splendid tall hickory whose outer leaves, basking in the mellow September sunlight, were still green, while the shaded inner leaves were already golden— a core of gold, a flickering inner life sheathed in seemly decorum; it gave the impression, as we sped by in the Infiniti, of a captive girlish soul, a twirling dryad.

Roberta brought Keith and Jennifer to visit me—my children have become solicitous, fluttering bothersomely, albeit loyally, about the wreck of my progenitive apparatus, whereby they came to be. In their adult, wrinkling faces I still see the plump cheeks and candid trusting gaze of ten-year-olds looking to me for protection and guidance and, most difficult to provide, entertainment. How can I explain that I must be left alone, without any pulling and hauling from loving kin, if I am to heal? That I have had my use of the world and my only salvation lies within, in tending the altar of my wound and waiting for nature or the force beyond it to slide me subtly away from my own disaster, by an invisible series of steps, into another world?

We fed Jennifer lunch. She kept taking the silver porringer, which cost a fistful of scrip at Firestone & Parson, and dumping its contents on the high-chair tray and then deliberately dropping the already much-dented porringer to
the floor. The fourth time she did it, with her challenging slate-blue stare directly on me, I exploded.
“Stop it
,” I said to Jennifer, and to Roberta, whiningly, “Why does she keep
doing
that?”

The baby, who had recently had her first birthday, was not used to being shouted at; her mouth formed a tiny circlet, with a bubble in it, before her lips downturned and she began to cry, to howl, and then to sob and sniffle.

Roberta comforted her. “Oh, Precious,” she said, “Grampy didn’t mean it; he’s just forgotten what little girls are like.” To me she explained, “Daddy, it’s just her way of getting used
to space.”

My daughter’s remark, derived no doubt from some digitized handbook of child development, was helpful: I saw an affinity between the infant and myself, beyond our both being clad in diapers. With gestures and perceptions as fumbling as hers, I was getting used to
time
.

It is a curious entity. It doesn’t exist, I have read, at the particle level: the basic laws of physics are time-symmetric, but for one tiny exception, the particle called the neutral kaon. Were it not for the neutral kaon, perhaps, buildings would self-assemble as frequently as they collapse, and old men would become young in more than their dreams.

In my dreams, I seem to roam a long harvest table heaped with the past eras of my life. One night, I am back in Hammond Falls High School, swinging down the locker-lined halls in my penny loafers and frayed blue jeans—frayed and torn up to the limit the school dress code allows, for beneath the anti-social pose I am a conscientious student, with a college career and lifelong escape from Hammond Falls my sneaking ambition. I chestily inhale effluvia of hair oil and cheap perfume and hormonal overproduction; I eye the knockout girls in their rounded sweaters and pleated skirts
and anticipate a Saturday-night sally into Pittsfield with my pals—dinner at the Dalton Avenue McDonald’s or Teo’s and a movie at the Showplace or the Capitol on North Street, followed by apple pie at Rosa’s or the Popcorn Wagon. City streets, illegal beers, lamplight reflected in black puddles, freedom and sin around the corner. The tender heat and latent violence of high school, its fast crass glamour, are all around me, along with the quaint orderliness of its hourly bells and scheduled migrations from room to room. Killers in our walks, we of the Class of 71 are yet as docile as concentration-camp inmates. Though the “system” is widely mocked and deplored, no better has materialized to rescue us from these locker-lined halls, with their hopeful, rebellious clatter.