Toward The End Of Time Part 1

Toward the End of Time.

by John Updike.

familiar only with G.o.d, We yearn to be pierced by that Occasional void through which the supernatural flows.-CHARLES WRIGHT, "Lives of the Saints"We cannot tell that we are constantly splitting into duplicate selves because our consciousness rides smoothly along only one path in the endlessly forking chains.-MARTIN GARDNER, "Wap, Sap, Pap, and Fap"

i.The Deer.

FIRST SNOW: it came this year late in November. Gloria and I awoke to see a fragile white inch on the oak branches outside the bathroom windows, and on the curving driveway below, and on the circle of lawn the driveway encloses-the leaves still unraked, the gra.s.s still green. I looked into myself for a trace of childhood exhilaration at the sight and found none, just a quickened awareness of being behind in my ch.o.r.es and an unfocused dread of time itself, time that churns the seasons and that had brought me this new offering, this heavy new radiant day like a fresh meal brightly served in a hospital to a patient with a dwindling appet.i.te.

And yet does the appet.i.te for new days ever really cease? An hour later, I was was exhilarated, clearing my porch and its single long granite step with my new orange plastic shovel, bought cheap and shaped like a scoop and much more silkily serviceable than the c.u.mbersome metal snow shovels of my childhood, with their sticky surfaces and noisy bent edges. Plastic shovels are an improvement-can you believe it? The world does not only get worse. Lightweight, the shovel hurled flakes sparkling into the still air, onto the bobbing leucothoe in the border bed. There had been bloated yews there, planted by the previous owner beneath the windowsills and over the years grown to eclipse the windows and darken the living room. My wife, the dynamic Gloria, commanded men to come and tear them out and plant little bushes that in turn are getting increasingly s.h.a.ggy. Nature refuses to rest. exhilarated, clearing my porch and its single long granite step with my new orange plastic shovel, bought cheap and shaped like a scoop and much more silkily serviceable than the c.u.mbersome metal snow shovels of my childhood, with their sticky surfaces and noisy bent edges. Plastic shovels are an improvement-can you believe it? The world does not only get worse. Lightweight, the shovel hurled flakes sparkling into the still air, onto the bobbing leucothoe in the border bed. There had been bloated yews there, planted by the previous owner beneath the windowsills and over the years grown to eclipse the windows and darken the living room. My wife, the dynamic Gloria, commanded men to come and tear them out and plant little bushes that in turn are getting increasingly s.h.a.ggy. Nature refuses to rest.

The transient sparkles seemed for a microsecond engraved upon the air. The weathervane on the garage, a copper mallard in the act of landing-wings lifted, webbed feet spread-pointed west, into a wind too faint to be felt. The snow was too early and light to summon the plowing service (our garden-and-lawn service in its winter guise), and I hadn't even planted the reflector stakes around the driveway; but that inch evidently intimidated the FedEx truck driver, for at some point in the quiet morning a stiff purple, orange, and white FedEx envelope appeared between the storm door and the front door without the truck's making its way up the driveway. How did the envelope-containing some bond slips I was in no hurry for-get there? By the time I walked, in mid-afternoon, down to the mailbox, a number of trucks and cars, including one cautiously driven by my wife, had pa.s.sed up and down. It was only when walking back up the hill that I was struck by-between the two broad grooves worn by tire treads-the footprints.

They were not mine. My boots have a distinctive sole, a mix of arcs and horizontals like the longitude and lat.i.tude lines on a globe. Nor could I match my stride to the other footprints-they were too far apart, though I am not short-legged, or unvigorous. But, stretch my legs as I would, I could not place my boots in the oblongs left by this other's pa.s.sing. Had a giant invaded my terrain? An angel dropped down from Heaven? The solution eventually came to me: the FedEx driver this morning, not wishing to trust his (or her; a number are women, in their policelike uniforms of gray-blue) wide truck to the upward twists of our driveway, had dismounted and raced up and back. He-no woman could have run uphill with such a stride-had cruelly felt the pressure of time.

Yet, though I had solved the mystery, the idea of a visitation by a supernatural being stayed with me, as I clumped into the house and spread the mail, the main spiritual meal of my day, upon the kitchen table. Perhaps the word is not "spiritual" but "social" or "contactual"-since my retirement from the Boston financial world I go for days without talking to anyone but my wife. I have kept a few old clients, and transactions for them and my own portfolio are frequently handled by FedEx. I once enjoyed the resources of faxing and e-mail, but when I retired I cut the wires, so to speak. I wanted to get back to nature and my own human basics before saying goodbye to everything.

My premonition of the FedEx driver as a supernatural creature was not merely an aging man's mirage: creatures other than ourselves do exist, some of them quite large. Whales, elephants, rhinoceri, Bengal tigers, not quite extinct, though the last Siberian tigers perished in the recent war. Giraffes and moose, those towering creations, even flourish. Deer haunt our property here. Walking on our driveway, I sometimes see an especially bold doe in the woods-a big haunchy animal the dull dun color of a rabbit, holding motionless as if to blend into the shadows of the trees. The doe stares at me with a directness I might think was insolence instead of an alert wariness. Her heart must be racing. Mine is. When I say a word or make as if to fling a stone, she wheels and flees. The amount of white tail she shows is startling. Startling also are the white edges of her large round ears, which swivel like dish antennae, above the black, globular, wet eyes.

Gloria does not share my enchantment, so I do not tell her of these surrept.i.tious encounters. She rants against these poor deer, who ate her tulip shoots in the spring and trimmed her rosebush of blooms in September. Who would imagine that deer would eat roses? My wife wants the deer killed. She gets on the telephone, searching for men with rifles or bows and arrows and an atavistic hunger for venison and the patience to stand for hours on a platform they will build in the trees; she has heard rumors of such men. So much projected effort makes me weary. My wife is a killer. She dreams at night of my death, and when she awakens, in her guilty consciousness she gives my body a hug that shatters my own desirous dreams. By daylight she pumps me full of vitamins and advice as if to prolong my life but I know her dreams' truth: she wants me and the deer both dead.

More snow, in early December. This morning, as I dressed to the shimmering, straining (what are they aspiring to? what Heaven awaits at the edge of their resolved harmonies?) violins of Vivaldi's Four Seasons Four Seasons, I saw a deer, looking like a large dark dog, curled up on the flagpole platform at the front of the lawn, toward the sea, with its snow-dusted islands. We have a majestic view, south and southwest across Ma.s.sachusetts Bay, and the sight of the reposing deer was also majestic. I must have thought I was married to some other wife, to judge from the innocent enthusiasm with which I called the deer to the attention of my own. She became galvanized, rapidly dressing and urging me to follow her downstairs while still in my pajamas. "Just Put on boots and a coat," she commanded.

Obedient, I yet thought of my years, my heart. Gloria makes my heart race, once with appet.i.te, now with fear.

She raced to the closet under the stairs and from its hiding place there she brought her basket of my old golf b.a.l.l.s. She keeps them to throw at the deer. When I had first protested against this waste she cited an article she had read, to the effect that golf b.a.l.l.s lose compression within a few months of being unsealed, and b.a.l.l.s over a year old are basically worthless. Outside we went, she in her righteous fury and shimmering mink coat, me in my pajamas and boots and old parka spouting goose down through its broken seams; but by the time we had trudged through the crusty snow around the side porch the deer, hearing us close the front door, had disappeared. "Look!" said my wife, the basket under her arm giving her the burdened, innocent air of a primitive gatherer. "Its tracks go everywhere!"

And it was true, one could see how the hungry animal, its innocence burdened only by the needs of its own sizable body, had gone from the yew bush by the rose bed to the box bush on the other side, from the box to the privet ball by the birdbath, and from the birdbath to the euonymus over by the driveway, not so far from our front door.

Among my minor conflicts with Gloria is an inability to agree which is the front of the house and which is the back: she thinks the side facing the sea should be considered the front, and I the other side, where the people park their cars and enter from the driveway. Perhaps die house has no back, but two fronts. It does not turn its back upon either visitors or the ocean breezes.

The poor graceful, bulky creature had nibbled only the merest bit from each bush, like a dieting banqueter sampling each course. I must have smiled slightly to myself-a mistake. "You don't give a d.a.m.n" d.a.m.n" my wife told me, "but each bush would cost my wife told me, "but each bush would cost hundreds hundreds of dollars to replace." Like many of us past a certain age, she says "dollars" when she means "welders," the Ma.s.sachusetts unit of currency named after a fabled pre-war governor, a rare Republican. She corrected herself. "This deer will do fifty of dollars to replace." Like many of us past a certain age, she says "dollars" when she means "welders," the Ma.s.sachusetts unit of currency named after a fabled pre-war governor, a rare Republican. She corrected herself. "This deer will do fifty thousand thousand welders' worth of damage-then see how funny you think it all is." Whenever Gloria feels me balking, she pulls out the whip of money, knowing me to have been a poor boy, and in my well-padded retirement still tender with financial anxiety. welders' worth of damage-then see how funny you think it all is." Whenever Gloria feels me balking, she pulls out the whip of money, knowing me to have been a poor boy, and in my well-padded retirement still tender with financial anxiety.

"Do I think it's funny?" I asked. I doubted it. Rapacity, compet.i.tion, desperation, death to other living things: the forces that make the world go around. The euonymus bush once had some powder-blue irises beneath it, but its spreading green growth, insufficiently pruned, had smothered them, even as their roots crept forward, damaging the lawn.

"Look how he kept s.h.i.tting everywhere! Little puddles of s.h.i.t!"

"Can't you say something other than 's.h.i.t'?" In our courting days I had been attracted to her way of saying "f.u.c.k" instead of a softer expression. "With deer, I think you can say 'scat,'" I suggested. "Or 'spoor.'"

Scornfully Gloria stared at me, not even granting me a moment's incredulous amus.e.m.e.nt. Her face was pink in the morning cold, her ice-blue eyes vibrant beneath a bushy wool hat that, set square on her head like the hat of a wooden soldier, is oddly flattering. Symmetry, fine white teeth, and monomaniacal insistence upon her own concept of order mark her impress upon the world. Hunting and tracking and plotting an enemy's death become her, like fur at her throat. Before we were married I, still married to another, bought her a black cashmere coat trimmed in bushy gray fox at the collar. The middle-aged saleswoman exclaimed, "How great that looks on her!"-sublimating her hope of making the sale into the simple rapture of a shared vision. It was a blessing of sorts; she connived in our adultery. I yielded up fifteen hundred dollars as painlessly as emitting a sigh.

Gloria asked sharply, "Can you tell by the tracks which way he went?"

The deer had seemed to me clearly a large doe, but to my wife, in her animus, the creature was a "he."

For my own sanity I had to resist this inexorable, deer-pitched tilt the universe was taking on. "What does it matter? Into the woods one way or another," I said. Some of the woods were ours, and some belonged to our neighbors.

"It's important to know," know," Gloria said. Her pale, nearly white eyes narrowed; her killer instincts widened like nostrils to include me in her suspicions of a pervasive evil. "If he had been still there, s.h.i.tting all over our hedge, would you have helped me throw golf b.a.l.l.s?" Gloria said. Her pale, nearly white eyes narrowed; her killer instincts widened like nostrils to include me in her suspicions of a pervasive evil. "If he had been still there, s.h.i.tting all over our hedge, would you have helped me throw golf b.a.l.l.s?"

"Probably not," I admitted. My time on Earth is getting too short, gradually, for lies.

"Oh!" Her disgust couldn't have been more physical if I had held one of my t.u.r.ds-a sample of my own scat-up to her fair pink face. "You Her disgust couldn't have been more physical if I had held one of my t.u.r.ds-a sample of my own scat-up to her fair pink face. "You want want him to destroy everything. Just to get at him to destroy everything. Just to get at me." me."

"Not at all," I protested, yet so feebly the possible truth of her a.s.sertion would continue to gall her.

"If we got a gun, would you shoot it then?"

The cold air was sifting through my pajamas. The morning Globe Globe was down by the mailbox, waiting to be retrieved. "Probably not." Yet I wasn't sure. In my youth in the Berkshires, those erosion-diminished, tourist-ridden green hills, I had handled a .22 owned by a friend less impoverished than I. There had been a thrill to it-the slender weight, the acrid whiff, the long-distance effect. was down by the mailbox, waiting to be retrieved. "Probably not." Yet I wasn't sure. In my youth in the Berkshires, those erosion-diminished, tourist-ridden green hills, I had handled a .22 owned by a friend less impoverished than I. There had been a thrill to it-the slender weight, the acrid whiff, the long-distance effect.

She sensed this uncertainty, and pried into it the wedge of her voice. "The homeowner can can, you know. Out of season or anything, as long as it's on his property. Shoot any pest. That's the law."

"I'd be scared," I told her, knowing it would sting, "to shoot a neighbor. Talk about money, honey-what a lawsuit!"

That night, we planned to go to bed de bonne heure de bonne heure, to make love. In our old age we had to carefully schedule copulations that once had occurred spontaneously, without forethought or foreboding. Before heading upstairs, she said, "Let's look out the window, to see if the deer has come back."

The yard was dark, with the thinnest kind of cloud-veiled moonlight. My wife saw nothing and turned to go up to bed. Once I would have given all my a.s.sets, including my body's health and my children's happiness, to go to bed with her, and even now it was a pleasant prospect. But, d.a.m.n my eyes, I saw a black hump sticking up from the curved euonymus hedge, whose top was crusted with hardened snow. The black shadow moved-changed shape like an amoeba in the dirty water of the dark, or like some ectoplasmic visitation from a former inhabitant of our venerable house. "Honey, he's eating the hedge," I said softly.

My wife screamed, "He is! Do is! Do something! something! d.a.m.n d.a.m.n you, don't just stand there smiling!" you, don't just stand there smiling!"

How could she know I was smiling? The living room was as dark as the front lawn with its ghostly herbivore.

"I'm calling the Pientas! It's not too late! It's not even eight-thirty! I'm going to borrow Charlie's gun! We've got to do something, and you won't do anything!"

The Pientas live fifteen minutes away. Louise is a Garden Club friend of Gloria's; Charlie has that Old World-peasant mentality which loves the American right to bear arms. He owns several shotguns, for ducks mostly, and my wife, having hurled herself and her teal-blue j.a.panese station wagon into the dark, brought one of Charlie's guns back with her, with a cardboard box half full of ammunition. The church bell down in the village was tolling nine. "I'll prop it right here behind the armchair," she said, "and we'll keep the bullets-"

"Sh.e.l.ls."

"-sh.e.l.ls on the bench in the upstairs hall. Charlie does that to keep children from putting them together."

We were in too jangled a mood to attempt love; we read instead, and then kept waking each other up, going to the bathroom in the middle of the night. Though she is younger, her bladder is graciously weakening along with mine. It was still dark when she woke me in a voice between a tender s.e.xual whisper and the whimper of a terrified child. "Ben! "Ben! He's eating the euonymus again! He's eating the euonymus again! Hurry! Hurry! I've a.s.sembled your socks and boots and overcoat." I've a.s.sembled your socks and boots and overcoat."

I had been dreaming of photographs, of life-moments that were photographs and had been placed in a marketing brochure for a mutual fund that called for them to be reduced to the size of postage stamps, though they were in full color. I couldn't quite make them out. My children by my former marriage? Their Their children? I was a grandfather ten times over. I wondered about the printing costs and determined to report my reservations to Firman Frothingham, the one of my colleagues at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise given to such unseemly wooing of the general public. As Gloria insistently woke me I realized, with a twist in my stomach, that I was retired and this brochure was not my problem. I said, hoping to smuggle out my truth-telling wrapped in a blanket of sleepiness, "I don't want to shoot any f.u.c.king deer." children? I was a grandfather ten times over. I wondered about the printing costs and determined to report my reservations to Firman Frothingham, the one of my colleagues at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise given to such unseemly wooing of the general public. As Gloria insistently woke me I realized, with a twist in my stomach, that I was retired and this brochure was not my problem. I said, hoping to smuggle out my truth-telling wrapped in a blanket of sleepiness, "I don't want to shoot any f.u.c.king deer."

"Not shoot shoot him," she pleaded, "shoot over his head, so he gets the idea we hate him. him," she pleaded, "shoot over his head, so he gets the idea we hate him. Oh please Oh please, darling, hurry!" hurry!"

She rarely asked anything so heartfelt of me, not since we had managed, twenty years ago, amid many social impedimenta, to marry. With much of me still immersed in my warm, puzzling dream, I found myself outdoors in the predawn murk, holding the shotgun, which I had with difficulty, drawing upon ancient boyhood memories, broken open and loaded with a Remington sh.e.l.l.

But by the time I got around the house, the front (or back) door opening noisily and the snow crunching at every step, the deer had vanished. A pile of fresh scat made a dark round spot on the snow by the euonymus hedge. Inside the house, her voice pathetically m.u.f.fled and dwindled by the double gla.s.s of window and storm window, my wife was rapping the gla.s.s and shouting, "Shoot! Shoot!" It was like the voice of a cartoon mouse in a bell jar. Involuntarily a smile of s.a.d.i.s.tic pleasure creased my face. The peace of the gray morning- dawn just a sliver of salmon color above the lefthand, eastward side of the sea's horizon, beneath a leaning moon-was something sacred I didn't want to mar. And I didn't want to shock my sleeping neighbors. We own eleven acres but from the house the land stretches in only two directions. The Kellys live just a wedge shot away, on the other side of a wide-branching beech, and the Dunhams a solid three-iron down through the woods toward the railroad tracks, and Mrs. Lubbetts in the other direction, a good drive and then perhaps a five-iron drilled straight toward the sea. I trudged around, willing to shoot over her head if the doe showed herself; but the 360-degree panorama was virginally quiet, except for the pathetic racket my wife was making inside the house, trapped and m.u.f.fled in her fury of frustration. If I by some mad quantum leap of impulse wheeled and fired at the living-room window, there would have been a mess of broken gla.s.s and splintered sash but likely no clean fatality.

"You b.a.s.t.a.r.dly coward," she said when I went back inside. "You didn't do anything."

"I didn't want to wake up the neighbors."

I noticed, uttering this remark, a certain oddity within myself, a displacement of empathy: I could empathize with the sleeping neighbors and die starving deer but not with my frantic wife and her helpless hedge. "That euonymus hedge," she amplified when I voiced this perception by way of apology, "can't run or hide; it can only stand there and be eaten."

Just as she, I thought, was helpless to do anything but attempt to direct and motivate me: ferocious female nagging is the price men pay for our much-lamented prerogatives, the power and the mobility and the p.e.n.i.s.

Julian Jaynes thinks that until about three thousand years ago men went about in a trance, taking orders direct from the G.o.ds. After my wife went off to work-she still works, in a gift shop of which she owns a third, while I languish about the house, writing these paragraphs now and then as if by dictation-I did dutifully keep a lookout for the deer. She didn't show all day, beneath a dull sky lackadaisically spitting snow. But at dusk, walking down to the mailbox, I saw her- up by the flagpole, in the corner of my eye, the shadow of a ducking head. Did I see or imagine her alert sensitive ears and questioning stare? I scrambled up the path by the rock-face and saw her bounding away in that unhurried, possessive way that animals have, leaping to lift her legs from the crusty snow, down past the garage into the woods on this side of the railroad tracks. I write "possessive" to convey the air of spiritual adhesion to the earth, of her guiltlessly guiltlessly occupying the volume of s.p.a.ce needed for her blood and innards, her musculature and fur. occupying the volume of s.p.a.ce needed for her blood and innards, her musculature and fur.

Galvanized, obedient to the dictates my wife had planted in me like tiny electrodes, I ran inside and got Charlie Pienta's gun and, my heart drumming, c.o.c.ked it open and slipped in a green-jacketed cartridge of buckshot and cracked it shut. I went outside. I hadn't walked around with a gun since I toted that borrowed (from my best friend, Billy Beckett, whose father worked in a sawmill) .22, squeezing off shots at tin cans and perching birds. One bird, at what it thought was a safe distance, dropped like a stone from its branchlet and when I went up to it I had taken off its head, clean, leaving a fluffy ball with wings and a chickadee's dapper black and white markings.

I have no declared appet.i.te for killing, but sensing the deer somewhere in the blue-tinted dusk, conscious of me as I was conscious of her, was more exciting than anything I had done lately, including making love to Gloria. She is still handsome, with her crown of ash-blond hair, and dresses with a beautiful trim sternness, but there is no faking that tight lean knit of a young woman's body. Her instructions, which I was following as blindly as a.s.syrians in the time of Hammurabi followed Ishtar's, had been to scare the deer with a blast.

I had the mail under one arm-bills and catalogues and a few early Christmas cards-and the gun under the other when there she was, suddenly, standing sideways in the driveway, closer to me than the chickadee had been fifty years ago. I slowly set the mail down on a bare spot (the snow melts first on the black asphalt) and then straightened and aimed the shotgun ten feet above the frozen silhouette's back (it was a good direction, there are no neighbors that way for a quarter of a mile) and squeezed the trigger.

Nothing. The trigger felt welded fast. The safety catch was on. Trembling but not panicked, I examined the unfamiliar gun and found no catch, just the flip lever to unc.o.c.k it, and at last realized I must set the hammer with my thumb. Though there was no noise, my haste and frustration must have generated a scent that communicated itself to the deer, for with a burst of astonishing easy vigor she bounded over the wall there-low on the driveway side, with an eight-foot drop on the other-and on into the deer-colored woods. I fired, blindly, into the mist of the dusky trees where she had vanished. The noise was enormous- flat, absolute-and the kick against my shoulder rude and unexpected. For what seemed a full minute there was a faint pattering in the woods, like sleet, as the buckshot settled and dry leaves detached by the blast (the oaks and beeches hang on forever) drifted to the cold, hushed earth, the forest floor whose trackable paths and branchings were sinking beneath the rising tide of darkness. My mail glimmered on the driveway like white scat.

Gloria, coming home, was thrilled to hear that I at least had fired Charlie Pienta's gun. She kissed me with a killer's ardor. After dinner, thus rewarded and stimulated, I checked the yard just in case, and, sure enough, against the snow I saw the deer's hungry silhouette nibbling at the round privet bush by the birdbath. I lifted the loaded, c.o.c.ked gun and fired, high, but not so high that I didn't think that a few pellets would sting her flank. To my amazement the deer didn't move. She just kept nuzzling the bush, chewing its outmost leaves, like a wife ignoring your most vehement arguments, having heard them before. It was only when, at last sharing my real wife's indignation, I moved toward the deer as if to throttle her with my hands or beat her with the gun b.u.t.t that the creature, with a shadowy surge of her extended head, loped off, as if awoken from a trance.

As my reward for coming over to her side against the deer, my wife offered to make love to me in any position I chose. I like it when she lies on top, doing the thrusting, and also it is bliss to f.u.c.k her from behind, with no thought of her own o.r.g.a.s.m. But by the time we went to bed, after dinner and the network news and a glance at Channel Two, and did a little reading-Scientific American for me and for her the compet.i.tion's Christmas gift catalogues-we were both too sleepy to act upon our new rapport. Outside, in the dark, a wobbly patch of life upon the blue snow, the deer perhaps browsed, her soft blob of a nose rapturously sunk in the chilly winter greenery, her modest brain-stem steeped in some dream of a c.o.c.kaigne for herbivores. for me and for her the compet.i.tion's Christmas gift catalogues-we were both too sleepy to act upon our new rapport. Outside, in the dark, a wobbly patch of life upon the blue snow, the deer perhaps browsed, her soft blob of a nose rapturously sunk in the chilly winter greenery, her modest brain-stem steeped in some dream of a c.o.c.kaigne for herbivores.

"Perhaps": the word is like the little fork in reality when a quantum measurement is made. Each time that we measure either the position or momentum of an elementary particle, the other specific becomes, by Heisenberg's indeterminacy principle, unknowable. The "wave function" of the particle collapses. Our universe is the one containing our observation. But, some cosmic theorists aver, the system- containing the particle, the measuring apparatus, and the observer-continues to exist in its other possible states, in parallel universes that have branched from this moment of measurement. The theory is called that of "many worlds." It is intellectually repulsive, which does not mean it is not true. Truth can be intellectually repulsive. From the same verifiable quantum formulations arises the possibility that our universe, born from nothing, was instantly boosted, by the gravity-reversing properties of a "false" vacuum, into an expansion so monstrous that the universe's real limits lie many times beyond the matter of which we can gather evidence with our farthest-seeing telescopes.

My wife's two sons, Roger and Henry, and her daughter, Carolyn, with Roger's wife, Marcia, and Carolyn's husband, Felix, have come for Christmas. It is nice to have the big old house trembling with other footsteps and the murmur of multiple domestic discussions. The rooms, even to the third floor, are permeated by the scent of woodsmoke from the fire the boys keep going in the living-room fireplace, which my wife and I rarely use. We just want, after dinner and the news, to get upstairs to bed. Often we are in our pajamas and nightie by eight o'clock; we have made a joke of it-"d.a.m.n it, you won again!"-as if it is a sporting event, the race to bed. But in fact we are in a more serious race, to the death. Which of us will die first? We look each other over every day, appraising the odds. I have given her five years' handicap, but two of my grandparents lived to ninety-hill folk from up near Cheshire, tough as beef jerky. When my mother died, and her meagre heirlooms descended to me, I gave the squinting, thin-lipped photographic portraits of her parents to the Pittsfield Historical Society. But I have never been back to see if they are hanging on the wall.

By Christmas all but one of Charlie Pienta's shotgun sh.e.l.ls were used up in scaring off the deer, but still she kept coming back, nibbling, at dawn or dusk, when the snow was blue. Snow that falls this early is slow to go away; it sinks in upon itself and hardens. Despairing of my effectuality, my wife through her network of Garden Club colleagues reached a young man from Maine who had grown up hunting and who loved venison. Slim and politely spoken, he came and stood in the driveway, listening to Gloria's tale of cervine persecution. Even though hunting season had pa.s.sed, he promised to come back the day after Christmas and see what he could do. He drove a tomato-red pickup truck, a Toyota. She confided to me that he seemed too much of a boy to do the job; she wanted her hunter to be big and grizzled-a twin of me, with a less oppositional character.

We had to attend a Boxing Day celebration provided annually by an English immigrant we knew. We asked my stepchildren and their mates to stay in the house, lest they be shot. We made nervous jokes about not wearing deerskin and pulling in their horns. Throughout the Boxing Day lunch-lamb, creamed broccoli, pear tart-we envisioned carnage, which robbed the food of taste. But when we came back, around four-fifteen in the semi-dark, all was quiet. There were the tracks of truck-tire treads in the driveway but no pickup and no trace of blood in the snow. Our five guests were gathered safely around the fire in the living room reading their Christmas books. Marcia-who is so like Carolyn, with the same shiny brushed brown hair, straight nose, aristocratic brow, and confident candor of expression, that I keep forgetting who is Gloria's daughter and who her daughter-in-law-looked up and, with a trace of her Philadelphia drawl, tw.a.n.ged, "We never heard a shot. There was a lot of walking around looking very solemn, but no shots. Sorry, you two."

Again, it seemed to me we were on a certain branch of possibility, and there was another in which something had been killed, and then, ramifying, many things were killed, everything-a universe packed black with death. This universe, I saw as the log fire settled with a flurry of sparks, was one that we were all certain to enter. We must have sinned greatly, at some juncture long buried in our protozoic past, to deserve such a universe. I devoutly wished that there was not this cruel war between the deer and my wife.

"Isn't that the pits!" Gloria said. "That deer is always always here at this time of day. I bet he scared it away with his show-offy dumb truck. I here at this time of day. I bet he scared it away with his show-offy dumb truck. I thought thought he looked too young." he looked too young."

"There were two two men, Mom," Carolyn said. "The older one was the more committed. He walked all around the yard, into the woods, looking for deer clues." Yet another word nicer than "s.h.i.t." men, Mom," Carolyn said. "The older one was the more committed. He walked all around the yard, into the woods, looking for deer clues." Yet another word nicer than "s.h.i.t."

"Did he say he'd be back?"

It turned out that n.o.body had gone out to talk to him. We had told them to stay indoors-we had planted those electrodes in their heads-and they had obeyed.

Yet they are ambitious and intelligent. All except Henry have Ph.D.'s. Roger and Marcia teach at the University of Pennsylvania, where they met before the war. Carolyn and Felix are racier, living in Washington Square, amid the pieces of New York University. Carolyn paints. Darker and an inch taller than Gloria, she reminds me of her father, a Boston University economics professor who made the mistake of moving with his family to the same North Sh.o.r.e town where I was lurking. All four young people have his erect dignity, his habit of pausing before an utterance, and a deference to your opinion that leads you to suspect, in mid-sentence, that you have it all somewhat wrong. Henry is less academic, and lives nearby, in Salem, picking up a living at computer, VCR, and cell-phone repair. None of her children quite have Gloria's pale fire, though of course Marcia and Carolyn stir me a bit. They seem, for all their impenetrable grooming and manners, not quite content. Carolyn's paintings border on the p.o.r.nographic, and Marcia has a childish streak that comes out in a startling baby voice, which I take to express, toward me, deflected aggression. When I give her the glancing kiss to which my stepfather-in-law status ent.i.tles me, she just perceptibly twists her face away, her chin tucked into her clavicle so that I have to plant my mouth on her hair-swathed ear or else go burrowing, like a ferret after a snake, to bring my lips into contact with the skin of her cheek; her shoulders hunch up and sock me in the chin. She pokes fun of the course she helps teach- "Systemic Decompensation in Patriarchies, with Special Emphasis upon Slave Narratives"-and wistfully talks of going into fashion design. Her sketches are of Hollywoodish ball gowns, slinky lounge pajamas, see-through blouses, high-necked dresses with slits up to mid-thigh. She gets headaches, and puts on wraparound sungla.s.ses to ease the pain. I wonder if "headaches" is a code for menstruation pains. It disturbs my retired calm, having a menstruating female in the house again.

Among the anti-deer methods that my wife has tried is scattering human hair over the hedges and bushes. I was humiliated to ask at my barber shop for some hair clippings, but they jollily gave me a whole transparent garbage bag full of the stuff, a single day's sweepings. Young glossy hair, glinting reddish hair, hair with gray in it, straight and curly hair clipped in the hirsute fullness of life-the giant bagful, eerily light to hoist, savored of atrocity, of those orderly death camps in the middle of the last century which ended forever Europe's concept of itself as civilized and of the Western world as proceeding under a benign special Providence.

The deer are supposed to scent humans in the hair and flee in repugnance and terror. Another stratagem her Garden Club fellow-members urged upon Gloria was to have me urinate at critical spots on the lawn. It had to be male urine, a human buck's scent. I obliged a little, by the euonymus hedge and near the birdbath, but the project was too undignified to be carried out systematically, in the winter cold. And the deer seemed unimpressed, or else after an initial repugnance she accustomed herself to the hostile tang in the air.

The young fill a house with the smell of heavy late-morning sleep, and of nightsweats of fear as they confront life in all its branching possibility and need for decision. Menstrual fluid, epidermal oils, s.e.m.e.n-all such effluvia in overflowing supply.

If my wife were to die, I used to think that I would look up women from my past, residues of pa.s.sionate affairs thirty years ago, but lately I have begun to think I would seek out only young wh.o.r.es, with tight lower bodies and long, exercise-hardened limbs, and put the problem of my erratic erections to them like a tricky tax matter laid before a well-paid accountant on a clean, bed-sized desk.

Two days after Christmas, having been out looking for an excuse to fire Charlie's last sh.e.l.l, I came into the living room still holding the gun. Roger and Marcia and Carolyn and Felix, who had been reading and burning my laboriously split logs, all pretended to scramble for cover behind the furniture, shouting, "We're leaving, Pop! We'll go!" They call me "Pop," saving the more affectionate "Dad" for my former rival.

When they did actually head south, two days before New Year's Day, Roger offered me his thoughtful opinion that the week of constant woodsmoke from the chimney was what had kept the deer away. They would be back, he thought. He is the closest, academically, to their father, who has remarried and moved to Mexico, where the economy is sounder than in our fragmented, warhead-pocked States. Roger teaches cycles and is accustomed to making predictions.

I woke in the middle of one of the first nights of the New Year-2020, a jeering staring number that once denoted perfect eyesight-stricken by dread: my professional usefulness over, my wife more of a disciplinarian than a comfort, my body a swamp in whose simmering depths a fatal infirmity must be brewing.

And worse and somehow larger than any of these major concerns loomed my bad playing of a three-no-trump hand in a friendly game of bridge that evening with Grace and Stanley Wren. I allowed Grace to pull my stopper king of clubs from the board, and when I yielded the lead on a low heart trick she ran the clubs and set me; all I would have had to do, I saw clearly now, to hold on to the high club was to draw out the ace of diamonds, avoiding the unfortunate hearts. Bridge always churns me up with the recognition of my intellectual limits: for this reason I generally avoid playing, just as, years ago at U. Ma.s.s., repeatedly outplayed by nimble-headed computer nerds from Boston's western suburbs, I gave up chess, which I had loved as a child back in Hammond Falls, playing opponents even more childish on 2 2 board set up on the oval rug braided of rags beside the cast-iron wood stove that heated the back end of the house. I liked all those areas-chess, science fiction, movies, comic strips- where my father in his grimy workclothes was a stranger. board set up on the oval rug braided of rags beside the cast-iron wood stove that heated the back end of the house. I liked all those areas-chess, science fiction, movies, comic strips- where my father in his grimy workclothes was a stranger.

And always this nagging elderly need to urinate, besieging my groin as I lie trying to coax myself back into the sickly-sweet therapy of dreams. Dreams: there s.e.x still revolves with surprising force, turning a phantom woman into a hairy moist center of desire hot as a star, and there excrement overflows the bowl like a fetid volcano, or I find myself, naked, obliged to defecate at a dinner party, in close proximity to the bejewelled hostess as I strive to maintain a polite conversation and she to ignore my rumbling, spurting bowels. Humiliated and self-disgusted, I awake, and from the bathroom window see that something has triggered the burglar floodlight to come on on the side of the house toward the sea-the back side, as I think of it.

The light's alarmist burning, spreading into the bedroom, had given me the false impression of approaching dawn. It really was still in the middle of the night. It had snowed some inches, and the fresh powder, I observed, was marked by several uneven lines of medium-size tracks-deer tracks.

The creature's habit is to set one foot behind the other to make almost a straight line of indentations, so that I am reminded of that little sharp-toothed wheel from my grandmother's sewing box, with which she would trace a chain of perforations onto paper dress patterns. What wistful, twisting canker of hunger had driven the deer back to us? She had bestirred herself from the tent-shaped shelter of some great hemlock in a remote woods. Fresh snow seemed to drive the animal to risk proximity to the gun, the shouts, the golf b.a.l.l.s. The tracks led to the front of the house, where there was nothing green save straggling rhododendrons, their long leaves rolled by the cold into dry cigar shapes, and pachysandra buried beneath a foot of icy white, and those leucothoe plantings that have never, I tell my wife, looked like anything but jungle weeds.

G.o.d, how suddenly savage and ruthless Grace Wren seemed, running those clubs on me, cashing in even the five and the two for tricks! As if no friendship existed between us at all, as if we had never danced and flirted together, my l.u.s.t coating us both in sweat. She had had a good pert figure before her bosom expanded and sank. She has stopped dyeing her hair, and the wiry, salt-and-pepper look is not unattractive. How stupid and vulnerable I was, without my stopper king! Perhaps this was my dream's day-remnant-my humiliation as we sat elbow to elbow at the card table turned into a helpless outpour of foul-smelling excrement. I had played s.h.i.ttily. Oh, horrible! I tossed and turned beside my oblivious wife, feeling those deer tracks outside as a love letter I could not answer and replaying the bridge hand until, trying to remember if the queen of spades was in my hand or the dummy, I slipped from the great magician's agitated sleeve into the false-bottomed box of sleep.

A week ago, Henry, the younger of my wife's sons, and his local girlfriend-an amazingly skinny, pale, supple redhead whose father runs a TV-and-VCR repair shop in Swamp-scott-and I ran down to pick up milk and orange juice and a bag of so-called Smart Food, popcorn flavored with cheddar cheese. Coming back up the hill, the Subaru, bought new last April, gripped the slick and sluggish road surface admirably, and I felt youthful, reliving teenage moments propelling the boatlike old family Plymouth through a Berkshire blizzard, back from a date that had steamed the car windows. My wife's son, in a flourish of automotive showing-off, likes to back a car into our narrow two-car port, fashioned by the son of the previous owner from the wooden sh.e.l.l of an old greenhouse. For some reason, maybe to impress the skinny redhead, I thought I should do the same. Henry jumped out, in the exuberance and c.o.c.kiness of youth, to help guide me. Distracted by his gesticulations, and driving in a bulky coat and clumsy boots, with the windows obscured by vapor, I rubbed the back of the Subaru against a white wooden inner wall of the old greenhouse. It was a subtle sensation but I knew disaster when I felt it.

That side of the car was in shadow, and my stepson kept rea.s.suring me, "It's nothing, Pop, I don't think it will even show," but in the morning, with the sky pure blue and its light reflecting from the drifts of fresh snow as in a hall of mirrors, the damage was clear and extensive. Gloria was furious-as furious at me as she had been at the deer. Again, a helpless possession of hers, an ornament to her existence, had been chewed by a predator. "It'll cost a fortune," she told me, with diamond-hard satisfaction. "A thousand welders minimum."

She had won a point in our battle to the death. I was incompetent, senile. I couldn't argue. And yet I had been somehow jostled into this abysmal mishap by the frisky young people who had accompanied me, whereas I could only blame myself for that badly played bridge hand.

My wife and I know dozens of women and a number of men who seem content to devote hours of each day to the practice and perfection of their bridge. What is wrong with me, who resents the energy spent in development of a skill whose end product is a scribbled bridge pad, a set of scores fading into the void? What doesn't fade into the void? The rest of their lives these bridge players devote to the cultivation of their roses, the tr.i.m.m.i.n.g of their hedges, the feeding of their faces, the tidying of their homes, the maintenance of contact with their children and grandchildren and socioeconomically identical acquaintances, the travelling to Florida and to Maine in the suitable seasons-all activities that leave no trace. What is wrong with me, that I want to leave a trace, by scribbling these disjunct and jumpy notes concerning my idle existence? Spoiling paper-no worse and no better than scribbling on a bridge pad.

There is, among the indeterminacies, a universe in which, undeflected by my stepson's overstimulating presence, I opted to drive the Subaru straight into the carport without a scratch or a dent. What would that universe be like? It would be one in which Gloria would have one less weapon, one less I-told-you-so, to wield against me. It would be like the one I am in, only with some other vexation crowding to the forefront of my brain-the tiny, conscious part, which floats on a primeval sea of hunger, s.e.x, and semi-automatic bodily functions.

I read last night about Neandert(h)al man. He has a history of sorts, it turns out. He was an evolutionary offshoot of slender h.o.m.o erectus h.o.m.o erectus, who migrated from Africa into Europe a million years ago or less. Though glaciers advanced and retreated, Europe was generally cold. Neanderthal (let's keep the old-fashioned, pleasantly incorrect "h") men developed the short, thick, conservative bodies of Arctic dwellers today. They were so strong that their muscles, knitted to our bones, would snap them. Their own bones are often found broken, perhaps in battle with giant elk, bison, and those long-horned extinct oxen called auroch (plural). Though the Neanderthals' relics show some progress in flint-working, they evidently never got the idea of projectiles-no slings and arrows for them. They had to grapple with their prey close up, and the patterns of their broken bones correspond most closely to, of all contemporary professional groups, rodeo riders.

Pre-Neanderthal men toppled hundreds of animals and thirty human colleagues into a cave in Spain three hundred thousand years ago; the first true Neanderthals date from seventy thousand years later. Fifty thousand years later still, glaciers so heavily descended upon Europe that the continent, for the next fifty thousand years, was empty, as far as the fossil record shows, of human beings. Think of it! Ten times the span of recorded human history pa.s.s, and men are squeezed from the European record of stones and bones. But evolution was not sleeping. When the glaciers retreated, the Neanderthal skeletons were more ma.s.sive, and the hundred-thousand-year heyday of their subspecies began. They made fires. They buried their dead with flowers. They fabricated flint knives and dug postholes for wooden dwellings, but left no tools for st.i.tching; they must have worn their animal hides untailored. They had big noses and receding chins and foreheads. Their skulls include the hyoid bone that indicates a voice box; cooperative hunting and the pa.s.sing on of even crude practical skills demand some level of communication. The Neanderthal people left no art, unless one counts a polished tooth from a baby mammoth, possibly used as a shaman's amulet. Shattered bones and skulls suggest that they practiced cannibalism.

They co-existed for ten thousand years with Cro-Magnon men, men anatomically like us, who forty thousand years ago came into Europe from the Middle East with projectiles, sewing needles, improved hearths and shelters, and art. Neanderthal man slowly vanished; his last remains are found in southern Spain, a few jawbones and femurs and tools going back to about thirty thousand years before Christ. It never occurred to these harried, dwindling primitives to cross the Strait of Gibraltar into warmer Africa. They were a conservative, dull-witted, rather hapless crew, never very numerous-a few thousand at a time, roaming around in packs of about thirty. There is a slight slenderness to the later fossils that some paleoanthropologists take as evidence of interbreeding with h.o.m.o sapiens h.o.m.o sapiens. Fat chance, say other paleoanthropologists; it was ever nothing but war, mutual abhorrence, and murder between the races. Most Neanderthal men died before they were half my present age. Some day I will be as forgotten, as dissolved back into the compacted silt, as your typical grunting, l.u.s.ting, hungry, broken-boned Neanderthal man. I simply cannot believe it! And that is certainly stupid of me.

I took the train to Boston yesterday, to conduct a little business at the old stand. The Lynn marshes were vast and virginal from the train windows-a brilliant arctic vista. In Boston the snow had already been translated to a dun-colored mush and an inhospitable shortage of parking s.p.a.ce, even in the lots. My former partners at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise were cordial, but harried-compet.i.tion is everywhere, stiffer than it used to be, and young blood is bubbling up through the firm, stressing the sclerotic arteries. The relaxed, discreet air that Boston money used to affect-in pointed contrast with noisy, obnoxious New York money-no longer obtains. Post-war, the numbers are down and the heat is up. I got out none too soon. I made my pile when it was a relatively easy effort.

A number of secretaries have been hired since I left; my presence kindled no spark of deference or potential engagement in their moist, clear, searching eyes. I was out of their food chain. I played the cordial antique fool, the only role open to me. My business-a sizable munic.i.p.al-bond redemption for my faithful old client Mrs. Fessenden, and some finicking mutual-fund readjustments for my own portfolio-was too quickly done. After respectfully observing how my old office has been cut into four "workstations" by frosted-gla.s.s part.i.tions (Ned Partridge, a meddlesome technology groupie whom I was always itching to get fired as office manager, could scarcely contain his triumph), I had little to do but walk up the hill to the Athenaeum, graze on the English newspapers, and then make my way across the hill to Cambridge Street and through Charles River Park- every sidewalk and street awkwardly narrowed by heaped snow-to North Station and rather ignominiously catch the four o'clock train home. Boston had little use for me now.

Two images from my expedition stuck in my craw: In North Station, a young woman, bundled against the weather in a long parka and a checked m.u.f.fler, accidentally turned her face toward mine as she blew a bubble of bubble gum. The primitive man within me p.r.i.c.kled at this casual uncalled-for protrusion of insolent mock-nakedness, a roundness out of her mouth pinker and more blatant than an exposed breast or p.e.n.i.s, there in the chilly damp gloom of the station, which is a much drearier, barer place since the renovations that subst.i.tuted Fleet Center for Boston Garden. At the same time, twenty-five years ago, they raised the platform to be level with the floors of the cheesy new plastic-seated cars, a handicapped-sensitive improvement which denies normal pa.s.sengers the old jaunty sensation of swinging down down into Boston. And they enlarged and enclosed the waiting area where we all used to stand in the fresh air, which was bracing after a day of inhaling recycled gases within our sealed office buildings. To discourage permanent perching by the homeless, they took out many of the friendly wooden benches in the station itself, which has been robbed of all its old shops save a diminished version of the fruit stand. There is no place where you can buy a candy bar. A sickening smell of hot cheese wafts everywhere from a pizzeria that has been installed at the end where the cretins who attend sporting events in Fleet Center might be tempted to coat their guts with fat and gluten. In this place, for decades a daily station of my pilgrimage, the young woman unthinkingly showed me her pink bubble, and then wolfed it back, seething with bacteria, into her oral cavity. into Boston. And they enlarged and enclosed the waiting area where we all used to stand in the fresh air, which was bracing after a day of inhaling recycled gases within our sealed office buildings. To discourage permanent perching by the homeless, they took out many of the friendly wooden benches in the station itself, which has been robbed of all its old shops save a diminished version of the fruit stand. There is no place where you can buy a candy bar. A sickening smell of hot cheese wafts everywhere from a pizzeria that has been installed at the end where the cretins who attend sporting events in Fleet Center might be tempted to coat their guts with fat and gluten. In this place, for decades a daily station of my pilgrimage, the young woman unthinkingly showed me her pink bubble, and then wolfed it back, seething with bacteria, into her oral cavity.

And, secondly, on the ride home, gliding past the marshes, which were dark now, making the window into a mirror, I saw my own gazing eye, in three-quarters view, unexpectedly close in the black gla.s.s, watery and round, like the watchful dark orb of a deer. A deer eye, fearful and alert- hostile or neutral, I couldn't quite tell. We cannot think or feel with the brain of another creature but we can see its eyes, those sensitive organs which the brain protrudes. My reflected face loomed inches from mine, the skin a dirty metallic color, skimming along in mid-air, transparent to the industrial shapes and receding lit windows, like the visage of a spy from outer s.p.a.ce, an evilly staring alter ego. It gave me a start, and forestalled the nap I had scheduled for myself, the fifteen minutes of sleep that mark the end of a commuter's day and fortify him or her for an evening at home.

Another foot of snow has fallen on top of the two feet already on the ground. I waded out across the front lawn to take down the Christmas lights that we run up on the flagpole as our part of the annual pretense that G.o.d descended to Earth in a baby's body. The neighbors expect it. I've been told that even ships at sea-the lonely-looking oil tankers that, like long cardboard silhouettes on a slow string, edge into Salem Harbor-appreciate it. But my wife, who has strict ideas on many topics, says that n.o.body with any taste keeps lights up after Twelfth Night. Her father never did. Twelfth Night came and went, and there was no thaw in sight, so I seized this even mildly sunny day, the sun a white blur in a high thin cloud cover.

Walking through snow up to my crotch turned out to be an ordeal almost comical in its severity-worse even than those childhood memories we distrust in hindsight, of eye-high drifts and tunnels from the front porch. My yard, where I amble back and forth in the summer practicing chip shots and setting up croquet wickets in antic.i.p.ation of a visit from my grandchildren, had become huge, an antarctic continent. Every step sucked at my entire leg with the force of gravity on another, much larger, planet. My boots quickly filled with snow-a chilly, sticky sensation that came back to me from sixty years ago. Extracting my leg from each socket was like pulling a giant tooth. I wondered if the deer was watching and could hear my grunts, my laughter at my physical plight. Her velvety white-rimmed ears would p.r.i.c.k, her eyes would show no more emotion than my own bulging eyes in the flickering black window of the commuter train. Suppose my heart decided to flip shut-to knock off for an eternity-long coffee break-at this moment. Would the deer come and sniff curiously, would the smell of my hair still frighten her, would the universe branch and carry me intact into another portion of endless s.p.a.ce? Are the funnel vortices of black holes the pa.s.sageways whereby we enter the afterlife?

But I was already on another planet. Each step a comical struggle, I fought my way to the pole on its little flagstoned platform-a conceit of the previous owner, a nautical man who loved to stand and take in his view of Ma.s.sachusetts Bay. I dug down to where the ends of the Christmas light cords had been pegged or tied to a handy bush. The experience was archaeological, really, and made me feel, as my numb fingers grappled at the knots, the cold connection between the buried and the present.

So much snow wraps the world in cosmic feeling. The euonymus hedge, no longer defenseless, is rounded in its thick white armor like a futuristic motor vehicle. A transcendent sparkle rides the surface; microscopic icy prisms send rainbows to my retinas. I am immersed in the white blind brute reality of nature, heartless and beautiful. I am in the rushing waterfall, the thunderhead cradle of blue new stars in a proximate galaxy. Beneath the dazzling skin of snow, a whole lost world waited to be born again, its details-blades of gra.s.s, pegs holding knotted ropes-faithfully tucked into the realm of the potential. I coiled the strings of Christmas lights, stiff and lumpy with ice, into their cardboard box and carried the box to the third floor. From the third-floor windows I looked for deer tracks, but of course there were none. She must be huddled in the tent-shaped shelter beneath a hemlock, the wet dark orb of her eye watchful. To stick a pin into that bulging eye-that would be a wicked thrill, a tunnel into another world.

Instead of deer tracks I saw curious paths between the trees, the oaks around the driveway, from one trunk to another, and then vanishing, bat-shaped dents in the snow. It took me surprisingly long to deduce that these were the body-prints of squirrels, only half hibernating, quickly floundering from one tree to another. But what makes them think one tree might be an improvement over another? A bed of gra.s.s in one, a cache of acorns in another. Like rich Manhattanites, they scuttle from Park Avenue to Wall Street and back, minimizing their moments on the ground. On this scorched planet we human beings are not yet quite alone; there is still other life. Squirrels, rats, deer, the last rhinos and cheetahs. Insects, of course, in their undismayable selfless mult.i.tudes.