Toward The End Of Time Part 11

The fungus is everywhere, but not everywhere the same- far from it. In especially nutrition-rich stretches, it is mountainous, the hyphae so thickly interwoven as to have a leathery, though resilient, hardness underfoot, like a springy turf. In other, barer, colder regions, the fungus exists itself as a thin dry film across the rocks, in spots a mere stain, which a finger rubs off. I lick my finger then, for the fungus in this attenuated state is oddly tasty. There are grottoes, splotched and shadowy, where curved gills of a sweet, crisp mycelium form a cave of easeful comfort, and there are wind-troughed plains where rare upright conidioph.o.r.es, brightly beaded with conidia, reward the wanderer with a pungent meat. A growth so vast and essentially amorphous at some point on its great surface folds and crests into every possible form- the stalked cauliflower of a tree, the flowing curves and protuberances of a reclining woman, the glimmering flatness of the sea. Everywhere, as I have said, it is edible, though my hands come away with broken fingernails from harvesting the stubborn delicacies in the crevices of rocks. The particularly delectable patches, wherein some secreted chemical such as lysergic acid induces a visionary sense of well-being, are maddeningly hard to distinguish, by outward appearance, from patches of the bland, somewhat rubbery daily fare. In general, one must either eat a great deal to arrive at a strikingly pleasurable mouthful, or else altogether refrain from eating until hunger renders any random handful delicious. The one promise the fungus makes is to be, however monotonously, there there, day after day. Its evolution-the organic predecessors upon which its rhizoids feed-is mysterious, but not so basic a mystery, I dare say, as my own existence here, on this planet of all planets.

I often wonder if the fungus has a consciousness. Not like mine, of course (I am clearly more elaborately differentiated, from toenails to eyelashes), but in some diffuse way comparable, compatible with its endlessly repet.i.tive structure-a dim awareness, like the light-sensors of blue-eyed scallops, that exists at the probing, searching tips of the tireless hyphae. Does it, moreover, like like me, or is its patient feeding of me, day after day, an indifferent accident, a heartless largesse spilled from its own blind, entirely self-absorbed life? At times, curled beneath its soft beige gills of thallic matter, I feel a kind of vaporous breath that hints of love. The perpetual silence seems to develop an almost audible node in which an urgent benevolence is held as in a clenched fist. Sometimes I find in the convolutions of a folded outcropping some strikingly anthropomorphic set of ridges and vesicles-another man, about to stand forth!-and sense a joke, a thinking comment, a wry salute from my ubiquitous co-inhabitant. Certainly its vast body is warmer in some spots than others, and exudes a language of smells-punky, pungent, musty, faintly fruity-that is inflected as if by an inner consideration, a hope of achieving communion. At moments it even gives me back, as if out of an armpit or a groin, my own odor of stale male sweat. me, or is its patient feeding of me, day after day, an indifferent accident, a heartless largesse spilled from its own blind, entirely self-absorbed life? At times, curled beneath its soft beige gills of thallic matter, I feel a kind of vaporous breath that hints of love. The perpetual silence seems to develop an almost audible node in which an urgent benevolence is held as in a clenched fist. Sometimes I find in the convolutions of a folded outcropping some strikingly anthropomorphic set of ridges and vesicles-another man, about to stand forth!-and sense a joke, a thinking comment, a wry salute from my ubiquitous co-inhabitant. Certainly its vast body is warmer in some spots than others, and exudes a language of smells-punky, pungent, musty, faintly fruity-that is inflected as if by an inner consideration, a hope of achieving communion. At moments it even gives me back, as if out of an armpit or a groin, my own odor of stale male sweat.

John appeared today, in mid-afternoon in his green truck, to take his stand in the woods for a few hours. Hunting season has begun. Gloria was outside raking leaves. In my infirmity, she has to do it all herself this fall, except for the Sat.u.r.days when Jeremy can tear himself away from his computer cla.s.ses and the aftermath of frat parties, including, he resentfully hints, a hungover and irritable girl in his bed. Gloria rakes up heaps of leaves and totes them off in bulging sheetfuls so heavy she staggers and stumbles in her slick-soled Wellingtons. She wears a red bandana and, when John pulled up, she put on a toothy smile that telegraphed happiness through the November drizzle even from my distant vantage at the guest-room window. Her face has a glow, from the vigorous exercise, as she puts down her burden and walks across the driveway to greet the gallant deerslayer. To me he seems, white-haired and stooped, with trembling hands, too old to warrant such a girlish greeting, but then I reflect that he is my age, if not-can it be?-a few years younger. Despite my post-prostatic discomfort, I put on trousers and shoes and a shirt and make my way downstairs. Steps down, I have discovered, are more painful than steps up.

I go outdoors, inhaling the heady liquor of oxygen and mist-filtered afternoon light. Only the ornamental bushes- forsythia, lilac-still cling to their leaves. John has a beautiful, unhurried grin, for all the defects of his lower teeth. His saintly patience slows all his facial movements, including the tongue and lip exertions of his careful, explanatory speech.

Proudly he shows us the absurd panoply of his camouflage gear. He owns, stacked on the driver's side of the truck, a variety of patterns and weights of costume. The splotches on one canvas jacket imitate the greenery of pine forest, and on another are painted the branches and coloring of deciduous trees in the fall. For today, he chooses a water-repellent Gore-Tex suit with a life-sized tree trunk prominent on the front. But before he puts it on, he shows us his bow-of gray metal, notched and calibrated like a gun, with a set of candy-colored sights embedded above the flat-faced grip, including a small tube that, when tightened, as he demonstrates, lights a tiny red light, for aiming in darkness. The string of the bow, as dark and plangent-looking as a harp string from h.e.l.l, has an incongruous tangle of fluff, like a gauzy pipe-cleaner, tied to it. "What's the purpose of that?" I ask.

"You know what they call that?" he asks in turn, chuckling. "A tarantula. It deadens the sound," he explains. "If a deer hears the tw.a.n.g, it'll drop down lower, as much as ten inches." Dramatically, he ill.u.s.trates the sudden defensive action with his own body. "It'll 'jump the string,' as hunters say. Throws the shot totally off. The deer's instinct, you see, when it hears anything, is to crouch down ready to spring."

From Gloria's beaming expression she expected him, her miraculous savior, to complete the lesson by levitating into the air. "You're aiming at a seven-inch circle," John went on, equably addressing the two of us, though we stood some feet apart, estranged by my illness. His half-gloved fingers and thumbs described the imaginary target. "So you can imagine it throws you off if they hear the string."

In the interests of clarity, he bent his knees and became a deer, about to leap. It seemed a kind of courting dance he was doing. An arrow of pain pierced me down below, on the dark side of my abdominal depths, as I murmured, "Interesting."

He showed us his arrows-again, metallic and machined. "Grooved," he explained, a finger lovingly tracing the groove. "For rigidity. Slow-motion movies show how a wood arrow, you can imagine with all that sudden pressure of release at the end, bends this way and that in flight, maybe six or seven times before it straightens out." His hands showed how, flexing in and then out. "By the time it reaches its target it's expended a lot of energy."

"But not these arrows," Gloria prompted, eagerly.

"No, ma'am," he said, the "ma'am" conveying, in its odd formality, an ironic intimacy. "These fly true."

The drizzle was making the driveway asphalt shine and gave a film-noirish intensity to our conference. The sun was a golden smear in a coa.r.s.e gray sky washed by blue stripes of watercolor. As I made feeble motions toward helping Gloria with the leaves, John set about dressing, first in the large green-and-brown mock-arboreal pants, then a jacket, and last an olive wool hat stiffened in front like the cap of a Swiss yodeler. You would think he would have looked absurd, a walking tree, but in truth he looked distinguished, younger than his years-a gentlemanly shaman off to blend with the forest.

The light failed within an hour. Back in bed, I must have been napping when his truck drove off loudly into the darkness. As she set my dinner on a tray before me, Gloria moved with an abstracted grace, smiling to herself.

"Did he get a deer?" I asked.

"Of course not, not so soon. Not immediately. But he said he'll be back in a few days. He'll bring a fawn blat."

"A fawn what?"

"Blat, apparently. It imitates the sound a fawn makes, so the mother comes."

"My G.o.d, how cruel. This is the cruellest guy I've ever met, and you seem to think he's great."

"I don't think that." Yet the inward-directed smile could not be erased from her tense cheeks, the tucked corners of her lips. "He's hopeful. He says that the signs are good."

"Signs."

"You know, darling. Signs Signs. Intimations. He feels He feels things." things."

"And I don't, huh?"

"Oh, Ben, you do, but everything you feel has to do with yourself. John feels things about others." others."

Where are the stars? The ancient legends describe the sky as full of stars, congregations of bright points that to unsophisticated eyes took on the forms of G.o.ds and G.o.dlike creatures-a centaur, a dragon, a bear, a whale. Our ancestors watched their sheep by starlight, and mariners steered their fragile ships upon the teeming sea by stars they knew by name and faithful location. Now the night sky presents a hazy slate, whose faint points of light can be confused with the small coagulations that float in the vitreous humor within the eyeball. Scientific apparatus less subjective than human sight reports that there is still a universe of ma.s.s and momentum out there in the dark, behind the closed closet door, so to speak, and science, though reluctant to admit the dimness, or visual negligibility, of the stars relative to their reported presence in their past, has tried to produce theories as to why this should be so. A general m.u.f.fling of signals has been proposed, due to a cosmic moment of stasis. The universe after twenty-five billion years of inflation has reached the point where the Big Bang's initial momentum is exactly equal to the total amount of matter and, like a ball at the apogee of its toss, it is momentarily at rest, a pause reflected in a heavenly brownout before a future surge in the other direction. The bloated, feeble state of our sun-the muddy color of brick and so swollen its arc subtends a third of the horizon- would seem to offer confirmation. We have entered, on the cosmic scale, a dull, declining time.

Another proposal is that, through an unforeseen but perfectly well understood effect of quantum mechanics and its uncertainty principle, "virtual" particles, called into "being" with their anti-particles, for t.i.tanically small periods of time, are multiplying in the gravitational and electromagnetic fields that permeate "empty" s.p.a.ce, exciting each other into existence in such numbers that s.p.a.ce is becoming a semi-transparent gel, occluding protons from afar. The condition may be restricted to our galaxy, or the nearer portion of it. A third school of scientific thought holds simply that industrial pollution and the dust raised by the last war have thickened our planet's atmosphere. But the war ended ten thousand revolutions of this planet ago, time for most dust to settle, and industrial production is still far from regaining pre-war levels. A fourth theory is that the ancients simply had better eyesight than we, or (a fifth theory) their astronomical descriptions were grossly exaggerated, to benefit the priestly hierarchy and its imbecilic royal puppets.

Coming back in the late-afternoon dark from a visit to the dazzlingly lit s.p.a.ces of the Beverly Hospital (the doctors say I am doing fine: my impotence, incontinence, pain, paranoia, depression, and sense of dislocation are all on track in the normal course of healing), we picked up in our headlights, to one side of the driveway, a man disguised as a tree. It was John, walking back to his truck after two hours of remaining motionless in his stand. Gloria push-b.u.t.toned the Infiniti window down and asked in a musical, sprightly, loving voice, "How did it go?"

"It was quiet," he admitted, with no hint of discouragement.

"Our neighbor, Mrs. Lubbetts, told me on the phone she saw four of them, feasting on her junipers."

"Oh, they're around," he chimed back. "It's just a question of time."

And what isn't? I sullenly thought. I sullenly thought.

The quiver of four aligned arrows on his back made him look like an anti-aircraft battery draped in camouflage cloth. His wire-frame gla.s.ses seemed still to hold the light from our headlights. To make him aware of my presence, as I huddled there beside Gloria, desperate for a diaper change, I cleared my throat and asked, "Do the trinkets ever bother you? These bigger new ones can do a job on human beings, I hear."

He straightened, so his saintly smile was all I could see through Gloria's rolled-down window. "I carry a spray; they mix it of sand and glue. One squirt of that and those darn critters don't come near your feet again."

Gloria made the car seat bounce, this expertise excited her so. Her radiant hair, cut and tinted while I was suffering my hospital checkup, blazed filament by filament in the ambient glow of our headlights. Or was some cunning part of John's armory giving off a secondary glow?

"Smell that?" he said suddenly.

"What?" she asked, breathless.

"A buck. Right about here."

We were parked, our engine idling, at a spot on the driveway beside the sourwood tree, whose fallen leaves gave off, I had noticed, a rich, l.u.s.ty smell of decay. But I didn't want to argue. I wanted only to get back to the house and get out of my wet Depends.

"There could be a buck?" buck?" Gloria asked, with a rising inflection. Gloria asked, with a rising inflection.

"Why not?" John asked in his slow voice. "This is the season. Fella I was shooting with over on Plum Island got a six-pointer whose nose was to the ground, following the scent of a doe. That's what they do. Buck smells a doe, his brain can't take in much else."

"How exciting!" Gloria exclaimed.

"Wasn't paying attention, that's how he got shot," John said, as if his nature lesson needed recapitulation.

"I'm soaked," I muttered at her side. "I'm miserable." Reluctantly she moved the car up the driveway, nudging it along as if keeping step with the hunter walking up alone.

Next morning, shuffling down to pick up the Globe Globe, I stopped by the sourwood to consider the odor in its vicinity. It was rank but, like the smell your finger brings away from probing the folds of your navel, or that your socks deliver when held beneath your nose at the end of a long day, not exactly unpleasant, because it is you you.

It happened in my sleep, at dawn, when tender-faced ruminants inquisitively tread-nose extended like a fending hand in the dark-through the frost-whitened leaf mulch of the forest floor scarcely expecting, in the morning's innocence, an enemy to be awake. But John had gone three weeks without his kill and had set his alarm to ring in the dark, in the middle of his faithful wife's dreams. She rolled over, hearing him clump into his hunting boots, and fell back into a vision of venison.

I myself awoke to the sound of John and Gloria jubilating in mutually congratulatory murmurs down on the driveway. He had driven his green truck down the dirt road to collect the gutted carca.s.s, then he had brought it back up to the house to show my wife his prize, the obscene fruit of their joint conspiracy. From my window I could see the deer's body like a taut russet sack tossed into the square-ribbed flatbed along with the metal lattice of his treestand and some stray planks of lumber. The white of the throat couldn't at first glance be distinguished from the big white-undersided tail. Heart thudding, I fumbled out of my sweated pajamas- never mind the soaked diaper, whose ammonia stung my eyes-and into yesterday's corduroy trousers and moth-eaten wool sweater. Without the patience for socks, I stuck my naked feet into loafers and, moving faster than I had for months, grabbed the old parka, with its seams leaking down, hung on the hook nearest the kitchen door downstairs. The cold outside was misty, and felt like shackles on my bare ankles. The day was still too young to have acquired horizons.

Scarcely since our wedding day have I seen Gloria's face aglow as it was beside the dusty, dented truck, with its lowered tailgate. Her bathrobe of purple chenille was clutched so tightly about her I knew she was wearing only a thin cotton nightie beneath. "He was crossing the old dirt road," she burst out proudly to me, "right where John" John"-it made me shiver, the juices of affection and respect she managed to squeeze into the monosyllable-"had figured out the route up to our yard was."

"She," I said. "It's a doe. It was a doe."

"Right across beneath my stand," John joined in. "A clean shot, the little downward angle suited me just fine, at about twenty feet." His saintly face, with its shambly brown teeth and washed-out blue eyes, was unable to conceal, quite, his murderous pride. "Maybe she sensed my pulling the bow," he went on. "She turned her head, to give me that seven-inch circle I spoke about. Zing! Right into the lungs. She didn't get more than a hundred yards, and stopped breathing where she bedded down. She gave me this one long look, like I was coming to her a.s.sistance, and then lay down her pretty little head on the leaves. I didn't have to use a second arrow. Depending on what gristle they pierce, they can be the devil to work out."

I saw the wound now, a messy matted X. The dried blood blended in with her reddish-brown coat, its hairs glinting silver in the rising sun. From my angle the deer's body stretched long as a lover's beside you in bed. "How'd you get her up in the truck?" I asked.

"The old fireman's squat-and-hoist," he boasted, unable to control his grin. "Once you've removed the entrails, that cuts out a lot of the water and slop. Still, she weighs something over a hundred pounds, I can tell you. Luckily, it was near the road. Sometimes you wind up with a mile or so to drag out the carca.s.s. I backed in the truck and hoisted. You try to take the weight on your legs and give a grunt out loud. That's something we've learned from the j.a.panese, giving the power grunt."

The deer's head was toward me, on the lowered tailgate, as if to be fed something, her lips slightly drawn back, a lavender sliver of tongue visible. There were little crusts of blood around her black nostrils, relic of the b.l.o.o.d.y foam she breathed in her last minute. Her eyes were open, long-lashed, coffee-brown globules in which our oaks and tall white house set vertical reflections like tiny submerged fins. The short-haired barrel of her body, dented by the removal of its intestines and multiple stomachs and liver and lungs and heart, emitted in the frosty morning a vapor of relative warmth, like the winter sea, and a helpless strong animal smell, of dry hair and damp hide and the pellets released from her tidy a.n.u.s in the sorry unravelling of death. From the inner corners of the deer's eyes flowed two dark markings, like tear trails. But the consciousness that had protruded into the two bright, snuff-flecked eyes had moved on, into another cosmic s.p.a.ce.

John stepped toward me, exuding his own scent, of patiently absorbed woods and a hint of bad breath-he must have been a pipe-smoker, once, to wear down those teeth like that-as if to claim my congratulations. Gloria beamed in a happy daze behind his mottled shoulders. In his bulky camouflage outfit, and his intricately shaped knit cap, with its stump of a bill, he seemed princely, a groom at a pre-Christian wedding. The deer was his bride. Or was she mine, and he and Gloria the blessed pair on this gala day? It seemed plain enough that among the four of us my affinity was with the deer. Her conical slender face, with its coa.r.s.e rubbery muzzle and indelible tear trails, gazed toward me; I could see myself move, a reflected splinter wearing a parka and no socks, in the orb of dulling gel.

With a woman in love, for a time, you can do no wrong; then you reach a point where nothing you do is right. I had reached that point with Gloria a while ago and felt hardly a flicker of jealousy as she with grave sweetness-North Sh.o.r.e Lady Bountiful clad in naught but thin cotton beneath her regal purple robe-thanked the hunter over and over, pressing his trembling hands in both of hers.

Uneasily including me, John told us, "After I do the butchering, I'd like to present you folks with a fine venison steak. You choose the cut."

Cla.s.s lines rea.s.serted themselves. We both stiffened at the offer. Did he mean for us to point out our preferred slice right on the still-steaming corpse? It would be like eating a large rat. Jointly we covered our refusal with the sauce of insistent mannerly grat.i.tude, but we had refused his, in a sense, flesh. As he stepped out of his hunting gear and tree costume, he seemed shrunken, smaller in size and in mystery. He put up the trunk tailgate, bending the deer's head back so that I winced. Ow Ow.

For a million years (or so), we didn't know what the stars were. Witnessed primarily by the sleepless, by watchful shepherds and sailors and the madmen who became the tribal seers, the slowly spinning spatter of lights reappeared overhead at sunset by we knew not what necessity; we gave the most prominent of them names, and wove stories to bind them together, but such exercise of our fancies drew us no closer to the astonishing truth of their gigantic circ.u.mferences, their unthinkable ma.s.s, their unbearable heat, their ghastly distance from us, and their lives of atomic turmoil, of incessant explosions and elemental mutations, fusing hydrogen nuclei to form the two-proton, two-neutron nuclei of helium, and then in the convulsions of a supernova pressing helium into carbon, oxygen, neon, and ultimately iron.

Discovery of the stars' nature had to await the invention of telescopes and spectrographs, which came about only after the rise and fall of many barbaric empires, led by kings proclaimed by their priests to be earthly embodiments of G.o.d. Their warfare, and the erection of monuments suitable in their grandeur to G.o.d-men, sluggishly propelled technology forward, through the invention of wheeled chariots, stirrups and saddles, catapults and rams, moats and portcullises, pulleys and booms, gunpowder, steam engines, radios, telephones, hydrocarbon-burning engines that could propel vehicles along the ground and even into the air, and so forth to the point where, a hundred years ago, it was understood that beyond the stars that a shepherd or sailor sees at night lie, across vast deeps of emptiness, conglomerations of more stars. These, fuzzy in their first sightings, were first called nebulae, and then island universes, and now galaxies. The numbers are so grand and round as to seem mere fabulations: a hundred billion stars in our own galaxy, a flattened spiral which is a hundred thousand light-years in diameter, and then a hundred billion galaxies beyond, of more or less the same size as our own. Such numbers numb us, else we would continually scream.

Scarcely fifty years ago-a mere wink in the history of our planet, a mere smothered yawn within the saga of our species-was it discovered that all the galaxies are rushing toward us at t.i.tanic speeds. Well, not all, for those the farthest away, at a distance of more than twenty-five billion years, are moving away, as a so-called "red shift" in their spectra inarguably reveals-which is to say, twenty-five billion years ago they were moving away. Now-but "now" makes no sense in cosmic terms. The farther we look, the more ancient is what we see. Inside this remote and ruddy ring of apparent recession there is a ring of stasis-of pause, of hesitation-twenty-four billion or so light-years away, and inside that the stars begin to scream blue. At first they murmur, but the nearer they are, the more distinctly and uniformly blue they are, since within a radius of five billion light-years we are looking into the relatively recent past. Some are rushing toward us at a considerable fraction of the speed of light.

It is clear what is happening: the universe is collapsing. The red shift on the periphery is very old news, testifying to a former expansion. There is much scientific speculation about the expansion. How did it happen? The collapse seems normal and inevitable: gravitational attraction, the most feeble but most relentless of the basic forces, is pulling everything home, to a singular core-a point, infinitely small and dense, of nothingness. But why did nothingness ever leave home, as it were? What placed the stars and galaxies, the quasars and black holes and oceans of neutrinos out there? Whence this inordinate amount of sparkling dust?

Out there-down there, up there-there must be or must have been, in the concentric rings of time, other souls. Indeed, the virtually infinite numerousness of heavenly bodies argues that somewhere, somewhen, I had or have an identical twin, amid a galaxy of brothers who resemble me closely. The odds are gigantically for it. Yet no proof has ever arrived. The distances have stifled with delay whatever radio signals or s.p.a.ceships other populations might have launched. An impeccable silence hangs as answer to the great Who? Who? Not that my twin would be any less puzzled than I-else he would not be my twin. Not that my twin would be any less puzzled than I-else he would not be my twin.

The long-range prospect appears clear. If the red-to-blue shift can be dated to plus or minus twenty-five billion years ago, the collapse will continue nearly that long before local effects can be observed. The background cosmic radiation of 2K will rise to 3K will rise to 3K, it is estimated, in ten billion years. From this point the universe will halve its dimensions in three and a half billion years and keep accelerating. In ten billion more years, the background radiation will have risen to 300K. This is still cold, too cold for even the toughest life forms, but our planet will slowly become unable to divest itself of heat. Our glaciers will melt, and then our oceans will evaporate. A mere forty million years later, the background radiation will match the temperature needed for the creation and sustenance of life; but life will have vanished on our scorched planet, if it has not already been engulfed by the expansion of the local sun into a red giant. The background radiation-the temperature of s.p.a.ce-has risen to 300C, or 572F, and will continue to rise as the universe halves in dimension every few millions of years. The galaxies will have merged, but star collisions will still be rare, there is so much empty s.p.a.ce to eat up. The night sky will begin to glow a dull red. In time it will turn yellow, then white. The universe will be a furnace, an oubliette with white-hot walls. All planetary atmospheres will have been stripped; all life-forms, however ingeniously evolved in their crannies and lightless depths, will be remorselessly incinerated. Unable to radiate their heat away, the stars will explode; s.p.a.ce will become a hot plasma of compressing gas. The rate of change will enter a scale of hundreds of thousands of years, then mere thousands, then centuries, days, minutes, seconds, split-seconds. As the temperature climbs to billions of degrees, atomic nuclei will disintegrate. In the compression of matter, protons and neutrons will no longer exist; the thick soup of unbound quarks will weigh trillions of tons per thimbleful. Black holes, those h.e.l.ls of absolute density, will merge with one another. Not just matter but s.p.a.ce itself, taking with it time, will be crushed out of existence, and I and my soulmate, my certain twin in the expanding dust of aeons and aeons ago, will be one or, to be exact, no one.

But can can time end? s.p.a.ce can be obliterated with the matter that measures it, but can time excuse itself from the grammar of sequence? time end? s.p.a.ce can be obliterated with the matter that measures it, but can time excuse itself from the grammar of sequence? It was It was implies a present that still implies a present that still is is. Can the fact of something-especially an entire universe, all 1087 particles of it, all 10 particles of it, all 1050 tons of it-having existed be ever obliterated? Time, having taken the imprint of being, must endure like a sheet of paper that, though blank, bears a watermark in its fibers. The priests who, in their conical hats configured with stars and moons, continue to practice their grotesque trade on this doomed planet even into this age of scientific enlightenment have a saying in their archaic language: tons of it-having existed be ever obliterated? Time, having taken the imprint of being, must endure like a sheet of paper that, though blank, bears a watermark in its fibers. The priests who, in their conical hats configured with stars and moons, continue to practice their grotesque trade on this doomed planet even into this age of scientific enlightenment have a saying in their archaic language: Our minds harry G.o.d from every covert, and yet he lives within. He is killed, and killed, and yet not Our minds harry G.o.d from every covert, and yet he lives within. He is killed, and killed, and yet not.

My own mind quails. The blue shift is tens of billions of years from heating the interstellar s.p.a.ce by so much as a degree Fahrenheit. I am safe in my nest of local conditions, on my hilltop in sight of the still-unevaporated ocean. Nevertheless, I am uneasy. All the vegetation in my view is gray, leafless. The sea has no color; its uniformity of surface, scarcely rippled, offers the very image of entropy. The firmament is heavy, a mere webbing of lambent mortar between giant clouds as shapeless and motionless as paving stones. Plagues stalk the scabs of land, perpetuated by microorganisms that understand only annihilation; and nations, too, all illusions of gloire gloire and civilizing mission hopelessly decayed, compete like animals in a cage where food for only half of them is supplied. The very short view alone is bearable. and civilizing mission hopelessly decayed, compete like animals in a cage where food for only half of them is supplied. The very short view alone is bearable.

The woods between here and the beach are a solid leafless brown, a kind of giant moss. Morning engenders beneath its surface a thousand forked glints of illumined bare twigs, an electric crackle of white sunlight. The flat roof of Mrs. Lubbetts' beach house forms the only note, a jarring one, of human habitation in the view.

Yesterday, or the day before-they do run together, the days-the air for the first time since last winter was so much colder than the sea that the water smoked: little cloudlets of vapor, in strips and vague zigzags, adhered to its surface until the sun warmed them out of existence. On such sunny dry days shrivelled leaves sc.r.a.pe and scutter almost deafeningly across the black asphalt of the driveway.

The world still holds leaves. Along 128, as Gloria drove me, "to get me out of myself," on some errands of hers (sizing up the compet.i.tion in the gifts trade, mostly) to the so-called North Sh.o.r.e Shopping Plaza-an inferno of tacky consumerism that I once visited with Deirdre, she looking like my young nurse, I looking like every other retired parasite upon the shattered economy-I noticed that among the mostly bare trees the willows still have kept lemonade-yellow tops, the lower, shaded leaves having fallen but these top leaves still sucking vitality from the ever more obliquely angled sun. I also saw along the highway that some strange trees (oaks, I think, of a special sort) have bleached almost white in turning and yet do not drop their leaves, rather like trees abruptly killed by lightning.

A strange hallucination: in walking down to pick up the Globe Globe, with my gradually more vigorous stride, I made a mental note, rounding the first curve, to pick up the sizable branch that I had seen fall off the hickory tree. But no branch was there, and then I remembered that I had seen it fall in a dream, this morning before awaking. In my dream, I was looking out this window beside which I so often sit writing and saw the branch that most conspicuously hangs down slowly break away and fall. The sight made me happy, because the branch had long bothered me and now I had a less obstructed view of the sea, and of Misery Island and, beyond it, Baker's, with its lighthouse and Methodist summer houses. The dream had been so vivid, and yet so modestly plausible, that I caught myself trying to act upon it in the "real" world of three dimensions and Greenwich time.

As the day that had begun so cold continued, the sea became absolutely silken, the same delicately rippling blue from sh.o.r.e to horizon, as if in two dimensions. It had perceptible threads in it-tiny "floats," as textile manufacturers say-in diagonal rows, as in gabardine. The blue line of the South Sh.o.r.e also floated, admitting beneath itself a thin pale line of air the same faintly tawny color as the sky.

Coming back up the driveway, annoyed with the lilac and the forsythia for still being green, I touched a forsythia branch, and several of the leaves, narrow and pointed, fluttered to the ground. They came off at the lightest tug, twirling down to join the gaudier leaves of the sourwood, already matted in a mulch, compounded like chipwood, of scarlet and gold. I withdrew my hand in distaste. I had no wish to take Nature's place, to usurp her lethal, cyclical prerogatives.

The Kegel exercises are coming well. I stand above the toilet bowl and think of all the oval toilet bowls I have gazed into since first learning to go pee-pee in that narrow country house shaken by the traffic on the road heading down into the chimneyed brick heart of Hammond Falls. Imagining myself a child again, I try to remind my puzzled, wounded body how to release the urethral sphincter and make a golden arc. There is a ghost in my machine that controls the valves. Ever more, I seem to locate him, somehow. Mind over matter: I feel such triumph, to be regaining this bit of my animal self. But I can brag about it only to Gloria, and not too often; her face shows impatience with my body. Christmas looms a month away, and she spends more time at her gift shop, leaving me to roam, cautiously, in the house.

One day I went looking for the dahlia. The ugly white tubers, the black dirt slowly drying and crumbling off their wrinkled skins, lay for a week on a green garbage bag spread on the laundry-room counter, and then vanished. I knew she was going to pack them in plastic peanuts, in a ten-inch square cardboard box she had brought from the shop, and store them in either the cellar for coolness or the attic for dryness, but I did not know which. I dared the sinister dank cellar, where in my absence the spiders have been free to multiply their webs, and checked all the closets on the third floor, yet could not find the cardboard cube. I wanted simply to gaze at it for a few seconds, even if it was taped shut, and to hoist its weight in my hands. It would be lighter, I imagined, than I expected. It would be Egyptian only in its severe shape and sealed pledge.

I could ask her where she had stored it, but fear she would take this as an intrusion. Since I can no longer insert myself into her flesh, any other form of intrusion has become offensive to her. She does not know this herself, but her face and voice tell me, and the impatient quickness with which she moves around me. The dahlia was the unforeseen triumph of her summer. She loves it; it is hers; any attempt of mine to draw consolation from it would be an affront. She is afraid, perhaps, that I will open the box before it is ready, before spring is here. She sees me, it dawningly becomes clear, as a brute, clumsy and impulsive and unpredictable, apt to tear open everything sealed and to crush everything fragile.

Another hallucination: walking down to pick up the Globe Globe, I distinctly heard the gurgle of a mountain stream, purling and twisting unseen through a narrow rock-lined gorge. But my little hill is no mountain, and though the November day was misty, no rain had fallen for days. Yet the sound was unignorable, arising from the swampy valley between the driveway and the beach, yet close to my ear-a huge invisible angel murmuring.

There had to be a rational explanation, and bit by bit, like a coded message a.s.sembling itself in mid-air, it came to me. Dark birds were flicking, I saw, from branch to branch in the veil of trees on the slope toward the sea; I realized that a great flock of migrating starlings had settled momentarily in my woods, and that the birds' ma.s.sed chirping, their merry-sounding signals one to another, had uncannily imitated the sound of a gurgling stream, even to its tinny and pulsating undertones. As if flushed by my reasoning, percipient mind from their camouflage, hundreds of birds arose with a soft thunder of wings and roosted, still twittering, in the great solitary oak on the boundary between our property and the Kellys' Thick as leaves, the starlings blackened the bare branches so that there was only a shuffle of sparks of daylight between them.

What do the little black-and-white birds that stay with us all winter live on? Plump, uncomplaining, they hop from twig to twig of the thickets visible from the driveway and yet one never sees them peck a berry from the goosefoot maple or a seed from beneath the euonymus.

The lilac has quite lost its leaves suddenly; but next year's buds are already in place. When I pinch them, they yield, as living matter does.

There are voices downstairs. Gloria's children have come for the holiday. I should be down there with them, answering to the name of "Pop." Since they will be joining their real father in Mexico for Christmas, they are giving thanks with us tomorrow. Divorce and remarriage impose fair-mindedness, with its strict mathematics, upon the children. They have added a voice-a baby's squawk and much-tended-to cry. Roger and Marcia in the year past have produced a male child, named Adam. He is brick-red. Marcia talks to him incessantly in that baby voice of hers, while the tiny person, three months old, still stunned by the world, stares unfocusedly up into the outpour of what is to be had on this planet-light, milk, voices, danger, love. Beatrice will be having her child, my eleventh grandchild, in January of 2021.

Gloria has expanded thrillingly into the role of grand-motherhood; it gives her yet another dimension, with, impotent though I am, a stirring element of perverse fantasy. My mental apparatus of l.u.s.t, constructed mainly of images from popular culture, remains inconveniently intact. In her grandmotherhood she is like an actress in a blue movie whom we discover, before her preordained nudity, dressed in the habit of a nun, or as a little girl, with rouged cheeks, sucking on a lollipop.

She says the weathermen are talking snow tomorrow. Last year this time we were wallowing in the stuff, but today, under an indeterminate sky, is unseasonably warm. She cannot mound up the roses until the ground freezes; otherwise, mice burrow and nest in the tilth beneath the mulch and eat the rose roots. The weather is so warm a mult.i.tude of small pale moths have mistakenly hatched. In the early dark they flip and flutter a foot or two above the asphalt, as if trapped in a narrow wedge of s.p.a.ce-time beneath the obliterating imminence of winter.

A Note about the Author

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker The New Yorker, and since 1957 has lived in Ma.s.sachusetts. He is the father of four children and the author of some forty books, including collections of short stories, poems, and criticism. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal.