Toward the End of Time - By John Updike Page 0,108
was periodically strapped, I was stoical about my hair loss and blistered anus; I minded only the infrequent sieges of nausea and the pathetic shrunken wreck the procedures made of my beloved genitals.
“What didn’t you like about the cosmos?” I asked, with a sickly croak. In my frail sensitivity I imagined I could feel the damp of the lawn creeping up through my shoe soles— baroquely ornate running shoes, purchased to speed my convalescence.
“It didn’t fit,” Gloria stated firmly. “It wanted to take over the entire garden.”
“It wasn’t a good soldier,” I amplified, in this new voice of mine that seems to have a permanent scratch in it.
“Exactly” Shards of earth and vegetation flew. Fistfuls of torn-up flowers stared skyward, lacking the nervous systems to realize that all those chemical transactions called life had been abruptly cancelled.
I felt—eerie, phantasmal sensation!—a trickle of urine warmly glide from my bladder into the plastic catheter, which conveyed it downward into the cumbersome leg bag strapped below my knee. The leg bag was flesh-colored, amusingly—as if I might enter a beauty contest wearing it and it mustn’t show. Sometimes it backed up, and urine already ejected once backed up as high as my flaccid penis spilling down my thighs.
Big belling morning glories had climbed the green fence, and the single dahlia in my absence had grown and proliferated into a small tree crowded with numerous blooms the blushing color of a maiden’s labia. There seemed something rancid and evil about the garden—clumps of nameless livid growths formed caves for slugs and havens for beady-bodied daddy longlegs with ornately evolved venomous mandibles. In fact moles, rats, and woodchucks did burrow and rummage in the soft, much-mulched soil. Woodchucks nibble off the tops of Gloria’s flowers—they are especially partial to poppies—so she heartlessly sets out so-called Havaheart traps for them, low rectangular cages whose doors fall diagonally and lock when the hapless animal treads on a central trigger. In my absence she had caught a creature who had calmly chewed an escape hatch through the 14-gauge galvanized wire. That must mean that she had caught a metallo-bioform, and that they were getting bigger. All the specimens I had ever seen or read about could have slipped out through the half-inch square mesh.
“Ben, as long as you’re just standing there watching me struggle, wouldn’t you like to throw the cosmos into the green cart and pull it down to the mulching pile?”
“Bending over is agony for me.”
“The doctor said the more you exercised the better you’d be.”
“The doctor doesn’t have a reamed prick and a bag of piss strapped to his leg.”
“You don’t have to be rude about it.” Another clump of uprooted cosmos was flung and a spray of dirt speckled the tops of my hitherto pristine running shoes. They were aqua, turquoise, crimson, black, and white, with striped laces. Gloria added, “The cart is in the garage.”
The effort left me feeling I had dragged a load of broken concrete up the side of Mount Greylock. She told me, “While you were in the hospital, I was frightened. I kept hearing noises and voices in the woods.”
A tension of guilt tugged at my wound, my seared and cleansed pockets of cancerous flesh. Though the delayed-focus laser in theory left the intervening tissue unaffected, in truth the flesh knew it had been violated, and why. Flesh knows everything, and forgets nothing.
“Oh?” I said. “I’ve been struck since I was home by how quiet everything is.” I had been listening, in my captivity, for the Lynn boys, my adopted grandsons, to come to the door dutifully inquiring after my health, or for Doreen at night to come and hiss sexily beneath my window. I even scanned the driveway for her cigarette butts. My flesh remembered the scent of her cigarettes in the sweatshop closeness of the shack, and her malty smell, and the glazed hard place between her breasts, shallow taut cones tipped with honeysuckle-berry nipples. She liked—the only thing she admitted liking—my rapidly flicking them with my tongue. At night I would lie and listen for sounds of human life from the woods but there was only the contralto drone of the cicadas—a thousand brainless voices blended, like an inhuman radio signal from space.
“I know,” Gloria said. Her cheeks as she lowered her eyes to weed bulged with a complacent smile. “I did something about it.”
“What?” I braced for the answer. Any mental disturbance or anxiety tugs at the seat of my pain with its torque.