Toward the End of Time

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 grass 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 chores 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 appetite.

And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease? An hour later, I 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 cumbersome 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 leucothoë 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 shaggy. 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 passed 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 latitude 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 passing. 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 surreptitious 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, 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 Massachusetts 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 appetite, 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 balls. 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 balls lose compression within a few months of being unsealed, and balls 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 damn” my wife told me, “but each bush would cost hundreds of dollars to replace.” Like many of us past a certain age, she says “dollars” when she means “welders,” the Massachusetts unit of currency named after a fabled pre-war governor, a rare Republican. She corrected herself. “This deer will do fifty 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.

“Do I think it’s funny?” I asked. I doubted it. Rapacity, competition, 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 shitting everywhere! Little puddles of shit!”

“Can’t you say something other than ‘shit’?” In our courting days I had been attracted to her way of saying “fuck” 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 amusement. 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,” 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, shitting all over our hedge, would you have helped me throw golf balls?”

“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 turds-a sample of my own scat-up to her fair pink face. “You want him to destroy everything. Just to get at me.”

“Not at all,” I protested, yet so feebly the possible truth of her assertion 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 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, 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, 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 assets, 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, damn 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 something! Damn 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 Japanese 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-”

“Shells.”

“-shells 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 sexual whisper and the whimper of a terrified child. “Ben! He’s eating the euonymus again! Hurry! I’ve assembled 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 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 fucking deer.”

“Not shoot him,” she pleaded, “shoot over his head, so he gets the idea we hate him. Oh please, darling, 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 shell.

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 muffled and dwindled by the double glass of window and storm window, my wife was rapping the glass and shouting, “Shoot! Shoot!” It was like the voice of a cartoon mouse in a bell jar. Involuntarily a smile of sadistic 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 muffled 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 glass and splintered sash but likely no clean fatality.

“You bastardly 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 penis.

Julian Jaynes thinks that until about three thousand years ago men went about in a trance, taking orders direct from the gods. 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 occupying the volume of space 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, cocked 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 appetite 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 Assyrians 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 uncock 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, cocked 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 butt 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 fuck her from behind, with no thought of her own orgasm. 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 competition’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 Cockaigne 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-“Damn 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 shells 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 passed, 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, twanged, “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 here at this time of day. I bet he scared it away with his show-offy dumb truck. I thought he looked too young.”

“There were 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 “shit.”

“Did he say he’d be back?”

It turned out that nobody 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 Shore 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 pornographic, 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 entitles 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 sunglasses 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, semen-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 passionate affairs thirty years ago, but lately I have begun to think I would seek out only young whores, 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 shell, 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. Mass., 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 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 sex 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 balls. 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 leucothoë plantings that have never, I tell my wife, looked like anything but jungle weeds.

God, 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 lust 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 shittily. 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 shell 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 cockiness 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 reassuring 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 trimming 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, sex, 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 Homo 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 pass, 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 massive, 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 stitching; 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 passing 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 Homo 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, lusting, 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 space, even in the lots. My former partners at Sibbes, Dudley, and Wise were cordial, but harried-competition 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 municipal-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-glass partitions (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 muffler, accidentally turned her face toward mine as she blew a bubble of bubble gum. The primitive man within me prickled 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 penis, there in the chilly damp gloom of the station, which is a much drearier, barer place since the renovations that substituted 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 passengers the old jaunty sensation of swinging 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.

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 glass, 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 space, 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 God 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 nobody 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 anticipation 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 prick, 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 space? Are the funnel vortices of black holes the passageways 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 Massachusetts 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 grass, 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 grass 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 multitudes.

And then the next day, or the next, awaking too early, unsettled by the hyperactive, menacing weather-Gloria is falling in love with the different channels’ weathermen, and can tell them all apart-I was walking in the pre-dawn semi-dark down to the mailbox, where the delivery man throws the newspaper, sparing himself the trouble of our driveway. Above me a two-thirds moon hung in a sky already blue. I looked up at this apparition and tried to see it as it is, a ball in space, illuminated by a single light-source. The direction of the source was clearly indicated by the way the light lay; it was somewhere over my shoulder. The sun was in the southeast but not yet risen. I tried to make myself realize that the moon was hoisted into the same light that had not yet touched me; there is no other light; it soaks the inner solar system, in whose interplanetary spaces there is no night and day; and this light would not soon be lifting over the horizon behind my left shoulder, beyond the cluster of quaintly named local islands, but in fact the surface I am standing on and all surface continuous with it to the horizon of the sea and beyond was plunging forward the sun, like the floor of a vast airplane crashing, a vast curved floor monumentally, imperceptibly spinning in the direction dead against that in which the sun like a knob in a slotted groove would arc across the sky to make another day in my minuscule, clinging, transitory, insectlike life. Inside my curved skull I approached this spatial visualization as if approaching the edge of a windswept cliff or steep slippery-tiled roof; then my mind darted back, dizzy, into the safety of pre-scientific stupidity. I could not at all visualize how the moon-its waxing and waning; its presenting always the same face to the Earth; its monthly revolution; its tug on the tides-fit into this gigantic toy of gravity with all its balls of matter. Everything went flat for me; the snow-packed driveway beneath my feet stopped moving.

How curious it is, given the scientific view of the universe as ultimately causeless and accidental, that the moon and the sun are the exact same size in the sky, as we see in a solar eclipse, where the fit is so exact that Bailey’s beads of sunlight shoot out rays through the valleys of the moon. No wonder men for millennia took these two heavenly bodies, so disparate in astronomical fact, to be twin gods-competing brothers, or a brother and sister safeguarding different aspects of the human soul. The kinship did not have to be. In another easily imagined system there might be two moons, or five, or none. There might be two suns, a large and a small, locked in a gravitational embrace, setting and rising at opposite ends of the horizon. Somewhere beyond Jupiter our space-exploring vehicles show the sun as another star, no brighter than Venus from our planet’s vantage. One of the scientific sages I admired as a boy, a kindly prune-faced dwarf who appeared on public television, educating the masses, said that, if all our cosmological wisdom had to be passed on to a benighted future in a single sentence, the sentence should be The sun is a star.

The sun is a star. Christianity said, God is a man. Humanism said, Man is a god. Today the sages say, via such Jainist cosmogonies as string theory and the inflationary hypothesis, that everything is nothing. The cosmos is a free lunch, a quantum fluctuation.

The deer awakens, starving, in her tent of hemlock boughs and comes up to the house, placing and lifting each foot in an almost straight line. My wife is away, eating up the world with her errands, consumer and merchant both. The deer nibbles at our euonymus hedge, its edges exposed by the recent thaw, at first warily, then voraciously. She becomes as she eats a young lean-bodied whore, whom I invite into the house. We take care to brush from the front-hall Oriental, a little red, blue-bordered Qum, the pieces of melting snow that fall from her narrow naked feet. We go up to the third floor, where among the cobwebs and bat droppings there are discarded beds and down quilts, held in reserve for my stepchildren. Her thin body slowly sheds its chill, its shivering (all the little downy hairs of her body erect), and she serves me with a cold, slick expertise, her mind elsewhere to preserve her dignity. What I love most about the encounter is watching her walk back and forth to the bathroom, her flanks stately, her step silent, all but the crease between her buttocks tan. The bathroom fixtures up here have not been changed since the house was built in 1905; they are porcelain antiques, moon-white. My groin pleasantly aches from its unaccustomed friction. My semen, still coming in the sluggish way of an old man’s body, leaks onto my thigh, and thence makes a telltale stain on the sheet. The sheets are changed only once or twice a year, when a child comes to visit. I will have to call the local taxi, to get the girl away, off my property. The driver hangs out, over a scummy cup of cooling coffee, at the drugstore in the village. I am leaving clues, I realize. My body fluids are leaking out into the community. When I become frightened, for my prestige and safety and domestic peace, I tell myself she is a fantasy, a branching not existent in the palpable universe.

Walking down to the mailbox this morning, I observed in the mounds that the plow heaped on either side of the driveway, and in the ice and packed snow receding on the asphalt, the patterns of melting-the ornate undercutting, the fragile lace left behind by liquefaction and evaporation, the striations of successive snowfalls, some damper and icier than others. The snow rots at its own indolent pace, its innards crawling with bubbles of meltwater like wood lice.

In the southeast there are low thin clouds, violet rimmed with a sickly tangerine color; crumbling flakes of this metallic Day-Glo color float free and oddly mirror in the heavens the two islands, Baker’s and Misery, that float in the view from our hill. Overhead, in a sky already the powdery blue of mid-day, there are two moons-a half-moon drinking the sky’s blue through the seepage along its thin edge, and a smaller, even paler, more papery moon. If the first occupies, like the sun, approximately a half-degree of the celestial hemisphere’s 180 degrees, this second is no wider than a sixth of a degree. It has a honeycomb appearance, with a pair of scarcely visible appendages, stubby dragonfly wings.

This moon was man-made-a space station set in orbit three thousand miles above the Earth, one-hundredth of the first moon’s distance, by men before the Sino-American Conflict dissolved the governments able to maintain the shuttle ships. Earth abandoned its satellite, and the colonists marooned there survived for a time amid their tons of provisions and their solar-powered greenhouses. Then, as the world watched in horror the television broadcasts that were maintained with the generator’s last volts of energy, the space-dwellers one by one died. This episode, become mythic, has inspired any number of bathetic retellings in the popular media, even if all of us who dwell on Earth are in a position exactly the same, if on a larger scale. Indeed, it is not impossible that the colony, in its giant honeycomb of hollow struts and exquisitely stretched sheets of insulating foil, still holds a few live crewpersons, surviving on protein tablets and hydroponic lettuce. The scattered surviving populations of the Earth lack the technical resources to send a rescue mission aloft, even if there were a will. This second moon, with its own phases and periods of eclipse, hangs in the sky as an embarrassment, a bad conscience. Once my species had been strong enough to put it up there, and now it is out of our reach. Like its larger natural brother, it was a half-moon today, struck at the same angle of solar radiation, half dissolved in the blue, translucent like a mirage. The moon’s two power-gathering wings seemed, as I squinted up, an optical aberration, like the feathers of iridescence that spin off from the sim when you squint at it, or when you emerge from the sea with drenched lashes and corneas stinging from the salt.

The mailbox stands beneath several hemlocks. Their shadows make the snow slow to melt on this slope of driveway, an icy tunnel in wintertime. But, as I turned, Boston Globe in hand, to climb the hill, the hairy red sun, just lifted above the gray treetops of the woods, struck the bare asphalt at a low angle that brought into relief the parallel scratches left by the lawn service’s plow. I had never noticed them before. They seemed ominously ancient, Egyptian, these man-induced grooves, as if slaves had dragged one huge stone across another in the construction of a pyramid so gigantic that death itself would be defeated.

Our late-January thaw continues. Looking down upon my lawn from a third-floor window, I marvel at how the bushes and hedges are completely freed and how much green grass has been exposed. Where I struggled heroically, braving a heart attack, out to the flagpole to remove the Christmas lights, a ragged green path exists, on which, if I wished, I could stroll out to run up the American flag. But I spare the flag the winter winds; already it is so frayed the stripes are coming apart at their ends, each becoming a thin pennant.

On Cape Cod, the snow has receded to the point where some golf courses are open. Yesterday a friend, Red Ruggles, invited me to drive down, with another friend of his, a retired airline pilot named Ken Dixon, and to play a round at a course of which a friend of Red’s is a member. The member, who is our age, was suddenly too sick with something-gout, arthritis, the flu-to join us, but he phoned us in as guests. Red is not exactly retired, although his two sons have taken over the daily routines of the fish business he founded in Gloucester. While driving his Dodge Caravan down Route 1 and through Boston to Route 3 to the Sagamore Bridge and Route 6, Red kept picking up his cellular phone and talking to the distant places-Vladivostok, Punta Arenas, Dar es Salaam-where “product” (fish) can still be found and bought. He gives the greeting in the local language-“Dobrii dyen!” “Buenos días!” “Jambo!”-and then speaks in a loud English. He calls everybody “friend.” He makes all these calls, I think, in part to impress his helpless passengers and in part to maintain sentimental contact with the shreds of what had been his fish empire. The fact seems to be that the world contains fewer and fewer fish. The oceans are as exhausted and mined-out as the land. Much of Red’s cellular-phone time is spent reminiscing, with the person on the other end, about great hauls of yesteryear-multi-vessel shipments of frozen product that steamed across the Pacific like convoys in wartime and around Cape Horn to the bustling, venerable wharves of Gloucester, catch after catch. The planks of the wharves, in his telling, were slick and rank with cod liver oil.

It took a tedious two-hour drive to transpose rocky, oaky Cape Ann into Cape Cod’s sand dunes and pitch pines and salt-bleached shingles. But there was golf, on a course that was all rounded hills, grassed-over links-an opulent succession of freshly exposed breasts and thighs, little hill upon hill, with comforting swales and clefts and bulges between them. There were no flat lies, but no bare ones either. The grass under all that early snow had not had time to brown and harden. The greens held frost beneath a thawed quarter-inch that ripped open when a ball hit. I felt masterly and tender, repairing these wounds with a two-pronged plastic U and tamping the scar smooth with my shoe. It was lovely to be out and swinging. Among all these green bulges the flight of the ball felt especially penetrating. A good drive tended to catch a downslope that added yards. Ken hit one that, on a 420-yard par-four, wound up at the 150-marker. Two hundred seventy yards! And this from a silver-haired former pilot who is very deliberate and a bit cautious in all his preliminary moves, as if just before takeoff.

A few surviving white drifts in the sand traps and along the shaded edges of the fairway heightened our sense of adventure. The air was cold but not still-I put on my winter gloves only toward the end of the round. We had the course to ourselves: Ken, Red, and Ben, which made a euphonious scorecard. I was low medalist, by a stroke or two, but lost money at the game of skins we played. On one hole with four skins riding on it, I had a stroke advantage but then three-putted, with hateful senile nerves. Short on my lag, I pulled my four-footer. God, how I hated myself, while Ken and Red crowed.

Driving back through the rush hour was worse than after a ski trip down from North Conway. A hamstring in Red’s left leg began to seize up, but there was nowhere to stop on the Southeast Expressway, full of cars pouring, with red taillights and white headlights, into and out of the ghost of Boston. This approach from the south used to be thrilling, the glass skyscrapers looming closer and closer and then burning rectangular and golden all around you as the expressway climbed upward out of the Chinatown tunnel. But with the completion of the so-called Big Dig in 2002, it became one long tunnel up to Causeway Street and the giant looping connectors to Charlestown and the Mystic River Bridge. Neglect has taken the futuristic shine off of the long subterranean stretch; the dead lights and the fallen tiles go unreplaced. Flickering in and out of shadow, the blue-tinted buried highway is spooky, the spookier for our knowing that above its dim roof rests a blasted swathe-formerly the old elevated highway with its constant traffic jams-of weed-ridden parks, stilled carousels, pot-holed jogging paths, straggling shops and restaurants doing a bankrupt imitation of the Faneuil Hall Marketplace, and other such rotting wisps of a vision of civic renewal. Few of the Chinese missiles made it this far, but there were pro-Chinese riots, and the collapse of the national economy has taken a cumulative physical toll. Looking back at the city’s profile from the dizzying cloverleaf above the Charles, we saw the blue-glass, post-modern downtown buildings darkened in their post-war desolation, and rusty stumps of projected construction that had been abruptly abandoned, as too expensive for our dwindled, senile world.

One advantage of the collapse of civilization is that the quality of young women who are becoming whores has gone way up. No more raddled psychotics or puffy, dazed coke addicts for the discriminating consumer: twenty-year-olds who would once have become beauticians or editorial assistants, nurses or paralegals, have brought efficiency and comeliness to the trade. The prostitution rings advertise under such names as Velvet Sensations, Unadorned Fantasies, and the like, not just in the Herald and Phoenix but in the Globe and Christian Science Monitor Anything for a welder in our new world. The commonwealth scrip is sepia, the tint of the former governor’s red hair; it was hastily issued when the dollar hyperinflated, so the frozen wheels of commerce could begin again to turn; the engraver was a Republican.

Deirdre-Deirdre Lee, she confided to me on her last visit, her third, a last name being a treasure evidently as worth withholding as a whore’s kiss on the lips-now moves about on our third-floor love nest with the briskness of a wife, remaking the bed, bundling our used towels for the washer and dryer. I can’t rid myself, as I entertain her, of the uneasy feeling that Gloria will come back, slamming all the doors downstairs, clattering up the steps, exploding with icy-eyed fury at the homemaking prerogatives that Deirdre has usurped. It is not clear to me that Gloria is dead; I have a memory of wheeling and shooting her with Charlie Pienta’s shotgun through the living-room window, but when I went back inside there was no body. It was a moment of measurement. I felt the universe crackle and branch.

Deirdre also steals material things-two silver-plated candlesticks, and an exquisite little French clock with a gilded face and a case veneered in mother-of-pearl-that Gloria had brought to the marriage. I brought nothing from the Berkshires but my maternal grandfather’s china mustache cup and some bone-handled dull cutlery that I can still see my father’s workmanly hands, callused and ingrained with machine grease, plying upon a tough Thanksgiving turkey. My mother’s anxious face is framed between his cocked elbows as she waits to augment each set of slices with mashed potatoes, gravy, peas, and cranberry sauce, on one of those terrible holidays of childhood, those dry-mouthed group penances we owed the calendar’s faded gods.

When I dared reproach Deirdre with her thefts today, she looked me up and down with her expressionless brown eyes-tarry coffee into which some pale flecks of nutmeg had fallen-and said mulishly, “I do plenty for you.”

“But, darling, I pay you. Even more than you asked, the last time.”

Our lovemaking had some of the excitement of an auction, as she volunteered, in a breathless whisper, to perform or submit to a variety of acts beyond the basic missionary in-and-out. She even, as I tried to move my tongue from one lovely smallish uptilted breast to the other-tan but for the little triangles of a thong-bikini bra-specified, “Twenty-five welders extra if you suck both.”

“You bitch,” I panted, liking this and knowing she liked it too, this damp tangle of commerce and hostility amid the friction of our naked epiderms. “Fifteen. Not a penny more. Your tits should be part of the package. I mean, I’m paying you for your time, not for each itty-bitty bit of you.”

“Thirty-five if you suck so hard it hurts me,” she countered.

It had not occurred to me until this moment to hurt her. Now it seemed an inviting idea. The universe had branched.

“Ow,” she said, within a second, looking down maternally from within the massive Sphinx-mane of her bushy black hair, the side nearest the window glinting on the crests of its dishevelled curls. Her broad young face, simply but impressively carved but for its blunt and visibly pored nose, loomed a muddy brown, a sandstone tint, insofar as my eyes could pull color from the murk of the ambient dim windowlight. She was somehow Egyptian in this light, pharaonically opaque.

“You’re lying,” I protested. “That didn’t hurt.”

“I’m very sensitive there. Especially when I’m ovulating.”

“If you’re so fucking sensitive you shouldn’t be a whore,” I told her, slobbering on, so the small glossy slope of her profiled breast shone by virtue of what must have been, beyond our sheltered grapple on this lonely planet, the moon, the barren uninhabitable moon hanging above the yard’s retreating snow.

She was maddening me into an inflamed condition such as I had not experienced since the sweaty backseat tussles of my teens, with their excruciatingly grudging advances, piece by piece, into the forbidden, sacred terrain of a female body. “Let’s do it with you on your knees this time,” I suggested hoarsely.

“That’s fifty more welders.” Her hard little voice, with its Massachusetts accent, which erased the “r” in “welders,” sounded a touch hoarse also. “Doggie is normally seventy-five more.”

“How about up-”

“I don’t do that,” she quickly said, then added, “for less than three hundred.”

She had put herself in doggie position, presenting me with the glazed semi-rounds of her tight young buttocks, and, visible in the moonlight between them, the lovable little flesh-knot of her anus, suggestive of a healed scar. Here, too, the sun had failed to penetrate, deep between the tan buttocks, making a slim white crescent. I wondered if it was Revere Beach where she sunbathed so diligently, her swart skin fearless of the keratoses that cancerously dotted my horny old hide. The Columbus-haters are right: we Northern Europeans should never have veered south across the roiling Atlantic into this dazzling New World. It was a pit-failed Eden; it was forbidden fruit; we drank too much and lost our faith. We began to speckle and rot.

I slapped her solid glazed butternut ass, with its infantile puckered aperture, so decisively that she tumbled onto her back, her eyes stung into life by the blow. I noticed those wounded, tear-moistened eyes nevertheless flick with professional satisfaction toward my triumphantly swollen member, its undischarged juices swirling their intoxicants through my veins. My prostate ached with the forthcoming discharge. I told her calmly, “You can take that hypothetical three hundred and-”

On her back, where I had tumbled her, she laughed at my nicety. “Stuff it,” she finished for me. “Go ahead,” she teased. “Do it, you old fart.” Pronounced “faaht.” She spread her legs a bit; her thighs were paler inside than out. “But not up my ass for less than three hundred. Those membranes are delicate. That’s how people used to get AIDS.”

“Shut up about your ass all the time. Your cunt will do fine. I’m not one of your sicko pervert customers.”

She was heavily furred, her forearms swirling with dark down. Her pubic hair was so oily it would have been iridescent in a stronger light. So she could wear a thong bathing suit, she had shaved all but a central strip, which stood straight up like an old-fashioned typewriter brush. I imagined I saw a gleam of responsive moisture between the elephant-gray lips of her vulva. Her cool fingers seemed to be guiding me in but in fact held me off, even as I crouched to thrust home. Deirdre murmured into my ear, “Hey wouldn’t you like me to sit on your face? I could do that and blow you at the same time. For only a hundred extra-I’l give you a deal.”

“You bitch, will you shut up about money?” But I hesitated. Her offer was tempting. She knew her man.

“But not so much that I come,” I bargained. “I want my seed inside you. You money-grubbing cunt, I want to prong you up to your eyeballs.”

She shuddered under me involuntarily. Her face like the face of a girl being mussed in the backseat of a family Chevrolet was built all of shadows, a ruin of little slabs. “Jesus, I hate men,” she said, conversationally, as if I had become a disinterested anthropologist. “You’re all so fucking proud of nothing-just nothing.”

“Oh yeah?” I said, pronging her. “That nothing?”

“Nothing,” she said, stiffening like a scared child beneath me.

“How about that?” She was young and slender and unex-cited, with a virgin womb and a never-distended cervix. I knew I could hurt her, and gave a pelvic thrust that pinched my old prostate gland; it, too, wanted to retire, after pushing toxic effluents through its knotty core for fifty-plus years.

Her dark eyes widened and went watery in the shadow my head was casting. Her face sank a bit deeper into the black nest of her widespread hair. “Ow,” she did admit, sweetly.

After Deirdre left, bounding down through the woods with her lifted tail showing more white than anyone could expect, I noticed that Gloria’s silver quail were gone from the dining-room table. One bent down pecking; the other lifted its beak. I had given them to her on a bygone Christmas, on a lower limb of the thick gray tree of the branching past. Heavy silver-one had to be careful setting them on the table, lest their feet scratch the finish-they would melt down to a lump worth a few lousy welders, a bargain quickly struck with some cheating fence. The nether world preys on its own. I felt deeply ashamed, as though cancer had invaded my body. I would beat the thieving slut black and blue next time, tying her wrists and ankles together with pieces of the waxed cord that I had once bought to replace the rotting sash cords of the old house, and which I thought was still in the cellar. I would screw her until she squealed for mercy, and toss her out naked into the snow, and not pay her a red cent. If she beat sobbing on the door, I would pelt her with golf balls.

With Gloria gone from my side, the bed seems huge and cold at night, and the house reveals vast creaking depths as the unsated February winds whistle and roar outside. I have been taking Sominex to get me through the empty hours of the night, but then, fearful of becoming an addict, I abstained last evening. Sleep came with a satisfyingly dull and solid book on former President Gore-I never read fiction; after all its little hurly-burly what does it amount to but more proof that we are of all animals the most miserable?- but then I awoke in the whining, spitting dark. Furtive footsteps were detectable below and beyond me, faint as thumbprints on black glass.

In the breakdown of order, the criminal element has proved to be the only one with the resources and ruthless-ness to rule. I pay protection to a pair of spivs, Spin and Phil who come out of the local underbrush, and am allowed to reside on my little hill for somewhat less than I formerly paid in combined state and federal taxes. Of course, Spit and Phil aren’t trying to make the world safe for democracy or to administer a sensible but humane welfare program. I is not likely that I will be allowed my domain, defenseless a I am, forever, but for now, in the improvisatory confusion c the new world taking rough shape, I am allowed a space; I am overlooked. The new powers do not provide all the services the old did, but water continues to move through the town pipes into my own, and electricity flows. It amused me that in order to make their last collection the ambassadors from the underworld had to plow my driveway for me; thanks to them I could shop, and the local taxi could bring Deirdre to me. The footsteps that I seemed to hear I reasoned to be imaginary, because the world is so empty now; there are hundreds of empty houses where the starving and the disease-ridden can take shelter. The population pressure, for at least a time, is off.

I rose to urinate. Not wishing to agitate my neurons by turning on the bedside light, I groped toward the narrow pale slit behind which the bathroom night light feebly gleams. It was the two-slit experiment, it occurred to me, that embodied the paradox of quantum reality-a single photon, passing through both slits simultaneously, was able to project a striped pattern of interference with itself. I perhaps would have fallen back to sleep but for a snag, a nagging realization that I had not taken Sominex. After an indeterminate motionless time, I gave up trying to trick my body into thinking it was asleep; I rose again and turned on the light, not my own bedside lamp but Gloria’s, reaching across the stretch of bed as cool and as smooth as a marble tombstone, to switch on the lamp. By some law that had evolved early in our marriage, the alarm clock, a Braun quartz travelling clock, lived on her side of the bed.

But she, like me a light and anxious sleeper, always kept its face turned so that its luminescent hands would not greet her eyes in a wakeful moment. I had to stretch, cursing, to press the switch and turn the little black box that contained time in its two endless spools. Two-fifteen! Not three hours of sleep! It seemed incredible to me that at that hour I would not fall asleep again, but in the long featureless blur of shifting positions and churning brain (like a cement mixer full of dry rocks, the same rocks over and over, never consolidating into pourable wet concrete) this did seem to be the case. I was tense, waiting for the first signs of dawn, a change of tune, a distant car-some event to trigger a relaxing realization that there existed a world other than my howling brain. As the wind outside died, my brain got noisier, senselessly tumbling alphabet games and previews of tomorrow (in which nothing in particular was scheduled to happen, just a dental checkup and a teatime visit to one of my grandchildren, and in the evening a television show on the cosmological implications of the new deep-space evidences gathered by the venerable Hubble Space Telescope, a show I would be too exhausted to enjoy unless I could now fall asleep) and comparisons between Gloria and Deirdre (whose body was not as comforting as Gloria’s, which although softer was also warmer, infiltrating calories into the bed covers, whereas Deirdre’s hard lithe form was cool even in the heat of coitus; after she would leave, by that disreputable taxi whose glowing rooflight I watched from the upstairs window circle my driveway and then pull away like a momentarily captured planet, shivers would overtake me and I would rush to put on a sweater) and all sorts of clattering useless mental debris including a rock-hard fury at my stupid self, my foolishly, helplessly rotating brain.

I could not shake free of myself. Whenever my thoughts loosened enough to permit a glowing, nonsensical mirage to peep through, my hungry consciousness leaped upon the glimmer with the triumphant thought I’m falling asleep and thereby snuffed it, closing the peephole into blissful rest. In the disorderly blizzard of waking thoughts I now and then prayed to the vibrating shadows, silently running the mutinously non-stop inner speaker through the paces of the Lord’s Prayer or a simple beseechment, Dear Lord, for Christ’s sake, let me fall asleep. But no remission in my torment was granted. God was a vibrating patch indistinguishable from the featureless others in the fuzzy Rothko that insomnia painted on the ceiling. The sheet beneath me was a bed of bent nails, of dead coals.

Then, before dawn, the surface of silence was lightly ruffled by the purr of a car coming up the driveway, the soft squeal of its brakes, and the thump of Gloria’s New York Times arriving on the porch. Then the car’s purr, shaped like a vortex in the sink, retreated down the driveway. The Times came to the door; the Globe just to the mailbox. I reminded myself I must cancel the subscription. This daily bulletin from another exhausted, blasted city, doubling the burden of paper to be set out fortnightly in the orange recycling bin, had always struck me as a snobbish excess. But I did not yet quite believe that she was gone. She existed in my brain and in my dreams. Sometimes in my dreams I find her bloodied and even headless corpse on the living-room carpet-an ethereal rose-and-sky-blue Tabriz that set us back twenty-four thousand dollars when dollars still counted. So the Timeses keep coming, with their news of crack crackdowns and motor-mouthed mayors and uncollected garbage and public schools run like prisons and subways that are warrens of mayhem and disease.

Finally, the radiator close to my ear began to tick, at a signal from the thermostat, and my tense frame slackened. Soon the old pipes would companionably chug, chitter, and bang. I was not utterly alone in the universe. The house, well built at the other end of the last century, in slightly slumping over the years has reversed the pitch of some of the pipes, which therefore collect moisture that explodes when the rising steam encounters it. I pictured the little plastic wheel in the thermostat, marked with the numbers of the hour, and the little tripping protrusion I had myself poked into a small hole at the numeral 6, and the leverage this minuscule plastic protrusion (they came in two colors, red for day and blue for nighttime) would exert on the adjoining small wheel that would tip a bead of mercury in its inch-long vial, completing an electric circuit that would activate the furnace. That little bead of mercury, balanced on a temperature-sensitive spring of two annealed metals with a different expansion rate- brass and steel, at a guess-was more of a friend to me in the endless night than almighty eternal God.

But, believers will respond, God gave Mankind the wit to construct thermostats, and this manifests His benevolent existence. I was suddenly too relaxed to argue. The radiators had been resurrected and were shouldering the task of watching over the house. My vigil could cease. But by now, near seven, sunlight, arriving earlier each day, shone in a heartless white stripe below the window shade, and it was time to get up, groggy, disconsolate, and doomed to oblivion though I was. The day was a hostile dare I must take, with a commensurate hostility.

The chores of living: the brushing of the teeth, the shaving of the cheeks and chin, taking extra care around the lips, which invariably wear a pursed, haughty expression, the expression of a stranger. My mouth over the years has sunk into a downturned, faintly sneering expression, like the mouth of a death mask, slightly lower on one side than the other. Luckily, I was always rugged-looking rather that handsome, so the wreck of the flesh-the eyelids so sagging their folds snag one on another and need to be rubbed back into place upon awaking, the double cords of throat wattle, taut only when I lift my chin to shave beneath it-dismays me relatively little. The meaningless geography of an old face: the odd dark spot on the edge of one upper lip, the inexplicably sensitive patch along the left jaw, the actinic bumps that have returned after their enraging treatment with Efudex. It resembles the moon’s geography, which once afforded room for hypothetical canals and seaports and which has proved, now that we have walked upon it and photographed its pores, obdurately meaningless, a study in enlarged non-significance. A pimple of a hillock here, a blue-gray mare there, a rumpled dark side. But not an anatomy: bleak evidence, rather, of heavenly happenstance.

Though I gave it up over thirty years ago, when pitiable tobacco-addicts were being banished from restaurants and offices and being made to stand outside on the sidewalk in all weathers, I still miss smoking, if only because it deadened my sense of smell. A clammy pungence arises to my nostrils from pockets of my body when I, lifting first one leg and then the other, remove my pajamas. No amount of soaping in the shower long suppresses scents which I do not, myself, find disagreeable but remember Gloria complaining about. Yet she herself, in the sodden relaxation of sleep, emitted odors I would never chastise her with. Alone in the house with my unnarcotized nose, I scent what I fear may be a fire in some plastered wall or combustible corner of the cellar but what I deduce is only the Kellys burning wood in their fireplace a wedge shot away. A few carbon atoms in the air; how do our nasal receptors find them, out of so much mere bland oxygen and nitrogen, and digitize them into signals that activate the brain? The brain protrudes the eyes, but molecules seek out the smell centers within it, at the back of the cave. There, matter meets mind.

I undress my body, shower it, dress it again, in slightly different clothes. No need any more for the crisp business suit and shirt; the same beige corduroys and pilled blue sweater will do, with clean underwear and a maroon turtleneck of fresh-smelling cotton. My papery bare feet with their purple etching of veins beg for their socks and ever more shapeless moccasins. We are the herders of our bodies, which are beasts as dumb and bald and repugnant as cattle. Death will release us from this responsibility, which grows, morning by morning, ever heavier. This morning, having completed the last tightened lace of my dressing and preparing to make my constitutional down the driveway for the Globe, I looked from the window and saw on the seaside lawn one of the deer that, now that Gloria is gone, browse untroubled on our shrubbery. This one, munching a crescent into the euonymus hedge, seemed less than full size, and gazed up at my face calmly. His (I felt it was a half-grown buck) muzzle was surprisingly coarse, seen head-on, as lumpy and stupid, around the dark-grained and convolute nostrils, as a cow’s. I was beginning to see deer as stupid ruminants rather than heraldic apparitions. Gloria had not been wildly wrong to hate them. The animal slowly scented danger in my watching-my white face as much a signal as his white tail-and stalked off, with an affronted dignity, across the flagpole platform and then down toward the driveway.

An inch of wet snow had fallen while I had been wrestling with insomnia. From another upstairs window I saw that the black tire tracks of the man still bringing Gloria her Times had stopped-stopped as if his chariot had become Elijah’s or Phaëthon’s and taken flight-at the section. Dark footprints, however, brought the story down from the realm of the supernatural: the poor fellow, not wishing to risk slipping off the curve, had, like the FedEx man two months ago, after the first snowfall of this snowy winter, got out of his vehicle and walked.

The Globe delivery man always prudently stops at the mailbox. As I, having squeezed my feet into my L.L. Bean Maine Hunting Shoes, walked down to retrieve the morning paper, I observed in addition to my own tracks (which imitate chains laid closely parallel) others: the clustered four paws of the hopping rabbit; the stately punctures, almost in a line, of the deer; the dainty marks, shaped like pansies, of the Kellys’ cat, who comes over here to stalk the Y-footed birds that feed on our purple pokeberries; and a troubling set of prints, as widely spaced as the deer’s but larger and multiply padded. In trying to picture the animal I could only imagine a lion. A smallish lion. One reads that, as the woods of the Northeast encroach more and more upon cleared fields, bears and coyotes and mountain lions are spreading south. As our species, having given itself a hard hit, staggers, the others, all but counted out, move in. Think of those days when the hominids were just a two-footed furry footnote lost amid the thundering herds of horned perissodactyls. Why does the thought make us happy?

Deirdre is becoming a little too familiar. Instead of submitting to my sexual whims, she prefers to give me the benefit of her feminist rage. “Why are men so cruel?” she asks soul-fully, with a little-girl rustle of her head on my shoulder.

“Natural selection,” I tell her. “The killers survive, the killed drop out of the genetic pool. Same reason,” I go on, “women are masochistic. The submissive ones get fucked and make the babies and the scrappers don’t. The meek inherit the earth.”

I’m not sure she has been listening. “Jesus, I hate men,” she says, off in her own world of memories and strictly localized intellectual reference.

I permit myself to get angry. “You keep telling me that. Where would you be without them? A lazy ignorant cokehead like you, what are you fit for except turning tricks? And you’re damn lucky to have found an old sweetheart like me, instead of some crazy young buck who’d beat the crap out of you.”

“You’re not so uncrazy, Ben. You’re crazy about being Frenched, I notice.” Toying with my white chest hair, curling it around one index finger, while her headful of wiry oily wool tickles my shoulder and the side of my neck.

It is true, the sight of her plump lips obediently distended around my swollen member, her eyelids lowered demurely, afflicts me with a religious peace.

“And horsing around with my asshole.”

Yes, that, too. Her vagina, Deirdre’s unspoken accusation ran, was less favored by me than these two orifices designed for other purposes, for ingestion and excretion, and to this extent I was a pervert. My own sense of it is that, at age sixty-six, I am still working up to the vagina-that Medusa whose sight turned ancient men to stone, that sacred several-lipped gateway to the terrifying procreative darkness. I was not yet, at three score and six, quite mature enough to face its blood-empurpled folds, its musty exudations. I was still a boy shutting his eyes when the vaccination needle went in. My working-class doxy sensed this ant disliked me for it, even as she wearily roused herself from my side and prepared to nurse me into arousal.

“You rich leech,” she told me. “You’ve never had to get down into it, have you?”

“What do you mean, ‘into it’?”

“Into the dirt where the rest of us grub. You called me a money-grubbing cunt last week. Thanks a lot. Just because I didn’t get born a fat cat and can clip coupons all my life-”

“Nobody clips them any more. It’s all in computers. Anyway, I was born poor. Out in the west of the state. We lived in a town north of Pittsfield called Hammond Falls. There was a river downtown and a bunch of brick mills, mostly empty by the time I came along. Our house, which had belonged to my mother’s parents, was up the hill, out on the outskirts, an old farmhouse. Except it was narrow and dark, like a city rowhouse, close to the road, surrounded by these sloping fields going back to cedar and scrub maple. I went to U. Mass., when it cost almost nothing, and met my first wife, and we came to Boston, where I went to the B.U. Business School on student loans, and became a stockbroker. I changed my accent, to blend in. I suggest you change yours too, darling, if you expect to get anywhere in this very class-conscious commonwealth.”

This nearly made her spit, naked as she was, crouched on the bed. “Commonwealth, well, la-ti-da darling, yourself. What a liar! We should both wash our mouths out, me from sucking your stubby dick and you from being a liar. I can see all around this house, it’s full of inherited stuff.”

“It’s Gloria’s. My late wife’s.”

“Who says she’s late?”

“She’s not here, is she?”

“No, but she wouldn’t be, would she? With me here. Unless she was a real AC-DC.”

In a rage of annoyance-she was resisting me, in every resentful fibre-I seized her brown arm, which was propping her up over my belly like the leg of a beast poised to drink. “Who says it’s stubby? You’re the liar. If it’s so stubby why do you gag when it’s only halfway in?”

She sullenly pulled her arm away, revealing four white finger-marks. “Ow. O.K., not stubby. Stinky, though.”

“You should talk. You’re like low tide down there-low tide next to a sewer outlet.”

Deirdre brushed a mass of her curls back from one ear, contemplating thoughtfully the erect refutation of stubbiness which my surge of violence had pushed through my blood. “You guys hate us, don’t you?” she said musingly. “Cocks hate cunts.”

“But they love mouths,” I crooned to her, and fell into a state of beatitude as her lips absent-mindedly enclosed me, and her brown hand, narrow as a hoof, worked the skin at the base up and down, into a moist tingle mounting heavenwards.

“We hate you, too,” she told me afterwards, when I was too languid to hurt her. “You own us, but we hate your guts.” She had come back from the bathroom, after a tumult of flushed toilet and expectorated mouthwash, in a clearheaded, combative mood.

“Who’s this ‘you’?”

“You rich creeps. I never got into one of your houses before. Usually the tricks are guys with no background, Irish or eyetie, you know, who have a little money they can’t hang on to. They don’t want to hang on to it. They’re too Catholic. Down deep they think it’s holy to be poor. Only the Jews and you Wasps aren’t ashamed to hang on to money, to sit in heaps of it and roll in it and smear it all over yourselves-disgusting! You think you’re so great God likes your being stinking rich.”

“Darling, I agree. I must learn to spend. That thing you just did was worth every welder.”

“Two hundred.”

“It’s usually a hundred fifty.”

“You had a lot of come today. I nearly choked.”

“I love it when you nearly choke.”

“I know you do, you prick. That’s what my father began by having me do, blow him.” Her eyes narrowed as she looked into the past, preparing to match my confession with her own.

“Hey,” I said, “do I need to hear this? I’m no therapist. I’ll start charging you by the hour.”

“I was eight. My head came up to just the right height on him. He said to do it, I didn’t know, I thought it might be normal. He was my father, he said it was all right, who else could I trust?”

“You could have gone to your mother.”

“Tchaa!”-a catlike snarl. “She was worthless. She would have slapped me and called me a liar. She didn’t want to know. He was all she had, too.”

“I’m sorry, dear, for calling you a liar.”

“O.K. I appreciate your saying that. I’m a hooker and I steal, but I don’t generally lie. It’s too confusing, it makes another world. So I stick with the truth, generally. Except when I said you were stubby. You have a nice prick.”

“Don’t break my heart.”

“You can’t take a compliment, can you? You hate me too much. You hate needing me. Guys do. It must feel funny, having that business hanging down outside you have to keep feeding.”

“I feed you,” I said, and felt compelled to embrace her, her pliant slim waist, the long brown supple abdominal stretch between the wispy ghosts of her bathing suit, and I felt her harden, in fright at my confessed need and in calculation of how best to employ it to her advantage. I was her slave, my slave’s slave. I whispered into her ear how I wanted before I died to pump a ton of jism into her, into her mouth, into her little puckered asshole, into her huge warm cosmic cunt, pump it all as some kind of glutinous silvery bridge to the next world, and she was saying, “Uh-huh, uh-huh,” automatically, calculating how to put my craziness into a profitable harness.

Our mothers wipe our bottoms and praise our first babbled words, our nurses at the finale tidy up and maternally murmur amid the mess of our dying, but the women who out of whatever motive swallow our seed through one of their holes deliver the acceptance that matters. They drink our groins’ milky tears. Through the bodies of women men conduct what tortured dealings they can with the universe, producing serial murder and morganatic marriages and a Morgan Library’s worth of love letters, novels, and death threats. Women don’t ask for this, true. But what do women ask for? as a maligned sage at the far end of the last century infamously inquired in all innocence.

Between bouts of lovemaking Deirdre and I have taken to exploring the house together, naked. I turn the thermostat way up for the adventure. Gloria kept a thrifty cold house, and when I wasn’t looking would sneak our bedroom window open an inch or two even in the bitterest January weather. She would even raise the storm window, which she ordinarily said she couldn’t do because the little spring catches would break her fingernails; but, in the attempt to freeze my old gray head fast to the pillow, she would take this risk. When I began wearing a knit watch-cap to bed, she mocked me, and would pluck it off in my sleep, to ensure that I awoke with sniffles and a fatal dry cough.

My slim young companion and I explore seldom-visited chambers of the far-flung old house. It was built by one of that legendary race of Boston rich who came to this shore for the summer cool, before air conditioning, their untaxed dollars engaging armies of Italian masons and Scots-Irish carpenters. Seven fireplaces, no two alike, in Ionic, Doric, and even (in the living room) Corinthian modes. Palladian windows, columned verandas. A fully finished third floor, and a basement with a plastered ceiling. Over the course of more than a century, the plaster has lost its grip, and chunks of it litter the remoter regions, including a mysterious room whose floor is the jagged ledge the house was built upon. This rough chamber, which knits the structure to primal matter, has always rather frightened me. It lies beyond the laundry room and the servants’ bathroom, where the thick old porcelain toilet goes months unflushed, its oval eye of water scummed with plaster dust. A steam pipe arrives at its safety valve in the farthest, rock-bottomed chamber, and the hissing, as from a captive serpent, startles us. Deirdre exclaims in disgust at the dry filth, the decades of unswept plaster fragments and whitewash flakes and flecks of crumbling brick and mouse droppings and bits of mouse poison, all accumulating on her sticky bare soles. I tell her, in the ardor of this strangeness, that I will lick them clean, even though I die of it. My genitals dangle in the cloistered cellar air; I love how her body beside mine displaces dead space. Faint musty and oily whiffs spring from her flesh and hair and dart deep into my nasal passages. I keep touching her, lightly, guiltily, the way we touch a smooth statue or a rough-textured canvas when the museum guard is not looking.

We go up the cellar stairs. Naked we move through the main floor, past Gloria’s Chippendale dining chairs and mahogany table of many leaves and teak-veneered breakfront laden with Meissen and Limoges china and filigreed Victorian wineglasses with ruby-red stems, our dirty feet tracking cellar crumbs over the blue Tabriz. I inspect the rug for bloodstains but can see none, in the bald winter light. I exultantly, fearfully feel our joint intrusion as systematic desecration. Our filthy bare feet, our Edenic nudity. If the white FedEx truck were to flash around the driveway, the driver would see us through the Palladian windows. I am getting an erection, mounting the carpeted stairs with this body lithe as a boy’s beside me. When I glance down at her, she has sullen, swollen lips and a blunt blob of a nose-an obtuse muzzle. We survey the second floor, the rooms the boys lived in before they went off and got married. Some rock posters and car posters are still up. My mistress is younger, I realize with a start of shame, than even the younger of my stepsons. Our relationship abruptly seems exploitive. I take her cool sharp elbow and lead her up the back stairs, to the third-floor “safe” room, with its special alarm that must be deactivated with a switch in a closet, where Gloria keeps or kept her special family treasures- jewels inherited, in unwearably ornate settings, from great-great-grandmothers; silver platters and teapots too heavy to use at less than a state banquet; vast punchbowls of cut glass; boxes of turn-of-the-century first editions that her maternal grandfather paid to have shipped from England, along with his Savile Row shoes and dinner clothes, and that he slit, as he read, with a little ivory paper knife tilted in his signet ringed right hand. Even men, men of means, attended to books then as if to carven caskets in which a crucial secret, a key to living, might be locked.

Another capped steam pipe hisses in here, overheating the slant-ceilinged small chamber. Its single window, a dormer, overlooks the lethal sea, with its ragged islands and pewter glare of shrouded sunlight. Deirdre, amid all this treasure, is frightened by something within herself-perhaps a chemical need, for a quick pipe of crack, or a surge of covetousness. I have shown her too much. I make a mental note to change the padlock, lest she and that pimp of a taxi driver return with criminal intent. Gloria’s splendid ancestors, so confident in their luxurious appropriations, hiss crushingly in our ears. As if ashamed of her meagre assets- her momentarily young and healthy body, her willingness to play the whore-Deirdre folds her thin arms tight across her small breasts. Her wine-dark nipples are taut, as if from a chill. Fear like an odor leaps from her skin and clings to me, softening my erection.

What do we know about the Egyptian grave robbers? We know, by inference, that they were brave, risking the anathemas of the gods and execution by torture. They were clever, breaking into even the center of the great pyramid of Cheops and emptying it before the archaeologists arrived a millennium later. They were persistent, gutting of treasure, by the year 1000 B.C., every known rock tomb save that of the golden-faced boy-king Tutankhamen, which had been haphazardly concealed by a pile of stone rubbish from the excavation of another tomb. Tomb-robbing was a profession, a craft, a guild, practiced by whole villages such as that of Gourna, located above the Valley of the Kings, and connected, possibly, with the honeycomb of royal tombs by deep-dug wells. The thieves’ tunnels rival in extent if not finish the sanctioned passageways of the pharaohs’ engineers. The divinely inspired technological achievements of the tomb-builders-false stairways, monolithic booby traps, passageways hundreds of feet in extent-were matched by those of the sacrilegious thieves, who conquered even the labyrinths of Amenemhat, constructed by the shores of Lake Moeris. Thieves were angry, vandalizing everything they could not steal: levering open giant sarcophagi, ripping apart mummies like jackals at a leopard’s corpse, hurling precious vessels and statues with such force against the walls that dents and smudges of pure gold remain in evidence. Their fury was a way, perhaps, of combatting the gods, whose vengeance they could not help fearing. Yet their crimes were beneficent, performing the useful service, modern economists inform us, of restoring gold to circulation- bringing it back from unsound investment underground, counteracting the severe trade imbalance that this world kept incurring with the next. Tutankhamen’s golden coffin alone weighed two hundred fifty pounds.

What did the robbers, breathing the adhesive dust of damnation, scraping through crevices of a predatory narrowness, do for light? The builders chiselled by the light of the sun, which was bounced around corners by circular reflectors of bronze and, quivering like water, illumined the deepest recesses of laboriously hollowed limestone. But an outside member of a looting team risked apprehension by the hooded priests’ police and death by slow disembowelment, flaying, or impalement. No torture was too extreme for the enemies of immortality; we robbed our victims not merely of life’s passing illusion but of an eternity. We crept along holding before us lamps of translucent calcite, so the glow permeated downward as well as leaped up, a notch holding the twisted, serpentine wick in place and our fingers warmed through the alabaster. The smell of sesame oil was strong, enlarging the smell of our sweating bodies much as the flickering flame enlarged our shadows, which surged and lunged around us as we inched forward in the silence of the dead. Each piece of floor had to be tested for a pitfall- a precipice or a delicately balanced slab that would tumble our broken bodies onto the bones of previous trespassers. The light was ruddy on the painted walls; our flames were orange, with a blue base like the change of tint in the heart of a flower, at the base of each fragile petal. There were two of us: if one wick guttered out, it could be relit from the other. If both blew out at once, in a sudden draft from an intersecting passageway, we must perish in these subterranean tunnels and turnings unless I could strike fresh fire from the flints and dry grass I carried in my leathern waist-pouch. This method, though, was chancy, and the outraged gods would have breath enough to extinguish the fire again.

“The air grows worse,” my accomplice muttered.

I ventured to say, though my larynx was clogged by fear as by a cloth stopper, “Mayhap we are approaching the House of Gold, where the mummy reigns, with his rotting nose and urn of foul innards. A pox on Horus! May Anubis dine on his own excrement in the life everlasting!” Insulting the dead and their gods braced our courage. We had come through the First Divine Passage, whose triple doorway had forced upon us two months’ worth of gnawing circumvention, done in the secret stretches of the night, while the priests’ guards slept, content with their bribes and stupid on fermented barley. We had negotiated the Hall of Hindering; its tangle of decoy corridors and stairs had been long ago decoded by a trail of henna powder, left by a thief himself now as dead as the Ruler of All in his onyx sarcophagus. Along the walls of a long sloping corridor, bright colors leaped forward into the lights of our lamps-scenes, crowded yet tranquil, of seasonal pleasures along the Nile, of seed being sown and grain being harvested, of fish being plucked from the transparent river waves painted as zigzags of a blue weaving, of cattle being herded and a hippopotamus being hunted, of workmen assembling a temple and dancing girls with heads of abundant knitted hair applying kohl to the rims of their softly staring eyes. Feathered ibises and ducks, solemn oryxes and monkeys accompanied the brown broad-shouldered human figures undergoing the rites of daily life, a life the dead king in his House of Gold was still enjoying amid his jewelled furniture and dolls of faïence-the faithful ushabtiu-in the chamber we had not yet reached.

Now the walls on both sides showed a procession bearing treasures toward this chamber, and hieroglyphic lists of the prayers that must be said to Thoth and Ra on the boat journey to the land of the dead. The masses of the stone around and above us pressed on our spirits, making it still harder to breathe. Centuries of stillness had thickened the air’s taste. Carefully picking our way through an area of collapsed rubble, we came to the Hall of Truth, where murals showed the monarch’s heart being weighed by Osiris, with Ammut squatting near at hand waiting to devour the heart if it was found unworthy. By the flutter of our lamps, the paintings were hasty, sketchy. The king must have died before the tomb was quite completed, because the murals ceased. The walls grew rough-the chisel marks slashing frantically in the wavering light of our naked flames-and the ceiling grew lower. Of the narrowing passageway that loomed to our lamps it was difficult to say whether it was fortuitously unfinished or an intended trap. The slanting ceiling compelled us to lower our heads and bend our knees. When crouching became impossible, we crawled in the pale dust like crippled animals, hobbled by the necessity of carefully moving the lamps ahead of us. A spidering of our double shadows filled the dwindling space. The walls squeezed inward so that we could no longer crawl side by side. A faint breath, damp as if from a ghost of the Nile, brushed our faces and made our delicate flames stagger. When they had regained steadiness I made out in the dim dust a lintel leaning at an angle above a spill of rubble. The irregular aperture might have admitted, with not an inch to spare, the head and shoulders of a slithering man.

My young companion had pressed up beside me, in a space scarcely wide enough for one body, and joined his lamp to mine to cast light into the space beyond. We saw at the very edge of our lamps’ merged glow what appeared to be a giant gold face. Gold: the skin of deity. Black irises glared from within whites pieced together of alabaster flakes. Shadows flickered across the immutable great features in a counterfeit of agitation. The inert weight of the stone all about us seemed to be meditating an action. We talked in whispers, so as not to blow out our lamps with our words.

“You go first,” I said.

“No,” came the sighed response, causing my flame to shrink to its blue root on the fibrous wick before regaining, orange and erect, its strength. “You, master,” his light voice urged huskily in my ear. He was in a sweat of fear; I could smell it even through the dust.

“You are younger and more slender,” I explained.

“But you are stronger and more courageous. You have lived more life.”

“There is nothing in there,” I stated, fighting panic as his slippery, fragrant body pressed upon mine in our corset of mute stone.

“There is something.”

“Our fortune, it may be,” I insisted, attempting to wriggle backward, to let him slide forward. “Loot for a lifetime’s worth of feasting. Go in, I tell you. There is nothing”

“Nothing is not nothing,” he moaned. His gritty naked knees flexed convulsively into my chest; in the suffocating closeness I smelled his uncircumcised sex. As if by an impatient breath, both our lamps were blown out. Absolute darkness encased us.