Read Online Toward the End of Time by John Updike - Free Book Online Page A

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, butmolecules 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 storydown 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