This is the Way the World Ends

by James Morrow

The novel’s prologue opens in 1554, with Dr. Michel de Nostredame, in his secret study at Salon-de-Provence, France, poring over a set of small paintings on glass squares “no larger than a Tarot card,” created by Leonardo da Vinci. Having heard of the astonishing prophetic visions of the teen-age visionary, who had already acquired a reputation as the Little Astrologer, the great man had invited the lad to his manor at Clos-Luce, to ask him how the world would end.

Referring to the storms and floods he’d envisioned, da Vinci asked Nostradamus, “Is this how God has contrived for His Creation to end?” 

Nostradamus explains to the illustrious genius that, “It will not be an act of God or Nature,...but a conflagration of human design….fireballs hurled from great spears that had in turn been catapulted from the backs of iron whales.” 

Hundreds of years later, during the Cold War years of the ever-escalating nuclear arms race, between the US and the Soviet Union, we meet our protagonist, tombstone engraver, George Paxton, who is introduced thus: 

“...[H]e came to manhood in the tepid bosom of the Unitarian Church…an unadorned, New England sort of faith. Unitarians rejected miracles, worshiped reason, denied the divinity of Jesus Christ, and had serious doubts about the divinity of God. George grew up believing that this was the most plausible of all possible worlds.” 

Like his fellow Americans, George lives under the ominous cloud of a future disaster and becomes obsessed with purchasing a Scopas suit, at an exorbitant cost, for innocent little Holly, hoping to protect her from the horrors of a post-nuclear world fall-out. 

A few chapters in, George’s whole, happy world–comprised of his wife, Justine, and adorable daughter, Holly, literally collapses. By “Chapter 5 ‘In Which the Limitations of Civil Defense Are Explicated in a Manner Some Readers May Find Distressing,’” the unthinkable has transpired and our hero is plunged into a global-scale dystopia the scale of which the human mind can not fully fathom let alone comprehend.

Discovering that he is one of only a handful of survivors, George eventually learns he’s been chosen to be spared from the thermonuclear annihilation, that has wiped out mankind and every other form of life, so that he, along with a crew of military strategists, will stand trial for the crime of destroying the entire planet, initiating instant extinction to all on earth and thereby depriving millions upon millions of human beings being born. The trial proceedings are carried out by these individuals–the Unadmitteds–life-like creations animated with technology giving them the ability to think and reason, their insides flowing with a black, viscous liquid–are demanding justice be carried out; should the defendants be found guilty the sentence is death by hanging.

The ensuing trial proceedings, overseen by a panel of Unadmitted judges provide the ever-hopeful, optimistic George, and his beloved spermatids, a chance to literally fight for his life–and the continuation of mankind.  

Assisting him–in more ways than one–is his therapist, Dr. Morning Valcourt, who is ostensibly helping George adjust to the inconceivable world he must now learn to navigate. One that pulls him into an unrelenting situation of weird Kafkaesque rules, laws and regulations, and an Alice-in-Wonderland atmosphere of nonsensical characters and bizarre goings-on. Like the strange Professor Carter, George is instructed by a strange woman to find, and who will supply him with a Scopas suit for free!  He meets the odd professor, who sports a top hat, and introduces himself: “Also known as the Tailor of Thermonuclear Terror. Also known as the Sartor of the Second Strike. Also known as the MAD Hatter.”

Terry Tempest Williams describes a vivid memory in Refuge, a scene seared into her mind: a blinding blast of intense light, witnessed when she’d been a child, sitting on her mother’s lap as her father drove down the highway one night, through what she discovered later was the radioactive desert, where “secret” atomic-tests had been regularly conducted. Many years later she is finally able to connect that unforgettable sight with its toxic long-after effects: cancer–that comes on slowly and silently; subtle, up until the long, painful end–that several women in her family, including her two grandmothers and her mother that she describes as the “clan of the one-breasted women.” 

Considering the damage inflicted on the human body, through three generations (and counting?) from a test, we shudder to think what the end-of-life-on-planet-earth Bomb would inflict. 

George describes the instant the explosion occurs: “The light bleached his retinas, making his vision a luminous void. His face became an unbroken first-degree burn, the pain reminiscent of a severe sunburn. The blind, dead van glided forward. Staring into the horrible, endless, sunny hole, George applied the brakes and bailed out…Had he lingered–instant death, for among the many quick, loud, and evil events that follow the detonation of a one-megaton thermonuclear warhead is a wave of pressurized air that transforms automobiles windshields into barrage of glass bullets.”

Eventually, George is allowed to look out from the submarine, where the survivors have been healing and recuperating, through a periscope: “Nothing. Nothing save the burned land, the poisoned water, the harsh stillness, the rare clam, the occasional roach, the intermittent swatch of grass, the clusters of salt-pickled corpses floating in the South Atlantic timefolds, like barges of flesh.”

It will not be a spoiler to say that all of the defendants are found guilty–the last living human beings, now sentenced to die. Guilty of not stopping the nuclear madness before it was too late. 

Now, more than ever, people all over the world are demanding an end to the nuclear-weapons madness. Like the recent “Amnesia Atomica NYC: Zero Nukes, from The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, artist Pedro Reyes, and curator Pedro Alonzo, presenting a “collective effort to address nuclear threat,” including the large mushroom-cloud sculpture planted in the middle of Times Square. 

And still, the nuclear clock ticks forward–we are 100 seconds away from midnight…