The thought that mankind might not endure has been replaced by the fear it may make it through another age of ice.
In spite of death and desolation, music, Professor Joseph Skizzen assured himself, would still be made. Toms would be tom’d, the earth beaten by bones born to a rhythm if not a rhyme, a ground swept by sweet dancing feet. There would be voices raised in song to celebrate heaven, to thank the gods for the radish about to be eaten, to pray for victory in tomorrow’s war, or the reinvention of the motorcar. Someone would, like Simonides, remember where everyone was sitting when the roof of the world fell in, or how the stars were configured, and would be able to identify the dead, if anyone cared. With that feat on his résumé, Simonides could easily sell his memory method for a lot of cabbages, many messes of pottage, thirty carloads of silver. Because we would want everyone properly buried in their appropriately consecrated ground, sacred ground we would kill one another to acquire, to protect and fill with our grateful dead — each race decomposing, each would allege, with more dignity, more delight to those worms, more … more to the nth than the others.
We would bury our dead with more tender regard for their bits and pieces than we ever had shown a shin or a thigh while elbow or knee was alive.
Soon there would be family clans and prisons again. Beneath all ash, hate would still be warm enough to make tea. That’s the state in which Professor Skizzen’s mind would be when he left off worrying his sentence: imagining man’s return, the triumph of the club and the broken knees of enemies, the harvesting of ferns, the refinement of war paint — each time taking a slightly different route to new triumphs and fresh renown. Upon our Second Coming, we would hate the earth and eat only air. We would live in ice like a little bit of lost light. We would grow fur and another nose. Fingernails, hard as horn, would curl like crampons. We would scuttle in and out of caves, live on insects, bats, and birds, and grow blue as a glacier. Perhaps we’d emerge in the shape of those ten-foot tropical worms, and like Lumbricus terrestris have many hundreds of species. It was so discouraging, but such thoughts had one plus: they drove him away from his obsession with words like “fear” and “concern” and “worry” and returned him to his profitable work — the study of the late piano pieces of Franz Liszt, a passion that his former colleagues found amusing, especially in an Austrian such as himself, who ought to disdain the French/Slav Musical Axis in favor of a hub that was purely German (little did they know where he’d already been!), and who had foolishly chosen a solo instrument to play when the entire Vienna Philharmonic could have been strumming and tootling his tunes.
Yes, in that very orchestra where his father might have played had he chosen to imagine himself a concert violinist instead of a fleeing Jew. His mother carried him to London like coffee in a thermos. To grow up in a ruin, amid the blitzed, the burned and broken, a foretaste of the soon-to-be forlorn and fallen world. Joseph preferred to think of his father’s moves as resembling, when he left Vienna in the guise of a Jew, a profound departure from the tonic; and his father’s sojourn in London, until he went to work in the betting parlor, a deft modulation back to the Aryan fold; but it was difficult to account for the abandonment of his family, his departure for America, and his subsequent disappearance, in some sort of sonata form. Changelings required impromptus, variations, bagatelles, divertimenti, to do justice to their nature. He, Joseph Skizzen, was a weathercock too.
Joseph Skizzen’s surmise that mankind might not survive its own profligate and murderous nature has been supplanted by the suspicion that nonetheless it will.
The gothic house he and his mother shared had several attic rooms, and Joseph Skizzen had decided to devote one of them to the books and clippings that composed his other hobby: the Inhumanity Museum. He had painstakingly lettered a large white card with that name and fastened it to the door. It did not embarrass him to do this, since only he was ever audience to the announcement. Sometimes he changed the placard to an announcement that called it the Apocalypse Museum instead. The stairs to the third floor were too many and too steep for his mother now. Daily, he would escape his sentence in order to enter yesterday’s clippings into the scrapbooks that constituted the continuing record:
Friday June 18, 1999
Sri Lanka. Municipal workers dug up more bones from a site believed to contain the bodies of hundreds of Tamils murdered by the military.
Poklek, Jugoslavia. 62 Kosovars are packed into a room into which a grenade is tossed.
Pristina, Jugoslavia. It is now estimated that 10,000 people were killed in the Serbian ethnic-cleansing pogram.*
*The reader is invited to substitute or add a similarly focused report whenever this point in the text is reached.
Now there was no one left in Kosovo to kill but gypsies.
Or
Tuesday April 16, 2001
Cotonou, Benin. The boat at the center of an international search for scores of child slaves believed to have been roaming the West African coast for more than two weeks arrived early this morning in this port.
Next day
Cotonou, Benin. Authorities boarded a ship suspected of carrying child slaves after it docked at Cotonou early today but found no sign of such children.
Next day
Cotonou, Benin. According to the manifest, there were only seven children aboard. UNICEF officials said thirty-one were placed in foster homes. The Men of the Earth charity had forty-three at their refuge. The ship’s chief mate insisted that there were twenty-eight children onboard, all with their families.
Skizzen decided that his paste would have to wait on further reports, since the incident would not be a keeper unless some of the kids had been thrown overboard.