Signs. Womwom has been having to make his own breakfast. Not that he minds, but it is symptomatic. Elan gazes the mornings long out on the snow, on the rain, on the sun, on the wind, and finds words like “structural dissolution” and “the coalescence of polarities” leaking out her fingertips. He has heard them before, knows what must surely follow. Again. But not just again. Something new this time. Of course, it’s obvious what it is. It is the unprecedented participation of the Other. There have been large groups before, but the nucleus has always been his wife. Now, several nuclei seem, as though by accident, to have become attached, forming an almost organic something larger than any of them, and though his wife is still its most important member, she is now, for the first time, truly a member, depending on the others as they depend on her. If there is a center, of course, it is Giovanni Bruno, the One to Come. Little matter that he is so enigmatic a figure, Elan has led Womwom to expect such a mystery at the middle, but the point is, this abstract thing which has dragged them through the years is now suddenly upon them, and what he never expected is that the core thing should be outside his wife herself.
West Condon pep talk and sales pitches appear on billboards, defiantly tawdry above the patches of crusty snow, signaling the town’s proximity. Working hard these days. Has to get what he can. He is not an avaricious man, anybody can tell that by a single glance, but always they need it. Money. And never more than at times like these. And so he has to push, though he has no heart for it. Of course, he enjoys his work, but, as his wife has always said, he is too much an artist. Wastes whole days in the country, and meanwhile the easy money is in town. Sick dogs. Dogs with worms. Worms! A farmer bets on value when he calls a vet. Pet owners care nothing for economics. Keeping a pet is an affront to thrift in the first place, not to mention that it’s an affront to nature to boot. So, they pay up. “Ten bucks? Sure, Doc!” Beaming grab for the pocket. And little brats gazing raptly on, learning patterns that will make successes out of medical frauds for generations to come. Leeches. Why can’t he be a happy leech like the rest? An artist. Well, he is. But times of stress push him and he undertakes, against his own nature, the disagreeable.
Indications of West Condon can be seen a couple miles outside of town: a steeple or two, some smoke, and so on. But the town itself springs into being only at the city limits. There’s just enough soft roll to the land around, a settling over the coal beds, that no great distances can be seen from ground level. Then, too, things block the view — trees, humps of raw land shoveled up by strip-mining, barns and motels and the like, the usual brash fungi of billboards — block the view or flick distractingly in front of it, such that the city limits sign is a kind of guarantee you have made it, a lever you trip in passing that pops the town out of the yellow soil like a jack-in-the-box. Nothing special about it. Town like many they have lived in. But he likes it, has liked them all, and here in West Condon, as the only fully qualified veterinarian, he is especially needed. So, he feels an urge today, tripping the lever and feeling the town spring up to embrace him, to drive his roots in so deeply here that no crisis could ever tear him out.
At home, his wife is seated at the kitchen table, as usual, with Rahim the lawyer. Papers, logs, graphs, tools out in front of them. Late afternoon sun glows there. “Wylie!” she exclaims when he enters. “Giovanni said: ‘A circle of evenings’—of course! It means another seven Sundays! And seven Sundays after the first of March is the nineteenth of Apriclass="underline" the last day the sun is in the sign of rebirth!” Rahim, excited, is frantically constructing new graphs.
“That’s good, dear,” Womwom says with a smile, and he goes in and lies down on the couch. The nineteenth of April.
But he has work to do. Can’t waste a minute. He gets up and goes out to straighten up his garage-office. Things are in a mess. The more he cleans, the worse it seems to get. He shows a fellow there through the pens, where he is growing worms, using dog intestines as hosts. Important experiment. Many of the worms are, as though magnified, snake size, but their morphology is strictly vermicular. “Lyttae,” he puns, but he sees the fellow fails to grasp this. A scorpion has got in and killed his best worms. Carnage. It is grotesque. Afraid of the tail, he kicks it in the head. The scorpion’s legs, detached by the blow, twitch in death throes, look almost like chicken claws. The head wanders about autonomously. “Make the best of it,” he cautions himself, and attempts to study the scorpion’s incredible head. But it terrifies him. The fellow is gone. Wylie is alone. With the dead worms and the scorpion head. It seems to be enjoying itself. He is afraid to kill it.
“I’m cold, Tommy,” whimpers Sally Elliott at the ice plant. A thawing rain drums the roof of the big Lincoln, securing them from parents, police, and bushwhackers. Tommy has found that girls jump in the back faster when he uses his Dad’s Lincoln instead of his own jalop. Something psychological. “Somebody’ll come and catch us.”
“Use a little common sense, Sally. It’s Monday night and it’s raining pitchforks. Nobody’s gonna come.” He has talked the slacks off her, but not the panties. He kisses her neck, strokes the sleek flesh of her tummy. Boy oh boy, does it feel good! “I told you I know what I’m doing,” he whispers. He insinuates his fingers under the elastic band, slithers toward whatever it is that’s down there.
She twists away, curls up in one corner, staring out at the rain. “Tommy, please, let’s go home.”
She wants you to do it, she just doesn’t want to feel guilty, wants you to make her do it so it’s not her fault. He sets his teeth. “Listen, Sally, if it was the end of the world tomorrow, I mean really, if this was our last, like our last chance, would you let me do it then?” He is on his knees beside her, staring at her almost edible everything. Sheen off the silk panties. White as a ghost.
“Why do you talk like that, Tommy? Do you believe that?”
“No, I just mean, if.” Boy, she’s dumb! She deserves it! If he can just get her down on her belly somehow.
“I guess so,” she says then, surprising him.
“Sally!” he whispers, kissing her ear. He moves in. “You’re beautiful! You’re Eve!” His own mark of Adam, so taut and prickly he almost wants somebody to bite the end off, prods her softly in the side.
That scares her and she jumps away, scrambles for her slacks, pulls them on. But anyway she finally sees what he’s got. He figures she’s pretty impressed, because she forgets about being mad and gets cuddly again on the way home. “If the end of the world does come,” she whispers, “will you hold my hand all the time?”
“Sure,” he smiles. Hey, this Judgment thing is pretty rich, he decides, and can be mined for more. He’ll have to plan it out. Meanwhile, he lays hold of a plump breast and says, “We’ll have to practice, though.”
Rain falls. Clerks are laid off. A creek outside town overflows its banks. A three-hour power failure blacks out the town. A nice old lady rolls down a flight of stairs and breaks her neck. Signs all, and the signs are bad. And on the door of a stall in the boys’ rest room at the high schooclass="underline" APRIL 19. Carved with a knife.
“Mrs. Norton, this is a friend calling.”
“Why can’t you people leave us alone?”
“I’m not calling to trouble you, Mrs. Norton, let me assure you.” The diamond shape has reverted once more to a square, a large checkerboard, composed of twenty-five smaller squares, thirteen of which contain eight small triangles each, all blacked in, although the alternating vertical and horizontal strokes preserve the separate identity of each triangle. If the light is right. “Why I called was simply to tell you that I have good reason to believe you have a, shall we say, a pretender, in your midst, who may in fact mean you considerable harm.” The other end of the line remains silent. Diagonals are passed through the white squares giving them four triangles each. “And perhaps harm to our community as well. I speak of Mr. Justin Miller. I am sorry to say that I fear his intentions may be opportunistic ones.”