This is the Way the World Ends Read Online Free PDF Page B

child, money worries or not, and eventually it even embraced thermonuclear war and strategic doctrine. George believed that the bombs were normally dropped from airplanes. Justine was certain that they would arrive via guided missiles. Whenever the fight began to lull, George demonstrated some additional virtue of the suit.
    ‘What the hell good are those going to do anybody?’ Justine demanded after George showed her the vacuum-packed seeds. ‘Do you know how long it will take for those to grow?’
    ‘They’re resistant to ultraviolet light.’
    ‘Yeah? What does that mean?’
    ‘It’s like the grasshopper and the ant.’
    ‘It’s like what? ’
    ‘A bad move that was, Justine, getting fired. Truly dumb. This suit will give us peace of mind. You’ll just have to ask Harry for your job back.’
    ‘There’s one thing I forgot to tell you, darling,’ said Justine with a tilted smile. ‘Today Harry grabbed my ass.’
    The moment John Frostig saw George standing in the doorway with the little scopas suit under his arm, he knew that he had lost the sale. Taking the contract and the $345.71 check from his briefcase, he rolled them into a tube and thrust it toward George’s belly as if knifing him. He spoke in grim whispers.
    ‘I’m going to explicate a few things now, buddy-buddy,’ He curled his arm in a yoke around George’s neck and led him into the house. ‘Right now we’re friends, my dear grasshopper, but when the warheads reach their targets, I’m going to be looking out for me and mine and nobody else. That’s the way with us ants.’
    Scopas suits cluttered John’s living room, sprawling on the floor, resting on the couches, relaxing on the chairs. One suit was watching a football game on television. Another played the piano. The house looked like a meeting place for an extraterres-trial chapter of the Ku Klux Klan.
    ‘In short,’ John continued softly, ‘anybody who hears that us ants have a few extra suits stored up . . . anybody who drops by our larders looking to borrow one of those suits . . . such a person – even if he’s an old buddy – such a person is asking to get his brains dredged out with a Remington 870.’
    Alice Frostig glanced up from her sewing machine – she was repairing a scopas suit glove – and moved her bulbous and balding head with an amen sort of nod. Among other pitiable things, she was the female equivalent of a cuckold. More than once George had seen John approach a vulnerable housewife in the Lizard Lounge and convince her to accept his hospitality at the Wildgrove Motel.
    ‘Justine lost her job,’ said George. ‘She’s going to take acting lessons. We can’t afford the suit any more.’
    ‘Tell that to the Soviets,’ said the suit salesman.
    ‘There probably won’t even be a war,’ said George.
    Throughout his entire life, George had never discovered a pleasure more complete than reading to his daughter. Food did not go beyond taste and satiation, sex lacked intellectual rewards, but Holly’s bed-time had everything. There was, first of all, the sheer physical enjoyment of swaddling oneself in blankets. Then, too, the process brought out Holly’s adorable side, suppressing the whiny beast that lived in four-year-olds and fed on parental exasperation. And frequently the books themselves were pithy and provocative, the sorts of things an advertising executive might have written in a fit of scruple.
    Father and daughter were huddled together, orienting Holly’s selection for the evening – a bad selection as it happened, a vapidity called Carrie of Cape Cod . A kitten scampered amid the blanketed terrain. Holly’s menagerie of stuffed animals went about their soft habits. George began reading: Outside the cottage harsh winds whipped the lake, giving it whitecaps and a tide. Canadian geese splashed down, squonking loudly.
    Carrie of Cape Cod slogged on. Near summer’s end, Carrie saw a seagull pick up a clam and drop it on a rock. The shell