Toward the End of Time Read Online Free PDF

boots, with the windows obscured by vapor, I rubbed the back of the Subaru against a white wooden inner wall of the old greenhouse. It was a subtle sensation but I knew disaster when I felt it.
    That side of the car was in shadow, and my stepson kept reassuring me, “It’s nothing, Pop, I don’t think it will even show,” but in the morning, with the sky pure blue and its light reflecting from the drifts of fresh snow as in a hall of mirrors, the damage was clear and extensive. Gloria was furious—as furious at me as she had been at the deer. Again, a helpless possession of hers, an ornament to her existence, had been chewed by a predator. “It’ll cost a fortune,” she told me, with diamond-hard satisfaction. “A thousand welders minimum.”
    She had won a point in our battle to the death. I was incompetent, senile. I couldn’t argue. And yet I had been somehow jostled into this abysmal mishap by the frisky young people who had accompanied me, whereas I could only blame myself for that badly played bridge hand.
    My wife and I know dozens of women and a number of men who seem content to devote hours of each day to the practice and perfection of their bridge. What is wrong with me, who resents the energy spent in development of a skill whose end product is a scribbled bridge pad, a set of scores fading into the void? What doesn’t fade into the void? The rest of their lives these bridge players devote to the cultivation of their roses, the trimming of their hedges, the feeding of their faces, the tidying of their homes, the maintenance of contact with their children and grandchildren and socioeconomically identical acquaintances, the travelling to Florida and to Maine in the suitable seasons—all activities that leave no trace. What is wrong with me, that I want to leave a trace, by scribbling these disjunct and jumpy notes concerningmy idle existence? Spoiling paper—no worse and no better than scribbling on a bridge pad.
    There is, among the indeterminacies, a universe in which, undeflected by my stepson’s overstimulating presence, I opted to drive the Subaru straight into the carport without a scratch or a dent. What would that universe be like? It would be one in which Gloria would have one less weapon, one less I-told-you-so, to wield against me. It would be like the one I am in, only with some other vexation crowding to the forefront of my brain—the tiny, conscious part, which floats on a primeval sea of hunger, sex, and semi-automatic bodily functions.
    I read last night about Neandert(h)al man. He has a history of sorts, it turns out. He was an evolutionary offshoot of slender Homo erectus , who migrated from Africa into Europe a million years ago or less. Though glaciers advanced and retreated, Europe was generally cold. Neanderthal (let’s keep the old-fashioned, pleasantly incorrect “h”) men developed the short, thick, conservative bodies of Arctic dwellers today. They were so strong that their muscles, knitted to our bones, would snap them. Their own bones are often found broken, perhaps in battle with giant elk, bison, and those long-horned extinct oxen called auroch (plural). Though the Neanderthals’ relics show some progress in flint-working, they evidently never got the idea of projectiles—no slings and arrows for them. They had to grapple with their prey close up, and the patterns of their broken bones correspond most closely to, of all contemporary professional groups, rodeo riders.
    Pre-Neanderthal men toppled hundreds of animals and thirty human colleagues into a cave in Spain three hundred thousand years ago; the first true Neanderthals date from seventy thousand years later. Fifty thousand years later still, glaciers so heavily descended upon Europe that the continent,for the next fifty thousand years, was empty, as far as the fossil record shows, of human beings. Think of it! Ten times the span of recorded human history pass, and men are squeezed from the European record of