Read Toward the End of Time for Free Online

muffler, accidentally turned her face toward mine as she blew a bubble of bubble gum. The primitive man within me prickled at this casual uncalled-for protrusion of insolent mock-nakedness, a roundness out of her mouth pinker and more blatant than an exposed breast or penis, there in the chilly damp gloom of the station, which is a much drearier, barer place since the renovations that substituted Fleet Center for Boston Garden. At the same time, twenty-five years ago, they raised the platform to be level with the floors of the cheesy new plastic-seated cars, a handicapped-sensitive improvement which denies normal passengers the old jaunty sensation of swinging down into Boston. And they enlarged and enclosed the waiting area where we all used to stand in the fresh air, which was bracing after a day of inhaling recycled gases within our sealed office buildings. To discourage permanent perching by the homeless, they took out many of the friendly wooden benches in the station itself, which has been robbed of all its old shops save a diminished version of the fruit stand. There is no place where you can buy a candy bar. A sickening smell of hot cheese wafts everywhere from a pizzeria that has been installed at the end where the cretins who attend sporting events in Fleet Center might betempted to coat their guts with fat and gluten. In this place, for decades a daily station of my pilgrimage, the young woman unthinkingly showed me her pink bubble, and then wolfed it back, seething with bacteria, into her oral cavity.
    And, secondly, on the ride home, gliding past the marshes, which were dark now, making the window into a mirror, I saw my own gazing eye, in three-quarters view, unexpectedly close in the black glass, watery and round, like the watchful dark orb of a deer. A deer eye, fearful and alert— hostile or neutral, I couldn’t quite tell. We cannot think or feel with the brain of another creature but we can see its eyes, those sensitive organs which the brain protrudes. My reflected face loomed inches from mine, the skin a dirty metallic color, skimming along in mid-air, transparent to the industrial shapes and receding lit windows, like the visage of a spy from outer space, an evilly staring alter ego. It gave me a start, and forestalled the nap I had scheduled for myself, the fifteen minutes of sleep that mark the end of a commuter’s day and fortify him or her for an evening at home.

    Another foot of snow has fallen on top of the two feet already on the ground. I waded out across the front lawn to take down the Christmas lights that we run up on the flagpole as our part of the annual pretense that God descended to Earth in a baby’s body. The neighbors expect it. I’ve been told that even ships at sea—the lonely-looking oil tankers that, like long cardboard silhouettes on a slow string, edge into Salem Harbor—appreciate it. But my wife, who has strict ideas on many topics, says that nobody with any taste keeps lights up after Twelfth Night. Her father never did. Twelfth Night came and went, and there was no thaw insight, so I seized this even mildly sunny day, the sun a white blur in a high thin cloud cover.
    Walking through snow up to my crotch turned out to be an ordeal almost comical in its severity—worse even than those childhood memories we distrust in hindsight, of eye-high drifts and tunnels from the front porch. My yard, where I amble back and forth in the summer practicing chip shots and setting up croquet wickets in anticipation of a visit from my grandchildren, had become huge, an antarctic continent. Every step sucked at my entire leg with the force of gravity on another, much larger, planet. My boots quickly filled with snow—a chilly, sticky sensation that came back to me from sixty years ago. Extracting my leg from each socket was like pulling a giant tooth. I wondered if the deer was watching and could hear my grunts, my laughter at my physical plight. Her velvety white-rimmed ears would