“I’m afraid so. When he took her to the hospital they found out she’d strangled under anesthesia, and there were obvious signs of the abortion.”
“That’s a terrible shame!”
“Isn’t it? Dr. Schott managed to keep everybody quiet, and the police are investigating secretly, but so far they haven’t had any luck. Morgan claims he doesn’t know who the doctor was that did it or where the thing was done. Says his wife arranged it on her own and he wasn’t there when it happened. I don’t know whether he’s lying or not; there’s no way to tell.”
“Good Lord! Can they punish him for anything?”
“Not a thing. But here’s the unfortunate part: even though Dr. Schorl’s kept everything hushed up, he decided he can’t in all good conscience keep Morgan on the staff. It’s a bad thing in itself, and it would be worse if the students got wind of it. You know, a small college in a little town like Wicomico. It could lead to a great deal of unpleasantness. Frankly, he asked for Morgan’s resignation.”
“Oh, the poor bastard!”
“Yes, it’s a pity. You won’t say anything, will you?”
I shook my head. “I won’t tell a soul.”
I was going to be denied, then, the chance to take public responsibility. Rennie was buried. I was still employed, my reputation was untouched, and Joe was out of a job.
Lord, the raggedness of it; the incompleteness! I paced my room; sucked in my breath; groaned aloud. I could imagine confessing publicly—but would this not be a further, final injury to Joe, who clearly wanted to deprive me of my responsibility, or at any rate wanted to hold his grief free from any further dealing with me? I could imagine carrying the ragged burden secretly, either in or out of Wicomico, married to Peggy Rankin or not, under my real name or another—but was this not cheating my society of its due, or covertly avoiding public embarrassment? For that matter, I couldn’t decide whether marrying Peggy would be merciful or cruel; whether setting police on the Doctor would be right or wrong. I could not even decide what I should feel: all I found in me was anguish, abstract and without focus.
I was frantic. Half a dozen letters I started—to Joe, to the police, to Peggy, to Joe again—and none could I finish. It was no use: I could not remain sufficiently simple-minded long enough to lay blame—on the Doctor, myself, or anyone—or to decide what was the right course of action. I threw the notes away and sat still and anguished in my rocking chair. The terrific incompleteness made me volatile; my muscles screamed to act; but my limbs were bound like Laocoön’s—by the twin serpents Knowledge and Imagination, which, grown great in the fullness of time, no longer tempt but annihilate.
Presently I undressed and lay on the bed in the dark, though sleep was unthinkable, and commenced a silent colloquy with my friend.
“We’ve come too far and learned too much,” I said to Laocoön. “Of those of us who have survived to this age, who can live any longer in the world?”
There was no reply. My mouth had the taste of ashes in it.
Sometime during the night the telephone rang. I was nude, and since the window curtains were open I answered the phone in the dark. Joe’s voice came strong, clear, quiet, and close over the wire.
“Jake?”
“Yes, Joe.” I tingled in every nerve, thinking, among other things, of the big pistol in his closet.
“Are you up to date on everything?”
“Yes. I think so.”
There was a pause.
“Well. What are your plans? Anything special?”
“I don’t know, Joe… I guess not. I was going to follow your lead, whatever it turned out to be.”
Another pause.
“I might leave town too,” I said.
“Oh yes? Why?”
No alteration in his voice, no hint of his attitude at all.
“I don’t know. How about you, Joe? What’ll you do now?”
He ignored the question.
“Well, what’s on your mind, Jake? What do you think about things?”
I hesitated, entirely nonplused. “God, Joe—I don’t know where to start or what to do!”
“What?”
His voice remained clear, bright, and close in my ear. I can’t understand why it was that I started crying, but the tears ran in a cold flood down my face and neck, onto my chest, and I shook all over with violent chills.
“I said 1 don’t know what to do.”
“Oh.”
Another pause, this time a long one, and then he hung up and I was left with a dead instrument in the dark.
Next morning I shaved, dressed, packed my bags, and called a taxi. While I waited for it to come, I rocked in my chair and smoked a cigarette. I was without weather. A few minutes later the cabby blew his horn for me; I picked up my two suitcases and went out, leaving the bust of Laocoön where it stood on the mantelpiece. My car, too, since I saw no further use for it, I left where it was, at the curb, and climbed into the taxi.
“Terminal.”
THE END
About the Author
John Barth was born May 27, 1930, in a town on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, a location he was to use repeatedly in his later writing. As a youth, Barth’s reading material often came from the paperback racks of his father’s candy store. As a college student he discovered in the Classics Library of John Hopkins University the Oriental tale-cycles and medieval story collections that greatly influenced his fiction. He received his B.A. from Johns Hopkins in 1951 and his M.A. in 1952, having studied there with George Boas, Leo Spitzer and Pedro Salinas. A full-time teacher as well as a writer, Barth is now Alumni Centennial Professor of English at John Hopkins.
Barth’s first three novels were critical successes, but commercial failures. The Floating Opera (1956) won him a nomination for the National Book Award. The End of the Road (1958) was well-received by reviewers and a growing coterie of Barth fans, but marked the end of the author’s interest in writing realistic fiction. In 1960 the racy, comic pseudohistorical novel The Sot-Weed Factor appeared and firmly established him as a favorite among academic and intellectual readers. In 1966 Giles Goat-Boy, an allegorical tale narrated by a computer, brought him huge financial success and a popularity that allowed him to revise and republish his first three novels. Lost in the Funhouse, a, cycle of fictions beginning with the short story “Night-Sea Journey” in which a spermatozoan is the speaker, earned him a nomination for the 1968 National Book Award. Chimera, a collection of three novellas, followed in 1972, and Letters, an epistolary novel, in 1979. All of Barth’s superbly crafted works reaffirmed his observation that “My own talent has been to make simple things complicated. In doing so, he has amused, instructed, and delighted his readers.
Back Cover:
Exciting, important, a great American novel.
John Barth emerged as one of the most exciting and promising novelists of his generation with the publication of his first novel, The Floating Opera. The subsequent appearance of The End of the Road, The Sot-Weed Factor, and Giles Goat-Boy has more than justified this promise.
In The End of the Road, Barth tells an intensely perceptive, funny, and savagely realistic tale, with a principal character, Jake Horner, who has been described as “one of the most fantastically dreadful” to appear in a long time.
“The End of the Road has more freshness, more wit and invention, and more intellectual life of its own than most recent American fiction. It is a horrifying book too, and neither the vocabulary nor the situations will recommend themselves to the squeamish.”—Harper’s
“A brilliant novel of marital infidelity on a college campus by the best writer we have at the present, and one of the best we have ever had.”—New York Times
Scan Notes, v3.0: Proofed carefully, italics and special characters intact. The chapter headings are really like that in the DT.
converted to .ePUB by antimist on 01/03/2015
John Barth, The End of the Road
 
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