The End by Salvatore Scibona Page A

teach them): to search for the dead father, which meant “to desire the impossible.”
    Rocco said slowly, “I have never been to the Pennsylvania before, don’t you know.”
    “This ain’t Pennsylvania, pally. This is New York.”
    The barber’s breathing smelled of mustard.
    “You’re joking.”
    “You are one half hour’s motoring time south-southwest of Buffalo, New York.”
    He had swerved north of his planned trajectory on account of having decided that to buy a road atlas was to betray Providence. He knew he was headed east, essentially. In the fullness of time, the Lord would lead him to his destination.
    The barber had progressed to the back of Rocco’s neck. “Listen, there isn’t any natural place for me to stop here.” He swiveled the chair and positioned a hand mirror so as Rocco could see in the mirror on the wall where he was pointing his razor. “What do you say?” he asked.
    Rocco pouted indifferently.
    The mug in which the barber agitated the shaving brush was embossed with a swirling blue design, and a barrel, and the words I went over Niagara Falls.
    “Put your head down.”
    A speck of dandruff landed on the oilcloth. The barber folded Rocco’s ear over itself and slid the warm steel over a mole on his neck.
    Niagara Falls.
    But wait. But he was a half hour from Buffalo. But Buffalo was, was it not, only a half hour from Niagara Falls.
    He inclined his head, too quickly, feeling a gleeful stress, an elation of childhood—of climbing the lava columns in the bay at Aci Trezza, naked at night, and leaping into the sea. The razor sliced into his neck.
    “Aw, hell,” the barber said, reaching for a towel. “Look what you made me do.”
     
    It was 11:42 in the morning on the sixteenth of August, 1953. The republic, so vast and beautiful, the heir of tremendous technological and political genius and of thousands of millions of hours of the working man’s work across the centuries, had yet, as of this moment, to be destroyed. It was a tyrant killer, a vendor of grain and typewriter ribbons. Nothing could be more self-evident than that it meant well by the world, and still the world was threatening at any moment to transform us, its people, into ash and bone shards. Our belief in the justness of our cause was being tested.
    In the meantime, said the Lord to Rocco, consider the gorge I have scooped out, and the steaming cliffs of falling water that I have made to fall so that you might come here and feel your heart being drawn out of your throat.
    Canada was right over there, across the canyon. If he squinted, Canadians could be seen moving along a Canadian street in midday Canadian summer sunshine.
    The titanic physical dimensions of this place gave to the movement of any small thing, any merely human-life-sized thing, an illusion of supernatural slowness. The Canadian cars on the opposite lip of the canyon seemed at best to be creeping. Any splash, any arbitrarily chosen patch of water you followed into the cloud below, appeared not to fall (since what could take so long falling?) but to drift leisurely down the face of the cataract. A few clouds overhead and these other clouds, what a shock, drifting up into the sky. And down by the base of the falls the clouds were so thick as to obscure completely his view of where the falling water made impact with the river itself, giving him the impression that the water wasn’t descending into the river at all but into a befogged chasm, where it was swallowed up and annihilated. Raw senses were not to be believed in this place. And he had to ask himself if the unchanging physical rules that governed small things in fact changed radically in the face of a really big thing. As in, if he dropped a newspaper into the river up here it might turn into a flamingo by the time it got to the bottom of the falls. Next to him the river was clean, green, fat, and fast. Down there, postfall, it was blue and teemed with hills of brown scum. A knee-high sycamore