Now and Again

12.0 TACTICS & EXECUTION

12.1 Penn Sinclair

Penn spent his last day in New York City shopping for an engagement ring. He hadn’t known it would be so complicated: How much did he want to spend? Which cut of stone did he find appealing? Should the band be platinum or gold, and if it was to be gold, what about alloy and purity?

At each store he went to, a sales associate laid a velvet tray on the countertop and set out a selection of rings for Penn to admire. He had always been sure of himself, but now he couldn’t seem to make up his mind on anything. “Perhaps you should bring your fiancée in with you,” suggested an unsmiling salesman. “The ladies tend to have definite ideas about these things.”

“She’s not my fiancée yet,” said Penn.

“I see,” said the salesman, arching an eyebrow as if what he saw was not entirely pleasing. “I assume you’ve discussed marriage with her, though. These days couples usually discuss the ring.”

They talked about marriage endlessly, but it was always in the context of another bridegroom and another bride, and now Penn couldn’t remember anything Louise had told him. He wondered if he was supposed to feel happy as he shopped, or at least as if he was trading his money for a chance at happiness. He supposed he wasn’t unhappy, even if he was a little irritated when the saleswoman at Tiffany’s ignored him to wait on a woman who clutched an expensive purse and disapproved of invisible flaws in an array of pearl necklaces.

“Pearls are a natural product,” said the saleswoman. “Natural products have flaws, which is one of the reasons we value them.”

“But why so pink?” asked the customer. “These aren’t for my daughter, after all. They are for me.”

“What about this double strand?” asked the saleswoman. “They’re really lustrous. Or, have you considered yellow — or even black?”

“Heavens, no,” said the woman. “Those are far too modern for my taste.”

When it was his turn, Penn found out that there was color to diamonds as well.

“Color is just one of the four Cs,” said the saleswoman. “Cut, clarity, color, and carat. Your job is to balance these attributes without straining your budget. Even an imperfect diamond can appear quite brilliant to the naked eye.”

“Only quite brilliant?” asked Penn.

“Quite, quite brilliant,” said the saleswoman.

Perhaps he should come back with Louise even if it ruined the surprise. Or he could buy a cheap glass ring for the proposal with the idea that they could replace it with the real thing down the road. He tried to imagine the scene: the little blue box, Louise’s trembling fingers, the inevitable awkward seconds between the moment Louise first saw the substitute ring and the moment she realized it was only temporary. Much as she might be a costume jewelry convert, he didn’t think she would settle when it came to an engagement ring, and he didn’t want his first words after “Darling, will you marry me?” to be a long-winded explanation for why the ring he was putting on her finger was only standing in for the one they would choose together. And when would they choose it? He couldn’t expect Louise to wear the temporary ring for the long months he was overseas.

Penn walked down Madison Avenue, pausing now and then to gape into the shop windows and trying not to feel defeated. It was a warm summer Friday and clutches of excited shoppers gave the city a festive air, but he couldn’t help feeling critical of their high spirits. By the time he reached Forty-second Street, the crowds had thickened and changed. Now it was men and women in suits who crowded the sidewalks talking into their cell phones or rushing to catch an early train to the suburbs or the beach. Instead of turning west toward Louise’s apartment, where he planned to shower and change his clothes, something made him jump into a gap in the revolving door of the library just as a woman with children was coming out. “Hi, kids,” he said, but the girl ignored him and the boy peered at him suspiciously from behind his mother’s leg.

He made his way up the escalator to the room where his eyes had been opened, fully expecting to encounter the homeless man sprawled on the floor where he had first seen him, but of course he wasn’t there. “I’m looking for a man who used to come in here to read books on war,” he said to a librarian sitting at the information desk. “Have you seen him lately?”

“I’m new here, but I can ask my colleague.”

Penn waited while the man went off and came back again with an older woman. “You must mean the professor,” she said. “He hasn’t been here in several months, but there’s a soup kitchen two blocks away. I know he used to eat there.”

Penn hurried along the sidewalk to where a group of haphazardly dressed people were clustered near a recessed entryway. It was 4:40, and a sign taped to the inside of a window said the door wouldn’t open until five o’clock. He was supposed to meet Louise for an early dinner before heading to the airport to catch a flight to DC, where he would board a military transport plane. He hadn’t yet told her he was going back to Iraq, and he had counted on the ring to soften the blow. But now he concluded it might be better to put off the proposal to a day when he had more time and less on his mind. That morning he had gotten up early with the pleasant sense that the day stretched endlessly before him, but now he felt rushed and indecisive. It would be folly to propose in such a harried state of mind — that and the news of his departure would ruin the atmosphere for a romantic celebration. In any case, he didn’t have a ring. He leaned against the side of the building and ran his fingers against the grimy stone cladding. He still had to shower and change his clothes and head uptown to the restaurant, so if he waited until five for the soup kitchen to open, he risked being late for Louise.

He paced the length of the block and back again. Just when he had decided he was compounding his folly by waiting when he didn’t even know what he was hoping to discover, an old man came around the corner tapping a gnarled stick in front of him. It took Penn almost a minute to recognize the professor. Something fundamental about him had changed, and when he banged his stick on the ground, it was without his previous air of conviction. Penn introduced himself and explained what he had been doing in the months since they had met, but the man showed no sign of recognition.

“We talked about war,” said Penn. “You told me that man is warlike, but that he doesn’t like to think of himself that way.”

“I say that to everybody,” said the professor, stopping to cough into a grimy handkerchief. “Everybody who will listen, that is.”

“I gave you half a bagel.”

“Ah,” said the professor. “Half a bagel.”

“We talked about philosophy,” said Penn.

“Philosophy!” wheezed the professor. He squinted at Penn and leaned forward, balancing on unsteady feet with the help of the flimsy stick. “It seems to me that there is only one worthwhile philosophical question, and it isn’t whether or not…” He started wheezing again. His eyes were red and runny, and his skin seemed to erupt in new boils while Penn watched.

“It isn’t whether or not man is warlike. Of course he is. It isn’t whether or not the system works to sustain itself. Of course it does. So the question is not whether it is even possible to be outside the system or whether man is doomed to be a cog in a killing machine, it…” He coughed and scrutinized his handkerchief and seemed befuddled by what he saw.

“What is the question, then? What were you going to say?”

“It is whether it is possible to be both moral and…” Here, he was taken by a paroxysm of painful coughing, accompanied by what seemed to be a memory lapse. “Where was I? Where was I?” he asked. The professor poked his stick in Penn’s direction, hitting him on the kneecap, but his grip was so feeble that it bobbled and dropped from his hand.

Penn stooped to pick it up, trying to conceal his agitation. “You were saying there is only one worthwhile philosophical question.”

“Thank you, young man. Yes, exactly. I believe there is.”

“What one is that?” Penn felt increasingly desperate, and while it occurred to him that he was listening to an old man’s ramblings, he was certain the professor possessed the kernel of truth he was looking for.

Now it was the old man’s turn to say, “What? What one is what?”

“The question!” cried Penn, but the professor’s response was interrupted when a volunteer in a red apron came with a ring of keys to open the door for the long line of people that had formed on the sidewalk.

“What’s for dinner?” shouted the professor.

“Come in and you’ll find out,” said the volunteer.

“I’m hoping it’s not meat loaf,” said a scrawny woman who was standing near them.

At the sound of the keys, another horde of people had materialized, and now they were jostling for position in the line. The professor used his stick to clear a space for himself as the volunteer called out, “One at a time, please! There’s plenty for everybody!”

“But it’s not yet five!” cried Penn. His wristwatch, which had been given to him by his father when he went off to college, was finely calibrated and had neither lost nor gained a minute in the nine years he had owned it.

“One at a time,” the volunteer called again. Cooking smells wafted out the door to mingle with the exhaust from a passing bus and the stink of rotting garbage that curled up from the curb.

“What’s the one philosophical question?” Penn was shouting now, but the old man had scuttled up to the door and was vanishing through it. “Can you at least tell me that?”

The volunteer smiled benignly at Penn. “It’s hard to think about philosophy when you’re hungry,” she said. “Come back after dinner. Maybe you’ll get your answer then.”

Penn slung his duffel over his shoulder and wandered through a nearby park where an art class was experimenting with line and form. “Solids and voids,” said a bearded man when Penn stopped to peer over his shoulder at the abstractions on his canvas. The face of Penn’s watch showed 6:04. It was too late to shower, too late to change his clothes, too late to be on time for Louise. He walked another block west and turned north on the Avenue of the Americas. It was seventeen blocks to the restaurant overlooking Central Park. He imagined hailing a cab and getting locked in rush-hour traffic or jogging up the avenue on foot, becoming sweatier with each block while Louise tapped her long fingers on the tablecloth and ordered a bottle of imported water and then a selection of appetizers when he still didn’t appear. He saw her choosing an expensive wine and sending it back when it wasn’t quite what she expected.

Suddenly it seemed easier to go back to the war than to face Louise without a ring, without a life plan, without a polished sense of who he was or how he was going to answer life’s big questions. With only a vague sense of what those questions were. All around him, people were making small protests against fate: the taxicab drivers fighting over a customer, the fat woman enjoying a candy bar, the thin woman shaking a tambourine and belting out a gospel song. Even the proprietor of a nearby newsstand waved cheerfully at the headlines: MARKETS SLAMMED BY BIG OIL, RUSSIA WIDENS ATTACKS ON GEORGIA, CRISIS DEEPENS AS BIG BANKS FAIL, OKLAHOMA WOMAN SOUGHT IN LEAKED DOC PROBE. He followed a carefree young woman who tossed her hair and crossed against the light. Then Times Square exploded in front of him, and he felt a wave of happiness wash over him, or if it wasn’t happiness, it was at least a sense that cross-purposes and conflicting messages and questions with no clear answers weren’t necessarily bad and might even be evidence of progress. He told himself that he had done a little good in the warehouse. He and the men had started something, and whether or not they finished it wasn’t up to him. He’d call Louise. Or he’d leave a message with the maître d’ of the restaurant. He’d send her flowers. Meanwhile, he had a plane to catch.

On the plane, Sinclair went over his orders again. He was being assigned to an engineer battalion that had undergone intensive stateside training with a new generation of robotic devices that were now being deployed overseas. The first wave of combat robots had been plagued with technical issues and precipitously pulled from the theater after reports of malfunction and friendly fire. But improvements had been made and hopes were high that the new devices would save soldiers’ lives. He re-read the spec sheets: the Groundhog was equipped with an M249 light machine gun that could shoot a thousand rounds per minute with 100 percent accuracy; the Parakeet could fly thirty miles per hour and hover in place as long as its power source lasted, which depended on factors like wind resistance and operator skill. If only they’d had a robot scouting the supply route that terrible day. But now he was being given a chance to save future soldiers even if there was nothing he could do about the past.

He put his head against the seat back and closed his eyes, happier than he’d been in a long time. He wondered what the new troops would be like. He wondered if there would be a businessman like Kelly or a computer whiz like Le Roy or an escape artist like Pig Eye — Edwards, he corrected himself. Paul Edwards was his name. Or a poet like Danny or a captain like himself, given leadership before he was completely ready for it. He knew that in some respects the men and women were all unique — of course they were — but in other respects, they were all the same.

12.2 Maggie

It was early morning when the last truck driver let Maggie out at the Red Bud exit. Now and then a car sped off the highway heading toward town, but she didn’t try to flag it down. What if it was someone she knew? She wouldn’t know how to answer the inevitable questions and she didn’t want to lie, so she walked with her head down, eyes glued to the dirt. Every time she caught a glimpse of her shadow stretching behind her, she thought it might be Dino, but of course it wasn’t. She tried to decide whom she had let down more — God, because she hadn’t kept her promise to him, or Tomás and George, because nothing she had done for them had made a tangible difference. She remembered how she had declared so confidently to anyone who would listen, “Saving someone else’s son is the only way to save my own.” But she hadn’t saved someone else’s son. So far, she hadn’t saved anybody. All she’d done was to raise the hopes of people who couldn’t stand too much more disappointment, which didn’t seem particularly kind under the circumstances. When she turned onto Old Oak Road, her heart started knocking like the engine of the truck on a cold day. Lyle! she thought. Will! And then she knew who it was she had let down most of all.

The driveway was hidden by a bend in the road. First the hayfield came into sight, nailed in place by the big old oak, and then the mailbox, which hung open as if panting in the June heat. It was all uphill from there — up the last stretch of road, up the driveway, up the cracked front walk with its embellishments of dandelions and tufted grass, up the steps and across the worn porch with its broken boards and rusted nails. The door was locked — why had Lyle taken to locking it? Maggie didn’t have a key, so she jimmied a loose window and climbed through it into the dining alcove, where she had hoped to find Lyle and Will drinking their Saturday morning coffee in companionable silence. But Will had joined the army, and the alcove was empty even of Lyle.

She saw by the battery-powered kitchen clock that it was already ten o’clock. Of course Lyle would be up and about by now. She washed her face and fixed a tall glass of water, which she sipped as she tidied first the kitchen and then the living room. She had always been too busy to clean properly. She had always been rushing from one thing to another: taking a hurried shower before her family was awake, eating breakfast as she slapped together the sandwiches for lunch, reminding Will about his homework and hustling everybody out the door. And then the busy day at work before coming home to dinner, household chores, and bed. Now she could take her time. Will’s room was spotless, so she started in on Lyle’s room, folding the scattered clothing and making up his bed with fresh sheets. Her bed — rather, hers and Lyle’s. It felt good to concentrate on each task, on each object, on each slow tick of the clock that was marking the seconds until Lyle would come home to find her waiting for him with dinner bubbling on the stove. She unpacked her duffel, putting the dirty clothes in the laundry basket with the sheets, the worn-out shoes on the rack in the closet, the sweaters in the sweater drawer — no, sweaters in the closet. She was pushing the sweater drawer shut when she realized it should be full of the evidence she had carefully hidden inside magazine covers all those months ago, but the evidence was gone. Lyle! What had Lyle done?

Maggie rushed back to Will’s room, only now noticing that nothing of Will remained in it. The emptiness frightened her. Her heart rattled in her rib cage like a broken clapper. The house seemed to be telling her something, so she stood very quietly, listening to the stillness and smelling the musty, closed-up smell. It wasn’t a home any longer, it was only a house.

She crept back along the hallway to the living room. The curtains hung heavily on their rings. Years ago, she had stitched them herself from fabric she had saved up for months to buy. Now she noticed that the hem was coming out and pinprick holes in the floral weave allowed tiny galaxies of light to come through. The once-bright cushions on the corduroy couch were used-up squares of dingy fabric. Dishes with the crusted remains of a meal had been kicked underneath the couch. The desk was piled with unopened mail, and propped up against the desk lamp was a letter from the attorney that started off “Good news!” It went on to say that the appellate court had agreed to a new trial for Tomás, and could she send another installment on the fee? She sat down at the desk to write out a check, but when she flipped through the check register, she saw that Lyle’s paycheck deposits had stopped over a month before.

The desk held other answers: a sternly worded letter from the bank that held their mortgage, a notice of termination from the munitions plant, documentation that Will had passed his army intake physical, had achieved a high score on his vocational aptitude test, was being deployed to Iraq. Maggie gazed out the window, but the oak tree and the rolling landscape were the only things in their proper places. Will had gone off to fight a war she had forgotten all about. How could she have forgotten the very thing that had started her on her current journey? Had she lost her way or found it? Or was life a series of mostly blind turnings guided by instinct and luck? And her husband of almost twenty years, where the heck was he?

She thought of the where-would-you-go game they had played when Will was little. But how was the game relevant? Surely Lyle hadn’t gone to California or Tahiti. And then she wondered if there was something else about the game she should be remembering. The last time the three of them had played it together, Will had only shrugged and said, “I’m too old for that.” But Maggie had played along. It had been before she had found the top-secret document on Winslow’s desk, before they had stopped driving Will to school together, before everything about her life had changed. Before she herself had changed it. She had said, “I’d hop a bus and go clear across the country to New York.”

“A bus,” Will had scoffed. “If you could afford to go anywhere, couldn’t you afford to take a plane?”

“I want to look out the window and see the sights,” Maggie had said, but without Will’s participation, the air had gone out of the game. They had driven the rest of the way to school in silence, but as soon as Will got out, Lyle had patted her shoulder in a consoling way. “I’m with you on seeing the sights, but it might be hard to take a bus to Tahiti. That’s the place I really want to go.”

Maggie had gotten her bus trip after all. She had seen Phoenix and the Grand Canyon, and it was deeply unfair that Lyle hadn’t been with her. But she didn’t think Lyle would go off without her now no matter what had happened. Still, the idea of the bus station stuck in her head. It was a hub of transportation. It was the place, on the day she had departed for Phoenix, she had left the bicycle with a note attached to it that said, PLEASE RETURN TO LYLE RAYBURN WHO LIVES ON OLD OAK ROAD. Now, she hoped someone had returned the bicycle and she would find it in the shed.

The clock in the kitchen said it was 11:40. Something told her she should hurry. Hurry for what? she asked herself, but there was no answer to the question, just an inner ticking and the image of the squat brick building on Hill Street with the bench outside for waiting and the silent morphing of the liquid crystal numbers on the kitchen clock and the familiar weight of the threadbare backpack as she slung it once again over her shoulders and left the house.

12.3 Joe Kelly

Kelly took his coffee outside to watch the street come to life: the white panel laundry truck starting on its rounds, the road crew putting new sewers in the street, the single mother walking her children to the corner and waiting with them for the bus, the muscled brothers who owned the car parts shop rolling up the metal awning and smoking a cigarette, passing it back and forth and calling out to Kelly, “This way only one of us will get cancer.” On the surface, everything was the same as usual, but something tickled Kelly’s attention. For one thing, he wasn’t used to the starched and buttoned cuffs that were poking out from the sleeves of his new jacket, and for another, the captain was gone. For the first time in his life, Kelly felt like the master of his own fate, but he also felt a little disconnected and alone.

He walked across the tracks toward the school bus stop where the oldest child was telling the younger ones horror stories of what awaited them in third grade. “What are you going to school on Saturday for?” he asked.

“Make-up days,” said the oldest. “Because of all the snow.”

“Da-amn,” said Kelly. “Well, come and see me when you’re out.”

“You boys are on your own this evening,” said the single mother. “I started that new job, but I’ll see you tomorrow for sure.”

“Things are looking up,” said Kelly.

“Yes, I think they are.”

The bus rolled to a stop. Shiny faces peered down at Kelly through the glass. The driver said, “Hurry up, kids.” The single mother blew three kisses, and together she and Kelly watched the bus chug up the street toward the intersection.

When it was out of sight, she said, “Me oh my, you look good in a suit! What’s the special occasion?”

“Big meeting today,” said Kelly. He would have liked to linger in the cool morning air and enjoy the sense of change and possibility, but he had work to do. The buyers and their lawyers were coming at noon to deliver a draft of the sales contract and to answer any questions the men or the attorney they had hired might have. When Kelly had asked to make it a condition of the sale that the site wouldn’t be shut down and that the new owners would keep Le Roy and Danny on if they wanted to stay, the representative for the buyers had said, “No problem, man. Why would my clients pay a million dollars for something only to turn around and shut it down? They believe in this mission is why, and they have the money to do it right. They’re hoping you’ll all stick around for a while.”

The sewer crew started up their jackhammer, splintering the morning quiet as Kelly walked back down the street. Above him, the clouds exploded with brightness and the air was sharp with the smell of new-mown grass. With the captain gone, there was no one to question his decisions, but no one to help him make them either. It was both liberating and disconcerting.

He drained the last of his coffee and headed back inside. Le Roy had gone on his morning run, but Danny was standing in the middle of the room adding his voice to the din from the jackhammer:

The rich get richer and the poor stay poor

While we’re knock knock knockin’ on the devil’s door.

The Defense Department isn’t keeping score,

And the generals talk about esprit de corps

As they sign you up for another tour

So the rich can get richer while the poor stay poor.

Sinclair’s absence made the decision to sell the website easier, but now Kelly wondered if it was the right thing to do. He was beginning to feel at home in the warehouse. They had applied for an occupancy waiver, and the sense of being somewhat settled astonished him. Besides, now that the captain was no longer around as a force of opposition, Kelly had started to see the mission of the website from the captain’s point of view. He had started to wonder if making a profit off the sale was ethical and if he should divide the site into two separate entities — one for the everyday horror stories and one for hard-core revelations like those contained in the classified documents they had already published and the ones Le Roy said they were getting from a new source at the NSA.

He wished he had someone he could discuss it with, but Danny had started talking about going back to Oklahoma and it wasn’t the sort of question Le Roy cared about. If Danny left, he would be shorthanded if he wanted to turn the website into something bigger and more significant than it was now. Unless he decided to sell and get out from under the shadow of the war once and for all, the way Hernandez had done.

Closing the door on the street sounds, he poured himself another cup of coffee and sifted through the morning’s email correspondence. One of the volunteers wrote to suggest moving the site overseas, and the captain to say they were in over their heads — as if they couldn’t handle things without him! But he couldn’t worry about that now. The buyers would be there in just under four hours, and he still had to print out the spreadsheets and figure out his strategy regarding the sale. Then he had to loop Le Roy and Danny in on whatever the strategy was and remind them to let him do the talking. He guessed they could play a waiting game. He guessed they could listen and give the purchasers just enough information to buy themselves a little time.

The question of what Kelly wanted for the website was complicated by the question of what he wanted for himself, but that was becoming clearer. The idea that he was positioned to do something truly good took hold of him the way the starched collar and cuffs took hold. “Unsettling”—that was the word for it. Equally unsettling was a new and insistent desire to talk things over with Joe Senior, who was his father after all. He’d missed Christmas and Easter, but he’d go home for a weekend soon — the Fourth of July was approaching — he’d go home for that. Not that Hoboken was home. Of course it wasn’t. While he was there, he’d call up that Rita woman and get to know her better. An election was coming up in a few months — hell, maybe he’d even vote.

12.4 Le Roy Jones

While Kelly got ready for the meeting with the buyers, Le Roy generated a string of random numbers for use as an encryption key in preparation for receiving some explosive documents from his contact at the NSA. It was also a good idea to encrypt any encryption key and store it in a safe place. Le Roy believed in Kerckhoff’s principle, which said that an encryption system would remain secure if the key was secure. Even if everything else about the system was known to the enemy, the key was, well, the key. That made where to store the key the most important decision he had to make. While he was thinking about it, he sent an email to E’Laine:

I just did 5 miles in less than thirty minutes and I hardly broke a sweat.

With the captain gone and E’Laine back in Detroit, the warehouse seemed empty, like there was a blank place in Le Roy’s peripheral vision despite the fact that the row of sturdy, mismatched desks and the metal lockers and the cots and the kitchenette were still in their usual places — everything solid and just as it should be. As soon as he got back to work, the hole in the universe closed up until the next time he happened to raise his head, always scuttling just ahead of his line of sight. It was almost noon when he saw it — a shadow moving on the porch, an incomplete silhouette creeping and crouching silently, smoke-colored and indistinct. He sat cemented to his chair, afraid in a way he hadn’t been afraid since that day in Iraq, trying to figure out what it was. Just then his email pinged with a reply from E’Laine, and he turned his attention back to the screen.

Good going, track star.

Le Roy went back to figuring out where to store the encryption key and decided he could send it to E’Laine.

I’m putting something in your drop box. Keep it in a safe place until I ask for it.

You can count on me.

I know I can.

Now that that was solved, Le Roy could get back to work on his simulation. He felt good about the arrangement, but he knew that encryption programs and even keys weren’t the most important link in any security chain. People were.

12.5 Danny Joiner

When the stapler misfired for the third time, Danny threw it across the room. “Who bought this piece of shit?” he wanted to know, but Kelly was printing out documents and Le Roy was deep inside his simulation. They had their headphones on, happy in their separate bubbles of isolation.

As Danny watched them, his irritation was replaced by an unfamiliar sense of belonging, and when he walked over to retrieve the stapler, he put a hand on Le Roy’s shoulder and left it there for a moment before getting back to work on his epic. He had changed the beginning several times, trying to get it right. A possible title was “The Mars Hoax,” which referred to both the Roman god of war and to a widely believed but erroneous report about the planet that was based on a misread email. “Are Ares and Mars the same?” he had asked the captain a week or so before he left. “Or are there subtle differences between them that will color the meaning of whichever one I use?” The captain had studied classics as well as philosophy and seemed to have been placed right there across the room from Danny in order to answer his questions about the two ancient gods of war.

“They’re different,” said the captain. “Ares was destructive and destabilizing, whereas Mars saw war as a pathway to peace.”

“Awesome!” crowed Danny. “Just what I was looking for!”

Sometimes he wanted to zero in and sometimes he wanted to telescope out, and the word “Mars” allowed him to do both. It was a vast red planet with impact craters and frozen polar caps, but it was only visible from earth as a pinprick of light. Not only was the entire solar system swept up in those four little letters, but also the color red, which was the color of anger, the color of passion, the color of blood and lust and love. The word was tailor-made for his purposes, and finding out about the opposing war connotations had given him a sense of order and control he had never experienced before. He thought how time was like a funnel for events, where everything in the past made the present seem ordained: the World Trade Towers had led to the war, which had led Danny to his unit and the IED and the warehouse and the epic, and finally to just the word he wanted—“Mars.” It might be an illusion, but it all felt inevitable and fated. And then he wondered if inevitability was the same as determinism, which didn’t allow for choice. Choice seemed just as real as inevitability did, but they couldn’t both be true.

“Do you believe in free will?” he asked, but no one heard him, and even if they had, free will wasn’t something Kelly or Le Roy thought about. The three of them were as close as human beings could be, but the truth was, the only thing they had in common was the war.

The epic had to work on several levels at once, with particular words, like “Mars” and “red,” acting as bridges between worlds that existed simultaneously, that could be sensed but not inhabited by a single person all at once. How did a linear and specific string of words portray both vastness and minuteness, simplicity and complexity, possibility and finality, choice and inevitability, self and other? How did he indicate that horror and beauty coexisted — in the same moment, in the same heart?

The Mars thread was finally working, and he had devised a system of footnotes to indicate that not only were there layers to the epic, but there were layers upon layers. He just needed to find a synonym for “help”—or did he?

War, war, what’s it for

Help the rich and draft the poor.

Whether he needed it or not, the perfect word was out there, and he was going to find it. It was in the air. Could be it was already in his head — he could feel it hovering, somewhere between his ear and his eye. He knew it was there, but he couldn’t quite catch it, and now for some reason Le Roy was trying to get Kelly’s attention by making faces and jumping up and down. Kelly was standing in a corner with his headphones on and his back to Le Roy, working on what he was going to say at the meeting. Kelly didn’t want to be distracted, and Danny didn’t want to be distracted either. He wanted to hold on to the sense that things were falling into place. He arranged the pens and pencils on his desk and squared the edges of his manuscript. Then he set the blue mechanical pencil he had been using down in the very center of the top page. Vertical or horizontal? He left it where it was. What was it? What was going on? Why was Le Roy opening and closing his mouth like a fish? Was it because the website was about to be sold and he didn’t do well with change? Why did he look like he was going to fly out of his chair and grab Joe Kelly by the neck?

“Chill, man,” said Kelly, heading to the printer. “The buyers will be here in ten. We need to be collecting our thoughts and I need to copy these spreadsheets, so don’t bug me now. I’ll talk to you later, K?”

But Le Roy wasn’t making any noise. His neck bulged above his collar and he seemed to be choking. Danny thought he was having a heart attack or some sort of seizure. Then he thought that a train must be coming through, but if the clock was right, it wasn’t due for another five and a half minutes — and anyway, Le Roy wasn’t bothered by the train.

Then he heard breaking glass and boots on the porch, and when he turned, kind of in slow motion, he saw men swarming into the room and weapons being drawn and sited. Black bulletproof vests, legs squared and braced, helmeted heads held low like battering rams, barrels burnished and menacing.

“Everybody on the floor! Everybody on the fucking floor!”

Mars had been the perfect choice. When the captain had told him that Mars was complex and peace loving, whereas Ares was pure aggression, Danny knew it was just the sort of gossamer filament that would float over his epic, that would weave through it, inform it, give it shadow and lightness and depth. A crimson thread running right through the black-and-white words and tying them together.

Kelly had taken off his headphones and Le Roy had shut his mouth and dropped to the floor, but Danny looked instinctively for the captain before he remembered that the captain had gone back to Iraq. It was just the three of them now, unless he counted E’Laine, who had come to visit them a few times — but she wasn’t there now so he guessed he shouldn’t count her. He wished Le Roy would pay more attention to her, but E’Laine thought she was making progress in that regard, and who was he to disillusion her? He didn’t know if things would work out with Dolly — she deserved better, but he was beginning to think they had a fighting chance.

“You, you! Face down! I’m giving you ten seconds! Nine seconds! Eight!”

The meeting with the buyer was coming up. He’d changed his mind and now he thought they should sell. They’d have money. They could do anything they wanted — or almost anything. Anything but go back in time to what Danny thought of as before. The three of them — five if you counted E’Laine and Dolly — could get a fresh start somewhere else or stay where they were and start a new venture, or Danny could finish college, which was an old dream of his, one he had lost hold of but might be able to reel back in once the sale of the website went through. The captain had bought the building and put it in their names, so they could stay there by the railroad tracks as long as they wanted or they could sell the building and move on — alone or separately. Everything was up to them. “The sky’s the limit,” Sinclair had said.

12.6 Lyle

Lyle’s hands gripped the steering wheel as he sped through town. The clock on the dashboard ticked like a quiet bomb. His nerves tingled, and something flared in his guts as if he were the one with the threadbare tires and an internal combustion engine fueled by petrochemicals and a series of tiny explosions. He powered around the corner and past the muffler shop, gathering speed down the hill and past the bus station before skidding into the parking enclosure and wheeling around a row of cars so the truck was facing out again before ramming the gearshift into park. But he didn’t kill the engine. Instead, he let the car idle, and while the truck chugged unevenly and the minute hand on the dashboard notched forward, Lyle felt the thing inside him continue to get bigger, as if a fuse had been lighted, as if a combustible pocket of gas had started to expand.

He was sure Maggie was coming. He blasted out another mental warning, but he guessed that all those days of wishing Maggie home had set things in motion, and it was too late to stop the dominoes from falling. He sensed the police presence. They could be hiding inside the cramped waiting room with its wooden benches and ticket window or in the alley behind the boxy brick station house. The sun was ricocheting off the cars lined up along the chain-link fence, and even the unwaxed surfaces of Lyle’s truck emitted a dull, unnatural sheen.

By the clock on the dashboard, it was two minutes before noon when Lyle saw Maggie coasting around the corner onto Hill Street and pausing at the top of the hill. His heart almost broke. No, Maggie, no! He had expected her to come by bus, and he had planned to drive by and scoop her out of the disembarking crowd of passengers even though that would only initiate a high-speed chase if the station was as filled with police officers as he thought it was. He imagined them arrayed in their surplus military gear, crouched behind the plate-glass window or creeping along the sides of the building, waiting for the bus to arrive. But she wasn’t on a bus, and that gave him an advantage.

He willed her to turn around, but she pushed off with her feet, and then she just kept coming, the angle of the hill and gravity causing the wheels of the bike to spin faster and faster until he thought for sure that she would crash. He couldn’t give anything away just in case the police were surveilling the parking lot from the south-facing windows of the station. He couldn’t show he had seen her by any movement of his body, so he just observed the scene woodenly, as if he were watching a news clip of a disaster that had already occurred.

And then the pocket of gas caught fire, and Lyle was filled with a great and liberating inspiration. As he revved the engine of the truck and aimed it at the sidewalk outside the bus station, he thought of the man pushing the Plunge-O-Sphere to the edge of Niagara Falls and getting in. He pictured the improbable orb spinning along in the current and then barreling over the edge as he aimed for the empty bench on the sidewalk, for the weedy shade tree, for the plate-glass window behind which he was sure the men in their bulletproof vests were waiting for Maggie and the bus.

But now a woman was easing her bulk onto the bench, looking expectantly down the road in the direction the bus would come from and shifting from side to side to settle her skirt around her knees. Lyle couldn’t sound the horn or he would alert the police too early, before Maggie had a chance to see him. Before she had a chance to see that something was wrong. And before she could turn into the side street just uphill from the station house and pedal out of sight. Woman-in-a-skirt or no woman-in-a-skirt, there was no stopping what he had started. It was as if Lyle was running on gasoline or the truck was running on rage when he hunched into the wheel and shouted out the open window, “Get the hell out of my way!” At the last second, the woman saw him coming and jumped clear, and at 11:59 by the clock on the dash, Lyle rammed the truck right through the rickety bench, right through the skinny tree and into the metal awning supports, where it came to a stop only inches from the glass.

Out of the corner of his eye, Lyle saw Maggie’s bicycle veer into the side street. The bicycle skidded and she almost fell, but then it was safely around the corner and Maggie was gone and the police were streaming out of the bus station, swarming like hornets, aiming their guns and shouting at Lyle to put his hands in the air. Lyle had to laugh to see the look on Ben’s face when he said, “What the fuck, Lyle.” He had to laugh when the sheriff said, “Lyle Rayburn, you’re under arrest.” He had to laugh to see the disappointment on the SWAT team’s faces as they realized they weren’t going to get a chance to fire their military-style weapons after all. And he had to laugh because it had never occurred to him that anger could feel so good.

12.7 Maggie

Maggie was glad to see the bicycle leaning against the shed. She had left her empty duffel in the house, but she kept her backpack with her as she mounted the bike and started pedaling. The crunch of the gravel beneath the tires brought to mind the free, almost floating feeling of heading off to Phoenix all those months ago. This was entirely different. With every revolution, the front tire rubbed against the fender, which was rusted and bent, and the brakes squealed whenever she slowed down. Even the wind generated by the bicycle was dusty and seemed to suck at her rather than blow. But the tires were new, and they bounced obligingly over any potholes or stones they encountered.

When she turned onto Main Street, she kept her head down in case there was traffic, but even though it was nearly lunchtime, everything was quiet. It was as if the town had shrunk in her absence, or she had somehow grown. She passed the town’s lone office building, although now, from the looks of things, they were getting another, and the Main Street Diner had a freshly painted sign indicating it was now called the Main Street Café. She peered at the window as she went by, but the glass storefront only reflected her image back at her, and if any of the customers were watching her from the leatherette booths, she couldn’t see them. She thought of eating dinner there with Lyle and Will and wondered if she was having a memory of the past or a happy premonition of the future.

An oil truck whizzed past, frightening her because she hadn’t seen it coming. It was as if the film of her life had been spliced, leaving out the vehicle’s approach and also its departure, for just as suddenly, it was gone. Even the air seemed jumpy, as if it were attached to her nerves and images were painted on it in thin colors rather than seen through it, or as if the town she had lived in for her entire life was only a mirage or an elaborately constructed set that could be changed at the whim of an unseen director, someone she envisioned smoking and laughing at her from a canvas chair with his name stenciled on the back or flirting with a winsome assistant rather than caring about what was taking place on stage.

She recognized the feeling as a combination of apprehension and loneliness, and then she realized that the apprehension was turning into full-blown fear. Where was Lyle? She passed the turnoff to the Church of the New Incarnation and thought of going there to seek refuge in its sparkling vastness. She missed having the shell of a church around her, and if she went there, she could ask the pastor for advice. She could ask God to forgive her for reneging on her promise. But all she could think about now was finding Lyle.

The bell on the Catholic church was chiming the hour when she turned the corner by the muffler shop. A group of men were sitting outside smoking cigarettes and drinking Dr Pepper. She wondered briefly what their lives were like, whether the good in them outweighed the bad. Now she could see the bus station far ahead. It was little more than a storefront with a park bench outside for waiting. An old metal awning and a thin tree provided a stripe of shade, and just beyond was a chain-link enclosure for long-term parking. She thought she recognized Lyle’s truck at the end of a short row of parked cars, but the glare of the noonday sun made it difficult to tell. She paused for a moment at the top of the hill before pedaling forward again.

The truck’s window was open, and as she got closer, she could see that the driver of the truck was wearing aviator glasses and a blue shirt and a baseball cap that she imagined — no, she knew! — was made of crushed red felt with the letters OU stenciled on the front. Lyle! He was looking in her direction. He was looking and she knew in her heart he had recognized her. But even when she took one hand off the handlebars and held it up in joyful greeting, causing the bicycle to teeter dangerously beneath her, Lyle didn’t wave back. Worse than that, he turned away. Of course he was angry with her. Anyone would be.

Anyone, she thought, except for Lyle. Lyle didn’t get angry.

Maggie pressed her sneakered foot on the brake just as the truck lurched through a gap in the chain-link fence, wheels spinning. It careened sideways into the road and gained momentum before slamming up on the curb, across the sidewalk and into the bench and the spindly metal stanchions. He had seen her! He was warning her away! A side street was coming up. As Maggie skidded into it, the bicycle’s tires shimmied and slipped in the gravel. She almost lost her balance, but then the tires bit, and by some saving miracle, she didn’t fall.

12.8 Danny Joiner

— The what? I can’t hear you, soldier. You’d better speak up.

— The dust. Just there…in the distance…eleven o’clock…

— What dust?

— About three or four klicks up the road.

Danny could see Kelly crouching now, lowering himself on strong arms. And Le Roy, who only that morning had laughed for the first time since anyone could remember, was flattened in a patch of striped light from the barred window, muttering, “Fuck this shit,” over and over to himself. He looked from the shiny barrels of the guns to the FBI logos to the laced and polished boots and tried to decide if he was experiencing a flashback or a dream or just a particularly vivid scene for the epic. It seemed very real, but all of the scenes had seemed real before he turned them into words and wrote them down.

By the waters of Babylon…

— Get going. You should have left when it was dark.

— Just let Pig Eye stay. He was supposed to go home last week.

— We were all supposed to go home.

— But Pig Eye.

He got slowly out of his chair, adjusting the blue mechanical pencil so it was horizontal now rather than vertical, the plastic barrel of the body arranged so that it lay just underneath the last words he had written — words that might make a fitting last line, which would make his epic shorter than he had imagined it, but lots of things were either longer or shorter than he had thought they would be — the war, for instance, and innocence and life. He felt sharp and clearheaded, if somewhat unhinged, and then not unhinged, but brittle and coldly righteous. Strong. A bell was ringing. It was the bell at the railroad crossing. He felt a bullet of comprehension click into its chamber. That’s all it was — the train! But a train didn’t explain the guns and the boots and the voices that were finished shouting at Le Roy and had started shouting at him. One of the agents took a step forward, and through the thick plastic visor, Danny saw Harraday’s eyes staring at him, the hollow eyes of a natural killer.

“What do you think you’re doing?”

“I’m writing a rap epic.”

By the waters of Babylon,

A soldier makes a lucky shot…

— Tell them who you are.

— I am an American soldier.

— Tell it to them, and say it like you mean it!

He turned to face the door. The perfect word was out there. It was somewhere between his ear and his eye. He could feel the guns aiming at it, and then it shifted ever so slightly until it was dead center, right in the middle of his forehead. Help, he thought.

Le Roy had his eyes closed. Kelly was moving his mouth, but no sound was coming out. Or, if sound was coming out, he couldn’t hear it. Maybe he was deaf. He didn’t think he was deaf, but he couldn’t absolutely rule it out. Where was the captain? The captain should be there to tell them what to do. Or his recruiting officer or the doctor or the sergeant who had always smoked him in basic training but who had taught him everything he needed to know. He straightened his shoulders.

By the waters of Babylon,

He stood with his head up and his feet squared.

We sat down and wept.

— Tell them who you are!

“I am an American soldier! I am disciplined, physically and mentally tough!”

“On the ground, now!”

The captain had gone back to Iraq — he remembered that now. But Dolly was coming. Last time they had talked, she had said she would. “Not right away,” she had told him. “Ask me in a couple weeks.” He would call her and ask her to marry him again, just to make sure. He’d plan something special for a celebration. No sparklers. No alcohol. No tablecloth with stars and stripes. “I will never accept defeat!” he shouted, this time a little louder, just in case. Then he looked into the middle distance and thought of Pig Eye and also of Joe Kelly the day the two soldiers had stood together like brothers on the Toyota — and then he rammed his right fist into the air.

It was as if he had punched through a sound barrier, for as he did it, Kelly shouted, “Hit the deck, Danny! Hit the deck!” and the bell stopped ringing and the train blasted through right on schedule or even a little early for once, rattling the glass in the barred windows. But then Kelly was drowned out by a deafening crash, as if the train had jumped its tracks. Danny saw stars, and among the stars, a planet — Mars! At first it was the barest pinprick of light, and then it became big, blood-red, and molten before it exploded the way Pig Eye had exploded, into a thousand new pinpricks as everything disintegrated and settled into a kind of shrouded, starstruck peace.

12.9 Maggie

The side street intersected with an alley that ran behind the bus station, and as she tore past it, Maggie could see three squad cars and the sheriff’s big pickup parked there, gleaming in the sun. She gripped the handlebars as tightly as she could. Sweat pooled in her armpits and dripped from her brow. Were the police after her? Had they found the stolen documents? Was she a fugitive from the law?

She sent a prayer into the ether and hoped Lyle would hear it. And then she thought about the army and the war and how she had taken her eye off the ball, but was the ball the depleted uranium munitions, or was it Tommy and George, or was it her poor, neglected family? Please, God, she thought, take care of Will!

She was pedaling as hard as she could, keeping her head down and taking back roads to a track she knew of that followed Ash Creek from the park with the baseball field where the summer league games were played all the way to the Church of the New Incarnation, where the narrow trickle of the creek widened out into a glassy man-made reflecting pool before meandering through the fields and eventually into a concrete culvert that funneled it beneath the highway. When the undulating form of the church came into view, Maggie was already tiring. How would she make it the hundred miles to Oklahoma City? How would she make it to wherever she was going with only a rusty bicycle and scarcely a dollar to her name? Almost of its own accord, the bicycle turned up the long driveway toward the twin domes of the church, the domes that made the church look like a female torso toppled over on its back.

As Maggie entered the vestibule, she could hear music emanating from the nave: the big pipe organ accompanied by what sounded like the full choir. It was Saturday. It must be a special holy day, but she couldn’t think of which one it might be. Just as she was tiptoeing forward to peek through the double doors, the pastor’s wife burst through them and almost knocked into her. “Maggie!” she cried. “Whatever are you doing here?”

Maggie was taken aback by the perfectly waved hair and the made-up face and the tightly wrapped summer dress and the air of voluptuous good will. When Tiffany put out her arms, Maggie allowed herself to fall into the softness and burst into tears. “I’m tired,” she said. “I’m just a little tired is all.”

“Of course you are,” said Tiffany. “Let me get you a glass of water and a bite to eat.”

It turned out that the producers had wanted to film some background segments for the television show, so for the previous week, a camera crew had been shadowing the pastor and his wife. Today was the day to shoot the choir and the interior of the church. “The show’s going national,” said Tiffany. “They even want to do a segment on me.”

She led Maggie to where a tray of fruit and sandwiches had been set out for the camera crew. She poured two glasses of water and took Maggie to an inner room where they wouldn’t be disturbed. “I heard you talking to Houston the day you and your husband came to him for advice,” she said. “I heard you talking about the prisoners, and I haven’t been able to forget what you said. As you know, I lead a group called Mothers of Mercy, and you inspired me to take on something more significant than providing school supplies for the prison and sewing quilts for wounded soldiers.”

The backpack was still cutting into Maggie’s shoulders, and now she took it off, reminded of the day she had met the representative from PATH. A lot had happened since then, but what had she accomplished?

As if she were reading her mind, Tiffany said, “Long story short, the MoMs group has recently received some money, but we don’t have a mission — not a real one, anyway. If I’m going to be on television, it would be nice to have something important to talk about.”

Maggie recognized the tone, the set of the jaw, the refusal to be dissuaded. Don’t do it, she wanted to say. She wanted to warn Tiffany about all she stood to lose, but the sensation that she was looking at a younger, better version of herself destroyed her ability to speak.

“I’m thinking…well, I’m actually thinking two things,” said Tiffany. “The first is that there is some money — quite a lot of it, actually — in the MoMs account. And the second thing is that you might have a few ideas about how that money can best be spent.”

“You have to focus in,” said Maggie. “It’s easy to get distracted if you take on too much at once.”

Maggie wanted to ask how a person chose just one thing in a world where so much needed doing. She wanted to warn Tiffany that progress on any one of the items was impossibly slow. She wanted to say that there were sacrifices involved. Instead, she said, “Tomás is getting a new trial, so it would be wonderful if you could send something for his legal fees. And I’ve completely neglected George…” She held out the backpack with the same mixture of reluctance and relief with which the PATH woman had passed her the quilted bag with the name GEORGE appliquéd on the side, and the woman in front of her took it with the same eager confidence Maggie had once had. It was as if Maggie were both staying and leaving, both giving the prisoners up and holding them close. When the pastor’s wife transferred the files from the backpack to a locked drawer of her desk, Maggie noticed that there were no other papers in the drawer. The surface of the desk was clean too, arrayed only with a set of matching implements, no doubt purchased from the office supply depot in town but never used.

Tiffany went to the donation closet and filled a small duffel with clothing. “What size are your feet?” she asked. She repacked the backpack with food and money and gave Maggie the telephone number of someone she knew in San Francisco. “I’ll be sure to give the same telephone number to Lyle,” she added. “And don’t you worry, I’ll check on him as soon as I’m finished here.”

“And Will,” said Maggie. “Can you find out where Will’s unit is stationed and give him the number too?”

“Of course I can. Don’t you worry about a thing. And don’t forget to call me now and then to let me know how you are.”

Tiffany gave Maggie her cheerleader smile and accompanied her to where the bicycle was tipped over beside the reflecting pool. “This is just between us,” she said. “Not that the pastor wouldn’t fully support everything we’re doing, but he has a lot on his mind right now. What he doesn’t know won’t hurt him.”

“I’m not sure that’s true,” said Maggie with some of her old fire. “But of course, my lips are sealed.”

“If he has a problem with it, I’ll just tell him it’s my one crazy thing.” When Tiffany laughed, Maggie felt a burst of joy, and better than joy, she felt hope — for herself, for the prisoners, and for the world. Where would she go if she could go anywhere? She’d stay right there in Red Bud, of course, but life was a narrowing down as much as an opening out, and for now Red Bud was the one place on earth she couldn’t be.

She wheeled the bicycle to the top of a low rise and looked around her at the green fields of wheat waving gracefully in the breeze. Please take care of Will, she thought again, but this time it wasn’t so much a prayer to God as to the other people out there, people who might lend a hand to a stranger in time of need.

In the distance, a straight ribbon of highway stretched all the way to California. On either side of it, a flock of oil derricks bowed and preyed on the rich Carboniferous sludge deposited millions of years before, when Oklahoma was a steamy and suppurating swamp. Behind her, the double-domed Church of the New Incarnation had doubled again — it was sprawled on its back giving comfort to the sky and it was also flipped upside down, drowning in the reflecting pool. As she surveyed the familiar landscape, she wondered again if she had done any good at all, and if she had, had she done right? When she had started down this path all those months ago, she had assumed that things would be clearer than they were and that she would be able to look back on her choices and accomplishments with certainty and satisfaction. Partial knowledge, she thought. It was all anybody had. Overhead, a plane tipped its wings at her, filled with people who had other problems and other destinies awaiting them. As she watched it disappear into the distance, a hawk plummeted from the heavens and rocketed up again with a field mouse in its talons. She was sorry for the little creature, but there was nothing she could do for it. Even she knew that saving too many mice would doom the hawk. The world was paradoxical, and if there was a solution to the paradox, it wasn’t for her to know.