The Nuclear Age

12 The Nuclear Age

WE HIT PAY DIRT on the twelfth day out. By the twentieth day we knew exactly what we had. I’d been confident all along, and the data were there to back me up, but that didn’t prevent celebration when Ollie ran the clicker over that pile of hot rock. On February 4, 1980, we bought the mountain. Rancher Roe reckoned we were setting up a commune, or maybe a new close-to-the-clouds religious establishment, but even so he couldn’t wait to unload. At the registry of deeds he kept saying how, if he had it to do over, he’d most surely lead the hippie life himself. I never saw a man so willing to please. When it was done, we rented an electric typewriter and group-composed the letter. I handled the technical stuff, Rafferty the prose, Sarah the legal ins and outs. Then I sat down at the IBM Electric and cranked out seven copies, one for each Sister. We mailed the letters and waited. That was the hard part: two months before the first tentative reply, another month before Gulf brought in its exploratory team, two more months before we got any sort of bidding war going, then forty days more before Texaco doubled BP and we finally signed the papers. A straight cash deal—it had to be that way. No options, no pie-cutting, no deferred payments. The check was for twenty-five million dollars. Of course, there wasn’t a banker in town who’d touch it, so we ended up in Ned’s van, the whole gang, heading for First National in Helena. Along the way we stopped. There, on the banks of a shallow creek, we conducted a ceremony. It was silly, but the ladies insisted, so we each tossed a chunk of precious ore into the water, and I uttered a few solemn words, and we left two clickers behind as a gift for the next generation.

In the van, halfway home, Sarah cuddled up against me and asked how I’d be using my cut. It wasn’t something I wanted to talk about. Buy a town somewhere, I said, or maybe a sinecure at Harvard.

“Geology?” Sarah asked. “No other dreams?”

“Well,” I said, but of course she was right. “I guess I’ll go to Bonn.”

“In reference to what, exactly? As if I didn’t know.”

“A girl,” I admitted. “A woman—I’m in love with her.”

We rode along for a while. Sarah said she’d never seen Bonn. Not even a postcard. Could she come along?

We made Helena at midnight. It was Saturday’s midnight, which meant another idle day, so we selected a motel advertising a heated pool and sauna. I suppose it was a combination of things—the van, the way Ned had let his hair go, Tina’s behind-the-times peasant costume—but, whatever, the night clerk insisted on cash up front. He was just a kid. “We’re good,” I said, and I showed him the check: “Texaco’s good.” The clerk shrugged and claimed it was one of those computer foul-ups—extra zeros—and we ended up depositing our last hundred or so. The kid was smug about it. When he asked how many rooms we’d be wanting, I held up a finger and said, “One,” and before he could smile I moved the finger to his nose. “Day after tomorrow,” I said. “Watch out.”

“No kidding?”

“Day after tomorrow. You’re out of work.”

The kid smiled and handed me a room key.

“Yes, sir,” he said. “And don’t forget, shower before you use the pool. New house rule.”

We spent Sunday in the water. It was our last full day together, the Committee, and there was lots of talk about where everyone was headed. After all the nonsense, it boiled down to the predictable. Tina and Ollie were returning to Key West, where they would soon be very well-heeled revolutionaries. Ned Rafferty talked about buying himself a piece of property somewhere, maybe horses, maybe cattle, he couldn’t decide. He glanced at Sarah, who kept quiet. At times sadness intervened, but we fought it off—much splashing and dunking. It was a heated outdoor pool, big and comfortable, and we made the most of it, floating side by side, holding hands, turning sentimental in the way smart people do, hipping it, finally coming straight out and saying how much we loved one another and how it wasn’t the money that made it good, it was something else, the time together, all the ups and downs, and how we felt older and sadder, and how we hadn’t done much to change the world but how the world had changed us, and how the whole thing was like camp. We hated ending it. Ollie said he’d heard tell of rich lodes up in British Columbia. Ned said he’d heard the same stories. We’ll do it again, we said, but bashfully, with the sophistication of senior citizens who know better. Tina cried. Everybody hugged and kissed. “Maybe we should pray?” Ollie said. Nobody wanted to pray, but we knew what he meant.

In the morning, after some delays, we opened up substantial bank accounts at First National.

“We’re even now,” I told Sarah.

She nodded soberly.

“Even,” I said. “No debts either way.”

Ned Rafferty drove us out to the airport.

“British Columbia,” somebody said, and we all said, “Can’t wait, same time next year,” but not one of us was feeling wealthy.

In the terminal there was more hugging.

Ollie went first. He shouldered his duffel—a waddling, funny-looking guy in his cowboy hat and fancy boots. After a moment, Tina pecked my cheek and tagged along after him.

They boarded a Frontier Airlines flight for Denver.

Ned and Sarah and I waved at the windows, then Rafferty said, “Where to? Portland? Samoa?”

I said I was headed the opposite way. So did Sarah. Rafferty gave us a lift back into town, but this time there was little emotion.

“My problem,” Rafferty said, “is I can’t cry.”

We shook hands and then it was down to Sarah and me.

“There’s risk in this,” I told her.

“Accepted.”

“Thing is, I do love her.”

“You did,” Sarah said. “Perhaps.”

“So.”

“So let’s find out,” she said. “The uranium, that was a gamble, too”

Wrong, but I nodded. The uranium had to be there. That was science, this was something else.

“Ready?”

We were on the corner of Elm and Moore. Across the street was a parked tractor, and beyond that was the capitol dome, and far off were those mountains we’d plundered.

“Ready?”

“Ready,” I said.

Sarah slipped her hand into my back pocket, took out my wallet, and put it in her purse for safekeeping.

“Let’s at least keep the risks to a minimum,” she said. “How do we get to Bonn?”

First, though, I bought myself a motel. The night clerk took it pretty well. So well, in fact, he almost ruined the pleasure; it was a relief when he got a bit testy near the end.

A night later we were over the Atlantic.

“So let’s have the data,” Sarah said.

“Bobbi Haymore. Married a guy named Scholheimer. Bobbi Scholheimer.”

“Bobbi?”

“She can’t help it.”

“I suppose not.” Sarah levered back her seat.

“She can’t.”

“I know that. Unfortunate, though. I’m sure she’s a doll.”

“You want to hear it?”

“Everything.”

We were alone in first class. Two of the flight attendants were already sleeping, and the third had gone back to help in coach. The jet seemed to fly itself.

“Well,” I said, “it was like getting shot by a stun gun. Just happened. The smile, maybe, I don’t know. Something clicked—the passion thing. There it was. When I saw her the first time, it was like I’d known her all my life, or before I was born. One look, you know? I’m sorry.” Sarah listened with her eyes closed. I could see movement beneath the lids, darting motions; I knew it was hurting but I had to get it said. I described the night flight and the bad dreams and the martinis and poems and hand-holding. “Couldn’t forget her,” I said. “All in my head, I guess. I’d keep seeing her face, hearing that voice, and sometimes—I am sorry—but sometimes I’d make up these stories about how we’d run away together. Pictures. Little glimpses.”

Sarah laughed. “And me?”

“You were there, too.”

“Steady Sarah. Go on, you’re breaking my heart.”

The jet made a slight adjustment to starboard.

I told her about the airport stakeouts—just a game at first, but then a desperate game, something to live for and hope for—an obsession, I admitted—and then I talked about the chain of events, how the trail led to Manhattan, then the phone calls and the navigator and finally Scholheimer.

“Hot pursuit,” Sarah murmured.

“I guess so.”

“And then?”

I shrugged. “And then nothing. Called her up. Told her—you know—told her I loved her. Big confession. Big hopes. All those stories and pretty pictures… Anyway, she was nice about it. A couple of times I thought, God, it’ll work, I could hear this—I don’t know—this willingness in her voice. So after a while I asked if we could have dinner or something, or run off to Hudson Bay, and then she laughed, but it was a nice laugh, like wistful, and she told me, No, she couldn’t, because she was going to Bonn, and there was this married guy she was going with. ‘The guy’s married to me,’ she said. Just like that. But sort of sad, too. ‘The guy’s married to me.’ That’s all I remember. Except I wanted to ask about that grass she gave me. Grass—what’s the grass mean? This time I’m asking.”

“She sounds swell,” Sarah said.

“Yes, but I love her.”

Sarah was quiet. She covered herself with a blanket and watched the flashing green light at the edge of a wing.

“Grass,” she finally said, and sighed. “If I’d only known it was so easy. Grass galore. Poems, too. Would’ve pinned them to your ears. ‘What is love? ’tis not hereafter; Present mirth hath present laughter.’ That turn you on, William?”

“Let’s just wait. See what transpires.”

“I’ll eat her alive,” said Sarah.

In Paris, the choice was either a train that afternoon or a plane the next morning, so we took the train. Sarah said it was best to keep up the momentum. She didn’t want things fizzling out in some quaint hotel room. For the first hour or so we sat up watching the suburbs and grapes go by, then Sarah began making up the berth.

“It isn’t just that I love you,” she said. “I mean, we’ve committed crime together. Doesn’t that count for anything? Aren’t we thick as thieves, you and I?” She pulled the shades and undressed and got into bed. There was a red bow in her hair, a cigarette in her mouth. She looked lean and unladylike and smart. “William,” she said slowly, “the girl won’t even recognize you. Things have changed. You’ve changed. The uranium, for God’s sake. What’s she to make of it? One look, she’ll see you’ve lost that crazy edge of yours. Mr. Normal. Ban the bomb to boom the bomb. Denim to sharkskin, plowshares to swords. How does dear Bobbi-cakes cope with all that?”

“I’ll explain.”

Sarah sniffed and kissed her kneecaps. “Rancher Roe?” she said. “You’ll explain how we conned that poor old fairy? Take a look at yourself. Not a moral fiber to be found.”

“I’m sweet, though.”

“Nixon was sweet. Oppenheimer was sweeter. Einstein—sweetest old geezer who ever lived.”

“Yes, but Einstein warned us.”

“That’s how sweet he was! Invents the end of the world, then sounds the alarm. Isn’t that how relativity works? Szilard was a sweetie, Fermi was a pussycat. Just like you and me, William. We’re all such charmers.”

“If you’re feeling guilty—”

“Guilt?” she said. “Forget it, man. Guilt went out with culottes. It’s a new world.”

Sarah crushed out her cigarette and winced and stroked a thick red blister at her lip. It was a blemish that had been recurring for years now, but here, in the flickering light, it seemed to have its own organic mandate. I wanted to reach out and brush it away.

“Face it,” she said, “we’re established. Donated our scruples to the highest bidder. Buckled, snapped, sold out. Sweet Bobbi will see the change.”

“Enough,” I said.

“Am I a nag?”

“A little.” I watched her massage the blister. It was the color of her nipples, almost exactly, and it did the same thing for me. I locked the door and took off my clothes and squeezed in beside her.

“You love her, William? Really?”

“Pretty much.”

“Maybe we should take separate compartments.”

“If you say so.”

“But maybe not,” she said. “In a case like this, proximity’s important.”

“Fine,” I said.

We made Bonn late the next morning. Sarah wanted to get right down to business—no last-minute waffling, she said—but I needed a day for reconnaissance and planning. No mistakes. Ten years and more I’d been dreaming about this, how one day I’d pack my bags and take off after her, chase her to the ends of the earth, do it right this time, show her what a brave and sane and exciting man I am, make her beg for me, buy her furs and jewels, the things of the world-as-it-is, real things, show her how life is meant to be lived, show her what she’d missed. I was done with half-assed fantasies. I was a pragmatist. Let the world stew in its own bloody juices, it didn’t mean a damn next to Bobbi.

“You want it too bad,” Sarah said. “You can’t win.”

I told her to wait and see.

We found a room near the government district, unpacked, then went out for lunch and a walk. It was the burning end of August. There were giant shade trees along the Rhine, and bridges and boulevards; there was a sidewalk café where we ate sausages on brown bread and drank beer. We were beginning to feel rich. We rode the riverboats, bought cameras, bought clothes, dined elegantly at a high rooftop restaurant. Sarah looked great. She looked tan and aristocratic, silver earrings and a Cyd Charisse dress that was made to dance in, so we danced slow to jazzy music, then we rented a hansom that took us clomping through the wee-hour streets.

“A question,” I said. “Put yourself in Bobbi’s shoes. A night like this—will it win her over?”

Sarah snuggled close. She had a shawl around her shoulders. Her shoes were off.

“Depends on the vibes,” she said.

“How are they?”

“Ho-hum, sort of. This is Europe, man, you have to wear your wealth more freely. Take it more for granted.”

“What about the basics?”

“Passion,” she said. She showed me a brown leg. “Otherwise it gets soupy and she starts thinking of you as something sweet. Like Fermi and Einstein. Take some chances. Get violent.”

“Like so?”

“Harder. We’re talking violence.”

The hansom circled through a park. I practiced violence for a time, then got sleepy, and Sarah ended up paying the driver and seeing me to the room.

In bed, she cried.

“This lip of mine,” she said. “I’m not hideous, am I? I mean, I’m still kissable?”

“Absolutely.”

We kissed cautiously. Afterward, with the lights out, Sarah slipped a pillowcase over her head and came in close for warmth.

“Idiot,” she said, “I love you.”

In the morning I began making calls. There wasn’t much to go on—a few vague possibilities. All I remembered, really, was that her husband had taken a position as a visiting lecturer in prosody at Bonn University; Bobbi had planned to teach English to the children of embassy officials.

But all that was nearly a decade in the past.

“A cold trail,” Sarah told me.

She lay in bed as I made the calls; after each strikeout she kissed me and said it wasn’t meant to be. I tried the university, the American Embassy, and the central APO mailroom in Bad Godesberg. No one knew anything. In part, it was a problem in detection, teasing out clues, but there were also the complications of language and uncertainty and Sarah.

“It’s an omen,” she said. She was at the foot of the bed, legs wrapped around a phone book. “Tell you what. Let’s get married.”

“Not that simple.”

“It is simple. Get hitched in Istanbul. Honeymoon in Venice and then settle down in some nifty castle on the river Rhone.”

“Nice thought,” I said, and frowned at her. “Maybe I should try American Express.”

Sarah put her head in my lap while I dialed.

“Man and wife,” she said lightly, not quite teasing. “We’ll do it right. Have portraits done. Those rich, dark oil jobbies that age so nicely. Hang them in your hunting den. You’ll call me Lady, I’ll call you Sir William. Dine each evening at eight sharp. Very proper, you know. I’ll run charity balls and you can chase foxes with your friends. Late at night we’ll talk pornography. We can do it.”

American Express had never heard of Bobbi Scholheimer.

“William, for God’s sake, don’t you love me?”

We had breakfast in bed, then I tried several hotels and pensions, then the German-American Club, then each of the banks. I was getting desperate. Somehow, for all the wasted years, I’d always thought that when the time came it would be easy. Ring her up and plead my case and start making children. I’d run through the image a million times.

“Hey, look here,” Sarah said. She went up into a handstand at the foot of the bed. “Command performance. How does Bobbi match up?”

“Stop it.”

“I’ll bet she can barely stand on her feet.”

“Sarah—”

“Balance, man.”

She curled her toes toward the ceiling, the muscles at her hips correcting for the wobble in the bedsprings.

“Is she cuter? Perkier? No shit, I can be perky, too.” Sarah came down to the kneeling position. “Coy and shy and mysterious. Demure as all get-out. Sublime. You want sublime?” She crossed her arms on her chest, bowed her head, and smiled. “Gee golly, sir, I don’t commit Congress on the first date. Am I blushing?”

I looked away.

“Listen,” I said gently, “we can’t accomplish anything this way.”

“Accomplish me, William.”

“Let’s just—”

“I’m sublime! I am, I’m brilliant. You can wear my Phi Beta Kappa key around your neck, we’ll go steady. My doctor says I’ve got this gorgeous womb—ovaries like hand grenades—I’m built for motherhood—I can cook and rob banks and manage money. I can sew. I know how to make pickles. Just name it.”

“Get dressed.”

Sarah sighed. “I hope she’s dead.”

“Then there’ll be ghosts.”

“Who cares? Hope she got hit by a tank—nothing left but tread marks and maggots. We’ll build a memorial to her somewhere in southern Illinois.”

We spent two days making the rounds of every school in the city. Sarah complained that it was too much like FBI work, like tracking down Most Wanteds, but still she insisted on tagging along. It was rough on both of us. We interrogated teachers and headmasters, paged through old yearbooks, wasted hours at the embassy, placed ads in the three daily newspapers. Nothing. At night, while Sarah slept, I’d sit up and study Martian Travel. It was all I really had of her. And a few threadbare images: the way she moved, the blondness and blue eyes, the voice that never seemed to alight on nouns or verbs. I remembered the phone call—her light laugh when I declared myself. Flattered, she’d said. She understood. Dreams were wonderful, but we had to be practical, we had to be adults, and then she’d gotten around to the business about being married.

Well fine, I thought. If it was practicality she wanted, acceptance of the world-as-it-was, I was ready now to take her on a uranium ride to the ends of the earth. I’d be dead-hard practical; I’d toe the line; I’d take her as my wife and build a house and lay in supplies to last a lifetime—whatever she wanted, whatever practicality could buy—and then, when the lights went out, when the established planet went hot like a cinder, then we’d uncork that last bottle of Beaujolais and turn to the civil defense channels and congratulate each other on how splendidly adult we were. It didn’t bother me a bit. All I wanted was to end the world with Bobbi close by.

And there was Sarah, too.

As we went into the second week of the search, she began moping. She slept in a closet. She drove the bellhops crazy with elaborate late-night orders and penny-pinching tips. At lunch one day she gave me a memento of our times together, a lavender envelope containing the scented shavings of pubic hair. “It isn’t grass,” she told me, “but it’ll grow on you.”

She was relieved, then depressed, with each new dead end.

“A proposition,” she said one evening. “What we’ll do is, we’ll set up a basic-training business for all the up-and-coming provocateurs. Like at Sagua la Grande, only franchise it, spread the risks around, establish branches in all the major capitals. Terror’s the fashionable thing. A wide-open field—Beirut, Jerusalem—the market’s there. Say the word.”

“I’ll sleep on it,” I told her.

She smiled. “You do that. Dream the good dreams. The closet’s all yours.”

Next morning we turned up our first hard lead. The Dean of Faculty at Bonn University remembered Scholheimer and Bobbi. “Lovebirds,” the man said, and shook his head. “They go kaputt.” He was a portly old gentleman with red cheeks and an ivory cane. Leaning forward, wheezing, he pulled out a soiled old photograph and carefully presented it to me. It was Bobbi in pigtails. “Liebchen,” he said. “Make many men cry. Auf Wiedersehen, Scholheimer.”

“In other words,” said Sarah, “a bad-ass bimbo.”

The old man nodded.

“Bobbi, she squeeze the juice out of rock, freilich. Break the husband heart.”

“Right,” Sarah said. “Yours, too, I’ll bet.”

“Bitte?”

“Keep talking.”

The language barrier was formidable but Sarah managed it. Apparently the marriage had not been a long one—Bobbi had walked out after two months; Scholheimer had returned to the States with a chastened perspective and a pocketful of poems. “Bimbo,” the old man said sadly. He fingered the hem on Sarah’s skirt and went on to explain that Bobbi had taken a job teaching sixth-graders at the American Air Force base in Wiesbaden, 130 kilometers southwest of Bonn.

The man’s eyes dampened. He patted Sarah’s knee.

“All many years ago,” he said. “Herzen und Schmerzen. You find my Bobbi, you say I still love. Alles vergessen.”

Sarah put the snapshot in her purse.

“Count on it,” she said grimly, “I’ll deliver the message.”

That afternoon we rented a car and drove for almost an hour along the Rhine, through Königswinter and Remagen, then a straight shot to Wiesbaden.

An adjutant recognized Bobbi’s photograph.

“Angel,” he said. “Sweetest thing on earth. She your sister?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Some sister.”

“I know that. The whole family knows.”

“An angel,” he said flatly. “Wings. All of it. How’d she hook up with that bastard hubby of hers? Schlum, Schultz?”

“Scholheimer.”

The adjutant bit down on a pipe. He was a trim, polite man of forty-five or so, whiskey lines along the nose and cheekbones, but still healthy-looking, the ruddy tightness of a long-distance runner. “Scholheimer,” he muttered. “Shit on a shingle. Bobbi deserved better.”

“Angels do,” said Sarah. She crossed her legs and looked at him with understanding. “You knew her pretty well?”

“Ma’am?”

“I mean, you knew her. That way. I can tell.”

The man wanted to smile. He filled his pipe from a leather pouch, tamped it down, and struck a match against his desk. There was a hesitation before he shrugged. “Yes, ma’am, I guess you could say that. She was my daughter’s teacher—damn fine teacher, too. Kids loved her. So the marriage goes bad, hubby’s out of the picture. I took up some slack.” He turned toward me. “But, sir, I’ll tell you something, it was real romance. Your sister, she was no troop groupie. I hope that’s understood.”

I nodded.

“Romance,” he said, “the genuine article. She used to slip poems under my pillow.”

“God,” said Sarah, “she must’ve been a darling.”

“Roger that. Even my daughter said so.”

The adjutant pulled a piece of ruled paper from his desk drawer. He smoothed the edges and passed it across to me.

“Martian Travel,” he said. “Go ahead, read it.”

“I already have.”

“Your sister’s got talent. One day I woke up, she was gone, and maybe a week later I found that poem in my Class A’s. Made me feel like a million bucks. She had this way with words.”

“Sure,” Sarah said. “Like a Xerox machine.”

“Ma’am?”

“Nothing. She writes like Shakespeare.”

“Affirmative,” said the adjutant. “Maybe better.”

It was easy after that. At last report, he said, Bobbi had returned to grad school, this time the University of Minnesota. She was a Golden Gopher. Early the next morning we boarded a Lufthansa flight for New York.

“The thing that gets me,” Sarah said at forty thousand feet, “is the way you’ve written off our whole relationship. You don’t talk about it, you don’t think about it. All Bobbi. No Sarah. What the hell happened?”

Her eyes showed fatigue. She was quiet for a moment, then searched for my hand.

“William, I’m quitting.”

“No.”

“I am. I’ve had it. The end. Give it up, otherwise I’m bailing out.”

“One more week?”

“Impossible.”

“Sarah, I need time.”

Eyes closed, she glided over the clouds. “Sorry,” she said, “I’m done.”

“All right, then.”

“Sure. All right.”

But over New York she said she loved me; at Kennedy International she said she’d give it a while longer.

We took a nonstop to Minneapolis, spent the night in separate beds, then walked across town to the U of M. It was bright September. Freshman season, kickoff, the rush, and the campus was clean with Swedes and maroon and gold and Big Ten fever. We’d won the peace for them. Hair was out, health food was in. And it was our labor of a decade ago that made all this possible—straight-legged jeans, Jantzen shirts, ears wired for sound, the serenity of higher education. “Memories moribundus,” Sarah murmured. In the administration building, she hummed a tune that had been fashionable during occupations of such places, or in jail, or in torchlit parades for amity on earth. Her voice was husky. Boys in letter jackets stopped to ogle. She wore high heels that went snap-click in the waxed hallways. Her nylons gleamed. She had the posture of a model, a moneyed alumna, classy and chic, stunning; she could still stop traffic. She hummed and ignored the jocks while I bribed the assistant registrar. “Inflation,” the man said crisply, “is the evil of our era,” for his price was high; then he slipped me the records.

Bobbi had enrolled in 1978—a master’s candidate in fine arts. She’d completed the program in ten months, record time, and the transcript was monotonous with A’s and B’s. A professor named Rudolph was responsible for the A’s. We found him in the faculty lounge, a tall and very bitter man. “She deserved A’s,” he snapped. “Johnson gave her B’s—Johnson’s the one she ran off with. Should’ve flunked her ass!” Then the anger came. Last he’d heard, she was working as a tour guide at the United Nations. “The princess of Dag Hammarskjöld Plaza,” he said. “What a waste. All those goddamn A’s.”

“This Johnson?” I said.

“B’s! Claimed she needed incentive.”

“And now?”

Rudolph cackled. “The scrap heap. B’s didn’t cut it. Hope he’s peddling candied apples, that’s what I hope. Hope she dumped him hard.”

In Manhattan, we took two rooms. Sarah insisted. That evening we talked tactics, went out to dinner, then spent the night together. There wasn’t a word spoken. I kissed her on the lips, a healing kiss, tracing that red blister with my tongue, memorizing its shape and texture, knowing it would eventually be all I remembered, or almost all. In the morning she was back in her own room. I spent an hour in a barbershop. At noon, by arrangement, I met Sarah outside the hotel. We went arm in arm toward the East River.

Twice we circled the UN, then Sarah led me inside.

She spotted Bobbi outside the Security Council.

“There’s the jackpot,” Sarah said. “I’ll retire to Rio. Good luck.”

“You’re a neat lady.”

“She looks adorable. Really, she does. I’m crazy about her uniform.”

“Well.”

“You’re sorry, I know.”

“More than that. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll—you know—I’ll arrange another search party. You know?”

“Rio,” Sarah said. She was backing away, still holding my hand. “I’ll leave a trail of bread crumbs. You be Hansel, I’ll be Snow White.”

“I am sorry.”

Sarah’s eyes were colorless.

“I’ll grant you this, she’s one in a million. You’ll get your money’s worth. Everything you deserve.” Sarah walked out the revolving door. Then she came in again and slugged me on the shoulder.

“Bye,” I said.

“You’re an asshole.”

“Rio.”

We bought a limo and drove to Helena and took over the top floor of my motel.

I stayed away from nostalgia. Sarah had warned me about that. “You’ve led a nasty life,” I said, and I ticked off the betrayals—me and the navigator and TWA and Scholheimer and NYU and the Air Force and Rudolph and Johnson and the United Nations. It was a hard speech. Here and there I shouted. “You can’t stick. You don’t know what commitment is. You can’t want a thing and get it and still want it. You quit. You’re unfaithful. Iron deficiency. Anemia of the will. No magnetic glue. You drop off men like leaves off trees, by the season. You’re selfish. You’re fickle. You don’t attach to things. You don’t believe in causes or people, and what else is there? Essence, existence—you can’t cope with either. You flit like a fucking fruit fly. You can’t hold on. You can’t endure. You’re shallow and cowardly and vain and disgusting—you’re probably mad—that’s what madness is—can’t stick, always sliding—you’re an ice rider, a melter, gutless and hopeless, and I love you with all my heart, and I swear to God—I swear it—I’ll never let you go. Never. That means never.”

We soaked in the motel’s big green pool. At night we watched television, anything but the news, and then we got married.

We honeymooned in the Sweetheart Mountains.

Each morning was a miracle: I’d wake up and take a breath and reach out to make sure.

I’d hold her tight, squeezing.

And in 1983 we had a daughter this way, Melinda, whose presence brought happiness and new responsibility. As a father, as a man of the times, I was more determined than ever to hold the line against dissolution. When the newspapers warned of calamity, I simply stopped reading; I was a family man. The motel turned a modest profit. I attended monthly meetings of the Chamber of Commerce. We coped. We had our disputes and found solutions, we vacationed at Yosemite, we raised our daughter with discipline and love. At the back of my mind, of course, I feared that someday I might wake to find a poem in my pocket, but Bobbi was always there. Through her poetry, which she would sometimes read aloud, she permitted access to her secret life. She was devoted. She made soft love. She was a wise mother, a patient wife.

The balance held.

It was not a fantasy.

We prospered in a prosperous world. We took our showers as a team, the three of us, and there was peace and durability, a kind of art. On Halloween we bobbed for apples. We designed our own Christmas cards, hand-stenciling Bobbi’s poems on fine white parchment. We shared things—our lives, our histories. Once, on a whim, I took Bobbi up to have a look at the uranium strike. The season was pre-winter, twiggy and bare, a desolate wind, and I held her arm and pointed out the scars left by man and machine. I showed her where the mountain had once been. With my hands, I shaped it for her, explaining how we’d followed the clicking trail toward riches, and how, at a spot roughly between Orion and the Little Dipper, in the age of flower children gone sour, we had come across the source, the red-hot dynamics. It was science, I told her. Morality was not a factor. Bobbi said she understood. Yet, for me, there was something sad about the disappearance of that mountain, because it was now a pasture, flat like Kansas, with pasture weeds and mesquite bent east with the wind. We found a pickax and a burnt-out bulldozer and a No Trespassing sign with the Texaco star preserved by heat and cold, bright red, friendly-looking as symbols go.

“Somewhere,” I said, as I stashed the sign as a souvenir, “the mountain is still there, it’s tucked away in silos across the Great Midwest. It isn’t gone, you just can’t see it.”

Bobbi asked if this scared me.

It didn’t, not then. But back at the motel, two or three years later, it did.

A Sunday afternoon. I was sleeping. It was August, and I was out by the pool, a calm summer Sunday, the gentlest Sunday of all time, a day of rest, and even in my sleep I could hear the lap of water and tourists splashing—business was booming, Montana was the Energy State—and there was the feel of Sundays forever, a lawn mower buzzing, a child laughing, a steady hum beneath all things. And the sun. And a breeze that wasn’t really a breeze and made no earthly sound as it swept the Sunday like a Hoover. This was sleep. This was the day of perfect union, when Christians bar-becued. A day for picnics and lazing. I basked like a lizard. I wasn’t dreaming, just drifting. The sun—that full sun—the sun was part of it. It was a Sunday like no other Sunday. It was a day without spite or malice, not an evil thought abroad, not a word of blasphemy, not a sickly deed; a day when, by some incredible chance, one shot in ten billion, the human race quieted as if in church. Disembodied, dusty, I felt like fragrance, I could’ve made chlorophyll.

Afterward, I told Bobbi how it happened: “Just this drone at first. Maybe a mosquito, like that. Except the sound was way up. Way up. Nobody else noticed. Everybody in the pool kept splashing, having a great time, they didn’t notice, and the drone kept getting louder and louder, like this screechy whine, like—like I don’t know what—like from outer space. A whistle sound, sort of, but it wasn’t a whistle, it was something else. Like this, like wheeet. You know? Just wheeet-wheeet. So I sat up. I saw these weird ripples in the pool. Then this vortex, swish, a whirlpooly thing, like when water goes down the toilet, and then—maybe it was the heat or something—but then I looked up and there was this huge zipper across the sky, a big silver zipper. And it was unzipping itself. That’s what I saw. That’s how it happens. A zipper opens up.”

Bobbi was gentle. She kept close to me that night, and for many nights afterward. If I wanted, she said, we could make some changes. Would I like to travel? Go back to school, maybe? Pursue a career? I thought about it, then shook my head. All I wanted was for her to stay with me. Always. Fidelis ad extremum. I looked straight at her. “Fidelity,” I said. “It’s absolute. I won’t let you leave me.”

Her smile was opaque. Not much later she composed a poem called Leaves. Lush imagery, but I didn’t quite understand it.

What do the leaves mean?

Autumn comes to fire

on hillside flesh,

but you ask:

What do the leaves mean?

The oak, the maple, and the grass.

Winter comes and leaves

and each night you touch me

to test the season.

Here, I say, and you ask:

What do the leaves mean?

A year later we sold the motel for a handsome profit. We toured Europe, and the Orient, then returned to build a house in the Sweetheart Mountains. It was a large, expensive house, with decks and fine woods, not a neighbor for miles. To be safe, though, I bought up the surrounding land and spent a summer fencing it in. I installed a burglar alarm and dead-bolt locks on all doors. It was a lovely sort of life, Bobbi said, horses and hiking, our daughter, but even so I could sometimes feel an ominous density in the world. The stars seemed too tightly packed. The mornings were too short; the nights collided. Beirut was a madhouse. The graveyards were full. In Amarillo, they were manufacturing MIRVs, and in the Urals there were Soviet answerings in kind, a multiplication.

And me—I stewed. At night I would often wake up and squeeze Bobbi for all she was worth, which was everything. The flashes were killing me.

Density, I thought. Implosion, not explosion, would surely end the world.

It wasn’t mental illness. By and large I was happy. The world spun on one axis, we spun on our own. Bobbi worked on a translation of Erlkönig, I putzed around the house, Melinda grew smart and beautiful.

We were homebodies.

On November 8, 1988, Chuck Adamson was elected mayor of Helena. When the polls closed, I remember, there was a gathering at his house, which by midnight became a victory party, and we were all there, his wife and kids and cocker spaniel, and Bobbi, and my mother, and many people I didn’t know. I remember dancing with my mother—hard stuff, no waltzes—her hair bluish now, the way she snapped her fingers and rocked without modesty. I remember delivering an oration. It had to do with the governorship, how Chuck was a shoo-in if he kept his nose clean and his eyes on the shining dome. It was stirring rhetoric. We were all very drunk and very happy. Later, I found Adamson off by himself, sitting in a stairwell with a drink and a glum expression in his eyes. The dog was curled up in his lap. “Mr. Mayor,” I said, “what’s the sadness for?” and Adamson fixed a stare on me, a long one. He wasn’t acting when he said, “The usual.” I knew what he meant. Nothing more was said. I sat beside him, and we listened to the party, and after a while we went back in.

My mother died on January 10, 1993.

And that summer Bobbi disappeared. She was gone two weeks; her diaphragm went with her.

That was the worst time. I loved her, she loved me. I was almost sure of it. So why? I’d go to the medicine cabinet and open it and just stand there. It was like watching a hole. The diaphragm, I came to realize, was one of those objects whose absence reveals so much more than its presence.

In mid-June, Bobbi returned as abruptly as she left.

She put her bag down and kissed Melinda. She gave me a look that meant: Don’t ask.

But I did. I wanted specifics. Where exactly, and who, and what was said and done. I wanted to know these things, but I didn’t want to know, but I did, I wanted to know and not know, and what I most wanted to know and not know was why. Bobbi was forthcoming in her own way. She did love me, she said. But then why? Why couldn’t it be absolute and perfect and final and lasting? Her smile was uncontrite. When I asked about the diaphragm, she said it was only a precaution—I believed in precaution, didn’t I?—and when I asked where, she said it didn’t matter—she was here, with me, now—and when I asked who, the navigator or Scholheimer or the adjutant or Johnson or someone new, Bobbi shrugged and went off to wash her hair.

I followed her into the bathroom. I kept asking why. It was more than asking, because I opened the medicine cabinet and showed her the hole and yelled, “Why?”

Bobbi worked up a lather with her fingertips. The shampoo, I remember, was lime-smelling. She looked at me in the mirror. She was back, she said. Couldn’t we let it go at that? I remember sitting on the edge of the tub, smelling limes and picturing the diaphragm. It was round and rubbery and discolored to a white-brown. Two weeks, I was thinking. Why? I pictured the tube of spermicide. Bobbi in bed: blond and long-legged, those narrow hips, how she made love with her eyes open, not moving much until near the end, when she would reach behind her head with both hands and grasp the vertical grillwork on our brass bed and make a sound like a bassoon. But the diaphragm was there between us. It was there even when it wasn’t, or especially when it wasn’t, and it was there now when I asked, “Why?”

She dried her hair with a red towel.

She closed the bathroom door and sat beside me on the tub. She did not smile. Because, she said quietly, she was a breathing human being. Because she was not a dream. Real, she said, and it was time to accept it.

Then she quoted Yeats.

Brutal, she said.

For several months afterward, through the summer and fall, I expected to find a last poem nailed to my heart. I couldn’t sleep. In bed, I watched her eyelids. I plotted tactics. Ropes and locks and dynamite. I felt sane and brutal. Dig, a voice whispered, but that came later.

There were stresses and uncertainties, an in-between time, and then one day near Christmas Sarah and Ned Rafferty drove up in a jeep. They needed a hideout.

“Just for a month or so,” Sarah said, kissing me, then Bobbi. “Till things quiet down.”

She was wearing mink. Piled high in the back of the jeep were Christmas presents, boxes of Swiss chocolate, a frozen turkey, and an armed nuclear warhead.

“So far,” Sarah said, “the Air Force doesn’t even know it’s gone. Ignorance breeds calm.”

Rafferty hugged me.

That evening Bobbi cooked the turkey and I put a record on and Sarah chatted about the terrorist life. She was not a terrorist, of course, or not exactly, but she enjoyed the wordplay. “You wouldn’t believe how tough it is,” she said. “Not all glamour and fun. I mean, shit, nobody gets terrified anymore.” She looked at Melinda. “Excuse the shit.”

After midnight, when Bobbi and Melinda and Ned had gone to bed, Sarah curled beside me on the couch.

“Home, sweet home,” she said softly. “Your daughter, an absolute honeybun. How old? Nine? Ten?”

“Ten.”

Sarah sighed. “Ten biggies. The magic number.” She put her head in my lap. “Naïve Sarah. All that time I kept thinking, Hang in there, baby—he’ll be back. Wanted to be wanted. Not a peep.” She tapped my wedding ring. “Anyway, it’s still politics as usual. Key West, the old Committee. Not quite the same, I’m afraid—mostly just dreams. Super Bowl, remember? Never made it. Cowgirls won’t have me. Look at this skin, William, like cowhide, that’s what the tropics do. I’ll be tan till I die.”

“It’s perfect skin,” I said.

“Old.”

“And perfect.”

She laughed and kissed my nose.

“So here’s the program,” she said brightly. “We kill Bobbi-cakes. Sell your daughter. Blow this house up then hightail it for Rio. Two days, we’re home free.”

“Not funny,” I said.

“Add your own wrinkles.”

“There’s Ned, too. You’re lucky.”

“Yes,” she sighed, “that I am. Magnificent guy. Loves me dearly, you know. Not a string, just loves me and loves me.”

“Well, he should.”

“He does. Love, love, love.”

I waited a moment.

“So look,” I said, “what about that warhead?”

Sarah coughed and rubbed her eyes. She’d lost some weight—too much, I thought—and without the mink she seemed skinny and poor-looking. Unhealthy, too. The blister at her lip was hard to ignore.

“The warhead,” she said, and shrugged. “Actually, I guess, we could’ve built our own—Ollie had the blueprints. Who doesn’t? But that wouldn’t make the same waves. Had to swipe it. These days, it takes real drama.”

She stared at the ceiling.

“God, William, I do miss you. But anyhow. The bomb. Ebenezer—it was his brainstorm. Proliferation, you know. Dramatize the problem. Show what could happen. One last shot, so we got organized and pulled it off like you wouldn’t believe. Like with the guns, that easy.”

“And now?”

“Yes, now’s the problem.” Sarah pulled off my wedding ring and popped it in her mouth and swallowed. “They wanted to use the damned thing.”

“Use it? You mean—”

“Blackmail. A demonstration project or some such shit. Set it off in the desert, wake up the rattlesnakes. I don’t know. Headlines. Ollie was crazy about the idea—Tina, too—she wouldn’t stop quoting Chekhov. Some terrorists. Threats, that’s what scares people. A difference of opinion, you could say. So Ned and I, we had to reswipe the warhead. Packed it up one night and took off. And now we’re badly wanted.”

“I see.”

“By our own comrades. That old gang of ours. They want the bomb back.”

We were quiet for a time. It occurred to me that life has a way of tidying up after itself. I remembered my Ping-Pong days, but then I remembered the grief.

“Sarah,” I said, “I want that ring back.”

“In due time,” she said.

Later we put on our coats and went outside.

It was snowing hard. Sarah lay down and made angels on the lawn, then she led me to the jeep and pulled back a tarp and showed me the warhead.

“There’s your mountain,” she said.

She brushed snow from the nose cone. It was the size of a large cantaloupe, smoothly polished.

“Seventy-two pounds,” she said, “but think what it would do to Las Vegas. New model—Mark 24 or something, I forget.” She slipped her arm through mine. Her voice seemed faraway. “Graceful lines, don’t you think? Like me. Bombshell. If you want, we can run away together, you and me and Mark. Tuck us in at night, tell us bedtime stories. Great sex, I bet.”

“Enough,” I said.

“Touch it, William.”

“Not necessary. No.”

“Your big chance. Cop a quickie. Feel it.”

“No.”

“Touch.”

She took me by the hand and pressed it down. The metal was cold. No surprise, I thought. Just cold and real. I felt a slight adhesion to the fingers when I pulled away. I nodded and said, “Get rid of it.”

“Of course.”

“I mean it, Sarah.”

“Yes. You always do.” She tapped the warhead. “For now, though, we need storage space. Three weeks. A month, max. Look at it as a good deed. For me.”

“Temporary?” I said.

“Oh, sure,” said Sarah. “Just temporary. Like everything.”

We lugged the bomb into the tool shed, covered it with rugs, and locked the door.

Outside, Sarah hugged me hard.

“I love you,” she whispered, “and that’s final.”

We celebrated the holidays like a family. Rafferty and I chopped down a tree, Bobbi and Sarah made pudding and pies, there was mistletoe everywhere. On Christmas Eve we set up an electric train for Melinda. We opened gifts and sang carols and drank rum toddies. On Christmas morning, before breakfast, Sarah returned my wedding ring.

The days afterward were lazy. I remember snowshoeing and quiet reminiscence. Beneath the surface, however, there was renewed velocity: that Doppler feeling.

Late one night I heard crying. It was Sarah—she was crying hard—and it went on for a long time, all night it seemed. But in the morning, when I asked about it, she shook her head and laughed and said, “No way, man. Not crying. I don’t indulge.” It was that kind of velocity. The kind that moves beneath things, as blood moves beneath skin. There were no flashes. No sirens or pigeons, nothing so vivid. I’d sometimes find myself gazing at the tool shed. Normal, I’d think. Things in their place; the absolute normality of the abnormal.

There was some apprehension, yes, but the bomb didn’t disturb me nearly as much as Sarah’s lip.

It was badly inflamed. Bruised-looking and scary—movement beneath the surface.

Dangerous, I thought, and one morning I told her so.

Sarah smiled and touched my wedding ring. “A love disease,” she said. “It’ll clear up once we get married.”

“Seriously.”

“Ugly, am I?”

“It should be looked at,” I said. “By a doctor.”

Sarah laughed.

Not funny, however. At the end of January, she complained of fatigue. A dark, thimble-sized scab formed at the corner of her mouth. Tiny black veins snaked across the surface of the blister. Her speech faltered. She had trouble coordinating past with present.

In February there were periods of dizziness; at night there was crying.

“Mommy!” she’d scream.

She’d press a pillow to her face and curl up at the foot of the bed and scream, “I’m dead!”

For a week or two it got better. Then it got much worse.

“Dead!” she’d yell.

One evening she used a needle to drain the lip. There was infection and severe swelling. In the morning, when I brought breakfast to her room, she pulled a pillowcase over her head.

She was cogent, though.

“Well,” she said cheerfully, “this smart-ass mouth of mine.”

Rafferty sat in a rocking chair near the bed. His eyes were dull. He looked at her for a while, then left us alone.

Gently, I tried to lift off the pillowcase, but Sarah stopped me.

“No, please,” she said. “Leave it be. Just for now.”

The room smelled of medicines, Campho-Phenique and Xy-locaine. For several minutes I sat in the rocking chair and tried for silence.

“A doctor,” I finally said. “You know that?”

“Not quite yet.”

“Sarah, I won’t let—”

“Not yet,” she said. “No hospitals. I can’t be alone like that.”

“You’re not alone.”

“I can’t be.”

She turned away from me. It was a bright winter morning, and the curtains were open, and the sunlight made little trails along the flesh at her arms and ankles.

Lying back, she seemed to doze off.

Then she said, “William, you know what I wish? I wish—don’t get upset or anything—but I wish we’d had some things together. The two of us. Just certain things. I wish I was pregnant. It’s corny, I know, but I really wish that.”

“It’s not so corny,” I said.

“I guess not. Sounds that way, but… You know what else? I wish there was more time. A billion years. I wish I was floating on this raft in the ocean somewhere, like somewhere romantic, and there’s this island with palm trees and waterfalls and stuff, but it’s not exactly a desert island because we’ve got all these kids running around barefoot, and I’m pregnant again and it’s a real hot day and I’m just floating on this raft—no sharks or anything—so whenever I want I just sort of slip into the water and go down to the bottom and get cool, and there’s this baby inside me, this thing we have together, and then when I’m cool I come up to the raft again and lie there and get hot. Pretty corny, I told you. But that’s what I wish. I wish we could just float. I wish you’d make love to me. You can’t, I know, but I still wish it.”

“I’d like that,” I told her.

“But you can’t?”

“No. But it’s not corny.”

Sarah took off the pillowcase and sat up. She wasn’t quite smiling, or crying, but it was a little of both. Even with the lip, I thought, she was a very striking woman. There was still a great deal between us.

“If you kissed me,” she said, “could you live with it?”

“I think I could.”

“Might be contagious.”

“There’s the risk.”

She came to the rocking chair. “Go on, then,” she said, and almost laughed. “Just keep that tongue in your mouth. It’ll be wonderful, I promise.”

It was not cancer.

A form of encephalitis, they told us. A viral migration along the pathways between lip and brain.

She was operated on in Helena, she came home to recuperate, there were convulsions, she died in March.

Which is how it happens, that fast.

We know we will live forever until that instant when we know we will not.

“God,” she screamed, “something’s haywire!”

“There, now,” I said.

“William?”

“I’m right here.”

“Where? I can’t think.”

“Don’t, then,” I said. “Just don’t think.”

In the last week there were hallucinations. The cortex liquefied. The viruses consumed her thoughts. The left eye roamed in its socket, her face darkened, there was puffiness along the jaw, she had trouble swallowing, her arms and fingers twitched, her breathing became fast and shallow.

“Am I dead?” she asked.

Another time she jerked up and said, “I want something! I forget what—I want it.”

We took turns sitting with her. She was never alone. When she died, Ned Rafferty was there. He came into the kitchen, where I was shelling peas, and he looked at me and said, “I loved her best.”

The funeral was quick and somber.

When it was over, I asked Rafferty what he’d be doing with himself. He thought it over, then said he’d probably stick with the gang, they were family. He didn’t cry much until later, but later he cried a lot.

After all, she was dead.

“I’m dead!” she keeps yelling.

Not long afterward, the others showed up. Ollie and Tina and Nethro and Ebenezer, they were all shaken by the news, their grief was genuine, and for more than a week we catered to a morose household.

When they left, in early April, they took the warhead with them.

And later that summer they died by gunfire in the tropics. There was tear gas, I remember. Bullhorns and sharpshooters and a burning safe house and a bomb in the attic—all the networks were there, a TV spectacular.

In the autumn I suffered a minor breakdown.

And in the winter, when Bobbi said she needed space, when she suggested a trial separation, I was comforted by the final passage of a poem in progress: The balance of power, our own, the world’s, grows ever fragile.

13 Quantum Jumps

THE HOLE SNORTS and says, Do it.

It’s a smug, self-satisfied voice. Constant chatter all night long—Star light, star bright! Shut me up with dynamite!

Below, in their hammocks, Bobbi and Melinda sleep beautifully, and the backyard shimmers with the lights of Christmas, and here, at last, I’ve come up against the edge of an imposing question: What now? Three hours till daylight. Soon, I realize, it will be time for absolutes.

Chasm! Spasm!

The hole releases a steamy, insinuating laugh, then coughs and belches. I can smell its breath.

I lie back and watch the lights.

Certain truths appear. I love my wife. I loved her before I knew her, and I love her now, and I will not let her go. I’m committed. I believe in fidelity. I will not be separated. One thing in my life will last and keep lasting and last forever. Love is absolute.

What I need now is silence, but the hole has a mind of its own: Here’s a good one… Jack be nimble! Jack be slick! Jack me off with a dynamite stick!

I shake my head: “I’m not interested.”

The hole snickers.

Oh, yeah, you’re interested. I’m the mouthpiece, you’re the brains. Now and never. Do it.

I’m wired. I’m hot. But I know the difference between life and death. When the hole hoots and says, Home, sweet hole, I don’t respond, not even a shrug. I get to my feet and do some exercises. A clear, calm night, but there’s a dynamic moving through the dark. I’m at wits’ end; I can’t think beyond black and white. In a time of relativity, I wonder, how does one achieve absolutes? Separate, Bobbi said. She was gracious about it. She smiled and said she loved me. But then she said separate—she needed space—what does space mean?—and later there was a poem called Space Walk—walk on air, walk away—but I can’t be relative about it. I won’t let it happen. Trouble is, what now? I want to nail our hearts together. I want no space between us. I want wholeness, without separation. I want it all, now and forever.

The question is simple. In this age, at this late hour, how do I make a happy ending?

The odds, I know, are poison.

It’s a real world and it’s dangerous. Science takes no prisoners; the atom forecloses; there are no epilogues. Here, at the rim of the hole, I can see what I’m up against. I can see Sarah dying. A burning safe house, oceans boiling, cities in ash. I can see it. A Titan II missile: ten feet in diameter, 103 feet tall, 330,000 pounds of launch weight, a flight range exceeding 6,000 miles, two engines, five megatons of no-bullshit firepower. It’s out there. It’s deep in the Kansas soil—you can touch it, man to metal—you can walk the underground corridors and press your fingers against the cool, damp technology. There it is. Just look: the whirring exhaust fans, bright lights, no shadows, the chrome launch console, the red box with its two silver keys, the coffee pot, the photographs of loved ones, the clocks and computers and holstered pistols, the crew-cut missileers in their spit-shined boots and SAC-blue uniforms and daredevil scarves. It is in fact there. And here’s how it happens. Topside, it’s a hot Kansas day. A record-buster—roasting heat. It’s witch weather. A freaky black atmosphere and high winds and high voltage. Just look and say the words: Nuclear war. Kansas is the creeps. Tornado country, ghost country. Say it: Nuclear war. Look at it: black-eyed Susans and sunflowers staring at you from roadside ditches, vast fields of wheat, the sun and soil. And it happens. There’s lightning now, huge neon Z’s, a violet virga, and then the sky divides itself into two perfect halves—one hemisphere bruised and ugly, the other bright like summer—and the crease opens up like a smile over that Titan silo. This is it. A sudden wind comes up. It’s hard to stand, but you lean against the wind. You ponder the hemispheres. You see a small plot of land enclosed by barbed wire; you see a cow grazing; you see a farmer on his tractor; you see a little boy circling under a pop fly; you see a parked Air Force truck and a tiny white outbuilding and a stenciled sign that reads: “Deadly Force Authorized.” You consider running. You hear thunder. You watch a 700-ton concrete lid blow itself sideways; you say, “Oh!”; you see a woman run for the telephone; you see the Titan rising through orange and yellow gases—there’s still that wind and that Kansas sun and that grazing cow—and you gawk and rub your eyes—not disbelief, not now, it’s belief—and you stand there and listen to the thunder and track the missile as it climbs into that strange smiling crease in the sky, and then, briefly, you ask yourself the simple question: Where on earth is the happy ending?

Kansas is burning. All things are finite.

“Love,” I say feebly.

The hole finds this amusing.

I am all there is, it says. Keyhole, rathole, asshole, eyehole, hellhole, loophole, knothole, manhole, peephole, foxhole, armhole, sinkhole, cubbyhole, pothole, wormhole, buttonhole, water hole, bullet hole, air hole, black hole, hidey-hole… I am that I am. I am that which nearly was but never will be, and that which never was but always will be. I am the unwritten masterpiece. I am the square root of infinity. I am one hand clapping. I am what happened to the dinosaurs. I am the ovens at Auschwitz, the Bermuda Triangle, the Lost Tribes, the Flying Dutchman, the Missing Link. I am Lee Harvey Oswald’s secret contact in Moscow. I am the anonymous tipster. I am Captain Kidd’s treasure. I am the uncaused cause, the unnamed source, the unindicted co-conspirator, the unknown soldier, the untold misery, the unmarked grave. I am, in modesty, Neverness. I am the be-all and end-all. I am you, of course. I am your inside-out—your Ace in the Hole.

There’s a sharp grinding sound. Rock slides against rock, a perilous shifting.

Go on, do it. Dynamite.

“No,” I say.

Light the fuse! What’s to lose? Like a time capsule, except we dispense with time. It’s absolute! Nothing dies, everything rhymes. Every syllable. The cat’s meow and the dog’s yip-yip—a perfect rhyme. Never rhymes with always, rich rhymes with poor, madness rhymes with gladness and sadness and badness… I could go on forever. I do, in fact.

“Lunatic,” I say.

Can’t have sorrow without tomorrow.

“Crazy!”

The hole laughs and sings: Oh, I got plenty o’ nuttin’, an’ nuttin’s plenty fo’ me.

I shut it out. I squat down and fold my hands and wait. For what, I don’t know. A miracle, I suppose, or some saving grace.

I’m not myself.

It’s a feathery hither-and-thither sensation, like riding music, slipping up and down the scales of my own life. A balmy night in May—May 1958—and I grab my pillow and run for the basement and crawl under the Ping-Pong table and lie there faceup. I hear my father calling out my name. I smell the dank, sweet-sour odor of mildew, the concrete walls and basement moisture. “Easy, now,” my father says. He takes me in his arms and says, “Just a dream, cowboy, just a bad, bad dream.” But he’s wrong. It’s beyond dreaming. It’s right here and it’s real.

Balls to the wall! the hole yells. Off your ass, yo-yo!

The Christmas lights sparkle all around me.

There’s no other way.

Reluctantly, I move to the tool shed. I bend down and lift a crate and hoist it to my shoulder. There’s a queer sense of standing a few steps outside myself, a nonparticipant.

I carry the explosives across the yard.

Just the mechanics.

I use a pickax to chisel out three notches along the rim of the hole. I study the angles. I lay in the charges, crimp the caps, wire it up, test the firing device. I’m careful. I concentrate on each task as it comes.

When the surface work is done, I set in the ladder and climb down and prepare three more charges against the base of the north wall.

Dark down here—I stumble. I drop a blasting cap and jump back, then I spend five minutes searching for it on my hands and knees. Pitiful, the hole says, or maybe I say it, or both of us together: All thumbs, no nerve. Fire and ice—poetic justice!

I find the blasting cap.

An omen, I think. Then I wonder: Do we find the omens or do the omens find us?

Riddles!

I won’t be rushed. I work slowly, at my own pace.

The hole seems to press in closer, and there’s a foul, clammy smell that makes me wheeze as I wedge in the last stick of dynamite and lean down to hook up the firing device. I feel queasy. It’s partly the stench, partly my own misgivings. No hurry, I tell myself, just follow the sequence—attach the copper wires, turn the screws, make sure it’s a solid connection.

Done.

And what now?

I kneel at Melinda’s hammock. She sleeps with a thumb at the edge of her mouth, her tongue taut against the lower front teeth, her expression frank and serious. I stroke her hair. I want to cry but I can’t; I want to rescue her but I don’t know how. There are no survivors. When it happens, as with Sarah, the proteins dissolve and the codes are lost and there is only the endless rhyme. I feel some remorse, and even grief, but the emotions are like ice, I can’t get a grip on them.

What’s wrong with me? Why am I alone? Why is there no panic? Why aren’t governments being toppled? Why aren’t we in the streets? Why do we tolerate our own extinction? Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads? Why don’t we scream it? Nuclear war!

I love my daughter, I love my wife. It’s permanent. Gently, with love, I smooth the blankets around Melinda’s neck and shoulders, kissing her, surrendering to a moment of intimacy, then I turn and go to Bobbi and stoop down and put my arms around her and say, “I love you.” I rock the hammock. I’m frightened but I keep the vigil, just waiting, cradling the firing device, watching for the first frail light of dawn.

Once, I drift off.

There’s a fluttering in the darkness, like wings, and I snap awake and jerk my finger from the yellow button.

I lock my hands together.

So much can go wrong. Madness or malfunction, simple evil, an instant of overwhelming curiosity. Like a child with a chemistry set, and the instructions say, “Never mix X with Y,” but the kid starts wondering, What if? He’s human. He has to know. Curiosity, that’s all. A noble instinct. A craving for secrets. And so one day the kid creeps to his room and opens up his chemistry set and cautiously sprinkles out a little X and a little Y, just to know, and it’s the discovery of a lifetime. There are no more hypotheses. Knowledge becomes perfect and absolute. And again there’s that simple question: A happy ending?

If you can imagine it, I remind myself, it can happen.

But imagine this: Nuclear war.

A dark movie theater and you’re eating buttered popcorn and someone shouts, “Nuclear war!”

You laugh.

But this: “Fire!”

Drop the popcorn and run. It’s a stampede.

And then again this: “Nuclear war!”

Shrug? Shake your head? A joke, you think?

Imagine the surprise.

In the dark I hear someone chuckling, which startles me, but it’s just the hole. T minus nine, it says softly. Like falling off a log. We’ll all dream the same sweet dream—pure metaphor, that’s all it is. Push the button. Its voice is smooth and mellow. It recites nursery rhymes. It tells stories from the Bible, as if reminiscing, adding and subtracting here and there. Amen, it says. T minus eight, the century’s late.

I try not to listen.

I watch the night reorganize itself, the movements of stars and shadows. The patterns tend toward stasis.

God knows, I don’t want it this way.

Folded in forever like the fossils. I don’t want it but I can see it, as always, the imprints in rock, the wall shadows at Hiroshima, leaves and grass and the Statue of Liberty and Bobbi’s diaphragm. Here, she can’t leave me. The fossils don’t move. Crack open a rock and she’ll be curled around me. Her smile will be gold and granite. Immutable, metamorphic, welded forever by the stresses of our age. We will become the planet. We will become the world-as-it-should-be. We will be faithful. We will lace through the mountains like seams of ore, married like the elements …

Jackass! the hole says. Very pretty, very stupid! Push the fucking button!

It scares me. I’m tempted.

I put down the firing device and stand and try to shake out the brain waves. I’m capable of atrocity. Lucid, entirely practical, I feel both powerful and powerless, like the stars. I make myself move. I circle the floor of the hole, feeling my way, but also not feeling—which is what scares me—then I sit down and check the safety on the firing device and stare at the walls and look for signs in the darkness. I see myself crawling under barbed wire at Sagua la Grande. Flares and tracers. The terrible things man will do to man. I see the wreck of the Thresher. I see my father dying under yellow spotlights. He won’t stop, he’s a professional, he keeps dying. I hear sonar. I hear Melinda yelling, “Daddy!” I hear Bobbi’s warm blond voice, scanning itself, free verse on the brink of blank. She needs space, she tells me. She pins Space Walk to my pillow. There’s a transworld look in her eyes when she sees my rage, when I take a scissors to her diaphragm, when I burn the poem, when I tell her no one’s leaving. I see her sleeping. It’s after midnight, and I kiss my wife’s cheek and quietly slide out of bed. No lights, no alarm. Blue jeans and a flannel shirt, then out to the backyard, where I pick a spot near the tool shed and begin digging. I won’t permit separation. It’s final. Am I crazy? Maybe, maybe not, but I see black flashes against a chrome sky, scalps in a punch bowl, mass going to energy. And there’s more. Because I also see a white stucco house in the tropics. The roof is burning. It’s live television, all the networks are there, and cops and SWAT teams and smoke and sirens, and Ollie Winkler is shot through the mouth. The front door burns slowly, like charcoal. The diningroom drapes are burning. Ollie moves along the floor, toward Tina, but he’s shot again, in the hip and head. Tina hides in a closet. But the closet burns, and the bedrooms and attic. I can smell the heat and tear gas and burning plaster. Ned Rafferty coughs and smiles. His face is wax. He keeps touching himself, but his face sticks to his hands, he can’t fix the melting. “The gist of the gist,” he says. He raises a hand, as if to point out a lesson, but the hand curls into a claw, and Ned Rafferty burns. The gunfire seems distant and trivial. Holes open up in the walls, and there’s a shower of sparks from the ceiling, and the doorbell rings, and Tina Roebuck cries out from her burning closet. It all seems phony and impossible, except it is possible, it’s real, people truly burn, the skin goes black to gray, the bowels open, the fingernails peel back and the bones glow and there are snappings and splinterings, burning sugars and phosphates, burning enzymes, the body burns. Nethro is shot dead. Ebenezer Keezer topples sideways and burns. The safe house burns. In the attic, a warhead no doubt burns. Everything is combustible. Faith burns. Trust burns. Everything burns to nothing and even nothing burns. There are no footprints—the footprints burn. There are no messages in bottles, because the bottles burn, and there is no posterity, because posterity burns. Cement and steel, it all burns. The state of Kansas, the forests, the Great Lakes, the certificates of birth and death, every written word, every sonnet, every love letter. Graphite burns. Churches burn. Memory burns, and with it the past, all that ever was. The reasons for burning burn. Flags burn. Liberty and sovereignty and the Bill of Rights and the American way. It just burns. And when there is nothing, there is nothing worth dying for, and when there is nothing worth dying for, there is only nothing.

The hole makes a sound of assent.

Nothing.

The night seems to stretch out like elastic. Melinda turns in her sleep and looks at me with half-opened eyes. “Hey, there,” I whisper, and she nods, then tucks her chin down and sleeps.

If I could, I would save her life.

I let myself sway with the night. Bobbi’s breathing. The influences of the moon.

And later Sarah appears. She does a cartwheel on the wall. Then she giggles and says, “I’m dead! You know what dead is? You get this malaise. You forget to wash your hair. You’re bored stiff. I’m dead.” How much, I wonder, is real? Like those phone calls back in high school, I can still dial and break the connection and hear that husky voice of hers. It’s not unreal. Right now, as she goes up into a handstand, it’s neither real nor unreal, it’s just dazzling. “Love you,” I say, and Sarah smiles and says, “Oh, well—better late than never. Except I’m dead. Too bad about Rio, though. Would’ve been a gas.” She sighs. She pecks my cheek and sits cross-legged on the wall. “But don’t apologize. No problem, I’m dead. What’s new with you?” So I tell her about the hole and the dynamite and the implausibility of happy endings. The bombs, I say, are real, and Bobbi wants to leave me. Sarah listens carefully. When I feel sorrow, she comes off the wall and goes inside me for a time, then hovers near Bobbi, frowning. “Well,” she says, “if I weren’t so dead I’d say hit the switch. We’ll run away together. That island I told you about.” She kisses Bobbi’s lips. “So then. The fantasies didn’t pan out?”

Then she takes the firing device from my lap.

“Hold me,” she says.

Along the rim of the hole, the Christmas lights are soft and mysterious, and Sarah takes her place in my arms. I don’t know what to tell her, except it wasn’t our universe.

She seems to stiffen.

“Such bullshit,” she snarls. “I’m in the other universe. Nothing here! Washout—colossal fucking drag. You should’ve loved me. You know that, don’t you? We could’ve been happy. All those places we could’ve seen, Paris and East Berlin. That honeymoon I never had. Oh Christ, we could’ve had it. Diapers and rattles and all those nights together. Is that too sentimental? I don’t mean to sound morbid, but I’m dead, and there’s only one universe that counts. You should’ve loved me. That’s all I mean, we should’ve made promises to each other and kept them, like vows, and we should’ve unzipped each other and crawled inside and been honest and true and loving, just loving, all the time, and we should’ve done everything we didn’t do. We should’ve taught each other things. We should’ve had Christmas together—is that silly? Eat lobster and open the presents and make love and go to church and believe in God and make love again and light candles on the tree and listen to records and have oyster stew at midnight and go to bed and smell the pine needles and sleep and wake up and still be together. It’s a little sad, isn’t it? It’s sad that we could’ve been so happy.”

Later, in the dark, she says, “Why did I die?”

I don’t have the answer.

Sarah nods and says, “I thought so.”

And later she reads my thoughts: “Doesn’t seem real, does it? I don’t feel dead. Maybe I’m not. Maybe it’s something we dream up to make our stories better. Maybe so?”

Then comes a long silence.

“Sarah?” I say, but she doesn’t speak.

She’s dead.

Like my father, like all of them, she died and dies and keeps on dying, again and again, as if repetition might disclose a new combination of possibilities.

“Oh, Lord,” I say, but I don’t know what to ask for.

I smell daylight coming.

The hole says, Now and never.

I lift the firing device. It’s light in my hands, or seems light, box-shaped, an aluminum casing with a small plastic safety catch and a yellow button. The copper wires wind off toward the north wall. All it takes is a touch. Not even courage, bare volition. It occurs to me that I’m not immune to curiosity—so easy. I think about Ned and Ollie and Tina, my father, my mother, and it’s the simple desire to discover if the dead are ever truly dead.

In the absence of hope, what can we hope for?

Does love last forever?

Are there any absolutes?

I want to know what the hole knows. The hole is where faith should be. The hole is what we have when imagination fails.

“Hey,” Melinda says.

Something moves inside me.

“Hey—”

She makes a languid, woozy motion with her arm. After a moment she sits up in the hammock, rubs her nose, turns her head slightly to one side, and looks at me without recognition.

I feel unsteady.

There’s a sudden compression when she says, “Daddy?” Enormous pressure, it’s too much for me. I place the firing device at my feet and get down on my hands and knees and practice deep breathing. The hole, it seems, is in my heart.

“Daddy?” Melinda says.

“Here, angel.”

“Where? How’d I get down in this… God, it’s dark. Where’s Mommy?”

“Mommy’s fine.”

“Yeah, but—” She stops and touches her flannel nightgown. Her eyes wander. She looks at the granite walls, then up at the Christmas lights, then down at me, then at the firing device. There isn’t enough light to make out her expression, but I can easily imagine it. “Man oh man,” she says, “what’s going on?”

It isn’t a question, though. She knows.

Her eyes, if I could see them, would be blue and full of wisdom. Drawing conclusions, perhaps. Maybe a little frightened.

I’m still on my hands and knees. The squeeze is on.

No dignity in it, but I don’t trust myself to stand.

Melinda stares at me.

“Daddy,” she says, “what’s happening?”

I keep smiling. I want to go to her but I can’t manage it; I make a queer crabbing motion, knees and knuckles. It’s a balance problem. I’m embarrassed when I feel myself slipping—I can’t get traction.

The hole cackles.

Dynamite!

Melinda seems startled. I’m smiling at her—it’s all love—but she recoils and hugs herself and says, “What?”

“Nothing, baby.”

“I heard you.”

“Nothing.”

“That word,” she says, “I heard it. You said it, I heard you! I can’t believe this.”

She’s wide awake now.

Quickly, she gets out of the hammock and takes a step toward me and stops and glances at Bobbi and then steps backward. All I can do is smile. She takes another step backward.

There’s silence while she makes the connections.

“Get up,” she says sternly.

“In a second.”

“Daddy.”

“One second, princess.”

She puts a thumb against the edge of her mouth.

“No,” she says, “I don’t want a second. I want out. This hole, God, it smells like… Let me out!”

“Melinda—”

“Out!” she shouts.

I can see her eyes now. She glares at me, then spins around and moves to a wall and hits it with her fist. “Now,” she screams, “I want out!” The Christmas lights give her face a splotchy blue and red tint. She kicks the wall. “Now!” she screams. Her eyes keep roving—quick, jerky movements of the head, up and down.

When she spots the dynamite, I pretend it’s not what it is. It’s not evil, I think. Not murder, not sorrow.

“Oh, wow,” she grunts.

With her left hand, gingerly, she reaches out and nudges one of the copper blasting caps.

Reality impinges.

“Baby, don’t,” I say.

It’s a discovery for both of us. Melinda wipes her hand and turns and looks at me. I can’t explain it. Just the sadness of discovery, the dynamite and the wiring and the blasting caps, and when she looks at me—not accusing, only knowing—there is nothing that can be said or done. She bites down on her lip. She wants to cry, I know. Her tongue makes a light clicking noise against her teeth.

I’m helpless. I’m aware of the night’s pure harmonics, but I can’t make myself move.

I watch her trace the wires back to the firing device. Stooping, she inspects the plastic safety catch; she clutches her nightgown at the throat. Not murder, I remind myself. There is no evil in it, no rancor or shame, and we are all innocent and unsullied and sane. Even so, I suck in my breath when she finds the yellow button.

“God,” she says.

And she knows.

Now, at this instant, we share the knowledge that there is no mercy between fathers and daughters. We will kill for our children. Our children will kill for us. We will kill for families. And above all we will kill for love, as men have always killed. Crimes of passion. As terrorists kill. As soldiers kill for love of honor and love of country. Just love. And when there is no love, there is nothing worth dying for, only nothing, and Melinda knows this.

She picks up the firing device.

“I don’t care what,” she says, “I’m not afraid of you. I’m just not.”

“I know that.”

“I’m not.”

“Fine, then,” I tell her. “But be careful, okay? Be extra careful.”

“Don’t move, Daddy.”

“I won’t.”

“Stay right there,” she says. “You better not even move, because… You better not.”

“Careful, baby. Extra super careful.”

“I mean it. You better not.”

She carries the firing device to the far side of the hole, near Bobbi’s hammock. I do the calculations. Five or six paces between us, maybe four seconds. Hard to be sure. Would my legs work? What about the shock? All the imponderables.

“Sweetheart,” I say, very softly, “I wish you’d—”

“Don’t move.”

“No, I’m not moving.”

“If you do, though, I might—you know—I might. Just stay there. Just be nice, don’t scare me.”

A gallant little girl. And smart. She keeps her eyes on me. We both know. She reaches out and shakes Bobbi’s arm.

“What’s wrong?” she says. “How come Mommy won’t wake up?”

Again, I smile. “Just can’t, I guess. Maybe—I don’t know—maybe Mommy forgot how.”

“Forgot?” Melinda says. She makes a motion with her shoulders. “That’s stupid. Not even funny. It’s almost… How’d I get down here in the first place? Just dumped me in, I suppose.”

“I carried you, baby. Both of you.”

“You could’ve dropped me, though.”

“I didn’t.”

“Yeah, but I mean—” Suddenly, almost falling, she sits down and clamps her arms around the firing device. “I don’t mean that!” she yells. But she doesn’t cry; she doesn’t dare. She measures the distance between us. One hand flutters up to her ear, as if to brush away an irritation, then she flicks her thumb against the safety catch. “I mean this thing. I mean, why? I always thought you sort of loved me.”

“I do,” I say. “I do love you.”

“Okay, but I mean, how come you almost tried to blow me up? You did, didn’t you?”

“Never.”

“You did!”

“No way. Never. Careful, now.”

For a moment she’s on the verge of crying. She puts a finger near the button.

“Scared?” she asks.

“You bet I am.”

“Don’t move, then. Better be real scared.”

“I am,” I say. “I’m scared.”

She runs a hand across her forehead. I know what she’s going through, I’ve been there myself.

“Don’t think I’m chicken,” Melinda says, “because I’m not. And if something bad happened, I bet you’d be so goddamn sorry you couldn’t believe it.”

She makes a small, incongruous fist and holds it over the firing device and screams, “Goddamn!”

There is nothing I can do.

“Goddamn!” she cries, and the hole laughs and says, No survivors! and Melinda yells, “Stop it!”

We sit facing each other from opposite sides of the hole. She’s crying now; I can see her shoulders shaking. “Daddy, please!” she says. “Let’s get out of here!” And if I could, I would do it. I would take her in my arms and be calm and gentle and find safety by saving. God, yes, I would. “A joke,” I’d say, “just a big silly joke,” then I’d carry her up the ladder, and Bobbi, too, both of them, one in each arm, and I’d laugh and say, “What a joke.” I’d be a hero. I’d do magic. I’d lead them into the house and brew up some hot chocolate and talk about the different kinds of spin you can put on a Ping-Pong ball. And the world would be stable. The balance of power would hold. A believer, a man of whole cloth, I would believe what cannot be believed. The power of love, the continuing creation—it cannot be believed—and I would therefore believe. If you’re sane, the world cannot end, the dead do not die, the bombs are not real.

Am I crazy?

I am not.

To live is to lose everything, which is crazy, but I choose it anyway, which is sane. It’s the force of passion. It’s what we have.

When I get to my feet, Melinda whimpers and says, “Stay away from me.” But I’m willing to risk it. I’m a believer. The first step is absolute. “Daddy,” she says, “you better not!” But I have to. I cross the hole and kneel down and lift the firing device from her lap and hold her tight while she cries. I touch her skin. It’s only love, I know, but it’s a kind of miracle.

In the dark, Sarah’s smile seems hopeful.

“Another universe,” she says. “A nice little miracle, that’s all I want. You, William. I’ll never stop wanting.”

But it isn’t real.

Not Sarah, not the Bomb. Nuclear war: just a fault line in the imagination. If you’re sane, you accept this. It’s easy. Sarah winks at me, still flirting, and I nod and embrace my daughter.

At daylight we climb the ladder.

And that, too, is easy.

I hustle Melinda into the house, turn on the shower, test the temperature, and tell her to hop in.

She looks at me through the steam.

She nearly smiles, but doesn’t.

“I’m a grown-up girl,” she says. “You can’t just stand there and watch.”

“No, I guess I can’t.”

“God. What a father.”

“Right,” I say.

I close the bathroom door, listen for a moment, then return to the hole. It’s a fine summer morning. I take Bobbi from the hammock, holding her as if we’re dancing, and when she opens her eyes, the hole seems to laugh and whisper, One more clown in the screwy cavalcade. Hickory dickory hope.

It doesn’t matter.

I’m a realist. Nothing’s real.

Bobbi goes first, up the ladder, I follow behind with the firing device. I turn off the Christmas lights. The sky at this hour is purple going to blue. The mountains are firm and silent. There are morning birds in the trees, and the grass is a pale dusty green, and I love my wife. She leans against me. For some time we stand together in the backyard, and later I lead her into the house and make coffee and sit with her at the kitchen table. There is little to say. I ask how much space she needs; I ask if we could stay together a while longer. Bobbi touches my hand. Her eyes, I notice, don’t quite focus. Her voice, when she says anything’s possible, comes from elsewhere. She’s thinking of other worlds. But she does smile. She lets me love. In her heart, I suppose, there’s a lyric forming, but even that doesn’t matter.

I have a last piece of business.

Outside, I pick up the firing device and take shelter behind the tool shed. Nuclear war, it’s a hoax. A belly laugh in the epic comedy. I flip up the safety catch, crouch low, look at the sky, and put my finger against the yellow button.

I know the ending.

One day it will happen.

One day we will see flashes, all of us.

One day my daughter will die. One day, I know, my wife will leave me. It will be autumn, perhaps, and the trees will be in color, and she will kiss me in my sleep and tuck a poem in my pocket, and the world will surely end.

I know this, but I believe otherwise.

Because there is also this day, which will be hot and bright. We will spend the afternoon in bed. I’ll install the air-conditioner and we’ll undress and lie on the cotton sheets and talk quietly and feel the coolness. The day will pass. And when night comes I will sleep the dense narcotic sleep of my species. I will dream the dreams that suppose awakening. I will trust the seasons. I will keep Bobbi in my arms for as long as she will stay. I will obey my vows. I will stop smoking. I will have hobbies. I will firm up my golf game and invest wisely and adhere to the conventions of decency and good grace. I will find forgetfulness. Happily, without hesitation, I will take my place in the procession from church to grave, believing what cannot be believed, that all things are renewable, that the human spirit is undefeated and infinite, always. I will be a patient husband. I will endure. I will live my life in the conviction that when it finally happens—when we hear that midnight whine, when Kansas burns, when what is done is undone, when fail-safe fails, when deterrence no longer deters, when the jig is at last up—yes, even then I will hold to a steadfast orthodoxy, confident to the end that E will somehow not quite equal mc², that it’s a cunning metaphor, that the terminal equation will somehow not quite balance.