by Tamas Dobozy
No, the thing that really broke him up was the failure of our doomsday machines, and so his mother, Rebecca, and I had words.
Rebecca insisted he had Asperger’s syndrome. She’d taken him to a therapist who’d run four three-hour tests, and there was no doubt.
“You took him to a therapist?” I shouted into the phone. “Aren’t you supposed to have my permission for doing something like that?”
Rebecca said she knew I’d disagree, so she just went ahead and forged my signature on the forms, which is of course exactly the sort of thing I divorced her for, and why I happened to get primary custody of Bobby, and why I’m continually tormented by fantasies of ripping off her head. It was also why I was powerless to do anything more about it: she had nothing left to lose where she and Bobby and I were concerned.
“The therapist,” she continued, “concluded that for sure Bobby has borderline Asperger’s, which is now actually included in the broad spectrum of autism disorders . . .”
“I know what Asperger’s is,” I said, trying not to sound bitchy. “It doesn’t fit at all. Those people are introverted freaks. They turn their backs to you when you’re speaking to them! When they’re speaking to you! They say goodbye through the palms of their hands. They can tell you the exact train schedule between Kitchener and Sault Ste. Marie for the months of August through February, but don’t know how to ask a checkout girl to give them the price of milk.”
“He’s borderline!” replied Rebecca, getting agitated, as she always does, whenever she’s contradicted. “Right now he’s a kid, so it’s not so noticeable. But the therapist said that as he gets older, and social interactions become more complex, he’s not going to be able to keep up.”
“Crap.”
“Jesus, have you ever listened to him? He sounds like some smartass twenty-year-old! No kid talks the way he does. And all that stuff he’s into—he’s memorized it to the last detail.”
“Rebecca,” I said, adopting the grandfatherly tone I used when I wanted to send her into a screaming frenzy. “Bobby’s the most popular boy in class. What do you mean ‘borderline’? He’s even got girls working on his goddamn doomsday machine.” I couldn’t believe we were having this conversation, talking about Bobby as if he were some kind of outcast loitering on the edge of the playground, when in fact I’d pick him up from school and always there was a crowd of kids listening to everything he said, hanging on every word, running errands, even offering him their toys, and then calling at night, on weekends, one parent after another wanting to arrange play dates, sleepovers, birthday-party invites. “Everyone wants to do everything for Bobby,” I said to Rebecca. “Our kid isn’t one of those invisible loners. He’s Charles fucking Manson! The only person who doesn’t worship him is you.”
“That’s because he doesn’t like to come here,” she said, accusingly.
“You think that’s my fault? I spend all my time trying to get him to like you.”
She burst into tears and hung up the phone.
I called the therapist. Or, rather, I called the therapists, looking them up one by one in the phone book—anyone that had “child psychology” or “educational counselling” or “learning disabilities” beside his or her ad in the Yellow Pages—threatening each of them in turn, “Do you realize the trouble you could get into for treating a boy without the consent of both parents?” until finally one of them, Maryse LeBlanc, said, “You don’t need to threaten me, you know.”
“Does Bobby have Asperger’s?” I said, not bothering to apologize.
“What is it with you people and Asperger’s?” she said. When I asked what she meant, Maryse replied, “Your wife, what was her name?” I could hear papers being shuffled. “Right, Rebecca. She just would not get off it! Asperger’s, Asperger’s, Asperger’s. She came in here with books and articles and . . . you name it!”
“You don’t think Bobby has Asperger’s?”
“I think Rebecca has Asperger’s,” she said, and when I laughed, Maryse took heart and continued, “Bobby, I think, is a genius. Off the charts on every test.” For some reason, Maryse was now breathing hard. “He is the most amazing young man I have ever met.”
This sounded more than a little excessive. “‘Young man?’ The kid’s six years old!” I waited for her to respond to me, but Maryse said nothing. “Do you realize he’s trying to build a doomsday machine?”
I was thinking this might put the brakes on Maryse a little, and she remained silent for a long time, but then: “Well, Mr. Howe, if anyone was ever to succeed at something like that, I’d say it’s Bobby.” She laughed. “Can you say hi to him for me? And let him know that if he ever gets that machine built I’d love to join him in his post-apocalyptic world.”
Everyone always assumed there’d be some kind of world after doomsday—that the Earth, in some shape or form, would go on—and there’d be this lucky few whom Bobby would save and take with him into the next phase of human history. But Bobby kept this list of names—if it even existed—very close, and it was painful watching the assumptions of people like Vic and Maryse crumbling as they joked with Bobby about being notified of the apocalypse, a kind of nervousness creeping into their laughter as they waited for my son to offer some reassurance that he wouldn’t abandon them along with the billions of others when he finally lit that fuse. What made them think they’d be saved, that he’d want them around? I always wondered. The fact is, they needed Bobby to love them, and he knew that’s what they wanted, and he withheld it on purpose, watching them squirm, trying to please him in some way.
The only one who didn’t squirm was Otto Kovács. But, then, he had no intention of leaving the world, much less humanity, intact. There wasn’t going to be any new phase of human history in his apocalypse. No friends saved. No elect. Not even himself. I still wonder if that’s what fascinated and disturbed my son so much about Otto, why they started writing letters back and forth: here was someone, finally someone, who didn’t care whether Bobby liked him.
Which brings me right back around to Rebecca. I always believed, and still believe, that Bobby wanted to make the world better, wanted to destroy what was in order to bring about what could be, and that this idealism was obvious in everything he did, including his relationship with his mother, whose problems with Bobby could be traced exactly to her failure to understand this. He was, after all, the reason Rebecca and I got divorced, which began on that Monday morning in 1991 when we sat down to breakfast. Bobby watched as the two of us grumbled at each other over how little milk there was in the fridge, who should and shouldn’t have gotten groceries, why I’d showered before she did when I knew she had a 9:30 meeting, why she’d not folded the laundry last night, just once folded it, when I’d been doing it for weeks, and Bobby looked at both of us over his cantaloupe and quietly started whistling Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor. Not just part of it—the famous opening—but the whole thing, start to finish, and when he was done he picked up his breakfast plate, took it to the sink, and left the room, as if his actions, including the verdict on our marriage, was just business as usual, something that needed to be done, and we should for God’s sake get on with it.
We sat there staring after him. Of course, divorce had been on our minds a long time, but like most parents noodling along in the dry comforts of a dead marriage we’d convinced ourselves that our laziness was a kind of martyrdom, that staying together was the good thing to do—for the kid. But after that morning it was impossible. During every fight Rebecca and I had, Bobby would enter the room, cross his arms, and begin whistling the toccata and fugue.
When we finally told him it was over—the marriage—he let out a low sigh, and said, “Finally.” Then he looked at Rebecca and said, “It’s going to hurt for a while, but in the long run you’ll both be a lot happier—and so, by extension, will I.”
She never forgave him for that. It wasn’t so much that he made our divorce so easy, so possible, but that he’d known what was best better than she did, he�
��d had more wisdom, been brave where she’d been weak, been kinder and more forgiving than either of us, taking the worst of the divorce on himself, making us co-operate, continuing to exercise love while Rebecca and I were free to finally hate one another—and so she invented the Asperger’s to explain it away, to turn Bobby’s greatness into a failing, a lack of control, rather than something willed. Me, I was just happy to have her out of the house.
It’s no surprise, all things considered, that I got full custody. Rebecca disappeared into her happier life—off on business trips to trade shows, conferences, sales meetings, whatever it is they do in the world of smartphones—and had Bobby over on the occasional weekend when she was at home and unable to avoid having him around. Bobby always went along dutifully, saying, “As distasteful as she might find these sleepovers, Mom will one day be grateful to look back on the time we spent together. The few memories she has will somewhat mitigate her regret over all the fun things we could have done.” I shook my head to clear it, and then asked if he wasn’t getting anything out of it at all, and Bobby shrugged: “No, it’s boring over there. Run-of-the-mill mom and kid stuff. I put it on for her, you know—Mom the big authority, Bobby the little kid—to make her feel better. But I’d rather be here working on our doomsday machine.”
I kept doing my numbers, day in day out, at George Nix & Associates Chartered Accountants. Sometimes Bobby would sneak out of bed at night to peer over my shoulder at the figures and tables and code, shaking his head, saying he couldn’t sleep, sitting on my lap watching as I keyed in “all those boring numbers,” as he called them, and sooner or later he’d look into my face and say, “You know, you could do something different with your life. It’s not too late! So much of age is a function of the mind—an ingrained attitude.” He’d wait while I smiled and hit the equation keys to complete a spreadsheet, and then I would ask if he’d like to sit with me on the couch with a bowl of popcorn and watch The Omega Man or any of those other bad post-apocalyptic movies he was always researching and asking me to buy. Bobby would nod eagerly and we’d sit down, his small body snuggled beside me on the couch, my arm up along the backrest and around his shoulders.
So it went, year after year, until Bobby was nine, and Otto Kovács knocked on the door—or rather just before he knocked on the door.
We were sitting in the kitchen eating breakfast, Bobby and me, the Saturday before Halloween. Bobby was more excited than usual, which is saying something, though it was a nervous excitement, hopping around the table, glancing out the window, checking the time on the microwave. I finished, pushed my plate away, and looked at him. “You want to do something today? Laser Quest? Maybe drive in to the Science Centre in Toronto? Take another trip out to the Conestoga Reactor and see if we can finally get past the guards?”
“Oh, we can’t go anywhere,” Bobby said. “Otto Kovács is coming.”
“Otto what? Who are you talking about?”
He was talking about the Nazi nuclear program, that’s what he was talking about. “Otto Kovács,” he repeated, pronouncing the name with a very believable Hungarian accent. “He was a member of the original Uranverein.”
“Uranverein?” My German, by contrast, was terrible. “What the hell is the Uranverein?”
Bobby put his hand on my arm. “The Uranium Club,” he patiently explained. “German scientists who worked on nuclear fission. Some of them went on to form the second Uranverein in 1939. Kovács was a Hungarian physicist who ended up siding with Diebner against Heisenberg, when Diebner was administering the Kaiser-Wilhelm-Institut für Physik. . .”
“Jesus, Bobby, what the hell are you talking about?”
Bobby let out a long sigh. “Don’t you know anything?”
“No, I don’t know anything!”
“They were Hitler’s physicists, early theorists of the atomic bomb.”
I looked at Bobby like I was looking at some dark hole just prior to sticking my hand in.
“Some of them fell into American hands after the war,” he said, “but Kovács went back to Budapest in 1944, when it became obvious—to him at least—that Germany would lose the war.”
“Back to Budapest.” For some reason this didn’t sound like a good career move.
“He survived the siege of the city at the end of the war.” Bobby shook his head. “I could tell you about that.”
“I’ll bet you could.”
“Afterwards, when it looked like the Soviets weren’t going to leave—this was 1948, in case you don’t know—he got out fast. But for some reason,” Bobby paused a minute, “well, some reason I haven’t figured out yet, he never caught on in the west—like Heisenberg, von Laue, Hahn, von Weizsäcker, and some others—and he ended up tutoring high school and university physics students in Toronto. We’re lucky it was Toronto.” He stared at me. “I mean, if he was anywhere else, he wouldn’t have the money to come out here.” Bobby kept looking at me. “What?” he asked. Then he dropped his head. “I wrote him a letter, sent him some bus fare I saved up from my allowance. I thought since he’d been forgotten, it might make him feel better.” Bobby waited for me to say something, then made one last attempt to justify himself: “He’s one of the forgotten greats!”
I sat there, completely speechless. “So this guy is coming here? Today?”
Bobby got up from the table, walked out of the kitchen, and returned with a folder he pushed under my nose, marked with the words “Doomsday Machine Project—Otto Kovács,” in thick felt marker on the tab. I pushed my plate to one side and leafed through it, skimming Xeroxed copies of articles showing pictures of Kovács in Berlin in the 1930s and early 1940s, even a few from after the war, when he’d worked briefly for the Soviet weapons program. Mostly the file contained articles about other people—Heisenberg, along with the other scientists Bobby mentioned—with the name “Kovács” highlighted whenever it came up, notes along the margins in Bobby’s precise handwriting, and, at the end, a translation of the “open letter” Kovács wrote for the June 1947 issue of Nemzet-talanság, a short-lived anarchist newspaper published out of Miskolc (Bobby had remarked: “Three issues published, no extant copies of number two”).
This last article was the reason Bobby had contacted him. Kovács was definitely of the right-wing anarchist persuasion, hating government not because it prevented organic community, but because he didn’t want anyone—especially government—telling him what to do with himself, or his wife, or kids, or property (not that he had a wife or kids or property). The letter was ten pages long, more like an autobiographical essay, written in an attempt to justify where he’d ended up. He talked about Germany during the war, how the Nazis had failed to “properly fund” the “super-weapon” they’d been developing, how everything was constantly bogged down in “ideology and bureaucracy,” how various scientists had decamped to the Soviet or American authority, and who among them had “betrayed the principle of disinterested scientific inquiry by contaminating the laboratory with moral questions.” By this point, I could tell the letter was a long farewell, the last words of a man who knows he’s vanished into obscurity and will not get another chance to put into words his vision of life (or, in this case, his vision of the end of life).
Kovács finished with a description of what was awaiting him when he returned to Budapest in 1944—months of siege, soldiers looting the city, dead bodies in the streets, starving civilians, places so devastated you could no longer tell if you were standing on a street or on top of some fallen building. It was all there—rapes witnessed, throats slit over wristwatches, fires burning people alive. But what was truly remarkable was his fascination with the machinery of war—the tanks, the guns, the airplanes, all of it—set down in complete reverence, as if in addressing them he was addressing some higher intelligence, even a god. It was here that the words “doomsday machine” made their first appearance. Bobby, reading over my shoulder, said, “It had something to do with evolution.” He pointed to the relevant but vague passages, and then read ver
batim, “‘Not the National Socialist understanding of Darwin, not the emergence of the super-man, the Aryan master race. This is not evolution as the siege made it known to me,’” wrote Kovács, “‘rooted in that absurd organic determinism. When I speak of the machinery of evolution I am not using a metaphor.’”
I looked at Bobby, one eyebrow raised, then went back to the letter. “The siege,” Kovács wrote, “radically altered my opinion of our labours.” For the first time, he was happy not to be working under Nazi guidance, for while Hitler would have used the super-weapon to rid the world of certain races only to have other races take their place—which had seemed like an okay idea to Kovács back in the day—Kovács now wanted to get rid of all races, period.
“Equal-opportunity genocide,” Bobby said, clearly in disagreement with Kovács.
“You say he’s coming here?” I asked, coming up from the depths of the file and the information it contained. Without waiting for Bobby’s reply, I continued, “So he wants to destroy all humanity, and you just want to destroy most of it—what’s the difference?”
It was the first time I’d done that—seriously taken up what Bobby had been doing all these years—and I could see in his eyes that I’d broken some rule, transgressed some code in which my indulgence, my humour, my forbearance, acted as a counterweight to his own behaviour, keeping it all in the realm of play. But this wasn’t play anymore. Otto Kovács was coming, and I had no idea what to expect.
“I never said I’d actually go through with it,” Bobby quietly replied.