by Tamas Dobozy
“You just want the power? Is that it?”
“Yes.” He laughed maniacally. “Yes, that’s it! I just want the power!”
“Seriously?” I said.
“No.” He shook his head. “Power’s no good unless you can use it. I’d have to use it.”
I could not for the life of me tell whether he was kidding or serious. But I had to laugh. The way he said it, the whole thing, was so ridiculous.
Otto Kovács showed up early that afternoon, around one o’clock. Bobby ran to the door and had it unlocked and open before I’d had a chance to come in from the kitchen and peer out the window to see what Kovács looked like, whether he’d brought along any henchmen, whether the sky had suddenly darkened on his arrival, the wind begun to blow, forked lightning in the sky. He stepped into our home on a sunny autumn day looking indescribably old, worn out, broken, a tattered black overcoat hanging off his bony shoulders, a white goatee trimmed short, hair missing in patches, a twig-like cane in one hand and a creased leather suitcase in the other. The look in his eyes was neither mean, nor wary, nor embittered—none of the things you’d expect from a mad scientist. Instead, he looked grateful, and in fact the first words out of his mouth were directed at me and Bobby both: “It’s so nice to finally meet you,” he said, his Hungarian accent thickening every word, “and thank you very much for inviting me to your home.” He looked around. “It’s been a while since anyone let me inside.”
I could see how that might be the case. There was a smell on him you got from month-old beer bottles not properly rinsed. I could picture him in one of those drippy apartments in Toronto’s east end, broken furniture propped up with outdated phone books, scarred coffee tables with the veneer peeling off, drawers full of mismatched knives and forks, dishcloths duct taped around the handles of frying pans. It was all there in my mind, along with the room dedicated to Kovács’s work—the tin filing cabinets, the cardboard file boxes, the shelves of books stacked haphazardly to the ceiling, charts and diagrams and mathematical formulas pinned to the wall, the very small dossier, not much bigger than Bobby’s, filled with clippings on Kovács’s career. And spread across the floor were the blueprints for the super-weapon that he’d sit down to every day, and which were no further advanced than they had been in 1948. But what flashed through my mind, more than this, was an image of Kovács walking out of his apartment every day, past the whores on the front steps recovering from a hard night, through the park, Allan Gardens, drug dealers bopping alongside asking if he wanted pot, meth, crack, keeping up their pitch until another potential customer came along, across Church Street heading west, three or four blocks during which the city shed its homeless and overnight shelters and bedsits and took on business towers, gaslit restaurants, and finally the hipster scene along Queen, its boutiques and sparkling electronics and restaurants overflowing with mojitos and brie burgers and fresh sushi and designer coffees and the clientele to go with them. But it was all the same to Kovács no matter where he walked, the things he’d seen in Budapest during the winter of 1945 had not ceased—there were still those who scrambled in the ruins because of those others who soared above—as if the siege stretched right across history, as if the siege was all of history, and the only way to end it was to reach the threshold and refuse to carry anything human across. Kovács was never out of it, he knew better than to even want out of it, and he’d take relief from Queen Street, from the way it made the siege real, and then turn and walk home again to sit in front of his blueprints, dreaming of the new elements, the new radiation, that would finally allow him to pass from theory to practice.
And now he was in my house.
Kovács reached into his bag. “Dom Perignon,” he said, smiling at both of us, “1996.”
I looked at him, at the bottle, at Bobby who was grinning. “That’s an excellent vintage,” my son said, “though some claim the 1985 is better.”
“Assholes,” Kovács replied, then looked at me. “I’ll prove it to you. That is, if your father doesn’t mind. You see, it’s a very special day for me: I’ve been remembered.”
Bobby looked at him and frowned. “That’s surprising,” he said, and I could it hear it already, that tone Bobby used, for instance at the junkyard, whenever he realized he was dealing with an imbecile. “Surprising because I thought the whole point of what you were doing—and correct me if I’m wrong—was to be forgotten. Isn’t that right? If what you want is an end to human history, then surely ‘being remembered’ is no concern of yours.”
“True,” nodded Kovács, looking at him grimly. “I hadn’t thought of that.” He reached into his bag again and brought out three champagne flutes made out of what looked like stainless steel, gave one to each of us, popped the cork right there in our entryway, and poured two huge glasses for him and me, and a small one for Bobby. “To nothingness, then,” he said.
I took a quick sip before Bobby did, thinking that if it tasted funny, if it was poison, I’d still have time to reach over and stop my son from drinking. But the champagne tasted amazing. We drank up, then Kovács refilled my glass and his own, and, after a glance at me, gave Bobby a little more.
There it was in my son’s eyes as always: that same fearlessness, that command, that air of being two steps ahead of whatever we were thinking.
“So, uh, how did you two meet?” I asked.
“I wrote him a letter care of CSIS,” Bobby replied.
“Ah,” I said, abandoning my previous vision of Kovács in Toronto, “you work for CSIS?”
Kovács shook his head. “Nooooo,” he replied, looking at Bobby as if I’d just said the stupidest thing. “They just know where to find me.”
“Nazi atomic scientist,” Bobby added. “CSIS would be interested in keeping tabs.”
“Of course,” I muttered, feeling like an idiot.
“Well,” Kovács said, smacking his lips and taking from us the champagne flutes and putting them back into his bag. He nodded at Bobby. “You want to do this here?”
I looked at my son, then back at Kovács. “Do what?” I asked.
“Examine the prototype,” Bobby said.
“Prototype? Bobby, what the fuck . . . ?” I stopped talking immediately, never having sworn in front of Bobby before, and Kovács was looking at me and shaking his head as if I was the worst father on Earth. “You brought a prototype into my house?”
Kovács appealed to Bobby for help. “The basement,” Bobby said, glancing at the windows as if at this very moment CSIS agents were hiding in the hedge, peering into windows, crawling headfirst down the chimney with high-tech eavesdropping gear. “The basement,” he said again, pointing, and Kovács put his hat back on and followed my son down the stairs.
It was damp down there, smelling of cinderblock, kitty litter, too much humidity. Bobby cleared a spot on the Ping-Pong table with a sweep of his arm, sending our junkyard scraps clattering to the floor, then indicated a spot where Kovács could lay out his gear. The old man reached into his bag, groped around blindly, rejecting one thing after another before his eyes widened and he pulled out what looked like a long looping horn, almost a trumpet but with more twists and only a single red button on top. He held it a while, and looking closely I could see how delicate it was, almost as if it were made of silver foil origami, carefully folded, and so thin that touching it too hard would tear a hole.
“It’s actually pretty tough,” Kovács said, seeing the look on my face. He shrugged. “You were expecting something big, right? Ironclad? That’s the mistake they all make. Simplicity is the essence of good design,” he whispered, “even—no, especially—in doomsday machines.” He held up the horn. “Steve Jobs is a big hero of mine.”
“This is stupid,” I said, blurting it out. I looked at Bobby, who grimaced and held out his hand for the device. But Kovács shook his head and gripped it to his chest.
“You should go,” I said to Kovács, stepping in front of Bobby, who looked like he was going to pounce on Kovács, rip the devi
ce from his hand, and press the red button or blow into it or whatever you were supposed to do. Kovács was tapping his fingers on the rim of the bell, staring at me now with eyes popping, lips stretched tight across his teeth. Then he held it out to me. “Why not take it?” he said, though I could barely make out the words, as though he were muttering to nobody at all. “You of all people,” he snarled. “Take it!” I looked at it and shook my head. “You have sacrificed your life,” Kovács continued. “Since your divorce you have not slept with a woman.” He jabbed the horn in my direction, trying to get me to take it. “You have not spent time with your friends. You have no friends! Not anymore. You spend every hour of every day either at work—a job that bores you to tears, I might add—and the rest of the time trying to shore up your . . . crazy child’s fantasy world. At night you’ve barely got the energy for a glass of whiskey.” He continued to hold out the horn, though his arm was trembling. “By the time your son is old enough to leave, what’s going to be left? Or perhaps that’s when you’re going to need this?” He jiggled the horn, and I finally reached over and ripped it from his hand. It was unbelievably heavy, like an anchor, and almost pulled me to the floor. I’d had some grand gesture in mind, breaking it over my knee, but it was all I could do to stay on my feet.
Bobby stepped in and grabbed the device, moving so fast I was startled and stepped back, and even though he quickly grabbed on with the other hand he still had to squat to keep from being pulled over, and ended up dropping it. The whole movement took about one second, which was long enough for Bobby to register the betrayal in my eyes, and for me to see the understanding in his. I knew what he’d done—detailing my pitiful life in those letters to his mad scientist pen pal, Kovács.
“My world would be beautiful,” Kovács said. “It would be evolution,” he continued, not interested in Bobby and me or what was going on between us. “None of that stuff you see in books and movies—where humanity has disappeared, and in its place trees and flowers have taken over the cities. All butterflies and blue skies and no factories or cars or overcrowded apartments anywhere.” Kovács snorted. “I’m talking about true evolution! In its essence!” Bobby crossed his arms and looked at Kovács with an eyebrow raised. “Why does everyone assume that evolution is so clean, so untechnological?” Kovács whispered, squatting down to speak to my son. “Who’s not to say that all of this”—he indicated the world outside—“all those oil spills, radiation leaks, tar sands, spewing factories, cars by the billions, aren’t exactly what nature intended for humanity? It let us have these brains and abilities, didn’t it? Maybe all this industrial waste is a fulfilment of our evolutionary destiny. Maybe it’s our natural purpose to wipe out biological life as we know it. I’ll bet you environmentalists haven’t thought of that, have you?”
“I’m not an environmentalist,” said Bobby, offended. “Or at least not in the sense you’re thinking of. Anyhow, what’s your point?”
Kovács went on as if he hadn’t heard him. “No! And that’s because at its heart environmentalism is really a kind of ultra-conservatism. What you people want, more than anything, is for nothing to change—no species lost, no land masses drowned under rising tides, no alteration in the ecosystem as it stands. Or maybe you’re even more conservative than that! Maybe like all conservatives you want to return to some mythic golden past! Bring back the dodo! Restore the rainforest! Let’s have dinosaurs! You see, on this planet nothing is what it is, everything’s constantly becoming (from the perspective of geological time, of course), and that’s evolution—continual transformation with no end in sight. It’s neither good nor bad, it just is.”
“Jesus,” said Bobby, “I had no idea you were such a fucking pedant.” He looked at me and tilted his head as a way of saying sorry for using a swearword.
“Think of what we could bring about,” Kovács said. “All those chemicals and isotopes and ozone-corroding gasses we’re leaking everywhere. Bizarre hybrid plants! Dogs with ten eyes! Whales with massive prehensile legs! Or it could be so much more! By which I mean less!”
“More?” Bobby was skeptical.
“Less?” I asked.
“Maybe it’s not a question of new organic life forms,” said an exultant Kovács. “Maybe the next evolutionary leap is beyond biology. Maybe our destiny is to wipe out all biological life—us included—in order to bring about this next phase! Maybe where this planet is headed, what we’ve evolved to bring about, is machines—robots, inorganic lives of steel and microchips and isotopes wandering across a planet reduced to plutonium dust!” Kovács stood up again. “Why not?” he said. “If evolution is about adapting to environment, and we’re poisoning the environment, then that would be a logical development. What if that’s nature’s grand design, and we’re just doing our small, humble part to enable it?”
Bobby shrugged, bored. I looked at my hands, preparing to throw out Kovács.
The old man lifted the device from the floor with one hand as if it weighed nothing. “That’s what I saw during the siege,” he said. “I’d get up in the morning, go out for water, and right in front of my door there was some soldier, his head run over by a tank. Crushed flat. Brains everywhere. And it occurred to me that rather than building machines to destroy ourselves we were destroying ourselves to build machines. That was our inescapable purpose.”
“It sounds like Battlestar Galactica,” said Bobby.
“First or second series?” Kovács asked.
“Second of course,” replied Bobby, snorting. He nodded toward the device held in Kovács’s hand. “So that’s it?”
“This?” Kovács lifted the device to his lips, blew into it, and a horrible squawking sound echoed throughout the basement. “I thought I could improve the trumpet,” he said. “What would Steve Jobs do? He’d take out the three valves and just have one.” He pressed the red button down. Nothing happened, but despite myself I looked around, expecting the basement walls to quake. “Now I just have to figure out the causing-doomsday part of it.”
There was a moment of silence, and then Bobby spoke: “Otto,” he said, “please tell me you haven’t come in here under false pretenses—telling me you’ve perfected the . . .”
“In theory!” the old man protested. “I’ve perfected it in theory!”
“You insult my father,” Bobby continued, “never mind that what you say is true. But most importantly, I’m afraid we have deep philosophical differences regarding doomsday. For one thing”—he got up, dusted off his pants, and then looked the old man right in the eye—“here are some people, a small remnant, whom I would save. You see, I’m firmly rooted in the humanist tradition when it comes to the apocalypse.”
There was a second of silence as Kovács looked at my son—and I could see something forming on his lips, arguments, counter-arguments, questions as to who Bobby planned to save, and why, and what the point of that would be—but before he could say a word I started to laugh, and I kept right on laughing as I grabbed Kovács from behind, causing him to drop the device, and pushed him up the stairs and out the front door.
“I sure was a weird kid,” Bobby says, sitting beside me at the table and looking at the device. He’s visiting with his wife, Anna-Marie, and their son, my grandson, Lucas, as they do twice a year, once at Christmas, and once in July for the week of my birthday. Bobby’s a million miles away from me. In fact, you might say that Bobby—the Bobby this story’s about—is long dead, passed away with all the other lives your child leads, all the people he is, from birth to adolescence to adulthood, each child I loved buried away and inaccessible to me in Bobby as he is now. I’m marking it again in Lucas with every visit—the kid he is, and the kid he will not be the next time they fly all the way from Australia to visit me.
“All that doomsday stuff,” Bobby says, opening a beer, “very weird.” It sounds like an apology, and I look at my son in his jeans, his blue shirt, the sneakers he’s kicked off on the floor beside the kitchen table, where most nights we sit around drinkin
g wine or playing cards, trying with all my might not to ask them to stay another week, a few more days, making up stories from a life I’m not living, all that stuff I’m not really busy with—buddies, lady friends, trips to the track or the opera, junkets to Las Vegas—the life I’ve invented so that Bobby can be at ease with the choices he’s made, as I’ve done every step of the way.
“No,” I say, “you weren’t weird at all. You were perfect.”
Acknowledgements
Some of the stories in this book were first published (a few of them in earlier versions) in the following places:
“The Animals of the Budapest Zoo, 1944-1945” appeared in Raritan.
“The Restoration of the Villa Where Tíbor Kálmán Once Lived” first appeared in One Story, and was subsequently published in the PEN/O. Henry Prize Stories 2011: The Best Stories of the Year.
“The Beautician” appeared in The Southern Review.
“Days of Orphans and Strangers” appeared in Fiction.
“Rosewood Queens” appeared in The New Quarterly.
“The Encirclement” first appeared in Granta, and was subsequently published in The Best American Nonrequired Reading 2010, and then translated into Esperanto by Einar Faanes and published in Beletra Almanako.
“The Miracles of Saint Marx” appeared in Alaska Quarterly Review.
“The Selected Mug Shots of Famous Hungarian Assassins” appeared in Camera Obscura.
I can’t overstate my gratitude to the editors, staff, supporters and readers of these journals (and others) whose advice, interest, and encouragement kept me from quitting through seven otherwise lean years. It’s still the purest publishing experience I know—done neither for fame nor money, only the love of the story. A huge thanks to Pei-Ling Lue for extraordinary editorial commitment and believing in the work more than I did, and to Cara Blue Adams for making an exception.