Universe of Two

by Stephen P. Kiernan

  Then I turned to see Chris drinking—and the truth is, he looked amazing: his strong jaw, his muscular throat, the poise of his hand holding the glass. I had never known a boy could be so handsome just drinking water.

  “Ahhh.” He gave himself a refill from the pitcher. “Hits the spot.”

  “You were saying, Chris?” I prompted. Calm as a pond, all I had to do was wait out whatever he wanted to say. Then I could deliver my little rehearsed speech, and everything would be fine. “About being upside down?”

  “Right,” he snapped his fingers. “Also what you said last night, about how I barely know you. I said I would find a perfect answer and today I did.”

  “Then your day was better than mine,” I said. It broke his stride a little, and I could see him weighing whether to ask about my day. Instead he charged ahead.

  “I need to be right side up, Brenda. Especially until the war ends, and we bury Hitler and his boys under good American bombs. I need to know you better, too, is my point, I need all the time it takes to know a person as well as you possibly can. There is one thing we can do that would take care of both necessities, both at the same time, which is why it is the perfect answer. If I ask the perfect question.”

  He dug in a pocket. “And then, princess, if you give me the perfect answer.”

  On the table in front of me, Chris placed a little box. It was velvet and blue.

  “Wait.” I held up both hands. Now I understood his nervousness. I should have seen this coming five blocks away. “This is not going to happen, mister.”

  He smiled, suddenly calm. “It is already happening.”

  “No it’s not.” I stood. “You are not asking me. You can’t.”

  He came forward, as if onto one knee. “I am about to, if you’d—”

  “I have to go,” I said, grabbing my things. Maybe I was a fool, maybe this was the only time a guy would ever ask me, maybe the war would take Chris, would ruin Charlie, would crush my selfish little heart. But I could not stay in that place one second longer.

  “Brenda, don’t be silly. This is our moment.”

  I moved away from the table, backing toward the door. “I hope you are all right over there. Truly I do. And come home in one piece. I’m sorry, but I have to go.”

  I ran from that diner at top speed. As far as I know, he did not follow. If he had, I suspect the big man behind the counter would have tackled him.

  The sidewalk felt like a running track, hard and straight. I heard only the slap of my shoes and the sound of my breathing. Before I knew it I was home, panting by the front steps. Gone half an hour, but everything had changed. The lights were on inside. My mother knew nothing about what I’d been through, what trouble I’d invited onto myself, what hurt I had probably done to a decent guy who wanted to go back to the war confident that a girl would be waiting for him—even if he didn’t know her—to have another reason to stay alive.

  Some part of me also feared that Chris would chase me, would try to talk me into it. Out of weakness I might say yes just to keep from breaking his heart twice in one hour. So I hurried up the steps and into the house and shut the door tight.

  “In here,” my mother called from the kitchen.

  “Oh, Mama,” I said, hurrying in to her.

  “Mama?” She turned from the sink. “Since when do you call me that?”

  “Since now.” I rushed into her arms. And when she put them around me, I thought I would burst into tears. But I didn’t. Instead I felt the most immense liberation. Gigantic. What kind of a monster was I, to cut a suitor cold like that, and feel only relief?

  My mother pulled away, scanning my face. “Let me look at you.”

  “I’m all right. I’m really all right.”

  “Was it a bad boy you were mixed up with?”

  I shook my head. “Not bad. But he was no Charlie Fish.”

  She smiled. “There’s only one of them.”

  “I need to go,” I said, expecting her to argue, predicting her resistance. “I can’t stay here. I need to leave Chicago.”

  “Probably you do, Brenda.”

  “Excuse me?”

  “Before you pack your bags though, look at this.” She drew me to the breakfast table, where a map of New Mexico was already spread flat.

  “This is the homework I had to leave the store to do today. Did you know that libraries subscribe to newspapers from all over? They have a whole room of them.” She handed me a list she’d made. “These are jobs in Santa Fe, from the want ads. A church is looking for an organist and choir director. Land that, and all we’d have to do is find you a place to live.”

  “This is possible?”

  “This is necessary, my girl. For about twenty reasons.”

  “And I would go?” I asked. “And live there?”

  “I’m betting there isn’t an organist of your ability in two hundred miles of Santa Fe. And working as a professional will keep you skilled for the conservatory.”

  My hands dropped to my sides. “Mother.”

  “I know,” she said. Our eyes met. What she was suggesting meant something huge. She would be the only one of us left in Chicago. And I would follow my heart to New Mexico. For the first time in my life, I thought my mother looked old.

  She lit a cigarette, making a slow upward exhale. “I know, my girl. I know.”

  26.

  As it turned out, he had learned everything he needed to know from Beasley. A tortoise with a soldering iron, Charlie squatted on the wide fabrication table, half-trusting the sawhorses that held it up, and built his assembly step by torturous step. How odd it was, that the stork man in a Chicago basement had brought him to this point: fourteen devices in a single circuit, more than anyone had built before, designed to detonate simultaneously. Leaning over the triggering place, and reaching four devices down the line, he touched the tester’s sensors to each end. The white light blinked on, the indicator needle jumped. Easing down as if from a rickety ladder, he allowed himself a second to admire his progress.

  “Why are you climbing around like that?”

  Charlie jerked upright, catching his breath, and saw Mather leaning in the doorway. He took out a toothpick and needled his front teeth. “You look like a monkey.”

  “The testing device is too small,” Charlie answered. “Short wires. I have to test the assembly in parts.”

  Mather smirked. “It wouldn’t occur to you to connect more wire, so you could check the whole thing? Start to finish?”

  “I tried that for two weeks.” Charlie circled the fabrication table. “But whenever something didn’t work, I had to diagnose piece by piece anyway.”

  “I heard two of your last ones didn’t go off as planned.”

  “True. But ten did, which was a new record.”

  “Sounds like failure to me.” Tonguing the toothpick to one side of his mouth, Mather sauntered into the room. Wires splayed all over the table, threading among little mounds of electronic parts. “Reminds me of a toy train.”

  Charlie climbed gingerly on the near corner, hunching the tester over more nodes. “Maybe, but it’s a powerful toy.”

  “Still,” Mather said. “It appears you deserve your nickname.”

  The needle jumped again. “I have a nickname?”

  “Come on,” Mather scoffed. “You were probably the first to know.”

  Charlie crept off the table. “I don’t know what day it is. I can’t remember the last time I showered, or ate an actual meal.” He straightened, the tester’s wires dangling. “Nicknames have not been a priority.”

  Mather took out his toothpick and inspected the tip. “Bronsky must have a string tied directly to your balls.”

  Charlie circled his project, then paused. “Did you hear that the SS killed fifty thousand Poles last week, to retaliate for the Warsaw uprising? Bronsky is not the problem. I have fifty thousand strings tied to me.”

  “What a good soldier you are,” Mather scoffed.

  “I hope not.” Charlie
arrived at the last four points in his circuit. Mather stood in front of them. “Excuse me,” Charlie said.

  “I’m in your way.” Mather stepped aside, then leaned on another corner of the table. It began to tip and Charlie rushed over.

  “Please. This is weeks of work. No touching.”

  “You,” Mather said, hands high like he was under arrest, “are a man incapable of irony. Using it, recognizing it.”

  Charlie narrowed his eyes. “Why do you insist on being such a difficult person?”

  Mather sighed, giving him a bland regard. “I wonder if you would understand.”

  Charlie set down the tester. “Try me.”

  “All right.” He pointed with the toothpick. “For all of your gee-whiz ways, Fish, there have been times in your life in which you were the smartest person in the room.”

  “Oh, I don’t know about—”

  “Spare me the oh-shucks. You were admitted to Harvard, so you were likely first in your class in high school. Probably the sharpest mind in some college classes too. Didn’t you graduate at twenty?”

  “This project grabbed me before graduation,” Charlie said. “But I was eighteen.”

  “There.” Mather leaned against an empty desk, crossing his arms. “Now imagine being the smartest person in the room, for every room you ever inhabit. Imagine how tedious humanity would seem. How shallow. ‘Hello, how are you today?’ God help me.”

  “Is that your affliction, Mather? Too smart to be nice?”

  “You mock me, which I may deserve. But I tell you this, Fish: Over in Theoretical, I am no big deal. Fermi has intellectual thunderbolts that reimagine the world. Just crossing the street, he realized that atomic reactions could occur. And Bethe, calculation by calculation, has such colossal brain power, I feel like an ant.”

  Mather straightened. “It may well turn out that this strange, perverse, remote place is the happiest I will ever be.”

  Charlie had no idea how to answer. Was the man indulging in unbridled arrogance? Or was he committing brutal honesty? He decided to change the subject.

  “Tell me,” Charlie said. “What became of your beautiful sister?”

  Mather shrugged. “She’s a WAC. Some hospital in London. Rarely writes.”

  “Maybe she’ll meet a prince, like you always thought she deserved.”

  Mather paused before a blueprint of the Gadget, the sphere with nodes poking out. This version was more detailed than the one at Sebring’s lecture, with measurements, dimensions, details about how much explosive would be placed in each node. “Prince or not, he’d better have a decent backhand.”

  Meanwhile, Charlie had turned from him, leaning over the last set of nodes. He touched the tester’s wires to either end, and the little white light came on. “There it is,” he announced. “The whole thing works. Fourteen detonators on one command.”

  “Bravo.” Mather made to clap his hands but they never touched.

  “A relief, actually. Time to tell the boss.”

  Mather continued to study the blueprint. “He’s unavailable just now.”

  Charlie wandered over, running his eyes across the sphere’s detailed sketch too. Something bothered him, now that the assembly was complete. What exactly, he could not say. “Why is he unavailable?”

  “Because it is five fifteen on a Tuesday morning. I suspect the Detonation Division director is busy dreaming of icy Moscow winters or summer days at Lake Baikal.”

  “Five fifteen on Tuesday?” Charlie said, suddenly feeling fatigue in all his bones. “I’ve been here since Sunday afternoon. Forgive me, but I believe I’ll go for a walk.”

  He threw a sheet over the fabricator table, then snatched his coat.

  “Trigger,” Mather said.

  “Excuse me?”

  “That’s your nickname. Trigger.”

  Charlie stopped. “You must be joking.”

  “It’s what everyone says. In Chemistry, Electronics. Even in Theoretical. I’d wager that Oppie, if he is aware of your existence, doesn’t know your real name. Only Trigger.”

  Charlie stood near the doorway, fuming. “That is unfair. I am not responsible for how this technology is used. If anyone is the trigger, it’s Oppenheimer. I’m just a math kid, doing what he’s told.”

  Mather chuckled. “You keep telling yourself that, Fish. It may help you sleep tonight, not to mention forty years from now. But everyone on The Hill is complicit. We are all building the Gadget. And we will all be guilty of the crimes it commits.”

  “I am not making a Gadget,” Charlie said. “I’m making a circuit of detonators. You could use them with dynamite to build a road. You could use them in mining.”

  “You could,” Mather said. “Though I prefer Sebring’s description.” He tossed his toothpick in the trash. “‘Weaponry whose force exceeds our imagination.’”

  Charlie jammed his arms in his coat sleeves. “I’m going for a walk.”

  He was halfway down the hall before Mather yelled after him: “Trigger.”

  The barracks had barely begun stirring for the day. A few technicians were lined up at the sinks. Others stood waiting for a shower. One boy put finishing touches on a letter. Another kneeled on the floor beside his bunk, with closed eyes and folded hands.

  Charlie staggered past, leaning forward as if gravity were drawing him toward sleep. Instead of untying his shoes, he stepped on their heels and pulled. Unbuttoning his shirt, he saw that there was no envelope on his pillow. Twenty-five days.

  He slid a box from under the bed, and opened it. There were her previous letters, arranged by date. He shouldn’t write to her again. He’d put himself at Brenda’s mercy, and her reply had been no reply, for almost a month. Only an idiot would fail to admit what that meant. Only a fool would keep hoping.

  Charlie stretched out on the bunk, still dressed. Fifty things happened every day that he wanted to tell Brenda. And no answer was not a real answer. Maybe she was trying to decide. Maybe she needed a nudge. Maybe she wanted one.

  “Why not?” He took out pen and paper. But where to start? Should he take back what he wrote in his last letter, and the offer to let him go? Should he tell her what those twenty-five days had been like, not hearing from her? Whichever, of course he should write. Silence never helped anyone.

  “Dear Brenda,” he wrote. “Dear, dear Brenda.” Charlie lowered his head to the pillow to think. What should he tell her about first? Three breaths, and he was asleep.

  In midafternoon, he had company. Midnight snuck aboard, snuggling against the bend in his knees. Charlie ruffled her head, and she climbed over for easier petting.

  Only then did he fully awaken, and see that her normally black fur now had large spots of white—on her front legs and dotting her chest.

  “Where have you been, little miss?” His forefinger circled her ear. “What place have you been going where you do not belong?”

  By way of answer, Midnight stretched out a white-tipped paw and began to purr.

  27.

  The train to Lamy felt eternal, but I did not think I was going to die until I boarded the bus to Santa Fe. Despite impressive squealing, the brakes had so little grip, I doubted they could stop a mouse on roller skates. You asked for this, Brenda, I told myself, clutching the seat back ahead of me. You chose this.

  When at last I stepped off the bus into a broad plaza, clean August sun poured down on us all. The buildings were small, none more than two stories, and spotless. The air smelled woody and sweet, and lacked the familiar hardness of Chicago. Almost immediately I felt myself warming and relaxing.

  Before that trip, I had never been farther from Hyde Park than eastern Wisconsin, at my aunt Claire’s place on Lake Michigan. Now I’d covered twelve hundred miles, to work for people I’d never met, in a place I’d never seen. Before my trip, I spent an afternoon in the library scouring picture books of New Mexico: landscapes, Indians, and the Spanish people. Not one photo of a church organ.

  Travel had tested me: a wrenc
hing good-bye from my mother that left us both weepy and weak, the melancholy of leaving a city by train, seeing its back-lot debris as if to say this place was never what you thought, never as pretty or kind. I was suspicious of strangers in nearby seats, anxious about my luggage in a separate car. Away from home, all my confidence turned out to be bravado.

  “Here you are, miss.”

  I jumped, but the porter only smiled and gestured at my bags on the sidewalk.

  “Thank you.” I tipped him a dime, hoping that was right. “Will there be a taxi along any time soon?”

  “Not many taxis in this town, miss. Where you heading?”

  I told him the address and he nodded. “Five blocks off, up that street there.”

  I watched closely where he pointed, saying to myself five five five. Although I felt intrepid, I could not wait to finish the journey, so I could write to my mother and Greta, sweet forgiving Greta, and tell them every little thing.

  The only question was my bags. I could manage each one on my own, but carrying two would be a backbreaker. Three was out of the question. I poked my head into a little rug and pottery shop, dim and cool, abandoned by the looks of it. “Hello?”

  “Buenos dias,” said a woman I had not noticed, perched on a stool to one side. She had dark skin and the blackest hair, while around her neck hung a pendant of silver and turquoise. It was stunning.

  “Yes, hello.” I cleared my throat, and pointed out at the sidewalk. “I need to leave my suitcases here for a few minutes. Would that be all right?”

  She replied in a string of Spanish, and the only word I understood was senorita. But her smile I comprehended just fine. I tapped the face of my watch. “Quick as I can.”

  I set two suitcases beside her doorway, toting the heaviest one first. Five blocks, and I set off in the direction the man had pointed. After a hundred steps I began to understand what people had meant about the thin air. I flushed warm, felt my heart speeding up, while the suitcase seemed to gain weight with every block. The cross street came along in due time, and I forged on till I reached the right number. It was a wooden frame house, with open stairs hugging one side of the building. On the porch sat a woman in a sleeveless white shirt, drying her hair with a towel.