They were unused to spending money but they had bought a new car with all-wheel drive and airbags, and Louisa drove it daily to the construction site they had chosen together, fifty miles away, along a westward-facing slope of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains within walking distance of the school in the town of Chimayo. There would be no mortgage: Tilly would pay for everything.
While they were still in Oklahoma, he had gone to an FLV branch office to sign a direct-deposit form for the distribution of the trust, and when he came back out Louisa was waiting for him behind the wheel of her old car, which they were about to scrap. “End of the war?” she asked.
“Yes,” he said.
“Did you win?”
“Nobody won, but we get the spoils.”
She started the car. Tilly was crying. She asked, “It ain’t all spoils, is it?”
“Guess not,” Tilly said. “Some of it was a gift.”
Days later, his account was credited with a sum so large, by their lights, that it made the work they’d done to accumulate what savings they had—the years of hours, the deferred medical procedures, the private daily austerities that each had represented its own small accomplishment—meaningless.
But they had made their choice.
Weekdays, on her way to the construction site, she checked their box at the P.O. in Los Alamos. Her passport arrived within two months of her application. His, for some reason, was delayed.
She liked to watch the house taking shape. A shelter made on a place that was theirs. It was a true adobe house with bricks made from mud and straw, and a portal, and vigas in the principle rooms that extended outside beyond the edges of the roof, and kiva fireplaces in the bedrooms, and long canales to keep the rain from undermining the foundation as had happened to the Heflin place. She wanted this house to last a thousand years.
Having no refrigerator in the warehouse, most nights they boiled soup from a can for supper. Afterward they read or talked outside by a wood fire—or sometimes drove deeper into the Jemez to an unmarked trailhead and got out wearing wool socks and winter coats and followed the trail guided by flashlights that showed their breath in the cold as the trail switchbacked through densely smelling pines and around fallen boulders, and the trail made a final sharp turn downward, and they stepped over a cleft in the rocks and arrived at a hot spring where they took off their clothes and got in the water and watched the galaxies or the clouds while snow fell through the mountains and lost itself in the steam above the pools. Hippie kids came there from Santa Fe, shyly taking off their clothes and talking softly and smoking pot, and one of them took a long breath and put his mouth to a didgeridoo and submerged his head and played dirges from underwater. Other nights the two of them had the place to themselves.
After three more months of wrangling—as well as a final intervening phone call to Washington from Lorch—Tilly’s passport arrived, and they drove down to Albuquerque and left the car in the long-term lot and checked their bags and passed through security and boarded the plane.
As it was taking off she said a prayer. She had never flown before. Once they reached cruising altitude, he asked if she was all right. She said she was fine, pressing the button inside the armrest as if to see what it was for, although inwardly she was still speaking to God and listening for any guidance he might be willing to give. By the time the plane was hurtling toward the runway in Newark, God had indeed begun to speak with her—of his darker proclivities, his taste for mayhem, his willingness to lead us into wildernesses and into further wildernesses inside them.
One by one the passengers went down the aisle of the plane into the jetway and through the terminal door where they merged into a human current, thousands of people flowing as one substance through the veins of a creature unknowable by them because they were a part of it.
And God spoke through the burble of roller bags, the birdcall alarm of electric shuttle carts ferrying the elderly to their gates, the many spoken tongues she couldn’t identify, the skidding soles on tiles, the rhythmic thumping of the moving sidewalk: all of it feeding into one voice, answering her in a way she strained to hear.
At passport control she stood beside her luggage, waiting, listening hard.
She handed the agent her document. He opened it and laid it flat on the black screen crisscrossed with red lasers, and she understood at last what the voice was saying and why. Her arm was crooked in Tilly’s arm, and she pulled him close.
She had to stop here, she said. She mustn’t go any farther from home than she’d already come. She was very sorry. He’d have to go the rest of the way without her. She would rent a hotel room outside the airport and wait for him to return.
* * *
• • •
“I THOUGHT YOU WOULD BE a physicist or mathematician,” the priest said, “from the secret desert city of doom.”
He showed Tilly to a miniature chair, a one-piece polypropylene shell affixed by concealed rivets to a frame of steel tubing. A dozen such chairs were arranged in groups of three around similarly miniature work tables, and there was a knee-high drinking fountain and bookcase and little garbage cans for little garbage. No adult-size desk presided as in the one-room Calamus school of Tilly’s youth: if he had rightly understood, this facility where the priest had arranged for them to meet was not the children’s school but their home, and the present room a place not for instruction but for independent and group study. An adult here felt the wrongness of his size, the extent of his unbelonging, and wished at last to know his right place among things both seen and unseen. Light as Tilly was these days, he feared his wrongful weight would break the chair. Carefully, he sat.
The priest said, “They say the sand was sucked into the fireball and turned to liquid glass that rained down on the desert and it crackles under your foot when you walk. Is that true?”
“Maybe down south at White Sands,” Tilly said, “where the shot happened, the test. Los Alamos was where they did the calculations and the metallurgy. They do a lot of other kinds of research now. I play gin at the VFW with a condensed matter scientist. Also a theoretical biophysicist, a couple of nanotechnologists. Professors come from South Africa and Bangkok to use the linear accelerator. I don’t know what any of these things mean. I never worked at the labs.”
“Then why, may I ask, do you live there?”
Tilly nearly retorted, Why do you live in Germany? but recognized in time his habit of regarding as an enemy anyone who asked to know the contents of his mind. Still, one of his Frade uncles had in fact been killed not far from here, in the Ruhr Pocket near the end of the Second World War, his father’s brother Fred, whose name his father never spoke and whose bed upstairs became Vollie’s bed.
Tilly had landed a day before in Paris and boarded a train of lightning speed that shortly arrived in Brussels, where he changed to the InterCity Express, which shot through reaped fields by stout brick homes with skylights fitted in corrugated roofs, and crossed the Belgian frontier, where through the window the signage whipping past along the gravel ballast of the track bed turned to German, which was to him, lacking any other enduring associations with it, the language of mass murder, and German trains the vehicles that had carried unknowing crowds to their deaths. His body passed at three hundred kilometers per hour through the lingering spirits of the disembodied dead. Why had no such intuitions ever haunted him in Los Alamos? The dead didn’t care to go where their death had been invented; they haunted the places they had lived. “Why did I live in Los Alamos?” he said. “I wanted a condo with the radiant-heat flooring option and sliders onto the patio. I don’t live there anymore.”
The cruel music of children babbling in German came from the hall before the children themselves passed the doorway in single file. On the cork floor their sneakers made no sound. Farther down the hall they could be heard snapping and zipping themselves into outdoor clothes.
The two men spoke o
f Oppenheimer, Harry Truman, Harry Belafonte; then of people utterly obscure, sinners in the confessional. All interested the priest equally. It was the variousness of other people that engrossed him. Their deviations and stinks. The inimitable self responsible for what the person had done. And Tilly wanted to ask whether he had misunderstood all along, since the dream from his fever bed that had convinced him his self was the obstacle he was meant to defeat, and why it persisted despite his efforts to erase it.
“One of my former neighbors used to be Edward Teller’s maid,” Tilly said. “Ever heard of him?”
“Oh yes, Teller. The so-called father of the hydrogen bomb. I suppose we all must be the father of something. His reputation was inflated by his own conniving.”
“That’s what they say.”
“It was not Teller who solved the dilemma of fusion ignition but the Pole Stanisław Ulam. This has been well documented in recent accounts. A slimy figure, Teller. He could never fully admit he had done wrong. An intriguing figure. A tragic figure. We all live in his shadow. He had an artificial foot.”
“She never mentioned it.”
“He fell under a railcar in Munich when he was a young man, and the foot was smashed. What in the world could fate have meant by that?”
On the wall a life-size portrait hung of a skinless human being with her muscles finely labeled, also a candy-colored periodic table, in the seventh row of which gray squares had been taped for elements with the atomic numbers 113, 115, 117, and 118, which had not been given names because they could not yet be proven to exist.
“Munich,” Tilly said. “But I thought he was Hungarian.”
“A certain class of learned man has no proper country. What else does she remember of him?”
“Not much. She’s senile. Whenever I met her walking her dog in our complex in the daytime she always knew right where she was. But at night—”
“My sister was that way,” the priest said. He had seen all his siblings die. He did not say so. The American’s drawn face and unswerving eyes disclosed nothing except that he would listen closely to whatever the priest had to say. The priest wanted to tell him what there remained no one else to tell, that over the years he had given each of his siblings the last rites and watched them go—all but the final brother, a soul wrapped clumsily in aluminum foil, like a sandwich he wouldn’t share, who had left orders with the administrators of the hospice to let no one visit.
“Teller proposed using thermonuclear weapons underwater to create a harbor in Alaska, also to free the oil in the Canadian tar sands, also to deflect asteroids that might strike the earth. Enrico Fermi said of him he was the only monomaniac he ever knew with several manias.”
“You speak English like a native.”
“Of where?”
“Of anywhere.”
The priest looked at his white fingers. “And therefore of nowhere. Perhaps I missed my calling, if I am using the idiom correctly. I could have been a criminal impostor.”
“People in town say Teller was a rat.”
“A rat. Now you will instruct me, my friend. I am going to guess. It must mean an eater of cheese, but the deeper significance eludes me.”
“Somebody who double-crosses a person he’s supposed to be loyal to.”
“Oh, yes. When I spoke earlier of the wrong he would not admit, I was speaking not only of the super bomb but of the betrayal and destruction of Oppenheimer. Now tell me, what brought you to New Mexico in the first place? If I recall your dossier, you came from one of the fertile states.”
“I went looking for a friend of mine who lived there.”
“Did you find him?”
Tilly shifted his bones on the plastic chair.
“You don’t mind my asking? I can imagine a young man going to the desert in search of something that would be invisible in other places. It seems an odd destination to go for friendship. Of course my associations with it are almost entirely related to weaponry.”
“I never saw him again.”
“And what kept you there?”
Tilly made his eyes unreadable, or believed he did.
The priest waited for an interval determined by what seemed a hard-won sense of empathy and decorum. Finally he asked, “What was her name, your reason to stay in the state of New Mexico?”
“Is it that obvious, even to you, a priest?” Tilly asked.
“I would like a business card to hand out. It would read, Reverend Werner Wurs—Physical Being, Possessor of Flesh and Glands.”
Tilly snorted.
“It sounds different in German.”
“She was the same woman you see there, the woman in the documents.”
“You don’t want to say her name,” the priest observed.
Not since the Romanian professor at the Presidio in Monterey had Tilly felt the present intuition that although he had met this person only an hour before, he must do all his life’s business with him now, because they would not meet again. Impertinent questions begged to be asked. Advice he’d long wished he could have got from his silverhead father. Personal news begged to be disclosed, through the priest, to the old man buried in time. Things his father deserved to know. I lost your name. I sold the farm.
“The name never loses its power over us,” the priest said. “I knew a woman fifty years ago, a greengrocer in the south of France. To this day I see her given name even backward in a newspaper being read opposite me on a tram. Wherever the name appears it seizes my heart with crushing force. I forget to breathe. But you didn’t come all this way to talk about women.”
A heavy door slammed, and the voices of the last few departing children were extinguished. Shortly Tilly saw them through the window in the playground outside, sprinting in fevered loops, blindfolding each other with the sleeves of jackets, watching the sky with grave expectation.
“Not that I expected you to come at all,” the priest said. “You might have telephoned first.”
“I don’t speak German.”
“Or emailed.”
“I don’t have an email. Maybe we didn’t want to give up the element of surprise.”
“Are we in an adversarial position, you and I?” the priest asked.
“I hope not.”
“But if I knew you intended to come, you expected I would try to dissuade you? Perhaps redouble our efforts to place the boy in a suitable home here and keep him out of the hands of people such as yourselves who might return him to his father?”
“We are not going to do that,” Tilly said. “The boy’s father doesn’t know I’m here. I’ve lost touch with him.”
“Cut him off, you mean,” the priest said. “None of us is permitted the fiction of losing touch anymore. In the internet age, we either drop our relationships or keep them. If the court requires it, are you willing to guarantee Mr. Heflin will have no contact with the child?”
“I guarantee it right now.”
“You won’t let him in the house?”
“He won’t know where the house is.”
“And Mrs. Tilly agrees?”
“She doesn’t like it, but she agrees it’s necessary.”
The Brandenburg Concerto began to play thinly around the priest’s person. He convulsed with swatting at his many pockets like a man attacked by flies until he found his smartphone and squeezed its edge within his clothes. The music stopped. “It’s taken you rather a long time to get here.”
“My passport was held up. A military document had my birthdate wrong. It triggered an extra level of scrutiny.”
“And had you done anything in regard to which it concerned you to be scrutinized? You’ll forgive my habit of inquiry, people do often come to me hoping to be asked what they regret.”
“Are you trying to make me confess something?”
“To make another confess—a pointless enterprise. Contr
ite words that don’t come freely from the heart are perhaps an interesting perversity for the study of psychoanalysts, but no one is fooled, and no one is helped. I see no reason for us to be adversaries. If the facts you’ve laid out in the dossier should pass scrutiny, I would be open to supporting your petition. Let’s come to business. Mr. Heflin, your—” His thumb tapped the glass face of his phone. He asked it a question in German and squinted at the instantaneous response, “—your stepson?”
“Not exactly. There wasn’t any father before me, and I was never married to the real mother. Come to think, I never met her.”
“There was no father Heflin. Therefore Heflin was the mother?”
“No.”
“Heflin was the name of the true mother’s spouse, who nonetheless was not the true father?”
“No.”
“Heflin was a name drawn at random from a shoe? Please elucidate.”
“They picked his name.”
“No, no. The surname Heflin.”
“They picked it. And they picked the first name.”
“No, no. We have crossed our wires. By ‘given name’ I mean the chosen name. The surname is the fact.”
Tilly looked away at the chalkboard, freshly washed and waiting for someone to write something on it. “We took legal guardianship of Elroy when he was five. No one else had custody of him after that but us. Practically speaking, I’m his father. None of the rest matters.”
“On the contrary, it matters absolutely and forever.”
Outside, a screech of ecstasy arose from the courtyard. Tilly started; the priest remained still, erect, leaning slightly forward, like an optician performing an examination of the retina. Through the gray German atmosphere snow had begun to fall on the hats and bundled limbs of the hysterical children.
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