by Jack Livings
My debrief was one hundred and twenty-two typed pages. The name Janusz Stern appeared nowhere. I was told, as we all were, that everything I’d done, everything I’d seen, was secret. You were expected to take that information to your grave. No one spoke about the missions until they were declassified.
Forty, fifty, sixty years we kept our mouths shut, and where do you put that, where do you store those memories of what you’ve seen and done? Well, you’re trained to keep secrets, and that’s what you do. But let me tell you, it causes a fundamental rift within a person who is motivated to seek truth, of course, to lie by omission for that long.
Water will find its level.
At first, I couldn’t sleep. I don’t mean this colloquially—I wasn’t having trouble sleeping. I stopped sleeping completely. By the middle of the second week back in D.C. I’d come undone. It was obvious to everyone at command that I wasn’t fit for duty. I was a babbling mess. Hallucinating. At night I sweated through the sheets, flopping around like a fish, staring at the dark. In the morning, drag myself in to work, sit down, nod off at the desk, bolt awake. Over and over, all day long. I took medicine. I drank. Nothing worked. I was seeing eyes in the shrubbery. I was being followed by the Gestapo. My food was being poisoned. The girl behind the reception desk was a double agent. This was shameful to the whole outfit, you understand. Field officers were supposed to be hard as nails. They were selected for their mental stability. That was a fundamental requirement. I was a complete failure on all fronts—not only was I falling apart, I was dragging down morale in the office. So they got me out of there posthaste, packaged me off to Fairfax for evaluation. The doctors didn’t even let me go back to D.C. for a change of clothes. Diagnosed with operational fatigue and sent directly to Santa Cruz with an escort.
At least I finally got to sleep. They shot me full of barbiturates and put me in a private room at the Casa Del Rey, which had been converted into a naval hospital. A deep, empty sleep without dreams. I woke up and I felt like myself again. I talked to psychologists, but of course we couldn’t get at the problem. They’d give you a shot of sodium amytal in those days to dredge up the root of the neurotic behavior. Or the psychologist would hypnotize you and take you back to the battlefield. But they couldn’t use those methods with me. My work was classified. So the shrinks did their best and I did my best with the little charade. After about two weeks, they declared me well enough for some day passes. I’d made a friend by then, a sailor from Idaho who’d lined us up a couple of dates, nurses, and we went out for an afternoon on the boardwalk. It was the Fourth of July.
My father reaches into his pocket and pulls out the hex nut he’s carried with him for as long as I’ve been alive. Do you know where I got this? he says.
You said it was part of a roller coaster.
That’s right, he says, and smiles. The roller coaster was in Santa Cruz.
It was not a good date, he says. The nurse I was paired with was named Marcy. Marcy Plotkin from Clearwater, Florida. Her friend was lighthearted, you might say, but Marcy had a kind of haughty distraction about her, something I suspect she’d developed long before she joined the Nurse Corps. I had no idea how to talk to her. No doubt I was quoting Shelley, trying to work her into an elegiac froth, but this Marcy Plotkin couldn’t be bothered to humor me. She tended to convalescing sailors and soldiers all day and night. The things she must have seen in that hospital. What’d she want with poetry? It’s a funny thing, because she of all people would have been pretty well suited to listen to me talk about what was really on my mind, but of course that wasn’t possible. What a date.
We all rode the roller coaster, the Giant Dipper. It was a creaky, rattling wooden contraption. Surely it’s collapsed by now. Mind you, it was about as frightening as a pet bunny, but as soon as we went clicking up the first little incline, I was in a panic. I felt death all around me, as palpable as the sweat on my skin. It was everywhere, pressing in on me. I was too terrified to even scream. Thank god I didn’t or old Marcy might have thrown me overboard.
A roller coaster! A ride for kids. But for precisely the reason that it was designed to be harmless, I seized on the idea that the probability of a malfunction was astronomical. See, during the war, maintenance would have been done by some old codger who could barely get up on the catwalks every morning. Probably half blind. Every bolt and screw would be loose, the boards soaked in salt air, axles inadequately lubricated—the possibility of something going wrong felt absolutely guaranteed. I’d never considered such things before Poland, before I’d worked on the manual.
If you’d asked, I would have said that I trusted that the mechanical world held together because otherwise capitalism would fall apart. You can’t make any money selling shoddy machinery, so you design a better piston than the next guy, manufacture it to a higher tolerance than the next guy, you test it thoroughly and refine it so that, left untouched, it would operate correctly for decades. And every company operated this way, a perfectly synchronized aperture of industry, opening and closing with exacting precision. I would have said there was some elegance to it. Maybe I would have said that our machines were gleaming proof of the quality of our national character. It’s American, by god, best in the world. I believed in the constructed world, in the intelligence behind our superior designs. I believed that every cog was machined to mesh perfectly with every other cog. I believed in efficient systems.
This was my brother’s influence, you know, my beliefs. He thought like a scientist from the time he could talk. Do you know how many patents Ben had filed by the time he retired?
No, I say.
Thirty-one. Dow owns them, almost all of them polymer structures, but they’re his work. Well, no longer did I believe in the divine nature of calculus. The scales had fallen from my eyes. It was suddenly obvious to me that simple sabotage was simple because the manufactured world already strove toward entropy. We can’t conquer natural laws, I realized. It’s a gargantuan feat to build a city, it takes hundreds of years, infinite quantities of human thought and labor, and it can all be leveled in a flash. We are, on our best day, only a hair ahead of chaos. The natural order is rubble. Left alone, everything finds its way to ruin.
Was it Janusz Stern who’d made me think this way? Certainly. Certainly it was. Through his death I had become aware of the carelessness behind the decision to induct me into OSS. The carelessness that had put me in a position to make such a foolish mistake. The total lack of thought that had gone into my insertion into Poland. I was just another body thrown at the Nazi machine in hopes that I’d clog the gears before being mashed to a pulp—this was how the world operated. As a child, I trusted that my world was the result of thoughtful planning, but in Poland I understood unequivocally that as a race we are in a constant state of panic and last-ditch efforts, everything a stopgap measure, everything an act of faith.
Well, I started jawing away about all this right there on the roller coaster, but guess what, Marcy’s not interested in hearing about entropy and rubble, and as soon as we set foot back on the boardwalk, she and the other nurse took off. My buddy from Idaho took off after them, and I stood there, sweat pouring down my shirt like I was standing on the surface of the sun, and I’m shivering, my teeth rattling around in my mouth. I looked around and the only safe place I saw was the beach. What was sand, after all, but pulverized civilizations, vegetable and meat and mortar all reduced together on their journey back to nothingness? The next stop after you’re a grain of sand? Atoms. Subatomic particles. Then you were done. You were returned to origin, broken and scattered. That was our natural state, not this random propagation of flesh and bone. Silence and nothingness was the pinnacle of existence, not animation, not thinking, not creating.
There was a big band in a shell up on the boardwalk playing patriotic standards. The gulls were crying and the sea was breaking on the beach with these little plashes. Sun was shining. The sand was hot, there was a breeze. It all helped. Eventually I began to calm down. And then I started thinki
ng about the Japanese saboteurs lying just off the coast in their little subs.
Thank god I took a pill and fell asleep on the sand before I worked myself into another state. When I woke up, the band was playing “Song of the Volga Boatmen.” I was between a couple of umbrellas. There were girls under them, or families, people, in any case, I suppose, and puffs of their conversations came to me when the wind shifted. It was getting toward evening. I could feel a little breeze on the wet cloth between my shoulders.
I looked out at the sea, out where the submarine nets were. Up and down the coast there were gun batteries and watch posts. Full-time coastal defense. If I’d been a sub commander, I would have parked beyond the nets and after dark put an insertion team in an inflatable. They could have landed right there, right where I was sitting. Piece of cake in blackout conditions. From there, easy to get to the rides on the boardwalk. The hospital was across the street, but in an operation like that, you’d be more interested in the high-visibility objective, the one with psychological impact. Blowing up hospitals is pretty despicable work, even for saboteurs. If it had been me, the roller coaster would have been the first thing I’d hit. Guaranteed success: loosen a few nuts, pry-bar the joints, pull some nails, take a hacksaw to a couple of joists. It wouldn’t take much to kill an entire Cub Scout troop or some Rotarians and their wives. You sabotage a few other rides, just to eradicate any possibility that it was a freak accident or a maintenance oversight, and suddenly up and down the West Coast there’s full-scale panic.
So that night I went back. Everything had been locked up tight, and I scaled the fence and wriggled into the area there beneath the tracks. There was a spot inside all the crosshatching, like a nest. It was dark as pitch but I could feel that the concrete was covered with nuts and bolts. I was revolted, as though I’d been feeling around under the fridge for a quarter I’d dropped and discovered a blanket of dead roaches. The flags were popping in the wind. I heard the waves. And voices, very faint at first, hushed, and the shushing sound of something being dragged over sand.
My father presses the hex nut into my palm.
The voices got closer and I began to sweat. The same cold, shivering sweat as earlier. The dragging sound of the raft was distinct—there was no question in my mind that I was hearing canvas on sand. I didn’t know what to do, so I did nothing. I cowered there inside the roller coaster, in the dark, praying that I wouldn’t be killed, but knowing that as soon as they swept their red filters across my face I’d be shot. They came closer, and I heard shushing, one voice shushing another, and the hissing of the canvas, more whispering. And then giggling. I lifted my head and made out figures moving against the moonlit water, only about twenty feet away. They tumbled down onto the thing they’d been dragging, which I could see then was a big, flat raft, and I realized what I’d heard was nothing more than a soldier and his date looking for a place to bed down.
Look at this Finn, my father says to the television. He’s like a UFO. Do you think the skis are designed primarily as airfoils or as vehicles for achieving maximum speed on the ramp?
I don’t know, Dad.
And is there an ideal speed at which to launch, or is it simply, Go faster, fly farther?
I really don’t know, Daddy. Probably works according to a logarithmic scale. Weight times speed divided by height times speed.
Probably so, he says. I’m sure they have the drag coefficients worked out to the thousandth decimal point.
He shakes his head at the pointlessness of such precision.
* * *
Sleet ticks at the window base. The raven is standing in the middle of the blank field, as still as a painting. Suddenly it extends its wings to shiver off the precipitation, then goes back to standing sentry.
I believe that, like Lazlo Brunn, I need to shift my perception of time, to arrest my perception so that a glacier’s progression toward the sea emits a grinding screech that sets my heart racing; so that the moon is a blur zipping around a wildly oscillating earth, so that an oak grows and dies in the span of a breath. Stellar time, rock time, radioactive half-life time. I need to stride over generations, two hundred, three hundred at a time. This isn’t grief but a new way to survive.
Explain, I say. Are you part of it, Daddy?
Part of what? he says.
The complication, I say. This thing that’s between me and my real life.
My father stares at me, as I expected he would, admittedly the correct response to what would sound like insanity to him if he is, in fact, part of the complication. In that case, he would be no more conscious of it than a character in a book is conscious of the book.
Your life doesn’t feel real to you? he says after a long pause, channeling old Dr. Schiff.
Plenty real, but I have my suspicions, I say. Around the edges it can seem a little hypothetical.
What is a father’s response to the knowledge that his only child has lost her marbles? For mine, it is to rise, slowly, glacially, in fact, and shuffle over to the sofa. He sits down next to me and pulls me close to his bony flannel frame, and he grows to twice, three times his size, enveloping me in peace, and I cannot but help thinking that I am doing nothing more than transferring my tragedy to him, this lovely old neurotic catastrophe who failed at every turn to protect me from the onslaught of the world because he could not even protect himself. Charged by bulls, he threw books; beset by floodwaters, he built levees of paper. He told a joke that killed a man. He gave a test that turned out to be a suicide note. He was too distracted to save his own daughter from destruction. The catalogue of his failures is a heavy tome.
Neither you, he says, nor I, nor Vik, nor anyone, is a thought experiment.
Prove it, I say into his arm.
Impossible, he says, And that’s the staunchest proof I know. Proof by contradiction. I cannot simultaneously exist and not exist, ergo … How can I posit the possibility of my existence if I do not exist? Therefore, I exist because I don’t not exist. Except, of course, when I go to the post office. Twenty years and I’m still invisible to that woman behind the counter.
I have to go, Daddy. It’s sleeting.
Just stay here tonight.
Have to go, Daddy, I say.
Do you believe me when I tell you what happened in Poland was real? he asks.
Of course I believe you, I say.
You’ve read that story before, so you might be inclined not to believe it, he says. But it’s true.
I’ve read a version of it. In Slingshot.
The version you read was fiction. Now you know the truth. Do you believe me?
I believe you, I say.
And this business about a hypothetical life? he says.
I’m working on it. I’m righting the ship.
How’s that?
I’m rewriting The Blizzard Party, I say.
Are you? he says and sits up, his face bright.
I’m all but finished, I say.
Well, this is news, he says. This is wonderful news. When can I read it? Do I get to see it before you’re done?
You’ll see it soon, I say.
I hope so. What an undertaking. Correcting the sins of the father and all that?
A corrective, yes. I never did understand why you thought fiction was the way to tell the truth about what happened. Maybe I understand a little better now.
Are you sticking to the facts? he says.
I’ve tried to.
You’ve taken no liberties?
Maybe one or two.
And have you found that they grow? They’re like seeds, aren’t they? Before you know it, you’ve got a forest.
That might be true, I say.
We like to believe we can control the story, he says, or for that matter how we live, not that there’s really any difference. But we don’t. The truth comes when it’s ready. It hides when it’s not. Don’t confuse fact with truth. That book—it’s always needed you to make it right. You’ve always been the thing that’s missing.
&nbs
p; * * *
The raven pumps into the spitting sky when I start my car. There’s a little choo-choo-train puff of smoke from my father’s chimney, the forest behind the house a gingerbread fantasyland of evergreens dripping with icing.
Back to the city, praising Audi all-wheel drive the whole way, the silver four-ring logo staring at me from the steering wheel, cousin to Krupp’s triclopean hoops, brother to the Olympic loops, chains all, methods of restraint—but these are only idle observations, distractions to occupy my mind as I slice southward toward the city, as I slide into the tollbooth lane, greened for EZ passage, as I barrel down the West Side Highway, hugging the river, past my favorite sloop, Ishtar, my signal to exit, weirdly having reappeared at its mooring in the dead of winter, and east to the Apelles. The city is producing some slushy precipitate mess, nothing worthy of being called snow, but portentous.
28.
Albert Caldwell was thirty-nine when Japan bombed Pearl Harbor, too long in the tooth, and too well connected, anyway, for the infantry, thus inducted as an officer in 1942 and assigned to the Judge Advocate General’s Corps. Discharged 1945, he was called back in 1947 to work on the “subsequent proceedings” against Alfried Krupp at Nuremberg. The primary proceedings had failed to win a conviction against Gustav, the family patriarch and head of the firm, whom the court had deemed mentally unfit, and the U.S. was bringing a new case, one in which his son, Alfried, was charged with four counts: crimes against peace, crimes against humanity, use of slave labor, and conspiracy. Albert worked on the team prosecuting Krupp for using slave labor in its factories both within and outside Germany.
Albert’s discovery notes for Cecelia Goetz, the counsel in charge, were accurate, carefully executed, and surprisingly absent the condescending tone that crept into the notes of many of Goetz’s subordinates (men, all). Albert respected Goetz deeply, though his motivations were hardly noble. He’d never worked for a woman before, and never again would. He knew as well as anyone that back home no private firm would hire a woman, thus he wasn’t competing with her for an office in New York. This knowledge afforded him the ability to work calmly, with no concern for his own future. It was the only time in his life he felt comfortable conversing with another lawyer about questions to which he had no answers. He and Goetz endlessly discussed the intractable problem before the prosecution: What punishment could possibly equal the crimes Krupp had committed? Albert was adamant that a death sentence was far from adequate. What was a hanging? A quick jolt and then darkness. A firing squad? A painless moment of shock. A quick death was no punishment at all. Death should be a reward dangled at the end of a stick until the convicted begged night and day for it. But how to push a convicted Nazi to that point? Flaying? Boiling? Catherine wheel? They were hardly even beginnings.
