Now and Again

by Charlotte Rogan

  “I’m new here, but I can ask my colleague.”

  Penn waited while the man went off and came back again with an older woman. “You must mean the professor,” she said. “He hasn’t been here in several months, but there’s a soup kitchen two blocks away. I know he used to eat there.”

  Penn hurried along the sidewalk to where a group of haphazardly dressed people were clustered near a recessed entryway. It was 4:40, and a sign taped to the inside of a window said the door wouldn’t open until five o’clock. He was supposed to meet Louise for an early dinner before heading to the airport to catch a flight to DC, where he would board a military transport plane. He hadn’t yet told her he was going back to Iraq, and he had counted on the ring to soften the blow. But now he concluded it might be better to put off the proposal to a day when he had more time and less on his mind. That morning he had gotten up early with the pleasant sense that the day stretched endlessly before him, but now he felt rushed and indecisive. It would be folly to propose in such a harried state of mind—that and the news of his departure would ruin the atmosphere for a romantic celebration. In any case, he didn’t have a ring. He leaned against the side of the building and ran his fingers against the grimy stone cladding. He still had to shower and change his clothes and head uptown to the restaurant, so if he waited until five for the soup kitchen to open, he risked being late for Louise.

  He paced the length of the block and back again. Just when he had decided he was compounding his folly by waiting when he didn’t even know what he was hoping to discover, an old man came around the corner tapping a gnarled stick in front of him. It took Penn almost a minute to recognize the professor. Something fundamental about him had changed, and when he banged his stick on the ground, it was without his previous air of conviction. Penn introduced himself and explained what he had been doing in the months since they had met, but the man showed no sign of recognition.

  “We talked about war,” said Penn. “You told me that man is warlike, but that he doesn’t like to think of himself that way.”

  “I say that to everybody,” said the professor, stopping to cough into a grimy handkerchief. “Everybody who will listen, that is.”

  “I gave you half a bagel.”

  “Ah,” said the professor. “Half a bagel.”

  “We talked about philosophy,” said Penn.

  “Philosophy!” wheezed the professor. He squinted at Penn and leaned forward, balancing on unsteady feet with the help of the flimsy stick. “It seems to me that there is only one worthwhile philosophical question, and it isn’t whether or not…” He started wheezing again. His eyes were red and runny, and his skin seemed to erupt in new boils while Penn watched.

  “It isn’t whether or not man is warlike. Of course he is. It isn’t whether or not the system works to sustain itself. Of course it does. So the question is not whether it is even possible to be outside the system or whether man is doomed to be a cog in a killing machine, it…” He coughed and scrutinized his handkerchief and seemed befuddled by what he saw.

  “What is the question, then? What were you going to say?”

  “It is whether it is possible to be both moral and…” Here, he was taken by a paroxysm of painful coughing, accompanied by what seemed to be a memory lapse. “Where was I? Where was I?” he asked. The professor poked his stick in Penn’s direction, hitting him on the kneecap, but his grip was so feeble that it bobbled and dropped from his hand.

  Penn stooped to pick it up, trying to conceal his agitation. “You were saying there is only one worthwhile philosophical question.”

  “Thank you, young man. Yes, exactly. I believe there is.”

  “What one is that?” Penn felt increasingly desperate, and while it occurred to him that he was listening to an old man’s ramblings, he was certain the professor possessed the kernel of truth he was looking for.

  Now it was the old man’s turn to say, “What? What one is what?”

  “The question!” cried Penn, but the professor’s response was interrupted when a volunteer in a red apron came with a ring of keys to open the door for the long line of people that had formed on the sidewalk.

  “What’s for dinner?” shouted the professor.

  “Come in and you’ll find out,” said the volunteer.

  “I’m hoping it’s not meat loaf,” said a scrawny woman who was standing near them.

  At the sound of the keys, another horde of people had materialized, and now they were jostling for position in the line. The professor used his stick to clear a space for himself as the volunteer called out, “One at a time, please! There’s plenty for everybody!”

  “But it’s not yet five!” cried Penn. His wristwatch, which had been given to him by his father when he went off to college, was finely calibrated and had neither lost nor gained a minute in the nine years he had owned it.

  “One at a time,” the volunteer called again. Cooking smells wafted out the door to mingle with the exhaust from a passing bus and the stink of rotting garbage that curled up from the curb.

  “What’s the one philosophical question?” Penn was shouting now, but the old man had scuttled up to the door and was vanishing through it. “Can you at least tell me that?”

  The volunteer smiled benignly at Penn. “It’s hard to think about philosophy when you’re hungry,” she said. “Come back after dinner. Maybe you’ll get your answer then.”

  Penn slung his duffel over his shoulder and wandered through a nearby park where an art class was experimenting with line and form. “Solids and voids,” said a bearded man when Penn stopped to peer over his shoulder at the abstractions on his canvas. The face of Penn’s watch showed 6:04. It was too late to shower, too late to change his clothes, too late to be on time for Louise. He walked another block west and turned north on the Avenue of the Americas. It was seventeen blocks to the restaurant overlooking Central Park. He imagined hailing a cab and getting locked in rush-hour traffic or jogging up the avenue on foot, becoming sweatier with each block while Louise tapped her long fingers on the tablecloth and ordered a bottle of imported water and then a selection of appetizers when he still didn’t appear. He saw her choosing an expensive wine and sending it back when it wasn’t quite what she expected.

  Suddenly it seemed easier to go back to the war than to face Louise without a ring, without a life plan, without a polished sense of who he was or how he was going to answer life’s big questions. With only a vague sense of what those questions were. All around him, people were making small protests against fate: the taxicab drivers fighting over a customer, the fat woman enjoying a candy bar, the thin woman shaking a tambourine and belting out a gospel song. Even the proprietor of a nearby newsstand waved cheerfully at the headlines: MARKETS SLAMMED BY BIG OIL, RUSSIA WIDENS ATTACKS ON GEORGIA, CRISIS DEEPENS AS BIG BANKS FAIL, OKLAHOMA WOMAN SOUGHT IN LEAKED DOC PROBE. He followed a carefree young woman who tossed her hair and crossed against the light. Then Times Square exploded in front of him, and he felt a wave of happiness wash over him, or if it wasn’t happiness, it was at least a sense that cross-purposes and conflicting messages and questions with no clear answers weren’t necessarily bad and might even be evidence of progress. He told himself that he had done a little good in the warehouse. He and the men had started something, and whether or not they finished it wasn’t up to him. He’d call Louise. Or he’d leave a message with the maître d’ of the restaurant. He’d send her flowers. Meanwhile, he had a plane to catch.

  On the plane, Sinclair went over his orders again. He was being assigned to an engineer battalion that had undergone intensive stateside training with a new generation of robotic devices that were now being deployed overseas. The first wave of combat robots had been plagued with technical issues and precipitously pulled from the theater after reports of malfunction and friendly fire. But improvements had been made and hopes were high that the new devices would save soldiers’ lives. He re-read the spec sheets: the Groundhog was equipped with an M249 light machine gun
that could shoot a thousand rounds per minute with 100 percent accuracy; the Parakeet could fly thirty miles per hour and hover in place as long as its power source lasted, which depended on factors like wind resistance and operator skill. If only they’d had a robot scouting the supply route that terrible day. But now he was being given a chance to save future soldiers even if there was nothing he could do about the past.

  He put his head against the seat back and closed his eyes, happier than he’d been in a long time. He wondered what the new troops would be like. He wondered if there would be a businessman like Kelly or a computer whiz like Le Roy or an escape artist like Pig Eye—Edwards, he corrected himself. Paul Edwards was his name. Or a poet like Danny or a captain like himself, given leadership before he was completely ready for it. He knew that in some respects the men and women were all unique—of course they were—but in other respects, they were all the same.

  12.2 Maggie

  It was early morning when the last truck driver let Maggie out at the Red Bud exit. Now and then a car sped off the highway heading toward town, but she didn’t try to flag it down. What if it was someone she knew? She wouldn’t know how to answer the inevitable questions and she didn’t want to lie, so she walked with her head down, eyes glued to the dirt. Every time she caught a glimpse of her shadow stretching behind her, she thought it might be Dino, but of course it wasn’t. She tried to decide whom she had let down more—God, because she hadn’t kept her promise to him, or Tomás and George, because nothing she had done for them had made a tangible difference. She remembered how she had declared so confidently to anyone who would listen, “Saving someone else’s son is the only way to save my own.” But she hadn’t saved someone else’s son. So far, she hadn’t saved anybody. All she’d done was to raise the hopes of people who couldn’t stand too much more disappointment, which didn’t seem particularly kind under the circumstances. When she turned onto Old Oak Road, her heart started knocking like the engine of the truck on a cold day. Lyle! she thought. Will! And then she knew who it was she had let down most of all.

  The driveway was hidden by a bend in the road. First the hayfield came into sight, nailed in place by the big old oak, and then the mailbox, which hung open as if panting in the June heat. It was all uphill from there—up the last stretch of road, up the driveway, up the cracked front walk with its embellishments of dandelions and tufted grass, up the steps and across the worn porch with its broken boards and rusted nails. The door was locked—why had Lyle taken to locking it? Maggie didn’t have a key, so she jimmied a loose window and climbed through it into the dining alcove, where she had hoped to find Lyle and Will drinking their Saturday morning coffee in companionable silence. But Will had joined the army, and the alcove was empty even of Lyle.

  She saw by the battery-powered kitchen clock that it was already ten o’clock. Of course Lyle would be up and about by now. She washed her face and fixed a tall glass of water, which she sipped as she tidied first the kitchen and then the living room. She had always been too busy to clean properly. She had always been rushing from one thing to another: taking a hurried shower before her family was awake, eating breakfast as she slapped together the sandwiches for lunch, reminding Will about his homework and hustling everybody out the door. And then the busy day at work before coming home to dinner, household chores, and bed. Now she could take her time. Will’s room was spotless, so she started in on Lyle’s room, folding the scattered clothing and making up his bed with fresh sheets. Her bed—rather, hers and Lyle’s. It felt good to concentrate on each task, on each object, on each slow tick of the clock that was marking the seconds until Lyle would come home to find her waiting for him with dinner bubbling on the stove. She unpacked her duffel, putting the dirty clothes in the laundry basket with the sheets, the worn-out shoes on the rack in the closet, the sweaters in the sweater drawer—no, sweaters in the closet. She was pushing the sweater drawer shut when she realized it should be full of the evidence she had carefully hidden inside magazine covers all those months ago, but the evidence was gone. Lyle! What had Lyle done?

  Maggie rushed back to Will’s room, only now noticing that nothing of Will remained in it. The emptiness frightened her. Her heart rattled in her rib cage like a broken clapper. The house seemed to be telling her something, so she stood very quietly, listening to the stillness and smelling the musty, closed-up smell. It wasn’t a home any longer, it was only a house.

  She crept back along the hallway to the living room. The curtains hung heavily on their rings. Years ago, she had stitched them herself from fabric she had saved up for months to buy. Now she noticed that the hem was coming out and pinprick holes in the floral weave allowed tiny galaxies of light to come through. The once-bright cushions on the corduroy couch were used-up squares of dingy fabric. Dishes with the crusted remains of a meal had been kicked underneath the couch. The desk was piled with unopened mail, and propped up against the desk lamp was a letter from the attorney that started off “Good news!” It went on to say that the appellate court had agreed to a new trial for Tomás, and could she send another installment on the fee? She sat down at the desk to write out a check, but when she flipped through the check register, she saw that Lyle’s paycheck deposits had stopped over a month before.

  The desk held other answers: a sternly worded letter from the bank that held their mortgage, a notice of termination from the munitions plant, documentation that Will had passed his army intake physical, had achieved a high score on his vocational aptitude test, was being deployed to Iraq. Maggie gazed out the window, but the oak tree and the rolling landscape were the only things in their proper places. Will had gone off to fight a war she had forgotten all about. How could she have forgotten the very thing that had started her on her current journey? Had she lost her way or found it? Or was life a series of mostly blind turnings guided by instinct and luck? And her husband of almost twenty years, where the heck was he?

  She thought of the where-would-you-go game they had played when Will was little. But how was the game relevant? Surely Lyle hadn’t gone to California or Tahiti. And then she wondered if there was something else about the game she should be remembering. The last time the three of them had played it together, Will had only shrugged and said, “I’m too old for that.” But Maggie had played along. It had been before she had found the top-secret document on Winslow’s desk, before they had stopped driving Will to school together, before everything about her life had changed. Before she herself had changed it. She had said, “I’d hop a bus and go clear across the country to New York.”

  “A bus,” Will had scoffed. “If you could afford to go anywhere, couldn’t you afford to take a plane?”

  “I want to look out the window and see the sights,” Maggie had said, but without Will’s participation, the air had gone out of the game. They had driven the rest of the way to school in silence, but as soon as Will got out, Lyle had patted her shoulder in a consoling way. “I’m with you on seeing the sights, but it might be hard to take a bus to Tahiti. That’s the place I really want to go.”

  Maggie had gotten her bus trip after all. She had seen Phoenix and the Grand Canyon, and it was deeply unfair that Lyle hadn’t been with her. But she didn’t think Lyle would go off without her now no matter what had happened. Still, the idea of the bus station stuck in her head. It was a hub of transportation. It was the place, on the day she had departed for Phoenix, she had left the bicycle with a note attached to it that said, PLEASE RETURN TO LYLE RAYBURN WHO LIVES ON OLD OAK ROAD. Now, she hoped someone had returned the bicycle and she would find it in the shed.

  The clock in the kitchen said it was 11:40. Something told her she should hurry. Hurry for what? she asked herself, but there was no answer to the question, just an inner ticking and the image of the squat brick building on Hill Street with the bench outside for waiting and the silent morphing of the liquid crystal numbers on the kitchen clock and the familiar weight of the threadbare backpack as she slung it once again over her shoul
ders and left the house.

  12.3 Joe Kelly

  Kelly took his coffee outside to watch the street come to life: the white panel laundry truck starting on its rounds, the road crew putting new sewers in the street, the single mother walking her children to the corner and waiting with them for the bus, the muscled brothers who owned the car parts shop rolling up the metal awning and smoking a cigarette, passing it back and forth and calling out to Kelly, “This way only one of us will get cancer.” On the surface, everything was the same as usual, but something tickled Kelly’s attention. For one thing, he wasn’t used to the starched and buttoned cuffs that were poking out from the sleeves of his new jacket, and for another, the captain was gone. For the first time in his life, Kelly felt like the master of his own fate, but he also felt a little disconnected and alone.

  He walked across the tracks toward the school bus stop where the oldest child was telling the younger ones horror stories of what awaited them in third grade. “What are you going to school on Saturday for?” he asked.

  “Make-up days,” said the oldest. “Because of all the snow.”

  “Da-amn,” said Kelly. “Well, come and see me when you’re out.”

  “You boys are on your own this evening,” said the single mother. “I started that new job, but I’ll see you tomorrow for sure.”

  “Things are looking up,” said Kelly.

  “Yes, I think they are.”

  The bus rolled to a stop. Shiny faces peered down at Kelly through the glass. The driver said, “Hurry up, kids.” The single mother blew three kisses, and together she and Kelly watched the bus chug up the street toward the intersection.