Universe of Two

by Stephen P. Kiernan

  “I’ll throw the confetti later. Tell me, how do you know when water is very cold? Quick, now.”

  “Well, it’s ice, I suppose.”

  “You suppose? Pathetic.”

  Charlie crossed his arms. “What’s pathetic about that?”

  “How can you tell when water is very hot?”

  “It boils.”

  “Progress,” Beasley said. “But I won’t get my hopes up. Now.” He lifted off a rack one of those strange pens. “How do you know when metal is cold or hot? Does it freeze or boil? How can you tell?”

  Charlie puzzled that over for a second. “I don’t know.”

  “HOT,” Beasley yelled, pressing the pen’s tip against Charlie’s arm.

  “Yow,” Charlie jumped back, rubbing where he’d been touched.

  Beasley shook his head slowly, a picture of disappointment. “It wasn’t hot.”

  Charlie reddened with anger. “No.”

  “But you couldn’t tell by sight. There is no way, looking at a piece of metal, to know if it is hot or cold or”—he thumbed the metal pen’s tip—“Room temperature.” He put the device back in its stand. “These soldering irons can reach seven hundred and fifteen degrees. If you ever touch something in my work area, I figure the third-degree burn you’ll get will serve as education and reprimand all at once. But if I come over to your station for any reason—to borrow a tool or check your work or blow my nose—and you have left a hot iron uncovered, I will find the first possible opportunity to stick it in your eye. Got me?”

  “You were telling the truth,” Charlie marveled. “You really aren’t a teacher.”

  “Lesson one is ended.” He pointed at a stool. “Sit.”

  “Would it be entirely too much to ask for a bit of context?” Charlie hooked his foot on the stool and rolled it closer. “What is this department, and what are we doing?”

  Beasley crossed his arms. “I’m permitted to tell you that we receive electronic designs from somewhere outside this building, and my job is to build them. Every part is top secret, every assembly is urgent. That’s what I’m doing. What you are doing, other than slowing my work? I have no idea. But I will placate my director, and with luck the war will end before either of us murders the other.”

  Charlie sat on the stool with a sigh. “Are you always this disagreeable?”

  “Are you kidding?” Beasley sniffed. “Today I’m in a good mood.”

  Later the stork announced that he was going to lunch, and that “Harvard boy” should organize his station. Alone, the first thing Charlie did was switch the overhead lights back on. He returned to his desk, scooping up a handful of the components. They were all pieces of colored ceramic, roughly the size of a dime, with stiff wires sticking out of both ends. He found goggles, a welding mask.

  Was this odd laboratory how he would manage to stay in Chicago? Was this a means to seeing Brenda again? The room was dusty and smelled of burned metal. Charlie went to the lavatory and returned with towels to wash and dry the desk. They came away gray. As an afterthought he wiped the stool, too, and the towels turned black. But he hummed as he cleaned, his mood improving.

  Beasley reappeared gnawing on a piece of jerky, and gulping from a bottle of pop. He chewed with his mouth open, forcing Charlie to turn his head. There were packages of jerky in Beasley’s shirt pocket, which he dumped out on his desk. Then, his face in a sour expression, he went to the doorway and switched off the overhead lights. Beasley returned, chewing audibly.

  “Lesson two, Harvard,” he said, finishing the soda along the way, tossing the bottle in his metal waste bin, which clanged nearly as loudly as a church bell. “I am not teaching, I am demonstrating.” He sat at Charlie’s station, belched, and leaned over the desk. “Observe.”

  For about one minute, he showed Charlie how to operate the soldering iron, how to set the temperature, and how to keep the tip clean. “I do this for you once, Harvard. After that, you’re on your own.”

  Beasley uncoiled gray wire from a spool. When he touched it to the soldering iron, the soft outer layer vanished in a whiff of buttery smoke. The remaining core melted into a little volcano-shaped droplet. He made point after point, his hands deft and precise.

  “It’s called tinning. You tin a component into place. You snip off the surplus wire. You tin another component. Done.”

  Beasley rummaged in a bin, found a flat metal plate with rows of small holes, and set it in front of Charlie. “Tin all of these points. Don’t bother me till you’re finished.”

  At that, Beasley made his storky way back to his desk. Charlie was glad to be left to himself. It seemed easy, and he started right in.

  The outer layer would not melt. The core would not stick. The gun tip clogged with metal. Charlie sat back, breathing deeply to control his frustration, then tried again. Hours passed. The sponge dried out. The lighting was terrible.

  “Pop quiz,” Beasley announced down his nose, holding out a hand as he stood beside Charlie’s station.

  Charlie passed along the soldered plate. “I haven’t got the knack yet.”

  Beasley touched his glasses, though they remained precisely as low on his nose. “Well, well.”

  “Am I doing okay?”

  He handed back the plate. “You are the worst at soldering I have ever seen. No one else in my experience comes close.”

  “With a little practice, I—”

  “With a lifetime of practice, you might advance all the way to mediocrity.” He peered at the control panel of Charlie’s iron. “No wonder. Your temp was set at two-ninety. That’s too cold to make anything but a mess.”

  Beasley wrote something on a piece of paper, placing it facedown on a filing cabinet beside Charlie’s desk. “Shut down, Harvard. Go home. Come again tomorrow to fail another day.”

  “I’ll keep practicing, if you don’t mind. At the higher temperature.”

  Beasley ambled to his desk and snapped off the light. “You are permitted in here only when I am present, and I am leaving.”

  “I’m a slow and steady kind of worker. How can I improve if I can’t practice?”

  Beasley opened the dungeon door, sweeping his arm to indicate that Charlie should precede him. “My sincere advice to you is to go home, and stand awhile in front of your bathroom mirror.”

  “My mirror?” Charlie shut off his own desk lamp, making his way to the door. “What would that accomplish?”

  “You can contemplate what you will look like with an army helmet on.”

  The next day Charlie turned his instrument hotter, and the wire melted, the iron made the wet sponge hiss. The basics were exactly as Beasley had demonstrated.

  But he still didn’t make neat volcanos. Instead the wire clumped up on his iron. He wiped and wiped the tip on his sponge, but the clumping continued. Also the smoke had drifted away when Beasley demonstrated, but with Charlie it rose right up his nose—sweet-scented, but piercingly hot. He managed to solder a total of two points successfully before lunch.

  Occasionally he spied on the stork. The man was a master, that was clear: cleaning and tinning and moving pieces with dexterity, never lifting his head except to stir one gloved finger through a bin of components, searching. When he finished a plate, he would clear his throat, gnaw off a fresh plug of jerky, and start the next.

  Charlie could not imagine how many hours it had taken to develop that level of skill. A thousand, probably. Here he was, ten hours in, nine hundred and ninety to go.

  “Buckle down,” he told himself. This was only the first full day. Soldering might be his only way of staying in Chicago.

  In fact, the afternoon went better. A hotter iron did make the wire behave. One component seemed to melt into place properly, and when he snipped away the extra wire, he noticed that Beasley went still for a second at the sound. Still it took hours, and all of his focus. He was concentrating so hard, his nose inches from the hot iron, the tap of a finger on his shoulder startled him.

  “What?” Charlie
jerked upright.

  The finger belonged to Beasley, who extended his hand. “Show.”

  Charlie’s lower spine hurt from staying bent over for so long. He glanced at the clock, it was five already. The afternoon had flown. “It’s pretty rough.”

  “Show.”

  After covering the hot iron, Charlie handed over his plate. Beasley peered here and there, nodding. “Simmons neglected to tell me that you were mentally retarded.”

  “You should watch your mouth.”

  “Should I?” He flipped over the paper he’d left on the filing cabinet the day before and read aloud: “nine rows, eighteen contacts each.” Beasley dropped the paper in Charlie’s lap. “That was what you needed to do to get a C on this examination. One hundred and sixty-two contact points. Instead I count, let me see . . . if I allow this half-done area, it’s forty-one. You failed by one hundred and twenty-one.”

  “Soldering is harder than I thought.”

  “Fish, you dolt. Life is harder than you think. Show me your technique.”

  Charlie picked up the hot iron, and began pressing the wire to it.

  “Stop,” Beasley said. “Stop before I throttle you.”

  “What?” Charlie asked. “What am I doing wrong?”

  “Never touch the iron directly to the wire. I told you that. All it will do is clump.”

  “You most certainly did not tell me—”

  “I am now repeating myself, which I detest.”

  Charlie rolled his stool backward, calming himself. When Simmons told him to resist the temptation to punch Beasley, he’d thought the man was joking. Not anymore.

  “Pay attention this time.” Beasley demonstrated, placing the iron against a point on the square. “You heat the component, not the wire. The wire melts into place.”

  Charlie was too angry to reply. The man’s instruction had deliberately omitted a basic step.

  “I’m taking a meal break,” Beasley said. “Though your stupidity makes me sick.”

  He had reached the door before Charlie managed to reply. “Why are you so deliberately annoying?”

  The stork paused in the doorway, turning slowly, perhaps so that his glasses would not fall off. “Because I am not theoretical, Harvard. I am real.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “I am a licensed electrical engineer.” Beasley waved an arm at the room. “Everyone else here is theoretical. Math theory, physics theory, chemistry theory, and nothing gets done. You theoreticians scamper around this place like ants. And about as usefully.”

  Charlie shook his head. “Do you always exaggerate like this?”

  “Exaggerate?” He strode back, hackles raised, and waved Charlie’s unfinished plate in his face. “You are working on electronics that our military men will depend on with total faith. Do it right and Americans live, do it wrong and they die. So far, Harvard, you have done every single thing wrong.” He tossed the plate on the desk, components scattering. “And you think I exaggerate. Grow a conscience, will you?”

  Beasley was gone before Charlie could answer—not that he had any comeback ready. Even with a less abrasive instructor, he was out of his depth and he knew it. A person could not learn soldering in a day and a half, not well enough for soldiers to bet their lives on. He rose from the stool, poked his head out the door to make sure the hallway was deserted, then climbed the stairs two at a time.

  The secretary was gone and he knocked on the professor’s outer door. Instead of waiting to hear any welcoming words, though, he barged in. “Uncle John.”

  “Charlie.” Simmons sat at his desk, looking up from his papers. “I guess I should have expected to see you.”

  “I don’t mean to seem ungrateful.”

  “But you wonder what you are doing in the dungeon.”

  “With the most difficult human being I have ever encountered.”

  The professor nodded, waiting.

  “Doing a task I am wholly unqualified for,” Charlie continued. “With a teacher who despises me for no reason I have given him. And soldiers’ lives are at stake. And any burn I get is my fault.”

  Simmons maintained a serious expression. “All done?”

  “I don’t even know what this soldering is for.”

  “That didn’t seem to bother you when the work was arcs.”

  “True.” Charlie felt caught. “That’s true.”

  “Son, you are going to encounter all sorts of people in life. You have to decide which ones you allow to determine your fate, and which ones are bumps in the road.”

  “Beasley feels bigger than a molehill.”

  Simmons rose and went to the window. He lifted one leg to put his shoe on the sill, and leaned an elbow on his thigh. Charlie thought of a football coach, giving a halftime pep talk.

  “There is always more to know,” Simmons said. “There is always a backstory that makes simple things look complicated.”

  “Beasley, for example?”

  “His mother’s family name is Kozera. They are Poles. One night last spring, Nazis killed the entire family. Aunts, uncles, grandparents, cousins, all of them. So here is this young man, an outstanding engineering student in Rensselaer, who has spent every summer of his life with his family in Warsaw. And they’re all gone. What does he do next? Pick up a gun? Enlist? No, he volunteers to use what he has, skills which prove to be quite valuable. Personality issues aside, he creates a highly productive electronics laboratory, which is helpful to national defense in a way neither he nor I is permitted to tell you. Some people consider Beasley a war hero.”

  Charlie ran his hand over the back of a chair. “I am supposed to respect him, then? Or have sympathy for him?”

  “Maybe not. Maybe no one is allowed to treat people the way he does, no matter what they have lost or what they accomplish.” Simmons returned to his seat. “But you have a choice to make, about how large his influence will be on your life.”

  “He seems determined to have me fail.”

  “Well, like it or not, this is your shot, son. Most boys don’t get as much as one, which you had already in the math crew. The dungeon is opportunity number two. There won’t be a third, not because I can’t keep a promise to my baby sister, but because at that point we’re out of options.”

  “What if I can’t learn soldering well enough though? What if I’m terrible at it?”

  Simmons sighed. “Plenty of young men make better soldiers than you might expect. And many soldiers get through a war and come out the other side just fine.”

  “What should I do?”

  “You’ll need to write your own story, Charlie. I can’t devote any more time to you, there’s too much work. Sometime down the road, I imagine you sending me a note, maybe three words long. Get me out—and I’ll have it done by supper time. Or, if you treat Beasley as a way of strengthening your determination, knowing that bigger challenges lie ahead, you might send three different words. Ready for inspection—something like that. If the work’s good enough, I’ll make sure you advance quickly.”

  As he listened, Charlie dug a fingernail into the wood of the chair back. “There is no way around this guy, is there, Uncle John?”

  “Make the most of this opportunity, overcome it, and you will earn yourself a ringside seat at history. It would be a hell of a shame for you to miss it.”

  “The history of this war, you mean?”

  “Charlie.” Simmons let his shoulders drop. “I can’t tell anymore whether you’re being sincere, or discreet about something you’ve already figured out.”

  “I am genuinely in the dark here.” Charlie advanced till his thighs touched the desk. “As your nephew, I’m asking. What do you mean? The history of what?”

  The professor looked down. He seemed to discover the piles of work on his desk. He placed both palms on the stacked papers, then raised his head, looking his nephew in the eye. “I mean of all time, Charlie. I mean the history of the human race.”

  11.

  My mother wa
s waiting up when I came home on Valentine’s Day. Or, to be more accurate, when I let myself in she was plopped down in one of the living room’s overstuffed chairs, smoking a cigarette. There was only the one lamp on, over the piano, so the room was dim. She seemed surprised to see me.

  “Dinner’s over already?”

  “It is.” I hung my coat in the hall closet.

  “Did you have a nice time?”

  “So-so.” I headed past her for the kitchen where I switched on the lights.

  “The food was less than excellent?”

  I peered into the icebox. “The company was less than excellent.”

  I heard her exhale, then. It was not just the smoking, there was attitude in it. One quirk about Frank and Daddy being gone, with all of their male noise and activity, was how sensitive my mother and I became to each other’s expressions. That exhale had the weight of what a year before might have required a long parental lecture.

  I came to the kitchen door. “What?”

  “What happened?”

  “Mother. I am allowed to not like a boy, if I want.”

  “Of course you are.”

  “A girl deserves to feel special, sometimes.” I felt myself almost about to cry, just saying it. “She deserves more than hours of waiting, sloppy clothes, no flowers, a bad table, boring conversation. She deserves more than an apology.”

  My mother took a long drag on that cigarette. The end of it glowed.

  “Go ahead,” I told her. “I’m sure I’ll hear it eventually anyhow.”

  “Brenda.” She put her cigarette in the ashtray. It was the speak-no-evil monkey, one of the Christmas gifts from Charlie. “Sit down here half a minute, sweetheart.”

  Sweetheart? I was in no mood for sugar talk. I was still angry, and frustrated, and wanting to shout at someone. But she patted the arm of the other overstuffed chair, and what else could I do? “This is not a great time for a lecture, Mother.”

  “Good thing I don’t have a lecture to give you.”

  So I came and perched on the edge of the chair, and waited. My mother stared off out the window, not in any hurry.