Universe of Two

by Stephen P. Kiernan

  Charlie sipped his beer. “No idea at all.”

  “The persistent feeling of being out of place.”

  “Oh, I know that well. The only time I don’t feel it is in choir practice.”

  “You sing?” Monroe staggered up. “Warble us a lick.”

  “Not right now.”

  “Come on, choirboy.” He swigged from a whiskey bottle. “Do it before I up and fall over.” He held the bottle forward. “I’ll give you some courage.”

  “Thanks anyway.” Charlie bowed back a few steps. “I’m off to the dance now.”

  “Monroe, the thing I want to know,” Giles said, grabbing the bottle for himself, “is why a couple of drinks turns your vocabulary into a cornpone cartoon.”

  “Kentucky luck.” Monroe smiled. “Booze brings up my blood, is all.”

  Giles nudged Charlie. “Be good.” And he tilted the bottle into his mouth.

  “Always,” Charlie said, backing away from the bonfire. He waited till he was fully in the dark before pouring out the rest of his beer.

  The walk to Fuller Lodge was pleasant with the power out. The residential side of The Hill lay under a canopy of stars so plentiful, compared to anywhere else he had lived, it could have been a different sky.

  He marveled that some people were expert in the heavens, knew the stars’ names and brightness and locations. Maybe he would try astronomy, once the war was over.

  That again. Once that unimaginable time should come. Meanwhile he lived on a parapet of science as isolated as any feudal castle, the surrounding canyons more deep and protective than any moat.

  Humming to himself, Charlie thought about the fellows back by the fire. They were all young, the average age on The Hill being twenty-seven. Even Oppenheimer, boss of the entire Project Y enterprise, was only thirty-nine. In part, that was why square dances suited Charlie so well: all kinds of young people, everyone far from home.

  Also he enjoyed the freedom from worries about romantic entanglements. In a square dance you did not have one partner so much as four, moving through the steps as the caller named them: simple ones like the “Allemande Left” and “Promenade,” which were like taking a playful walk; complicated steps like “Weave the Ring” and “Box the Gnat,” where Charlie had to pay attention to left foot, right foot, left hand, right hand, and the sixteen ways he could confuse them; and moves that defied description but gave him keen pleasure, like “Ocean Wave” or the classic “Do-Si-Do.”

  He’d arrived not knowing one dance step, clinging to the walls like a moth for months, until an older woman spotted him.

  “I’ve got a girl at home,” Charlie protested.

  “I’m twice your age,” the woman laughed, pulling on his arm. “Besides, square dancing isn’t about sweet talk, it’s about losing the overwork blues.”

  He acquiesced, made a fool of himself with a thousand missteps—which girl was his cross and which one was his corner?—and laughed more that night than he had in the last five months combined. At evening’s end the woman patted Charlie on the shoulder. “You come back here next week, all right, young man?”

  He hadn’t missed a Saturday since, except for those times the site boss gave him an assignment on Saturday to build something by Monday.

  The gaiety at Fuller Lodge was so deliberate, so determined, the music did not even stop when the band took a break. The minute they put down their instruments, Willy Meehan—by day an Electronics Division leader—would break out his accordion, an instrument so large people called it his Stomach Steinway, to keep the party bouncing. No time for rest, just boisterous fun till the clock struck midnight.

  At that, the room emptied in minutes. People might linger on the terrace, and sometimes romances occurred on the grassy knoll at the foot of Bathtub Row. But quiet came fast, the dance floor swept and everything made ready for religious services in the same room eight hours later. Charlie had joined the choir, prompted less by faith than by the desire to sing, though it meant an early morning after a late night. He would squeeze his whole week’s joy into one twelve-hour burst.

  Now he was passing the family apartment buildings, so hastily built they would have been called tenements back home, though they housed some of the world’s preeminent scientific minds. Out of the dark came women’s voices, a peal of laughter.

  The power came back on. By then Charlie was facing the tech area, where men working late meant the lights were on in nearly all the windows. From Fuller Lodge, brightness spilled onto the outside patio, and music poured out to echo across the campus. Charlie felt like a swimmer, approaching a cruise ship at anchor.

  The caller had a microphone, Charlie could hear him telling people to hustle and rustle, new squares were forming. He quickened his pace.

  Fuller Lodge had been the main building of a boys’ school. They’d left behind horse trails, a basketball hoop, and a main lodge made of logs—with antlered deer heads over the doorways and local Indians’ rugs tacked to the wall. Here and there, long strings of crimson chilis hung to dry. There were large fireplaces at each end of the main room, with a piano pushed against the wall to make room for more dancers.

  There were far more men on The Hill than women, no surprise given the disciplines that Project Y required. But there were WACS, female technicians and administrators, wives whose husbands didn’t dance, plus a few women scientists with reputations equal to many of the men. After all, Marie Curie had won two Nobel Prizes for discovering radioactivity and more. Still, the lopsided population meant that women had no rest on dance nights. It was likewise considered polite for boys not to monopolize partners.

  When breaks came, Charlie liked to wander out on the stone terrace. The tech area’s lights reflected off Ashley Pond, reminding him of Chicago skyscrapers shining on Lake Michigan. What was Brenda doing? A time zone ahead, she was probably asleep.

  “May I please to say hello?”

  It sounded like hail-lo, and Charlie turned to see the slender man with the brushed-back hair. Charlie couldn’t help checking, and yes, his shoes were still immaculate. “Mister Bronsky.”

  He made the slightest bow. “Mister Fishk.”

  Charlie waited, but the man said nothing more, and he felt he had to fill the silence. “Are you enjoying the square dancing tonight, sir?”

  “I do not dancing.”

  “I didn’t use to, myself. I’ve learned how, since I arrived here.”

  “I come from Russia, where it is not time for dancing.”

  Charlie hardly knew how to respond. “Yes, sir.”

  Bronsky stared into the distance. “That assembly you use today. At concrete bowl. How you do arrange three detonations to be simultaneous?”

  “I make the connecting wires all the same length. One may have an extra loop, but that’s a small inefficiency for having all three go off at the same time.”

  The Russian man nodded. “Make electrons travel same distance. Simple.”

  “There would be more integrity if I created a timing device,” Charlie replied.

  Bronsky bent and wiped the toe of a shoe with his thumb. “You can build device with more than three triggers?”

  “Theoretically, I could make an infinite number.”

  Bronsky frowned. “I am not discussing of theoretical.”

  Charlie turned from the pond. The man wore an expression of deprivation, as if he were hungry. But there was plenty of food on The Hill. He wanted something else. Charlie felt like he was back at Harvard, taking an important oral exam.

  “I don’t know. I don’t know how far soldering wire can carry a clean signal.”

  “Is easily determined. Trial and error.”

  “Yes, sir, but it would be hard to know what caused the error. Resistance in the material limits its capacity. Also, if you had too many triggers, the device could become unwieldy. For example, if the contacts need to be closer together than the width of the wire, making the device physically impossible to build.”

  Bronsky waited while Char
lie continued to think the problem through.

  “There’s a reliability risk too. If you have one firing control for, let’s say ten or twelve circuits, what if one thing failed? It would affect ten other things. I’d probably want redundancy, too, especially in a combat situation.” He chuckled at the complexity of it all. “Can we go back to theoretical ideas instead?”

  Bronsky waited, making sure Charlie had nothing more to add, before he spoke. “Perhaps, Fishk, please you are build for me device that triggers six, and we see what flaws we find.”

  Six. He’d never done more than three. It would take days of work—designing, soldering, trouble-shooting—and only if he quit the field team. “I could do that, sir.”

  “Good.” Bronsky cleared his throat, began moving away in his cautious, mincing fashion, then paused at the edge of the light. “Perhaps please, by Friday, you are build for me ten of them.”

  Charlie threw his head back laughing. “Ten? Do you know how much time that would . . .”

  His voice trailed off. The man had already vanished in the dark.

  21.

  It had to be submarines. I’d considered everything else Charlie could possibly be working on. For a while I speculated that it had something to do with the big new bombers. My girlfriend Greta said they flew so high, no Japanese defense plane or antiaircraft fire could reach them, so they bombed at will. Powerful. I liked imagining Charlie contributing to that strength.

  At the movies I saw a newsreel about bomber factories in Wichita, Kansas, and Renton, Washington. Not New Mexico. Next letter, I asked point blank: “What are you doing down there?”

  Charlie’s reply dodged it with a joke. “We build the front end of horses. The other half comes from Washington, D.C.”

  Which made that letter like many in those days—you did not know how to read it. Was Charlie mocking my curiosity? Or was he forbidden to tell me, and trying to make light of it? A girl had no way of knowing.

  I missed Charlie, his kindness, his attentiveness, his patience. But I hated the tedious communication, not knowing when I’d see him again. Life reduced to longing, requiring my mother and me to cope and worry. Families around us experienced such severe losses, sons injured or killed, we could not utter one word of complaint.

  One morning she left the newspaper on the kitchen table while I sipped coffee, and I was bored, and scanned the headlines: The US Navy had torpedoed the Lima Maru of Japan. Two thousand seven hundred and sixty-five men had died.

  That was the population of my whole high school, times four. I pictured our gym, packed for a basketball game, and tried to conceive of four times that many people. I knew those sailors did not all die at once, too, the instant the torpedo hit. No, they were in the middle of the ocean, and their ship sank and pulled them right down with it. They fought for air, they knew what was happening, they drowned.

  It was gruesome, and fascinating. The maps and numbers of the war stopped being abstract. I could conceive of four gymnasiums of people. Destruction had come within the grasp of my imagination.

  The very next morning, I read that the US Navy had torpedoed the Petrella. Two thousand six hundred and seventy men drowned. I began following the news, especially submarines: stealth, a water missile streaking across open sea, the surprise explosion, the devastating result. I could picture it all. I craved news of the next success.

  Three weeks later, down went the Sakito Maru, taking 2,495 men to the bottom. My school times four, again and again.

  Charlie had to be part of it. Of course, New Mexico was an odd place to develop ocean weapons. But to me, that made the idea all the more canny. Something in Charlie’s math was useful to underwater warfare. Essential, perhaps.

  In April the Yoshida Maru #1 took a torpedo and sank with 2,649 souls. The next day I received a letter from Charlie.

  I hope spring has arrived in Chicago. It has been warm here already for weeks. They say the snow was insufficient this winter, and we may have water shortages. I would be okay with that if I could stomach the milk. Meanwhile, my work has intensified, and I don’t get outside as often as I used to. But the square dances continue and they improve my mood. If only I could have one dance with you . . .

  As usual, there were many blacked-out parts. I read the remaining words as if they were code, as if Charlie was communicating a special message only I would understand. Did dances mean successful sub attacks? Was not getting outside his way of describing the span of days without a sinking? What was the significance of bad milk?

  A girl could drive herself crazy. But my mother had already decided we would not be going loco. If she said there would be changes, it had the weight of law. So: Dubie’s Music was now open half days. We were not, she insisted, going to sit around all day despairing. Anyone who wants an organ badly enough will come in the afternoon.

  We still had precious few customers, but somehow it did not feel as offensive, or as personal, if I only had to occupy myself for four hours at a time. When customers did arrive, I was in better humor.

  One result of the reduced hours was that my organ playing, which had settled into a steady plateau when I was applying to conservatories, broke free. I would never play in the league of the instrument’s giants, whose performances in the 1920s had drawn thousands. But I had definitely surpassed the amateur level. If the war ever ended, if I ever found a way to pay for Oberlin, if my acceptance there was still valid, I no longer worried that I would be out of my league.

  One afternoon my mother came out of the back office as I practiced. “Brenda,” she said, a mess of papers against her chest, “I bet there aren’t three churches in Chicago with someone of your skills. You keep right on working.”

  She returned to the office, while I sat speechless. Not only had my mother spontaneously praised me, she also gave voice to my secret opinion of myself. The unusual thing is, it wasn’t bragging. An organist’s skill can be measured as easily as the time a runner needs to run a mile. Repertoire tells all. And the piece that had my attention the most? Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D Minor.

  “Toccata” means touch, and that particular work required a great variety of touches: the trumpeting opening notes like a call to attention, flights of spriteliness, deep Germanic bombast. There were vast washes of chords, too, with Bach’s brilliant arpeggios going nonstop in the high notes. Not to mention a finger-bender of a fugue in the middle, the melody like a bird flitting this way and that, then repeated in the other hand, then in harmony, then sideways. Oh, and the call and response passage, that was like a soloist with his choir. Bach used the full instrument, every inch of its span. Technically the Bach toccata was not an especially difficult piece, but for me the fugue part was impossible. I needed a proper teacher but also relished my solo attempts.

  My mother spent her free mornings at an armory, the Eighth Regiment’s brick castle up by Thirty-Fifth Street. She refused to say what she was doing. Of course I nagged her to tell me. One night at dinner she’d had enough. “Suppose some Nazi guy grabs you and drags you into an alley.”

  “I’d kick him in the shins,” I snapped back.

  “Not if he had a gun you wouldn’t. And he puts the pistol barrel to your throat and says, ‘Tell me what your mother is doing at the armory.’”

  “I would say I have no idea. She won’t tell me.”

  She crossed her arms in victory. “And that is how it must stay.”

  The other change we made, at her insistence, was nightlife. Mine. She stayed home like always, her companions a book and a pack of cigarettes. I could gauge how good a novel was by her ashtray. The fewer the butts, the more the story had captured her attention. But she urged me to go out, to rekindle my friendships.

  I told her I was fine, but actually I was scared. Would fun create a distance between me and Charlie? What would I do about the interests of boys—which were natural, but might come as a test I did not want to take?

  Greta solved the problem. She’d been in my class: big-boned but gorgeous,
with bright green eyes. Greta had curly hair so black, in certain lights it looked blue. With a roaring contagious laugh, that girl was fun as a carnival. She called one Wednesday and invited me to Casablanca.

  “Seen it, thanks,” I said. “Twice.”

  “Me too,” she laughed. “Five times. But I’m ready to make it six.”

  “Who all is going?”

  “You and me, like old times.”

  I glanced across the kitchen, where cigarette smoke rose from behind the evening paper. I did love that movie, how it was both funny and serious.

  “Sure,” I said. “You bet.”

  By the time Greta arrived, she’d found the four other girls from our regular gang, and we marched off to the theater together, a warm spring night with my pals. But I also noticed, when my mother answered the door, the presence of the other girls did not surprise her. “Hello, ladies,” she’d said, like she’d been expecting them.

  Well, and so what? Maybe she asked my friends to get me out of the house. We loved the movie, hollering the best lines, Greta squeezing my arm when Rick tells Ilsa, “We’ll always have Paris.”

  No one shushed us. Everyone in the theater had seen it before. When Rick said the last line, it seemed like the entire place shouted along: “Louie, I think this is the beginning of a beautiful friendship.”

  So it began. Out most nights: movies, bowling, long walks by the lake. I shouldn’t have worried. I missed Charlie no less. And I had something to put in my letters. In June the Allies invaded Normandy, newspapers filled with heroism and sacrifice. I did not sense that the beginning of the end might have arrived. Later that month, an American ship sank the Toyama Maru, and 5,400 Japanese died. Almost as many men as we’d lost in all of D-Day, gone from a single torpedo.

  The next day we sank the Nippon Maru, taking 3,019 lives. I felt a dark thrill of connection to Charlie, and the incredibly complicated math it probably took to track down an enemy ship, and aim a torpedo to rush through the water true as an arrow, not diverted by waves or currents or a ship’s evasive movements.