Universe of Two

by Stephen P. Kiernan

  “Wait till you’re twenty-seven and married, kid.”

  I was about to protest as usual. But thoughts entered my head from the night before, and I kept quiet.

  “He loves the smell of my hair,” Lizzie continued. “When we hug, he always burrows that big old schnozz in my noggin, and I can hear him sniffing. Taking it all in.”

  “Oh, sweetie.”

  She undid the braid and shook her hair down. Raising the glass, she threw back the shot in one gulp, chomped on the lime with her eyes squinted shut, and shuddered the length of her body. After a second, she opened her eyes again. “This war is not over till that man is home, and his face is buried in my hair, and I can hear him breathing through that fabulous big nose of his.”

  Lizzie held up the glass, and I knocked my knuckles against it. “Here’s to big noses,” I said. “And big love.”

  Lizzie poured me another shot, and sliced another wedge of lime.

  Eventually I needed to use the john. When I stood, the tequila pounced on me, bending the walls, tilting the floor, interrupting my line of thought so much I stopped, and sat back down on the bed.

  Lizzie laughed uproariously, and after a second I did too. Though if Mrs. Morris had come in right then and asked what was so funny, I doubt either of us could have begun to explain. After that, it was only a matter of time before Lizzie challenged me to a push-up contest.

  “Now that the damn war is almost done, you need to be ready.”

  “I have things to tell you though,” I said. “Big things.”

  “The end of the war is a big thing, kid.”

  “About Charlie, though.”

  Bottle in hand, she pointed at the floor. “No stalling.”

  Well, Lizzie didn’t know it, but I’d been diligent. Push-ups every morning before I dressed, at the church during the day, and before bedtime. I’d made progress in secret. Also the tequila gave me confidence. I knelt, planked forward, and set out to tie my record: sixteen. But I hadn’t slept much the night before, thanks to Charlie, nor eaten much breakfast, thanks to the Morrises. I began to slow at eleven.

  “Not good enough,” Lizzie said, squatting by my face. “Push it. Push it.”

  Twelve, thirteen. My arms burned. Fourteen.

  “Don’t you want your man to want you?” Her face was nearly as red as mine.

  Fifteen. Sixteen. Slower than ice melting.

  “Do it,” Lizzie yelled. “Push it, Brenda.”

  Seventeen. I collapsed onto the floor, panting and spent. But Lizzie’s face remained stern as ever.

  “What?” I said. “What’s wrong?”

  “Nothing. It’s stupid.”

  “It’s not, I can tell.” Dizzily, I sat up. “What is it, Lizzie?”

  “A superstition I’ve had.” She sucked on a used lime wedge, then winced. “Long as I did push-ups, Tim would stay alive. No matter what happened, if I kept at it, he would keep breathing. Now Germany is finished with. Maybe—” Her face softened, one pearly drop raced down her cheek. “Maybe he’ll actually come home.”

  “No time for tears,” Mrs. Morris said. Startled, we both whirled. She’d come up the stairs without our noticing. “Lizzie, your husband is on the phone.”

  “Timmy.” She jumped up, grabbing the bedpost for balance, then hustled down the stairs. As Mrs. Morris looked after her, I tucked the tequila bottle out of sight.

  “And you.” She scowled from the doorway.

  Did she know about Charlie? Was I about to get evicted? “Ma’am?”

  Instead she nodded once, sharply, like her chin was cutting something in the air. “Good work today. The choir was on pitch.” She hesitated. “Your playing also was fine.”

  A compliment? I was too surprised to reply. She turned and trundled down the stairs as well. I worked myself upright and staggered to the landing. “Thank you, ma’am,” I called down, but she had already closed the door below.

  With that, I was alone. Before the war, that was almost never so—home crowded with family, classes at school, fun with girlfriends, dates with boys. Since then I’d grown accustomed to solitude. I was changing. Even drunk in the middle of the day, I knew it. The European battles were over. I had slept all night beside Charlie. I was twenty-one, and so far from home it might as well be another planet.

  The giddiness drained out of me as if I’d exhaled it. I collected the limes, washed the glass, put the bottle in Lizzie’s room. Then I went back into my little monkish cell, and sat on the bed, and wondered what immense thing was going to happen next.

  Charlie stepped off the bus the following Saturday into my open arms. I hadn’t planned it, but I didn’t care who saw. I suppose we’d both been expecting our usual awkward hello and gradual reacquaintance. Not this time. When the olive drab bus pulled into view, instead of my weekly butterflies, I felt lust. As he hugged me I planted a kiss right on his lips. And felt my hips tilt in a way they never had before, involuntarily toward him. Some boys stepping off the bus gave a cheer.

  “Nice work, Trigger,” one of them called.

  I felt Charlie flinch, and I stepped back. “I’m sorry. Was that too much?”

  He shook his head. “It was the name he called me. I hate it.”

  “What? Trigger?”

  He seized both of my hands. “Do me a favor, Brenda? Never call me that. Not when you’re angry, not as a joke, never.”

  “I promise, Charlie Fish.” I kissed his neck. “I like your real name, anyway. It’s like a big nose.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “One of the things Lizzie likes most about her husband is his nose.”

  “Oh.” He scanned the courtyard, people heading here and there from the bus, new arrivals climbing aboard with suitcases and travel papers. Then he put the world aside and looked at my face. “Hi.”

  “Hello.” I snuggled against him.

  “How are our organ repairs holding up?”

  “Well, it’s the strangest thing.” I led him away from the name callers. “Not all the pipes sound the same volume anymore. Some are much louder.”

  Charlie nodded. “We need to do a voicing. Do you mind if I take a look at it?”

  “I was hoping you would.”

  So, instead of the lunch I’d expected, or the smooching and caressing I’d dreamed of, we went to the church. Charlie tossed his coat over the back of a pew. Rolling up his sleeves, he came and kissed me long on the mouth. One second more and I would have glommed onto him for the rest of the day. But he turned his attention to the organ.

  “What is a voicing?” I asked.

  Climbing onto the wood molding behind the pulpit, Charlie peered into the pipes. “I don’t know nearly enough to perform a full one. But it’s a process of making the instrument fit the room, and making its parts work with one another. Giving the pipes the same volume is a basic start.”

  “But how do you do it? I only know Hammond organs, and they don’t have pipes.”

  “Each one has an adjustable collar or a movable opening. But there are no half jobs. You have to do all the pipes.”

  I slid my dress sleeves up like he’d done with his shirt. “Ready when you are.”

  He smiled, and I realized how rarely Charlie smiled in those days, and how wonderful it was when a moment of lightness stole over him. We went to work.

  Hours passed. The light through the church’s big front windows crept across the floor as the afternoon passed. Mostly my job was to sit at the organ and play a note over and over, while Charlie did his business inside the nest of pipes—I’d peered in and it was a dusty, cobwebbed place. Little space to move, and no room for two.

  I could have said the process was stultifying, a waste of my organ talents, a waste of his time. But I did not feel subservient at all. Charlie could not do the voicing without me. Likewise I needed him to make the instrument my livelihood depended on sound right.

  At noon I went for sandwiches. When he came out to eat, Charlie had a dark smudge on his cheek. My impulse w
as to wipe it away. But I restrained myself. Too cute.

  “I hope this isn’t unbearably boring,” he said, biting into his sandwich.

  “Actually, I like it,” I said. “I mean sure, it can be tedious to play a note again and again. But we’re in a church, right? This feels a bit . . . well . . . sacred.”

  Charlie’s old surprised face appeared. Like a long-lost friend. “Is that what’s going on? I’ve been trying to figure out why this work is making me so darn happy.”

  “It doesn’t hurt to do it together.”

  “Organ voicing can’t be done by one person, Brenda. It takes two: one to play the note, the other to adjust it. That’s the only way.”

  We gazed at each other. I know it was young love, and predictable. But take it from an old woman now: We had spent so many hours together being cagey, hiding our feelings, trying not to be at risk. All of that caution was finally falling away. I was happy to see Charlie happy. Today in my little apartment, I have a photo taken a few weeks later. He’s standing in front of a clunky old Hudson, his face open as a book, and the grinning girl beside him is both me and not me. Brenda is the gal he’s holding, yes, but so much life has happened since then, time has changed her in countless ways.

  We do not get to keep anything. Best moments, worst moments, they rush by and away. So it may be corny that we stared at each other there in that church eating lunch on the floor, but we would never be those young people again, carefree despite the darkness that lay ahead. If I could freeze that instant somehow, or preserve it in amber, I would look at it a hundred times a day.

  “Okay,” Charlie said at last, crumpling up the waxed paper that had held his sandwich. “Better get back to work.”

  When he finished, I did wipe the dirt from his cheek. He watched me intently as I did it. Then he put his arm around me and we nuzzled to the front of the church.

  “Brenda,” he said, “I need to talk about what happened last time I was here.”

  “If you say anything other than that you loved sleeping with me, I will slap you.”

  He burst out laughing. “Pretty much the opposite. But thanks for letting me know where I stand.”

  “I can’t stop thinking about it. The feelings are so powerful.”

  “Me too.” He nodded. “That’s why I’m sorriest about what I have to say next.”

  It was like he’d dropped a two-ton weight on my heart. I glanced around the churchyard, a few thirsty trees, a passing car. “What’s that?”

  “I’m going to do what you told me. I’m going to be a man. But it means I may not be able to see you for a while.”

  “Oh.”

  “Everyone is counting on me now.”

  I took a deep breath. “I can wait, Charlie. We’ve needed a ton of patience all through this war, both of us. I just hope it doesn’t drag on.”

  “That’s how lots of people feel,” he said. “I think I’m allowed to say that they want our job done before the Pacific invasion happens.”

  “Lizzie’s husband called last week. Victory in Germany didn’t change anything. His unit is still preparing to go. If you can prevent that . . .”

  “I’m so small in this, Brenda.” Charlie rolled his sleeves back down. “A tiny part of a huge thing. But it turns out to be a very necessary part.”

  “Like one wheel on a bus?”

  “One headlight. But it is very dark out.” He heaved an enormous sigh. “Speaking of a bus, I need to be on the five o’clock run.”

  “You can’t stay longer?”

  “Afraid not.”

  “Then kiss me while you can.”

  And he did, as I pressed myself to him without shame or reserve, and he responded in kind. Our bodies clung like moths to the screen of a light-filled room.

  I walked him to the bus, not talking much till we turned onto East Palace Avenue. “Do you know that I hate this street?”

  “I do. My feelings about it depend on whether I am arriving or departing.”

  The old green bus was there, idling, all the other passengers already aboard. A church bell rang five times.

  “How long do you think it will be?” I asked.

  “Too long,” Charlie said, kissing me once more, then trotting up the steps.

  The engine belched black smoke, and there, on a window halfway back, he spread his palm out on the glass, an open hand till the bus turned the corner and I was standing on the sidewalk alone again.

  38.

  In the end, Charlie used a car battery. Also two dozen flashlight bulbs. But simple components sometimes gave the clearest results.

  How long had passed since he decided to finish? When you only sleep in naps between bouts of work, brief surrenders to the body’s demands before returning to the calculating desk or the soldering iron—days were the wrong unit of measure.

  Now Charlie stood at the head of the worktable. An assembly lay before him, spread out on two sheets of plywood. Turning that flat result into something that operated on the Gadget’s spherical shape, that was a problem for someone else to solve.

  It was odd, but for some components he felt a form of affection: They had always fired, always worked, while others misfired or proved to be duds. But now there were twenty-four of them, each with a lightbulb the size of a fingertip where the Gadget’s explosives would be. If the lights went on all at once, those small bursts would crush the plutonium, pop the nut of beryllium and polonium, spray the atoms with neutrons, and produce a fission that would go critical in a few ten-millionths of a second.

  As Sebring said in his lecture: pop.

  How a car battery—purloined from a broken-down jeep at the vehicle depot—would fit inside the Gadget was not his problem. In fact, he had an intuition that something was not exactly right with the sphere’s design. But after being told dozens of times, Charlie was sticking to his knitting.

  He attached wires to the positive and negative terminals on the car battery. Lifting the initiator switch, Charlie examined the table again. Twenty-four devices, a maze of wires, a maze of questions for his conscience. He held the switch in his hand.

  If only they had not called him Trigger. It was insulting. It diminished the complexity of his work. It implicated him in the Gadget’s purpose. Charlie told himself for the hundredth time that he was neither building a bomb, nor slaughtering innocent civilians. He was a pawn, whose job was math involving arcs, and soldering. How the nation used those skills was not his affair. He was being a soldier. He was being a man.

  Charlie glanced out the window. Dawn hinted vaguely in the eastern sky. Another full night in the lab. Maybe Uncle John and Oppie were right. Maybe demonstrating the Gadget would bring the Pacific war to a speedy end. Maybe it would prevent future wars.

  “Right,” he told the empty room. “And maybe tomorrow’s Christmas.”

  With that, he closed the initiator switch, the contacts touched, and twenty-four flashlight bulbs switched on.

  He counted twice to be sure. Yes, every single one of them. Finally he’d done it.

  Charlie flipped the switch back, the bulbs instantly extinguished. On another day, he might have felt proud. Relieved. Triumphant. Instead he felt exhausted.

  Also there was the nagging feeling that the design was not right. He’d done his part. Still, there was something wrong.

  Charlie threw a sheet over the assembly, to shield it from dust and discourage prying eyes. He turned off the light at his desk—one that illuminated his soldering, as Brenda had taught him. At the door, he switched off the room light as well, then navigated the hallway by feel and the stairs by their creaking under his weight. Fatigue followed Charlie all the way, through the access door and out into the high-altitude predawn morning—where the light on the hills behind Los Alamos stopped him cold.

  All this time he had seen the landscape of New Mexico as uniform, one muddy red with lighter or darker hues, but lacking entirely the variety of well-treed New England, and its million shades of green. People carried on about s
outhwestern beauty, and he nodded along out of manners, with no idea what they were talking about.

  Now the highlands were a daybreak rainbow: blues and purples at the base of the hills to vibrant yellow at the peaks. Above that, a sky whose blue was so pale it seemed white. A giant bird, he did not know what kind, sailed over without a single flick of his wings. Although the atmosphere lacked the dewy morning scent of lawns and fields back home, there was a freshness to the air, a cleanness. The scent of ponderosa was wonderfully sharp. He found that his shoulders were dropping from their clench up beside his ears. He took a deeper breath.

  Two soldiers patrolled the tech area perimeter, rifles down, chatting in low voices. A dog trotted along inside the fence, heading in the other direction. Charlie had been planning to go to the barracks, but something about that dog made him change his mind. Instead he turned toward Fuller Lodge.

  The front door was unlocked, the offices corridor dark. He ambled into the main hall, where there was neither dance nor lecture nor church nor party. Simply a large open room with a high ceiling, pine beams, serapes hung on the walls. Along one side stood glass cabinets, holding striking black pottery made by local Indians.

  Charlie strode past all of that, to the far end, to the piano. The usual padlock hung on the keyboard cover, but whoever played last had left it looped through the metal bracket, unlocked. He sat, pulling the bench under him with a scraping noise that seemed to offend the empty space. He opened the top, and there were all the keys. He wished like anything that he knew how to play.

  “Brenda,” he whispered. She would know the perfect song for that moment too. And if it was a quiet one, he would get to see her face become sweet, unguarded.

  Charlie placed his hands on the keys in the only way he knew how, the only shape, while pressing the pedal with his foot so the instrument would sound as loud and long as it could. Then with all of his strength: the G-major chord. He’d done it on a hundred organs, a thousand pianos, he’d played it one second before meeting Brenda.

  And now, though the chord sounded powerfully—he felt it in his belly and heard it echo in the rafters—still it was no organ, the lodge no cathedral, those keys having no mighty pipes as loud as an entire orchestra. He played the chord again but arpeggiated, one note at a time from bottom to top.