Universe of Two

by Stephen P. Kiernan

  “I thought you’d be taller.”

  Charlie held his hands wide. “Sorry to disappoint you.”

  “Still,” the boy said. “This is the detonator genius of Los Alamos, guys. Trigger.”

  Charlie stood, picking up his tray. “I don’t like that name.”

  That night Brenda had dinner waiting, and she was wearing a snug red dress. They had rented a three-room bungalow with a tiny front porch a dozen blocks from campus. By then they had woken in the same bed for eight consecutive mornings, and the pleasure of it was so acute, Charlie lingered. Each day he’d had to run to campus to meet his first commitments.

  “How’s it going so far?” she asked, while they sipped iced tea on the porch.

  “Not what I expected.”

  “In a good way?”

  “Someone called me Trigger.”

  “Oh, Charlie.”

  “No acoustics till spring. But there’s an electronics course that might be fun. A little soldering, perhaps.”

  She laughed. “I pity anyone who tries to compete with you.”

  Charlie put his glass down on the table. “I think I’m going to bed.”

  “Are you all right?”

  He paused at the door. “I am the tiredest man on earth.”

  And he left his wife on the porch alone, dusk coming on like a premonition.

  The next morning he was at the kitchen table, writing, when she came in. “Sorry I overslept.” Brenda bent and kissed the side of his neck. “How did you sleep?”

  “Next to you,” he said, flipping the papers over into a folder, then hugging her waist. Brenda stood as still as a tree, not moving until he let go. He pressed his head against her belly, and she had to shift her hips—still tender. She grabbed a fistful of his hair, then released it and went to pour herself a mug of coffee. “Still healing, I guess.”

  “I know how you feel.”

  “Oh, but look at the time,” she added, and when Charlie glanced at the stove clock, he jumped up and ran for the door.

  By lunchtime that day, nearly all the students were calling him Trigger. Charlie went to electronics early, set himself up with a soldering bench, and amused himself with components until the room was full and the professor arrived. Papers and books tucked under one arm, he glanced at Charlie’s work area and stopped cold.

  “Gentlemen, there will be no use of the irons except under my supervision.” He said it loudly, for the whole room to hear. “Is that understood?”

  Charlie turned off his iron, removed his mask, and placed it over the hot tip.

  The professor put down his papers and sidled over, arms crossed like a disappointed parent. “This is dangerous equipment, young man. Reckless of you to—”

  Charlie moved aside, revealing the assembly he’d made. The professor tilted the device on one side. “Wicking, sweating, smooth wires. Where’d you learn all this?”

  An undergraduate in the back row called out, “Los Alamos.”

  “Well, thank you for a job well done.” The professor ambled to the head of the room. “You may know enough to teach this course. Others here may feel the same. But I’m the one with the PhD, so you’ll not be touching equipment except as I direct.” He faced the class. “Do we understand one another?”

  Charlie went and found his seat, settling in at the small desk. “Yes.”

  “Sir,” the boy in back said. “This man is a hero.”

  “He may well have been, and bravo, but he’s a student now.”

  The next morning Brenda came into the kitchen and Charlie was writing again.

  “The great American novel?” she asked.

  “A letter to Giles.” He turned the page over, tucking it into a manila folder.

  “How is he doing?”

  “I’m writing to him, as you see. He hasn’t received this yet, much less replied.”

  Brenda had been on her way to the coffee, but instead she pulled back a chair to sit beside him. “I am not the enemy, Charlie.”

  He put down his pen. “Of course you aren’t.”

  “What is upsetting you today?”

  “You mean besides the Gibraltar of guilt I’m carrying around?”

  “Plenty of people consider what you did heroic. That’s why we’re here.”

  “I was called a hero yesterday,” Charlie said. “In front of a whole class.”

  “Well, isn’t that sw—”

  “I could have throttled him.” Charlie shook his head. “What I did was maybe—possibly, theoretically—necessary. No more than that. Some people were excited by the difficulty of the task, but for most of us, we did our part only because it was needed.”

  “But, Charlie, you—”

  “We faced no enemy. Nobody was shooting at us. I saw not one person die. Hardly heroic. In fact you could argue that making the bomb—my bomb, my damned bomb—was the consummate cowardice. I could not have been safer, sitting by your bed in the Santa Fe hospital, while the people of Hiroshima were getting ready for work or laboring in the fields or on their way to school.”

  “You just interrupted me twice.”

  “I—” Charlie caught himself. “So I did.”

  She took his hand. “You shush now. You had a small part in a giant victory, which is all any soldier does. You helped end the war, which is good for America and Japan.”

  “But the carnage.”

  “Do you wish we were still fighting today? That men your age were throwing themselves on some beach five thousand miles from here? Or that Japanese men were defending it to the death, however futile that was?”

  “Of course not.”

  “Can you imagine the rage of every mother and father who lost a child in the invasion, if they found out later that we had the bomb and did not use it?”

  “I hadn’t thought of that.”

  “Enough of this guilt. Those parents love you. They don’t even know your name, but they love you with their whole hearts. Now,” she said, standing, “I am going to make us some breakfast, and you are going to eat it.”

  He bowed his head. “All right.”

  “And then,” she said, “you are going to go talk to someone, some senior person, about how Stanford University can take better care of this excellent man and famous student.”

  Not two hours later, Charlie spotted Richard Zeno in the hall. “Pardon me, sir, could I speak with you for a minute?”

  Zeno, his bushy eyebrows lowered, gave Charlie a long look. “Fish, isn’t it?”

  “Yes, sir.”

  “Come to my office in ten minutes.”

  Charlie went outside to march his nervousness around the building. It was a lovely fall day in Palo Alto, sun sparkling through the trees, the air sweetened with a scent another student had told him was eucalyptus. Gradually, his pace slowed. The campus was nearly empty, two students crossing the lawn from one building to another. On the far side of the physics building, a parking lot sprawled, most of its spaces empty.

  Zeno’s secretary was out, but the department chairman called from his desk. “Come in, come in.” He waved Charlie to a seat. “Welcome to Stanford. How is it going?”

  “Thank you, sir.” Charlie placed his stack of books on the floor. “I’m glad to be here. But I have some concerns.”

  “Then I want to hear them. Be as frank as you like.”

  “Thank you.” Charlie sat straight, hands on his knees. “My concern is that the work here, all of the priorities, are about atomic bombs.”

  “The study of physics has entered a vast new territory.”

  “Yes, sir. But I spent the past three years in that territory, and I came here hoping to gain knowledge in other areas.”

  Zeno scratched a sideburn. “Acoustics, wasn’t it?”

  “And optics, and radar.”

  “We’ll likely have funding for radar soon. Peace won’t stop that enterprise.”

  “But the work will be for military applications, I imagine.”

  “We live in an unstable world.�
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  Charlie pulled back, taking a deep breath. “I’ve been contemplating withdrawing, sir. Not getting my PhD after all.”

  “Nonsense.” Zeno stood. “No no. Fish, this is a preeminent graduate program. You’ll find no better. What do you want? A teaching assistantship? A lab job?”

  “I don’t know, sir.”

  “That makes it hard for me to help.”

  “I don’t want to learn how to become a better warrior.”

  Zeno ambled to his window. He gazed out on the quad, where Charlie had just been walking. “I’d like you to think about it, Fish. What do you actually need from us, as opposed to what you need to reconcile within yourself?” With his thumb, he brushed his thick eyebrows back. “I want you to stay. I will make any reasonable accommodation.”

  “That is incredibly generous, sir.”

  “You do your thinking, and let me know.”

  “That’s the best answer I could ask for, sir.”

  “Excellent.” He came forward, hand outstretched. “Truth is, it raises our stock to have the likes of Charlie Fish in the program.”

  Charlie shook his hand. “I’m just a mathematician.”

  “Hardly.”

  Gathering his books, Charlie said nothing.

  “In fact my colleagues will be green with envy,” Zeno continued, sitting again at his desk.

  “Why is that, sir?”

  “Are you kidding? I got to have a private meeting with Trigger.”

  51.

  Riding the bus was a sign that I was healing. The system was different from Chicago’s straight lines, instead following a web of crossing routes. While Charlie was gone all day, though, I ventured out—each time a bit farther from our love cottage. Things had not been as passionate as in New Mexico. Which I blamed on Charlie’s blues. Each day that passed without lovemaking, without even a casual caress, gave more mass to the weight between us. This was not about my lust, this was about finding our way back to each other.

  One night in the shower, it became too much and I began to cry. I longed for his touch, his closeness, our bond. With me, though, sadness and anger are close as thumb and forefinger. Yanking back the curtain, I called out, “Hey, Charlie? Charlie Fish?”

  After a moment, he poked his head in the doorway. “What is it?”

  I gave him the same look as I had on the roads outside Santa Fe, and said what I always said. “I want you to come with me.”

  He undressed slowly, while I watched, and ducked in under the steamy stream. We touched tenderly, as if we might break. He knelt to press his face against the scar on my belly. I soaped the numbers tattooed by his shoulders. Then he straightened and kissed me on the mouth. Instantly the atmosphere changed. I handed Charlie the soap, and we were off and running. We stayed in that shower till the hot water ran out. Afterward I joked that I must have the cleanest breasts in all of California.

  We were lovers again, yet still I had not told him that I loved him. There was an obstacle of some kind, an impediment—not to the feeling, but to the saying of it. I knew it was an unkindness, and I knew it was entirely my problem.

  Each day after he’d dashed off to morning class, I did my push-ups. I’d lost strength in the hospital, and each push tugged at my scar, but I was back to nine already. As I dressed, I thought about how Charlie felt responsible for all those dead Japanese people. My belief that it had been necessary didn’t change the fact that I had pushed him to do it, I had made him contradict his conscience. In a way, I was guiltier than he was. And the longer he took to recover, the more I regretted being mistaken.

  Yes, the superior girl was realizing that maybe she did not have all the answers. If he’d refused to build the detonator, someone else might have. But the bomb would not be on his conscience.

  I am still wrestling with this idea in my head, all these years later. There have been plenty of wars and battles since 1945, but I feel the restlessness of culpability. It pushes me out of my recliner, to the dresser, where I see that photo of us, standing in front of the Morrises’ Hudson on our wedding day. It works every time. It reminds me that I did do one thing right. I did love him—even if I hadn’t told him yet.

  So, on those California mornings, it was out of the house for this girl. I’d hop on a bus, ride it a random number of stops, then climb down and investigate a new part of town. Streets were safe and people were friendly.

  We’d had some hard good-byes in Santa Fe, of course. The Morrises offered us a ride to the depot in Lamy, and Charlie arrived late.

  “Quite the valedictory from Giles,” he said. “But I couldn’t find the cat anywhere.”

  Mrs. Morris, with a hug that smelled of lily of the valley, thanked me for getting her playing music again. Reverend Morris said a blessing in a soft voice. As for Lizzie Hinks, we’d long made up by then, and after an awkward moment she tumbled tearfully into my arms.

  “I hope Tim is home soon,” I said, “and you make babies by the dozen.”

  “But first I have to ride back with Mrs. M,” she whispered.

  “She’s not so bad,” I said.

  Lizzie grinned at me. “Yes she is.”

  The conductor called all aboard, Charlie hoisted our bags, I took the picnic basket, and we boarded the train to Denver—the first leg in our long journey west.

  Charlie kept his promise, and persuaded Professor Simmons to find me a place in Stanford’s freshman class—but the following fall, when the faculty would be back. My postsurgical energy sometimes flagged at odd times anyway, so waiting seemed wise.

  I healed quickly, though, as young people do, and my mood lifted too. My father would be in Chicago by Halloween. Frank accepted a post in Nuremberg, maintaining prosecutors’ cars until the trials were over, then he’d come home too. My mother’s letters were giddy.

  That was the tempo around us. Of course there was sorrow, deep as a canyon. One morning a woman on the bus wept from the time I got on till I stepped off in Redwood City. But the world allowed optimism now. The sun was coming out.

  That day I saw the sign for Peale’s Organs, a modest store, a few blocks from the water. Outside, three trucks bore the company name, beside the outline of a console with pipes. I hadn’t touched an instrument since we boarded that train in Lamy. The idea of playing tugged on my heart like the moon pulls the sea. I marched right in.

  A bearded man on the phone glanced at me and held up one finger. “Of course,” he said. “We can fix that before Sunday.”

  I peered around, and there was no showroom. No display of Hammonds waiting for my fingers. The shop was a long narrow space with workbenches along both walls, a hammering noise coming from the back. I smelled sawdust. One man was carving a small block of reddish wood, while another was hand-buffing a pipe taller than he was.

  “Can I help you?” The man on the phone had hung up. He held a pair of pliers. A square pencil was tucked behind his ear.

  “I gather you do not sell organs here.”

  “No, ma’am. We repair them.”

  That idea held me in place for a moment. The two times that I’d seen Charlie working and happy, he was repairing the organ at Reverend Morris’s church. Quieting the ciphers before that wedding, voicing the whole instrument a week later. I could picture him, crawling out from under the console, smiling and covered with dust. Not to mention the pipes he fixed with my father’s basement soldering equipment. He was happy that morning too. “Do you have a lot of work these days?”

  “Pretty much any church in the Bay Area has a problem, they call us. And with the war over, we’ve got a whale of a backlog.” He used the pliers to scratch his beard. “For an organ store, ma’am, I’d guess the nearest one’s in Palo Alto.”

  “Thank you,” I said. “I’ll give it a look.”

  But that was not what I had in mind. On the bus home I hoped that Charlie would be there already. I’d rush him right into bed, make him forget all about the bomb. Instead the house was quiet, as if waiting for me.

 
I went into the kitchen to see what I might make for dinner. There on the table was the manila folder, which held the letter Charlie had been writing.

  “Brenda,” I told myself, “don’t you dare.”

  Then I sat right down and turned the pages over.

  My brilliant Giles:

  I am sitting in my kitchen, afflicted by rubatosis. I’m sure you already know that this is the unsettling awareness of your own heartbeat.

  Where is your whiskey when I need it most? Where is your fine companionship?

  I suspect that coming here was a grievous error. The war followed me. What we did followed me. It rubs salt in my wounds day and night. There is no peace.

  Probably you have a million-dollar word to describe my emotions exactly. Do you also have a word for its cure?

  I am a stew of uncertainty, a stone soup of doubts. I didn’t need those tattoos after all. The numbers are with me forever.

  I know how to be a good husband but

  He’d stopped there when I came in. I wondered how he would have finished that sentence . . . but I can’t because I am charred with guilt? . . . but my wife urged me to build something that killed hundreds of thousands of people?

  Now that I had committed the crime of snooping, I went further—seeing what else was in the folder. Photos: Hiroshima after the bomb. A flattened Nagasaki. No buildings, no houses, no trees. Just rubble, a wheel but no wagon, the white spine of a horse. A picture captioned “Industrial Promotion Hall,” the building still standing, but one whole side torn away, its tower looking like a hollow silo. The most striking picture was from high above, showing a rough circle of charred land, surrounded by ash-white fields. I studied that one, trying to imagine what Charlie felt when he saw it. And this was what I had driven him to do.

  “Sweetheart?”

  I jumped. He stood in the kitchen doorway. “Darling. You’re home early.”

  I didn’t bother to hide what he’d caught me doing. I just ran and threw myself against him. He held me, too, pressing us together till I felt his heart beating against mine. It was not sexual; it was like two people clinging to a lifeboat.