Nina said, “Have regular facial expressions.” That was a command from their inventory of facetious devices they used to josh one another out of bad moods. She would put on a chicken suit if it would make him laugh.
Nina got out of bed. She removed her jeans and sweater. She worked her bra off under the tee shirt. She would sleep in that and her panties. She waited for him. She shook the bedcovers in a way she hoped was inviting. Down to his briefs, Ned got in with her.
Nina turned on her side to face him and said, “I’m sorry but I have more to tell you.”
“Why am I here?” he asked no one. He meant several things. One was why he was giving this time to his meaningless personal history when the country was getting ready to burn people to death in large numbers. The mental volume of the thought had been equivalent to a shout. That was odd. He was screaming at himself, it seemed. His personal history would amount to nothing, would amount to a surplus of painful feelings worth nothing, in the balance. And another thing, he had been a fuckwit. His documented stupidity was set in stone for the friends he loved, still loved, to put into the balance when they thought of him. And another thing. Why hadn’t somebody kept him up to date? But he knew the answer to that and it was because it was unimaginable for either of them, Joris or Gruen, to tell him man to man. No, it was the accidental availability of Nina. If she hadn’t been there, what he was to Claire would have remained secret, apparently. His thoughts were killing him.
He got out of bed without explanation. He needed to move around while he was suffering.
“What else is there?” he asked.
Nina said, “Well this is from Jacques. Who got it off the Réseau Voltaire, which is on the internet. It’s an aggregator site. How do you like my pronunciation?”
Ned made an aggrieved sound, but motioned to her to continue.
She said, “The story is that Douglas made a critical discovery that I don’t understand. It sounds really technical to me and I don’t know how much he knew about advanced optics, etcetera, but apparently he did, because what he invented or discovered was the answer to a problem that had been unsolved all during the rise of digital reproduction … which as you know very well is the problem of distinguishing between real and fake in digital images and products. Every intelligence service in the world was working on it, according to my source, Jacques. By the way, there’s all sorts of complicated equipment in the tower basement. Jacques says that Douglas was negotiating with the Mossad to give the thing to them and they would use it jointly with the CIA, but he wanted to be taken care of forever, if you get my drift. And it was important that no evidence of the transfer, such as a sale or big payments to him that could be traced, would ever surface. And listen to this. The sheer existence of the invention if that’s what it was had to be kept secret. It was going to be worked out through foundations in Germany and Israel. Money would go for some kind of institute for forensic justice. I told you about the similar thing that had been done for him earlier for some lesser service or discovery where he got paid a staggering fee for the Tambov movie script. Someone named Bondarchuk was involved. That payment to Douglas was called a pass-through …”
She was leaning down and feeling along the floor near the bed. She found her boots. She threw first one and then the other at him, not hard, at his knees. He had almost no reaction.
“Please come back to bed,” she said, raising her voice. He sighed and obeyed. He wanted her to finish her presentation so that the sermonizing on the radio could end forever.
Nina took his hand. “There’s not much more to tell. The deal over his invention was on and then it was off. There was constant negotiation going on. The invention was never patented because that would show the thing existed. The deal looked like it was off, I guess, when Iva was after Joris. But who knows? And then it was on again and then suddenly Douglas was dead, out of it, unable to go out and promote himself and this new institute, so now there’s this public relations spectacular. Which is really all it is, but you’d figured that out. So now tell me what you think.”
“I don’t know if it’s true,” Ned said.
“Neither do I, but it’s what I’ve been told and it’s credible to me.”
Ned covered his face with the blanket briefly. He lowered it and said, “I think I’m not going to have an opinion on this. It’s a pretty good example of a fait accompli. We were talking about that the other day. If Douglas came up with something you can use to defend the better countries against the worse countries, fine. We can never make it up to the Jews, anyway, Americans can’t. It goes back to the beginning, beginnings. Benjamin Franklin wanted to deny Jews citizenship. Roosevelt’s policymaker on Jewish refugees from Germany was a horrible anti-Semite. So you might say, Well, his invention is defensive except when it isn’t. That’s true. I’m making the decision to be okay with it if it’s half defensive, half something dark. Nobody will leave the Israelis alone. It’s a fight in the Convergence. It’s the Palestinians we’re supposed to be for, first of all, but the Palestinians won’t leave the Israelis alone and remember how everybody at the Labor Center was outraged when the Israelis started putting up their great walls because they were tired of being blown up in their cafés? Everybody said it was an outrage but voilà the bombings stopped. The Palestinians had grievances in spades but they fought back like … like monsters. I know it’s not simple, but that’s all I have to say.”
He could tell that there was something else she wanted to say to him.
“Do you remember the first joke you made to me when we were dating, or not even dating, when we were still in the taste-exchanging phase and you asked me what kind of movies I liked and I don’t remember what I said. And then you asked what kind I didn’t like and I said, westerns, violence, and suspense, and you said, Does that mean you don’t want to go with me to see Kill the Horse Slowly?”
He said, “I’m not sleeping in my underwear no matter what you say.” He got out of bed, went to the chest of drawers, opened it, and took out a pair of pajamas and held them up for her to see.
He said, “These may be Douglas’s pajamas but I don’t care. Tonight I’m wearing them.”
She said, “Ned, you’re funny.”
“I once was.”
47
Ned couldn’t sleep. Nina’s penlight was under her pillow. He extracted it with care, managing not to disturb her. There were the papers Jacques had handed Nina earlier. They were on the floor next to the bed. Thinking about the old days was difficult, tonight. It was like looking at events through a dark mist. I hear as through a wall, poorly, one of them had said once. Certain times had been amusing. Like Douglas’s impromptu heckling of the Venceremos Brigade reunions in Washington Square Park. Douglas thought Castro was a clown and he referred to Cuba as the Brave Little Police State. Ned remembered it all, Douglas shouting Páredon!, the cry the Cuban rebels used in their salad days when they were sending their enemies to the firing squad. And of course by the seventies the volunteer sugar-cane-cutter brigadiers had forgotten what the word means and just took Douglas as encouraging them when in fact he was both reminding them of something shameful and insinuating subtly that they themselves could go to the wall, for all he cared. Douglas’s mind had been a dungheap of the left’s past transgressions, which had gone well with his occasional appearances as the conscience of the left, or one of them, anyway.