Her husband undoes the collar of his shirt and struggles out of its sleeves. The flaps of fabric go slack onto their haphazard hanger. She will turn his closet right again after he leaves for school in the morning. He moves across the room in T-shirt and boxers, this night’s peace in his eyes. The war is over, or it will be soon. Work can begin again, free from nuisance politics, the showdown of power, the assorted evils that he, a secular Jew in love with knowing, would never have chosen to mix in. Life can resume, safe at least, if never again the way it was before such safety. This is her husband, padding over the floorboards to their August bed, across a distance harder to guess than any Fermi problem.
She wants to ask, Is this what you thought? One cog in the largest engineering project ever. Nothing. She wants to ask him exactly what he did, what subsection of this invention he made possible. But he closes the distance to her before she finds the nerve. He bends his weight onto the bed, and just as every night, their two adjacent hues shock each other into being. His eyes drop to the greater mystery. He puts his hand on her thickened middle, the third life they’ve started there. He says something soft she can’t catch, neither English nor German, but in a language far older than both, an earliest benediction.
It’s August, too hot for the slightest touch. He rubs her with a little alcohol on a cotton rag that they keep on the bed stand. For a minute, she is cool. “You have not felt sick today?”
Because she does not lie to him, she says to the road-map ceiling, “A little. But it wasn’t the baby.”
He shoots her a look. Does he know? Always the same question. And no one can give her an answer that won’t, itself, go forever begging. He looks away from her ripened belly. He swings his feet onto the bed. He lifts the undershirt above his head, bares the chest she can’t quite learn. He lies back on the mattress, his shoulders pressed down into the sheet and his hips lifted, like a wrestler bucking free of a pin. In one smooth motion, he draws his boxers down his legs. A final fish wiggle and he’s naked, his undershorts a soft missile arcing onto the chair. How many nights has she seen him undress? More than the miles a crow lives to fly. How many more will be given to her? Fewer than the notes in a Beethoven allegro.
She lies in bed, six inches from a man who has helped — what? Begin a new age. Helped his awe-blind friends think the unthinkable and place it squarely into this world. She might ask him, and gain only his confusion. She can come no closer than flush alongside him. Every human a separate race. Each one of us a self no one can enter. How has this man found his way to this bed? How has she? Here they are, a little more than five years on in their marriage, and already there’s no hope of saying. Even less chance of saying where another five years will leave them. She casts herself — her solitary, sole race — forward another five years into this new age. Then fifty more, and further. She sees herself blocked, breaking out, becoming something new. She feels what this unknowable man next to her so often insists: “Everything the laws of the universe do not prohibit must finally happen.”
He lies naked along her nakedness. He on top of the flat sheet, she half under. She can’t sleep, however hot the night, without some cover. A hundred thousand people gone in one airborne flash, and she needs a sheet to sleep. She, too, wanted this device. She, too, asked him to hurry. An evil large enough to end the larger evil. Now the war is over, and life — whatever they might yet make of it — begins again. Now peace must rise to the horrors war has left. Now the world must become one people. If not one, then billions.
The one person who is her husband lies back in his own body. He slips his palms behind his neck, elbows protruding into a ship’s prow, his face the figurehead. In profile, he grows strange, another species. Would he have taken on this marriage had he known what the days would bring? Their endless battle just to step out of the house, walk down the block, go shopping. The times they must pretend to be strangers, slight acquaintances, employer and servant. The passive attacks and murmured violence he came to this country to escape. The low-grade war no blinding flash will ever end.
She should never have let him, knowing what he didn’t. How much she’s dragged him into. How much she’s made impossible. And yet, the children: as inevitable as God. Now that they live, they had to, all along. Her two little men, her JoJo, who could never not be. And this new third life on the way, sleeping in her, soft and round as an Indian mound: already a story that always was. She and this man are here only to ensure these three.
Her husband turns to her. “What will we do for schooling?”
He reads her mind, as he has once a day since the mind-reading day they met. She needs no other proof that this war is theirs, the one they were meant for. School will kill them. The daily bruise of their lessons will make grade-standard schoolyard assaults look like ice-cream socials. Her JoJo, like those magazine illusions: paper white against one crowd, lamp black against the other. Already, they belong nowhere. Their oldest has perfect pitch. She’s tested it already: infallible. He seems to be training his brother in the same. They play together, paint, hold their lines in complex rounds. They love themselves, love both their parents, see no shades between. All this will die in school’s brutal curriculum.
“We could school them at home.” Writing her mind, reading his.
“We could school them ourselves. You and I, the two put together.”
“Yes.” She shushes him. “Between the two of us, we can teach them a great deal.”
He lies back quiet, content in their plans. Maybe that is whiteness, manness. Safe within himself, even on a day like this day. Even with all that has happened to his own family. In a minute, his contentment leads to what it always does. His night to start tonight: He hums a tune. She can’t say what it is. Her mind is not naming yet, but keeps inside the phrase. Something Russian: the steppes; onion domes. A world as far away from hers as this world permits her. And by the time his slow Volga tune comes into its second measure, she’s there with the descant.
This is how they play, night after night, more regular than sex, and just as warming. One begins; the other harmonizes. Finds some accompaniment, even when she has never heard the tune, when it comes down out of the attic from some musty culture no one would claim to own. The secret’s in the intervals, finding a line half free of the melody, yet already inside it. Music from a single note, set loose to run in unfolding meter.
Humming in bed: softer than love, so as not to wake their two sleeping children. This third, as close as her abdomen, won’t mind hearing. She sings, tuning with a man who has as little sense of her past as she has of these haunted Czarist chords. His whole family has vanished, leaving behind no hard fact to mourn. He’s left his handprints on a bomb that takes a hundred thousand lives. It’s August, too hot for the lightest touch. But when they fade and settle down to sleep, no angels watching over them out of the newly stripped skies, his fingers brush against the small of her back and hers reach out behind him to rest, for the next half hour anyway, upon the familiar strangeness of his thigh.
Her father writes David a long letter, started the day after the second bomb and finished three weeks later. “Dear David.” How their letters always begin: “Dear William.” “Dear David.”
This incredible news explains everything you couldn’t tell me over the last two years. I’ve come to appreciate what you must have carried inside you, and I thank you for giving me as much of a sense of this as you were able.
With the rest of America, I give praise to whatever power there is that this chapter in human history is at last over. Believe me, I know how much longer it might have dragged on had science not succeeded in producing this “cosmic bomb.” If nothing else, I thank you for Michael’s sake. But so much else about this development eludes me that I feel I must write you for clarification.