“I didn’t know we had a Space Warfare Center,” Celestine said.
“A Space Warfare Center?” Kenny asked her.
At our rehearsal dinner, now three years back in the rearview mirror, during a lull at our table Carly’s college roommate said, “I never had a black eye, but I always kinda wished I did.” Carly looked surprised and said, “Well, I licked one all over once.” And everybody looked at her. “You licked a black eye?” I finally asked. And Carly went, “Oh, I thought she said ‘black guy.’ ”
“You licked a black guy all over?” I asked her later that night. She couldn’t see my face in the dark but she knew what I was getting at.
“I did. And it was so good,” she said. Then she put a hand on the inside of each of my knees and spread my legs as wide as she could.
“What’s the biggest secret you think I ever kept from you?” she asked during our most recent relocation, which was last Memorial Day. We had a parakeet in the backseat and were bouncing a U-Haul over a road that you would have said hadn’t seen vehicular traffic in twenty-five years. I’d been lent out to Northrup and couldn’t even tell her for how long.
“I don’t know,” I told her. “I figured you had nothing but secrets.” Then she dropped the subject, so for two weeks I went through her e-mails.
“I don’t know anything about this Kenny guy,” she told me the day I threw the drink. “Except that you can’t get over that he disappeared.”
“You know, sometimes you just register a connection,” I told her later that night in bed. “And not talking about it doesn’t have to be some big deal.”
“So it was kind of a romantic thing,” she said.
“Yeah, it was totally physical,” I told her. “Like you and your mom.”
Carly had gotten this far by telling herself that compartmentalizing wasn’t all bad: that some doors may have been shut off but that the really important ones were wide open. And in terms of intimacy, she was far and away as good as things were going to get for me. We had this look we gave each other in public that said, I know. I already thought that. We’d each been engaged when we met and we’d stuck with each other through a lot of other people’s crap. Late at night we lay nose to nose in the dark and told each other stuff nobody else had ever heard us say. I told her about some of the times I’d been a dick and she told me about a kid she’d miscarried, and about another she’d put up for adoption when she was seventeen. She had no idea where he was now, but not a day went by that she didn’t think about it. We called them both Little Jimmy. And for a while there was all this magical thinking, and not asking each other all that much because we thought we already knew.
That not-being-on-the-same-page thing had become a bigger issue for me lately, though that’s something she didn’t know. Which is perfect, she would’ve said.
What I’d been working on at that point had gone south a little. Another way of putting it would be to say that what I was doing was wrong. The ATOP we’d developed for Minotaur had been an unarmed drone that could hover above one spot like a satellite couldn’t, providing instant lookdown for as long as a battlefield commander wanted it. But how long had it taken for us to retrofit them with air-to-surface missiles? And how many Fiats and Citroëns have those drones taken out because somebody back in Langley thought the right target was in the car?
There was an army of us out there up to the same sorts of hijinks and not able to talk about it. Where I worked, everything was black: not only the test flights, but also the resupply, the maintenance, the search-and-rescue. And the security scrutiny never went away. The guy who led my last project team, at home when he went to bed, after he hit the lights, waved to the surveillance guys. His wife never understood why even in August they had to do everything under the sheets.
On black-world patches you see a lot of sigmas because that’s the engineering symbol for the unknown value.
“The Minotaur’s the one in the labyrinth, right?” the materials guy in my project team asked the first day. When I told him it was, he wanted to know if the Minotaur was supposed to know where it was going, or if it was lost, too. That’d be funny, I told him. And we joked about the monster and the hero just wandering around through all these dark corridors, nobody finding anybody.
And now here I was and here Kenny was, with poor Carly trying to get a fix on either one of us.
“So what brings you to this neck of the woods?” I finally asked him once we were well into our second drinks.
“You know how sad he was,” Carly asked, “when he couldn’t get in touch with you anymore?”
“How sad?” Kenny asked. Celestine seemed curious, too.
“I thought we were gonna have to get him some counseling,” Carly said.
“It’s hard to adjust to not being with me anymore,” Kenny told her.
“So did he ever talk to you about me?” she asked.
“You came up,” Kenny answered, and even Celestine picked up on the unpleasantness.
“I’m listening,” Carly said.
“Oh, he was all hot to trot whenever he talked about you,” Kenny said.
“Sang my praises, did he?” Carly’s face had the expression she gets when somebody’s tracked something into the house.
“When he wasn’t shooting himself in the foot about you, he was pretty happy,” Kenny said. “I called it his good-woman face.”
“As in, I had one,” I explained.
“Whenever he tied himself in knots about something, I called it his Little Jimmy face,” he said. When Carly swung around toward him, he said, “Sorry, chief.”
“That was a comic thing for you?” Carly asked me. “The kind of thing you’d tell like a funny story?”
“I never thought it was a funny story,” I told her.
“There’s his Little Jimmy face now,” Kenny noted. When she looked at him again, he used his index fingers to pull down on his lower eyelids and made an Emmett Kelly frown.
“We started calling potential targets Little Jimmies,” he said, “whenever we were going to bring the hammer down and maximize collateral damage.”
Carly was looking at something in front of her the way you try not to move even your eyes to keep from throwing up. “What is that supposed to mean?” she finally said in a low voice.
“You know,” Kenny told her. “ ‘I don’t wike the wooks of this …’ ”
“Is that Elmer Fudd you’re doing?” Celestine wanted to know.
And how could you not laugh, watching him do his poor-sap-in-the-crosshairs shtick?
“This is just the fucking House of Mirth, isn’t it?” Carly said. Because she saw on my face just how many doors she’d been dealing with all along, both open and shut, and she also saw the We’re-in-the-boat-and-you’re-in-the-water expression that guys cut from our project teams always got when they asked if there was anything we could do to keep them onboard.
“Jesus Fucking Christ,” she said to herself, because her paradigm had suddenly shifted beyond what even she could have imagined. She thought she’d put up with however many years of stonewalling for a good reason, and she’d just figured out that as far as Castle Hubby went, she hadn’t even crossed the moat yet.
Because here’s the thing we hadn’t talked about, nose to nose on our pillows in the dark: how I’ve never been closer to anyone isn’t the same as We’re so close. That night I threw the drink, she asked why I was so perfect for the black world, and I wanted to tell her, How am I not perfect for it? It’s a sinkhole for resources. Everyone involved with it obsesses about it all the time. Even what the insiders know about it is incomplete. Whatever stories you do get arrive without context. What’s not inconclusive is enigmatic, what’s not enigmatic is unreliable, and what’s not unreliable is quixotic.