"I know, I know." Her voice weakened again. "My cousin Hazel said I was wrong to do that."
"We had things to do, places we'd planned to take you," he lied. She was so– he couldn't find the word.
"We could have talked about ... things. You know."
"We will. I'm not feeling so good right now but I hope I can come out there again soon."
"Not so good? What do you mean, Mom, not so good?"
"A little pleurisy, it's nothing. I threw away money on a doctor and some tests. Everything is fine now."
"Oh, good. You take care of yourself, now."
"It's nothing worse than that strep throat you had, remember? I know these things, Gordon. Your sister was over for dinner yesterday and we remembered how–" and she was off in her usual tone of voice, recounting the events of the weeks, tracing an implied return to the fold of the wandering sister, of making cabbage soup and kugel and flanken and tongue with the famous Hungarian raisin sauce, all for one dinner. And after, the "thee-yater," the two of them taking in Osborne's
Luther
("Such a fuss about things!"). She had never budged his father downtown to lay out his good hard money for such things, but now the process of reclaiming her children justified such small luxuries. He smiled fondly, listening to the easy flow of words from another, earlier life three thousand miles away, and wondering if Philip Roth had heard of Laos yet. He had a picture in his head of her at the other end of the long copper cord, her hand at first clenched white around the telephone receiver. As her voice softened he could sense the hand relax, the knuckles not so pale now. He was feeling good as the call ended. He hung the heavy black receiver back into its wall mount and only then recognized the choking gasp of repressed crying coming from the living room. Penny was sitting on the couch beside Cliff, holding him as he sobbed into his cupped hands. "I didn't...
We was goin' across this paddy, followin' a bunch of Pathet Lao from
'Nam back to where we knew they were runnin', toward the Plain of Jars. I was with this asshole platoon of 'Nam regulars, me and Bernie. Bernie from our class, Penny–and ... this AR opened up right on us, an' Bernie's head jerked... He sat down in the mud an' his helmet fell into his hands, he was reachin' up for his face, an' he started to pick somethin' up out of the helmet and he fell over sideways. I was down behind him with the AR fire goin' right over us. I crawled up to him an' the water was all pink aroun'
him and that's when I knew. I looked in the helmet and what he was tryin'
to get out was part of his scalp, the hair still stuck in it, the round musta run up inside there an' gone in his brain after it smashed his jaw." Cliff was speaking more clearly now, heaving great sighs as the words tumbled out and his palms worked in the sockets of his eyes. Penny hugged him and murmured something. She reached over his broad shoulders and kissed him on the cheek with a sad, vacant gesture. Gordon saw with a sudden, gnawing shock that she had slept with him somewhere back in those rosy high school days. There was an old intimacy between them.
Cliff looked up and saw Gordon. He stiffened slightly and then shook his head, his mouth a blur. He sniffed. "It started to goddamn rain," he said clearly, as if resolved to go on and tell the rest of it no matter who was there. "They couldn't get any choppers in to us. Those pissass 'Nam pilots won't come in under fire. We was stuck in this little grove of bamboo, where we pulled back to. Pathet Lao and Cong had boxed us in. Me and Bernie were advisors, not supposed to give orders, they'd put us in with this platoon 'cause we weren't s'posed to make contact at all. Ever'body thought with the rainy season comin' on they'd pull out."
He hoisted the Brookside jug and poured himself another glass. Penny sat beside him, hands folded demurely in her lap, eyes glistening. Gordon realized he was standing rigid, halfway between kitchen and living room, arms stiff. He made himself sit in the Boston rocker. Cliff drank half the glass and rubbed his eyes on his sleeve, sighing. The emotion ebbed from him now and there was a settled fatigue about the way he went on, as though the words drained away the small drops of feeling as they emerged.
"This ARVN platoon leader went spastic on me. Didn't know which way was up, wanted to move out that night. The mist came in across the paddies. He wanted I should go out with ten 'Nams, reconnoiter. So I did, these little guys carryin' M-l's and scared shitless. We didn't get a hunnert yards before the point man rammed a punji up his boot. Started screamin'. AR fire comes in, we waddle our way back to the bamboo."
Cliff leaned back in the couch and casually draped his arm around Penny, staring blankly at the Brookside jug. "The rain feeds fungus that grows in your socks. Your feet get all white. I was tryin' to sleep with that, your feet so cold you think they're gone. An' I woke up with a leech on my tongue." He sat silently for a moment. Penny's mouth sagged open but she said nothing. Gordon found he was rocking energetically and consciously slowed the rhythm. "Thought it was a leaf or somethin' at first. Couldn't get it off. One of the 'Nams got me to lie down–I was runnin' around, screamin'. Th' pissass platoon leader thought we was infiltrated. So this
'Nam puts boot cream on my tongue and I wait lyin' there in the mud an'
he just picks this leech out of my mouth, a little furry thing. All the next day I taste that boot cream and it makes me shiver. Relief battalion drove off the Cong around noon." He looked at Gordon. "Wasn't till I got back to base that I thought about Bernie again."
Cliff stayed until late, his stories about advising the ARVN becoming almost nostalgic as he drank more of the sweet wine. Penny sat with her legs tucked under her, arm cocked against the couch back and supporting her occasionally nodding head, a distant look on her face. Gordon supplied short questions, nods of agreement, murmurs of approval to Cliff's stories, not really listening to them all that closely, watching Penny.
As he was leaving, Cliff suddenly turned manically gay, wobbling from the wine, face bright and sweating slightly. He lurched toward Gordon, held up a finger with a wise wink, and said, "'Take the prisoner to the deepest dungeon,' he said condescendingly."
Gordon frowned, puzzled, sure the wine had scrambled the man's brains.
Penny volunteered, "It's a Tom Swiftie."
"What?" Gordon rasped impatiently. Cliff nodded sagely.
"A, well, a joke. A pun," she replied, imploring Gordon with her eyes to go along, to let the evening end on a happy note. "You're supposed to top it."
"Uh ..." Gordon felt uncomfortable, hot. "I can't ..."
"My turn." Penny patted Cliff's shoulder, in part as though to steady him. "How about 'I learned a lot about women in Paris,' said Tom indifferently?"
Cliff barked with laughter, gave her a good-humored slap on the rear, and shuffled to the door. "You can keep the wine, Gordie," he said. Penny followed him outside. Gordon leaned on the door frame. In the wan yellow glow of the outdoor lamp he saw her kiss him goodbye. Cliff grinned and was gone.
He put the Brookside jug in the trash and rinsed out the glasses. Penny rolled up the mouth of the Fritos bag. He said, "I don't want you bringing any more of your old boy friends by here from now on."
She whirled toward him, eyes widening. "What?"
"You heard what I said."
"Why?"
"I don't like it."
"Uh huh. And why don't you like it?"
"You're with me now. I don't want you starting up anything with anybody else."
"Christ, I'm not 'starting up' with Cliff. I mean, he just came by. I haven't seen him in years."
"You didn't have to kiss him so much."
She rolled her eyes. "Oh God."
He felt hot and suddenly uncertain. How much had he drunk? No, not much, it couldn't be that. "I mean it. I don't like that kind of stuff. He's going to get the wrong idea. You talking about your old high school days, arms wrapped around him–"
"Jee-sus, 'get the wrong idea.' That's a Harry Highschool phrase. That's where you're stuck, Gordon."
"You were leading him on."
"Fuck I was. That man is walking wounded, Gordon. I was comforting him. Listening to him. From the moment he knocked on the door I knew he had something inside, something those rah-rah types in the Army hadn't let him get out. He almost died over there, Gordon. And Bernie, his best friend–"
"Yeah, well, I still don't like it." His momentum blunted, he grasped for some other way he could prove the point. But what was the point? He had felt threatened by Cliff from the moment he saw him. If his mother had been able to see through that telephone, she'd have known quite well what to call the way Penny behaved. She'd have—
He stopped, avoiding Penny's hostile, rigid face, and looked down at the Brookside jug waiting forlornly in the trash for its destruction, incompletely used. He had seen Penny and Cliff with his mother's eyes, his New York imprinting, and he knew that he had missed the whole point.
The war talk had put him off balance, unsure of how to react, and now in some odd way he was taking it all out on Penny.
"Look," he began, "I'm sorry, I..." He brought his hands halfway up into the space between them and then let them drop. "I want to go for a walk."
Penny shrugged. He shouldered past her. Outside, in the cool and salty air, fog shrouded the tops of the crusty old live oaks. He marched through this La Jolla of the night, his face a sheen of sudden sweat.
Two blocks over, on Fern Glen, a figure emerging from a house distracted him from the jumble of his thoughts. It was Lakin. The man glanced to each side, seemed satisfied, and slipped quickly into his Austin-Healey. In the house Lakin had left, venetian blinds fluttered at a window, momentarily silhouetting a woman's body in the light that seeped from behind her. Gordon recognized the place; it was where two women graduate students from Humanities lived. He smiled to himself as Lakin's Healey purred away. Somehow this small evidence of human frailty cheered him.
He walked a long way, past sealed-up summer cottages with yellowed newspapers on their doorsteps, occasionally passing by huge homes still ablaze with light. Cliff and Laos and the sense in Cliff's words of things real and important, muddy and grim–the thoughts chewed at him, all churned together in the layered fog with Penny and his distant, inevitable mother.
Experimental physics seemed a toy, no better than a crossword puzzle, beside these things. A distant war could roll across an ocean and crash on this shore. He thought muzzily to Scripps Pier, which jutted out below the campus, used as a loading dock for men and tanks and munitions. But then he snorted to himself, sure the drink was now fuzzing his mind.
Around him the tight pocket of La Jolla could not be threatened by a bunch of little guys running around in black pajamas, trying to topple the Diem government. It didn't make any goddamn sense.
He turned back toward home and Penny. It was easy to get overexcited about threats–Cliff, the Cong, Lakin: 'Waves could not batter down a coastline overnight'. And dim ideas about Cubans dumping fertilizer into the Atlantic and killing the life there. Yeah, it was all too unlikely, more of his paranoia, yeah, he was sure of that tonight.
MARCH 22, 1963
Gordon opened the
San Diego Union
and spread it out on the lab workbench. He wished immediately that he had taken the trouble to find a copy of the
Los Angeles Times
, because the
Union
in its usual country-bumpkin manner devoted a lot of space to the wedding between Hope Cooke, the recent Sarah Lawrence graduate, and Crown Prince Palden Thon-up Namgyal of Sikkim. The
Union
seemed all a-twitter that an American girl would marry a man who would become a maharajah, just any day now. The real news appeared only as a minor article on the front page: Davey Moore was dead. Gordon thumbed impatiently back to the sports page and was mollified to find a longer story. Sugar Ramos had knocked out Moore in the tenth round of their bout for the featherweight title, in Los Angeles. Gordon wished again that he had got tickets; the press of classes and research had made it slip his mind until they were all sold out. So Moore had died of a cerebral hemorrhage without regaining consciousness; another blot on boxing. Gordon sighed. There were the predictable comments from the predictable people, calling for an end to the whole sport. He wondered for a moment if they might be right.
"Here's the new stuff," Cooper said at his elbow.
Gordon took the data sheets. "More signal?"
"Yep," Cooper said flatly. "I've been getting good resonance curves for weeks now, and all of a sudden–whacko."
"You decoded it?"
"Sure. A lot of repetition in it, for some reason."
Gordon followed Cooper over to Cooper's working area, where the lab notebooks were spread out. He found himself hoping the results would be nonsense, simply interference. It would be much easier that way. He wouldn't have to worry about any messages, Cooper could proceed on his thesis, Lakin would be happy. His life didn't need any complication right now, and he had hoped the whole spontaneous resonance effect would go away. Their
Physical Review Letters
note had aroused interest and nobody in the field had criticized the work; maybe it was best to leave matters that way. His hopes faded as he studied Cooper's blocky printing.
TRANSWI3PRY 7 fROM CL998 CAMBE19983ZX UA 18 5 36 DEC 30
29.2 RA 18 5 36 OEC 30 29.2 RA 18 5 36 DEC 30 29.2
The mystifying chant of letters and numbers ran on for three pages.
Then it abruptly stopped and there followed:
SHOULD APPEAR AS POINT SOURCE IN TACHYON SPECTRUM 263
KEV PEAK CAN VERIFY WITH NMR DIRECTIONALITY
MEASUREMENT FOLLOWS ZPASUZC AKSOWLP BREAKDOWN IN
RECTANGULAR CO-ORDMZALS SMISSION FROM 19BD
1998COORGHQE
After this came nothing sensible. Gordon studied Cooper's data. "The rest of this stuff looks like simple on and off. No code to it." Cooper nodded, and scratched his leg beneath his cutaway jeans shorts. "Just dots and dashes," Gordon muttered to himself. "Funny." Cooper nodded again.