“So it was sort of an industrial accident. He shouldn’t have been playing with the big boys’ toys.”
“If you want to put it that way.”
“How would you put it? You pulled the trigger.”
“This is crazy. You don’t know about Liberia yesterday?”
“Africa? We’ve been too busy—”
“There’s a Liberia in Costa Rica.”
“I see. That’s where the boy was.”
“And a thousand others. Also past tense.” I took a long drink of whiskey and coughed. “Some extremists killed a couple of hundred children, and made it look like we’d been responsible. That was horrible enough. Then a mob attacked us, and . . . and . . . the riot control measures backfired. They’re supposed to be benign, but they caused the death of hundreds more, trampled. Then they started shooting, shooting their own people. So we, we . . .”
“Oh, my God. I’m sorry,” she said, her voice trembling. “You need real support, and here I come all edgy with fatigue and preoccupied. You poor . . . have you been to a counselor?”
“Yeah. He was a big help.” I plucked an ice cube from the tea and dropped it in the whiskey. “He said I’d get over it.”
“Will you?”
“Sure. He gave me some pills.”
“Well, be careful with the pills and the booze.”
“Yes, doctor.” I took a cool sip.
“Seriously. I’m worried.”
“Yeah, me too.” Worried, wearied. “So what are you and this Pete doing?”
“But you—”
“Let’s just change the subject. What did he want you for?”
“Jupiter. He’s challenging some basic cosmological assumptions.”
“Then why you? Probably everyone from Macro on down knows more about cosmology—hell, I probably do.”
“I’m sure you do. But that’s why he chose me—everyone senior to me was in on the planning stages of the Project, and they have this consensus about . . . certain aspects of it.”
“What aspects?”
“I can’t tell you.”
“Oh, come on.”
She touched her tea but didn’t drink it; looked into it. “Because you can’t really keep a secret. All your platoon would know as soon as you jacked.”
“They wouldn’t know shit. Nobody else in that platoon can tell a Hamiltonian from a hamburger. Anything technical, they might pick up on my emotional reaction, but that’s it. No technical details; they might as well be in Greek.”
“Your emotional reaction is what I’m talking about. I can’t say any more. Don’t ask me.”
“Okay. Okay.” I took another drink of whiskey and pushed the order button. “Let’s get something to eat.” She asked it for a salmon sandwich and I got a hamburger and another whiskey, a double.
“So you’re total strangers. Never met before.”
“What is that supposed to mean?”
“Only what I asked.”
“I met him maybe fifteen years ago, at a colloquium in Denver. If you must know, that’s when I was living with Marty. He went to Denver and I tagged along.”
“Ah.” I finished the first whiskey.
“Julian. Don’t be upset about that. There’s nothing going on. He’s old and fat and more neurotic than you.”
“Thanks. So you’ll be home, when?”
“I have to teach tomorrow. So I’ll be home by morning. Then come back here Wednesday if we still have work to do.”
“I see.”
“Look, don’t tell anyone, especially Macro, that I’m here.”
“He’d be jealous?”
“What is this with jealousy? I told you there’s nothing . . .” She slumped back. “It’s just that Peter’s been in fights with him, in Physics Review Letters. I may be in a position where I have to defend Peter against my own boss.”
“Great career move.”
“This is bigger than career. It’s . . . well, I can’t tell you.”
“Because I’m so neurotic.”
“No. That’s not it. That’s not it at all. I just—” Our order rolled up to the booth and she wrapped the sandwich in a napkin and stood. “Look, I’m under more pressure than you know. Will you be all right? I have to get back.”
“Sure. I understand about work.”
“This is more than just work. You’ll forgive me later.” She slid out of the booth and gave me a long kiss. Her eyes were wet with tears. “We have to talk more about that boy. And the rest of it. Meanwhile, take the pills; take it easy.” I watched her hurry out.
The hamburger smelled good but it tasted like dead meat. I took a bite but couldn’t swallow it. I transferred the mouthful to a napkin, discreetly, and drank up the double in three quick swallows. Then I buzzed for another, but the table said it couldn’t serve me alcohol for another hour.
I took the tube to the airport and had drinks in two places, waiting for the flight back home. A drink on the plane and a sour nap in the cab.
When I got home I found a half-bottle of vodka and poured it over a large mug of ice cubes. I stirred it until the mug was good and frosty. Then I emptied out the bottle of pills and pushed them into seven piles of five each.
I was able to swallow six of the piles, one mouthful of icy vodka apiece. Before I swallowed the seventh, I realized I should write a note. I owed Amelia that much. But I tried to stand up to find some paper and my legs wouldn’t obey; they were just lumps. I considered that for awhile and decided to just take the rest of the pills, but I could only make my arm swing like a pendulum. I couldn’t focus on the pills, anyhow. I leaned back and it was peaceful, loose, like floating in space. It occurred to me that this was the last thing I would ever feel, and that was all right. It was a lot better than going after all those generals.
* * *
amelia smelled urine when she unlocked the door eight hours later. She ran from room to room and finally found him in the reading alcove, slumped sideways in her favorite chair, the last neat pile of five pills in front of him, along with the empty prescription vial and half a large glass of warm watered vodka.
Sobbing, she felt his neck for a pulse and thought maybe there was a slight thread. She slapped him twice, hysterically hard, and he didn’t respond.
She called 9-1-1 and they said all units were out; it might be an hour. So she switched to the campus emergency room and described the situation and said she was bringing him in. Then she called a cab.
She heaved him out of the chair and tried to pick him up under the arms, staggering back out of the alcove. She wasn’t strong enough to carry him that way, though, and she wound up dragging him ignominiously by the feet through the apartment. Backing out through the door, she almost ran into a large male student, who helped her carry him to the cab and went along with her to the hospital, asking questions that she answered in monosyllables.
He wasn’t necessary at that end, it turned out; there were two orderlies and a doctor waiting at the ER entrance. They swung him up onto a gurney and a doctor gave him two shots, one in the arm and one in the chest. When he got the chest one, Julian groaned and trembled, and his eyes opened but showed only whites. The doctor said that was a good response. It might be a day before they knew whether he would recover; she could wait here or go home.
She did both. She took a cab with the helpful student back to the apartment building, picked up the notes and papers for her next class, and returned to the hospital.
There was nobody else in the waiting room. She got a cup of coffee from the machine and sat at the end of a couch.
The papers were all graded. She looked at her lecture notes but couldn’t concentrate on them. It would have been hard to go through the teaching routine even if she had come home to a normal Julian. If Peter was right, and she was sure he was, the Jupiter Project was over. It had to be shut down. Eleven years, most of her career as a particle physicist, down the drain.
And now this, this strangely reciprocal crisis. A few months ago
he had sat this deathwatch for her, brain-deathwatch. But she had caused both of them. If she had been able to put the work with Peter aside—put her career aside—and give him the kind of loving support that he needed to work through his guilt and anguish, he wouldn’t have wound up here.
Or maybe he would. But it wouldn’t have been her fault.
A black man in a colonel’s uniform sat down next to her. His lime cologne cut through the hospital smell. After a moment he said, “You’re Amelia.”
“People call me Blaze. Or Professor Harding.”
He nodded and didn’t offer his hand. “I’m Julian’s counselor, Zamat Jefferson.”
“I have news for you. The counseling didn’t take.”
He nodded the same way. “Well, I knew he was suicidal. I jacked with him. That’s why I gave him those pills.”
“What?” Amelia stared at him. “I don’t understand.”
“He could take the whole bottle at once and survive. Comatose, but breathing.”
“So he’s not in danger?”
The colonel put a pink laboratory form on the table between them, and smoothed it out with both hands. “Look where it says ‘ALC.’ The alcohol content of his blood was 0.35 percent. That’s more than halfway to suicide by itself.”
“You knew he drank. You were jacked with him.”
“That’s just it. He’s not normally a heavy drinker. And the scenario he had for suicide . . . well, it didn’t involve either alcohol or pills.”
“Really? What was it?”
“I can’t say. It involved breaking the law.” He picked up the form and refolded it neatly. “One thing . . . one thing you might be able to help with.”
“Help him or help the army?”
“Both. If he comes out of this, and I’m almost certain he will, he’ll never be a mechanic again. You could help him get through that.”
Amelia’s face narrowed. “What do you mean? He hates being a soldier.”
“Maybe so, but he doesn’t hate being jacked with his platoon. Quite the contrary; like most people, he’s become more or less addicted to it, to the intimacy. Perhaps you can distract him from that loss.”
“With intimacy. Sex.”
“That.” He folded the paper twice again, creasing it with his thumbnail. “Amelia, Blaze, I’m not sure you know how much he loves you, depends on you.”
“Of course I do. The feeling’s mutual.”
“Well, I’ve never been inside your head. From Julian’s point of view, there’s some imbalance, asymmetry.”
Amelia sat back in the couch. “So what does he want of me?” she said stiffly. “He knows I only have so much time. Only have one life.”
“He knows you’re married to your work. That what you do is more important than what you are.”
“That’s harsh enough.” They both flinched when someone in another room dropped a tray of instruments. “But it’s true of most of the people we know. The world’s full of proles and slacks. If Julian were one of them, I would never have even met him.”
“That’s not quite it. I’m in your class, too, obviously. Sitting around consuming would drive us crazy.” He looked at the wall, reaching for words. “I guess I’m asking that you take a part-time job, as therapist, in addition to being a full-time physicist. Until he’s better.”
She stared at him in a way she sometimes stared at a student. “Thank you for not pointing out that he’s done the same thing for me.” She stood up suddenly and crossed over to the coffee machine. “Want a cup?”
“No, thank you.”
When she came back she hooked a chair around so that the table was between them. “A week ago I would have dropped everything to be his therapist. I love him more than you, or he, seem to think, and of course I owe him, too.”
She paused and leaned forward. “But the world has gotten a lot more complicated in the last few days. Did you know he went to Washington?”
“No. Government business?”
“Not exactly. But that’s where I was, working. He came to me with what I see now was obviously a cry for help.”
“About killing the boy?”
“And all the other death, the tramplings. I was properly horrified, even before I saw the news. But I . . . I . . .” She started to take a drink of coffee but put it down and sobbed, a startling, racking sound. She knuckled away sudden tears.
“It’s all right.”
“It’s not all right. But it’s bigger than him or me. Bigger than whether we even live or die.”
“What, wait. Slow down. Your work?”
“I’ve said too much. But yes.”
“What is it, some sort of defense application?”
“You could say that. Yes.”
He sat back and pressed on his beard, as if it were pasted on. “Defense. Blaze, Dr. Harding . . . I spend all day watching people lie to me. I’m not an expert in much, but I’m an expert in that.”
“So?”
“So nothing. Your business is your business, and my interest in it begins and ends with how it affects my patient. I don’t care if your job is saving the country, saving the world. All I ask is that when you’re not working with that, you’re working with him.”
“I’ll do that, of course.”
“You do owe him.”
“Dr. Jefferson. I have one Jewish mother already. I don’t need one with a beard and a suit.”
“Point well taken. I didn’t mean to be insulting.” He stood up. “I’m misdirecting my own sense of responsibility onto you. I should not have let him go after we jacked. If I’d admitted him, put him under observation, this wouldn’t have happened.”
Amelia took his offered hand. “Okay. You beat yourself up over this, and I’ll beat myself up over it, and our patient will have to improve, by osmosis.”
He smiled. “Take care. Take care of yourself. This kind of thing is a terrible strain.”
This kind of thing! She watched him leave and heard the outer door close. She felt her face redden and fought the pressure of tears behind her eyes, then let it win.
* * *
when i’d started to die it felt like I was drifting through a corridor of white light. Then I wound up in a big room with Amelia and my parents and a dozen or so friends and relations. My father was the way I remember him from grade school, slim and beardless. Nan Li, the first girl I was ever serious about, was standing next to me with her hand in my pocket, stroking. Amelia had an absurd grin, watching us.
Nobody said anything. We just looked at each other. Then everything faded out and I woke up in the hospital with an oxygen mask over my face and the smell of vomit deep inside my nose. My jaw hurt, as if someone had punched me.
My arm felt like it belonged to someone else, but I managed to drag my hand up and pull the mask down. There was someone in the room, out of focus, and I asked for a Kleenex and she handed it to me. I tried to blow my nose but it triggered retching, and she held me up and put a metal bowl under my chin while I coughed and drooled most attractively. Then she handed me a glass of water and said to rinse, and I realized it was Amelia, not a nurse. I said something romantic like “oh, shit,” and started to black out again, and she eased me back to the pillow and worked the mask over my face. I heard her calling for a nurse and then I passed out.
It’s strange how much detail you recall from some parts of an experience like this, and how little of others. They told me later that I slept a solid fifteen hours after the little puking ceremony. It felt more like fifteen seconds. I woke up as if from a slap, with Dr. Jefferson drawing a hypo gun away from my arm.
I wasn’t wearing the oxygen mask anymore. “Don’t try to sit up,” Jefferson said. “Get your bearings.”
“Okay.” I was just able to focus on him. “First bearing, I’m not dead, right? I didn’t take enough pills.”
“Amelia found you and saved you.”
“I’ll have to thank her.”
“By that, you mean you’re going to try again?” r />
“How many people don’t?”
“Plenty.” He held out a glass of water with a plastic straw. “People attempt suicide for various reasons.”
I drank a cold sip. “You don’t think I was actually serious about it.”
“I do. You’re pretty competent at everything you do. You’d be dead if Amelia hadn’t come home.”
“I’ll thank her,” I repeated.
“She’s sleeping now. She stayed with you for as long as she could keep her eyes open.”
“Then you came.”
“She called me. She didn’t want you to wake up alone.” He weighed the hypodermic gun in his hand. “I decided to help you along with a mild stimulant.”
I nodded and sat up a little. “It feels pretty good, actually. Did it counteract the drug? The poison.”
“No, you’ve already been treated for that. Do you want to talk about it?”
“No.” I reached for the water and he helped me. “Not with you.”
“With Amelia?”
“Not now.” I drank and was able to replace the glass by myself. “I guess first I want to jack with my platoon. They’d understand.”
There was a long silence. “You’re not going to be able to do that.”
I didn’t understand. “Of course I can. It’s automatic.”
“You’re out, Julian. You can’t be a mechanic anymore.”
“Hold it. Do you think any of my platoon would be surprised by this? Do you think they’re that dumb?”
“That’s not the point. It’s just that they can’t be made to live through it! I’m trained for it, and I can’t say I look forward to jacking with you. Do you want to kill your friends?”
“Kill them.”
“Yes! Exactly. Don’t you think it’s possible you might push one of them into doing the same? Candi, for instance. She’s close to clinical depression most of the time, anyhow.”
I could see the sense in that, actually. “But after I’m cured?”
“No. You’ll never be a mechanic again. You’ll be reassigned to some—”
“A shoe? I’ll be a shoe?”
“They wouldn’t want you in the infantry. They’ll take advantage of your education, and put you in a technical post somewhere.”