Everything Matters!

  I wonder what they’re doing here, Debbie says.

  Probably developers from Boston, I say. Gonna buy up some lake property and build condos on it.

  How do you know that?

  I’m just guessing, I say. They’re in a jet, not a prop plane, so you know they’ve got money. Real money. And it’s a safe bet, this time of year, that they’re not on vacation.

  Unless they’re skiing, Debbie says.

  Hadn’t considered that.

  We watch the figures some more as they carry stuff into the terminal, then come back out for more stuff. And wouldn’t you know it, one of them pulls something long and thin from the plane, something that at this distance looks a lot like a ski case.

  I turn to Debbie. So one of the things I wanted to talk about, I say. Not to ruin the mood.

  What is it?

  I hesitate. Well, I say, to put it plainly, it’s about Junior.

  Debbie has no obvious reaction. She waits for me to keep talking.

  I think it’s time we discussed . . . or not discussed, I guess, but more kind of admit to ourselves that there’s a good chance he’s gone.

  Well of course he’s gone, Debbie says. We haven’t seen him for a long time now.

  Three years, I say. But when I say gone, Debbie, I mean gone. As in. Dead?

  Yes. I think so.

  She drinks from the bottle. I hadn’t thought about that, she says. I thought he was just in Chicago or somewhere.

  I shake my head. No, Debbie, he’s not in Chicago. Listen, what I’m saying is I think we should do something. Some sort of ceremony or memorial.

  Why?

  Because I’m tired of picking up the phone and hoping to hear him on the other end. Aren’t you?

  No, I’m not, Debbie says. I don’t do that.

  I look at her. Her face is relaxed and her eyes are dry, staring up at the airfield, where the lights have been turned off again. I think of her face when she was watching Oprah this afternoon—tears in her eyes, her cheeks red with sadness.

  I say, Maybe we should talk about the other thing first. Or instead.

  What other thing? Debbie asks.

  There’s something I want you to do for me.

  Okay.

  It’s pretty simple, I say. I want you to stop drinking.

  She’s in mid-sip, and as she brings the bottle down it crosses the moon and I see it’s nearly empty. Why? she says.

  Because it’s killing you, Debbie. We’ve seen it happen enough times to know that’s what it does to people.

  She turns to me. Her face has changed, from the blank and friendly expression I’ve learned to expect, to something sharper. Did you think that maybe that’s just what I’m trying to do?

  Once again, I’m surprised into a few seconds of silence. Is it? I ask finally.

  She looks back to the ground between her dangling feet. I don’t know, she says. Some days I think so.

  Why?

  You want to know why, ask my father. But you can’t. He’s dead. So I don’t know what to tell you.

  I’ve never seen such anger in her. Not in thirty years of marriage, not even before she started in with the drinking. Somehow it makes me think things will be alright. Which is definitely no guarantee they will be; wouldn’t be the first time I had a good feeling that turned out to be dead wrong. Still, it’s nice to feel positive, if only during the few minutes before Debbie finishes the wine and we get back in the Mustang and I take her to the hospital and have her admitted. The way I do it is I tell them Debbie is suicidal. It’s only a half-lie, but it feels strange regardless because I haven’t told a lie about anything since I was in the Marines. They take her in and she goes quietly. The woman at the desk says Debbie will wear a hospital gown for the first few days but will need clothes after that, so I go outside and get in the car to drive home and pack some of her things. I’ve barely gotten out of the parking lot when I start in with one of the spells. My chest gets tight and my vision narrows. I can feel myself slipping all the way away this time, I’m definitely going out, but instead of slowing down and pulling over I hit the gas, I can’t even say why, except that it’s such a rush, it’s like the couple of times I smoked opium with Jacques and his crew of artillery guys: a happiness so strong you just know you’re going to pay for it one way or another.

  And then, just before the world fades completely, I come back from the brink.

  Junior

  Work on the Alcubierre drive is coming along at a pace that surprises everyone. We’ve shaved about two years with the help of some tasty little morsels of extraterrestrial technology, previously kept under heavy wraps at the U.S. South Pole research station, and I’m hoping that when the prototype is tested next week and negotiations for production contracts begin with the Big Four—Boeing, McDonnell Douglas, Lockheed, and Grumman—I’ll be allowed to leave for the first time since returning from Bulgaria. This was the arrangement I made with Sawyer, and though I’ve got nowhere to go I still intend to see that he honors it.

  I’m in the lecture room off the biosphere lab, and my cell phone buzzes in my pocket. I answer and find an oddly subdued Sawyer on the other end. Absent is the usual snide tone. He makes no jokes, pokes no fun.

  “We’ve picked up a telephone conversation that you probably ought to hear,” he says.

  “Can it wait?” I ask. “I’m stuck at Langley. The oxygen level in the biosphere has been dropping again.”

  “I would recommend you come right now. I can send a helicopter.”

  “Not to mention there’s a problem with the flowering plants failing to produce at rates sufficient to sustain the caloric output of our guys inside. It looks like the two issues are related. Not surprisingly.”

  “Junior.”

  “Really though, whether or not the biosphere thing works out is sort of moot now that we’re finally breaking through with propulsion.”

  “Junior, listen,” Sawyer says. “You need to come back to Meade and hear this phone call. It’s to do with your father.”

  This stops me cold. “Can’t you just patch it through or something?” I ask. “You guys can do that, right? I’ve seen it in the movies.” It’s a weak attempt at levity in my sudden fear, and it comes out lame.

  “Not a good idea,” Sawyer says.

  There’s silence on the line for several moments. “This has got you rattled, huh?” I say finally.

  “Yes,” Sawyer says. “Oddly enough.”

  “Then I guess you’d better send that helicopter.”

  Forty-five minutes later I’m in Sawyer’s subterranean office, deep below the giant obsidian cube of NSA headquarters. He has me put on a headset attached to a computer terminal.

  “We picked this up a couple hours ago,” he says, punching several buttons on the keyboard. There’s the garbled sound of a connection being formed over a landline, then the lazy electronic purr of the ring-through. After four rings the call is answered, and I hear my brother’s voice asking hello.

  When my mother says hello back to him, I’m as shocked as I’ve ever been in my life. Imagine—my mother using the phone. And not just answering it, but dialing out, initiating a call. Clearly a lot has changed in my absence.

  “Where are you, Rodney? Are you in Chicago?”

  “Hi Ma, no, we’re . . . hold on a minute.” There’s a brief, muffled conversation on Rodney’s end, and then he comes back on. “Kansas City. Interleague,” he says. “So we get to have a DH.”

  “I don’t know what that means, babe,” my mother says.

  “It’s someone who hits for the pitcher.”

  “Okay,” my mother says, not sounding any more certain of the definition or function of a DH. “Listen, Rodney, we’re going to need you to come home for a bit.”

  “This is the first series of the road trip,” Rodney says. “I won’t be in Chicago for a while.” Another pause, more muffled conversation. “Almost two weeks.”

  “I don’t mean Chicago. I mean home-home. Here. Maine.??
?

  “Jeez, I don’t know, Ma. I’d have to ask Al if that’s okay.”

  “This is important, Rodney. It’s important that you come home. Do you understand?”

  “I understand,” Rodney says. “What’s going on?”

  “I’d rather not tell you on the phone, Rodney.”

  I could scream, right here in Sawyer’s clean cool office with the generic books lining the walls and the Undercover Bear on the desk, I could scream in frustration and fear, listening to them dance around the point like this.

  “Is something wrong, Ma?” Rodney asks.

  This is really all it should take, because if my new mother, this woman who speaks in complete sentences and dials telephones, is anything like the old one, she has a penchant for the dramatic, not to mention a strong gossip reflex, and it shouldn’t take much more than a gentle prodding to get her to out with it. And sure enough, the tears I could hear lurking in her voice spill forth. She cries for a minute, and I feel the cold tendrils of her fear reach through the phone line.

  After a few moments she composes herself enough to speak. “I didn’t want to tell you on the phone,” she says. “Your father came home from the bakery with blood on his shirt. He was coughing up blood all night.”

  I don’t know what I was expecting, but this was not it. The tendrils turn hard and sharp; the sensation is of being run through with icicles.

  “I brought him to the hospital,” my mother continues. “They took X-rays and found tumors in his lung.”

  Rodney is silent.

  The moment does not feel like I imagine it’s supposed to. There is no sadness. There is no anger. I do not cry. I am experiencing an utter lack of feeling, an emotional black hole. I worry, faintly, that this means I am a monster, but it’s more likely I am just in shock and cannot reasonably be expected to feel much of anything, right at the moment. Still, it seems wrong, this absence of emotion. This is the man, after all, who raised me, paid for every morsel, toy, and transgression. This is the man who cast his long protective shadow over my existence, my one and only father. I should throw myself on the floor and wail. I should mourn extravagantly, like the Palestinian mothers I see on television, writhing atop piles of shattered mortar, oblivious to any effort to comfort them. Grief as trance, as epileptic fit. This should be me. Instead, I clamp the headset to my ear and breathe and sit very still with my free hand pressed so hard and flat against Sawyer’s desktop that my fingers turn to alabaster.

  “Tumors,” Rodney says. “You mean cancer.”

  “Cancer, yes,” my mother says. “Hold on, Rodney.” She puts the phone down with a clunk, and I can hear her blowing her nose in the background. She comes back on, more composed now. “You still there?”

  “I’m here, Ma,” Rodney says, his voice reluctant and sad.

  “So will you come?”

  “I’ll call Al,” Rodney says. “He always gives me his room number when we’re on the road, in case I need anything. I’ll talk to him now.”

  “Okay. Call me back when you know.”

  A few moments pass when neither of them says anything.

  Then Rodney finally speaks. “Jesus, Ma,” he says.

  “I know, babe. Call me back, okay?”

  The recording ends, and I am left sitting there at Sawyer’s desk, staring at the wall, staring through it, really, seeing nothing.

  Sawyer has stepped out of the room to give me privacy, though I doubt very much that there is any such thing within the walls of this place. To confirm my suspicion, he returns right on cue.

  “Finished?” he asks, doing a poor job of acting like he doesn’t know.

  “Yeah.” I pull the headset off and place it on the desk.

  “Hate to be the one to bring such news,” he says.

  “You know, I believe you mean that, Sawyer.”

  “I am sincere. Unfortunate that you can’t be there.”

  “I can’t?”

  “No.” Sawyer comes around the desk. “Not to be insensitive, but you have much more important matters to tend to. Could I have my chair back?”

  I stand, and Sawyer takes his seat.

  “I’m not in the mood to go round and round, so I’ll save us both the trouble—I’m leaving to be with my father. You have no leverage.”

  “I could have you killed,” Sawyer says.

  I make a face. “Like I’d care. Honestly.”

  “Regardless, that’s not my point. I’m not saying you can’t be there merely because we forbid it. I’m saying you can’t be there because having you materialize after eight years would add a good deal of confusion and stress to a situation that already has plenty of both. Listen to me, for once. I’m speaking as your friend here.”

  I raise my eyebrows.

  “Trying to? Speak as your friend?” Sawyer searches my face. “Okay. Bad choice of words. Let me rephrase: I am speaking out of genuine concern and sympathy, both for you and your family.”

  “Still a stretch,” I say.

  “And as a concerned party it’s my responsibility to point out that at a moment so emotionally charged, to have their son return from the grave would likely be too much for either of your parents to deal with.”

  “My father could deal with it,” I say. “Ma, who knows. But my father can deal with anything.”

  “You might be surprised.”

  “Clearly you don’t know the man,” I say.

  “I may know him better than you do,” Sawyer says. “It’s my job, after all, to dissect personalities, to figure out what makes people tick, as is said. And I made it my business to get to know your father.”

  “He’s a bit of an enigma,” I say.

  “To you,” Sawyer says. “Because in your eyes he’s a superhero, a minor deity to be feared and worshipped in equal measure. To me he’s just an unremarkable person with a notably thin file. Who do you suppose has the more factual impression of the man?”

  “Factual would probably lie somewhere in the middle.”

  “Then you don’t deny that you see him in a way that is not an accurate reflection of who he actually is, as a human being,” Sawyer says. “That your perception of him is at best idealized, at worst impossible for any mortal to live up to.”

  “Don’t know if I’d go that far.”

  “I would,” Sawyer says. “So when without a moment’s thought or hesitation you say ‘My father could handle it’ I have to wonder if maybe that idealized perception is interfering with your common sense. The man was diagnosed with a terminal illness less than twenty-four hours ago. No matter how tough or unflappable he is, that’s probably enough to deal with, here, without his long-dead son showing up too.”

  “There are things you can’t read in a file,” I say, turning to open the door.

  “I’m going.”

  “Junior. Grow the fuck up, and realize he’s not your daddy anymore. He’s your father. He is in a deep, deep hole, and the last thing he needs is for you to show up with an excavator.”

  I stare at Sawyer, trying to remember if I’ve ever heard him swear before.

  “I am not playing games with you on this,” he says.

  I let go of the doorknob and turn to face him. “Sawyer, do you know why I agreed to come here and work on the Program?”

  “To impress your girlfriend?”

  I ignore this. “My whole life there never was a point to anything. Oblivion was always just around the corner, so what was the use of, say, trying to make the varsity basketball team, or starting a retirement fund, or having kids, or any of the other things that normal people do? No point. To anything. Try to imagine what that would be like.”

  Sawyer makes no obvious effort to imagine anything.

  “Needless to say, this raised some sticky philosophical questions for me. Nothing mattered at all. Things got a little loose in my head, for a while. I contemplated some fairly evil shit, I can tell you.”

  “Ah, yes. For example, bombing a federal building.”

  “No.
Much worse than that. Let me put it this way: human life, as a currency, was severely devalued. In my view.”

  “And then we came along,” Sawyer says.

  “Eventually, yes. That’s the point. When you came to me in Bulgaria, I saw an opportunity to take the world I’d always known, and change it into the world that you, and everyone else, has always enjoyed—a world where what you do and say matters. A world that has a point to it. So I took that opportunity.”

  “Commendable. Truly.”

  “And now that my father’s life finally has a point, I plan to do what I can to make sure that it continues.”

  “Again, commendable. The sentiment, I mean. But I’m warning you, Junior . . .”

  I think for a minute. “What if I approached it more creatively? What if I did something other than just showing up out of nowhere?”

  “Have something in particular in mind?” Sawyer asks.

  There’s the barest seed of an idea, but it’s nothing I can yet articulate. “Don’t know. Whatever it turns out to be, though, I’m sure I’ll need your help carrying it off.”

  Sawyer studies my face, and after a few moments seems satisfied by what he sees. “Okay,” he says. “Tell me this: will the Alcubierre drive test be successful?”

  “Yes.”

  “Even if you’re not here?”

  “Absolutely,” I say. “The work is done. It’s just a scheduling thing now. Ross can handle it. Spergel can handle it.”

  Sawyer picks a pen up off the desk and fiddles with it. “Understand that when I ask you if the test will be successful, and you say yes, you’d better be right. Or else it’s both our hides.”

  “Sawyer.”

  He throws up his hands. “Okay,” he says. “Fine. Go. I’ll arrange for transportation, cash, et cetera. You realize, of course, that there’s nowhere you can go I can’t see you. Yes?”

  “Of course.”

  “So that if you violate the one condition I’m setting forth—if you make direct, face-to-face contact with your family—I will know about it. And there will be consequences.”

  “Fair enough,” I say.

  Sawyer busies himself with sifting through a stack of paperwork on his desk. “Go, then,” he says without looking up.