The driver opens his door and we all get out.

The wind comes with a labored drone. Several technicians and military men stand talking nearby. Viktor lights a cigarette and approaches them. He looks misplaced in his long leather coat. Out beyond the road we see bluffs scarred white by earlier detonations. I keep glancing at the driver for signs and portents.

Viktor comes back and points to a corner of the cleared area where thick cables snake away from several pieces of equipment set in a pale square of earth. He says this is ground zero. We stand there nodding in the wind.

He says the shot will be fired in granite about one kilometer down. Reactor waste and cores from retired warheads are packed around a low-yield nuclear device. He says the hole drilled from the surface to the firing point has been tamped and plugged to keep radiation from venting.

The driver puts a finger to his tongue and rubs some dirt off his sleeve. I check my sleeve for dirt. Then the driver heads back to the car and we all go with him.

He drives us to a bunker complex some distance away. About four dozen people are assembled here. Generals with braided caps, uranium speculators, a man and woman from the Bundesbank. We are introduced around. Many chesty bureaucrats with interchangeable heads. There are industrialists, bomb designers, official observers here to monitor the test. And every one of us wears a badge that measures off the rads. I follow Viktor into a briefing room where tureens and serving plates are spread across a table, heaped with smoking food. I meet executives from Tchaika and high officials of several commonwealth ministries. There is a palpable wave of expectation. Dark young men in round caps serve glasses of peppered vodka cradled in porringers of crushed ice. I talk to a veteran of the Polygon, a weapons scientist looking for work. A Russian tells a joke to a huddle of burly men and I stand on the edge, startled to hear the name Speedy Gonzalez mixed into the rolling narration. I look around for Brian. I want Brian to be in on this. The joke teller is in uniform, his middle finger extended skyward, his face going ruddy as the plot winds down. He does the punch line very well, speaking the words to his lifted finger, and the line comes back to me as he does it in Russian-back in English, of course, after so many years. The huddled men nod and rock, sending plosive noises from their moon jowls.

Caviar pulsing in chilled bowls. There are geologists and game theorists and energy experts and a journalist with a book contract. I see waste traders and venture capitalists, piroshki and skewered lamb. There are arms dealers looking to make bids, Viktor says, on the idle inventory of weapons-grade plutonium floating at the fringes of the industry.

this explosion," I say. "Not banned by international accord?"

"Banned, not banned. We are exception. Test site was closed by local decree. But we are exception. It is necessary to do a trial demonstration. Plutonium waste is getting to a point that's very crazy. Worldwide, who is counting? Maybe twelve hundred metric tons."

"More."

"More. Okay. Has to disappear somehow."

The food makes me happy for a time. I eat everything I can reach. Meat, fish, eggs, my appetite is enormous. The vodka looks beautiful, with a lucent ruby softness that belies its spice and bite. I fill myself to near capacity, feeling rebuilt, fundamentally sound and content, pro-teinized, and I watch Viktor mingle with the nuclear brass. He looks a little lost among those mainframe bodies. He needs to get adjusted to an environment in which fixing and hustling have come out of the shadows of black-market speculation to create a wholly open economy of plunder and corruption. I'm not sure he can forget all the things he has to forget before he can become a man who flourishes here.

I talk to a woman with a pastry flake fixed to a corner of her mouth. Eating saves us from the fatedness of the landscape, from the dosage meters we wear on our bodies. We talk about this. How nice that the unprinted record of some stray pleasure might rebuke the exclusion out there, the forces that make it chancy for us to take a simple breath of air.

I go looking for Brian Classic. The bunker complex is set on several levels with one large section clearly off-limits to guests-sealed and guarded. I go looking in and out of map rooms, sleeping quarters, a medical setup, down concrete passageways, often ducking my head under low openings. An economist from the U.N. is searching for a toilet. I ease myself down a hatchway that has an iron rail and hobnail steps and there he is in a small room, asleep again.

A chair, a cot and a sink. I'm carrying a plate of food. Not for him- food for me. I sit and watch him sleep and I eat my food. He is wearing his loden coat, one of those hooded Tyrolean things of coarse cloth with wooden toggles for buttons. How right for his old-fashioned face, narrow and boyish, that I could probably crush with five earnest blows. I imagine this with some satisfaction. Dealing a serious blow. But we don't do that anymore, do we? This is a thing we've left behind. Five dealt blows to the pinkish face with the paling hair. But I sit there and watch him, you know, and I'm not sure I want to hit him.

Brian thought I was the soul of self-completion. Maybe so. But I was also living in a state of quiet separation from all the things he might cite as the solid stuff of home and work and responsible reality. When I found out about him and Marian I felt some element of stoic surrender. Their names were nice together and they were the same age and I was hereby relieved of my phony role as husband and father, high corporate officer. Because even the job is an artificial limb. Did I feel free for just a moment, myself again, hearing the story of their affair? I watch him sleep, thinking how satisfying it would be, ten serious smashes to his prep-school face. But it was also satisfying, for just a moment, to think of giving it all up, letting them have it all, the children of both marriages, the grandchild, they could keep the two houses, all the cars, he could have both wives if he wanted them. None of it ever belonged to me except in the sense that I filled out the forms.

I don't have to get out of the chair to kick the side of the cot. I just extend my leg and kick.

Then I watch him come awake.

"So. The fastest lover een Mayheeko."

"What's that?"

"Old joke, You don't know this joke?"

"Jesus, I was dreaming. What was I dreaming?"

"A guy's worried about his wife because there's a famous lover on the prowl. What, you don't know this joke? The Speedy Gonzalez joke. Goes way back. Took decades, this joke, to get from there to here."

"From where to here?"

"Fuck you. That's from where."

I kick the bed again.

He says, "What?"

"How long, Brian?"

"How long what?"

"You and Marian."

"What do you mean?"

"What do I mean?"

I kick the bed. He sits up and puts his hands over his face and begins to laugh miserably.

"We used to talk more or less. That's all."

"Don't contradict me."

"We used to exchange, all right, a confidence now and then. We were close that way but it didn't last long."

"I'm smoking a cigar and drinking a brandy. Don't contradict me."

He looks at me. I don't have a cigar and I'm drinking vodka.

"I mean now? Is this the time we want to discuss the matter? Here? Can't we think about finding a more suitable?"

"She told me everything."

He looks away.

"I'm prepared to be very open about this but I think we need to reconsider the timing," he says.

I lean over, the plate in my left hand, and I cuff him with the right. I throw a right, openhanded because we're being open about this, hitting him with the heel of the hand on the side of the head-a token blow that improves my mood. It is even better than eating. It is better than the meat, the fish, the eggs, the fish eggs and the vodka. I feel good about it. I think we both feel better.