"You think the stories are true?"
"No," Eric said.
"Then why do you spread them?"
"For the tone, of course."
"For the edge."
"For the edge. The bite. The existential burn."
Matty was six years old when his father went out for cigarettes.
Eight days later, when his father hadn't come back and hadn't called or sent a message through a friend, the boy took all the change he could find in the apartment and started walking.
He'd never gone alone past the Third Avenue el in this particular direction but that's where he walked. Then he crossed the avenue where the trains ran through the long corridor below street level from the suburbs all the way down to Grand Central Station. That Nicky would one day throw rocks at. That Nicky would stand at the railing in plain sight throwing rocks at the trains running right below him.
Then he climbed the long set of steps up to the streets near the Concourse. He'd climbed these steps with his mother to go to the movies and get a sundae at the ice-cream parlor nearby and now he climbed the steps alone, going to the Grand Concourse, where the movie theater stood, the Loew's Paradise, and there were sixty or seventy steps and buildings on iron stilts, like another country altogether.
He sees himself from this distance in the white sands standing across the street looking at the great Italianate facade of the Paradise.
He sees himself staring up at the clock and the roof balustrade and the ornate stone cupola.
He sees himself buying a ticket, barely able to reach the window hole, and he pushed the coins through the hole and watched the ticket woman hit a thing that sent the ticket out of a slit.
He walked into the lobby. He felt an enveloping sort of warmth rise from the thick carpet like the happy repose of a stroked dog. There were goldfish swimming in marble basins. He looked at the etched glass chandeliers. There were a number of jutting balconies where paintings hung in gilded frames. He thought this was a thousand times more holy than church.
He is sitting in his half bungalow near the missile range and he sees himself climb the carpeted staircase because he wanted to sit high up, close to the theater ceiling.
He saw the usher standing with a flashlight held across his belt. The usher wore braiding on his shoulders and a row of brass buttons set aslant his chest and he flashed the light repeatedly on and off just to hear it click. Matty thought the usher would tell him he could not sit in the balcony because it was grown-ups only here, for smoking, or boys and girls who want to neck. But the usher clicked the thing and stood there and Matty walked right by.
He climbed to seats near the ceiling, where stars twinkled and moved. The whole sky moved across the ceiling, stars and constellations and misty blue clouds. His mother wanted him to be an altar boy when he was old enough but this was more tremendous than church.
He sees all this as a grown-up who has never smoked a cigarette, who barely drives a car and no longer plays chess and loves a woman who's a nurse in Boston.
He sees himself sitting in the balcony at the Paradise. The light from the movie glowed or faded depending on the nature of the scene. He looked at the wall nearest him and then at the other wall and when the light flared and leaped there it all was, the whole tremendous thing, arches, porticos, statues, the urns and marble busts, the vines trained through balusters, the pedestaled heroes with long swords, the columns in the shape of draped figures, both walls crowded with stacked anatomies and structures, too much to take in, and angels that stood halo'd atop the pediments, and he sat there and waited for his father, for the ghost or soul of his father to make a visitation.
He took off his glasses, he put on his glasses. Then he took them off and wiped them with a pale cloth and sat in front of his screen blinking at a display of data that pertained to an arming system, to that element of the weapon designed to send signals that will arm or safe or resafe the firing system. He heard a faint boom somewhere over the desert, the blast wave of mach speeds, and it thrilled him, moved him. It always did, no matter how often he heard it or how far he was situated from the source. The sound woke him some mornings when the planes flew right over and sometimes he stood outside his quarters before nightfall and watched the matched contrails of half a dozen aircraft in tight formation, the planes themselves long gone, but it was the drag and sonic shock, this is what awed and moved him, and then the afterclap rolling off the mountains, like they were blowing out a seam in the world.
There were people here who didn't know where their work ended up, how it might be applied. They didn't know how their arrays of numbers and symbols might enter nature. It could conceivably happen in a flash.
Everything connected at some undisclosed point down the systems line. This caused a certain select disquiet.
But it was a splendid mystery in a way, a source of wonder, how a brief equation that you tentatively enter on your screen might alter the course of many lives, might cause the blood to rush through the body of a woman on a tram many thousands of miles away, and how do you define this kind of relationship?
Matt did not like to drive. He'd been driving only six months and knew he'd never feel natural at the wheel. The best he could do was mimic a driver. He borrowed a four-wheel-drive vehicle from one of the bombheads and drove it with the instruction booklet in his lap. The roads, the road signs, the other cars made him self-conscious, exposing his crime of driving.
But he wanted to practice for his camping trip with Janet and he went for drives on his days off and there were signs for runaway truck ramps and dangerous crosswinds and there was the Jesus is Lord sign and the lines of whitish haze in the deep distance that he now knew to be sea-bottom sand and the Do not enter sign When road is flooded and the slat-back shadows on the flats formed by the crossbars of power lines that stretched hellbent to Texas.
Returning one day from a drive he saw the protesters, as always, positioned in the wrong place. They should have been standing by the third gate to the air base, the unmarked gate, because that's where scientists from the Pocket entered and left, and they were the most susceptible presence, and he half wanted to tell the protesters to move their operation up the road.
Matt looked slightly Jewish, a little Hispanic maybe. He'd lifted weights in his late teens, remaking the soft flimsy body that used to function as an adjunct to the Univac head. Back in the Bronx, people said he looked a little everything. Mexican, Italian, Japanese even-his friendliest smile could look like a ceremonial grimace. A police sketch made from seven different descriptions-that was Matt. He never stopped resembling the student he was at City College in the late fifties, hardworking, nearsighted, smart and poor, riding the subway to class.
He sat with Eric Deming in the mess. Eric took a strand of spaghetti in his fingers and slow-lowered it down his throat with a certain amount of snakely constriction.
Matt said, 'All right. These are things we have to expect. We're not naive. Mistakes are part of the process. There's a sudden wind shift and the fallout blows the wrong way. Or the blast and shock are larger than anyone anticipated."
"The placid nineteen-fifties. Everybody dressed and spoke the same way. It was all kitchens and cars and TV sets. Where's the Pepso-dent, mom? We were there, so we know, don't we?"
"You know. I don't know," Matt said.