"You were there. We were both there."

"You were there. I was somewhere else."

"Dad's in the breezeway washing the car. Meanwhile way out here they were putting troops in trenches for nuclear war games. Fireballs roaring right above them."

"Positioned too close, you mean."

"That's the story I hear. You look at your arm and see right through it. Basically your arm becomes an x ray of your arm. You can see right through the uniform cloth and the skin. The light's so white. You can see blood, bones and whatnot. But that's not all. You can see all this with your eyes shut. You don't have to open your eyes. You see right through the lids. Ha!"

"Well was it officially acknowledged?"

"You wake up one day a few years later, all your inner organs are fused. It's one big jellied lump."

"But did the men get compensated?"

"I don't know," Eric said.

"That's not part of your rumormongering."

Eric stuck a finger in Matty's creamed spinach and hooked a shreddy morsel toward his mouth.

"What good's a rumor that deals with bureaucratic details? The point is this," he said. "It happened right out in the open but it's still a huge secret to this day. That's the story anyway. Which I don't happen to believe. They did major shots off towers or dropped devices from planes and they put troops too close to the blast and they let the fallout drift to Utah, where kids are getting born with their bladders backwards."

Matt wanted to like Eric. The guy was smart, friendly, sort of semi-charismatic in a physically awkward and too-tall way. But his motives were sometimes lost to observers in the inward drifts of his smile. You saw the shadow action around the mouth and wondered if you were being set up for something.

"You know about the school not far from here. This is not rumor now but fact. I've been there and seen it. The Abo Elementary School and Fallout Shelter. A real place down in the ground."

"Just like us."

"We're not real," Eric said. "They're only kids. It's a grade school. They still have a chance to be real. I was sent there to speak to them."

"As a bombhead."

"As a clean-cut younger member of the military industrial complex. A diversion at recess type thing."

"What did you say to them?"

"There's a water tank at the edge of town. State Champs in bright new paint. And rows of neat homes. Then you come upon the school but just barely. Some trailerlike structures and a couple of basketball courts and finally you spot an entrance and you open the steel door and go down the stairs and there's a lot of concrete and steel and the lighting's slightly eerie. The classrooms, the bedding, the canned food, the morgue. No window breakage. That's one of the features. Because there aren't any windows of course. But the point is. What's the point, Matty?"

"I don't know. Tell me."

"Did they do all this to protect the kids from Soviet bombs or from our bombs and our fallout?"

"I don't know. Both. What did you say to the kids?"

"I spoke in tongues," Eric said. "I mean think about it. I'm standing in an underground room at the northern edge of a great desert with filtering systems for fallout and a fully equipped morgue and there are crayon drawings pinned above the blackboard of piglets and cows. Incidentally."

"What?"

"I have a chess set in my room. What about a game?"

The Pocket was one of those nice tight societies that replaces the world. It was the world made personal and consistently interesting because it was what you did, and others like you, and it was self-enclosed and self-referring and you did it all together in a place and a language that were inaccessible to others.

Janet Urbaniak was Matt's girlfriend, a registered nurse. They were off-and-on serious, mostly on, often impatient with each other but always strongly joined, the kind of star-matched couple born to meet and disagree.

He called Janet on her days off and she told him where she'd gone and what she'd seen or bought, and who with, and for how long, and he listened and commented and asked for details.

She worked in a trauma unit now. She told him about her nights there but he said almost nothing about his own work and of course she understood and did not probe.

Janet called his mother twice a week to find out how she was doing and then she called Matt to give him a report and then Matt called his mother to confirm everything, to clarify the particulars of an ache or pain, and he liked all these calls, the ones he made and the ones he heard about-they gave him a life outside the Pocket.

He drove his borrowed jeep past a protester alone, a woman struggling to keep the sign upright in a dry stiff wind that beat across the flats. He wanted to stop and talk to her. Give her a hand, have a chat. He wanted to show his tolerance of her viewpoint, allow himself to be convinced by some of her arguments, make certain trenchant points of his own and then drive her to the nondescript room where she lived at the edge of this or that town, with a partial view of the mountains, and have soft, moaning and mutually tolerant sex in her rumpled bed, but he slowed only slightly as he drove past.

Later someone told him the protesters lived in a ruined school bus in the Sacramento Mountains. Matt kind of liked that. He liked the idea of people leaving everything behind to pursue an idea. He thought of Sister Edgar in sixth grade talking about desert saints, pillar saints, stylites, and she hoisted herself up on her desk and crossed her legs under the habit, a saint lotused on a column in the Sinai, and spoke to the class in snatches of Latin and Hebrew and he remembered liking that-he liked to think of a godstruck band of wanderers haunting the test ranges and silos of the West.

It was part of the reason he'd come here in the first place. For the questions and challenges. For the self-knowledge he might find in a sterner life, in the fixing of willful limits.

Did you do grad work on solar energy? Did you do a paper on the trigger principle of nuclear fission? Do you go to the dentist every six months for a prophy and a polish? Are you a physicist with a grudge against your mother? Are you a systems engineer who masturbates in secret while your wife is watching reruns of "The Honeymooners"? Do you wish to hell you could see a tower shot with all the special effects, with the sun coming up ass-backwards and the trees casting shadows in the wrong direction, the spectacle of the unmattered atom, the condensation cloud arranged split-secondly on the shock disc, sort of primly place-centered, and the visible shock approaching, and the biblical wind that carries sagebrush, sand, hats, cats, car parts, condoms and poisonous snakes, all blowing by in the desert dawn?

Eric kept after him to play chess. But he didn't want to play chess. He didn't talk about his chess. His chess was old dark difficult history, suppressed forever. The history of a chess homunculus. No one knew about his chess. Janet knew a little and only Janet and no one else but his mother and brother and Mr. Bronzini, of those who might tend to remember.

"'You don't get the point," Eric said in the jeep.

"You're spreading rumors you don't even believe. That's the point," Matt said.

"They had to throw up roadblocks because the cloud was moving into populated areas. Neuroblastomas. Beta burns. Two-headed lambs. Or entire herds of sheep dead in the fields. Or you wake up one morning and your teeth start flipping out of their sockets, painlessly and bloodlessly."

Two or three teeth, say. Sort of gently expelled with the faintest kind of squishy sound, Eric said. And you wrap them in cold wet gauze and jump in your car and drive to the dentist's office confident that he'll be able to reinsert the teeth because don't doctors do amazing things with severed limbs. Or he will not reinsert the teeth. He will send the teeth to a lab at the new medical center where they have equipment so advanced it can learn more about you in a passing glance than you could figure out yourself if you lived to be a thousand.