shirt, a gray rag blotted with rust-colored stains, just hung there in its frame, a battle flag long unused.
After his rescue, he'd been in and out of hospitals for ten months. Because he was a former prisoner of war, there was a place for him in the Air Force as long as he wished. They made him a lieutenant colonel, in fact. They took care of you, they took care of their own. But implicit in the promise was the recognition that you might need such a promise. You might be broken. You might not be valuable anymore. And, truth to tell, he was broken. Wasn't worth shit. Couldn't walk right, couldn't sit right, couldn't lift up the kids and play with them, couldn't watch television without getting headaches. Pain in his neck, shoulders, back, arms, left hand where the bullet went through and hit him in the testicle, left leg, both knees, both ankles. He'd picked up all kinds of bugs while in captivity and been lucky he hadn't died from those alone-worms in his intestines, fungus in his anus, infection in his ears. Shrunken cartilage, bone loss, nerve damage. Vertigo, palsy, numbness. Limited extension of the left hamstring muscles, rotator cuff damage, permanent vulnerability in ankle pronation. Compression of the frontal eminence of the parietal bone, complete atrophy of the torn capsular ligaments of the right shoulder, degradation of the internal condyle of the left humerus.
After his first surgeries, they took him up in an A-10, a green buffalo of a plane, just to get him back in the air, but his spine couldn't take the G's anymore. Like grinding broken beer bottles together. He felt uncertain and weak, he felt fraudulent-for the first time in his life. Get me out of here, I'm going to crash this thing. They tried going up three times, once with painkillers, which was against regs. Didn't work. His back was stiff, he had trouble even climbing into the seat. He couldn't shoot a basketball, much less fly a fighter jet. Once they knew that about you, you were no longer operational. You couldn't be forward-based, you couldn't train other pilots. The instructors were all the best pilots who had survived their own expertise. And anyway, new planes were coming through the procurement pipeline, F-14s, F-16s, F-18s. All advanced fly-by-wire avionics. Heads-up instrument displays. More complicated tactical weaponry, the advanced versions of which had later been used to smoke up Saddam's pathetic army in Kuwait and then a couple of hundred Serbian tanks. By 1976, it had been clear that Charlie was washed up.
They had been living in Virginia then, where he'd had a desk job at SAC in Langley. Ben and Julia almost teenagers. His salary twenty-one thousand a year. He was driving an old Buick, which he'd bought because it was soft on his back. A bad year all around. That was the year he did not fuck, not once. The nerve damage and the scar tissue adhesions had his back in a vise. No hip motion, no flex to the upper back. His legs were still weak. Ellie had tried sitting on him, but she didn't really like it. She performed the other possibilities, but it was a duty, not a pleasure.
Yet there were many others like him, men whom the Air Force no longer needed, capable and hardworking and intelligent, and he found two of them, Merle Sokolov and Harold Cole, both Vietnam washouts like Charlie. They talked, they dreamed, they drank a lot of cheap beer and figured out that they trusted their fates with one another. Each man had children and an anxious wife, each man needed to pull a rabbit out of a hat. They fixed upon three essential pieces of information: One, computers and telecom switching equipment were soon to benefit from the massive R amp;D of the war effort and the space program; two, the demographics of the American population foretold a huge market of prime-age consumers; and three, most residential growth would continue to occur not in cities but in new suburban and rural developments, which meant investment in new telecom equipment. The key was to put yourself in front of the wave, let it wash over you, carry you forward.
The three men, as it turned out, had separate skills. Sokolov was a natural salesman, a fellow of neckties and haircuts and cuff links, and they relied on him to raise venture capital. Harold, the gloomy genius, understood transistors and switches and was schooling himself in microchip technology, and that, he announced, was all that he could do for them, which was more than enough. Charlie's natural ability was organization and leadership. He set up the first corporate structure, made the first hirings. Negotiated the first office lease, the first supplier agreement, did all the traveling to the Far East to look for subcontractors.
Each man tended to hire younger versions of himself. Harold chose young, socially uncomfortable tech- workers who responded to his disinterest in their gracelessness. Sokolov picked one slick salesman after another, burning them out, letting them spend too much on their clients' food and entertainment. And Charlie? Charlie hired workhorses. Their only great argument was where to locate the company. Charlie wanted to stay in Virginia, where costs were lower, but Sokolov prevailed upon them to move to New York and rent cheap office space. It made them appear serious, made them look like players. This was not necessarily true, but it was true that Sokolov had a new girlfriend in New York and they needed him more than he needed them. He could move to New York and sell anything-cars, advertising, apartments. Ellie told Charlie they should move, and that had been the decisive factor. They'd established themselves in crappy offices on lower Fifth Avenue and made no money for five years. The company's backers, four semiretired heart surgeons, had wanted to pull out. Instead Sokolov and Charlie talked them into putting in more money, which effectively diluted the trio's ownership to less than ten percent. Among the doctors' conditions for further investment was that Charlie commit to a five-year contract. The company wasn't going anywhere without that kind of elbow grease. As for Sokolov and Harold, the doctors made no requirement; they were forcibly elevating Charlie; either he ran the show or it closed. Sokolov and Harold understood, but he felt he had betrayed them. The shift in the power among the three men was made easier by the fact that they had started to make some money, and then, a year or two later, quite a lot of it. Yet Harold committed suicide for reasons Charlie still did not understand, and Sokolov said he wanted Charlie to buy him out so that he could get into the real-estate business, which he was sure was going to boom. So Charlie bought him out, increasing his stake in the company to almost seven percent. The surgeons, each anticipating the age of reckoning, wanted the company to go public so that they could cash out their gain. Charlie had no idea how to do an IPO, but the old men hired a cocky punk from Goldman Sachs who inspected the numbers in Charlie's office.
'You're sure these are right?' he'd asked Charlie.
'Yes.'
The kid shrugged, not impressed. 'The company's worth eighty million dollars.'
In celebration of his impending fortune, Charlie had put his father up in the Pierre Hotel and taken him to dinner to explain the momentousness of what was happening. He could now send Julia to a good law school, he could buy Ellie a decent apartment, he could join a golf club. But the old man couldn't listen, for the age of reckoning was upon him, too, and he could barely hold his soup spoon without spilling it. His ears were hairy, the red rims of his lower eyelids hung forward, his coat was too big; he was tired; he missed Charlie's mother, dead ten years; he was old, worn out by work, scared of New York, confused by the opulence of the Pierre. 'Charlie… I don't follow…' The rest of the time he listened to his father talk about his stomach, the nuances of its digestion, the schedule of its torments, what it preferred and what it disliked, and, as things turned out, Charlie thought now, his father had been right to be so worried, because two months later the whole bag of guts more or less disintegrated. One could not live without a functioning stomach, and Charlie's father did not.
Death, always tracking you. Took his mother and father, took his son, took all of Julia's embryos. Took Larry, his backseater. And Harold Cole, too. Perhaps no grandchildren was his punishment for all the killing he'd done. How many? Don't ask, don't tell. He knew the number. Added it up once, only once. They told you not to do it, but he'd looked back at all his post-flight reports and made a guess. A terrible thing to do-he was condemned to know the number forever. You could put that big number on the left and the number one on the right. One. One child. One more child. One more child, God. Forgive me. Ellie's right, I'm going to be old soon. Give me one more child. Correct the flow of time, God. Let me roll the dice again.
He drifted disconsolately through the dark apartment and glanced at the irregular mosaic of lighted windows in the other apartment buildings, rows of yellow rectangles, people inside them-sort of like airplanes at night, he thought-and, there, as he stood in the dark, that thought was what brought the lost dream rushing back to him, except that it had not been a dream, it had actually happened the previous night on the flight from Hong Kong. He had put his inflatable pillow around his neck when the cabin lights dimmed, slipped on his sleeping mask, kicked off his shoes, taken his little blue capsule, pushed the seat back, and fallen into a deep sleep. But then, a few hours later, he had woken suddenly, his pillow hot against his neck like a giant finger curling around it menacingly, the sleep mask a veil pressing against his open eyes. He had leaned forward in his seat, coldly aware, frightened even. Around him the other passengers slept. He stood, not quite knowing why, and in his socks walked slowly back along the plane, a wide-body 767, his back aching a bit, his hands skimming each seat rest, passing row upon row of sleeping passengers. Businessmen, teenagers, young wives and husbands, babies, retired couples, slouched and fallen and slumped against one another with unknowing intimacy, heavy, unmoving, as if- dead, they all looked dead, he'd thought, gliding silently along the aisle, the soft, open-mouth faces illuminated by the emergency exit
