The Day Before Midnight

specific, isn’t it?

Yes, very, he said. He’d spent the day contemplating the effects of a nine-megaton fused airburst from a W53/Mk-6 reentry vehicle delivered by a Titan II at four thousand feet versus the same hardware and throw-weight in a fused air-burst at two thousand feet in terms of fireball circumference vis-a-vis damage radius to a soft target like an industrialized urban base the size of, say, downtown Vladivostok.

I look on it as thinking about peace, he said. Ways to keep the peace.

By building more and better bombs?

He sighed, not at the stupidity of it, but because he knew that from that moment on, there was no turning back, no recall.

“How did your wife take the news?”

“Not too well.”

“No kids?”

“The bomb was our baby, she used to say. But Megan was too beautiful for pregnancy. She didn’t want to lose her waistline. She’d never admit that, but that’s it. And the bomb. It wasn’t that it would blow the world up, it’s that it would blow her up. She took it personally. She took everything personally.”

Peter, she once said to him, do you realize you are the only man in the Western world who has nightmares about nuclear bombs not exploding?

“She’s famous, your wife?”

“In a very small world. She makes sculptures that are highly thought of. She gets great reviews, and sells the stuff for a ton of money. I liked it. It was very impressive. And I think the reason she never left me was that she drew off of me and what I did. Her art would have suffered. She made these anguished things, these masses of mashed tin and plaster and painted surfaces. It was our old pal, Mr. Bomb.”

“Was she untrue?”

It took Peter a long second to make sense of the word. It was so quaint and comical.

“I don’t know. She went to New York once a month or every six weeks. She said she had to get out of Washington. At first I went with her, but I didn’t really go for those people. Assholes, all of them. It was still the sixties for them. It always will be.”

“Politics. Was she in a ban-the-bomb group or anything?”

“No. She was too vain to join groups. She wouldn’t join any group she couldn’t be the leader of. Then I published my essay, and I became the celebrity and started going on the tube and that really hurt her.”

“‘And Why Not Missile Superiority? Rethinking MAD’?”

“Yes.”

He remembered: the argument was simple. MAD — mutual assured destruction, the crux of strategic thought — was a fallacy. We could deploy our MXs before the Soviets improved their 18s and got their 24s on line and it would be possible, under certain rigidly controlled circumstances, to make aggressive moves against the Soviet Union without fear of retaliation. Eastern Europe, for example. In other words, it was theoretically possible, if we could get our MXs out and Star Wars going, to win without the big launch. Reagan loved it. It made Peter the superstar of the sunbelt right.

“That’s what got me the head of the MX Basing Modes Group. I was making eighty thousand a year, I was suddenly very high-profile, I’m on TV, journalists are coming courting. And she hated it. I think that’s what finally drove her to him.” He paused. “She started up with him right after that. I think she’s with him now.”

“Who is he?”

“I met him once. His name was Ari Gottlieb. He was an Israeli painter, briefly big in Manhattan. Very handsome man, taught a course at the Corcoran. She met him at some Washington art thing. It was a very difficult time. We were in the middle of this squabble over MX basing modes.”

“She was different after meeting him?”

“Yes. It was about two years ago. Congress had settled on an initial deployment of one hundred missiles to go into Minuteman II silos and we knew that was tragically wrong because it completely invalidated the premise and that it was dangerous and we had to put at least one in an independent-launch-capable super-hard silo, to beat the new inertial guidance system of the SS-18, to say nothing of the next-generation missiles. So we were working crazily on South Mountain to be our first deployed independent-launch-capable Peacekeeper unit, but trying to keep it within the congressional guidelines. We were cheating, in other words. And she hated it, because the thing just was eating up my time and my mind. And I was fighting for this fifteen-million- dollar gimmick called the key vault, which nobody wanted, and let me tell you, it was maximum-effort time. She hated that the most, I guess. That it absorbed me so completely. And maybe that finally pushed her over.”

“How was she different?”

“I’d finally screamed at her”—he remembered the night, a livid memory, like a scar, still tender to the touch —“that maybe she hated what I was doing, but I was doing something. Something. That I believed. That she sat around making wisecracks and playing at despair but never doing anything, never believing in anything. That she was too precious to do anything. For some reason that really cut into her. After that she was different. And then I began getting these reports that she was seeing this guy for lunches in various obscure spots around town. That was all.”

“And that was it?”

“In January, I think. I smelled his aftershave on the pillow. She hadn’t even bothered to change the pillowcases. She had to let me know. She had to hurt me.”

He thought about it: the last provocation. After all the years, the final, the ultimate provocation. It was as if she’d finally launched, and now he had to counterstrike on warning or lose his hardware in the silos.

“Cheap aftershave,” he said. “English Leather, can you believe that?”

“What happened?”

Peter couldn’t reach it, couldn’t touch it.

The pause lengthened.

“And?”

“Look, it was a very intense relationship. I was capable of…”

“Capable of what, Dr. Thiokol?”

“I guess finally I hit her.” He remembered the evening, June it was, leafy June, the air full of light, the trees green, the breeze sweet and lovely. He’d never hit anything before. He remembered the way her head jolted on the impact and the way her eyes went blank and then her face broke up with fear. She fell back, leaking blood, her nose mashed. Spasm war: the end. She cried. He felt so shitty, he tried to help her, but he was afraid he’d think about Ari Gottlieb again and hit her some more. He told her he was feeling pretty fucked up in the head, she ought to get out of there. He might kill her. And he told her he was going to get a gun and kill Ari Gottlieb. That was June.

“It was something else too.”

Peter turned so that he didn’t have to look at the two of them. After all the denying, it was time to reach in and go where he was most terrified to go. He finally faced it.

“I’d also — well, I did a lot of work at home, and I found stuff — rearranged. Out of order. Slightly scrambled. It really scared the hell out of me. I guess I couldn’t deal with it.”

“It was her?”

“It had to be.”

“Why didn’t you say something?”

“I just put it into the deep part of my head and covered it up with everything I had. Have you ever heard of denial? You refuse to deal with reality. That’s when I flipped, I really flipped. I crashed in July.”

There was another long silence.

“It sounds like a classic,” said one of the agents. “They probably had the two of you under surveillance for a long time, knew exactly how vulnerable she was. They built her a dream man, tailored exactly to your weaknesses. He seduced her. And recruited her. That’s how they did it.”