hubris. It was this quasi-animist belief that Chandler believed was fueling the nuclear arms race: from primitive fire arrows to medieval trebuchets to nuclear bombs, humanity was doing the bidding of the fire god, building the tools that would enable it to realize its ultimate goal: the purification of the world through its annihilation.
He knew the arguments backward and forward, had scoured the dusty corners of every library between Cambridge and Princeton for supporting evidence. But every time he sat down at the typewriter, something stopped him. There was always one more fact he needed to look up, a distracting errand he had to get done. Chandler knew the truth, of course. The truth was that if he ever finished his dissertation he’d have to leave school. Go out into the world and make something of himself, and he knew how that story ended. Knew how it had ended for his father at any rate, and Uncle Jimmy, and Percy Logan, his best friend at Andover: a slab of white marble forty-two inches tall, thirteen inches wide, and four inches thick. For now he’d settle for the less frightening prospect of a blank sheet of paper.
And besides, this time there was no getting around it. He had to write
He glanced at his watch—7:18. Just under ten hours to write fifty pages. Chandler didn’t think he could fill that many pages even if, like the proverbial monkey, all he did was hit random keys for the next ten hours, let alone attempt to lay out a cogent argument spanning five continents and as many millennia.
He set his fingers on the keyboard, let his mind fill with the image of Adar. Like all fire, Adar was always moving from one place to another. To Chandler, he was like Hanuman, Rama’s devoted servant, not as powerful as his king, but made invincible by unwavering fealty. Hanuman’s chin was scarred by a lightning bolt when he was a child. Adar was the lightning itself: a limbed comet, a warrior made of pure flame—
The clacking of keys pulled him from his thoughts. He looked down, was surprised to see that he’d typed everything that had just run through his mind. He’d substituted the word “Urizen” for “Adar” (one of Blake’s deities? he wasn’t quite sure, although he could see the god clearly enough, beard and hair streaming in a cosmic breeze). Emboldened, his fingers flew over the keys. Words, sentences, paragraphs poured onto the page. One page, two, a third. In the middle of the fourth he needed to check a quotation but was afraid to get up. He knew the quote, could almost see it in front of him, written out on one of the thousands of index cards that filled a dozen drawers in his carrel in the library. And then, suddenly, he
There will be a mighty conflagration, and all men will have to wade through a stream of molten metal that will seem like warm milk to the just and a torrent of igneous lava to the wicked.
He didn’t ask himself how this was happening or if it could possibly have something to do with last night. When he finally looked up, it was just after four. A stack of pages sat next to the typewriter. He was about to count them when the number came to him: seventy-two. He had no idea how he knew this number, but he knew it was accurate. He threw the pages into his briefcase and ran out the front door. The campus was half a mile away. He was going to have to sprint if he wanted to get this in on time. He set off down Brattle Street at a run, but before he’d gone half a block he pulled up short. Something had caught his eye. A stack of newspapers at the corner kiosk. The
Friday?
Never mind that he was able to see letters a quarter-inch high from ten feet away (and at a run to boot): if the paper was right, he’d somehow lost
Confused and frightened, he turned and walked back home. His key was in the door when he heard a throat clear. Even before he turned, he felt her. Her sense of barely controlled panic as she waded through the pyroclastic emotions streaming by with the other people on the sidewalk. She was hunched inside a dark jacket, her face shielded by sunglasses with lenses as big as the saucers on which espresso is served in cafes in the Latin Quarter of Paris. The most real thing about her seemed to be the ruby ring on her right hand, which she twisted nervously with the fingers of her left.
“Naz.” Chandler’s voice was as dry as the crust of food on the plates in his sink upstairs. “I—I thought I dreamed you up.”
Naz didn’t say anything for so long that Chandler thought she was just another hallucination. Then:
“I think you did,” she said, and fell into his arms.
CIA Headquarters, McLean, VA
November 1, 1963
In the wake of his Caribbean sojourn, the Halls of Justice seemed bland and expensive. Terrazzo floors speckled black and brown like a wren’s egg, buffed walnut wainscoting giving way to Listerine- colored walls. Sure, the slate roofs of Cuba’s government buildings were leaking and the rococo wallpaper had been repatterned by gunfire. But the Cubans made all this seem intentional. Not decrepit or disheveled, but
On the beaded glass of the nearest doorway, three letters were stenciled in gold and outlined in black, like the office of a private dick in a forties noir:
D.D.P.
No name was painted on the door, but if he squinted Melchior could make out the ghostly outline of the words FRANK WISDOM just above the title. Whoever’d scraped the paint off had scratched the glass in the process, indelibly etching the Wiz’s name into the door and rendering him more of a presence than he’d ever been during his tenure as chief of covert ops. This seemed a fitting tribute, since the Wiz had spent even less time in this office than Melchior had in the Adams Morgan apartment he’d owned for the past eight years.
