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?'
'
'
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'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.
