My father reaches into his pocket and pulls out the hex nut he’s carried with him for as long as I’ve been alive. Do you know where I got this? he says.
You said it was part of a roller coaster.
That’s right, he says, and smiles. The roller coaster was in Santa Cruz.
It was not a good date, he says. The nurse I was paired with was named Marcy. Marcy Plotkin from Clearwater, Florida. Her friend was lighthearted, you might say, but Marcy had a kind of haughty distraction about her, something I suspect she’d developed long before she joined the Nurse Corps. I had no idea how to talk to her. No doubt I was quoting Shelley, trying to work her into an elegiac froth, but this Marcy Plotkin couldn’t be bothered to humor me. She tended to convalescing sailors and soldiers all day and night. The things she must have seen in that hospital. What’d she want with poetry? It’s a funny thing, because she of all people would have been pretty well suited to listen to me talk about what was really on my mind, but of course that wasn’t possible. What a date.
We all rode the roller coaster, the Giant Dipper. It was a creaky, rattling wooden contraption. Surely it’s collapsed by now. Mind you, it was about as frightening as a pet bunny, but as soon as we went clicking up the first little incline, I was in a panic. I felt death all around me, as palpable as the sweat on my skin. It was everywhere, pressing in on me. I was too terrified to even scream. Thank god I didn’t or old Marcy might have thrown me overboard.
A roller coaster! A ride for kids. But for precisely the reason that it was designed to be harmless, I seized on the idea that the probability of a malfunction was astronomical. See, during the war, maintenance would have been done by some old codger who could barely get up on the catwalks every morning. Probably half blind. Every bolt and screw would be loose, the boards soaked in salt air, axles inadequately lubricated—the possibility of something going wrong felt absolutely guaranteed. I’d never considered such things before Poland, before I’d worked on the manual.
If you’d asked, I would have said that I trusted that the mechanical world held together because otherwise capitalism would fall apart. You can’t make any money selling shoddy machinery, so you design a better piston than the next guy, manufacture it to a higher tolerance than the next guy, you test it thoroughly and refine it so that, left untouched, it would operate correctly for decades. And every company operated this way, a perfectly synchronized aperture of industry, opening and closing with exacting precision. I would have said there was some elegance to it. Maybe I would have said that our machines were gleaming proof of the quality of our national character. It’s American, by god, best in the world. I believed in the constructed world, in the intelligence behind our superior designs. I believed that every cog was machined to mesh perfectly with every other cog. I believed in efficient systems.
This was my brother’s influence, you know, my beliefs. He thought like a scientist from the time he could talk. Do you know how many patents Ben had filed by the time he retired?
No, I say.
Thirty-one. Dow owns them, almost all of them polymer structures, but they’re his work. Well, no longer did I believe in the divine nature of calculus. The scales had fallen from my eyes. It was suddenly obvious to me that simple sabotage was simple because the manufactured world already strove toward entropy. We can’t conquer natural laws, I realized. It’s a gargantuan feat to build a city, it takes hundreds of years, infinite quantities of human thought and labor, and it can all be leveled in a flash. We are, on our best day, only a hair ahead of chaos. The natural order is rubble. Left alone, everything finds its way to ruin.
Was it Janusz Stern who’d made me think this way? Certainly. Certainly it was. Through his death I had become aware of the carelessness behind the decision to induct me into OSS. The carelessness that had put me in a position to make such a foolish mistake. The total lack of thought that had gone into my insertion into Poland. I was just another body thrown at the Nazi machine in hopes that I’d clog the gears before being mashed to a pulp—this was how the world operated. As a child, I trusted that my world was the result of thoughtful planning, but in Poland I understood unequivocally that as a race we are in a constant state of panic and last-ditch efforts, everything a stopgap measure, everything an act of faith.
Well, I started jawing away about all this right there on the roller coaster, but guess what, Marcy’s not interested in hearing about entropy and rubble, and as soon as we set foot back on the boardwalk, she and the other nurse took off. My buddy from Idaho took off after them, and I stood there, sweat pouring down my shirt like I was standing on the surface of the sun, and I’m shivering, my teeth rattling around in my mouth. I looked around and the only safe place I saw was the beach. What was sand, after all, but pulverized civilizations, vegetable and meat and mortar all reduced together on their journey back to nothingness? The next stop after you’re a grain of sand? Atoms. Subatomic particles. Then you were done.
