His father used to say, whenever you make a to-do list, begin it with #1: Make a List. That way, when you finish writing the list, you can cross off the first item.
God, he misses his father.
He closes the score, closes his eyes, keeps listening. The delicate dance of new strength—he sees Beethoven tottering on his pins around his squalid room—is followed by the hymn again, the voices weaving around each other in a more complicated way. Then another dance, and then the hymn again, with even more complication, but still so open, so guileless, so grateful. It gets to the long crescendo, where the first violin edges higher and higher, and the chords get more insistent, like hands reaching up, fingers stretched as far as they will go, and the chords repeat themselves, the fingers will stretch no farther, no matter how they try. And this always happens, right here—he is weeping. So fragile, so yearning, so mortal.
• • •
A story Vernon’s dad used to tell:
A man is out on a bird hunt. Nothing is going his way. The waterfowl near his stand have disappeared. The field birds flush before he creeps close enough. Now it’s evening, and he’s walking home through the woods, tired and discouraged. His path takes him across a log bridging a stream. When he reaches the midpoint he sees a catfish below him, just under the surface. The man doesn’t have a fishing pole with him, but he has his bird gun. He raises the gun to his shoulder. Now, he likes to think he’s a clever man, and it occurs to him that if he fires the gun, the recoil will knock him off the log. After pondering the problem, he realizes he can lean forward until he’s off-balance, then shoot, and the recoil will push him back upright. He knows his gun; he’s confident he’ll be able to sense the right moment to fire. So, sighting on the fish, he leans forward and begins to fall. He pulls the trigger. The gun misfires and he topples into the stream.
One of the last things Vernon did at RAND, when he had more or less stopped work on his real project involving the aerodynamics of ICBMs, was to double-check the data from a civil defense study headed up by Herman Kahn. Vernon was drawn to Kahn’s work because it seemed the epitome of what he had come to loathe about RAND. When engineers express contempt for aspects of a proposal, they talk about “hand-waving”—the moment when the idea guys get vague on the details of how one might actually bring into working existence that winged pig they’re dreaming of. Kahn, RAND’s jovial clown peddling patter and pixie-dust magic at the generals’ parties, was a hand-waver par excellence.
This must have been the spring of 1958, and the idea was that any American threat of escalation during a crisis would be more credible if the United States had in place a robust civil defense program—i.e., go ahead and nuke us, you Soviet savages, we’ll ride it out in our shelters and then turn everything east of the Urals into a glass plain of trinitite. For rural areas, small towns, and suburbs, fallout shelters like the one Vernon is sitting in right now would be sufficient, but cities would need blast shelters. Kahn actually envisioned a future in which much of the US population would have to descend into shelters two or three times a decade. He talked about the strategic danger of a “mine gap”—whether the Soviets had more and deeper mines than we did, to hide their people in. So he hired an outside engineering firm to evaluate the feasibility of excavating shelter space for four million people in the bedrock under Manhattan. The plan called for a network of chambers 800 feet below the surface, providing 20 square feet per person, a 90-day supply of food and water, power generators, etc. There would be 91 entrances spaced regularly around the island, so that no residents would be farther than a ten-minute walk from the nearest entrance.
Since one aim of the study was to evaluate cost, Kahn postulated that humankind might find new uses for the crushed rock produced by the excavation. And since RAND really did let its employees pursue their private passions, Vernon spent a grimly hilarious two days calculating the volumes of Manhattan mica schist, Fordham gneiss, and Inwood marble likely to be brought to the surface, and then investigating what firms might be interested in buying it. It turns out that crushed mica schist—by far the bulk of the product, somewhere in the neighborhood of one billion cubic feet—is lousy for road construction, foundation work, landscaping, etc, because it cleaves in planes. For the same reason, it’s rarely used as dimension stone in construction. On the other hand, it can be converted to vermiculite, which is that tuff-like stuff they mix into potting soil for water retention. So maybe the Great Manhattan Shelter could pay for itself by supplementing victory gardens across the country, after the Soviets bombed US agriculture back to the Stone Age.
The hand-waving here didn’t involve technical details of construction, which were well known and trivial, but pie-in-the-sky political and social expectations. The same realpolitikniks who had rightly scoffed at calls for World Government somehow expected US politicians and the American public to act with long-range foresight, accepting immense expenditure, to defend against an emergency no one had ever experienced nor could imagine. Part of Kahn’s Manhattan study calculated how quickly residents in high-rises could descend using preexisting elevators—but it assumed that people would wait their turns. Evacuation plans to outlying areas proposed that families with even-numbered license plates wait until all the odd-numbered people went first. They proposed that all drivers have printed on their car registration their designated shelter, which assumed that people would be willing to drive past
