Vernon touches the keys again. He has wanted for years to find a combination of notes that sounds like a train whistle. Like Ives’s father, he has never found it. He remembers when he was a boy lying in bed, listening to the Norfolk & Western coal train coming into town. Half a mile from his house, by the old colored cemetery, the belt line split off from the main line, and the engineer would sound the whistle before hitting the switch. Vernon will never forget that sleepy clatter and the squealing cry. Different engineers voiced it differently, depending on how they pulled the cord. Julian would be dead asleep in the other bed. He always went out like a light.
That little house with its trio of silly gooses and his poor, patient father. Everyone but Vernon hung on him like a clutch of drowning children. When his father died, Vernon was the only one left with a lick of sense, and he understands now, looking back, that his lifelong project has been to avoid letting them drag him under, too. He saw his sister Patty as little as possible. Julian handed him the gift of his betrayal over the school money, so Vernon could wash his hands of him. And when his mother lost her teaspoonful of wits and never said anything anymore but “Isn’t that nice?” and “Have we met?,” she was rolled into a nursing home near where Patty lived with her husband, Ray, and vegetated there for twenty years. In lieu of visiting, Vernon sent money. Patty also avoided her mother. After all, she’d grown up with her. It was son-in-law Ray who went twice a week, sat with her, consulted with the staff. Over the years he managed to keep writing letters to Vernon, despite never having anything to report. Everything we do is music.
Vernon checks the clock on the kitchen wall. Eight-thirty. Chattering and drinking. Hola, Carlos! His cold won’t keep him away from the wine. If he even has a cold.
He heads down to the study, leaving the door at the top of the stairs ajar so that Vargas can pretend to remember some unrelated thing he needs to accomplish in the basement. And people say cats have no personality. Of course he went to his mother’s funeral. He’s not that bad. None of the older relatives were still around to object, so they cremated her. It was the last time he saw Julian, who was there with Peter, his boyfriend of many years. Vernon understands that homosexuals are just people, and he agrees they ought to have their rights. Peter, as far as Vernon can tell, has made Julian happy, which is no easy task. He only wished, at the funeral, that Peter hadn’t been so goddamn poofy.
Here’s a terrifying detail from the bombing of Nagasaki: years after the radiation victims were cremated, it was discovered that their ashes had turned pitch black.
He pulls down the Lindsay box. Time at last for Opus 130.
There’s that thing Oppenheimer always claimed he thought at the moment the first bomb exploded at Trinity, a line from the Bhagavad Gita: “I am become Death, destroyer of worlds.” What a dandified fancy-pants. What he really said at the time, according to witnesses, was, “It worked.” Which reminds Vernon of something he read in an oral history book about Hiroshima. A Japanese man from an outlying area climbed a hill on the morning after the bombing and looked out over the plain where the city was supposed to be. He was so stunned, the only thing his mind could formulate, over and over, was, “It’s gone.”
It worked.
It’s gone.
In the moments after the bomb went off at Trinity, while other scientists were gazing awestruck at the mushroom cloud and Oppenheimer was ransacking his mind for a pretentious quote, Fermi was dropping scraps of notebook paper and watching how far the wind from the blast carried them. From that, he made a rough calculation of the kilotonnage of the explosion, and came within a factor of two of the correct answer. Simple ingenuity. There won’t even be any Hiroshimas.
Vernon opens the box. He bought the Lindsay Quartet recordings in 1984. Two years later he was diagnosed with Parkinson’s, and he hasn’t bought any Beethovens since. Maybe he realized, with nine sets, that he already had more than he could take with him. Typical Musical Heritage Society—the recording quality is good, the performances are great, the packaging is shit. Get this, they actually managed to put the wrong labels on the disks. Opus 130 is on the disk labeled as 132. 132 is labeled 131. 131 is labeled 130. Unbelievable. Vernon slips out the right fucking disk because he relabeled them, maintaining order and minimal standards in the universe.
There’s something the physicist Freeman Dyson liked to quote, something from a children’s book about an imaginary land: “There’s a dreadful law here—it was made by mistake, but there it is—that if anyone asks for machinery they have to have it
