Impossible Things (53 page)

“There’s no point in all of us standing here in the rain for two hours,” Morris said. “I’ll wait here with the … I’ll wait here. Jack”—he turned to him—“go and report to Nelson.”

“I’ll do it,” Vi said. “Jack needs to get to his day job.”

“Is she up?” Nelson said. He clambered over the
fourth-floor beams to where we were standing. “Is she dead?” He glared at Morris and then at my hat, and I wondered if he were going to reprimand me for the condition of my uniform.

“Which of you found her?” he demanded.

I looked at Jack. “Settle did,” I said. “He’s a regular wonder. He’s found six this week alone.”

Two days after Mrs. Lucy’s funeral, a memo came through from Civil Defence transferring Jack to Nelson’s post, and I got my official notice to report for duty. I was sent to basic training and then on to Portsmouth. Vi sent me food packets, and Twickenham posted me copies of his
Twitterings
.

The post had relocated across the street from the butcher’s in a house belonging to a Miss Arthur, who had subsequently joined the post. “Miss Arthur loves knitting and flower arranging and will make a valuable addition to our brave little band,” Twickenham had written. Vi had got engaged to a pilot in the RAF. Hitler had bombed Birmingham. Jack, in Nelson’s post now, had saved sixteen people in one week, a record for the ARP.

After two weeks I was shipped to North Africa, out of the reach of the mails. When I finally got Morris’s letter, it was three months old. Jack had been killed while rescuing a child at an incident. A delayed-action bomb had fallen nearby, but “that bloody murderer Nelson” had refused to allow the rescue squad to evacuate. The DA had gone off, the tunnel Jack was working in had collapsed, and he’d been killed. They had gotten the child out, though, and she was unhurt except for a few cuts.

But he isn’t dead, I thought. It’s impossible to kill him. I had tried, but even betraying him to von Nelson hadn’t worked, and he was still somewhere in London, hidden by the blackout and the noise of the bombs and the number of dead bodies, and who would notice a few more?

In January I helped take out a tank battalion at Tobruk. I killed nine Germans before I caught a piece of shrapnel. I was shipped to Gibraltar to hospital, where the rest of my mail caught up with me. Vi had gotten married, the raids had let up considerably, Jack had been awarded the George Cross posthumously.

In March I was sent back to hospital in England for surgery. It was near North Weald, where Morris’s son Quincy was stationed. He came to see me after the surgery. He looked the very picture of an RAF pilot, firm-jawed, steely-eyed, rakish grin, not at all like a delinquent minor. He was flying nightly bombing missions over Germany, he told me, “giving Hitler a bit of our own back.”

“I heard you’re to get a medal,” he said, looking at the wall above my head as if he expected to see violets painted there, nine of them, one for each kill.

I asked him about his father. He was fine, he told me. He’d been appointed Senior Warden. “I admire you ARP people,” he said, “saving lives and all that.”

He meant it. He was flying nightly bombing missions over Germany, reducing their cities to rubble, creating incidents for their air-raid wardens to scrabble through looking for dead children. I wondered if they had bodysniffers there, too, and if they were monsters like Jack.

“Dad wrote to me about your friend Jack,” Quincy said. “It must have been rough, hearing so far away from home and all.”

He looked genuinely sympathetic, and I supposed he was. He had shot down twenty-eight planes and killed who knows how many fat women in hair nets and thirteen-year-old girls, but no one had ever thought to call him a monster. The Duchess of York had called him the pride of England and kissed him on both cheeks.

“I went with Dad to Vi Westen’s wedding,” he said. “Pretty as a picture she was.”

I thought of Vi, with her pin curls and her plain face.
It was as though the war had transformed her into someone completely different, someone pretty and sought after.

“There were strawberries and two kinds of cake,” he said. “One of the wardens—Tottenham?—read a poem in honor of the happy couple. Wrote it himself.”

It was as if the war had transformed Twickenham as well, and Mrs. Lucy, who had been the terror of the churchwardens. What the War Has Done for Us. But it hadn’t transformed them. All that was wanted was for someone to give Vi a bit of attention for all her latent sweetness to blossom. Every girl is pretty when she knows she’s sought after.

Twickenham had always longed to be a writer. Nelson had always been a bully and a stickler, and Mrs. Lucy, in spite of what she said, had never been either. “Sometimes it takes something dreadful like a war for one to find one’s proper job,” she’d said.

Like Quincy, who had been, in spite of what Morris said, a bad boy, headed for a life of petty crime or worse, when the war came along. And suddenly his wildness and daring and “high spirits” were virtues, were just what was needed.

What the War Has Done for Us, Number Two. It has made jobs that didn’t exist before. Like RAF pilot. Like post warden. Like bodysniffer.

“Did they find Jack’s body?” I asked, though I knew the answer. No, Quincy would say, we couldn’t find it, or there was nothing left.

“Didn’t Dad tell you?” Quincy said with an anxious look at the transfusion bag hanging above the bed. “They had to dig past him to get to the little girl. It was pretty bad, Dad said. The blast from the DA had driven the leg of a chair straight through his chest.”

So I had killed him after all. Nelson and Hitler and I.

“I shouldn’t have told you that,” Quincy said, watching the blood drip from the bag into my veins as if it were a bad sign. “I know he was a friend of yours. I wouldn’t
have told you only Dad said to tell you yours was the last name he said before he died. Just before the DA went up. ‘Jack,’ he said, like he knew what was going to happen, Dad said, and called out your name.”

He didn’t though, I thought. And “that bloody murderer Nelson” hadn’t refused to evacuate him. Jack had just gone on working, oblivious to Nelson and the DA, stabbing at the rubble as though he were trying to murder it, calling out “saw” and “wire cutters” and “braces.” Calling out “jack.” Oblivious to everything except getting them out before the gas killed them, before they bled to death. Oblivious to everything but his job.

I had been wrong about why he had joined the ARP, about why he had come to London. He must have lived a terrible life up there in Yorkshire, full of darkness and self-hatred and killing. When the war came, when he began reading of people buried in the rubble, of rescue wardens searching blindly for them, it must have seemed a godsend. A blessing.

It wasn’t, I think, that he was trying to atone for what he’d done, for what he was. It’s impossible, at any rate. I had killed only ten people, counting Jack, and had helped rescue nearly twenty, but it doesn’t cancel out. And I don’t think that was what he wanted. What he had wanted was to be useful.

“Here’s to making the best of a bad job,” Mrs. Lucy had said, and that was all any of them had been doing: Swales with his jokes and gossip, and Twickenham, and Jack, and if they found friendship or love or atonement as well, it was no less than they deserved. And it was still a bad job.

“I should be going,” Quincy said, looking worriedly at me. “You need your rest, and I need to be getting back to work. The German army’s halfway to Cairo, and Yugoslavia’s joined the Axis.” He looked excited, happy. “You must rest and get well. We need you back in this war.”

“I’m glad you came,” I said.

“Yes, well, Dad wanted me to tell you that about Jack calling for you.” He stood up. “Tough luck, your getting it in the neck like this.” He slapped his flight cap against his leg. “I hate this war,” he said, but he was lying.

“So do I,” I said.

“They’ll have you back killing jerries in no time,” he said.

“Yes.”

He put his cap on at a rakish angle and went off to bomb lecherous retired colonels and children and widows who had not yet managed to get reinforcing beams out of the Hamburg Civil Defence and paint violets on his plane. Doing his bit.

A sister brought in a tray. She had a large red cross sewn to the bib of her apron.

“No, thanks, I’m not hungry,” I said.

“You must keep your strength up,” she said. She set the tray beside the bed and went out.

“The war’s been rather a blessing for our Vi,” I had told Jack, and perhaps it was. But not for most people. Not for girls who worked at John Lewis’s for old stewpots who never let them leave early even when the sirens had gone. Not for those people who discovered hidden capabilities for insanity or betrayal or bleeding to death. Or murder.

The sirens went. The nurse came in to check my transfusion and take the tray away. I lay there for a long time, watching the blood come down into my arm.

“Jack,” I said, and didn’t know who I called out to, or if I had made a sound.

I
got to Hollywood around one-thirty and started trying to check into the Rialto.

“Sorry, we don’t have any rooms,” the girl behind the desk said. “We’re all booked up with some science thing.”

“I’m with the science thing,” I said. “Dr. Ruth Baringer. I reserved a double.”

“There are a bunch of Republicans here, too, and a tour group from Finland. They told me when I started work here that they got all these movie people, but the only one so far was that guy who played the friend of that other guy in that one movie. You’re not a movie person, are you?”

“No,” I said. “I’m with the science thing. Dr. Ruth Baringer.”

“My name’s Tiffany,” she said. “I’m not actually a hotel clerk at all. I’m just working here to pay for my transcendental posture lessons. I’m really a model/actress.”

“I’m a quantum physicist,” I said, trying to get things back on track. “The name is Ruth Baringer.”

She messed with the computer for a minute. “I don’t show a reservation for you.”

“Maybe it’s in Dr. Mendoza’s name. I’m sharing a room with her.”

She messed with the computer some more. “I don’t show a reservation for her either. Are you sure you don’t want the Disneyland Hotel? A lot of people get the two confused.”

“I want the Rialto,” I said, rummaging through my bag for my notebook. “I have a confirmation number. W-three-seven-four-two-oh.”

She typed it in. “Are you Dr. Gedanken?” she asked.

“Excuse me,” an elderly man said.

“I’ll be right with you,” Tiffany told him. “How long do you plan to stay with us, Dr. Gedanken?” she asked me.

“Excuse
me,” the man said, sounding desperate. He had bushy white hair and a dazed expression, as if he had just been through a horrific experience or had been trying to check into the Rialto.

He wasn’t wearing any socks. I wondered if
he
was Dr. Gedanken. Dr. Gedanken was the main reason I’d decided to come to the meeting. I had missed his lecture on wave-particle duality last year, but I had read the text of it in the
ICQP Journal
, and it had actually seemed to make sense, which is more than you can say for most of quantum theory. He was giving the keynote address this year, and I was determined to hear it.

It wasn’t Dr. Gedanken. “My name is Dr. Whedbee,” the elderly man said. “You gave me the wrong room.”

“All our rooms are pretty much the same,” Tiffany said. “Except for how many beds they have in them and stuff.”

“My room has a
person
in it!” he said. “Dr. Sleeth. From the University of Texas at Austin. She was changing her clothes.” His hair seemed to get wilder as he spoke. “She thought I was a serial killer.”

“And your name is Dr. Whedbee?” Tiffany asked,
fooling with the computer again. “I don’t show a reservation for you.”

Dr. Whedbee began to cry. Tiffany got out a paper towel, wiped off the counter, and turned back to me. “May I help you?” she said.

Thursday, 7:30–9
P.M
.
Opening Ceremonies
. Dr. Halvard Onofrio, University of Maryland at College Park, will speak on the topic, “Doubts Surrounding the Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.” Ballroom.

I finally got my room at five, after Tiffany went off duty. Till then I sat around the lobby with Dr. Whedbee, listening to Abey Fields complain about Hollywood.

“What’s wrong with Racine?” he said. “Why do we always have to go to these exotic places, like Hollywood? And St. Louis last year wasn’t much better. The Institute Henri Poincaré people kept going off to see the arch and Busch Stadium.”