The Brink Read online

  Sam holds a matchstick in his fingers.

  His missile, the one from Ethan. His turn.

  “Somebody’s going to win this war,” the professor says, pacing behind them. “Who is it going to be? Is it going to be you?”

  Across the map, Ethan nods at Sam privately, the way a gangster in a movie cues an execution. Sam has no strategy. He’s afraid that Ethan, up in his throne, has unspeakable powers, the gift of knowing that you’re only alive because somebody else died. But with the matchstick in his grip, his Centaur, Sam sees his life from above. Suddenly the map, the game, doesn’t matter. Sam can be Guam, the speck in the Pacific, the small thing passed between people.

  Or he can be the missile.

  He arcs the match over the ocean, toward America. He aims for Ethan, for home. When it lands, Ethan whispers, “What are you doing?” and Irwin makes the blowing-up noise, a rumble with puffed cheeks. The professor says, “First strike. Guam against U.S.A. Interesting . . .” Soon, every missile on the map will launch, the planet turned to stone, the lesson lost. But Sam is, already, elsewhere.

  That night, Mom’s new friend Latrice reclines on the couch, smoking languidly and turning Sam’s photo cube over in her hand. It’s all vistas of his father: grilling, up a ladder, holding Sam at birth when he was still jaundiced and Chinese-looking. Sam recognizes Latrice from the Unitarian church, from the part of the service when people stand up and speak. Latrice talked about women’s rights and black people rights and coming together for a better tomorrow and Mom clutched Sam’s hand. Latrice is the only black person there, so it’s like she is all black people.

  “Your father looks like a nice fellow,” Latrice says, and sets down the cube. She pulls her denim jacket tight. Her hair intimidates Sam, so solid and dense, like the black foam at the tip of a microphone. On the right pocket of her jacket is a button: the radioactive symbol and the Ghostbusters line through it.

  “My dad’s really strong,” Sam says. “He loves to hunt.” Sam sits in the rocking chair, making it rock as much and as irritatingly as possible. His bangs curtain into his eyes, and his mouth is half-full of the chocolate bar she bribed him with.

  “Do you see him much?”

  “All the time,” Sam says. “He comes here too sometimes, just to watch the house. See who is coming and going. My mom doesn’t know.”

  This time, Sam’s lie is bold, riskier. Latrice raises her eyebrows and turns toward the window. The blinds are up, the drapes wide, and the streetlights make the parked cars look only half-there. Latrice’s jeep is parked at the curb, the sticker for the Princeton Seminary in the back window. By her worry, Sam can feel a trajectory taking shape, the flickers of a future impact.

  “Oh, and thanks for the candy,” Sam says. “My dad doesn’t let me eat sweets.”

  Latrice checks her watch.

  “Candy and smoking,” Sam says. “He really hates both of those things.”

  Latrice stubs out the cigarette. “Your dad sounds like a piece of work.”

  Mom descends the stairs in her feathery blue blouse except now it’s too tight because Sam put it in the dryer, trying to be helpful. She smiles weakly. “The babysitter’s still not here?”

  Sam shrugs. The babysitter is not coming. She called, but Sam took the message and forgot to tell.

  “I can make us something,” Mom says. “I have some leftover chicken.”

  Latrice exhales and her breath just keeps going. “I’m vegetarian, remember?”

  Sam sticks out his tongue with the plop of chocolate. Mom fingers a cigarette from Latrice’s pack. “Not what I need right now.”

  Every class, they war, and every class, the earth dies. Over two thousand nuclear warheads exist, the professor tells them. But only twenty detonations are necessary to erase all life, and they have a hundred matchsticks. The twins, playing Russia and Brazil, can’t keep from bullying the planet. Ethan, with his arsenal, makes a point to tick off Guam in every strike. Sam just waits for the nuclear winter to snow all civilization. Once, the class gangs up on the twins and rains its stockpiles onto Russia all at once. But even then, even with their entire population killed, Russian missiles retaliate automatically. “It’s called The Dead Hand,” explains the professor. “Even when they lose, they win.”

  Jerusha begins to cry. “I hate this game,” she says. “All it is is getting killed.”

  The professor taps his fingers together. “Very good, so what are we learning?”

  Jerusha’s sobs fill the quiet room. At least she believes in angels, Sam thinks. At least she has someone to get her when the time comes.

  “Anyone?” the professor asks.

  Ethan says, brightly, “New game.”

  His father’s voice booms from underneath the house-painting van. Only his boots stick out.

  “How’s your mother?”

  Sam leans on the van’s bench seat, unbolted from the car and propped against the garage wall, listening to the radio. A newscaster says that a West German plane landed in Red Square, that this might be the beginning of something. Sam spins a gasket around his fingers. A gasket is the ring of metal that goes between other metal, his dad said, to make them join. These lessons usually bother Sam. He doesn’t want to learn what his father wants to teach. But now, here is this bright fact of gasket. Even words can grow up and make themselves useful.

  Sam stares at the hanging lamp over the car, puzzling an answer. His father doesn’t know about Latrice, who has been sleeping over and leaving paperbacks on the coffee table and storing sand she calls “fiber” on the breakfast shelf. This morning, when his mom was in the shower, he saw Latrice naked, lying in his mother’s bed, scratching the pale bottom of her foot. Her nipples looked like light switches. If he told his father all of this, his father would go quiet and far away.

  “She asks about you,” Sam says.

  The cranking and banging stop. The newscaster says the pilot was a boy.

  “She does? What do you say?”

  “I told her,” Sam begins, “that you have a new friend. And her name is Jerusha.”

  His father glides out on his sled, turns down the radio. “Why did you tell her that?”

  The lies are getting hard for him to think through. First strike is easy. But second and third and fourth go further than he can see.

  “I wanted her to know you have somebody.”

  “I have somebody,” his father says. “I have you.”

  This is his father trying to make him feel worthy. But Sam knows that he’s the consolation prize, what you win when you’ve actually lost. “It’s not the same.”

  His father taps a wrench against his leg. “Your mother just needs some time. Just wait.”

  But how much time, Sam thinks. Because there won’t always be time. Japanese people got hit so hard by light they became permanent shadows—an old man with a cane, a mother with baby stroller—and their shadows won’t even wash off the ground. Time ends. He’s seen the pictures.

  From here on out, the professor says, class is about the after. “Let’s say we hear the big alarms. Let’s just say we have five minutes before a ten-megaton explosion over New York City.”

  Sam’s eyes go instinctively to the row of high windows in the room. It is noon and clear, but the weather doesn’t tell you anything—it was beautiful that morning in Hiroshima too. In his mind, he can see the cloud trace of arcing missiles like rows of close-rule paper in the sky.

  “Imagine nobody is coming for us,” the professor says. “Now what?”

  Their suggestions go up on a blackboard. Store water from the water fountain. Cover the windows. Ration their lunches. Sam has walked through these steps in his head so many times they are polished smooth with worry.

  “I want to be with my parents,” Jerusha says. “In heaven.”

  The professor tugs at his beard. “I’m okay with that.”

  Jerusha lies flat and stares up at the ceiling.

  “What are you doing?” Irwin asks.


  “I’m waiting for the angel.”

  The professor picks up a coffee can with a plastic wrapper over the top. “Does anyone know what this is?” Sam has seen the designs in Protect and Survive, the booklet he ordered from the Department of Defense. “It’s a fallout meter,” Sam says. “It measures the atmosphere. It tells you when you can go outside.”

  “Very good,” the professor says, and for the rest of class they make their own meters. The professor passes out the empty cans, and Sam notices flakes of instant coffee stuck to the bottom. A dank and spicy smells rises out. They pour in the crushed gypsum, which looks like white dirt, and hang two squares of aluminum foil above it on kite string.

  “How do we know these things work?” Ethan asks. His fallout meter looks broken, the string sagging. He has gypsum powder sprinkled on his pants.

  “Well, we won’t know,” the professor says, “until it happens, really.”

  “But then we’ll be dead.”

  The professor points at him. “And that is a distinct possibility.”

  “That’s retarded,” Ethan says. He motors over to the trash can and dunks his fallout meter.

  “I’m okay with that,” the professor says.

  Then Ethan rams his chair into the door to the outside. But it doesn’t open and he’s stuck there, his chair straining. He leans over and shoves the bar to drive forward, but when the door opens, his chair lodges in the gap. From the effort, Ethan begins to cough wetly, buckling over and hacking into his lap. It sounds like he’s drowning on the inside.

  Sam goes to him. Everybody should be able to open a door.

  Ethan sits up, his eyes gluey and cheeks flush.

  “Fuck off,” Ethan says, weakly, and wheels himself outside.

  The professor follows Ethan out. He’s gone for a long time, long enough for the twins to practice strangling each other until they can withstand wiggling fingers at their necks. Ethan’s Panama hat lies crumpled on the floor, and Sam takes it. Through the window, he can sees Ethan at the curb, waiting in the sun.

  “Ethan is fine,” the professor says when he returns. “He had a tantrum like this last time.”

  “Last time?” Sam asks. “He’s been in this class before?” So that is how Ethan knew about the chips and the rules, about the consequences for winning early.

  The professor stares out at Ethan. “He’ll come back.”

  Except Ethan doesn’t. They finish with the fallout meters and nobody learns anything except that gypsum tastes like ash and they can flick balls of tinfoil across the room if they do it right. And still Ethan waits in the sun. Nobody comes. Just like the professor said. Nobody will come for them and one day this class, this room, might be all they have.

  The next day, Ethan doesn’t show. Or the day after. He’s in the hospital, Jerusha says. Her parents are friends with his mother, and she said he got to the top of the list for his operation. She brought a get-well card for everyone to sign. It goes around the room, and when Sam gets it, he sees just a bunch of fancy signatures. The card was a chance to practice their penmanship.

  Sam writes, “I have your hat.”

  They never see Ethan again.

  On the last day of class, out on the front porch, Mom hugs Latrice and moans softly into her shoulder. Sam is disgusted. His mother never hugged his father on the way out. Latrice doesn’t deserve what his father didn’t get. He tells Latrice, telepathically, that her time in their lives is coming to an end. As they embrace, Latrice turns her mother slightly so she can scan the street, see who is seeing them.

  “I’m going to be late for class,” Sam says.

  They separate into their cars, but when Mom turns the key, Sam hears just a small click, softer maybe that what he expected. The engine doesn’t start. Latrice leans into the window.

  “What do you think?” Mom asks.

  “No idea,” Latrice says. “I won’t even pretend.” The way she says it, she pretends sometimes.

  Sam says again that he’s going to be late.

  “Latrice can take both of us in her car,” Mom says. But that will change the order of things, Sam thinks, the way the future has to happen.

  “I can?” Latrice says, and Sam replies, “I don’t want to go with her.”

  Mom massages her temples. “Come on, guys. Work with me.”

  Latrice studies Sam skeptically, as though she can see through to his secret. But at this point, Sam doesn’t actually need to do more than make his loyalties plain.

  His mom whispers, “Shit.”

  “I wish you wouldn’t swear,” Latrice says.

  Mom looks up at Latrice with exhaustion. “Really?”

  Sam opens the glove compartment, where the covert pack of cigarettes is, and hands them over. Mom snatches the pack from him. “You’re not supposed to know about these. Don’t know about these.”

  “We should call Dad,” Sam says.

  Latrice now seems impatient. She says she has somewhere to be. She has decided this problem is not her problem.

  “I’ll call you,” Latrice says, backing off.

  She leaves and Mom goes to the front stoop to sit, fiddling with the fern, yanking off the dead parts. It has more dead parts than green parts. The plant supposed to be his, his reward for letting his father go, but it’s nobody’s plant, put where nobody’s looking. He remembers his mom bringing it home, so springy with life, saying, “You need to learn how to keep things alive,” but it smelled like crotch, and Sam felt betrayed. The person who could give him a plant as a gift was someone who didn’t know him at all.

  “Call your father,” Mom says. “Tell him to get his ass over here.”

  Sam is kneeling on the couch and watching from inside, through the blinds, when his father’s van pulls up a half hour later. He’s come straight from a job, overalls crusted with paint and flecks of white on his cheek and in his beard. His parents face each other coolly, Mom on the stairs, Dad on the lawn with his hands on his hips, as though they don’t need a single thing from each other. His mother points to the car, hood up, and his father peers into the engine.

  His father does nothing, just looks up at Sam’s bedroom window and scratches under his cap. A kind of joy warms inside Sam. This is what he wanted.

  “Come here, Judy,” his father says.

  “No lessons, please,” Mom says.

  “Just. Come. I want to show you something.”

  She goes to him. If she would only keep going to him. They stand together at the open hood and consider the damage. Sam knows he’s been discovered. His father leans on the bumper. Mom puts her hands to her lips in a sort of prayer, even though the Unitarians only bow their heads.

  “Sam, get out here!” she calls through the screen door.

  When Sam gets on the porch, his father sees him and says, “Jesus Christ.”

  “Sweetie, what did you do?” Mom says.

  A breeze seems to gather the heat of the day and press it toward him. An old woman in a robe walks by with a little dog and stares.

  “I cut my hair,” Sam says. With the kitchen scissors. All by himself, while they waited for his father.

  Mom sits on the top step and pats next to her. Sam joins her, his go bag between his legs. She runs her fingers through his hair and asks if he knows that they love him. But it’s a stupid question. Loving someone is easy—look at Latrice! And knowing someone loves you is useless, like knowing the name of a bird.

  “You broke the car, didn’t you?” she says. “And you told some fibs.”

  “Fibs?” his father says. “That’s the word we’re using?”

  Mom gives him her look. “Do you know what he said? He said you come around at night and watch me.”

  His father sighs and scratches at the flecks of paint, scraping them off.

  “Why?” Mom asks. “Why did you do it, Sam?”

  Under his breath, his father whispers, “We know why.”

  “If you don’t tell us, sweetheart . . .” Mom says, and he can see her hunt for ter
ms. “We’ll have to take you out of that class.”

  “We need to go back and live with Dad,” Sam says.

  Mom takes his hand and brings it to her chest, like it’s broken and you make it better by holding. “If you want to go live with your father, you can do that, Sambo,” she says. “You can. But I can’t.”

  His father turns away, and his chest begins to convulse. Seeing his father cry is like watching a building collapse when someone you know is inside. It is raw and close and terrifying. Sam shudders too, and the tremor grows inside, a tremor that started months ago with his mom waking him up, late at night, in the house in the woods, to take his hand and whisper, “I need you to be brave, sweetie, because tomorrow we leave.”

  A row of black cars have parked outside the hall, golden seals on their doors and flags on their radio antennae. In the shade of the oak, a group of men in suits and sunglasses wilt in the heat, their suit jackets hung on the branches. They seem to be waiting for Sam, a gang of fathers ready to administer punishment.

  His father parks the car at the hall entrance. He’s wearing sunglasses to hide his eyes. The Beach Boys tape flips over, another harmony starts. His father looks straight through the dash. “As smart as you are,” his father says, “one day you’re going to grow up and forgive us.”

  “How do you know?” Sam says, stepping out of the car. “Nobody knows anything.” Growing up is pure luck. Two thousand warheads are ready in their silos, waiting to grow up. If the class taught him anything it’s that every place in the world is inside the kill zone. He grabs his bag, with the Band-Aids and the granola bars and water bottles, all of it rolling around in a big swill.

  “I’ll wait for you outside,” his father says. “I’m not going anywhere.”

  So Sam will need to find a distraction, a way of sneaking out. Because he’s not going home, not going back. He’s on his own now, as he always was and will be. The moment he steps inside the foyer, Sam hears clapping. The main hall is crowded with parents and other professors, strangers he hasn’t seen before, the whole summer school, and he can’t make his way in. Spread across the carpet, students sit attentively, preparing for a transmission. On the stage, a fat man in a blue suit jingles the change in his pockets. He surveys the room with a smile like he’s at the top of a mountain and they are the trees. The room is hot already, sun glaring through the windows.