“I’ll do the washing.” Ruth thought restoring her kitchen to order might soothe. Also it was only polite.
“We’re here now. We’re grateful to you both. I feel so much better, having eaten. I think I might have another drink.” G. H. refilled. It was a whisky old enough to vote. It was for special occasions, but surely this counted.
“I’ll join you.” Clay slid his glass toward the man. “You see, there’s nothing to worry about here.” Tumbler was somehow fitting; the glass was heavy and expensive and it kept him from tumbling to the floor.
These strangers didn’t know him, so they didn’t know that G. H. was not given to hyperbole. In the hour and a half drive his fear had doubled like resting dough. “Well, it was disturbing.” He had what he wanted, but now he wanted this man and this woman to understand him. He could sense their suspicion.
Ruth was calmed by the suds, the yellow sponge, the lemon scent, the squeak of a clean, hot plate. The preceding ninety minutes she’d been both suspended and speeding—modern life had an uncanny tempo, one man was never meant for. Cars and planes made time travelers of all of us. She’d looked out at the black night and shivered. She’d put a hand on G. H.’s knee. She’d thought about this place, this house, solidly made and tastefully furnished, beautifully situated and absolutely safe but for the complication of these people in her kitchen. “That’s an understatement.”
“A blackout. Like Hurricane Sandy.” Clay recalled unfounded reports of an explosion, Superfund sludge from the Gowanus spilling into the water supply, every sip a carcinogen. They were without power a day and a half. It had been a kind of charming emergency; hunker down with playing cards and books. When the lights came back on, he had baked an apple pie.
“Or in 2003,” Amanda said. “The electrical grid, remember that?”
“I walked across the Manhattan Bridge. Couldn’t reach her on the phone.” Clay put a hand on his wife’s, nostalgic and possessive. “I was so worried. Of course, we were all remembering 9/11, but it was so much better than that day.” That parochial one-upmanship New Yorkers think their own, special remit, but everyone is possessive of the places they inhabit. You recount the disasters to demonstrate your fidelity. You’ve seen the old girl at her worst.
“I thought of 9/11, of course.” Ruth washed the food scraps down the drain and switched on the disposal. “What if people are dying right now? Remember a few years ago, that guy drove his truck on the bike path on the West Side? Just rented a truck in New Jersey and killed all those people? It’s not even difficult. Like how much planning could that have possibly taken?”
“The lights. All the lights—” G. H. knew that no one was interested in hearing about the dream you had last night. This had been real, but maybe some things you had to see for yourself.
Clay believed if you said it, it would be true. “I think in the morning—”
“It is morning, now.” Ruth met Clay’s eyes in the reflection of the window, a neat little trick.
“I guess what I mean is that things always look different in the light of day. I guess self-help clichés are rooted in truth.” Clay sounded apologetic, but he believed it. The world was not as fearful as people thought.
“I don’t know how to explain it.” Ruth dried her hands on a towel and hung it back where it belonged. A building lit up was alive, a beacon; dark, it vanished, like David Copperfield had made the Statue of Liberty do that one time. Ruth associated the sudden absence of light with something being extinguished, with a switch being flipped, with a change, and this invited the question: What had been extinguished, what switch flipped, what had changed?
“You’ve had a scare.” Clay understood.
Ruth had learned only one thing from the current reality, and it was that everything held together by tacit agreement that it would. All it took to unravel something was one party deciding to do just that. There was no real structure to prevent chaos, there was only a collective faith in order. “I was scared. I am.” This last part she didn’t quite whisper. She wasn’t ashamed, but she was embarrassed. Was this it, then; was she a fearful old woman now?
“We’ll find out more tomorrow.” Clay believed this.
“What if it’s the North Koreans? That fat one who fed his own uncle to the dogs.” Ruth could not stop herself. “What if it’s a bomb. A missile.” A year ago, was it, there was that false alarm in Hawaii where, for some terrible stretch, vacationers and honeymooners and dropouts and housewives and surf instructors and museum curators thought that was it, a missile was on its way from the Korean peninsula to obliterate them. How would you spend the last thirty-two minutes: looking for a basement or texting your friends or reading a story to your children or in bed with your spouse? People would probably monitor their own destruction by CNN play-by-play. Or the local stations wouldn’t cut away, and you could go out watching The Price Is Right.
“The North Koreans?” Amanda said it like she’d never heard of the place. What if it was the Outer Mongolians? The Liechtensteiners? The Burkinabé? Did they even have the bomb in Africa? She’d watched Lorin Maazel conducting in Pyongyang. Some cable correspondent had promised détente, some previous president had promised them all peace. Amanda didn’t have time to think about the North Koreans, and had no idea, even, what Ruth was talking about, feeding people to dogs; she thought the rap on the Koreans was that they were the ones who ate dogs.
“It’s not the North Koreans.” G. H. shook his head, but this was as remonstrative as he was willing to get. You didn’t scold Ruth. She was a Barnard girl: she had ready answers. He fiddled with the heavy watch on his wrist, a nervous tic he knew was a tic. He had his money on Iran, maybe Putin. Not literally so; that was against the law. But he was no fool.
“How do you know?” Now that they were safe—but there was a question mark there—Ruth could cede to the panic that had been in her throat as they drove. She could say what she’d been unable to in the car, afraid of jinxing them with an empty tank or a punctured tire. She kept her silence and pictured the faces of her daughter and grandsons, the atheist’s prayer. Muslim fundamentalists! Chechen true believers! Rebels in Colombia, Spain, Ireland, every country had its madmen.
“Wouldn’t there have been a boom?” This was a familiar feeling for Clay, whenever he had to assemble furniture or the car made funny noises: how little he knew. Perhaps that was why, in his estimation, true intelligence was accepting how limited one’s intelligence always is. This philosophy let him off the hook. “You would have . . . heard something. Like if it had been a bomb.”
“I was having breakfast at Balthazar on 9/11.” G. H. remembered the silky omelet, the salty French fries. “Can’t be more than twenty blocks from the towers, right? I didn’t hear a goddamn thing.”
“Can we please not talk about 9/11?” Amanda was uncomfortable.
“I heard the sirens, and then people in the restaurant started talking, so—”
Ruth idly rapped her fingers against the countertop. There was no way to explain that the thing about dark is that it’s rare. There’s always some ambient light. There’s always that contrast that helps you understand: This is dark. The pricks of stars, the leak beneath the door, the glow of an appliance, something. Wasn’t its ability to assert itself, and at breakneck speed at that, light’s most remarkable quality?