My debrief was one hundred and twenty-two typed pages. The name Janusz Stern appeared nowhere. I was told, as we all were, that everything I’d done, everything I’d seen, was secret. You were expected to take that information to your grave. No one spoke about the missions until they were declassified.
Forty, fifty, sixty years we kept our mouths shut, and where do you put that, where do you store those memories of what you’ve seen and done? Well, you’re trained to keep secrets, and that’s what you do. But let me tell you, it causes a fundamental rift within a person who is motivated to seek truth, of course, to lie by omission for that long.
Water will find its level.
At first, I couldn’t sleep. I don’t mean this colloquially—I wasn’t having trouble sleeping. I stopped sleeping completely. By the middle of the second week back in D.C. I’d come undone. It was obvious to everyone at command that I wasn’t fit for duty. I was a babbling mess. Hallucinating. At night I sweated through the sheets, flopping around like a fish, staring at the dark. In the morning, drag myself in to work, sit down, nod off at the desk, bolt awake. Over and over, all day long. I took medicine. I drank. Nothing worked. I was seeing eyes in the shrubbery. I was being followed by the Gestapo. My food was being poisoned. The girl behind the reception desk was a double agent. This was shameful to the whole outfit, you understand. Field officers were supposed to be hard as nails. They were selected for their mental stability. That was a fundamental requirement. I was a complete failure on all fronts—not only was I falling apart, I was dragging down morale in the office. So they got me out of there posthaste, packaged me off to Fairfax for evaluation. The doctors didn’t even let me go back to D.C. for a change of clothes. Diagnosed with operational fatigue and sent directly to Santa Cruz with an escort.
At least I finally got to sleep. They shot me full of barbiturates and put me in a private room at the Casa Del Rey, which had been converted into a naval hospital. A deep, empty sleep without dreams. I woke up and I felt like myself again. I talked to psychologists, but of course we couldn’t get at the problem. They’d give you a shot of sodium amytal in those days to dredge up the root of the neurotic behavior. Or the psychologist would hypnotize you and take you back to the battlefield. But they couldn’t use those methods with me. My work was classified. So the shrinks did their best and I did my best with the little charade. After about two weeks, they declared me well enough for some day passes. I’d made a friend by then, a sailor from Idaho who’d lined us up a couple of dates, nurses, and we went out for an afternoon on the boardwalk. It was the Fourth of July.
My father reaches into his pocket and pulls out the hex nut he’s carried with him for as long as I’ve been alive. Do you know where I got this? he says.
You said it was part of a roller coaster.
That’s right, he says, and smiles. The roller coaster was in Santa Cruz.
It was not a good date, he says. The nurse I was paired with was named Marcy. Marcy Plotkin from Clearwater, Florida. Her friend was lighthearted, you might say, but Marcy had a kind of haughty distraction about her, something I suspect she’d developed long before she joined the Nurse Corps. I had no idea how to talk to her. No doubt I was quoting Shelley, trying to work her into an elegiac froth, but this Marcy Plotkin couldn’t be bothered to humor me. She tended to convalescing sailors and soldiers all day and night. The things she must have seen in that hospital. What’d she want with poetry? It’s a funny thing, because she of all people would have been pretty well suited to listen to me talk about what was really on my mind, but of course that wasn’t possible. What a date.
We all rode the roller coaster, the Giant Dipper. It was a creaky, rattling wooden contraption. Surely it’s collapsed by now. Mind you, it was about as frightening as a pet bunny, but as soon as we went clicking up the first little incline, I was in a panic. I felt death all around me, as palpable as the sweat on my skin. It was everywhere, pressing in on me. I was too terrified to even scream. Thank god I didn’t or old Marcy might have thrown me overboard.
A roller coaster! A ride for kids. But for precisely the reason that it was designed to be harmless, I seized on the idea that the probability of a malfunction was astronomical. See, during the war, maintenance would have been done by some old codger who could barely get up on the catwalks every morning. Probably half blind. Every bolt and screw would be loose, the boards soaked in salt air, axles inadequately lubricated—the possibility of something going wrong felt absolutely guaranteed. I’d never considered such things before Poland, before I’d worked on the manual.
If you’d asked, I would have said that I trusted that the mechanical world held together because otherwise capitalism would fall apart. You can’t make any money selling shoddy machinery, so you design a better piston than the next guy, manufacture it to a higher tolerance than the next guy, you test it thoroughly and refine it so that, left untouched, it would operate correctly for decades. And every company operated this way, a perfectly synchronized aperture of industry, opening and closing with exacting precision. I would have said there was some elegance to it. Maybe I would have said that our machines were gleaming proof of the quality of our national character. It’s American, by god, best in the world. I believed in the constructed world, in the intelligence behind our superior designs. I believed that every cog was machined to mesh perfectly with every other cog. I believed in efficient systems.
This was my brother’s influence, you know, my beliefs. He thought like a scientist from the time he could talk. Do you know how many patents Ben had filed by the time he retired?
No, I say.
Thirty-one. Dow owns them, almost all of them polymer structures, but they’re his work. Well, no longer did I believe in the divine nature of calculus. The scales had fallen from my eyes. It was suddenly obvious to me that simple sabotage was simple because the manufactured world already strove toward entropy. We can’t conquer natural laws, I realized. It’s a gargantuan feat to build a city, it takes hundreds of years, infinite quantities of human thought and labor, and it can all be leveled in a flash. We are, on our best day, only a hair ahead of chaos. The natural order is rubble. Left alone, everything finds its way to ruin.
Was it Janusz Stern who’d made me think this way? Certainly. Certainly it was. Through his death I had become aware of the carelessness behind the decision to induct me into OSS. The carelessness that had put me in a position to make such a foolish mistake. The total lack of thought that had gone into my insertion into Poland. I was just another body thrown at the Nazi machine in hopes that I’d clog the gears before being mashed to a pulp—this was how the world operated. As a child, I trusted that my world was the result of thoughtful planning, but in Poland I understood unequivocally that as a race we are in a constant state of panic and last-ditch efforts, everything a stopgap measure, everything an act of faith.
Well, I started jawing away about all this right there on the roller coaster, but guess what, Marcy’s not interested in hearing about entropy and rubble, and as soon as we set foot back on the boardwalk, she and the other nurse took off. My buddy from Idaho took off after them, and I stood there, sweat pouring down my shirt like I was standing on the surface of the sun, and I’m shivering, my teeth rattling around in my mouth. I looked around and the only safe place I saw was the beach. What was sand, after all, but pulverized civilizations, vegetable and meat and mortar all reduced together on their journey back to nothingness? The next stop after you’re a grain of sand? Atoms. Subatomic particles. Then you were done. You were returned to origin, broken and scattered. That was our natural state, not this random propagation of flesh and bone. Silence and nothingness was the pinnacle of existence, not animation, not thinking, not creating.