“No,” she said.
“Stay here,” he said. “Is not long till morning. Then call your friends. Ask to come and pick you up. Yes?”
“No,” she said. “Don’t go.”
“I must.” He smiled, as though to remind her of what she had said, before midnight, before she slept. “If I must I must, is it not so?”
“No. No don’t.” There was a noise around them, a huge noise like a jet airplane’s settling on a runway, and she realized what it was: wind.
“Kyt,” he said. He sat by her. “Listen. Tomorrow, later on, they may say they know what became of me, what happened, but they will be wrong. Because an act—any act—may be one thing in one world and something else in another world, a thing that is not like it but has its shape, that rhymes with it. A commonplace thing, accident or loss, it may mean nothing here and everything there…”
“There’s only one world.”
“Yes. Yes there is. Only one.” He stood. He had shed the uncertain restlessness that had afflicted him before, and it made her afraid, for him or herself. When he returned to the farther room she got up too, weak as water, pulling on her shoes, and followed him.
“Are you,” she said, unable to believe she could guess this, say this aloud, “are you going back?”
“Back,” he said. “No. On. I am going on.” He took from the table his black case of imitation leather, and filled it with papers, yellow copy paper, typewritten: his poems in Russian. Then he stopped, and lifted his eyes, the lamps of his eyes, to her. “And do you know. Strangest thing of all in this mirrorland. I can only go because you, Kit, my dear, my love, you want me to stay.”
Tears sprang to her eyes and she put her hands to her mouth. When he came closer she pressed herself to him, to keep him or stop him. He took her shoulders in his hands so that he could see her face. “I can tell you now. The world, this world, is to go on; it will not end. That is certain now, this day, this morning. No bomb will fall. You will have a life that you must live, a long one it might be. Instead of closing now, it opens, do you see? So you must learn to speak, Kyt. You must find ways to speak.”
“I could with you. Without you I can’t.”
“You can, for you must. Oh my dear love, don’t you see. You have to say. For them, for him. For my sake too.” He held her again, his cheek pressed to hers, and he spoke softly in Russian; she heard her own name, and a diminutive of it, and other words she knew, and then words she didn’t know and would never remember.
“I must go.”
She released him, having no choice; without haste he picked up his case, and took from his pocket a shiny key on a length of gray twine; he looked at her and seemed to have passed away already, to be seeing her clearly but from a great distance.
At the door he turned, as though there were a thing left to say that he had not yet said. “You will see me soon, Kyt. I promise this.”
He went out.
She knew, by now, what it is when someone walks away or goes away saying they’ll return, how you can know that they won’t, that they are already lost to you even in setting out. She knew it and she couldn’t go after him, she couldn’t cry out or call him back. The gray cat came around her legs and purred and stroked her in its soft selfish ignorance. She heard the car start, and its lights colored the yard she could see through the windows; the light swayed, diminished; the sound diminished.
She took her coat, went out into the yard. The wind was increasing, an autumn storm come, or passing overhead. The road was entirely dark, only the occluded moon outlining it, and she began to walk along it, and then to run, knowing how far ahead he was, how far behind she was, but running anyway. The tall roadside trees thrashed their limbs and lost their leaves in great cascades.
The main road was dark and empty too. The way east, the way west. She stood, breathing hard. Then down the straight road far away she saw two headlights coming toward the place where she stood. As she watched they seemed to come on with awful, impossible speed, the lights of a huge vehicle, roaring. No, the lights weren’t one vehicle but two motorcycles, two that had drifted apart as they came on, fooling her. Still her heart raced. They were unbearably loud. They passed by her, one, then the other, both black, and went on down the straight road.
There was nowhere for her to go, nowhere to follow. She went back toward the house, where only the light in Falin’s room was still lit and waiting. She shut the door she had left open. In Falin’s bedroom his quilt was thrown back, his shirt on a chair. She took the shirt in her hands and inhaled its odor; she crawled into the bed beneath the quilt. She drew her legs up and held his shirt to her cheek as she had for so long held her white lamb. Just please don’t hurt him, don’t hurt him she prayed, to what powers she didn’t know. The wind diminished. She lay unmoving, and after a long time her heart ceased its banging and she knew, astonished, that she would sleep again.
10.
All that night a storm moved over the Gulf too, and toward morning Cuba was beneath it: rain and wind and the palms wild and the sea coming ashore to cover the roads and wash away the beaches. Cuban and Soviet officers in the northeastern mountain posts watched it through the knocking windows of their command posts, small shacks with corrugated roofs, and wondered how long their equipment would remain functioning. All the MRBMs on the island were now ready to be fired; they lacked only their nuclear warheads, which were stored away from the missile sites and heavily disguised by maskirovka, camouflage, the same word Soviet intelligence used for all misdirection, disinformation, false stories, entrapments. The twenty-four warheads for the R-14 IRBMs remained on the Aleksandrovsk, now rocking in the stirred waters of La Isabela harbor. At about ten o’clock the clouds parted; an antiaircraft unit in the mountains above Banes was alerted that a U-2 had been sighted near Guantanamo. It seemed certain that it was taking pictures in preparation for an attack the following day. The officers at the station had been forbidden to fire on U.S. aircraft without orders from the Soviet commander on the island, but they couldn’t reach him; the U-2 would be out of Cuban airspace in just minutes. The officers made their own decision: an SA-2 surface-to-air missile was fired up through the rainy air, found the U-2, and exploded near enough to it to bring it down. The pilot died in the crash.
American plans called for an immediate retaliatory strike on any SAM bases in Cuba that attacked an American aircraft. As soon as the report could be confirmed, the news went to the President. The assumption was that the Kremlin was deliberately intensifying the crisis by ordering an attack on an unarmed U-2.
Great feeble angels, long-winged and slow, all eyes. At almost the same moment, though so far from the sun it was still in the dark of the morning, a U-2 from a SAC base in Alaska strayed into Soviet airspace over the Chukotski Peninsula. Soviet MiGs rose to intercept it, and at the same time, in response to the U-2’s call for help, American F-102s armed with nuclear air-to-air missiles scrambled and headed for the Bering Sea. With just a few minutes to go before contact, the U-2 managed to fly out of Soviet airspace: as unintentionally, it seems—as helplessly, as accidentally—as it had wandered in.
No rain fell that night on the University campus, but the leaves of all the trees, yellow elm and hickory, gray-green ash, coppery oak and beech, seemed to have fallen at once in the night: long wind-combed rows of them moving in the still-restless air, dead souls lifted and tossed on gusts.
People were in motion too. Kit crossing the campus from the College Street gate felt them, small eddies or flocks, people coming in from Fraternity Row and from town in numbers, the way they did on class days, hurrying together toward their classes in different buildings; but this wasn’t a class day, and they seemed to be all going one way. She went that way too. She’d awakened in the dawn light in Falin’s bed, and had not dared or wanted to lift the phone from its cradle. She’d left the empty house and walked in the frost to town, so strangely weak she had to stop now and then to rest, until she came to the All Night Cafeteria. She sat there with a coffee, thinking of nothing, wondering at the pain in her throat. Was she really sick? Her head felt not light but heavy, made of mud or stone; when she rested it on the cold plastic tabletop and closed her eyes, the waitress shook her awake, and told her not unkindly that she couldn’t sleep there, which maybe people did a lot, and she got up and found a quarter to pay with and went up toward the University.