Excerpt 1:

 

He could make a complex thing simple, so he’d have made a fine teacher, they said, though he’d as soon turn a plain thing bewildering from overwork, so they banged on about rabbit holes and Rube Goldberg. He’d make a face that claimed he saw the fun in it and that night he made the face because they had him dead to rights and nothing was simpler than your birthday. Still, who really knew sometimes whether he was perceiving a thing or event or interaction in its essence or doing the other thing when a thousand ideas and sensations blew up and whipped him around like a kite in a squall, and telling sturdy discernment from nonsense was beyond him, given the general hallucinant vividness. It would scare him stiff when an alarm felt old, like an echo but sharper, so he blamed it on the Judge and that whole Armageddon-greedy generation and supposed he’d come to this mental convoluting honestly back then as the best means available to a peculiar thirteen-year-old. It was his row to hoe now, sure as the sky. 

 

It was his birthday, just before cake and it ought to have been fine—just the four of them, devoted wife, Alice, son Addy, and Addy’s girlfriend, Rosemary, and what could be better?—and he’d managed well enough until Rosemary said a thing that should have been lovely but landed like news the world was finally ending and stole his breath, much as Kennedy’s had when he announced the missiles in Cuba the night of his thirteenth birthday. That pretty boy’s address to the nation had laid full waste to Theo’s 1962 birthday dinner, but Rosemary’s words landed harsher because her soul was good and, unlike Kennedy, she was no sabre-rattler and hadn’t been provoking the other side for years, but mostly because of their inevitability. 

“You have perfect lives,” was all she said, but they fell inescapably and horribly, the second shoe he at once understood he’d been expecting all these years. It was too much for the evening, after such a day. He tried to get a breath, subtly, not to make a scene, told himself things were different with Kennedy gone and Khrushchev and other cold warriors dead or on their way, and the earth was still hanging on and Rosemary had meant nothing bad and there was no such thing as accidental invocation. 

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“What do you want to hear?” Addy was saying on his way to the stereo, so evidently the last record had finished. There was only the clatter of the windows from the wind. The rattling was another intrusion, the wind blowing for three days, bringing more dead leaves into the garden, and Hubba-Bubba wrappers and Old Dutch bags, though Moose hadn’t stirred on his sill and that was a consolation. 

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“Earth to Theo,” Addy said. 

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So first to mind was Space Oddity, though it amplified the alarm somehow. Second was Berlioz’ Great Mass for the Dead, but you don’t play a requiem on a birthday. Britten’s War Requiem. Requiem æternam dona ei, Domine. 

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“Crosby, Stills,” he said. It seemed safe. 

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He needed to take charge, so he stood, though too quickly, given the dizziness, and it was as though an echo of Rosemary’s words grew fingers and yanked a strand of yarn at the waist of his sweater hard enough to unravel the bottom row and spin him around to unbind the second and the third, accelerate up through the belly and chest, the centrifugal force throwing his hair out wide. 

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“Jesus!” he said and braced against the table. He was suddenly as chilly as if there was nothing left of his old sweater but its silver-grey crew collar around his neck like a saggy woggle, the rest a mess of yarn on the hardwood. 

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“Okay there, old fella?” Addy said. 

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Theo tried to orient to the sound of his boy’s voice, the sense of his palms laid flat, Moose asleep on the sill, Graham Nash, singing about the cozy room and evening sunshine. But also the wind buffeting the dining room windows. He guessed he’d best sit. 

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“Birthdays, huh?” Addy said. Smart-ass. Then Alice called and he turned the music down. Rosemary pushed her glasses up and hit the dining room lights. Theo saw the candlelight before Alice rounded the corner with the cake. 

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 Alice started singing because she insisted every year. The others joined in. He reckoned, given Addy’s expression, that his attempt at smiling had come off crooked or creepy. Rosemary had the voice of an angel. 

   

Alice set the thing down before him, and hadn’t she gone with the full forty in red, and a blue one in the middle for luck? They held the last note. He envied Moose, sleeping through it on his sill, oblivious to birthdays and time. 

   

“Well now,” he said and sucked what spit there was in his mouth. He began to draw a breath. 

Something happened then, or, rather, penetrated the room: a great danger, the leading edge of an emergency. He straightened and looked, but there was only Alice, Addy, and Rosemary, Moose by his window, a chocolate zucchini cake with candles. 

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Part of him had uncoupled, seemed to be floating over the kitchen doorway, so he watched them set the plate down, saw how his face reflected the dreadful light. His lungs were full but only hovered, and he heard the window rattle but knew the peril was more than a south wind. The pitch of the room had dropped lower, sounds had slowed and retreated, except his heart, which had the roll of a kettledrum, and some little gasps as he drew in more air. From above, he made out a twitch or tremor at the junction of his shoulders and neck, and the vibration of fingers, as though readying themselves. 

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Whatever it was had an awful familiarity: it was fixed and brittle, as old and awful as the Judge in suit pants and undershirt, shaving at his mirror, while Verna fried eggs down the way, the old man rubbing Royal Crown into his black hair, reaching for his comb like a gun, and the scrape scrape as she buttered toast. He caught the heavy mix of pomade and butter. 

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Excerpt 2:

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You can be minding your own business, enjoying your thirteenth birthday supper at Busch’s Grove, feeling for all the world like you’ve made a quantum leap toward adulthood in your new suit with the pocket square, you and the Judge having left the ladies in the dining room and gone through to the Men’s Bar. The Judge’s friends shake your hand and you say, Why, thank you very much, sir, then stand with your glass and nod along with the things they say, or chuckle, though you don’t get all the jokes, and you don’t even mind when the Judge shows you off like a circus monkey. Go ahead, ask him a math question, he says. Or anything about science. But then Omar will turn on the set behind the bar, the President will announce the end of the world, and whatever purchase you have is gone, and, as you free fall, it occurs to you that things have been wobbly enough, for long enough, that you should have seen it coming, though chiding yourself is only another kind of flailing. It won’t even matter that, six days later, October 28, on the Sunday, Chairman Khrushchev will tell Radio Moscow he’s bringing the missiles home because, even as the world breathes its sigh, you know the ending’s still as certain as night following day. 

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Times like that, the wheel is unmistakable. The round and round of it. The recurrence has the septic scent of eternity. Maybe, in times like those or like these ones now, you could even name it if you stopped trying to scramble clear. 

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How easy, for instance, to prove the idiocy of Ford’s proposal? 

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“Request,” Ford said. “It’s a request.” 

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Demonstrate the full impossibility. 

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The point is, you’ve seen it all before, and the repetition is awful until another side pipes up and claims that destiny or fate, or the wheel are made-up things, and that you’ve made them to distract from the precariousness of your little arrangement with Alice and Addy, that they let you forget that everything depended on the wings of a milkweed butterfly on an Okinawa island waving twice instead of once. Without some plan or guiding hand, the accidents stab like shivs: that you could as easily have turned left instead of right that night in Taos and never laid eyes on Alice, that if one of a hundred things had been otherwise in October 1962, creation would have ended, not to mention the immeasurable unlikelihood of that exact dust and those particular gasses coagulating when they did and where by chance alone, so this unremarkable spheroid chunk had to fall into orbit around a middling star. In other words, necessity may frighten the life out of you, but the unconditioned jumble is worse and the what-ifs will be the death of you.