As usual Kit was uncertain how to understand what he said, whether he was teasing her or letting her in on a secret she’d better listen to. She only stared, and shook her head a little in incomprehension.
“Simple,” George said. “It means that if either side initiates an attack, the other side guarantees it will respond in kind and in toto. You make it certain that the response will come even if your command and control centers are knocked out and your leaders are dead and even most of your people are dead. You make it a standing order that can’t be countermanded: if they let fly, we let fly, automatically.”
“So if they…so if we bomb them, they have to bomb us back, even though that means the end of everything and there’s no winning?”
“That’s the concept,” George said. “I mean you can see the logic.”
“So that’s why we can’t protect ourselves?” That was where the talk had begun, why with computers or something we couldn’t know about attacks and prevent them.
“Right. It upsets the balance, queers the deal. If we, or they, started to build defenses against ICBM attacks, which is theoretically possible, and the other side got wind of it, they might feel they had to attack; because once your defense system is in place you can send off your missiles and destroy their country—you’ve got the capacity—without them being able to destroy you back.”
“Oh my God.”
He nodded, pleased, and held out his hands as though between them he held the perfect and irrefutable logic of it. “It’s like two guys standing up to their knees in kerosene, aiming flare guns at each other. No matter who fires first, they both go.”
“But they’re just people. We’re just people. What if somebody gets angry, or goes insane, or…”
George’s eyebrows rose and he nodded as though in sympathy with humankind in its dilemma. “Have to be careful,” he said. “Any little thing.”
“Is this now? They have this plan now?”
“Well,” George said. “If I know about it, probably it is now. Yes.”
“So it would be the end. They’ve made it so they can’t even help it.”
“I don’t know. Maybe. Maybe not.”
MAD. It was like the game of chess in Alice: a game of unbreakable rules played by people who were all crazy.
“Dad,” she said. She looked down at the little yellow napkin she held, folded it, crushed it, smoothed it. “Do you think. I mean would it be possible. That what we were told about Ben isn’t true?”
“Isn’t true, hon?”
“I heard,” Kit said, and her throat was tight, “I heard that some Americans are fighting in Vietnam, or well Indochina in places, against the Communists. And we don’t want anybody to know. So, if a soldier there, you know, if he…” She moved her hand in the air to represent what she couldn’t say, and George nodded. “Then what they do is carry him someplace else, and pretend it was an accident.”
He didn’t answer, and didn’t look astonished; he only knit his fingers together as though he were going to crack his knuckles, and looked at her, and waited.
“And well do you think, I mean did you ever hear of this, or…”
“Where did you hear this?”
“Oh,” she said. “People on campus.”
“Not, say, in the New York Times.”
“No.”
He folded his hands now as though in prayer, and touched them to his lips, and looked away, or within. Kit felt helpless shame; shame for hurting him, helpless because she had to ask.
“Well,” he said. “Suppose it was so. That there was fighting going on, that those governments over there were getting our help. I hear the rumors too. The other side’s saying it. So. Naturally we would want to deny it. Like we just said, Kit. Any little thing.”
“Could you find out? I mean about Ben?”
“Well what would it matter? In a way. He’d still, it would still be the same.”
“But what if it’s so.”
He shook his head slowly. “They wouldn’t tell me. They’ve got their reasons. Anyway surely it’s not so. Surely. I mean people imagine a lot of things now, because there is so much that can’t be told. People get paranoid.”
She said nothing, folded the little rag of yellow again.
“What good would it do you, Kit? To know?”
“Because,” she said. “Then I’d know what world I live in.”
The door to the apartment opened then, and Marion came in; George ducked his head with a glance at Kit that she understood.
She was in a bathing suit with a flouncy skirt and mules, a flowered robe over her shoulders. “That pool is the best part,” she said. “Mm.” She had the mail in her hand, and distributed it. “Who’s this from?” she said, handing Kit one.
It was a long envelope addressed with care in pale ink, the name and address lines set out in steps down the envelope as she too had been taught to do and never did any more. A funny sweet warmth filled her that she hadn’t felt before but recognized immediately: a letter from my love. It felt as heavy as gold.
“One of my teachers,” she said, blushing or glowing for sure, she could feel it. “From last year.”
“Hm,” said Marion wisely, though without meaning anything by it; Kit knew the look. There were two sheets in the envelope. One had a few lines of verse, typed on the Undervud; the other was a sheet of typing paper written on in his strange hand, edge to edge, waste nothing.
My dearest Kit, I will send with this letter a piece for you to have and to study. Perhaps [But this word was crossed out.] I have read with great interest the books you have given me, about lost girls who find their way back. With especial interest the one of Alice in behind-the-mirror world, with dictionary also, and much pondering of many remarks. It is frightening, is it not. The poem of the walrus and carpenter is surely among the most terrible in all your language. How is this book given to children? Did it not make you have anxious dreams? When I read I believed I discovered a flaw in it: would it not be impossible for Alice to pass through the mirror? She would I thought only kiss herself there: face to face, hand to hand, breast to breast. How to pass through? Then I saw, no, this is supreme genius of the book: that if Alice passes through her mirror, then Alice from the other side must also pass through; and while we read interesting adventures of Alice in her mirror, at the same time there is another story not told, the adventures of mirror-Alice here, where she does not belong, strange world where clocks run only one way and you cannot always tell red kings from white. A poem could perhaps be written of her adventure?
Well we have kissed at that frontier, my love, haven’t we? We ourselves. I have come into a world where West is away, where freedom does not rhyme with fate, and where alone you can be found. So it is enough, and must be; for unlike Alice I know no way back.
She read it again, and then again in her little room (anonymous, usable for “guests” when Kit wasn’t there, not hers at all in fact except insofar as she was a guest or ghost here). Freedom was volya and fate was dolya, not a word they taught in her classes but one in a poem of his, a comic poem. She thought that Alice didn’t know a way back either, not until her author gave her one.
For a time she studied the lines on the other, typewritten sheet, sounding out the words and recognizing some but unable to untangle their cases and moods and tenses; without a dictionary she soon had to give up. It was apparently about angels: if angel was the same in both languages. Were angels in his world what they were in hers? She couldn’t guess. She thought she could smell him in the paper, the smoke of his cigarettes, the musty room, the card table; she pressed the sheet to her face and breathed it in.
On Sunday they took her to church. Something in her mother’s face when she listed for Kit the times of Sunday Masses made it impossible to refuse or to fight. She went through her clothes to find something to wear and borrowed a hat from Marion, a navy straw that was at least not flowered or fruited. They parked in a big parking lot and went in and took blond pews in their brand-new church, an austerely modern one, raw concrete walls deformed out of any ordinary geometry and pierced irregularly by windows of abstract stained glass. It smelled of nothing, like a waiting room. Her own inward church, she knew, didn’t smell of nothing. Above the altar was suspended a vast bare cross of rusted steel, cruel enough for a sacrifice surely, crueler-seeming to Kit than any painted wooden corpus writhen and bleeding.