it? Just, ‘Oh, okay’?”
“How about, ‘Oh, you didn’t tell me you were married.’”
There was silence on the other end of the line for a few seconds. “I am,” he finally admitted.
“Was that so hard?”
I listened to him inhale and exhale. “I’m sorry. I should have told you.”
“What’s her name?”
“Chloe.”
“And your children?”
“One. Corey. He’s four years old.”
A few awkward seconds passed. “Well, no matter,” I said. “It was just a one-night stand. Thanks for calling.”
“Wait, Sylvia. Don’t hang up. Please. I really liked talking to you. I was hoping we could do it again.”
“Do what again?”
“Talk.”
“Sure.”
“Sure . . . what?”
“Sure, we can talk.”
He laughed. “Well, okay then. I’ll call you.”
“Sure.” Sure, meaning a married man who just wanted to talk would be a first. And sure, meaning I knew he wasn’t going to call anyway.
But he did call, the next day and the next. The following Thursday we met after work to talk. We met again the Thursday after that and the Thursday after that, then before and after the coalition meetings on Tuesdays. It was just talk, I told myself. Nothing more. Just talk. That first night had been a fluke, a drunken mistake, and I really didn’t know what had happened anyway. Several weeks went by before I finally asked him.
“I’m embarrassed that I don’t know,” I said, “but did we have sex the night we met?”
He laughed. “You passed out,” he said. “I was drunk, too, but I had enough sense not to take advantage. I tucked you into bed and hurried home.”
My initial instincts had been right: he was a good man, a decent man. I told myself there was no reason to feel guilty about our relationship. Norton might be married, but he and I were just friends, that was all. He probably went home and told his wife all about our conversations each week.
For six weeks we met every Tuesday and Thursday, still talking, just talking—mirroring each other’s terror about the world being on the brink of the final abyss and raging at Nectaral Corporation’s continued manufacture of weapons of mass destruction—always in the same back booth in the same bar with the same drinks, white zinfandel for me, Pabst beer for him. One night he brought his journal and read what he’d written about a dream he’d had.
I’m standing on top of a hill that’s almost tall enough to be considered a mountain, high enough to see a mushroom cloud in the distance. There’s a fire in the cloud, red, yellow, orange. First there’s only one cloud, but then I see another, and then another. It’s familiar. I’ve seen it before, in real life.
A flash of terror crossed his face and he stopped reading, then started again.
At first, the mushroom clouds are far away, but they’re getting closer and multiplying. There are people lower on the hillside. They’re not high enough to see what I see. I call out to warn them. “The end of the world is here! Hug your children. Hold your loved ones. Tell them you love them. Say good-bye to them.” But they all laugh at me. They think I’ve gone mad. They turn away as if they don’t hear and go about their business as if I don’t exist.
A woman in a long white robe appears before me with arms outstretched, palms up in a meditative pose. “Do not give power to fear, my dear,” she says. “Bring love to your fear.” I scream at her that it’s not just fear, it’s real, and we’re all going to die. But she just looks at me with a condescending smile and says “Bring love to your fear” again and then disappears.
Norton tightened his grip on his journal.
A young man in his twenties comes toward me and tells me I worry too much. He talks to me as if I’m a young child or a senile grandfather. “Our military has been on the cutting edge of missile defense systems for the past sixty years,” he says. “Nobody’s going to get nuked. They won’t let it happen.” I scream at him, tell him to wake up. Don’t you see? Don’t you see? He rolls his eyes and walks away, laughing. I fall to my knees and cover the back of my head with my hands just as I was taught to do during atomic bomb drills in public school. I howl. But no one hears me. No one will listen.
He stopped reading and sighed. Then he gathered me in his arms and his dream became mine. We clung tight to each other for a long time, bound together by a shared terror in the depths of our souls, a terror not felt by others.
After that, things were different. Something had changed between us.
“My wife is like the woman in my dream who told me not to give power to my fear,” he said after we finally broke apart. “Chloe’s a good person, but her only goal in life is to be happy.”
“I envy her that,” I said.
“It’s so different with you, Sylvia. You understand me. We understand each other.”
I knew he’d just crossed the invisible line that up until then we’d both honored. And I liked it, despite the tsunami of guilt sweeping over me. I waited for him to continue, wanted him to cross that line again, and he did.
“Chloe and I see most things differently. She’s not keen about my involvement with the coalition, to put it mildly. She says she doesn’t know why I want to be such a killjoy.” I should have stopped him. Instead, I downed another glass of wine.
From that point on our conversations deepened, became more and more personal. Norton told me stories about his son, Corey, whom he adored and lived for, whose future he’d be willing to die for if necessary. I told him about being married to Frank and living and teaching in the Bronx, how we’d moved back to the Midwest to live off the land in a one-room cabin and then divorced after I left for university to get a master’s degree and never returned. I told him stories about what it was like to be a foster care worker in a broken child welfare system. He told me stories about people he’d worked with at the post office for twenty years. As time went by, we dug further and further into our histories as if searching for special places where our lives converged, times when similar experiences meant we had somehow known each other before we even met.
It seemed like we could talk about anything, that nothing was off-limits. Until one night, when he said he’d enlisted right after graduating from high school.
“What was it like to be in the military?” I asked.
That was when I learned that a distant look could take someone away from you in an instant. He guzzled his beer, then raised the empty can to signal for another one. When he finally spoke again, he didn’t answer my question.
“You know, Sylvia,” he said. “It’s the accidents and near misses that scare me the most. Like last year, when the Soviets thought a nuclear attack from us was imminent
