“There is no control.”
Aughenbaugh knocked back the beaker of whiskey. He sat on the edge of his bed and set the empty beaker on the nightstand. He picked up the one he had poured for my grandfather and toasted my grandfather’s health. He knocked that one back, too. He let out a sigh that did not sound entirely bereft of pleasure.
“Good?”
“Wonderful.” He put down the beaker and rose, looking heavy on his feet. He went to pick up the book that he had thrown. He smoothed its pages and handed it back to my grandfather. “It’s just the illusion of control,” Aughenbaugh said with his accustomed gentleness. “You know that, right? There is no actual control. It’s all just probabilities and contingencies, wriggling around like cats in a bag.”
“Yes, I know that,” my grandfather said. “But when I’m sober, I never have to think about it.”
There was a thump, a pressure felt somewhere deeper than the eardrums, rooted in the ground. It was like the turbulent boom that rumbled windows, walls, and floorboards when a bomb hit the house down the street, the office block next door, but it could not have been a bomb. A bomb gave warning of its approach. It heralded its own arrival. It fell whistling from the belly of a Junker, or keening, or humming, or with a yell of inhuman high spirits that got louder and more ecstatic as it fell. If it was a buzzbomb, a doodlebug, then it prowled overhead, restless and muttering to itself, before its counter hit zero and its servo was cut. Then you heard a loud silence as the doodlebug surrendered to gravity and fell to its appointment with fire and destruction.
My grandfather just had time to think rocket! when the unheralded explosion gave way to a roar and a clatter like the Central pulling in to Marble Arch station. A second boom unfurled across the neighborhood, an uncoiling peal of thunder with a stinger in its tail. At four times the speed of sound, the concussion and the turbulence of the rocket’s approach would always show up late for its detonation.
“We heard it,” said Aughenbaugh. “That means we aren’t dead.”
My grandfather laced up his boots and tied his tie. They got their topcoats and hats. Aughenbaugh grabbed a camera. They took the stairs down to the basement of the hotel to avoid whatever hysteria might be loose in the lobby. They went down a long hallway with a checkerboard floor. Through the open door at the end of the hallway you could feel the heat of the fire and the cold of the night. Cooks and dishwashers in their white coats and black trousers were going in and out, speaking French and Polish and English. Into the kitchen, out the door, out of the kitchen, into the street. It looked purposive, a relay, a bucket brigade, but they were just wandering around like idiots with nothing to do. A fat cook stood in the doorway looking out. There was firelight on his belly and his face. My grandfather pushed him out of the way. He and Aughenbaugh ran out into Oxford Street and unoriginally stood there like idiots with nothing to do.
The physics of the rocket’s detonation had sucked the show windows from the front of Selfridges. The windows had been decorated for the season with ice floes and ice mountains of pasteboard and sequins. A frolic of pasteboard Eskimos and penguins. The aurora borealis or australis in arcs of colored foil. A mannequin Father Christmas in Scott Expedition drag. Now the sidewalk was buried in snowbanks of shattered glass. Christmas trees lay scattered like tenpins. Their needles drifted down onto my grandfather’s hat and the epaulets of his greatcoat. When he hung up his trousers that night before bed, cellophane snowflakes snowed down from the upturned cuffs. Pasteboard Eskimos and penguins, headless, torn in half, continued their inaccurate cohabitation. Father Christmas was found the next morning in a dovecote on a nearby rooftop, intact and unharmed apart from a holiday frosting of pigeon shit.
Selfridges was not on fire, but the building beside it was. A fire brigade came around the corner in a wheezing old calliope of a pumper, followed by two teams of air raid wardens in Crossleys. The wardens in their shaving-bowl helmets made their way back along the street toward the corner, barking at hotel guests and patrons of the ballroom, telling them to get out of the way and please let the crews do their job. An ambulance nosed its way in among the bystanders and ruination. It was driven by a breathtaking young woman, blue eyes, black hair tumbling from under a narrow-brimmed hat, packed hastily into some man’s shirt and trousers under her green WVS coat. He never saw her again, but forty-four years later, my grandfather remembered her vividly, her necktie, the swell of her breasts under the shirt, her gabardine trousers into the tops of her wellingtons. She told him and Aughenbaugh that the spirit of volunteerism was commendable, but it would be best for them just to get out of the way and let her mates and her do the job that the ARP and the Jerries had trained them to do. It was a harrowing job. If blood and pieces of what had until recently been citizens of London were something you wanted to see, you could see them.
“Penguins with Eskimos,” Aughenbaugh said contemptuously. Remembering this line, years later, my grandfather burst out laughing, even though it literally hurt to laugh. “What the hell are we fighting for, Rico?”
They went back inside and up to their room. Aughenbaugh poured more whiskey into the beakers and passed one to my grandfather. It was graduated in milliliters. The whiskey went to ninety-two. My grandfather raised it and proposed a toast. “Cats in a bag,” he said. He drank it all in one swallow and held it out for Aughenbaugh to fill again. “Probabilities and contingencies.”
“It’s a metaphor,” Aughenbaugh said. “The bag is Newtonian physics.”
“I missed that,” my grandfather said.
12
Sometimes they would roll into a town or village so hard on the heels of the armor and infantry that they encountered people uninstructed on the difference between liberation and surrender. An old man in a clock tower with a deer rifle, say, or five murderous Boy Scouts sharing a burp gun, or the last joker in town with a death’s-head on his hatband, insisting with tedious punctilio on standing them to a round of pointless slaughter. Lives and time would be lost trying to clarify the matter.
“This is bullshit,” said Diddens.
He was talking about the arrow in his left foot. It was a fine piece of pine and goose feathers. A second arrow had lodged with a thunk in a window box several feet wide of my grandfather, just before he dragged Diddens to cover behind a pile of rubble in the main thoroughfare of Vellinghausen. It had taken Diddens a minute to get past incredulity.
“I mean, what kind of thing is that?” Diddens was squatting on his right haunch with his left leg stuck out in front of him. He was an Alabaman, a chemist who had worked in Dow’s pesticides division before the war. He was not prone to hysteria, but the arrow had him a little keyed up. “A fucking arrow?”
“At least it makes a change from bullets,” my grandfather said.
“Fuck you, it’s not sticking out of your foot!”
“You have a point.”