It was exactly the sort of comforting notion Daniel had long ago rejected, but he was drawn to Mira despite it. That weekend, they drank wine and listened to Paul Simon’s Graceland on a boom box Mira wedged in the open window of her third-floor walk-up. When she put her hands in the back pockets of his jeans and pulled him close, Daniel felt such bliss that it almost embarrassed him. He had not realized how lonely he was, or how long he’d been lonely.
At his wedding, when he looked into the audience and saw only Gertie and Varya, something snapped in his heart like a branch. That Klara and Mira had never met remained one of the biggest regrets of his life. Mira was eminently practical and Klara was certainly not, but they shared an arch sense of humor and an air of playful – sometimes, not so playful – challenge. He didn’t know how much he relied on his sister for this purpose until he met his wife. During the breaking of the glass, he imagined his life until now shattering, too: its ignorance and anguish, its great and petty losses. From the pieces, he would assemble something new with Mira. He looked into her bright, hazel eyes, shimmering beneath a layer of tears, and felt his soul relax as if into a warm bath. So long as he kept looking at her, that feeling of peace pulsed outward, pushing pain to the perimeter of his consciousness.
Later, lying naked with his bride – Mira snored, her forehead damp on his chest – Daniel began to tremble. He prayed. The words came forth as naturally, as necessarily, as urine. (A terrible analogy, he knew – Mira would have been horrified, had he shared it – and yet it still seemed to him more fitting than the inflated metaphors he’d heard in childhood.) Please, God, he thought. Oh God, may this last.
In the following weeks, when he remembered the prayer, Daniel felt bashful, but also, somehow, lighter; it was as though he’d cut a lock of hair. He had not thought religion could do this for him. Truthfully, the seeds of his atheism had been sown years before the deaths of Klara and Simon and Saul. It began with the woman on Hester Street. He had felt such shame at his paganism, his desire to know the unknowable, that his shame became repudiation. No one, he vowed, could have such power over him: no person, no deity.
But perhaps God was nothing like the dreadful, lurid fascination that brought him to the fortune teller, nothing like her preposterous claims. For Saul, God had meant order and tradition, culture and history. Daniel still believed in choice, but perhaps that did not foreclose belief in God. He imagined a new God, one who nudged him when he was going the wrong way but never strong-armed him, one who advised but did not insist – one who guided him, like a father. A Father.
Several years later, when they were married and living in Kingston, New York, he asked Mira if she’d intentionally sat beside him in the dining hall all those years before.
‘Of course,’ said Mira. When she laughed, a beam of light from the kitchen window turned her eyes to gold coins. ‘The cafeteria was empty. Why else would I have picked your table?’
‘I don’t know,’ said Daniel, embarrassed for having asked, or for having doubted her. ‘You might have wanted company. Or sun. It was sunny, I recall.’
Mira kissed him. He could feel the cool strip of her wedding ring, a gold band that matched his own, on the back of his neck.
‘I knew exactly what I was doing,’ she said.
21.
Ten days before Thanksgiving, 2006, Daniel sits in the office of Albany MEPS Commander Colonel Bertram. In his four years with the Military Entrance Processing Station, Daniel has only visited the colonel’s office a handful of times – usually to discuss an unusual case, once to receive a promotion from physician to chief medical officer – and today, he hopes for a raise.
Colonel Bertram sits in a leather chair behind a glossy, wide desk. He is younger than Daniel, with a clean shell of blond hair, shaved at the sides, and a tight, wiry frame. He looks scarcely older than the eager ROTC graduates who arrive by the carload for assessment.
‘You’ve had a good run,’ he says.
‘Pardon?’
‘You’ve had a good run,’ he repeats. ‘You’ve served your country well. But I’m going to be blunt, Major. Some of us think it’s time you took a break.’
Daniel commissioned after medical school. For the first ten years of his career, he worked at Keller Army Community Hospital in West Point. This was the kind of work he had always imagined doing, high-stakes and unpredictable, but he was depleted by the hours and the relentless suffering. When a job opened up at MEPS, Mira encouraged him to apply. The position wasn’t glamorous, but Daniel came to enjoy its stability, and now he can hardly imagine a return to the hospital – or, worse, a deployment.
Sometimes, he fears his preference for routine is cowardly. The paradox of his job – confirming that young people are healthy enough to go to war – is not lost on him. On the other hand, he also sees himself as a guardian. It’s his job to act as a sieve, separating those who are ready for war from those who are not. Applicants look at him with anxious hopefulness, as if he can give them permission to live, not license to die. Of course, there are some whose faces show pure terror, and in them Daniel sees the military fathers or dead-end poverty that brought them to the armed forces in the first place. He always asks them if they’re sure they want to go to war. They always say yes.
‘Sir.’ For a moment, Daniel’s mind goes dark. ‘Is this about Douglas?’
The colonel inclines his head. ‘Douglas was fit. He should have been cleared.’
Daniel remembers the boy’s papers: Douglas’s spirometry and peak flow tests were far below normal. ‘Douglas had asthma.’
‘Douglas is from Detroit.’ Colonel Bertram’s smile is gone. ‘Everyone from Detroit has asthma. You think we should stop letting kids in from Detroit?’
‘Of course not.’ For the first time, the gravity of the situation becomes clear to Daniel. He knows that enlistment is down by ten percent. He knows that the military has lowered standards for the mental aptitude exam – they haven’t admitted so many Category IV applicants since the seventies. He’s heard that certain commanding officers have written waivers for misconduct convictions: petty theft, assault, even vehicular manslaughter and homicide.
‘This isn’t just about Douglas,’ he says.
‘Major.’ Colonel Bertram leans forward, and his commander’s pin – a wreathed star – catches the light. Daniel pictures the colonel hunched over his desk with the pin in his hand, scrubbing it with a cotton ball doused in silver polish. ‘You’re well-intentioned; we all know that. But you come from a different generation. You’re conservative, and that’s fair: you don’t want to see anyone go down who doesn’t have to. Some of these kids aren’t right, I’ll grant you that. We screen for a reason. But there’s a time to be conservative, Major, and this isn’t it. We need guys, we need numbers, for God and country, and sometimes we get a guy come in here with a bad knee or a little cough, but his heart’s in the right place, he’s good enough – and right now, Dr. Gold, we need heart. We need good enough. We’ – the colonel picks up a stack of forms – ‘need waivers.’
‘I write waivers when they’re merited.’
‘You write waivers when you think they’re merited.’