Learning to Swear in America (25 page)

“You’re poet.”

“And a prism,” she said, waggling her fingers and catching the candlelight in her rings. She was silent for a moment, and when she spoke, her voice was tinged with melancholy. “Yuri? One way or another, this will all be over in a few days, won’t it?”

“Yes.” He hesitated a moment. “There is this guy in Russia—bad physicist, but his father’s very powerful. He’s claiming he co-authored my work. I have to get back.”

“Wow. I’m so sorry.”

He shrugged.

“Would this hurt your chance to get the Nobel?”

“I might have to share it.”

“With this guy who doesn’t deserve it?” He nodded. “Wow. The ultimate ego fulfillment and the ultimate offense to ego, wrapped together.”

He narrowed his eyes at her.

“Did you ever look carefully at the
Pietà
? Michelangelo’s sculpture of the Virgin Mary holding the dead Christ?”

“I don’t know it.”

She rolled her eyes. “It’s the best sculpture ever made.
Seriously. And Michelangelo knew it. A few days after it was installed, he was hanging around, trying to overhear compliments about his work. And somebody standing there looking at it told the guy next to him that it had been sculpted by one of Michelangelo’s rivals.”

“That’s terrible,” Yuri said. “Michelangelo deserved credit for his work.”

“Yeah,” Dovie said. “That night he sneaked in with a chisel and on the sash across Mary’s chest he carved, ‘This sculpture was made by Michelangelo Buonarroti of Florence.’”

“Ha!” Yuri said. “That showed them!”

Dovie looked at him soberly. “It showed them more than he meant. He marred his greatest accomplishment because of his ego. He regretted it immediately, but there was nothing he could do about it.”

Yuri shifted on the blanket.

“It’s still there for everyone to see—the greatest sculpture in history, scarred by one of history’s greatest egos.”

“He deserved recognition,” Yuri said. “He was sculptor, yes? Not that other guy.”

“Yeah,” Dovie said. “It was his work. But it could have stood on its own.” They were quiet for a few minutes. “So,” Dovie said, “if we survive, you’re going home?”

“Yes. As soon as I can.”

“Then take off your socks.”

He blinked. “What?”

“Your socks, Science Boy. Take ’em off.”

Was this a romantic overture? He felt a moment of panic. Was there some type of American foot sex he didn’t know about? He stripped off his socks. Dovie rolled on her side to reach her voluminous purse, then set it beside the picnic basket and pulled out a bottle of nail polish. She beckoned. Oh. No American foot sex. He hesitated, then put his heel in her lap. On a list of things he would least want done to his body, having his toenails painted had to be in the top five. But his foot was in Dovie’s lap, his heel resting in the gentle depression between her thighs. And touching her, there, topped his list of things to do with his body. His heel was a lucky
ublyuodok.

Dovie shook the little glass bottle, then with three deft strokes painted his right big toenail indigo. She capped the polish and pulled another bottle out and painted his second toe violet. Yuri shut his eyes and concentrated on the feel of her hands on his skin, gently separating his toes, adjusting the angle of his foot. When she was done, he opened his eyes.

“You painted them like rainbow.”

“Yeah. I had to start the color sequence over again. It was that or cut three toes off.”

“You made right choice.” He waggled his feet and admired the polish—red, orange, yellow, green, blue. Indigo, violet, then red, orange, and yellow.

“It’s so you’ll remember me,” Dovie said. “So someday you’ll come back.” She started to cry softly, and he pulled her into his chest and cupped her head with his hand.

“Rainbows come back,” he said. “And now my feet are rainbow.”

She smiled up at him, and he kissed a tear on her cheek and tasted the salt.

“You understood.”

He nodded. They were silent for a moment.

“I believe I was promised cabbage.”

“Oh!” Dovie pulled two fresh cabbages from the picnic basket and held them up, blinking away the last of her tears.

“Did you have plan for them?”

“No. They just seemed Russian.”

“They are,” he said, taking them from her. “We are cabbage-powered people. It’s what gives us strength to stand near walls without leaning on them.”

He pulled a leaf off and cupped it over Dovie’s head, making her smile, then pulled the others off, one by one, and scattered them over her, over him, over the picnic blanket. The light from the candles flickered softly against the pale green leaves. Dovie lay on her back and he gently placed a curving leaf over each of her breasts.
I will never be able to go down the produce aisle again.

Dovie tugged on his shirtfront till it came out of his pants, and then she rolled on top of him and unbuttoned his shirt. He put his arms around her and they kissed, her hands exploring his neck and shoulders, then brushing softly over his stomach. He rolled them onto their sides, crushing cabbage leaves beneath them, and circled her breast with his finger.

They lay there for a moment, arms around each other in the candle glow. And then he fell asleep.

Yuri woke to a sharp rap on his door.

“Mike Ellenberg needs to see you again.” It was Fletcher’s voice.

Right then he hated them both for taking him away from Dovie. Then he came more fully awake and knew she was gone even before he looked. The beet candles were missing, and her bag that clinked with nail polish bottles and who knew what other treasures. The picnic basket was gone, and somehow she’d gotten the blanket out from under him without waking him. She’d arranged crushed cabbage leaves over him as a blanket.

Fletcher banged again. “Strelnikov? You in there?”

“Yeah.”

He stood, stretched, and buttoned his shirt.

“Ellenberg! Fate of the world!”

He picked up the leaves and put the stack in a desk drawer.

“Boom!” Fletcher shouted.

Yuri tucked in his shirt and opened the door.

“About time …”

Yuri slammed the door shut. He ran for his socks, pulled them on, and had crammed one foot in a shoe when Fletcher opened the door. He looked around suspiciously. “It smells like peasants in here.”

“Sweat and cabbage,” Yuri said. “You’re right, it smells like peasants.” He smiled.

Fletcher narrowed his eyes, and pointed toward the staircase.

“Ellenberg said he needs to see you. Said he’s ready for the second part?”

Yuri flushed. “Right. I’m giving it to them a piece at a time.”

Fletcher grunted.

Yuri grabbed a spare box of disinfectant wipes off his shelf and tucked them under his arm as he walked back down to the programmers’ room.

Ellenberg grinned at him when he walked in. “We got it. I’m not kidding, we got the first one done.”

Yuri looked at him suspiciously. Ellenberg ran it for him, the graphs, the models. He was wrong, they didn’t have it, but another four hours of working together at the marker board and they did. One of the programmers, a heavy man with a pizza sauce stain on his khakis, ran through the room giving everyone a high five.

“He doesn’t get out much,” Ellenberg said by way of explanation.

Then they tackled the second set of data—the set Fletcher intended to use. Yuri had to have both available—he might yet be able to sell the director on the backward shot.

They’d worked twelve hours straight, Yuri catching occasional catnaps in the chair, when he asked Ellenberg, “How sure are you of work on first set of data?”

“What do you mean?”

“Is it perfect? Would you bet your life on it?”

“Why would anyone ever bet their life on anything? But yeah, if you gotta know. It’s perfect.”

Yuri gave him a tight smile, and they worked on.

Hours later, exhausted and full of Italian sausage and onion, Yuri agreed with Mike Ellenberg that they had the second data set nailed down. The programming lead ran the models on the whiteboard, without bothering to pull the screen down or erase the orange scrawls on the board. It worked perfectly. The wrong approach, but the models ran. Yuri shook Ellenberg’s hand, then went around the room, shaking hands with each of the programmers. He still didn’t know most of their names, but he’d come to respect them all.

“Thank you for your work.”

The programmers shuffled wearily to gather up their belongings and head home. Yuri took his handwritten notes, and the programming code and graphs Ellenberg’s people had generated, and trudged upstairs to Fletcher’s office.

The door was open. Fletcher was sitting in his chair, his posture perfect but his head slumped forward. The ceiling light shone off his scalp. For a moment Yuri thought he was dead.

“Dr. Fletcher?”

The director’s head came up before his eyes opened. He grunted.

“Guess I drifted off. Mike’s guys get it done?”

Yuri stood at the door, gripping the papers. “Yeah. They ran models for both approaches.”

It took Fletcher a moment to understand, and when he did, his face turned purple.

“What do you mean, both approaches? Because I’m sure as hell not telling the Pentagon to direct a stream of antimatter straight back at us. If we die, it’s going to be because of the asteroid, not because of me.”

Yuri didn’t trust himself to speak. Fletcher impatiently motioned him forward, and Yuri’s legs moved of their own accord. He felt detached, as though he were watching himself from the ceiling. Would Fletcher even know if he handed him the wrong set? The
right
set. Fletcher saw the hesitation and raised an eyebrow, and Yuri handed him the data he wanted, for shooting at the asteroid only as it came toward the accelerator, and not after it passed.

Fletcher laid it beside Yuri’s handwritten notes and started reading, slowly. Checking to make sure Yuri hadn’t made the switch. When he was satisfied, he looked up and nodded. “No offense. Just checking.”

Yuri didn’t trust himself to speak.

“There’ll be a meeting in the conference room in an hour. I want to show this to everybody.”

“Okay.”

He left Fletcher’s office.
One hour. I have one hour to persuade the others to use my approach, to rally them and force Fletcher to send the Pentagon the right models. And I have absolutely no idea how to do that.

Yuri walked barefoot down to the cafeteria. The place was nearly deserted—no colleagues to rally to his cause—so he snagged an apple and trudged back upstairs, his crunches echoing in the empty stairwell. He thought about calling Dovie to ask for advice. But what could she—or anyone—say? He needed charisma, and he needed it now.

He walked down to the conference room. The place was filling up with bleary-eyed scientists who had been in the building for the better part of a week, and the odor made his nose curl. Eau de Physicist wasn’t going to be in anybody’s spring collection.

“Hey,” he said, getting the attention of a specialist in the Sunyaev-Zeldovich effect, “have you thought about our other approach to antimatter bursts?”

“The one you suggested, with the backward shot? We decided to go with the safer approach,” the man said.

“Yes, but do you understand, backward shot …”

“Would be risky as hell. Are you still lobbying for that? It’s too late. Fletcher’s already entered the data.”

“What? No. He’s going to have meeting to show models to everybody.”

“Yeah, but it’s just so we can see it. People want to see it run,” the man said. “But he was by here a minute ago and said he already entered it.”

Yuri stood perfectly still for a moment.

“Has he sent it yet? To Pentagon?”

“Hmm? No. He wants all of us to see it run—Mike Ellenberg and a couple of his guys, too. Just to be sure, you know? Then he’s got to go in his office and push ‘send.’” He shook his head. “I don’t envy him, doing that.”

Yuri was suddenly in a hurry. “You said he was just through here? Where did he go?”

The man nodded toward the back hall, and Yuri saw the director’s tall forehead over the crowd. “He’s running to his office, but he’ll be back after a while. Let me ask you, your research …”