The Brink

For my mom,
who dreamed this first
.

The mind blanks at the glare. Not in remorse

—The good not done, the love not given, time

Torn off unused—nor wretchedly because

An only life can take so long to climb

Clear of its wrong beginnings, and may never;

But at the total emptiness for ever,

The sure extinction that we travel to

And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

Not to be anywhere,

And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

PHILIP LARKIN, “AUBADE”

The catalog comes in a sharp white envelope, “PLEASE FORWARD” written in his father's cursive on the outside. Sam paws the return label, which reads, “Governor's School for the Gifted and Talented.” The governor has noticed him.

“Tell me it's free,” Mom says. “Free would be nice.”

But Sam would do summer school even if he had to drain his savings account or extend his paper route. He likes school—the sweet octane of highlighters, the systems of reward—with a pureheartedness most seventh-grade boys reserve for taking advantage of themselves. He skims the courses, Euclidean Geometry, Beginning Japanese, and stops at a “late addition.” How to Win a Nuclear War.

Suddenly, Sam knows exactly how he'll spend the summer.

Tucked in his closet is a “go bag” with Band-Aids, sunblock, shin pads, and the cinnamon granola bars no one wants. As far as he is concerned, nuclear holocaust is the only thing worth thinking about. Back in the winter, when Mom left his father and they moved into the apartment, she promised Sam a gift, a prize for coming. He asked for a plastic barrel to store
fresh water. She bought him a fern instead, a fern now browning on the front stoop. According to Sam's estimates, Princeton, New Jersey, sits just outside the kill zone of Manhattan. He has a chance of surviving. He and his mom have a distinct chance, and the idea that he could save people orients him like a polestar. The year is 1987.

“Seriously? You want to take that class?” Mom asks, setting down her book, a hardcover for nursing school. The book fascinates Sam, the photographs of gashes and lesions and people with cowed, empty looks, as though no matter how pink or black the wound, no matter how dire, they still might yawn. “This is your summer we're talking about.”

“But summer school doesn't cost anything. It's
zero dollars
,” Sam says. He digs around in the box of Fig Newtons tucked next to her on the chair. One is left. That is their rule now, living together as a team. Leave one behind.

“Promise me that when you find out how to win,” she says, signing her permission, “you'll tell the governor. Tell everybody. Even if I'm not around.”

She will always be around. That is the whole point of winning.

“Now,” Mom says, “go get us more cookies.”

The first day, Mom drives up the narrow road of the local college. Workers in white suits rip long strands of ivy from buildings, and Sam is reminded of that movie, the one about the war against the plants, the one where we lose but there is an island.

“Your father will get you after,” she says. “Don't let him take you to pizza again. That's too much pizza happening.” Then she pulls her lips over her teeth like she has no teeth and, with her pinkie, scrapes a neat edge to her lipstick. The blouse she's wearing, shiny and blue, is made from whatever hot-air balloons are made from. She wants to look pretty for someone, and Sam wants to tell her this is wrong. They need to go backward. They belong back with his father, at the house in the woods, with a basement and kerosene and a well, instead of the duplex apartment in town where, after the bombs, they could be forced to eat people.

She idles the car at the entrance to the hall, a stone building with a sign out front that says, “Gifted This Way.” “No grades here, right?” Mom asks.

“Right,” Sam says, even though he wishes there were grades, the proof that he matters to an indifferent world. For the past year, he has had a problem with caring too much. A C on an algebra test made him weep. When the art teacher called his mug an “ashtray,” he vomited. Later, in his diary, Sam wrote, “MUST DO BETTER,” and then practiced his telekinesis on a pencil, marshaling invisible forces in his favor.

Mom brushes his bangs. “And tell your father you need a haircut.”

Inside, the conference hall has the carpeted, low-traffic feel of the Unitarian church where Mom now takes him—stacked folding chairs, chandeliers, the sense of things moved to the side to make way for more boring. Kids scatter across the room with books in their laps, pretending to read. Nearby,
two redheaded twins fight in slow-motion. One says, crazy-eyed and arms spread wide, “Enter Thunderdome!”

Sam finds a table with lanyards and takes his—his first official designation, and already he feels remarkable. At the front of the room, a bearded professor sits on a stage in hiking shorts and short-sleeved Hawaiian shirt. A giant metal bowl of poker chips rests in his lap. He has the lordly face of the one with the directions, and his fingers comb and coddle the black hair on his chin, like scratching something private and dark.

The professor whistles with two fingers. “We're going to start with a game,” he says, and Sam's heart sinks. He is terrible at competition, the neighborhood of failure. The turdlike mound of his mug returns to him.

The professor holds the bowl over his head like an offering. They are going to trade chips. Two blue chips equal one red chip and two green chips equal one blue—Sam only half follows—and in the end, only five chips in their hand will count.

“Count toward what?” asks one of the twins.

The professor says, “You'll see.”

A mechanical door sighs open at the side of the room, and a boy in a wheelchair motors inside. Sam notices his white sneakers, splayed out to each side and unscuffed, the way Sam wants but can't have because the world keeps making more dirt. A Panama hat shadows his face. The rest of him looks small and shrunken, like he's been through the dryer. His plaid, long-sleeved shirt is buttoned all the way to the top, but his throat is a tendony stalk and doesn't fill the
collar. An older boy follows him in, carrying his backpack like it's a dead animal. “Yowza,” he says. “Opening ceremonies in Dorktown?”

The boy in the chair tilts his head up to him. “You may leave, Teddy.”

The older kid dropkicks the bag into his lap and gives all of them the finger as he exits. The handicap door wheezes back into place.

“Please excuse my brother,” says the boy in the chair. His yellow eyes swim behind heavy glasses. “He was raised by snakes.”

The professor asks someone to get a lanyard for him—Ethan is his name—and Sam is nearest. Once more, the professor explains the rules and then dumps the bowl of chips on the carpet. Kids rush forward, giddy and screaming, a vortex of spaz.

As Sam hands Ethan his lanyard, he grabs Sam's arm and pulls him close. His breath is a hot fog, the pallor of his skin almost butter. “Get us the red and blue ones,” Ethan says. “As many as you can.” A cough rumbles from inside him, and Sam steps away—he doesn't want whatever Ethan has—and dives into the fray.

Since he's started to clean the living room rug with his fingers, Sam has no problem working at carpet level. A girl with braces scratches his hand in desperation, and he scratches back. A boy stumbles and spills his hand, and the others set on the chips like feral dogs. Somehow, the carpet is covered with black chips and white chips, and Sam doesn't remember
the professor saying anything about them. Now the black and white chips are all that is left.

At the end, Sam improvises a bowl with his shirt and Ethan plucks five red chips from it. This makes sense for a moment, since Ethan can't reach the floor. But that leaves Sam stuck with the remaining colors.

“Don't you want to trade?” Sam asks. “Aren't we supposed to?”

“No, not really,” Ethan says.

The professor whistles again. The game is over. Ethan drives his wheelchair to the front of the room, where the professor counts the chips and Ethan, with the five red chips Sam gathered for him, ends up the winner. “Congratulations, you get to choose your country,” the professor says, and Ethan flashes the headlights on his wheelchair, basking in praise. He doesn't even look at Sam, who feels lied to, or at least not told everything other people know. Like two weeks ago when Mom dropped him off at the video arcade with a twenty-dollar bill, and he came home with most of it unspent, feeling thrifty and proud, only to find the front door locked and a strange jeep parked out front. He knocked until she answered in the silky gown she only wore at night and her hair all crazy, and she said, like she was sad to see him, “Oh, Sam, please, help me out here.”

Sam needs lessons in people.

At the afternoon pickup, his father asks, “Who blew up who?” Kids stream out of the hall into the waiting cars. Sam slumps into the passenger seat of his father's truck and watches as an elevator hoists Ethan into a van driven by his mother.
His father feeds in a Beach Boys tape in a preemptive bid for affection. It's the one tape Sam said he liked. On the dash sits a twisted up bag of peanut M&Ms, opened already and therefore tainted, the ransom for spending another weekend with his father.

“Okay then,” his dad says to the silence. “What do you want for dinner?”

“Pizza.”

On his old bed, in the house in the woods, Sam pours over the class textbook, a catalog of ballistic missiles—their ranges, payloads, blast perimeters. He reads about the Centaur, a missile that scissors the clouds and guides itself by the stars. It's more powerful, more beautiful, that way: a missile that looks up. Now he has a favorite missile. He wonders what the stars will see the day the war begins, the whole planet brightening, then going gray like a dead bulb.

Sam cinches a piece of floss around his two front teeth, to close the gap between them. He wants to teach them to get in line, and the dull ache in his gums is the proof that they are learning. The sounds of the television rise up through the floor. Downstairs, in the dark, his father watches sports with the unsalted, least-fun peanuts. The house is dim and cavernous now, since they left. Mom was the one who kept on the lights, and his father would follow behind, turning them off.

Earlier, in the garage, his father showed off the car engine he had taken apart, the grimy pieces laid out on newspaper like bones from a dig. The front grille of the VW van, the one
his father uses for his house-painting company, gaped in front of them, a face with a staggered aspect. His father pointed out the ways the pieces came together, the Wite-Out dashes he'd made to remind him how they joined.

Sam thought: my father will be useful in the afterscape.

He sets the book down and stares out his bedroom window. The night is clear and the trees behind the house almost purple. A plywood plank covers the old well, now just a ring of crumbled stones. Sam can make out, nestled up in the crook of the maple tree, the tree house his father built for him. If necessary, Sam can raise the rope ladder and survive up there. His fingers trace the fire emergency decal on the windowpane, the one they passed out in school. “KID INSIDE,” it says. No one will notice this sticker in the war, Sam thinks. No one will be looking for stickers.

“Sambo,” his father says at the door, beer in hand. “What's happening?”

Sam tells him about the arcing paths of Centaurs and Tridents, twenty times more powerful than Hiroshima.

“Jesus Christ,” his father says. “That's what they're
teaching
you?”

“That's the homework.”

The next morning, his father comes with him to class. Having your parents, the Big Robots, come with you is a sign of weakness. Sam separates himself as much as possible, trying to look like he barely recognizes the man who tinfoiled the leftover pizza for lunch and who quizzed him on the state capitals on the drive.

Ethan motors over. He's dressed in the same shirt and pants from yesterday, only different colors. His Panama hat dangles from one of the handles of his chair.

“Is that your father?” he asks.

“Maybe,” Sam says. He watches his father shake hands with the professor and point Sam out. The professor's beard is bigger than his father's, and Sam theorizes that he has unknown capacities, subterranean holds of grown-up.

His father waves him over, and Sam drags himself to the professor's side. “If anything we do in class makes you feel uncomfortable, you can opt out, right?” he says.

This close, Sam notices a gap between the professor's front teeth, just like his own, and he feels a sudden, covert allegiance.

“I'm fine,” Sam says.

“Good,” his father says. “As long as it's on the up and up.” He holds out his palm. “High-five.”

But if Sam high-fives, in front of the class, the gesture will cost him. Enjoying the company of your parents is a form of offsides. His father pats him on his shoulder instead, swipes his bangs out of his eyes. “Be good,” he says. “And tell your mom you need a haircut.”

The class unfolds a world map, the size and wrinkled texture of Twister. Last class, they chose their countries. As the winner, Ethan took the U.S.A., large country/large resources, and became the most hated person in the room. Out of spite and boredom, Sam chose an island, a speck in the Pacific. Guam.

“You can't sit this one out,” the professor said to him. “Look at the Falklands. Look at Cuba.”

“I'm looking at Cuba,” Sam said. “Now what?”

“Little places have a way of changing history.” This is the professor's way of making Sam feel better, except stories like this only make him sick to his stomach. He doesn't want to change history, just outlive it.

The professor circles the room, handing out army men and single matchsticks to represent missiles. “First we'll see who survives,” the professor says. “Then we'll find out
how
to survive.”

Ethan gets a whole matchbox and an entire freezer bag of army men. The map fills up with their allotments. Sam takes his single army man, a grenade thrower, and bends the arm around so it picks its butt. He hears the whirr of Ethan's approach.

“Take these,” Ethan says. He hands over several army men and a single matchstick. Sam can see the underside of Ethan's chin, where a razor has been. He's old enough to shave.