HE STARTS TO say something. He can’t think of what to say. More than that, he can’t make anything come out. He turns around. Tears stream down his cheeks.
He walks to the door. He opens it. Discovers no one standing outside, or at the stair landing. Doesn’t mean anything. They’re downstairs, out front, wherever. Whatever.
He pauses at the door.
“We could group the colors together. It is a good idea. It was a good idea.”
He shuts the door. He turns to mother and child.
“Kent,” he continues. “We didn’t have to do the corners first, on the rocket ship puzzle.”
It was the puzzle that Jeremy and Kent were doing when they had their first big fight. The one where Kent challenged Jeremy’s authority and Jeremy snapped in his usual way.
“Jeremy, don’t try your obtuse tricks with—”
Kent interjects: “Why can’t I grow up!?”
Emily and Jeremy both look up, startled by the non sequitur. They catch eyes, like parents, then look back at the boy.
“What do you mean, sweetie?”
Kent answers his mother by sitting down.
“He doesn’t like me when I’m not a baby.”
She laughs, bitterly. “Me either.” She looks at Jeremy. “Harry Chapin. ‘The Cat’s in the Cradle and the Silver Spoon.’ The song. I get your reference. It’s about neglecting your child. Not really the right reference, Jeremy.”
He bites his tongue, his instinct to challenge her. He just meant that he knows he’s created this world. He’s reaping what he’s sown.
She says: “That song is about a father and son. Your issue is around your mother, which is beside the point. Your real issue isn’t that you learned how to neglect. Your issue is you never learned to let people have space. To be themselves. You can’t love them for what they are, who they are. It’s the opposite of what Harry Chapin is saying. You can’t neglect anything. Not a flaw, a perceived flaw, a difference of opinion, not any threat to your way of thinking, your feeling of superiority, your need to feel superior. Just . . .” She stops. It’s obvious. Just like his mother.
“Just like them,” he says, letting his eyes gaze out the window. “Nik, the Guardians.” He thinks: I’m like them, unforgiving, rigid, more willing to destroy the world than to let differences blossom. “Scorched Earth.”
Finally, Emily gives him a softer look, not soft, but softer, a new look. She’s said her piece. She’s run dry of fury. It’s not in her, and never was. Still, he doesn’t feel any forgiveness, no latitude. Instead of walking forward, he sits. It’s his own exhaustion coupled with a deliberate effort to be on their level, a rhetorical, strategic move that remains in him, an instinct he can’t shed.
He notices Emily wears a watch. It’s one he gave her. Rather, one he’d been given by some venture capitalist as a gift for her. The fact she’s wearing it gives him some hope; maybe it represents a subconscious act on her part—a sign that she has not abandoned him altogether.
“What time is it?”
She looks at the watch. “One thirty. Kent is hungry.”
“Less than twenty minutes,” Jeremy says. He’s hit by a sudden urge to just sit like this, wait for the end, hope his desperate plan has worked and that the end might not yet come, not tell them what’s happening.
But that’s not fair. And, besides, telling them might allow him to bridge the gap, create a narrative, a different conversation to smooth their way into peace.
“Emily, we don’t have much time.”
Without further preface, he starts explaining.
Ten minutes later, they’ve all walked to the window, Jeremy finishing his story, all looking at the distant speck of a charter boat nearing the bridge.
“Ten minutes?” Emily exclaims.
He points to her watch and she holds it up. “Less.”
“It’s too impossible to believe.”
“The boat is there, Emily. These people, downstairs, wherever, they have guns. We’re not imagining this. This plot has been years in the making, decades, centuries. You’re right, it’s impossible to believe. The most powerful things are.”
“Isaac,” Kent whispers.
His hamster. “What will happen to him?”
“There is one, tiny possibility,” Jeremy interjects. “One small chance.”
He feels Emily’s eyes on him.
“I swapped out the access code. A last-ditch thing, a Hail Mary, if you want to get biblical.”
“What are you talking about?”
He explains. He tells Emily and Kent that he’d correctly guessed that the bomb needed an access code and that he himself, unknowingly for so long, was carrying the code: a combination of the random number generated by the key fob and Jeremy’s personal password.
“You gave it to them?” Emily says.
“No. Not exactly.”
He explains that, having guessed this is what they wanted, he created a substitute access code.
“But then how did it work to get into the computer?”
Jeremy says that, a few hours earlier, he was in a café where he saw a woman working with a key fob that looked very much like his own. A standard issue random-number generator. He took the fob when she wasn’t looking. He tossed out his own actual fob. But not before he reprogrammed the algorithm with a new password.
“I’m not totally following, Jeremy. How long now?”
He looks at the watch. Six minutes.
“I knew that they’d test to see whether the access code was accurate, by making me log into the iPad,” he says.
So, he explains, he programmed the iPad to accept any combination of numbers and letters. It, in effect, has no password at this point. “You could enter anything into it and get into the guts of the program. But they don’t know that. They think that the number on the woman’s key fob, combined with my password, is the key.”
“Why not just change the access code and give them your key fob?”
“Because they’d have the actual number. Then, conceivably, they could make it work.”
She blinks, calculating. He feels flush with love, attraction. She’s his equal, intellectually, she just never needed to prove it. She’s his great, great superior, emotionally.
“So will your plan work?”
He shrugs. “They bugged me, they could’ve found my fob, the real one. They’ve got a dirty bomb, a real one. So many possibilities. Chief among them: I could be wrong.” He pauses. “There’s a strong likelihood that I’m wrong and that my plan, this . . . last-ditch . . . this idea won’t fool them. Besides,” he says, then pauses again. “The computer still thinks the world is going to end.
“Last I checked.”
“Hail Mary,” Emily says absently.
He swallows.
“They took advantage of me, Em. I was set up from every direction. Used by the Pentagon, by Nik, by the venture capitalists, the peace and conflict community, people just preying on . . .” He pauses, continues: “On my tone-deaf talent.”
Emily looks at him. He can see her deep nurturing instincts. He steps back to avoid her coming to his aid.
“I brought it on myself. I was deaf. I was the center of all of it, the world of peace and conflict, the plots and counterplots, but I was so busy attacking, preparing to attack, that I couldn’t really listen . . . I couldn’t . . .” He pauses, tries to catch his breath, puts his hand to his chest, where it used to ache all the time. It doesn’t anymore.
“Listen.”
“What?” she asks.
He wants to say: love. He can’t get it out. A tear drips.
He feels Kent wrap a leg. Jeremy chokes back a tear, a sob, then doesn’t—choke it back. He lets tears stream down his face. He feels Emily getting nearer. He wipes his cheeks with his palm and looks at the watch.
He looks at the watch. Two minutes.
“I wanted it to end a different way.” He clears his throat. “But I did want it to end with you. Both of you.”
He recognizes a terrible truth: even if the blast doesn’t go off, the three of them will not possibly escape. “Just like the computer,” he mumbles, “we know too much.”
They look out the window, see the boat nearly beneath the bridge.
Ninety seconds.
He reaches for Emily and puts his arm around her. He wraps a hand around Kent, resting it on the boy’s chest. Mother then kneels, putting her head next to the boy. “I love you more than anything. I’m sorry if I did anything wrong.”
“You were perfect,” the boy responds.
Jeremy listens, feels together with them, so apart. Emily’s eyes are closed, her forehead touching Kent’s, and Jeremy is sure she’s praying.
Forty-five seconds.
He wants to tell them: please forgive me. But it’s not about him.
Forty seconds.
“Look!” Kent points.
A small skiff, a dot, approaches the large boat. It must be the world killers, the Guardians, poised to set the world on fire. Poised, in their view, to save it.
It was right. The computer was right.
Twenty-five seconds.
The skiff nearly collides with the charter. It’s hard to see what’s happening.
Twenty seconds.
Jeremy feels himself kneeling. Joining the pair, huddling with them. He feels Emily lean in, touch her cheek to his cheek.
Fifteen seconds.
There’s an explosion.
Outside the house, a flurry of gunfire. A cascade of rifles, shouts, drowned out by bang, bang, bang.
Emily turns to him. “Andrea,” he mutters. She got his text message. Way too late.
Ten seconds.
They look out the window. They huddle.
More gunfire. Then something like a bomb going off, maybe a car exploding.
:05.
:04.
:03.
:02.