Austin Bunn: The Brink: Stories

At the entrance of the hall, Sam sees the professor crouch next to Ethan. A tube now runs over Ethan’s ears and up into his nose, like an old person in a hospital show. A tank props up in the netting at the back of his chair, and Sam tries, telekinetically, to turn the knob on the tank and cut off whatever gas Ethan needs to survive. But it doesn’t work. The opposite happens: the professor brings Ethan over.

“Space for one more?” the professor asks, and they make room reluctantly. Ethan lays out his lunch in his lap: a baloney sandwich and chips. Sam can hear little puffs of air jetting up Ethan’s nose.

“Do you have AIDS?” Irwin asks.

Ethan sighs. He does not have AIDS, he says wearily. His lungs don’t work right. He’s on a list, and if his name comes up, they’re going to cut him in half and give him new ones.

“Cut in half, like side to side or top to bottom?” Sam asks, and Ethan places finger at the notch at the base of his throat. “From here,” he says, drawing his finger down his shirt to his stomach, “to here.”

“Lungs from a dead person?” Irwin asks. “ Awesome .”

Ethan turns to Sam and kicks him gently. “When we get back, I want you to attack Russia.”

This is just what Sam was afraid of, that he’d become another small thing in a game played between people. He just wants to be ignored, the way he spent the entire basketball season — on the bench, whispering multiplication tables, praying for armpit hair. Sam balls his tinfoil into a hard nut. “What do I get if I do what you say?”

Ethan says, “You get to die for a reason.”

On the last morning of the world, light breaks over the ocean and Sam is there, on the beach, in Guam. The people of this island nation make necklaces from shells or eat donuts, whatever they do. But the beach is all his. Sam’s father and mother lounge on the big towels, talking like they haven’t talked in a long time, like they want to keep talking. Sam pokes at a dead sand crab, a weird piece of armor the ocean threw up. He is tucked between his parents, feeling gathered and protected, when he sees the white contrail of a Centaur streak up, a fast and terrible rip in the sky. .

Sam holds a matchstick in his fingers.

His missile, the one from Ethan. His turn.

“Somebody’s going to win this war,” the professor says, pacing behind them. “Who is it going to be? Is it going to be you?”

Across the map, Ethan nods at Sam privately, the way a gangster in a movie cues an execution. Sam has no strategy. He’s afraid that Ethan, up in his throne, has unspeakable powers, the gift of knowing that you’re only alive because somebody else died. But with the matchstick in his grip, his Centaur, Sam sees his life from above. Suddenly the map, the game, doesn’t matter. Sam can be Guam, the speck in the Pacific, the small thing passed between people.

Or he can be the missile.

He arcs the match over the ocean, toward America. He aims for Ethan, for home. When it lands, Ethan whispers, “What are you doing?” and Irwin makes the blowing-up noise, a rumble with puffed cheeks. The professor says, “First strike. Guam against U.S.A. Interesting. .” Soon, every missile on the map will launch, the planet turned to stone, the lesson lost. But Sam is, already, elsewhere.

That night, Mom’s new friend Latrice reclines on the couch, smoking languidly and turning Sam’s photo cube over in her hand. It’s all vistas of his father: grilling, up a ladder, holding Sam at birth when he was still jaundiced and Chinese-looking. Sam recognizes Latrice from the Unitarian church, from the part of the service when people stand up and speak. Latrice talked about women’s rights and black people rights and coming together for a better tomorrow and Mom clutched Sam’s hand. Latrice is the only black person there, so it’s like she is all black people.

“Your father looks like a nice fellow,” Latrice says, and sets down the cube. She pulls her denim jacket tight. Her hair intimidates Sam, so solid and dense, like the black foam at the tip of a microphone. On the right pocket of her jacket is a button: the radioactive symbol and the Ghostbusters line through it.

“My dad’s really strong,” Sam says. “He loves to hunt.” Sam sits in the rocking chair, making it rock as much and as irritatingly as possible. His bangs curtain into his eyes, and his mouth is half-full of the chocolate bar she bribed him with.

“Do you see him much?”

“All the time,” Sam says. “He comes here too sometimes, just to watch the house. See who is coming and going. My mom doesn’t know.”

This time, Sam’s lie is bold, riskier. Latrice raises her eyebrows and turns toward the window. The blinds are up, the drapes wide, and the streetlights make the parked cars look only half-there. Latrice’s jeep is parked at the curb, the sticker for the Princeton Seminary in the back window. By her worry, Sam can feel a trajectory taking shape, the flickers of a future impact.

“Oh, and thanks for the candy,” Sam says. “My dad doesn’t let me eat sweets.”

Latrice checks her watch.

“Candy and smoking,” Sam says. “He really hates both of those things.”

Latrice stubs out the cigarette. “Your dad sounds like a piece of work.”

Mom descends the stairs in her feathery blue blouse except now it’s too tight because Sam put it in the dryer, trying to be helpful. She smiles weakly. “The babysitter’s still not here?”

Sam shrugs. The babysitter is not coming. She called, but Sam took the message and forgot to tell.

“I can make us something,” Mom says. “I have some leftover chicken.”

Latrice exhales and her breath just keeps going. “I’m vegetarian, remember?”

Sam sticks out his tongue with the plop of chocolate. Mom fingers a cigarette from Latrice’s pack. “Not what I need right now.”

Every class, they war, and every class, the earth dies. Over two thousand nuclear warheads exist, the professor tells them. But only twenty detonations are necessary to erase all life, and they have a hundred matchsticks. The twins, playing Russia and Brazil, can’t keep from bullying the planet. Ethan, with his arsenal, makes a point to tick off Guam in every strike. Sam just waits for the nuclear winter to snow all civilization. Once, the class gangs up on the twins and rains its stockpiles onto Russia all at once. But even then, even with their entire population killed, Russian missiles retaliate automatically. “It’s called The Dead Hand,” explains the professor. “Even when they lose, they win.”

Jerusha begins to cry. “I hate this game,” she says. “All it is is getting killed.”

The professor taps his fingers together. “Very good, so what are we learning?”

Jerusha’s sobs fill the quiet room. At least she believes in angels, Sam thinks. At least she has someone to get her when the time comes.

“Anyone?” the professor asks.

Ethan says, brightly, “New game.”

His father’s voice booms from underneath the house-painting van. Only his boots stick out.

“How’s your mother?”

Sam leans on the van’s bench seat, unbolted from the car and propped against the garage wall, listening to the radio. A newscaster says that a West German plane landed in Red Square, that this might be the beginning of something. Sam spins a gasket around his fingers. A gasket is the ring of metal that goes between other metal, his dad said, to make them join. These lessons usually bother Sam. He doesn’t want to learn what his father wants to teach. But now, here is this bright fact of gasket. Even words can grow up and make themselves useful.

Sam stares at the hanging lamp over the car, puzzling an answer. His father doesn’t know about Latrice, who has been sleeping over and leaving paperbacks on the coffee table and storing sand she calls “fiber” on the breakfast shelf. This morning, when his mom was in the shower, he saw Latrice naked, lying in his mother’s bed, scratching the pale bottom of her foot. Her nipples looked like light switches. If he told his father all of this, his father would go quiet and far away.