Life_ An Exploded Diagram - Mal Peet [114]
If the Russians had won, the Americans had won even better. The Soviet Union had backed down. The unwavering determination of the United States and the cool nerve of its young president had banished the Red Menace from the neighborhood. The brave frontiersman had stared down the grizzly bear and dispatched it, shuffling and grunting, back to its lair. So everyone was happy, and the cold war continued on its merry way.
Actually, not everyone was happy. When Fidel Castro learned of the Russian “betrayal,” he kicked the walls and roared and trashed a mirror. And the hawkish U.S. military men were livid. On that Sunday, the air inside the Pentagon was thick and foul with curses. The generals were psyched up, erect, ready to go. The invasion of Cuba was scheduled for the following Tuesday, for Christ’s sake! And the goddamn politicians had screwed it all up.
“This is the greatest defeat in our history,” crazy Curtis LeMay said. “We should invade Cuba today.”
Much time has passed since then. A lot of blood has flowed under the bridge.
A sniper murdered JFK in 1963, in Dallas. A year later, the hard men of the Kremlin gave Khrushchev the shove; he died, obscurely, in 1971. In 1968 a young Palestinian man by the name of Sirhan Sirhan gunned down Bobby Kennedy in a Los Angeles hotel. At the time of writing, Fidel Castro is old and sick but still alive. Since the thrilling days of the crisis, he has seen nine American presidents come and go and witnessed, in shocked disbelief, the defeat of Communism. His brother Raúl runs Cuba now.
The Soviet Union collapsed in on itself, like a diseased lung, in 1989. In that year joyful Germans swarmed over the wall that had divided East Berlin from West Berlin; the wall that had divided, symbolically, Europe. Christian capitalist democracy had won the cold war! Rejoice! The world was no longer divided by crazed ideologies! Rejoice!
I lived through all these times, these great events, without caring very much, concerned with my own aging rather than the world’s. Most of us do likewise. History is the heavy traffic that prevents us from crossing the road. We’re not especially interested in what it consists of. We wait, more or less patiently, for it to pause, so that we can get to the liquor store or the laundromat or the burger bar.
And I lived down all those years with the absence that was Frankie. I grew a coating over it. Several coatings. It grew bearable. No longer a mortal wound but a familiar and manageable affliction. A small ulceration of the soul. A slight tinnitus of the heart.
IWAS UP and about early on the morning of September 11, 2001. I had a meeting downtown scheduled for eight forty-five, and a good deal of money depended on its outcome. I’d spent the last four months on layouts and drawings for a book with the working title Fantastic Machines from Fantastic Movies. It was to be a large-format volume with hyperrealistic spreads by yours truly: cross sections, cutaways, exploded diagrams of James Bond’s cars, spacecraft and gizmos from Star Trek and Star Wars, stuff like that. A lot of work, because I’d had to invent lots of futuristic technology that doesn’t feature on the screen, that gets bluffed with special effects.
There was more riding on the meeting than my nice fat fee. I’d been commissioned for the job by Val Leibnitz, an art director