CHAPTER FOURTEEN
Elsa gripped the wheel of her little brown Volkswagen with such force that her knuckles were white disks rimmed in red and the bands of her rings cut into the flesh of her fingers. There were no words, Hungarian or English, to express her fury. While she sat in Yardley's office, determined to help this lecherous pilot, she had listened in horror to one half of the conversation as Calavicci had thrown away his chances without even trying to fight.
It was the lack of a struggle that angered her. You couldn't just lie down and die! If her parents had given up when the fires of war had swept through their country, or when poverty threatened to swallow them, Elsa wouldn't be here now. She would have starved on the streets or languished in a Budapest orphanage. She would be a cleaning woman scrubbing other people's stairs now, or a beggar. If Papa had given up when it had become plain that his daughter could not pursue higher education in Europe, she would be the wife of some storekeeper, balancing his books and polishing his shoes and raising his children. If she had given up her dream of working with computers, she would be toiling in a clinic in upstate New York, weary and unhappy. If Andrew hadn't given up…
If Andrew hadn't given up she wouldn't be driving down this unfamiliar street, headed for the apartment of a man she hardly knew, bent on whipping him back into shape—by force, if she had to. She wasn't going to let Calavicci quit. He had come through too much to surrender now, just because his mind was under strain and his fear attacking him. She had not received the news in time to help Andrew, but she could help Calavicci. If it killed them both, she wasn't going to let him give up.
As she drove she primed herself for battle.
MWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMWMThe linoleum was cool against his bare feet. Al sat on the floor in the narrow space between the refrigerator and the dividing wall that separated the kitchen from the living room. It made no sense, none at all, but the three white walls that penned him in weren't oppressive now. They were comforting, because they limited his surroundings. They limited his world. If only they could limit his problems, too.
He didn't know what to do. He couldn't deal with this. So many decisions, day in and day out, and so many new situations to cope with. He didn't know how to handle them. Years of having everything decided for him had weakened his capacity to make up his mind. All he could do was muddle blindly through choice after choice, and lately he had been making all of the wrong ones.
The second he'd got off the phone with Yardley he had regretted that decision. It was definitely the wrong one. How could he have thought that throwing away his chances at NASA was going to make anything better? The thought of space flight was the only thing that had kept him going for months now. It was the only thing that had finally got him out of hospital. That and sheer livid determination.
He wished he could call Yardley back, say he hadn't meant what he said about resigning, tell him that Calavicci had every intention of making it to the moon. But he couldn't. It was over. He had blown it. Thrown it away just like he'd thrown away everything he'd ever cared about. Space was only the most recent example. There was Beth. And Lisa. Trudy. Pop. Momma. He never realized the value of things until they were gone forever.
He thought wistfully, and not for the first time, that he could have died in Vietnam. Any one of a thousand times he could have died. That time when Quon had hung him upside down for two days, then let the guards beat him with switches cut from a thorn-bush until there wasn't a patch of whole skin anywhere on his body. The weeks he had been shaking with ague as malaria raged through his blood, too weak to fight it off and left without medication or nursing or even clean water. Titi's cruel and horrifically imaginative games… that time in the scorching summer of '68 when cholera had ripped through the ranks at Briarpatch… take your pick of the interrogations at the Hilton… that first beating, courtesy of the North Vietnamese welcoming committee of long-traumatized and therefore vicious villagers… hell, he could have died in the crash. That would have been kindest of all. If only he had caught that missile instead of Chip…
A sickening pang of guilt twisted his stomach. Didn't that mean that he wished Chip had taken his place?
He drew his hand across his brow, trying to scrub away the black thoughts. His bony knees crept closer to his washboard chest, and he hugged them with thin, ropey-muscled arms. His vivid imagination fell into old patterns. She was there, her love like a blanket of peace around him. It didn't matter how much they hurt him. It didn't matter what they did. She was still there, on the other side of that great, wide ocean, staring out at the sea and thinking of him…
A whimper welled up in his throat. Staring out to sea and planning her wedding. Her second wedding. A dry sob of desolation shook him. What kind of a God let things like this happen? What was the point of God, if he couldn't stop—if he couldn't be bothered to stop the Devil from turning the earth into a junior Hell?
Junior Hell? Sure. Fire and brimstone and demons couldn't be worse than this forsaken, accursed existence.
He shuddered. He could hear the "V" now, coming up and down the corridors of the New Guy Village at Hoa Lo, hammering on the doors with their billy clubs, just to make sure that the feverish, pain-wracked, terrified inmates didn't get any sleep that night. Welcome to purgatory, the pounding seemed to say. Abandon all hopes of a normal life, ye who don't die here.
Hang on, that wasn't in his mind. The noise was in his ears. Someone was knocking on the door to his apartment. Al froze, not sure what to do. Nobody had knocked on that door since he'd moved in. The overnight houseguests he'd had had all come in with him, not after.
The knocking persisted. Instincts from another lifetime finally resurfaced. Al had to answer the door. He got unsteadily to his feet and straightened his bathrobe, making sure it was closed as snugly over his chest as possible. He went to the door, barking his shin against one of the plastic-upholstered aluminium chairs in the gloom. He put one hand on the smooth wood, and the other on the deadbolt.
"Who's there?" he called.
"Open the door and you'll see," said a familiar contralto voice.
Sheer astonishment had the door open before Al realized that he really didn't want to see her. She stood in the corridor, hands on her hips and a very firm expression on her face.
"You are a fool, Calvichy. A stupid fool," she said abruptly.
Al blinked at the non sequitur. There's the signpost, up ahead. Your next stop? The Twilight Zone.
"Excuse me?"
"You heard me." She tossed her head so that her red hair shone, and looked him over. "Where are your clothes?"
"What kind of question is that? What are you doing here?" Al demanded.
"You need talking to," Elsa said. "Are you going to leave me standing out here until I take root and start growing apples from my fingertips?"
"How did you find my address?" Al asked, still hostile .
"I told you," she said; "I can get into your records. Easy. Now let me in."
"I don't let strange women into my house," groused Al.
"That's not what I hear," Elsa said dryly.
"I didn't say anything about women I don't know," Al corrected sourly. "I said strange."
The nuance was lost on her. Nothing like a patchy grasp of idiom. She stepped forward, into his airspace. Al backed off instinctively, unwittingly giving her the room that she needed in order to slip past him.
"Close the door," she ordered. "And get some lights in here!"
"Can't you ever mind your own business?" Al asked, glaring at this intruder now strolling nonchalantly through his house.
"Can't you follow simple instructions?" Elsa retorted. "Close the door."
Al stared at her in disbelief. She had to be the single most pigheaded, unpredictable woman he had ever met, but what the hell was she doing here?
"Why did you do it?" she demanded, switching on the kitchen light and marching through to the living room, where she yanked open the curtains to let in the gathering sunset.
"Do what?"
"Tell Yardley you want to resign."
"What the hell choice did I have?" Al asked. Then he paused. "How do you know about that?"
"I was in his office when you telephoned," she said, coming back to face him. "I was in his office telling him that you could be an astronaut."
"What?"
"I was telling him that you could be an astronaut, and that he should not wash you out because of one little incident in the simulator," she said. "He was about to agree that you should get another try, when you telephoned and ruined it!"
Al didn't know what to think, much less what to say. She was standing up for him? Elsa Orsós the Snow Queen? But he didn't want her interference…
"Who the hell asked you to stick your nose into my business?" he snapped.
"Hah! If you ran a store the way you run your business you'd be bankrupt!" Elsa exclaimed. "What are you doing, giving up so easy?"
"Believe me, nothing about this is easy," Al muttered, trying to walk away from her. Not that there was anywhere he could go in a three hundred square foot apartment.
"Hah! Sure! It's always easiest to quit, to run away. It's much harder to stay and fight!"
Easy to die. Hard to live. Major Quon's taunting voice rang in his ears. I am going to teach you how hard it can be!
"Get out of here," Al snarled, gesturing at the door. "Go back to whatever backwater European hellhole you came from and leave me alone!"
"Leave you alone so you can give up on something you wanted—or did you not really want it?" She tilted her chin fearlessly. "Maybe the Navy tried to pressure you into it, and you're glad to get out?"
"I wanted it as much as I've wanted anything in a long time," Al snapped. Almost anything. "But I can't have it, so drop it and go away!"
"You want it, you fight for it!" Elsa cried. "You can't give up, you have to fight for it! You give up, and they win without trying!"
He stared at her. It was like having a redheaded incarnation of his mind across from him, the strong, determined part of his mind that had kept him alive. The part of his mind that had healed his broken body. The part of his mind he wanted to shut down, because it made him more ashamed than ever of the other voice, the cowardly voice, the one that wanted so desperately to lie down and die.
"Well?" Elsa said. "Are you going to give up?"
Anger and desolation washed over him. Over him, under him, around him, and through him. "Yes," he said, his voice hardened against the tremor that wanted to undermine it. "Yes. I give up. I quit. I can't fight anymore. Now go away and leave me alone."
Her distress and emphatic conviction were tangibly transfigured. Her face hardened into a mask of rage.
"How do you live with yourself? You want it! You're a fighter! You fought, you survived terrible things, and now you cannot even face a little fear?"
"This isn't about claustrophobia!" Al exclaimed. "Nobody wants me to go into space. I can't fight everybody. I'm not even—"
He caught himself just in time. He had been about to say human anymore. He shuddered. That was too much information to share with anyone, especially an enemy. He turned his back on Elsa so that he didn't need to look at her cold eyes and wonder what she was thinking.
"Hah! Nobody wants you in space? Too many people want you in space! When the other astronauts figure that out you will have trouble—but not as much trouble as you are giving yourself now! You stupid fool, if you would just pick yourself up and—"
Al whirled on her. "Pick myself up? What the hell do you know about picking yourself up? Have you ever been down, you spoiled little Hungarian brat? Have you ever dragged yourself up from absolute bottom just to have some nozzle throw you right back down? Every time you think you're finally ahead, you've finally got it made, then along comes a bolt straight from Hell and everything's gone again! How many times do you expect me to get up? Forget it! I'm down for the count! Let me pass out! The fight is over. Round, match and championship to the Devil!"
Elsa's anger faltered briefly in favor of a haunted look. "Boxing…" she murmured.
"Yeah, boxing! Just like life! Except I was actually good at boxing!" Al snapped.
The rage was back. "You come out of the prison camps just to give up! Why did you come home at all, if you are just going to bury yourself in America?"
"I ask myself that question every goddamned morning!"
"So stop feeling sorry for yourself and do something!"
They were both shouting now, overcome with emotions. Al couldn't understand Elsa's reaction. It made no sense that she should explode like this. Why the hell did she even care?
"I am doing something!" he roared. "I'm going back to my boats where I belong—just like you've been saying since I got here!"
She started to yell in what he could only presume was Hungarian, letting loose a tirade that Al didn't understand. The furious exclamations grated against his raw nerves.
"Aw, shut up!" he snapped. "I quit. It's over."
With a shriek of rage she raised her hand to strike him. He caught her wrist and stopped the blow. For a moment they stood thus, frozen like a sculpture of some Olympian struggle. Her cold, flashing blue eyes and his stormy dark ones held one another thrall, two rods of a tesla coil with the tension crackling between them. Then Elsa's other hand shot up and gripped the back of Al's neck, and suddenly she was kissing him, violently and passionately.
He reciprocated almost without processing what was happening, his fingers finding her hips and drawing her body against his. The kiss continued, fierce and electric. One small, nimble hand worked in his hair. The other frantically clutched his back.
Inevitably they had to surface for air, and Al's lips formed a protest.
"You want to leave now," he gasped.
Elsa shook her head and kissed him again, harder than before. Then suddenly she was pushing him, driving him ahead of her as they embraced. A very tiny part of Al's mind protested that he didn't want to sleep with her, and they were both going to regret it, but that was belied by every thought he had ever had about her. She obviously wanted it, and he knew he needed it. He gripped her tighter, his lips working hungrily against hers.
They were in the bedroom now. Elsa was fumbling with the belt of his robe even before he thought to find her zipper, and suddenly they were on the bed, Elsa pressing against his abdomen as she wriggled out of the dress he held open for her. Al wrapped his arms around her chest and rolled them both over. His mouth still moved frenetically. Talon-tipped fingers tangled themselves in his hair.
And then for a long time he didn't think about NASA, or Vietnam, or even Beth.