Small Bang Only

By Geeta Kothari

When he left the boatyard in Vladmir’s ugly little brown car, with its broken heater and torn seats, Milo headed northwest. In his rearview mirror, he saw the Statue of Liberty, fading into the dusk. The day had been unseasonably cold, and now lavender light rimmed the skyline to his west. He turned right on Bourne. In the passenger seat, there was a small suitcase he had found in a thrift store last year when Serafina started her training. He thought she was training to be a secretary, and the suitcase had been a kind of joke, how they had come this far so she could type someone else’s letters. Stamped in gold on the worn leather: United Nations. Lake Success. 1952.

Milo drove past a cluster of row houses, cramped and mean with ragged net curtains in the windows and lopsided tricycles on the sidewalk in front. Along Hamilton, he saw the car dealerships and the boarded up windows and scarred doors of the old warehouses, once part of a prosperous industrial neighborhood. It was a landscape he loved and hated, a familiar ruin. Serafina had been less ambivalent. We came to America for a new life, not a reminder of the old one, she said. Last month, a developer bought the entire block and Milo’s landlady said the whole place would be razed for condos and retail. Perhaps this development would impress Serafina, she said, her look full of sympathy and pity for her single tenant. Lois was in her sixties, full of energy and life, despite her grey hair and small frame. Milo knew that to her he was pathetic — unshaven, scrawny in baggy jeans and second-hand shirts.

At the corner, Milo passed a brick wall covered in the graffiti of several nations. An international wailing wall. He did not slow down to admire his handiwork of a drunken summer night, the black scrawl of Serafina is bitch. He was ashamed now, though the letters were so small and cramped, they were invisible from any distance. He promised himself, as he had for the last three months, that he would go back and insert the article. He would at least be grammatical.

On the ramp to the BQE, traffic moved slowly, and dusk became night. She would be working late all week. It was October, and the big shots were in town. Last year, when she crawled into bed at 1 in the morning, exhilarated and exhausted, he had urged her to quit. Perhaps that was the moment when she began to leave him.

By the time he got onto the bridge, all the lights were on, their reflection dancing on the dark water below. He thought he might stop the car, ignore the angry drivers and make his way over the edge and jump. He had never fully explored this option — it looked so easy in the movies, but reality was complicated by traffic, barriers, and the complex workings of the bridge itself. Besides, the moment for killing himself had passed. It had been an empty threat, uttered in the weeks before she left, and following through with it now would not change the humiliation. Vladmir’s solution offered possibilities. You are broken man, he said. You want to feel better. Revenge. I find for you, ultimate revenge. Is a man’s job.

The ultimate revenge, Milo thought, might be to sit in traffic like this for a few hours, in an overheated Jetta with a seat that would not adjust and left his knees knocking against the steering wheel. Traffic inched forward; ahead of him, a car had stalled in the left lane and now a red BMW convertible was trying to merge right, in front of a gold Accord. Milo hit the horn; now was not the time for delays. If he waited too long, he would be late. And loose his nerve. That was what Jas had said in the kitchen the other day, this man is loosing his nerve. And when Milo corrected him, tried to explain the difference between lose and loose, Jas had laughed and said, You think you’re American now, Mr. Serafina?

Mr. ex-Serafina, sitting in a tin can of a car, that’s who he was. Mr. ex-Serafina, without a green card, which he would need now that she and her G-4 visa had left him. Mr. ex-Serafina, who would have to return to a country he left behind if he didn’t get “his situation sorted out.” That’s how Lois, whose son was a lawyer, had put it. Milo watched a smooth cap of platinum blond hair emerge from the passenger’s window of the BMW. The hair was perfect, but when she turned her head to face the Honda, Milo lost his breath. The face under the hair was rough, fallen and crushed by age, with thick lips smeared in pink lipstick. Not what he expected, such an old face with such young hair.

The Honda would not give way, and the blonde woman waved at Milo, her face cracked by a hideous smile. He could not let her in; he was late. What did he care if Vladmir’s ugly shitbox got scratched? And if the police stopped him, searched the car? Vladmir’s car, with Jas’s handiwork in the little suitcase in the seat next to him? Maybe they were losers — or loosers — but they were his friends. His only friends, testing him.

Milo honked and let the BMW cut in front of him. The woman smiled and blew a kiss at him, yelling something about the time. Or his mind.

He was on the bridge for a mile, but it took 45 minutes to get to the FDR/Pearl St. ramp heading north. The heat in the car was unbearable, and he rolled down a window, suddenly panicked. Maybe he was too stupid to be nervous, too stupid to worry about the little brown suitcase. Small bang only, Jas had said, as if Milo knew nothing about explosives, as if Milo did not know that a small bang was relative and that when you were picking through the rubble of your office, trying to find the security guard you greeted every morning, nothing seemed small, and the sorrow and fear felt infinite. The smell of burning wood and rubber, the chemical taste that lingered for weeks in his mouth, the burning sensation when he blew his nose. After the building he worked in collapsed, his nose bled every night for weeks.

Milo drove slowly, anxious about missing his exit. To his right, the East River shimmered. Had it been three years or four since that Circle Line trip when Serafina pointed to the UN, told him she had heard they needed interpreters? He thought she meant secretaries. He had not known her French was that good, that she would qualify as someone fluent in four languages, and now, so many months later, sick at heart, he was still wondering, what was that fourth language, and had he really been too tired to ask or just stupid?

The garage was around the corner from the exit; he had her old parking pass, valid for another month. Give those fat politicians a shock, Vladmir said. What good they have done for us? With their peace force that takes people to safe area and lets them die? So a few cars are lost, some Swiss, some Dutch. A fair exchange, Vladmir said. He grunted and pulled his pants up over his belly. As far as Milo could tell, Vladmir had always been a short-order cook. But he, like Milo, expected more, giving up one life for another should mean a move up, not down. And had the UN done its job, there would have been no need for this unfair exchange, this giving up of everything you knew and loved for a life of invisibility.

Milo parked the car on the second floor, in the handicapped space near the elevator. He reached for the suitcase next to him. Lake Success, 1952. So much for world peace. He thought about the brick wall, covered in error and unhappiness. Had their lives really been so great before? What had they exchanged? Serafina crying as she peeled potatoes. The war had reduced them to this — the men working half days in tenuous conditions, the women cleaning house all day, sobbing over their wasted education. Sometimes Serafina stayed in bed in all day, reading one thick English novel after another, the dictionary and a pencil always at hand.

Milo had taken Jas to the wall the next day and had noticed the error immediately. Shit, he said. Yes, Jas said, reaching under his turban to scratch his head. She is now gone forever. But Jas did not see the missing article until Milo pointed it out, and later he told Vladmir, and they teased Milo all week, a kind of gentle teasing that only underscored their pity for him. Was this negligible black scrawl the best he could do?

Jas had rigged the bomb so that Milo would not screw it up, would not forget the essential indefinite article that completed the sentence.

“You the man, my friend,” Vladmir said in the boatyard, the smell of sweat and garlic filling the car as he leaned in through the window.

“Yes, I am a man,” Milo said, wincing at the misused article, the dropped verb.

Vladmir sighed. “The man. You the man. Like on TV.”

“This car is junk,” Milo said, resisting the urge to continue the discussion of “the” versus “a.”

“The world is junk, my friend. The politicians think they can throw away whole country, whole people. Life is cheap.”

Lights reflected off the cars behind him, most of them black and sleek. Some had DPL plates, and he wondered why diplomats bothered paying for parking when they could park on the street with impunity. Their children got drunk and ran into lampposts or pedestrians, then quickly disappeared to the home country, covered by immunity. No wonder war criminals got away.

When had Milo become a man without hope? Four years ago, he was a different man when his brother called and said, You’re with us or you’re with them. Your choice.

If the war had not come, if he had not hung up on his brother mid-sentence — if, if, and if. Nothing was as he expected. When people said New York, they did not think of the shabby neighborhood he had just left behind, its squalid tenements and uneven streets, looking like a war zone itself. He had not expected to work day and night bussing tables, taking shit from illegals while his wife went to school. In this new country, with his halting English, his engineering degree was useless. At home, Serafina had been the housewife. She had been the one washing dishes, holding cracked glasses to the light, scraping leftovers into the garbage. Here, she was the one with the visa.

He just had to open the suitcase, hit the timer, and leave it in the shadow of the trashcan near the elevator.

“Don’t think about it,” Vladmir said. “Too much thinking, no action.”

There was too much to think about — the tiny kitchen where Serafina wept, the ministry of development where he worked, first barricaded, then reduced to frame and rubble. His brother’s words. You give up your family for her?

Milo did not tell Serafina about the phone call. He did not know what had bothered his brother more — her lack of family or her religion. He had never paid attention to his brother’s nationalist rants, but after the call Milo felt frightened and worried that he would lose Serafina. War was coming, and it would change everything. They left home in the middle of the night, with two small suitcases and their passports. Milo forced Serafina to leave her books, even though she insisted she’d be able to carry her suitcase. One of the women in their group had brought her small dog, and when she saw it, Serafina cut Milo a look, her blue eyes sharp slivers in a pale round face. They had argued about Aggie, the stray Serafina found a year ago, and when Milo left the cat behind the dumpster in the alley, a month’s supply of food piled next to her, Serafina cried and refused to look at him.

She’ll be here when we get back, Milo said. You’ll see.

There was a long walk, up and down, through quiet suburban streets and wooded areas. Finally, they were at the border. For a moment, Milo thought about letting Serafina go ahead. He remembered he had not seen his mother in a year, not since Serafina’s first awkward meeting with her and Novak. His mother’s arthritis made it difficult for her to do much around the house, and a fine layer of dust covered the mantle and the framed pictures of Milo and Novak as children, and their father, when he was young, vibrant and alive. His mother had been polite, but Milo could tell she was displeased. Later, on the phone, she said it was not because Serafina was not like us. No, the problem was she was an intellectual, one of those women who would put career before family. Am I to die without grandchildren? Your brother refuses to marry, and you marry this he-she who just wants to be smart.

All that was certain lay behind Milo, and only darkness and uncertainty lay ahead. Twigs snapped underfoot. Someone breathed heavily behind him, wheezing as they slowly walked uphill, their path lit by a couple of weak flashlights. The woman with the dog blew her nose noisily, perhaps weeping for the life she’d left behind. If Milo went home, he’d be okay. He could disappear into these woods and return home during daylight. Serafina would go ahead; she had not looked back since they left the city, and she might not notice his absence until she was safely over the border. He could retrieve the cat and wait for normalcy to return. An engineer would always find work. And in a year or two, or even three if necessary, Serafina would return, they would start their family, the awfulness of their country’s disintegration a fading memory.

Before crossing the border, their guide demanded their passports.

These passports won’t be worth anything soon, the guide hissed when Milo handed over his and Serafina’s passports.

They had the old red ones, one of the most sought after passports when he was a teenager and hitchhiked across Europe. With this red passport, one could travel east, west, everywhere freely, no hassles.

Yours has nearly expired, the guide said. Milo couldn’t see his face in the shadow cast by the flashlight, but he heard the disgust in the guide’s voice. He didn’t understand what difference his passport made; they were entering another country illegally, and if they got caught, having an up-to-date passport would not change anything.

They crossed the border at dawn then hiked through the mountains for two days. They were free. And still, Milo did not tell Serafina about the phone call. In the days and weeks to come, they would read the latest news of destruction and mayhem, and he would wonder what Novak was doing. Serafina would not know how close he had come to leaving her.

When the elevator opened, Milo had been sitting in the garage for an hour. A woman with brown hair and a heavy coat emerged, with a pronounced limp. Milo slouched in his seat, but she had seen him. She walked over to the car, confidence in every uneven step.

“Is this the second or third floor?” she asked, leaning in through the open window.

He must have looked confused.

“I’m so tired, I forgot what button I pressed,” she said. “And I don’t want to walk to the other side if my car isn’t here.”

Milo panicked. Was she asking for a ride? He willed himself not to look at the suitcase. Maybe this was a trick, a way to get him to give himself up. He felt sweat trickle down his neck.

“Second floor? Is second floor.”

“They’ll all be coming down in a few minutes.”

“Excuse?”

“Are you waiting for your wife? Girlfriend?”

Milo nodded.

You’re always waiting for her, his brother once said, his voice neutral, the possibility of war still distant.

When she came home after her first week at work, she had been so happy she could not fall asleep. She stayed up late into the night, reading, and still seemed rested in the morning. The arguments started during the first General Assembly and continued into the following year. You don’t want me to be happy, she said, a few weeks before she left. She took her clothes and her books, leaving behind a single white bookcase, its empty shelves echoing her absence.

The woman limped off towards the other side of the lot. Why hadn’t she parked in the handicapped spot? Maybe someone else had taken it. Maybe she did not see herself as needing it.

Novak would be Vladmir’s age now, early fifties. They had not spoken since that phone call, and for all Milo knew, his brother — older, wiser, once much admired — was dead.

Two women emerged from the elevator, laughing and talking. Their heels rang out on the concrete, and Milo knew before he saw her black hair, that one of them was Serafina. She was wearing black pumps and a skirt that came to her knees. In her arms, she carried a sheaf of papers, and a black briefcase hung over her shoulder. Her gestures were animated, and he felt a pain so sharp in his side, his breath caught and he had to stop himself from crying out.

Milo opened the suitcase. Was this all it took? A broken heart, a sense of injustice, someone to blame?

He could hear voices echoing across the empty garage as he reduced the device to its parts: a detonator cap, a broken timer, and a small piece of pipe. Vladmir and Jas’s idea of a joke. Or a test. You’re with us or you’re with them. Not small bang, but no bang. Once he’d had friends who talked about fractals and string theory; now he hung out with fools, aimless men who had given up. For this he’d left Aggie behind the dumpster. When she tried to follow them, Milo had hissed and stomped at her, embarrassed and ashamed for Serafina to see him behave so cruelly.

When had he become a man who would plant a bomb to make a point? When words failed, Jas had said, one must use force, and Milo, in a weak moment, had agreed.

Milo snapped the suitcase shut and pushed himself out of the car, his legs stiff and cold, and walked around to where he could be seen. A heavy certainty rimmed with regret settled in him. All that was good had passed now. A car approached — a maroon Kia — and slowed down.

“Milo?”

He walked over to the open window. Her face, round and pale, framed by smooth brown hair, was lovelier to him now than ever before. He swallowed hard.

“You left this behind,” he said, holding up the case, flashing the gold lettering at her.

Serafina said something to her companion.

“You can put it in the trunk,” she said. “It’s open.”

Milo walked around to the back of the car. The trunk was pristine, unlike Vladmir’s with its empty beer cans and old tires. He slammed the lid with a lot more force than he intended and walked back to the window.

“How did you get in?” Serafina asked. Her lipstick was bright red, fresh and glossy. He wanted to ask her where she was going. There was a time when she would have told him, and he wouldn’t have listened, or would have only half listened, hearing secretary for interpreter, training for job. Now where she went was none of his business.

Remember Aggie? he said.

I remember many things.

Voices came from the radio in the car, and the woman in the driver’s seat, with her soft jaw line and streaks of grey in her black hair, stared straight ahead.

How many words for sorry, and now, not one came to his lips.

“There’s a little striped cat that sleeps on the back porch of the house. The landlady feeds him. We call him Porch.”

He could feel the words tumbling over his tongue. He knew how he looked, in his old canvas coat and jeans, dirty sneakers, shaggy brown hair. Desperate. Homeless. Like a refugee.

The driver undid her coat buttons and shifted in her seat until she had pulled her coat off, nearly knocking Serafina in the face.

“Miloje,” Serafina said. Her eyes were clear and steady behind her glasses. When had she started wearing glasses full time?

“He left us. She said he was sowing oats. I thought he was dead. Then he came back.”

“What do you want?”

He wanted to know why she was speaking English. He wanted to know why she never asked about his brother, his mother, his younger sister. Didn’t she want to know why he never called home? But this woman with Serafina’s face was a stranger, as strange to him as the brother who threatened him. He thought of the weeks she spent calling the neighbors to find out if Aggie was okay, and how he had ignored her crying. He could have been a better husband; she could have been a better wife.

“I want to go home,” Milo said and returned to the car.

After a moment, he heard the KIA drive away. He started the Jetta. A blast of cold air hit him. In minutes, the car would be hot again. How to explain it all to Vladmir and Jas? He didn’t think he could find the words in English. He didn’t want to. In the rear view mirror, Milo saw a flash of red, the fender of a car parked in the corner. He remembered the gold Honda. The smile of a total stranger. The kiss blown in his direction. Her words, in slow motion.

You are so kind.