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That's as much as I knew. He was working on a weapon that could potentially wipe out the planet.
And there he was, a quiet man in the seat by the window.
ONCE WE'D MOVED OUT OVER THE BAY, THE WATER MADE ITSELF known. It was so bright and vast, stretching off into the haze. Opp looked out the window. Then, when the train pulled into the tunnel through Yerba Buena, he got up and went to stand by the door. Once again, he faced out the window, but now, in the tunnel, there was nothing to see. Only a light passing, every so often, from an occasional dead man's hole in the darkness.
I tried to imagine what he could be thinking. Maybe he was counting the holes. Maybe he was watching his own reflection, swimming on the glass in the window. From the side, he looked blind and determined, like a man getting ready to make a mistake, the inevitability of which he's already accepted.
Or maybe that's just what I saw. It's possible I was reading him wrong. Like I've said, I slept badly that summer. Sometimes I was up all night on the job. Other nights I was at home, and I still had trouble sleeping. Once I'd turned out the lamp, there was always that conversation with Warren to go over again.
Then I'd picture the scene: me and my little brother, out on the back stoop, the moths knocking themselves out on the streetlight.
May had gone into the bedroom to sleep. You could smell the jasmine crawling over the opposite fence. Warren was standing, leaning on the stoop railing, and I'd taken a seat on the steps.
For a while, we stayed out there without having much to say to each other. It was a strange moment between us. Warren was shipping out the next morning. It was the end of our three days together, and now that we were alone we both felt compelled to imitate a brotherly closeness.
We sat there in silence. We were trying, I think, to come up with something to say. Something conclusive to allow us to imagine that in the course of three days, we'd gotten close. That I'd miss him, and that he would miss me. That we'd be in each other's minds even after he'd shipped out in the morning.
But it wasn't that easy. How do you miss a brother you never really knew in the first place? The last time I'd seen Warren was when he was a kid, when my mother packed up the car and asked which of us would come with her. He went, and I stayed. And then he showed up ten years later, the week before he shipped out to the Pacific, and it's true that nothing went wrong.
He stayed with us in the new house. He met May. We played cards. We had a good time. We smoked cigarettes and listened to records.
But there was still something unnatural about it. And that last night, on the back porch, neither one of us knew how to take his leave in a way that would seem normal. We sat there in the darkness, with the jasmine vines in the alley, and the streetlight flickering, and the dog a few yards down occasionally yowling, and I couldn't think of the right thing to say, so I was grateful when he started talking. But then I realized where he was going: Asking about where May grew up. Asking about where she went to high school.
I got a metal taste in my mouth. Then I stood up, stubbed out my cigarette, and headed back into the kitchen, and Warren left the next day. I drove him to the base.
The whole way there, neither one of us spoke. At the gate, with those enormous ships flying their flags behind us, we both got out of the car. We stood there awkwardly for a moment: me and my brother, who I'd never known all that well in the first place.
My last memory of him was when he was a kid, his face a moon in the car window, jutting out from the jumble of suitcases and lamps and spare pillows our mother thought to throw in there. Now he was grown and getting ready to ship out to fly planes over Japan, and the point he wanted to make never got made. That conversation just hung in the air around the back stoop, gathering the importance of conversations that never got finished.
Excerpted from Trinity by Louisa Hall. Copyright © 2018 by Louisa Hall. Excerpted by permission of Ecco. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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