“And here,” he went on, “the cycle has started again. Assama wallows in chaos. The rest of the world with its wars and unruliness won’t be far behind.”

“It seems a long way,” I said, “from here to Paradise. It’ll take an eternity.”

“Perhaps not. Just one rousing catastrophe could do it—some cataclysm of nature or of man and it’s Genesis revisited. And this time, maybe we’ll get it right.”

I had had enough of my father’s lurid eschatology. “I think a compromise might be in order,” I said.

“God doesn’t compromise.”

“Not God. I was referring to the stalemate between you and the General.”

“What do you suggest?”

“Something that would make both of you happy. Relatively happy.”

He thought for a moment. “I have a box of hand grenades. We could divide them up and toss ’em at each other.”

“You could teach the troops to toss them. At inanimate targets, I mean, taking proper safety cautions.”

“Hmmm…” Brows knit, he began to pace with the long stride of an infantryman, spurred, presumably, by my suggestion. Peculiar or not, he’s always center stage, I thought as I followed him with my eyes, whether he’s alone with me in a hovel compounded of mud and shit, or in the midst of a crowd in a marbled hall. I wondered if that radiating glory was infectious, whether those high-intensity chromosomes would one day assert themselves in me.

THIRTY-SEVEN
QUESTIONABLE BEHAVIOR

In the piercing afternoon light the sky hung like an angry bruise over the nuclear facility. The shell was completed, and sealed with a flat roof. Its geometrics were so free of ornamental frills that it looked less designed than engineered, an exercise in hypertrophic packaging, so long and so wide that, despite its twelve stories, it most resembled a clay-colored sardine can on a concrete slab. The land like a reluctant partner in miscegenation refused to embrace the monster that lay on it.

Although Abdul, since his ascension, had ordered Chatterton’s prodigious symphony reduced to a few otherwise unemployable tooters and all able hands over to the plant, Grady still raged against the slow pace. Whenever his baleful eye turned elsewhere, the workers dawdled on the side of the building away from the sun, like ravens crowding under the wings of a condor for precious shade.