Early in the morning a flight of them boomed through and I jumped awake, a little trembly. They must have made me dream of those German 88-millimeter all-purpose rifles we used to admire and fear so much.

My body was prickly with fear sweat as I lay in the gathering morning light and listened to the slender spindles of malice whining away in the distance. I thought how that shudder was under the skin of everybody in the world, not in the mind, deep under the skin. It’s not the jets so much as what their purpose is.

When a condition or a problem becomes too great, humans have the protection of not thinking about it. But it goes inward and minces up with a lot of other things already there and what comes out is discontent and uneasiness, guilt and a compulsion to get something—anything—before it is all gone. Maybe the assembly-line psychoanalysts aren’t dealing with complexes at all but with those warheads that may one day be mushroom clouds. It does seem to me that nearly everyone I see is nervous and restless and a little loud and gaily crazy like people getting drunk on New Year’s Eve. Should auld acquaintance be forgot and kiss your neighbor’s wife.

I turned my head toward mine. She was not smiling in her sleep. Her mouth was drawn down and there were lines of weariness around her squinched-shut eyes and so she was sick, because that’s the way she looks when she is sick. She is the wellest wife in the world until she is sick, which isn’t often, and then she is the sickest wife in the world.

Another flight of jets exploded through sound. We had maybe a half-million years to get used to fire and less than fifteen to build thinking about this force so extravagantly more fierce than fire. Would we ever have the chance to make a tool of this? If the laws of thinking are the laws of things, can fission be happening in the soul? Is that what is happening to me, to us?

I remember a story Aunt Deborah told me long ago. Early in the last century some of my people were Cambellites. Aunt Deborah was a child then, but she remembered how the end of the world was coming at a certain time. Her parents gave everything away, everything they owned but the bed sheets. Those they put on and at the predicted time they went to the hills to meet the End of the World. Dressed in sheets, hundreds of people prayed and sang. The night came and they sang louder and danced and as it got near time there was a shooting star, she said, and everybody screamed. She could still remember the screaming. Like wolves, she said, like hyenas, although she had never heard a hyena. Then the moment came. White-dressed men and women and children held their breaths. The moment went on and on. The children got blue in the face—and then it passed. It was done and they were cheated out of their destruction. In the dawn they crept down the hill and tried to get back the clothes they had given away, and the pots and pans and their ox and their ass. And I remember knowing how bad they must have felt.

I think what brought that back was the jets—all that enormous effort and time and money to stockpile all that death. Would we feel cheated if we never used it? We can shoot rockets into space but we can’t cure anger or discontent.

My Mary opened her eyes. “Ethan,” she said, “you’re talking in your mind. I don’t know what it’s about but it’s loud. Stop thinking, Ethan.”

I was going to suggest that she give up drink but she looked too miserable. I don’t always know when not to joke, but this time I said, “Head?”

“Yes.”

“Stomach?”

“Yes.”

“All over?”

“All over.”

“I’ll get you something.”

“Get me a grave.”

“Stay down.”

“I can’t. I’ve got to get the children off to school.”

“I’ll do it.”

“You’ve got to go to work.”

“I’ll do it, I tell you.”

After a moment she said, “Ethan, I don’t think I can get up. I feel too bad.”

“Doctor?”

“No.”

“I can’t leave you alone. Can Ellen stay with you?”

“No, she has examinations.”

“Could I call up Margie Young-Hunt to come over?”

“Her phone is out. She’s getting a new thingamabob.”

“I can go by and ask her.”

“She’d kill anybody that waked her this early.”

“I could slip a note under her door.”

“No, I don’t want you to.”

“Nothing to it.”

“No, no. I don’t want you to. I don’t want you to.”

“I can’t leave you alone.”

“That’s funny. I feel better. I guess it was shouting at you that did it. Well, it’s true,” she said, and to prove it she got up and put on her dressing gown. She did look better.

“You’re wonderful, my darling.”

I cut myself shaving and went down to breakfast with a red tatter of toilet paper sticking to my face.

No Morph standing on the porch picking his teeth when I went by. I was glad. I didn’t want to see him. I hurried just in case he might try to catch up with me.

When I opened the alley door I saw the brown bank envelope that had been pushed under it. It was sealed and bank envelopes are tough. I had to get out my pocket knife to slit it open.

Three sheets of paper from a five-cent lined school pad, written on with a soft lead pencil. A will: “I, being in my right mind . . .” and “In consideration I . . .” A note of hand: “I agree to repay and pledge my . . .” Both papers signed, the writing neat and precise. “Dear Eth: This is what you want.”

The skin on my face felt as hard as a crab’s back. I closed the alley door slowly as you’d close a vault. The first two sheets of paper I folded carefully and placed in my wallet, and the other— I crumpled it and put it in the toilet and pulled the chain. It’s a high box toilet with a kind of step in the bowl. The balled paper resisted going over the edge, but finally it did.

The alley door was a little open when I emerged from the cubicle. I thought I had closed it. Going toward it, I heard a small sound and, looking up, I saw that damn cat on one of the top storage shelves hooking out with its claws for a hanging side of bacon. It took a long-handled broom and quite a chase to drive it out into the alley. As it streaked past me, I swiped at it and missed and broke the broom handle against the doorjamb.

There was no sermon for the canned goods that morning. I couldn’t raise a text. But I did get out a hose to wash down the front sidewalk and the gutter too. Afterward I cleaned the whole store, even corners long neglected and choked with flug. And I sang too:

I know it’s not a song, but I sang it.