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Page 22.

— vii —

I will take you even further back, mon journal, to the moment when my father was a young U.S. navy officer who quasi-died in the sea after a German torpedo attack. He was a young clockmaker from New Haven, and confused as young people always are by hope and hormones. He’d left behind in New Haven a beautiful red-haired girl he would never see again, and did not have a woman in his life. Time stopped for him on the sunny green sea where dead men’s corpses floated still burning. His clock was stopped but his heart kept ticking. He was the only man on his ship to return from the dead. Time gradually fixed his clock and his life resumed its orbit among the spheres.

How did he know he was actually alive? I would say because he felt a great irrational urge to survive, which is our natural instinct as humans. Maybe he felt some great purpose, because in the end he helped save the world from Stalin and atomic war. Stalin never forgave him, and had men like Viktor hunting my father for years. Only everything became smooshed in the cool condensate of time and atoms, and nothing was as it seemed, except the terrible loss I had known first-hand as a child in remote Anadyr.