The Day Before Midnight by Stephen Hunter

friendliest smile she’d ever seen.
    “I want to go out,” she said.
    “Oh, no, Poo,” he said. “Just for a little while longer you have to be inside with Herman. We can be chums. Best buddies. Pals. Okay? Then you can go out and play and it will be all fun. You’ll have a good time, you’ll see. It’ll be great fun for everybody. And Herman will bring you a present. I’ll bring you a new Pretty Pony, all right? A pink one. A pink unicorn, just like the one you have there, all right, little girl?”
    “C’n I have a drink of water?” Poo asked.
    “Of course,” he said. “Then I’ll tell you a story.”
    Peter Thiokol was rambling.
    He could feel his sentence trail off in a bramble of unrelated clauses, imprecise thoughts, and hopelessly mixed metaphors until it lost its way altogether and surrendered to incoherence.
    “Um, so, um, it’s the decapitation theory that holds, you see, that a surgical strike aimed at leadership bunkers, if it should come, and of course we all hope it won’t, anyway, um …”
    The note card before him was no help.
    It simply said, in his almost incomprehensible scrawl, “Decapitation theory—explain.”
    Their faces were so bored. One girl chewed gum and focused on the lights. A boy looked angrily into space. Someone was reading the feature section of
The Sun.
    It wasn’t a great day in 101, the big lecture room in the basement of Shaffer Hall on the campus of the Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, where Peter Thiokol convened Strategic Theory, an Introduction three times a week for an ever-shrinking group of undergrads, most of whom wanted to be M.D.s anyway. How do you reach these damned kids?
    Just make it interesting, one of his new colleagues had suggested.
    But it
is
interesting, Peter had said.
    He struggled to find his focus, a problem he’d been having ever since the problems with Megan.
    “Decapitation, of course, is from head cutting-off of, that is, it’s the idea that you could paralyze a whole society by sort of removing, like in the French Revolution, with the, um, the guillotine, the—”
    “Uh, Dr. Thiokol?”
    Ah! A question! Peter Thiokol
loved
it when someone in his class asked a question, because it got him off the hook, even if for just a minute or two. But there were hardly ever any questions.
    “Yes?” he said eagerly. He couldn’t see who had spoken.
    “Uh,” an attractive girl asked, “are we going to get our midterms back before we have the final?”
    Peter sighed, seeing the pile of exams, ragged blue booklets smeared with incomprehensible chickentracks in ballpoint, sitting on the table next to his bed. He’d read a few, then lost interest. They were so boring.
    “Well, I’m almost done with them,” he lied. “And yes, you will get them back before the final. But maybe nuclear war will break out and we’ll have to cancel the final.”
    There was some laughter, but not much. Peter lurched onward, trying to relocate his direction. He had expected to be so much better at this, because he loved to show off so for Megan.
    “You show off
very
well, I must admit,” Megan Wilder, his ex-wife, had once said. “It’s your second greatest talent, after thinking up ways to end the world.”
    The teaching had seemed to offer so much after his breakdown—a new start, a sense of freedom from the pressures of the past, a new city, new opportunities, a discipline he loved. But the kids turned out not to be very interesting to him, nor he to them. They just sat there. Their faces blurred after a while. They were so passive. And this performing took so much out of him. He went home at night bleached out, too tired to think or remember.
    He’d just stare at the phone, trying to figure out if he should call Megan or not, and praying that she’d call him.
    The memory was still brittle. He’d even seen her two weeks ago, in a wretched, maybe heroic, attempt at reconciliation. She’d simply showed up after months of staying out of touch.