The Nuclear Age

by Tim O'Brien

  Intelligence, that was part of it. And she also had a rare intuitive gift for the process of push and shove. She brought glitter to bear, and at times a certain ruthlessness.

  Cheerleader to rabble-rouser: It was a smooth, almost effortless transition. Surprising, maybe, and yet the impulse was there from the start. In a sense, I realized, cheerleaders are terrorists. All that zeal and commitment. A craving for control. A love of pageantry and crowds and slogans and swollen rhetoric. Power, too. The hot, energizing rush of absolute authority: Lean to the left, lean to the right. And then finally that shrill imperative: Fight—fight—fight! Don’t politicians issue the same fierce exhortations? Isn’t sex an active ingredient in the political enterprise? Pressing flesh, wooing the voters, stroking the Body Politic—aren’t these among the secret lures of any cheerleader?

  Too simplistic, no doubt, but during the spring of 1967 the parallels seemed uncanny.

  Sarah had the touch.

  Her generalship was impeccable. Her demands were unqualified.

  In public, but also in bed, she was a born leader.

  “Passion,” she’d say. “Make me squirm.”

  She’d use the bed like a trampoline. She’d lock her legs around me, tight, keeping the pressure on until I begged her to ease off.

  Then she’d snort.

  “Caution-caution,” she’d say. “No zip or zing. Can’t cut loose.”

  “It’s not that.”

  “It is that. I mean, here I am—perky Sarah—show me some sizzle, man. A girl wants to feel wanted.”

  “But I can’t just—”

  “Sizzle!”

  She’d kneel beside me. Coyly, without shame, she’d do a little trick with her breasts, an expanding-flattening thing.

  She might smile.

  “Now that,” she’d say, “is what I call perkiness. Mona Lisa with muscles. And besides, I’m fond of you. God knows why—opposites attract, I guess—but it’s all yours. Everything. The entire perky package.”

  “Nice,” I’d say, “it’s a nice package.”

  “So what’s the holdup?”

  “Nothing. Time, that’s all.”

  “I’m loyal, William. I won’t desert you. I’ve got sticking power, you know? High fidelity.”

  “I know that.”

  “So?”

  I’d shake my head and say, “Give it time.”

  Sometimes she’d nod, sometimes not.

  “Well, that’s very prudent,” she’d finally say, “but see, here’s the problem. Life has this weird quality called shortness. Places to go, minds to blow. It’s love I want. Worship.”

  And then she’d straddle me.

  She’d twirl her tongue against my throat.

  “Don’t be bashful,” she’d whisper. “Yank out the cork, man, let’s go steady.”

  The human heart, how do you explain it?

  I was gun-shy. I didn’t trust her. Too temperamental, I thought. Too flashy.

  A campus celebrity, wasn’t she?

  That whole aura—the rattlesnake eyes, the pink polish on her toenails, the plucked and penciled eyebrows—an exhibitionist, a compulsive show-off. In the warm weeks of late spring, it wasn’t uncommon to find her sunbathing out in front of the student union, oiled up and elegant, flaunting her assets in a string bikini and high-heeled sandals. She’d come to class in spangled red shorts; she’d show up for dinner in pearls and mesh stockings and a fake fox coat. When I asked about all this, Sarah would only shrug: “The Age of Image,” she’d tell me. “Project or perish, it’s that simple.”

  But it wasn’t simple. The psychological contradictions were stunning. An intelligent girl, she played the coquette; a dignified girl, she played vulgar. And yet she was also oddly vulnerable, even little-girlish at times. She could be gentle; she could be vicious. It wasn’t a split personality, it was fractured.

  How could I take the risk?

  In part, no doubt, I was held back by the old doomsday principle, an unwillingness to expose myself. But it was more than that.

  Politics, too—she was aggressive in the extreme. True, she had a conscience, and tremendous charisma, but even so I could detect the intimidating shape of things to come. In May, I remember, she led a midnight raid on the ROTC offices in the basement of the humanities building—no damage done, just a statement of intent, but a day or two later she began pushing for even more drastic measures. She had no interest in compromise. She knew where the screws were.

  “Either you’re serious about this,” Sarah told me one morning at breakfast, “or you’re a twit. There’s no halfway. Like your poster says, real bombs, you can’t hide your head. Pain leads to pain. Ask the kids in Saigon.”

  I nodded.

  “Fine,” I said, “but sometimes it seems just a little excessive.”

  “You think so?”

  “A little.”

  Sarah gazed at her coffee cup. Complicated events were occurring along the surfaces of her eyes.

  “Well, that’s a pity,” she finally said. “Excessive. Tell it to the White House. Go lay it on the Joint Chiefs, I’d be real interested in some professional feedback.” Then her voice went low. A husky, mocking tone. “You’re something else, pal. You want this nice happy world, all roses, except you get all squeamish when somebody goes out and tries to make it happen. The jellyfish mentality.”

  “Forget it. You win.”

  “I do,” she said softly, “I win.”

  She finished her coffee and stood up.

  “And one more thing. So far you haven’t seen diddly. Excessively speaking, I mean.”

  An unpleasant tone, I thought.

  Culottes to sansculotte—a radical realignment. The question, though, was why. There were many such questions: Why politics? Why so sudden? Why so rabid? And why me? Why stick with a jellyfish?

  Except in the most superficial sense, I didn’t really know her. Even the facts seemed unsubstantial.

  A cheerleader, of course.

  But why?

  A history major. Pre-law. Brains, obviously, but not legal brains.

  A birthmark below her right breast.

  Thick blackish brown hair freshened by modern chemistry.

  A small, recurring fever blister at her lower lip. I’d often catch her toying with it, applying ointments. “It’s a fatal flaw,” she’d say, “for the femme fatale.”

  Flippant.

  Sarcastic to the point of wise-ass. But it was almost certainly a kind of camouflage, like her cosmetics, the gaudy nail polish and lipstick and mascara. At times, I thought, it was as if she were hiding herself, or from herself.

  Reticence, maybe.

  Maybe fear.

  A splay-footed way of walking, like a deer. A certain stiffness in her posture. As a kid, she told me, she’d had polio, a mild case. But no details. When I pressed her about it, Sarah smiled and tapped her chest. “Nothing serious,” she said. “Iron lungs.”

  Her mother was dead.

  Her father was a mortician.

  Does it matter? She wasn’t gloomy, and she rarely talked about it, but I often found myself imagining what it must’ve been like to grow up in that big white funeral home on Main Street. How did it feel? What was the emotional residue? I was curious, of course, but she wouldn’t respond to even the most basic questions.

  “Don’t be a ghoul,” she’d say.

  Or she’d say, “No big mystery. Luscious me, sugar and spice. Don’t analyze it, William, just adore it.”

  A playful, uninhibited girl.

  And yet there were also moods of complete withdrawal. It could happen instantly. In bed, she’d peel off her clothes, clowning, then suddenly her whole face would freeze. She’d slide away. She’d pull a pillowcase over her head and crawl up on my desk and squat there like a statue. Tempting, I’d think. Not lewd, not immodest, just the white pillowcase and that awesome nakedness. “Sarah,” I’d say quietly, but she wouldn’t budge. There was something chilling about it, something desperate. Why
the mask? Why, sometimes, would she clamp the pillowcase at her throat and whisper, “I want to be wanted. Get reckless, William. Go for broke—love me.”

  And in my own way I did.

  Granted, it was a judicious sort of love, one step at a time, but over the spring of our junior year I discovered the great pleasures and bondings of a political romance. I was part of something. I belonged. At our Committee meetings, I was perfectly content to let Sarah take charge; I admired her poise and control; I got a kick out of watching how she kept Ollie and Tina under tight rein. I liked the closeness. I liked being seen with her. In the geology lab, late at night, I liked it when she’d come up behind me and turn off my microscope and say, “For Christ sake, man, stop playing with your rocks.” Endearment, I liked that, too. How she held my arm walking to class, how she always stood beside me during our noon vigils at the cafeteria. Many things. The times I’d wake up to find my hands tied to the bedposts. The way she’d sleep with one knee hooked tenderly around my neck.

  And the sex.

  Congress, she called it.

  “All rise!” she’d cry. “Congress is in session!”

  In a way, naturally, I was grateful for this, but there were times when I thought she took it too far. It was the rah-rah side of her personality, too flamboyant, and one evening I asked if she’d mind toning it down.

  Sarah gave me a hard look.

  “Down?” she said. “Discreet, you mean?”

  “Well, no, I just wish you’d—”

  “Demure? Candy and flowers? A nice little Southern belle—sit around batting my eyes?”

  She twisted away.

  It was a warm spring evening, very humid, and she was naked except for a chrome bracelet. She got down on the floor and began a furious set of exercises, sit-ups and leg-lifts. I could see goose bumps forming in the flesh at her nipples.

  After a moment she laughed.

  “Discretion,” she said bitterly, “is for dead people. Am I dead?” Her tone surprised me. The anger was real. “I grew up in a goddamn mortuary, remember? Organ music day and night. Flowers up the bazoo. You wouldn’t believe how discreet a stiff can be. Very modest. They’re dead, get it? Tickle them, they don’t budge—real coy, real dead. You don’t get deader. You know what dead is? It’s dead.”

  Then she gave me a brief synopsis of life and death in a funeral home.

  The various odors. The comings and goings. How her father’s workshop had been located directly beneath her own bedroom, one floor down, and how at night she used to lie there with a pillow pushed up to her face. Like a gas mask, she said. Wonderful fragrances—just what a kid needs at bedtime.

  She paused in mid-sit-up. There was a soft, faraway look in her eyes.

  Then she shrugged.

  “Anyway, I know what discreet is,” she said. “Plain flat dead. You take demure, I’ll take rigor clitoris any time.”

  “I didn’t mean—”

  “Besides,” she said tightly, staring at me, “you better consider the alternatives. Who else would go near that mincemeat pecker of yours? Like a battle zone.”

  “A bike accident, I explained that.”

  “Oh, sure, a fine story.” She shook her head. “Scars and stitches. Looks like you tried to poke a blender.”

  “Sarah—”

  “Discretion!” she said. “Go paste Band-Aids on your weewee, Congress is adjourned.”

  A troubled girl, that much was clear.

  Part iron, part mush. Neurosis maybe. But how far can you dig into a personality? How much do you finally accept at face value? Do motives matter?

  Politics, for example.

  Why ask why?

  Clearly, in Sarah’s case, the war deeply offended her. The pain was genuine. I remember how she closed her eyes during those made-for-TV combat clips; I remember the casualty count she kept on a bulletin board in her dorm room. “The thing about a corpse,” she once told me, “is you can’t fix it. All that formaldehyde, but nothing moves. Poor fuckers just lie there.” Psychology seemed superfluous. From my own experience, I’d learned to distrust the easy explanations of human behavior; it’s all too ambiguous; the inner forces ricochet like pinballs. John Reed: a Harvard cheerleader. How do you draw conclusions? The real world, I thought, is unresponsive to Rorschach tests. You can’t shrink a warhead. Ultimately, you take things as they are, you accept the imponderables, you find harmony in the overwhelming incongruity. Sarah Strouch: schizophrenic, perhaps. Unpredictable. But there was a war on, people were dying, and the realities conditioned consciousness, not the reverse. Issues of personality became trivial. Was Noah paranoid? Who sank and who swam? In a crowded theater, if someone yells “Fire!” do you respond by inquiring into matters of the mind? If a madman holds a knife to your throat, if a butcher goes berserk, do you pause to administer a character inventory? And if the bombs are real. If you see a missile rising over the Little Bighorn. If you can conceive of last things. If there’s a war on. If you care.

  She was a mystery.

  Only one thing for certain, Sarah Strouch understood the critical dynamic of our age. It was all escalation.

  On May 21, 1967, two weeks before summer break, she gave Ollie Winkler the green light. Once more, there’s that time-space slippage—the beginning mixes with the end, effect becomes cause—but I can see Sarah commanding a bonfire rally down at the river. She’s wearing her silver letter sweater and blue culottes, she’s got the crowd leaning left and right. There’s a flush at her cheeks. And I see Ollie Winkler bending over a set of bomb blueprints. “Not big bombs,” he says, “just attention-grabbers,” then he slips on a black armband and says, “Sergeant at arms! It takes arms, like in deadly force.” There were occupied offices. Picket lines went up in front of Old Main. My own role was limited, but I remember the sound of breaking glass, a jimmied lock, how we effected entry into the Dean of Students’ office on that last warm night in May. I remember holding a flashlight while Ollie set up the ordnance. It was well after midnight, and there were echoes and creakings, and I remember the rubber gloves on my hands, the reflections, the sudden thought that things had passed into a vicious new dimension. The flashlight plucked out random objects in the dark. A typewriter, I remember, and a vase of lilacs, and a slender white fuse. There were numerous shadows. There was ambiguity. And there was also, briefly, the image of terrible waste. I could see gunfire. Then the flashlight wobbled—it seemed greased and heavy. Behind me, or off to the side, there was a whisper, then someone laughed and Tina Roebuck appeared and pried away the flashlight and said, “Poor boy.” But it didn’t matter. The present was firmly fixed to the future; the pattern was evident. This, I realized, would surely lead to that. There would be wastage, no doubt, and breakage, and abbreviation by force. My thoughts were precise. I remember the moment of stealth when Ollie struck the match. And the yellow-red glow against Sarah’s face, the way she hesitated and moved to a window, then smiled, then came back and touched my arm.

  “Here,” she said softly, “is how it goes. You know?”

  I made an indefinite motion with my shoulders. I was inclined toward silence.

  Tina Roebuck giggled.

  “William?”

  I remember backing off. I remember thinking: What do I think? There was that delicate white fuse, like dental floss, and the burning match, and the metallic, curiously amplified sound of my own breathing. “From now on,” Sarah said, “it’s rough-and-tumble. Question is, do you understand?”

  I did not.

  The human heart, I thought, how do you explain it?

  But I shrugged and said, “Of course.”

  “Of course what?”

  “This.”

  “You’re sure?”

  “Like black and white,” I said.

  The summer went fast. Fort Derry seemed smaller now, and dead, but Sarah gave it motion: a Fourth of July picnic, nights at the drive-in theater. “If you love me,” she said, “you’ll steal that speaker. Do you love me?” Cruising up Ma
in Street in my father’s big Buick. Windows open, Revolution on the radio, Sarah tapping time against the dashboard. Root beers at the A&W. Pinball and cherry phosphates at Jig’s Confectionery. Sex in any number of places; she loved the risk of it. “Don’t be a lame duck,” she’d say, “you’ve got congressional responsibilities.” Sarah sunbathing—a hammock and sunglasses and deep brown skin. In midsummer we took a tent and sleeping bags up into the Sweethearts, just the two of us, and for nine days we eased the time away, exploring, walking the canyons, trading secrets late at night. A campfire, I remember … She said she loved me. Quite a lot, she said. I asked why, and Sarah said, “Who knows? Chemistry,” and I said, “The big explainer.” I remember stars and crickets. One night, very late, she told me about a crazy three-legged dog she used to have. Got hit by a car, she said. Lost a leg. Still fast, though, kept chasing cars, kept running away, and how one day it started running and never stopped. “That rotten crippled dog,” she said, “I hated it, but I loved it. That’s chemistry for you.” Things were quiet. Sarah poked the fire and talked about the first time she ever kissed a boy. She told me about a vacation to Chicago. She told me her dreams. “Stupid, I know,” she said, “but sometimes I dream I’m—you know—I’m sort of dead, I’m in this dark closet, I can smell these mothballs, and then, bang, somebody knocks on the door—I don’t know who, just this guy—and he asks me what it’s like, being dead, what it feels like. And you know what I tell him? I tell him it feels real alone. Alone, I tell him. That’s the worst part.” Sarah looked at me, then looked away. There were pines, I remember, and those jagged mountains, and we had our sleeping bags zipped together. “I want you to want me,” she said, “like real love.” Then she smiled. She said she was fertile, she could feel it. She wanted children someday. There was the war, of course, things to do, but when it was over she wanted all the peaceful stuff. Babies, she said, and a house and a family. But she wanted to travel first. She wanted to see Rio. “You and me together,” she said, and her hands wandered. I could smell smoke and mosquito repellent. “You and me, William, we could do it, couldn’t we? Have babies, maybe? I mean, we’d probably have to get married first, blood tests and so on, but it’s possible, isn’t it? And Rio, too. I’ve always had this wild fantasy about Rio. The sun and everything. All the tight brown bodies, those weird masks they wear at Carnival time. Sounds like I’d fit right in. A good life. Adventure, I want that, but I want … I don’t know what I want exactly. I want you to tear down those walls. Does that make sense? You build these walls. And, God, sometimes I can’t get through, I try but I can’t. Just walls, and you hide there, and I can’t break through. My own fault, maybe. Sometimes I act pretty rough, I know that. But I’m not rough. Down inside I’m not so rough. And I get afraid sometimes, I need you to say things, like you care about me and you won’t ever … That damned dog. You believe that? Muggs, that was her name, that crazy rotten dog. Three legs, but lickety-split, she wouldn’t listen, she wouldn’t stop chasing those goddamn cars … Am I rambling? I guess I am. But I don’t mean to act so rough. I hate myself sometimes, I really do, I’d like to rip my tongue out, but it’s like self-defense or something. Anyhow, I do have these feelings. Rio and a billion babies. It’s possible, don’t you think?”