The Nuclear Age

by Tim O'Brien

  I smiled at the pillowcase.

  “Except?”

  “Yes,” she said. “Except there’s still that ladder I told you about.”

  “And me?”

  “You.”

  “No grand destiny, Sarah. A guy on the run.”

  “Agreed.”

  “So where do I fit?”

  She waited a moment. Outside, there were crickets and night birds.

  “Difficult question,” she said. “There’s always Sweden or Hudson Bay, right? Hide your head. Cover your eyes and wish the war away.”

  “I didn’t say—”

  “William, listen to me. I love you, you know that, but sometimes—lots of times—I can’t help wondering about your backbone. All that bullshit about a dangerous world. The bombs are real, la-di-dah, but you don’t ever do anything, just crawl under your Ping-Pong table. That jellyfish attitude, I despise it. Despise, that’s the only word. I love you, but the despising makes it hard.”

  Sarah turned and made her way toward the bed. She was attractive, I thought, in her chrome bracelet and white pillowcase.

  For a few moments we lay still.

  “Involvement,” she said. “In a day or two, I’m afraid, it’ll get very rough around here, and if you can’t hack it—”

  “A warning?”

  “No, just a statement. Love and war. Sooner or later you have to choose sides.”

  Six splendid days.

  On the seventh we were roused a half hour before dawn.

  A bell, a shrill whistle. “Up, up!” someone yelled, and then another voice, much louder: “Haul ass!”

  We assembled in the courtyard.

  A single rank, stiff at attention. All around us were khakied soldiers with heavy boots and bad tempers. “Freeze!” someone shouted, and we froze.

  Dream time, I decided.

  I concentrated on the sounds. Across the courtyard, in shadows, a door slammed shut. There was the squeal of a bullhorn.

  We stood with our backs to a tile wall.

  At noon we were still there.

  Near midnight Tina said, “Wow,” then smiled and collapsed. But infirmity was not allowed. After a moment one of the soldiers hoisted her back to a standing position. No explanations, just blood in the feet. Speech was prohibited. Eighteen hours, I thought, then later I thought: twenty hours. Mostly, though, I tried to keep from thinking. Don’t think, I’d think. Then I’d think: this world of ours. But I refused to think about it. A matter of moral posture. Shoulders square, spine stiff. I calculated the precise specifications of pain, quantifying things, squaring off the roots, letting the numbers pile up as a kind of insulation.

  And then the zeros came. Blank time, nothing at all. When I looked up, it was full daylight.

  Two men stood staring. They were dressed identically in combat fatigues, jungle boots, and black berets. Their skin, too, was black, and their eyes.

  “Oooo, lookie,” one said, and smiled.

  The other did not smile.

  They surveyed us for a time, then the first man—the smiler—stepped forward and said, “Hi, there, kiddies. Welcome to camp.”

  His companion snorted.

  The smiler kept smiling. It was an extraordinary smile, sharp-toothed and wolfish. He prowled back and forth, gracefully, stopping once to wipe sweat from Ollie’s forehead, once to inspect the fat at Tina’s stomach.

  “These campers,” he said gently, “are in sore need of outdoor recreation.”

  “Bullshit,” said the second man.

  The first man chuckled.

  “Pitiful, I concur.” He smiled and make a tsking noise. Stooping, he ran his hand along the surface of Tina’s stomach. Then suddenly he stopped smiling.

  “My name,” he said, “is Ebenezer Keezer. This here gentleman is Nethro.” He paused to let these facts take shape. “So let’s everybody get acquainted. Real loud an’ happy. Say hi to my pal Nethro.”

  “Hi,” we said.

  “Loud, children.”

  “Hi!” we shouted.

  “Bullshit,” said Nethro. “Can’t hear nothin’.”

  “Volume, people. Blow it out. On three—ready?”

  On three we yelled, “Hi!”

  Nethro shook his head. He was a large, unhappy man. “Fuckers forgot my name. They s’posed to say, Hi, there, Nethro.”

  “Legitimate truth,” Ebenezer said. “Repeat them your name.”

  “My name,” said Nethro, “is fuckin’ Nethro.”

  “Again,” said Ebenezer.

  He counted to three, and on three we shouted, “Hi, there, Nethro!”

  Nethro seemed unimpressed.

  “Nobody waved.”

  “Beg your pardon?” said Ebenezer.

  “Didn’t wave,” Nethro said. “Not one wave in the whole bullshit crowd. My ego’s hurt.”

  Ebenezer Keezer sighed. Carefully, he took off his beret, inspected it for dust, put it on again, then stepped up to Ned Rafferty and stared at him with an expression of solemn perplexity. His nose was a half inch from Rafferty’s forehead.

  “A level answer,” he said softly. “You forget to wave?”

  “I guess.”

  “Oh, you guess,” Ebenezer purred, smiling again. “First day at camp an’ you don’ display no fundamental politeness. Where’s your salutations, shithead?”

  “Sorry,” Rafferty said, and grinned.

  “Oooo! Man’s sorry, Nethro.”

  “I overheard.”

  “Man claims sorryhood.”

  Nethro shrugged and scuffed the toe of his boot against the courtyard tiles. He seemed genuinely aggrieved.

  “Sorry don’ do it,” he said. “Don’ help the hurt none.”

  “Shitheads,” said Ebenezer Keezer. “What they require, I submit, is politeness practice.”

  “Let’s practice ’em,” said Nethro.

  There was distress in the courtyard. Reality, I surmised, was passé. Here was a new dimension. Over the morning hours we engaged in supervised waving practice. “Hi, there!” we yelled, and we waved with both hands, vigorously. The courtesy was painful. I could feel it in my throat and shoulders. Nethro counted cadence, Ebenezer Keezer smiled and offered instruction in matters of form and posture, schooling us in the complexities of camp etiquette. It was a kind of basic training, clearly, but with numerous innovations. Standing there, waving, I recognized the diverse and intricate plenitude of a world on tilt.

  At noon Ebenezer Keezer clapped his hands and said, “Recreation time, people. Fun an’ games.”

  Single file, we marched through the courtyard and down a long grassy slope to the tennis courts. There were no rackets or balls. The game was called Fictitious Tennis, and the rules, I thought, were capricious. “Advantage, Shithead!” Ebenezer cried—“Quiet, please!”—and then we pantomimed the mechanics of serve and volley, rushing the net, backpedaling in pursuit of high phantom lobs. “Out!” Nethro would yell. Or he’d yell, “Let! Two serves!” There were no disputed calls. For me, at least, it was hard to maintain a keen competitive edge.

  The match went five sets. An awards ceremony, a quick lunch, then we convened on the volleyball court.

  “No net,” said Ebenezer.

  “No problem,” said Nethro.

  In the late afternoon they led us on a nature hike. The pace was brisk, mostly running, and by dusk, when we trooped into the villa’s courtyard, things had approached the point of shutdown.

  We ate supper standing up.

  Afterward we were escorted into a small lecture hall. The room was bare except for a podium and five metal chairs.

  Ebenezer Keezer smiled at us.

  “This concludes,” he said, “our first day at camp. I trust we’re all relaxed.”

  His beret was gone. He wore a dark blue suit, a blue tie, a crisply starched white shirt with gold cuff links. His voice, too, had changed. There were no dropped consonants, no ghetto slurrings; it was the precise, polished voice of a corporate executive. Smoothly, referri
ng now and then to notes, he outlined the program that lay ahead. He stressed its rigors. The idea, he said, was to stop a war, which would require certain skills, and certain qualities of a physical nature, among them stamina and strength and the capacity to resist hardship. “Resistance,” he declared, “entails resistance.” Then he discussed the particulars of Vietnam. It was a firsthand account, largely anecdotal. He talked about the effects of white phosphorus on human flesh. He talked about anatomy. He described the consequences of a foot coming into contact with the firing mechanism of a Bouncing Betty, the reds and whites, the greenish-gray color of a man’s testicles in bright sunlight. He smiled at this, and winked. He leaned forward against the podium, adjusting his tie, and spoke quietly about a morning in 1966 when his platoon of marines had gone on a buffalo hunt in Quang Ngai province, how they’d entered the village at dawn, and burned it, and how, afterward, with the village burning, they had moved out into a broad paddy where the buffalo were—big slow water buffalo, he said, maybe a dozen, maybe twenty—and how the platoon had lined up in a single rank, as if on a firing range, and how without hunger or provocation the platoon had gone buffalo hunting—like the Wild West, he said, like Buffalo fucking Bill—how they put their weapons on automatic, M-6os and M-16s, how it was slaughter without aim, just firing to fire, pistols, too, and M-79s, and grenades, and how those slow stupid water buffalo stood there and took it broadside, didn’t run, didn’t panic, just took it, how chunks of fat and meat seemed to explode off their hides—how the horns exploded, and the tails and heads—but those ignorant damned buffalo, he said, they took it, they didn’t make sound, and how there was the smell of a burning village and munitions and those buffalo that wouldn’t run or die, just took it. Ebenezer paused and shuffled his papers. “That’s the Nam,” he said softly, “and it’s unbecoming. I’ve seen my share of buffalo. And you folks—you nice folks have not seen shit. Understand me? You have not seen shit.” There was conviction in the room. There was also, I thought, anger. Ebenezer Keezer folded his hands and smiled and went on to discuss evil. He was specific about atrocity and saturation bombing. The war, he told us, was a buffalo hunt, and we would be wise to disabuse ourselves of romantic notions regarding the propriety of peaceful protest and petitions of grievance. We were soldiers, he said. Volunteers one and all. It was an army. “Like in wartime,” he said, and his smile was cool and pleasant. “When there’s evil, you learn to absorb it. You build up your resistance. This here’s buffalo country.”

  He studied his notes, then nodded at Tina.

  “Young lady,” he said, “front and center.”

  Tina moved to the podium.

  Deftly, with the tip of his thumb, Ebenezer lifted her yellow T-shirt. “Yummy,” he whispered. Tina’s stomach was conspicuous under the white fluorescent lighting. Fish-colored, it seemed, bloated and pale and slightly bluish. She wore a white bra. Her breasts, too, were large, but Ebenezer ignored them.

  He chuckled and dipped a finger into the belly fat.

  “Now, then,” he said, “let us discuss obesity. You porkers gross me out.”

  He grasped Tina’s stomach with both hands.

  “Piggies!” he said.

  Tina squirmed but he held tight.

  “Fatsos! Grease!”

  Still smiling, Ebenezer bent down and put his mouth to her stomach and licked the flesh.

  “Pigs!” he yelled. “Pigs and pork chops—I want to eat it! Gobble it up, all those good juices. Can I eat your fat, girl?”

  Tina whimpered.

  “Say the word, I’ll definitely eat it. Yes, I will. I’ll swallow it.”

  “No,” said Tina.

  “One bite?”

  “No.”

  She tried to back away, but Ebenezer Keezer had her by the fat. Oddly, I found myself thinking about Mars bars, the relations between fantasy and gluttony. Eyes half shut, Ebenezer was nibbling at her belly.

  “Oink!” he said. “Go oink, babe. Give me a piggy squeal.”

  “Oink,” Tina said.

  “Louder!”

  “Oink!” she cried.

  “Oooo, good! Oink it up!”

  Tina oinked and wept.

  Later, when it was over, Ebenezer’s tone became philosophical. He dwelled on the need for physical fitness. Soldiers, he told us, are neither pigs nor pork chops. Resistance required resilience.

  “For the next sixty days,” he said, “you lardballs are my personal property. I say oink, you definitely oink. I say don’t oink, you definitely abstain from oinking. Same applies with Nethro. We own you. Questions?”

  There were no questions.

  “Wunderbar,” he said. “Sleep tight, kiddies. Tomorrow’s a weird day.”

  That night, as in many nights, I indulged in fantasy. It was a means of escape, a way of gliding from here-and-now to there-and-then, an instrument by which I could measure the disjunction between what was and what might be. I imagined myself in repose beneath a plywood Ping-Pong table. I imagined my father’s arms around me. I imagined, also, a world in which men would not do to men the things men so often do to men. It was a world without armies, without cannibalism or treachery or greed, a world safe and undivided. Fantasy, nothing else. But I pressed up against Sarah, stealing warmth, imagining I was aboard a spaceship sailing through the thin, sterile atmosphere of Mars, and below were the red dunes, the unmoving molecular tides, and I smiled and stroked Sarah’s hip and whispered, “Bobbi.” There was guilt, of course, but I couldn’t stop myself. Stupid, I thought, all fluff and air, but then I remembered Martian Travel, and the grass, and the great calm as we flew high over the darkened seaboard of North America. I remembered that Leonardo smile—eyes here, lips there, the blond hair and soft voice. I imagined embarking on a long pursuit. Pick up the airborne scent and track her down and carry her away. A desert island, maybe, or the planet Mars, where there would be quiet and civility and poetry recitals late at night. Peace, that’s all, just a fantasy.

  Over the first month it was all physical fitness. Reveille at dawn. Formation, inspection, waving practice. Then down to the beach for warm-up exercises. “Move it!” they’d yell. “Agility! Hostility! Make it hurt!” And it did hurt. Even Sarah felt it, even Rafferty. It was the kind of hurt that comes to visit and rearranges the spiritual furniture.

  Unreal, I’d think, but I couldn’t ignore the pain.

  There were jumping jacks, I remember. We ran and climbed ropes and took nature hikes at full speed. We learned to say “Yes, sir!” and “No, sir!” and little else. No use complaining, because the penalty was pain. There were push-ups and sit-ups and hot afternoons on the obstacle course. There was tear gas, too—I remember the sting. I remember Tina crying. All night, it seemed, she cried, and in the morning there was more pain.

  “Maniacs,” I told Sarah. “Psychosis. Deep in the crazies.”

  In the second week I came up hard against the barrier of self-pity. Here, I thought, was everything I’d run from. But you couldn’t run far enough or fast enough. You couldn’t dodge the global dragnet. The killing zone kept expanding. Reaction or revolution, no matter, it was a hazard to health either way.

  Day to day, I did what I could. Arms and legs, just the bodily demands. The days seemed to skid by, and even now, looking back, I remember very little in the way of detail.

  The fierce sun.

  Mushiness in the extremities.

  Ollie huffing, Tina straining under the forces of fat and gravity, Sarah’s lip swelling up in reaction to the tropical heat.

  I remember intense thirst. Intense hunger, too. Yearnings for Coca-Cola and the air-conditioned wonders of a Holiday Inn. America, I’d think, but this was somewhere else. We were tutored in hand-to-hand combat. We ran mock relay races up and down the white beaches. Often, at night, we were awakened and made to stand at attention against the courtyard wall.

  “A good waver,” Ebenezer Keezer told us, “is a rare cat in this day an’ age. Everywhere I go, I see half-ass waves that don’ tru
ly emanate from the inner soul. A sorry commentary. Collapse of the social fabric, that’s what it is.”

  “God’s word,” said Nethro. “Ebenezer and me, we just missionaries out to spread the wavin’ gospel.”

  “Tell it.”

  “I did. I tol’ it.”

  A sunny afternoon, and Tina Roebuck sat in the sand and folded her arms.

  She did not move.

  Squatting down beside her, Ebenezer Keezer frowned and said, “Oh, my. Tuckered Tina. El mucho fatigo?”

  She did not move and she did not speak.

  Ebenezer lifted her shirt, very gently.

  “I’m famished,” he murmured.

  But even then she was silent. Arms folded, she gazed straight ahead, northward, where the sea curved toward the Straits of Florida.

  Ebenezer pinched her stomach.

  “Let me eat it,” he said softly. “Be a good girl now, let me eat that yummy tummy.”

  But she did not move.

  A drugged, dreamy expression. Her eyes were empty. It was the emptiness that follows upon surrender, and one by one it happened to all of us.

  In mid-December, as we moved into our second full month, the curriculum turned increasingly technical. We learned the craft of crime: how to break and enter and spot surveillance and plant a bug and sweep a room and untap a telephone. The platitudes of felony, spoken straight, had the sound of wisdom. “Always travel first-class,” Nethro said, “ ’cause the law goes coach.” There were many such maxims, lessons passed on from Jesse James. The best disguise is a crowd. The best weapon is brain-power. “In God we trust,” said Nethro, “but don’ forget to frisk him.”

  There was also a formal side to our training. Most evenings, after dinner, we would assemble in the lecture hall for a series of so-called political education seminars. Indoctrination, I suppose, but there was no haranguing; if anything, Ebenezer’s presentations had a low-key, almost professorial quality. In one instance he outlined and analyzed the ideological underpinnings of the American Revolution. He reviewed constitutional doctrine and explicated key passages from the Federalist papers and the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty. He reminded us that our republic had been born in disobedience, even terrorism, and that the faces which decorate our currency had once appeared on English Wanted posters.