The Nuclear Age

by Tim O'Brien

  It tickles me.

  “Yes,” I say gently, “I love you, too.”

  Outside, as I hook up the Chevy’s battery, I’m feeling pinched and out of touch. A little dizzy. Anything can happen. Eventually, given time, anything will happen.

  No guts, no glory.

  I fasten my seat belt and honk twice and point the car toward town. It’s a twenty-six-minute drive, all downhill, and I let my mind unwind with the road, curling west along the spine of the Sweetheart Mountains, through rock-collecting country, the canyons and shaggy stands of birch and pine, then south to the foothills which open into meadow and dusty ranchlands, then straight west to Fort Derry. Off to the left, beyond the new K Mart, I can see the grandstand and floodlights at the fairgrounds where my father used to die—once too often; he no longer dies. At the east edge of town I cross the railroad tracks and turn down Main Street. Here, nothing much has changed. My father’s real estate office is under new management, but otherwise the year could be 1958. Slowly, just tapping the accelerator, I cruise down a corridor of hitching posts and weathered storefronts, past the courthouse and the Strouch Funeral Home and Doc Crenshaw’s little clinic at the corner of Main and Cottonwood. The old fart won’t let loose. Over ninety now, and he’s out of the doctoring business, but he hangs in there like the town itself, cantankerous and stubborn. He doesn’t know his days are numbered. No one knows.

  Grasshoppers! the hole hisses. The wolf is at the door! These jerks don’t know the score!

  I pull into the parking lot behind Gordy’s Piggly Wiggly. I’m exhausted. A strange spinning. For several minutes I lean forward against the steering wheel.

  “Christ,” I groan, but the hole tells me to snap out of it.

  Sin and din! Lemme in! Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin! Time to pay the piggy!

  Odd thing, but I’m dealing with disorder as I do the grocery shopping. Some sorrow, too.

  I can’t find the fucking Raisin Bran.

  Entropy and dissolution, it’s all around us.

  I want to loot this place. But I don’t. I smile at the stock boys and fill my cart with imperishables. Powdered milk for Melinda’s teeth. Frozen carbohydrates and vacuum-sealed proteins. Asparagus, olives, mouthwash. I know what I’m doing. I’m a sly fox. And the hole says, You betcha, you’re no dummy. Just look at these assholes—smug motherfuckers! Don’t know doom from canned goods. Nitwits! They think it’s a joke. Can’t happen, they think. Won’t happen. Ding dong doom!

  It requires some effort, but I locate the Raisin Bran.

  Who’s crazy?

  Who’s lost whose perspective?

  Not you, the hole says. You’re a sharpie. This little piggy went to market. Those little piggies perished.

  In the checkout line I’m all business, cool and sober.

  Higgily wiggily bang!

  I don’t pay attention. The mental operations are strictly rote. Later, after I’ve stashed the groceries in the car, I check my lists and then cross the street to the Coast to Coast store.

  I go down the agenda item by item.

  One electric drill. One crowbar. Two sleeping bags. Two hammocks. Rope. Nuts and bolts. In a moment of inspiration I do some impulse buying—four strings of outdoor Christmas lights from last winter’s stock.

  Up front, at the cash register, a young clerk gives me a wise-ass smirk. He looks at his calendar and says, “Smart decision, sir. Only six more shopping months.”

  “Time flies,” I tell him.

  The kid grins. “Plan ahead—I’ll bet that’s your motto, right?”

  The question contains a subtle commentary, but I show him my brightest smile. Plan ahead, I think. If the poor cocksucker only knew.

  “Merry Christmas,” I say.

  The next part is difficult.

  I hate to contemplate what might go wrong. Love, it’s my only defense. Purity of mind and motive. Outside the drugstore I stop to give it some final thought, then I shrug and walk in and present my prescription. My voice sounds reedy. It’s like listening to myself on a tape recorder, that same distance and surprise, unexpected squeakiness in the higher registers, but I keep up a running banter while the pharmacist does his duty. Not a decent night’s sleep in weeks, I tell him. The man makes sympathetic noises and sends me away with a month’s supply of Seconal.

  Not murder, I tell myself.

  I won’t hurt anyone. A legitimate means to a noble end. Time capsules.

  The idea, simply, is to live forever.

  Next the liquor store—vermouth and gin—then down to the A&W for a quart of root beer.

  The ride home is smooth. I lean back and floor it. If there were any other way—Hush, the hole says, just go with the rhymes. High diddle diddle.

  “They’ll thank me,” I whisper. “When the time comes, they’ll wake up and thank me.”

  Yeah, tiger, when they wake up. You bet your life.

  It’s a gorgeous afternoon, windless and warm, cattle grazing under a yellow sun, not a cloud, wheat and wildflowers growing in patches along the road. Here is the world-as-it-should-be. A constant universe. Harmony among all things, unchanging, without dynamic, just the unaging ages.

  From now on it’s all black holes.

  Twenty miles later, when I pull up the driveway, I’m feeling clearheaded. I remove the Chevy’s battery, hide it behind the tool shed, then lug my purchases into the kitchen. The house seems undisturbed. For a few seconds I stand there, watching bits of dust play in the late-afternoon window light. It’s a house at peace—the drowsy hum of deep July. I put the groceries away and move to the bedroom door.

  “Hey, Flub-a-dub,” Melinda says, “is that you?”

  “Safe and sound, baby.”

  “Too bad. Thought you might get arrested.” Laughter rattles up against the summer quiet. Melinda’s tone is aggressive when she says, “So did you buy me anything?”

  “Lots,” I tell her.

  “Like what?”

  “Raisin Bran. Asparagus. All kinds of stuff.”

  “Wonderful.”

  “And root beer.”

  “Root beer,” she mutters, but I can tell she’s tempted. There’s a pause. “All right, then, I’ll try some, but you can’t bribe me. Pretty soon I’ll have to do something drastic.” Another pause, then a squeal. “Agghh! Can’t breathe—I’m a goner!”

  “Good show, kiddo. Very impressive.”

  She snorts and says, “Okay, I’m thirsty now.”

  In the kitchen I become a chemist. A martini for Bobbi—a double, no holding back—a tall root beer for Melinda. I break open six sleeping pills, sprinkle in the white powder, stir gently, taste for bitterness, wipe my forehead, top off the glasses, and carry them on a tray to the bedroom door.

  Radical times, radical remedies.

  There is only the slightest hesitation before I open the hatch. “For you,” I say.

  And then, for perhaps an hour, I lie flat on the hallway floor. I smoke a cigarette. I pay heed to the passing shadows.

  A fleet of bombers circling over Omaha.

  A burning safe house.

  A planet lighted by glowworms and fireflies.

  As if through Chuck Adamson’s toy telescope, faraway yet close, I see my father’s scalp floating in a punch bowl, my mother weeping at graveside, all the dead and dying, Tina and Ollie and Nethro and Ned, and there is no one left to grieve.

  Outside, but also inside, the hole rumbles—

  I am Armageddon.

  I am what there is when there is no more. I am nothing, therefore all. I am the before and after. I am the star which has fallen from the heavens. I am sackcloth, the empty promise, the undreamt dream, the destroyer of worlds.

  “Safe?” I ask, and the hole chortles and says, You bet your booties! That, too—I am safe.

  When dusk comes, I make my way to the backyard. The stars are out; the night is receptive. At the horizon, a crescent moon climbs over the mountains and the laws of nature insist: Now.

  I s
trive for objectivity. Lucid, yes, and tingling-alert, but vertigo intrudes as I descend into the hole and begin rigging up the two hammocks. Familiar presences appear—Sarah’s silhouette flowing along the south wall, my mother and father holding hands in the dark. Rattling sounds, too, and a voice I can’t quite place until I realize it’s my own. “No sweat,” I’m saying. Then Sarah calls out to me—“Please!” she screams. But I concentrate on the operations at hand. Bolts into rock—ropes—attach the hammocks—lay out the sleeping bags. A deep breath. Step back. Survey the arrangements. A pity, I think, that the shelter will go unfinished, without roof or creature comforts, but for now I’ve done all I can.

  “William!” Sarah shouts.

  It’s unreal, though, like everything.

  I climb the ladder and stand for a moment at the rim.

  If I could, I tell myself, I would find another way. If I were a believer, if the dynamic were otherwise, if we could erase the k factor, if Fermi had failed physics, if at the nucleus of all things we might discover an inviolate, unbreakable heart.

  The hole groans at this.

  Poetry! Hop to it, man! Time is short, can’t abort! Holy night! Dynamite! What a sight!

  Reluctantly, I go back to work. I string up the new Christmas lights in the trees and shrubs, along the roof of the tool shed, and when I push the switch, the backyard swirls in brilliant greens and reds and blues. I’m in awe. The night seems touched by something supernatural.

  And now, the hole whispers. The family hour.

  I return to the house with my crowbar and drill.

  The bedroom door can’t stop me. Board by board, I tear down the two-by-fours. I plug in the drill and blow away the lock in a single shot.

  I’m in tears when I lift Melinda from her bed.

  “Daddy,” she slurs.

  Her eyes come partly open, a lazy blink. She has no weight. Warm and flannel-smelling, she curls against me and says, “What’s happening?”

  “There, now,” I say.

  “Where’s Mommy?”

  “Right here, baby. We’re all together.”

  Melinda’s eyelids flutter. “Daddy?” she asks, but she’s sleeping.

  I press my cheek to hers. I feel powerful. My daughter, I think, and I cradle her in my arms and carry her down the hallway and through the kitchen and out to the hole. I’m strong. I’m capable of anything. A one-arm hold, then down the ladder—it’s easy—and I zip her into a sleeping bag and kiss her and place my fingers at her throat and smile at the steady pulse, then I take her to a hammock and tuck her in and say, “Sleep tight, princess.”

  And now Bobbi.

  It’s a struggle but I manage it. She doesn’t wake. She’s a poet. Two arms this time, with great care, down the ladder face-forward as if descending a steep staircase. Risky, but it’s a time of risk. The night is deep and mysterious, and there is no limit to man’s appetite for atrocity.

  I place Bobbi in her hammock, kiss the soft lips, then climb the ladder and pull it up after me. “Done,” I say, and the hole belches and falls silent.

  And here at the edge I sit down to a nightlong vigil. The Christmas lights give me courage. I will not compromise; I’ll defend what I have. The moon is out and the stars are stable, and below, in the earth, my wife and daughter sleep without nightmares, and all around us there is the blessing of stillness and safe repose.

  If I could, I would join them.

  I would slip into a sleeping bag and let the epochs take me down. If it were reasonable, if it were only sane, I would give credence to the proposition that ours is a universe without beginning or end, that mortality itself is relative, that the dead never die.

  If it were believable, I would believe.

  I would have faith. I would take my family from this hole in the conviction that we might live happily upon the earth. I would fly the flag and pooh-pooh the prophets. Yes, I would.

  But the hole chuckles at me.

  If you could, it says. Too bad, though, because you know better. Dynamite! Blow my mind! Fission, fusion, critical mass!

  I shake my head.

  “No,” I say.

  Ain’t no sin to lock ’em in! T minus eight, the century’s late! Dynamite, man!

  “No,” I say firmly. “Never.”

  The hole widens around me, I can smell its breath.

  Higgily wiggily doom!

  11

  Fallout

  OVER A TWO-YEAR PERIOD, from early March 1969 to late April 1971, I logged something on the order of 200,000 miles in my capacity as a network passenger pigeon. Shuttle diplomacy, Sarah called it. Hectic but safe: Wake up in Key West, eat breakfast over the Gulf, do business in Tampa, fly on to New Orleans, make my pickups and deliveries, see the sights, then hop a night flight for Denver or Chicago. Typically, I’d be on the move for a week at a time—mostly college towns—and then back to the Keys.

  In theory, I suppose, it might’ve seemed a decent way to spend the war. “Mr. Jet Set,” Sarah liked to say. “Join the revolution and see the world.”

  But it wasn’t that rosy.

  What she didn’t understand, and what sometimes gets lost in my own memory, is that constant tickle in the backbone, the Herb Philbrick sweats. I could never relax. Even during the most monotonous times I’d find myself tensed up and waiting, imagining a knock at the door, then a cop asking questions.

  It was a delicate daily balance. Betrayal, informants, random accident. The variables were complex.

  I was on the run, after all.

  Implausible, I’d often think, but my crimes were punishable by lock and key. The draft was one problem. Contraband was another. Routinely, even on the easy campus runs, I was ferrying hot goods through hot channels: money, of course, and the various ways and means of un-American activity.

  The situation required vigilance.

  Whom to trust? How far? How often?

  Early on, I established certain SOPs and then stuck to them without exception. I avoided strangers. I took my meals alone. I dictated the terms for all transactions. If a drop looked questionable, if instinct instructed caution, I’d simply walk away and go about the tedious chore of setting up new arrangements. Granted, paranoia was a factor, but when you’re deep in the shit, you can’t help turning slightly anal.

  Loneliness, too. Clerks and bellhops and crowded lobbies, but no human intercourse.

  And also exile. It sounds trite but I longed for America. Out on the fringe, alone, there wasn’t a day when I didn’t feel a sense of embarrassment nudging up on shame. Unhinged and without franchise, prone to odd daydreams, I had trouble sleeping. I’d get the midnight chokes. I’d sit on my bathroom throne and close my eyes and ask, “Where am I?”

  Two years, but they were long years.

  1969—Jane Fonda was on the stump and Kissinger was calling trick shots and Hoffman and Rubin and Dellinger were raising hell in public places. In Vietnam the American troop presence peaked at 540,000, and in Paris the peace talks idled along from hour to hour with high formality, many limousines, frequent adjournments for tea.

  At home there was riot gas. It had come now to fracture.

  In August a small bomb exploded in a janitor’s closet outside the offices of a Manhattan draft board; in early September a somewhat larger bomb caused untidiness in a Houston National Guard armory. Headlines, of course, and deadlines, and three weeks later, on September 24, a consignment of two hundred M-16 automatic rifles disappeared at a truck stop along Interstate 84 near Hartford.

  I was on the road at the time of these events, but it was no surprise to find a celebration in progress when I reached Key West on the evening of September 28. There was cheap wine and laughter. At the appropriate moment Sarah led us up into the attic and pulled back a canvas tarp to display the goods.

  “What you see before you,” she said, “is the product of man’s search for meaning.”

  The guns were still sealed in plywood crates bearing the Colt logo. At the rear of the attic, where the
eaves narrowed, twelve cases of ammunition were lined up neatly along a bare wooden beam. There was the faint smell of oil and carbonized steel.

  “Disarmament,” said Ollie Winkler. “No treaties or nothin’, we just flat-out disarmed the fuckers.”

  “Unilateral,” said Tina.

  Ollie blushed and smiled at her fondly. “Smart lady,” he said.

  Ned Rafferty was silent.

  This, I surmised, was where it had to go. The future was firepower. Obliquely, half smiling, Sarah looked at me as if waiting for some secret acknowledgment—a sign of conviction, perhaps—then she shrugged and covered the guns.

  “What this calls for,” she said, “is ritual.”

  Tina produced champagne and we sat on the attic floor and passed the bottle. To me, it didn’t mean much, only late-hour collegiality. I was out of it now. They were fine as friends but it was hard to show enthusiasm when Tina described the hijacking operation: How it had gone like tick-tock—like shoplifting, she said—Ebenezer and Nethro had set it up—a map and a timetable and duplicate keys—a cinch—hop in the truck and drive away.

  Tina laughed and shook her head.

  “Broad daylight,” she said, “that’s the amazing part. This Howard Johnson’s, you know, real clean and friendly, traffic zipping by, and we just take off with the ordnance. Put it in gear and wave bye-bye.”

  “Simple,” said Ollie. “Unilateral piece of cake.”

  There was obvious pride and good feeling. Later, when the champagne was gone, we went out for ice cream and then sat drinking at an outdoor café along the waterfront. The night was tropical with stars and a warm wind. I was tired but I listened attentively while Sarah brought me up to date on current events. There was movement now, push alternating with shove. It had gone beyond mere protest.

  “The guns,” I said, “I suppose that’s one indicator.”

  “I suppose,” Sarah said.

  “They don’t stay in the attic?”

  “No,” she sighed, “probably not.”

  Behind us, a jukebox was playing old Temptations and people were getting up to dance.