by Tim O'Brien
The dialing, that was the true pleasure. It was almost a disappointment when she finally answered.
Not grief, really, just an empty place where all the pretty pictures used to be. She was kind about it. She quoted Yeats: We had fed the heart on fantasies, the heart’s grown brutal from the fare. She wished me luck. She was flattered, she said. She didn’t laugh when I told her about the chase, how much she meant to me, how foolish I felt, how crazy, but how I had to go with my dreams. She said she admired that. She was smiling, I could tell. She said dreams were important. Then she told me her own dreams. She needed space, she said; NYU was fine but there was no space; she’d dropped out in April. She was happy, though. She was going to Germany—Bonn, she said—and there was a married man she was going with, Scholheimer, and the married man was her husband. She laughed at this, lightly. Dreams were lovely, she said, but they could be dangerous, too, which is when she lowered her voice and quoted Yeats: We had fed the heart on fantasies, the heart’s grown brutal from the fare.
But it wasn’t grief. Not even sadness. If you’re crazy, I now understood, you don’t feel grief or sadness, you just can’t find the future.
I spent a few days reassembling myself, and on the evening of May 29 Sarah met me at the Key West airport. Understandably, her mood was dark. I’d been out of contact for some time; I’d skipped out on my responsibilities. “Globe-trotter,” she muttered, “back from his magical mystery tour.”
In the cab she applied irony.
I wasn’t ready for it. I took her by the wrist and dug in with my fingernails.
“Don’t push,” I said quietly. “Don’t even nudge. Just this once—total silence, I mean it.”
Sarah nodded.
And for two weeks she treated me with something just short of respect. I went my way, she went hers. It was unlived-in time. Like blank film, no images or animus, no pretty pictures. At the dinner table, Ollie and Tina would keep up a nonstop banter about the current political situation, the screw-turnings and incipient terror, but none of it really registered. I couldn’t make visual contact. I’d stare at my plate and try to construct the contours of a world at perfect peace: Bobbi’s smile, for instance; binding energy; things to hope for and believe in; the city of Bonn with its spires and castles. But nothing developed. Blank film—I’d lost the gift. If you’re crazy, it’s a lapse of imagination. You stare at your dinner plate. You can’t generate happy endings.
The postulate was obvious. If you’re crazy, it’s the end of the world.
Which is how it felt. Just nothing.
When there’s nothing, there is no sadness. There was a war on, but it didn’t matter, because when there’s nothing, there is no outrage.
One evening Ned Rafferty knocked on my door.
For a moment he stood there waiting, then shrugged and came in and sat on the bed. He wore a beard now, and wire-rimmed glasses, but he still had strength.
Nothing was said.
It was late and the house was quiet. Rafferty leaned back against a pillow. He was simply there. At one point he got up and turned off the light and then came back and touched my shoulder and held it for a while and then sat down again and waited. His glasses sparkled in the dark. A humid night, dense and oppressive. I took a breath and tried to keep it inside, but it came out fast, and then I was choking and telling him everything I could tell. The tears surprised me. I didn’t feel any great emotion. Ding-Dong, I thought, but I couldn’t stop choking and saying, “Crazy.” Rafferty was silent. He didn’t move or speak, but he was there. I told him how crazy I was. The fucking Ping-Pong table, I said. The flashes and missiles and sirens, and the fucking war, the fucking draft, the bombs and shrapnel and guns and artillery and all the shit, the fucking sun, it would fucking fry us, I said, or we’d get fried by the fucking physicists, or else the silos and submarines and fly-boys and button-pushers—all the assholes out to kill other assholes—fucking Nixon, fucking Brezhnev, fucking Ebenezer Keezer and Nethro and Hitler and Crazy Horse and Custer, my father, too, yes, my father, the way he died out at the fairgrounds every summer, just died and died and died, how he wouldn’t stop dying, every fucking summer, all the heroes and corpses, the fucking Alamo, fucking Hiroshima and Auschwitz—No survivors!—everybody killing everybody else—yes, and the so-called peace movement, the fucking underground with its fucking slogans and riots, the fucking dynamic—what good was it?—those guns in the attic and Ollie with his fucking bombs—where was the good?—No survivors!—it was all so crazy, I said, just absolute fucking crazy—and then I laughed and shook my head and told him about Bobbi.
Pie in the sky, I said.
I quoted Yeats.
I told him about obsession and fantasy.
I told him you had to believe in something; I told him how it felt when you stopped believing.
“It feels fucking crazy,” I said, almost yelled, then I caught my breath and said, “That’s what craziness is. When you can’t believe. Not in anything, not in anyone. Just can’t fucking believe.”
I was sobbing now, but it wasn’t sadness. It was nothing. For a few minutes I lost my balance—I’m not sure what happened exactly, a kind of fury, thrashing around and yelling “Crazy!”—and then Rafferty had me pinned down by the wrists and arms. I could smell his sweat. He was leaning in hard, saying, “Slack now, lots of slack, let it unwind.”
Then the quiet came.
“There,” he said, “let it go.”
I closed my eyes and cried.
“Just let it out,” he said.
A nice guy. Nice, that was all I could think, and I told him so. “Nice,” I kept saying, “you’re a nice, nice, nice guy. You are. You’re nice.”
“A prince,” said Rafferty.
“For sure. Fucking prince.”
“Don’t say fucking.”
“I apologize. Not fucking at all. But nice.”
Rafferty filled my glass.
“What we should do in a situation like this,” he said, “is drink to how nice I am.”
We finished the brandy. The hour was late but Rafferty suggested a sea voyage, which seemed fitting, so we hiked down to the Front Street marina and exercised the right of angary over a handsome wooden skiff and aimed the vessel Gulfward. A mile out, we cut the engine. We drifted and breathed the air and looked back on the sad white lights of Key West.
I felt much improved. A quiet sway, and the skiff rode high and neat.
Rafferty laughed at something.
“Nice guy,” he said. He lit up a joint and passed it across to me.
I wasn’t a smoker but I liked the ritual of it. I liked him, too. And the smells and water sounds. There was largeness around us. When the joint was gone, Rafferty asked if I wanted more, and I said I did, so we smoked that one and then another, letting the currents take us, and presently I was made aware of numerous unique perspectives. It was all in the angle. The moon, I noticed, was without third dimension. I was intrigued by the concept of hemispheres. I detected a subtle crease at the horizon where the global halves had been stitched to perfect the whole.
Ned Rafferty nodded when I explained these matters.
“Nuts,” I said. “Haywire. I warned you, didn’t I?”
“I believe it was mentioned, yes.”
“Loose screws. Did I say that? Sometimes I feel—you know—I feel—there’s a word for it—not depressed, not just that. Like when you can’t cope anymore.”
“Desperate,” Rafferty said. “I know.”
“That’s it. Desperate. Did I tell you about Bobbi?”
“You did.”
“Married. Off to Bonn in Germany.”
“You told me.”
“Scholheimer.”
“A turd. You told me.”
“Desperate,” I said.
“Desperadoes.”
“That’s it.”
Rafferty sighed and removed his glasses. Funny angle, the dark and the Gulf and the dope, but it looked like he’d pulled out his eyes and p
laced them in the pocket of his shirt. The shine was gone. He leaned back and looked at me without his eyes.
“One thing,” he said. “To clear the air.”
“Anything.”
“About Sarah. This relationship we had, Sarah and me. It’s over. Never really got started. I love her. She loves you.”
“You don’t have to—”
“No, I want it out,” he said. “She loves you. Breaks my heart, but there’s the fact. Understand me? Loves you. Wants you back. Rio, that’s all she talks about.” He reached overboard, splashing water to his face. The skiff was gently fishtailing with the tide. “I do care for her, you know. Emotional thing.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Rio, for Christ sake. What the hell’s Rio?”
“Nothing,” I said. “A fantasy.”
There was silence while Rafferty reflected on this. After a time he issued a complex noise from the bottom of his lungs.
“Fantasy, I can respect that,” he said. “Obsessions, too. You’re obsessed, I’m obsessed. Look at Tina—big fat killer obsessions. Our Lord Jesus Christ, the man was obsessed, who isn’t? Ollie Winkler—walking obsession. Thing is, you have to respect people’s obsessions. Like with me. You want to know my obsession?”
“What’s your obsession?”
“Will you respect it?”
“I will.”
“My obsession,” he said gravely, “is Sarah. I’m a nice guy, you’re right, but you know something? I’d do anything for her. Drown your ass. Right here, if I thought it would do any good, I’d just drown your ass. Can you respect that?”
“I certainly can.”
“Maybe we should have another smoke?”
“Yes,” I said.
“I am a nice guy.”
“Of course. But you’d have to drown me.”
“You understand, then.”
“Completely and absolutely,” I told him. “Obsession, it’s nothing personal.”
Rafferty laughed and stood up to light the joint. He seemed stable enough. The boat was sliding sideways to the current but he kept his balance, passing the smoke and then turning and staring out at the sad lights across the water.
“Stoned,” he said, “but not all that stoned. You want to hear my fantasies?”
“Very much,” I said.
“Get the hell out of here. That’s the A-one deluxe fantasy, just split. With Sarah. Drown your ass and kidnap her—drugs or something—a sea voyage—take her away.” He paused a moment, shook his head violently, then pointed at the town lights. “I hate this place. Key West, it sucks. Everything we’re doing, the gangster shit and the guns and Ebenezer Keezer, everything, I hate it. Don’t believe in it. Got to believe, man, and I don’t. Never did. Ranch kid—I ever tell you that? Grew up on a ranch. Dumb cowboy. Home on the range. All I ever wanted, some cows and dope and git along little dogie. And Sarah. Not a damned thing else. That’s why I’m here. No other reason. Just Sarah.”
“A good fantasy,” I said.
“Nifty lady, Sarah.”
“She is.”
“Different fantasies, though. I want her, she wants Rio. That’s the thing, nobody has the same fantasies.”
Rafferty swayed and sat down heavily.
“Anyway, there it is,” he said. “Obsession. You and me, two peas in the same dipshit pod.”
“Crazy,” I whispered.
There was a short silence. When he spoke, his voice seemed firm and exact, fully sober.
“Not crazy,” he said, “but here’s a word of advice. Sarah, she’s real. Take it and run. Get out. This whole situation—the guns and shit—we both know how it ends. Badness, that’s all. Graveyards. Forget the dreams, man, do something positive. Grab her and start running and don’t ever stop. The world-famous gist: Go with reality. Take off.”
“And you?”
“Gone. First chance, I’m gone. Home on the range.”
“What about—”
“Just go.”
He smiled and held up a hand, palm forward.
“Peace,” he said, “the gist of the gist.”
There was a feeling of comity and goodwill. A fine human being, I thought, and we sat back and smoked, and for a long while I concentrated on the hemispheres. I watched the scheme of things, the constellations, the moon veering toward Europe, peace with honor, Bobbi and Bonn and Rio and Vietnam and the violet glow of uranium dioxide in the Sweetheart Mountains. I was not afraid. I knew where the future was. Later, as Rafferty slept, I watched without alarm as a black submarine surfaced to starboard, its conning tower cutting like a fin through the placid dark. I felt no dismay, only wonder. Here, I deduced, was how it would be when it finally came to be. It would be quick. Out of the blue, a blink and a twitch, here then gone. I could see it. I could hear the sonar. The submarine rose up in profile, buoyant, circling the skiff, and I nodded and closed my eyes and gave myself over to how it had to be. There was a slight trembling. A shower of yellow-white sparks, then the missiles ascended, but to my credit, I stood fast. I studied the ballistics. I admired the gleamings—reds and pinks spilling in the Gulf. There was grace in it, I thought, and the beauty that attends resolution, as fire is beautiful, and nuclear war, things happening as they must happen and always will. I was brave. I’d seen it all before, many times, and now there was just gallantry.
The question declared itself: Who’s crazy?
Not me.
When the submarine slipped away, I was smiling. Imagination. I had the knack again.
For the next year, up to April 21, 1971, the casualties kept piling up on all sides. People were dying. In Vietnam, there was steady concussion; in Paris, the peace talks dragged on into the third year of stalemate; in Georgia, Lieutenant William Calley went on trial for murder; in Cambodia, there were fires. There was a war on, yes, but for me it was mostly blank time. Which is to say I can’t remember much—the present never quite became the past.
What happened? How much is memory, how much is filler?
If I close my eyes, if I ignore the hole, I can see Sarah reclining in a lawn chair on the back patio at Key West. We’re lovers again, though not exactly in love; we’re both waiting, though for what I don’t know. She just lies there in sunlight. She wears a blue bandanna and a white muslin blouse. Her skin is dark brown. The hair at her calves is bleached silver, and at the corner of her mouth is a lumpish blister—herpes simplex, but the complications will prove unhappy. In her lap is a copy of Newsweek. A celebrity now, she smiles at me from the magazine’s cover, or seems to smile, and says or seems to say, “I warned you. Years ago, I told you I was dangerous, big dangerous dreams, and here’s the proof. Now I belong to the ages.”
Blank time, but great speed, too. I can see Sarah’s eyes going cold. “I’m dead,” she whispers.
Mid-November 1970, and a butchered pig was deposited on the steps of the FBI building in downtown Washington.
There was a bombing in Madison.
A startling image—is it real?—but I can see Ollie Winkler in a rented airplane. He’s wearing his cowboy hat and aviator goggles, a yellow scarf flapping behind him, and he’s squealing and dumping homemade ordnance on the nation’s Capitol. It did not happen that way, but it could’ve happened, and still can, and therefore I see it.
“I’m dead!” Sarah cries. That much did happen.
In December they redecorated the Lincoln Memorial.
In January 1971, they released a dozen skunks in the carpeted hallways of the Rockefeller Foundation.
Not quite terrorism.
“Skunks,” Sarah said, “that’s a prank. TNT, that’s terror. You have to know where to draw your nice fine lines.”
I remember nodding.
Pathetic, I thought, but things were clearly moving toward misadventure.
The guns, for instance.
When I look back, I can see those plywood crates stacked in the attic. One night I heard noise up there, so I investigated, and I found Ned Rafferty sitting cros
s-legged before a candle, alone. Just cobwebs and guns. “How’s tricks?” I asked, and Rafferty snuffed the candle and told me to get the fuck out. “Just go!” he said, and he sounded angry.
What else?
A minor hurricane named Carla.
I can hear the wind, I can feel Sarah up against me in bed. Maybe it’s then when she says, “My God, I’m dead.”
Slow time, but it seems fast.
I remember Ollie eating grapes at the kitchen table. The seeds make plinking sounds in a metal wastebasket; he talks about hitting banks; he seems serious; he doesn’t laugh when he says, “Why not?” A seed goes plink in the wastebasket and he says, “Why not?”
Tina Roebuck on a crash diet.
She’s determined. She papers the refrigerator with photographs from Vogue. “Just once in my rotten life,” she says grimly, “just this once, a lean mean killing machine.”
But it doesn’t happen. The pressures intervene and she checks out as a heavyweight.
Are the dead, I wonder, ever dead?
The hole laughs and says, Believe it.
