by Tim O'Brien
There were changes. Her hands, when she touched me, were raw and bony, smaller now, and her hair, when we kissed, was thin and gray against my cheek. Her eyes were milky. Her voice was like straw when she said, “I did. I knew it.”
But the silhouette was my mother’s.
That night, and the next night, I slept at home. And my mother slept with me, in the same bed. It was just closeness, but we did sleep together. I explained that it wasn’t quite over yet. Not everything, I said. I told her I’d made the break. I held her when she cried—she was my mother—and I told her about the cottage and how Adamson had arranged it and how I was close by now and how I needed to be alone to sort things out. “But I’m here,” I said, “I’m home,” and we talked quietly and then slept together, but it was nothing except what it was.
Christmas Eve 1971. I remember a fine long-needled spruce and a pitcher of eggnog and my mother getting tipsy and a card from Sarah which said: Love me?
November 7, 1972, an electoral landslide, but it didn’t mean a thing.
Then Christmas again, and Nixon bombed Hanoi. Eleven days. Forty thousand tons of high explosives. But I reached out and found quietus: It was someone else’s war. Just a silhouette, form without content.
Then early spring 1973, a Sunday, and Chuck Adamson and my mother came to dinner. There were blizzard warnings. A hard wind, I remember, and sleet turning to snow. The cottage windows frosted over, but things were snug inside, and we ate turkey and drank wine and played Password.
“Pencils,” my mother said, and I said, “Graphite,” and Adamson was amazed.
Acceleration.
That half decade of rapid-fire history. Like a wind tunnel, wasn’t it?
On August 9, 1974, Richard Nixon said goodbye. He received his pardon on September 8.
In January 1975, the North Vietnamese Army began its final push. Ban Me Thuot was overrun on March 11. On March 20, Hue. On March 30, Da Nang. And then Quang Ngai and Chu Lai and Pleiku and Qui Nhon and Nha Trang and Kontum.
That fast. There then gone.
On April 17, Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge. The city was empty within four days.
A wind tunnel—am I wrong?
Silhouettes. Four days, an empty city. Form without content. And in Vietnam it was full retreat now. Children dangled from helicopters, and NVA troops were playing pinball at Cam Rahn Bay, and on April 30, 1975—that fast—the decades collapsed into a twenty-second dash up the steps of the presidential palace in Saigon, and then it was finished.
Take a breath and it’s 1976.
There were fireworks and tall ships. Amnesia was epidemic. Gerald Ford: My life was like his presidency; it happened, I’m almost certain.
In late summer of that year, 1976, there was another card from Sarah. It was a Kodachrome photograph of Rio at twilight, a little slick, but pretty, pinkish-blue reflections on water. I felt a kind of smiling sadness, though not really sadness, because in that water I saw what our world might have been, and in a way, I suppose, now was. I saw what she meant by commitment and passion, and it was present in that other universe, as love was also present, and as it would be present always. I thought about her a great deal; I’m sure she thought about me.
On my thirtieth birthday, October 1, Chuck Adamson suggested that now was the time. And I agreed.
There were lawyers, of course. It was not easy but it was not hard either. Like visiting the dentist: You squirm and tighten up, and maybe there’s an ache, but then it’s over and you touch your jaw and shrug and walk away. There was no jail. There was no trial. There were formalities and papers to sign, even pleasantries, and in the end it was almost a letdown, not enough hurt.
On January 21, 1977, President Jimmy Carter issued a blanket pardon—ten thousand draft-dodgers shot full of Novocain.
I began my graduate studies in February. Geology, it was a natural, and for the next two years I went underground in an entirely new way. I was an adult. I learned about the world we live in, all of us, which was finally a world of real things, sandstone and gold and graphite and plywood and art and books and bombs and the particles which make these things, and how each thing is vulnerable, even Bobbi, who was no longer a fantasy, but real. My dreams were glass. There were no flashes, not even a glow. I was hard and sane.
I completed my master’s in June 1979.
A time of miniaturization, it seemed. Our cars were shrinking; our daily affairs were printed on microchips. Across America, the streets were quiet. Richard Daley was dead and Gene McCarthy was in seclusion and I spent the last summer of that decade in the Sweetheart Mountains, deciding. Before me was the rest of my life. What I wanted above all was to join the world, which was to live and to go on living with the knowledge that nothing endures, but to endure. It was a matter of choice. I didn’t give a damn about missiles or scruples, all I wanted now was my life, the things of the world, a house and whatever hours there were and the ordinary pleasures of biology. I was hard and sane and practical. I wanted Bobbi, who was real.
And I knew where to start.
If you’re sane, I realized, you take the world as you find it.
Science dictated: The uranium had to be there, and it was.
All summer, and through the fall, I followed the trail up into the high ground, homing in, and by mid-October there was no doubt.
On New Year’s Day 1980, Sarah and the others came to visit. In a sense, I suppose, I was expecting them. Except for the years, nothing much had changed. There was some gray in Ned Rafferty’s beard, a few extra pounds at Tina Roebuck’s beltline, the usual wear and tear. It was good to see them. Ollie Winkler was a Christian now, and before dinner he led us in prayer, then we ate lamb chops and talked nostalgia. For the first time I felt at ease in their presence. Like family, I thought, and I was one of them—hard and sane and practical to the end.
Around midnight, after the others had turned in, Sarah and I sat on blankets in front of the wood stove.
“Son of a bitch,” she said. “Almost nine years. Not a word.”
She meditated for a while, then put her head in my lap.
“Kiss?” she said.
Later we held each other. Her skin felt cool and foreign. She laughed when I told her about the uranium.
“Well,” she said, “it’s a crime, isn’t it?”
I said, “No.”
Then I laid out my plans. It wasn’t crime. It wasn’t selling out. I was an adult, I said. I was able to take the world as I found it, and to use it, and to make what I could of it. When she asked about morality, I shrugged. When she asked about the flashes, I smiled and quoted Yeats: We had fed the heart on fantasies, the heart’s grown brutal from the fare.
Sarah thought about it.
“Oh, well,” she said, “at least we’re rich.”
CRITICAL MASS
12
The Nuclear Age
WE HIT PAY DIRT on the twelfth day out. By the twentieth day we knew exactly what we had. I’d been confident all along, and the data were there to back me up, but that didn’t prevent celebration when Ollie ran the clicker over that pile of hot rock. On February 4, 1980, we bought the mountain. Rancher Roe reckoned we were setting up a commune, or maybe a new close-to-the-clouds religious establishment, but even so he couldn’t wait to unload. At the registry of deeds he kept saying how, if he had it to do over, he’d most surely lead the hippie life himself. I never saw a man so willing to please. When it was done, we rented an electric typewriter and group-composed the letter. I handled the technical stuff, Rafferty the prose, Sarah the legal ins and outs. Then I sat down at the IBM Electric and cranked out seven copies, one for each Sister. We mailed the letters and waited. That was the hard part: two months before the first tentative reply, another month before Gulf brought in its exploratory team, two more months before we got any sort of bidding war going, then forty days more before Texaco doubled BP and we finally signed the papers. A straight cash deal—it had to be that way. No options, no pie-cutting, no def
erred payments. The check was for twenty-five million dollars. Of course, there wasn’t a banker in town who’d touch it, so we ended up in Ned’s van, the whole gang, heading for First National in Helena. Along the way we stopped. There, on the banks of a shallow creek, we conducted a ceremony. It was silly, but the ladies insisted, so we each tossed a chunk of precious ore into the water, and I uttered a few solemn words, and we left two clickers behind as a gift for the next generation.
In the van, halfway home, Sarah cuddled up against me and asked how I’d be using my cut. It wasn’t something I wanted to talk about. Buy a town somewhere, I said, or maybe a sinecure at Harvard.
“Geology?” Sarah asked. “No other dreams?”
“Well,” I said, but of course she was right. “I guess I’ll go to Bonn.”
“In reference to what, exactly? As if I didn’t know.”
“A girl,” I admitted. “A woman—I’m in love with her.”
We rode along for a while. Sarah said she’d never seen Bonn. Not even a postcard. Could she come along?
We made Helena at midnight. It was Saturday’s midnight, which meant another idle day, so we selected a motel advertising a heated pool and sauna. I suppose it was a combination of things—the van, the way Ned had let his hair go, Tina’s behind-the-times peasant costume—but, whatever, the night clerk insisted on cash up front. He was just a kid. “We’re good,” I said, and I showed him the check: “Texaco’s good.” The clerk shrugged and claimed it was one of those computer foul-ups—extra zeros—and we ended up depositing our last hundred or so. The kid was smug about it. When he asked how many rooms we’d be wanting, I held up a finger and said, “One,” and before he could smile I moved the finger to his nose. “Day after tomorrow,” I said. “Watch out.”
“No kidding?”
“Day after tomorrow. You’re out of work.”
The kid smiled and handed me a room key.
“Yes, sir,” he said. “And don’t forget, shower before you use the pool. New house rule.”
We spent Sunday in the water. It was our last full day together, the Committee, and there was lots of talk about where everyone was headed. After all the nonsense, it boiled down to the predictable. Tina and Ollie were returning to Key West, where they would soon be very well-heeled revolutionaries. Ned Rafferty talked about buying himself a piece of property somewhere, maybe horses, maybe cattle, he couldn’t decide. He glanced at Sarah, who kept quiet. At times sadness intervened, but we fought it off—much splashing and dunking. It was a heated outdoor pool, big and comfortable, and we made the most of it, floating side by side, holding hands, turning sentimental in the way smart people do, hipping it, finally coming straight out and saying how much we loved one another and how it wasn’t the money that made it good, it was something else, the time together, all the ups and downs, and how we felt older and sadder, and how we hadn’t done much to change the world but how the world had changed us, and how the whole thing was like camp. We hated ending it. Ollie said he’d heard tell of rich lodes up in British Columbia. Ned said he’d heard the same stories. We’ll do it again, we said, but bashfully, with the sophistication of senior citizens who know better. Tina cried. Everybody hugged and kissed. “Maybe we should pray?” Ollie said. Nobody wanted to pray, but we knew what he meant.
In the morning, after some delays, we opened up substantial bank accounts at First National.
“We’re even now,” I told Sarah.
She nodded soberly.
“Even,” I said. “No debts either way.”
Ned Rafferty drove us out to the airport.
“British Columbia,” somebody said, and we all said, “Can’t wait, same time next year,” but not one of us was feeling wealthy.
In the terminal there was more hugging.
Ollie went first. He shouldered his duffel—a waddling, funny-looking guy in his cowboy hat and fancy boots. After a moment, Tina pecked my cheek and tagged along after him.
They boarded a Frontier Airlines flight for Denver.
Ned and Sarah and I waved at the windows, then Rafferty said, “Where to? Portland? Samoa?”
I said I was headed the opposite way. So did Sarah. Rafferty gave us a lift back into town, but this time there was little emotion.
“My problem,” Rafferty said, “is I can’t cry.”
We shook hands and then it was down to Sarah and me.
“There’s risk in this,” I told her.
“Accepted.”
“Thing is, I do love her.”
“You did,” Sarah said. “Perhaps.”
“So.”
“So let’s find out,” she said. “The uranium, that was a gamble, too”
Wrong, but I nodded. The uranium had to be there. That was science, this was something else.
“Ready?”
We were on the corner of Elm and Moore. Across the street was a parked tractor, and beyond that was the capitol dome, and far off were those mountains we’d plundered.
“Ready?”
“Ready,” I said.
Sarah slipped her hand into my back pocket, took out my wallet, and put it in her purse for safekeeping.
“Let’s at least keep the risks to a minimum,” she said. “How do we get to Bonn?”
First, though, I bought myself a motel. The night clerk took it pretty well. So well, in fact, he almost ruined the pleasure; it was a relief when he got a bit testy near the end.
A night later we were over the Atlantic.
“So let’s have the data,” Sarah said.
“Bobbi Haymore. Married a guy named Scholheimer. Bobbi Scholheimer.”
“Bobbi?”
“She can’t help it.”
“I suppose not.” Sarah levered back her seat.
“She can’t.”
“I know that. Unfortunate, though. I’m sure she’s a doll.”
“You want to hear it?”
“Everything.”
We were alone in first class. Two of the flight attendants were already sleeping, and the third had gone back to help in coach. The jet seemed to fly itself.
“Well,” I said, “it was like getting shot by a stun gun. Just happened. The smile, maybe, I don’t know. Something clicked—the passion thing. There it was. When I saw her the first time, it was like I’d known her all my life, or before I was born. One look, you know? I’m sorry.” Sarah listened with her eyes closed. I could see movement beneath the lids, darting motions; I knew it was hurting but I had to get it said. I described the night flight and the bad dreams and the martinis and poems and hand-holding. “Couldn’t forget her,” I said. “All in my head, I guess. I’d keep seeing her face, hearing that voice, and sometimes—I am sorry—but sometimes I’d make up these stories about how we’d run away together. Pictures. Little glimpses.”
Sarah laughed. “And me?”
“You were there, too.”
“Steady Sarah. Go on, you’re breaking my heart.”
The jet made a slight adjustment to starboard.
I told her about the airport stakeouts—just a game at first, but then a desperate game, something to live for and hope for—an obsession, I admitted—and then I talked about the chain of events, how the trail led to Manhattan, then the phone calls and the navigator and finally Scholheimer.
“Hot pursuit,” Sarah murmured.
“I guess so.”
“And then?”
I shrugged. “And then nothing. Called her up. Told her—you know—told her I loved her. Big confession. Big hopes. All those stories and pretty pictures … Anyway, she was nice about it. A couple of times I thought, God, it’ll work, I could hear this—I don’t know—this willingness in her voice. So after a while I asked if we could have dinner or something, or run off to Hudson Bay, and then she laughed, but it was a nice laugh, like wistful, and she told me, No, she couldn’t, because she was going to Bonn, and there was this married guy she was going with. ‘The guy’s married to me,’ she said. Just like that. But sort of sad, too
. ‘The guy’s married to me.’ That’s all I remember. Except I wanted to ask about that grass she gave me. Grass—what’s the grass mean? This time I’m asking.”
“She sounds swell,” Sarah said.
“Yes, but I love her.”
Sarah was quiet. She covered herself with a blanket and watched the flashing green light at the edge of a wing.
“Grass,” she finally said, and sighed. “If I’d only known it was so easy. Grass galore. Poems, too. Would’ve pinned them to your ears. ‘What is love? ’tis not hereafter; Present mirth hath present laughter.’ That turn you on, William?”
“Let’s just wait. See what transpires.”
“I’ll eat her alive,” said Sarah.
In Paris, the choice was either a train that afternoon or a plane the next morning, so we took the train. Sarah said it was best to keep up the momentum. She didn’t want things fizzling out in some quaint hotel room. For the first hour or so we sat up watching the suburbs and grapes go by, then Sarah began making up the berth.
“It isn’t just that I love you,” she said. “I mean, we’ve committed crime together. Doesn’t that count for anything? Aren’t we thick as thieves, you and I?” She pulled the shades and undressed and got into bed. There was a red bow in her hair, a cigarette in her mouth. She looked lean and unladylike and smart. “William,” she said slowly, “the girl won’t even recognize you. Things have changed. You’ve changed. The uranium, for God’s sake. What’s she to make of it? One look, she’ll see you’ve lost that crazy edge of yours. Mr. Normal. Ban the bomb to boom the bomb. Denim to sharkskin, plowshares to swords. How does dear Bobbi-cakes cope with all that?”
“I’ll explain.”
Sarah sniffed and kissed her kneecaps. “Rancher Roe?” she said. “You’ll explain how we conned that poor old fairy? Take a look at yourself. Not a moral fiber to be found.”
“I’m sweet, though.”
“Nixon was sweet. Oppenheimer was sweeter. Einstein—sweetest old geezer who ever lived.”
“Yes, but Einstein warned us.”
