The Nuclear Age

by Tim O'Brien

I’m a realist. Nothing’s real.

  Bobbi goes first, up the ladder, I follow behind with the firing device. I turn off the Christmas lights. The sky at this hour is purple going to blue. The mountains are firm and silent. There are morning birds in the trees, and the grass is a pale dusty green, and I love my wife. She leans against me. For some time we stand together in the backyard, and later I lead her into the house and make coffee and sit with her at the kitchen table. There is little to say. I ask how much space she needs; I ask if we could stay together a while longer. Bobbi touches my hand. Her eyes, I notice, don’t quite focus. Her voice, when she says anything’s possible, comes from elsewhere. She’s thinking of other worlds. But she does smile. She lets me love. In her heart, I suppose, there’s a lyric forming, but even that doesn’t matter.

  I have a last piece of business.

  Outside, I pick up the firing device and take shelter behind the tool shed. Nuclear war, it’s a hoax. A belly laugh in the epic comedy. I flip up the safety catch, crouch low, look at the sky, and put my finger against the yellow button.

  I know the ending.

  One day it will happen.

  One day we will see flashes, all of us.

  One day my daughter will die. One day, I know, my wife will leave me. It will be autumn, perhaps, and the trees will be in color, and she will kiss me in my sleep and tuck a poem in my pocket, and the world will surely end.

  I know this, but I believe otherwise.

  Because there is also this day, which will be hot and bright. We will spend the afternoon in bed. I’ll install the air-conditioner and we’ll undress and lie on the cotton sheets and talk quietly and feel the coolness. The day will pass. And when night comes I will sleep the dense narcotic sleep of my species. I will dream the dreams that suppose awakening. I will trust the seasons. I will keep Bobbi in my arms for as long as she will stay. I will obey my vows. I will stop smoking. I will have hobbies. I will firm up my golf game and invest wisely and adhere to the conventions of decency and good grace. I will find forgetfulness. Happily, without hesitation, I will take my place in the procession from church to grave, believing what cannot be believed, that all things are renewable, that the human spirit is undefeated and infinite, always. I will be a patient husband. I will endure. I will live my life in the conviction that when it finally happens—when we hear that midnight whine, when Kansas burns, when what is done is undone, when fail-safe fails, when deterrence no longer deters, when the jig is at last up—yes, even then I will hold to a steadfast orthodoxy, confident to the end that E will somehow not quite equal mc2, that it’s a cunning metaphor, that the terminal equation will somehow not quite balance.