A Girl's Guide to Missiles

by Karen Piper

  After that, I carried in me the PTSD from the war that was his life. I froze up in his sorrow and let the train keep rolling, all the way to the altar. If I had not had that dream, I would never have known any of this. Would that have been better?

  * * *

  —

  Suddenly, in a panic, I ran out of the wedding chapel and into a nearby mansion where the college president’s office was. Leaning over a marble bathroom sink, I tried to catch my breath, which was failing me. I cringed at my reflection in the mirror, seeing the burn mark on my face from the hairdresser’s curling iron. “Oops,” she had said, as if this were any other day. “Oops.” There was a two-inch red welt next to my eye. I had tried to cover it with makeup, but that only made it look like a bruise, as though Keith had hit me.

  My mom walked in and stood by me quietly. “You don’t have to do this,” she said. “Not for us. The money doesn’t matter. We can cancel the whole thing right now.”

  “No, I’ll be okay,” I lied. “I’m just upset about the burn. I can’t seem to hide it.”

  The truth is I felt I was in a vat of Jell-O. The Valium was kicking in.

  As we walked outside, it started pouring rain. I cursed Santa Barbara’s weather modification program, which made it rain more, keeping it lush and green. China Lake had designed that cloud-seeding program, too, where you drop silver iodine into clouds to make them rain. It was impossible to get away from them. “We regard the weather as a weapon,” China Lake scientist Pierre Saint-Amand once said. “Anything one can use to get his way is a weapon and the weather is as good a one as any.” After they used it to cause landslides in Vietnam, they brought it to Santa Barbara. To fill their reservoirs. To ruin my wedding day. I started to cry.

  “Can you get my umbrella, Mom?” I looked away to hide my tears.

  “Of course, baby,” she said, and ran out in the rain.

  Suddenly, everything was falling apart. My hair had been done up and the flowers had been done up, but I could not stop the rain. I could not make it perfect, could not erase the past. I was wearing gold brocade Vera Wang and carrying French tulips, but everything started wilting under the weight of the water.

  Inside the chapel, Keith stood in the front in his tuxedo, which I had made him wear. He dealt with his discomfort by making “look at me I’m a snob” faces, lifting up his nose and looking down on our guests. Had I made him do this? I thought. As he stood there, our childhood photographs flashed on a TV screen in front thanks to Mitch, who had set our photos and home movies to my favorite Rachmaninoff concerto.

  As I started down the aisle with my dad, I began to hope that, as in The Graduate, someone would bang on that window overlooking the ocean to stop us. I pictured a man pounding on the pane behind the empty cross, yelling at me to go back. I wanted shocked guests looking on as we drove crazily and forever away while Sounds of Silence played.

  “Who gives this woman away?” asked the minister, a woman who had been ordained online before everyone was doing that. She looked nervous, this internet minister, knowing we were suddenly her responsibility.

  All I needed was one sentence from my dad, which I had patiently coached him on. “Her mother and I do,” I kept repeating. “Her mother and I do.” Now was the time to say it, and then he could be done acting normal. Forever. “But you have to get it right,” I had said. I wanted to be released, to be allowed to make all the mistakes I knew I would make when he was not there to watch.

  In this moment for which I had waited so long, I suddenly realized that I was furious. I hated my dad for being sick and not being there for me. I hated him for never being able to look me in the eye and say, I know who you are, and it’s okay. You’re okay with me. I hated him for everything he had concealed, for all those feelings I would never know now, and for a sickness that seemed sometimes like the last manifestation of a life of secrecy. Now he was going even further away than I could ever go from him, and I hated him for that. I hated him for going to a place where I would never be able to reach him, further than a locked bedroom door.

  “I do,” my father said in his black tuxedo.

  “No, no. Try again,” the minister prodded gently.

  I just knew my father would forget, but I wished the minister would let it go.

  “Huh?” he said, looking flustered.

  “Her mother and I do,” the minister whispered to him.

  “Huh?” my dad said, and I thought he would walk off in frustration as he often did, out the door to who-knows-where. Once, he walked out of a London hotel and we all had to chase him through the crowded streets. When we gave up and turned back, we found him quietly sitting in the hotel lobby, looking at us like “What’s all the fuss?”

  “Her mother and I do,” my sister whispered.

  “Oh, my mother and I do.” My father laughed, emphasizing the last word. Then he shrugged, clearly thinking, Of course . . . that’s what I said. Then he kissed me on the cheek and let me go, obviously glad to be done with the whole thing.

  Keith and I turned to each other to say our vows. It was then that I realized I had taken too much Valium. I had said half a tab would be enough—but no, Keith had wanted to go all the way. I stood there, in a Valium-induced haze, hoping someone would stop me. My husband said he loved me, and I knew he did. But the man who took my hand to marry me looked at me as if I were the prettiest little virgin girl in the whole world. He loved me as though I were nine years old and promised to watch over me. He said I was his soul mate, and I was too stoned to care. I had wanted to rescue Keith from his past, but he had wanted to protect me from ever knowing that world.

  “Now take these candles and light the one I’m holding, symbolizing the two becoming one,” the minister said, signaling the end of the ceremony. She handed us two birthday-cake-sized candles. I was embarrassed by how small they were, as if that were all she could find around her house that day. What are we paying her? I thought. She also forgot to bring a match, and among a group of nonsmokers, it was hard to find one. I suspected Keith might have one stashed on him somewhere but would not admit it, since he told me he had quit smoking. Finally, my ever-ready cousin Linda came to the rescue, and the minister lit her candle. As Keith and I leaned in to light our candles from hers, a gust of wind came in and blew all the candles out. The minister laughed nervously.

  “That’s okay, we’ll try again,” she said. The second time it worked, but all I could think about was the Columbia River coming up, up, up, putting out every light, smashing down cities and towns and people. Keith smiled, a stoned smile, as my dad walked out of the room without even waiting to watch the kiss. “Her mother and I do,” he muttered, shaking his head as my sister ran after him down the aisle.

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  The End of the World

  After the wedding, Keith and I began to live for roads: dirt roads, roller-coaster roads, long bicycle paths that made our thighs chafe, roads to Anywhere-but-Here. Roads to the Farthest-Away-Possible. Keith was like Conrad’s Marlow, putting his finger on the blank space on a map and saying we have to go. Of course, this blank space was always in Canada. Had we stayed at the Farthest-Away-Possible place, I sometimes wonder if we would still be married. That was what Keith had wanted, after all. But I was born with a terror of poverty, of going back, of not having health insurance. I would not, could not, give up my job. So we traveled instead on a shoestring in a Ford F-250.

  First, we biked around Newfoundland and Nova Scotia, then spent a summer in Quebec, and when we thought the world would finally end, we drove to the most remote place Keith could think of: Bella Coola, British Columbia.

  At the time, everyone was worried about the giant computer glitch. On December 31, 1999, the world was supposed to go dark because no one had bothered to program the computers to recognize the year 2000. “It’s not like you even need more space,” I had complained to my mother. “You just need a ‘2
.’” The world’s computers were expected to all fritz out at the stroke of midnight because apparently they needed to know the when in order to figure out what they were supposed to be doing. Or something like that. Stoplights would go dark, air traffic control screens would go blank, civilization as we knew it would end. Keith and I sort of hoped it would.

  At first, I assumed the giant glitch was all hype, but then I called my mom. “Mom,” I asked, “what will happen when midnight comes?” I assumed she would explain it in detail to me, alleviating my fears with words I could not follow. Words about national security, backup plans, and so forth. Computer words.

  Instead, she said, “Anyone’s guess.” She probably never knew that this was what sent Keith and me fleeing to a town of five hundred people in remote BC.

  “She doesn’t know,” I told Keith, incredulous.

  Keith said that when the world ended, we could settle down in Bella Coola and live off the grid. The “grid” would be a thing of the past, anyway. In many ways, we were in our element. I could build a straw-bale house, which I had learned how to do in my “Green Architecture” class. “No, rammed earth,” Keith corrected. “Too wet for straw.” He could identify mushrooms and gather mussels.

  “If the people with guns find their way to Bella Coola,” he said, “I know an even better spot in Haida Gwaii, an island off the coast of northern BC.”

  I remembered a story Keith once told about him and his father getting red tide in Haida Gwaii. “It was wild,” he said. “Our hands started tingling and going numb, and then it gradually moved up my arms. All I could do was wait to see where it stopped. People die when it paralyzes their heart or lungs.”

  Keith had panic attacks that sounded like that, starting with his hands tingling, then going numb, and then the sensation moving up his arms. He had a terror of public speaking, which we shared in common, though I did not have his fear of bridges. He thought he would drive off of them but would never let me drive instead.

  “Did you go to the doctor?” I asked.

  “No, there are no doctors where we were in Haida Gwaii.”

  After that, I secretly started making my own plans for after the great computer glitch. I did not want to get paralyzed eating mussels. I wanted my mom. So I called my mom again. “Mom,” I said, “if anything happens, I think we need a plan. I’m stocking up food. Missouri is a natural halfway point for all of us. Try to get to my house, and tell Christine to do the same. Stock up on gas.” By then, Christine and her family had moved to Philadelphia, where Mitch had become president of his defense contracting company. It was closer to Washington, DC, and the politicians.

  “Okay, I will,” my mom replied. I started hiding food like assets in preparation for a divorce. I pictured my mom shoving my dad into their wheelchair-ready van and setting off, evading gunfire along the way, just to get to that food.

  “Sure, I could live in Haida Gwaii,” I would lie to Keith, even as I planned to steal his truck. I think we were both hoping the world would end, which would decide the fate of our marriage. It would all finally be over.

  “In Bella Coola, the Indians are cowboys,” Keith said on the way to Bella Coola as we passed ranches and signs for rodeos along the one road leading down a narrowing valley. Gradually, the trees got bigger and the world grew darker as giant snow-topped mountains inched closer to the road, enveloping it in night in the early afternoon.

  At the end of the road, a glowing world popped out of the darkness. The enormous firs stopped before the edge of the fjord, where jellyfish were glowing white in the bluish-black waters. Mesmerized, I exited the truck to what I thought was the sound of their tentacles pushing the inky depths. The sky was pitch-black; only the stars and these bright orbs lit up what looked like a long dock extending out to sea.

  Keith took my hand and whispered, “There are spirit bears here.”

  “What are they?” I whispered in the quiet certainty of our union, our Gore-Tex jackets pressed against each other. This was us at our best, pressed together, looking out.

  “White bears are born from black bears only in this region,” he said. “No one knows why. People say they will awaken your unconscious if you see one.” In this luminescent sparkling world, it did not surprise me the bears would glow white as well. An orca suddenly jumped from the water, bluish white in the reflection of the twinkling sea. I gasped. If only we could stay, I thought. If only the world would end and the bears would bring us back to life.

  We decided to drive along the bay to find a place to camp, and when Keith found a suitable spot, he went ahead to scout out the darkness. Soon he shouted back, “Look at this!”

  I jumped out and slammed the truck door shut, rushing to see what he saw. Abruptly, my hand refused to join me. My arm yanked me back to the site of my hand, where one finger was neatly jammed deep in the truck door. This is how a wolf must feel, looking at her leg in a trap. I wanted to gnaw it off, to get rid of the problem as quickly as possible. I pulled and pulled, not caring if it broke off, but it would not budge. I did not feel a thing but simply knew my finger was no longer my own.

  “Keith, I need the key to the car,” I said, trying to stay calm.

  “In a minute,” he said, not turning to look back.

  “Keith!” I then screamed. “Get over here now!” I was jumping up and down, neither in pain nor in hopes of freeing my finger, but simply to demonstrate urgency.

  When is it going to hurt? I kept thinking. Shouldn’t it hurt?

  By the time Keith turned the key and opened the door, my finger looked white and lifeless. We rushed to the tiny Nuxalk town of Bella Coola as my finger slowly turned red in a flood of blood and began to scream and swell. “Ouch,” I whimpered as we passed darkened mobile homes and government-style buildings.

  Keith found an open gas station where the attendant, a quiet large man with suspicious eyes, rushed to the phone when he saw my finger. “Hey, Steve,” he said. “Get over to the clinic. You’ve got a broken finger.”

  Broken? I thought. “It needs to be amputated right away!”

  It turned out the gas station attendant was right. After a hole was drilled in my nail to release the pressure and my finger was nicely bandaged and splinted up, Keith and I went back to the gas station to thank the man who had helped us and buy some ibuprofen. He looked in his thirties with short dark hair, blue jeans, and cowboy boots. “Hey, you survived,” he said, nodding at my finger. “You okay?”

  “Yeah, it’s not serious,” I said, glad I had not asked for an amputation.

  “A little tequila might work better than aspirin, eh?” he joked, handing me the ibuprofen. Suddenly, that feeling of suspiciousness we all had upon first meeting in the darkness was gone. “There’s a party over at the Valley Inn. End of the World and all. You should come.”

  So there we were, with midnight approaching, jumping up and down with a group of Nuxalks who had pushed aside the pool tables to dance in the End of the World. Slowly, Keith and I realized that when they talked about the End of the World, they had two possibilities in mind. First, their world was going to end when an oil pipeline was built across their valley, as someone drunkenly said to our drunken selves: “The tankers are going to pull up into our bay to get oil from the pipeline. But those pipes leak, you know it? And the boats are filthy and, one day, one will crash. But what can we do?” That was the first End of the World. The second End of the World was the same as ours, but it seemed as if they kind of wanted it too. I realized then that you cannot build oil pipelines without computers. You cannot build missiles either.

  Choose your own End of the World, I guess.

  There we were, dancing in the celebration of the coming darkness.

  “Let’s go to the dock before the clock strikes,” Keith shouted to no one in particular. A few men in their twenties followed us to the promontory perched on a shining sea. There, we put our arms on each othe
r’s shoulders, all in a circle, as we counted down the clock. “Ten, nine, eight,” we yelled, and the mountains echoed our voices back to us, creating their own time confusion.

  Finally, “Happy New Year!” our new friends shouted, and started jumping up and down hard enough to shake the old boards on the dock.

  Soon we joined in the jumping and screaming, “Happy New Year!” Over and over again in a frenzy of joy at the End. We hugged in the darkness of No More World.

  See, the thing is that we had no way of knowing if the computers had glitched or spat or groaned. The Valley Inn was on a local generator. Even as we crawled out of the truck in the morning, hungover heads first, we agreed we would have to drive back out of the valley to find out if the world had ended, too embarrassed to ask in town.

  What if we just decided that it had and stayed?

  Instead, we were a bit defeated when, hours later, we saw a commercial airplane overhead. Then we noticed the growing traffic and noise and busyness of unconcerned travelers whose faces looked blank, signifying to us that the world was intact or, at least, that a different End of the World was in store for us.

  But that one still remained my favorite.

  PART SIX

  Off Target

  Missile Guidebook:

  Believe your mother when she says she has had experience with them. She can help.

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Student or Spouse

  Keith left the year the Twin Towers fell. A month or so before. The signs had been there for some time, but when it happened, I went into shock. I wanted to kill him. To attack. Trauma can do that. I started to suspect there was a problem when he said he had to take off his wedding ring to get back across the border into the United States. It turned out that he had never updated his visa status from “student” to “spouse.”

  “What were you thinking?” I scolded him. “You need to take care of that.”