Dad's Maybe Book

by Tim O'Brien

  “What food?” Timmy asked.

  “The food you ordered.”

  “But I didn’t order any food. I just got home from my game.”

  “No, I heard you order food,” I said sternly. “I saw you do it.”

  Timmy looked at me with bewilderment, then fear. “Dad,” he said, “I didn’t order anything. I haven’t even been here.”

  This upset me. I told him not to lie.

  At that point things tumbled.

  Timmy asked who was delivering the food. I told him it was coming from a body shop, on a conveyor belt.

  For a second or two, I fell asleep again.

  And then, distantly, as if from another room, I heard Timmy explaining that body shops don’t deliver food, that conveyor belts can’t carry hamburgers and French fries to every house in town. Again, I drifted off. And later—maybe a split second later—Meredith was there, trying to reason with me, and Timmy was crying, and for an instant there was a flash of clarity—I was sick, I knew that—but then I heard myself, a different self, getting angry, really angry, telling them I wasn’t crazy, that I’d heard Timmy ordering food, that I’d watched him place the phone call, that this particular body shop delivered food, and that I’d seen the actual conveyor belt running up to our front door. I fell asleep again. I woke up again. Timmy was still crying. Meredith was bending over me with a bottle of water. To me, it was the flu, but to Meredith, and especially to Timmy, it was (I learned much later) indescribable helplessness and fear.

  “You dreamed it all,” Meredith kept saying, which infuriated me.

  My whole family, I thought, had lost its marbles.

  Later in the day, probably around nightfall, I awakened once more to find Timmy staring at me from what seemed a million miles away. I asked how his basketball game had turned out. I asked if the Golden Viking had been there.

  My son’s eyes shifted.

  “What’s a Golden Viking?” he asked.

  “You didn’t see him?”

  “See who?”

  Now, a month afterward, it’s a complete jumble in my head, but at the time the Golden Viking was an actual human being, as real as the words I’m now typing: I had found his photo online. He was a Scandinavian graduate student. He played center on the opposing school’s eighth-grade basketball team. He stood six feet five inches. His hair was golden blond. His name was Lars. He wore heavy chain armor and a helmet topped with a pair of Viking horns. At game time, he descended to the basketball floor by way of wires attached to the ceiling. He was a basketball magician. He was unstoppable. You couldn’t miss him.

  “There wasn’t any Viking,” Timmy said.

  “What about the Vikingettes?”

  “Who?”

  “The cheerleaders. The ones wearing Viking helmets.”

  “I didn’t see that,” said Timmy, “and I don’t think—”

  “What about the Viking ship?”

  Timmy moistened his lips. He wasn’t looking at me now. “A ship at a basketball game?”

  “Up in the bleachers,” I said.

  It did not end there. I quizzed Timmy about several other such Vikingesque details, each of which had—for me and for me alone—the blistering clarity of the here and now. For Timmy, though, there was the fearful and delicate problem of dealing with a father who had plainly gone insane.

  That night, Timmy slept with his mother. He was afraid of me.

  Around noon on the following day, after the intervention of a physician friend, I was transported to an emergency room and within minutes found myself hospitalized with pneumonia. My white blood cell count was off the charts; I was dehydrated; I was anemic; I had trouble answering yes-or-no questions; my brain felt like lard; my kidneys and liver and pancreas and digestive system were shutting down. Though I remember very little from that time, I have the distinct recollection of a thick, slushy infection rolling around in my chest cavity, sloshing from organ to organ, and in retrospect I am pretty sure that this cement-mixer sensation was not fictitious. I’m pretty sure I was dying.

  I remember no fear. I was too sick to know how sick I was. In fact, if there was any emotion at all, it amounted to a kind of spellbound curiosity, an awestruck, almost reverent fascination with the bizarre goings-on inside me and all around me. During my first several nights in the hospital, a pair of identical Asian nurses paid frequent visits to my bedside, speaking not a word, hovering in the pitch dark as they took turns stabbing at my forearms until one of them found a vein. They were inept. They were silent as stone. They were pitiless. They were incapable of pity. These mute, nearsighted twins may have been a product of my imagination, or a product of raging disease, but in the hospital dark they seemed to me as real as Tad and Timmy, as real as the Golden Viking, and as real as a body-shop burger riding its conveyor belt to my front door.

  A month has passed.

  I’m still weak, still sleeping a great deal, but the worst is over. For the present.

  In the days since my discharge from the hospital, I’ve learned that hallucinations can be a consequence of high fever, dehydration, extreme fatigue, and kidney failure, all of which accompanied my encounter with pneumonia. I’ve also discovered that hallucinations often precede, and may even predict, the onset of death. It’s comforting, I suppose, to know that our bodies seem to shield us, at least in part, from the terrors of approaching extinction, replacing reality with an alternate reality, sending Golden Vikings and body-shop burgers to the rescue. Hallucination eases the way. (Again, I remember no fear at all.) Maybe it’s a crackpot theory, but in the aftermath of my sickness, I’ve often wondered if what we call insanity might be a biological response to mankind’s consciousness of its own mortality, a way of unknowing what we know, a defense against the specter of nothingness and foreverness and intolerable finality.

  Even more than this, I now have the peculiar feeling that I’ve spent the past month hitting buckets of balls in preparation for a final round of golf. I needed the practice. I hope it helps. Like any prudent seventy-one-year-old father, I’ve engaged in other such preparations—signing a will, doing some estate planning—and my brush with delusion has left me with a similar sense of preparatory peace. It is the peace of which John Dryden speaks in The Spanish Friar:“There is pleasure sure, / In being mad, which none but madmen know.” Likewise, in the face of cruel and incomprehensible extinction, it is also the peace of which William Blake speaks in The Marriage of Heaven and Hell: “I was walking among the fires of Hell, delighted with the enjoyments of Genius; which to Angels look like torment and insanity.”

  As nearly as I will ever know, this is how the end will be. A benevolent fog will precede the dark. Reality will vanish before reality claims me.

  And so, now, though still dazed by recent events, I am convinced it was all for the better. If nothing else, the ordeal amounted to a Vietnam refresher course—an intimate, dreamlike, hello-again reacquaintance with the beasts of oblivion howling at the doorstep. The whole war was hallucination—every evil tick of the clock—the air in my lungs, the whispering rice paddies, the dripping sounds in the grass and trees, the sunlight striking the faces of the dead. Also, at the conclusion of any battle, there was always a shocking slap of aliveness—the miracle of aliveness, the surprise of aliveness, the undeserved gift of aliveness—a sensation that has again come over me in these quiet days after my discharge from the hospital. I am alive, yes, and the world is alive, and yet, in an upside-down way, the aliveness is as bizarre and unsettling as body-shop burgers riding a conveyor belt. After living for two weeks in a world of lunacy, I’m having trouble shifting back into the everyday world of so-called reality. It is surreal and alien. Fatherhood seems implausible. Gravity seems implausible. Breakfast seems implausible. My face in a mirror seems implausible—how can I still be here? And where is here? Is it a place? Or is hereness in my head? And who is this bruised and sunken-eyed creature staring back at me? Although it’s hard to admit, even Timmy and Tad and Meredith sometimes seem to
have stepped out of a feverish pneumonia dream, as if from another universe, or as if Lars the Golden Viking had suddenly rung the doorbell and joined us for a dinner of meatballs and red wine and Scandinavian chitchat.

  Still, I’m improving.

  Lars did not visit last night. Perhaps we bore him. Perhaps he has other engagements.

  And Tad and Timmy and Meredith seem more real with each passing hour. As I gradually rejoin the waking world, I realize with some sadness that I’m exchanging one illusion for another. The Golden Viking is being replaced by the familiar old hallucination of immortality, the hallucination that keeps us moving through our lives, the hallucination that keeps us sane, the hallucination that sends us off to cocktail parties and bridge tournaments, the hallucination that protects us from the astonishing reality that what now exists will one day not exist. In any event, there is comfort in having completed a two-week dress rehearsal, shedding some stage fright, learning my lines, getting my act together for opening night.

  49

  Timmy and Tad and Papa and I (IV)

  Half a century ago, after returning from Vietnam, I took a do-nothing job in the Twin Cities, quit the job after a few weeks, loafed, pretended I was okay, discovered I was not, and then eventually drove north and spent time on Madeline Island in Lake Superior. I slept on a beach, without company, which was unpleasant, but which seemed necessary. I rarely spoke with anyone. At night I drank beer and sat listening to the radio in my car. Nothing in particular was bothering me—no panic attacks, no bad dreams—and the war seemed impossibly distant, almost unreal, as if for the past year I’d been soundly asleep on this pretty beach in Lake Superior. Very occasionally, and only at night, a disagreeable image might come to mind, but the image seemed to be the property of another human being, or the property of history. I’d picture a corpse, for instance, and then a short film would unwind in my head, a few seconds of horror and disbelief, except both the horror and the disbelief belonged to the man in the moon.

  By and large, despite this, I was content on Madeline Island. I ate fresh fish in a small and mostly deserted café. I lay in the sun and thought about girls. I worried about the coming months and what I might realistically do with myself, whether to attend graduate school in Massachusetts or husk corn in South Dakota. Vietnam was absent. It was not that I could not remember; it was not that I triednot to remember; remembering simply did not happen. When night came, I scooped out a shallow trench on the beach along Lake Superior and climbed into my sleeping bag and swiftly and deeply slept.

  Now, at age seventy-one, I’m still scooping out a trench each night. The trench is how I get by. It’s how I’ve gotten by for decades. In imagination, after the lights go out, I transform my bed into a shallow hole in the earth. I string barbed wire, emplace machine guns, put out the claymores and trip flares, establish listening posts, load my weapon, walk the perimeter for a time, check to be sure my helmet and flak jacket are nearby, and then ease into the make-believe sleeping trench and eventually sleep. Some people lock their doors at night. I lock the doors in my head.

  In Ernest Hemingway’s “Big Two-Hearted River: Part I,” Nick Adams, another war veteran, goes through a similar ritual as he prepares for the approaching dark:

  Already there was something mysterious and homelike. Nick was happy as he crawled inside the tent. He had not been unhappy all day. This was different though. Now things were done. There had been this to do. Now it was done. It had been a hard trip. He was very tired. That was done. He had made his camp. He was settled. Nothing could touch him.

  Like Hemingway’s Nick Adams, I am not unhappy. I don’t think much about Vietnam. And yet there is always the pressure of the past, an unspecified and disembodied pressure, a kind of absent weight, a toneless, droning, unrecollected recollection. The absence of specific references to war in Hemingway’s fine story is typically treated as a literary device—an example of the power of omission. I certainly don’t quarrel with that. But in this case omission is not entirely a literary strategy; it is also a meticulous and powerful representation of how war’s evil and war’s jeopardy remain present even when they are unsummoned by memory, even when they are unattached to a particular incident or image. The evil is faceless. The jeopardy is everywhere. For me and for Nick Adams, sleep requires the surrender of vigilance, that nothing-can-touch-you sensation. In reality, of course, neither a sheet of canvas nor an imagined trench offers much in the way of genuine security. But the security that a former soldier seeks is not of the realistic or genuine sort. What a soldier seeks is a necessary fantasy, a “mysterious and homelike” illusion of safety, just as we all seek such illusion as we build our houses and install our security systems and take our vitamins and go to church and erect our nighttime fortifications against the laws of nature. Birth is a death sentence. We know this, but we don’t want to know.

  In his novel The Night in Lisbon, Erich Maria Remarque writes: “why is death forever tugging us by the hand, making us move on, even when we are tired, even when we are trying, for one short hour, to keep up the illusion of eternity?”

  Once disillusioned, a person gets careful. The cave, the foxhole, the fortress, the fire escape, the seat belt, the nothing-can-touch-you tent—each of these is effaced by time and by the assaults of mortality. For those who have seen combat, as for those who have spent time in a cancer ward or sat at the bedside of a dying child, the illusion of eternity demands assiduous late-hour maintenance, and now, forty-six years after my return from Vietnam, I’m still at it each night, still mending the barbed wire and then repairing my pitiful little sleeping trench.

  * * *

  Yesterday morning, Timmy asked what I was writing about. I told him I was writing about coming home from war. My son laughed and said, “Except you never came home.”

  The boy has a point. Some essential part of me remains in Quang Ngai Province, still young and scared, still astonished by my own moral diminishment. Getting old hasn’t helped.

  Among the strange and bitter ironies that have visited me over these seven decades is the certainty that I will be remembered, if I am remembered at all, as a war writer, despite my hatred for war, despite my ineptitude at war, despite my abiding shame at having participated in war, and despite the fact that I am in no way a spokesman or a “voice” for the 2.6 million American military personnel who served in Vietnam from August 1964 to May 1975. In the eyes of many Vietnam veterans—probably a majority—I’m an outlier. I don’t fit in and never did. As far as I can tell, the bulk of those who fought in Vietnam are proud of their service. I am not. They generally believe their cause was just. I do not. Many profess nostalgia about their days in uniform. I do not. Many would do it all again. I would not. A sizable number see themselves as victims—betrayed by politicians, by Hollywood, by Ramparts magazine, by an indecisive and weak-willed citizenry, by ivory-tower idiots who blamed them for a failed war. I don’t feel that way. I never did. Numerous Vietnam veterans, including a few of my own war buddies, claim to have been spat on when they returned from the war. I make no such claim. (And I was not spat on.) Many wanted ticker-tape parades. I did not. I wanted to go home. A good number of the men with whom I served—probably most—view antiwar activity, past and present, as unpatriotic to the point of treasonous. I do not. Many believe the American war in Vietnam was lost not by the United States but rather by leftist news organizations, by ungrateful protesters, by Jane Fonda and Jerry Rubin and Daniel Ellsberg, by intellectuals, by hippies, by Eugene McCarthy, by the South Vietnamese army, by spineless bureaucrats, by Quakers and college professors and the NAACP and draft-card burners and the Chicago Seven and flower children and more or less the entire population of San Francisco back in the year 1969. In fact, as far as I can tell, a substantial number of my fellow veterans believe the United States did not lose the war at all, at least not in a military sense. Many are convinced that the war could have been won, and should have been won, if only vastly superior American firepower had been brought
to bear without restraint. I believe none of this. Granted, Vietnam veterans are a mixed bag, as diverse in their opinions as any large population, but for many of them I’m off in left field, a black sheep, a nonplayer, a prodigal son who by some peculiar fluke happened to hump the paddies alongside the real soldiers, the intrepid believers. I’m a softie. I’m a fucking peace writer.

  * * *

  We’re in the Bahamas, it’s Thanksgiving Day, and a few minutes ago Tad wandered out onto the hotel balcony where I sat wrestling with these sentences.

  Tad squinted down at my computer screen.

  “You shouldn’t write the f word,” he said sternly.

  “Okay. I’ll delete it.”

  “Do it now, before you forget,” Tad said. “You’ll be in huge trouble if somebody actually reads that.”

  I told him I was already in trouble. It had been a difficult morning at the computer, I explained, and the f word was the least of my problems.

  “So what’s wrong?” Tad asked.

  “The usual. Finding a way to say something.”

  “About what?”

  “About being called a war writer.”

  “What’s so terrible about that?”

  “I’m sick of it. I hate war. They don’t call Updike a suburb writer. They don’t call Conrad an ocean writer.”

  “Who’s Conrad?”

  “Joseph Conrad,” I said, “was a famous ocean writer specializing in sea turtles. Forget it.”

  “Well, okay, I will,” Tad said quietly, “but I think you should forget it, too. At least they call you something.”

  “You’re right,” I told him. “Who cares?”

  The boy seemed concerned, even agitated. After a moment he wagged his head.

  “Obviously you care,” he said. He opened the balcony’s sliding glass door, went into the hotel room, and then poked out his head and said, “Why not tell them to go f themselves?”