The Nuclear Age

by Tim O'Brien

  Split?

  Doesn’t make sense.

  Dig.

  That makes sense. All day long I’ve been at it, sweat and calluses, and my back hurts, but there’s pleasure in the pain. It’s duty-doing; taking charge. Tension translates into doggedness, anxiety into action, skittishness into firm soldierly resolve.

  I feel a nice tingle as I rig up the dynamite.

  Ollie Winkler taught me—I learned from a pro.

  Two sticks and the primer. Wire it up. Crimp the blasting caps. Take shelter behind the tool shed. Think about Ollie and his Bombs for Peace.

  “Fire in the hole!” I yell.

  The kitchen windows rattle. A muffled explosion, just right. Bobbi comes to the back steps and stands there with a mystical smile on her lips. In the backyard, like smoke, there’s a light dusting of powdery debris, and my wife and I stare at each other as if from opposite sides of a battlefield. Bobbi bites her thumb; I smile and wave. Then it’s over. She goes inside, I go back to digging.

  The dynamite, that’s what disturbs her. She thinks I’ll miscalculate. Crazy, but she thinks I’ll blow the house down, maybe hurt someone. Dangerous, she thinks. But what about the bomb, for Christ sake? Miscalculations? If that’s the stopper—miscalculations—I’ll be happy to show her a few. Four hundred million corpses. Leukemia and starvation and no hospitals and nobody around to read her miserable little jingles.

  Screw it. Dig.

  A pick, a garden spade, a pulley system to haul out the rock.

  When Melinda returns from school, I’m still on the job. I straighten up and smile over the rim of the hole. “Hey, there,” I say, but she doesn’t answer. She kicks a clod of dirt down on me and says “Nutto” and scampers for the house.

  I don’t let it rattle me. At dusk I plug in the outdoor Christmas lights. I skip supper. I keep at it, whistling work songs.

  It isn’t obsession. It’s commitment. It’s me against the realities.

  Dig, the hole says, and I spit on my hands. Pry out a boulder. Lift and growl and heave. Obsession? Edgar Allan Poe was obsessed.

  At ten o’clock I tell myself to ease off. I take a few more licks at it, then a few more, and at midnight I unplug the lights and store my tools and reluctantly plod into the house. No signs of life, it’s eerie.

  In the living room, I find only the vague after-scent of lilac perfume—a dusty silence. I stop and listen hard and call out to them. “Bobbi!” I shout, then “Melinda!” The quiet unnerves me, it’s not right.

  Melinda’s bed is empty. And when I move to Bobbi’s bedroom—my bedroom—I’m stopped by a locked door.

  I knock and wait and then knock again, gently.

  “All right,” I say, “I know you’re in there.”

  I jiggle the knob. A solid lock, I installed it myself. So now what? I detect the sound of hushed voices, a giggle, bedsprings, bare feet padding across oak floors.

  Another knock, not so gentle this time.

  “Hey, there,” I call. “Open up—I’ll give you ten seconds.”

  I count to ten.

  “Now,” I say. “Hop to it.”

  Behind the door, Melinda releases a melodious little laugh, which gives me hope, but then the silence presses in again. It occurs to me that my options are limited. Smash the door down—a shoulder, a foot, like on television. Storm in and pin them to the bed and grab those creamy white throats and make some demands. Demand respect and tolerance. Demand love.

  I kiss the door and walk away.

  Supper is cold chicken and carrot sticks. Afterward, I do the dishes, smoke a cigarette, prowl from room to room. A lockout, but why? I’m a pacifist, for God’s sake. The whole Vietnam mess: I kept my nose clean, all those years on the run, a man of the most impeccable nonviolence.

  So why?

  There are no conclusions.

  Much later, at the bedroom door, I’m pleased to discover that they’ve laid out my pajamas for me. A modest offering, but still it’s something. I find a sleeping bag and spread it out on the hallway floor.

  As I’m settling in, I hear a light scratching at the door, then a voice, muted and hoarse, and Melinda says, “Daddy?”

  “Here,” I say.

  “Can’t sleep.”

  “Well, gee,” I tell her, “open up, let’s cuddle.”

  “Nice try.”

  “Thanks, sweetie.”

  She clears her throat. “I made this promise to Mommy. She said it’s a quarantine.”

  “Mommy’s a fruitcake.”

  “What?”

  “Nothing,” I murmur. “We’ll straighten things out in the morning. Close your eyes now.”

  “They are closed.”

  “Tight?”

  “Pretty tight.” A pause, then Melinda says, “You know something? I’m scared, I think.”

  “Don’t be.”

  “I am, though. I hate this.”

  There’s a light trilling sound. Maybe a sob, maybe not. In the dark, although the door separates us, her face begins to compose itself before me like a developing photograph, those cool eyes, the pouty curvature of the lips.

  “Daddy?”

  “Still here.”

  “Tell the honest truth,” she whispers. “I mean, you won’t ever try to kill me, will you?”

  “Kill?”

  “Like murder, I mean. Like with dynamite or an ax or something.”

  I examine my hands.

  “No killing,” I tell her. “Impossible. I love you.”

  “Just checking.”

  “Of course.”

  “Mommy thinks … Oh, well. Night.”

  “Night,” I say.

  And for several minutes I’m frozen there at the door, just pondering. Kill? Where do kids get those ideas?

  The world, the world.

  I groan and lie down and zip myself into the sleeping bag. Then I get jabbed in the heart. Another poem—it’s pinned to the pajama pocket.

  THE BALANCE OF POWER

  Imagine, first, the high-wire man

  a step beyond his prime,

  caught like a cat,

  on the highest limb,

  wounded, wobbling,

  left to right,

  seized by the spotlight

  of his own quick heart.

  Imagine, next, the blue-eyed boy

  poised on his teeter-totter

  at the hour of dusk,

  one foot in fantasy,

  one foot in fear,

  shifting, frozen—

  silly sight—

  locked in twilight balance.

  Imagine, then, the Man in the Moon,

  stranded in the space

  of deepest space,

  marooned,

  divorced from Planet Earth

  yet forever bound to her

  by laws of church

  and gravity.

  Here, now, is the long thin wire

  from Sun to Bedlam,

  as the drumbeat ends

  and families pray:

  Be quick! Be agile!

  The balance of power,

  our own,

  the world’s,

  grows ever fragile.

  Horseshit of the worst kind. Bedlam—unbalanced, she means. Marooned, divorced—a direct threat, nothing else. At least it rhymes.

  Lights off.

  Sleep, I tell myself, but I can’t shut down the buzzings. The issue isn’t bedlam. Uranium is no figure of speech; it’s a figure of nature. You can hold it in your hand. It has an atomic weight of 238.03; it melts at 1,132.30 degrees centigrade; it’s hard and heavy and impregnable to metaphor. I should know, I made my fortune on the stuff.

  We were all in on it, Sarah and Ned and Ollie and Tina—we followed the trail and plundered those ancient mountains and now we’re left with the consequences, that old clickety-clack echoing back. It’s history. It can’t be undone.

  There’s a soft tapping at the bedroom door.

  “Hey, Goofy,” Melinda whispers, “stop
talking to yourself.”

  5

  First Strikes

  AUTUMN 1964, AND THERE was a war on, and people were dying. There were jets over the Gulf of Tonkin. There were bombs and orphans and speeches before Congress. It was a season of flux: leaves were turning, times were slippery. And it was real. No paranoia, not this time. At night, in bed, I detected a curious new velocity at work in the world, an inertial zip; I could hear it in the rhetoric, in the stiff battering-ram thump of the music. Unwholesome developments, I thought. The Chinese detonated their first nuclear device. Khrushchev was on the skids. Call it prescience, or a sensitivity to peril, but I could not shake the hunch that things were accelerating toward the point of hazard. In Da Nang the Marines were digging in, and in Saigon the generals played their flamboyant games of hopscotch, and at home, at random spots across the North American continent, in back rooms, in the dark, there were the first churlish rumblings of distemper.

  Nothing mutinous, not yet. Abbie Hoffman was a nobody. Jane Fonda was a starlet. By daylight, at least, Vietnam was still a fairy tale.

  We were at peace in time of war.

  And at Peverson State College, in September of 1964, we did the peaceful things. We crammed for exams and talked sex until four in the morning. We were kids, after all, and the future seemed altogether probable. It was a bridge between two eras, a calm, old-fashioned time, and on the nation’s campuses, certainly at Peverson State, football was still king and booze was queen and raw physicality was the final standard of human excellence.

  To be sure, Pevee was not a distinguished institution. More like a health resort, I decided, or a halfway house for the criminally vacuous. Mostly ranch kids—hicks and dullards. Even after my experience at Fort Derry High, I had to admire the way my new classmates so daringly refined the meaning of mediocrity. A dense, immobile apathy. Ignorance on a colossal scale. There was something ambitious about it, almost inspired. No one cared. No one tried. On the surface, of course, the place could seem deceptively collegiate, with the usual tweedy teachers and wimps with slide rules, but even so, beneath the cosmetics, Peverson State College was a student body without student brains. In a note to my parents, composed near the end of freshman orientation, I outlined the major difficulties. Stereos that blew your brains out at 3 a.m. Coeds who pondered the spelling of indefinite articles. Elaborate farting contests in the school library, with referees and formal regulations and large galleries of appreciative spectators.

  Cynical, maybe, but true. The college had been founded back in the early fifties in anticipation of the coming wave of baby-boomers, millions of us, children of the age. To educate us, or at least to contain us, Montana’s state legislature had appropriated several million dollars for the construction of a large, fully modern facility along the banks of the Little Bighorn, ten miles from the famous battlefield, forty miles from SAC’s northern missile fields. It was a danger zone, to put it mildly, and this circumstance was clearly reflected in the campus architecture, a kind of Neo-Pillbox, forty acres of solid concrete. Dorms and parking lots and fences, all cement: Ready-Mix University.

  The place wasn’t ugly, exactly. It wasn’t anything, exactly. Just bland and boring, like an East German housing development.

  A zoo, some people called it, but that wasn’t quite the case. It was jungle. So I kept a low profile during the fall and winter of my freshman year. I avoided parties and mixers. Fortunately, I had no roommates, which kept the socializing to a minimum, and I was scrupulous about steering clear of the bull sessions and nonstop horseplay in the dorms. I installed a special lock on my door. I took my showers late at night to ensure privacy, no towel-snapping shit, no comparing penis sizes.

  My theory, essentially, was the old standby. Cover your flanks and watch out for morons.

  I wasn’t lonely, just careful.

  On the plus side there was the fact that I was smarter than the typical Pevee underclassman, more mature, and in class I didn’t mind showing off those qualities. A little arrogant, I suppose, but there was a real world out there, a serious world, and I cared about it, I knew what the stakes were. I enjoyed chemistry, for example—learning about quantum mechanics and the periodic table, how atoms worked, how fractional errors could produce massive consequences. I studied history, too, and political science. I liked the certainty of absolute uncertainty. I liked reading about Winston Churchill and Davy Crockett: obsessed people, but real dynamos when the chips were down.

  And of course geology. That was my main love, and from my first day at Peverson I knew I’d be majoring in rocks.

  The geology lab was my true home on campus. Some evenings, when the dorm became unbearable, I’d take my pillow and blankets over to the lab, lock the door, turn out the lights, and lie there watching the brilliant twinklings all around me, like a jeweler’s showcase, flakes of silver and gold, ruby reds, fluorites and diamonds and foliated talc, those glowing prisms. Terra firma, I’d think. Back to the elements. A hard thing to explain, but for me geology represented a model for how the world could be, and should be. Rock—the word itself was solid. Calm and stable, crystal locked to crystal, there was a hard, enduring dignity in even the most modest piece of granite. Rocks lasted. Rocks could be trusted. The covalent bonds were tight and sure, and the electrons held fast from hour to hour, age to age. Sometimes I’d pick up a chunk of uranium dioxide and just squeeze it. I’d press it to my cheek. I’d study its properties, the purply-black coloration, bits of red and yellow, slightly greasy to the touch, dull and opaque and brittle. And it was safe; it did not explode. Not in the world-as-it-was, not in the world-as-it-should-be. I’d put my tongue against it, tasting, thinking about Ping-Pong and Chuck Adamson and collapsing stars, thinking doom, but the uranium was a friend. It had staying power. Man was goofy but the earth was tolerant. In geology, there was always time.

  I wasn’t crazy. I didn’t unravel. Over that long freshman year, 1964 and 1965, I stuck it out alone. I had my own table in the cafeteria, my own good company. At times I felt a little frazzled, but I was blessed with the mental equipment to keep a firm fix on the moral priorities.

  Imagination, that was my chief asset. Not fantasies, exactly, just vivid home movies of the world-as-it-should-be.

  At night, in my room, I carried on internal dialogues with important world personages. I was perfectly sane. I’d set up meetings with LBJ and Andrei Gromyko and Ho Chi Minh, informal summit conferences at which I would preside as an instrument of moderation and compromise, a peacemaker. “Just relax,” I’d say, and Gromyko would say, “Man, I can’t relax, these fucking Texans,” so then I’d come up with suggestions about ways to cope with anxiety and stress, anything to prevent twitches in the trigger finger.

  Mind games, but nothing freaky. I pretended I was a corpse. I saw myself as a member of Custer’s lost command.

  And Sarah Strouch.

  Sarah was Fantasy Number One.

  Ever since high school, our relationship had been a classic love-hate affair, and at Peverson State there was no change. Two different people, two different worlds. She was a campus superstar—a cheerleader, of course—vapid, vain, cruel, and beautiful. The combination intrigued me. During our first year at Peverson, we crossed paths fairly often, in the cafeteria, or walking to class, but Sarah’s eyes would always slide over me with a kind of queenly indifference. She didn’t nod or wave. She didn’t smile. The signals, I thought, were not encouraging, so naturally fantasy took over. There was Sarah-as-she-was and there was Sarah-as-she-should-be.

  At certain hours of the night she would slip into my room and put her arms around me and say, “Well, now, here we are. Just you and me.”

  Or she’d sit quietly on the bed, smiling a secret smile while I finished my homework.

  Not crazy.

  Not mere whimsy.

  To the contrary, those feats of imagination kept me sane. They were a means of connecting the dots, locating the hidden scheme of things. Who could become a surgeon, for instance, without
first visualizing the surgical event, slicing open a human breast and prying apart the ribs and dipping into blood and gore? Our lives are shaped in some small measure by the scope of our daydreams. If we can imagine happiness, we might find it. If we can imagine a peaceful, durable world, a civilized world, then we might someday achieve it. If not, we will not. Therefore Sarah Strouch would say, “Imagine this, William—I’m all yours.” And it was somehow real. Or at least a kind of reality, the reality of what could be and might still be. Lying back, smiling with her eyes, she would perform uncommon acts of generosity and understanding. She would allow liberties—holding, touching. “Very nice,” she’d whisper, “just keep squeezing, don’t stop.”

  It’s true, I lived in my head, but my head was a secure residence. There were no fracture lines. Sometimes I’d feel a little slippage, even some inexplicable sorrow, and yet with luck, with immense willpower, I made it through my freshman year.

  I put up No Trespassing signs outside my door.

  I papered my walls with obituaries.

  No problem, I was fine.

  Strange goings-on, however.

  January 1966, a sophomore slump, and there were some disconcerting nighttime occurrences.

  I watched a missile rising from the plateau beyond the Little Bighorn. Yes, a rocket, bright white with blue markings and a silver nose cone. “Ah me,” I said mildly. But there it was, sleek and conspicuous against the night sky. I could read the letters USA on its midsection; I could see the tail fins and the peeling paint at its rear quarters. This was not, I realized, a dream. This was a missile. At the time, which was well after midnight, I was situated in a reclining position at the riverbank. I was alone. I had no future. “Ah me,” I said, then came a high whining sound. The missile rose at a slight northward angle. It passed across the face of the moon. For a moment I feared the flashes might come, but there was just the missile climbing against gravity, beyond the football stadium, toward Canada and the Arctic Ocean, a smooth, graceful parabola that was not without mystique and beauty.