by Tim O'Brien
“The darkest hour,” Ebenezer intoned solemnly, “is just about now. But bear in mind, people, you’ll find a jive light show at the end of the tunnel.”
He did Woody Woodpecker and LBJ and Porky Pig.
“This is your life,” he said. “Terror tends to terrorize, absolute terror terrorizes absolutely. Th-th-that’s all, folks!”
A dull explosion turned me over.
When I looked up, the wooden tower seemed to be reconstituting itself. A second explosion blew away the tower’s foundation. The structure stood legless for an instant, then toppled sideways and burned. “Fire in the hole!” Ollie Winkler shouted. Fine, clean work, I thought. And in the future, no doubt, there would be other such operations, the Washington Monument or the Statue of Liberty.
Immediately the gunfire eased off. A final flare colored the circumstances in shades of violet.
“Terrorism,” Ebenezer Keezer declared, “is the subtraction of the parts. Back to zero.”
Then I began digging.
I scooped out a shallow hole at the edge of the sea and slipped in and carefully packed wet sand against my legs and hips and chest. I apologized to my father. I jabbered away about the flashes and pigeons and sizzling sounds, and my father said, “Sure, sure,” and he was there beside me, with me, watching me dig. I told him the truth. “There’s nothing to die for,” I said, and my father thought about it for a time, then nodded and said, “No, nothing.” His eyes were bright blue. He smiled and tucked me in.
“Am I crazy?” I asked.
“That’s a hard one.”
“Am I?”
There was a pause, a moment of incompletion, but he finished it by saying, “I love you, cowboy,” then he bent down and kissed my lips.
Pass or fail, so I missed graduation. I spent nine days cooped up in a hospital on the outskirts of Havana. The diagnosis had to do with acute anxiety, a stress reaction, and I was too canny to argue. I lay low. There were nurses, I remember, and they were sticking me with sedatives. But I was fine. I recited Martian Travel in my head. I carried on dialogues with Castro and Nixon, offering sage advice and psychological support. I urged caution above all else. If there is nothing, I told them, then there is nothing to kill for, not flags or country, not honor, not principle, for in the absence of something there is only nothing.
I had a firm grip on myself. On occasion I felt a sudden lurching in my stomach, as if a trapdoor had opened, and at night I dreamed barbiturate dreams—gunfire and flares. But I played it cagey. I didn’t cry or carry on; I gave up speech; I smiled at the nurses and watched the needles without fear or protest. If you’re sane, there’s no problem.
I thought about escape.
I contemplated suicide.
No sweat, though, because I was on top of things.
I was released in mid-January 1969. A week later we were back in Key West.
Things were the same now, but different.
“Believe me,” Sarah said, “I’m not making judgments.”
“Of course not.”
“You understand?”
“Yes,” I said, “pass or fail.”
It was early morning, and we were having coffee at the kitchen table. The house had a stale, musty smell.
“No rough stuff,” she said. “Strictly behind the lines. A courier maybe.”
“Fine.”
“Different thresholds, different boiling points. It’s not a criticism.”
“Sure, I know.”
“William—” Her eyes skittered from object to object. She finished her coffee, stood up, and smiled. “So then, a passenger pigeon? Lots of exotic travel. Maybe Rio. Glamour and beaches, all those tight brown bodies. You can scout it out. Make reservations for after the war.”
“Fine.”
“Rio,” she said, “it’s a date.”
I nodded and said, “Fine.”
Which is how we left it.
Bad luck, I never made Rio. But for the next two years, while Sarah and the others pressed the issue, I found some peace of mind in my capacity as a network delivery boy. I was out of it. On March 6, 1969, when the Committee pulled its first major operation—a night raid on a Selective Service office in downtown Miami—I was buckled in at thirty-two thousand feet over the Rockies, heading for a pickup in Seattle. By all accounts they acquitted themselves well. Four days later, when I checked into my hotel in San Francisco, there was a message from Sarah: “I’m famous. Newsweek, page 12. I’m wanted.”
10
Quantum Jumps
“IF I WANTED TO,” Melinda says, “I could bust out of here.”
“How?”
“Simple Simon.”
“Go on, then, tell me. It’s a dare.”
She laughs. “Don’t be so condescending. I mean, God, if I told you, then it wouldn’t work.”
“True.”
“I’m not a dunce,” she says.
Another laugh, then I hear a clatter behind the bedroom door. Midmorning cleanup—dishes being stacked, the transfer of waste products. It’s all part of our new domestic order.
Stooping down, humming Billy Boy, I open up the service hatch at the foot of the door.
“Ready in there?”
“Just hold your horses,” Melinda says, “it’s not like we’re going anywhere.”
I smile at this. A fair statement: No one’s going anywhere. It’s a lockup. For two weeks now, nearly three, we’ve been living under conditions of siege at these bedroom barricades—an investment, so to speak, in the future—and the service hatch, though small, has functioned quite nicely as a means of communication and supply, a lifeline of sorts. I’m proud of it. It’s a brilliant piece of engineering: a rectangular hole in the door, nine by twelve inches, wide enough to permit the essential exchanges, narrow enough to deflect foolish thoughts of flight. As an extra safeguard, the hatch is fitted with its own miniature door and lock—a door within a door.
Melinda’s face appears at the opening. She slides out a tray piled with dirty breakfast dishes. The chamber pot comes next.
“Yunky to the max,” she says.
“Yunky?”
“It means stink.” She gets to her hands and knees and stares out at me. “Anyway, I could do it, you know. If I wanted to, I could escape easy.”
“Oh, sure, absolutely.”
“You don’t think so?”
Her face is framed by the opening. Behind her, near the bed, I can see Bobbi’s bare foot tapping out the meter to a poem in progress.
Melinda’s eyes shine.
“Okay, here’s a question, smartie,” she says. “What if I got sick or something? You’d have to let me out. If I caught some disease like—you know—like that time I had my stupid tonsils out. Then what?”
Bobbi’s foot stops tapping. This intrigues her, I can tell.
“Well,” I say.
“So then what? What if I said, ‘Daddy, I’m dying’?”
I smile at Bobbi’s curled toes.
“I guess you’d be fibbing, princess.”
“Well, sure,” she says, “but how would you know? I could cry and scream and stuff, just like this—” She makes a twisted face and shouts, “Agony! Polio!”
Bobbi’s toes stiffen.
“Agghh!” Melinda yells. “Can’t breathe! God, I’m choking!”
“Knock it off.”
“Help!”
Her face goes red. She jerks sideways and rolls out of my field of vision. Ridiculous, but I feel some discomfort. “Agghh!” she cries. And then it’s instinct—I reach through the hatch and grope for contact.
“God,” Melinda says, “talk about gullible.” She reappears at the hatch. “You get the idea now? I could do it, couldn’t I?”
“Maybe so.”
“Not maybe. I scared you.”
She wiggles her nose and says, “Agghh!” and then laughs. What are the limits? I wonder. What can be done? Such love. That cool, unblemished skin of hers, it makes me question my own paternity.
/> “So you see how it works,” Melinda says. “Get sick, that’s one plan, but I’ve got about six zillion better ones. I mean, boy, if I had to, I could—” She pauses, rubbing her eyes. There’s a tentative quality in her voice when she says, “Daddy, what if I did get sick? I mean, really sick? It’s not impossible.”
“Nothing is.”
“But what if?”
“Too iffy,” I tell her.
“You’re afraid to answer, aren’t you?”
“Melinda, I can’t—”
“You’re afraid.”
I shrug and try to finesse it, but she knows where I’m vulnerable.
“Tell the truth,” she says. “You’d at least take me to the hospital, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t just sit there and let me die?”
“Never, baby.”
“Never what?”
“Can’t happen that way.”
“What can’t?”
“You know,” I say softly, “it can’t happen.”
“You’re afraid.”
“Not that.”
“Afraid,” she says.
For a few moments we just gaze at each other. Her eyes are like one-way mirrors; she sees out, I can’t see in. If it were possible, I would end it here. I would break down the door and take the consequences.
Melinda knows this, and keeps pressing.
“If something happened to me,” she says, “something real bad, it’d be like murder almost. Kidnapping your own family, keeping us prisoner, it’s like … What if there’s a fire? We couldn’t even get out, we’d burn up in here, and it’d be just like murder.”
“Sweetheart, don’t talk that way.”
“Why not?”
“Just because.”
She wags her head sadly. “Because you’re afraid. Because stuff can happen, like fires and stuff, or else you might blow me to smithereens with dynamite.”
“Melinda, don’t—”
“Murder,” she says.
It’s no use.
What all this represents, ultimately, is an erosion of the traditional family structure. Cohesion and trust, we’ve somehow lost it. A little faith, for God’s sake—why can’t they see the obvious?
Quietly, I close the hatch and secure the lock.
“Loony!” Melinda shouts, but I walk away.
I do the dishes, make coffee, empty the chamber pot, set out a pound of hamburger to thaw for dinner. Murder, though. It eats at me. I think about Sarah and Tina and Ned and Ollie, all that wasted blood, and the thought makes me squeamish. I’m no killer, I never was, I never had that terrorist nerve.
Besides, what about love?
Good intentions?
I’m saving their lives. An act of mercy. The year, after all, is 1995, and we’re coming up on the millennium.
I return the chamber pot and change clothes and then trudge out to the hole. For a time I just stand at the edge. I’ve been at it nearly three months now, April to July, and the results are gratifying. Nineteen feet deep, twelve feet square. No need to justify. The hole speaks for itself. Dig, it says. At times I’m actually cowed by its majesty. It has a kind of stature—those steep walls plunging to shadow, the purity of line and purpose, its intangible holeness. There it is, you can’t dismiss it. It’s real.
Be safe, it says.
It says, Survive.
I’m not losing my marbles. Just a hole, of course, and when it speaks I rarely listen.
I know better.
Down the ladder, grab my spade, go to work. A hot day, but the earth smells cool and moist. I’m at home here. This is where it ends. Hey, man, the hole whispers. Here’s a riddle: What is here but not here, there but not there? Then a pause. “You,” I say, and the hole chuckles: Oh, yeah! I am the absence of presence. I am the presence of absence. I am peace everlasting.
There’s a giggling sound, high and crazy, but I don’t give it credence.
Discipline, I think. Mind and body. I work steadily, pacing myself. The key to progress, I now realize, is gradual accretion, routine and rhythm; that’s how monuments get built. Today it’s mostly a repair job. There was a light drizzle during the night, barely enough to dampen the grass, but it produced a thick coat of slime at the floor of the hole, slick and treacherous, and smelly, too, as if a toilet had backed up, and for the first hour I concentrate on tidiness. I’m alert to the possibility of a cave-in. Carefully, I check the four granite walls for signs of stress, those hairline fractures that can cause conclusion. You never know. Two weeks ago I was fortunate to be topside when a quarter-ton boulder sheared off along the north wall. It taught me a lesson: You can die saving yourself. Even safety entails risk. Which was the upshot of a poem Bobbi slipped through the service hatch a few days later. Backflash, she called it, and even now several lines still stick with me—
Here, underground, the flashes
are back, filaments of history
that light the tunnels
beneath the mind
and undermine the softer lights
of love and reason.
Remember this
as though in backflash:
A bomb.
A village burning.
We destroyed this house
to save it.
There’s more—it was one of her longish efforts—but I’m spared by a faulty memory. To my own ear, at least, there’s something rather glib about the way those metrics goose-step off the tongue. Bad poetics compounded by bad logic.
How does one respond?
With tenacity and daring. Spit on the hands and bend down and put muscle to it.
Dig. Nuclear war.
If you’re sane, you don’t fuck with the obvious. You know what MAD means. It means there is nothing to live for. Which means bedlam. So who’s crazy? True or false: The world can end. Multiple choice: Fire or ice or nuclear war. The realities are with us, Pershing and Trident and the kitchen sink, it’s all throw-weight, it’s buried nose-up under the flatlands of Kansas and North Dakota. A radical age requires radical remedies. The world, for Christ sake—biology!—so don’t call me crazy. I’m digging. You’re diddling. You, I mean. The heavy sleepers. The mealymouthed pols and hard-ass strategists who talk so reasonably about containment and deterrence. Idiots! Because when there’s nothing, there’s nothing to deter, it’s uncontained.
Sane, I think. I’ve got it together.
The hole snickers and says, Sure, man, you’re straight as an arrow.
I nod.
At noon I rig up a charge of dynamite, crouch behind the tool shed, hit the button, wait for the dust to settle, then begin the hard chore of piling the debris into pulley baskets and hauling it to the surface. When in doubt, dig. Abnormal, yes, but what’s the alternative? Plan a dinner party? Chalk it up to the existential condition? If that’s normal, I’m proud to call myself deviant.
Reality, it tends to explode.
I’ve got eyes. I can see.
I’ve got ears. I can hear.
And because I’m sane, because I can imagine an unpeopled planet, because life is so precious, because I’ve seen the flashes, I am willing to recognize the facts for what they are, pared to the bone, unrhymed and unmusical. Is it uncouth to speak plainly? Nuclear war—am I out of key with my times? An object of pity? Am I comic? Here, now, digging, my wife and daughter locked away, the hole egging me on, am I crazy to extrapolate doom from the evidence all around me, Minuteman and Backfire, a world stockpiled with 60,000 warheads? Are the numbers too bald, too clumsy? Am I indiscreet to say it? Nuclear war.
If you’re sane, you’re scared; if you’re scared, you dig; if you dig, you deviate.
If I could—
You can’t, the hole says. If you could, but you can’t. Keep the faith—you’re my main man.
“Right,” I mumble.
Speak up!
“Right,” I say.
The hole laughs.
Oh, yeah, you’ll show ’em, brother. When the shit comes down, they’ll sing a real different t
une. Amazing grace! Sweet melodies! Your wife’s a grasshopper, man—you and me, we’re the ants. Fee fi fo fum—I smell uranium! Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of blood! High diddle diddle, the fire and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the doom! Rome’s burning! Ding dong bell! Pussy’s gone to hell! Can you dig it, man? Can you truly dig it?
There’s a quaking sound. The granite walls seem to shrug.
Dig, dug, dead! Bobbi’s in her bed! Hickory dickory doom!
I’m perfectly calm. I ignore the chortling.
At two o’clock I knock off for the day. A cold shower, fresh clothes, then I sit down to prepare a shopping list. When it’s finished, I rap on the bedroom door.
“Get lost,” Melinda says.
“I am.”
“What?”
“Nothing.” I bend down and open up the service hatch. Melinda’s hair is in curlers. She lies on the floor, belly-down, peering out at me with the smartest eyes on earth.
“Well,” she says, “I guess you’re here to kill me.”
I treat it as a joke.
I smile and tell her I’m heading into town—is there anything she needs?
“Poison,” she says.
“Anything else?”
She thinks for a moment. “Yeah,” she says, “I could use a new father.”
“Sure, princess. I’ll see what I can do.”
“A good one this time. Get me one that’s not so goddamn screwy.”
The swearing disturbs me but she’s out of spanking range. I tighten my smile and tell her to check with her mother.
“Final call,” I say. “You want it, you name it.”
Melinda slides away. Through the open hatch I can hear the soft tones of Bobbi’s voice; it’s a blond voice; the voice of art, or the inexplicable mysteries of art; the voice of a flight attendant, calm and calming in the high turbulence. The words, of course, don’t register. The meanings don’t mean. Like the grass she once gave me, like her poetry, Bobbi’s voice is pure timbre. She doesn’t make sense.
Still, I can’t help listening. In a way, she’s right, the meanings don’t matter, it’s the voice that counts.
But why would she leave me?
Why a separation?
“Hey, you,” Melinda says, “wake up.”
She passes a slip of notepaper through the hatch, a requisition in my wife’s neat, left-leaning script: mouthwash, asparagus, Raisin Bran, olives, gin, vermouth, spaceship, husband.