by Tim O'Brien
“Often. You did.”
“Your own damned fault.”
“I understand.”
“All those years, William, but you were never really there. Not totally.”
“And he was?”
“Oh, yes. Yes, he was.”
Again, briefly, her hand went to her eyes. There was the need to simplify things.
“Do you love him?” I asked.
“Such a question.”
“Do you?”
“Love,” she sighed. “Who knows? He cares about me. And he’s present. No qualifications.”
“Noble of him,” I said. “A nice guy.”
“Yes, that, too. He sticks. Completely there.”
I nodded. “Wonderful, then, he sticks, that must be a great satisfaction. Do you love him?”
“I get by.”
“That’s something, I suppose.”
“It is. Quite a lot, in fact.”
“Happy you,” I said.
When my flight was called there was a moment of regret and bitterness. My own fault, though. I kissed her lightly on the forehead and walked down the ramp, then came back and kissed her on the lips and said, “I’m sorry,” which were the truest words I’d ever spoken.
It was the era of Vietnamization. The war, we were told, was winding down, peace through transfer, and to date our government had turned over to the ARVN more than 700,000 rifles, 12,000 machine guns, 50,000 wheeled vehicles, 1,200 tanks, and 900 artillery pieces. For some, however, it was not enough. President Nguyen Van Thieu proposed that the United States equip his nation with a modest nuclear capability. Others disagreed. Among them, Senator George McGovern took a fresh look at his options, and Senator Charles Goodell was legislating in behalf of final withdrawal. Others disagreed violently. Viet Cong flags flew over Sioux City. In Chicago, Judge Julius Hoffman presided over a discomposed courtroom, and in the streets, within shouting distance, the Weathermen went hand to hand with riot cops. There were gag orders and troop deployments. It was the year of upsets, and at the World Series, Gil Hodges and his fabulous Mets took Baltimore up against the center-field wall.
In Quang Ngai, the monsoons had come.
There were footprints on the moon.
Ronald Reagan governed California.
The Stones sang Let It Bleed.
On October 15, 1969, the moratorium came down on schedule. I checked into a Kansas City motel and watched it on television with the help of Magic Fingers. I’m not sure what I felt. Pride, on the one hand, and rectitude, but also a kind of heartache.
Big numbers—
In Boston, 100,000 people swarmed across the Common. New York City, 250,000; New Haven, 40,000; Des Moines, 10,000 plus tractors. At Whittier College, and at Clemson, and at a thousand other schools, you could hear the National Anthem mixing with hymns and folk songs and services for the dead. There were oratorical declarations by Hollywood dignitaries. Church bells, too, and torches and suspended commerce and pray-ins at national shrines. Wall Street was wall-to-wall with citizenry; the Golden Gate Bridge was stopped to traffic. At the University of Wisconsin a crowd of 15,000 carried candles and umbrellas through a heavy rain. At UCLA, 20,000. At Chicago’s Civic Center, 10,000. In Washington, with a bronze moon over the White House, 50,000 constituents came with flashlights to petition their chief of state for peace.
Around midnight I went out for a hamburger. I played some pinball, took a short walk, and returned to the room.
It was hard to find the correct posture. I thought about the flow of things. Ping-Pong to Chuck Adamson to Peverson State, and also Sarah, her culottes and letter sweater, and now the guns, and how you couldn’t nail down the instant of turn or change but how small actions kept leading to larger actions, then the inevitable reactions. The late-night CBS wrap-up showed Lester Maddox singing God Bless America. In Sacramento, Ronald Reagan talked about the perfidious nature of the day’s events, which gave “comfort and aid to the enemy,” and in the nation’s capital Barry Gold-water and Gerald Ford harmonized on the grand old themes. Then came a closing collage: the American flag at half-staff in Central Park, a graveyard vigil in Minneapolis, Eugene McCarthy reciting Yeats, Coretta King reciting Martin Luther King, 30,000 candles burning in the streets of Kansas City.
I couldn’t sleep.
I slipped my last quarter into the Magic Fingers and lay there in the twentieth-century dark. It was all kindling. “Save us,” I said, to no one in particular, just to the forces, or to the 39,000 dead, or to those, like me, who needed Magic Fingers.
When the time expired, I picked up the phone and called home. It seemed appropriate. The ringing itself was a kind of shelter. That soft, two-beat buzz—like a family voice, I thought, indelible and yet curiously diminished by the phonics of history and long distance—older now, depleted and somewhat fragile. I lay very still. I pictured my father’s Buick parked in the driveway; I could see the shadows and reflections of household objects: a chrome-plated toaster in the kitchen, windows and mirrors, the old rubber welcome mat at the front door. Silhouettes, too, and familiar sounds. The doorbell chiming off-key. The way the refrigerator would suddenly kick in and hum. Home, I thought. The shapes and smells, all the unnoticed particulars.
My mother answered on the seventh ring. Her voice was low and sleepy-sounding, not quite her own. I didn’t speak. Eyes closed, I pictured her face, how she would frown at the silence, that impatient squint when she said, “Yes, hello?” I wanted to laugh—“Guess who,” I wanted to say—but I held my breath and listened. There was a long quiet. I could see her wedding band and the veins running thick and blue along the back of her hand. I could hear the kitchen clock. Long-distance sounds. I imagined a tape recorder turning somewhere in the dark, a tired FBI agent tuning in through headphones.
Then my mother’s voice. A hesitation before she said, “William?”
I was silent. I held on a few seconds longer.
“William,” she said.
Then she repeated my name, several times, without question, softly yet absolutely.
“It’s you,” she said. “I know.”
Like sleepwalking, the inertial glide.
I spent Thanksgiving in a Ramada Inn near Reno. On Christmas Eve I treated myself to oyster stew at a Holiday Inn outside Boston. My goals were modest—to stay unjailed, to keep the biology intact.
Crazy, I’d think.
On New Year’s Day 1970, a new decade, I built a snowman in the parking lot of my motel in Chicago. Then I went haywire. I butchered it. I committed murder. I gouged out the eyes and smashed the head, and when it was done I took a shower and washed off the gore and lay in bed and watched the Rose Bowl.
Stability was a problem. You could only keep running for so long, then the odds caught up and you got mangled like a snowman.
If you’re sane, I thought, you’re fucking crazy.
Over the dreary months of January and February I performed my duties and nothing more. Inertia. Town to town: I delivered the mail and watched my step and looked for a way out. I focused on routine and ritual. Once a week I’d get a haircut. Twice a month I’d receive an envelope containing expense cash and a typed itinerary. Now and then I’d find a short note from Sarah. Be well, she’d write. Or she’d write: William—I feel unwanted.
In March there was no note at all.
In April she wrote: I miss you. It hurts. Whatever happened to Rio?
In May I began looking for Bobbi.
Madness, I realized, had now become viable. Fantasy was all I had. Something to hang on to—that one-in-a-million possibility—so I went after it.
Passively at first, then actively.
In airports, between flights, I stationed myself near the Trans World gate area, a stakeout, sitting back and scanning the crowds for blue uniforms and blond hair. Impossible odds, I’d think, but even so I’d feel a tingle at each arrival and departure. I’d listen for her name over the airport loudspeakers. Bobbi, I’d think. I’d rehearse bits of dialogue. S
ure, I’d tell her—obsession—imagination—but those were my great assets. I knew how to dream. I’d win her over. Yes, I would. I’d recite Martian Travel from memory. I’d charm her with love and practicality. Money was no problem—I knew where the money was, it was in the rock, it was there in the Sweethearts to be found and dug up and spent without thought of consequence—I’d buy her furs and perfumes, whatever the ore could buy, and we’d have a family, and the world could go to hell, but we’d go in style, we’d live as others live, in fantasy, happily.
In mid-May I began making direct inquiries. There was little to go on, a first name and a vague description, but luck was the governing factor—a TWA flight, Denver to Salt Lake.
I picked up the trail at thirty-two thousand feet.
“Bobbi,” the stewardess said, and she looked at me with grave eyes. “Sublime smile? Lots of rhythm?”
“It sounds right,” I said.
The woman shook her head.
“Pity,” she murmured. “This way.”
She led me down the aisle to the galley area. We were somewhere high over the Rockies, a fresh spring sky, and there were troops in Cambodia and ceremonies at Kent State, but it didn’t mean a thing to me. The stewardess mixed a pair of drinks and motioned for me to sit down in the last row.
She lighted a cigarette and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. Her name tag said Janet.
After a time she sighed.
“Bobbi Haymore,” she said. “The Skywriter, we called her. Bobbi the Haiku Haymore. Let me guess—she pinned a poem to your shirt?”
“Coat.”
“Coat, then. Fill in the blank.”
“Haymore?” I said.
“Like Hey-more. Care less. Not my favorite person.” She took out a pen and wrote down the name for me. “The golden bard. Very mystical. Those poems of hers, she’d pass them out like peanuts. Passengers loved it. Especially male types. You, too, I suppose.”
“Yes,” I admitted, “she had an effect.”
“The full treatment, no doubt?”
“Not a treatment. She was—it’s hard to describe—she was completely there. No qualifications.”
The woman nodded. “I’ve heard it before. A spiritual experience.”
She snuffed out her cigarette.
“All right,” she said slowly, “let’s see if I can set the scene. A night flight, I suppose. Very cozy. Dark cabin. Soft voice. Classy legs. Martini or two. Sound familiar? This leads to that, lots of spirituality. Next thing you know you’re getting the complete unabridged works, sweet and sexy. A day later you find a sonnet pinned to your undies. I miss anything?”
“Grass,” I said.
“I’m sorry?”
“Just grass, it came with the poem. She said it expressed her deepest feelings for me.”
There was a pause.
“Yes, well,” the woman said, “I think we’re obviously talking about the same person.”
For a time I was silent, just reflecting. I watched the passing atmosphere. It occurred to me that the events of imagination are never easily translated into the much less pliant terms of the real world. Too damned inflexible, I thought, but then I shrugged.
“So,” I asked, “how do I find her?”
The stewardess grunted.
“Sucker,” she said. She pulled a tube of lipstick from her handbag and dabbed grimly at the corners of her mouth. “Listen, I know the girl. I crewed with her. Tone-deaf little tramp. Doesn’t talk to people—she recites. That so-called poetry of hers—rushing tides and dappled dunes—garbage, you know?—but the guys, though, they all fell for it, they just ate it up. Putrid. Men, they’re all suckers.”
She turned and half smiled at me.
“All I want,” she said, “is to help. Forget it, that’s my advice.”
“Well, thanks.”
“A word to the wise.”
“I appreciate it,” I said. “Where is she?”
The stewardess closed her eyes and leaned back. Her smile seemed bitter.
“Bailed out,” she said. “The great blond beyond.”
“In other words—”
“Departed. Thin air. Ran off with some navigator. New York, I think. Hey-more. Care less.”
“Navigator?’
“Andy Nelson. Cute guy. Sucker, though.”
“For sure,” I said gently, “aren’t they all?”
I borrowed her pen and jotted down the name Andy Nelson.
The facts came slowly, but in the end I had what I needed. Back in the early fall, Bobbi had retired to pursue her muse full-time. Grad school, apparently. A creative writing program at Columbia or NYU—New York City, that much was certain. The navigator had gone along for the ride.
I studied my notes. Sketchy at best, but at least there were options.
“Last warning,” the stewardess said, “she’s a bloodsucker, she’ll eat your heart out. Crush it, I mean. Drain it dry.”
I smiled and said, “That’s the risk.”
In Salt Lake I changed my travel arrangements.
Go, I thought. Curtain Number Three. There was time for a cup of coffee and then I was airborne again.
The next few days were chaotic.
In New York, I took a room at the Royalton and started making calls. The phone book listed thirteen Haymores, no B’s or Bobbis, but I tried anyway. No luck, just bad tempers. I spent a restless, tumbling night, and the next morning I was up early. Alarming developments on the Today show: the Kent State aftershocks. There was violence in Little Rock. In St. Paul, 80,000 people stormed down Summit Avenue, and there was public mayhem in the streets of Philadelphia. It was epidemic. Arson in Tallahassee, a bombing at Fort Gordon. Surreal maybe, or maybe not, but I imagined the Committee’s contribution to all this. Sarah calling shots, Tina quoting Chekhov. I could hear Ollie Winkler’s squeaky giggle: “The chef and the terrorist—they’re finally cooking!”
No matter, though. I was disengaged. I turned off the television and closed the curtains and began dialing.
At Columbia, the registrar had no record of a Bobbi Haymore. I tried NYU, then Brooklyn College, then several others. All dead ends. At noon I went out for a walk down Sixth Avenue. Vaguely, without dwelling on it, I realized I was chasing air. Bobbi, I’d think, but the name was more than a name. Its meaning—the crucial meaning—was like grass. She was real, yes; the hair and the eyes and the voice; but the reality was also an emblem. “Bobbi,” I’d say, which meant many things, possibility and hope and maybe even peace.
A pipe dream, I knew that.
But the future is always invented. You make it up out of air. And if you can’t imagine it, I thought, it can’t happen.
I ate a hearty lunch.
Afterward I returned to the room and opened up the phone book: N this time, as in Nelson or navigator. The trick was confidence. There were eighteen Andrews, five Andys, but I hit it on the second shot.
“Bobbi?” he said, as if puzzled.
Then he laughed.
There was some belligerence before he sobbed and hung up on me. I gave him ten minutes and tried again.
It was not a cheerful conversation. Mostly silences, then quick gusts of misery; the man was obviously navigating without charts or compass. Split, he said. She’d walked out in January. Left him for a poet-translator named Scholheimer. Scholheimer, he said bitterly—big-shot Nazi. Very famous. Her teacher at NYU. Admired her poetry—midnight office hours—claimed she had promise. At the word promise there was weeping and the man excused himself and dropped the receiver. In the background I heard a toilet flush. Ditched, I thought, and I pictured a 727 floating belly-down in the mid-Atlantic, the navigator strapped in and struggling, much panic, Bobbi smiling and waving and paddling toward the horizon in a bright yellow life raft.
I tried not to take pleasure in it. I wrote down the data on a note pad: Ditched. Scholheimer. Nazi. NYU—question mark.
Later, I commiserated as best I could. Sad, I told him. A general ungluing of things. It wa
s the fundamental process of our age: collapsing valences and universal entropy.
Then I cleared my throat and asked where to find her.
No luck at NYU, I explained. Urgent business—I had to make contact.
The man blew his nose.
“You, too,” he said.
“Not necessarily.”
“No?”
“Just urgent. A personal matter.”
“Personal,” he said. “I’ll bet.”
He laughed.
There was a conspiratorial, almost friendly note to his voice when he said, “Fuck you.”
It didn’t matter. The last act was easy.
Scholheimer: only one listing.
There was no answer all afternoon but I enjoyed the dialing. That was the pleasure. A kind of pre-memory, dialing and listening and anticipating the rest of my life. “William,” she’d say, instantly, without hesitation.
And then what? A dinner date. An Italian restaurant. Pasta and checkered tablecloths. Quiet talk. A ferry ride past the Statue of Liberty. A twinkly night sky. She’d smile and hold my arm, not clinging, just holding, and she would nod with full understanding when I confessed to the possibility of madness. I’d tell her everything. I’d start with the year 1958, when I first went underground, that night in May when I grabbed my pillow and blankets and ran for the basement and slept the one great sleep of my life. “Am I crazy?” I’d ask. I’d tell her about Chuck Adamson and the Cuban missile crisis and unevacuated bowels. I’d look her in the eyes and ask it bluntly: “Am I crazy?” Everything. Exile, dislocation, Key West, the events at Sagua la Grande, flares and tracers and guns in the attic. “How much is real?” I’d ask. “The bombs—are they real? You—are you real?” Quietly, in graphic detail, I’d tell her about ball lightning striking Georgia; I’d tell her about a Soviet SS-18 crossing the Arctic ice cap, how I could actually see it, and hear it, but how no one else seemed to notice, or if noticing, did not care, how no one panicked, how the world went on as if endings were not final. “Am I crazy?” I’d ask. All afternoon, as I dialed and waited, I worked my way through the scenarios. A rooftop bar with piano music and dim lighting. The way we’d dance, barely moving. Her steady blue eyes. Then a taxi ride through Central Park. The clicking meter. Her hand coming to rest on mine. I imagined rain. There would be rain, yes, and umbrellas and fuzzy yellow streetlights and the sound of the taxi tires against wet pavement. And she’d smile at me, that secret smile, which would give me the courage to suggest a lifelong commitment. I’d ask her to save my life. I’d say, “Bobbi, I’m crazy. But save me.” And she’d listen to all this with grace and equanimity. At the Royalton we would no doubt undress and move to the bed and lie there listening to the rain. Maybe sex, but maybe not. And then later, near dawn, I would issue proposals. I would promise her happiness, and fine children, and a house with sturdy locks and heavy doors. No more running, I’d say. No nightmares. A happy ending in which nothing ever ends. “It’s possible,” I’d tell her, “it’s almost plausible, we just have to imagine it,” and after a time Bobbi would turn toward me and smile without speaking, placing her hand against my heart, holding it there, mysteriously, shaping the possibilities, and that shining smile would mean Yes, she could imagine these things and many more.