by Tim O'Brien
Sarah smiled and touched my wedding ring. “A love disease,” she said. “It’ll clear up once we get married.”
“Seriously.”
“Ugly, am I?”
“It should be looked at,” I said. “By a doctor.”
Sarah laughed.
Not funny, however. At the end of January, she complained of fatigue. A dark, thimble-sized scab formed at the corner of her mouth. Tiny black veins snaked across the surface of the blister. Her speech faltered. She had trouble coordinating past with present.
In February there were periods of dizziness; at night there was crying.
“Mommy!” she’d scream.
She’d press a pillow to her face and curl up at the foot of the bed and scream, “I’m dead!”
For a week or two it got better. Then it got much worse.
“Dead!” she’d yell.
One evening she used a needle to drain the lip. There was infection and severe swelling. In the morning, when I brought breakfast to her room, she pulled a pillowcase over her head.
She was cogent, though.
“Well,” she said cheerfully, “this smart-ass mouth of mine.”
Rafferty sat in a rocking chair near the bed. His eyes were dull. He looked at her for a while, then left us alone.
Gently, I tried to lift off the pillowcase, but Sarah stopped me.
“No, please,” she said. “Leave it be. Just for now.”
The room smelled of medicines, Campho-Phenique and Xy-locaine. For several minutes I sat in the rocking chair and tried for silence.
“A doctor,” I finally said. “You know that?”
“Not quite yet.”
“Sarah, I won’t let—”
“Not yet,” she said. “No hospitals. I can’t be alone like that.”
“You’re not alone.”
“I can’t be.”
She turned away from me. It was a bright winter morning, and the curtains were open, and the sunlight made little trails along the flesh at her arms and ankles.
Lying back, she seemed to doze off.
Then she said, “William, you know what I wish? I wish—don’t get upset or anything—but I wish we’d had some things together. The two of us. Just certain things. I wish I was pregnant. It’s corny, I know, but I really wish that.”
“It’s not so corny,” I said.
“I guess not. Sounds that way, but … You know what else? I wish there was more time. A billion years. I wish I was floating on this raft in the ocean somewhere, like somewhere romantic, and there’s this island with palm trees and waterfalls and stuff, but it’s not exactly a desert island because we’ve got all these kids running around barefoot, and I’m pregnant again and it’s a real hot day and I’m just floating on this raft—no sharks or anything—so whenever I want I just sort of slip into the water and go down to the bottom and get cool, and there’s this baby inside me, this thing we have together, and then when I’m cool I come up to the raft again and lie there and get hot. Pretty corny, I told you. But that’s what I wish. I wish we could just float. I wish you’d make love to me. You can’t, I know, but I still wish it.”
“I’d like that,” I told her.
“But you can’t?”
“No. But it’s not corny.”
Sarah took off the pillowcase and sat up. She wasn’t quite smiling, or crying, but it was a little of both. Even with the lip, I thought, she was a very striking woman. There was still a great deal between us.
“If you kissed me,” she said, “could you live with it?”
“I think I could.”
“Might be contagious.”
“There’s the risk.”
She came to the rocking chair. “Go on, then,” she said, and almost laughed. “Just keep that tongue in your mouth. It’ll be wonderful, I promise.”
It was not cancer.
A form of encephalitis, they told us. A viral migration along the pathways between lip and brain.
She was operated on in Helena, she came home to recuperate, there were convulsions, she died in March.
Which is how it happens, that fast.
We know we will live forever until that instant when we know we will not.
“God,” she screamed, “something’s haywire!”
“There, now,” I said.
“William?”
“I’m right here.”
“Where? I can’t think.”
“Don’t, then,” I said. “Just don’t think.”
In the last week there were hallucinations. The cortex liquefied. The viruses consumed her thoughts. The left eye roamed in its socket, her face darkened, there was puffiness along the jaw, she had trouble swallowing, her arms and fingers twitched, her breathing became fast and shallow.
“Am I dead?” she asked.
Another time she jerked up and said, “I want something! I forget what—I want it.”
We took turns sitting with her. She was never alone. When she died, Ned Rafferty was there. He came into the kitchen, where I was shelling peas, and he looked at me and said, “I loved her best.”
The funeral was quick and somber.
When it was over, I asked Rafferty what he’d be doing with himself. He thought it over, then said he’d probably stick with the gang, they were family. He didn’t cry much until later, but later he cried a lot.
After all, she was dead.
“I’m dead!” she keeps yelling.
Not long afterward, the others showed up. Ollie and Tina and Nethro and Ebenezer, they were all shaken by the news, their grief was genuine, and for more than a week we catered to a morose household.
When they left, in early April, they took the warhead with them.
And later that summer they died by gunfire in the tropics. There was tear gas, I remember. Bullhorns and sharpshooters and a burning safe house and a bomb in the attic—all the networks were there, a TV spectacular.
In the autumn I suffered a minor breakdown.
And in the winter, when Bobbi said she needed space, when she suggested a trial separation, I was comforted by the final passage of a poem in progress: The balance of power, our own, the world’s, grows ever fragile.
13
Quantum Jumps
THE HOLE SNORTS and says, Do it.
It’s a smug, self-satisfied voice. Constant chatter all night long—Star light, star bright! Shut me up with dynamite!
Below, in their hammocks, Bobbi and Melinda sleep beautifully, and the backyard shimmers with the lights of Christmas, and here, at last, I’ve come up against the edge of an imposing question: What now? Three hours till daylight. Soon, I realize, it will be time for absolutes.
Chasm! Spasm!
The hole releases a steamy, insinuating laugh, then coughs and belches. I can smell its breath.
I lie back and watch the lights.
Certain truths appear. I love my wife. I loved her before I knew her, and I love her now, and I will not let her go. I’m committed. I believe in fidelity. I will not be separated. One thing in my life will last and keep lasting and last forever. Love is absolute.
What I need now is silence, but the hole has a mind of its own: Here’s a good one … Jack be nimble! Jack be slick! Jack me off with a dynamite stick!
I shake my head: “I’m not interested.”
The hole snickers.
Oh, yeah, you’re interested. I’m the mouthpiece, you’re the brains. Now and never. Do it.
I’m wired. I’m hot. But I know the difference between life and death. When the hole hoots and says, Home, sweet hole, I don’t respond, not even a shrug. I get to my feet and do some exercises. A clear, calm night, but there’s a dynamic moving through the dark. I’m at wits’ end; I can’t think beyond black and white. In a time of relativity, I wonder, how does one achieve absolutes? Separate, Bobbi said. She was gracious about it. She smiled and said she loved me. But then she said separate—she needed space—what does space mean?—and later there was a poem called Space Walk—walk on air, walk away—
but I can’t be relative about it. I won’t let it happen. Trouble is, what now? I want to nail our hearts together. I want no space between us. I want wholeness, without separation. I want it all, now and forever.
The question is simple. In this age, at this late hour, how do I make a happy ending?
The odds, I know, are poison.
It’s a real world and it’s dangerous. Science takes no prisoners; the atom forecloses; there are no epilogues. Here, at the rim of the hole, I can see what I’m up against. I can see Sarah dying. A burning safe house, oceans boiling, cities in ash. I can see it. A Titan II missile: ten feet in diameter, 103 feet tall, 330,000 pounds of launch weight, a flight range exceeding 6,000 miles, two engines, five megatons of no-bullshit firepower. It’s out there. It’s deep in the Kansas soil—you can touch it, man to metal—you can walk the underground corridors and press your fingers against the cool, damp technology. There it is. Just look: the whirring exhaust fans, bright lights, no shadows, the chrome launch console, the red box with its two silver keys, the coffee pot, the photographs of loved ones, the clocks and computers and holstered pistols, the crew-cut missileers in their spit-shined boots and SAC-blue uniforms and daredevil scarves. It is in fact there. And here’s how it happens. Topside, it’s a hot Kansas day. A record-buster—roasting heat. It’s witch weather. A freaky black atmosphere and high winds and high voltage. Just look and say the words: Nuclear war. Kansas is the creeps. Tornado country, ghost country. Say it: Nuclear war. Look at it: black-eyed Susans and sunflowers staring at you from roadside ditches, vast fields of wheat, the sun and soil. And it happens. There’s lightning now, huge neon Z’s, a violet virga, and then the sky divides itself into two perfect halves—one hemisphere bruised and ugly, the other bright like summer—and the crease opens up like a smile over that Titan silo. This is it. A sudden wind comes up. It’s hard to stand, but you lean against the wind. You ponder the hemispheres. You see a small plot of land enclosed by barbed wire; you see a cow grazing; you see a farmer on his tractor; you see a little boy circling under a pop fly; you see a parked Air Force truck and a tiny white outbuilding and a stenciled sign that reads: “Deadly Force Authorized.” You consider running. You hear thunder. You watch a 700-ton concrete lid blow itself sideways; you say, “Oh!”; you see a woman run for the telephone; you see the Titan rising through orange and yellow gases—there’s still that wind and that Kansas sun and that grazing cow—and you gawk and rub your eyes—not disbelief, not now, it’s belief—and you stand there and listen to the thunder and track the missile as it climbs into that strange smiling crease in the sky, and then, briefly, you ask yourself the simple question: Where on earth is the happy ending?
Kansas is burning. All things are finite.
“Love,” I say feebly.
The hole finds this amusing.
I am all there is, it says. Keyhole, rathole, asshole, eyehole, hellhole, loophole, knothole, manhole, peephole, foxhole, armhole, sinkhole, cubbyhole, pothole, wormhole, buttonhole, water hole, bullet hole, air hole, black hole, hidey-hole … I am that I am. I am that which nearly was but never will be, and that which never was but always will be. I am the unwritten masterpiece. I am the square root of infinity. I am one hand clapping. I am what happened to the dinosaurs. I am the ovens at Auschwitz, the Bermuda Triangle, the Lost Tribes, the Flying Dutchman, the Missing Link. I am Lee Harvey Oswald’s secret contact in Moscow. I am the anonymous tipster. I am Captain Kidd’s treasure. I am the uncaused cause, the unnamed source, the unindicted co-conspirator, the unknown soldier, the untold misery, the unmarked grave. I am, in modesty, Neverness. I am the be-all and end-all. I am you, of course. I am your inside-out—your Ace in the Hole.
There’s a sharp grinding sound. Rock slides against rock, a perilous shifting.
Go on, do it. Dynamite.
“No,” I say.
Light the fuse! What’s to lose? Like a time capsule, except we dispense with time. It’s absolute! Nothing dies, everything rhymes. Every syllable. The cat’s meow and the dog’s yip-yip—a perfect rhyme. Never rhymes with always, rich rhymes with poor, madness rhymes with gladness and sadness and badness … I could go on forever. I do, in fact.
“Lunatic,” I say.
Can’t have sorrow without tomorrow.
“Crazy!”
The hole laughs and sings: Oh, I got plenty o’ nuttin’, an’ nuttin’s plenty fo’ me.
I shut it out. I squat down and fold my hands and wait. For what, I don’t know. A miracle, I suppose, or some saving grace.
I’m not myself.
It’s a feathery hither-and-thither sensation, like riding music, slipping up and down the scales of my own life. A balmy night in May—May 1958—and I grab my pillow and run for the basement and crawl under the Ping-Pong table and lie there faceup. I hear my father calling out my name. I smell the dank, sweet-sour odor of mildew, the concrete walls and basement moisture. “Easy, now,” my father says. He takes me in his arms and says, “Just a dream, cowboy, just a bad, bad dream.” But he’s wrong. It’s beyond dreaming. It’s right here and it’s real.
Balls to the wall! the hole yells. Off your ass, yo-yo!
The Christmas lights sparkle all around me.
There’s no other way.
Reluctantly, I move to the tool shed. I bend down and lift a crate and hoist it to my shoulder. There’s a queer sense of standing a few steps outside myself, a nonparticipant.
I carry the explosives across the yard.
Just the mechanics.
I use a pickax to chisel out three notches along the rim of the hole. I study the angles. I lay in the charges, crimp the caps, wire it up, test the firing device. I’m careful. I concentrate on each task as it comes.
When the surface work is done, I set in the ladder and climb down and prepare three more charges against the base of the north wall.
Dark down here—I stumble. I drop a blasting cap and jump back, then I spend five minutes searching for it on my hands and knees. Pitiful, the hole says, or maybe I say it, or both of us together: All thumbs, no nerve. Fire and ice—poetic justice!
I find the blasting cap.
An omen, I think. Then I wonder: Do we find the omens or do the omens find us?
Riddles!
I won’t be rushed. I work slowly, at my own pace.
The hole seems to press in closer, and there’s a foul, clammy smell that makes me wheeze as I wedge in the last stick of dynamite and lean down to hook up the firing device. I feel queasy. It’s partly the stench, partly my own misgivings. No hurry, I tell myself, just follow the sequence—attach the copper wires, turn the screws, make sure it’s a solid connection.
Done.
And what now?
I kneel at Melinda’s hammock. She sleeps with a thumb at the edge of her mouth, her tongue taut against the lower front teeth, her expression frank and serious. I stroke her hair. I want to cry but I can’t; I want to rescue her but I don’t know how. There are no survivors. When it happens, as with Sarah, the proteins dissolve and the codes are lost and there is only the endless rhyme. I feel some remorse, and even grief, but the emotions are like ice, I can’t get a grip on them.
What’s wrong with me? Why am I alone? Why is there no panic? Why aren’t governments being toppled? Why aren’t we in the streets? Why do we tolerate our own extinction? Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads? Why don’t we scream it? Nuclear war!
I love my daughter, I love my wife. It’s permanent. Gently, with love, I smooth the blankets around Melinda’s neck and shoulders, kissing her, surrendering to a moment of intimacy, then I turn and go to Bobbi and stoop down and put my arms around her and say, “I love you.” I rock the hammock. I’m frightened but I keep the vigil, just waiting, cradling the firing device, watching for the first frail light of dawn.
Once, I drift off.
There’s a fluttering in the darkness, like wings, and I snap awake and jerk my finger from the yellow button.
>
I lock my hands together.
So much can go wrong. Madness or malfunction, simple evil, an instant of overwhelming curiosity. Like a child with a chemistry set, and the instructions say, “Never mix X with Y,” but the kid starts wondering, What if? He’s human. He has to know. Curiosity, that’s all. A noble instinct. A craving for secrets. And so one day the kid creeps to his room and opens up his chemistry set and cautiously sprinkles out a little X and a little Y, just to know, and it’s the discovery of a lifetime. There are no more hypotheses. Knowledge becomes perfect and absolute. And again there’s that simple question: A happy ending?
If you can imagine it, I remind myself, it can happen.
But imagine this: Nuclear war.
A dark movie theater and you’re eating buttered popcorn and someone shouts, “Nuclear war!”
You laugh.
But this: “Fire!”
Drop the popcorn and run. It’s a stampede.
And then again this: “Nuclear war!”
Shrug? Shake your head? A joke, you think?
Imagine the surprise.
In the dark I hear someone chuckling, which startles me, but it’s just the hole. T minus nine, it says softly. Like falling off a log. We’ll all dream the same sweet dream—pure metaphor, that’s all it is. Push the button. Its voice is smooth and mellow. It recites nursery rhymes. It tells stories from the Bible, as if reminiscing, adding and subtracting here and there. Amen, it says. T minus eight, the century’s late.
I try not to listen.
I watch the night reorganize itself, the movements of stars and shadows. The patterns tend toward stasis.
God knows, I don’t want it this way.
Folded in forever like the fossils. I don’t want it but I can see it, as always, the imprints in rock, the wall shadows at Hiroshima, leaves and grass and the Statue of Liberty and Bobbi’s diaphragm. Here, she can’t leave me. The fossils don’t move. Crack open a rock and she’ll be curled around me. Her smile will be gold and granite. Immutable, metamorphic, welded forever by the stresses of our age. We will become the planet. We will become the world-as-it-should-be. We will be faithful. We will lace through the mountains like seams of ore, married like the elements …