Amy Brashear - The Incredible True Story of the Making of the Eve of Destruction

I screamed. I couldn’t help it. A shiver went down my spine, like someone was walking over my grave—as the saying went.

Everyone turned their head. I was having a panic attack. Mr. Truitt rushed toward me. He tried to calm me down. He grabbed my shoulders to keep me from shaking, but I kept struggling in his arms. I couldn’t breathe. I could see my reflection in his silver tie-clip. The look on his face made me just as afraid as he was. My face was bright red and covered in tears. Rodney ran to get the nurse, and she came in just as fast as he’d left with a brown paper bag.

“Laura. Laura. Laura,” the nurse said over and over again, “just breathe.”

Mr. Truitt stopped the tape and turned off the TV. Kevin turned on the lights and we sat quietly. What was there to say? I had nucleomituphobia. [66] Nucleomituphobia: the fear of nuclear weapons. Some people with this fear believe they will die because of a nuclear weapon. Also called nucleomitaphobia or nucleomitophobia. Associated words: fallout, radiation, thermonuclear warfare. Causes: external events and internal predispositions. Symptoms typically include extreme anxiety, dread, the fear of going outside and standing under the bomb, which would result in turning into a skeletonized version of a fleshless body, and of course anything associated with panic, such as shortness of breath, rapid breathing, irregular heartbeat, sweating, excessive sweating, nausea, dry mouth, inability to articulate words or sentences, and shaking. There is no cure. Like my teacher in ninth grade told us, “Don’t worry about the possibility of war. If it happens, the school will be a target in the primary strike zone, and our obliteration will be swift, instantaneous, and painless.” He was going through a divorce, and he was fired the next week after many of the parents complained.

Class was pretty much done after that until the bell rang. I kept breathing into my brown paper bag. I saw Mrs. Martin during gym class, where I talked about my feelings. I knew that I could never show my face again in chemistry. I was the girl who got freaked out over a fake nuke; what would I do if there was ever a real thing? A brown paper bag wasn’t going to save me.

I didn’t want to think about what happened in chemistry or Mrs. Martin’s assertion that if I didn’t come to terms with my nucleomituphobia, I would most definitely have a nervous breakdown. So I focused on the comic and how our superheroine looked. Max kept on talking about her boobs. I wanted something different, and it always went back to her breasts. Ugh. Human nature, I guess. Everything about life is about the human body and sex. Bombs are very phallic. War is very homoerotic. I probably shouldn’t be writing this. Future generations will read this and think humans were strange creatures obsessed with sex, but afraid of its destruction just the same. Oh, what complicated creatures we were/are.

Anyway, I couldn’t describe her right, and Max and I were arguing over whether he was going to make her a brunette, a redhead, or a blonde. When Terrence came home and saw us basically at a standstill, he suggested we make her black. “I’m guessing there’s not a lot of black superheroes,” he said.

“Besides Vixen, Monica Rambeau aka Captain Marvel, Nubia—you know, Wonder Woman’s twin—and Storm,” Max said.

“You know your superheroes,” Terrence said.

“I know my superheroes.”

“Don’t forget to add the boobs,” Terrence said.

“See, no matter what she has up here, it’s all about what’s down here,” I said pointing to my head and then to my boobs, for emphasis on my comic character.

“Gross! You’re my stepsister.”

Since Max wasn’t showing me any of his drawings for Big Sister , I decided to take a crack at it.

“What’s her name?” Terrence asked.

“I don’t have one,” I said. “Nothing seems right.”

“Destiny,” said Terrence. “That’s her name.”

I looked at her once again. She was Destiny. She had a destiny. It might have been too on the nose, but who cared. She was our Destiny. (Our goal was to finish our comic and show it to the producers, who had to know someone big in publishing.)

“So Rodney told me what happened in class today,” Terrence said, sitting on the couch next to Max.

“I don’t really want to talk about it,” I said.

“But it happened again,” he said.

Okay, yes, it had happened before. The first time was after gym class—a year ago. We played this game where we started in the middle of the football field and the teacher would blow his whistle and we all would run home, touch our front doors, and run back. If we could do it under fifteen minutes, the school would let us go home if the nukes were coming so we could die with our families. Kids ran around Griffin Flat, dodging traffic in the streets. If you couldn’t, you’d stay put in the fallout shelter in the basement. The second time was in English when we were reading about Orson Welles’s biggest practical joke ever, The War of the Worlds. [67] An adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel, The War of the Worlds , which was published in 1898, but the radio show occurred in 1938. People listening to the broadcast thought it was real, and it caused mass chaos. During Halloween week, we listened to the radio broadcast, and I started having a panic attack in class. Mrs. Barnes had to stop the tape. Can you imagine thinking it was real when it wasn’t, and freaking out that of all the ways the world could end—this was it, aliens?

“Like I said, I don’t want to talk about it.”

“Why?”

“It was scary,” I said.

“It was scary,” Max said, chiming in.

“You look okay now,” Terrence said.

“She had to talk to Mrs. Martin.”

“The school counselor?” Terrence said, making a face. He had to see her too after the great affair became known to the whole school/town.

“Stop talking like I’m not here,” I said.

“Well, are you cured?” he asked.

“What do you think?” I asked.

“I’m going to take that as a no.”

“Yeah, no. There is no cure for nucleomituphobia. You just have to deal with the symptoms and hope there are no consequences.”

“There’s not going to be a nuclear war,” Terrence said.

“You don’t know that. There could be…”

“There could be a nuclear accident,” Max said, nodding. “There was one before. There could be another.”

“Helpful, Max, helpful,” Terrence said. “Laura, you need to get your mind on something else, that’s all.” He grabbed my notebook. “Now, don’t forget to describe the boobs.”

Not everyone felt the same way I did about the thought of being blown off this planet. But a few did. And what do people say about grassroots? They grow with only one person—and that was me. I wanted to stay on planet Earth for as long as I could. I didn’t want any outside forces deciding it for me. Besides, Mr. Truitt owed me. (For Kevin Barnes.) I stood at the front of the room and asked the class one simple question: “Do you want to die?” By the look on Mr. Truitt’s face, he didn’t like the direction my question was going.

“Yes, I had a panic attack. Yes, I am afraid of nuclear war. I have nucleomituphobia. It is a condition with no cure. And yes, I am embarrassed by it,” I said.

Mr. Truitt’s brow literally had sweat dripping from it. My little desire to talk to the class about my little episode yesterday made him nervous.

But I continued. “The whole idea of mutually assured destruction is a useless figure of speech that politicians use to scare the bejeebers out of everyone on this planet who has access to modern technologies. If you think about it, if a thermonuclear bomb destroys half the world, sending it back to the Dark Ages, we as a planet would be on even footing. No one would be better than the other. I’ll ask y’all three questions. One: What would happen if a bomb exploded over Griffin Flat? Two: What would we do? And three: How would we survive? Don’t kid yourself; no one wants to live through a nuclear war. Who would want to be around after? It would be easier to sit down on the couch and patiently wait to be vaporized than live during the unknown.”