Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

It was an obvious ploy, trying to pin the blame on my mom and dad, but I wouldn’t let him get away with it. “Best parents in the world,” I said flatly. “Nobody better. Period.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“The best ,” I said.

For some time we sparred back and forth like that, a polite little duel. I could tell it was wearing him down. He kept fidgeting, rubbing those sad little eyes. It was time, I decided, to let him know where I stood.

Very casually, I asked if he wanted my true feelings, and he said he did, so I leaned forward and told him that the whole counseling game was a waste of time. A racket, I said. It was for creeps and crybabies. I was strong; I knew how to deal with the world. A total charade, I told him—that was my honest belief.

Adamson shrugged.

“Charade?” he said. “How so?”

“It just is. Worthless. That’s how I feel.” I stared him in the eyes. I meant every word of it. “Take an example. Edgar Allan Poe: a disturbed guy. All those weird visions running through his head, fruitcake stuff. But I’ll tell you something, he didn’t go crying to some stupid counselor. He used his nuttiness. He made something out of it—those disturbed poems of his, those disturbed stories. He had willpower, like me. And besides, maybe there’s nothing wrong with a little wackiness. Maybe it’s a plus. An asset. You ever think of that?”

“Quite possible,” Adamson said.

“Sure, it’s possible. It’s true. And there’s plenty to be disturbed about . Real stuff, I mean. Realities. They don’t shrink.”

For a moment I wasn’t sure if he’d even heard me, but then he frowned and said, “Which realities are these?”

“Just things,” I said.

“Like?”

“Like everything. Turds. Assholes. The whole corrupt pecking order.”

And then I gave him a quick lecture on the ins and outs of high school. No personal secrets, I just listed all the crap I had to put up with: the popularity game, hayrides and dancing lessons and sadism and petty cruelty. I told him how brutal it could get. How sometimes you had to turn your back on it, just walk away, ignore the bastards.

“The real world,” I said, “it comes pre-shrunk.”

Adamson nodded. “I know the story. High school. Fucking torture.”

He snapped his pencil in half.

Outside, the sky had gone dark. There was thunder. No rain, just the feel of rain.

Adamson got up and closed the window and stood with his back to me. He seemed hypnotized, not quite there, staring out at the dense clouds beyond the capitol dome.

“High school,” he said bitterly. “I hated it. Torture, that’s the word. Snobs and bullies—those tough-guy letter jackets—who cares about letter jackets? Christ, when I think about it… Hate.”

“Well,” I said.

“Hate! Worst experience of my life .”

His voice had a strange wound-up sound. He paused and touched the corner of his right eye.

“A nightmare,” he said. “Start to finish. Just hate.”

I looked out at the heavy sky. It could’ve been an act of some sort—I wasn’t naïve—but what threw me off was the man’s obvious passion. I couldn’t be sure. I waited a moment and then changed the subject, rambling on about neutral topics like pep rallies and homecoming, but the more I went on, the gloomier he got.

“High school!” he suddenly yelled. “Should be laws against it. Hate, William. You know hate?”

There was lightning now, and hard thunder, but Adamson didn’t seem to notice. He slouched forward, examined his fists, and then, in a low, soggy-sounding voice, nearly inaudible, he gave me the entire play-by-play description of his pitiful high school days. How he was low man on the totem pole. No friends, nobody to talk to. Eventually it got so bad, he said, that he began having fantasies about lacing the cafeteria food with arsenic, or rigging up dynamite and blowing the whole school sky-high. “No joke,” he said, “I would’ve done it. Dust and bones.”

I moved my head thoughtfully.

“Well, look,” I said, “maybe you shouldn’t dwell on it quite so much. You’re an adult now, just forget it.”

“Sure,” he grunted. “Easy for you to say.”

Pivoting, rolling his shoulders, Adamson stared at the far wall. I felt a strange jumble of emotions. Pity mixed up with contempt, sympathy with a kind of smug superiority.

I liked him. I despised him.

For a while neither of us said a word. The room was muggy and dark, and I could smell the rain coming. Finally, to fill up the time, I offered a few more horror stories. I described the cliques and teasing and practical jokes; I talked about terrorism and repression; I told him how inane it was and how hot-ass cheerleaders like Sarah Strouch wouldn’t give you the time of day. “Nobody cares about anything,” I said. “Just garbage. Turds and jocks.”

“Jocks?” he said. He jotted something down on a note pad. “Jocks, they think they rule the world .”

As it turned out, we spent the rest of that session comparing notes on how much we loathed the whole sports setup in this country. It was a coincidence, probably, but we’d experienced some of the same problems. Adamson talked about the trouble he’d had as a Little Leaguer—always dropping easy pop flies, booting ground balls—and so to make him feel better I admitted that I wasn’t the world’s greatest shortstop. “The thing is,” I told him, “you can’t let it get you down. That’s life, that’s how it works. No sense moping about it.”

“I guess not,” he said. There was a boom of thunder, then the rain came. He slapped his hands together. “Baseball, though. I’d like to ban it forever. Make it a felony just to play the game. Almost wrecked my life .”

And there it was again.

That sullen, quavering voice. It was a relief when the session finally ended.

Five minutes later, in the elevator, my mother asked how things had gone, whether we’d made any progress, and I gave her a noncommittal shrug. “Too early to tell,” I said. “The guy’s a real sickie.”

Except for his unhappiness, it seemed that Adamson and I had quite a lot in common. We were both intelligent. Both loners, both somewhat cynical. We even shared a certain defensive attitude toward the world. Despite myself, I ended up half liking the man, which was a good thing, because we spent six days cooped up together. Six grueling sessions. Each morning, my parents would drive me across town and drop me off in front of Adamson’s office. “Go get ’em,” my dad would say, and my mother would reach out and brush down my hair.

Always the same routine. As soon as I walked in, Adamson would take a look at his wristwatch and rub his eyes and gaze out at the shiny dome on the state capitol building. “So, then,” he’d say, “how’s my pal William?” Then he’d wag his head and start complaining. It was his favorite pastime. There were times when I wanted to bang him on the head, or shake him up somehow, but instead I tried finesse, using little incidents out of my own life as a way of putting things in perspective. When he mentioned insomnia, for instance, I recommended solitaire and hot baths. At another point, when he brought up the subject of nightmares, I told him about some of my own experiences in that area, the nuclear stuff, the sirens and pigeons and fires, the incredible reality of it all. I discussed the Cuban missile crisis and tried to get across that sense of quiet fear, nothing desperate, just a wired-up tightness.

“It’s not mental,” I said. “Kennedy and Khrushchev—I didn’t make those guys up out of thin air. I just get worried sometimes.”