Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

“Doom,” he said. “And that’s just the start. It gets worse.”

Then he explained how the entire universe was scheduled for destruction. Not just our own puny planet. Everything. Every star, every speck of dust. It was hard to follow the technicalities, which had to do with whether we live in a collapsing or expanding universe, but his main point was that no matter how you cut it, whichever theory you believed, the end result was doom.

“The end of the world,” he said flatly. “Don’t kid yourself, it’s in the cards. Can’t prevent it, nowhere to run. Just a question of time.”

He stared at me, half smiling. There was a smugness about it that touched a nerve.

Showdown, I thought.

I sat up straight and pointed a finger at him and told him I was fed up.

“The same old bitching day after day,” I said. “It’s a sickness. You’re happy to be unhappy. That’s how you get your kicks. Unhappiness. A disease.”

He shook his head.

“Science,” he said. “You can’t ignore it.”

“Here we go.”

“Doom, William.”

“So what?” I snapped. “We all die. You’re a doctor, you should know that.”

“Oh, I do know.”

“And?”

“Nothing, I guess.” He looked at me with an expression of intense disappointment. “Nothing. Except I thought you and I were on the same wavelength about this.”

“About what? ”

“All of it. Civilization. I mean, yes, we all die. But we have these… these ways of coping. Our children. The genetic pool. The things we’ve made, books and buildings and inventions. Doesn’t Edison still live in his light bulb? Switch it on and there he is. Immortality, in a way. A kind of faith. We plant trees and raise families, and those are ways of seeking—I don’t know—a kind of significance. Life after death. That’s what civilization is: life after death. But if you wipe out civilization—”

He stopped and waited. It was as if he were asking me to complete the sentence.

“See the sticker?” he said. “Nothing lasts. Doom, it means no children. No genetic pool. No memory. When the lights go out, Edison goes out. And what significance did his life have? Erased. Shakespeare and Einstein. You and me.”

“But nobody—”

“Right, nobody realizes,” he said. “Nobody cares. People just keep diddling on. A joke, they think. But it’s not. It’s our goddamn silhouette.”

We sat facing each other, eye to eye, and for an instant there was something very much like a bond between us, as if we were touching, or embracing, shared knowledge and shared vision, two losers drawn together by the interlocking valences of terror.

“Imagination,” Adamson said gently, “that’s what you and I have in common. A wonderful faculty, but sometimes it gets out of control, starts rolling downhill, no brakes, and all you can do is hang on for dear life and hope you don’t—”

“Crack up,” I said.

I looked down at the ragged edges on my fingernails. And then suddenly, without planning it, I was talking about bombs and missiles and radioactivity and thermal blasts and the sound of a Soviet SS-4 zipping across the night sky. Real, I told him. The silos and submarines and launching pads. Things you could touch. Real things. It wasn’t some theory, I said, it wasn’t a ghost story, it was real.

My voice caught.

“Crazy,” I said.

Adamson sat very still. “No, just special. Very special.”

We were quiet again; that bonded feeling.

Adamson finally smiled at me and came across the room and shook my hand. It was an awkward moment. He kept squeezing, hanging on.

“Well,” I said, “I hope that helps. Sometimes it’s better to talk things out.”

He laughed and said, “You bet, it helps plenty.” He clapped me on the back, fairly hard, as if signaling something, then he led me out to the elevator. Funny, but I felt a little choked up, almost teary. We stood there in the hallway, not quite looking at each other, and then we shook hands again. “ Adios ,” he said. But a strange thing happened next. When the elevator doors opened, Adamson got in and rode down to the first floor with me and followed me all the way outside. Like an orphan, I thought, or a stray dog.

My mom and dad were parked across the street, ready to head home, but I couldn’t just walk away. I thanked him for all the help. A good listener, I said, a good sharp mind. Adamson shrugged. He took out a pencil and a scrap of paper and jotted down a telephone number.

“Keep it in your wallet,” he said. “Night or day. I’m here.”

He looked away.

There was a short silence, then he laughed and said, “A charade, you were right.”

He pointed up at the dome on the state capitol.

“Politics,” he said. “A new racket. What the hell—run for governor.”

“You’re a shoo-in, Chuck.”

“You think so?”

“Absolutely. I mean, hey, you’ve got the sympathy vote all locked up.”

We smiled at each other.

“Friends?” he said, and I said, “Friends,” and then my dad honked the horn and I turned and trotted across the street.

Those six days in therapy did not turn my life around. The headaches disappeared, and my plumbing problems cleared up, but otherwise things remained almost exactly the same. A wobbly gyroscope; a normal guy in an abnormal world. But now and then, when the pressures began to accumulate, it cheered me up to think about Chuck Adamson, remembering that dismal face of his, imagining his campaign for the governorship—anti-high school, anti-baseball, anti-social. A hard person to pin down. How much was acting, how much was real? Even now, in memory, it all blends together. Those moist, fearful eyes and that weary posture and the way he’d sigh and tap his pencil and gaze out at the bright golden dome on the state capitol.

I missed him.

That much was for sure. I did miss the man.

Except for a few postcards, I had no contact with him for the next seven or eight years, and yet there was still a certain consolation in having his phone number tucked away in my wallet, just in case. Like a safety valve, or a net. Often, during bad times, I’d take out that wrinkled scrap of paper and quietly rub my fingers across it, memorizing the numbers, and on one or two occasions I came very close to putting in a long-distance distress call, person to person. I’d dial and break the connection and then spend an hour or so in a nice relaxed conversation, almost real, as if we were back in his office again, discussing telescopes and loneliness and the powers of the human imagination, figuring out ways to cope with the end of the world.

DIG, IT WHISPERS. Two weeks on the job, and my hole is nearly four feet deep, ten feet square. It’s a beauty—I’m proud—but I’ve paid a terrible price. My daughter says I’m nutto. My wife won’t speak to me, won’t sleep with me. She thinks I’m crazy. And dangerous. She refuses to discuss the matter. All day long, while I’m busy saving her life, Bobbi hides in the bedroom, quietly cranking out those insinuating bits of verse. She uses silence like a blackjack; she withholds the ordinary courtesies of love and conversation. It hurts, I won’t deny it. Those damned poems. Christ, she’s baiting me—