Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

I don’t get it. Meanings, I mean. What’s the point? Why this preference for metaphor over the real thing?

Fuck her , the hole says. Dig!

Bobbi doesn’t understand. She’s a poet, she can’t help it. I’ve tried to talk things out. I’ve presented the facts. I’ve named names: Poseidon, Trident, Cruise, Stealth, Minuteman, Lance, Pershing—the indisputable realities. Trouble is, Bobbi can’t process hard data. The artistic temperament. Too romantic, too sublime. She’s a gorgeous woman, blond and long-legged, those shapely fingers and turquoise eyes, a way of gliding from spot to spot as if under the spell of a fairy tale, but she makes the mistake of assuming that her beauty is armor against the facts of fission. Funny how people hide. Behind art, behind Jesus, behind the sunny face of the present tense. Bobbi finds comfort in poetry; Melinda finds it in youth. For others it’s platitudes or blind optimism or the biological fantasies of reproduction and continuity.

I prefer a hole.

So dig. I won’t be stopped.

I’ll admit it, though, these past two weeks have been murder, and at times the tension has turned into rage. This morning, for example. After a night of insomnia and celibacy, I came to the breakfast table a bit under the weather. It was hard to see the humor in finding another of Bobbi’s snide ditties stapled to the Cheerios box. I wanted to laugh it off, I just couldn’t muster the resources. Besides, the poem was cruel, an ultimatum. Fission , she called it.

I can read between the lines. Split, it’s not even cute.

Who could blame me? I lost my head for a minute. Nothing serious—some bad language, some table-thumping.

“God,” Melinda squealed. “Crackers!”

Bobbi remained silent. She lifted her shoulders in a gesture that meant: Yes, crackers, but let’s not discuss it in front of your father.

“Daffy Duck,” said my daughter. “Hey, look at him! Look, he’s eating—”

I smiled. It was a mark of sanity, the cheerful face of a man in tip-top health—I smiled and chewed and swallowed Fission —and then I asked if they’d kindly put a lid on all the name-calling stuff, I was fed up with wisecracks and Mother Goose innuendo. “A little respect,” I said. “Fair enough? Time for some understanding.”

Melinda stared at her mother.

“You see that?” she said. “He ate your poem.”

My wife shrugged.

“I think he’s flipped!” Melinda yelled. “He did, he ate it, I saw him.”

“Now wait a minute—”

“Daddy’s flippo!”

“No,” I said, “Daddy’s smart. He’s a goddamn genius.”

Melinda snorted and flicked her pale eyebrows.

“Selfish Sam,” she said. “What about my feelings? What happens when everybody at school finds out? God, they’ll think I’ve got the screwiest family in history.”

“They laughed at Noah, princess.”

“God!”

I tapped the table. “Eat your Cheerios,” I said. “And cut out the swearing.”

“ You swear.”

“Hardly ever.”

“I just heard it, you said—”

“Hustle up, you’ll be late for school.”

Authority, I thought. Don’t bend. Don’t crack. I ignored their coded mother-daughter glances. I made happy chitchat, humming, stacking the dishes, buttoning Melinda’s coat and then marching her out to meet the school bus. A splendid morning, despite everything. That smooth blue sky, wildflowers everywhere, the wide-open spaces. And the Sweetheart Mountains—beautiful, yes, but also functional, a buffer between now and forever. Shock absorbers. Heat deflectors.

But Melinda had no appreciation for these facts. She wouldn’t look at me. We stood a few feet apart along the tar road.

“Well, Flub-a-dub,” she finally said, “I hope you enjoyed your breakfast.”

I reached out toward her, but she yelped and spun away. Again I offered extravagant apologies. Too much tension, I told her. Too little sleep. A lot on my mind.

“Holes,” Melinda said, and glanced up for a moment, soberly, as if taking a measurement. “God, can’t you just stop acting so screwy? Is that so hard?”

“I suppose it is sometimes.”

“Eating paper .”

She closed her eyes.

“You know what Mommy says? She says you’re pretty sick. Like a breakdown or something.”

“No way, baby.”

“Yeah, but—” Melinda’s voice went ragged. She bit down on her lower lip. “But you always act that way, real flippy, and it makes me feel… You know what else Mommy said?”

“What else?”

“She says if you don’t stop digging that hole, she says we might have to go away.”

“Away where?”

“I don’t know where, just away . That’s what she told me, and she means it, too. That poem you ate—that’s what it was about .”

I nodded. “Well, listen, right now your mother and I have this problem. Like when the telephone doesn’t work. Like a busy signal, you know? But we’ll get it fixed. That’s a promise.”

“Promise?”

“On my honor.”

Later, when the school bus came grinding up the road, Melinda generously offered me her cheek, which I kissed, then I watched her ride away. A beautiful child. I love her, and Bobbi, too.

Isn’t that the purpose? To save those smooth blond hides?

Split?

Doesn’t make sense.

Dig.

That makes sense. All day long I’ve been at it, sweat and calluses, and my back hurts, but there’s pleasure in the pain. It’s duty-doing; taking charge. Tension translates into doggedness, anxiety into action, skittishness into firm soldierly resolve.

I feel a nice tingle as I rig up the dynamite.

Ollie Winkler taught me—I learned from a pro.

Two sticks and the primer. Wire it up. Crimp the blasting caps. Take shelter behind the tool shed. Think about Ollie and his Bombs for Peace.

“Fire in the hole!” I yell.

The kitchen windows rattle. A muffled explosion, just right. Bobbi comes to the back steps and stands there with a mystical smile on her lips. In the backyard, like smoke, there’s a light dusting of powdery debris, and my wife and I stare at each other as if from opposite sides of a battlefield. Bobbi bites her thumb; I smile and wave. Then it’s over. She goes inside, I go back to digging.

The dynamite, that’s what disturbs her. She thinks I’ll miscalculate. Crazy, but she thinks I’ll blow the house down, maybe hurt someone. Dangerous, she thinks. But what about the bomb, for Christ sake? Miscalculations? If that’s the stopper—miscalculations—I’ll be happy to show her a few. Four hundred million corpses. Leukemia and starvation and no hospitals and nobody around to read her miserable little jingles.

Screw it. Dig .

A pick, a garden spade, a pulley system to haul out the rock.

When Melinda returns from school, I’m still on the job. I straighten up and smile over the rim of the hole. “Hey, there,” I say, but she doesn’t answer. She kicks a clod of dirt down on me and says “Nutto” and scampers for the house.

I don’t let it rattle me. At dusk I plug in the outdoor Christmas lights. I skip supper. I keep at it, whistling work songs.

It isn’t obsession. It’s commitment. It’s me against the realities.

Dig , the hole says, and I spit on my hands. Pry out a boulder. Lift and growl and heave. Obsession? Edgar Allan Poe was obsessed.

At ten o’clock I tell myself to ease off. I take a few more licks at it, then a few more, and at midnight I unplug the lights and store my tools and reluctantly plod into the house. No signs of life, it’s eerie.