Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

In the living room, I find only the vague after-scent of lilac perfume—a dusty silence. I stop and listen hard and call out to them. “Bobbi!” I shout, then “Melinda!” The quiet unnerves me, it’s not right.

Melinda’s bed is empty. And when I move to Bobbi’s bedroom—my bedroom—I’m stopped by a locked door.

I knock and wait and then knock again, gently.

“All right,” I say, “I know you’re in there.”

I jiggle the knob. A solid lock, I installed it myself. So now what? I detect the sound of hushed voices, a giggle, bedsprings, bare feet padding across oak floors.

Another knock, not so gentle this time.

“Hey, there,” I call. “Open up—I’ll give you ten seconds.”

I count to ten.

“Now,” I say. “Hop to it.”

Behind the door, Melinda releases a melodious little laugh, which gives me hope, but then the silence presses in again. It occurs to me that my options are limited. Smash the door down—a shoulder, a foot, like on television. Storm in and pin them to the bed and grab those creamy white throats and make some demands. Demand respect and tolerance. Demand love .

I kiss the door and walk away.

Supper is cold chicken and carrot sticks. Afterward, I do the dishes, smoke a cigarette, prowl from room to room. A lockout, but why? I’m a pacifist, for God’s sake. The whole Vietnam mess: I kept my nose clean, all those years on the run, a man of the most impeccable nonviolence.

So why?

There are no conclusions.

Much later, at the bedroom door, I’m pleased to discover that they’ve laid out my pajamas for me. A modest offering, but still it’s something. I find a sleeping bag and spread it out on the hallway floor.

As I’m settling in, I hear a light scratching at the door, then a voice, muted and hoarse, and Melinda says, “Daddy?”

“Here,” I say.

“Can’t sleep.”

“Well, gee,” I tell her, “open up, let’s cuddle.”

“Nice try.”

“Thanks, sweetie.”

She clears her throat. “I made this promise to Mommy. She said it’s a quarantine.”

“Mommy’s a fruitcake.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” I murmur. “We’ll straighten things out in the morning. Close your eyes now.”

“They are closed.”

“Tight?”

“Pretty tight.” A pause, then Melinda says, “You know something? I’m scared, I think.”

“Don’t be.”

“I am, though. I hate this.”

There’s a light trilling sound. Maybe a sob, maybe not. In the dark, although the door separates us, her face begins to compose itself before me like a developing photograph, those cool eyes, the pouty curvature of the lips.

“Daddy?”

“Still here.”

“Tell the honest truth,” she whispers. “I mean, you won’t ever try to kill me, will you?”

“Kill?”

“Like murder, I mean. Like with dynamite or an ax or something.”

I examine my hands.

“No killing,” I tell her. “Impossible. I love you.”

“Just checking.”

“Of course.”

“Mommy thinks… Oh, well. Night.”

“Night,” I say.

And for several minutes I’m frozen there at the door, just pondering. Kill? Where do kids get those ideas?

The world, the world.

I groan and lie down and zip myself into the sleeping bag. Then I get jabbed in the heart. Another poem—it’s pinned to the pajama pocket.

Horseshit of the worst kind. Bedlam—unbalanced, she means. Marooned, divorced—a direct threat, nothing else. At least it rhymes.

Lights off.

Sleep, I tell myself, but I can’t shut down the buzzings. The issue isn’t bedlam. Uranium is no figure of speech; it’s a figure of nature. You can hold it in your hand. It has an atomic weight of 238.03; it melts at 1,132.30 degrees centigrade; it’s hard and heavy and impregnable to metaphor. I should know, I made my fortune on the stuff.

We were all in on it, Sarah and Ned and Ollie and Tina—we followed the trail and plundered those ancient mountains and now we’re left with the consequences, that old clickety-clack echoing back. It’s history. It can’t be undone.

There’s a soft tapping at the bedroom door.

“Hey, Goofy,” Melinda whispers, “stop talking to yourself.”

AUTUMN 1964, AND THERE was a war on, and people were dying. There were jets over the Gulf of Tonkin. There were bombs and orphans and speeches before Congress. It was a season of flux: leaves were turning, times were slippery. And it was real. No paranoia, not this time. At night, in bed, I detected a curious new velocity at work in the world, an inertial zip; I could hear it in the rhetoric, in the stiff battering-ram thump of the music. Unwholesome developments, I thought. The Chinese detonated their first nuclear device. Khrushchev was on the skids. Call it prescience, or a sensitivity to peril, but I could not shake the hunch that things were accelerating toward the point of hazard. In Da Nang the Marines were digging in, and in Saigon the generals played their flamboyant games of hopscotch, and at home, at random spots across the North American continent, in back rooms, in the dark, there were the first churlish rumblings of distemper.

Nothing mutinous, not yet. Abbie Hoffman was a nobody. Jane Fonda was a starlet. By daylight, at least, Vietnam was still a fairy tale.

We were at peace in time of war.

And at Peverson State College, in September of 1964, we did the peaceful things. We crammed for exams and talked sex until four in the morning. We were kids, after all, and the future seemed altogether probable. It was a bridge between two eras, a calm, old-fashioned time, and on the nation’s campuses, certainly at Peverson State, football was still king and booze was queen and raw physicality was the final standard of human excellence.

To be sure, Pevee was not a distinguished institution. More like a health resort, I decided, or a halfway house for the criminally vacuous. Mostly ranch kids—hicks and dullards. Even after my experience at Fort Derry High, I had to admire the way my new classmates so daringly refined the meaning of mediocrity. A dense, immobile apathy. Ignorance on a colossal scale. There was something ambitious about it, almost inspired. No one cared. No one tried. On the surface, of course, the place could seem deceptively collegiate, with the usual tweedy teachers and wimps with slide rules, but even so, beneath the cosmetics, Peverson State College was a student body without student brains. In a note to my parents, composed near the end of freshman orientation, I outlined the major difficulties. Stereos that blew your brains out at 3 a.m. Coeds who pondered the spelling of indefinite articles. Elaborate farting contests in the school library, with referees and formal regulations and large galleries of appreciative spectators.