Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

I don’t say a word. I smile and close the door.

In the kitchen, however, I feel some pain coming on. Buggo? I pour myself a glass of grape Kool-Aid and then stand at the big window that looks out on the backyard. It’s late, and my head hurts, but I make myself think things through rationally, step by step. Mid-April now—I can get it dug by June. Or July. Which leaves three months for finishing touches. A nice deep hole, then I’ll line the walls with concrete, put on a roof of solid steel. No cutting corners. Install a water tank. And a generator. And wall-to-wall carpeting. A family room, a pine-paneled den, two bedrooms, lots of closet space, maybe a greenhouse bathed in artificial sunlight, maybe a Ping-Pong table and a piano, the latest appliances, track lighting and a microwave oven and all the little extras that make for comfort and domestic tranquillity. It’ll be home. I’ll put in a word processor for Bobbi, a game room for Melinda, a giant freezer stocked with shrimp and caviar. Nutto? I’m a father, a husband, I have solemn responsibilities. It isn’t as if I enjoy any of this. I hate it and fear it. I would prefer the glory of God and peace everlasting, world without end, a normal household in an age of abiding normalcy.

It just isn’t possible.

I finish the Kool-Aid and rinse the glass and return to the hole. I’m exhausted, yes, and a bit groggy, but I find the spade and resume digging.

I’m not crazy. Eccentric, maybe. These headaches and cramped bowels. How long since my last decent stool? A full night’s sleep? Clogged up and frazzled, a little dizzy, a little scared. But not crazy. Fully sane, in fact.

Dig , the hole says.

Patience and tenacity. An inch here, an inch there, it’s a game of inches. Beat the Clock. Dig and dream.

A rough life, that’s my only excuse. I’ve been around. I’ve seen the global picture and it’s no fantasy—it’s real. Ask the microorganisms in Nevada. Ask the rattlesnakes and butterflies on that dusty plateau at Los Alamos. Ask the wall shadows at Hiroshima. Ask this question: Am I crazy? And then listen, listen hard, because you’ll get one hell of an answer. If you hold your breath, if you have the courage, you’ll hear the soft drip of a meltdown, the ping-ping-ping of submarine sonar, the half-life of your own heart. What’s to lose? Try it. Take a trip to Bikini. Bring your friends, eat a picnic lunch, a quick swim, a nature hike, and then, when night comes, build a bonfire and sit on the beach and just listen .

I’ve done it.

And I’ll be candid, I blinked. I ran for it. Ten years on the lam, hideout to hideout, dodging bombs and drafts and feds and all the atrocities of our machine-tooled age. You bet I’m eccentric. I was a wanted man; I was hounded by Defense Intelligence and the FBI; I was almost shot to death at Sagua la Grande; I watched my friends die on national television; I was a mover in the deep underground; I could’ve been another Rubin or Hoffman; I could’ve been a superstar.

But it’s finished now, no more crusades.

The year is 1995. We’re late in the century, and the streets are full of tumbleweed, and it’s every man for himself.

Times change—take a good hard look. Where’s Mama Cass? What happened to Brezhnev and Lester Maddox? Where’s that old gang of mine, Sarah and Ned and Tina and Ollie? Where’s the passion? Where’s Richard Daley? Where’s Gene McCarthy in this hour of final trial? No heroes, no heavies. And who cares? That’s the stunner: Who among us really cares? A nation of microchips. At dinner parties we eat mushroom salad and blow snow and talk computer lingo.

And me, I’m rich. I’m on a uranium roll. I’m well established and there’s no going back. My assets include a blond wife and a blond daughter, and expensive Persian rugs, and a lovely redwood ranch house in the Sweetheart Mountains.

Call it what you want—copping out, dropping out, numbness, the loss of outrage, simple fatigue. I’ve retired. Time to retrench. Time to dig in. Safety first.

WHEN I WAS A KID, about Melinda’s age, I converted my Ping-Pong table into a fallout shelter. Funny? Poignant? A nifty comment on the modern age? Well, let me tell you something. The year was 1958, and I was scared. Who knows how it started? Maybe it was all that CONELRAD stuff on the radio, tests of the Emergency Broadcast System, pictures of H-bombs in Life magazine, strontium 90 in the milk, the times in school when we’d crawl under our desks and cover our heads in practice for the real thing. Or maybe it was rooted deep inside me. In my own inherited fears, in the genes, in a coded conviction that the world wasn’t safe for human life.

Really, who knows?

Whatever the sources, I was a frightened child. At night I’d toss around in bed for hours, battling the snagged sheets, and then when sleep finally came, sometimes close to dawn, my dreams would be clotted with sirens and melting ice caps and radioactive gleamings and ICBMs whining in the dark.

I was a witness. I saw it happen. In dreams, in imagination, I watched the world end.

Granted, I was always extra sensitive—squeamish, even a little cowardly—but it wasn’t paranoia or mental illness. I wasn’t crazy. Fort Derry, Montana, was a typical small town, with the usual gas stations and parks and public schools, and I grew up in a family that pursued all the ordinary small-town values. My father sold real estate, my mother kept house.

I was a happy kid.

I played war games, tried to hit baseballs, started a rock collection, rode my bike to the A&W, fed the goldfish, messed around. Normal, normal. I even ran a lemonade stand out along the sixth fairway at the golf course, ten cents a glass, plenty of ice: a regular entrepreneur.

Just a regular childhood in a regular town. Each summer, for instance, Fort Derry staged a big weekend celebration called Custer Days, and even now, decades later, I can still see that long parade down Main Street, the trombones and clowns and horses, the merchants dressed up in frontier clothes. I remember the carnival rides. And the rodeo. And my father, I remember him, too. Every summer he played the role of George Armstrong Custer. Every summer he died. It happened at night, out at the fairgrounds—Custer’s Last Stand—a dazzling historical pageant, blood and drama, the culmination of Custer Days. Up in the grandstand, among neighbors, my mother and I would eat ice cream and cotton candy while my father led the U.S. Seventh Cavalry to its annual reckoning at the Little Bighorn.

“There!” I’d cry.

Spotlights.

The National Anthem, the high call of a bugle, then my father would ride in on his big white stallion. He wore buckskins and a yellow wig. At his side was a silver sword; his face had the leathery gloss of a saddle.

I remember sabers and battle flags.

And then a drumroll.

And then a procession of mounted soldiers in blue uniforms and yellow neckerchiefs. I felt pride, but also panic. Jangling spurs and weaponry, canteens clanking, wagons, my father’s posture in the saddle. Tall and straight, those bright blue eyes.

I worshipped that man.

I wanted to warn him, rescue him, but I also wanted slaughter. How do you explain it? Terror mixed with fascination: I craved bloodshed, yet I craved the miracle of a happy ending. When the battle began—tom-toms and howls and gunfire—I’d make tight fists and stare out at the wonders of it all. I was curious. I’d shiver and look away and then quickly look back again. It was the implacable scripting of history; my father didn’t stand a chance. Yet he remained calm. Firing, reloading, firing—he actually smiled. He never ran, he never wept. He was always the last to die and he always died with dignity. Every summer he got scalped. Every summer Crazy Horse galloped away with my father’s yellow wig. The spotlights dimmed, a bugler played Taps, then we’d head out to the A&W for late-night root beers.