Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

And the sex.

Congress, she called it.

“All rise!” she’d cry. “Congress is in session!”

In a way, naturally, I was grateful for this, but there were times when I thought she took it too far. It was the rah-rah side of her personality, too flamboyant, and one evening I asked if she’d mind toning it down.

Sarah gave me a hard look.

“Down?” she said. “Discreet, you mean?”

“Well, no, I just wish you’d—”

“Demure? Candy and flowers? A nice little Southern belle—sit around batting my eyes?”

She twisted away.

It was a warm spring evening, very humid, and she was naked except for a chrome bracelet. She got down on the floor and began a furious set of exercises, sit-ups and leg-lifts. I could see goose bumps forming in the flesh at her nipples.

After a moment she laughed.

“Discretion,” she said bitterly, “is for dead people. Am I dead? ” Her tone surprised me. The anger was real. “I grew up in a goddamn mortuary, remember? Organ music day and night. Flowers up the bazoo. You wouldn’t believe how discreet a stiff can be. Very modest. They’re dead , get it? Tickle them, they don’t budge—real coy, real dead . You don’t get deader. You know what dead is? It’s dead .”

Then she gave me a brief synopsis of life and death in a funeral home.

The various odors. The comings and goings. How her father’s workshop had been located directly beneath her own bedroom, one floor down, and how at night she used to lie there with a pillow pushed up to her face. Like a gas mask, she said. Wonderful fragrances—just what a kid needs at bedtime.

She paused in mid-sit-up. There was a soft, faraway look in her eyes.

Then she shrugged.

“Anyway, I know what discreet is,” she said. “Plain flat dead . You take demure, I’ll take rigor clitoris any time.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Besides,” she said tightly, staring at me, “you better consider the alternatives. Who else would go near that mincemeat pecker of yours? Like a battle zone.”

“A bike accident, I explained that.”

“Oh, sure, a fine story.” She shook her head. “Scars and stitches. Looks like you tried to poke a blender.”

“Sarah—”

“Discretion!” she said. “Go paste Band-Aids on your weewee, Congress is adjourned.”

A troubled girl, that much was clear.

Part iron, part mush. Neurosis maybe. But how far can you dig into a personality? How much do you finally accept at face value? Do motives matter?

Politics, for example.

Why ask why?

Clearly, in Sarah’s case, the war deeply offended her. The pain was genuine. I remember how she closed her eyes during those made-for-TV combat clips; I remember the casualty count she kept on a bulletin board in her dorm room. “The thing about a corpse,” she once told me, “is you can’t fix it. All that formaldehyde, but nothing moves . Poor fuckers just lie there.” Psychology seemed superfluous. From my own experience, I’d learned to distrust the easy explanations of human behavior; it’s all too ambiguous; the inner forces ricochet like pinballs. John Reed: a Harvard cheerleader. How do you draw conclusions? The real world, I thought, is unresponsive to Rorschach tests. You can’t shrink a warhead. Ultimately, you take things as they are, you accept the imponderables, you find harmony in the overwhelming incongruity. Sarah Strouch: schizophrenic, perhaps. Unpredictable. But there was a war on, people were dying, and the realities conditioned consciousness, not the reverse. Issues of personality became trivial. Was Noah paranoid? Who sank and who swam? In a crowded theater, if someone yells “Fire!” do you respond by inquiring into matters of the mind? If a madman holds a knife to your throat, if a butcher goes berserk, do you pause to administer a character inventory? And if the bombs are real. If you see a missile rising over the Little Bighorn. If you can conceive of last things. If there’s a war on. If you care.

She was a mystery.

Only one thing for certain, Sarah Strouch understood the critical dynamic of our age. It was all escalation.

On May 21, 1967, two weeks before summer break, she gave Ollie Winkler the green light. Once more, there’s that time-space slippage—the beginning mixes with the end, effect becomes cause—but I can see Sarah commanding a bonfire rally down at the river. She’s wearing her silver letter sweater and blue culottes, she’s got the crowd leaning left and right. There’s a flush at her cheeks. And I see Ollie Winkler bending over a set of bomb blueprints. “Not big bombs,” he says, “just attention-grabbers,” then he slips on a black armband and says, “Sergeant at arms! It takes arms , like in deadly force.” There were occupied offices. Picket lines went up in front of Old Main. My own role was limited, but I remember the sound of breaking glass, a jimmied lock, how we effected entry into the Dean of Students’ office on that last warm night in May. I remember holding a flashlight while Ollie set up the ordnance. It was well after midnight, and there were echoes and creakings, and I remember the rubber gloves on my hands, the reflections, the sudden thought that things had passed into a vicious new dimension. The flashlight plucked out random objects in the dark. A typewriter, I remember, and a vase of lilacs, and a slender white fuse. There were numerous shadows. There was ambiguity. And there was also, briefly, the image of terrible waste. I could see gunfire. Then the flashlight wobbled—it seemed greased and heavy. Behind me, or off to the side, there was a whisper, then someone laughed and Tina Roebuck appeared and pried away the flashlight and said, “Poor boy.” But it didn’t matter. The present was firmly fixed to the future; the pattern was evident. This, I realized, would surely lead to that. There would be wastage, no doubt, and breakage, and abbreviation by force. My thoughts were precise. I remember the moment of stealth when Ollie struck the match. And the yellow-red glow against Sarah’s face, the way she hesitated and moved to a window, then smiled, then came back and touched my arm.

“Here,” she said softly, “is how it goes. You know?”

I made an indefinite motion with my shoulders. I was inclined toward silence.

Tina Roebuck giggled.

“William?”

I remember backing off. I remember thinking: What do I think? There was that delicate white fuse, like dental floss, and the burning match, and the metallic, curiously amplified sound of my own breathing. “From now on,” Sarah said, “it’s rough-and-tumble. Question is, do you understand?”

I did not.

The human heart, I thought, how do you explain it?

But I shrugged and said, “Of course.”

“Of course what?”

“This.”

“You’re sure?”

“Like black and white,” I said.

The summer went fast. Fort Derry seemed smaller now, and dead, but Sarah gave it motion: a Fourth of July picnic, nights at the drive-in theater. “If you love me,” she said, “you’ll steal that speaker. Do you love me?” Cruising up Main Street in my father’s big Buick. Windows open, Revolution on the radio, Sarah tapping time against the dashboard. Root beers at the A&W. Pinball and cherry phosphates at Jig’s Confectionery. Sex in any number of places; she loved the risk of it. “Don’t be a lame duck,” she’d say, “you’ve got congressional responsibilities.” Sarah sunbathing—a hammock and sunglasses and deep brown skin. In midsummer we took a tent and sleeping bags up into the Sweethearts, just the two of us, and for nine days we eased the time away, exploring, walking the canyons, trading secrets late at night. A campfire, I remember… She said she loved me. Quite a lot, she said. I asked why, and Sarah said, “Who knows? Chemistry,” and I said, “The big explainer.” I remember stars and crickets. One night, very late, she told me about a crazy three-legged dog she used to have. Got hit by a car, she said. Lost a leg. Still fast, though, kept chasing cars, kept running away, and how one day it started running and never stopped. “That rotten crippled dog,” she said, “I hated it, but I loved it. That’s chemistry for you.” Things were quiet. Sarah poked the fire and talked about the first time she ever kissed a boy. She told me about a vacation to Chicago. She told me her dreams. “Stupid, I know,” she said, “but sometimes I dream I’m—you know—I’m sort of dead, I’m in this dark closet, I can smell these mothballs, and then, bang, somebody knocks on the door—I don’t know who, just this guy—and he asks me what it’s like, being dead, what it feels like. And you know what I tell him? I tell him it feels real alone . Alone, I tell him. That’s the worst part.” Sarah looked at me, then looked away. There were pines, I remember, and those jagged mountains, and we had our sleeping bags zipped together. “I want you to want me,” she said, “like real love.” Then she smiled. She said she was fertile, she could feel it. She wanted children someday. There was the war, of course, things to do, but when it was over she wanted all the peaceful stuff. Babies, she said, and a house and a family. But she wanted to travel first. She wanted to see Rio. “You and me together,” she said, and her hands wandered. I could smell smoke and mosquito repellent. “You and me, William, we could do it, couldn’t we? Have babies, maybe? I mean, we’d probably have to get married first, blood tests and so on, but it’s possible, isn’t it? And Rio, too. I’ve always had this wild fantasy about Rio. The sun and everything. All the tight brown bodies, those weird masks they wear at Carnival time. Sounds like I’d fit right in. A good life. Adventure, I want that, but I want… I don’t know what I want exactly. I want you to tear down those walls. Does that make sense? You build these walls . And, God, sometimes I can’t get through, I try but I can’t. Just walls, and you hide there, and I can’t break through. My own fault, maybe. Sometimes I act pretty rough, I know that. But I’m not rough. Down inside I’m not so rough. And I get afraid sometimes, I need you to say things, like you care about me and you won’t ever… That damned dog. You believe that? Muggs, that was her name, that crazy rotten dog. Three legs, but lickety-split, she wouldn’t listen, she wouldn’t stop chasing those goddamn cars… Am I rambling? I guess I am. But I don’t mean to act so rough. I hate myself sometimes, I really do, I’d like to rip my tongue out, but it’s like self-defense or something. Anyhow, I do have these feelings. Rio and a billion babies. It’s possible, don’t you think?”