Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

I couldn’t find a great deal to say.

The nights were slippery, but the days were fine. I remember Sarah in her alpine climbing hat. Sarah swimming under a waterfall. A box canyon, a secret cave, a stream where I found the uranium.

We were barefoot, I remember, and the water was fast and cold. I bent down and scooped up a rock and showed her the purple-black crystals.

“A souvenir,” I said.

“It isn’t—?”

“Harmless.”

Sarah squeezed the ore with both hands, deliberately, the way a child might handle modeling clay. There was a bright sun. I remember the heat and the cold water and the red polish on her toenails. Squinting, she looked at the stream, tracing its course toward the violet ridges.

“You don’t suppose… I mean—”

“Maybe.”

“Up there?”

“Chemistry,” I said.

With her thumb, she flicked the ore away.

“What we’ll do,” she said after a moment, “is we’ll pretend it’s not there. Leave it be.”

“Sure. That’s how it’s done.”

“William—”

“Wish it away,” I said, and smiled. “No sweat.”

But there was a dynamic at work.

It was all around us. In our lovemaking, in the mountains. It was there in the music that summer.

On August 9, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson lifted the old restrictions on U.S. bombing policy. Warplanes were now unloading over the city limits of Hanoi and Haiphong.

On August 20, the United States Air Force flew more than two hundred combat sorties—a new record for the war.

On August 23, a plane bearing nuclear weapons crash-landed at Edwards Air Force Base.

The world, I reasoned, was not entirely sane.

The dynamic was permissive.

On August 27, during Custer Days, Sarah and I sat up in the grandstand at the county fairgrounds. It was no big thing. We held hands and watched Crazy Horse gallop away with my father’s hair.

“Kids,” she said afterward. “They just can’t take a joke.”

At the end of August, on a humid afternoon, Sarah took me on a tour of the Strouch Funeral Home—her own home, actually—a lived-in place with bright kitchen curtains and family photographs. It did not smell of death. Even her father’s workshop, I thought, seemed warm and cheery, the walls painted in bright pastels. At the center of the room was a white porcelain table with slightly raised edges. “So anyway,” Sarah said, “home, sweet home.” She held me lightly by the arm, just in case. There was a faint hospital odor—nothing terrible. An oversized sink, a few cabinets, a closet, a coil of orange tubing, a second table mounted on rubber rollers. “Hop aboard,” she said, but I declined. Later she showed me the viewing room, which did smell of death, then she led me up a wide staircase to her own bedroom. “I don’t want pity,” she said. She undressed and pulled the shades. In bed, despite the muggy afternoon, we lay with a quilt up to our necks, side by side, only our arms and ankles touching. “Not pity,” she said, “but love would be nice. You can try, can’t you?”

“It’s not a question of love.”

“Time?”

“I don’t know. I guess.” I thought about it for a few minutes. “Screwed up, probably. It’s like I can’t take the jump. Can’t believe in miracles. I don’t know.”

Sarah pulled a pillow over her face.

We lay there quietly, without moving. After a time I pried the pillow away and kissed her.

“What I’m saying,” she murmured, “is I don’t want to be alone. Not ever. You had your Ping-Pong table, I had this.”

The rule of thumb was acceleration. During our senior year, 1967 and 1968, Sarah led us toward new occupations. History had finally caught up with itself. On November 30, 1967, Eugene McCarthy announced his presidential candidacy. Robert Kennedy sorted through the scenarios. In the city streets, there was organized disorder, and at Berkeley and NYU, even at Peverson State, the writing was on the wall in big black letters. Evolution, not revolution. Abbie Hoffman was now a somebody; Jane Fonda was making choices; Sirhan Sirhan was taking target practice; LBJ was on the ropes; Richard Nixon was counting noses; Robert McNamara was having second thoughts; Dean Rusk was having bad dreams. By the turn of the year, the American troop presence in Vietnam had approached 500,000. Bad omens, I thought, but General William Westmoreland declared that “we have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.” And he was right, of course. The silhouette was there. The end revealed itself as an ending that would never quite end. When I look into my hole, allowing for distortion, I can see the end all around me. I can see Sarah leading the rallies at Peverson State. A baroque cartwheel, a fingertip handstand, a pair of identical somersaults—like the tracings of a compass, like school figures in skating. “We’re all cheerleaders,” she says, “you and me and Nelson Rockefeller. High fidelity, William. No switching sides at half time.”

There are fracture lines in the continuum from past to present. Are the dead truly dead?

Dig , the hole says, but I’m watching Sarah and Tina and Ollie in action at a Friday-night football game. I can see the American flag at stiff-flutter beyond the goalposts. I’m up in the bleachers. I know what’s coming. The score is deadlocked, the teams are at midfield, it’s a punting situation—imagine it—that brown ball spiraling through the bright yellow flood-lights, the crowd, the stadium, the artificial greenness of the grass—and the ball never comes down—it’s still up there, even now, it’s still sailing high over Canada and the Arctic Ocean—and there’s a distant sputtering sound—Sabotage, I think, it’s the work of Ollie Winkler—then the floodlights flicker and the stadium goes dark. At the fifty-yard line Sarah lights a sparkler. Tina, too, and later Ollie, and then I join them. “Spine straight,” Sarah whispers, “show me some class.” The pep band plays peace music. It’s all orchestrated. The sparklers and the music and the blackout and people standing and locking arms and singing and swaying under a huge autumn sky.

Impressive showmanship, but what disturbed me was the outlaw mentality. Too reckless, I thought. Those sabotaged floodlights: there was a cost involved, and over the next months it kept rising.

In January they seized the campus radio station. A year of decision, 1968, and Tina manned the microphone, and Sarah and Ollie took turns issuing demands. My own contribution was minimal. Five minutes into the operation I excused myself and found a men’s room and sat there for a long while, just reflecting, tracking goofiness toward sorrow.

Afterward Sarah said, “Well.”

Ollie laughed. “He’s not tuned in. Too shy, maybe. Hasn’t got that on-air personality.”

“Poor boy,” said Tina.

Recklessness, that was one thing, and there was also secrecy. Sarah had undesignated irons in the fire; she wouldn’t always confide in me. Security, she called it, but the variables seemed to graph out as conspiracy. On three occasions during our senior year, Sarah took off on extended trips to various unspecified locales. She came back tan and silent. There were late-night phone calls and coded conversations with anonymous personages. In February, after one of her trips, I came across a packet of twenty-dollar bills in her book bag. The currency still smelled of mintage, stiff and unwrinkled, two thousand dollars in all. And there were other such discoveries. There was an airline schedule. A Spanish-English dictionary, a travel brochure with photographs of Key West by moonlight, a set of house keys, a snapshot of two imposing black gentlemen dressed in berets and fatigues and combat boots. Unhealthy, I thought. I didn’t like the way things were trending. “Loose lips, leaky ships,” she’d tell me. “What you have to bear in mind is that this college crap won’t last forever. Pretty soon we graduate. Commence, et cetera.”