Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

A mountain town.

Elevation, just under six thousand feet.

Population, just over a thousand.

Ranch country. Scrub grass and pine and dust. An old hitching post in front of the Strouch Funeral Home. A courthouse, a cemetery, the Ben Franklin store. What else? The Thompson Hotel. The Sweethearts, of course. A stone-walled library. The air, I remember, had the year-round smell of winter, a brittle snapping smell, and at night, brushing my teeth, I could taste something like sulphur at the back of my tongue.

A pretty place, I suppose, but boring.

“Culture’s that way,” my dad would say, pointing east, “and if you want it, civilization’s somewhere over that last ridgeline, more or less,” then he’d hook a thumb westward, as if hitchhiking. Isolated. Fifty-eight miles from Yellowstone, eighty miles from Helena, twenty miles from the nearest major highway.

We were not high on the Russian hit list. But how could you be sure? Fort Derry, it sounded like a target.

And, besides, mistakes happen.

Even as a kid, maybe because I was a kid, I understood that there was nothing make-believe about doomsday. No hocus-pocus. No midnight fantasy. I knew better. It was real, like physics, like the laws of combustion and gravity. I could truly see it: a sleek nose cone, the wiring and dials and tangled circuitry. Real firepower, real danger. I was normal, yes, stable and levelheaded, but I was also willing to face the truth.

Anyway, I didn’t have much choice. The nightmares had been squeezing my sleep for months, and finally, on a night in early May, a very quiet night, I woke up dizzy. My eyeballs ached. Things were so utterly silent I feared I’d gone deaf. Absolute silence. I sat up and wiped my face and waited for the world to rebalance itself. I’d been dreaming of war—whole continents on fire, oceans boiling, cities in ash—and now, with that dreadful silence, it seemed that the universe had died in its sleep.

I was a child. There were few options.

I scrambled out of bed, put on my slippers, and ran for the basement. No real decision, I just did it.

Basement, I thought.

I went straight for the Ping-Pong table.

Shivering, wide awake, I began piling scraps of lumber and bricks and old rugs onto the table, making a thick roof, shingling it with a layer of charcoal briquettes to soak up the deadly radiation. I fashioned walls out of cardboard boxes filled with newspapers and two-by-fours and whatever basement junk I could find. I built a ventilation shaft out of cardboard tubing. I stocked the shelter with rations from the kitchen pantry, laid in a supply of bottled water, set up a dispensary of Band-Aids and iodine, designed my own little fallout mask.

When all this was finished, near dawn, I crawled under the table and lay there faceup, safe, arms folded across my chest.

And, yes, I slept. No dreams.

My father found me down there. Still half asleep, I heard him calling out my name in a voice so distant, so muffled and hollow, that it might’ve come from another planet.

I didn’t answer.

A door opened, lights clicked on. I watched my father’s slippers glide across the concrete floor.

“William?” he said.

I sank deeper into my shelter.

“Hey, cowboy,” my father said. “Out.”

His voice had a stern, echoing sound. It made me coil up.

“Out,” he repeated.

I could see the blue veins in his ankles. “Okay, in a minute,” I told him, “I’m sort of busy right now.”

My father stood still for a moment, then shuffled to the far end of the table. His slippers made a whish-whish noise. “Listen here,” he said, “it’s a swell little fort, a dandy, but you can’t—”

“It’s not a fort,” I said.

“No?”

And so I explained it to him. How, in times like these, we needed certain safeguards. A line of defense against the man-made elements. A fallout shelter.

My father sneezed.

He cleared his throat and muttered something. Then, suddenly, in one deft motion, he bent down and grabbed me by the ankles and yanked me out from under the table.

Oddly, he was smiling.

“William,” he murmured. “What’s this? ”

“What?”

“This. Right here.”

Leaning forward, still smiling, he jabbed a finger at my nose. At first I didn’t understand.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “It’s a fallout mask.”

Actually, of course, it was just a paper bag filled with sawdust and charcoal briquettes. The bag had ventilation holes in it, and the whole contraption was attached to my face by strings and elastic bands. I grinned and started to show him how it worked, but my father raised his arm in a quick jerky movement, like a traffic cop, as if to warn me about something, then he squeezed my shoulder.

“Upstairs,” he said. “On the double. Right now.”

He seemed upset.

He pulled the mask off and marched me up the stairs, coming on strong with all that fatherly stuff about how I could’ve caught pneumonia, how he had enough to worry about without finding his kid asleep under a Ping-Pong table. All the while he kept glancing at me with those sharp blue eyes, half apprehensive and half amused, measuring.

When we got up to the kitchen, he showed my mother the mask. “Go ahead,” he said, “guess what it is.” But he didn’t give her a chance. “A fallout mask. See there? Regulation fallout mask.”

My mother smiled.

“Lovely,” she said.

Then my father told her about the Ping-Pong table. He didn’t openly mock me; he was subtle about it—a certain change of tone, raising his eyebrows when he thought I wasn’t looking. But I was looking. And it made me wince. “The Ping-Pong table,” he said slowly, “it’s now a fallout shelter. Get it? A fallout shelter.” He stretched the words out like rubber bands, letting them snap back hard: “Fallout shelter. Ping-Pong.”

“It’s sweet,” my mother said, and her eyes did a funny rolling trick, then she laughed.

“Fallout,” my father kept saying.

Again, they didn’t mean to be cruel. But even after they’d scooted me in for a hot bath, I could hear them hooting it up, making jokes, finally tiptoeing down to the basement for a peek at my handiwork. I didn’t see the humor in it. Over breakfast, I tried to explain that radiation could actually kill you. Pure poison, I told them. Or it could turn you into a mutant or a dwarf or something. “I mean, cripes,” I said, “don’t you guys even think about it, don’t you worry?” I was confused. I couldn’t understand those sly smiles. Didn’t they read the newspapers? Hadn’t they seen pictures of people who’d been exposed to radioactivity—hair burned off, bleeding tongues, teeth falling out, skin curled up like charred paper? Where was the joke in all that?

Somehow, though, I started feeling defensive, almost guilty, so finally I shut up and finished my pancakes and hustled off to school. God, I thought, am I crazy?

But that didn’t end it.

All day long I kept thinking about the shelter, figuring ways to improve on it, drawing diagrams, calculating, imagining how I’d transform that plywood table into a real bastion against total war. In art class, I drew up elaborate renovation blueprints; in study hall, I devised a makeshift system for the decontamination of water supplies; during noon recess, while the rest of the kids screwed around, I began compiling a detailed list of items essential to human survival.

No question, it was nuke fever. But I wasn’t wacko. In fact, I felt fully sane—tingling, in control.

In a way, I suppose, I was pushed on by the memory of that snug, dreamless sleep in my shelter. Cozy and walled in and secure. Like the feeling you get in a tree house, or in a snow fort, or huddled around a fire at night. I’ll even admit that my motives may have been anchored in some ancestral craving for refuge, the lion’s instinct for the den, the impulse that first drove our species into caves. Safety, it’s normal . The mole in his hole. The turtle in his shell. Look at history: the Alamo, castles on the Rhine, moated villages, turrets, frontier stockades, storm cellars, foxholes, barbed wire, an attic in Amsterdam, a cave along the Dead Sea. Besides, you can’t ignore the realities. You can’t use faggy-ass psychology to explain away the bomb.