Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

I cut the telephone line.

I trudge over to the Chevy, open the hood, remove the battery, lug it across the yard and hide it in the tool shed.

“Good work,” Sarah would say.

I pause at the edge of the hole, wavering. There is something burdensome in the night. I hear myself reciting aloud the names of my wife and daughter, then other names, Ollie and Tina and Ned and Sarah.

What happened to them? All of us? I wonder about the consequences of our disillusion, the loss of energy, the slow hardening of a generation’s arteries. What happened? Was it entropy? Genetic decay? Even the villains are gone. What became of Brezhnev and Nixon and Curtis LeMay? No more heroes, no more public enemies. Villainy itself has disappeared, or so it seems, and the moral climate has turned mild and banal. We wear alligators on our shirts; we play 3-D video games in darkened living rooms. As if to beat the clock, the fathers of our age have all passed away—Rickover was buried at sea, von Braun went quietly in his sleep. Sarah, too, and the others. Left for dead. And who among us would become a martyr, and for what?

The hole seems impatient.

So then. Get on with it .

It’s an era of disengagement. We are in retreat, all of us, and there is no going back.

I return to the tool shed.

I arm myself with hammer and nails. I pick up the two-by-fours and make my way toward the house.

In the kitchen I try for stealth. Past the stove, a left turn, down the hallway to the bedroom door. There I stop and listen. The sounds are domestic. Muffled but still comforting—Bobbi’s hair dryer, Melinda’s radio.

“You guys,” I say, “I love you.”

I perform each task as it comes.

First a wedge, which I tuck between the knob and the door’s outer molding. I drive it tight with the hammer.

Next the two-by-fours.

Speed is critical.

I feel sorrow coming on, but I push it back and carefully check the measurements. I don’t want mistakes. We are dealing, I remind myself, with the end of the world. Nuclear war: I am not crazy.

When I begin hammering, the hair dryer clicks off and Melinda says, “What’s going on? ”

I nail a board flush to the door.

“Daddy!” she shouts.

I am sane. Yes, I am. Sane—I hit the nails square on.

“God!” she yells.

Bobbi hushes her, and I hear bedsprings, sharp voices, but I know what bombs can do, I’ve seen it, I’m willing to call it nuclear war, and I do, I cock the hammer and say, “Nuclear war.” There’s justice involved. It’s love and preservation. It’s shelter. It’s carpentry. I nail down the second two-by-four, then the third, an overlapping system that anchors on the hallway wall.

“Hey, you!” Melinda says. Her voice is closer now, a bit shaky. “Stop that racket! Can you hear me! Stop it!”

Finally the braces. Six of them. Door to molding: I’ve figured the angles. As an afterthought I remove the knob and use a screw-driver to jam the inner workings.

I kneel at the door.

The shakes have got me, and for a moment or two it nearly spills over into sentiment.

Melinda jiggles the inside knob.

“Well,” she says, “I hope you’re happy.”

“Almost,” I say.

“The door doesn’t work.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

She gives it a sharp tug. I hear a squeak but it’s solid. For a time the house seems impossibly silent, as if a furnace had shut down, then from behind the door comes the sound of a latch turning, a window sliding open. There’s a conference in progress. No doubt about the topic. Bobbi’s a poet, Melinda’s a child. It adds up to a paucity of imagination.

“Forget it,” I say gently, “I’m years ahead of you.”

My pace is brisk.

Not rushing, not dawdling either.

When I step outside, the night has become treacherous. A heavy rain now, and the Christmas lights seem blurry in the dark, almost mobile, like the lights in a dream, fluid and shapeless. There is an absence of clarity.

I find the ladder, place it against the house, climb nine rungs to the bedroom window. I take great care. I don’t want broken legs, not mine, not theirs.

The window is wide open. The gauzy white curtains billow inward, and through them I watch my wife and daughter. It’s a touching scene. Bobbi stands at the center of the room, in profile, her lips drawn in concentration as she ties the bedsheets together. She wears green cords and sneakers and a yellow cotton sweater. Poignant, I think. The bedsheets make me smile; it would be funny if it were not so poignant. A gorgeous woman—the breasts beneath that cotton sweater, the places I would touch, the things I would say. But now she tests the knot, frowning, and I can’t let it go on. Behind her, wearing a raincoat, Melinda sits on a blue suitcase, waiting, her eyes excited with thoughts of escape.

I feel sadness in my backbone.

If I could, I would climb through the window and take them to me and crush them with love.

If I could, I would.

Softly, though, I close the shutters. If there were any other way. But I pull the hammer from my belt and drive in the nails.

“Hey!” Melinda shouts.

It’s a two-minute job. If I could, I would do otherwise, but I can’t. I seal up the window with two-by-fours. Guilt will come later. For now it’s just heartache.

“We’ll starve!” Melinda screams, but of course they won’t, I’ll figure something out in the morning.

The rain seems hot and dry.

There are no shapes, the night has no configuration.

The hole says, Beautiful!

Inside, I take a bath, then shave, then busy myself with little household chores. I’m optimistic. I’ll reason with them. I’ll explain that it’s love and nothing else. I’ll be logical. Bowl them over with my own sanity. I’ll show them photographs of an armed nuclear warhead—that’s what I’ll do—I’ll do mathematics—I’ll slip the equations beneath the door.

Yes, I’ll do it, and they’ll understand.

But now I find comfort in vacuuming the living-room rug. I’m domestic. I have duties. I dust furniture, defrost the refrigerator, scrub the kitchen floor. Ajax, I think, the foaming cleanser… I sing it. The house seems empty around me. In the basement I toss in a load of laundry and sit on the steps and sing, Clean clear through, and deodorized too, that’s a Fab wash, a Fab wash, for you! I watch the clothes spin. My voice is strong. In Key West we’d sit out on the back patio and one of us would start singing, maybe Tina, and then Ned and Ollie… Are they dead? What happened? They knew the risks, they indulged in idealism. There was evil at large. Vietnam: the word itself has become a cliché, an eye-glazer, but back then we recognized evil. We were not the lunatic fringe. We were the true-blue center. It was not a revolution, it was a restoration. And now it’s over. What happened? Who remembers the convoluted arguments that kept us awake until five in the morning? Was it a civil war? Was Ho Chi Minh a tyrant, and if so, was his tyranny preferable to that of Diem and Ky and Thieu? What about containment and dominoes and self-determination? Whose interests were at stake? Did interests matter? All those complexities and ambiguities, issues of history, issues of law and principle—they’ve vanished. A stack of tired old platitudes: The war could’ve been won, the war was ill conceived, the war was an aberration, the war was hell. Vietnam, it wasn’t evil, it was madness, and we are all innocent by reason of temporary insanity. And now it’s dropout time… Be young, be fair, be debonair …

We pat ourselves on the back. We marched a few miles, we voted for McGovern, and now it’s over, we earned our rest. Someday, perhaps, we’ll all get together for a bang-up reunion, thousands of us, veterans with thinning hair and proud little potbellies, and we’ll sit around swapping war stories in the lobby of the Chicago Hilton, the SDS bunch dressed to kill in their pea coats and Shriner’s hats, Wallace in his wheelchair, McCarthy in his pinstripes, Westmoreland in fatigues, Kennedy in his coffin, Sarah in her letter sweater. We’ll get teary-eyed. We’ll talk about passion. And I’ll be there, too, with my hard hat and spade. I’ll lead the songfest. I’ll warm them up with some of the old standards, and we’ll all get soppy with sentiment. We’ll remind ourselves of our hour of great honor. We’ll sing, Give peace a chance , then we’ll drink and chase girls and compare investment portfolios. We’ll parade through Lincoln Park singing, Mr. Clean will clean your whole house, and everything that’s in it …