Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

I was not feeling well. Disconnections, I thought, or maybe the sandwich.

Ollie’s voice seemed to be coming from the far end of the terminal.

“What you have to remember,” he was saying, then came a short hum. “See what I mean? Right now you’re on the ultimate guilt trip, just ride it out. You know?”

I excused myself.

“Oysters,” I said, “you were right.”

In the men’s room I sat on the can and let the fuses blow.

I’d been expecting it, or something like it, and now it was bad. There was just the indeterminate future. It occurred to me that I should cry. Briefly, as if slipping out of myself, I imagined that I was back home again, watching all this on television.

Hollywood, I decided.

I washed up and combed my hair. If you’re sane, I thought, you look at the end of things but you can’t cry because the end isn’t real. You put on a David Janssen smile. Because nothing ever ends, not really.

Later, in the lobby, Ollie suggested deep breathing.

“Like this,” he said, and he demonstrated for me, puffing up his cheeks. “Slow and deep, it works magic.” He took me by the arm, lightly, just steering. “The depths, pal, lots of pressure per square inch. The bends, right? That first dive, you just got to breathe slow and deep.”

We took our time heading down to the TWA gate area. It was a thirty-minute wait. When the flight was announced, Ollie went over to a pay phone, placed a quick call, then came back and handed over a packet of tickets.

“Okay, you’re off,” he said. “The Big Apple. Another layover at La Guardia then a straight shot down to Miami. Pure gravity the whole way.” There was a soft, almost compassionate expression on his face; he paused and held out a stick of Juicy Fruit. “Don’t dwell on it. Put her on cruise and just coast for a while. The gum, too. Keeps the ears unplugged, helps decompress. No problem, you just got caught in a draft.”

There was turbulence all the way to New York. I didn’t crack. I put myself on glide, breathing deep, imagining I was aboard a one-man spaceship tracking for the stars. Far below, the home planet spun on its axis, a pleasing vision, those lovely whites and blues, the fragile continents, and as I sailed away, as the world receded, I felt a curious measure of nostalgia, desire mixed with grief. Here, in space, there was just the smooth suck of inertia.

At La Guardia I dozed off for an hour, then roamed around the terminal, then called home.

It did not matter that the line was busy. I just kept talking, very quietly, picturing my mother’s face, and my father’s, explaining to them that I was running because I couldn’t envision any other way, because the dangers exceeded the reach of my imagination. Safety, I said. Nothing else. Not honor, not conscience. All I wanted for myself was a place to ride out the bad times.

“It isn’t cowardice,” I said, “it’s my life.”

And then I chuckled.

No big deal, I told them, because none of it was real. If you’re sane, that is.

I put courage in my voice. I told them how alone I felt, how much I missed them, but how it was all a daydream. There are no bombs, I said. We live forever. It’s a steady-state universe. I told them about the spaceship sensation, warped time and high velocity, as if I were traveling through some strange new dimension, another world, no maps or landmarks, no right or wrong, no ends to the earth.

It was Trans World from there on.

A clear night sky, like glass, and I could see it all. I could see the lights of Atlantic City, the scalloped edges of Chesapeake Bay, the tidewaters of Virginia. The clarity was amazing. Telescopic breadth and microscopic precision. I could see Baltimore and Richmond and Washington, the glowing dome on the nation’s Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, the dark Carolinas, Cape Hatteras and Cape Fear, the quiet suburbs of Norfolk, the rivers and inlets, the Jersey shore, north to Maine, south to the Keys, all of it, the whole profile, the long sleeping silhouette of midnight America.

I was in orbit. The eye of a satellite. A space walk, and I was tumbling at the end of my tether.

There were lights in the Kremlin.

I could see a submarine in the shallows off Cape Cod, like a fish, and I could see Kansas, too, where there was a harvest moon and vast fields of corn and wheat, and men in blue uniforms beneath the translucent earth. The men wore silk scarves and black boots. They were not real men, of course, for none of it is real, not the blue uniforms and not the boots and not the Titan II missile with its silver nose cone and patriotic markings. I could see Los Alamos, too, where nothing real had ever happened; I could see across the ocean to Bikini; I could see the Urals and the Sweethearts; I could see all of what cannot be seen, because it’s beyond seeing, because we’re sane.

The Trans World engines made a lullaby sound. People slept, the flight attendants chatted in the galley.

There was nowhere to land.

Below, in the dark, I watched ball lightning strike Georgia: a conspicuous white fireball that rolled toward Atlanta. The jet was on low-hum cruise. There was comfort in knowing it could not be real. Later, I fell asleep, and later yet, as we passed over Charleston and Savannah, I could see how it might happen, if it could, though it can’t—crisscrossing threads of color in the great North American dark, bright flashes zigzagging from sea to sea. It was not a dream. One by one, all along the length of the eastern seaboard, the great cities twinkled and burned and vanished. A half-dream, I thought. I felt no fear. I buckled my seat belt. I knew what was next, and when it came, I watched with a kind of reverence. There were flashes of red and gold. There were noises, too, and powdery puffs of maroon and orange and royal blue, fungal arrangements in the lower atmosphere, the laws of physics. But it was not real. When it happens, I realized, it will not happen, because it cannot happen. It will not be real.

The jet dipped, bounced, and woke me up.

I pushed the call button.

Just a nightmare, the stewardess said, and I nodded, and she brought me a martini and wiped my brow and then held my hand for a while.

Over Miami we went into a holding pattern. I was sick, but I fell in love.

When I told her so, the stewardess smiled and said it was the martini, or altitude sickness.

We circled over the Everglades at ten thousand feet.

She said my skin was green—pale green, she said, like a Martian. Then she gave my hand a squeeze. She asked if I was feeling better. I said I felt fine, I was in love.

The stewardess crossed her legs. She was tall and slim, with space-blue eyes and yellow hair and a pair of wings on her collar and a name tag at her breast that said Bobbi.

“Bobbi what?” I asked, but again she smiled, and after a moment she told me names didn’t matter. There were company policies, and private policies, too. But in any case names didn’t matter, did they? I thought about it as we banked over the Atlantic. No, I decided, names did not necessarily matter. But without names, I asked, how would we get married? I told her we had to be practical. Bobbi smiled at this and said it seemed a bit sudden. I agreed with her. Things sometimes happened suddenly, I said, even things that could not happen. Passion, for instance, and commitment. Her eyes were cryptic. Was this a line? she asked. It was not a line. She took the olive from my martini and fed it to me, saying I needed vitamins, I should find a nice beach somewhere and stretch out and bake away the bad dreams. She told me to close my eyes. I was sick and the plane was circling through fog. What about love? I asked. Could we run away together? How many children would she want? Over the Everglades she looked at me and said, You’re crazy, you know that? I knew. Bobbi nodded. Then I told her as much as there was time to tell. I told her about the dynamic. It was crushing, I said. How much was real? Was she real? I told her I was caught up by current events. I couldn’t separate right from wrong. I needed a hideout. Would she mind saving my life? Could we find an island somewhere?