Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

“Bobbi what? ” I asked, but she only smiled.

The plane seemed to wobble for a moment, then stabilized. The fog was gone and there were stars and blinking lights. I listened to the engines.

Later, very softly, Bobbi talked about flight and books and travel and poetry. Poetry, she said, that was her first love. Would I care to hear a poem? Very much, I said. And she recited one about a violet sunset over Hudson Bay. A remarkable piece of work, I thought; I asked what it meant. She gave me a long secret look and explained that poems do not mean , that art is like grass and dreams, like people holding hands in the sky, that meanings are merely names, just as grass is a name, but that grass would still be grass without its name. I did not fully understand this. What I understood was love, and I asked if we could go away to Hudson Bay. Watch the sunsets? Live happily? Build a cabin in the woods? She said no, but she touched my face. She recited Auden and Frost and Emily Dickinson, then several of her own poems, and I thought about Sarah, and how sick I was, and lost, and in love.

I drifted away for a time. Just hovering, on hold, and when I looked up I was alone.

To what extent, I wondered, was it real?

A hard landing—too much torque. There was again the problem of gravity.

At the ramp, I waited for the plane to empty out. She was gone. But when I put my coat on, I found a poem pinned to the pocket— Martian Travel —and it was signed Bobbi. That much was real. The words didn’t matter. It had to do with flight and fantasy and pale green skin, which was hard to follow, but it seemed meaningful despite the absence of meaning. There was some grass tucked into the fold. Plain dried grass, yet fragrant, and a postscript which explained that the grass expressed her deepest feelings for me.

We spent two days in a motel on the outskirts of Miami. The grass, I kept thinking. I couldn’t match it to the real world. When I was well enough to travel, Sarah rented a van and fixed up a bed in back, pillows and blankets.

“Home free,” she said.

We made Key West in just under four hours. There was blue water and sickness and jungly greens and a fierce sun that made my eyes burn. What did it mean? The pieces wouldn’t fit. A white stucco house, I remember, and Ned Rafferty said, “Hang tight,” and he helped me inside, where it was cool, and then I felt the disease. Chills turning to fever. It was true illness. Emotional burnout, too, but the rest was physical. I remember a ceiling fan spinning over my bed. A heavy rain, then dense humidity; faces bobbing up—Tina Roebuck peeling an orange, Ned Rafferty wringing out a washcloth and folding it across my forehead. There were voices, too. Some I recognized, some I didn’t. And cooking smells. And intense heat, and doors swinging open, and a radio at low volume in another room. The smells were tropical. At times I’d seem to float away on one of those leisurely space walks. Nowhere to land, I’d think, and I’d be circling over the Everglades, airborne, all flight and fantasy.

“It’s done,” Sarah kept telling me.

She was patient. At night, when the chills came, she would come close and whisper, “End of the road.”

Key Wasted, Tina called it. There was no war here, and no clamor, just the tropical numbs.

Over that first month we took things slow. Hour by hour, quiet meals and quiet conversation. The patterns were entirely domestic. Tina did the shopping and cooking, Rafferty tended a small garden out back. For me, it was recovery. Safe, I’d think. A safe house, a safe neighborhood, and the underground seemed tidy and languid. There were no choices to make; the killing was elsewhere. Our little bungalow was situated at the edge of Old Town, near the cemetery, on a narrow, dead-end lane that was prosperous with window boxes and sunlight. No one talked politics. If this was the movement, I decided, the movement was fine, because nothing moved. Our neighbors were property owners and retired naval officers and widows and watercolorists. The houses were painted in pastels. In the yards were many flowers and pruned shrubs. During the day, from my bedroom window, I’d watch people passing by in their bright clothes, and at night I could hear radios tuned to the Voice of Havana.

I’d hear myself thinking: Where am I?

On the lam, I’d think. Then I’d smile. What, I wondered, was a lam? And why did it sound so corny and sad?

“There now,” Sarah would say. “Sleep it off.”

But my dreams were unwholesome. Criminal and outlandish. One night I was Custer. Another night I was chased through a forest by men with torches and silver badges—“Shame!” they were yelling—but I put my head down and ran. I dreamed of dishonor. I dreamed of dragnets and posses and box canyons and dead ends. “Shame!” my father yelled, but I couldn’t stop running. And then, dreaming, but also awake, I came to a country where there was great quiet and peace. It was a country without language, without names for shame and dishonor. Here, there was nothing worth dying for, not liberty or justice or national sovereignty, and nothing worth killing for. It was a country peopled by apostates and mutineers, those who had dropped their arms in battle, runaways and deserters and turncoats and men with faint hearts.

Just a dream, like everything, but the nights were disjointed.

I’d wake up dizzy—uncertain whereabouts. A malfunction of compass. I couldn’t get my bearings; I felt open to injury.

“Easy,” Sarah would say, “give it time.”

She was tender with me. Uncommonly careful, and caring. In the mornings, before the heat set in, she would often lead me on long winding strolls through Old Town. The pace was slow. She was tactful, never pushing. Along the way she pointed out the local flora and fauna, many gulls and flowers, exotic trees, fish bones bleaching on white sand. We’d go arm in arm down Margaret Street, then left on Caroline, past Cuban restaurants and conch houses, then right on Duval, where there were crowds and drinking establishments and young girls in halters and headbands and young boys with long hair and bruised arms, then down to the waterfront, just walking, often resting, watching the shrimp boats and fishermen and tourists. Mildew smells, I remember. And salt and gasoline. There were jugglers and magicians at Mallory Square. There was an old man with an iguana on a leather leash. There was no war here, but there was bright sunlight and water, so we’d walk until we were hungry, then we’d stop for fish cakes at one of the outdoor cafés. We’d hold hands under the table. We’d be silent, mostly, or else talk around things, admiring the temperature and the shadings of color in the sky. Later, at the house, we’d nap or read, then take a swim, then oil up our bodies and hide behind sunglasses and spend the late afternoon soaking our toes in the Gulf of Mexico.

On the surface, at least, it was a holiday. R&R, Sarah called it, but she skirted the hard topics. She did not mention her new friends. She did not venture information as to why we were here or what her plans might be or where the trends might take us. Except for a few late-night phone calls, there were no contacts with any outside network. There was an odd passivity to it all, an absence of endeavor. Too lush, I thought. Too remote. The immense quiet and the afternoon heat and the slow island tempo. Where, I wondered, was the resistance? And why Key West? And what next? There were these questions, and others, but I was not yet prepared to frame them.

I concentrated on convalescence. Day to day, just idling. A good time, mostly—a family feeling.

Tina Roebuck performed home economics, toiling over casseroles and desserts that flamed. “Health begins with nutrition,” she’d say. Then she’d chuckle and tap her belly: “Balanced diets make balanced minds.” So we’d sit down to nutritious meals, Tina in a brightly colored muumuu, Rafferty in gym shorts, Sarah in almost nothing. The talk was family talk—Tina told McCarthy stories, Rafferty went on at length about his garden. After supper we’d play Scrabble or Monopoly, or watch television, or go dancing down on Duval Street, and although I’d sometimes feel myself slipping away, space walking, the others were always there to give comfort.