Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

I’d tease the name, saying “Bobbi.”

Bobbi who? I’d wonder.

And there was Sarah, too, whose love and ministrations speeded recovery.

In the evenings, before bed, she gave me long professional back rubs, attending the vertebrae one by one, taking each toe to her mouth and sucking out the poisons and wickedness. There was some guilt, of course. There were unsaid things. Our lovemaking was often quick and formal. Bobbi, I’d be thinking, which was silly, and Sarah would regard me with flat eyes, just waiting, and eventually I’d find reason to look away. But even then she showed patience. Quietly, without sarcasm, she said she was proud of me. I’d done the proper thing. She knew how difficult it was, she knew about the pain.

“We all want to be heroes,” she said one afternoon. “That’s the constant. Nobody wants a bad rep. Ducking out, the big blush, I know. But I’ll tell you a true fact—you can’t die of embarrassment. Doesn’t happen that way.”

I watched the clouds.

A seashore scene, and we were beached up side by side. The blues were startling. It was an afternoon of repose, just the wide-open stratosphere and those long rhyming wavelengths of water and light.

For a time Sarah watched me through her sunglasses. There was a hesitation, then she reached into her beach bag and pulled out a new leather wallet.

“Yours,” she said, and passed it over.

Inside, under clear plastic, was a Social Security card made out in the name of Leonard B. Johnson. There was a driver’s license, too, in the same name, with my face affixed, and two credit cards, and a snapshot of Sarah in her Peverson cheerleading outfit. At the bottom of the photograph, in black ink, she’d written: With high fidelity, Sarah .

“The credit cards,” she said. “Don’t use them. ID stuff, just for show.”

“Leonard?” I said.

“You don’t like it?”

“Not much.”

Sarah sat up and massaged cocoa oil into her calves and thighs. Her skin was deep brown with good muscle definition. A hard act, I thought, in a hard world.

She laughed.

“Ah, well,” she said brightly, “what’s in a name? No real meaning. Know what I mean?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Names and names, William. Meanings. Names don’t matter.” She rolled onto her stomach. Overhead there were sea gulls and wispy white clouds. “Anyway,” she said, “I hope it’s not an identity crisis. Leonard, I mean, it’ll grow on you. Very wishy-washy as names go. Tomorrow, maybe the next day, I’ll have your passport.”

“And then?”

Absently, Sarah traced a design in the sand.

“Nothing, really. New papers, new citizenship. We’re all émigrés here.”

She wiped the sand clean and started over, drawing an airplane, wings tilted at a steep downward angle. Her eyes, I thought, were wired.

“One of these days,” she said slowly, “you’ll have to stop grieving for the old country. It’s gone. Not there anymore.”

“A new world,” I said.

“Believe it.”

“New friends, too?”

She gave me a sharp look.

“Friends, too,” she said. “Who you think pays for all this? Those papers—the house, the groceries—somebody has to pick up the tab. They aren’t bad people.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You implied.”

“All right,” I said. “Generous people. What I’m curious about, though, is the repayment schedule. The fine print, the terms of agreement and all that.”

“A few favors. Odd jobs here and there.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Complaints?”

I shook my head. “No, just apprehensive. The law.”

“Well,” she said, “it takes some savoir-faire.”

Sarah studied her airplane in the sand. It wasn’t what she wanted, apparently, because she hit it with her fist and then flipped onto her back and watched the circling gulls.

“Savoir-faire?” I said.

“You know.”

“I don’t know. I’m stupid.”

She made an impatient movement with her chin. “Survival skills. How to cope. How to avoid handcuffs. Like grad school except it’s strictly pass-fail. Anyway, you’re enrolled.”

Her voice trailed off. She kept fidgeting, tight and restless.

Presently she sighed.

“You’re right,” she said, “there’s always a price. But listen, you made the decision, you walked , so pretty soon you’ll have to get off your butt and start showing me some involvement. You do or you don’t.”

“A war,” I said.

“True enough.” She took off her sunglasses and looked at me. “Things change, William. All that pom-pom garbage, it’s history, I’m in this for keeps. I’m in . And what I mean is, I mean you have to grow up. Crawl out of your goddamn hidey-hole.”

“Black or white,” I said. “Sounds so simple.”

“It is simple. Pull your own weight or pull out. I need a commitment.”

For a moment she was silent, letting it hang, then she tapped the wallet.

“Commitment,” she said softly. “Know what it means?”

There was a subtle undercurrent. She shook out her hair and stood up and waded out into the Atlantic.

Commitment, I thought.

Two different value systems. She was out to change the world, I was out to survive it. I couldn’t summon the same moral resources.

I dozed off for a time, and when I looked up, Sarah was standing over me, toweling off, the sun directly behind her head.

“Who’s Bobbi?” she said.

Her face was all angles. She knelt down, opened the wallet, and pulled out Martian Travel .

“Found it this morning. Naïve Sarah. Went to reload your billfold. Switch papers—some switch. What do I find? I find this. All about airplanes and safe landings. Maybe I should read it out loud.”

“No,” I said, “don’t.”

But she went ahead anyway, in a soft, measured voice, and at the final line she nodded and placed the poem in my lap.

There was some stillness.

“Snazzy stuff,” she said shortly. “Mars and stars. Dah-dee-dah, et cetera. Nice metrics. Content-wise, it seems a little ambiguous, but I guess that’s literature for you.”

“Sarah, it’s not—”

She shook her head and laughed.

“Fidelity?” she said. “Offhand I can’t think of a decent rhyme. True? Blue? Shit.” Her eyes were closed. “I guess I’m just hypersensitive. The whole thing, it strikes me as—how do I say this?—a little cheesy. And there’s that cute P.S., too. Something about grass. The regular cow kind. She says it expresses her deepest feelings for you.”

“Yes,” I said, “I know.”

“Cheesy.”

“I know.”

After a time, Sarah put on her sunglasses and stretched out beside me.

The afternoon was hot. A fine clean sky, and for a long while nothing more was said. All whimsy, I thought. It wasn’t what it seemed. Out on the horizon a white cruise ship was toiling south, and we lay quietly until it disappeared over the rim of the world.

Sarah touched my arm.

“I’m not poetic, William. You and me. I thought we had something. Remember?”

“I remember.”

“Love. Rio and babies. That was the plan, I thought.”

“It still is. A good plan.”

She sat up.

“Fucking Martians,” she said. “Fucking grass. I don’t get it.”

“No meaning,” I said. “All air.”

“I love you.”

“Just air.”

“ Love ,” she said, then paused. “So who’s Bobbi?”

I gazed out at where the cruise ship had been, but there was just the thin, unbroken edge of things.

“Bobbi who?” I said.