Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

He chuckled and dipped a finger into the belly fat.

“Now, then,” he said, “let us discuss obesity. You porkers gross me out.”

He grasped Tina’s stomach with both hands.

“Piggies!” he said.

Tina squirmed but he held tight.

“Fatsos! Grease!”

Still smiling, Ebenezer bent down and put his mouth to her stomach and licked the flesh.

“Pigs!” he yelled. “Pigs and pork chops—I want to eat it! Gobble it up, all those good juices. Can I eat your fat, girl?”

Tina whimpered.

“Say the word, I’ll definitely eat it. Yes, I will. I’ll swallow it.”

“No,” said Tina.

“One bite?”

“No.”

She tried to back away, but Ebenezer Keezer had her by the fat. Oddly, I found myself thinking about Mars bars, the relations between fantasy and gluttony. Eyes half shut, Ebenezer was nibbling at her belly.

“Oink!” he said. “Go oink, babe. Give me a piggy squeal.”

“Oink,” Tina said.

“Louder!”

“Oink!” she cried.

“Oooo, good! Oink it up!”

Tina oinked and wept.

Later, when it was over, Ebenezer’s tone became philosophical. He dwelled on the need for physical fitness. Soldiers, he told us, are neither pigs nor pork chops. Resistance required resilience.

“For the next sixty days,” he said, “you lardballs are my personal property. I say oink, you definitely oink. I say don’t oink, you definitely abstain from oinking. Same applies with Nethro. We own you. Questions?”

There were no questions.

“Wunderbar,” he said. “Sleep tight, kiddies. Tomorrow’s a weird day.”

That night, as in many nights, I indulged in fantasy. It was a means of escape, a way of gliding from here-and-now to there-and-then, an instrument by which I could measure the disjunction between what was and what might be. I imagined myself in repose beneath a plywood Ping-Pong table. I imagined my father’s arms around me. I imagined, also, a world in which men would not do to men the things men so often do to men. It was a world without armies, without cannibalism or treachery or greed, a world safe and undivided. Fantasy, nothing else. But I pressed up against Sarah, stealing warmth, imagining I was aboard a spaceship sailing through the thin, sterile atmosphere of Mars, and below were the red dunes, the unmoving molecular tides, and I smiled and stroked Sarah’s hip and whispered, “Bobbi.” There was guilt, of course, but I couldn’t stop myself. Stupid, I thought, all fluff and air, but then I remembered Martian Travel , and the grass, and the great calm as we flew high over the darkened seaboard of North America. I remembered that Leonardo smile—eyes here, lips there, the blond hair and soft voice. I imagined embarking on a long pursuit. Pick up the airborne scent and track her down and carry her away. A desert island, maybe, or the planet Mars, where there would be quiet and civility and poetry recitals late at night. Peace, that’s all, just a fantasy.

Over the first month it was all physical fitness. Reveille at dawn. Formation, inspection, waving practice. Then down to the beach for warm-up exercises. “Move it!” they’d yell. “Agility! Hostility! Make it hurt!” And it did hurt. Even Sarah felt it, even Rafferty. It was the kind of hurt that comes to visit and rearranges the spiritual furniture.

Unreal, I’d think, but I couldn’t ignore the pain.

There were jumping jacks, I remember. We ran and climbed ropes and took nature hikes at full speed. We learned to say “Yes, sir!” and “No, sir!” and little else. No use complaining, because the penalty was pain. There were push-ups and sit-ups and hot afternoons on the obstacle course. There was tear gas, too—I remember the sting. I remember Tina crying. All night, it seemed, she cried, and in the morning there was more pain.

“Maniacs,” I told Sarah. “Psychosis. Deep in the crazies.”

In the second week I came up hard against the barrier of self-pity. Here, I thought, was everything I’d run from. But you couldn’t run far enough or fast enough. You couldn’t dodge the global dragnet. The killing zone kept expanding. Reaction or revolution, no matter, it was a hazard to health either way.

Day to day, I did what I could. Arms and legs, just the bodily demands. The days seemed to skid by, and even now, looking back, I remember very little in the way of detail.

The fierce sun.

Mushiness in the extremities.

Ollie huffing, Tina straining under the forces of fat and gravity, Sarah’s lip swelling up in reaction to the tropical heat.

I remember intense thirst. Intense hunger, too. Yearnings for Coca-Cola and the air-conditioned wonders of a Holiday Inn. America, I’d think, but this was somewhere else. We were tutored in hand-to-hand combat. We ran mock relay races up and down the white beaches. Often, at night, we were awakened and made to stand at attention against the courtyard wall.

“A good waver,” Ebenezer Keezer told us, “is a rare cat in this day an’ age. Everywhere I go, I see half-ass waves that don’ truly emanate from the inner soul. A sorry commentary. Collapse of the social fabric, that’s what it is.”

“God’s word,” said Nethro. “Ebenezer and me, we just missionaries out to spread the wavin’ gospel.”

“Tell it.”

“I did. I tol’ it.”

A sunny afternoon, and Tina Roebuck sat in the sand and folded her arms.

She did not move.

Squatting down beside her, Ebenezer Keezer frowned and said, “Oh, my. Tuckered Tina. El mucho fatigo?”

She did not move and she did not speak.

Ebenezer lifted her shirt, very gently.

“I’m famished,” he murmured.

But even then she was silent. Arms folded, she gazed straight ahead, northward, where the sea curved toward the Straits of Florida.

Ebenezer pinched her stomach.

“Let me eat it,” he said softly. “Be a good girl now, let me eat that yummy tummy.”

But she did not move.

A drugged, dreamy expression. Her eyes were empty. It was the emptiness that follows upon surrender, and one by one it happened to all of us.

In mid-December, as we moved into our second full month, the curriculum turned increasingly technical. We learned the craft of crime: how to break and enter and spot surveillance and plant a bug and sweep a room and untap a telephone. The platitudes of felony, spoken straight, had the sound of wisdom. “Always travel first-class,” Nethro said, “ ’cause the law goes coach.” There were many such maxims, lessons passed on from Jesse James. The best disguise is a crowd. The best weapon is brain-power. “In God we trust,” said Nethro, “but don’ forget to frisk him.”

There was also a formal side to our training. Most evenings, after dinner, we would assemble in the lecture hall for a series of so-called political education seminars. Indoctrination, I suppose, but there was no haranguing; if anything, Ebenezer’s presentations had a low-key, almost professorial quality. In one instance he outlined and analyzed the ideological underpinnings of the American Revolution. He reviewed constitutional doctrine and explicated key passages from the Federalist papers and the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty. He reminded us that our republic had been born in disobedience, even terrorism, and that the faces which decorate our currency had once appeared on English Wanted posters.

“The line between sainthood and infamy,” Ebenezer said quietly, “is the line between winning and losing. Winners become statues in public parks. Losers become dead.”

There was a pause.

“Dead,” he said.

Then another pause, longer, after which he smiled.

“ Dead , children. Losers get embalmed. Our purpose here is to produce winners.”