Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

The bullhorn crackled.

“Hide an’ go seek,” Ebenezer cried. “You’re it, shitpot. Peekaboo! I see you!”

His inflection carried mockery, but it wasn’t enough to make me move. I had strong convictions. There was nothing worth dying for. Not for this, not for that. If you’re sane, you resign yourself to the tacky pleasures of not dying when there is nothing worth dying for.

I knew my limits. I also knew my heart.

Up the beach there were battle cries. I heard Sarah shouting out commands. She had the knack, I didn’t.

“Too bad,” I said, but I didn’t move.

Again there was that time-space slippage. I was back under my Ping-Pong table, under layers of charcoal and soft-lead pencils, and all around me, inside me, there were those powdery neural flashes lashing out like heat lightning. I watched it happen. The equator shifted. New species evolved and perished in split seconds. Every egg on the planet hatched. And then my father was there, holding me, saying, “Easy now, take it slow, tiger.” He rocked me and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” I could smell the heat of his armpits. “It’s okay,” he said, “just a dream,” but it wasn’t a dream, and even then, even now, there was still the glowing afterimage, the indelible imprint of things to come.

I am not crazy, I told myself. I am sane.

Gunfire swept the beach. The music now was martial, piccolos and snare drums. Ebenezer Keezer was doing impressions.

He did Groucho and Martin Luther King.

“Shane!” he cried. “Shane! Shane!”

It was coming up on a finale. A dozen quick flares made the sky tumble, and the machine guns kept firing and firing.

I pressed low into the sand.

“The darkest hour,” Ebenezer intoned solemnly, “is just about now. But bear in mind, people, you’ll find a jive light show at the end of the tunnel.”

He did Woody Woodpecker and LBJ and Porky Pig.

“This is your life,” he said. “Terror tends to terrorize, absolute terror terrorizes absolutely. Th-th-that’s all, folks!”

A dull explosion turned me over.

When I looked up, the wooden tower seemed to be reconstituting itself. A second explosion blew away the tower’s foundation. The structure stood legless for an instant, then toppled sideways and burned. “Fire in the hole!” Ollie Winkler shouted. Fine, clean work, I thought. And in the future, no doubt, there would be other such operations, the Washington Monument or the Statue of Liberty.

Immediately the gunfire eased off. A final flare colored the circumstances in shades of violet.

“Terrorism,” Ebenezer Keezer declared, “is the subtraction of the parts. Back to zero.”

Then I began digging.

I scooped out a shallow hole at the edge of the sea and slipped in and carefully packed wet sand against my legs and hips and chest. I apologized to my father. I jabbered away about the flashes and pigeons and sizzling sounds, and my father said, “Sure, sure,” and he was there beside me, with me, watching me dig. I told him the truth. “There’s nothing to die for,” I said, and my father thought about it for a time, then nodded and said, “No, nothing.” His eyes were bright blue. He smiled and tucked me in.

“Am I crazy?” I asked.

“That’s a hard one.”

“Am I?”

There was a pause, a moment of incompletion, but he finished it by saying, “I love you, cowboy,” then he bent down and kissed my lips.

Pass or fail, so I missed graduation. I spent nine days cooped up in a hospital on the outskirts of Havana. The diagnosis had to do with acute anxiety, a stress reaction, and I was too canny to argue. I lay low. There were nurses, I remember, and they were sticking me with sedatives. But I was fine. I recited Martian Travel in my head. I carried on dialogues with Castro and Nixon, offering sage advice and psychological support. I urged caution above all else. If there is nothing, I told them, then there is nothing to kill for, not flags or country, not honor, not principle, for in the absence of something there is only nothing.

I had a firm grip on myself. On occasion I felt a sudden lurching in my stomach, as if a trapdoor had opened, and at night I dreamed barbiturate dreams—gunfire and flares. But I played it cagey. I didn’t cry or carry on; I gave up speech; I smiled at the nurses and watched the needles without fear or protest. If you’re sane, there’s no problem.

I thought about escape.

I contemplated suicide.

No sweat, though, because I was on top of things.

I was released in mid-January 1969. A week later we were back in Key West.

Things were the same now, but different.

“Believe me,” Sarah said, “I’m not making judgments.”

“Of course not.”

“You understand?”

“Yes,” I said, “pass or fail.”

It was early morning, and we were having coffee at the kitchen table. The house had a stale, musty smell.

“No rough stuff,” she said. “Strictly behind the lines. A courier maybe.”

“Fine.”

“Different thresholds, different boiling points. It’s not a criticism.”

“Sure, I know.”

“William—” Her eyes skittered from object to object. She finished her coffee, stood up, and smiled. “So then, a passenger pigeon? Lots of exotic travel. Maybe Rio. Glamour and beaches, all those tight brown bodies. You can scout it out. Make reservations for after the war.”

“Fine.”

“Rio,” she said, “it’s a date.”

I nodded and said, “Fine.”

Which is how we left it.

Bad luck, I never made Rio. But for the next two years, while Sarah and the others pressed the issue, I found some peace of mind in my capacity as a network delivery boy. I was out of it. On March 6, 1969, when the Committee pulled its first major operation—a night raid on a Selective Service office in downtown Miami—I was buckled in at thirty-two thousand feet over the Rockies, heading for a pickup in Seattle. By all accounts they acquitted themselves well. Four days later, when I checked into my hotel in San Francisco, there was a message from Sarah: “I’m famous. Newsweek , page 12. I’m wanted.”

“IF I WANTED TO,” Melinda says, “I could bust out of here.”

“How?”

“Simple Simon.”

“Go on, then, tell me. It’s a dare.”

She laughs. “Don’t be so condescending. I mean, God, if I told you, then it wouldn’t work .”

“True.”

“I’m not a dunce,” she says.

Another laugh, then I hear a clatter behind the bedroom door. Midmorning cleanup—dishes being stacked, the transfer of waste products. It’s all part of our new domestic order.

Stooping down, humming Billy Boy , I open up the service hatch at the foot of the door.

“Ready in there?”

“Just hold your horses,” Melinda says, “it’s not like we’re going anywhere.”

I smile at this. A fair statement: No one’s going anywhere. It’s a lockup. For two weeks now, nearly three, we’ve been living under conditions of siege at these bedroom barricades—an investment, so to speak, in the future—and the service hatch, though small, has functioned quite nicely as a means of communication and supply, a lifeline of sorts. I’m proud of it. It’s a brilliant piece of engineering: a rectangular hole in the door, nine by twelve inches, wide enough to permit the essential exchanges, narrow enough to deflect foolish thoughts of flight. As an extra safeguard, the hatch is fitted with its own miniature door and lock—a door within a door.