Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

Melinda’s face appears at the opening. She slides out a tray piled with dirty breakfast dishes. The chamber pot comes next.

“Yunky to the max,” she says.

“Yunky?”

“It means stink .” She gets to her hands and knees and stares out at me. “Anyway, I could do it, you know. If I wanted to, I could escape easy.”

“Oh, sure, absolutely.”

“You don’t think so?”

Her face is framed by the opening. Behind her, near the bed, I can see Bobbi’s bare foot tapping out the meter to a poem in progress.

Melinda’s eyes shine.

“Okay, here’s a question, smartie,” she says. “What if I got sick or something? You’d have to let me out. If I caught some disease like—you know—like that time I had my stupid tonsils out. Then what?”

Bobbi’s foot stops tapping. This intrigues her, I can tell.

“Well,” I say.

“So then what? What if I said, ‘Daddy, I’m dying ’?”

I smile at Bobbi’s curled toes.

“I guess you’d be fibbing, princess.”

“Well, sure,” she says, “but how would you know? I could cry and scream and stuff, just like this—” She makes a twisted face and shouts, “Agony! Polio!”

Bobbi’s toes stiffen.

“Agghh!” Melinda yells. “Can’t breathe! God, I’m choking!”

“Knock it off.”

“Help!”

Her face goes red. She jerks sideways and rolls out of my field of vision. Ridiculous, but I feel some discomfort. “Agghh!” she cries. And then it’s instinct—I reach through the hatch and grope for contact.

“God,” Melinda says, “talk about gullible.” She reappears at the hatch. “You get the idea now? I could do it, couldn’t I?”

“Maybe so.”

“Not maybe. I scared you.”

She wiggles her nose and says, “Agghh!” and then laughs. What are the limits? I wonder. What can be done? Such love. That cool, unblemished skin of hers, it makes me question my own paternity.

“So you see how it works,” Melinda says. “Get sick, that’s one plan, but I’ve got about six zillion better ones. I mean, boy, if I had to, I could—” She pauses, rubbing her eyes. There’s a tentative quality in her voice when she says, “Daddy, what if I did get sick? I mean, really sick? It’s not impossible.”

“Nothing is.”

“But what if?”

“Too iffy,” I tell her.

“You’re afraid to answer, aren’t you?”

“Melinda, I can’t—”

“You’re afraid.”

I shrug and try to finesse it, but she knows where I’m vulnerable.

“Tell the truth,” she says. “You’d at least take me to the hospital, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t just sit there and let me die?”

“Never, baby.”

“Never what?”

“Can’t happen that way.”

“ What can’t?”

“You know,” I say softly, “it can’t happen.”

“You’re afraid.”

“Not that.”

“Afraid,” she says.

For a few moments we just gaze at each other. Her eyes are like one-way mirrors; she sees out, I can’t see in. If it were possible, I would end it here. I would break down the door and take the consequences.

Melinda knows this, and keeps pressing.

“If something happened to me,” she says, “something real bad, it’d be like murder almost. Kidnapping your own family, keeping us prisoner, it’s like… What if there’s a fire? We couldn’t even get out, we’d burn up in here, and it’d be just like murder.”

“Sweetheart, don’t talk that way.”

“Why not?”

“Just because.”

She wags her head sadly. “Because you’re afraid. Because stuff can happen, like fires and stuff, or else you might blow me to smithereens with dynamite.”

“Melinda, don’t—”

“Murder,” she says.

It’s no use.

What all this represents, ultimately, is an erosion of the traditional family structure. Cohesion and trust, we’ve somehow lost it. A little faith, for God’s sake—why can’t they see the obvious?

Quietly, I close the hatch and secure the lock.

“Loony!” Melinda shouts, but I walk away.

I do the dishes, make coffee, empty the chamber pot, set out a pound of hamburger to thaw for dinner. Murder, though. It eats at me. I think about Sarah and Tina and Ned and Ollie, all that wasted blood, and the thought makes me squeamish. I’m no killer, I never was, I never had that terrorist nerve.

Besides, what about love?

Good intentions?

I’m saving their lives. An act of mercy. The year, after all, is 1995, and we’re coming up on the millennium.

I return the chamber pot and change clothes and then trudge out to the hole. For a time I just stand at the edge. I’ve been at it nearly three months now, April to July, and the results are gratifying. Nineteen feet deep, twelve feet square. No need to justify. The hole speaks for itself. Dig , it says. At times I’m actually cowed by its majesty. It has a kind of stature—those steep walls plunging to shadow, the purity of line and purpose, its intangible holeness. There it is , you can’t dismiss it. It’s real.

Be safe , it says.

It says, Survive .

I’m not losing my marbles. Just a hole, of course, and when it speaks I rarely listen.

I know better.

Down the ladder, grab my spade, go to work. A hot day, but the earth smells cool and moist. I’m at home here. This is where it ends. Hey, man , the hole whispers. Here’s a riddle: What is here but not here, there but not there? Then a pause. “You,” I say, and the hole chuckles: Oh, yeah! I am the absence of presence. I am the presence of absence. I am peace everlasting .

There’s a giggling sound, high and crazy, but I don’t give it credence.

Discipline, I think. Mind and body. I work steadily, pacing myself. The key to progress, I now realize, is gradual accretion, routine and rhythm; that’s how monuments get built. Today it’s mostly a repair job. There was a light drizzle during the night, barely enough to dampen the grass, but it produced a thick coat of slime at the floor of the hole, slick and treacherous, and smelly, too, as if a toilet had backed up, and for the first hour I concentrate on tidiness. I’m alert to the possibility of a cave-in. Carefully, I check the four granite walls for signs of stress, those hairline fractures that can cause conclusion. You never know. Two weeks ago I was fortunate to be topside when a quarter-ton boulder sheared off along the north wall. It taught me a lesson: You can die saving yourself. Even safety entails risk. Which was the upshot of a poem Bobbi slipped through the service hatch a few days later. Backflash , she called it, and even now several lines still stick with me—

There’s more—it was one of her longish efforts—but I’m spared by a faulty memory. To my own ear, at least, there’s something rather glib about the way those metrics goose-step off the tongue. Bad poetics compounded by bad logic.

How does one respond?

With tenacity and daring. Spit on the hands and bend down and put muscle to it.

Dig. Nuclear war.

If you’re sane, you don’t fuck with the obvious. You know what MAD means. It means there is nothing to live for. Which means bedlam. So who’s crazy? True or false: The world can end. Multiple choice: Fire or ice or nuclear war. The realities are with us, Pershing and Trident and the kitchen sink, it’s all throw-weight, it’s buried nose-up under the flatlands of Kansas and North Dakota. A radical age requires radical remedies. The world , for Christ sake—biology!—so don’t call me crazy. I’m digging. You’re diddling. You, I mean. The heavy sleepers. The mealymouthed pols and hard-ass strategists who talk so reasonably about containment and deterrence. Idiots! Because when there’s nothing, there’s nothing to deter, it’s uncontained.