Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

Sane, I think. I’ve got it together.

The hole snickers and says, Sure, man, you’re straight as an arrow .

I nod.

At noon I rig up a charge of dynamite, crouch behind the tool shed, hit the button, wait for the dust to settle, then begin the hard chore of piling the debris into pulley baskets and hauling it to the surface. When in doubt, dig. Abnormal, yes, but what’s the alternative? Plan a dinner party? Chalk it up to the existential condition? If that’s normal, I’m proud to call myself deviant.

Reality, it tends to explode.

I’ve got eyes. I can see.

I’ve got ears. I can hear.

And because I’m sane, because I can imagine an unpeopled planet, because life is so precious, because I’ve seen the flashes, I am willing to recognize the facts for what they are, pared to the bone, unrhymed and unmusical. Is it uncouth to speak plainly? Nuclear war—am I out of key with my times? An object of pity? Am I comic? Here, now, digging, my wife and daughter locked away, the hole egging me on, am I crazy to extrapolate doom from the evidence all around me, Minuteman and Backfire, a world stockpiled with 60,000 warheads? Are the numbers too bald, too clumsy? Am I indiscreet to say it? Nuclear war.

If you’re sane, you’re scared; if you’re scared, you dig; if you dig, you deviate.

If I could—

You can’t , the hole says. If you could, but you can’t. Keep the faith—you’re my main man .

“Right,” I mumble.

Speak up!

“Right,” I say.

The hole laughs.

Oh, yeah, you’ll show ’em, brother. When the shit comes down, they’ll sing a real different tune. Amazing grace! Sweet melodies! Your wife’s a grasshopper, man—you and me, we’re the ants. Fee fi fo fum—I smell uranium! Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of blood! High diddle diddle, the fire and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the doom! Rome’s burning! Ding dong bell! Pussy’s gone to hell! Can you dig it, man? Can you truly dig it?

There’s a quaking sound. The granite walls seem to shrug.

Dig, dug, dead! Bobbi’s in her bed! Hickory dickory doom!

I’m perfectly calm. I ignore the chortling.

At two o’clock I knock off for the day. A cold shower, fresh clothes, then I sit down to prepare a shopping list. When it’s finished, I rap on the bedroom door.

“Get lost,” Melinda says.

“I am.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” I bend down and open up the service hatch. Melinda’s hair is in curlers. She lies on the floor, belly-down, peering out at me with the smartest eyes on earth.

“Well,” she says, “I guess you’re here to kill me.”

I treat it as a joke.

I smile and tell her I’m heading into town—is there anything she needs?

“Poison,” she says.

“Anything else?”

She thinks for a moment. “Yeah,” she says, “I could use a new father .”

“Sure, princess. I’ll see what I can do.”

“A good one this time. Get me one that’s not so goddamn screwy.”

The swearing disturbs me but she’s out of spanking range. I tighten my smile and tell her to check with her mother.

“Final call,” I say. “You want it, you name it.”

Melinda slides away. Through the open hatch I can hear the soft tones of Bobbi’s voice; it’s a blond voice; the voice of art, or the inexplicable mysteries of art; the voice of a flight attendant, calm and calming in the high turbulence. The words, of course, don’t register. The meanings don’t mean. Like the grass she once gave me, like her poetry, Bobbi’s voice is pure timbre. She doesn’t make sense.

Still, I can’t help listening. In a way, she’s right, the meanings don’t matter, it’s the voice that counts.

But why would she leave me?

Why a separation?

“Hey, you,” Melinda says, “wake up.”

She passes a slip of notepaper through the hatch, a requisition in my wife’s neat, left-leaning script: mouthwash, asparagus, Raisin Bran, olives, gin, vermouth, spaceship, husband.

It tickles me.

“Yes,” I say gently, “I love you, too.”

Outside, as I hook up the Chevy’s battery, I’m feeling pinched and out of touch. A little dizzy. Anything can happen. Eventually, given time, anything will happen.

No guts, no glory.

I fasten my seat belt and honk twice and point the car toward town. It’s a twenty-six-minute drive, all downhill, and I let my mind unwind with the road, curling west along the spine of the Sweetheart Mountains, through rock-collecting country, the canyons and shaggy stands of birch and pine, then south to the foothills which open into meadow and dusty ranchlands, then straight west to Fort Derry. Off to the left, beyond the new K Mart, I can see the grandstand and floodlights at the fairgrounds where my father used to die—once too often; he no longer dies. At the east edge of town I cross the railroad tracks and turn down Main Street. Here, nothing much has changed. My father’s real estate office is under new management, but otherwise the year could be 1958. Slowly, just tapping the accelerator, I cruise down a corridor of hitching posts and weathered storefronts, past the courthouse and the Strouch Funeral Home and Doc Crenshaw’s little clinic at the corner of Main and Cottonwood. The old fart won’t let loose. Over ninety now, and he’s out of the doctoring business, but he hangs in there like the town itself, cantankerous and stubborn. He doesn’t know his days are numbered. No one knows.

Grasshoppers! the hole hisses. The wolf is at the door! These jerks don’t know the score!

I pull into the parking lot behind Gordy’s Piggly Wiggly. I’m exhausted. A strange spinning. For several minutes I lean forward against the steering wheel.

“Christ,” I groan, but the hole tells me to snap out of it.

Sin and din! Lemme in! Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin! Time to pay the piggy!

Odd thing, but I’m dealing with disorder as I do the grocery shopping. Some sorrow, too.

I can’t find the fucking Raisin Bran.

Entropy and dissolution, it’s all around us.

I want to loot this place. But I don’t. I smile at the stock boys and fill my cart with imperishables. Powdered milk for Melinda’s teeth. Frozen carbohydrates and vacuum-sealed proteins. Asparagus, olives, mouthwash. I know what I’m doing. I’m a sly fox. And the hole says, You betcha, you’re no dummy. Just look at these assholes—smug motherfuckers! Don’t know doom from canned goods. Nitwits! They think it’s a joke. Can’t happen, they think. Won’t happen. Ding dong doom!

It requires some effort, but I locate the Raisin Bran.

Who’s crazy?

Who’s lost whose perspective?

Not you , the hole says. You’re a sharpie. This little piggy went to market. Those little piggies perished .

In the checkout line I’m all business, cool and sober.

Higgily wiggily bang!

I don’t pay attention. The mental operations are strictly rote. Later, after I’ve stashed the groceries in the car, I check my lists and then cross the street to the Coast to Coast store.

I go down the agenda item by item.

One electric drill. One crowbar. Two sleeping bags. Two hammocks. Rope. Nuts and bolts. In a moment of inspiration I do some impulse buying—four strings of outdoor Christmas lights from last winter’s stock.

Up front, at the cash register, a young clerk gives me a wise-ass smirk. He looks at his calendar and says, “Smart decision, sir. Only six more shopping months.”

“Time flies,” I tell him.

The kid grins. “Plan ahead—I’ll bet that’s your motto, right?”

The question contains a subtle commentary, but I show him my brightest smile. Plan ahead, I think. If the poor cocksucker only knew.