Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

The sirens woke me up.

For a long while I lay there waiting for the dream to burn itself out. Not foresight, I thought. Just a preview. It was nearly dawn when I made my way to the bathroom. No sirens, and no smoke, but I could still feel the heat.

I showered and brushed my teeth and moved down the hallway to Sarah’s bedroom.

I undressed without thinking.

Outside, there were morning birds, slivers of pink light playing against the curtains, and when I slipped into bed, softly, trying not to wake her, Sarah curled alongside me and smiled in her sleep, her arms bare, the soles of her feet cool and dry, and after a time she turned and came closer and said a name that wasn’t mine.

It didn’t matter. I knew anyway.

“No,” I said, “just the birthday boy.”

In the morning there was little to say. By fortune I was scheduled to fly out that afternoon, and at one o’clock I finished packing and called a cab.

We were adult about it. At the front door Sarah handed me my itinerary, and we smiled and said our goodbyes, and even hugged, but when the cab pulled up she decided to tag along out to the airport. It was a pleasant eight-minute ride. She wore white shorts, and her feet were bare, and I noticed how nicely engineered the heels were, so narrow and elegant, and the unshaved legs, the ankles and arches, the exact relations among the toes. These details seemed important.

At the boarding gate, we sat in plastic chairs and made grown-up conversation.

I wished her luck with the moratorium.

Sarah rubbed her eyes.

“The truth is,” she said, “I did send out signals. Distress and so on. It isn’t as if I didn’t warn you.”

“Often. You did.”

“Your own damned fault.”

“I understand.”

“All those years, William, but you were never really there. Not totally.”

“And he was?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, he was.”

Again, briefly, her hand went to her eyes. There was the need to simplify things.

“Do you love him?” I asked.

“Such a question.”

“Do you?”

“Love,” she sighed. “Who knows? He cares about me. And he’s present. No qualifications.”

“Noble of him,” I said. “A nice guy.”

“Yes, that, too. He sticks. Completely there.”

I nodded. “Wonderful, then, he sticks, that must be a great satisfaction. Do you love him?”

“I get by.”

“That’s something, I suppose.”

“It is. Quite a lot, in fact.”

“Happy you,” I said.

When my flight was called there was a moment of regret and bitterness. My own fault, though. I kissed her lightly on the forehead and walked down the ramp, then came back and kissed her on the lips and said, “I’m sorry,” which were the truest words I’d ever spoken.

It was the era of Vietnamization. The war, we were told, was winding down, peace through transfer, and to date our government had turned over to the ARVN more than 700,000 rifles, 12,000 machine guns, 50,000 wheeled vehicles, 1,200 tanks, and 900 artillery pieces. For some, however, it was not enough. President Nguyen Van Thieu proposed that the United States equip his nation with a modest nuclear capability. Others disagreed. Among them, Senator George McGovern took a fresh look at his options, and Senator Charles Goodell was legislating in behalf of final withdrawal. Others disagreed violently. Viet Cong flags flew over Sioux City. In Chicago, Judge Julius Hoffman presided over a discomposed courtroom, and in the streets, within shouting distance, the Weathermen went hand to hand with riot cops. There were gag orders and troop deployments. It was the year of upsets, and at the World Series, Gil Hodges and his fabulous Mets took Baltimore up against the center-field wall.

In Quang Ngai, the monsoons had come.

There were footprints on the moon.

Ronald Reagan governed California.

The Stones sang Let It Bleed .

On October 15, 1969, the moratorium came down on schedule. I checked into a Kansas City motel and watched it on television with the help of Magic Fingers. I’m not sure what I felt. Pride, on the one hand, and rectitude, but also a kind of heartache.

Big numbers—

In Boston, 100,000 people swarmed across the Common. New York City, 250,000; New Haven, 40,000; Des Moines, 10,000 plus tractors. At Whittier College, and at Clemson, and at a thousand other schools, you could hear the National Anthem mixing with hymns and folk songs and services for the dead. There were oratorical declarations by Hollywood dignitaries. Church bells, too, and torches and suspended commerce and pray-ins at national shrines. Wall Street was wall-to-wall with citizenry; the Golden Gate Bridge was stopped to traffic. At the University of Wisconsin a crowd of 15,000 carried candles and umbrellas through a heavy rain. At UCLA, 20,000. At Chicago’s Civic Center, 10,000. In Washington, with a bronze moon over the White House, 50,000 constituents came with flashlights to petition their chief of state for peace.

Around midnight I went out for a hamburger. I played some pinball, took a short walk, and returned to the room.

It was hard to find the correct posture. I thought about the flow of things. Ping-Pong to Chuck Adamson to Peverson State, and also Sarah, her culottes and letter sweater, and now the guns, and how you couldn’t nail down the instant of turn or change but how small actions kept leading to larger actions, then the inevitable reactions. The late-night CBS wrap-up showed Lester Maddox singing God Bless America . In Sacramento, Ronald Reagan talked about the perfidious nature of the day’s events, which gave “comfort and aid to the enemy,” and in the nation’s capital Barry Gold-water and Gerald Ford harmonized on the grand old themes. Then came a closing collage: the American flag at half-staff in Central Park, a graveyard vigil in Minneapolis, Eugene McCarthy reciting Yeats, Coretta King reciting Martin Luther King, 30,000 candles burning in the streets of Kansas City.

I couldn’t sleep.

I slipped my last quarter into the Magic Fingers and lay there in the twentieth-century dark. It was all kindling. “Save us,” I said, to no one in particular, just to the forces, or to the 39,000 dead, or to those, like me, who needed Magic Fingers.

When the time expired, I picked up the phone and called home. It seemed appropriate. The ringing itself was a kind of shelter. That soft, two-beat buzz—like a family voice, I thought, indelible and yet curiously diminished by the phonics of history and long distance—older now, depleted and somewhat fragile. I lay very still. I pictured my father’s Buick parked in the driveway; I could see the shadows and reflections of household objects: a chrome-plated toaster in the kitchen, windows and mirrors, the old rubber welcome mat at the front door. Silhouettes, too, and familiar sounds. The doorbell chiming off-key. The way the refrigerator would suddenly kick in and hum. Home, I thought. The shapes and smells, all the unnoticed particulars.

My mother answered on the seventh ring. Her voice was low and sleepy-sounding, not quite her own. I didn’t speak. Eyes closed, I pictured her face, how she would frown at the silence, that impatient squint when she said, “Yes, hello?” I wanted to laugh—“Guess who,” I wanted to say—but I held my breath and listened. There was a long quiet. I could see her wedding band and the veins running thick and blue along the back of her hand. I could hear the kitchen clock. Long-distance sounds. I imagined a tape recorder turning somewhere in the dark, a tired FBI agent tuning in through headphones.

Then my mother’s voice. A hesitation before she said, “William?”

I was silent. I held on a few seconds longer.

“William,” she said.

Then she repeated my name, several times, without question, softly yet absolutely.