Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

No matter, though. I was disengaged. I turned off the television and closed the curtains and began dialing.

At Columbia, the registrar had no record of a Bobbi Haymore. I tried NYU, then Brooklyn College, then several others. All dead ends. At noon I went out for a walk down Sixth Avenue. Vaguely, without dwelling on it, I realized I was chasing air. Bobbi, I’d think, but the name was more than a name. Its meaning—the crucial meaning —was like grass. She was real, yes; the hair and the eyes and the voice; but the reality was also an emblem. “Bobbi,” I’d say, which meant many things, possibility and hope and maybe even peace.

A pipe dream, I knew that.

But the future is always invented. You make it up out of air. And if you can’t imagine it, I thought, it can’t happen.

I ate a hearty lunch.

Afterward I returned to the room and opened up the phone book: N this time, as in Nelson or navigator. The trick was confidence. There were eighteen Andrews, five Andys, but I hit it on the second shot.

“Bobbi?” he said, as if puzzled.

Then he laughed.

There was some belligerence before he sobbed and hung up on me. I gave him ten minutes and tried again.

It was not a cheerful conversation. Mostly silences, then quick gusts of misery; the man was obviously navigating without charts or compass. Split, he said. She’d walked out in January. Left him for a poet-translator named Scholheimer. Scholheimer, he said bitterly—big-shot Nazi. Very famous. Her teacher at NYU. Admired her poetry—midnight office hours—claimed she had promise. At the word promise there was weeping and the man excused himself and dropped the receiver. In the background I heard a toilet flush. Ditched, I thought, and I pictured a 727 floating belly-down in the mid-Atlantic, the navigator strapped in and struggling, much panic, Bobbi smiling and waving and paddling toward the horizon in a bright yellow life raft.

I tried not to take pleasure in it. I wrote down the data on a note pad: Ditched. Scholheimer. Nazi. NYU—question mark.

Later, I commiserated as best I could. Sad, I told him. A general ungluing of things. It was the fundamental process of our age: collapsing valences and universal entropy.

Then I cleared my throat and asked where to find her.

No luck at NYU, I explained. Urgent business—I had to make contact.

The man blew his nose.

“You, too,” he said.

“Not necessarily.”

“No?”

“Just urgent. A personal matter.”

“Personal,” he said. “I’ll bet.”

He laughed.

There was a conspiratorial, almost friendly note to his voice when he said, “Fuck you.”

It didn’t matter. The last act was easy.

Scholheimer: only one listing.

There was no answer all afternoon but I enjoyed the dialing. That was the pleasure . A kind of pre-memory, dialing and listening and anticipating the rest of my life. “William,” she’d say, instantly, without hesitation.

And then what? A dinner date. An Italian restaurant. Pasta and checkered tablecloths. Quiet talk. A ferry ride past the Statue of Liberty. A twinkly night sky. She’d smile and hold my arm, not clinging, just holding, and she would nod with full understanding when I confessed to the possibility of madness. I’d tell her everything. I’d start with the year 1958, when I first went underground, that night in May when I grabbed my pillow and blankets and ran for the basement and slept the one great sleep of my life. “Am I crazy?” I’d ask. I’d tell her about Chuck Adamson and the Cuban missile crisis and unevacuated bowels. I’d look her in the eyes and ask it bluntly: “Am I crazy?” Everything. Exile, dislocation, Key West, the events at Sagua la Grande, flares and tracers and guns in the attic. “How much is real? ” I’d ask. “The bombs—are they real? You—are you real?” Quietly, in graphic detail, I’d tell her about ball lightning striking Georgia; I’d tell her about a Soviet SS-18 crossing the Arctic ice cap, how I could actually see it, and hear it, but how no one else seemed to notice, or if noticing, did not care, how no one panicked, how the world went on as if endings were not final. “Am I crazy?” I’d ask. All afternoon, as I dialed and waited, I worked my way through the scenarios. A rooftop bar with piano music and dim lighting. The way we’d dance, barely moving. Her steady blue eyes. Then a taxi ride through Central Park. The clicking meter. Her hand coming to rest on mine. I imagined rain. There would be rain, yes, and umbrellas and fuzzy yellow streetlights and the sound of the taxi tires against wet pavement. And she’d smile at me, that secret smile, which would give me the courage to suggest a lifelong commitment. I’d ask her to save my life. I’d say, “Bobbi, I’m crazy. But save me.” And she’d listen to all this with grace and equanimity. At the Royalton we would no doubt undress and move to the bed and lie there listening to the rain. Maybe sex, but maybe not. And then later, near dawn, I would issue proposals. I would promise her happiness, and fine children, and a house with sturdy locks and heavy doors. No more running, I’d say. No nightmares. A happy ending in which nothing ever ends. “It’s possible,” I’d tell her, “it’s almost plausible , we just have to imagine it,” and after a time Bobbi would turn toward me and smile without speaking, placing her hand against my heart, holding it there, mysteriously, shaping the possibilities, and that shining smile would mean Yes, she could imagine these things and many more.

The dialing, that was the true pleasure. It was almost a disappointment when she finally answered.

Not grief, really, just an empty place where all the pretty pictures used to be. She was kind about it. She quoted Yeats: We had fed the heart on fantasies, the heart’s grown brutal from the fare . She wished me luck. She was flattered, she said. She didn’t laugh when I told her about the chase, how much she meant to me, how foolish I felt, how crazy, but how I had to go with my dreams. She said she admired that. She was smiling, I could tell. She said dreams were important. Then she told me her own dreams. She needed space, she said; NYU was fine but there was no space; she’d dropped out in April. She was happy, though. She was going to Germany—Bonn, she said—and there was a married man she was going with, Scholheimer, and the married man was her husband. She laughed at this, lightly. Dreams were lovely, she said, but they could be dangerous, too, which is when she lowered her voice and quoted Yeats: We had fed the heart on fantasies, the heart’s grown brutal from the fare .

But it wasn’t grief. Not even sadness. If you’re crazy, I now understood, you don’t feel grief or sadness, you just can’t find the future.

I spent a few days reassembling myself, and on the evening of May 29 Sarah met me at the Key West airport. Understandably, her mood was dark. I’d been out of contact for some time; I’d skipped out on my responsibilities. “Globe-trotter,” she muttered, “back from his magical mystery tour.”

In the cab she applied irony.

I wasn’t ready for it. I took her by the wrist and dug in with my fingernails.

“Don’t push,” I said quietly. “Don’t even nudge. Just this once—total silence, I mean it.”

Sarah nodded.

And for two weeks she treated me with something just short of respect. I went my way, she went hers. It was unlived-in time. Like blank film, no images or animus, no pretty pictures. At the dinner table, Ollie and Tina would keep up a nonstop banter about the current political situation, the screw-turnings and incipient terror, but none of it really registered. I couldn’t make visual contact. I’d stare at my plate and try to construct the contours of a world at perfect peace: Bobbi’s smile, for instance; binding energy; things to hope for and believe in; the city of Bonn with its spires and castles. But nothing developed. Blank film—I’d lost the gift. If you’re crazy, it’s a lapse of imagination. You stare at your dinner plate. You can’t generate happy endings.