Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

“Stoned,” he said, “but not all that stoned. You want to hear my fantasies?”

“Very much,” I said.

“Get the hell out of here. That’s the A-one deluxe fantasy, just split. With Sarah. Drown your ass and kidnap her—drugs or something—a sea voyage—take her away.” He paused a moment, shook his head violently, then pointed at the town lights. “I hate this place. Key West, it sucks. Everything we’re doing, the gangster shit and the guns and Ebenezer Keezer, everything, I hate it. Don’t believe in it. Got to believe, man, and I don’t. Never did. Ranch kid—I ever tell you that? Grew up on a ranch. Dumb cowboy. Home on the range. All I ever wanted, some cows and dope and git along little dogie. And Sarah. Not a damned thing else. That’s why I’m here . No other reason. Just Sarah.”

“A good fantasy,” I said.

“Nifty lady, Sarah.”

“She is.”

“Different fantasies, though. I want her, she wants Rio. That’s the thing, nobody has the same fantasies.”

Rafferty swayed and sat down heavily.

“Anyway, there it is,” he said. “Obsession. You and me, two peas in the same dipshit pod.”

“Crazy,” I whispered.

There was a short silence. When he spoke, his voice seemed firm and exact, fully sober.

“Not crazy,” he said, “but here’s a word of advice. Sarah, she’s real . Take it and run. Get out. This whole situation—the guns and shit—we both know how it ends. Badness, that’s all. Graveyards. Forget the dreams, man, do something positive. Grab her and start running and don’t ever stop. The world-famous gist: Go with reality. Take off.”

“And you?”

“Gone. First chance, I’m gone. Home on the range.”

“What about—”

“Just go .”

He smiled and held up a hand, palm forward.

“Peace,” he said, “the gist of the gist.”

There was a feeling of comity and goodwill. A fine human being, I thought, and we sat back and smoked, and for a long while I concentrated on the hemispheres. I watched the scheme of things, the constellations, the moon veering toward Europe, peace with honor, Bobbi and Bonn and Rio and Vietnam and the violet glow of uranium dioxide in the Sweetheart Mountains. I was not afraid. I knew where the future was. Later, as Rafferty slept, I watched without alarm as a black submarine surfaced to starboard, its conning tower cutting like a fin through the placid dark. I felt no dismay, only wonder. Here, I deduced, was how it would be when it finally came to be. It would be quick. Out of the blue, a blink and a twitch, here then gone. I could see it. I could hear the sonar. The submarine rose up in profile, buoyant, circling the skiff, and I nodded and closed my eyes and gave myself over to how it had to be. There was a slight trembling. A shower of yellow-white sparks, then the missiles ascended, but to my credit, I stood fast. I studied the ballistics. I admired the gleamings—reds and pinks spilling in the Gulf. There was grace in it, I thought, and the beauty that attends resolution, as fire is beautiful, and nuclear war, things happening as they must happen and always will. I was brave. I’d seen it all before, many times, and now there was just gallantry.

The question declared itself: Who’s crazy?

Not me.

When the submarine slipped away, I was smiling. Imagination. I had the knack again.

For the next year, up to April 21, 1971, the casualties kept piling up on all sides. People were dying. In Vietnam, there was steady concussion; in Paris, the peace talks dragged on into the third year of stalemate; in Georgia, Lieutenant William Calley went on trial for murder; in Cambodia, there were fires. There was a war on, yes, but for me it was mostly blank time. Which is to say I can’t remember much—the present never quite became the past.

What happened? How much is memory, how much is filler?

If I close my eyes, if I ignore the hole, I can see Sarah reclining in a lawn chair on the back patio at Key West. We’re lovers again, though not exactly in love; we’re both waiting, though for what I don’t know. She just lies there in sunlight. She wears a blue bandanna and a white muslin blouse. Her skin is dark brown. The hair at her calves is bleached silver, and at the corner of her mouth is a lumpish blister—herpes simplex, but the complications will prove unhappy. In her lap is a copy of Newsweek . A celebrity now, she smiles at me from the magazine’s cover, or seems to smile, and says or seems to say, “I warned you. Years ago, I told you I was dangerous, big dangerous dreams, and here’s the proof. Now I belong to the ages.”

Blank time, but great speed, too. I can see Sarah’s eyes going cold. “I’m dead,” she whispers.

Mid-November 1970, and a butchered pig was deposited on the steps of the FBI building in downtown Washington.

There was a bombing in Madison.

A startling image—is it real?—but I can see Ollie Winkler in a rented airplane. He’s wearing his cowboy hat and aviator goggles, a yellow scarf flapping behind him, and he’s squealing and dumping homemade ordnance on the nation’s Capitol. It did not happen that way, but it could’ve happened, and still can, and therefore I see it.

“I’m dead!” Sarah cries. That much did happen.

In December they redecorated the Lincoln Memorial.

In January 1971, they released a dozen skunks in the carpeted hallways of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Not quite terrorism.

“Skunks,” Sarah said, “that’s a prank. TNT, that’s terror. You have to know where to draw your nice fine lines.”

I remember nodding.

Pathetic, I thought, but things were clearly moving toward misadventure.

The guns, for instance.

When I look back, I can see those plywood crates stacked in the attic. One night I heard noise up there, so I investigated, and I found Ned Rafferty sitting cross-legged before a candle, alone. Just cobwebs and guns. “How’s tricks?” I asked, and Rafferty snuffed the candle and told me to get the fuck out. “Just go!” he said, and he sounded angry.

What else?

A minor hurricane named Carla.

I can hear the wind, I can feel Sarah up against me in bed. Maybe it’s then when she says, “My God, I’m dead.”

Slow time, but it seems fast.

I remember Ollie eating grapes at the kitchen table. The seeds make plinking sounds in a metal wastebasket; he talks about hitting banks; he seems serious; he doesn’t laugh when he says, “Why not?” A seed goes plink in the wastebasket and he says, “Why not?”

Tina Roebuck on a crash diet.

She’s determined. She papers the refrigerator with photographs from Vogue . “Just once in my rotten life,” she says grimly, “just this once, a lean mean killing machine.”

But it doesn’t happen. The pressures intervene and she checks out as a heavyweight.

Are the dead, I wonder, ever dead?

The hole laughs and says, Believe it .

I believe it. The dead, perhaps, live in memory, but when memory goes, so go the dead.

There is no remembering when there is no one to remember. Hence no history, hence no future. It’s a null set; the memory banks are wiped out; there is no differentiation—all the leptons look alike—believe it.

For now, though, I have a dim recollection of Ebenezer Keezer briefing us on coming attractions. Volatile stuff, no doubt, because I remember the brittle sound to his laughter. There was talk about crime. At one point, when Ned Rafferty brought up the subject of penalties, jail and so on, Ebenezer removed his sunglasses and looked heavenward for some time. Then he shrugged. He grinned at Nethro. “Freedom,” he said, “is just a dependent clause in a life sentence. Don’ mean nothin’.” There was a pause before he entertained suggestions as to how the guns might be most properly used. “Let’s discuss climax,” he said, which is all I remember, except for walking away.