Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

You brave son of a bitch, I would’ve said. I love you.

I tried to say it but I couldn’t.

It was all grief now. I looked away, at the mountains, and later Sarah laced her fingers through mine and said, “I think it’s finished.”

Below, people were mingling and shaking hands, sliding off toward their cars. Doc Crenshaw had my mother by the elbow. For a long time I kept the binoculars up, but finally there was just that relentless wind.

“William,” Sarah said.

I nodded.

“Another minute,” I told her. “Go on ahead, don’t worry. Just one minute.”

I smiled to show I was in control.

When they were gone, I watched the sky and tried to find some words. A bright, sunny day, but the wind made it hard. I wanted to talk about my life. Apologize, maybe. Tell him I’d be making some important changes. How it was time to stop running, and how I’d need help, but how, when the moment came, I’d pretend he was right there beside me under the yellow spotlights.

I had a last look through the binoculars.

The coffin was still there, unburied. I studied it for a while and then said goodbye and followed Sarah and Rafferty down the hill.

The hours fell away.

We had dinner that night at a restaurant near the motel. Around midnight Sarah went to bed and Rafferty and I stayed up late making plans. When I mentioned the guns, he looked at me and said, “You’re sure?” and I said I was, and he smiled and said, “Positive thinking.”

I slept hard for the rest of the night.

In the morning I took a wrinkled scrap of paper from my wallet, went to a pay phone, dropped in some quarters, and placed the call.

“What you have to do,” Chuck Adamson said, “is make it quick and clean. Cold turkey. Move, that’s all I can say.”

“I’ll need time,” I said.

“Time. That can be arranged.”

“A place to go.”

“That, too,” he said. “Time and place, I’ll handle it. From there on you’ll have to draw your own map.”

Behind him, the capitol dome had lost some of its shine. Otherwise not much had changed.

Adamson slouched in his chair, taking notes.

He was older, of course, and balding, but he still had those sad copper-colored eyes. Still jittery and preoccupied. I felt at home. I could almost hear him groaning—“You think you’ve got problems”—but instead he opened a desk drawer and took out a photograph and examined it for a moment and then handed it across to me. Surprise, but I was smiling. A handsome child: blond hair and a cowboy shirt and a big smile.

Adamson reached out and touched the photograph.

“Square one,” he said, “tell it to me.”

It took nearly a week. I started with the binoculars; I told him that I’d come to appreciate his fascination with telescopes. “That’s what it feels like,” I said. “My life, it feels like it’s happening inside a telescope.”

Over that first afternoon I laid out the chronology, or what I could remember of it. Peverson State and my poster and Ollie and Tina, and then Sarah, and the war, and Ebenezer Keezer and Nethro and life on the run, and then Bobbi—it was hard to get the order straight—but then Bobbi—and a missile rising over the Little Bighorn, and guns in the attic, and uranium dreams, and my father, and a sleek black submarine, and how in retrospect it all had the shape and logic of a chain reaction, cause becoming effect and then cause again.

When I finished it was dark.

“Well,” Adamson said. Then he rubbed his eyes and took me home with him.

It wasn’t what I expected: a huge old house on the outskirts of Helena, white clapboard with black shutters and a wraparound porch, and a cocker spaniel and a pretty wife and four terrific kids, the youngest just a baby. He put me up in a spare bedroom. At dinner that night, it felt as if I’d rejoined the world. Lots of laughter. Adamson clowning with the kids, a parakeet diving through the dining room, his wife shaking her head and smiling at me—a madhouse, she meant.

After dinner we played Careers. And then late at night, when we were alone, Adamson dished up ice cream and we ate it standing up at the kitchen counter.

I laughed.

“Well,” I said, “this explains it.” I made a gesture that encompassed the entire house. “I mean, listen. Now I know why you’re so miserable.”

Adamson licked his spoon.

“Right,” he said. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

But we never did. For the next five or six days I led him through the chronology again, slowly. It wasn’t therapy; it was purely practical. When I told him about Sarah, he asked the essential question: Why didn’t I go with her? There was no answer for it. Trust, I said. Or no trust. Did I love her? I did. Did she love me? She no doubt did. Then why? I shrugged: there was no answer for it. It wasn’t our universe. I didn’t know. Not our universe, that was all I could say, except no trust, or not enough, or the inability to see how it could end happily. But I didn’t know.

If you can’t imagine it, I said, it can’t happen.

I told him about Bobbi.

That much I could imagine. Why? he said. I didn’t know. It seemed possible.

I told him about Ned Rafferty. A person is defined by the quality of obsession, I said, and Ned Rafferty was a quality person. Ollie Winkler was not quality. Nor was Tina Roebuck, nor Ebenezer Keezer. Sarah was high quality.

“And you?” Adamson asked.

I thought about it. Up in the air, I told him. My obsessions were sometimes quality and sometimes not. Nothing lasts: that was not a quality obsession. But there was also Bobbi, and peace, and that was quality.

For many hours we went over these things, shifting back and forth, but the purpose was never therapeutic, it was always practical.

A serious problem, Adamson said. There were legal issues. There was the question of surrender. How exactly to go about it, and when and where, and all the attendant logistics. There were consequences to consider. Prosecution, maybe. Maybe jail. And beyond that, he said, there was the whole matter of deciding on a future for myself. “Not just any future,” he said, “we’re talking quality ” and then he asked the simple, practical questions. Did I want a house to live in? I said, Yes, I did, very much. Did I want children? I did. What about a career? Geology, I said. What about love and happiness and peace of mind?

“The point,” he said quietly, “is that you have to try to picture the exact circumstances. The shapes and routines, the things you want. A blueprint. Then go out and make it happen.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Do you?”

“Yes, I think so. Take charge, you mean.”

Adamson shook his head.

“What I mean,” he said, and paused. “I mean you’re not a child anymore. Nowhere to hide. It’s a grown-up bitch of a world.”

On the last day we spent a few hours in his office and then he drove me over to the bus station.

It ended where it began.

“Cold turkey,” he said. “Time and place, I’ll set it up. From then on it’s your life.”

There was a final trip to Key West. When I explained my decision to Sarah, she nodded and said she’d been expecting it. “No hard feelings,” she said.

It took a full day to pack up my things.

That evening we sat in the backyard, just holding hands, letting the sim go down.

In bed, she said, “I have to ask this. Did you ever love me?”

“Right now,” I said.

The next day she took an early-morning flight for Miami. She was gone when I came down to breakfast.

“It’s you and me,” Ned Rafferty said.

We ate pepper omelets and drank Bloody Marys. In the afternoon we switched to gin, and then later, after dark, we rinsed our glasses and drank vermouth.