Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

Then we hauled out the last crate and pried it open and committed it to the bottom.

In the van, heading for town, I thanked him for his partnership. More than a token, I said. Something positive. For my father, partly, but mostly for myself.

He sat with his eyes closed.

“Men of virtue, are we?”

“No,” I said. “Just positive.”

At the house I showered and put on a coat and tie and inspected myself in a full-length mirror. I looked presentable. The smile was straight and full, almost happy. The skin was copper brown, the hair was just a shade short of blond, and the eyes had a bright blue clarity which gave me pleasure.

I have a theory. As you get older, as the years pile up, time takes on a curious Doppler effect, an alteration in the relative velocity of human events and human consciousness. The frequencies tighten up. The wavelengths shorten—sound and light and history—it’s all compressed. At the age of twelve, when you crouch under a Ping-Pong table, a single hour seems to unwind toward infinity, dense and slow; at twenty-five, or thirty-five or forty, approaching half-life, the divisions of remaining time are fractionally reduced, like Zeno’s arrow, and the world comes rushing at you, and away from you, faster and faster. It confounds computation. You lose your life as you live it, accelerating.

Which is my theory, and which is how the next eight or nine years went by.

Chuck Adamson’s word was gold. Time and place, he’d promised, and he set me up in a small cottage in the foothills outside Fort Derry—no frills, but comfortable—eight miles from home, close to the old sources but far enough away. Always, to his credit, he was practical. He covered the rent, helped to furnish the place, bought me a pair of hiking boots and a beat-up Volvo and a Geiger counter. “Time and place,” he said, “so draw your map.” He never pressed me; he let me surface in my own way. On weekends, sometimes, he’d come to visit, but for the most part the time was my own. I became a householder. I learned how to regulate a wood-burning stove and how to spend the hours of night without terror. Just the simple things. Doing dishes became an important piece of business; it seemed civilized and honorable, a matter of consequence. Once a week there was garbage to dispose of. There was a floor to sweep, a woodpile that required vigilance and wise husbanding. Eventually, I knew, I would have to begin squaring the legal circles, but for that first year it was enough to let the days accumulate. I camped out and collected rocks and devoted many hours to my Geiger counter. It was all acceleration. Alone, listening through headphones, I followed the trace elements along a stream that led where it had to lead, as I knew it would, and at the source there was just the steady click of a geological certainty. It was my secret, though. I lived with it. Naturally there were times when the solitude pressed in hard, and I’d think about Sarah and the others, but then I’d think about the mountains and tell myself, No, that’s finished. Here it is, I’d think. Right here. Lying in bed at night, or sitting at the stove, I’d take satisfaction in the shadings of sound and temperature, the most minute increments in the density of silence. I noticed how even cobwebs cast shadows. I noticed how geopolitics made no perceptible difference in the movement of dust against a lighted lamp. For me, at least, the war was over.

The rest was a silhouette.

June 1971. I drove into town, parked on Main Street, and walked home. My mother did not seem much surprised. When I came in the back door, she said, “I knew it.”

There were changes. Her hands, when she touched me, were raw and bony, smaller now, and her hair, when we kissed, was thin and gray against my cheek. Her eyes were milky. Her voice was like straw when she said, “I did. I knew it.”

But the silhouette was my mother’s.

That night, and the next night, I slept at home. And my mother slept with me, in the same bed. It was just closeness, but we did sleep together. I explained that it wasn’t quite over yet. Not everything, I said. I told her I’d made the break. I held her when she cried—she was my mother—and I told her about the cottage and how Adamson had arranged it and how I was close by now and how I needed to be alone to sort things out. “But I’m here,” I said, “I’m home,” and we talked quietly and then slept together, but it was nothing except what it was.

Christmas Eve 1971. I remember a fine long-needled spruce and a pitcher of eggnog and my mother getting tipsy and a card from Sarah which said: Love me?

November 7, 1972, an electoral landslide, but it didn’t mean a thing.

Then Christmas again, and Nixon bombed Hanoi. Eleven days. Forty thousand tons of high explosives. But I reached out and found quietus: It was someone else’s war. Just a silhouette, form without content.

Then early spring 1973, a Sunday, and Chuck Adamson and my mother came to dinner. There were blizzard warnings. A hard wind, I remember, and sleet turning to snow. The cottage windows frosted over, but things were snug inside, and we ate turkey and drank wine and played Password.

“Pencils,” my mother said, and I said, “Graphite,” and Adamson was amazed.

Acceleration.

That half decade of rapid-fire history. Like a wind tunnel, wasn’t it?

On August 9, 1974, Richard Nixon said goodbye. He received his pardon on September 8.

In January 1975, the North Vietnamese Army began its final push. Ban Me Thuot was overrun on March 11. On March 20, Hue. On March 30, Da Nang. And then Quang Ngai and Chu Lai and Pleiku and Qui Nhon and Nha Trang and Kontum.

That fast. There then gone.

On April 17, Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge. The city was empty within four days.

A wind tunnel—am I wrong?

Silhouettes. Four days, an empty city. Form without content. And in Vietnam it was full retreat now. Children dangled from helicopters, and NVA troops were playing pinball at Cam Rahn Bay, and on April 30, 1975—that fast—the decades collapsed into a twenty-second dash up the steps of the presidential palace in Saigon, and then it was finished.

Take a breath and it’s 1976.

There were fireworks and tall ships. Amnesia was epidemic. Gerald Ford: My life was like his presidency; it happened, I’m almost certain.

In late summer of that year, 1976, there was another card from Sarah. It was a Kodachrome photograph of Rio at twilight, a little slick, but pretty, pinkish-blue reflections on water. I felt a kind of smiling sadness, though not really sadness, because in that water I saw what our world might have been, and in a way, I suppose, now was. I saw what she meant by commitment and passion, and it was present in that other universe, as love was also present, and as it would be present always. I thought about her a great deal; I’m sure she thought about me.

On my thirtieth birthday, October 1, Chuck Adamson suggested that now was the time. And I agreed.

There were lawyers, of course. It was not easy but it was not hard either. Like visiting the dentist: You squirm and tighten up, and maybe there’s an ache, but then it’s over and you touch your jaw and shrug and walk away. There was no jail. There was no trial . There were formalities and papers to sign, even pleasantries, and in the end it was almost a letdown, not enough hurt.

On January 21, 1977, President Jimmy Carter issued a blanket pardon—ten thousand draft-dodgers shot full of Novocain.

I began my graduate studies in February. Geology, it was a natural, and for the next two years I went underground in an entirely new way. I was an adult. I learned about the world we live in, all of us, which was finally a world of real things, sandstone and gold and graphite and plywood and art and books and bombs and the particles which make these things, and how each thing is vulnerable, even Bobbi, who was no longer a fantasy, but real. My dreams were glass. There were no flashes, not even a glow. I was hard and sane.