Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

In Manhattan, we took two rooms. Sarah insisted. That evening we talked tactics, went out to dinner, then spent the night together. There wasn’t a word spoken. I kissed her on the lips, a healing kiss, tracing that red blister with my tongue, memorizing its shape and texture, knowing it would eventually be all I remembered, or almost all. In the morning she was back in her own room. I spent an hour in a barbershop. At noon, by arrangement, I met Sarah outside the hotel. We went arm in arm toward the East River.

Twice we circled the UN, then Sarah led me inside.

She spotted Bobbi outside the Security Council.

“There’s the jackpot,” Sarah said. “I’ll retire to Rio. Good luck.”

“You’re a neat lady.”

“She looks adorable. Really, she does. I’m crazy about her uniform.”

“Well.”

“You’re sorry, I know.”

“More than that. If it doesn’t work out, I’ll—you know—I’ll arrange another search party. You know?”

“Rio,” Sarah said. She was backing away, still holding my hand. “I’ll leave a trail of bread crumbs. You be Hansel, I’ll be Snow White.”

“I am sorry.”

Sarah’s eyes were colorless.

“I’ll grant you this, she’s one in a million. You’ll get your money’s worth. Everything you deserve.” Sarah walked out the revolving door. Then she came in again and slugged me on the shoulder.

“Bye,” I said.

“You’re an asshole.”

“Rio.”

We bought a limo and drove to Helena and took over the top floor of my motel.

I stayed away from nostalgia. Sarah had warned me about that. “You’ve led a nasty life,” I said, and I ticked off the betrayals—me and the navigator and TWA and Scholheimer and NYU and the Air Force and Rudolph and Johnson and the United Nations. It was a hard speech. Here and there I shouted. “You can’t stick . You don’t know what commitment is. You can’t want a thing and get it and still want it. You quit. You’re unfaithful. Iron deficiency. Anemia of the will. No magnetic glue. You drop off men like leaves off trees, by the season. You’re selfish. You’re fickle. You don’t attach to things. You don’t believe in causes or people, and what else is there? Essence, existence—you can’t cope with either. You flit like a fucking fruit fly. You can’t hold on. You can’t endure. You’re shallow and cowardly and vain and disgusting—you’re probably mad—that’s what madness is —can’t stick, always sliding—you’re an ice rider, a melter, gutless and hopeless, and I love you with all my heart, and I swear to God—I swear it—I’ll never let you go. Never. That means never .”

We soaked in the motel’s big green pool. At night we watched television, anything but the news, and then we got married.

We honeymooned in the Sweetheart Mountains.

Each morning was a miracle: I’d wake up and take a breath and reach out to make sure.

I’d hold her tight, squeezing.

And in 1983 we had a daughter this way, Melinda, whose presence brought happiness and new responsibility. As a father, as a man of the times, I was more determined than ever to hold the line against dissolution. When the newspapers warned of calamity, I simply stopped reading; I was a family man. The motel turned a modest profit. I attended monthly meetings of the Chamber of Commerce. We coped. We had our disputes and found solutions, we vacationed at Yosemite, we raised our daughter with discipline and love. At the back of my mind, of course, I feared that someday I might wake to find a poem in my pocket, but Bobbi was always there. Through her poetry, which she would sometimes read aloud, she permitted access to her secret life. She was devoted. She made soft love. She was a wise mother, a patient wife.

The balance held.

It was not a fantasy.

We prospered in a prosperous world. We took our showers as a team, the three of us, and there was peace and durability, a kind of art. On Halloween we bobbed for apples. We designed our own Christmas cards, hand-stenciling Bobbi’s poems on fine white parchment. We shared things—our lives, our histories. Once, on a whim, I took Bobbi up to have a look at the uranium strike. The season was pre-winter, twiggy and bare, a desolate wind, and I held her arm and pointed out the scars left by man and machine. I showed her where the mountain had once been. With my hands, I shaped it for her, explaining how we’d followed the clicking trail toward riches, and how, at a spot roughly between Orion and the Little Dipper, in the age of flower children gone sour, we had come across the source, the red-hot dynamics. It was science, I told her. Morality was not a factor. Bobbi said she understood. Yet, for me, there was something sad about the disappearance of that mountain, because it was now a pasture, flat like Kansas, with pasture weeds and mesquite bent east with the wind. We found a pickax and a burnt-out bulldozer and a No Trespassing sign with the Texaco star preserved by heat and cold, bright red, friendly-looking as symbols go.

“Somewhere,” I said, as I stashed the sign as a souvenir, “the mountain is still there, it’s tucked away in silos across the Great Midwest. It isn’t gone, you just can’t see it.”

Bobbi asked if this scared me.

It didn’t, not then. But back at the motel, two or three years later, it did.

A Sunday afternoon. I was sleeping. It was August, and I was out by the pool, a calm summer Sunday, the gentlest Sunday of all time, a day of rest, and even in my sleep I could hear the lap of water and tourists splashing—business was booming, Montana was the Energy State—and there was the feel of Sundays forever, a lawn mower buzzing, a child laughing, a steady hum beneath all things. And the sun. And a breeze that wasn’t really a breeze and made no earthly sound as it swept the Sunday like a Hoover. This was sleep. This was the day of perfect union, when Christians bar-becued. A day for picnics and lazing. I basked like a lizard. I wasn’t dreaming, just drifting. The sun—that full sun —the sun was part of it. It was a Sunday like no other Sunday. It was a day without spite or malice, not an evil thought abroad, not a word of blasphemy, not a sickly deed; a day when, by some incredible chance, one shot in ten billion, the human race quieted as if in church. Disembodied, dusty, I felt like fragrance, I could’ve made chlorophyll.

Afterward, I told Bobbi how it happened: “Just this drone at first. Maybe a mosquito, like that. Except the sound was way up. Way up. Nobody else noticed. Everybody in the pool kept splashing, having a great time, they didn’t notice , and the drone kept getting louder and louder, like this screechy whine, like—like I don’t know what—like from outer space. A whistle sound, sort of, but it wasn’t a whistle, it was something else. Like this, like wheeet . You know? Just wheeet-wheeet . So I sat up. I saw these weird ripples in the pool. Then this vortex, swish, a whirlpooly thing, like when water goes down the toilet, and then—maybe it was the heat or something—but then I looked up and there was this huge zipper across the sky, a big silver zipper. And it was unzipping itself. That’s what I saw. That’s how it happens. A zipper opens up.”

Bobbi was gentle. She kept close to me that night, and for many nights afterward. If I wanted, she said, we could make some changes. Would I like to travel? Go back to school, maybe? Pursue a career? I thought about it, then shook my head. All I wanted was for her to stay with me. Always. Fidelis ad extremum . I looked straight at her. “Fidelity,” I said. “It’s absolute. I won’t let you leave me.”

Her smile was opaque. Not much later she composed a poem called Leaves . Lush imagery, but I didn’t quite understand it.