Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

“I’d like that,” I told her.

“But you can’t?”

“No. But it’s not corny.”

Sarah took off the pillowcase and sat up. She wasn’t quite smiling, or crying, but it was a little of both. Even with the lip, I thought, she was a very striking woman. There was still a great deal between us.

“If you kissed me,” she said, “could you live with it?”

“I think I could.”

“Might be contagious.”

“There’s the risk.”

She came to the rocking chair. “Go on, then,” she said, and almost laughed. “Just keep that tongue in your mouth. It’ll be wonderful, I promise.”

It was not cancer.

A form of encephalitis, they told us. A viral migration along the pathways between lip and brain.

She was operated on in Helena, she came home to recuperate, there were convulsions, she died in March.

Which is how it happens, that fast.

We know we will live forever until that instant when we know we will not.

“God,” she screamed, “something’s haywire!”

“There, now,” I said.

“William?”

“I’m right here.”

“Where? I can’t think .”

“Don’t, then,” I said. “Just don’t think.”

In the last week there were hallucinations. The cortex liquefied. The viruses consumed her thoughts. The left eye roamed in its socket, her face darkened, there was puffiness along the jaw, she had trouble swallowing, her arms and fingers twitched, her breathing became fast and shallow.

“Am I dead?” she asked.

Another time she jerked up and said, “I want something! I forget what—I want it.”

We took turns sitting with her. She was never alone. When she died, Ned Rafferty was there. He came into the kitchen, where I was shelling peas, and he looked at me and said, “I loved her best.”

The funeral was quick and somber.

When it was over, I asked Rafferty what he’d be doing with himself. He thought it over, then said he’d probably stick with the gang, they were family. He didn’t cry much until later, but later he cried a lot.

After all, she was dead.

“I’m dead!” she keeps yelling.

Not long afterward, the others showed up. Ollie and Tina and Nethro and Ebenezer, they were all shaken by the news, their grief was genuine, and for more than a week we catered to a morose household.

When they left, in early April, they took the warhead with them.

And later that summer they died by gunfire in the tropics. There was tear gas, I remember. Bullhorns and sharpshooters and a burning safe house and a bomb in the attic—all the networks were there, a TV spectacular.

In the autumn I suffered a minor breakdown.

And in the winter, when Bobbi said she needed space, when she suggested a trial separation, I was comforted by the final passage of a poem in progress: The balance of power, our own, the world’s, grows ever fragile.

THE HOLE SNORTS and says, Do it .

It’s a smug, self-satisfied voice. Constant chatter all night long— Star light, star bright! Shut me up with dynamite!

Below, in their hammocks, Bobbi and Melinda sleep beautifully, and the backyard shimmers with the lights of Christmas, and here, at last, I’ve come up against the edge of an imposing question: What now? Three hours till daylight. Soon, I realize, it will be time for absolutes.

Chasm! Spasm!

The hole releases a steamy, insinuating laugh, then coughs and belches. I can smell its breath.

I lie back and watch the lights.

Certain truths appear. I love my wife. I loved her before I knew her, and I love her now, and I will not let her go. I’m committed. I believe in fidelity. I will not be separated. One thing in my life will last and keep lasting and last forever. Love is absolute.

What I need now is silence, but the hole has a mind of its own: Here’s a good one… Jack be nimble! Jack be slick! Jack me off with a dynamite stick!

I shake my head: “I’m not interested.”

The hole snickers.

Oh, yeah, you’re interested. I’m the mouthpiece, you’re the brains. Now and never. Do it .

I’m wired. I’m hot. But I know the difference between life and death. When the hole hoots and says, Home, sweet hole , I don’t respond, not even a shrug. I get to my feet and do some exercises. A clear, calm night, but there’s a dynamic moving through the dark. I’m at wits’ end; I can’t think beyond black and white. In a time of relativity, I wonder, how does one achieve absolutes? Separate, Bobbi said. She was gracious about it. She smiled and said she loved me. But then she said separate—she needed space—what does space mean?—and later there was a poem called Space Walk —walk on air, walk away—but I can’t be relative about it. I won’t let it happen. Trouble is, what now? I want to nail our hearts together. I want no space between us. I want wholeness, without separation. I want it all, now and forever.

The question is simple. In this age, at this late hour, how do I make a happy ending?

The odds, I know, are poison.

It’s a real world and it’s dangerous. Science takes no prisoners; the atom forecloses; there are no epilogues. Here, at the rim of the hole, I can see what I’m up against. I can see Sarah dying. A burning safe house, oceans boiling, cities in ash. I can see it. A Titan II missile: ten feet in diameter, 103 feet tall, 330,000 pounds of launch weight, a flight range exceeding 6,000 miles, two engines, five megatons of no-bullshit firepower. It’s out there. It’s deep in the Kansas soil—you can touch it, man to metal—you can walk the underground corridors and press your fingers against the cool, damp technology. There it is. Just look: the whirring exhaust fans, bright lights, no shadows, the chrome launch console, the red box with its two silver keys, the coffee pot, the photographs of loved ones, the clocks and computers and holstered pistols, the crew-cut missileers in their spit-shined boots and SAC-blue uniforms and daredevil scarves. It is in fact there. And here’s how it happens. Topside, it’s a hot Kansas day. A record-buster—roasting heat. It’s witch weather. A freaky black atmosphere and high winds and high voltage. Just look and say the words: Nuclear war. Kansas is the creeps. Tornado country, ghost country. Say it: Nuclear war. Look at it: black-eyed Susans and sunflowers staring at you from roadside ditches, vast fields of wheat, the sun and soil. And it happens. There’s lightning now, huge neon Z’s, a violet virga, and then the sky divides itself into two perfect halves—one hemisphere bruised and ugly, the other bright like summer—and the crease opens up like a smile over that Titan silo. This is it. A sudden wind comes up. It’s hard to stand, but you lean against the wind. You ponder the hemispheres. You see a small plot of land enclosed by barbed wire; you see a cow grazing; you see a farmer on his tractor; you see a little boy circling under a pop fly; you see a parked Air Force truck and a tiny white outbuilding and a stenciled sign that reads: “Deadly Force Authorized.” You consider running. You hear thunder. You watch a 700-ton concrete lid blow itself sideways; you say, “Oh!”; you see a woman run for the telephone; you see the Titan rising through orange and yellow gases—there’s still that wind and that Kansas sun and that grazing cow—and you gawk and rub your eyes—not disbelief, not now, it’s belief—and you stand there and listen to the thunder and track the missile as it climbs into that strange smiling crease in the sky, and then, briefly, you ask yourself the simple question: Where on earth is the happy ending?