Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

Kansas is burning. All things are finite.

“Love,” I say feebly.

The hole finds this amusing.

I am all there is , it says. Keyhole, rathole, asshole, eyehole, hellhole, loophole, knothole, manhole, peephole, foxhole, armhole, sinkhole, cubbyhole, pothole, wormhole, buttonhole, water hole, bullet hole, air hole, black hole, hidey-hole… I am that I am. I am that which nearly was but never will be, and that which never was but always will be. I am the unwritten masterpiece. I am the square root of infinity. I am one hand clapping. I am what happened to the dinosaurs. I am the ovens at Auschwitz, the Bermuda Triangle, the Lost Tribes, the Flying Dutchman, the Missing Link. I am Lee Harvey Oswald’s secret contact in Moscow. I am the anonymous tipster. I am Captain Kidd’s treasure. I am the uncaused cause, the unnamed source, the unindicted co-conspirator, the unknown soldier, the untold misery, the unmarked grave. I am, in modesty, Neverness. I am the be-all and end-all. I am you, of course. I am your inside-out—your Ace in the Hole .

There’s a sharp grinding sound. Rock slides against rock, a perilous shifting.

Go on, do it. Dynamite .

“No,” I say.

Light the fuse! What’s to lose? Like a time capsule, except we dispense with time. It’s absolute! Nothing dies, everything rhymes. Every syllable. The cat’s meow and the dog’s yip-yip—a perfect rhyme. Never rhymes with always, rich rhymes with poor, madness rhymes with gladness and sadness and badness… I could go on forever. I do, in fact .

“Lunatic,” I say.

Can’t have sorrow without tomorrow .

“Crazy!”

The hole laughs and sings: Oh, I got plenty o’ nuttin’, an’ nuttin’s plenty fo’ me .

I shut it out. I squat down and fold my hands and wait. For what, I don’t know. A miracle, I suppose, or some saving grace.

I’m not myself.

It’s a feathery hither-and-thither sensation, like riding music, slipping up and down the scales of my own life. A balmy night in May—May 1958—and I grab my pillow and run for the basement and crawl under the Ping-Pong table and lie there faceup. I hear my father calling out my name. I smell the dank, sweet-sour odor of mildew, the concrete walls and basement moisture. “Easy, now,” my father says. He takes me in his arms and says, “Just a dream, cowboy, just a bad, bad dream.” But he’s wrong. It’s beyond dreaming. It’s right here and it’s real.

Balls to the wall! the hole yells. Off your ass, yo-yo!

The Christmas lights sparkle all around me.

There’s no other way.

Reluctantly, I move to the tool shed. I bend down and lift a crate and hoist it to my shoulder. There’s a queer sense of standing a few steps outside myself, a nonparticipant.

I carry the explosives across the yard.

Just the mechanics.

I use a pickax to chisel out three notches along the rim of the hole. I study the angles. I lay in the charges, crimp the caps, wire it up, test the firing device. I’m careful. I concentrate on each task as it comes.

When the surface work is done, I set in the ladder and climb down and prepare three more charges against the base of the north wall.

Dark down here—I stumble. I drop a blasting cap and jump back, then I spend five minutes searching for it on my hands and knees. Pitiful , the hole says, or maybe I say it, or both of us together: All thumbs, no nerve. Fire and ice—poetic justice!

I find the blasting cap.

An omen, I think. Then I wonder: Do we find the omens or do the omens find us?

Riddles!

I won’t be rushed. I work slowly, at my own pace.

The hole seems to press in closer, and there’s a foul, clammy smell that makes me wheeze as I wedge in the last stick of dynamite and lean down to hook up the firing device. I feel queasy. It’s partly the stench, partly my own misgivings. No hurry, I tell myself, just follow the sequence—attach the copper wires, turn the screws, make sure it’s a solid connection.

Done.

And what now?

I kneel at Melinda’s hammock. She sleeps with a thumb at the edge of her mouth, her tongue taut against the lower front teeth, her expression frank and serious. I stroke her hair. I want to cry but I can’t; I want to rescue her but I don’t know how. There are no survivors. When it happens, as with Sarah, the proteins dissolve and the codes are lost and there is only the endless rhyme. I feel some remorse, and even grief, but the emotions are like ice, I can’t get a grip on them.

What’s wrong with me? Why am I alone? Why is there no panic? Why aren’t governments being toppled? Why aren’t we in the streets? Why do we tolerate our own extinction? Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads? Why don’t we scream it? Nuclear war!

I love my daughter, I love my wife. It’s permanent. Gently, with love, I smooth the blankets around Melinda’s neck and shoulders, kissing her, surrendering to a moment of intimacy, then I turn and go to Bobbi and stoop down and put my arms around her and say, “I love you.” I rock the hammock. I’m frightened but I keep the vigil, just waiting, cradling the firing device, watching for the first frail light of dawn.

Once, I drift off.

There’s a fluttering in the darkness, like wings, and I snap awake and jerk my finger from the yellow button.

I lock my hands together.

So much can go wrong. Madness or malfunction, simple evil, an instant of overwhelming curiosity. Like a child with a chemistry set, and the instructions say, “Never mix X with Y,” but the kid starts wondering, What if? He’s human. He has to know. Curiosity, that’s all. A noble instinct. A craving for secrets. And so one day the kid creeps to his room and opens up his chemistry set and cautiously sprinkles out a little X and a little Y, just to know , and it’s the discovery of a lifetime. There are no more hypotheses. Knowledge becomes perfect and absolute. And again there’s that simple question: A happy ending?

If you can imagine it, I remind myself, it can happen.

But imagine this: Nuclear war.

A dark movie theater and you’re eating buttered popcorn and someone shouts, “Nuclear war!”

You laugh.

But this: “Fire!”

Drop the popcorn and run. It’s a stampede.

And then again this: “Nuclear war!”

Shrug? Shake your head? A joke, you think?

Imagine the surprise.

In the dark I hear someone chuckling, which startles me, but it’s just the hole. T minus nine , it says softly. Like falling off a log. We’ll all dream the same sweet dream—pure metaphor, that’s all it is. Push the button . Its voice is smooth and mellow. It recites nursery rhymes. It tells stories from the Bible, as if reminiscing, adding and subtracting here and there. Amen , it says. T minus eight, the century’s late .

I try not to listen.

I watch the night reorganize itself, the movements of stars and shadows. The patterns tend toward stasis.

God knows, I don’t want it this way.

Folded in forever like the fossils. I don’t want it but I can see it, as always, the imprints in rock, the wall shadows at Hiroshima, leaves and grass and the Statue of Liberty and Bobbi’s diaphragm. Here, she can’t leave me. The fossils don’t move. Crack open a rock and she’ll be curled around me. Her smile will be gold and granite. Immutable, metamorphic, welded forever by the stresses of our age. We will become the planet. We will become the world-as-it-should-be. We will be faithful. We will lace through the mountains like seams of ore, married like the elements …

Jackass! the hole says. Very pretty, very stupid! Push the fucking button!