Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

It scares me. I’m tempted.

I put down the firing device and stand and try to shake out the brain waves. I’m capable of atrocity. Lucid, entirely practical, I feel both powerful and powerless, like the stars. I make myself move. I circle the floor of the hole, feeling my way, but also not feeling—which is what scares me—then I sit down and check the safety on the firing device and stare at the walls and look for signs in the darkness. I see myself crawling under barbed wire at Sagua la Grande. Flares and tracers. The terrible things man will do to man. I see the wreck of the Thresher . I see my father dying under yellow spotlights. He won’t stop, he’s a professional, he keeps dying. I hear sonar. I hear Melinda yelling, “Daddy!” I hear Bobbi’s warm blond voice, scanning itself, free verse on the brink of blank. She needs space, she tells me. She pins Space Walk to my pillow. There’s a transworld look in her eyes when she sees my rage, when I take a scissors to her diaphragm, when I burn the poem, when I tell her no one’s leaving. I see her sleeping. It’s after midnight, and I kiss my wife’s cheek and quietly slide out of bed. No lights, no alarm. Blue jeans and a flannel shirt, then out to the backyard, where I pick a spot near the tool shed and begin digging. I won’t permit separation. It’s final. Am I crazy? Maybe, maybe not, but I see black flashes against a chrome sky, scalps in a punch bowl, mass going to energy. And there’s more. Because I also see a white stucco house in the tropics. The roof is burning. It’s live television, all the networks are there, and cops and SWAT teams and smoke and sirens, and Ollie Winkler is shot through the mouth. The front door burns slowly, like charcoal. The diningroom drapes are burning. Ollie moves along the floor, toward Tina, but he’s shot again, in the hip and head. Tina hides in a closet. But the closet burns, and the bedrooms and attic. I can smell the heat and tear gas and burning plaster. Ned Rafferty coughs and smiles. His face is wax. He keeps touching himself, but his face sticks to his hands, he can’t fix the melting. “The gist of the gist,” he says. He raises a hand, as if to point out a lesson, but the hand curls into a claw, and Ned Rafferty burns. The gunfire seems distant and trivial. Holes open up in the walls, and there’s a shower of sparks from the ceiling, and the doorbell rings, and Tina Roebuck cries out from her burning closet. It all seems phony and impossible, except it is possible, it’s real, people truly burn, the skin goes black to gray, the bowels open, the fingernails peel back and the bones glow and there are snappings and splinterings, burning sugars and phosphates, burning enzymes, the body burns. Nethro is shot dead. Ebenezer Keezer topples sideways and burns. The safe house burns. In the attic, a warhead no doubt burns. Everything is combustible. Faith burns. Trust burns. Everything burns to nothing and even nothing burns. There are no footprints—the footprints burn. There are no messages in bottles, because the bottles burn, and there is no posterity, because posterity burns. Cement and steel, it all burns. The state of Kansas, the forests, the Great Lakes, the certificates of birth and death, every written word, every sonnet, every love letter. Graphite burns. Churches burn. Memory burns, and with it the past, all that ever was. The reasons for burning burn. Flags burn. Liberty and sovereignty and the Bill of Rights and the American way. It just burns. And when there is nothing, there is nothing worth dying for, and when there is nothing worth dying for, there is only nothing.

The hole makes a sound of assent.

Nothing .

The night seems to stretch out like elastic. Melinda turns in her sleep and looks at me with half-opened eyes. “Hey, there,” I whisper, and she nods, then tucks her chin down and sleeps.

If I could, I would save her life.

I let myself sway with the night. Bobbi’s breathing. The influences of the moon.

And later Sarah appears. She does a cartwheel on the wall. Then she giggles and says, “I’m dead! You know what dead is? You get this malaise. You forget to wash your hair. You’re bored stiff. I’m dead.” How much, I wonder, is real? Like those phone calls back in high school, I can still dial and break the connection and hear that husky voice of hers. It’s not unreal. Right now, as she goes up into a handstand, it’s neither real nor unreal, it’s just dazzling. “Love you,” I say, and Sarah smiles and says, “Oh, well—better late than never. Except I’m dead. Too bad about Rio, though. Would’ve been a gas.” She sighs. She pecks my cheek and sits cross-legged on the wall. “But don’t apologize. No problem, I’m dead. What’s new with you?” So I tell her about the hole and the dynamite and the implausibility of happy endings. The bombs, I say, are real, and Bobbi wants to leave me. Sarah listens carefully. When I feel sorrow, she comes off the wall and goes inside me for a time, then hovers near Bobbi, frowning. “Well,” she says, “if I weren’t so dead I’d say hit the switch. We’ll run away together. That island I told you about.” She kisses Bobbi’s lips. “So then. The fantasies didn’t pan out?”

Then she takes the firing device from my lap.

“Hold me,” she says.

Along the rim of the hole, the Christmas lights are soft and mysterious, and Sarah takes her place in my arms. I don’t know what to tell her, except it wasn’t our universe.

She seems to stiffen.

“Such bullshit,” she snarls. “I’m in the other universe. Nothing here! Washout—colossal fucking drag. You should’ve loved me. You know that, don’t you? We could’ve been happy. All those places we could’ve seen, Paris and East Berlin. That honeymoon I never had. Oh Christ, we could’ve had it. Diapers and rattles and all those nights together. Is that too sentimental? I don’t mean to sound morbid, but I’m dead, and there’s only one universe that counts. You should’ve loved me. That’s all I mean, we should’ve made promises to each other and kept them, like vows, and we should’ve unzipped each other and crawled inside and been honest and true and loving, just loving, all the time, and we should’ve done everything we didn’t do. We should’ve taught each other things. We should’ve had Christmas together—is that silly? Eat lobster and open the presents and make love and go to church and believe in God and make love again and light candles on the tree and listen to records and have oyster stew at midnight and go to bed and smell the pine needles and sleep and wake up and still be together. It’s a little sad, isn’t it? It’s sad that we could’ve been so happy.”

Later, in the dark, she says, “Why did I die?”

I don’t have the answer.

Sarah nods and says, “I thought so.”

And later she reads my thoughts: “Doesn’t seem real, does it? I don’t feel dead. Maybe I’m not. Maybe it’s something we dream up to make our stories better. Maybe so?”

Then comes a long silence.

“Sarah?” I say, but she doesn’t speak.

She’s dead.

Like my father, like all of them, she died and dies and keeps on dying, again and again, as if repetition might disclose a new combination of possibilities.

“Oh, Lord,” I say, but I don’t know what to ask for.

I smell daylight coming.

The hole says, Now and never .

I lift the firing device. It’s light in my hands, or seems light, box-shaped, an aluminum casing with a small plastic safety catch and a yellow button. The copper wires wind off toward the north wall. All it takes is a touch. Not even courage, bare volition. It occurs to me that I’m not immune to curiosity—so easy. I think about Ned and Ollie and Tina, my father, my mother, and it’s the simple desire to discover if the dead are ever truly dead.