Tim O'Brien - The Nuclear Age

Later, he led me over to the stairs and sat beside me. He was wearing undershorts and slippers, and he looked silly, but I didn’t say anything. I just rocked against him.

“No kidding,” he said, “I think it’s a terrific shelter. Absolutely terrific.”

Then the embarrassment hit me.

To cover up, I began jabbering away about the flashes, the pigeons, the sizzling sounds, whatever came to mind, and my father held me close and kept saying, “Sure, sure,” and after a time things got very quiet.

“Well, now,” he said.

But neither of us moved.

Like the very first men on earth, or the very last, we gazed at my puny shelter as if it were fire, peering at it and inside it and far beyond it, forward and backward: a cave, a few hairy apes with clubs, scribblings on a wall.

“Well, partner,” he said. “Sleepy?”

I wasn’t, but I nodded, and he clapped me on the back and laughed.

Then he did a funny thing.

As we were moving up the stairs, he stopped and said, “How about a quick game? Two out of three?”

He seemed excited.

“Just you and me,” he said. “No mercy.”

I knew what he was up to but I couldn’t say no. I loved that man. I did, I loved him, so I said, “Okay, no mercy.”

We unloaded the bricks and charcoal and pencils, set up the net, and went at it.

And they were good, tough games. My dad had a wicked backhand, quick and accurate, but I gradually wore him down with my forehand slams. Boom, point. Boom, point. A couple of times it almost seemed that he was setting me up, lobbing those high easy ones for me to smash back at him. But it felt good. I couldn’t miss.

“Good grief,” he said, “you could be a pro .”

Afterward he offered to help me rig up the shelter again, but I shrugged and said I’d get to it in the morning. My father nodded soberly.

It was close to dawn when we went upstairs. He brewed some hot chocolate, and we drank it and talked about the different kinds of spin you can put on a Ping-Pong ball, and he showed me how to grip the paddle Chinese style, and then he tucked me into bed. He said we’d have to start playing Ping-Pong every day, and I said, “It sure beats chemistry sets,” and my father laughed and kissed me on the forehead and said it sure did.

I slept well.

And for the next decade my dreams were clean and flashless. The world was stable. The balance of power held. It wasn’t until after college, on a late-night plane ride from New York to Miami, that those wee-hour firestorms returned. The jet dipped, bounced, and woke me up. I pushed the call button. By then I was a mature adult and it really didn’t matter. The stewardess brought me a martini, wiped my brow, and then held my hand for a while.

IWAS ON FIRM GROUND. The nights were calm, and those crazy flashes disappeared, and the end of the world was a fantasy. Things were fine.

All through seventh and eighth grades, that most vulnerable time in a kid’s life, I carved out a comfortable slot for myself at the dead center of the Bell-Shaped Curve. I wore blue jeans and sneakers. I played shortstop for the Rural Electric Association Little League team; I batted a smooth .270—not great, but respectable. I was popular. People liked me. At school I pulled down solid grades, A’s and B’s, mostly B’s, which was exactly how I wanted it. I devoted long hours to the practice of a normal smile, a normal posture, a normal way of walking and talking. God knows, I worked at it. During the autumn of my freshman year, I hiked down to the junior high every Thursday night for dancing lessons—fox-trot and tango, the whole ballroom routine. I went out on hayrides with the Methodist Youth Fellowship. It didn’t matter that I hated hayrides, or that I wasn’t a Methodist, it was a question of locking in with the small-town conventions, hugging the happy medium.

So what went wrong?

Genetics, probably. Or a malfunction somewhere in the internal dynamics.

The problem was this: I didn’t fit .

It’s a hard thing to explain, but for some reason I felt different from all the others. Like an alien, sort of, an outsider. I couldn’t open up. I couldn’t tell jokes or clown around or slide gracefully into the usual banter and horseplay. At times I wondered if those midnight flashes hadn’t short-circuited the wiring that connected me to the rest of the world. I wasn’t shy, just skittish and tense; very tight inside; I couldn’t deal with girls; I avoided crowds; I had trouble figuring out when to laugh and where to put my hands and how to make simple conversations.

I did have problems, obviously, but they weren’t the kind a shrink can solve. That’s the key point. They were real problems.

I gave up dancing lessons.

I also gave up hayrides and MYF.

By the time I reached high school, 1960 or so, I’d turned into something of a loner. A tough skin, almost a shell. I steered clear of parties and pep rallies and all the rah-rah stuff. I zipped myself into a nice cozy cocoon, a private world, and that’s where I lived. Like a hermit: William Cowling, the Lone Ranger. On the surface it might’ve looked unwholesome, but I honestly preferred it that way. I was above it all. A little arrogant, a little belligerent. I despised the whole corrupt high school system: the phys-ed teachers, the jocks, the endless pranks and gossip, the teasing, the tight little self-serving cliques. Everything. Top to bottom—real hate.

And who needed it?

Who needed homecoming?

Who needed cheerleaders and football and proms and giggly-ass majorettes?

Who needed friends?

I was well adjusted, actually, in a screwed-up sort of way. During the summers I’d hike up into the mountains above town, all alone, no tension or tightness, just enjoying the immense solitude of those purply cliffs and canyons, exploring, poking around, collecting chunks of quartz and feldspar and granite. I felt an affinity for rocks. They were safe; they never gave me any lip. In the evenings, locked in my bedroom, I’d spend hours polishing a single slice of mica, shaving away the imperfections, rubbing the tips of my fingers across those smooth, oily surfaces. There was something reassuring about it, just me and the elements.

My parents, of course, didn’t see it that way.

“Look,” my dad said one evening, “rocks are fine, but what about people? You can’t talk to rocks. Human contact, William, it’s important.” He stood nervously for a moment, jingling the loose change in his pockets. “Thing is, you seem cut off from the world. Maybe I’m way off base but I get the feeling that you’re—I don’t know. Unhappy.”

I smiled at him. “No,” I said, “I’m fine.”

My father nodded and ran a hand along his jaw.

“What about—you know—what about girls?”

“Girls how?”

“Just girls ,” he said. He studied the palms of his hands. “This isn’t a criticism, it really isn’t, but I haven’t noticed you out there burning up the old social circuit, no dates or anything, no fun.”

“Rocks are fun,” I told him.

“Yes, but what I’m driving at… I’m saying, hey, there’s more to life than locking yourself up with a bunch of stones . It’s bad for the mental gyroscope. Things start wobbling, they get out of synch. Just a question of companionship.”