Tim O'Brien: The Nuclear Age

AM I CRAZY?

It’s after midnight, and I kiss my wife’s cheek and quietly slide out of bed. No lights, no alarm. Blue jeans and work boots and a flannel shirt, then out to the backyard. I pick a spot near the tool shed. A crackpot? Maybe, maybe not, but listen. The sound of physics. The soft, breathless whir of Now.

Just listen.

Close your eyes, pay attention: Murder, wouldn’t you say? A purring electron? Photons, protons? Yes, and the steady hum of a balanced equation.

I use a garden spade. High over the Sweetheart Mountains, a pale dwarf moon gives light to work by, and the air is chilly, and there is the feel of a dream that may last forever. “So do it,” I murmur, and I begin digging.

Turn the first spadeful. Then bend down and squeeze the soil and let it sift through the fingers. Already there’s a new sense of security. Crazy? Not likely, not yet.

If you’re sane, anything goes, everything, there are no more particulars.

It won’t be easy, but I’ll persevere.

At the age of forty-nine, after a lifetime of insomnia and midnight peril, the hour has come for seizing control. It isn’t madness. It isn’t a lapse of common sense. Prudence, that’s all it is.

Balance of power, balance of mind—a tightrope act, but where’s the net? Infinity could split itself at any instant.

“Doom!” I yell.

Grab the spade and go to work.

Signs of sanity: muscle and resolve, arms and legs and spine and willpower. I won’t quit. I’m a man of my age, and it’s an age of extraordinary jeopardy. So who’s crazy? Me? Or is it you? You poor, pitiful sheep. Listen—Kansas is on fire. What choice do I have? Just dig and dig. Find the rhythm. Think about those silos deep in fields of winter wheat. Five, four, slam the door . No metaphor, the bombs are real.

I keep at it for a solid hour. And later, when the moon goes under, I slip into the tool shed and find a string of outdoor Christmas lights—reds and blues and greens—rigging them up in trees and shrubs, hitting the switch, then returning to the job.

Silent night, for Christ sake. There’s a failure of faith. When the back door opens, I’m whistling the age-old carol.

“Daddy!” Melinda calls.

Now it starts.

In pajamas and slippers, ponytailed, my daughter trots out to the excavation site. She shivers and hugs herself and whispers, “What’s happening? What the heck’s going on? ”

“Nothing,” I tell her.

“Oh, sure.”

“Nothing, princess. Just digging.”

“Digging,” she says.

“Right.”

“Digging what?”

I swallow and smile. It’s a sensible question but the answer carries all kinds of complications. “A hole,” I say. “What else?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Just a hole. See? Simple, isn’t it? Come on, baby, back to bed now—school tomorrow.”

“Hole,” Melinda mutters.

She folds her arms and looks at me with an expression that is at once stern and forgiving. A strange child. Twelve years old, but very wise and very tough: too wise, too tough. Like her mother, Melinda sometimes gives me the willies.

“Well, okay,” she says, then pauses and nibbles her lower lip. “Okay, but what kind of hole?”

“A deep one.”

“I know, but what—”

“Now listen,” I say, “I’m serious. Back inside. Pronto.”

Melinda squints, first at my spade, next at the Christmas lights, then at me. That mature gaze of hers, it makes me squirm.

“Tell the truth,” she demands, “what’s it for? ”

“A long story.”

She nods. “A dumb story, I’ll bet.”

“Not at all.”

“Daddy!”

I drop the spade and kneel down and pat her tiny rump, an awkward gesture, almost beggarly, as if to ask for pardon. I make authoritative noises. I tell her it’s not important. Just a hole, I say—for fun, nothing else. But she doesn’t buy it. She’s a skeptic; Santa Claus never meant a thing to her.

What can I do?

I look at the moon and tell her the facts. And the facts are these. The world is in danger. Bad things can happen. We need options, a safety valve. “It’s a shelter,” I say gently. “Like with rabbits or gophers, a place to hide.”

Melinda smiles.

“You want to live there?” she says. “In a gopher hole?”

“No, angel, just insurance.”

“God.”

“Don’t swear.”

“Wow,” she says.

Her nose wiggles. There’s suspicion in that stiff posture, in the way she slowly cocks her head and backs away from me.

Kansas is on fire.

How do you explain that to a child?

“Well,” she sighs, “it’s goofy, all right. One thing for sure, Mommy’ll hit the ceiling, just wait. God, she’ll probably divorce you.”

“We’ll work it out.”

“Yeah, but I bet she’ll say it’s ridiculous, I bet she will. Who wants to be a gopher?”

Melinda sniffs and kicks at the hole.

“Poop,” she says.

I try to lift her up, but she turns away, telling me I’m too sweaty, too dirty, so I lead her inside by the hand. The house smells of Windex and wax. My wife is meticulous about such things; she’s a poet, the creative type; she believes in clean metaphors and clean language, tidiness of structure, things neatly in place. Holes aren’t clean. Safety can be very messy.

Melinda’s right—I’m in for some domestic difficulties—and if this project is to succeed, as it must, it will require the exercise of enormous tact and cunning.

Begin now.

I march my daughter to her bedroom. I tuck her between the all-cotton sheets. I brush a smudge of soil from her forehead, offer a kiss, tell her to sleep tight. All this is done tenderly, yet with authority.

“Daddy?” she says.

“Yes.”

“Nothing.”

“No,” I say, “go ahead.”

She shakes her head. “You’ll get mad.”

“I won’t.”

“Bet you will .”

“Won’t. Try me, kiddo.”

“Nothing,” she mumbles. “Except.”

“Yes?”

“Except, God, you’re pretty nutto, aren’t you? Pretty buggo, too.”