The Nuclear Age (26 page)

Strange, but I didn’t feel shame. Emptiness and relief, but not shame. Later, when the jokes started, I thought: If you’re sane, you don’t feel shame. You feel helpless. You feel a stickiness at the seat of your pants. But not shame.

Rafferty helped me up.

“This development,” said Ebenezer Keezer, “gives scared shitless a whole new meaning.”

“Ain’ roses,” said Nethro.

“Let him be,” Ned Rafferty said.

“Yeah, but that
smell
.”

Rafferty held my arm and said, “Let him be.”

And again that same night.

A final exam, Ebenezer called it. He was grading on the pass-fail system.

At midnight we formed up in the courtyard. We smeared our faces with charcoal. We wore black sweat pants and black cotton jerseys. On our backs and belts, we carried C-4 explosives, wire cutters, Claymores, blasting caps, fuses, electric firing devices, rifles, and rucksacks.

“Tonight,” said Ebenezer Keezer, “we baptize the Christians. You people
will
get shot at. You will
not
commit messies in your shorties.”

He looked directly at me.

“Shitpots,” he said, smiling. “Regulation panty-poopers.”

Nethro briefed us on the details.

A simulated commando raid. The object, he said, was to make our way across a two-hundred-meter stretch of open beach. To move with haste and silence. To attack and destroy a twenty-foot wooden tower that had been erected that afternoon. Along the way, he told us, we would encounter certain obstacles. Barbed wire and booby-traps and tear gas. Then he grinned and snapped his fingers. “Oh yeah, an’ two machine guns. M-60s—live ammo.” Nethro opened his hands in a gesture of reassurance. “No sweat, we aim high. Four feet, more or less. Just don’ take no leaks standing up.”

Then we moved out.

We crossed the tennis courts and followed Nethro down to the dunes.

The darkness was something solid. There was fog, too, which carried the scent of brine and seaweed, and the night seemed to slide beneath itself. Ahead, I could see the green phosphorescent glow of a wristwatch. I reached out and put a hand on Rafferty’s rucksack and moved by touch. If you’re sane, I thought. Then I laughed and thought: Ghosts.

“Hush,” Rafferty said. “Cerebral slack, man, just spin it out.”

The starting line was a shallow trench in the sand. Quietly, we knelt down to wait. There were spooks in the dark but I imagined I was elsewhere. Mars, maybe. A deep cave. I breathed from the bottom of my lungs. Forty minutes, a full hour, then the fog lifted and I could see moonlight on barbed wire, the outline of a rickety tower two hundred meters up the beach. No panic, I thought. Just this once, I would perform with dignity. I would not wail or freeze or befoul myself.

There was movement in the dark.

“On your bellies!” Nethro called. “Stay flat, kiddies!”

At the far end of the beach there was a sharp splatting noise. A green flare exploded high over the tower.

Rafferty tapped my arm.

“Stick close,” he said. “I’ll run the interference.”

Behind us, Nethro fired up a flare and yelled, “Hit it!” and we were moving. Sarah went first, then Ollie and Tina and Rafferty. Nethro kicked me and said, “Anytime, darlin’.”

The first twenty meters were easy. Up and over, out of the trench, snaking motions, part wiggle, part crawl, rifle cradled across the elbows. I was a commando now. Anything was possible. Push-glide, no thinking. Off to my right I could make out the peaceful wash of waves where the sea touched land. Dignity, I thought, then I said it aloud, “Dignity.”

When we hit the first wire, Rafferty used his cutters and motioned for me to slip through.

We bellied forward.

“Easy,” Rafferty said, but it wasn’t easy. There was confusion, and my rucksack caught, and I felt a cool slicing sensation on my forehead. Concertina wire—looped and tangled—and when I twisted sideways I was cut again at the neck and cheek.

A white flare rocketed up over the beach.

There was a soft whooshing sound and then the guns opened up. Red tracer rounds made edges in the night. “Move,” Rafferty said, “just
move
.” But the wire had me. High up, almost directly above us, another flare puffed open, and the two machine guns
kept up a steady fire. A game, I reminded myself, but then I flopped over and watched the red tracers unwind through the dark. That much was real. The guns were real, and the flares and muzzle flashes. No terror, just the absence of motor control. I felt Rafferty’s big arms around me, and then came a clicking sound, and we rolled through the wire.

I pressed my face into the sand. I found myself posing foolish questions. Why were my eyelids twitching? Foolish, but why?

Later, when I looked up, Rafferty was gone.

I lay flat and hugged my rifle. It was all I could do, hug and twitch. Gunfire swept the beach. This, I deduced, was how it was and had to be. If you’re sane, if you’re in command of the present tense, you dispense with scruples. You recognize the squirrel in your genes. You sprawl there and twitch and commit biology.

The night whined with high velocities.

Lazily, I got to my hands and knees. It occurred to me that the danger here was mortal. A tracer round ricocheted somewhere behind me—blue sparks, a burning smell—then a succession of flares lit up the sky, yellow and red and gold, and for a moment I seemed to slide back to the year 1958, a balmy night in May when I jerked up in bed and waited for the world to rebalance itself. I was a child. A Soviet SS-4 whizzed over my head. Far off, the earth’s crust buckled and there was the sizzle of a lighted fuse. The sky was full of pigeons. Millions of them, every pigeon on earth. I watched the moon float away. There was horror, of course, but it was seductive horror, even beautiful, pastels bleeding into primaries, the radioactive ions twinkling blue and purple, the pink and silver flashes, charm mixing with childhood.

If you’re sane, I thought, you come to respect only those scruples which wire to the nervous system.

I surprised myself by crawling forward.

It was a crabbing kind of movement, without dignity. I heard myself saying, “Sorry,” then saying, “Stop it!” Squirrel chatter. I was thinking squirrel thoughts: There is nothing worth dying for. Nothing. Not dignity, not politics. Nothing. There is nothing worth dying for.

I reached a miniature dune and stretched flat. The guns kept firing, raking the beach, swiveling left to right and back again.

Nothing, I thought.

A tracer round corkscrewed over my head. I was twitching, but the twitches were strictly amoral. I was lucid. I understood the physics: If there is nothing, there is nothing worth dying for.

I blinked and looked up and swallowed sand. There were no ethical patterns. Ahead was another tangle of barbed wire, and beyond the wire was more wire, then flat beach, then the two droning machine guns. There was fog, too, and tear gas, and familiar voices. In the distance, Ebenezer Keezer was shouting through a bullhorn, “Life after Lenin! Revolution, people! Ollie-Ollie in free!”

Then amplified laughter.

Briefly, near the tower, a human form rose and took shape against a yellow flare. Sarah, I thought, and I scrambled forward. Gunfire snapped close by. “Please,” I said, and lunged into the wire. The pain surprised me. I was bleeding from the nose and lips. The tear gas was heavy now, and the tremors took hold, but I clawed through the wire and rolled along the beach and whimpered and thought: Nothing. The thought was perfectly symmetrical, because if there is nothing, there is nothing worth dying for.

I sobbed and listened to Ebenezer Keezer’s bullhorn laughter. He was engaged in philosophy.

“Terrorism,” he shouted, “is a state of mind! A state of mind is a state of bliss! Extremism in the pursuit of bliss is no bummer!”

There was a harsh electronic squeal. A lavender flare exploded without sound. The guns were on automatic and the night shimmied in bright greens and reds.

Odd, but I also heard music.

Out on the margins, Buffalo Springfield was singing … 
a man with a gun over there … tellin’ me I got to beware
.

The bullhorn buzzed and Ebenezer cried, “States of mind! States of bliss! Down with the states!”

With effort, I detached myself.

It all seemed fanciful, the mix of guns and rhetoric, the Beatles
now insisting on revolution. Belly-down, I crawled toward the sea.

“Ain’ no mountain high,” Ebenezer sang.

I bled from the lips and nostrils. Numerous clichés came to mind. Missing in action, I thought. Lost in space. My gyro had gone, I couldn’t locate the scheme of things, but I kept moving until chance brought me to the fringe of the sea.

It was the maximum reach. This far, no farther.

I composed myself in a respectable posture, faceup, heels seaward, hands folded at my belly, and I lay back and watched the lights.

“Day-O, Day-O,” Ebenezer sang, “dee daylight come an’ I want to go home.”

A dud flare fizzled overhead.

Tracers skipped across the Caribbean, toward Miami, and the sound track had become sentimental. Mellow music, smooth and wistful … 
Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end
.

“In time of terror,” Ebenezer declared, “there is no objection by means of conscience. There is no alternative service.”

I didn’t budge.

I watched the sky do sleight of hand. Awesome, I decided, miracles of form and color. Dangling from its parachute, a nearby flare sailed upward against gravity. The twin machine guns kept firing their steady fire, and Mary Hopkin sang persuasively in the dark, achingly,
we’d fight and never lose, those were the days, oh yes
 …

The bullhorn crackled.

“Hide an’ go seek,” Ebenezer cried. “You’re it, shitpot. Peekaboo! I see you!”

His inflection carried mockery, but it wasn’t enough to make me move. I had strong convictions. There was nothing worth dying for. Not for this, not for that. If you’re sane, you resign yourself to the tacky pleasures of not dying when there is nothing worth dying for.

I knew my limits. I also knew my heart.

Up the beach there were battle cries. I heard Sarah shouting out commands. She had the knack, I didn’t.

“Too bad,” I said, but I didn’t move.

Again there was that time-space slippage. I was back under my Ping-Pong table, under layers of charcoal and soft-lead pencils, and all around me, inside me, there were those powdery neural flashes lashing out like heat lightning. I watched it happen. The equator shifted. New species evolved and perished in split seconds. Every egg on the planet hatched. And then my father was there, holding me, saying, “Easy now, take it slow, tiger.” He rocked me and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” I could smell the heat of his armpits. “It’s okay,” he said, “just a dream,” but it wasn’t a dream, and even then, even now, there was still the glowing afterimage, the indelible imprint of things to come.

I am not crazy, I told myself. I am sane.

Gunfire swept the beach. The music now was martial, piccolos and snare drums. Ebenezer Keezer was doing impressions.

He did Groucho and Martin Luther King.

“Shane!” he cried. “Shane! Shane!”

It was coming up on a finale. A dozen quick flares made the sky tumble, and the machine guns kept firing and firing.

I pressed low into the sand.

“The darkest hour,” Ebenezer intoned solemnly, “is just about now. But bear in mind, people, you’ll find a jive light show at the end of the tunnel.”

He did Woody Woodpecker and LBJ and Porky Pig.

“This is your life,” he said. “Terror tends to terrorize, absolute terror terrorizes absolutely. Th-th-that’s all, folks!”

A dull explosion turned me over.

When I looked up, the wooden tower seemed to be reconstituting itself. A second explosion blew away the tower’s foundation. The structure stood legless for an instant, then toppled sideways and burned. “Fire in the hole!” Ollie Winkler shouted. Fine, clean work, I thought. And in the future, no doubt, there would be other such operations, the Washington Monument or the Statue of Liberty.

Immediately the gunfire eased off. A final flare colored the circumstances in shades of violet.

“Terrorism,” Ebenezer Keezer declared, “is the subtraction of the parts. Back to zero.”

Then I began digging.

I scooped out a shallow hole at the edge of the sea and slipped in and carefully packed wet sand against my legs and hips and chest. I apologized to my father. I jabbered away about the flashes and pigeons and sizzling sounds, and my father said, “Sure, sure,” and he was there beside me, with me, watching me dig. I told him the truth. “There’s nothing to die for,” I said, and my father thought about it for a time, then nodded and said, “No, nothing.” His eyes were bright blue. He smiled and tucked me in.

“Am I crazy?” I asked.

“That’s a hard one.”

“Am I?”

There was a pause, a moment of incompletion, but he finished it by saying, “I love you, cowboy,” then he bent down and kissed my lips.

Pass or fail, so I missed graduation. I spent nine days cooped up in a hospital on the outskirts of Havana. The diagnosis had to do with acute anxiety, a stress reaction, and I was too canny to argue. I lay low. There were nurses, I remember, and they were sticking me with sedatives. But I was fine. I recited
Martian Travel
in my head. I carried on dialogues with Castro and Nixon, offering sage advice and psychological support. I urged caution above all else. If there is nothing, I told them, then there is nothing to kill for, not flags or country, not honor, not principle, for in the absence of something there is only nothing.

I had a firm grip on myself. On occasion I felt a sudden lurching in my stomach, as if a trapdoor had opened, and at night I dreamed barbiturate dreams—gunfire and flares. But I played it cagey. I didn’t cry or carry on; I gave up speech; I smiled at the nurses and watched the needles without fear or protest. If you’re sane, there’s no problem.

I thought about escape.

I contemplated suicide.

No sweat, though, because I was on top of things.