The Nuclear Age (32 page)

I tried not to take pleasure in it. I wrote down the data on a note pad: Ditched. Scholheimer. Nazi. NYU—question mark.

Later, I commiserated as best I could. Sad, I told him. A general ungluing of things. It was the fundamental process of our age: collapsing valences and universal entropy.

Then I cleared my throat and asked where to find her.

No luck at NYU, I explained. Urgent business—I had to make contact.

The man blew his nose.

“You, too,” he said.

“Not necessarily.”

“No?”

“Just urgent. A personal matter.”

“Personal,” he said. “I’ll bet.”

He laughed.

There was a conspiratorial, almost friendly note to his voice when he said, “Fuck you.”

It didn’t matter. The last act was easy.

Scholheimer: only one listing.

There was no answer all afternoon but I enjoyed the dialing. That was the
pleasure
. A kind of pre-memory, dialing and listening
and anticipating the rest of my life. “William,” she’d say, instantly, without hesitation.

And then what? A dinner date. An Italian restaurant. Pasta and checkered tablecloths. Quiet talk. A ferry ride past the Statue of Liberty. A twinkly night sky. She’d smile and hold my arm, not clinging, just holding, and she would nod with full understanding when I confessed to the possibility of madness. I’d tell her everything. I’d start with the year 1958, when I first went underground, that night in May when I grabbed my pillow and blankets and ran for the basement and slept the one great sleep of my life. “Am I crazy?” I’d ask. I’d tell her about Chuck Adamson and the Cuban missile crisis and unevacuated bowels. I’d look her in the eyes and ask it bluntly: “Am I crazy?” Everything. Exile, dislocation, Key West, the events at Sagua la Grande, flares and tracers and guns in the attic. “How much is
real?
” I’d ask. “The bombs—are they
real?
You—are
you
real?” Quietly, in graphic detail, I’d tell her about ball lightning striking Georgia; I’d tell her about a Soviet SS-18 crossing the Arctic ice cap, how I could actually see it, and hear it, but how no one else seemed to notice, or if noticing, did not care, how no one panicked, how the world went on as if endings were not final. “Am I crazy?” I’d ask. All afternoon, as I dialed and waited, I worked my way through the scenarios. A rooftop bar with piano music and dim lighting. The way we’d dance, barely moving. Her steady blue eyes. Then a taxi ride through Central Park. The clicking meter. Her hand coming to rest on mine. I imagined rain. There would be rain, yes, and umbrellas and fuzzy yellow streetlights and the sound of the taxi tires against wet pavement. And she’d smile at me, that secret smile, which would give me the courage to suggest a lifelong commitment. I’d ask her to save my life. I’d say, “Bobbi, I’m crazy. But
save
me.” And she’d listen to all this with grace and equanimity. At the Royalton we would no doubt undress and move to the bed and lie there listening to the rain. Maybe sex, but maybe not. And then later, near dawn, I would issue proposals. I would promise her happiness, and fine children, and a house with sturdy locks and heavy doors. No more running, I’d say. No nightmares. A happy
ending in which nothing ever ends. “It’s possible,” I’d tell her, “it’s almost
plausible
, we just have to imagine it,” and after a time Bobbi would turn toward me and smile without speaking, placing her hand against my heart, holding it there, mysteriously, shaping the possibilities, and that shining smile would mean Yes, she could imagine these things and many more.

The dialing, that was the true pleasure. It was almost a disappointment when she finally answered.

Not grief, really, just an empty place where all the pretty pictures used to be. She was kind about it. She quoted Yeats:
We had fed the heart on fantasies, the heart’s grown brutal from the fare
. She wished me luck. She was flattered, she said. She didn’t laugh when I told her about the chase, how much she meant to me, how foolish I felt, how crazy, but how I had to go with my dreams. She said she admired that. She was smiling, I could tell. She said dreams were important. Then she told me her own dreams. She needed space, she said; NYU was fine but there was no space; she’d dropped out in April. She was happy, though. She was going to Germany—Bonn, she said—and there was a married man she was going with, Scholheimer, and the married man was her husband. She laughed at this, lightly. Dreams were lovely, she said, but they could be dangerous, too, which is when she lowered her voice and quoted Yeats:
We had fed the heart on fantasies, the heart’s grown brutal from the fare
.

But it wasn’t grief. Not even sadness. If you’re crazy, I now understood, you don’t feel grief or sadness, you just can’t find the future.

I spent a few days reassembling myself, and on the evening of May 29 Sarah met me at the Key West airport. Understandably, her mood was dark. I’d been out of contact for some time; I’d skipped out on my responsibilities. “Globe-trotter,” she muttered, “back from his magical mystery tour.”

In the cab she applied irony.

I wasn’t ready for it. I took her by the wrist and dug in with my fingernails.

“Don’t push,” I said quietly. “Don’t even nudge. Just this once—total silence, I mean it.”

Sarah nodded.

And for two weeks she treated me with something just short of respect. I went my way, she went hers. It was unlived-in time. Like blank film, no images or animus, no pretty pictures. At the dinner table, Ollie and Tina would keep up a nonstop banter about the current political situation, the screw-turnings and incipient terror, but none of it really registered. I couldn’t make visual contact. I’d stare at my plate and try to construct the contours of a world at perfect peace: Bobbi’s smile, for instance; binding energy; things to hope for and believe in; the city of Bonn with its spires and castles. But nothing developed. Blank film—I’d lost the gift. If you’re crazy, it’s a lapse of imagination. You stare at your dinner plate. You can’t generate happy endings.

The postulate was obvious. If you’re crazy, it’s the end of the world.

Which is how it felt. Just nothing.

When there’s nothing, there is no sadness. There was a war on, but it didn’t matter, because when there’s nothing, there is no outrage.

One evening Ned Rafferty knocked on my door.

For a moment he stood there waiting, then shrugged and came in and sat on the bed. He wore a beard now, and wire-rimmed glasses, but he still had strength.

Nothing was said.

It was late and the house was quiet. Rafferty leaned back against a pillow. He was simply
there
. At one point he got up and turned off the light and then came back and touched my shoulder and held it for a while and then sat down again and waited. His glasses sparkled in the dark. A humid night, dense and oppressive. I took a breath and tried to keep it inside, but it came out fast, and then I was choking and telling him everything I could tell. The tears surprised me. I didn’t feel any great emotion. Ding-Dong, I thought, but I couldn’t stop choking and saying, “Crazy.” Rafferty was silent. He didn’t move or speak, but he was there. I told him
how crazy I was. The fucking Ping-Pong table, I said. The flashes and missiles and sirens, and the fucking war, the fucking draft, the bombs and shrapnel and guns and artillery and all the shit, the fucking
sun
, it would fucking fry us, I said, or we’d get fried by the fucking physicists, or else the silos and submarines and fly-boys and button-pushers—all the assholes out to kill other assholes—fucking Nixon, fucking Brezhnev, fucking Ebenezer Keezer and Nethro and Hitler and Crazy Horse and Custer, my father, too, yes, my father, the way he died out at the fairgrounds every summer, just died and died and died, how he wouldn’t stop dying, every fucking summer, all the heroes and corpses, the fucking Alamo, fucking Hiroshima and Auschwitz—No survivors!—everybody killing everybody else—yes, and the so-called peace movement, the fucking underground with its fucking slogans and riots, the fucking dynamic—what
good
was it?—those guns in the attic and Ollie with his fucking bombs—where was the
good
?—No survivors!—it was all so crazy, I said, just absolute fucking crazy—and then I laughed and shook my head and told him about Bobbi.

Pie in the sky, I said.

I quoted Yeats.

I told him about obsession and fantasy.

I told him you had to believe in something; I told him how it felt when you stopped believing.

“It feels fucking crazy,” I said, almost yelled, then I caught my breath and said, “That’s what craziness
is
. When you can’t believe. Not in anything, not in anyone. Just can’t fucking
believe
.”

I was sobbing now, but it wasn’t sadness. It was nothing. For a few minutes I lost my balance—I’m not sure what happened exactly, a kind of fury, thrashing around and yelling “Crazy!”—and then Rafferty had me pinned down by the wrists and arms. I could smell his sweat. He was leaning in hard, saying, “Slack now, lots of slack, let it unwind.”

Then the quiet came.

“There,” he said, “let it go.”

I closed my eyes and cried.

“Just let it out,” he said.

A nice guy. Nice, that was all I could think, and I told him so. “Nice,” I kept saying, “you’re a nice, nice, nice guy. You
are
. You’re nice.”

“A prince,” said Rafferty.

“For sure. Fucking prince.”

“Don’t say fucking.”

“I apologize. Not fucking at all. But
nice
.”

Rafferty filled my glass.

“What we should do in a situation like this,” he said, “is drink to how nice I am.”

We finished the brandy. The hour was late but Rafferty suggested a sea voyage, which seemed fitting, so we hiked down to the Front Street marina and exercised the right of angary over a handsome wooden skiff and aimed the vessel Gulfward. A mile out, we cut the engine. We drifted and breathed the air and looked back on the sad white lights of Key West.

I felt much improved. A quiet sway, and the skiff rode high and neat.

Rafferty laughed at something.

“Nice guy,” he said. He lit up a joint and passed it across to me.

I wasn’t a smoker but I liked the ritual of it. I liked him, too. And the smells and water sounds. There was largeness around us. When the joint was gone, Rafferty asked if I wanted more, and I said I did, so we smoked that one and then another, letting the currents take us, and presently I was made aware of numerous unique perspectives. It was all in the angle. The moon, I noticed, was without third dimension. I was intrigued by the concept of hemispheres. I detected a subtle crease at the horizon where the global halves had been stitched to perfect the whole.

Ned Rafferty nodded when I explained these matters.

“Nuts,” I said. “Haywire. I warned you, didn’t I?”

“I believe it was mentioned, yes.”

“Loose screws. Did I say that? Sometimes I feel—you know—I feel—there’s a word for it—not depressed, not just that. Like when you can’t cope anymore.”

“Desperate,” Rafferty said. “I know.”

“That’s it. Desperate. Did I tell you about Bobbi?”

“You did.”

“Married. Off to Bonn in Germany.”

“You told me.”

“Scholheimer.”

“A turd. You told me.”

“Desperate,” I said.

“Desperadoes.”

“That’s
it
.”

Rafferty sighed and removed his glasses. Funny angle, the dark and the Gulf and the dope, but it looked like he’d pulled out his eyes and placed them in the pocket of his shirt. The shine was gone. He leaned back and looked at me without his eyes.

“One thing,” he said. “To clear the air.”

“Anything.”

“About Sarah. This relationship we had, Sarah and me. It’s over. Never really got started. I love her. She loves you.”

“You don’t have to—”

“No, I want it out,” he said. “She
loves
you. Breaks my heart, but there’s the fact. Understand me? Loves you. Wants you back. Rio, that’s all she talks about.” He reached overboard, splashing water to his face. The skiff was gently fishtailing with the tide. “I do care for her, you know. Emotional thing.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Rio, for Christ sake. What the hell’s Rio?”

“Nothing,” I said. “A fantasy.”

There was silence while Rafferty reflected on this. After a time he issued a complex noise from the bottom of his lungs.

“Fantasy, I can respect that,” he said. “Obsessions, too. You’re obsessed, I’m obsessed. Look at Tina—big fat killer obsessions. Our Lord Jesus Christ, the man was obsessed, who isn’t? Ollie Winkler—walking obsession. Thing is, you have to respect people’s obsessions. Like with me. You want to know my obsession?”

“What’s your obsession?”

“Will you respect it?”

“I will.”

“My obsession,” he said gravely, “is Sarah. I’m a nice guy, you’re right, but you know something? I’d do anything for her. Drown your ass. Right here, if I thought it would do any good, I’d just drown your ass. Can you respect that?”

“I certainly can.”

“Maybe we should have another smoke?”