The Nuclear Age (41 page)

There’s a sharp grinding sound. Rock slides against rock, a perilous shifting.

Go on, do it. Dynamite
.

“No,” I say.

Light the fuse! What’s to lose? Like a time capsule, except we dispense with time. It’s absolute! Nothing dies, everything rhymes. Every syllable. The cat’s meow and the dog’s yip-yip—a perfect rhyme. Never rhymes with always, rich rhymes with poor, madness rhymes with gladness and sadness and badness … I could go on forever. I do, in fact
.

“Lunatic,” I say.

Can’t have sorrow without tomorrow
.

“Crazy!”

The hole laughs and sings:
Oh, I got plenty o’ nuttin’, an’ nuttin’s plenty fo’ me
.

I shut it out. I squat down and fold my hands and wait. For what, I don’t know. A miracle, I suppose, or some saving grace.

I’m not myself.

It’s a feathery hither-and-thither sensation, like riding music, slipping up and down the scales of my own life. A balmy night in May—May 1958—and I grab my pillow and run for the basement and crawl under the Ping-Pong table and lie there faceup. I hear my father calling out my name. I smell the dank, sweet-sour odor of mildew, the concrete walls and basement moisture. “Easy, now,” my father says. He takes me in his arms and says, “Just a dream, cowboy, just a bad, bad dream.” But he’s wrong. It’s beyond dreaming. It’s right here and it’s real.

Balls to the wall!
the hole yells.
Off your ass, yo-yo!

The Christmas lights sparkle all around me.

There’s no other way.

Reluctantly, I move to the tool shed. I bend down and lift a crate and hoist it to my shoulder. There’s a queer sense of standing a few steps outside myself, a nonparticipant.

I carry the explosives across the yard.

Just the mechanics.

I use a pickax to chisel out three notches along the rim of the
hole. I study the angles. I lay in the charges, crimp the caps, wire it up, test the firing device. I’m careful. I concentrate on each task as it comes.

When the surface work is done, I set in the ladder and climb down and prepare three more charges against the base of the north wall.

Dark down here—I stumble. I drop a blasting cap and jump back, then I spend five minutes searching for it on my hands and knees.
Pitiful
, the hole says, or maybe I say it, or both of us together:
All thumbs, no nerve. Fire and ice—poetic justice!

I find the blasting cap.

An omen, I think. Then I wonder: Do we find the omens or do the omens find us?

Riddles!

I won’t be rushed. I work slowly, at my own pace.

The hole seems to press in closer, and there’s a foul, clammy smell that makes me wheeze as I wedge in the last stick of dynamite and lean down to hook up the firing device. I feel queasy. It’s partly the stench, partly my own misgivings. No hurry, I tell myself, just follow the sequence—attach the copper wires, turn the screws, make sure it’s a solid connection.

Done.

And what now?

I kneel at Melinda’s hammock. She sleeps with a thumb at the edge of her mouth, her tongue taut against the lower front teeth, her expression frank and serious. I stroke her hair. I want to cry but I can’t; I want to rescue her but I don’t know how. There are no survivors. When it happens, as with Sarah, the proteins dissolve and the codes are lost and there is only the endless rhyme. I feel some remorse, and even grief, but the emotions are like ice, I can’t get a grip on them.

What’s wrong with me? Why am I alone? Why is there no panic? Why aren’t governments being toppled? Why aren’t we in the streets? Why do we tolerate our own extinction? Why do our politicians put warnings on cigarette packs and not on their own foreheads? Why don’t we scream it? Nuclear war!

I love my daughter, I love my wife. It’s permanent. Gently,
with love, I smooth the blankets around Melinda’s neck and shoulders, kissing her, surrendering to a moment of intimacy, then I turn and go to Bobbi and stoop down and put my arms around her and say, “I love you.” I rock the hammock. I’m frightened but I keep the vigil, just waiting, cradling the firing device, watching for the first frail light of dawn.

Once, I drift off.

There’s a fluttering in the darkness, like wings, and I snap awake and jerk my finger from the yellow button.

I lock my hands together.

So much can go wrong. Madness or malfunction, simple evil, an instant of overwhelming curiosity. Like a child with a chemistry set, and the instructions say, “Never mix X with Y,” but the kid starts wondering,
What if?
He’s human. He has to know. Curiosity, that’s all. A noble instinct. A craving for secrets. And so one day the kid creeps to his room and opens up his chemistry set and cautiously sprinkles out a little X and a little Y, just to
know
, and it’s the discovery of a lifetime. There are no more hypotheses. Knowledge becomes perfect and absolute. And again there’s that simple question: A happy ending?

If you can imagine it, I remind myself, it can happen.

But imagine this: Nuclear war.

A dark movie theater and you’re eating buttered popcorn and someone shouts, “Nuclear war!”

You laugh.

But this: “Fire!”

Drop the popcorn and run. It’s a stampede.

And then again this: “Nuclear war!”

Shrug? Shake your head? A joke, you think?

Imagine the surprise.

In the dark I hear someone chuckling, which startles me, but it’s just the hole.
T minus nine
, it says softly.
Like falling off a log. We’ll all dream the same sweet dream—pure metaphor, that’s all it is. Push the button
. Its voice is smooth and mellow. It recites nursery rhymes. It tells stories from the Bible, as if reminiscing, adding and subtracting here and there.
Amen
, it says.
T minus eight, the century’s late
.

I try not to listen.

I watch the night reorganize itself, the movements of stars and shadows. The patterns tend toward stasis.

God knows, I don’t want it this way.

Folded in forever like the fossils. I don’t want it but I can see it, as always, the imprints in rock, the wall shadows at Hiroshima, leaves and grass and the Statue of Liberty and Bobbi’s diaphragm. Here, she can’t leave me. The fossils don’t move. Crack open a rock and she’ll be curled around me. Her smile will be gold and granite. Immutable, metamorphic, welded forever by the stresses of our age. We will become the planet. We will become the world-as-it-should-be. We will be faithful. We will lace through the mountains like seams of ore, married like the elements …

Jackass!
the hole says.
Very pretty, very stupid! Push the fucking button!

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.