The Nuclear Age (5 page)

He looked across the table at my mother, who nodded.

“But here’s the point,” he went on, soft and serious. “You can’t let these things get the best of you. You can’t stew in the bad juices. Can’t dwell on all the problems and dangers in this world.
When it comes down to it, we all have to keep the faith, just hang in there, because otherwise you end up—”

“I’m not crazy!” I said.

My mother’s head snapped up.

“Darling,” she said quickly, “we know you’re not … disturbed. We worry, that’s all.”

“Well, I’m worried too,” I told her. “I worry about getting roasted. Thermal burns and shock waves and who knows what all. That junk gives me the willies.”

“Sweetheart—”

“And you guys act like I’m bonkers. Like I’m loony or something.”

My father clicked his spoon against the chicken platter.

“Easy does it,” he said.

“It’s true! Laughing at me, telling stupid jokes. I
heard
you.”

They were quiet for a moment.

“William,” my father said gently. He closed his eyes, then opened them. “We weren’t laughing at you. We weren’t.”

“Sure.”

“We were amused,” he said. “Fair enough? The Ping-Pong table, the charcoal. Just amusing.” His eyes fastened on me. He didn’t blink. “Think about it. Amusing, isn’t it?”

“Ha-ha,” I said.

“Come on, now. See the humor? A Ping-Pong table versus the bomb?”

“Right,” I said, “except I fixed it up. The bricks and pencils and stuff. I’m not stupid.”

My father almost smiled. I could tell he was trying not to.

“No,” he said carefully, “you’re not stupid. A bright boy, I’d say.” He paused, absently tapping a spoon against his plate. He cleared his throat. “One thing, though—one thing I’m curious about. The pencils. What are all those pencils for?”

“Lead,” I told him.

His eyelids fluttered. I could tell he didn’t get it.

“Lead, it stops radioactivity. I bet you didn’t even
know
that.”

Again, my father tried to stop from smiling, but this time he didn’t quite make it.

“Ah, yes,” he said softly, “I see.” He made a funny whistling sound through his teeth. “A smart, smart cookie.”

I grinned at him. For an instant it seemed that I’d wrested an important admission from my father, almost an apology.

He gazed at me for a long time.

“Just one tiny problem,” he said.

“Such as?”

“Nothing much. Tiny.”

He looked at my mother. Something odd passed between them, a kind of warning. My mother got up and moved to the stove.

“Forget it,” said my father.

“No, let’s hear it. Like what?”

“Well,” he said. His shoulders were rigid. His hands whitened against the tablecloth. “I hate to break the news, kiddo, but pencils don’t contain real lead. They
call
it lead, but in fact it’s graphite or something.”

“Graphite?”

“Afraid so.”

I took a bite of chicken and chewed and swallowed. It was the driest, most tasteless chicken I’d ever eaten.

“Well, sure,” I mumbled, “I knew that all along.”

“Of course.”

“I
did
.”

Down inside, though, I felt like strangling myself. Graphite, I thought. Parents could be absolutely merciless. They just kept coming at you, wearing you down, grinding away until you finally crumbled.

“Graphite,” I said. “I
knew
that.”

My dad nodded.

He was a decent man—an ideal father—but for an instant I felt killing rage, the same venom I felt for Crenshaw. That stone-hard face of his. And those eyes, so smart and unyielding. I loved him, but I also hated him. I hated the whole grown-up world with its secret codes and secret meanings. As if for the sport of it, adults
were always keeping important information up their sleeves, and then, bang, when you least expected it, they’d zap you right between the eyes: “Hey, dumbo,” they’d say, “didn’t you know that lead pencils are made out of graphite?” It was cruel and senseless. Why not come straight out with things? Bombs, for instance. Were they dangerous or not? Was the planet in jeopardy? Could the atom be split? Why wasn’t anyone afraid? Why not clue me in? The truth, that’s all I wanted. The blunt facts.

My father’s hands came apart. Only the fingertips were touching. His lips curled: a smile or a smirk? How could you be sure?

“Anyway,” he said.

It was bewildering and sad. Sitting there at the kitchen table, I suddenly didn’t give a damn about fallout or nukes or civil defense. All I wanted was to get back to normal. The way things were going, I was afraid I might end up like that ex-buddy of mine, a chemistry set bozo, testing nails for their iron content.

“Graphite,” I said. “
Piss
on it.”

After supper I stayed away from the basement. I helped my mother with the dishes, knocked off some homework, watched the last ten minutes of
You Bet Your Life
, then went to bed.

Except I couldn’t sleep.

I was afraid. For myself, for my prospects as an ordinary human being. It was like getting on a tightrope. You start tiptoeing across, very slowly, feeling your way, but you know you can’t make it, you know you’re going to fall, and it’s only a question of which way you’ll go, left or right. I could either end up like my ex-buddy, a screwball, or like my dad, a regular guy. No other options.

And the nuclear stuff. I was afraid of that, too.

Lying in bed, pillow tucked up against my belly, I couldn’t push the terror away. I wasn’t nuts. I wasn’t seeing ghosts. Somewhere out there, just beyond the range of normal vision, there was a bomb with my name on it.

I tossed around in bed, curling up, uncurling, trying out different sleep positions.

Perhaps I did sleep. Not for long. A Soviet SS-4 whizzed right
over the house. I almost died. There was a rumble, then a whine, then a shrill sucking sound. Far off, the earth’s crust trembled; continental plates shifted in the night. The mountains above town, so solid and ancient, began to groan like the very deepest summer thunder. I held my breath. In the distance, a mile away, a trillion miles, I could hear the sizzle of a lighted fuse. I could smell hot bacon. Then suddenly the sky was full of pigeons, millions, every pigeon on earth—screeches and wings and glowing eyes. I jerked up in bed. I was stunned. I just watched. Against the far window a single fly buzzed and hissed. The planet tilted. Kansas was burning. Hot lava flowed down the streets of Chicago. It was all there, each detail: Manhattan sank into the sea, New Mexico flared up and vanished. All across the country, washing machines kicked into their spin cycles, radios blared, oceans bubbled, jets scrambled, vending machines emptied themselves, the Everglades went bone dry. Oddly, I felt no fear. Not at first. It was a kind of paralysis, the curiosity of a tourist. There were dinosaurs. The graveyards opened. Marble churches burned like kindling. New species evolved and perished in split seconds. Every egg on the planet hatched.

Clutching my pillow, I watched the moon float away.

And then the flashes came. I almost smiled—here it was. Continent to continent: red flashes and silver flashes and brilliant un-colored flashes, raw energy, the blinding laws of physics, green and gold flashes, slippery yellow flashes that fuzzed like heat lightning, black flashes in a chrome sky, neutrons, protons, a high pop fly that never quite came down, a boy in a baseball cap shielding his eyes, circling, waiting forever, pink flashes, orange and blue, powdery puffs of maroon and turquoise opening up like flowers, a housewife running for the telephone, a poet puzzling over a final line, a grounded submarine, a silent schoolhouse, a farmer frozen on his tractor, cobalt flashes, bronze and copper and diamond-white, and it was raining upside down—but the rain was burning, it wasn’t really rain, it was wet and burning—loud noises, electricity, burning mountains and rivers and forests, and those flashes, all colors, the melted elements of nature coursing into a single molten
stream that roared outward into the very center of the universe—everything—man and animal—
everything
—the great genetic pool, everything, all swallowed up by a huge black hole.

The world wasn’t safe.

I grabbed my pillow and ran for the basement. No time to think. It was cold down there, mildewy and damp, silent as outer space, but I crawled under the Ping-Pong table and hugged myself and waited.

“Yo-yo,” I whispered. “You poor sick yo-yo.”

But even then I couldn’t leave the fragile safety of my shelter. I tried but I couldn’t.

“Crazy,” I said.

I said it loud. Maybe I even shouted it. Because right away my father was there, he was there with me, under the table.

“William,” he was saying, “it’s okay, it’s okay.”

He held me tight, cradling me, arms around my shoulders. I could smell the heat of his armpits.

“It’s okay now,” he purred, “no problem, you can
keep
the shelter, honest, you can fix it up like a fortress—why not, why not? Better than nothing, right? Right? Take it slow, now.”

All the while he was massaging my neck and shoulders and chest, cooing in that soft voice, warming me, holding me close. We lay under the table for a long time.

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.

3
Chain Reactions
 

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