The Nuclear Age (8 page)

“Makes sense,” he finally said. Then he hesitated and made an indefinite, sweeping gesture with his arm. “But doesn’t it get a little lonely? A guy like you—you must have a million friends. You don’t shut them out?”

“Well, no,” I said. “I use the phone a lot. Safer that way.”

“Safer?”

“Sure it is. No complications. Very clean.”

Adamson’s eyes thickened. “Lucky guy,” he said. “Personally, I don’t even
have
friends. Nobody to call up.”

“Nobody?”

“Zero.”

I crossed my legs and settled back. Once again, briefly, I wondered if he was putting me on. I wanted to trust him but I had to keep my bases covered.

“No friends?” I said, and for the next hour or so we combed through the man’s balled-up social life, every sad detail.

In the evenings, after supper, my mother and father and I would usually kill time by strolling around the city, checking out shop-windows, trying to put a happy face on things. Except in the most general terms, they never asked about my meetings with Chuck Adamson, but still I knew they were going through a rough period.
Late at night I’d wake up and hear them talking in the adjoining room, soft hospital voices, hush-hush and serious. It was painful. I wanted to rap on the wall and tell them to stop worrying. “Take it easy,” I wanted to say, “I’ll make it.” But they wouldn’t have listened. When your parents think you’ve gone haywire, it’s impossible to talk them out of it. So I’d lie there listening to those wee-hour motel sounds. Pacing footsteps, doors opening, doors closing, a television set blaring out
The Star-Spangled Banner
. My mother crying. My dad consoling her. “Relax,” I wanted to say.

I was feeling terrific. The headaches were gone, and I slept well, and on the fourth or fifth day, right before my morning consultation, I squeezed out one of the sweetest movements in the annals of toiletry. Later, in Adamson’s office, I couldn’t resist bragging. “Well,” I said, “it happened.”

“What’s that?” he asked.

He took a couple of guesses, way off the mark, so finally I blurted out the news. It didn’t impress him. He turned away and shuffled through some papers.

I stopped him cold.

“Hey, listen,” I said, “I’m
cured
. You’re a doctor—
say
something.”

Adamson frowned.

“Nice going,” he mumbled, “good job,” but he wasn’t even listening.

Obviously the man wasn’t cut out for that line of work. Later that morning, as subtly as possible, I suggested that he take some time off to reevaluate his career objectives. “You don’t put out any effort,” I told him. “You don’t pay attention, you don’t listen, you don’t
do
anything. It’s all me me me.” I could see sweat stains at the armpits of his shirt, but I had to lay it out for him. I was crisp and clinical. “For openers,” I said, “you’re definitely the most depressing human being I ever met. How can you expect to help people? Even if you wanted to, which you don’t, how could you cheer anybody up? I mean, those
eyes
of yours.”

He touched his forehead. “Lay off, William. My eyes are fine.”

“They’re
not
fine,” I said. “Look in the mirror, for Christ sake. Those sad, miserable little eyeballs. Think how your patients must feel. And it’s dangerous. Sadness. It can actually kill people.”

“Kill?”

“That’s right. Kill.”

I moved to his desk and picked up a wooden ruler and slapped it against the palm of my hand.

“I’m no expert,” I told him, “but the first thing is to take a good look at yourself. Stop covering up. Stop pretending.” I waved the ruler at him. “You might not believe me, but I’ve had some experience with this sadness stuff, and there’s one thing I know for sure. Self-deception, that’s the killer. You can’t get well if you don’t admit you’re sick. You have to open up the gates. Cut out the complaining. Have some fun, for crying out loud. Find yourself a hobby.”

Then I filled him in on the virtues of rock collecting. I told him how stable it was, how rocks never deserted you or let you down.

“Safety?” he said.

“There it is. Safety.”

Adamson made a crisp, decisive motion with his jaw. “I get the message. Locked doors and rocks.”

“For sure,” I said. “The main thing, though, is to find something you’re good at, something you enjoy. Just trying to help.”

He nearly smiled.

“Yes,” he said, “and I appreciate it, William.”

“Rocks.”

“Rocks. Thank you.”

I shrugged and pretended to tie my shoe.

“No sweat,” I said, “that’s what friends are for.”

Basically, that was the end of my therapy.

On the last day we got involved in a rambling, pointless conversation about the end of the world. Ridiculous, I thought, but for some reason Adamson was all fired up about the subject. It started out very innocently. I was giving him pointers on how to get set up in the rock-collecting business, listing the various tools he’d
need, and then, out of nowhere, Adamson brought up the fact that he used to own a toy telescope back when he was a kid. I couldn’t shut him off. He kept chattering on and on about how much he’d loved that telescope. “Astronomy,” he said, “now there’s a magical hobby—astronomy.” He gave the word a cushioned sound, as if it were somehow breakable, and that’s when I made the mistake of asking a couple of questions. I did it to pep him up. To prove I cared. Right away, he was off and running, giving me the entire in-depth lecture on stars and galaxies and the chemical composition of Halley’s Comet. I’d never seen him so excited. Almost smiling, almost happy. “Astronomy, that’s terrific,” I finally said, “but if you’re so hepped about it, why not take some action? Buy yourself a new telescope.”

Adamson wagged his head. “No,” he murmured, “I don’t think so. Too depressing.”

“You were just telling me—”

“Super depressing.” His entire posture seemed to change. It was back to suicide-as-usual. “You want to know the truth?” he said softly. “Why I gave up astronomy?”

I didn’t, but I nodded.

“Doom,” he said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Doom.”

Then he almost shouted it: “Doom! End of the world, end of everything! You want a depressing hobby? Try astronomy—
doom!
Christ, you don’t know the half of it.”

He was right, I didn’t, but he wasn’t shy about laying it out for me: How someday the sun would begin cooling down, losing energy, and how our pretty little planet would freeze up into a shining ball of ice.

“Doom!” he yelled. “Nothing else, just doom doom doom! Frozen oceans! Frozen continents!
Doom
, that’s the lesson of astronomy.”

He rubbed his face.

For a moment he seemed lost, but then he took a breath and went on to explain how the sun would pull one final trick before it
died. A terminal flash. Nothing left, he said. Not a tombstone. Not a mountain. Not a statue or a book. Nothing. No trees or grass or amber waves of grain. No bacteria. No people. Nothing. Not a single footprint. It was inescapable—a law of nature.

“Doom,” he said. “And that’s just the start. It gets worse.”

Then he explained how the entire universe was scheduled for destruction. Not just our own puny planet. Everything. Every star, every speck of dust. It was hard to follow the technicalities, which had to do with whether we live in a collapsing or expanding universe, but his main point was that no matter how you cut it, whichever theory you believed, the end result was doom.

“The end of the world,” he said flatly. “Don’t kid yourself, it’s in the cards. Can’t prevent it, nowhere to run. Just a question of time.”

He stared at me, half smiling. There was a smugness about it that touched a nerve.

Showdown, I thought.

I sat up straight and pointed a finger at him and told him I was fed up.

“The same old bitching day after day,” I said. “It’s a sickness. You’re happy to be unhappy. That’s how you get your kicks. Unhappiness. A disease.”

He shook his head.

“Science,” he said. “You can’t ignore it.”

“Here we go.”

“Doom, William.”

“So what?” I snapped. “We
all
die. You’re a doctor, you should
know
that.”

“Oh, I do know.”

“And?”

“Nothing, I guess.” He looked at me with an expression of intense disappointment. “Nothing. Except I thought you and I were on the same wavelength about this.”

“About
what?
”

“All of it. Civilization. I mean, yes, we all die. But we have these … these ways of coping. Our children. The genetic pool.
The things we’ve made, books and buildings and inventions. Doesn’t Edison still live in his light bulb? Switch it on and there he is. Immortality, in a way. A kind of faith. We plant trees and raise families, and those are ways of seeking—I don’t know—a kind of significance. Life after death. That’s what civilization
is:
life after death. But if you wipe out civilization—”

He stopped and waited. It was as if he were asking me to complete the sentence.

“See the sticker?” he said. “Nothing lasts. Doom, it means no children. No genetic pool. No memory. When the lights go out, Edison goes out. And what significance did his life have? Erased. Shakespeare and Einstein. You and me.”

“But nobody—”

“Right, nobody realizes,” he said. “Nobody cares. People just keep diddling on. A joke, they think. But it’s not. It’s our goddamn silhouette.”

We sat facing each other, eye to eye, and for an instant there was something very much like a bond between us, as if we were touching, or embracing, shared knowledge and shared vision, two losers drawn together by the interlocking valences of terror.

“Imagination,” Adamson said gently, “that’s what you and I have in common. A wonderful faculty, but sometimes it gets out of control, starts rolling downhill, no brakes, and all you can do is hang on for dear life and hope you don’t—”

“Crack up,” I said.

I looked down at the ragged edges on my fingernails. And then suddenly, without planning it, I was talking about bombs and missiles and radioactivity and thermal blasts and the sound of a Soviet SS-4 zipping across the night sky. Real, I told him. The silos and submarines and launching pads. Things you could touch. Real things. It wasn’t some theory, I said, it wasn’t a ghost story, it was real.

My voice caught.

“Crazy,” I said.

Adamson sat very still. “No, just special. Very special.”

We were quiet again; that bonded feeling.

Adamson finally smiled at me and came across the room and shook my hand. It was an awkward moment. He kept squeezing, hanging on.

“Well,” I said, “I hope that helps. Sometimes it’s better to talk things out.”

He laughed and said, “You bet, it helps plenty.” He clapped me on the back, fairly hard, as if signaling something, then he led me out to the elevator. Funny, but I felt a little choked up, almost teary. We stood there in the hallway, not quite looking at each other, and then we shook hands again. “
Adios
,” he said. But a strange thing happened next. When the elevator doors opened, Adamson got in and rode down to the first floor with me and followed me all the way outside. Like an orphan, I thought, or a stray dog.

My mom and dad were parked across the street, ready to head home, but I couldn’t just walk away. I thanked him for all the help. A good listener, I said, a good sharp mind. Adamson shrugged. He took out a pencil and a scrap of paper and jotted down a telephone number.

“Keep it in your wallet,” he said. “Night or day. I’m here.”

He looked away.

There was a short silence, then he laughed and said, “A charade, you were right.”

He pointed up at the dome on the state capitol.

“Politics,” he said. “A new racket. What the hell—run for governor.”

“You’re a shoo-in, Chuck.”

“You think so?”

“Absolutely. I mean, hey, you’ve got the sympathy vote all locked up.”

We smiled at each other.

“Friends?” he said, and I said, “Friends,” and then my dad honked the horn and I turned and trotted across the street.

Those six days in therapy did not turn my life around. The headaches disappeared, and my plumbing problems cleared up, but
otherwise things remained almost exactly the same. A wobbly gyroscope; a normal guy in an abnormal world. But now and then, when the pressures began to accumulate, it cheered me up to think about Chuck Adamson, remembering that dismal face of his, imagining his campaign for the governorship—anti-high school, anti-baseball, anti-social. A hard person to pin down. How much was acting, how much was real? Even now, in memory, it all blends together. Those moist, fearful eyes and that weary posture and the way he’d sigh and tap his pencil and gaze out at the bright golden dome on the state capitol.

I missed him.

That much was for sure. I did miss the man.

Except for a few postcards, I had no contact with him for the next seven or eight years, and yet there was still a certain consolation in having his phone number tucked away in my wallet, just in case. Like a safety valve, or a net. Often, during bad times, I’d take out that wrinkled scrap of paper and quietly rub my fingers across it, memorizing the numbers, and on one or two occasions I came very close to putting in a long-distance distress call, person to person. I’d dial and break the connection and then spend an hour or so in a nice relaxed conversation, almost real, as if we were back in his office again, discussing telescopes and loneliness and the powers of the human imagination, figuring out ways to cope with the end of the world.

4
Quantum Jumps