The Nuclear Age (21 page)

“You did.”

“Now they’re listening.”

“Sarah?”

“Oh, sure,” he said, “especially Sarah. Sometimes I almost wonder … Anyhow, you’ll see. She’s got some rude new friends.”

“Who—”

“Three fucking
years
ago, I said it. You heard me, right? I
said
it.”

“Yes. What about these friends?”

Ollie stood up. He unwrapped a stick of Juicy Fruit, folded it twice, placed it on his tongue, and chewed vigorously. “Just pals,” he said. “Concerned citizens, you might say.”

“Bad-weather types?”

“Sure,” he said, shrugging, “you might say that, too. Vigilantes. Various shades of dread. The network, it’s your basic franchise principle, like Kentucky Fried Terror. Independently owned and operated, but you can always count on the Colonel.”

“Happy arrangement,” I said.

“I guess. Let’s eat.”

We ordered sandwiches at a stand-up counter. Ollie reviewed my itinerary and told me the hard part was over. Like when a little kid starts walking, he said, the first few steps were tough, he understood that—sort of seasick, everything moving at weird angles—but in a week or two I’d get the hang of it. A month, max. He said to treat it like a business trip, a vacation, whatever. A big country, he said. Not to worry about Uncle Sam. Don’t start seeing ghosts. Paranoia, that was the killer. Just follow the rules of the road, he said, then he listed them for me, how I should avoid strangers, stay cool, keep my nose clean. Never jaywalk, he said. Be a good citizen. Then he laughed. “There’s nothing like crime,” he said softly, “to keep you honest.”

I was not feeling well. Disconnections, I thought, or maybe the sandwich.

Ollie’s voice seemed to be coming from the far end of the terminal.

“What you have to remember,” he was saying, then came a short hum. “See what I mean? Right now you’re on the ultimate guilt trip, just ride it out. You know?”

I excused myself.

“Oysters,” I said, “you were right.”

In the men’s room I sat on the can and let the fuses blow.

I’d been expecting it, or something like it, and now it was bad. There was just the indeterminate future. It occurred to me that I should cry. Briefly, as if slipping out of myself, I imagined that I was back home again, watching all this on television.

Hollywood, I decided.

I washed up and combed my hair. If you’re sane, I thought, you look at the end of things but you can’t cry because the end isn’t real. You put on a David Janssen smile. Because nothing ever ends, not really.

Later, in the lobby, Ollie suggested deep breathing.

“Like this,” he said, and he demonstrated for me, puffing up his cheeks. “Slow and deep, it works magic.” He took me by the arm, lightly, just steering. “The depths, pal, lots of pressure per square inch. The bends, right? That first dive, you just got to breathe slow and deep.”

We took our time heading down to the TWA gate area. It was a thirty-minute wait. When the flight was announced, Ollie went over to a pay phone, placed a quick call, then came back and handed over a packet of tickets.

“Okay, you’re off,” he said. “The Big Apple. Another layover at La Guardia then a straight shot down to Miami. Pure gravity the whole way.” There was a soft, almost compassionate expression on his face; he paused and held out a stick of Juicy Fruit. “Don’t dwell on it. Put her on cruise and just coast for a while. The gum, too. Keeps the ears unplugged, helps decompress. No problem, you just got caught in a draft.”

There was turbulence all the way to New York. I didn’t crack. I put myself on glide, breathing deep, imagining I was aboard
a one-man spaceship tracking for the stars. Far below, the home planet spun on its axis, a pleasing vision, those lovely whites and blues, the fragile continents, and as I sailed away, as the world receded, I felt a curious measure of nostalgia, desire mixed with grief. Here, in space, there was just the smooth suck of inertia.

At La Guardia I dozed off for an hour, then roamed around the terminal, then called home.

It did not matter that the line was busy. I just kept talking, very quietly, picturing my mother’s face, and my father’s, explaining to them that I was running because I couldn’t envision any other way, because the dangers exceeded the reach of my imagination. Safety, I said. Nothing else. Not honor, not conscience. All I wanted for myself was a place to ride out the bad times.

“It isn’t cowardice,” I said, “it’s my life.”

And then I chuckled.

No big deal, I told them, because none of it was real. If you’re sane, that is.

I put courage in my voice. I told them how alone I felt, how much I missed them, but how it was all a daydream. There are no bombs, I said. We live forever. It’s a steady-state universe. I told them about the spaceship sensation, warped time and high velocity, as if I were traveling through some strange new dimension, another world, no maps or landmarks, no right or wrong, no ends to the earth.

It was Trans World from there on.

A clear night sky, like glass, and I could see it all. I could see the lights of Atlantic City, the scalloped edges of Chesapeake Bay, the tidewaters of Virginia. The clarity was amazing. Telescopic breadth and microscopic precision. I could see Baltimore and Richmond and Washington, the glowing dome on the nation’s Capitol, the Lincoln Memorial, the dark Carolinas, Cape Hatteras and Cape Fear, the quiet suburbs of Norfolk, the rivers and inlets, the Jersey shore, north to Maine, south to the Keys, all of it, the whole profile, the long sleeping silhouette of midnight America.

I was in orbit. The eye of a satellite. A space walk, and I was tumbling at the end of my tether.

There were lights in the Kremlin.

I could see a submarine in the shallows off Cape Cod, like a fish, and I could see Kansas, too, where there was a harvest moon and vast fields of corn and wheat, and men in blue uniforms beneath the translucent earth. The men wore silk scarves and black boots. They were not real men, of course, for none of it is real, not the blue uniforms and not the boots and not the Titan II missile with its silver nose cone and patriotic markings. I could see Los Alamos, too, where nothing real had ever happened; I could see across the ocean to Bikini; I could see the Urals and the Sweethearts; I could see all of what cannot be seen, because it’s beyond seeing, because we’re sane.

The Trans World engines made a lullaby sound. People slept, the flight attendants chatted in the galley.

There was nowhere to land.

Below, in the dark, I watched ball lightning strike Georgia: a conspicuous white fireball that rolled toward Atlanta. The jet was on low-hum cruise. There was comfort in knowing it could not be real. Later, I fell asleep, and later yet, as we passed over Charleston and Savannah, I could see how it might happen, if it could, though it can’t—crisscrossing threads of color in the great North American dark, bright flashes zigzagging from sea to sea. It was not a dream. One by one, all along the length of the eastern seaboard, the great cities twinkled and burned and vanished. A half-dream, I thought. I felt no fear. I buckled my seat belt. I knew what was next, and when it came, I watched with a kind of reverence. There were flashes of red and gold. There were noises, too, and powdery puffs of maroon and orange and royal blue, fungal arrangements in the lower atmosphere, the laws of physics. But it was not real. When it happens, I realized, it will not happen, because it cannot happen. It will not be real.

The jet dipped, bounced, and woke me up.

I pushed the call button.

Just a nightmare, the stewardess said, and I nodded, and she
brought me a martini and wiped my brow and then held my hand for a while.

Over Miami we went into a holding pattern. I was sick, but I fell in love.

When I told her so, the stewardess smiled and said it was the martini, or altitude sickness.

We circled over the Everglades at ten thousand feet.

She said my skin was green—pale green, she said, like a Martian. Then she gave my hand a squeeze. She asked if I was feeling better. I said I felt fine, I was in love.

The stewardess crossed her legs. She was tall and slim, with space-blue eyes and yellow hair and a pair of wings on her collar and a name tag at her breast that said Bobbi.

“Bobbi what?” I asked, but again she smiled, and after a moment she told me names didn’t matter. There were company policies, and private policies, too. But in any case names didn’t matter, did they? I thought about it as we banked over the Atlantic. No, I decided, names did not necessarily matter. But without names, I asked, how would we get married? I told her we had to be practical. Bobbi smiled at this and said it seemed a bit sudden. I agreed with her. Things sometimes happened suddenly, I said, even things that could not happen. Passion, for instance, and commitment. Her eyes were cryptic. Was this a line? she asked. It was not a line. She took the olive from my martini and fed it to me, saying I needed vitamins, I should find a nice beach somewhere and stretch out and bake away the bad dreams. She told me to close my eyes. I was sick and the plane was circling through fog. What about love? I asked. Could we run away together? How many children would she want? Over the Everglades she looked at me and said, You’re crazy, you know that? I knew. Bobbi nodded. Then I told her as much as there was time to tell. I told her about the dynamic. It was crushing, I said. How much was real? Was
she
real? I told her I was caught up by current events. I couldn’t separate right from wrong. I needed a hideout. Would she mind saving my life? Could we find an island somewhere?

“Bobbi
what?
” I asked, but she only smiled.

The plane seemed to wobble for a moment, then stabilized. The fog was gone and there were stars and blinking lights. I listened to the engines.

Later, very softly, Bobbi talked about flight and books and travel and poetry. Poetry, she said, that was her first love. Would I care to hear a poem? Very much, I said. And she recited one about a violet sunset over Hudson Bay. A remarkable piece of work, I thought; I asked what it meant. She gave me a long secret look and explained that poems do not
mean
, that art is like grass and dreams, like people holding hands in the sky, that meanings are merely names, just as grass is a name, but that grass would still be grass without its name. I did not fully understand this. What I understood was love, and I asked if we could go away to Hudson Bay. Watch the sunsets? Live happily? Build a cabin in the woods? She said no, but she touched my face. She recited Auden and Frost and Emily Dickinson, then several of her own poems, and I thought about Sarah, and how sick I was, and lost, and in love.

I drifted away for a time. Just hovering, on hold, and when I looked up I was alone.

To what extent, I wondered, was it real?

A hard landing—too much torque. There was again the problem of gravity.

At the ramp, I waited for the plane to empty out. She was gone. But when I put my coat on, I found a poem pinned to the pocket—
Martian Travel
—and it was signed Bobbi. That much was real. The words didn’t matter. It had to do with flight and fantasy and pale green skin, which was hard to follow, but it seemed meaningful despite the absence of meaning. There was some grass tucked into the fold. Plain dried grass, yet fragrant, and a postscript which explained that the grass expressed her deepest feelings for me.

We spent two days in a motel on the outskirts of Miami. The grass, I kept thinking. I couldn’t match it to the real world. When I was well enough to travel, Sarah rented a van and fixed up a bed in back, pillows and blankets.

“Home free,” she said.

We made Key West in just under four hours. There was blue water and sickness and jungly greens and a fierce sun that made my eyes burn. What did it
mean?
The pieces wouldn’t fit. A white stucco house, I remember, and Ned Rafferty said, “Hang tight,” and he helped me inside, where it was cool, and then I felt the disease. Chills turning to fever. It was true illness. Emotional burnout, too, but the rest was physical. I remember a ceiling fan spinning over my bed. A heavy rain, then dense humidity; faces bobbing up—Tina Roebuck peeling an orange, Ned Rafferty wringing out a washcloth and folding it across my forehead. There were voices, too. Some I recognized, some I didn’t. And cooking smells. And intense heat, and doors swinging open, and a radio at low volume in another room. The smells were tropical. At times I’d seem to float away on one of those leisurely space walks. Nowhere to land, I’d think, and I’d be circling over the Everglades, airborne, all flight and fantasy.

“It’s done,” Sarah kept telling me.

She was patient. At night, when the chills came, she would come close and whisper, “End of the road.”

Key Wasted, Tina called it. There was no war here, and no clamor, just the tropical numbs.

Over that first month we took things slow. Hour by hour, quiet meals and quiet conversation. The patterns were entirely domestic. Tina did the shopping and cooking, Rafferty tended a small garden out back. For me, it was recovery. Safe, I’d think. A safe house, a safe neighborhood, and the underground seemed tidy and languid. There were no choices to make; the killing was elsewhere. Our little bungalow was situated at the edge of Old Town, near the cemetery, on a narrow, dead-end lane that was prosperous with window boxes and sunlight. No one talked politics. If this was the movement, I decided, the movement was fine, because nothing moved. Our neighbors were property owners and retired naval officers and widows and watercolorists. The houses were painted in pastels. In the yards were many flowers and pruned shrubs. During the day, from my bedroom window, I’d watch people
passing by in their bright clothes, and at night I could hear radios tuned to the Voice of Havana.

I’d hear myself thinking: Where am I?

On the lam, I’d think. Then I’d smile. What, I wondered, was a lam? And why did it sound so corny and sad?

“There now,” Sarah would say. “Sleep it off.”

But my dreams were unwholesome. Criminal and outlandish. One night I was Custer. Another night I was chased through a forest by men with torches and silver badges—“Shame!” they were yelling—but I put my head down and ran. I dreamed of dishonor. I dreamed of dragnets and posses and box canyons and dead ends. “Shame!” my father yelled, but I couldn’t stop running. And then, dreaming, but also awake, I came to a country where there was great quiet and peace. It was a country without language, without names for shame and dishonor. Here, there was nothing worth dying for, not liberty or justice or national sovereignty, and nothing worth killing for. It was a country peopled by apostates and mutineers, those who had dropped their arms in battle, runaways and deserters and turncoats and men with faint hearts.