The Nuclear Age

1 Quantum Jumps

AM I CRAZY?

It’s after midnight, and I kiss my wife’s cheek and quietly slide out of bed. No lights, no alarm. Blue jeans and work boots and a flannel shirt, then out to the backyard. I pick a spot near the tool shed. A crackpot? Maybe, maybe not, but listen. The sound of physics. The soft, breathless whir of Now.

Just listen.

Close your eyes, pay attention: Murder, wouldn’t you say? A purring electron? Photons, protons? Yes, and the steady hum of a balanced equation.

I use a garden spade. High over the Sweetheart Mountains, a pale dwarf moon gives light to work by, and the air is chilly, and there is the feel of a dream that may last forever. “So do it,” I murmur, and I begin digging.

Turn the first spadeful. Then bend down and squeeze the soil and let it sift through the fingers. Already there’s a new sense of security. Crazy? Not likely, not yet.

If you’re sane, anything goes, everything, there are no more particulars.

It won’t be easy, but I’ll persevere.

At the age of forty-nine, after a lifetime of insomnia and midnight peril, the hour has come for seizing control. It isn’t madness. It isn’t a lapse of common sense. Prudence, that’s all it is.

Balance of power, balance of mind—a tightrope act, but where’s the net? Infinity could split itself at any instant.

“Doom!” I yell.

Grab the spade and go to work.

Signs of sanity: muscle and resolve, arms and legs and spine and willpower. I won’t quit. I’m a man of my age, and it’s an age of extraordinary jeopardy. So who’s crazy? Me? Or is it you? You poor, pitiful sheep. Listen—Kansas is on fire. What choice do I have? Just dig and dig. Find the rhythm. Think about those silos deep in fields of winter wheat. Five, four, slam the door. No metaphor, the bombs are real.

I keep at it for a solid hour. And later, when the moon goes under, I slip into the tool shed and find a string of outdoor Christmas lights—reds and blues and greens—rigging them up in trees and shrubs, hitting the switch, then returning to the job.

Silent night, for Christ sake. There’s a failure of faith. When the back door opens, I’m whistling the age-old carol.

“Daddy!” Melinda calls.

Now it starts.

In pajamas and slippers, ponytailed, my daughter trots out to the excavation site. She shivers and hugs herself and whispers, “What’s happening? What the heck’s going on?”

“Nothing,” I tell her.

“Oh, sure.”

“Nothing, princess. Just digging.”

“Digging,” she says.

“Right.”

“Digging what?”

I swallow and smile. It’s a sensible question but the answer carries all kinds of complications. “A hole,” I say. “What else?”

“Yeah, I guess.”

“Just a hole. See? Simple, isn’t it? Come on, baby, back to bed now—school tomorrow.”

“Hole,” Melinda mutters.

She folds her arms and looks at me with an expression that is at once stern and forgiving. A strange child. Twelve years old, but very wise and very tough: too wise, too tough. Like her mother, Melinda sometimes gives me the willies.

“Well, okay,” she says, then pauses and nibbles her lower lip. “Okay, but what kind of hole?”

“A deep one.”

“I know, but what—”

“Now listen,” I say, “I’m serious. Back inside. Pronto.”

Melinda squints, first at my spade, next at the Christmas lights, then at me. That mature gaze of hers, it makes me squirm.

“Tell the truth,” she demands, “what’s it for?”

“A long story.”

She nods. “A dumb story, I’ll bet.”

“Not at all.”

“Daddy!”

I drop the spade and kneel down and pat her tiny rump, an awkward gesture, almost beggarly, as if to ask for pardon. I make authoritative noises. I tell her it’s not important. Just a hole, I say—for fun, nothing else. But she doesn’t buy it. She’s a skeptic; Santa Claus never meant a thing to her.

What can I do?

I look at the moon and tell her the facts. And the facts are these. The world is in danger. Bad things can happen. We need options, a safety valve. “It’s a shelter,” I say gently. “Like with rabbits or gophers, a place to hide.”

Melinda smiles.

“You want to live there?” she says. “In a gopher hole?”

“No, angel, just insurance.”

“God.”

“Don’t swear.”

“Wow,” she says.

Her nose wiggles. There’s suspicion in that stiff posture, in the way she slowly cocks her head and backs away from me.

Kansas is on fire.

How do you explain that to a child?

“Well,” she sighs, “it’s goofy, all right. One thing for sure, Mommy’ll hit the ceiling, just wait. God, she’ll probably divorce you.”

“We’ll work it out.”

“Yeah, but I bet she’ll say it’s ridiculous, I bet she will. Who wants to be a gopher?”

Melinda sniffs and kicks at the hole.

“Poop,” she says.

I try to lift her up, but she turns away, telling me I’m too sweaty, too dirty, so I lead her inside by the hand. The house smells of Windex and wax. My wife is meticulous about such things; she’s a poet, the creative type; she believes in clean metaphors and clean language, tidiness of structure, things neatly in place. Holes aren’t clean. Safety can be very messy.

Melinda’s right—I’m in for some domestic difficulties—and if this project is to succeed, as it must, it will require the exercise of enormous tact and cunning.

Begin now.

I march my daughter to her bedroom. I tuck her between the all-cotton sheets. I brush a smudge of soil from her forehead, offer a kiss, tell her to sleep tight. All this is done tenderly, yet with authority.

“Daddy?” she says.

“Yes.”

“Nothing.”

“No,” I say, “go ahead.”

She shakes her head. “You’ll get mad.”

“I won’t.”

“Bet you will.”

“Won’t. Try me, kiddo.”

“Nothing,” she mumbles. “Except.”

“Yes?”

“Except, God, you’re pretty nutto, aren’t you? Pretty buggo, too.”

I don’t say a word. I smile and close the door.

In the kitchen, however, I feel some pain coming on. Buggo? I pour myself a glass of grape Kool-Aid and then stand at the big window that looks out on the backyard. It’s late, and my head hurts, but I make myself think things through rationally, step by step. Mid-April now—I can get it dug by June. Or July. Which leaves three months for finishing touches. A nice deep hole, then I’ll line the walls with concrete, put on a roof of solid steel. No cutting corners. Install a water tank. And a generator. And wall-to-wall carpeting. A family room, a pine-paneled den, two bedrooms, lots of closet space, maybe a greenhouse bathed in artificial sunlight, maybe a Ping-Pong table and a piano, the latest appliances, track lighting and a microwave oven and all the little extras that make for comfort and domestic tranquillity. It’ll be home. I’ll put in a word processor for Bobbi, a game room for Melinda, a giant freezer stocked with shrimp and caviar. Nutto? I’m a father, a husband, I have solemn responsibilities. It isn’t as if I enjoy any of this. I hate it and fear it. I would prefer the glory of God and peace everlasting, world without end, a normal household in an age of abiding normalcy.

It just isn’t possible.

I finish the Kool-Aid and rinse the glass and return to the hole. I’m exhausted, yes, and a bit groggy, but I find the spade and resume digging.

I’m not crazy. Eccentric, maybe. These headaches and cramped bowels. How long since my last decent stool? A full night’s sleep? Clogged up and frazzled, a little dizzy, a little scared. But not crazy. Fully sane, in fact.

Dig, the hole says.

Patience and tenacity. An inch here, an inch there, it’s a game of inches. Beat the Clock. Dig and dream.

A rough life, that’s my only excuse. I’ve been around. I’ve seen the global picture and it’s no fantasy—it’s real. Ask the microorganisms in Nevada. Ask the rattlesnakes and butterflies on that dusty plateau at Los Alamos. Ask the wall shadows at Hiroshima. Ask this question: Am I crazy? And then listen, listen hard, because you’ll get one hell of an answer. If you hold your breath, if you have the courage, you’ll hear the soft drip of a meltdown, the ping-ping-ping of submarine sonar, the half-life of your own heart. What’s to lose? Try it. Take a trip to Bikini. Bring your friends, eat a picnic lunch, a quick swim, a nature hike, and then, when night comes, build a bonfire and sit on the beach and just listen.

I’ve done it.

And I’ll be candid, I blinked. I ran for it. Ten years on the lam, hideout to hideout, dodging bombs and drafts and feds and all the atrocities of our machine-tooled age. You bet I’m eccentric. I was a wanted man; I was hounded by Defense Intelligence and the FBI; I was almost shot to death at Sagua la Grande; I watched my friends die on national television; I was a mover in the deep underground; I could’ve been another Rubin or Hoffman; I could’ve been a superstar.

But it’s finished now, no more crusades.

The year is 1995. We’re late in the century, and the streets are full of tumbleweed, and it’s every man for himself.

Times change—take a good hard look. Where’s Mama Cass? What happened to Brezhnev and Lester Maddox? Where’s that old gang of mine, Sarah and Ned and Tina and Ollie? Where’s the passion? Where’s Richard Daley? Where’s Gene McCarthy in this hour of final trial? No heroes, no heavies. And who cares? That’s the stunner: Who among us really cares? A nation of microchips. At dinner parties we eat mushroom salad and blow snow and talk computer lingo.

And me, I’m rich. I’m on a uranium roll. I’m well established and there’s no going back. My assets include a blond wife and a blond daughter, and expensive Persian rugs, and a lovely redwood ranch house in the Sweetheart Mountains.

Call it what you want—copping out, dropping out, numbness, the loss of outrage, simple fatigue. I’ve retired. Time to retrench. Time to dig in. Safety first.

2 Civil Defense

WHEN I WAS A KID, about Melinda’s age, I converted my Ping-Pong table into a fallout shelter. Funny? Poignant? A nifty comment on the modern age? Well, let me tell you something. The year was 1958, and I was scared. Who knows how it started? Maybe it was all that CONELRAD stuff on the radio, tests of the Emergency Broadcast System, pictures of H-bombs in Life magazine, strontium 90 in the milk, the times in school when we’d crawl under our desks and cover our heads in practice for the real thing. Or maybe it was rooted deep inside me. In my own inherited fears, in the genes, in a coded conviction that the world wasn’t safe for human life.

Really, who knows?

Whatever the sources, I was a frightened child. At night I’d toss around in bed for hours, battling the snagged sheets, and then when sleep finally came, sometimes close to dawn, my dreams would be clotted with sirens and melting ice caps and radioactive gleamings and ICBMs whining in the dark.

I was a witness. I saw it happen. In dreams, in imagination, I watched the world end.

Granted, I was always extra sensitive—squeamish, even a little cowardly—but it wasn’t paranoia or mental illness. I wasn’t crazy. Fort Derry, Montana, was a typical small town, with the usual gas stations and parks and public schools, and I grew up in a family that pursued all the ordinary small-town values. My father sold real estate, my mother kept house.

I was a happy kid.

I played war games, tried to hit baseballs, started a rock collection, rode my bike to the A&W, fed the goldfish, messed around. Normal, normal. I even ran a lemonade stand out along the sixth fairway at the golf course, ten cents a glass, plenty of ice: a regular entrepreneur.

Just a regular childhood in a regular town. Each summer, for instance, Fort Derry staged a big weekend celebration called Custer Days, and even now, decades later, I can still see that long parade down Main Street, the trombones and clowns and horses, the merchants dressed up in frontier clothes. I remember the carnival rides. And the rodeo. And my father, I remember him, too. Every summer he played the role of George Armstrong Custer. Every summer he died. It happened at night, out at the fairgrounds—Custer’s Last Stand—a dazzling historical pageant, blood and drama, the culmination of Custer Days. Up in the grandstand, among neighbors, my mother and I would eat ice cream and cotton candy while my father led the U.S. Seventh Cavalry to its annual reckoning at the Little Bighorn.

“There!” I’d cry.

Spotlights.

The National Anthem, the high call of a bugle, then my father would ride in on his big white stallion. He wore buckskins and a yellow wig. At his side was a silver sword; his face had the leathery gloss of a saddle.

I remember sabers and battle flags.

And then a drumroll.

And then a procession of mounted soldiers in blue uniforms and yellow neckerchiefs. I felt pride, but also panic. Jangling spurs and weaponry, canteens clanking, wagons, my father’s posture in the saddle. Tall and straight, those bright blue eyes.

I worshipped that man.

I wanted to warn him, rescue him, but I also wanted slaughter. How do you explain it? Terror mixed with fascination: I craved bloodshed, yet I craved the miracle of a happy ending. When the battle began—tom-toms and howls and gunfire—I’d make tight fists and stare out at the wonders of it all. I was curious. I’d shiver and look away and then quickly look back again. It was the implacable scripting of history; my father didn’t stand a chance. Yet he remained calm. Firing, reloading, firing—he actually smiled. He never ran, he never wept. He was always the last to die and he always died with dignity. Every summer he got scalped. Every summer Crazy Horse galloped away with my father’s yellow wig. The spotlights dimmed, a bugler played Taps, then we’d head out to the A&W for late-night root beers.

A mountain town.

Elevation, just under six thousand feet.

Population, just over a thousand.

Ranch country. Scrub grass and pine and dust. An old hitching post in front of the Strouch Funeral Home. A courthouse, a cemetery, the Ben Franklin store. What else? The Thompson Hotel. The Sweethearts, of course. A stone-walled library. The air, I remember, had the year-round smell of winter, a brittle snapping smell, and at night, brushing my teeth, I could taste something like sulphur at the back of my tongue.

A pretty place, I suppose, but boring.

“Culture’s that way,” my dad would say, pointing east, “and if you want it, civilization’s somewhere over that last ridgeline, more or less,” then he’d hook a thumb westward, as if hitchhiking. Isolated. Fifty-eight miles from Yellowstone, eighty miles from Helena, twenty miles from the nearest major highway.

We were not high on the Russian hit list. But how could you be sure? Fort Derry, it sounded like a target.

And, besides, mistakes happen.

Even as a kid, maybe because I was a kid, I understood that there was nothing make-believe about doomsday. No hocus-pocus. No midnight fantasy. I knew better. It was real, like physics, like the laws of combustion and gravity. I could truly see it: a sleek nose cone, the wiring and dials and tangled circuitry. Real firepower, real danger. I was normal, yes, stable and levelheaded, but I was also willing to face the truth.

Anyway, I didn’t have much choice. The nightmares had been squeezing my sleep for months, and finally, on a night in early May, a very quiet night, I woke up dizzy. My eyeballs ached. Things were so utterly silent I feared I’d gone deaf. Absolute silence. I sat up and wiped my face and waited for the world to rebalance itself. I’d been dreaming of war—whole continents on fire, oceans boiling, cities in ash—and now, with that dreadful silence, it seemed that the universe had died in its sleep.

I was a child. There were few options.

I scrambled out of bed, put on my slippers, and ran for the basement. No real decision, I just did it.

Basement, I thought.

I went straight for the Ping-Pong table.

Shivering, wide awake, I began piling scraps of lumber and bricks and old rugs onto the table, making a thick roof, shingling it with a layer of charcoal briquettes to soak up the deadly radiation. I fashioned walls out of cardboard boxes filled with newspapers and two-by-fours and whatever basement junk I could find. I built a ventilation shaft out of cardboard tubing. I stocked the shelter with rations from the kitchen pantry, laid in a supply of bottled water, set up a dispensary of Band-Aids and iodine, designed my own little fallout mask.

When all this was finished, near dawn, I crawled under the table and lay there faceup, safe, arms folded across my chest.

And, yes, I slept. No dreams.

My father found me down there. Still half asleep, I heard him calling out my name in a voice so distant, so muffled and hollow, that it might’ve come from another planet.

I didn’t answer.

A door opened, lights clicked on. I watched my father’s slippers glide across the concrete floor.

“William?” he said.

I sank deeper into my shelter.

“Hey, cowboy,” my father said. “Out.”

His voice had a stern, echoing sound. It made me coil up.

“Out,” he repeated.

I could see the blue veins in his ankles. “Okay, in a minute,” I told him, “I’m sort of busy right now.”

My father stood still for a moment, then shuffled to the far end of the table. His slippers made a whish-whish noise. “Listen here,” he said, “it’s a swell little fort, a dandy, but you can’t—”

“It’s not a fort,” I said.

“No?”

And so I explained it to him. How, in times like these, we needed certain safeguards. A line of defense against the man-made elements. A fallout shelter.

My father sneezed.

He cleared his throat and muttered something. Then, suddenly, in one deft motion, he bent down and grabbed me by the ankles and yanked me out from under the table.

Oddly, he was smiling.

“William,” he murmured. “What’s this?”

“What?”

“This. Right here.”

Leaning forward, still smiling, he jabbed a finger at my nose. At first I didn’t understand.

“Oh, yeah,” I said. “It’s a fallout mask.”

Actually, of course, it was just a paper bag filled with sawdust and charcoal briquettes. The bag had ventilation holes in it, and the whole contraption was attached to my face by strings and elastic bands. I grinned and started to show him how it worked, but my father raised his arm in a quick jerky movement, like a traffic cop, as if to warn me about something, then he squeezed my shoulder.

“Upstairs,” he said. “On the double. Right now.”

He seemed upset.

He pulled the mask off and marched me up the stairs, coming on strong with all that fatherly stuff about how I could’ve caught pneumonia, how he had enough to worry about without finding his kid asleep under a Ping-Pong table. All the while he kept glancing at me with those sharp blue eyes, half apprehensive and half amused, measuring.

When we got up to the kitchen, he showed my mother the mask. “Go ahead,” he said, “guess what it is.” But he didn’t give her a chance. “A fallout mask. See there? Regulation fallout mask.”

My mother smiled.

“Lovely,” she said.

Then my father told her about the Ping-Pong table. He didn’t openly mock me; he was subtle about it—a certain change of tone, raising his eyebrows when he thought I wasn’t looking. But I was looking. And it made me wince. “The Ping-Pong table,” he said slowly, “it’s now a fallout shelter. Get it? A fallout shelter.” He stretched the words out like rubber bands, letting them snap back hard: “Fallout shelter. Ping-Pong.”

“It’s sweet,” my mother said, and her eyes did a funny rolling trick, then she laughed.

“Fallout,” my father kept saying.

Again, they didn’t mean to be cruel. But even after they’d scooted me in for a hot bath, I could hear them hooting it up, making jokes, finally tiptoeing down to the basement for a peek at my handiwork. I didn’t see the humor in it. Over breakfast, I tried to explain that radiation could actually kill you. Pure poison, I told them. Or it could turn you into a mutant or a dwarf or something. “I mean, cripes,” I said, “don’t you guys even think about it, don’t you worry?” I was confused. I couldn’t understand those sly smiles. Didn’t they read the newspapers? Hadn’t they seen pictures of people who’d been exposed to radioactivity—hair burned off, bleeding tongues, teeth falling out, skin curled up like charred paper? Where was the joke in all that?

Somehow, though, I started feeling defensive, almost guilty, so finally I shut up and finished my pancakes and hustled off to school. God, I thought, am I crazy?

But that didn’t end it.

All day long I kept thinking about the shelter, figuring ways to improve on it, drawing diagrams, calculating, imagining how I’d transform that plywood table into a real bastion against total war. In art class, I drew up elaborate renovation blueprints; in study hall, I devised a makeshift system for the decontamination of water supplies; during noon recess, while the rest of the kids screwed around, I began compiling a detailed list of items essential to human survival.

No question, it was nuke fever. But I wasn’t wacko. In fact, I felt fully sane—tingling, in control.

In a way, I suppose, I was pushed on by the memory of that snug, dreamless sleep in my shelter. Cozy and walled in and secure. Like the feeling you get in a tree house, or in a snow fort, or huddled around a fire at night. I’ll even admit that my motives may have been anchored in some ancestral craving for refuge, the lion’s instinct for the den, the impulse that first drove our species into caves. Safety, it’s normal. The mole in his hole. The turtle in his shell. Look at history: the Alamo, castles on the Rhine, moated villages, turrets, frontier stockades, storm cellars, foxholes, barbed wire, an attic in Amsterdam, a cave along the Dead Sea. Besides, you can’t ignore the realities. You can’t use faggy-ass psychology to explain away the bomb.

I didn’t need a shrink. I needed sanctuary.

And that’s when the Pencil Theory hit me. I was sitting at my desk during the final hour of classes that day, daydreaming, doodling, and then bang, the answer was there like a gift from God. For a second I sat there frozen. I held the solution in my hand—a plain yellow pencil.

“Pencils,” I said.

I must’ve said it in a loud voice, too loud, because the teacher suddenly jerked her head and gave me a long stare. I just smiled.

The rest was simple.

When the final bell rang, I trotted down to the school supply room, opened up my book bag, stuffed it full of No. 2 soft-lead pencils, zipped the bag shut, and hightailed it for home. Nothing to it. I didn’t like the idea of thievery, but this wasn’t a time for splitting moral hairs. It was a matter of live or die.

That evening, while my mom and dad were watching I’ve Got a Secret, I slipped down into the basement and quietly went to work reinforcing my shelter.

The theory was simple: Pencils contain lead; lead acts as an effective barrier against radiation. It made perfect sense. Logical, scientific, practical.

Quickly, I stripped the table of everything I’d piled on it the night before, and then, very carefully, I began spreading out the pencils in neat rows, taking pains not to leave any cracks or spaces. Wizard, I thought. I replaced the lumber and bricks and rugs, added a double layer of charcoal briquettes, and then crowned it off with an old mattress. All told, my shelter’s new roof was maybe three feet thick. More important, though, it now included that final defensive shield of solid lead.

When I got upstairs, my father didn’t say much. He just frowned and shook his head and told me to hit the sack.

“Sleep tight, tiger,” he said—something like that. Then he closed his eyes.

Later my mother came by to tuck me in. I could tell she was worried. She kept clucking, smoothing down the blankets, touching me.

Finally she sat on the bed and hooked her fingers into mine and asked if things were okay, if I’d been having any problems.

I played it cool. “Problems?” I said.

“You know—” She smiled tentatively. “School problems, friend problems. You seem different.”

“Really?”

“Really,” she said. “What is it?”

What could I do? I couldn’t just blab it all out, tell her I’d been having visions of the world blowing up. Mothers don’t like to hear that sort of thing; they start blaming themselves. Besides, the whole business embarrassed me in a funny kind of way.

I shrugged and rubbed my eyes and told her everything was fine, no problems at all.

My mother patted my stomach.

“You’re sure?” she said.

For a long time, nearly a minute, she gazed at me in that scary way mothers have of psyching you out, getting you to spill out your deepest emotions just by staring you down. It made me squirm. It was as if she were digging around inside my head, actually touching things, tapping the walls for trapdoors and secret passageways.

“I’m okay,” I said, and smiled. “Perfect.”

But she kept staring at me. I forced myself to look up to meet her eyes, but the next thing I knew she was pressing her hand against my forehead, checking me for a fever.

“You know,” she said softly, “your father and I, we love you a great deal. Bunches and bunches.”

“Yeah,” I said, “thanks a million.”

“You understand that?”

“Sure I do.”

“Seriously. We love you.”

“I said thanks.”

“And so if things are bothering you, anything at all, you shouldn’t be afraid to talk it out. That’s what moms and dads are for.”

She went on like that for several minutes, gently prodding, coaxing me to talk. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. Just to reassure her, to make her feel better, I manufactured a story about how I’d been getting weird flashes in my sleep, like lightning—bright zinging flashes—and I must’ve laid it on pretty thick, because my mother’s face suddenly seemed to freeze.

“Flashes?” she said. “What kind of flashes?”

I shrugged. “The usual. Just flashes, the regular ones.”

Her lower lip puffed out at me.

“Red flashes, white flashes?”

“All colors,” I said. “Pink, mostly. And blue and green, you name it. It’s sort of beautiful, really, like a rainbow, I guess, or like shooting stars with great big tails, and then they start mixing together, they mix up into one gigantic flash, a huge one, and then everything sort of blows apart. It’s fun to watch.”

“William,” she whispered.

“But it’s okay now,” I told her. “I haven’t had a flash in a long time. Two weeks, I bet.”

My mother scanned my eyes. “William,” she started. Then she stopped, touched her lip, then started again. “William, darling, I think it’s time for a checkup.”

“Checkup?”

“I think so, yes.”

“The doctor, you mean?”

She nodded gravely. “Just to be safe.”

Clucking her tongue, speaking in the softly modulated tones of a school nurse, my mother explained that there were all kinds of diseases around, polio and mumps and so on, and then she kissed me, a long kiss, and told me I wouldn’t be going to school in the morning. “Right now,” she said, “I want you to get some sleep. In bed. No creeping down to the basement, promise me? No Ping-Pong.”

“God.”

“William?”

I pulled the pillow over my face. “Ridiculous,” I groaned, but I promised.

Next morning, first thing, Doc Crenshaw showed up with that black bag of his. I felt like an idiot. In the first place, I was perfectly healthy, not even a headache, and in the second place I hated Crenshaw with a passion you feel only once or twice in your entire life. He was a butcher. I don’t want to exaggerate, and I won’t, but there was something unmistakably foul about the man, almost evil. His breath: It was a mixture of formaldehyde and stale chewing tobacco and foot rot. And he looked as bad as he smelled. The simple truth—warts and wrinkles and liver spots and mushy yellow skin. Like a mummy. A walking stiff. And a personality to match. I despised the guy, and to be honest, Doc Crenshaw wasn’t all that fond of me either. It went back a long way. A few years earlier, when I was seven or eight, I had this embarrassing bicycle accident, a bad spill, and the damned bike came down on top of me and I ended up with a mangled pecker. A huge gash, and it hurt like crazy. My mother almost had a seizure when she saw it—I guess she thought I’d be sterilized or something—so very quickly, almost in a panic, she stuffed a towel into my pants and drove me down to Crenshaw’s office. The man had zero finesse. He laid me out on a table and cut off my underwear and started to sew me up, no anesthetic, no nothing, and naturally I squealed and squirmed around, and Crenshaw slapped my leg and told me to lie still, a sour-snappy voice, and then he jammed the needle in, and that’s when I yelled and sat up and kicked the son of a bitch. I don’t remember it, but my mother swears it happened, and apparently Crenshaw got fairly upset, because he put in these huge stitches, like railroad ties, and I’ve still got the scar on my pecker to prove it. Great big tread marks, as if I’d been sewn up by a blind man.

So there wasn’t a whole lot of love lost between me and Doc Crenshaw. The man had messed around with my pecker, and besides, he didn’t have what you’d call a gentle bedside manner.

“Well, well,” he always said.

When he came into my room that morning, I beat him to it: “Well, well,” I said.

He didn’t smile.

All business. He unzipped his bag and pulled out some rusty-looking gadgets and began poking away at me. No reassurances, no preliminaries, no friendly little nod.

“Flashes,” he grunted. “Never heard of such crap.”

I took a breath and tried to hold it. Given our history, I figured tact was the best policy, and so, quietly, I tried to explain that the flashes were just minuscule things, barely worth mentioning, and that my mother and father tended to worry too much.

“Actually,” I said, “if you want the truth, they might not be flashes at all.”

“No?”

“Well, sure, what I mean is, I mean, it always happens late at night, you know, real late, so maybe I’m just dreaming or something. Just dreams. Or else—”

“Crap,” he snapped.

A doctor, for God’s sake.

I couldn’t help it. Instantly, before I could stop myself, I was blabbering away about the flashes, elaborating, adding little flourishes here and there—how it always started with a high-pitched sizzling sound, like hot grease, like bacon on a skillet, and how my ears would start buzzing, and how I’d sometimes see an enormous silver-colored cloud spreading out for miles and miles. Weird rainbows, I told him. And a spectacular purple glow in the sky. Looking back on it, I’m not quite sure why I rambled on like that. To get sympathy, maybe. To give the story some credibility, to make him believe me. Or maybe, in some roundabout way, I was trying to clue him in on the real problem—real bombs, real danger. In any case, it went right over the old man’s head.

“Well, well,” he finally said.

Then he stared right at me.

I knew what was coming.

He started out by telling me that the flash stuff was total garbage, that I should be ashamed of myself for throwing a scare into my parents.

“Next time you hanker for a vacation,” he said, “just go play yourself some honest hooky. No more flash crap. Understood?”

“I wasn’t—”

“Understood?”

I nodded.

But he was dead wrong. I hadn’t tried to scare my mom and dad. Exactly the opposite: I wanted to make them feel better, give them something to focus on. They couldn’t understand the real issue—nuclear war and sirens and red alerts—and so I had to concoct the flashes as a kind of handle on things, something they could latch on to.

It was compassion.

But you couldn’t tell Crenshaw that. You couldn’t tell him anything.

When he was finished preaching at me, he packed up his equipment, went to the door, stopped, turned around, and looked at me for a few seconds.

Finally he smiled.

“By the way, young man,” he said. “How’s your penis?”

Then he cackled and limped away.

Murder, that’s all I could think. For a while I sat there slugging my pillow, but it didn’t help much, so I got out of bed and crept over to the doorway and listened in while he told my parents what a faker I was. I couldn’t hear much, just laughter, but then my father said something about the Ping-Pong table, and a few minutes later they trooped down to the basement.

Barefoot, I moved to the top of the stairs. And that’s when I heard my dad explaining to Crenshaw about the fallout shelter. Except he wasn’t explaining it. He was mocking it. Mocking me.

“Note the briquettes,” he said. “And the mattress. Safety cushion, right?”

Crenshaw laughed like hell, and so did my dad, and both of them kept making zippy little wisecracks. “Keep it down,” my mother said, but then she joined the fun.

“Piss,” I said.

I didn’t understand it.

The shelter was no professional job—I knew that—but wasn’t it better than nothing? Better than twiddling your thumbs?

“Right,” I said. “So piss on it.”

All that laughter, it hurt me. Partly embarrassment, partly anger. It hurt quite a lot, in fact.

The way I was feeling, I couldn’t face my parents right then. I couldn’t stop saying “Piss!” So very calmly, even though I wasn’t calm, I got dressed and hopped on my bike and pedaled hard until I reached Main Street. For a time I just sat on one of the green benches out in front of the county library. I kept hearing my mother’s giggle, Crenshaw’s high cackle. It didn’t make sense. What about the facts? The countdowns and silos—a question of simple jeopardy. Wasn’t my father always telling me to be careful crossing the street? Safety first, he always said. It baffled me. I wanted to scream; I didn’t know what I wanted.

Finally, to pass some time, I dragged myself into the library and moped around for half an hour, thumbing through back issues of Time and U.S. News, studying photographs of bona fide, real-life fallout shelters. They were made of steel and concrete and asbestos, very strong and sleek, and by comparison my Ping-Pong table seemed a little pitiful.

And that made me feel even worse. Miserable, in fact. I’m not sure, but I must’ve sighed, or maybe groaned, because the librarian began shooting edgy glances at me. Eventually the woman wandered over and stared down at my pile of magazines.

She made a soft breathy sound.

“Ah,” she said. “Civil defense.”

I shrugged and turned away, but she leaned in for a closer look at the photographs. A nice-looking woman. Smooth skin and greenish eyes and a thick tangle of black hair. As she bent down, one of her breasts accidentally pushed in against my neck.

She frowned and said, “Frightening business, isn’t it? We tend to forget. I suppose we want to forget.”

“Sure,” I said.

“If you ask me, we should—”

The woman hesitated. I could almost feel her heartbeat.

“But anyway,” she said, “I’m always pleased to see youngsters taking an interest in these problems. It’s a rare thing. Very, very rare.”

“I guess.”

“War and peace. The issues of the day, it’s important. You enjoy politics?”

“Sort of, maybe. There’s other stuff I like better.”

The woman laughed. It was a husky laugh, like a cow’s moo, deep and throaty.

“No apologies,” she said, “I’m impressed.” She paused, straightening up, and I could feel that breast wobbling like water as it moved off my neck. “So then, here you are. No school today?”

It wasn’t an accusation, just a question, and I had the answer. I told her I’d been excused to do some special research. “Civil defense,” I said.

“Crucial topic.”

“It is?”

“A top priority,” she said, and nodded. “On my list it’s number one. The future. Everything. Crucial isn’t the word.”

I was starting to like the woman.

No giggles, no jokes, and that soft chest. For a few seconds it seemed she was getting ready to sit down for a long talk—I hoped she would—but then she reached out and tapped my knee and said, “Good luck with the research. And if you need help, just pipe up. I’m always here.”

Help, I thought, but I didn’t say anything. Instead I watched her move back to the circulation desk, all hips and breasts and brains.

For another twenty minutes I skimmed through more magazines, wasting time, wondering if maybe I should head for school. It hardly seemed worth the effort. Besides, I didn’t know if I could take it. There was a queasy feeling in my stomach, and my head hurt—not enough oxygen or something—and when I closed my eyes, things seemed to press in on me. My ears hummed. It wasn’t really a sound, just a dense heaviness as if I were sinking deep under water, a pressurized silence, and then, in the empty center of that silence, I heard somebody whimper.

I nearly laughed, but I didn’t, because I was sobbing.

I didn’t actually cry. But the whimpering sound got louder, and I kept telling myself to shut the hell up, kept trying to swallow, and then I felt something break open inside me, like a water balloon, and then I was sniveling and carrying on like a baby, like a little kid.

There was a hand on my neck. Her hand, the librarian’s.

“Say, there,” she said. “You all right?”

“Of course I am,” I told her, and I tried to laugh, and then it hit me.

A funny experience. Way down inside, I didn’t feel all that terrible. I could hear myself sobbing, I could feel the thump in my chest, but I didn’t have that crying urge.

The librarian hustled me into her office and sat me down and went straight for the telephone. She must’ve known my parents, because she didn’t ask questions, she just dialed. Eyes closed, I listened as she told my mother the whole sorry tale. Dumbo, I thought. Sad and stupid. I could picture my mother’s face, and my father’s, and how their eyes would meet very briefly in panic, then separate, then slowly come together again.

I bawled until the librarian hung up, and then, like magic, it stopped. Just like that, it stopped. I was fine.

Stupidly, I wiped my forehead and then stared at the floor.

“There now,” said the librarian. “Better?”

She brought over a glass of water, but she didn’t make me drink, she simply sat there with the glass in one hand, the other hand lightly on my knee, and in that deep mooing voice of hers, cool and steady, she told me that things were under control, no problem. And she was right. Now and then I made a weak little moan, but not because I had to, not because I was feeling bad. I did it for her. So she’d know I wasn’t wasting her time. So she wouldn’t take that hand from my knee.

“There,” she kept saying, “just relax.”

When my parents showed up, they weren’t laughing anymore. They weren’t even smiling.

My mother kissed me, straight on the lips, and my dad took the librarian aside for a secret conference. I only heard one word: “sensitive.” A while later he came over and clomped me on the back and said we’d better get home.

“I’m okay now,” I told him.

“Hey, kiddo,” he said, “I know you’re okay.” He locked his hands together, swaying back and forth on his heels. “Who says you’re not? Who? Up and at ’em—toss your bike in the trunk, we’ll give you a lift. Play her safe, right?”

He winked at the librarian.

It was one of those confidential, between-us-grown-ups winks, but, to her credit, the woman didn’t wink back at him. In fact she frowned, then almost scowled. I loved her for that. I wanted to crawl into her lap and curl up for a long sleep, just the two of us, cuddling, that gentle hand on my knee. All I did, though, was sigh and take a last fond look at her chest, then I headed for the door.

The ride home was tense. Every so often my father fired quick glances at me in the rearview mirror, jittery and unsure, almost shy, and my mother wouldn’t stop talking about how we really had to do something about that rattle in the car’s engine. She went on and on about it.

Then a crazy thing happened.

Quickly, without warning, my father offered to buy me a chemistry set. It popped right out of the blue. At first I wasn’t sure I understood him.

He was smiling.

“You know,” he said, “one of those elaborate jobbies. Beakers and bottles and everything. A chemistry set. A good one.”

I stared down at my fingernails.

Fathers, I thought.

His intention, I suppose, was to cheer me up, to get my mind off bombs and missiles, but even so it was hard to believe. I despised chemistry sets. I despised kids who played with them. Several years earlier, back in fourth grade, one of my ex-buddies used to own one, a chemistry set fanatic, and whenever you went over to his house you had to sit around and go gaga while he performed the dumbest experiments you ever saw—testing nails to see if they really contained iron. The guy was a turd. In fact, as far as I could tell, chemistry sets were originally invented for turds. Toy companies must’ve hired people to sit around and dream up ideas for goofballs like my ex-buddy—weirdos and losers and poor chumps who couldn’t play baseball.

But my father was enthusiastic about the idea, and all the way home he kept talking it up. It was obvious he had his heart set on it. “First-class,” he said. “A regular laboratory.”

“Can’t wait,” I told him.

I couldn’t hurt his feelings. By then I was mature enough, or wise enough, to understand that when your parents think you want something, they get upset when they find out you don’t.

My father was smart, though.

“Look,” he finally said, “what do you really want? Just name it.”

“Anything?”

“Anything, cowboy. Say the word.”

There was a short silence.

“A chemistry set,” I said.

I probably choked, because my dad’s eyes jerked up. He looked at me hard in the mirror.

“William,” he said.

“Well,” I admitted, “I could use a Geiger counter, too.”

Immediately I knew it was the wrong thing to say. My father blinked and squinted into the mirror. He wasn’t even watching the road.

The silence must’ve lasted thirty seconds.

“William,” he said, “we need to talk.”

I put it off as long as I could. For a while I holed up in the bathroom, which was the only place in the house where you could find any privacy. I locked myself in. I brushed my teeth and washed up and then sat on the can and read The Saturday Evening Post all the way through. Finally, though, I had to eat dinner.

Right away my parents started in.

“Here’s what disturbs us,” my father began. “It’s this. It’s the way you’ve been brooding. The Ping-Pong table, that episode at the library today. It’s not healthy, William, and that’s what we care about—your health.”

“Fallout,” I said. “I suppose that’s healthy?”

My father released a long, terribly patient sigh. “Of course not. Dangerous, I know. Scary as hell. And we understand—we’re on your side, got it? In fact… Hey, now, look at me… Your mother and I, we should’ve been paying closer attention to this—whatever you call it—this whole nuclear thing. Bombs and radiation, it’s enough to scare anybody. I mean anybody. So like I say, we should’ve noticed. I’m sorry we didn’t. Our mistake.”

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.

All through seventh and eighth grades, that most vulnerable time in a kid’s life, I carved out a comfortable slot for myself at the dead center of the Bell-Shaped Curve. I wore blue jeans and sneakers. I played shortstop for the Rural Electric Association Little League team; I batted a smooth .270—not great, but respectable. I was popular. People liked me. At school I pulled down solid grades, A’s and B’s, mostly B’s, which was exactly how I wanted it. I devoted long hours to the practice of a normal smile, a normal posture, a normal way of walking and talking. God knows, I worked at it. During the autumn of my freshman year, I hiked down to the junior high every Thursday night for dancing lessons—fox-trot and tango, the whole ballroom routine. I went out on hayrides with the Methodist Youth Fellowship. It didn’t matter that I hated hayrides, or that I wasn’t a Methodist, it was a question of locking in with the small-town conventions, hugging the happy medium.

So what went wrong?

Genetics, probably. Or a malfunction somewhere in the internal dynamics.

The problem was this: I didn’t fit.

It’s a hard thing to explain, but for some reason I felt different from all the others. Like an alien, sort of, an outsider. I couldn’t open up. I couldn’t tell jokes or clown around or slide gracefully into the usual banter and horseplay. At times I wondered if those midnight flashes hadn’t short-circuited the wiring that connected me to the rest of the world. I wasn’t shy, just skittish and tense; very tight inside; I couldn’t deal with girls; I avoided crowds; I had trouble figuring out when to laugh and where to put my hands and how to make simple conversations.

I did have problems, obviously, but they weren’t the kind a shrink can solve. That’s the key point. They were real problems.

I gave up dancing lessons.

I also gave up hayrides and MYF.

By the time I reached high school, 1960 or so, I’d turned into something of a loner. A tough skin, almost a shell. I steered clear of parties and pep rallies and all the rah-rah stuff. I zipped myself into a nice cozy cocoon, a private world, and that’s where I lived. Like a hermit: William Cowling, the Lone Ranger. On the surface it might’ve looked unwholesome, but I honestly preferred it that way. I was above it all. A little arrogant, a little belligerent. I despised the whole corrupt high school system: the phys-ed teachers, the jocks, the endless pranks and gossip, the teasing, the tight little self-serving cliques. Everything. Top to bottom—real hate.

And who needed it?

Who needed homecoming?

Who needed cheerleaders and football and proms and giggly-ass majorettes?

Who needed friends?

I was well adjusted, actually, in a screwed-up sort of way. During the summers I’d hike up into the mountains above town, all alone, no tension or tightness, just enjoying the immense solitude of those purply cliffs and canyons, exploring, poking around, collecting chunks of quartz and feldspar and granite. I felt an affinity for rocks. They were safe; they never gave me any lip. In the evenings, locked in my bedroom, I’d spend hours polishing a single slice of mica, shaving away the imperfections, rubbing the tips of my fingers across those smooth, oily surfaces. There was something reassuring about it, just me and the elements.

My parents, of course, didn’t see it that way.

“Look,” my dad said one evening, “rocks are fine, but what about people? You can’t talk to rocks. Human contact, William, it’s important.” He stood nervously for a moment, jingling the loose change in his pockets. “Thing is, you seem cut off from the world. Maybe I’m way off base but I get the feeling that you’re—I don’t know. Unhappy.”

I smiled at him. “No,” I said, “I’m fine.”

My father nodded and ran a hand along his jaw.

“What about—you know—what about girls?”

“Girls how?”

“Just girls,” he said. He studied the palms of his hands. “This isn’t a criticism, it really isn’t, but I haven’t noticed you out there burning up the old social circuit, no dates or anything, no fun.”

“Rocks are fun,” I told him.

“Yes, but what I’m driving at… I’m saying, hey, there’s more to life than locking yourself up with a bunch of stones. It’s bad for the mental gyroscope. Things start wobbling, they get out of synch. Just a question of companionship.”

I nodded at him. “All right. Companionship.”

“Fun, William. Get on the phone, line up a date or two. If you need cash, anything, just say the word.”

“Will do.”

“Fun.”

“Fun,” I said. “I’ll get right on it.”

He smiled and gave me a bashful pat on the shoulder. For a second I was afraid he might lean in for a hug, but he had the good sense to fold his arms and wink and back off.

He took two steps and then hesitated.

“One other thing,” he said quietly. “Your mother and I—we love you. Love, got it?”

“Got it,” I said.

I loved him, too. Which is why I didn’t blurt out the facts. To protect him, to beef up his confidence. Say what you want about honesty and trust, but there isn’t a father in the world who wants to hear that his kid has turned into a slightly warped ding-a-ling. All I wanted, really, was to give him the son he deserved.

So I kept the wraps on. A few fibs here and there. Quite a few, in fact.

Once or twice a week, for instance, I’d do a little trick with the telephone, dialing a random number, quietly breaking the connection, then carrying on fake conversations with fake friends. It was strictly a parental morale booster. Eyes closed, leaning back, I’d pretend I was calling up one of Fort Derry High’s hot-dog cheerleaders, like Sarah Strouch, and I’d make up zippy little bits of dialogue, clucking my tongue, trying to imagine the sort of topics Sarah might want to talk about. There were problems at first, but eventually, once I got the hang of it, I was able to relax and enjoy myself. It was a form of human contact. “So what’s happening?” I’d say, and she’d say, “Nothing much,” and then for an hour or two we’d discuss politics and religion, the nature of cheerleading, anything that popped up. A spooky thing, but there were even times when I’d get the feeling that Sarah was actually on the line—I could almost hear that husky voice of hers, very sexy but also very tough. “You poor, fucked-up guy,” she’d say, and I’d listen while she listed all my problems, then finally I’d say, “Okay, you’re right, but it’s just temporary,” and then I’d hear a snorting sound and she’d say, “I’m all ears, Billy, tell me about it.” So I’d lay it on the line. I’d talk about that alien feeling. How lonely I felt, how disconnected—lost in space.

It might sound strange, but those fake phone calls produced some of the most intelligent conversations I’d ever had. Absolutely no bullshit, no teasing. Sarah Strouch was my closest buddy.

A game, that’s all.

And what was the harm?

On weekends I’d sometimes go out on trumped-up dates. I’d do my phone trick with Sarah and splash on some Old Spice and bum money from my dad and then head down to Jig’s Confectionery for an evening of pinball and cherry phosphates and do-it-yourself fun.

It was a double life. Normal, but also shaky, and there were times when all the pressures took a toll. A weighed-down feeling: I couldn’t function. Lying in bed at night, I’d hold my breath and pretend I was stone dead, no more troubles, a nice thick coffin to keep out the worms.

Other times I’d imagine a yacht bobbing in the South Pacific. Waves and sun and gentle winds. Sarah Strouch sunbathing on a teak deck, those tight muscles, all that smooth brown skin.

Or a tree house made of steel.

A concrete igloo in Alaska.

A snug spaceship heading for the stars.

In the middle of the night I’d get up and wander out to the living room and shake dice or play solitaire. I’d roam from room to room. I’d fill the bathtub with hot water and ease myself in and practice floating.

Once, around four in the morning, my mother found me there. I was half asleep, waterlogged.

“Darling,” she whispered, “what’s wrong?”

“Nothing,” I said.

“William, please, it’s almost daylight.”

I smiled.

“No problem,” I said. “I need a bath.”

October 1962, and things got ticklish.

I looked at my father and said, “There, you see?” I wasn’t being a smart aleck. It was a serious question: Did he finally see?

How did we survive?

We were civilized. We observed the traditional courtesies, waving at neighbors, making polite conversation in supermarkets. People counted their change. Vacations were planned and promises were made. We pursued the future as though it might still be caught.

My mother vacuumed the living-room rug, dusted furniture, washed windows, told me to buckle down to my schoolwork—there was college to think about.

“College?” I said, and my mother fluffed her hair and said, “We have to trust,” so I buckled down.

We carried on.

By looking loved ones in the eye. By not blinking when Kennedy said: The path we have chosen for the present is full of hazards, as all paths are.

And we were brave. We went to church. We paid attention to our bodies—the in-and-out movement of lungs, the sweet pulse of a toothache. We masturbated. We slept. We found pleasure in the autumn foliage. There was much kissing and touching, and the name of the Lord was invoked at Kiwanis meetings.

My father made me get a haircut. “Shaggy-waggy,” he said, playfully, but he meant it.

Birthdays were celebrated. Clocks were wound.

One evening, at twilight, my mother and father and I sat in plastic lawn chairs in the backyard, scanning the sky, a peaceful pinkish sky rimmed with violet. No words were spoken. We were simply waiting. When darkness came, my mother took my hand, and my father’s hand, pressing them together. A modest gesture: Did she finally see? We just sat and waited. Later my father covered his eyes and yawned and stood up.

“Oh, well,” he said. “Tomorrow’s another day.”

I didn’t dream. I felt some fear, of course, or the memory of fear, but I had the advantage of having been there before, a kind of knowledge.

At school we practiced evacuation drills. There was bravado and squealing.

A convocation in the school gym. The principal delivered a speech about the need for courage and calm. The pep band played fight songs. Sarah Strouch led us in the Pledge of Allegiance, guileless and solemn, her hand teasing the breast beneath her letter sweater. The pastor of the First Baptist Church offered a punchy prayer, then we filed back to the classrooms to pursue the study of math and physics.

How?

By rolling dice. By playing solitaire. By adding up assets, smoking cigarettes, getting ready for Halloween, touching bases, treading water.

A dream, wasn’t it?

Jets scrambled over Miami Beach and warships cruised through the warm turquoise waters off St. Thomas.

“How’s tricks?” my dad asked.

“Fine.”

“Flashes?”

“What flashes?”

He grinned. “That’s the ticket. What flashes?”

We held together.

By pretending.

By issuing declarations of faith.

“They aren’t madmen,” my mother said.

“Exactly,” said my father.

So we played Scrabble at the kitchen table, quibbling over proper nouns and secondary spellings.

“They know better.”

“Of course.”

“Even the Russians—they don’t want it—politics, that’s all it is. True? Isn’t that true?”

“Oh, Christ,” my father said.

I wasn’t haunted by the nuclear stuff, I didn’t lose control, and if it hadn’t been for the headaches and constipation, I would’ve come through in good shape. Problem was, I couldn’t shit. Which brought on the headaches, which led to other problems.

In any case, I spent the Cuban missile crisis squatting on a toilet. It was painful business, and embarrassing, so one morning on the sly I slipped down to Elf’s Drug Store on Main Street and swiped the laxatives. Except nothing much happened. A slight bellyache, a throbbing at my temples. I doubled the dose and drank a couple of Cokes and dragged myself off to school.

That’s where it hit me.

One minute I was sitting quietly in study hall, finishing up some geometry problems, then a dizzy-scrambly feeling came over me. A fun-house experience—topsy-turvy, no traction. In a way I felt very loose and relaxed, letting things spin, lying there on the floor while everybody yelled, “Give him air.”

I almost laughed.

I didn’t need air. I needed peace. I started to sit up, but then I felt a cool hand against my forehead. “God,” someone said, and right away I knew who it was. All those fake phone calls. “Man alive,” Sarah muttered, “just look at this, just look.”

She unbuttoned my collar and began fanning me with a notebook.

I closed my eyes. The situation, I realized, was not romantic, but still I felt a sparky kind of human contact. That thick voice of hers: “God,” she kept saying. A few seconds later, when I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was one of her kneecaps, smooth and shiny. I could’ve licked it, or kissed it, but instead I jerked my arms and pretended I’d gone into a deep coma.

“Wow,” Sarah whispered.

I ended up in the school nurse’s office.

One thing led to another, thermometers and ice bags, and a half hour later I was ass-up on Doc Crenshaw’s examining table. “Don’t sweat it,” I told him, “I’m all right,” but Crenshaw didn’t listen.

His eyes sparkled. “Well, well,” he said.

I never saw a man enjoy his work so much.

He was a quack, though. He didn’t cure me. A week later my insides were clogged up again and the headaches were worse than ever. I was even running a temperature. Crenshaw put me through every test in the book, but at the end, when the results were in, he just wagged his head and told my mother that it didn’t seem to be anything physical.

“Not physical?” my mom said.

“You know. The opposite.”

“Opposite.”

“You know.”

My mother allowed herself a half-smile.

“Yes,” she said. “Yes, well.”

Calmly, I tried to explain the situation. A huge mistake, I said. A plumbing problem, nothing else.

My mother stared.

“William,” she said, “stop hiding it.”

“What?”

“Please, I wish you’d—”

“Hiding what?” I said. “Go on, let’s hear it.”

Her eyes seemed to frost over. She was a thin, delicate woman, with tiny wrists and ankles. She hesitated, toying with her wedding band. “William,” she said, “just listen to me.” And then she rattled off the facts. Apparently she’d been doing some detective work at school, because she knew about the telephone gimmick and the fake dates, how unpopular I was, no friends or prospects.

When I denied it, my mother stiffened and crossed her legs.

“No arguments,” she said. “There’s someone we want you to see. Someone to talk to.”

“Talk how?” I said.

“Just talk. A counselor up in Helena. A nice man, I think you’ll like him.”

“Jesus,” I said.

“It might help.”

“I don’t need help. I don’t need—”

“William.”

“No way.”

“We’ll find a way,” my mother said, very thickly, very decisively. “It’s your future we’re talking about.”

It was hopeless.

I raised hell, of course, but two days later we made the drive to Helena. I didn’t say a word the whole way. Arms folded, I sat there in the backseat, staring out at the mountains and trees and telephone poles. Treachery, I thought. Who could you trust in this screwy world?

“Piss,” I muttered.

My mother turned: “What’s that?”

“Bombs,” I said.

We took two rooms in a Holiday Inn—one for me, one for my parents—and the next morning they drove me across town to a dingy office building a few blocks down from the state capitol. As we were riding up the elevator, my father stood behind me with his hands on my neck and shoulders, massaging them as if to warm me up for a big race. “Nothing to it,” he said brightly. “Just level with the man, don’t hold back. Whatever’s on your mind.”

“Suicide,” I said.

“That’s the spirit. Anything.”

For ten minutes we sat around in a sterile little waiting room. My mother kept humming. Every few minutes she’d get up and go to the water fountain and then dab at her lips with a shredded-up Kleenex.

“Well, now,” she’d say.

It took forever, but eventually the shrink came out and shook everybody’s hand and led us down a tight corridor to his office.

Adamson was his name—Charles C. Adamson, that’s what his diplomas said—but while he was pouring coffee he made a point about how we had to call him Chuck. “Chuck-Chuck,” he said, “like in woodchuck,” then he smiled to show off his big front teeth. I looked away. Bad omens, I thought. Bare tile floors, two old armchairs, a sofa, a gray metal desk, flaking paint on the walls and ceiling. The office had a sour, slightly brackish smell, like the men’s room in a Greyhound bus depot, and right away, even before I sat down, I could feel the beginnings of a headache.

I stayed calm. There was some small talk, some nervous energy, but finally the shrink looked at his wristwatch and said it might be a good idea if he and I had a private chat. He blinked and gave me a tentative grin.

“Alone?” my mother said.

“I think so. For starters.”

She took a deep breath. “Private,” she chirped.

My dad winked at me, raised a thumb, then led my mother out to the waiting room.

Instantly, my whole body seemed to tense up. It was an itchy, clammy feeling—I couldn’t get comfortable—but the odd thing was that Adamson seemed a little jittery himself. He hustled over to his desk, opened a manila folder, and began chewing the skin around his fingernails.

“So then,” he said, “here we are.”

He reached into his shirt pocket and pulled out a stick of Doublemint.

“Gum?” he said.

“No, thanks.”

“You’re sure?”

“Positive,” I said. “I hate Doublemint.”

Adamson nodded. “Right, who doesn’t?”

He picked up a pencil and tapped it against the bridge of his nose. All nerves, I thought. He was a reasonably young man, maybe thirty-five or so, but he seemed old and weary-looking, especially the eyes. The saddest eyes I’d ever seen—very tiny, very timid, a moist copper color.

“So,” he said.

There was a short pause, then he asked me to begin by telling him a few things about myself, a general self-description.

“Just the basics,” he said. “Nothing fancy.” He gazed out the window, studying the big golden dome on the state capitol building. “Hobbies. School. One small request, though. If it’s possible, try not to bore me. Short and sweet. Make it peppy.”

“Well, sure.”

The man shrugged and showed me his front teeth.

“No offense,” he said, “but you wouldn’t believe the crap I have to tolerate in this job. Same old sob stories, day after day, and I have to—” He stopped and blinked at me. “Anyhow, do your best. Feel free to pull the lid off.”

“Look,” I said, “we can take a break if you want.”

“No. Just keep it halfway interesting.”

I was cautious. Briefly, as vaguely as possible, I outlined the bare facts of my life. I told him I was in good shape. An average kid, I said. Nothing unusual. Very sane.

Adamson folded his fingers around the pencil.

“Fine,” he murmured, “but what about—” He paused, flicking his tongue out. “What about your parents, for example? You get along all right?”

“Of course.”

“No tension areas? Squabbles?”

“Forget it,” I told him. “You met them. They’re terrific parents.”

It was an obvious ploy, trying to pin the blame on my mom and dad, but I wouldn’t let him get away with it. “Best parents in the world,” I said flatly. “Nobody better. Period.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“The best,” I said.

For some time we sparred back and forth like that, a polite little duel. I could tell it was wearing him down. He kept fidgeting, rubbing those sad little eyes. It was time, I decided, to let him know where I stood.

Very casually, I asked if he wanted my true feelings, and he said he did, so I leaned forward and told him that the whole counseling game was a waste of time. A racket, I said. It was for creeps and crybabies. I was strong; I knew how to deal with the world. A total charade, I told him—that was my honest belief.

Adamson shrugged.

“Charade?” he said. “How so?”

“It just is. Worthless. That’s how I feel.” I stared him in the eyes. I meant every word of it. “Take an example. Edgar Allan Poe: a disturbed guy. All those weird visions running through his head, fruitcake stuff. But I’ll tell you something, he didn’t go crying to some stupid counselor. He used his nuttiness. He made something out of it—those disturbed poems of his, those disturbed stories. He had willpower, like me. And besides, maybe there’s nothing wrong with a little wackiness. Maybe it’s a plus. An asset. You ever think of that?”

“Quite possible,” Adamson said.

“Sure, it’s possible. It’s true. And there’s plenty to be disturbed about. Real stuff, I mean. Realities. They don’t shrink.”

For a moment I wasn’t sure if he’d even heard me, but then he frowned and said, “Which realities are these?”

“Just things,” I said.

“Like?”

“Like everything. Turds. Assholes. The whole corrupt pecking order.”

And then I gave him a quick lecture on the ins and outs of high school. No personal secrets, I just listed all the crap I had to put up with: the popularity game, hayrides and dancing lessons and sadism and petty cruelty. I told him how brutal it could get. How sometimes you had to turn your back on it, just walk away, ignore the bastards.

“The real world,” I said, “it comes pre-shrunk.”

Adamson nodded. “I know the story. High school. Fucking torture.”

He snapped his pencil in half.

Outside, the sky had gone dark. There was thunder. No rain, just the feel of rain.

Adamson got up and closed the window and stood with his back to me. He seemed hypnotized, not quite there, staring out at the dense clouds beyond the capitol dome.

“High school,” he said bitterly. “I hated it. Torture, that’s the word. Snobs and bullies—those tough-guy letter jackets—who cares about letter jackets? Christ, when I think about it… Hate.”

“Well,” I said.

“Hate! Worst experience of my life.”

His voice had a strange wound-up sound. He paused and touched the corner of his right eye.

“A nightmare,” he said. “Start to finish. Just hate.”

I looked out at the heavy sky. It could’ve been an act of some sort—I wasn’t naïve—but what threw me off was the man’s obvious passion. I couldn’t be sure. I waited a moment and then changed the subject, rambling on about neutral topics like pep rallies and homecoming, but the more I went on, the gloomier he got.

“High school!” he suddenly yelled. “Should be laws against it. Hate, William. You know hate?”

There was lightning now, and hard thunder, but Adamson didn’t seem to notice. He slouched forward, examined his fists, and then, in a low, soggy-sounding voice, nearly inaudible, he gave me the entire play-by-play description of his pitiful high school days. How he was low man on the totem pole. No friends, nobody to talk to. Eventually it got so bad, he said, that he began having fantasies about lacing the cafeteria food with arsenic, or rigging up dynamite and blowing the whole school sky-high. “No joke,” he said, “I would’ve done it. Dust and bones.”

I moved my head thoughtfully.

“Well, look,” I said, “maybe you shouldn’t dwell on it quite so much. You’re an adult now, just forget it.”

“Sure,” he grunted. “Easy for you to say.”

Pivoting, rolling his shoulders, Adamson stared at the far wall. I felt a strange jumble of emotions. Pity mixed up with contempt, sympathy with a kind of smug superiority.

I liked him. I despised him.

For a while neither of us said a word. The room was muggy and dark, and I could smell the rain coming. Finally, to fill up the time, I offered a few more horror stories. I described the cliques and teasing and practical jokes; I talked about terrorism and repression; I told him how inane it was and how hot-ass cheerleaders like Sarah Strouch wouldn’t give you the time of day. “Nobody cares about anything,” I said. “Just garbage. Turds and jocks.”

“Jocks?” he said. He jotted something down on a note pad. “Jocks, they think they rule the world.”

As it turned out, we spent the rest of that session comparing notes on how much we loathed the whole sports setup in this country. It was a coincidence, probably, but we’d experienced some of the same problems. Adamson talked about the trouble he’d had as a Little Leaguer—always dropping easy pop flies, booting ground balls—and so to make him feel better I admitted that I wasn’t the world’s greatest shortstop. “The thing is,” I told him, “you can’t let it get you down. That’s life, that’s how it works. No sense moping about it.”

“I guess not,” he said. There was a boom of thunder, then the rain came. He slapped his hands together. “Baseball, though. I’d like to ban it forever. Make it a felony just to play the game. Almost wrecked my life.”

And there it was again.

That sullen, quavering voice. It was a relief when the session finally ended.

Five minutes later, in the elevator, my mother asked how things had gone, whether we’d made any progress, and I gave her a noncommittal shrug. “Too early to tell,” I said. “The guy’s a real sickie.”

Except for his unhappiness, it seemed that Adamson and I had quite a lot in common. We were both intelligent. Both loners, both somewhat cynical. We even shared a certain defensive attitude toward the world. Despite myself, I ended up half liking the man, which was a good thing, because we spent six days cooped up together. Six grueling sessions. Each morning, my parents would drive me across town and drop me off in front of Adamson’s office. “Go get ’em,” my dad would say, and my mother would reach out and brush down my hair.

Always the same routine. As soon as I walked in, Adamson would take a look at his wristwatch and rub his eyes and gaze out at the shiny dome on the state capitol building. “So, then,” he’d say, “how’s my pal William?” Then he’d wag his head and start complaining. It was his favorite pastime. There were times when I wanted to bang him on the head, or shake him up somehow, but instead I tried finesse, using little incidents out of my own life as a way of putting things in perspective. When he mentioned insomnia, for instance, I recommended solitaire and hot baths. At another point, when he brought up the subject of nightmares, I told him about some of my own experiences in that area, the nuclear stuff, the sirens and pigeons and fires, the incredible reality of it all. I discussed the Cuban missile crisis and tried to get across that sense of quiet fear, nothing desperate, just a wired-up tightness.

“It’s not mental,” I said. “Kennedy and Khrushchev—I didn’t make those guys up out of thin air. I just get worried sometimes.”

For at least two full sessions we talked about how volatile and dangerous the world is, fragile as glass, no margin for error, and we agreed that the best strategy was to put a premium on avoiding unnecessary risks: stay alert, never take chances. I explained that my basic philosophy of life was to seal myself off from potentially threatening situations. Locked doors were essential. Solid walls and a solid roof—shelter.

“You can quibble all you want,” I told him, “but it boils down to common sense. A matter of safety.”

Adamson bobbed his head.

“I’m with you,” he said. “Safety.”

“That’s right. And the same thing goes for how you deal with people. That Chuck-the-Woodchuck stuff, you have to be careful about it. Don’t give away too much.”

Adamson thought about it for a few seconds.

“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

DIG, IT WHISPERS. Two weeks on the job, and my hole is nearly four feet deep, ten feet square. It’s a beauty—I’m proud—but I’ve paid a terrible price. My daughter says I’m nutto. My wife won’t speak to me, won’t sleep with me. She thinks I’m crazy. And dangerous. She refuses to discuss the matter. All day long, while I’m busy saving her life, Bobbi hides in the bedroom, quietly cranking out those insinuating bits of verse. She uses silence like a blackjack; she withholds the ordinary courtesies of love and conversation. It hurts, I won’t deny it. Those damned poems. Christ, she’s baiting me—

I don’t get it. Meanings, I mean. What’s the point? Why this preference for metaphor over the real thing?

Fuck her, the hole says. Dig!

Bobbi doesn’t understand. She’s a poet, she can’t help it. I’ve tried to talk things out. I’ve presented the facts. I’ve named names: Poseidon, Trident, Cruise, Stealth, Minuteman, Lance, Pershing—the indisputable realities. Trouble is, Bobbi can’t process hard data. The artistic temperament. Too romantic, too sublime. She’s a gorgeous woman, blond and long-legged, those shapely fingers and turquoise eyes, a way of gliding from spot to spot as if under the spell of a fairy tale, but she makes the mistake of assuming that her beauty is armor against the facts of fission. Funny how people hide. Behind art, behind Jesus, behind the sunny face of the present tense. Bobbi finds comfort in poetry; Melinda finds it in youth. For others it’s platitudes or blind optimism or the biological fantasies of reproduction and continuity.

I prefer a hole.

So dig. I won’t be stopped.

I’ll admit it, though, these past two weeks have been murder, and at times the tension has turned into rage. This morning, for example. After a night of insomnia and celibacy, I came to the breakfast table a bit under the weather. It was hard to see the humor in finding another of Bobbi’s snide ditties stapled to the Cheerios box. I wanted to laugh it off, I just couldn’t muster the resources. Besides, the poem was cruel, an ultimatum. Fission, she called it.

I can read between the lines. Split, it’s not even cute.

Who could blame me? I lost my head for a minute. Nothing serious—some bad language, some table-thumping.

“God,” Melinda squealed. “Crackers!”

Bobbi remained silent. She lifted her shoulders in a gesture that meant: Yes, crackers, but let’s not discuss it in front of your father.

“Daffy Duck,” said my daughter. “Hey, look at him! Look, he’s eating—”

I smiled. It was a mark of sanity, the cheerful face of a man in tip-top health—I smiled and chewed and swallowed Fission—and then I asked if they’d kindly put a lid on all the name-calling stuff, I was fed up with wisecracks and Mother Goose innuendo. “A little respect,” I said. “Fair enough? Time for some understanding.”

Melinda stared at her mother.

“You see that?” she said. “He ate your poem.”

My wife shrugged.

“I think he’s flipped!” Melinda yelled. “He did, he ate it, I saw him.”

“Now wait a minute—”

“Daddy’s flippo!”

“No,” I said, “Daddy’s smart. He’s a goddamn genius.”

Melinda snorted and flicked her pale eyebrows.

“Selfish Sam,” she said. “What about my feelings? What happens when everybody at school finds out? God, they’ll think I’ve got the screwiest family in history.”

“They laughed at Noah, princess.”

“God!”

I tapped the table. “Eat your Cheerios,” I said. “And cut out the swearing.”

“You swear.”

“Hardly ever.”

“I just heard it, you said—”

“Hustle up, you’ll be late for school.”

Authority, I thought. Don’t bend. Don’t crack. I ignored their coded mother-daughter glances. I made happy chitchat, humming, stacking the dishes, buttoning Melinda’s coat and then marching her out to meet the school bus. A splendid morning, despite everything. That smooth blue sky, wildflowers everywhere, the wide-open spaces. And the Sweetheart Mountains—beautiful, yes, but also functional, a buffer between now and forever. Shock absorbers. Heat deflectors.

But Melinda had no appreciation for these facts. She wouldn’t look at me. We stood a few feet apart along the tar road.

“Well, Flub-a-dub,” she finally said, “I hope you enjoyed your breakfast.”

I reached out toward her, but she yelped and spun away. Again I offered extravagant apologies. Too much tension, I told her. Too little sleep. A lot on my mind.

“Holes,” Melinda said, and glanced up for a moment, soberly, as if taking a measurement. “God, can’t you just stop acting so screwy? Is that so hard?”

“I suppose it is sometimes.”

“Eating paper.”

She closed her eyes.

“You know what Mommy says? She says you’re pretty sick. Like a breakdown or something.”

“No way, baby.”

“Yeah, but—” Melinda’s voice went ragged. She bit down on her lower lip. “But you always act that way, real flippy, and it makes me feel… You know what else Mommy said?”

“What else?”

“She says if you don’t stop digging that hole, she says we might have to go away.”

“Away where?”

“I don’t know where, just away. That’s what she told me, and she means it, too. That poem you ate—that’s what it was about.”

I nodded. “Well, listen, right now your mother and I have this problem. Like when the telephone doesn’t work. Like a busy signal, you know? But we’ll get it fixed. That’s a promise.”

“Promise?”

“On my honor.”

Later, when the school bus came grinding up the road, Melinda generously offered me her cheek, which I kissed, then I watched her ride away. A beautiful child. I love her, and Bobbi, too.

Isn’t that the purpose? To save those smooth blond hides?

Split?

Doesn’t make sense.

Dig.

That makes sense. All day long I’ve been at it, sweat and calluses, and my back hurts, but there’s pleasure in the pain. It’s duty-doing; taking charge. Tension translates into doggedness, anxiety into action, skittishness into firm soldierly resolve.

I feel a nice tingle as I rig up the dynamite.

Ollie Winkler taught me—I learned from a pro.

Two sticks and the primer. Wire it up. Crimp the blasting caps. Take shelter behind the tool shed. Think about Ollie and his Bombs for Peace.

“Fire in the hole!” I yell.

The kitchen windows rattle. A muffled explosion, just right. Bobbi comes to the back steps and stands there with a mystical smile on her lips. In the backyard, like smoke, there’s a light dusting of powdery debris, and my wife and I stare at each other as if from opposite sides of a battlefield. Bobbi bites her thumb; I smile and wave. Then it’s over. She goes inside, I go back to digging.

The dynamite, that’s what disturbs her. She thinks I’ll miscalculate. Crazy, but she thinks I’ll blow the house down, maybe hurt someone. Dangerous, she thinks. But what about the bomb, for Christ sake? Miscalculations? If that’s the stopper—miscalculations—I’ll be happy to show her a few. Four hundred million corpses. Leukemia and starvation and no hospitals and nobody around to read her miserable little jingles.

Screw it. Dig.

A pick, a garden spade, a pulley system to haul out the rock.

When Melinda returns from school, I’m still on the job. I straighten up and smile over the rim of the hole. “Hey, there,” I say, but she doesn’t answer. She kicks a clod of dirt down on me and says “Nutto” and scampers for the house.

I don’t let it rattle me. At dusk I plug in the outdoor Christmas lights. I skip supper. I keep at it, whistling work songs.

It isn’t obsession. It’s commitment. It’s me against the realities.

Dig, the hole says, and I spit on my hands. Pry out a boulder. Lift and growl and heave. Obsession? Edgar Allan Poe was obsessed.

At ten o’clock I tell myself to ease off. I take a few more licks at it, then a few more, and at midnight I unplug the lights and store my tools and reluctantly plod into the house. No signs of life, it’s eerie.

In the living room, I find only the vague after-scent of lilac perfume—a dusty silence. I stop and listen hard and call out to them. “Bobbi!” I shout, then “Melinda!” The quiet unnerves me, it’s not right.

Melinda’s bed is empty. And when I move to Bobbi’s bedroom—my bedroom—I’m stopped by a locked door.

I knock and wait and then knock again, gently.

“All right,” I say, “I know you’re in there.”

I jiggle the knob. A solid lock, I installed it myself. So now what? I detect the sound of hushed voices, a giggle, bedsprings, bare feet padding across oak floors.

Another knock, not so gentle this time.

“Hey, there,” I call. “Open up—I’ll give you ten seconds.”

I count to ten.

“Now,” I say. “Hop to it.”

Behind the door, Melinda releases a melodious little laugh, which gives me hope, but then the silence presses in again. It occurs to me that my options are limited. Smash the door down—a shoulder, a foot, like on television. Storm in and pin them to the bed and grab those creamy white throats and make some demands. Demand respect and tolerance. Demand love.

I kiss the door and walk away.

Supper is cold chicken and carrot sticks. Afterward, I do the dishes, smoke a cigarette, prowl from room to room. A lockout, but why? I’m a pacifist, for God’s sake. The whole Vietnam mess: I kept my nose clean, all those years on the run, a man of the most impeccable nonviolence.

So why?

There are no conclusions.

Much later, at the bedroom door, I’m pleased to discover that they’ve laid out my pajamas for me. A modest offering, but still it’s something. I find a sleeping bag and spread it out on the hallway floor.

As I’m settling in, I hear a light scratching at the door, then a voice, muted and hoarse, and Melinda says, “Daddy?”

“Here,” I say.

“Can’t sleep.”

“Well, gee,” I tell her, “open up, let’s cuddle.”

“Nice try.”

“Thanks, sweetie.”

She clears her throat. “I made this promise to Mommy. She said it’s a quarantine.”

“Mommy’s a fruitcake.”

“What?”

“Nothing,” I murmur. “We’ll straighten things out in the morning. Close your eyes now.”

“They are closed.”

“Tight?”

“Pretty tight.” A pause, then Melinda says, “You know something? I’m scared, I think.”

“Don’t be.”

“I am, though. I hate this.”

There’s a light trilling sound. Maybe a sob, maybe not. In the dark, although the door separates us, her face begins to compose itself before me like a developing photograph, those cool eyes, the pouty curvature of the lips.

“Daddy?”

“Still here.”

“Tell the honest truth,” she whispers. “I mean, you won’t ever try to kill me, will you?”

“Kill?”

“Like murder, I mean. Like with dynamite or an ax or something.”

I examine my hands.

“No killing,” I tell her. “Impossible. I love you.”

“Just checking.”

“Of course.”

“Mommy thinks… Oh, well. Night.”

“Night,” I say.

And for several minutes I’m frozen there at the door, just pondering. Kill? Where do kids get those ideas?

The world, the world.

I groan and lie down and zip myself into the sleeping bag. Then I get jabbed in the heart. Another poem—it’s pinned to the pajama pocket.

Horseshit of the worst kind. Bedlam—unbalanced, she means. Marooned, divorced—a direct threat, nothing else. At least it rhymes.

Lights off.

Sleep, I tell myself, but I can’t shut down the buzzings. The issue isn’t bedlam. Uranium is no figure of speech; it’s a figure of nature. You can hold it in your hand. It has an atomic weight of 238.03; it melts at 1,132.30 degrees centigrade; it’s hard and heavy and impregnable to metaphor. I should know, I made my fortune on the stuff.

We were all in on it, Sarah and Ned and Ollie and Tina—we followed the trail and plundered those ancient mountains and now we’re left with the consequences, that old clickety-clack echoing back. It’s history. It can’t be undone.

There’s a soft tapping at the bedroom door.

“Hey, Goofy,” Melinda whispers, “stop talking to yourself.”

5 First Strikes

AUTUMN 1964, AND THERE was a war on, and people were dying. There were jets over the Gulf of Tonkin. There were bombs and orphans and speeches before Congress. It was a season of flux: leaves were turning, times were slippery. And it was real. No paranoia, not this time. At night, in bed, I detected a curious new velocity at work in the world, an inertial zip; I could hear it in the rhetoric, in the stiff battering-ram thump of the music. Unwholesome developments, I thought. The Chinese detonated their first nuclear device. Khrushchev was on the skids. Call it prescience, or a sensitivity to peril, but I could not shake the hunch that things were accelerating toward the point of hazard. In Da Nang the Marines were digging in, and in Saigon the generals played their flamboyant games of hopscotch, and at home, at random spots across the North American continent, in back rooms, in the dark, there were the first churlish rumblings of distemper.

Nothing mutinous, not yet. Abbie Hoffman was a nobody. Jane Fonda was a starlet. By daylight, at least, Vietnam was still a fairy tale.

We were at peace in time of war.

And at Peverson State College, in September of 1964, we did the peaceful things. We crammed for exams and talked sex until four in the morning. We were kids, after all, and the future seemed altogether probable. It was a bridge between two eras, a calm, old-fashioned time, and on the nation’s campuses, certainly at Peverson State, football was still king and booze was queen and raw physicality was the final standard of human excellence.

To be sure, Pevee was not a distinguished institution. More like a health resort, I decided, or a halfway house for the criminally vacuous. Mostly ranch kids—hicks and dullards. Even after my experience at Fort Derry High, I had to admire the way my new classmates so daringly refined the meaning of mediocrity. A dense, immobile apathy. Ignorance on a colossal scale. There was something ambitious about it, almost inspired. No one cared. No one tried. On the surface, of course, the place could seem deceptively collegiate, with the usual tweedy teachers and wimps with slide rules, but even so, beneath the cosmetics, Peverson State College was a student body without student brains. In a note to my parents, composed near the end of freshman orientation, I outlined the major difficulties. Stereos that blew your brains out at 3 a.m. Coeds who pondered the spelling of indefinite articles. Elaborate farting contests in the school library, with referees and formal regulations and large galleries of appreciative spectators.

Cynical, maybe, but true. The college had been founded back in the early fifties in anticipation of the coming wave of baby-boomers, millions of us, children of the age. To educate us, or at least to contain us, Montana’s state legislature had appropriated several million dollars for the construction of a large, fully modern facility along the banks of the Little Bighorn, ten miles from the famous battlefield, forty miles from SAC’s northern missile fields. It was a danger zone, to put it mildly, and this circumstance was clearly reflected in the campus architecture, a kind of Neo-Pillbox, forty acres of solid concrete. Dorms and parking lots and fences, all cement: Ready-Mix University.

The place wasn’t ugly, exactly. It wasn’t anything, exactly. Just bland and boring, like an East German housing development.

A zoo, some people called it, but that wasn’t quite the case. It was jungle. So I kept a low profile during the fall and winter of my freshman year. I avoided parties and mixers. Fortunately, I had no roommates, which kept the socializing to a minimum, and I was scrupulous about steering clear of the bull sessions and nonstop horseplay in the dorms. I installed a special lock on my door. I took my showers late at night to ensure privacy, no towel-snapping shit, no comparing penis sizes.

My theory, essentially, was the old standby. Cover your flanks and watch out for morons.

I wasn’t lonely, just careful.

On the plus side there was the fact that I was smarter than the typical Pevee underclassman, more mature, and in class I didn’t mind showing off those qualities. A little arrogant, I suppose, but there was a real world out there, a serious world, and I cared about it, I knew what the stakes were. I enjoyed chemistry, for example—learning about quantum mechanics and the periodic table, how atoms worked, how fractional errors could produce massive consequences. I studied history, too, and political science. I liked the certainty of absolute uncertainty. I liked reading about Winston Churchill and Davy Crockett: obsessed people, but real dynamos when the chips were down.

And of course geology. That was my main love, and from my first day at Peverson I knew I’d be majoring in rocks.

The geology lab was my true home on campus. Some evenings, when the dorm became unbearable, I’d take my pillow and blankets over to the lab, lock the door, turn out the lights, and lie there watching the brilliant twinklings all around me, like a jeweler’s showcase, flakes of silver and gold, ruby reds, fluorites and diamonds and foliated talc, those glowing prisms. Terra firma, I’d think. Back to the elements. A hard thing to explain, but for me geology represented a model for how the world could be, and should be. Rock—the word itself was solid. Calm and stable, crystal locked to crystal, there was a hard, enduring dignity in even the most modest piece of granite. Rocks lasted. Rocks could be trusted. The covalent bonds were tight and sure, and the electrons held fast from hour to hour, age to age. Sometimes I’d pick up a chunk of uranium dioxide and just squeeze it. I’d press it to my cheek. I’d study its properties, the purply-black coloration, bits of red and yellow, slightly greasy to the touch, dull and opaque and brittle. And it was safe; it did not explode. Not in the world-as-it-was, not in the world-as-it-should-be. I’d put my tongue against it, tasting, thinking about Ping-Pong and Chuck Adamson and collapsing stars, thinking doom, but the uranium was a friend. It had staying power. Man was goofy but the earth was tolerant. In geology, there was always time.

I wasn’t crazy. I didn’t unravel. Over that long freshman year, 1964 and 1965, I stuck it out alone. I had my own table in the cafeteria, my own good company. At times I felt a little frazzled, but I was blessed with the mental equipment to keep a firm fix on the moral priorities.

Imagination, that was my chief asset. Not fantasies, exactly, just vivid home movies of the world-as-it-should-be.

At night, in my room, I carried on internal dialogues with important world personages. I was perfectly sane. I’d set up meetings with LBJ and Andrei Gromyko and Ho Chi Minh, informal summit conferences at which I would preside as an instrument of moderation and compromise, a peacemaker. “Just relax,” I’d say, and Gromyko would say, “Man, I can’t relax, these fucking Texans,” so then I’d come up with suggestions about ways to cope with anxiety and stress, anything to prevent twitches in the trigger finger.

Mind games, but nothing freaky. I pretended I was a corpse. I saw myself as a member of Custer’s lost command.

And Sarah Strouch.

Sarah was Fantasy Number One.

Ever since high school, our relationship had been a classic love-hate affair, and at Peverson State there was no change. Two different people, two different worlds. She was a campus superstar—a cheerleader, of course—vapid, vain, cruel, and beautiful. The combination intrigued me. During our first year at Peverson, we crossed paths fairly often, in the cafeteria, or walking to class, but Sarah’s eyes would always slide over me with a kind of queenly indifference. She didn’t nod or wave. She didn’t smile. The signals, I thought, were not encouraging, so naturally fantasy took over. There was Sarah-as-she-was and there was Sarah-as-she-should-be.

At certain hours of the night she would slip into my room and put her arms around me and say, “Well, now, here we are. Just you and me.”

Or she’d sit quietly on the bed, smiling a secret smile while I finished my homework.

Not crazy.

Not mere whimsy.

To the contrary, those feats of imagination kept me sane. They were a means of connecting the dots, locating the hidden scheme of things. Who could become a surgeon, for instance, without first visualizing the surgical event, slicing open a human breast and prying apart the ribs and dipping into blood and gore? Our lives are shaped in some small measure by the scope of our daydreams. If we can imagine happiness, we might find it. If we can imagine a peaceful, durable world, a civilized world, then we might someday achieve it. If not, we will not. Therefore Sarah Strouch would say, “Imagine this, William—I’m all yours.” And it was somehow real. Or at least a kind of reality, the reality of what could be and might still be. Lying back, smiling with her eyes, she would perform uncommon acts of generosity and understanding. She would allow liberties—holding, touching. “Very nice,” she’d whisper, “just keep squeezing, don’t stop.”

It’s true, I lived in my head, but my head was a secure residence. There were no fracture lines. Sometimes I’d feel a little slippage, even some inexplicable sorrow, and yet with luck, with immense willpower, I made it through my freshman year.

I put up No Trespassing signs outside my door.

I papered my walls with obituaries.

No problem, I was fine.

Strange goings-on, however.

January 1966, a sophomore slump, and there were some disconcerting nighttime occurrences.

I watched a missile rising from the plateau beyond the Little Bighorn. Yes, a rocket, bright white with blue markings and a silver nose cone. “Ah me,” I said mildly. But there it was, sleek and conspicuous against the night sky. I could read the letters USA on its midsection; I could see the tail fins and the peeling paint at its rear quarters. This was not, I realized, a dream. This was a missile. At the time, which was well after midnight, I was situated in a reclining position at the riverbank. I was alone. I had no future. “Ah me,” I said, then came a high whining sound. The missile rose at a slight northward angle. It passed across the face of the moon. For a moment I feared the flashes might come, but there was just the missile climbing against gravity, beyond the football stadium, toward Canada and the Arctic Ocean, a smooth, graceful parabola that was not without mystique and beauty.

The omens were obvious. It occurred to me that the world’s mainspring had tightened up a notch. Much later, when I looked up, the missile had vanished and there was a light snow falling, soft and deadly.

“No sweat,” I said.

Imagination, that was my strong suit. I pretended nothing had happened.

But it happened, and it kept happening.

In February I watched thirteen marines die along a paddy dike near Chu Lai.

I recall an encounter with napalm.

Voices, too—people shouting. In the hours before dawn I was awakened by Phantom jets. I saw burning villages. I saw the dead and maimed. I saw it. I was not out of my mind. I was in my mind; I was a mind’s eyewitness to atrocity by airmail. There were barricades before public buildings. There were cops in riot masks, and clubs and bullhorns, and high rhetoric, and Kansas burning, and a black bomb pinwheeling against a silver sky, and 50,000 citizens marching with candles down Pennsylvania Avenue. I heard guns and helicopters and LBJ’s nasal twang: This will be a disorderly planet for a long time… turbulence and struggle and even violence.

Disorder, I reasoned, begets disorder, and no one is immune. Even Chicken Little got roasted.

But I held tight.

Day to day, I waited it out. February was dreary, March was worse. Delusion seemed optional. I couldn’t quite choose; I couldn’t unburden myself. In the bathroom, pants at my knees, it was easy to envision a set of circumstances by which I would ultimately expire of unknown causes in the confines of some public toilet stall—in a Texaco station outside Tucson, or behind a door marked “Gents” in a Howard Johnson’s along the road to Cleveland. It made a poignant image. A night janitor would find my corpse; the autopsy would be brisk and businesslike. For a month, perhaps, my remains would lie unclaimed, and afterward I would go to a pauper’s grave, in an aluminum box, and there I would present my modest tribute to the worms.

No question, I was depressed. Scared, too. One evening I picked up a scissors and held it to my throat. It was a ticklish sensation, not unpleasant. I drew the blade upward. No blood, just testing.

The time had come, I decided, to seek help.

Quickly, I dropped the scissors and walked down the hallway to a pay phone and put in a call to Chuck Adamson.

No answer, though.

So while the phone rang, I talked about the facts of the case. I told him I was boxed in by disorder. I described the pressures. “I swear to God,” I said, “it’s like I might explode or something. I keep seeing things.” Then I told him about that missile over the Little Bighorn. Nothing mystical, I said. It was there. I went on for some time about napalm and Phantom jets, how things were accelerating toward crack-up, high velocity, how I couldn’t cope, how I couldn’t make any headway with Gromyko and LBJ, how it was down-the-tubes time, the scissors, the temptation to call it quits, how I couldn’t shit, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t find my place in the overall pattern of events. “Otherwise,” I said, “I’m doing pretty well.” Then I pressed the phone tight to my ear. There were cracklings on the line, long-distance buzzings, but I paid attention while Adamson explained that he’d gone through the same experiences back in college, a tough time, and that it was finally a question of maintaining mental traction, keeping purchase on slippery winter roads.

“The first step,” he said, “is to stop talking to yourself.”

I nodded and said, “What else?”

There was a pause.

“These visions of yours. You have to figure out what’s fact and what’s—”

“It is fact,” I said sharply. “The war, it’s a fact.”

“True.”

“So?”

Adamson seemed pensive. “Imagination,” he said, “that’s your special gift, but you have to use it. Take charge. And stay away from scissors.”

There was a sharp clicking sound. The phone kept ringing, no answer, but for a few moments I was back in his office again. He winked at me. His eyes were clear and lucid. Smiling, he swiveled in his chair and stood up and went to the window. And there it was: the shining dome on the state capitol, buffed and golden. “Politics,” he said, “give it some thought.”

I was no radical, not by a long shot.

But what does one do?

I recovered. I spent the next six months seeking traction. Finally, though, what does one do?

By the autumn of my junior year, October 1966, the American troop level in Vietnam exceeded 325,000. Operation Rolling Thunder closed in on Hanoi. The dead were hopelessly dead. The bodies were bagged and boxed. In Saigon, General Westmoreland called for fresh manpower, and at the State Department, Dean Rusk assured us that rectitude would soon prevail, a matter of attrition. Yet the dead remained dead. For the dead there was no rectitude. For the dead there was nothing more to die for. The dead were silent on the matter of attrition. So what does one do? Among the living, Richard Nixon peeled his eyes and bided time. Robert Kennedy waffled. Richard Daley ruled a peaceful city. Beneath the surface, however, premonition was evolving toward history. I was a witness. Like déjà vu in reverse, lots of backspin. In Los Angeles, Sirhan Sirhan came into possession of a .22-caliber Iver Johnson revolver. I watched the transaction. In Minnesota, Eugene McCarthy reviewed his options; in Washington, Robert McNamara entertained misgivings; in Hollywood, Jane Fonda began setting an agenda. Hawks were at the throats of doves. It was a fitful, uncertain autumn, but the dead kept dying. They died on the six o’clock news, then they died again at midnight, and now and then I could hear the shearings of a great continental fault, I could feel the coming fracture.

In a time of emergency, the question will not be begged: What does one do?

I made my decision on a Sunday evening.

Politics, I thought.

On Monday morning I purchased some poster paper and black ink. The language came easily. In simple block letters I wrote: THE BOMBS ARE REAL.

Trite, I realized, but true.

At the noon hour I took up a position in front of the cafeteria. The place was crowded but there was the feeling of absolute aloneness. I lifted the poster with both hands. As people filed by, nothing much registered, just background noise, a brisk wind and giggles and wisecracks. That was the price. I knew it and I paid it.

Weird William, I thought.

In hindsight, it might seem silly, a kid holding up a sign that announced the obvious, but for me it represented something substantial. I felt proud. Embarrassment, too, but mostly pride.

I’m not sure how long I stood there. Twenty minutes, a half hour. I remember how bright the day was, no clouds, very crisp and clean, that wind off the river. I remember the sound of clanking plates in the cafeteria. There was laughter, but it didn’t bother me. In a sense, I suppose, I wasn’t entirely there. Drifting, maybe. The faces seemed to blend and dissolve. There was a war on—they didn’t know. There was butchery—they didn’t know. “Shit,” someone said, but they simply did not know, they had no inkling, so I smiled and let my sign speak sign language: the blunt, trite, unarguable truth. Real. The guns were real, and the dead, and the silos and hot lines and Phantom jets. The war was real. The technology was real. Even that which could not be seen was real, the unseen future, the unseen letting of unseen blood—and the bombs—the fuses and timers and tickings—and the consequences of reality, the consequences were also real. But no one knew. No one imagined. “What this brings to mind,” a voice said, “is shit.” And that, too, was real. And Sarah Strouch, who paused at the cafeteria doors, watching me with cool black eyes. Real, I thought. She wore blue shorts and a pink T-shirt scooped low at the neck. There was a hesitation, then she tilted her head sideways and said, “Such true shit.”

I was in control. Over the next two months, every Monday, I stationed myself at the same spot in front of the cafeteria. It was a feeble exercise, I realized that, but in conscience what does one do? Take a stance—what else?

I was alone until early December.

A frigid Monday, another noon vigil, then Ollie Winkler tapped me on the elbow and said, “Bombs.”

I knew the voice.

A couple of years earlier, back in chem class, we’d shared a Bunsen burner, but that was the full extent of it. Ollie was not my kind of person. Very short, very plump. A Friar Tuck facsimile in a white cowboy hat and fancy high-heeled boots.

He gestured at my poster with fat fingers.

“This bomb shit,” he said, “a catchy tune. Who do we assassinate?”

He straightened up to his full height—maybe five foot two. His smile seemed thin. “Just narrow it down for me. Plastic explosives? Time bombs? You got to name some names.”

I was candid with him. I told him to fuck off.

Ollie flicked his eyebrows. “A sense of humor, ace, it goes a long way. Bombs, though. I guess you could say I’m halfway intrigued.” He winked and tipped up his cowboy hat. Circus material, I thought. Not quite a midget, but there was obvious evidence of a misplaced chromosome. “What I mean,” he said, then paused again. “I mean, you’ve had your one-man show out here, but maybe you could use a helping hand, so to speak. If I’m interested, that is.”

I nodded.

“That’s wonderful,” I said, “just don’t get interested,” then I turned and left him standing there.

But ten minutes later, in the cafeteria, he waddled over to my table and put his tray down and made himself at home. The wise thing, I decided, was silence. I opened up a book called Minerals of the Earth and studied the cubic structure of thorianite.

“The problem,” Ollie said cheerfully, “is nobody likes you.”

Thorianite had a specific gravity of 9.87. It was soluble in nitric and sulphuric acids. It had a hardness factor of 6.5.

“I mean, you prance around with this holier-than-thou outlook. Don’t even talk to nobody. And this bombs-are-real bull—people just laugh. You want results, you best retool your whole piss-poor attitude.”

I took a sip of lemonade.

Thorianite, I noted, often contained traces of cesium and lanthanum. The largest deposits occurred in Ceylon and the Soviet Union.

“You want to be laughed at?” he asked. “You want that?”

“Morons,” I said.

Ollie rubbed his nose. “Don’t I know it? Hayseeds. But like I said, results is the bottom line.”

“And?”

“Kick ass. Find yourself some allies and start punching tickets. Riots, maybe. Whatever’s necessary.”

“Allies,” I said. “Like you, I bet.”

“Maybe. First we talk.”

I snapped the book shut. The cafeteria was jammed with the usual lunchtime crowd. Behind me, a radio was booming out House of the Rising Sun, and there was the clatter of silverware and triviality. No one knew. At the next table Sarah Strouch was showing off her thighs to a linebacker named Rafferty.

I folded my arms and said, “So talk.”

“Straight?”

“However,” I said. “Quick would be nice.”

Ollie straddled his chair and spent the next several minutes outlining my character flaws. Too conceited, he said. Too wrapped up in myself. Too smug and pompous and high and mighty.

“I could go on,” he said, and smiled, “but you get the drift. And now this bomb nonsense.”

“The truth,” I said.

“Oh, yeah. Truth. The war, right?”

“Partly. Other items, too.”

He shrugged. “Shrapnel, I know. You made your point, that’s why I’m here.”

“The point, Ollie.”

“Action. We team up.” He waved a pudgy hand at me. “In case you haven’t noticed, you and me got a lot in common. Two birds of the same fucked-up feather. Losers, that is. But I’ll tell you a basic fact. Losers sometimes get pissed. They get impolite, sometimes. That’s how revolutions happen.”

I put my coat on.

“Well,” I said, “it’s been fun.”

“Like in Moscow, 1917. Losers banging on winners. They didn’t wave no signs, they cut throats.”

“I’ll remember that.”

“Losing sucks,” he said. “Losers lose.”

He removed his cowboy hat and brushed the brim with the back of his hand. His voice had a squeaky, hollowed-out sound, like an old 78 recording.

“So anyway,” he said, “let’s brainstorm a minute. Let’s say, for instance, we drop this peaceful-protest crud. Winning-wise, it don’t create the right impression. You got to wake people up—get their attention, basically—which means you blow a few socks off. Rig up some ordnance. Let the wreckage speak for itself.”

“Not interested,” I said.

“You don’t talk bombs. You show bombs. Scorch City. I guarantee, nobody laughs. Don’t hear jack.”

Then he listed some recent developments.

He talked about C-4 explosives and white phosphorus and the killing radius of a Claymore mine. A technical whiz, I thought, but what impressed me most was his little-man ferocity, and that gremlin voice, and the way he managed to present his own freakiness in a fairly convincing context. Sitting there, half listening, I was reminded of those old B movies with midgets dressed up as cowboys—the hero and the outlaws and the Shetland ponies—all midgets, but they play it straight, so after a while you begin to think that’s how the world is, it’s pint-sized, it comes at you in small doses. With Ollie Winkler, however, there was the added dimension of danger.

I finally stood up.

“One personal question,” I said casually, smiling at him. “When you were a kid, I mean, did you ever fool around with chemistry sets? Like testing nails for their iron content?”

He gave me a stare.

“Maybe so,” he said. “What if?”

“Just a question.”

“Yeah, but so what?”

“Fine,” I said, “don’t get defensive.”

“I’m not defensive. What if, though?”

I nodded soberly and picked up my tray.

“Those nails,” I said. “I’ve always wondered. Iron or no iron?”

Ollie slapped a fork against the palm of his hand. There was a pause, then he chuckled and rolled his shoulders.

“Super wit,” he said. “Chemistry sets, I like that, very shitty-witty. And here’s another funny one: What’d the chef say to the terrorist? There’s this chef, see, and there’s this jerkoff terrorist—real namby-pamby, can’t get no results—so the chef says, he says: Listen up, asshole. You don’t make a revolution without breaking a few legs.”

A week later he joined me on the line. He was carrying a home-made model bomb. “Audiovisual device,” he said, “like in show-and-tell.”

It wasn’t friendship, just an alliance. Two of us now—me with my poster, Ollie with his bomb—and together we established a makeshift front against the war. It was entirely my show. No broken legs, I told him, and although there were complaints now and then, he generally played along.

“You’re the boss,” he’d say softly, “but the time’ll come. You can mark it on your calendar.”

I didn’t let it influence me.

Slow and steady, I thought.

It was a routine. All through December, then time off for Christmas vacation, then the brittle cold of January. Long hours on the line, stiff fingers and tenacity. There was schoolwork, too, and exams and humdrum classes, but there was also a subtle new sense of command. I slept well. Fluid sleep, smooth and buoyant, a plush new laxity in my bowels. I was healthy. I was almost happy.

The only drawback, really, was Ollie Winkler.

“Letter bomb?” he’d say. “All I need’s a zip code. Send it COD.”

“No.”

“Yeah, but Jesus, we’re not getting anywhere.”

“Negative.”

“No, you mean?”

“I do. I mean no.”

By temperament, obviously, I was not inclined toward violence, and therefore even his mock-up bomb made me a bit queasy. A demo model, Ollie called it, but it had the heft and authority of the genuine article. A steel frame with nasty appendages at each end, bright copper wiring, a soft ticking at its core.

“The bombs are real,” Ollie said, and tapped the hollow casing. “Say the word, I’ll arrange some surprises.”

I just shook my head.

In a way, though, he was right. The bomb had credibility. People made wide turns as they entered the cafeteria. The power of firepower: it delivered a punchy little message.

“What I could do,” Ollie said, “I could—”

“No.”

He grinned. “Oh, well,” he said, “live and learn.”

Mostly it was drudge work. We doubled our picket time—Mondays and Fridays. No theatrics, just moral presence. We were there. All around us, of course, the apathy was like cement, hard and dense, and to be honest there were times when I came close to chucking it. Goofy, I’d think. And futile. I was no martyr. I hated the public eye, I felt vulnerable and absurd. Fuck it, I’d tell myself, but then I’d remember. Headlines. A new year, January 1967, and eighteen GIs died under heavy mortar fire outside Saigon.

Goofy, perhaps, but the goofiness had an edge to it.

So what does one do?

Hold the line and hope. My dreams were honorable. There was the golden dome on the state capitol; there was the world-as-it-should-be.

When I look back on that period, it’s clear that my motives were not strictly political. At best, I think, it was a kind of precognitive politics. Granted, the war was part of it, I had ideals and convictions, but for me the imperative went deeper. Sirens and pigeons. A midnight light show. It occurred to me, even at the time, that our political lives could not be separated from the matrix of life in general. Joseph Stalin: the son of a poor cobbler in Tiflis. George Washington: a young neurotic who could not bring himself to tell a modest lie. Why does one man vote Republican, another Socialist, another not at all? Pure intellect? A cool adjudication between means and ends? Or more likely, does it have to do with a thick tangle of factors—Ollie Winkler’s garbled chromosomes, my own childhood, a blend of memory and circumstance and dream?

I wasn’t a fortune-teller.

Vision, nothing more. Dim previews of coming attractions. The rest was trial and error.

In the first week of February, we set up a formal organization on campus. The Committee, we called it. We took out an ad in the Pevee Weekly, calling for volunteers, and three days later, on a Saturday afternoon, we convened our first meeting in a small conference room in the basement of Old Main.

I presided, Ollie sat to my immediate left. At two o’clock, when I called the meeting to order, it was clear that we had a severe manpower problem. The only other body in the room belonged to a large, tent-shaped coed who brooded in total silence at the far end of the table.

“This is Tina,” Ollie said, “I’ll vouch for her.”

The girl gazed fixedly at her own stomach; she seemed fascinated by it, a little overwhelmed.

Tina Roebuck: two hundred pounds of stolid mediocrity. A home-ec major. A chronic overeater. She was not obese, exactly, just well spread out. Generous hips and sturdy thighs and big utilitarian breasts. Like a Russian hammer-thrower, I decided—the poor girl obviously could not tell day from night without a sundial.

I smiled and shuffled some papers.

“Floor’s open,” I said, and shrugged. “I think we can dispense with parliamentary procedure.”

Then I settled back.

Ollie Winkler did most of the talking. For ten minutes the discussion revolved around petty organizational matters. Ollie slipped his boots off, resting a foot on the edge of the table. “What we got here,” he was saying, “is a troika situation, like in the USS of R, three horses pulling the same big sled. Which means we best divvy up the power, keep the reins straight so to speak, that way we don’t get tangled up or nothing… Like with—”

I stood up and opened a window. The room had a stale, dirty-sock smell.

“Like with electricity,” Ollie said. “Power lines, I mean. One person can’t hog the amps and volts. Power, that’s where it’s at, we got to spread it around equal. The troika idea. Equal horsepower.” He paused to let this concept take shape, then massaged his toes and went on to talk about the virtues of shared leadership, how we had to be a democracy.

I slapped the table.

“Democracy’s fine,” I said. “Put your goddamn boots on.”

Ollie blinked.

“A case in point,” he said.

There was laughter at the end of the table. Tina Roebuck reached into her purse and pulled out a giant-sized Mars bar and placed it on the table directly in front of her.

She folded her hands and stared at it.

“Democracy,” Ollie sighed, “a lost art.”

“Next item,” I said.

Ollie hesitated. “Well, hey. Can’t we at least assign jobs, sort of? Like sergeant at arms. Where’s the fun if you don’t get special jobs?”

“Sergeant at arms,” I said. “You’re elected.”

“We didn’t vote.”

“One-zip, a landslide.”

“But we got to—”

“Unanimous. Congratulations.”

He grinned and tipped back his cowboy hat. “Sergeant at arms, it’s right up my alley. Jeez, maybe I should get myself an armband or something—I saw that on TV once, they always wear these nifty black armbands. Like a symbol, you know?”

“Fine,” I murmured.

“Armband. Write it down, man.”

“What?”

“On paper. Armband, put it in writing.”

I jotted a quick note to myself.

There was a disconcerting absence of dignity in the room. Shallow, I thought. Sad and stupid. Across the table, Tina Roebuck was still examining her Mars bar, hands folded. It was a test of willpower, apparently, a curious exercise in temptation and denial. At one point she reached out and nudged the candy with a thumb and then shuddered and quickly folded her hands again.

The world, I realized, was a frail and desperate place.

“Tina,” I said gently, “eat it.”

She frowned and looked up.

“Eat?” she whispered.

“Don’t be bashful.”

“But I’m not… I mean, I’m not hungry.”

“Go ahead, though,” I said. “Treat yourself.”

She glanced at the Mars bar. “No, I just like to look at it. Window-shop, sort of.” She swallowed. Her voice was soft, almost sexy, a surprising Deep South lilt to the vowels. “Anyway, I’m not hungry.”

“Well, good.”

“I’m not.”

“But if you get the urge—”

“Fuck off!” she yelled. The softness was gone. She shifted weight and stared at me. “All this bullshit! The war, that’s why I’m here. People getting killed.”

Ollie smiled.

“Give it to him,” he said. “Open up, kid—both barrels.”

“Killed dead!” said Tina.

“More.”

“Dead,” she repeated. She poked the candy bar. “Talk-talk, no action. When do we start raising hell?”

Again, Ollie smiled at her, fondly.

“There’s the question,” he said. “When?”

Strange people, I thought. The incongruities were beguiling. I couldn’t help but take notice of Tina’s white ballet slippers, Ollie’s cowboy shirt with its fancy embroidery and brass studs. Here was the new order. A midget in the White House, a Mars bar on every plate. Almost funny, except there was some emotion in the room.

“Shock waves,” Ollie was saying. “We cut out this pussyfoot stuff. Apply some heat, that’s my vote.”

I shook my head.

“We’ve been over this,” I said. “No bombs.”

“I’m not talking bombs. Noisemakers. Don’t hurt nobody, just decibels. Sit there, thumb up your ass, but sooner or later it’s smash time. The chef and the terrorist, remember?”

“I do.”

“And you know the moral? The moral’s this. Heat. You bring it to bear. And if you can’t stand the heat… Understand me?”

Tina Roebuck chuckled.

“The frying pan,” she said softly.

“That’s it exactly,” said Ollie. He smiled at me, but it was a grim smile. “Fuckin’ sizzle. That’s what the chef says. He says you better learn to tolerate extremes.”

I’d had enough.

I stacked my papers, stood up, and moved to the door.

“Carry on,” I said. I nodded at Tina. “Let me know how it turns out with that candy bar.”

At the time it all seemed hopeless, but in the end that meeting represented a pivot of sorts, a classic confrontation between the either-ors. The choice was there. I could’ve backed out with honor. Shrug and walk away—I could’ve dismissed the complications. Was it a correct war? Was it a civil war? Was Ho Chi Minh a nationalist or a Communist, or both, and to what degree, and what about the Geneva Accords, and what about SEATO, and what is worth killing for, if anything, and what is worth dying for, and who decides? I could’ve done without these riddles. I could’ve pursued my studies and graduated with distinction and spent the next decade lying low. Hedged my bets. Closed my eyes. Nothing to it, a slight change of course. Let the gravediggers do their work, I could’ve managed quite nicely. A snug mountain retreat. Or a cave, or a hole. No armies, no social milieu, no drafts to dodge, no underground strife. True, you can’t rewind history, but if I’d recognized the pivot for what it was, things might’ve followed a different track. I could’ve avoided some funerals. A choice, and I chose, but I could’ve avoided the rest of my life.

Amazing, how the circuits connect. One minute you’re all alone and then suddenly it just happens. The wires touch. A Friday evening, February 1967, and Sarah glared at me.

“You,” she said.

It was an affair called Winter Carnival. Like a prom, basically: an all-night party to ward off the midterm blahs. First a dance, then a buffet, then a movie, then finally a dawn breakfast. I’m not sure what made me go—premonition sounds phony—but around eight o’clock I put on a clean shirt and hiked over to the gymnasium.

For a while I just stood at the doorway letting my eyes adjust. Pitiful, I thought. Penny loafers and spiffy sweaters. No one knew. The theme for that year’s Carnival was “Custer’s Last Stand,” and the gym had been decorated to resemble a large and very gory battlefield, a mock-up of the Little Bighorn, with cardboard cutouts of dead horses and burning wagons and arrows and tomahawks and wild-eyed Indians and mutilated soldiers. At the center of the dance floor was a big papier-mâché dummy of Custer himself—very lifelike, except he was obviously dead. The body had been propped up against a wagon wheel. It was shot full of arrows and the hair was gone and the whole corpse was wet with ketchup-blood. The idea, no doubt, was to make everyone feel a swell of state pride, or a sense of history, but for me it was the creeps. Especially the scalps. Greasy and convincing—scalps everywhere—dangling from the basketball hoops, floating in the punch bowl.

Custer’s Last Stand, it was insane and juvenile. It was Montana, 1967.

At the front door a kid dressed up as Crazy Horse used a scissors to perform a symbolic scalping. Ned Rafferty, a big-shit line-backer—I recognized him through his war paint. Dumb as bread, of course, but very presentable in the muscle department.

Rafferty dipped some of my hair into a bowl of ketchup.

“Careful now,” he said. He gave me a long look. “Like your poster says. A violent world, white man.”

I nodded and edged away.

Jocks, I thought. Linebackers and bacteria. Try, but you couldn’t escape them.

Up at the far end of the gym, a band was playing Stranger on the Shore. The place was dark and noisy. Like a cattle show—everybody sweating and swaying and grinding up against each other. Right then I nearly called it a night. No dignity, I thought, but I moved over to the punch bowl and stood around drinking scalp for the next half hour. No knowledge, no vision. Wall-to-wall morons. At one point I spotted Ollie and Tina out on the dance floor. They were snuggled up close, like lovers, and in a way I envied them. Just the closeness. They weren’t my kind, though, and when Ollie waved at me I turned away and watched the band.

I could feel my stomach cramping up. Maybe it was the punch, maybe loneliness, but I was on the verge of walking out when the circuits connected.

Partly luck, partly circumstance.

It began as a silly party game called Pevee Pair-Off. The idea was for the women to line up in a single long row at one end of the gym, all the men at the other, and then when the signal was given, the two rows were supposed to march toward each other like opposing skirmish lines in old-fashioned warfare. A lottery of sorts. Whoever you bumped into became your partner for the evening. Again, for me, it was one of those mysterious either-ors—I could’ve headed for the door—but for some reason I took the risk.

Once the rules had been explained, and once we’d lined up in our parallel formations, the band struck up a jazzy version of Moon River and someone blew a whistle and we started out across the floor. It was a ticklish experience. Exciting, I suppose, but scary. The lights had been turned off to prevent people from taking aim, and there was the strange, somewhat dizzy sensation of moving blindfolded toward a steep drop-off. Finally I closed my eyes and let the momentum take over.

I almost knocked her down.

When the lights came on, she was bent forward at the waist, drawing shallow little breaths. It took a few seconds before she recognized me.

“Oh, shit,” she said. “You.”

It was not instant love. We danced a few numbers, watched the limbo contest, then sat at one of the tables near the bandstand. She seemed a little sullen. But gorgeous—the body of a gymnast, like hardwood, and black eyes and black eyebrows and black-brown hair. And the skin. Miracle skin, I thought. Even there, in winter, it had a rich walnut gloss, smooth and flawless against a white blouse and a crisp white skirt.

For some time nothing much was said. She kept fidgeting, very ill at ease, so finally I began chattering away about various cheerleading matters, megaphones and culottes, whatever I could dream up.

“Culottes?” she said absently. “What about them?”

I glanced over at Custer. “Nothing, really. Mysterious. Tantalizing, I guess.”

“Tacky,” Sarah mumbled.

“Exactly right.”

“You, I mean.”

I smiled. “Maybe so,” I said, “but I always thought you looked fabulous in culottes. Super kneecaps. Culottes and kneecaps, they go together.”

“No shit?” she said. Her eyes shifted out toward the dance floor.

It was not going well, I knew that, but I couldn’t seem to settle down. I told her how I used to sit up in the bleachers during high school football games, how much I admired her cartwheels and backflips. Stunning, I said. A real athlete. I even confessed that I’d always been somewhat in awe of her—in awe of cheerleaders in general.

Sarah nodded and looked at her wristwatch.

“Well,” she said, “I can understand that. We’re special people.”

She paused and massaged her temples. When she spoke again, her voice had a plaintive quality, mournful and bleak.

“I know what you’re thinking,” she said. “Fluffhead. All beauty, no brains. People think we’re just glitz and glitter, nobody realizes how much crap we have to put up with. Christ, if—” She stopped and stared at me. Complex things were happening in her eyes. “I mean, just think about it. You ever see a cheerleader with fat thighs? All that cruddy cottage cheese—God, I hate cottage cheese, it’s like eating chalk—but do you hear me complaining? No way, because I care. Because I’ll go that extra mile.”

“A martyr,” I said.

She gave her head a quick, violent shake.

“Don’t mock me, man. Straight A’s, you can check it out. I’m smart. Body and brains, the whole package.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Smart,” she said.

There was a silence.

“What I despise,” she said quietly, “is condescension. I’m a human being.”

“For sure,” I said. “A smart one.”

“Yes?”

“It’s very clear.”

Sarah frowned at me. For the first time there was some warmth in the eyes, tiny flecks of orange and silver floating in the deep blackness.

The band was playing My Girl.

“Well,” she said, still frowning, her voice cool and wary, “maybe you’re not such a creep after all.”

“Maybe not.”

“But still—”

Again, there was that softening. She looked at her hands.

“Anyway, this is strictly a one-night shot. We’re stuck with each other—c’est la vie, et cetera—but to be perfectly honest I’d rather be down in Brazil munching on maggots. No offense. Just so we have an understanding.”

I nodded, then Sarah stood up and hooked a thumb toward the dance floor.

“All right, let’s jiggle it,” she said. “Hands off, though. I know every gimmick in the book.”

She looked like a starlet. Sleek and lean and smart. She danced with her eyes closed, ignoring the crowd and the music, ignoring me. Luck, I kept thinking. Between dances we talked about the old days at Fort Derry High, the time I’d passed out in geometry class, the way she’d cradled my head and fanned me with her notebook. “Bizarre,” Sarah said, and I smiled at her and admitted that I’d gone through a rough period back then. I described the headaches and constipation, that out-of-synch sensation, my sessions with Chuck Adamson.

Sarah listened carefully.

“In other words—” She waited a moment. “Bats? Breakdown?”

“Not quite. Ancient history, back to normal.”

“Right,” she grunted. All around us people were dancing hard to drums. “And this thing at the cafeteria? The bomb scare—that’s normal?”

“No,” I said. “Necessary.”

“Which means?”

“Nothing. Just necessary.”

Sarah made a vague motion with her shoulders.

“Maybe so, but it seems a little—what’s the word?—pretentious. Mr. Prophet.”

“War,” I said. “Vietnam. In case you haven’t—”

She stepped back. “I told you, I’m not stupid, so you can cut out the condescending crap. The prophet with his poster, it’s all very cute, I suppose, but very half-assed.”

“Just a symbol,” I said.

“Oh, lovely.” Sarah snorted and shook her head. “Take a look around. You think these idiots care about symbols? Fireworks, that’s all they understand. Bang for the buck. It’s a bad new age—symbols don’t make it.”

“And you could do better?”

“No worse. At least you’d see some pyrotechnics. Not that I’d ever get involved.”

Her eyes moved sideways. She started to add something, then thought better of it.

The music had gone mellow.

“Symbols,” she muttered, then reached out and slipped her arms around me and came in close. There was a new openness in her posture: legs separated, a subtle tilt to the pelvis.

For the next hour things were fine. No talking, just motion. It all seemed appropriate. The scalps and arrows and twinkling lights, and the way she moved, athletic but graceful, and the mood, and the romantic expression in Custer’s wide blue eyes. I recognized the compatibilities. When we danced slow, I could feel her breasts against me, the give and take. There were skin smells, too, and a perfume of roses sprinkled with spice—clove or cinnamon.

The perfume was what did it to me.

First a prickly stirring below my belt, then the inevitable laws of hydraulics. I shut my eyes and tried to force it down, but Sarah suddenly jerked away.

“What the hell’s that?” she said.

“Nothing, it’s a—”

“I know what it is! Just keep it away from me!”

I was already wilting.

“An accident,” I said.

“Accident!”

“Look, I’m sorry, it’s like chemistry or something, those things happen. You shouldn’t take it quite so personal.”

Sarah winced.

“Never fails. Same old garbage—put on a letter sweater, guys automatically assume you’re Little Miss Easy Squeezie. Little Miss Huff and Puff.”

“Not me. I don’t think that way.”

“I’ve got feelings!”

For a second it seemed she might spin away. Her eyes moistened. It was real anger, and a kind of sadness, but then she gave me a resigned half-smile, almost tender, and locked her hands around the small of my back. She kept dancing even after the music stopped.

Here, I realized, was a very troubled young lady.

After a time Sarah sighed and put her cheek against mine. “All right, you couldn’t help it,” she said. “Chemistry. You’re not such a bad guy, really. Under other circumstances—who knows? It’s just too bad about your rotten personality.”

“My mistake.”

“A queer duck, aren’t you?”

“Unique,” I said. “One of a kind.”

She smiled. A volatile person, I thought, but it was a genuine smile, crooked and friendly.

We danced flat-footed, barely moving.

“You know what I remember?” she said. “I remember back in high school—even junior high—you had this tremendous crush on me. Remember that? Not that I blame you. Thing is, you never made a move. Didn’t even try, for God’s sake.”

“A little bashful,” I said.

“Maybe. But it was like I wasn’t quite good enough for you. I mean, did you ever smile at me? One lousy little smile?”

I thought about it.

“I guess not,” I said. “I didn’t know you were all that interested.”

Sarah laughed. “Of course I wasn’t interested. I would’ve shut you off like a light. All I’m saying is you never gave yourself a chance. Gutless, et cetera.”

But again she smiled.

It was tempting. Partly a dare and partly something else. Sarah looked straight at me.

“The problem,” she said softly, “is I’m bad news. Too hot to handle. You’d get burned.”

“I suppose.”

“Seriously. Don’t mess with it.”

There was still that intriguing half-smile, like an invitation, it seemed. At the corner of her mouth was a small red blister, which inspired me, and there was that hard acrobat’s body, and that perfumed skin.

I was working my way toward an act of great courage when Ned Rafferty tapped me on the shoulder and stepped in and glided away with her.

It was too quick to process. No words, just a wave, then she was gone.

“Sure,” I said, “go right ahead.”

I felt the fuses blowing. Scalped, I thought. First my father, now me.

Hard to find meaning in it.

When the music ended, I began weaving my way across the floor, but things were jammed, and by the time I got there it was too late, they were dancing again.

That fast—every time. It just happens.

I moved off to a corner and stood watching. Painful, but I had to admire Rafferty’s style, all the dips and fancy footwork. He was handsome, too—curly brown hair and gray eyes—but his greatest strength, I decided, was strength. He had that Crazy Horse power: feathers and war paint and big killer shoulders. It was pure hate. And what I hated most was the way Sarah smiled at him, that same inviting half-smile, except now it was aimed elsewhere.

Which is how it always happens.

That fast.

You get all revved up for somebody, ready to take the plunge, and the next thing you know you’re diving onto concrete.

There was a moral in it. Never underestimate the power of power. Never take chances. Because you end up getting smashed. Every time—crushed.

Safety first, that was the moral.

A half hour later Sarah found me sitting at a table near the buffet line.

“Back in the fold,” she said cheerfully, but I ignored her. I was busy twisting a scalp around my fists.

There was a hesitation before she sat down.

“You’re excited,” she said, “it’s obvious.”

At her forehead was a smudge of Rafferty’s orange war paint. I turned sideways and crossed my legs and began braiding the scalp into two neat pigtails.

For a few minutes Sarah sat watching.

“All right, listen, I’m sorry,” she finally said. She studied the scalp for a moment, then smiled. “Shouldn’t have gone off like that. The call of the wild, I guess. Fickle me. But it’s not like we’re engaged or anything. We’re barely friends.”

“Right,” I said, “barely friends. Take a walk.”

Sarah’s lips compressed.

“That old green devil. Jealousy, it gives me goose bumps.” As if by accident her hand dropped against my wrist. “Apologies, then? I didn’t mean to mess up your super ego. I was just—you know—just letting loose. Just dancing with the guy. No big deal.”

“He’s a turd,” I said.

“If you say so.”

“Fuzzball.”

Sarah laughed.

“Absolutely,” she said. “That’s why I’m here. Fuzzballs get boring. They tend to stick to your sweater.”

She liked me. She almost said so.

It was like riding ice, things seemed to skid by. I remember a saxophone. I remember Sarah leaning up against me. Not love, exactly, just intense liking. And it cut both ways. I liked her, she liked me. Late in the evening there was a Hula Hoop contest, which Sarah won, and afterward we ate sandwiches and potato salad, then danced, then sat in the bleachers and watched the party and talked about little things, our lives, which led into bigger things. Now and then she’d touch my arm. She’d look at me in a fond sort of way. At one point, I remember, she said she admired what I was doing at the cafeteria. It took guts, she said; it was honorable. I shrugged and said, “Half-assed?” and she was silent for a while, then said, “Well, listen, I’ve got this big mouth.” I told her it was a beautiful mouth. Then later we talked politics. It was soft, serious talk, not romantic, but it implied something. She said she hated the war as much as anyone. She had principles. She knew a thing or two about death—her father was a mortician—the stiffs stayed stiff—they didn’t wake up—she couldn’t see any reason for the killing. She put her hand on my arm. Her only quibble, she told me, was tactical. It was a real war, wasn’t it? Real bombs? Which required a real response. Posters were fine, but too passive, not enough drama.

She kept smiling, I remember. She kept that hand on my arm.

“What I’m trying to explain,” she said, “is you have to get people’s passions involved. Like with cheerleading. Politics and passion, same thing.”

And so then we discussed passion.

For me, I said, it wasn’t a question of right or wrong. It was a kind of seeing. “Crazy,” I said, but she didn’t laugh, so I told her about the flashes, and she nodded—she cared—she listened while I went on about Phantom jets and napalm and Kansas burning, how it wasn’t a dream, or not quite, or not entirely, just seeing.

Even then she didn’t laugh.

“Well,” she finally said, “I guess that’s one kind of passion.”

At two in the morning there was a final dance, then we trooped over to the student union to watch an old Jane Fonda movie.

But it was hard to concentrate. Sarah sat with her legs in my lap, knees cocked up like targets near my chin.

“You can touch,” she whispered.

So I touched. And later she chuckled and said, “Kneecaps—who would’ve thought it? You’re a sly puppy, aren’t you?”

Then she fell asleep.

For a long while I simply sat there in the dark. Up on the screen, Jane Fonda was busy seducing a basketball team, but I couldn’t keep my mind on it. I watched Sarah’s sleeping face. Real, I thought. It was no fantasy. Those pulsing places at the throat and inner thigh, the connectives, the curvatures and linkages. I considered my good fortune. There was a curious flow of warmth between us, as if we were exchanging blood, and the rest I imagined.

Much later, Sarah nudged me.

“Hey, there,” she murmured.

“Hey,” I said.

She sat up and stared at the screen. There was fatigue in her eyes, a lazy blankness.

“Kiss?” she said.

I kissed her, and she nodded. She moved closer. “You were aching for it, weren’t you? I can always tell. And now I suppose you want more?”

“I suppose so.”

“No future in it. No tomorrow.”

“We’ll see.”

“I do see. Nothing.” She eyed me for a moment. “You’re a virgin, no doubt?”

“Sort of,” I said. “With you, I used to pretend.”

“Pretend?”

“You know. Make-believe.”

There was a short silence. “Well,” she said, “glad I could help.” Then she sighed. “All right, permission granted, but just kisses. Nothing else. Don’t even pretend.” She slipped her head against my shoulder. “A little intensity this time, it’s good for the complexion.”

And later—maybe four in the morning, maybe five—later, when the lights came on, Sarah tucked her blouse in and looked at me with level eyes and said, “I wish it could work out. I really wish that.”

“But?”

“Let’s walk.”

We skipped the pancake breakfast.

Outside, there was a bright moon. Not quite dawn, but I could feel the stirrings.

“Be a gentleman,” Sarah said. “I’m très bushed. Too late for nookie.”

She hooked my arm.

We walked past the science building, across a parking lot, down a gravel path that led to the Little Bighorn. Our shoes made crunching sounds in the snow.

“What it comes down to,” she said, “is we’re different people. Complete opposites. Nobody’s fault.”

“Right,” I said. “Opposites.”

Sarah stopped at the riverbank.

She lay down and made an angel in the snow, then shivered and stood up and took my hand.

There was a slight droop to her eyelids.

“It’s like a jigsaw puzzle, like when the pieces don’t fit. Miss Razzle-Dazzle. Mr. Gloom-and-Doom. We’ve got our images to protect.”

“Images. I never thought of that.”

“I wish you’d—”

“Fucking images.”

I was moving on automatic. The river curled eastward, through white birch and pine, and things were very still.

“Besides,” Sarah said, “we had an agreement. A brief encounter. Didn’t we decide that?”

“I guess we did.”

“There you are, then.”

“Of course,” I said. “A deal’s a deal. Very tidy.”

She stopped, removed her gloves, put her hands on my cheeks, and held them there. We were the same height, almost exactly.

“It’s for the best,” she said. “I told you before, I’m dangerous. Too raunchy, too bitchy. Everything. You’d get hurt.”

“Sarah—”

“Enough.”

Crossing campus, we didn’t say much.

I was a gentleman.

Now and then, by chance, we brushed up against each other, and I could smell her skin, the skin itself, and there was that moment of hurt and panic, the urge to try something desperate, something gallant, like rape, a blow to the chin and then drag her off.

It made a nice picture.

At her dorm door I swallowed and said, “Well.”

Sarah kissed me.

“Passion,” she said, “good luck,” then she shook her head and backed away.

It was a rough weekend. Hard to envision a happy ending. Complete opposites—she was right.

On Monday morning I confronted the facts. It wasn’t love, after all. It wasn’t anything.

Getting out of bed was a major enterprise.

I showered and shaved and examined myself in the mirror. The eyes were bloodshot, the expression empty.

“No problem,” I said.

At noon I picked up my poster and walked over to the cafeteria. Ollie and Tina were already there. It was a dull winter day, bare and frozen, and no one cared, no one understood, and when I took my place on the line it all seemed trivial and small and dumb. Three clods in the cold. The poster, the model bomb—a bad joke. Not love, I thought. Not passion either. A joke, but it wasn’t funny.

For a long while I just stared down at my shoes, shoulders hunched, pondering the world-as-it-should-be.

When I looked up, Sarah was there.

Which is how it always happens—that fast. She was simply there.

We stood inspecting each other. Her hair was pulled back in a businesslike ponytail. She wore blue culottes and earmuffs and a silver letter sweater.

“What you remind me of,” she said after a moment, “is tooth decay. No sleep, I’ll bet. Bad dreams.”

“Surprise,” I said.

“You could’ve called.”

“I could’ve. I didn’t.”

Her lips brushed across my cheek.

“Well,” she said quietly, “a girl likes to be chased. Hot pursuit. The feminine mystique, I guess.” She looked over at Ollie and Tina, then at my poster. “So this is it? The famous Committee?”

It was all I could do to nod. There was an absence of symmetry, a strange new tilt to the world.

Sarah shrugged. She made a low sound, not quite a sigh, then took a step forward and turned and stood beside me. She was carrying a megaphone and red pom-poms.

“Don’t expect miracles,” she said. “You and me. A trial period, understand?”

“Of course.”

“And there’ll be some changes. New tactics. New leadership.”

“Agreed,” I said. “It’s only natural.”

Sarah lifted her megaphone.

“All right, that settles it,” she said. “Two weeks, maybe three, then we shut this rathole down. No more bullshit. There’s a war on.”

6 Escalations

LIKE HIDE-AND-GO-SEEK—the future curves toward the past, then folds back again, seamlessly, always expressing itself in the present tense.

The year is 1969, for example.

If I concentrate, if I stop digging for a moment, I can see Sarah sitting at a kitchen table in Key West. She wears a black bikini. She’s oiling an automatic rifle. “Terrorism,” she tells me, “is a state of mind. No need to hurt people, you just give that impression.”

Or it’s 1971. She’s famous. She’s on the cover of Newsweek. She smiles and says, “I warned you, William. Years ago, I told you I was dangerous. Remember that? And now I belong to the ages.”

Or it’s 1980, or 1985, and the war is over, and she’s one of the last of the die-hard rads. Her skin is leathery. Her eyes show the effects of windburn and fatigue. “Terrorism,” she repeats, “is a state of mind, but nobody gets terrified anymore.”

And now it’s late in the century, it’s 1995, and I’m digging, and I see sharpshooters and a burning safe house and the grotesque reality of the human carcass. The dead won’t stop dying. Ned and Ollie and Tina, all of them, they die in multiples, they can’t call it quits.

Then 1967.

Mid-March, a Sunday afternoon, and Sarah slips into my dorm room. She takes off her clothes and does a handstand at the center of my bed.

Even then, I suppose, she was something of a terrorist.

“Lucky William,” she’d sigh. “This relationship can’t last, you know. A law of nature, I’m just a higher form of life.”

At times it seemed she was right. Different species, almost, certainly different social classes, and yet over the final months of our junior year at Peverson State, as cause led to effect, Sarah and I somehow managed to make it work. We studied together, ate together, eventually slept together.

Even now, with the advantage of hindsight, I’m not sure what she saw in me. Maybe a counterpoint to her own charm; maybe a challenge. Cute, she’d sometimes call me, but I knew better—too skinny and angular and gawky. I had no poise, no presence. I’d often glance into windows or mirrors, obliquely, trying to catch myself unawares, to see myself as Sarah would, but the results were always depressing. I couldn’t find the cuteness. It was a strained, almost haggard face, blond hair gone sandy brown, blue eyes set back in deep dark sockets—grim-looking, I thought.

Still, she liked me. Not quite romance, just an intense collaboration of spirit. She kept me on my toes. Sudden shifts in mood, a heavy emphasis on coercion.

Extremism, after all, was her specialty and those were extreme times. There was a nip in the air. The music was militant. In Vietnam, more than 400,000 Americans were at war, and at home, even in Montana, apprehension had come to discontent.

“No more bullshit,” Sarah said, “there’s a war on,” then she went to work.

At the end of March, she orchestrated a series of teach-ins and classroom boycotts; in the first week of April she led a torchlight parade along the Little Bighorn—a pep rally for peace—half protest, half party.

How she did it, exactly, or why, I’m not sure, but by May Day politics had become respectable at Peverson State College, trendy and stylish. Again, the images blend and collide, but I remember pom-poms and cartwheels and barricades in front of Old Main. I can see Tina Roebuck silhouetted against a bonfire along the river. And I can see Ollie Winkler, who grins and spits on his hands as he wires up a stink bomb in the school auditorium. His eyes are nasty. “You don’t make a revolution,” he tells me, “without breaking a few legs.”

Mostly, though, I remember Sarah. She made things happen. Glamour, yes, and a flair for the dramatic, but she was also tough and practical, no tolerance for abstraction. “It’s combat,” she’d say. “Philosophy’s fine, but you don’t hem and haw on the front lines. You haul in the artillery.”

Intelligence, that was part of it. And she also had a rare intuitive gift for the process of push and shove. She brought glitter to bear, and at times a certain ruthlessness.

Cheerleader to rabble-rouser: It was a smooth, almost effortless transition. Surprising, maybe, and yet the impulse was there from the start. In a sense, I realized, cheerleaders are terrorists. All that zeal and commitment. A craving for control. A love of pageantry and crowds and slogans and swollen rhetoric. Power, too. The hot, energizing rush of absolute authority: Lean to the left, lean to the right. And then finally that shrill imperative: Fight—fight—fight! Don’t politicians issue the same fierce exhortations? Isn’t sex an active ingredient in the political enterprise? Pressing flesh, wooing the voters, stroking the Body Politic—aren’t these among the secret lures of any cheerleader?

Too simplistic, no doubt, but during the spring of 1967 the parallels seemed uncanny.

Sarah had the touch.

Her generalship was impeccable. Her demands were unqualified.

In public, but also in bed, she was a born leader.

“Passion,” she’d say. “Make me squirm.”

She’d use the bed like a trampoline. She’d lock her legs around me, tight, keeping the pressure on until I begged her to ease off.

Then she’d snort.

“Caution-caution,” she’d say. “No zip or zing. Can’t cut loose.”

“It’s not that.”

“It is that. I mean, here I am—perky Sarah—show me some sizzle, man. A girl wants to feel wanted.”

“But I can’t just—”

“Sizzle!”

She’d kneel beside me. Coyly, without shame, she’d do a little trick with her breasts, an expanding-flattening thing.

She might smile.

“Now that,” she’d say, “is what I call perkiness. Mona Lisa with muscles. And besides, I’m fond of you. God knows why—opposites attract, I guess—but it’s all yours. Everything. The entire perky package.”

“Nice,” I’d say, “it’s a nice package.”

“So what’s the holdup?”

“Nothing. Time, that’s all.”

“I’m loyal, William. I won’t desert you. I’ve got sticking power, you know? High fidelity.”

“I know that.”

“So?”

I’d shake my head and say, “Give it time.”

Sometimes she’d nod, sometimes not.

“Well, that’s very prudent,” she’d finally say, “but see, here’s the problem. Life has this weird quality called shortness. Places to go, minds to blow. It’s love I want. Worship.”

And then she’d straddle me.

She’d twirl her tongue against my throat.

“Don’t be bashful,” she’d whisper. “Yank out the cork, man, let’s go steady.”

The human heart, how do you explain it?

I was gun-shy. I didn’t trust her. Too temperamental, I thought. Too flashy.

A campus celebrity, wasn’t she?

That whole aura—the rattlesnake eyes, the pink polish on her toenails, the plucked and penciled eyebrows—an exhibitionist, a compulsive show-off. In the warm weeks of late spring, it wasn’t uncommon to find her sunbathing out in front of the student union, oiled up and elegant, flaunting her assets in a string bikini and high-heeled sandals. She’d come to class in spangled red shorts; she’d show up for dinner in pearls and mesh stockings and a fake fox coat. When I asked about all this, Sarah would only shrug: “The Age of Image,” she’d tell me. “Project or perish, it’s that simple.”

But it wasn’t simple. The psychological contradictions were stunning. An intelligent girl, she played the coquette; a dignified girl, she played vulgar. And yet she was also oddly vulnerable, even little-girlish at times. She could be gentle; she could be vicious. It wasn’t a split personality, it was fractured.

How could I take the risk?

In part, no doubt, I was held back by the old doomsday principle, an unwillingness to expose myself. But it was more than that.

Politics, too—she was aggressive in the extreme. True, she had a conscience, and tremendous charisma, but even so I could detect the intimidating shape of things to come. In May, I remember, she led a midnight raid on the ROTC offices in the basement of the humanities building—no damage done, just a statement of intent, but a day or two later she began pushing for even more drastic measures. She had no interest in compromise. She knew where the screws were.

“Either you’re serious about this,” Sarah told me one morning at breakfast, “or you’re a twit. There’s no halfway. Like your poster says, real bombs, you can’t hide your head. Pain leads to pain. Ask the kids in Saigon.”

I nodded.

“Fine,” I said, “but sometimes it seems just a little excessive.”

“You think so?”

“A little.”

Sarah gazed at her coffee cup. Complicated events were occurring along the surfaces of her eyes.

“Well, that’s a pity,” she finally said. “Excessive. Tell it to the White House. Go lay it on the Joint Chiefs, I’d be real interested in some professional feedback.” Then her voice went low. A husky, mocking tone. “You’re something else, pal. You want this nice happy world, all roses, except you get all squeamish when somebody goes out and tries to make it happen. The jellyfish mentality.”

“Forget it. You win.”

“I do,” she said softly, “I win.”

She finished her coffee and stood up.

“And one more thing. So far you haven’t seen diddly. Excessively speaking, I mean.”

An unpleasant tone, I thought.

Culottes to sansculotte—a radical realignment. The question, though, was why. There were many such questions: Why politics? Why so sudden? Why so rabid? And why me? Why stick with a jellyfish?

Except in the most superficial sense, I didn’t really know her. Even the facts seemed unsubstantial.

A cheerleader, of course.

But why?

A history major. Pre-law. Brains, obviously, but not legal brains.

A birthmark below her right breast.

Thick blackish brown hair freshened by modern chemistry.

A small, recurring fever blister at her lower lip. I’d often catch her toying with it, applying ointments. “It’s a fatal flaw,” she’d say, “for the femme fatale.”

Flippant.

Sarcastic to the point of wise-ass. But it was almost certainly a kind of camouflage, like her cosmetics, the gaudy nail polish and lipstick and mascara. At times, I thought, it was as if she were hiding herself, or from herself.

Reticence, maybe.

Maybe fear.

A splay-footed way of walking, like a deer. A certain stiffness in her posture. As a kid, she told me, she’d had polio, a mild case. But no details. When I pressed her about it, Sarah smiled and tapped her chest. “Nothing serious,” she said. “Iron lungs.”

Her mother was dead.

Her father was a mortician.

Does it matter? She wasn’t gloomy, and she rarely talked about it, but I often found myself imagining what it must’ve been like to grow up in that big white funeral home on Main Street. How did it feel? What was the emotional residue? I was curious, of course, but she wouldn’t respond to even the most basic questions.

“Don’t be a ghoul,” she’d say.

Or she’d say, “No big mystery. Luscious me, sugar and spice. Don’t analyze it, William, just adore it.”

A playful, uninhibited girl.

And yet there were also moods of complete withdrawal. It could happen instantly. In bed, she’d peel off her clothes, clowning, then suddenly her whole face would freeze. She’d slide away. She’d pull a pillowcase over her head and crawl up on my desk and squat there like a statue. Tempting, I’d think. Not lewd, not immodest, just the white pillowcase and that awesome nakedness. “Sarah,” I’d say quietly, but she wouldn’t budge. There was something chilling about it, something desperate. Why the mask? Why, sometimes, would she clamp the pillowcase at her throat and whisper, “I want to be wanted. Get reckless, William. Go for broke—love me.”

And in my own way I did.

Granted, it was a judicious sort of love, one step at a time, but over the spring of our junior year I discovered the great pleasures and bondings of a political romance. I was part of something. I belonged. At our Committee meetings, I was perfectly content to let Sarah take charge; I admired her poise and control; I got a kick out of watching how she kept Ollie and Tina under tight rein. I liked the closeness. I liked being seen with her. In the geology lab, late at night, I liked it when she’d come up behind me and turn off my microscope and say, “For Christ sake, man, stop playing with your rocks.” Endearment, I liked that, too. How she held my arm walking to class, how she always stood beside me during our noon vigils at the cafeteria. Many things. The times I’d wake up to find my hands tied to the bedposts. The way she’d sleep with one knee hooked tenderly around my neck.

And the sex.

Congress, she called it.

“All rise!” she’d cry. “Congress is in session!”

In a way, naturally, I was grateful for this, but there were times when I thought she took it too far. It was the rah-rah side of her personality, too flamboyant, and one evening I asked if she’d mind toning it down.

Sarah gave me a hard look.

“Down?” she said. “Discreet, you mean?”

“Well, no, I just wish you’d—”

“Demure? Candy and flowers? A nice little Southern belle—sit around batting my eyes?”

She twisted away.

It was a warm spring evening, very humid, and she was naked except for a chrome bracelet. She got down on the floor and began a furious set of exercises, sit-ups and leg-lifts. I could see goose bumps forming in the flesh at her nipples.

After a moment she laughed.

“Discretion,” she said bitterly, “is for dead people. Am I dead?” Her tone surprised me. The anger was real. “I grew up in a goddamn mortuary, remember? Organ music day and night. Flowers up the bazoo. You wouldn’t believe how discreet a stiff can be. Very modest. They’re dead, get it? Tickle them, they don’t budge—real coy, real dead. You don’t get deader. You know what dead is? It’s dead.”

Then she gave me a brief synopsis of life and death in a funeral home.

The various odors. The comings and goings. How her father’s workshop had been located directly beneath her own bedroom, one floor down, and how at night she used to lie there with a pillow pushed up to her face. Like a gas mask, she said. Wonderful fragrances—just what a kid needs at bedtime.

She paused in mid-sit-up. There was a soft, faraway look in her eyes.

Then she shrugged.

“Anyway, I know what discreet is,” she said. “Plain flat dead. You take demure, I’ll take rigor clitoris any time.”

“I didn’t mean—”

“Besides,” she said tightly, staring at me, “you better consider the alternatives. Who else would go near that mincemeat pecker of yours? Like a battle zone.”

“A bike accident, I explained that.”

“Oh, sure, a fine story.” She shook her head. “Scars and stitches. Looks like you tried to poke a blender.”

“Sarah—”

“Discretion!” she said. “Go paste Band-Aids on your weewee, Congress is adjourned.”

A troubled girl, that much was clear.

Part iron, part mush. Neurosis maybe. But how far can you dig into a personality? How much do you finally accept at face value? Do motives matter?

Politics, for example.

Why ask why?

Clearly, in Sarah’s case, the war deeply offended her. The pain was genuine. I remember how she closed her eyes during those made-for-TV combat clips; I remember the casualty count she kept on a bulletin board in her dorm room. “The thing about a corpse,” she once told me, “is you can’t fix it. All that formaldehyde, but nothing moves. Poor fuckers just lie there.” Psychology seemed superfluous. From my own experience, I’d learned to distrust the easy explanations of human behavior; it’s all too ambiguous; the inner forces ricochet like pinballs. John Reed: a Harvard cheerleader. How do you draw conclusions? The real world, I thought, is unresponsive to Rorschach tests. You can’t shrink a warhead. Ultimately, you take things as they are, you accept the imponderables, you find harmony in the overwhelming incongruity. Sarah Strouch: schizophrenic, perhaps. Unpredictable. But there was a war on, people were dying, and the realities conditioned consciousness, not the reverse. Issues of personality became trivial. Was Noah paranoid? Who sank and who swam? In a crowded theater, if someone yells “Fire!” do you respond by inquiring into matters of the mind? If a madman holds a knife to your throat, if a butcher goes berserk, do you pause to administer a character inventory? And if the bombs are real. If you see a missile rising over the Little Bighorn. If you can conceive of last things. If there’s a war on. If you care.

She was a mystery.

Only one thing for certain, Sarah Strouch understood the critical dynamic of our age. It was all escalation.

On May 21, 1967, two weeks before summer break, she gave Ollie Winkler the green light. Once more, there’s that time-space slippage—the beginning mixes with the end, effect becomes cause—but I can see Sarah commanding a bonfire rally down at the river. She’s wearing her silver letter sweater and blue culottes, she’s got the crowd leaning left and right. There’s a flush at her cheeks. And I see Ollie Winkler bending over a set of bomb blueprints. “Not big bombs,” he says, “just attention-grabbers,” then he slips on a black armband and says, “Sergeant at arms! It takes arms, like in deadly force.” There were occupied offices. Picket lines went up in front of Old Main. My own role was limited, but I remember the sound of breaking glass, a jimmied lock, how we effected entry into the Dean of Students’ office on that last warm night in May. I remember holding a flashlight while Ollie set up the ordnance. It was well after midnight, and there were echoes and creakings, and I remember the rubber gloves on my hands, the reflections, the sudden thought that things had passed into a vicious new dimension. The flashlight plucked out random objects in the dark. A typewriter, I remember, and a vase of lilacs, and a slender white fuse. There were numerous shadows. There was ambiguity. And there was also, briefly, the image of terrible waste. I could see gunfire. Then the flashlight wobbled—it seemed greased and heavy. Behind me, or off to the side, there was a whisper, then someone laughed and Tina Roebuck appeared and pried away the flashlight and said, “Poor boy.” But it didn’t matter. The present was firmly fixed to the future; the pattern was evident. This, I realized, would surely lead to that. There would be wastage, no doubt, and breakage, and abbreviation by force. My thoughts were precise. I remember the moment of stealth when Ollie struck the match. And the yellow-red glow against Sarah’s face, the way she hesitated and moved to a window, then smiled, then came back and touched my arm.

“Here,” she said softly, “is how it goes. You know?”

I made an indefinite motion with my shoulders. I was inclined toward silence.

Tina Roebuck giggled.

“William?”

I remember backing off. I remember thinking: What do I think? There was that delicate white fuse, like dental floss, and the burning match, and the metallic, curiously amplified sound of my own breathing. “From now on,” Sarah said, “it’s rough-and-tumble. Question is, do you understand?”

I did not.

The human heart, I thought, how do you explain it?

But I shrugged and said, “Of course.”

“Of course what?”

“This.”

“You’re sure?”

“Like black and white,” I said.

The summer went fast. Fort Derry seemed smaller now, and dead, but Sarah gave it motion: a Fourth of July picnic, nights at the drive-in theater. “If you love me,” she said, “you’ll steal that speaker. Do you love me?” Cruising up Main Street in my father’s big Buick. Windows open, Revolution on the radio, Sarah tapping time against the dashboard. Root beers at the A&W. Pinball and cherry phosphates at Jig’s Confectionery. Sex in any number of places; she loved the risk of it. “Don’t be a lame duck,” she’d say, “you’ve got congressional responsibilities.” Sarah sunbathing—a hammock and sunglasses and deep brown skin. In midsummer we took a tent and sleeping bags up into the Sweethearts, just the two of us, and for nine days we eased the time away, exploring, walking the canyons, trading secrets late at night. A campfire, I remember… She said she loved me. Quite a lot, she said. I asked why, and Sarah said, “Who knows? Chemistry,” and I said, “The big explainer.” I remember stars and crickets. One night, very late, she told me about a crazy three-legged dog she used to have. Got hit by a car, she said. Lost a leg. Still fast, though, kept chasing cars, kept running away, and how one day it started running and never stopped. “That rotten crippled dog,” she said, “I hated it, but I loved it. That’s chemistry for you.” Things were quiet. Sarah poked the fire and talked about the first time she ever kissed a boy. She told me about a vacation to Chicago. She told me her dreams. “Stupid, I know,” she said, “but sometimes I dream I’m—you know—I’m sort of dead, I’m in this dark closet, I can smell these mothballs, and then, bang, somebody knocks on the door—I don’t know who, just this guy—and he asks me what it’s like, being dead, what it feels like. And you know what I tell him? I tell him it feels real alone. Alone, I tell him. That’s the worst part.” Sarah looked at me, then looked away. There were pines, I remember, and those jagged mountains, and we had our sleeping bags zipped together. “I want you to want me,” she said, “like real love.” Then she smiled. She said she was fertile, she could feel it. She wanted children someday. There was the war, of course, things to do, but when it was over she wanted all the peaceful stuff. Babies, she said, and a house and a family. But she wanted to travel first. She wanted to see Rio. “You and me together,” she said, and her hands wandered. I could smell smoke and mosquito repellent. “You and me, William, we could do it, couldn’t we? Have babies, maybe? I mean, we’d probably have to get married first, blood tests and so on, but it’s possible, isn’t it? And Rio, too. I’ve always had this wild fantasy about Rio. The sun and everything. All the tight brown bodies, those weird masks they wear at Carnival time. Sounds like I’d fit right in. A good life. Adventure, I want that, but I want… I don’t know what I want exactly. I want you to tear down those walls. Does that make sense? You build these walls. And, God, sometimes I can’t get through, I try but I can’t. Just walls, and you hide there, and I can’t break through. My own fault, maybe. Sometimes I act pretty rough, I know that. But I’m not rough. Down inside I’m not so rough. And I get afraid sometimes, I need you to say things, like you care about me and you won’t ever… That damned dog. You believe that? Muggs, that was her name, that crazy rotten dog. Three legs, but lickety-split, she wouldn’t listen, she wouldn’t stop chasing those goddamn cars… Am I rambling? I guess I am. But I don’t mean to act so rough. I hate myself sometimes, I really do, I’d like to rip my tongue out, but it’s like self-defense or something. Anyhow, I do have these feelings. Rio and a billion babies. It’s possible, don’t you think?”

I couldn’t find a great deal to say.

The nights were slippery, but the days were fine. I remember Sarah in her alpine climbing hat. Sarah swimming under a waterfall. A box canyon, a secret cave, a stream where I found the uranium.

We were barefoot, I remember, and the water was fast and cold. I bent down and scooped up a rock and showed her the purple-black crystals.

“A souvenir,” I said.

“It isn’t—?”

“Harmless.”

Sarah squeezed the ore with both hands, deliberately, the way a child might handle modeling clay. There was a bright sun. I remember the heat and the cold water and the red polish on her toenails. Squinting, she looked at the stream, tracing its course toward the violet ridges.

“You don’t suppose… I mean—”

“Maybe.”

“Up there?”

“Chemistry,” I said.

With her thumb, she flicked the ore away.

“What we’ll do,” she said after a moment, “is we’ll pretend it’s not there. Leave it be.”

“Sure. That’s how it’s done.”

“William—”

“Wish it away,” I said, and smiled. “No sweat.”

But there was a dynamic at work.

It was all around us. In our lovemaking, in the mountains. It was there in the music that summer.

On August 9, 1967, President Lyndon Johnson lifted the old restrictions on U.S. bombing policy. Warplanes were now unloading over the city limits of Hanoi and Haiphong.

On August 20, the United States Air Force flew more than two hundred combat sorties—a new record for the war.

On August 23, a plane bearing nuclear weapons crash-landed at Edwards Air Force Base.

The world, I reasoned, was not entirely sane.

The dynamic was permissive.

On August 27, during Custer Days, Sarah and I sat up in the grandstand at the county fairgrounds. It was no big thing. We held hands and watched Crazy Horse gallop away with my father’s hair.

“Kids,” she said afterward. “They just can’t take a joke.”

At the end of August, on a humid afternoon, Sarah took me on a tour of the Strouch Funeral Home—her own home, actually—a lived-in place with bright kitchen curtains and family photographs. It did not smell of death. Even her father’s workshop, I thought, seemed warm and cheery, the walls painted in bright pastels. At the center of the room was a white porcelain table with slightly raised edges. “So anyway,” Sarah said, “home, sweet home.” She held me lightly by the arm, just in case. There was a faint hospital odor—nothing terrible. An oversized sink, a few cabinets, a closet, a coil of orange tubing, a second table mounted on rubber rollers. “Hop aboard,” she said, but I declined. Later she showed me the viewing room, which did smell of death, then she led me up a wide staircase to her own bedroom. “I don’t want pity,” she said. She undressed and pulled the shades. In bed, despite the muggy afternoon, we lay with a quilt up to our necks, side by side, only our arms and ankles touching. “Not pity,” she said, “but love would be nice. You can try, can’t you?”

“It’s not a question of love.”

“Time?”

“I don’t know. I guess.” I thought about it for a few minutes. “Screwed up, probably. It’s like I can’t take the jump. Can’t believe in miracles. I don’t know.”

Sarah pulled a pillow over her face.

We lay there quietly, without moving. After a time I pried the pillow away and kissed her.

“What I’m saying,” she murmured, “is I don’t want to be alone. Not ever. You had your Ping-Pong table, I had this.”

The rule of thumb was acceleration. During our senior year, 1967 and 1968, Sarah led us toward new occupations. History had finally caught up with itself. On November 30, 1967, Eugene McCarthy announced his presidential candidacy. Robert Kennedy sorted through the scenarios. In the city streets, there was organized disorder, and at Berkeley and NYU, even at Peverson State, the writing was on the wall in big black letters. Evolution, not revolution. Abbie Hoffman was now a somebody; Jane Fonda was making choices; Sirhan Sirhan was taking target practice; LBJ was on the ropes; Richard Nixon was counting noses; Robert McNamara was having second thoughts; Dean Rusk was having bad dreams. By the turn of the year, the American troop presence in Vietnam had approached 500,000. Bad omens, I thought, but General William Westmoreland declared that “we have reached an important point when the end begins to come into view.” And he was right, of course. The silhouette was there. The end revealed itself as an ending that would never quite end. When I look into my hole, allowing for distortion, I can see the end all around me. I can see Sarah leading the rallies at Peverson State. A baroque cartwheel, a fingertip handstand, a pair of identical somersaults—like the tracings of a compass, like school figures in skating. “We’re all cheerleaders,” she says, “you and me and Nelson Rockefeller. High fidelity, William. No switching sides at half time.”

There are fracture lines in the continuum from past to present. Are the dead truly dead?

Dig, the hole says, but I’m watching Sarah and Tina and Ollie in action at a Friday-night football game. I can see the American flag at stiff-flutter beyond the goalposts. I’m up in the bleachers. I know what’s coming. The score is deadlocked, the teams are at midfield, it’s a punting situation—imagine it—that brown ball spiraling through the bright yellow flood-lights, the crowd, the stadium, the artificial greenness of the grass—and the ball never comes down—it’s still up there, even now, it’s still sailing high over Canada and the Arctic Ocean—and there’s a distant sputtering sound—Sabotage, I think, it’s the work of Ollie Winkler—then the floodlights flicker and the stadium goes dark. At the fifty-yard line Sarah lights a sparkler. Tina, too, and later Ollie, and then I join them. “Spine straight,” Sarah whispers, “show me some class.” The pep band plays peace music. It’s all orchestrated. The sparklers and the music and the blackout and people standing and locking arms and singing and swaying under a huge autumn sky.

Impressive showmanship, but what disturbed me was the outlaw mentality. Too reckless, I thought. Those sabotaged floodlights: there was a cost involved, and over the next months it kept rising.

In January they seized the campus radio station. A year of decision, 1968, and Tina manned the microphone, and Sarah and Ollie took turns issuing demands. My own contribution was minimal. Five minutes into the operation I excused myself and found a men’s room and sat there for a long while, just reflecting, tracking goofiness toward sorrow.

Afterward Sarah said, “Well.”

Ollie laughed. “He’s not tuned in. Too shy, maybe. Hasn’t got that on-air personality.”

“Poor boy,” said Tina.

Recklessness, that was one thing, and there was also secrecy. Sarah had undesignated irons in the fire; she wouldn’t always confide in me. Security, she called it, but the variables seemed to graph out as conspiracy. On three occasions during our senior year, Sarah took off on extended trips to various unspecified locales. She came back tan and silent. There were late-night phone calls and coded conversations with anonymous personages. In February, after one of her trips, I came across a packet of twenty-dollar bills in her book bag. The currency still smelled of mintage, stiff and unwrinkled, two thousand dollars in all. And there were other such discoveries. There was an airline schedule. A Spanish-English dictionary, a travel brochure with photographs of Key West by moonlight, a set of house keys, a snapshot of two imposing black gentlemen dressed in berets and fatigues and combat boots. Unhealthy, I thought. I didn’t like the way things were trending. “Loose lips, leaky ships,” she’d tell me. “What you have to bear in mind is that this college crap won’t last forever. Pretty soon we graduate. Commence, et cetera.”

“Et cetera?”

“You know,” she’d say, and smile. “Apply our educations.”

The drift was disquieting. It put a crick in my dreams, I could sense the conclusion, but the real bitterness came in March when Ned Rafferty joined the Committee.

“He’s not a fuzzball,” Sarah said.

“I know.”

“Not a son of a bitch.”

“Sure, I know.”

“And we need him,” she said.

There was no subtle way to express it. Chemical, I suppose—just hate. It was irrational, in a way, because on the surface Rafferty was a genuinely nice person, friendly and courteous, almost formal in the way he’d call people “sir” or “ma’am” without irony or affectation, as if he meant it. He had a solid handshake. He looked you in the eyes. A jock, of course, but he didn’t brag about it, he kept it in reserve, a certain power that was there in his shoulders and arms and gray eyes. It was a modest sort of strength, which is why I hated him. I hated the goddamn modesty. I hated the good manners and the firm handshake and the body mass and the quiet confidence and the way he’d stare at Sarah until she blushed and looked away. Partly, I think, it was the Crazy Horse connection—I couldn’t dismiss the feathers and war paint—but there were other factors too. His obvious affection for Sarah, for instance. They had a history between them, something more than friendship, and although she insisted it was over, I could read the subtext in their body language.

It wasn’t paranoia. A truly nice guy—that’s what I hated most.

When he walked into our strategy session that afternoon, I stood up and let him shake my hand and then backed off. For the next half hour I didn’t say a word.

The meeting, I remember, was in Tina Roebuck’s dorm room, which was small to begin with, and the place was cluttered with empty Coke bottles and dirty dishes and diet books. The air had a sweet oily smell, like scorched butter. For me, though, the really peculiar thing was the room’s décor: All the walls were papered with photographs of fashion models—trim, well-tailored girls out of Vogue and Seventeen, shapely specimens out of Cosmopolitan—and beneath the pictures were little hand-printed notes:

It was somehow touching. Leaning back, I found myself measuring the vast distance between reality and ambition. Tina with her Mars bars and anorexic dreams, Ollie with his short fuse and high-heeled boots. Even Sarah. Or especially Sarah, who wanted to be wanted and soon would be.

And there was Ned Rafferty, too, whom I hated, but whose strength and modesty I would one day come to admire.

That afternoon, however, my thoughts were unkind.

I remember Rafferty sitting on a window ledge, quiet and composed. The conversation had come to departure points. Unfinished business, Sarah was saying. College was one thing but the world was something else. We had to grow up. Time to make commitments. Turning, she looked straight at me. Bombs, she said. The war—did we care? Active or passive? Were we in for the duration? Were we serious? Then she smiled and looked at Rafferty. Her voice was low. She had access to certain resources, she told us. A network. Connections: people and places. First, though, we had to resolve the basic question. In or out?

A stirring little speech, I thought. The ambiguities alone carried weight.

I was considering the risks when Ned Rafferty cleared his throat.

“I’m new at this,” he said. “Correct me if I’m wrong, but what you’re saying is we have to put up or shut up. Make a choice. That’s the gist, right?”

And then for the next five minutes he completely dominated the proceedings. A smooth talker, I thought, slow and deliberate, but there was a glibness that made me uneasy. Like grease. The whole time he kept his eyes fixed on Sarah.

“So anyhow,” he’d say, “here’s the gist of things.”

The gist of things: that was his favorite expression. The same phrase over and over, like dripping water. This gist, that gist. It was amazing how long I kept my composure. No doubt I was looking for an opening, some flaw in all that niceness, but the sheer enormity of it surprised me. The gists kept piling up. Whenever Ollie or Tina made a comment, he’d mull it over for a while and then smile and say, “I see what you’re driving at, but what you really mean is this—here’s the gist of it.” A couple of times I almost laughed. I couldn’t understand why Sarah kept nodding and taking notes.

Finally I had to cut him off.

“Hey listen,” I said, “you lost me somewhere. I see what you’re driving at, but what’s the gist of it?”

“Gist?” Rafferty said.

“The nub. The nutshell. I need the goddamn gist.”

A little muscle moved at his jaw. “William,” he said slowly, “I just gave you the gist.”

“You did?”

“Yes, sir. I did.”

For a moment I came close to backing down.

“Well, fine,” I said, “you gave me the gist, but I need the absolute gist. The gist of the gist. You have to step back and boil it all down for me.”

“Now listen—”

“Sum it up, put it in perspective.”

Rafferty’s eyes fell. There was puzzlement in his face, even hurt. I wanted to stop but I couldn’t.

“Nail it down solid,” I said. “The bottom line. I need the ultimate, final gist.”

Sarah stood up.

“Enough,” she said.

“Let’s get to the heart of it. Real fundamental basics.”

“William.”

Something in her voice stopped me. Apparently Ollie felt it, too, because he laughed and then busied himself with a fingernail clipper. Tina Roebuck studied the fashion models across the room.

After a moment Rafferty shrugged.

“A comedian,” he said. “Humor, I can appreciate that.”

“It wasn’t humor,” said Sarah. She looked at me for a long time. “Unnecessary. Whatever it was.”

“A joke,” Rafferty said. “No harm.”

“Harm, bullshit,” she hissed.

I felt some tension. There were things I could’ve said, and wanted to say, but I was already out the door.

That night, in bed, Sarah faced the wall.

“I’m sorry,” I said.

“You’re not sorry.”

“All right, I’m not. Slimy bastard. The way he looks at you, it’s almost like—” I waited a second, then said, “Are you sleeping with him?”

Sarah rolled sideways.

“And what does that mean?”

“What it means.”

“Cry wolf, William.”

“The truth.”

There was a long quiet. She leaned on her elbow and stared down at me. Her eyes, I thought, were a little puffy.

“Am I sleeping with him?” she said softly. She made it sound like a problem in mathematics. “Well, it’s not something a nice girl talks about, but let’s hypothesize. He likes me, I like him. It’s mutual. I said it before, life has this weird built-in factor called shortness. All this time I’ve been waiting and waiting, for you, just waiting, but the joyride never showed up. So maybe—it’s all hypothetical—maybe I decided to stick out my thumb and pull up my skirt and see if I could stop a little traffic. Conjecture. But what if?”

“I’m asking.”

“Ask.”

“Are you?”

Sarah closed her eyes.

“You know what it is, William? It’s a sickness.”

“Yes or no?”

Again, there was silence.

“Funny thing,” she finally said, “I thought I was sleeping with you. Appearances deceive.” She lay back and watched the shadows. “I care about you, William. A whole lot—too much. But this sickness I mentioned. There’s a name for it. Shall we call it by its name?”

“No,” I said, “let’s not.”

“But you know?”

“I know.”

Sarah touched me.

“So then,” she said. “Imagination time. Am I sleeping with him?”

“You’re not.”

“Sure?”

“Pretty sure.”

“I’m not,” she sighed. “More’s the pity.”

Then she turned away.

It was a bad night. I kept turning the unnamed name over in my head, just letting it tumble. I thought about pigeons and bombs. Crazy, I thought, but that wasn’t quite the name.

In the morning Sarah got dressed and sat on the edge of the bed.

“Rafferty,” she said. “He’s in. You realize that?”

For a few moments she looked away, then she shrugged and pulled the bedspread over me. “The strange thing about it, William, is he likes you. Thinks you’re extraordinary. Extraordinary—his word. The bombs-are-real stuff, that poster of yours, he says you started it all. Says he respects you.”

“Well,” I said, “that’s very genuine.”

“Yes, isn’t it?”

“Very sweet.”

“He is.”

“A nice guy,” I said. “I’ll bet that’s the gist of it.”

We graduated on May 27, 1968.

There were hugs, I remember, and slapped backs and promises, and on May 28 there were departures. In a way it was sad, in a way it wasn’t.

Ned Rafferty headed for his father’s ranch in Idaho.

Ollie Winkler and Tina Roebuck went west to hook on with the McCarthy campaign in California.

Sarah had appointments in Florida.

I knew better than to ask for details. She’d be in touch, she said, but for now there were numerous housekeeping chores, loose ends to attend to. At the bus station she put her hand on my cheek. She said she loved me. She told me to pay attention to my dreams. “It’s a tough call,” she said, “I know that, but you can’t straddle fences forever. In or out. Let me know.”

“Maybe it won’t come to that.”

“Oh, it’ll come,” she said. “No neutrality.”

For me it was a holding pattern.

I spent the summer in Fort Derry, a terrifying summer, a split between black and white. I couldn’t decide. Like sleepwalking, except I couldn’t move, the dynamic was paralyzing.

The war, of course.

The world as it clearly was.

There was violence in Grant Park. There was Sirhan Sirhan, who shot Robert Kennedy, and there was Robert Kennedy, who died. I saw it in slow motion, as we all did, but I also imagined it, and still do, how it can happen and will happen, a twitch of the index finger, a madman, a zealot, an aberration in human history, Kennedy’s wide-open eyes, a missile, a submarine off Cape Cod, a fine bright expansive day in June when the theater of things becomes a kitchen, and there’s a chef and there’s a terrorist, so it happens, a twitch, or it’s a balmy evening in midsummer and a finger comes to rest on a button in that cruising submarine—is it malice? spite? curiosity?—just a trigger finger that comes to perfect rest, then twitches, it’s reflex, it’s Sirhan Sirhan, and Kennedy blinks as we might blink, a sudden flash and a blink and then wide-open eyes. Which is the dynamic. Which is how it happened and will happen. We are immortal until the very instant of mortality. I imagined dying as Kennedy died, and as men died at war that summer.

But no decisions. Vaguely, stupidly, I was hoping for a last-minute miracle. In Paris they were talking peace, and I wanted the miracle of a decision deferred into perpetuity. I wanted resolution without resolve.

One evening Sarah called.

“So?” she said.

It was a long-distance connection broken by static, and I could hear coins clicking somewhere in the tropics. I told her I was frightened. I talked about the pros and cons and the shadings at the center. Like a teeter-totter, I said, or like a tightrope, I couldn’t make up my mind.

“Time,” I said.

In the background I heard someone laugh—the operator, maybe—then Sarah whispered, “Teeter-totter,” and hung up.

But mostly it was just waiting. During the days I’d drive up and down Main Street in my father’s Buick, watching the small-town silhouettes. I thought about Paris; I thought about Canada. There was Vietnam, too, and Uncle Sam, but I tried not to think about those things. Around dusk, sometimes, I’d stop at the A&W for french fries and a Papa Burger. I’d push the intercom button and place my order and then sit back listening to the radio. Peace, I’d think. Then I’d think: What does one do?

At night, with my parents, I’d watch the news on television.

“Whatever happens,” my mother said, “we’re with you all the way. A thousand percent.”

“Two thousand,” said my father.

He stared at the TV screen.

There were flags and limousines at the Hotel Majestic. Averell Harriman was shaking hands with Xuan Thuy.

“Assholes,” my father said, very quietly. “Shit or get off the pot.”

My mother nodded.

“Your decision,” she said.

But it was not my decision. The dynamic decided for me.

When I think back on the summer of 1968, it’s as though it all occurred in some other dimension, a mixture of what had happened and what would happen. Like hide-and-go seek—the future curves toward the past, then folds back again, seamlessly, and we are locked forever in the ongoing present. And where am I? Just digging. The year, for instance, is both 1968 and 1971, and I see Ollie Winkler tipping back his cowboy hat, squinting as he kneels down to rig up a bomb. I can hear the whine in his voice when he says, “You don’t make a revolution without breaking a few legs.” But the bomb is real. Legs get broken. And I see Tina Roebuck storming a radio station, except she’s older now, and meaner, and there is an impulse toward bloodshed. I see Robert Kennedy’s wide-open eyes, a twitch, a flash, Sarah oiling an automatic rifle, sharpshooters and a burning safe house and the grotesque, inex-pungible reality of the human carcass. Odd, how the mind works. It goes in cycles. The year is 1968, and 1958, and 1995, and I’m here digging, I’m sane, I’m trying to save my life.

What can one do?

Safety first.

It was no surprise when I received the draft notice in late August. “Run,” Sarah said, and I did. First by bus, then by plane, and by the second week in September I was deep underground.

7 Quantum Jumps

MY WIFE THINKS SHE’S leaving me. Already the suitcases are packed, and in the bedroom, behind a locked door, Bobbi spends the afternoon sorting through old letters and photographs. Her mood is truculent. Two months since she last spoke to me. When necessary—today, for instance—she communicates by way of the written word, using Melinda as a go-between, dispatching fierce warnings like this one:

“Mommy’s not too happy,” Melinda tells me. “Pretty upset, I think. She means it.”

“Mommy’s not herself,” I say. “Off the wall.”

“Off what?”

“The wall, baby. She’s a poet, we have to expect it.”

Melinda sniffs. She sits at the edge of the hole, legs dangling, peering down on me as I study Relativity. Her expression is grave. She tugs on her ponytail and says, “We’re going away. Real soon, like tomorrow, she told me so.”

“It won’t happen, angel.”

“Tomorrow. In the morning.”

“Won’t happen.”

“I heard her,” Melinda says. “I’m not deaf, that’s what she said—she already called the stupid goddamn taxi, I heard it.”

“Don’t say goddamn.”

“Goddamn,” she mutters.

It’s no use lecturing. I pocket the poem, spit on my hands, and go back to digging. Later I say, “This taxi business. What time?”

“Can’t tell you.”

“Early?”

Melinda nods. “Real early. We have to sneak out so you can’t get crazy and try to stop us. It’s a secret, though. I’m not supposed to talk about it.”

“Better hadn’t, then.”

“I already did.”

“You did, yes. Thanks.”

Shrugging, Melinda kicks some dirt down on me. Her position is precarious. I tell her to back away—it’s a fifteen-foot drop—but she doesn’t seem to hear. Those blue eyes, they’re wired to my heart.

What can one do but dig? Mid-June now, two months on the job, and I’ve got myself one hell of a hole. Fifteen feet and counting. No tricks—solid walls and solid rock. Amazing, I think, what can be done with a spade and a jackhammer and a little dynamite. I bend down and lift a chunk of granite.

“Daddy,” Melinda yells, “we’re leaving!”

But it doesn’t stop me.

I put my spine to the space and lean in. Relativity, for Christ sake. Metaphor. Poets should dig. Fire and ice—such sugar-coated bullshit, so refined and elegant. So stupid. Nuclear war, nuclear war, no big deal, just a metaphor. Fission, fusion, critical mass… “Daddy!” Melinda cries. I look up and smile. The world, I realize, is drugged on metaphor, the opiate of our age. Nobody’s scared. Nobody’s digging. They dress up reality in rhymes and paint on the cosmetics and call it by fancy names. Why aren’t they out here digging? Nuclear war. It’s no symbol. Nuclear war—is it embarrassing? Too prosaic? Too blunt? Listen—nuclear war—those stiff, brash, trite, everyday syllables. I want to scream it: Nuclear war! Where’s the terror in this world? Scream it: Nuclear war! Take a stance and keep screaming: Nuclear war! Nuclear war!

“Daddy!” Melinda wails.

She drops a clod of hard clay from fifteen feet, a near miss. The real world. It gets your attention.

“Do something!” she shouts. “God, we’re leaving! Do something!”

“Baby,” I say.

“Now!”

She smacks her hands together. She’s crying, but it isn’t sadness, it’s fury. She pushes a wheelbarrow to the lip of the hole. “Do something!” she yells. And then she shoves the wheelbarrow down. Frustration, that’s all. She doesn’t mean to kill me. “I don’t want to leave,” she cries. She’s on her hands and knees, bawling. I scramble up the ladder and try to hold her, but she rolls away and kicks at me and says, “Please!”

I clamp on a bear hug.

Melinda squirms but I press close, and for a long time we lie there at the edge of the hole, father and daughter. I can feel her heartbeat. A warm afternoon, a Friday, and there are puffy white clouds above us. Melinda’s eyes are closed.

“Better now?” I ask.

She stiffens, wipes her nose, puts her head in my lap. She doesn’t understand. Twelve years old, how could she?

“You’ll do something, won’t you?” she whispers. “Tomorrow, you won’t just let us go away?”

“Can’t happen.”

“Mommy said so.”

“She’s wrong,” I say firmly. “Nobody’s leaving.”

Later, in the house, we take turns using the shower. I go first, then Melinda. There was a time, not long ago, when we’d do our showering as a team, a real family, but now she’s at the age of modesty. I love that little girl. I love my wife. Standing in the hallway, toweling off, I can hear Melinda singing Billy Boy behind the bathroom door.

“Nobody’s leaving,” I murmur. “I won’t allow it.”

I know what must be done.

It’s ugly, but it’s also a relief. In the kitchen, I’m whistling Billy Boy as I prepare a lunch of sausage and salad.

“That song,” Melinda says, “I hate it.”

She comes to the table wearing a pink robe and pink slippers, a white towel wrapped turban style around her head. She tells me she’s sorry about the wheelbarrow. I nod and say, “A bad time.” Nuclear war: I want to scream it. But instead I tell her we’ll find a solution. Back to normal, I say, and then, out of the blue, I hear myself asking if she’d like to have her own pony someday. It’s a preemptive tactic, I suppose. Or maybe an apology. Melinda thinks about it for a moment and says, “I guess that’d be okay. A pony. Except you’d probably blow it up with dynamite.”

“I wouldn’t.”

“You would. Boom—dead pony. No, thanks.”

Composure, I think.

I shrug and fix up Bobbi’s lunch tray and carry it to the bedroom door. I knock twice but there’s no response. For a few seconds I listen with my ear to the door. Packed suitcases, things neatly folded and tucked away. A walkout.

I put the tray down and head back to the kitchen.

“See what I mean?” Melinda says. “She’s serious. It’s all planned, so you better hurry up and do something.”

“Done,” I say.

“What?”

“Relax, princess. All under control.”

The afternoon goes by peacefully. Bobbi has her plans, I have mine. While she’s busy tidying up the loose ends of our marriage, I go about my business with confidence and dispatch, a disconnected calm that seems to nudge up against sadness.

Two things are clear.

I won’t stop digging. I won’t lose my family.

The trick now is to avoid arousing suspicion. I’m canny. I stick to the routines: wash the dishes, sweep the floor, lace up my boots, and then march back to the hole.

I know what must be done, and I’ll do it, but for now I just dig.

Squeeze the spade. Concentrate on kinetics. The downward drag, it’s a solid feeling. All motion.

I was born to this sort of labor, a jackhammer and a spade. There are no metaphors. There is only science when I say, “Nuclear war.” Why, I wonder, is no one explicit? Why don’t we stand on our heads and filibuster by scream? Nuclear war! Nuclear war! Why such dignity? Why do we shy from declaring the obvious? Why do we blush at our own future? And why, right now, as I save her life, does my wife think I’m crazy? Why would she leave me? Why separate?

Dig, the hole says.

A light echo, then it chuckles and says, Nuclear war, man. Just dig.

All afternoon I keep at it. I weigh progress by the pound. I count the inches.

You’re sane, the hole says. Dig-down-dead!

I won’t be blackmailed.

This running-away garbage, I won’t tolerate it.

Dig—it’s my life.

Late in the afternoon I climb out of the hole and slip into the tool shed and make a few quiet preparations. Some measuring, some easy arithmetic.

Oh, yeah, the hole says.

I pile up a stack of two-by-fours; I go to work with a saw and hammer and nails. Specifications. I know what I’m doing. There’s nothing funny about it, but at one point I start giggling—it hurts, my eyeballs sting—and I have to step back and take a breather. Child’s play, the hole purrs. Follow the dotted lines: fission, fusion, critical mass.

“Love,” I say.

An hour later, when I leave the tool shed, the afternoon has become twilight. There’s a soft rain.

I switch on the outdoor Christmas lights and the backyard glows in reds and greens. The rain is warm and steady, not quite real, like a movie set. If Sarah were here she’d squeeze my arm and tell me to calm down. “Step by step,” she’d say, “one thing at a time.”

I cut the telephone line.

I trudge over to the Chevy, open the hood, remove the battery, lug it across the yard and hide it in the tool shed.

“Good work,” Sarah would say.

I pause at the edge of the hole, wavering. There is something burdensome in the night. I hear myself reciting aloud the names of my wife and daughter, then other names, Ollie and Tina and Ned and Sarah.

What happened to them? All of us? I wonder about the consequences of our disillusion, the loss of energy, the slow hardening of a generation’s arteries. What happened? Was it entropy? Genetic decay? Even the villains are gone. What became of Brezhnev and Nixon and Curtis LeMay? No more heroes, no more public enemies. Villainy itself has disappeared, or so it seems, and the moral climate has turned mild and banal. We wear alligators on our shirts; we play 3-D video games in darkened living rooms. As if to beat the clock, the fathers of our age have all passed away—Rickover was buried at sea, von Braun went quietly in his sleep. Sarah, too, and the others. Left for dead. And who among us would become a martyr, and for what?

The hole seems impatient.

So then. Get on with it.

It’s an era of disengagement. We are in retreat, all of us, and there is no going back.

I return to the tool shed.

I arm myself with hammer and nails. I pick up the two-by-fours and make my way toward the house.

In the kitchen I try for stealth. Past the stove, a left turn, down the hallway to the bedroom door. There I stop and listen. The sounds are domestic. Muffled but still comforting—Bobbi’s hair dryer, Melinda’s radio.

“You guys,” I say, “I love you.”

I perform each task as it comes.

First a wedge, which I tuck between the knob and the door’s outer molding. I drive it tight with the hammer.

Next the two-by-fours.

Speed is critical.

I feel sorrow coming on, but I push it back and carefully check the measurements. I don’t want mistakes. We are dealing, I remind myself, with the end of the world. Nuclear war: I am not crazy.

When I begin hammering, the hair dryer clicks off and Melinda says, “What’s going on?”

I nail a board flush to the door.

“Daddy!” she shouts.

I am sane. Yes, I am. Sane—I hit the nails square on.

“God!” she yells.

Bobbi hushes her, and I hear bedsprings, sharp voices, but I know what bombs can do, I’ve seen it, I’m willing to call it nuclear war, and I do, I cock the hammer and say, “Nuclear war.” There’s justice involved. It’s love and preservation. It’s shelter. It’s carpentry. I nail down the second two-by-four, then the third, an overlapping system that anchors on the hallway wall.

“Hey, you!” Melinda says. Her voice is closer now, a bit shaky. “Stop that racket! Can you hear me! Stop it!”

Finally the braces. Six of them. Door to molding: I’ve figured the angles. As an afterthought I remove the knob and use a screw-driver to jam the inner workings.

I kneel at the door.

The shakes have got me, and for a moment or two it nearly spills over into sentiment.

Melinda jiggles the inside knob.

“Well,” she says, “I hope you’re happy.”

“Almost,” I say.

“The door doesn’t work.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

She gives it a sharp tug. I hear a squeak but it’s solid. For a time the house seems impossibly silent, as if a furnace had shut down, then from behind the door comes the sound of a latch turning, a window sliding open. There’s a conference in progress. No doubt about the topic. Bobbi’s a poet, Melinda’s a child. It adds up to a paucity of imagination.

“Forget it,” I say gently, “I’m years ahead of you.”

My pace is brisk.

Not rushing, not dawdling either.

When I step outside, the night has become treacherous. A heavy rain now, and the Christmas lights seem blurry in the dark, almost mobile, like the lights in a dream, fluid and shapeless. There is an absence of clarity.

I find the ladder, place it against the house, climb nine rungs to the bedroom window. I take great care. I don’t want broken legs, not mine, not theirs.

The window is wide open. The gauzy white curtains billow inward, and through them I watch my wife and daughter. It’s a touching scene. Bobbi stands at the center of the room, in profile, her lips drawn in concentration as she ties the bedsheets together. She wears green cords and sneakers and a yellow cotton sweater. Poignant, I think. The bedsheets make me smile; it would be funny if it were not so poignant. A gorgeous woman—the breasts beneath that cotton sweater, the places I would touch, the things I would say. But now she tests the knot, frowning, and I can’t let it go on. Behind her, wearing a raincoat, Melinda sits on a blue suitcase, waiting, her eyes excited with thoughts of escape.

I feel sadness in my backbone.

If I could, I would climb through the window and take them to me and crush them with love.

If I could, I would.

Softly, though, I close the shutters. If there were any other way. But I pull the hammer from my belt and drive in the nails.

“Hey!” Melinda shouts.

It’s a two-minute job. If I could, I would do otherwise, but I can’t. I seal up the window with two-by-fours. Guilt will come later. For now it’s just heartache.

“We’ll starve!” Melinda screams, but of course they won’t, I’ll figure something out in the morning.

The rain seems hot and dry.

There are no shapes, the night has no configuration.

The hole says, Beautiful!

Inside, I take a bath, then shave, then busy myself with little household chores. I’m optimistic. I’ll reason with them. I’ll explain that it’s love and nothing else. I’ll be logical. Bowl them over with my own sanity. I’ll show them photographs of an armed nuclear warhead—that’s what I’ll do—I’ll do mathematics—I’ll slip the equations beneath the door.

Yes, I’ll do it, and they’ll understand.

But now I find comfort in vacuuming the living-room rug. I’m domestic. I have duties. I dust furniture, defrost the refrigerator, scrub the kitchen floor. Ajax, I think, the foaming cleanser… I sing it. The house seems empty around me. In the basement I toss in a load of laundry and sit on the steps and sing, Clean clear through, and deodorized too, that’s a Fab wash, a Fab wash, for you! I watch the clothes spin. My voice is strong. In Key West we’d sit out on the back patio and one of us would start singing, maybe Tina, and then Ned and Ollie… Are they dead? What happened? They knew the risks, they indulged in idealism. There was evil at large. Vietnam: the word itself has become a cliché, an eye-glazer, but back then we recognized evil. We were not the lunatic fringe. We were the true-blue center. It was not a revolution, it was a restoration. And now it’s over. What happened? Who remembers the convoluted arguments that kept us awake until five in the morning? Was it a civil war? Was Ho Chi Minh a tyrant, and if so, was his tyranny preferable to that of Diem and Ky and Thieu? What about containment and dominoes and self-determination? Whose interests were at stake? Did interests matter? All those complexities and ambiguities, issues of history, issues of law and principle—they’ve vanished. A stack of tired old platitudes: The war could’ve been won, the war was ill conceived, the war was an aberration, the war was hell. Vietnam, it wasn’t evil, it was madness, and we are all innocent by reason of temporary insanity. And now it’s dropout time… Be young, be fair, be debonair …

We pat ourselves on the back. We marched a few miles, we voted for McGovern, and now it’s over, we earned our rest. Someday, perhaps, we’ll all get together for a bang-up reunion, thousands of us, veterans with thinning hair and proud little potbellies, and we’ll sit around swapping war stories in the lobby of the Chicago Hilton, the SDS bunch dressed to kill in their pea coats and Shriner’s hats, Wallace in his wheelchair, McCarthy in his pinstripes, Westmoreland in fatigues, Kennedy in his coffin, Sarah in her letter sweater. We’ll get teary-eyed. We’ll talk about passion. And I’ll be there, too, with my hard hat and spade. I’ll lead the songfest. I’ll warm them up with some of the old standards, and we’ll all get soppy with sentiment. We’ll remind ourselves of our hour of great honor. We’ll sing, Give peace a chance, then we’ll drink and chase girls and compare investment portfolios. We’ll parade through Lincoln Park singing, Mr. Clean will clean your whole house, and everything that’s in it …

The world has been sanitized. Passion is a metaphor. All we can do is dig.

I put the laundry in to dry.

Upstairs, I smoke a cigarette, stand at the bedroom door. It’s not a pleasant thing.

If I could, I think. If there were no Minutemen. If we could somehow reverse the laws of thermodynamics.

Around midnight I lie on the sofa. Can’t sleep, though. I get up and clean the oven. Scour the sinks, apply Drano, carry out the garbage, make coffee, plan the breakfast menu.

It’s nearly dawn when Melinda begins banging on the bedroom door.

“Daddy!” she cries, and I’m there in an instant. I tell her to calm down, but she won’t, she keeps yelling and thumping the door. “Have to pee!” she says. “Real bad—I can’t hold it!”

It’s a dilemma. I ask her to hang on until I’ve had time to work out the arrangements.

“Wait?” she said. “How long?”

“Not long. You’re a big girl now, go back to bed.”

“Wet the bed. One more minute and—”

“Use a bottle, then.”

“What bottle?”

“Look around,” I say. “Check Mommy’s dresser.”

“Gross!”

She hits the door. I can picture the droop in her eyelids, the tightening along her jaw.

“Bottle,” she says, “that’s stupid. I’m a girl! God, I can’t even believe this.” Then she moans. “Daddy, listen, don’t you think maybe something’s wrong? It’s not too nice, is it? First you lock us in here, like we’re prisoners or something, and then you don’t even let me go to the bathroom. How would you feel? What if I did all that stuff to you?”

“Bad,” I tell her. “I’d probably feel terrible.”

“So there.”

Leaning against the door, rocking, I listen to a silence that seems to stretch out forever.

“Daddy?” Melinda says.

“I’m here.”

“You know what else?”

“What else?”

“I’m scared, I guess. And real sad, too. If you were me, you’d get so sad you couldn’t even stand it.”

“I know, honey.”

“Like right now. I’m sad.”

“Yes.”

“Let me out,” she says.

It’s a rocky moment, the most painful of my life. I hesitate. But then I tell her it can’t be done, not yet. “The hot-water bottle,” I say quietly. “Wake up your mother, she’ll handle it.”

“Please, can’t you—”

“I’m sorry, angel.”

She’s right, I can’t stand it. When she says she hates me, I nod and back away. I turn off the hallway light and move to the kitchen and drink coffee and try to patch myself together.

It’s a splendid sunrise. No more rain. The mountains go violet, then bright pink.

Just after six o’clock a taxi pulls up the long driveway.

Willpower, I think, and I write out a handsome check. “Tip?” the driver says. He’s just a kid, granny glasses and a sandy beard, but he clearly knows what it’s all about. He takes a twenty without blinking. “Could’ve called,” he says. “Six o’clock, man, no fucking courtesy.”

And that’s it.

Inside, I roll out my sleeping bag before the bedroom door. I strip to my underwear and curl up like a watchdog.

What more can I do?

Melinda hammers on the door.

“Daddy,” she shouts, “you’re crazy!”