The Nuclear Age

8 The Ends of the Earth

“IF IT WERE UP TO me—” my father said, but he had the courage not to finish. Instead he said, “What can I do?”

“The money, that’s all.”

“Cash? Play it cozy?”

“Probably so.”

“And you’ve got a place to—you know—a place to go?”

“It’s being set up,” I told him. “I’ll know tonight.”

“That’s good, then. Fine. So what about the basics? Toothbrush, clothes. A new wardrobe, what the hell.”

“Not necessary.”

He smiled and touched his jaw. “On the house. Any damned thing you want, just say it.”

“A wig,” I said.

“Right. What else?”

“I’m kidding. No wig. Nothing, just the cash.”

“A coat, though. You’ll need a coat. Definitely. And new shoes—some decent leather.”

“It’s not a funeral,” I said.

“No?”

“It’s not.”

My father jiggled his car keys. “Shoes,” he said, “let’s not argue. Shoes, then a coat, then we’ll see about a haircut.”

At the shoe store on Main Street, my father sat beside me, draped an arm across the back of my chair, and told the clerk he wanted the best. Leather soles and rubber heels, no plastic. The clerk said, “Yes, sir,” and hustled off to a back room. My father lit a cigarette. For a few minutes he sat watching the smoke, legs crossed, and then he shook his head and said, “Christ.”

“If you want,” I told him, “I’ll call it off.”

“I don’t want.”

“If you do, though.”

“No,” he said. “It’s a crime, that’s all I mean. Just a sick rotten crime. No other possibilities, right?”

“Except to call it off.”

He nodded. “Except that. And there’s Doc Crenshaw.”

“Yes, but I can’t—”

“Who knows?” he said. “A heart murmur maybe. I read somewhere—I think it was in Time—I read how heart murmurs can do the trick, or else asthma, a hundred different things. You never know.”

“I won’t beg.”

“Of course not. But we can hope, can’t we? Heart murmur, we can damn well hope.”

“Or cancer,” I said.

My father laughed and clapped me on the leg.

“That’s the spirit,” he said. “Cancer.”

He bought me shoes and a wool overcoat and shirts and jeans and a big green Samsonite suitcase. In the barbershop, he smoked cigarettes and flipped through magazines, keeping his hands busy. “Lop it off,” he told the barber. He made a slicing motion across his neck. “Amputate. Major surgery. The kid’s growing corn up there.” The barber chuckled and my dad went back to his magazine while I watched myself in the mirror. September 1968, and there was a thinning out in progress, a narrowing of alternatives. The scissors felt cool against my ear. The smells were good, I thought, all those lotions and powders. I closed my eyes for a few moments and when I looked up my father was studying me in the mirror. He turned away fast. “What we need,” he told the barber, “is one of those heavy-duty lawn mowers. Scissors won’t hack it.”

After dinner that night, when the dishes were done, I modeled my new clothes. An off-to-camp atmosphere, jokes and smiles, a nervous twitter when my mother said, “Well, it’s not the end of the world, is it?”

We avoided specifics. There was great courage in what was not said. We listened to records, made small talk about neighbors and old times, and then later, on the spur of the moment, my father challenged me to a game of Ping-Pong. “Two out of three, no mercy,” he said, and he winked, and I said, “You asked for it,” and we moved down to the basement and set up the net and played hard for almost an hour.

At eight o’clock I asked for the car keys.

“Right,” he said. “Absolutely.”

There was a clumsy moment when he handed the keys over. He followed me outside and stood on the steps as I backed the Buick down the driveway, then he waved and held up two fingers.

A good man, I thought. A veteran of foreign wars and a good man.

Twenty minutes to kill, so I drove up Main Street to the railroad tracks at the east edge of town, then circled around and came back again, slowly, elbow out the window. The air was warm and calm. A big red moon presided over the mountains, a Friday night, and the shoppers were out. There was commerce and goodwill. I drove past the Ben Franklin store, the Thompson Hotel with its old hitching post, my father’s real estate office, the courthouse and the library and Doc Crenshaw’s little three-room clinic. The streets were safe. It could’ve been anywhere, small-town America.

Nobody knew.

I turned on the radio. Rhythms, I thought, Surfin’ Safari, and I tapped the steering wheel and watched the mountains above town, the safe streets and storefronts. I was afraid, of course, but it was mostly homesickness. I thought about the things I’d be losing. Little things, like backyard barbecues, but big things, too, family and history, all of it. For me, at least, it would not be an act of high morality. My father understood that. “It’s a mess,” he’d said, “it’s all upside down, a real hornet’s nest. If it were up to me… It’s not, though. What can I tell you? That damned war. What the hell are we fighting for? That’s the bitch of it, I guess, but I don’t know. I wish I knew.”

Certain blood for uncertain reasons.

It was a phrase I’d picked up in college, one of Sarah’s favorite lines, and now, as I turned past the A&W, I said it aloud. I whistled Surfin’ Safari.

I did not want to die, and my father understood that.

It wasn’t cowardice, exactly, and he understood that, too, and it wasn’t courage.

It wasn’t politics.

Not even the war itself, not the coffins or justice or a citizen’s obligation to his state. It was gravity. Something physical, that force that keeps pressing toward the end.

Certain blood, uncertain reasons, but finally you have to choose.

At eight-thirty I stopped at a pay phone outside the State Bank building. Sarah was all business. “On or off?” she said.

“On,” I said, “I’m pretty sure.”

“Pretty?”

“Yes, I think so.”

There was a pause before she said, “Class dismissed. Call me back if—”

“On,” I said.

“Louder, man. Bad connection.”

“It’s go, almost positive. A couple of things to take care of first.”

“Medically, you mean?”

“My dad thinks it’s worth a shot.”

Sarah seemed pensive. In the background, barely audible, I could hear a tinkling sound, ice cubes or wind chimes.

“Flat feet,” she said, and sighed. “Or cold feet. What you should do, maybe, is buy yourself some cute pedal pushers. Have Congress with a butcher knife—works every time.”

“That isn’t quite fair.”

“Maybe not,” she said. “Stick an ice pick up your weewee. Tell them you’re two months pregnant.”

There was a moment of problematic silence. I watched a tractor turn left off Main, a big John Deere painted green with yellow trim. I was hurting. When the tractor was gone, I told her how sick I felt. Turned around, I said. Lost, too, and trapped, and I needed something more than smart-ass bullshit.

Sarah chuckled.

“You’re not pregnant?” she said.

“I’m not pregnant.”

“Pity.”

“Sick,” I said. “Lost.”

There was that wind-chime sound again.

“All right, then, you’re lost,” she said, and her voice seemed to back off a bit. “That’s understandable. Problem is, we need a commitment, something firm. These things get complicated. Heat’s on, I’m sorry, but you’ll have to—I hate to press—but you’ll have to… I am sorry.”

“Okay,” I said.

“Okay what?”

“Okay, on. Tomorrow night.”

“That translates to Saturday?”

“Saturday.”

“Firm?”

“Yes,” I said, “I guess so.”

Sarah cleared her throat. “That’s what I admire. All that boldness and fire.” She waited a moment, then told me to take notes. “Number one, you’ll have to bus it to Chicago. Number two—write this down—TWA, flight 233, Chicago to Boston, nine o’clock Monday morning. Nine sharp. Miss that flight, the whole deal’s off.”

“Tickets?” I said.

“At the check-in counter. Your name’s Johnson, L. B.”

“That’s comic.”

“We thought so. Anyhow, nine o’clock Monday. You’ve made financial arrangements?”

“My parents.”

“They know?”

“Not the details.”

“But they know?”

“A little. I couldn’t just walk away.”

Sarah snorted. “I thought it was clear. Mouth shut, I said. Didn’t I say that?”

“I was careful. No names.”

“Careful, shit,” she said. There was a brittle sound on the line, a clicking, as if someone were transmitting in code. Voices, too. I heard a whisper, or thought I heard it, then a soft buzzing. After a moment Sarah said, “So where was I? Number three. We’ll have a watchdog waiting in Boston—TWA, main lobby. Find a comfy chair and sit tight. Simple enough?”

“Like cloak-and-dagger.”

“You think so?” Her tone was perfectly neutral. “Because, listen, we can call it a bust right now. You think that?”

“Trans World,” I said. “Sit tight.”

“Exactly.”

“And?”

“Bring a book or something. The watchdog, he’ll find you.”

“Who?”

“No can say. A familiar face.” She made an indistinct sound, almost motherly, but her voice remained firm. “It’s not easy, we both know that. But flat feet don’t cut it. Sooner or later you have to walk.”

Breakfast was a ceremony. There was great decorum in the scrambling of eggs, cups on saucers, pourings and stirrings and fussings over fresh-squeezed orange juice.

“Socks,” my mother said.

“Plenty,” I told her, “no more socks,” but she smiled and shook her head and added socks to the shopping list. “Towels,” she said, “you could use towels.”

We spoke in ellipses.

My father stirred his coffee, glanced at the clock, yawned, stretched, folded his arms, and said, “Goddamned idiots. The whole jackass crew—the Pentagon, the jackass diplomats—give me a chance, I’d strangle the whole crew, one by one, line them up and start—” He strangled his napkin, then shrugged. “I would. My own two hands. March in and murder the sons of bitches, all those whiz-kid bastards. You think I’m not serious? Westmoreland, I’d nail him first, and then Bundy and Ho Chi Minh. I swear to God, I’d do it. Just like that. I’d do it.”

“Towels,” my mother said.

“Towels, right.” My father winked at me. “Towels, to mop up the gore.”

At noon they dropped me off at Doc Crenshaw’s office.

It was hopeless but I went inside and stripped down and closed my eyes while Crenshaw searched for flat feet and asthma and disturbances in the heart. I felt drowsy. Lying there, I wanted to curl up for a decade-long nap, an iron lung breathing for me, fluids flowing in and out through rubber tubing. I held my breath as the old man listened through his stethoscope.

“Thump-thump,” Crenshaw said. “Always the same old tune. Just once I’d like to hear Rhapsody in Blue.”

Later, when I was dressed, he took me by the arm. He squeezed hard, his eyes sliding sideways.

“You could go mental,” he said. “Start seeing flashes.”

“No,” I said.

“Just a thought.”

He released my arm and stepped back.

“I’m a doctor,” he said, “I can’t—”

“No problem.”

“A crazy world, but I can’t fake it. Tell your dad I’m sorry. Don’t blame him for asking—leaning hard. I’d do the same myself. Tell him that.”

“Sure,” I said, “you’re a doctor.”

In my bedroom, as I finished packing, there was the feel of a performance gone stale, too many rehearsals.

“Bag money,” my father said. He slipped a thick envelope into my pocket. “Tens and twenties, hard to trace.”

“Unmarked, I hope.”

“Slick as a whistle. Ran it through the scanner, it’s clean.”

My mother folded shirts; my father sat on the edge of the bed, head down, hands carefully pressed to his knees. Now and then he’d take a quick peek at his wristwatch.

“You know what this reminds me of?” he said. “That TV show—I Led Three Lives. Herb Philbrick, remember? That trench coat of his. Always pulling up the collar and ducking into phone booths, sweating to beat holy hell. Remember that?”

“Richard Carlson,” I said.

“Yeah, Richard Carlson. Subversives everywhere. FBI agents, too, all over the place, in the closet, under the bed. And that poor slob Philbrick, the way he’d slink around in that damned spy coat, just sweating up a storm—like a flood, I mean gallons—the guy couldn’t turn it off.”

“I’ll go easy on the sweat,” I told him. “No trench coats, either.”

My father smiled.

“Comrade,” he said.

Late in the afternoon I took a shower and dressed up in my new clothes. There was a short picture-taking session, fierce smiles straight at the camera, then my father said, “Ready, comrade?”

The ride down to the bus depot was almost jolly. We talked about David Janssen in The Fugitive, how it was the greatest TV program in history. My mother said she’d start looking for me in the next episode.

We were tough people. Scared, a little dazed, but we followed the script.

When the bus rolled up, my parents took turns hugging me.

“Postcards,” my mother said. “Don’t forget.”

“Invisible ink,” I said.

“Microdots under the stamps.”

My father turned away. It was a wobbly moment but he didn’t lose control.

“One favor,” he said. “Keep that hair trimmed.”

“For sure.”

“What I mean is, we’re proud of you. Not a single thing to be ashamed about.”

He kissed me on the forehead.

“Pride,” he said, “and love, that says it all, cowboy.”

I made Chicago at six o’clock Monday morning. Thirty-five hours on the run, and already I was feeling the side effects. Stomach problems and a crushing headache. I splurged on a cab out to O’Hare, ate breakfast, spent a half hour in the men’s room, then popped an aspirin and made the hard walk up to the TWA counter. “Johnson,” I said, and felt a telltale grin coming on. The girl didn’t look up. Her lips moved as she counted my tens and twenties, then she cranked out a ticket and waved me on. It was almost a disappointment. Over and over, during that long haul through North Dakota and Minnesota, I’d played out the various scenarios. A cop asking for my driver’s license, a Herb Philbrick sweat, then handcuffs and fingerprints.

“Gate Twelve,” the girl said. “Safe trip.”

Too ordinary, I thought. The effortless takeoff. Tweedy seats and canned music, the flight attendants with their rubber smiles and toasted almonds. It was unreasonable, of course, but I felt cheated. I wanted something more. A clot in the fuel lines. An instant of daffy panic. I wanted contact with my own emotions.

But the plane nosed up through a pale morning sky, banking eastward, leveling off at thirty thousand feet.

Automatic pilot, no pain.

I levered back my seat and slept through to Boston. It was a purring sleep, like the engines, not even a bad dream.

At Logan, Ollie Winkler was there to meet me at the gate.

“Well,” he said, “you look like snot. Green and rancid.”

There was no hugging or handshaking. We collected my luggage, took an elevator up to the main ticketing area, dropped quarters into a vending machine, and sipped our coffee standing up near a window.

“I kid you not,” he said, “you look sick. Like fried oysters. Real nice haircut, though.” He grinned and put his nose to the window and watched a plane lift off. “So anyhow, welcome to the depths. Depths—underground, get it? I’m real keen on the lingo.”

“Watchdog,” I said, “that’s another good one.”

Ollie shrugged. “Sarah, she goes in for the spook stuff. You ask me, it’s too James Bond-y, slightly paranoid, but I guess that’s her style. Like right now—today—I’m not even supposed to talk to you, just drop messages. Screw it, though. I figure you got to go with the normal flow, otherwise you start… Listen, maybe you better sit down.”

“Maybe,” I said.

“Worse than sick. Dead fuckin’ oysters.”

I let him lead me over to a bench in the main lobby. Jet lag, I thought. I closed my eyes and leaned back while he filled me in on his doings since graduation. Most of it I already knew. He explained how the McCarthy business had gone bust after California. Clean-cut candidate, clean-cut defeat. “Tidy Bowl Politics,” he said, “it makes you yearn for the pigpen. Crack a few skulls, you know?”

“I do know. Like RFK.”

“Right, Bobby. Messy shit. Didn’t do much for morale.”

“But you stuck?”

“Oh, sure, me and Tina both. The holy wars.”

Ollie was silent for a time. He’d lost some weight, and he seemed taller now, and stronger, and a little more subdued. He wore a buckskin jacket and boots, but no cowboy hat. At the crown of his head, I noticed, there was evidence of aging. After a moment he sighed, snapping his fingers, and talked about life on the campaign trail, mostly the disappointments. “The Windy City,” he said, “that was an eye-opener for all of us. Yippies here, Dippies there. Turns out clean-cut isn’t trendy. No offense, I do love that haircut.”

“And now?”

“You know. Politics as usual.”

“Meaning?”

He looked at his fingernails. “The chef, remember? I said it before, you got to break some legs. Three years ago. Nobody listened, but I said it.”

“You did.”

“Now they’re listening.”

“Sarah?”

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

“Who—”

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

“Yes. What about these friends?”

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

“Bad-weather types?”

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

“Happy arrangement,” I said.

“I guess. Let’s eat.”

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

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

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

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

I excused myself.

“Oysters,” I said, “you were right.”

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

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

Hollywood, I decided.

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

Later, in the lobby, Ollie suggested deep breathing.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And then I chuckled.

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

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

It was Trans World from there on.

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

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

There were lights in the Kremlin.

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

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

There was nowhere to land.

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

The jet dipped, bounced, and woke me up.

I pushed the call button.

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

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

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

We circled over the Everglades at ten thousand feet.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

To what extent, I wondered, was it real?

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

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

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

“Home free,” she said.

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

“It’s done,” Sarah kept telling me.

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

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

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

I’d hear myself thinking: Where am I?

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

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

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

Just a dream, like everything, but the nights were disjointed.

I’d wake up dizzy—uncertain whereabouts. A malfunction of compass. I couldn’t get my bearings; I felt open to injury.

“Easy,” Sarah would say, “give it time.”

She was tender with me. Uncommonly careful, and caring. In the mornings, before the heat set in, she would often lead me on long winding strolls through Old Town. The pace was slow. She was tactful, never pushing. Along the way she pointed out the local flora and fauna, many gulls and flowers, exotic trees, fish bones bleaching on white sand. We’d go arm in arm down Margaret Street, then left on Caroline, past Cuban restaurants and conch houses, then right on Duval, where there were crowds and drinking establishments and young girls in halters and headbands and young boys with long hair and bruised arms, then down to the waterfront, just walking, often resting, watching the shrimp boats and fishermen and tourists. Mildew smells, I remember. And salt and gasoline. There were jugglers and magicians at Mallory Square. There was an old man with an iguana on a leather leash. There was no war here, but there was bright sunlight and water, so we’d walk until we were hungry, then we’d stop for fish cakes at one of the outdoor cafés. We’d hold hands under the table. We’d be silent, mostly, or else talk around things, admiring the temperature and the shadings of color in the sky. Later, at the house, we’d nap or read, then take a swim, then oil up our bodies and hide behind sunglasses and spend the late afternoon soaking our toes in the Gulf of Mexico.

On the surface, at least, it was a holiday. R&R, Sarah called it, but she skirted the hard topics. She did not mention her new friends. She did not venture information as to why we were here or what her plans might be or where the trends might take us. Except for a few late-night phone calls, there were no contacts with any outside network. There was an odd passivity to it all, an absence of endeavor. Too lush, I thought. Too remote. The immense quiet and the afternoon heat and the slow island tempo. Where, I wondered, was the resistance? And why Key West? And what next? There were these questions, and others, but I was not yet prepared to frame them.

I concentrated on convalescence. Day to day, just idling. A good time, mostly—a family feeling.

Tina Roebuck performed home economics, toiling over casseroles and desserts that flamed. “Health begins with nutrition,” she’d say. Then she’d chuckle and tap her belly: “Balanced diets make balanced minds.” So we’d sit down to nutritious meals, Tina in a brightly colored muumuu, Rafferty in gym shorts, Sarah in almost nothing. The talk was family talk—Tina told McCarthy stories, Rafferty went on at length about his garden. After supper we’d play Scrabble or Monopoly, or watch television, or go dancing down on Duval Street, and although I’d sometimes feel myself slipping away, space walking, the others were always there to give comfort.

September was neither here nor there.

On October 1, my birthday, Tina baked a cake. There were candles and songs, and it was a happy occasion until I felt the grief. I excused myself and went out to the back patio and watched the sun go down.

Later, at twilight, Ned Rafferty joined me. He was still wearing his party hat. He smiled and showed me a bottle of rum and two glasses. For some time we just watched the dark. Ocean smells, and a breeze, and we drank the rum and listened to the crickets and tree frogs.

“Anyway,” he said.

But then he shrugged and fell silent.

Behind us, in the kitchen, Sarah and Tina were doing dishes. I could hear a radio somewhere. When the moon came up, Rafferty took off his party hat.

“You know,” he said softly, “we’ve always had this tension between us, you and me, but I wish—I mean, it’s too bad—I wish we could be friends. A treaty or something. Here we are.”

“Wherever here is,” I said.

Rafferty stirred his drink with a thumb. He seemed pensive.

“I know the feeling. Hard to connect sometimes, but you shouldn’t think—you know—you shouldn’t feel alone or anything. You shouldn’t. The Benedict Arnold disease, it’s one of the hazards. We all grew up saying the Pledge of Allegiance.”

“I’ll live,” I told him.

He nodded. “No doubt. But if you need to talk, I’m not such a terrible guy.”

“You’re not.”

“Just a fuzzball,” he said, and smiled.

He filled my glass.

A nice person, I thought. I wanted to tell him that, but instead I shifted weight and examined the sky. The radio seemed closer now, and louder, and for a while Rafferty hummed along with the Stones… just no place for a street fighting man.

Then he stopped and looked at me.

“You’ll learn to live with it,” he said. “Guaranteed. At first you get the jumps, that’s normal. You feel like J. Edgar Hoover’s on your tail, Feds and G-men and all that, but after a while you realize, shit, it’s a huge country—a free country, right?—and they can’t track down every Tom, Dick, and Harry. They just can’t. Not if you follow the rules of the road.”

“Don’t jaywalk,” I said.

Rafferty smiled at me.

“That’s one rule. Don’t jaywalk. Don’t ask a cop for directions. Not all that difficult. If a guy wants to get lost, he gets lost. Easy.”

I contemplated this. The rum was doing helpful things.

“Fine,” I said. “Lost-wise, I’m shipshape.”

“It gets better.”

“Sure it does.” I looked at him. “What about you? How’s your lostness?”

Rafferty laughed. “So-so,” he said. He picked up the party hat and put it on his head. “A goof, man. What do I know? Dumb jock. Long line of fuzzballs.”

“Not so dumb.”

“Dumb,” he said, and rubbed his eyes. “Hick. Grew up on a ranch. Like where the buffalo roam. All I ever wanted—that old home on the range. Deer and antelope. Dumb, you know? And now this.”

“Why?”

“Why what?”

“Here,” I said. “How come?”

He was silent. He stood up and moved over to his garden, peeing with his back to me, then turned and came back slowly and lifted the bottle and said, “Motives. Who knows? Real jumbled.”

“Sarah?”

“Oh, sure,” he said. “Sarah. Classy lady. Much love, but that’s not… This rad shit, it’s not me. Politics, I hate it. Humphrey, Nixon—who cares? But here I am. Sarah, sure. The right thing, I guess. The war. Not a nice war. Very tangled. So do the right thing… Dumb jock. The right thing, I think. Dumb. So what’s the right thing? Down inside I’m all red, white, and blue. Fucking Republican, you believe that? True. Many misgivings. What’s right? Motives, man, I don’t know. I walk away. Real brave, real dumb. No more home on the range. My dad says, ‘Hey, where you going?’ so I tell him, I tell him it’s the right thing, and my dad gives me this long look—he’s got these eyes you wouldn’t believe, like Gary Cooper or somebody, these no-bullshit eyes—he looks at me and he says, ‘Pussy.’ That’s all he says. My old man, he wasn’t pleased. Didn’t think it was the right thing.”

“Parents,” I said.

Rafferty rolled his shoulders. “Oh, yeah,” he said, “parents.”

We proposed a toast to parents. I told him how my mother kept packing socks and towels, how we couldn’t really talk about it, not straight on, just the logistics, socks and towels and haircuts. Like a game, I told him. Like it wasn’t real.

“Right,” Rafferty said, “like that.”

“Parents.”

“Unreal. That’s the thing.”

The radio was playing calypso now. We drank to our parents and birthdays and the right thing. Rafferty told me to stay loose. So far, he said, so good. Then he grinned and said, “Like the army, sort of. Hurry up and wait.” For the time being, he told me, no need to worry. Sarah had resources. There was no shortage of wherewithal.

Vaguely, a little drunk, he talked about the competing factions within the movement, how scrambled it was, the cliques and cabals and petty conspiracies.

“The political thicket,” he said, and shook his head. “Tangled, you know? Classic worm can. Slimy creatures, very messy. Panthers here, Weather guys there. Shades of red—like with blood, all types, you need a goddamn flow chart—SDSers and Quakers and the CPA and the PLP and God knows what all—let me think—the People’s Coalition for Peace, Dwarfs for a Nonviolent Solution. You name it. Lots of moral hairs to split. Head-smashers, ass-kickers. Hard-core weirdos. Liberation fronts. The League of Concerned Dieticians. If I had my way, I’d wipe out the whole rat’s nest. There it is, though. The famous network.”

There was a pause, then Rafferty shrugged and raised his glass.

“Screw it,” he said, “let’s drink. To the nonviolent dwarfs.”

We drank and refilled our glasses.

It wasn’t friendship, exactly, but it was something. We drank to moral hairs and split ends.

“Anyway, that’s the gist,” he said. “Where we fit in, I don’t know. Unaffiliated, I guess. Sarah wants to run her own little show. A ma and pa operation, whatever that means. Big dreams.”

“Franchise,” I said. “Kentucky Fried Terror.”

“Yeah, well. Forget the terror part. I’m not in this to bust skulls. Just a nice little subway system for guys like you and me. Fast and efficient.”

“Crack-ups?” I said.

Rafferty smiled. “No crack-ups. One thing about draft-dodging, it’s hardly ever fatal.”

“I meant—”

“Yes, I know,” he said. “Mental hygiene. Go with the shuffle, that’s all. Just flat-fuck live with it. Pretend it’s the right thing.”

“I suppose,” I said. “But sometimes—”

“Lost, right?”

“Pretty lost.”

We were quiet for a few moments.

“All right, then, lost,” Rafferty said. He smiled. “I guess we’d best drink to it.”

There were mobile shapes in the dark, rustlings and penetrations. We drank to the League of Concerned Dieticians. Later, after Sarah and Tina had gone to bed, we went inside and ate birthday cake and proposed toasts to mental hygiene and low profiles and safe houses and reformed fuzzballs and treaties of peace. We drank to Crazy Horse and Custer.

“To Herb Philbrick,” I said.

Rafferty seemed puzzled. Apparently the name didn’t ring a bell, but he shrugged and drank anyway.

By mid-October the cure was solid. Flat on my back, I basked away the daylight hours, staring up at a huge blue sky, alert to contrails and the whine of passing jets. There was an alternating current at work. A kind of giddiness at times, almost elation, and I’d hear myself laughing at the unlikely melodrama. Jesse James, I’d think. I could imagine my hometown draft board saddling up for the chase; that hide-and-go-seek feeling, fully revved, like a little kid playing grown-up games—slip under the bed and cover your eyes and giggle. Other times, though, it was grim. Shipwrecked, I’d think. Lying there, watching the sky, I’d seem to drift outside myself, outside everything. The law and history and the precedents of my own life. It wasn’t anything fanciful—I wasn’t ill—it was just disengagement. How much, I wondered, was real? I’d sometimes find myself hovering at thirty thousand feet. I’d contemplate the flight patterns and violet sunsets over Hudson Bay. I’d study Martian Travel for hidden meanings, sniffing the dried grass, smiling as I visualized the Trans World possibilities.

I’d tease the name, saying “Bobbi.”

Bobbi who? I’d wonder.

And there was Sarah, too, whose love and ministrations speeded recovery.

In the evenings, before bed, she gave me long professional back rubs, attending the vertebrae one by one, taking each toe to her mouth and sucking out the poisons and wickedness. There was some guilt, of course. There were unsaid things. Our lovemaking was often quick and formal. Bobbi, I’d be thinking, which was silly, and Sarah would regard me with flat eyes, just waiting, and eventually I’d find reason to look away. But even then she showed patience. Quietly, without sarcasm, she said she was proud of me. I’d done the proper thing. She knew how difficult it was, she knew about the pain.

“We all want to be heroes,” she said one afternoon. “That’s the constant. Nobody wants a bad rep. Ducking out, the big blush, I know. But I’ll tell you a true fact—you can’t die of embarrassment. Doesn’t happen that way.”

I watched the clouds.

A seashore scene, and we were beached up side by side. The blues were startling. It was an afternoon of repose, just the wide-open stratosphere and those long rhyming wavelengths of water and light.

For a time Sarah watched me through her sunglasses. There was a hesitation, then she reached into her beach bag and pulled out a new leather wallet.

“Yours,” she said, and passed it over.

Inside, under clear plastic, was a Social Security card made out in the name of Leonard B. Johnson. There was a driver’s license, too, in the same name, with my face affixed, and two credit cards, and a snapshot of Sarah in her Peverson cheerleading outfit. At the bottom of the photograph, in black ink, she’d written: With high fidelity, Sarah.

“The credit cards,” she said. “Don’t use them. ID stuff, just for show.”

“Leonard?” I said.

“You don’t like it?”

“Not much.”

Sarah sat up and massaged cocoa oil into her calves and thighs. Her skin was deep brown with good muscle definition. A hard act, I thought, in a hard world.

She laughed.

“Ah, well,” she said brightly, “what’s in a name? No real meaning. Know what I mean?”

“No, I don’t.”

“Names and names, William. Meanings. Names don’t matter.” She rolled onto her stomach. Overhead there were sea gulls and wispy white clouds. “Anyway,” she said, “I hope it’s not an identity crisis. Leonard, I mean, it’ll grow on you. Very wishy-washy as names go. Tomorrow, maybe the next day, I’ll have your passport.”

“And then?”

Absently, Sarah traced a design in the sand.

“Nothing, really. New papers, new citizenship. We’re all émigrés here.”

She wiped the sand clean and started over, drawing an airplane, wings tilted at a steep downward angle. Her eyes, I thought, were wired.

“One of these days,” she said slowly, “you’ll have to stop grieving for the old country. It’s gone. Not there anymore.”

“A new world,” I said.

“Believe it.”

“New friends, too?”

She gave me a sharp look.

“Friends, too,” she said. “Who you think pays for all this? Those papers—the house, the groceries—somebody has to pick up the tab. They aren’t bad people.”

“I didn’t say that.”

“You implied.”

“All right,” I said. “Generous people. What I’m curious about, though, is the repayment schedule. The fine print, the terms of agreement and all that.”

“A few favors. Odd jobs here and there.”

“I’ll bet.”

“Complaints?”

I shook my head. “No, just apprehensive. The law.”

“Well,” she said, “it takes some savoir-faire.”

Sarah studied her airplane in the sand. It wasn’t what she wanted, apparently, because she hit it with her fist and then flipped onto her back and watched the circling gulls.

“Savoir-faire?” I said.

“You know.”

“I don’t know. I’m stupid.”

She made an impatient movement with her chin. “Survival skills. How to cope. How to avoid handcuffs. Like grad school except it’s strictly pass-fail. Anyway, you’re enrolled.”

Her voice trailed off. She kept fidgeting, tight and restless.

Presently she sighed.

“You’re right,” she said, “there’s always a price. But listen, you made the decision, you walked, so pretty soon you’ll have to get off your butt and start showing me some involvement. You do or you don’t.”

“A war,” I said.

“True enough.” She took off her sunglasses and looked at me. “Things change, William. All that pom-pom garbage, it’s history, I’m in this for keeps. I’m in. And what I mean is, I mean you have to grow up. Crawl out of your goddamn hidey-hole.”

“Black or white,” I said. “Sounds so simple.”

“It is simple. Pull your own weight or pull out. I need a commitment.”

For a moment she was silent, letting it hang, then she tapped the wallet.

“Commitment,” she said softly. “Know what it means?”

There was a subtle undercurrent. She shook out her hair and stood up and waded out into the Atlantic.

Commitment, I thought.

Two different value systems. She was out to change the world, I was out to survive it. I couldn’t summon the same moral resources.

I dozed off for a time, and when I looked up, Sarah was standing over me, toweling off, the sun directly behind her head.

“Who’s Bobbi?” she said.

Her face was all angles. She knelt down, opened the wallet, and pulled out Martian Travel.

“Found it this morning. Naïve Sarah. Went to reload your billfold. Switch papers—some switch. What do I find? I find this. All about airplanes and safe landings. Maybe I should read it out loud.”

“No,” I said, “don’t.”

But she went ahead anyway, in a soft, measured voice, and at the final line she nodded and placed the poem in my lap.

There was some stillness.

“Snazzy stuff,” she said shortly. “Mars and stars. Dah-dee-dah, et cetera. Nice metrics. Content-wise, it seems a little ambiguous, but I guess that’s literature for you.”

“Sarah, it’s not—”

She shook her head and laughed.

“Fidelity?” she said. “Offhand I can’t think of a decent rhyme. True? Blue? Shit.” Her eyes were closed. “I guess I’m just hypersensitive. The whole thing, it strikes me as—how do I say this?—a little cheesy. And there’s that cute P.S., too. Something about grass. The regular cow kind. She says it expresses her deepest feelings for you.”

“Yes,” I said, “I know.”

“Cheesy.”

“I know.”

After a time, Sarah put on her sunglasses and stretched out beside me.

The afternoon was hot. A fine clean sky, and for a long while nothing more was said. All whimsy, I thought. It wasn’t what it seemed. Out on the horizon a white cruise ship was toiling south, and we lay quietly until it disappeared over the rim of the world.

Sarah touched my arm.

“I’m not poetic, William. You and me. I thought we had something. Remember?”

“I remember.”

“Love. Rio and babies. That was the plan, I thought.”

“It still is. A good plan.”

She sat up.

“Fucking Martians,” she said. “Fucking grass. I don’t get it.”

“No meaning,” I said. “All air.”

“I love you.”

“Just air.”

“Love,” she said, then paused. “So who’s Bobbi?”

I gazed out at where the cruise ship had been, but there was just the thin, unbroken edge of things.

“Bobbi who?” I said.

9 Underground Tests

NOVEMBER 6, 1968, A DISMAL DAY in paradise. Dark and drizzling and steamy hot. After breakfast Sarah dressed in mourning. She wore a black hat and a black bikini and a long black widow’s veil.

“Nixon’s the one,” she said. “Let’s walk it off.”

Outside, there was fog and thunder. We unfurled an umbrella and strolled past bait shops and boutiques, along the waterfront, down to a deserted beach at Land’s End. The rain was steady. Sarah lifted the veil and spat and said, “Not that it matters. We needed a classy new villain.”

She lay down and made angels in the sand, then stiffened and folded her arms.

“Go ahead,” she said. “Bury me.”

“Deep?”

“Use your judgment.”

I dug a shallow grave and rolled her in and tamped down the wet sand. At the end, only the hat and veil were visible.

She nodded.

“A prayer might be appropriate. Talk about my free spirit, how much you adored me.”

I knelt down and uttered a blessing.

“Beautiful,” she said.

There was gloom at Land’s End, and the day smelled of salt and mildew and troubled times.

Sarah’s eyes were dark behind the veil.

“Our beloved, misgoverned Republic,” she said. She attempted a smile. “And me, William? You do care?”

“A lot. Don’t be silly.”

“Silly me.”

“That’s right.”

“And Bobbi?”

“I explained that. Just this thing.”

Her head shifted slightly in the sand.

“Heavenly bodies,” she said.

It was a day for sobriety. I propped up the umbrella and leaned back and studied the rain. Things were pasty-gray. The ocean was part of the land and the sky was part of the ocean. Far off, there was lightning.

“The thing that gets me,” Sarah said, “is the broad’s guile. I’d give anything to watch her work a singles bar: ‘Hi, there, my name’s Bobbi. Here’s a delicious little poem I wrote just for you.’ A huckster, William. And you fall for it.”

“I didn’t fall.”

Sarah grunted. “Fall, flip, what’s the difference? I mean, Christ, I can knock out my own little beddy-bye rhymes. The grass, the grass! Bobbi, baby, kiss my ass!”

“Talent,” I said.

“Talent. You bet.”

“It’s not what you think.”

“No?”

“I told you, we barely even… Nothing.”

The rain was vast and undramatic. America had misstated itself—Nixon was the one—and at Land’s End there was only Real Politic.

Sarah made a clucking sound.

“Nothing,” she said. “Like Mother Goose. Now you see her, now you don’t.”

“Stop it.”

“The competition, man, it’s too celestial.”

“No competition. I’m here.”

“Oh, yes.”

“I am.”

She laughed.

“Half here, half there,” she said. “A little of both. The Martian Travel trick.”

Then she cried.

There was definite slippage. Along the surface of the grave I could see bits of brown flesh where the rain had made fissures in the sand. Sarah cried quietly, inside herself, then closed her eyes and lay still. “You never look at me,” she said. “Not really. When you love somebody, you keep looking, you can’t help it. But you never do that. You never look at me or ask questions about how I feel or… Just things. You know? I’m a real person.”

“You are,” I said.

I looked at her, then looked away.

She was not, I realized, beautiful. Hard and pretty but not beautiful. I pulled the veil up and kissed her and told her it was just circumstance. A random encounter, I said. Nothing to hold on to. A martini, a voice without language: I couldn’t remember words.

Sarah cradled her legs and began rocking. For some time she just watched the weather.

“It’s foolish,” she finally said, “but I need promises. You have to promise me things.”

“Things?”

She shrugged. “Whatever seems possible. The future. We keep doing this evasive dance together, all kinds of intricate footwork, but just once I’d like to stop the waltz. Just once. Tell me there’s a future for us. You have to promise.” She removed her hat and veil. “Do you love me?”

“Yes,” I said.

“Promise?”

“I do. I promise.”

“Say it.”

“I love you,” I said.

“More.”

“I don’t know more.”

“Make it up, then. Tell me we’ll be happy. Tell me it’s perfect love, it’ll last forever.”

“It will.”

“Swear it, though.”

“I swear. Forever.”

“Forever,” she said, and nearly smiled. “I like that.”

The next evening Ollie Winkler hit Key West aboard a sleek thirty-eight-foot Bertram cabin cruiser. He was in the company of a slim, mustachioed Cuban without a name. Compadre, Ollie called him. The man did not speak English. He touched his cap and stepped back while Ollie gave us a tour of the boat. It was brand-new and expensive-looking.

“A real attack vessel,” Ollie said proudly. “Fast, you know? All we need’s a torpedo or two.”

“And depth charges,” said Tina.

“You got it, kid. Charges for the depths.” Ollie beamed as he showed us the galley and the teak decks and the two big Evinrude engines. He was wearing Bermuda shorts and a sequined T-shirt that said MOON IN MIAMI. “No joke,” he said, “these babies cost a pretty penny. Had to shop around almost a week.”

“But?” Sarah said.

“Yeah, but.”

“A steal, I’ll bet.”

Ollie’s smile was modest. “You know me. Mr. Thrift.”

“Problems?”

“Zero problems. Compadre and me, we drove a hard bargain. You like it?”

Sarah pecked his cheek.

“It’ll float,” she said.

Then it was all action.

We had a quick dinner, packed our suitcases, locked up the house, and headed down to the boat. We spent the night on board. It was a reunion of sorts, and there was champagne and comradeship, but there was also the certainty that we had come up against departure. I slept badly. Late in the night I woke up and took a pee over the bow and then stood there for a long time. Coward, I thought. I watched the water and stars. I thought about the things I valued. I valued the love of my father and mother. I valued peace. I valued safety. I did not want to kill, or die, yet I did not want to do this thing we would now be doing. I had no zeal. For me, it was just a ride, and there were no convictions beyond sadness.

At dawn Tina Roebuck served omelets and orange juice.

“I won’t make speeches,” Sarah said. “Anyone wants out, now’s the time.”

Ollie reached for the jam.

“Love it!” he said.

“William?”

“I heard.”

“What I mean is—” She looked at Tina. “Go on, tell him what I mean.”

“Business,” Tina said, smiling at me. “Get with the program, she means. We’re tired of jump-starting your conscience.”

Ollie laughed and said, “Love it!”

It was a smooth seven-hour crossing.

Too smooth, I thought: a weekend boating party. The young Cuban manned the helm, and there was a polished sky and fair winds and the Gulf Stream running green to blue. A radio boomed out calypso. When the Keys sank away, I took off my shirt and pondered ticklish points of international protocol. It occurred to me that our passage held historical hazard—the Monroe Doctrine and piracy on the high seas. Also, in these same warm waters, the world had once squared off in preparation for expiry, causing prayer and the contemplation of final causes. What, I wondered, had happened to memory? Here, I thought. Idle musings, perhaps, but I couldn’t shake the sense that there was a pursuit in progress. The fugitive jitters, obviously. I imagined a helicopter high off our stern. A warning shot, and demands would be issued, and we would go eyeball to eyeball, and then it would happen as it nearly happened and finally must.

But no one knew.

Among the sane, I realized, there is no full knowing. If you’re sane, you ride without risk, for the risks are not real. And when it comes to pass, some sane asshole will shrug and say, “Oh, well.”

Events had their own track.

At noon we established radio contact. A half hour later a small gray pilot boat pulled alongside. There were guns and khaki uniforms.

Ned Rafferty touched my arm.

“You okay?” he asked.

“Just fine.”

“That’s good, then. Steady as she goes.” He squeezed my arm. “Clear sailing. Just us and the wild red yonder.”

We made Havana in time for a late lunch.

Afterward there was paperwork, then our hosts arranged for a bus that took us along a coastal highway, past poverty and palms and vast fields of sugarcane. The ride lasted four hours. We stopped once for water, once for fuel, but otherwise it was exactly as Rafferty predicted, clear sailing, just us and the wild red yonder.

For six days, which I marked off on a pocket calendar, we lazed away the time at an orientation compound situated beachside a few miles west of Sagua la Grande. It was an old plantation house that had been converted into a combined resort and training facility, with colorful flower beds and neatly tended grounds sloping to the sea. The rooms were spacious, the tennis courts lighted for night play. Plush, to be sure, but there was also menace. The watchtowers and barbed wire and armed cadres.

“Mix and match,” Tina said. “Half Che, half JFK. Two stars for originality.”

Then six relaxing days.

We devoted our mornings to the sun, swimming and snorkeling, idling. Tina built elegant sand castles; Ollie demolished them; Sarah snoozed behind sunglasses; Ned Rafferty taught me the elements of killer tennis, yelling encouragement as he fired cannon shots from point-blank range. A languorous time. Rum punch at sunset, dinner by lantern light in the villa’s pink-tiled courtyard, linen tablecloths and Russian wine and Swiss crystal. The service was cordial and efficient. Why? I’d sometimes wonder. Then I’d think: Why not? A holiday, I’d tell myself, but late at night I’d hear machine guns, or voices counting cadence, and on those occasions I’d find myself engaged in serious speculation.

No answers, though, just questions.

“Play it by ear,” Sarah advised. “Mouth shut, eyes open. That’s all I can say right now.”

It was no use pressing. I was afraid of the answers, no doubt, and I was also a little afraid of Sarah herself. She seemed cool and distant. Small, subtle things that added up to large, obvious things. The way she moved; her silences; a tactical precision to her love-making.

The hardness factor, too.

A power disequilibrium. She had it, I didn’t.

“You know something?” she said one evening. We were in bed, windows open, and there was the nighttime rustle of wind and ocean. “I was born for this, William.”

“This?” I said.

“Right here, right now. The whole decade. Like destiny or something. I honestly believe it couldn’t happen without me.” She made a pensive sound, then ran her tongue along my hipbone. “The cheerleading and the funeral home—all that—when I look back, I think, God, it was all planned, it was like a ladder up against a high wall, and I couldn’t see the top, but I started climbing, I had this incredible drive, I didn’t know why, I just had it, so I kept climbing, and here I am. It was planned for me.”

“Destiny,” I said.

She shrugged. “Laugh. It doesn’t bother me.”

“I’m not laughing. Wondering.”

“All I know is what I feel,” she said. “It’s in the stars, somehow. The DNA. I can’t explain it any better. This goddamn war. I hate it, I do hate it, but it’s what I’m here for. I hate it but I love it.”

She swiveled out of bed and went to an open window. For several minutes she simply stood there, framed by the future, whatever it was.

Then she sighed, squatted down, and pulled a pillowcase over her head.

“A long time ago,” she said, “I told you something. I want to be wanted. By you, by Interpol. Those handsome dudes on the FBI—doesn’t matter, just wanted. Do you see? I need that.”

“Of course.”

“Here, too. They want me.” She made a broad gesture with her arm. “What I’m trying to say is, I mean, I’m not the strongest person in the world. I get overwhelmed by all this. You know, this Red connection, Cuba and all that. I don’t know where it’s headed. Guns or jail. I’m committed, though, and it’s necessary, but sometimes I get the creeps, I get scared. You understand? Part of me wants to run away. Like to Rio, or anywhere. Have babies and clip coupons. Be your wife, maybe—something normal—anything.”

I smiled at the pillowcase.

“Except?”

“Yes,” she said. “Except there’s still that ladder I told you about.”

“And me?”

“You.”

“No grand destiny, Sarah. A guy on the run.”

“Agreed.”

“So where do I fit?”

She waited a moment. Outside, there were crickets and night birds.

“Difficult question,” she said. “There’s always Sweden or Hudson Bay, right? Hide your head. Cover your eyes and wish the war away.”

“I didn’t say—”

“William, listen to me. I love you, you know that, but sometimes—lots of times—I can’t help wondering about your backbone. All that bullshit about a dangerous world. The bombs are real, la-di-dah, but you don’t ever do anything, just crawl under your Ping-Pong table. That jellyfish attitude, I despise it. Despise, that’s the only word. I love you, but the despising makes it hard.”

Sarah turned and made her way toward the bed. She was attractive, I thought, in her chrome bracelet and white pillowcase.

For a few moments we lay still.

“Involvement,” she said. “In a day or two, I’m afraid, it’ll get very rough around here, and if you can’t hack it—”

“A warning?”

“No, just a statement. Love and war. Sooner or later you have to choose sides.”

Six splendid days.

On the seventh we were roused a half hour before dawn.

A bell, a shrill whistle. “Up, up!” someone yelled, and then another voice, much louder: “Haul ass!”

We assembled in the courtyard.

A single rank, stiff at attention. All around us were khakied soldiers with heavy boots and bad tempers. “Freeze!” someone shouted, and we froze.

Dream time, I decided.

I concentrated on the sounds. Across the courtyard, in shadows, a door slammed shut. There was the squeal of a bullhorn.

We stood with our backs to a tile wall.

At noon we were still there.

Near midnight Tina said, “Wow,” then smiled and collapsed. But infirmity was not allowed. After a moment one of the soldiers hoisted her back to a standing position. No explanations, just blood in the feet. Speech was prohibited. Eighteen hours, I thought, then later I thought: twenty hours. Mostly, though, I tried to keep from thinking. Don’t think, I’d think. Then I’d think: this world of ours. But I refused to think about it. A matter of moral posture. Shoulders square, spine stiff. I calculated the precise specifications of pain, quantifying things, squaring off the roots, letting the numbers pile up as a kind of insulation.

And then the zeros came. Blank time, nothing at all. When I looked up, it was full daylight.

Two men stood staring. They were dressed identically in combat fatigues, jungle boots, and black berets. Their skin, too, was black, and their eyes.

“Oooo, lookie,” one said, and smiled.

The other did not smile.

They surveyed us for a time, then the first man—the smiler—stepped forward and said, “Hi, there, kiddies. Welcome to camp.”

His companion snorted.

The smiler kept smiling. It was an extraordinary smile, sharp-toothed and wolfish. He prowled back and forth, gracefully, stopping once to wipe sweat from Ollie’s forehead, once to inspect the fat at Tina’s stomach.

“These campers,” he said gently, “are in sore need of outdoor recreation.”

“Bullshit,” said the second man.

The first man chuckled.

“Pitiful, I concur.” He smiled and make a tsking noise. Stooping, he ran his hand along the surface of Tina’s stomach. Then suddenly he stopped smiling.

“My name,” he said, “is Ebenezer Keezer. This here gentleman is Nethro.” He paused to let these facts take shape. “So let’s everybody get acquainted. Real loud an’ happy. Say hi to my pal Nethro.”

“Hi,” we said.

“Loud, children.”

“Hi!” we shouted.

“Bullshit,” said Nethro. “Can’t hear nothin’.”

“Volume, people. Blow it out. On three—ready?”

On three we yelled, “Hi!”

Nethro shook his head. He was a large, unhappy man. “Fuckers forgot my name. They s’posed to say, Hi, there, Nethro.”

“Legitimate truth,” Ebenezer said. “Repeat them your name.”

“My name,” said Nethro, “is fuckin’ Nethro.”

“Again,” said Ebenezer.

He counted to three, and on three we shouted, “Hi, there, Nethro!”

Nethro seemed unimpressed.

“Nobody waved.”

“Beg your pardon?” said Ebenezer.

“Didn’t wave,” Nethro said. “Not one wave in the whole bullshit crowd. My ego’s hurt.”

Ebenezer Keezer sighed. Carefully, he took off his beret, inspected it for dust, put it on again, then stepped up to Ned Rafferty and stared at him with an expression of solemn perplexity. His nose was a half inch from Rafferty’s forehead.

“A level answer,” he said softly. “You forget to wave?”

“I guess.”

“Oh, you guess,” Ebenezer purred, smiling again. “First day at camp an’ you don’ display no fundamental politeness. Where’s your salutations, shithead?”

“Sorry,” Rafferty said, and grinned.

“Oooo! Man’s sorry, Nethro.”

“I overheard.”

“Man claims sorryhood.”

Nethro shrugged and scuffed the toe of his boot against the courtyard tiles. He seemed genuinely aggrieved.

“Sorry don’ do it,” he said. “Don’ help the hurt none.”

“Shitheads,” said Ebenezer Keezer. “What they require, I submit, is politeness practice.”

“Let’s practice ’em,” said Nethro.

There was distress in the courtyard. Reality, I surmised, was passé. Here was a new dimension. Over the morning hours we engaged in supervised waving practice. “Hi, there!” we yelled, and we waved with both hands, vigorously. The courtesy was painful. I could feel it in my throat and shoulders. Nethro counted cadence, Ebenezer Keezer smiled and offered instruction in matters of form and posture, schooling us in the complexities of camp etiquette. It was a kind of basic training, clearly, but with numerous innovations. Standing there, waving, I recognized the diverse and intricate plenitude of a world on tilt.

At noon Ebenezer Keezer clapped his hands and said, “Recreation time, people. Fun an’ games.”

Single file, we marched through the courtyard and down a long grassy slope to the tennis courts. There were no rackets or balls. The game was called Fictitious Tennis, and the rules, I thought, were capricious. “Advantage, Shithead!” Ebenezer cried—“Quiet, please!”—and then we pantomimed the mechanics of serve and volley, rushing the net, backpedaling in pursuit of high phantom lobs. “Out!” Nethro would yell. Or he’d yell, “Let! Two serves!” There were no disputed calls. For me, at least, it was hard to maintain a keen competitive edge.

The match went five sets. An awards ceremony, a quick lunch, then we convened on the volleyball court.

“No net,” said Ebenezer.

“No problem,” said Nethro.

In the late afternoon they led us on a nature hike. The pace was brisk, mostly running, and by dusk, when we trooped into the villa’s courtyard, things had approached the point of shutdown.

We ate supper standing up.

Afterward we were escorted into a small lecture hall. The room was bare except for a podium and five metal chairs.

Ebenezer Keezer smiled at us.

“This concludes,” he said, “our first day at camp. I trust we’re all relaxed.”

His beret was gone. He wore a dark blue suit, a blue tie, a crisply starched white shirt with gold cuff links. His voice, too, had changed. There were no dropped consonants, no ghetto slurrings; it was the precise, polished voice of a corporate executive. Smoothly, referring now and then to notes, he outlined the program that lay ahead. He stressed its rigors. The idea, he said, was to stop a war, which would require certain skills, and certain qualities of a physical nature, among them stamina and strength and the capacity to resist hardship. “Resistance,” he declared, “entails resistance.” Then he discussed the particulars of Vietnam. It was a firsthand account, largely anecdotal. He talked about the effects of white phosphorus on human flesh. He talked about anatomy. He described the consequences of a foot coming into contact with the firing mechanism of a Bouncing Betty, the reds and whites, the greenish-gray color of a man’s testicles in bright sunlight. He smiled at this, and winked. He leaned forward against the podium, adjusting his tie, and spoke quietly about a morning in 1966 when his platoon of marines had gone on a buffalo hunt in Quang Ngai province, how they’d entered the village at dawn, and burned it, and how, afterward, with the village burning, they had moved out into a broad paddy where the buffalo were—big slow water buffalo, he said, maybe a dozen, maybe twenty—and how the platoon had lined up in a single rank, as if on a firing range, and how without hunger or provocation the platoon had gone buffalo hunting—like the Wild West, he said, like Buffalo fucking Bill—how they put their weapons on automatic, M-6os and M-16s, how it was slaughter without aim, just firing to fire, pistols, too, and M-79s, and grenades, and how those slow stupid water buffalo stood there and took it broadside, didn’t run, didn’t panic, just took it, how chunks of fat and meat seemed to explode off their hides—how the horns exploded, and the tails and heads—but those ignorant damned buffalo, he said, they took it, they didn’t make sound, and how there was the smell of a burning village and munitions and those buffalo that wouldn’t run or die, just took it. Ebenezer paused and shuffled his papers. “That’s the Nam,” he said softly, “and it’s unbecoming. I’ve seen my share of buffalo. And you folks—you nice folks have not seen shit. Understand me? You have not seen shit.” There was conviction in the room. There was also, I thought, anger. Ebenezer Keezer folded his hands and smiled and went on to discuss evil. He was specific about atrocity and saturation bombing. The war, he told us, was a buffalo hunt, and we would be wise to disabuse ourselves of romantic notions regarding the propriety of peaceful protest and petitions of grievance. We were soldiers, he said. Volunteers one and all. It was an army. “Like in wartime,” he said, and his smile was cool and pleasant. “When there’s evil, you learn to absorb it. You build up your resistance. This here’s buffalo country.”

He studied his notes, then nodded at Tina.

“Young lady,” he said, “front and center.”

Tina moved to the podium.

Deftly, with the tip of his thumb, Ebenezer lifted her yellow T-shirt. “Yummy,” he whispered. Tina’s stomach was conspicuous under the white fluorescent lighting. Fish-colored, it seemed, bloated and pale and slightly bluish. She wore a white bra. Her breasts, too, were large, but Ebenezer ignored them.

He chuckled and dipped a finger into the belly fat.

“Now, then,” he said, “let us discuss obesity. You porkers gross me out.”

He grasped Tina’s stomach with both hands.

“Piggies!” he said.

Tina squirmed but he held tight.

“Fatsos! Grease!”

Still smiling, Ebenezer bent down and put his mouth to her stomach and licked the flesh.

“Pigs!” he yelled. “Pigs and pork chops—I want to eat it! Gobble it up, all those good juices. Can I eat your fat, girl?”

Tina whimpered.

“Say the word, I’ll definitely eat it. Yes, I will. I’ll swallow it.”

“No,” said Tina.

“One bite?”

“No.”

She tried to back away, but Ebenezer Keezer had her by the fat. Oddly, I found myself thinking about Mars bars, the relations between fantasy and gluttony. Eyes half shut, Ebenezer was nibbling at her belly.

“Oink!” he said. “Go oink, babe. Give me a piggy squeal.”

“Oink,” Tina said.

“Louder!”

“Oink!” she cried.

“Oooo, good! Oink it up!”

Tina oinked and wept.

Later, when it was over, Ebenezer’s tone became philosophical. He dwelled on the need for physical fitness. Soldiers, he told us, are neither pigs nor pork chops. Resistance required resilience.

“For the next sixty days,” he said, “you lardballs are my personal property. I say oink, you definitely oink. I say don’t oink, you definitely abstain from oinking. Same applies with Nethro. We own you. Questions?”

There were no questions.

“Wunderbar,” he said. “Sleep tight, kiddies. Tomorrow’s a weird day.”

That night, as in many nights, I indulged in fantasy. It was a means of escape, a way of gliding from here-and-now to there-and-then, an instrument by which I could measure the disjunction between what was and what might be. I imagined myself in repose beneath a plywood Ping-Pong table. I imagined my father’s arms around me. I imagined, also, a world in which men would not do to men the things men so often do to men. It was a world without armies, without cannibalism or treachery or greed, a world safe and undivided. Fantasy, nothing else. But I pressed up against Sarah, stealing warmth, imagining I was aboard a spaceship sailing through the thin, sterile atmosphere of Mars, and below were the red dunes, the unmoving molecular tides, and I smiled and stroked Sarah’s hip and whispered, “Bobbi.” There was guilt, of course, but I couldn’t stop myself. Stupid, I thought, all fluff and air, but then I remembered Martian Travel, and the grass, and the great calm as we flew high over the darkened seaboard of North America. I remembered that Leonardo smile—eyes here, lips there, the blond hair and soft voice. I imagined embarking on a long pursuit. Pick up the airborne scent and track her down and carry her away. A desert island, maybe, or the planet Mars, where there would be quiet and civility and poetry recitals late at night. Peace, that’s all, just a fantasy.

Over the first month it was all physical fitness. Reveille at dawn. Formation, inspection, waving practice. Then down to the beach for warm-up exercises. “Move it!” they’d yell. “Agility! Hostility! Make it hurt!” And it did hurt. Even Sarah felt it, even Rafferty. It was the kind of hurt that comes to visit and rearranges the spiritual furniture.

Unreal, I’d think, but I couldn’t ignore the pain.

There were jumping jacks, I remember. We ran and climbed ropes and took nature hikes at full speed. We learned to say “Yes, sir!” and “No, sir!” and little else. No use complaining, because the penalty was pain. There were push-ups and sit-ups and hot afternoons on the obstacle course. There was tear gas, too—I remember the sting. I remember Tina crying. All night, it seemed, she cried, and in the morning there was more pain.

“Maniacs,” I told Sarah. “Psychosis. Deep in the crazies.”

In the second week I came up hard against the barrier of self-pity. Here, I thought, was everything I’d run from. But you couldn’t run far enough or fast enough. You couldn’t dodge the global dragnet. The killing zone kept expanding. Reaction or revolution, no matter, it was a hazard to health either way.

Day to day, I did what I could. Arms and legs, just the bodily demands. The days seemed to skid by, and even now, looking back, I remember very little in the way of detail.

The fierce sun.

Mushiness in the extremities.

Ollie huffing, Tina straining under the forces of fat and gravity, Sarah’s lip swelling up in reaction to the tropical heat.

I remember intense thirst. Intense hunger, too. Yearnings for Coca-Cola and the air-conditioned wonders of a Holiday Inn. America, I’d think, but this was somewhere else. We were tutored in hand-to-hand combat. We ran mock relay races up and down the white beaches. Often, at night, we were awakened and made to stand at attention against the courtyard wall.

“A good waver,” Ebenezer Keezer told us, “is a rare cat in this day an’ age. Everywhere I go, I see half-ass waves that don’ truly emanate from the inner soul. A sorry commentary. Collapse of the social fabric, that’s what it is.”

“God’s word,” said Nethro. “Ebenezer and me, we just missionaries out to spread the wavin’ gospel.”

“Tell it.”

“I did. I tol’ it.”

A sunny afternoon, and Tina Roebuck sat in the sand and folded her arms.

She did not move.

Squatting down beside her, Ebenezer Keezer frowned and said, “Oh, my. Tuckered Tina. El mucho fatigo?”

She did not move and she did not speak.

Ebenezer lifted her shirt, very gently.

“I’m famished,” he murmured.

But even then she was silent. Arms folded, she gazed straight ahead, northward, where the sea curved toward the Straits of Florida.

Ebenezer pinched her stomach.

“Let me eat it,” he said softly. “Be a good girl now, let me eat that yummy tummy.”

But she did not move.

A drugged, dreamy expression. Her eyes were empty. It was the emptiness that follows upon surrender, and one by one it happened to all of us.

In mid-December, as we moved into our second full month, the curriculum turned increasingly technical. We learned the craft of crime: how to break and enter and spot surveillance and plant a bug and sweep a room and untap a telephone. The platitudes of felony, spoken straight, had the sound of wisdom. “Always travel first-class,” Nethro said, “ ’cause the law goes coach.” There were many such maxims, lessons passed on from Jesse James. The best disguise is a crowd. The best weapon is brain-power. “In God we trust,” said Nethro, “but don’ forget to frisk him.”

There was also a formal side to our training. Most evenings, after dinner, we would assemble in the lecture hall for a series of so-called political education seminars. Indoctrination, I suppose, but there was no haranguing; if anything, Ebenezer’s presentations had a low-key, almost professorial quality. In one instance he outlined and analyzed the ideological underpinnings of the American Revolution. He reviewed constitutional doctrine and explicated key passages from the Federalist papers and the Virginia Statute of Religious Liberty. He reminded us that our republic had been born in disobedience, even terrorism, and that the faces which decorate our currency had once appeared on English Wanted posters.

“The line between sainthood and infamy,” Ebenezer said quietly, “is the line between winning and losing. Winners become statues in public parks. Losers become dead.”

There was a pause.

“Dead,” he said.

Then another pause, longer, after which he smiled.

“Dead, children. Losers get embalmed. Our purpose here is to produce winners.”

Over the course of those evening seminars, it became clear that both Nethro and Ebenezer were true professionals. They never preached or proselytized; there was no evidence of ideology. Combat veterans, of course—nothing theoretical. They were mechanics. Turners of nuts and bolts.

“A guerrilla-type war,” Ebenezer told us. “Which means we take a page from our good brethren Uncle Charlie. No trenches, no battle lines.”

“Tell it,” said Nethro.

“Ghost soldiers. Invisible. Like in the Nam, we hit here, hit there, then beat sweet feet.”

“Oooo!” Nethro said.

“During the day we wear our civvies. We melt away, we nowhere to be found. And then at night—”

“Ooooo!”

“At night we do our business. Slick little operations. In an’ out, like surgery, then presto, we vanish, we gone. Nothin’ but boogiemen. Ghost soldiers.”

It was important stuff, I suppose, but I had a hard time digesting the implications.

Ghosts, I’d think.

Tombstones and cemeteries, all the consequences of ghost-hood.

I wanted out.

A motivation problem, I told Sarah. Not enough mobility or hostility. A shortage of spirit. Turned around, I said. I’d walked in blind, I hadn’t understood the terms.

Sarah stepped out of the shower.

She toweled off, dusted herself with powder, examined her breasts in a mirror, and stood on the bathroom scale. One hundred and twelve pounds, but each ounce carried authority.

“Well,” she said, “you’re crawling up on a conclusion.”

“Hard to say.”

“Say it.”

I wiped off a damp spot at the small of her back.

“Everything,” I said. “Start with treason. And this boot camp thing—those two zombies. Like a death squad. Can’t tell the good guys from the bad guys, they’re all gunslingers. Completely scrambled. But it’s lethal. I know that much, it’ll kill somebody.”

“Lethal?” Sarah said. She stood facing the mirror. Her skin was a glossy brown, freckled at the shoulder blades. I wanted to touch her but it seemed inappropriate. After a moment she turned. “Funny coincidence, William, but that’s exactly what the folks in Da Nang keep saying. When the artillery comes down. Kaboom. Lethal, they say.”

“Granted.”

“Lethal times. Take it or leave it.”

“Yes,” I said. “Leave it.”

“Walk?”

“Maybe.”

For a moment she looked at me without expression. Then she smiled. It was a neutral smile, not angry, just dense with indifference.

“Sissy-ass,” she said. “A sad case, man.” She aimed a hair dryer at me. “Anyhow, you wouldn’t last ten minutes out there on your own. What about cash? Connections? And this minor legal hassle with Uncle Sam—you guys had a date, remember?”

I nodded. “There are places I could go, maybe. Hibernate for a while. Wait for things to quiet down.”

Sarah dropped the hair dryer.

“Fucking hibernate! Animals hibernate, people act. That’s why we’re here—to stop the goddamn killing!” She slapped her hip. “No lie, you amaze me. William the victim. Fuck conscience, fuck everything. Vietnam, you think it was cooked up just to ruin your day. That’s how you think. All the big shots, all the world leaders, they got together at this huge summit conference, and LBJ jumps up and says, ‘Hey, there’s this sissy-ass creep I want to fuck over,’ and Ho Chi Minh says, ‘I got it! Start a war—we’ll nail the son of a bitch!’ A persecution complex. Almost funny, except it’s so contemptible.”

“My error,” I said.

“Terrific. That’s your only comment?”

“Not quite. I get the feeling we’re growing apart.”

We stood facing each other.

The shower curtain was bright red. There was some steam in the room.

Sarah turned away. “This conversation,” she said slowly, “has outlived its utility.”

If you’re sane, you see madness. If you see madness, you freak. If you freak, you’re mad.

What does one do?

I froze. Couldn’t sleep, couldn’t move my bowels. At night I’d roam the villa’s hallways, thinking this: If you’re sane, you’re not completely sane.

By daylight, too, the bombs were real. Nethro explained the physics. He showed us how to make big bangs out of small household appliances. How to bait a booby trap and adjust the tension on a pressure-release firing device. All around us, for three days, there was the smell of cordite and gasoline.

Down on the beach, taking turns, we pitched grenades at mock enemy bunkers. We learned how to set up a Claymore mine—the angles of aim, a geometry lesson. If you’re sane, I decided, you can calculate the effects of petrochemicals on bone and tissue. If you’re sane, but only then, you understand the profundity of firepower.

“Blammo!” Ollie yelled.

Nethro folded his big arms. “Shit, man,” he said softly. “You don’ know shit.”

But Ollie did know shit.

And Sarah, too, and Ned and Tina. They knew the whys and wherefores of deadly force.

So I froze.

It happened first on the weapons range, where I locked and loaded, taking aim, pressing my cheek to the rifle’s plastic stock. I closed my eyes and drew a breath and squeezed the trigger. Then I froze. Full automatic—twenty rounds.

The rifle seemed to pick me up and shake me.

I heard myself squeal. I heard Sarah say, “Christ.” Behind me there was laughter.

I tried to release the rifle—drop it, throw it—but I couldn’t, because then the freeze came, and the panic, and I turned and watched the bright red tracers kick up sand all around me.

The black rifle kept jerking in my hands, I was part of the weaponry.

Then silence.

A soft, watery sound. The blue Caribbean, wind and waves, Sarah looking down and saying, “Christ.”

I was smiling. I dropped the rifle and squatted in the sand.

“Audie fuckin’ Murphy,” Ebenezer said.

Ollie giggled.

Ned Rafferty put his hand on my head, just holding it there, and there was still that silence.

Strange, but I didn’t feel shame. Emptiness and relief, but not shame. Later, when the jokes started, I thought: If you’re sane, you don’t feel shame. You feel helpless. You feel a stickiness at the seat of your pants. But not shame.

Rafferty helped me up.

“This development,” said Ebenezer Keezer, “gives scared shitless a whole new meaning.”

“Ain’ roses,” said Nethro.

“Let him be,” Ned Rafferty said.

“Yeah, but that smell.”

Rafferty held my arm and said, “Let him be.”

And again that same night.

A final exam, Ebenezer called it. He was grading on the pass-fail system.

At midnight we formed up in the courtyard. We smeared our faces with charcoal. We wore black sweat pants and black cotton jerseys. On our backs and belts, we carried C-4 explosives, wire cutters, Claymores, blasting caps, fuses, electric firing devices, rifles, and rucksacks.

“Tonight,” said Ebenezer Keezer, “we baptize the Christians. You people will get shot at. You will not commit messies in your shorties.”

He looked directly at me.

“Shitpots,” he said, smiling. “Regulation panty-poopers.”

Nethro briefed us on the details.

A simulated commando raid. The object, he said, was to make our way across a two-hundred-meter stretch of open beach. To move with haste and silence. To attack and destroy a twenty-foot wooden tower that had been erected that afternoon. Along the way, he told us, we would encounter certain obstacles. Barbed wire and booby-traps and tear gas. Then he grinned and snapped his fingers. “Oh yeah, an’ two machine guns. M-60s—live ammo.” Nethro opened his hands in a gesture of reassurance. “No sweat, we aim high. Four feet, more or less. Just don’ take no leaks standing up.”

Then we moved out.

We crossed the tennis courts and followed Nethro down to the dunes.

The darkness was something solid. There was fog, too, which carried the scent of brine and seaweed, and the night seemed to slide beneath itself. Ahead, I could see the green phosphorescent glow of a wristwatch. I reached out and put a hand on Rafferty’s rucksack and moved by touch. If you’re sane, I thought. Then I laughed and thought: Ghosts.

“Hush,” Rafferty said. “Cerebral slack, man, just spin it out.”

The starting line was a shallow trench in the sand. Quietly, we knelt down to wait. There were spooks in the dark but I imagined I was elsewhere. Mars, maybe. A deep cave. I breathed from the bottom of my lungs. Forty minutes, a full hour, then the fog lifted and I could see moonlight on barbed wire, the outline of a rickety tower two hundred meters up the beach. No panic, I thought. Just this once, I would perform with dignity. I would not wail or freeze or befoul myself.

There was movement in the dark.

“On your bellies!” Nethro called. “Stay flat, kiddies!”

At the far end of the beach there was a sharp splatting noise. A green flare exploded high over the tower.

Rafferty tapped my arm.

“Stick close,” he said. “I’ll run the interference.”

Behind us, Nethro fired up a flare and yelled, “Hit it!” and we were moving. Sarah went first, then Ollie and Tina and Rafferty. Nethro kicked me and said, “Anytime, darlin’.”

The first twenty meters were easy. Up and over, out of the trench, snaking motions, part wiggle, part crawl, rifle cradled across the elbows. I was a commando now. Anything was possible. Push-glide, no thinking. Off to my right I could make out the peaceful wash of waves where the sea touched land. Dignity, I thought, then I said it aloud, “Dignity.”

When we hit the first wire, Rafferty used his cutters and motioned for me to slip through.

We bellied forward.

“Easy,” Rafferty said, but it wasn’t easy. There was confusion, and my rucksack caught, and I felt a cool slicing sensation on my forehead. Concertina wire—looped and tangled—and when I twisted sideways I was cut again at the neck and cheek.

A white flare rocketed up over the beach.

There was a soft whooshing sound and then the guns opened up. Red tracer rounds made edges in the night. “Move,” Rafferty said, “just move.” But the wire had me. High up, almost directly above us, another flare puffed open, and the two machine guns kept up a steady fire. A game, I reminded myself, but then I flopped over and watched the red tracers unwind through the dark. That much was real. The guns were real, and the flares and muzzle flashes. No terror, just the absence of motor control. I felt Rafferty’s big arms around me, and then came a clicking sound, and we rolled through the wire.

I pressed my face into the sand. I found myself posing foolish questions. Why were my eyelids twitching? Foolish, but why?

Later, when I looked up, Rafferty was gone.

I lay flat and hugged my rifle. It was all I could do, hug and twitch. Gunfire swept the beach. This, I deduced, was how it was and had to be. If you’re sane, if you’re in command of the present tense, you dispense with scruples. You recognize the squirrel in your genes. You sprawl there and twitch and commit biology.

The night whined with high velocities.

Lazily, I got to my hands and knees. It occurred to me that the danger here was mortal. A tracer round ricocheted somewhere behind me—blue sparks, a burning smell—then a succession of flares lit up the sky, yellow and red and gold, and for a moment I seemed to slide back to the year 1958, a balmy night in May when I jerked up in bed and waited for the world to rebalance itself. I was a child. A Soviet SS-4 whizzed over my head. Far off, the earth’s crust buckled and there was the sizzle of a lighted fuse. The sky was full of pigeons. Millions of them, every pigeon on earth. I watched the moon float away. There was horror, of course, but it was seductive horror, even beautiful, pastels bleeding into primaries, the radioactive ions twinkling blue and purple, the pink and silver flashes, charm mixing with childhood.

If you’re sane, I thought, you come to respect only those scruples which wire to the nervous system.

I surprised myself by crawling forward.

It was a crabbing kind of movement, without dignity. I heard myself saying, “Sorry,” then saying, “Stop it!” Squirrel chatter. I was thinking squirrel thoughts: There is nothing worth dying for. Nothing. Not dignity, not politics. Nothing. There is nothing worth dying for.

I reached a miniature dune and stretched flat. The guns kept firing, raking the beach, swiveling left to right and back again.

Nothing, I thought.

A tracer round corkscrewed over my head. I was twitching, but the twitches were strictly amoral. I was lucid. I understood the physics: If there is nothing, there is nothing worth dying for.

I blinked and looked up and swallowed sand. There were no ethical patterns. Ahead was another tangle of barbed wire, and beyond the wire was more wire, then flat beach, then the two droning machine guns. There was fog, too, and tear gas, and familiar voices. In the distance, Ebenezer Keezer was shouting through a bullhorn, “Life after Lenin! Revolution, people! Ollie-Ollie in free!”

Then amplified laughter.

Briefly, near the tower, a human form rose and took shape against a yellow flare. Sarah, I thought, and I scrambled forward. Gunfire snapped close by. “Please,” I said, and lunged into the wire. The pain surprised me. I was bleeding from the nose and lips. The tear gas was heavy now, and the tremors took hold, but I clawed through the wire and rolled along the beach and whimpered and thought: Nothing. The thought was perfectly symmetrical, because if there is nothing, there is nothing worth dying for.

I sobbed and listened to Ebenezer Keezer’s bullhorn laughter. He was engaged in philosophy.

“Terrorism,” he shouted, “is a state of mind! A state of mind is a state of bliss! Extremism in the pursuit of bliss is no bummer!”

There was a harsh electronic squeal. A lavender flare exploded without sound. The guns were on automatic and the night shimmied in bright greens and reds.

Odd, but I also heard music.

Out on the margins, Buffalo Springfield was singing… a man with a gun over there… tellin’ me I got to beware.

The bullhorn buzzed and Ebenezer cried, “States of mind! States of bliss! Down with the states!”

With effort, I detached myself.

It all seemed fanciful, the mix of guns and rhetoric, the Beatles now insisting on revolution. Belly-down, I crawled toward the sea.

“Ain’ no mountain high,” Ebenezer sang.

I bled from the lips and nostrils. Numerous clichés came to mind. Missing in action, I thought. Lost in space. My gyro had gone, I couldn’t locate the scheme of things, but I kept moving until chance brought me to the fringe of the sea.

It was the maximum reach. This far, no farther.

I composed myself in a respectable posture, faceup, heels seaward, hands folded at my belly, and I lay back and watched the lights.

“Day-O, Day-O,” Ebenezer sang, “dee daylight come an’ I want to go home.”

A dud flare fizzled overhead.

Tracers skipped across the Caribbean, toward Miami, and the sound track had become sentimental. Mellow music, smooth and wistful… Those were the days, my friend, we thought they’d never end.

“In time of terror,” Ebenezer declared, “there is no objection by means of conscience. There is no alternative service.”

I didn’t budge.

I watched the sky do sleight of hand. Awesome, I decided, miracles of form and color. Dangling from its parachute, a nearby flare sailed upward against gravity. The twin machine guns kept firing their steady fire, and Mary Hopkin sang persuasively in the dark, achingly, we’d fight and never lose, those were the days, oh yes …

The bullhorn crackled.

“Hide an’ go seek,” Ebenezer cried. “You’re it, shitpot. Peekaboo! I see you!”

His inflection carried mockery, but it wasn’t enough to make me move. I had strong convictions. There was nothing worth dying for. Not for this, not for that. If you’re sane, you resign yourself to the tacky pleasures of not dying when there is nothing worth dying for.

I knew my limits. I also knew my heart.

Up the beach there were battle cries. I heard Sarah shouting out commands. She had the knack, I didn’t.

“Too bad,” I said, but I didn’t move.

Again there was that time-space slippage. I was back under my Ping-Pong table, under layers of charcoal and soft-lead pencils, and all around me, inside me, there were those powdery neural flashes lashing out like heat lightning. I watched it happen. The equator shifted. New species evolved and perished in split seconds. Every egg on the planet hatched. And then my father was there, holding me, saying, “Easy now, take it slow, tiger.” He rocked me and said, “It’s okay, it’s okay.” I could smell the heat of his armpits. “It’s okay,” he said, “just a dream,” but it wasn’t a dream, and even then, even now, there was still the glowing afterimage, the indelible imprint of things to come.

I am not crazy, I told myself. I am sane.

Gunfire swept the beach. The music now was martial, piccolos and snare drums. Ebenezer Keezer was doing impressions.

He did Groucho and Martin Luther King.

“Shane!” he cried. “Shane! Shane!”

It was coming up on a finale. A dozen quick flares made the sky tumble, and the machine guns kept firing and firing.

I pressed low into the sand.

“The darkest hour,” Ebenezer intoned solemnly, “is just about now. But bear in mind, people, you’ll find a jive light show at the end of the tunnel.”

He did Woody Woodpecker and LBJ and Porky Pig.

“This is your life,” he said. “Terror tends to terrorize, absolute terror terrorizes absolutely. Th-th-that’s all, folks!”

A dull explosion turned me over.

When I looked up, the wooden tower seemed to be reconstituting itself. A second explosion blew away the tower’s foundation. The structure stood legless for an instant, then toppled sideways and burned. “Fire in the hole!” Ollie Winkler shouted. Fine, clean work, I thought. And in the future, no doubt, there would be other such operations, the Washington Monument or the Statue of Liberty.

Immediately the gunfire eased off. A final flare colored the circumstances in shades of violet.

“Terrorism,” Ebenezer Keezer declared, “is the subtraction of the parts. Back to zero.”

Then I began digging.

I scooped out a shallow hole at the edge of the sea and slipped in and carefully packed wet sand against my legs and hips and chest. I apologized to my father. I jabbered away about the flashes and pigeons and sizzling sounds, and my father said, “Sure, sure,” and he was there beside me, with me, watching me dig. I told him the truth. “There’s nothing to die for,” I said, and my father thought about it for a time, then nodded and said, “No, nothing.” His eyes were bright blue. He smiled and tucked me in.

“Am I crazy?” I asked.

“That’s a hard one.”

“Am I?”

There was a pause, a moment of incompletion, but he finished it by saying, “I love you, cowboy,” then he bent down and kissed my lips.

Pass or fail, so I missed graduation. I spent nine days cooped up in a hospital on the outskirts of Havana. The diagnosis had to do with acute anxiety, a stress reaction, and I was too canny to argue. I lay low. There were nurses, I remember, and they were sticking me with sedatives. But I was fine. I recited Martian Travel in my head. I carried on dialogues with Castro and Nixon, offering sage advice and psychological support. I urged caution above all else. If there is nothing, I told them, then there is nothing to kill for, not flags or country, not honor, not principle, for in the absence of something there is only nothing.

I had a firm grip on myself. On occasion I felt a sudden lurching in my stomach, as if a trapdoor had opened, and at night I dreamed barbiturate dreams—gunfire and flares. But I played it cagey. I didn’t cry or carry on; I gave up speech; I smiled at the nurses and watched the needles without fear or protest. If you’re sane, there’s no problem.

I thought about escape.

I contemplated suicide.

No sweat, though, because I was on top of things.

I was released in mid-January 1969. A week later we were back in Key West.

Things were the same now, but different.

“Believe me,” Sarah said, “I’m not making judgments.”

“Of course not.”

“You understand?”

“Yes,” I said, “pass or fail.”

It was early morning, and we were having coffee at the kitchen table. The house had a stale, musty smell.

“No rough stuff,” she said. “Strictly behind the lines. A courier maybe.”

“Fine.”

“Different thresholds, different boiling points. It’s not a criticism.”

“Sure, I know.”

“William—” Her eyes skittered from object to object. She finished her coffee, stood up, and smiled. “So then, a passenger pigeon? Lots of exotic travel. Maybe Rio. Glamour and beaches, all those tight brown bodies. You can scout it out. Make reservations for after the war.”

“Fine.”

“Rio,” she said, “it’s a date.”

I nodded and said, “Fine.”

Which is how we left it.

Bad luck, I never made Rio. But for the next two years, while Sarah and the others pressed the issue, I found some peace of mind in my capacity as a network delivery boy. I was out of it. On March 6, 1969, when the Committee pulled its first major operation—a night raid on a Selective Service office in downtown Miami—I was buckled in at thirty-two thousand feet over the Rockies, heading for a pickup in Seattle. By all accounts they acquitted themselves well. Four days later, when I checked into my hotel in San Francisco, there was a message from Sarah: “I’m famous. Newsweek, page 12. I’m wanted.”

10 Quantum Jumps

“IF I WANTED TO,” Melinda says, “I could bust out of here.”

“How?”

“Simple Simon.”

“Go on, then, tell me. It’s a dare.”

She laughs. “Don’t be so condescending. I mean, God, if I told you, then it wouldn’t work.”

“True.”

“I’m not a dunce,” she says.

Another laugh, then I hear a clatter behind the bedroom door. Midmorning cleanup—dishes being stacked, the transfer of waste products. It’s all part of our new domestic order.

Stooping down, humming Billy Boy, I open up the service hatch at the foot of the door.

“Ready in there?”

“Just hold your horses,” Melinda says, “it’s not like we’re going anywhere.”

I smile at this. A fair statement: No one’s going anywhere. It’s a lockup. For two weeks now, nearly three, we’ve been living under conditions of siege at these bedroom barricades—an investment, so to speak, in the future—and the service hatch, though small, has functioned quite nicely as a means of communication and supply, a lifeline of sorts. I’m proud of it. It’s a brilliant piece of engineering: a rectangular hole in the door, nine by twelve inches, wide enough to permit the essential exchanges, narrow enough to deflect foolish thoughts of flight. As an extra safeguard, the hatch is fitted with its own miniature door and lock—a door within a door.

Melinda’s face appears at the opening. She slides out a tray piled with dirty breakfast dishes. The chamber pot comes next.

“Yunky to the max,” she says.

“Yunky?”

“It means stink.” She gets to her hands and knees and stares out at me. “Anyway, I could do it, you know. If I wanted to, I could escape easy.”

“Oh, sure, absolutely.”

“You don’t think so?”

Her face is framed by the opening. Behind her, near the bed, I can see Bobbi’s bare foot tapping out the meter to a poem in progress.

Melinda’s eyes shine.

“Okay, here’s a question, smartie,” she says. “What if I got sick or something? You’d have to let me out. If I caught some disease like—you know—like that time I had my stupid tonsils out. Then what?”

Bobbi’s foot stops tapping. This intrigues her, I can tell.

“Well,” I say.

“So then what? What if I said, ‘Daddy, I’m dying’?”

I smile at Bobbi’s curled toes.

“I guess you’d be fibbing, princess.”

“Well, sure,” she says, “but how would you know? I could cry and scream and stuff, just like this—” She makes a twisted face and shouts, “Agony! Polio!”

Bobbi’s toes stiffen.

“Agghh!” Melinda yells. “Can’t breathe! God, I’m choking!”

“Knock it off.”

“Help!”

Her face goes red. She jerks sideways and rolls out of my field of vision. Ridiculous, but I feel some discomfort. “Agghh!” she cries. And then it’s instinct—I reach through the hatch and grope for contact.

“God,” Melinda says, “talk about gullible.” She reappears at the hatch. “You get the idea now? I could do it, couldn’t I?”

“Maybe so.”

“Not maybe. I scared you.”

She wiggles her nose and says, “Agghh!” and then laughs. What are the limits? I wonder. What can be done? Such love. That cool, unblemished skin of hers, it makes me question my own paternity.

“So you see how it works,” Melinda says. “Get sick, that’s one plan, but I’ve got about six zillion better ones. I mean, boy, if I had to, I could—” She pauses, rubbing her eyes. There’s a tentative quality in her voice when she says, “Daddy, what if I did get sick? I mean, really sick? It’s not impossible.”

“Nothing is.”

“But what if?”

“Too iffy,” I tell her.

“You’re afraid to answer, aren’t you?”

“Melinda, I can’t—”

“You’re afraid.”

I shrug and try to finesse it, but she knows where I’m vulnerable.

“Tell the truth,” she says. “You’d at least take me to the hospital, wouldn’t you? You wouldn’t just sit there and let me die?”

“Never, baby.”

“Never what?”

“Can’t happen that way.”

“What can’t?”

“You know,” I say softly, “it can’t happen.”

“You’re afraid.”

“Not that.”

“Afraid,” she says.

For a few moments we just gaze at each other. Her eyes are like one-way mirrors; she sees out, I can’t see in. If it were possible, I would end it here. I would break down the door and take the consequences.

Melinda knows this, and keeps pressing.

“If something happened to me,” she says, “something real bad, it’d be like murder almost. Kidnapping your own family, keeping us prisoner, it’s like… What if there’s a fire? We couldn’t even get out, we’d burn up in here, and it’d be just like murder.”

“Sweetheart, don’t talk that way.”

“Why not?”

“Just because.”

She wags her head sadly. “Because you’re afraid. Because stuff can happen, like fires and stuff, or else you might blow me to smithereens with dynamite.”

“Melinda, don’t—”

“Murder,” she says.

It’s no use.

What all this represents, ultimately, is an erosion of the traditional family structure. Cohesion and trust, we’ve somehow lost it. A little faith, for God’s sake—why can’t they see the obvious?

Quietly, I close the hatch and secure the lock.

“Loony!” Melinda shouts, but I walk away.

I do the dishes, make coffee, empty the chamber pot, set out a pound of hamburger to thaw for dinner. Murder, though. It eats at me. I think about Sarah and Tina and Ned and Ollie, all that wasted blood, and the thought makes me squeamish. I’m no killer, I never was, I never had that terrorist nerve.

Besides, what about love?

Good intentions?

I’m saving their lives. An act of mercy. The year, after all, is 1995, and we’re coming up on the millennium.

I return the chamber pot and change clothes and then trudge out to the hole. For a time I just stand at the edge. I’ve been at it nearly three months now, April to July, and the results are gratifying. Nineteen feet deep, twelve feet square. No need to justify. The hole speaks for itself. Dig, it says. At times I’m actually cowed by its majesty. It has a kind of stature—those steep walls plunging to shadow, the purity of line and purpose, its intangible holeness. There it is, you can’t dismiss it. It’s real.

Be safe, it says.

It says, Survive.

I’m not losing my marbles. Just a hole, of course, and when it speaks I rarely listen.

I know better.

Down the ladder, grab my spade, go to work. A hot day, but the earth smells cool and moist. I’m at home here. This is where it ends. Hey, man, the hole whispers. Here’s a riddle: What is here but not here, there but not there? Then a pause. “You,” I say, and the hole chuckles: Oh, yeah! I am the absence of presence. I am the presence of absence. I am peace everlasting.

There’s a giggling sound, high and crazy, but I don’t give it credence.

Discipline, I think. Mind and body. I work steadily, pacing myself. The key to progress, I now realize, is gradual accretion, routine and rhythm; that’s how monuments get built. Today it’s mostly a repair job. There was a light drizzle during the night, barely enough to dampen the grass, but it produced a thick coat of slime at the floor of the hole, slick and treacherous, and smelly, too, as if a toilet had backed up, and for the first hour I concentrate on tidiness. I’m alert to the possibility of a cave-in. Carefully, I check the four granite walls for signs of stress, those hairline fractures that can cause conclusion. You never know. Two weeks ago I was fortunate to be topside when a quarter-ton boulder sheared off along the north wall. It taught me a lesson: You can die saving yourself. Even safety entails risk. Which was the upshot of a poem Bobbi slipped through the service hatch a few days later. Backflash, she called it, and even now several lines still stick with me—

There’s more—it was one of her longish efforts—but I’m spared by a faulty memory. To my own ear, at least, there’s something rather glib about the way those metrics goose-step off the tongue. Bad poetics compounded by bad logic.

How does one respond?

With tenacity and daring. Spit on the hands and bend down and put muscle to it.

Dig. Nuclear war.

If you’re sane, you don’t fuck with the obvious. You know what MAD means. It means there is nothing to live for. Which means bedlam. So who’s crazy? True or false: The world can end. Multiple choice: Fire or ice or nuclear war. The realities are with us, Pershing and Trident and the kitchen sink, it’s all throw-weight, it’s buried nose-up under the flatlands of Kansas and North Dakota. A radical age requires radical remedies. The world, for Christ sake—biology!—so don’t call me crazy. I’m digging. You’re diddling. You, I mean. The heavy sleepers. The mealymouthed pols and hard-ass strategists who talk so reasonably about containment and deterrence. Idiots! Because when there’s nothing, there’s nothing to deter, it’s uncontained.

Sane, I think. I’ve got it together.

The hole snickers and says, Sure, man, you’re straight as an arrow.

I nod.

At noon I rig up a charge of dynamite, crouch behind the tool shed, hit the button, wait for the dust to settle, then begin the hard chore of piling the debris into pulley baskets and hauling it to the surface. When in doubt, dig. Abnormal, yes, but what’s the alternative? Plan a dinner party? Chalk it up to the existential condition? If that’s normal, I’m proud to call myself deviant.

Reality, it tends to explode.

I’ve got eyes. I can see.

I’ve got ears. I can hear.

And because I’m sane, because I can imagine an unpeopled planet, because life is so precious, because I’ve seen the flashes, I am willing to recognize the facts for what they are, pared to the bone, unrhymed and unmusical. Is it uncouth to speak plainly? Nuclear war—am I out of key with my times? An object of pity? Am I comic? Here, now, digging, my wife and daughter locked away, the hole egging me on, am I crazy to extrapolate doom from the evidence all around me, Minuteman and Backfire, a world stockpiled with 60,000 warheads? Are the numbers too bald, too clumsy? Am I indiscreet to say it? Nuclear war.

If you’re sane, you’re scared; if you’re scared, you dig; if you dig, you deviate.

If I could—

You can’t, the hole says. If you could, but you can’t. Keep the faith—you’re my main man.

“Right,” I mumble.

Speak up!

“Right,” I say.

The hole laughs.

Oh, yeah, you’ll show ’em, brother. When the shit comes down, they’ll sing a real different tune. Amazing grace! Sweet melodies! Your wife’s a grasshopper, man—you and me, we’re the ants. Fee fi fo fum—I smell uranium! Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of blood! High diddle diddle, the fire and the fiddle, the cow jumped over the doom! Rome’s burning! Ding dong bell! Pussy’s gone to hell! Can you dig it, man? Can you truly dig it?

There’s a quaking sound. The granite walls seem to shrug.

Dig, dug, dead! Bobbi’s in her bed! Hickory dickory doom!

I’m perfectly calm. I ignore the chortling.

At two o’clock I knock off for the day. A cold shower, fresh clothes, then I sit down to prepare a shopping list. When it’s finished, I rap on the bedroom door.

“Get lost,” Melinda says.

“I am.”

“What?”

“Nothing.” I bend down and open up the service hatch. Melinda’s hair is in curlers. She lies on the floor, belly-down, peering out at me with the smartest eyes on earth.

“Well,” she says, “I guess you’re here to kill me.”

I treat it as a joke.

I smile and tell her I’m heading into town—is there anything she needs?

“Poison,” she says.

“Anything else?”

She thinks for a moment. “Yeah,” she says, “I could use a new father.”

“Sure, princess. I’ll see what I can do.”

“A good one this time. Get me one that’s not so goddamn screwy.”

The swearing disturbs me but she’s out of spanking range. I tighten my smile and tell her to check with her mother.

“Final call,” I say. “You want it, you name it.”

Melinda slides away. Through the open hatch I can hear the soft tones of Bobbi’s voice; it’s a blond voice; the voice of art, or the inexplicable mysteries of art; the voice of a flight attendant, calm and calming in the high turbulence. The words, of course, don’t register. The meanings don’t mean. Like the grass she once gave me, like her poetry, Bobbi’s voice is pure timbre. She doesn’t make sense.

Still, I can’t help listening. In a way, she’s right, the meanings don’t matter, it’s the voice that counts.

But why would she leave me?

Why a separation?

“Hey, you,” Melinda says, “wake up.”

She passes a slip of notepaper through the hatch, a requisition in my wife’s neat, left-leaning script: mouthwash, asparagus, Raisin Bran, olives, gin, vermouth, spaceship, husband.

It tickles me.

“Yes,” I say gently, “I love you, too.”

Outside, as I hook up the Chevy’s battery, I’m feeling pinched and out of touch. A little dizzy. Anything can happen. Eventually, given time, anything will happen.

No guts, no glory.

I fasten my seat belt and honk twice and point the car toward town. It’s a twenty-six-minute drive, all downhill, and I let my mind unwind with the road, curling west along the spine of the Sweetheart Mountains, through rock-collecting country, the canyons and shaggy stands of birch and pine, then south to the foothills which open into meadow and dusty ranchlands, then straight west to Fort Derry. Off to the left, beyond the new K Mart, I can see the grandstand and floodlights at the fairgrounds where my father used to die—once too often; he no longer dies. At the east edge of town I cross the railroad tracks and turn down Main Street. Here, nothing much has changed. My father’s real estate office is under new management, but otherwise the year could be 1958. Slowly, just tapping the accelerator, I cruise down a corridor of hitching posts and weathered storefronts, past the courthouse and the Strouch Funeral Home and Doc Crenshaw’s little clinic at the corner of Main and Cottonwood. The old fart won’t let loose. Over ninety now, and he’s out of the doctoring business, but he hangs in there like the town itself, cantankerous and stubborn. He doesn’t know his days are numbered. No one knows.

Grasshoppers! the hole hisses. The wolf is at the door! These jerks don’t know the score!

I pull into the parking lot behind Gordy’s Piggly Wiggly. I’m exhausted. A strange spinning. For several minutes I lean forward against the steering wheel.

“Christ,” I groan, but the hole tells me to snap out of it.

Sin and din! Lemme in! Not by the hair of my chinny-chin-chin! Time to pay the piggy!

Odd thing, but I’m dealing with disorder as I do the grocery shopping. Some sorrow, too.

I can’t find the fucking Raisin Bran.

Entropy and dissolution, it’s all around us.

I want to loot this place. But I don’t. I smile at the stock boys and fill my cart with imperishables. Powdered milk for Melinda’s teeth. Frozen carbohydrates and vacuum-sealed proteins. Asparagus, olives, mouthwash. I know what I’m doing. I’m a sly fox. And the hole says, You betcha, you’re no dummy. Just look at these assholes—smug motherfuckers! Don’t know doom from canned goods. Nitwits! They think it’s a joke. Can’t happen, they think. Won’t happen. Ding dong doom!

It requires some effort, but I locate the Raisin Bran.

Who’s crazy?

Who’s lost whose perspective?

Not you, the hole says. You’re a sharpie. This little piggy went to market. Those little piggies perished.

In the checkout line I’m all business, cool and sober.

Higgily wiggily bang!

I don’t pay attention. The mental operations are strictly rote. Later, after I’ve stashed the groceries in the car, I check my lists and then cross the street to the Coast to Coast store.

I go down the agenda item by item.

One electric drill. One crowbar. Two sleeping bags. Two hammocks. Rope. Nuts and bolts. In a moment of inspiration I do some impulse buying—four strings of outdoor Christmas lights from last winter’s stock.

Up front, at the cash register, a young clerk gives me a wise-ass smirk. He looks at his calendar and says, “Smart decision, sir. Only six more shopping months.”

“Time flies,” I tell him.

The kid grins. “Plan ahead—I’ll bet that’s your motto, right?”

The question contains a subtle commentary, but I show him my brightest smile. Plan ahead, I think. If the poor cocksucker only knew.

“Merry Christmas,” I say.

The next part is difficult.

I hate to contemplate what might go wrong. Love, it’s my only defense. Purity of mind and motive. Outside the drugstore I stop to give it some final thought, then I shrug and walk in and present my prescription. My voice sounds reedy. It’s like listening to myself on a tape recorder, that same distance and surprise, unexpected squeakiness in the higher registers, but I keep up a running banter while the pharmacist does his duty. Not a decent night’s sleep in weeks, I tell him. The man makes sympathetic noises and sends me away with a month’s supply of Seconal.

Not murder, I tell myself.

I won’t hurt anyone. A legitimate means to a noble end. Time capsules.

The idea, simply, is to live forever.

Next the liquor store—vermouth and gin—then down to the A&W for a quart of root beer.

The ride home is smooth. I lean back and floor it. If there were any other way—Hush, the hole says, just go with the rhymes. High diddle diddle.

“They’ll thank me,” I whisper. “When the time comes, they’ll wake up and thank me.”

Yeah, tiger, when they wake up. You bet your life.

It’s a gorgeous afternoon, windless and warm, cattle grazing under a yellow sun, not a cloud, wheat and wildflowers growing in patches along the road. Here is the world-as-it-should-be. A constant universe. Harmony among all things, unchanging, without dynamic, just the unaging ages.

From now on it’s all black holes.

Twenty miles later, when I pull up the driveway, I’m feeling clearheaded. I remove the Chevy’s battery, hide it behind the tool shed, then lug my purchases into the kitchen. The house seems undisturbed. For a few seconds I stand there, watching bits of dust play in the late-afternoon window light. It’s a house at peace—the drowsy hum of deep July. I put the groceries away and move to the bedroom door.

“Hey, Flub-a-dub,” Melinda says, “is that you?”

“Safe and sound, baby.”

“Too bad. Thought you might get arrested.” Laughter rattles up against the summer quiet. Melinda’s tone is aggressive when she says, “So did you buy me anything?”

“Lots,” I tell her.

“Like what?”

“Raisin Bran. Asparagus. All kinds of stuff.”

“Wonderful.”

“And root beer.”

“Root beer,” she mutters, but I can tell she’s tempted. There’s a pause. “All right, then, I’ll try some, but you can’t bribe me. Pretty soon I’ll have to do something drastic.” Another pause, then a squeal. “Agghh! Can’t breathe—I’m a goner!”

“Good show, kiddo. Very impressive.”

She snorts and says, “Okay, I’m thirsty now.”

In the kitchen I become a chemist. A martini for Bobbi—a double, no holding back—a tall root beer for Melinda. I break open six sleeping pills, sprinkle in the white powder, stir gently, taste for bitterness, wipe my forehead, top off the glasses, and carry them on a tray to the bedroom door.

Radical times, radical remedies.

There is only the slightest hesitation before I open the hatch. “For you,” I say.

And then, for perhaps an hour, I lie flat on the hallway floor. I smoke a cigarette. I pay heed to the passing shadows.

A fleet of bombers circling over Omaha.

A burning safe house.

A planet lighted by glowworms and fireflies.

As if through Chuck Adamson’s toy telescope, faraway yet close, I see my father’s scalp floating in a punch bowl, my mother weeping at graveside, all the dead and dying, Tina and Ollie and Nethro and Ned, and there is no one left to grieve.

Outside, but also inside, the hole rumbles—

I am Armageddon.

I am what there is when there is no more. I am nothing, therefore all. I am the before and after. I am the star which has fallen from the heavens. I am sackcloth, the empty promise, the undreamt dream, the destroyer of worlds.

“Safe?” I ask, and the hole chortles and says, You bet your booties! That, too—I am safe.

When dusk comes, I make my way to the backyard. The stars are out; the night is receptive. At the horizon, a crescent moon climbs over the mountains and the laws of nature insist: Now.

I strive for objectivity. Lucid, yes, and tingling-alert, but vertigo intrudes as I descend into the hole and begin rigging up the two hammocks. Familiar presences appear—Sarah’s silhouette flowing along the south wall, my mother and father holding hands in the dark. Rattling sounds, too, and a voice I can’t quite place until I realize it’s my own. “No sweat,” I’m saying. Then Sarah calls out to me—“Please!” she screams. But I concentrate on the operations at hand. Bolts into rock—ropes—attach the hammocks—lay out the sleeping bags. A deep breath. Step back. Survey the arrangements. A pity, I think, that the shelter will go unfinished, without roof or creature comforts, but for now I’ve done all I can.

“William!” Sarah shouts.

It’s unreal, though, like everything.

I climb the ladder and stand for a moment at the rim.

If I could, I tell myself, I would find another way. If I were a believer, if the dynamic were otherwise, if we could erase the k factor, if Fermi had failed physics, if at the nucleus of all things we might discover an inviolate, unbreakable heart.

The hole groans at this.

Poetry! Hop to it, man! Time is short, can’t abort! Holy night! Dynamite! What a sight!

Reluctantly, I go back to work. I string up the new Christmas lights in the trees and shrubs, along the roof of the tool shed, and when I push the switch, the backyard swirls in brilliant greens and reds and blues. I’m in awe. The night seems touched by something supernatural.

And now, the hole whispers. The family hour.

I return to the house with my crowbar and drill.

The bedroom door can’t stop me. Board by board, I tear down the two-by-fours. I plug in the drill and blow away the lock in a single shot.

I’m in tears when I lift Melinda from her bed.

“Daddy,” she slurs.

Her eyes come partly open, a lazy blink. She has no weight. Warm and flannel-smelling, she curls against me and says, “What’s happening?”

“There, now,” I say.

“Where’s Mommy?”

“Right here, baby. We’re all together.”

Melinda’s eyelids flutter. “Daddy?” she asks, but she’s sleeping.

I press my cheek to hers. I feel powerful. My daughter, I think, and I cradle her in my arms and carry her down the hallway and through the kitchen and out to the hole. I’m strong. I’m capable of anything. A one-arm hold, then down the ladder—it’s easy—and I zip her into a sleeping bag and kiss her and place my fingers at her throat and smile at the steady pulse, then I take her to a hammock and tuck her in and say, “Sleep tight, princess.”

And now Bobbi.

It’s a struggle but I manage it. She doesn’t wake. She’s a poet. Two arms this time, with great care, down the ladder face-forward as if descending a steep staircase. Risky, but it’s a time of risk. The night is deep and mysterious, and there is no limit to man’s appetite for atrocity.

I place Bobbi in her hammock, kiss the soft lips, then climb the ladder and pull it up after me. “Done,” I say, and the hole belches and falls silent.

And here at the edge I sit down to a nightlong vigil. The Christmas lights give me courage. I will not compromise; I’ll defend what I have. The moon is out and the stars are stable, and below, in the earth, my wife and daughter sleep without nightmares, and all around us there is the blessing of stillness and safe repose.

If I could, I would join them.

I would slip into a sleeping bag and let the epochs take me down. If it were reasonable, if it were only sane, I would give credence to the proposition that ours is a universe without beginning or end, that mortality itself is relative, that the dead never die.

If it were believable, I would believe.

I would have faith. I would take my family from this hole in the conviction that we might live happily upon the earth. I would fly the flag and pooh-pooh the prophets. Yes, I would.

But the hole chuckles at me.

If you could, it says. Too bad, though, because you know better. Dynamite! Blow my mind! Fission, fusion, critical mass!

I shake my head.

“No,” I say.

Ain’t no sin to lock ’em in! T minus eight, the century’s late! Dynamite, man!

“No,” I say firmly. “Never.”

The hole widens around me, I can smell its breath.

Higgily wiggily doom!

11 Fallout

OVER A TWO-YEAR PERIOD, from early March 1969 to late April 1971, I logged something on the order of 200,000 miles in my capacity as a network passenger pigeon. Shuttle diplomacy, Sarah called it. Hectic but safe: Wake up in Key West, eat breakfast over the Gulf, do business in Tampa, fly on to New Orleans, make my pickups and deliveries, see the sights, then hop a night flight for Denver or Chicago. Typically, I’d be on the move for a week at a time—mostly college towns—and then back to the Keys.

In theory, I suppose, it might’ve seemed a decent way to spend the war. “Mr. Jet Set,” Sarah liked to say. “Join the revolution and see the world.”

But it wasn’t that rosy.

What she didn’t understand, and what sometimes gets lost in my own memory, is that constant tickle in the backbone, the Herb Philbrick sweats. I could never relax. Even during the most monotonous times I’d find myself tensed up and waiting, imagining a knock at the door, then a cop asking questions.

It was a delicate daily balance. Betrayal, informants, random accident. The variables were complex.

I was on the run, after all.

Implausible, I’d often think, but my crimes were punishable by lock and key. The draft was one problem. Contraband was another. Routinely, even on the easy campus runs, I was ferrying hot goods through hot channels: money, of course, and the various ways and means of un-American activity.

The situation required vigilance.

Whom to trust? How far? How often?

Early on, I established certain SOPs and then stuck to them without exception. I avoided strangers. I took my meals alone. I dictated the terms for all transactions. If a drop looked questionable, if instinct instructed caution, I’d simply walk away and go about the tedious chore of setting up new arrangements. Granted, paranoia was a factor, but when you’re deep in the shit, you can’t help turning slightly anal.

Loneliness, too. Clerks and bellhops and crowded lobbies, but no human intercourse.

And also exile. It sounds trite but I longed for America. Out on the fringe, alone, there wasn’t a day when I didn’t feel a sense of embarrassment nudging up on shame. Unhinged and without franchise, prone to odd daydreams, I had trouble sleeping. I’d get the midnight chokes. I’d sit on my bathroom throne and close my eyes and ask, “Where am I?”

Two years, but they were long years.

1969—Jane Fonda was on the stump and Kissinger was calling trick shots and Hoffman and Rubin and Dellinger were raising hell in public places. In Vietnam the American troop presence peaked at 540,000, and in Paris the peace talks idled along from hour to hour with high formality, many limousines, frequent adjournments for tea.

At home there was riot gas. It had come now to fracture.

In August a small bomb exploded in a janitor’s closet outside the offices of a Manhattan draft board; in early September a somewhat larger bomb caused untidiness in a Houston National Guard armory. Headlines, of course, and deadlines, and three weeks later, on September 24, a consignment of two hundred M-16 automatic rifles disappeared at a truck stop along Interstate 84 near Hartford.

I was on the road at the time of these events, but it was no surprise to find a celebration in progress when I reached Key West on the evening of September 28. There was cheap wine and laughter. At the appropriate moment Sarah led us up into the attic and pulled back a canvas tarp to display the goods.

“What you see before you,” she said, “is the product of man’s search for meaning.”

The guns were still sealed in plywood crates bearing the Colt logo. At the rear of the attic, where the eaves narrowed, twelve cases of ammunition were lined up neatly along a bare wooden beam. There was the faint smell of oil and carbonized steel.

“Disarmament,” said Ollie Winkler. “No treaties or nothin’, we just flat-out disarmed the fuckers.”

“Unilateral,” said Tina.

Ollie blushed and smiled at her fondly. “Smart lady,” he said.

Ned Rafferty was silent.

This, I surmised, was where it had to go. The future was firepower. Obliquely, half smiling, Sarah looked at me as if waiting for some secret acknowledgment—a sign of conviction, perhaps—then she shrugged and covered the guns.

“What this calls for,” she said, “is ritual.”

Tina produced champagne and we sat on the attic floor and passed the bottle. To me, it didn’t mean much, only late-hour collegiality. I was out of it now. They were fine as friends but it was hard to show enthusiasm when Tina described the hijacking operation: How it had gone like tick-tock—like shoplifting, she said—Ebenezer and Nethro had set it up—a map and a timetable and duplicate keys—a cinch—hop in the truck and drive away.

Tina laughed and shook her head.

“Broad daylight,” she said, “that’s the amazing part. This Howard Johnson’s, you know, real clean and friendly, traffic zipping by, and we just take off with the ordnance. Put it in gear and wave bye-bye.”

“Simple,” said Ollie. “Unilateral piece of cake.”

There was obvious pride and good feeling. Later, when the champagne was gone, we went out for ice cream and then sat drinking at an outdoor café along the waterfront. The night was tropical with stars and a warm wind. I was tired but I listened attentively while Sarah brought me up to date on current events. There was movement now, push alternating with shove. It had gone beyond mere protest.

“The guns,” I said, “I suppose that’s one indicator.”

“I suppose,” Sarah said.

“They don’t stay in the attic?”

“No,” she sighed, “probably not.”

Behind us, a jukebox was playing old Temptations and people were getting up to dance.

Sarah yawned and kicked off her sandals and arranged her feet in Ned Rafferty’s lap. Her hair had been cropped Peter Pan style, tight to the head, and she was wearing yellow camp shorts that called attention to the shapely integrity of her legs. There was distance between us. Opposite extremes, I thought. The conclusion was foregone—she had her code, I had my own—but even so I felt some sadness.

After a moment Sarah smiled.

“Anyway, don’t fret about it,” she said pleasantly. “You play possum, we’ll handle the politics. No objections, I hope.”

“I guess not.”

“But?”

I watched her feet move in Rafferty’s lap.

“But nothing,” I said, “except it seems a little out of proportion. Those guns. I keep thinking people could get hurt.”

“Hurt?”

“Just one opinion.”

Sarah glanced across the table at Tina. “Hurt, he thinks. He’s got opinions.”

“I heard,” said Tina.

“No scruples, lots of opinions.”

“Sad boy.”

“No doubt,” Sarah said, “very sad.”

Ned Rafferty seemed uncomfortable. He looked down at Sarah’s pink toenails, then shifted in his chair and examined the night sky.

Ollie and Tina got up to dance.

For a time things were quiet. Sarah picked up her glass and drained it and rattled the ice. Not drunk, I thought, but close. Her eyes had a hazy, indefinite shine.

“Just one item,” she said thickly. “Those guns you’re so worried about, you know where they were headed? Here’s a hint—not Iowa. Not South Dakota. Guess where.”

“I know where.”

“Oh, you know. That’s the bitch, man, you really do know. That’s the sin. Right and wrong—real perceptive. Bombs and jets and shit, you know it all. But there’s this neuter problem. Huff and puff but you can’t get it up—conscience-wise, pecker-wise—can’t perform. Just can’t. You know but you can’t.”

“Whatever you say.”

Sarah nodded and reached for Rafferty’s glass.

“Neuter,” she murmured, “that’s what I say. Emasculation Proclamation.”

“All right, then.”

“Not all right. That people-might-get-hurt bullshit—dead wrong. Go count the bodies, check out the stats, then tell me who’s hurting who. Mull it over for a while. Ask yourself this: What’s it like to have Congress with a jellyfish?”

I folded my hands and said, “Fine.”

Sarah laughed.

“Fine, fine,” she mimicked. “Bury your head, it’s always fine.” She turned unsteadily toward Ned Rafferty. “I’ve said my piece. Anything to add?”

Rafferty kept his eyes down. It occurred to me that he wasn’t entirely unsympathetic. All evening, especially up in the attic, he’d been watchful and silent. A jock, to be sure, but he was no gunman.

“Final thoughts?” Sarah asked.

Rafferty tried to smile.

“No,” he finally said, but gently, as if to suggest apology. “I guess that’s pretty much the gist of it.”

He wiped his forehead with a napkin and looked straight at me, not without kindness, then shrugged and stood up and took Sarah’s hand and led her toward the music.

Too bad, I decided. They made a handsome couple. Fluid and fitting. Partners in dance and crime and bed. That was the kicker. The ultimate gist—just too damned bad.

There was nothing to be done.

I left some cash on the table and took a short walk up Duval Street and headed back to the house. Endings, I thought. It seemed conclusive. I sat up reading for a while, then turned off the light, but the various gists kept accumulating.

The kinetics, too.

Escalation: G-forces and dizzy spirals. Ho Chi Minh was dead. Others were dying. In the Republic of Vietnam there was the weekly butcher’s bill to pay. There was demolition and privation. There was duplicity. In New York, before the General Assembly of the United Nations, Richard Nixon spoke eloquently of peace, of raising a “great cathedral” to the human spirit, but even then, in Cambodia, the secret bombs were falling on the secret dead. What was unknown could not hurt us, yet somehow it did hurt. There was uncommon distress. Buildings were burning. Harsh words were exchanged. Autumn 1969—the scheme of things had come undone—councils of war, guns in the attic.

I was in it, yes, but I was not part of it.

I just watched.

On the first day of October, my birthday, Ebenezer Keezer and Nethro flew in for a daylong planning session. The meeting convened at 10 a.m. around the kitchen table. I kept my distance, of course, serving coffee, washing the breakfast dishes, but even so I heard enough to feel the dynamic at work. I remember the sounds of shuffling chairs and a briefcase snapping open, the singsong inflection in Ebenezer’s voice when he said, “Hurricane season,” pausing a beat before smiling—“Stormy climate, kiddies, that’s what the Weatherman tells me.”

He was wearing tweeds and sunglasses, a crimson tie loosened at the neck. A professor’s voice, I thought, cool and well waxed as he analyzed recent developments—a situation report, he called it—stressing the convergence of certain historical factors. His smile was steady. “The Feds and the Reds,” he said lightly, “they’re on a collision course. We just aim to lend a helping hand.”

Nethro grunted at this.

“No bullshit,” he said. “Let the good times roll.”

Ebenezer glanced across the table at Sarah, who nodded, then at Ned Rafferty, who looked away. I tried not to listen. I scoured the frying pan and hummed Happy Birthday, pretending I was back home again, my father outside raking leaves, my mother in the bedroom wrapping gifts. October, I thought, a splendid month, but then I was listening again. Knockout time, Ebenezer was saying. He discussed the meaning of moratorium—how it derived from the Latin, as in dilatory. His tone was contemplative as he talked about a pending coast-to-coast mobilization. The pieces were in place, he said. A nationwide coalition. Parades and pickets and fireworks of assorted caliber. The general thrust, he explained, would be nonviolent, but there was always room for maneuver.

Tina Roebuck looked up from the banana she was peeling. Her skin was sallow, her eyes small and beady.

“Maneuver,” she said, “you mean guns?”

“A possibility,” said Ebenezer.

Tina nodded. “You don’t do shit with parades. Guns, that does it. People tend to notice.”

Ebenezer crossed his legs professionally.

“Guns,” he said, smiling. “Now there’s a thought.”

I’d heard enough.

When the dishes were done, I excused myself, moved out to the living room, and turned on the television. I was feeling a little fuzzy. The midmorning fare of game shows seemed wanton and ill conceived—mostly static—happy winners and plucky losers, prizes for everyone. It all rang up as tragedy. There were automatic weapons in the attic, and out in the kitchen my colleagues were discussing crimes against the state, but here on the magic box was a contestant in a clown suit squealing over an Amana self-cleaning oven. Where was the rectitude? And where, I mused, did comedy spill over into sadness? Hard to impose clarity. No theorems, no proofs. Just a war. And the clown-suited contestant bounced and danced in claim of a brand-new self-cleaning oven. Passions were stirred—laughter and greed, the studio audience found it amusing—and Bob Barker rolled his eyes, winningly, as if to absolve: Here it is, America, the fruit, the dream, and the price is right.

Happy birthday, I thought. Johnny Olsen’s deep baritone: William Cowling—come on down!

Curtain Number One: Rio! Cha-cha-cha!

Curtain Number Two: Shine on, William! A trip to the moooon! Samsonite luggage and deluxe accommodations along the unspoiled shores of the Sea of Tranquillity—Shine on!

Curtain Number Three: Hold tight now, because here it is—You’ll never die! That’s right! Never! A blond stewardess and the northern lights and life ever after. It’s all yours… iffff the price is right!

But no consolation prizes.

Which made it hard. Risky choices, and if you guessed wrong the real-life game left you unconsoled.

I closed my eyes and dozed off.

At noon, when they called me in to prepare lunch, the table talk had turned toward acrimony. The issue, apparently, was guns. Tina and Ollie favored force, Ned Rafferty was urging restraint. At the head of the table, his eyes behind sunglasses, Ebenezer Keezer seemed to be enjoying the democratic ironies.

Tina’s face was flushed.

“Nobody ever listens to me!” she was saying. “Fat Tina, stupid Tina. I’m not stupid, though, I’ve got brains.”

“Look,” said Rafferty, “I didn’t—”

“You did. Ridiculous, you said, I heard it, you said fucking ridiculous.”

“The guns, I meant. The shoot-’em-up stuff.”

Tina crushed a napkin in her fist.

“There, you see? Nobody pays attention. I didn’t say anything about shoot, I never once said that. I said action. Action, that’s all I ever said.”

“Gun action,” Rafferty muttered.

“And so?”

“So I object.” He looked warily at Ebenezer. “This quick-draw business. I don’t go for it. The rifles, they’re just a symbol, right?”

Tina hooted.

“Symbols,” she said fiercely. “What about Nixon? Our chief executive, he doesn’t grasp symbols. Power. That’s all he grasps. Just power. Symbolize all you want—sit on your ass and sing If I Had a Hammer—but I’ll tell you something, somebody has to drive home the nails.”

Ollie Winkler clapped.

“Nails! Beautiful!” He got up and circled around the table and ran a hand through Tina’s thin greasy hair. Lovebirds, I thought. I could imagine their children: midgets and Mars bars. “Pure beautiful,” Ollie said. “Isn’t she beautiful?”

“Charmer,” said Nethro.

Ollie eased his fingers down the slope of her neck. “Nails, baby—say it again.”

“Nails!” Tina said.

Nethro yawned and said, “Fun couple.”

For two or three minutes the only sounds were my own, clanking plates and silverware.

Then Rafferty pushed his chair back.

Very gently, almost in a whisper, he said, “No guns.”

He started to add something, but stopped and tapped the table with his fingernails.

I admired him. Go for it, I thought. Curtain Number Three.

I sliced the sandwiches and laid them on a platter.

After a moment Rafferty pushed to his feet.

There was no movement in his face when he looked down on Ebenezer Keezer.

“The guns,” he said, “stay in the attic.”

“That so?”

“It is.”

Ebenezer lounged back in his chair. His eyes had a lazy, hooded quality.

“My friend,” he said politely, “take a seat.”

“No, thanks.”

“Be cool, child. Sit down.”

“No,” Rafferty said, “I don’t believe I will. If you want, we can settle it right here.”

Ebenezer kept smiling.

I delivered the sandwiches and went back for the mustard and mayonnaise. The price, I was thinking. You play, you pay. I admired him, and I wanted to say something, but it wasn’t my game.

Rafferty’s eyes were flat. He seemed perfectly at ease.

“I’m serious,” he said. “No gunplay.”

“Or else?”

“However you want it.”

“Oh, my.”

“Right here,” Rafferty said. “You and me. We settle it.”

Ebenezer seemed delighted. He stroked his tie and removed his sunglasses and winked.

“Violence,” he said mildly. “Love to oblige. Real pleasure, in fact.”

Rafferty shrugged.

“Pleasure an’ honor,” said Ebenezer. He glanced at Nethro. “Me, though, I’m nonviolent.”

“Peacenik,” Nethro said.

“God’s word. The nick of peace.”

Even then Rafferty did not move. Briefly, his eyes swung in my direction, but I busied myself with the coleslaw and potato chips.

There was a dead spot at the center of the kitchen.

“That’ll do,” Sarah said.

“I just want—”

“Point taken, Ned. We hear you.” She reached out and put her hand on Rafferty’s waist. “Let’s just table it.”

“The guns. I need an answer.”

“Ned—”

“Yes or no,” he said. “Do they stay in the attic?”

Sarah shrugged.

“The attic. For now.”

“And later?”

“Don’t press it,” she said, “later’s later.” She looked over at me and made a motion with her free hand. “Let’s do food.”

No problem, I served the sandwiches.

It wasn’t heroism or cowardice. Just noninvolvement: potato chips and coleslaw and iced tea.

After lunch I did up the dishes and slipped out the back door. Nowhere to go, really, so I hiked down to the plaza off Mallory Square and sat watching the gulls and sailboats. The first of October, approaching tourist season, and the Key was crowded with youth and polyester. Things seemed very clean. There was a war on, but you wouldn’t have known it, because there were happy faces and jugglers and shrimp boats and enterprising girls in halters and flowered skirts, blue sky and blue water, everything so pretty and polished and clean.

At midafternoon I drank a beer under one of the umbrellas at the Pier House.

Happy birthday, I thought.

Then I thought about Sarah and Rafferty. The signs were obvious. Sad, but there it was. They made a splendid match. I thought about the various comings and goings of age, how nothing ever lasted. Not romance. Nothing. I called the waiter and had another beer and then circled back to the house and sat on the porch and listened through an open window while my comrades mended fences.

I wasn’t a party to it.

At one point I heard Rafferty say, “All right, it’s settled. We don’t play with guns.”

I heard Tina Roebuck whine.

“Same old bullshit,” she was saying. “Tina-do-this, Tina-do-that, but who ever listens to me? Dumb fat ugly Tina. Here’s a fact, though—I’ve read my Chekhov—and if there’s a gun in the story, it better go bang at the end. Better happen. Sooner or later.”

I heard Ebenezer’s mellow laughter.

“Tell it,” he said. “Sooner or later.”

“Nobody listens.”

“No matter, girl. Just keep tellin’.”

That night, while the others were out dancing, I baked a cake and opened a bottle of brandy and celebrated my birthday alone.

By midnight I was riding a chocolate high. I proposed toasts to my health and prosperity, to the stellar flight crews of Trans World Airlines. I was drunk, no doubt, but I was emotionally solvent. I retched and had a nightcap and fell asleep on the sofa.

It was a bouncy sleep, in and out. There was turbulence and disorder. “Fire!” someone screamed.

Late in the night I heard a door slam. Voices rose up, and then footsteps and darkness and silence again.

Nethro draped a blanket over me.

His face was calm and kind, almost brotherly. He put a hand on my forehead and held it there.

“Rockabye, babe,” he whispered. “Don’ mean nothin’.”

Then I was back in the turbulence.

“Fire!” someone yelled, and I dreamed the attic was burning. There were projectiles in the dark. Intense heat and gunfire. Holes opened in the walls and ceiling, then other holes, and the wallpaper curled and burned. I smelled flesh. I heard Tina calling the fire department, but the line was busy, and the attic crackled with red tracers and flame. “I’m dead!” Sarah screamed. She leaned out a window and screamed, “I told you so! I’m dead!” The house was unsafe. Smoke and calamity. Tina crawled into a burning refrigerator. Ollie Winkler danced on the roof, which was also burning, and Ollie danced and burned along with it. “Dead!” Sarah cried. She was gone from the window—the glass was burning and the beams and timbers were silver-blue like bones lighted by X ray—but even then, though the fire had her, Sarah was still yelling, “Dead!” I couldn’t move; I was snagged up in long rubber hoses. “Alone!” she screamed. There were fire trucks now, and helicopters, and firemen wearing armored vests and silver badges, but the firemen were firing fire at the fire, it was cross fire, and the hoses hissed and shot fire, and Sarah screamed, “Dead!”

The sirens woke me up.

For a long while I lay there waiting for the dream to burn itself out. Not foresight, I thought. Just a preview. It was nearly dawn when I made my way to the bathroom. No sirens, and no smoke, but I could still feel the heat.

I showered and brushed my teeth and moved down the hallway to Sarah’s bedroom.

I undressed without thinking.

Outside, there were morning birds, slivers of pink light playing against the curtains, and when I slipped into bed, softly, trying not to wake her, Sarah curled alongside me and smiled in her sleep, her arms bare, the soles of her feet cool and dry, and after a time she turned and came closer and said a name that wasn’t mine.

It didn’t matter. I knew anyway.

“No,” I said, “just the birthday boy.”

In the morning there was little to say. By fortune I was scheduled to fly out that afternoon, and at one o’clock I finished packing and called a cab.

We were adult about it. At the front door Sarah handed me my itinerary, and we smiled and said our goodbyes, and even hugged, but when the cab pulled up she decided to tag along out to the airport. It was a pleasant eight-minute ride. She wore white shorts, and her feet were bare, and I noticed how nicely engineered the heels were, so narrow and elegant, and the unshaved legs, the ankles and arches, the exact relations among the toes. These details seemed important.

At the boarding gate, we sat in plastic chairs and made grown-up conversation.

I wished her luck with the moratorium.

Sarah rubbed her eyes.

“The truth is,” she said, “I did send out signals. Distress and so on. It isn’t as if I didn’t warn you.”

“Often. You did.”

“Your own damned fault.”

“I understand.”

“All those years, William, but you were never really there. Not totally.”

“And he was?”

“Oh, yes. Yes, he was.”

Again, briefly, her hand went to her eyes. There was the need to simplify things.

“Do you love him?” I asked.

“Such a question.”

“Do you?”

“Love,” she sighed. “Who knows? He cares about me. And he’s present. No qualifications.”

“Noble of him,” I said. “A nice guy.”

“Yes, that, too. He sticks. Completely there.”

I nodded. “Wonderful, then, he sticks, that must be a great satisfaction. Do you love him?”

“I get by.”

“That’s something, I suppose.”

“It is. Quite a lot, in fact.”

“Happy you,” I said.

When my flight was called there was a moment of regret and bitterness. My own fault, though. I kissed her lightly on the forehead and walked down the ramp, then came back and kissed her on the lips and said, “I’m sorry,” which were the truest words I’d ever spoken.

It was the era of Vietnamization. The war, we were told, was winding down, peace through transfer, and to date our government had turned over to the ARVN more than 700,000 rifles, 12,000 machine guns, 50,000 wheeled vehicles, 1,200 tanks, and 900 artillery pieces. For some, however, it was not enough. President Nguyen Van Thieu proposed that the United States equip his nation with a modest nuclear capability. Others disagreed. Among them, Senator George McGovern took a fresh look at his options, and Senator Charles Goodell was legislating in behalf of final withdrawal. Others disagreed violently. Viet Cong flags flew over Sioux City. In Chicago, Judge Julius Hoffman presided over a discomposed courtroom, and in the streets, within shouting distance, the Weathermen went hand to hand with riot cops. There were gag orders and troop deployments. It was the year of upsets, and at the World Series, Gil Hodges and his fabulous Mets took Baltimore up against the center-field wall.

In Quang Ngai, the monsoons had come.

There were footprints on the moon.

Ronald Reagan governed California.

The Stones sang Let It Bleed.

On October 15, 1969, the moratorium came down on schedule. I checked into a Kansas City motel and watched it on television with the help of Magic Fingers. I’m not sure what I felt. Pride, on the one hand, and rectitude, but also a kind of heartache.

Big numbers—

In Boston, 100,000 people swarmed across the Common. New York City, 250,000; New Haven, 40,000; Des Moines, 10,000 plus tractors. At Whittier College, and at Clemson, and at a thousand other schools, you could hear the National Anthem mixing with hymns and folk songs and services for the dead. There were oratorical declarations by Hollywood dignitaries. Church bells, too, and torches and suspended commerce and pray-ins at national shrines. Wall Street was wall-to-wall with citizenry; the Golden Gate Bridge was stopped to traffic. At the University of Wisconsin a crowd of 15,000 carried candles and umbrellas through a heavy rain. At UCLA, 20,000. At Chicago’s Civic Center, 10,000. In Washington, with a bronze moon over the White House, 50,000 constituents came with flashlights to petition their chief of state for peace.

Around midnight I went out for a hamburger. I played some pinball, took a short walk, and returned to the room.

It was hard to find the correct posture. I thought about the flow of things. Ping-Pong to Chuck Adamson to Peverson State, and also Sarah, her culottes and letter sweater, and now the guns, and how you couldn’t nail down the instant of turn or change but how small actions kept leading to larger actions, then the inevitable reactions. The late-night CBS wrap-up showed Lester Maddox singing God Bless America. In Sacramento, Ronald Reagan talked about the perfidious nature of the day’s events, which gave “comfort and aid to the enemy,” and in the nation’s capital Barry Gold-water and Gerald Ford harmonized on the grand old themes. Then came a closing collage: the American flag at half-staff in Central Park, a graveyard vigil in Minneapolis, Eugene McCarthy reciting Yeats, Coretta King reciting Martin Luther King, 30,000 candles burning in the streets of Kansas City.

I couldn’t sleep.

I slipped my last quarter into the Magic Fingers and lay there in the twentieth-century dark. It was all kindling. “Save us,” I said, to no one in particular, just to the forces, or to the 39,000 dead, or to those, like me, who needed Magic Fingers.

When the time expired, I picked up the phone and called home. It seemed appropriate. The ringing itself was a kind of shelter. That soft, two-beat buzz—like a family voice, I thought, indelible and yet curiously diminished by the phonics of history and long distance—older now, depleted and somewhat fragile. I lay very still. I pictured my father’s Buick parked in the driveway; I could see the shadows and reflections of household objects: a chrome-plated toaster in the kitchen, windows and mirrors, the old rubber welcome mat at the front door. Silhouettes, too, and familiar sounds. The doorbell chiming off-key. The way the refrigerator would suddenly kick in and hum. Home, I thought. The shapes and smells, all the unnoticed particulars.

My mother answered on the seventh ring. Her voice was low and sleepy-sounding, not quite her own. I didn’t speak. Eyes closed, I pictured her face, how she would frown at the silence, that impatient squint when she said, “Yes, hello?” I wanted to laugh—“Guess who,” I wanted to say—but I held my breath and listened. There was a long quiet. I could see her wedding band and the veins running thick and blue along the back of her hand. I could hear the kitchen clock. Long-distance sounds. I imagined a tape recorder turning somewhere in the dark, a tired FBI agent tuning in through headphones.

Then my mother’s voice. A hesitation before she said, “William?”

I was silent. I held on a few seconds longer.

“William,” she said.

Then she repeated my name, several times, without question, softly yet absolutely.

“It’s you,” she said. “I know.”

Like sleepwalking, the inertial glide.

I spent Thanksgiving in a Ramada Inn near Reno. On Christmas Eve I treated myself to oyster stew at a Holiday Inn outside Boston. My goals were modest—to stay unjailed, to keep the biology intact.

Crazy, I’d think.

On New Year’s Day 1970, a new decade, I built a snowman in the parking lot of my motel in Chicago. Then I went haywire. I butchered it. I committed murder. I gouged out the eyes and smashed the head, and when it was done I took a shower and washed off the gore and lay in bed and watched the Rose Bowl.

Stability was a problem. You could only keep running for so long, then the odds caught up and you got mangled like a snowman.

If you’re sane, I thought, you’re fucking crazy.

Over the dreary months of January and February I performed my duties and nothing more. Inertia. Town to town: I delivered the mail and watched my step and looked for a way out. I focused on routine and ritual. Once a week I’d get a haircut. Twice a month I’d receive an envelope containing expense cash and a typed itinerary. Now and then I’d find a short note from Sarah. Be well, she’d write. Or she’d write: William—I feel unwanted.

In March there was no note at all.

In April she wrote: I miss you. It hurts. Whatever happened to Rio?

In May I began looking for Bobbi.

Madness, I realized, had now become viable. Fantasy was all I had. Something to hang on to—that one-in-a-million possibility—so I went after it.

Passively at first, then actively.

In airports, between flights, I stationed myself near the Trans World gate area, a stakeout, sitting back and scanning the crowds for blue uniforms and blond hair. Impossible odds, I’d think, but even so I’d feel a tingle at each arrival and departure. I’d listen for her name over the airport loudspeakers. Bobbi, I’d think. I’d rehearse bits of dialogue. Sure, I’d tell her—obsession—imagination—but those were my great assets. I knew how to dream. I’d win her over. Yes, I would. I’d recite Martian Travel from memory. I’d charm her with love and practicality. Money was no problem—I knew where the money was, it was in the rock, it was there in the Sweethearts to be found and dug up and spent without thought of consequence—I’d buy her furs and perfumes, whatever the ore could buy, and we’d have a family, and the world could go to hell, but we’d go in style, we’d live as others live, in fantasy, happily.

In mid-May I began making direct inquiries. There was little to go on, a first name and a vague description, but luck was the governing factor—a TWA flight, Denver to Salt Lake.

I picked up the trail at thirty-two thousand feet.

“Bobbi,” the stewardess said, and she looked at me with grave eyes. “Sublime smile? Lots of rhythm?”

“It sounds right,” I said.

The woman shook her head.

“Pity,” she murmured. “This way.”

She led me down the aisle to the galley area. We were somewhere high over the Rockies, a fresh spring sky, and there were troops in Cambodia and ceremonies at Kent State, but it didn’t mean a thing to me. The stewardess mixed a pair of drinks and motioned for me to sit down in the last row.

She lighted a cigarette and blew smoke rings at the ceiling. Her name tag said Janet.

After a time she sighed.

“Bobbi Haymore,” she said. “The Skywriter, we called her. Bobbi the Haiku Haymore. Let me guess—she pinned a poem to your shirt?”

“Coat.”

“Coat, then. Fill in the blank.”

“Haymore?” I said.

“Like Hey-more. Care less. Not my favorite person.” She took out a pen and wrote down the name for me. “The golden bard. Very mystical. Those poems of hers, she’d pass them out like peanuts. Passengers loved it. Especially male types. You, too, I suppose.”

“Yes,” I admitted, “she had an effect.”

“The full treatment, no doubt?”

“Not a treatment. She was—it’s hard to describe—she was completely there. No qualifications.”

The woman nodded. “I’ve heard it before. A spiritual experience.”

She snuffed out her cigarette.

“All right,” she said slowly, “let’s see if I can set the scene. A night flight, I suppose. Very cozy. Dark cabin. Soft voice. Classy legs. Martini or two. Sound familiar? This leads to that, lots of spirituality. Next thing you know you’re getting the complete unabridged works, sweet and sexy. A day later you find a sonnet pinned to your undies. I miss anything?”

“Grass,” I said.

“I’m sorry?”

“Just grass, it came with the poem. She said it expressed her deepest feelings for me.”

There was a pause.

“Yes, well,” the woman said, “I think we’re obviously talking about the same person.”

For a time I was silent, just reflecting. I watched the passing atmosphere. It occurred to me that the events of imagination are never easily translated into the much less pliant terms of the real world. Too damned inflexible, I thought, but then I shrugged.

“So,” I asked, “how do I find her?”

The stewardess grunted.

“Sucker,” she said. She pulled a tube of lipstick from her handbag and dabbed grimly at the corners of her mouth. “Listen, I know the girl. I crewed with her. Tone-deaf little tramp. Doesn’t talk to people—she recites. That so-called poetry of hers—rushing tides and dappled dunes—garbage, you know?—but the guys, though, they all fell for it, they just ate it up. Putrid. Men, they’re all suckers.”

She turned and half smiled at me.

“All I want,” she said, “is to help. Forget it, that’s my advice.”

“Well, thanks.”

“A word to the wise.”

“I appreciate it,” I said. “Where is she?”

The stewardess closed her eyes and leaned back. Her smile seemed bitter.

“Bailed out,” she said. “The great blond beyond.”

“In other words—”

“Departed. Thin air. Ran off with some navigator. New York, I think. Hey-more. Care less.”

“Navigator?’

“Andy Nelson. Cute guy. Sucker, though.”

“For sure,” I said gently, “aren’t they all?”

I borrowed her pen and jotted down the name Andy Nelson.

The facts came slowly, but in the end I had what I needed. Back in the early fall, Bobbi had retired to pursue her muse full-time. Grad school, apparently. A creative writing program at Columbia or NYU—New York City, that much was certain. The navigator had gone along for the ride.

I studied my notes. Sketchy at best, but at least there were options.

“Last warning,” the stewardess said, “she’s a bloodsucker, she’ll eat your heart out. Crush it, I mean. Drain it dry.”

I smiled and said, “That’s the risk.”

In Salt Lake I changed my travel arrangements.

Go, I thought. Curtain Number Three. There was time for a cup of coffee and then I was airborne again.

The next few days were chaotic.

In New York, I took a room at the Royalton and started making calls. The phone book listed thirteen Haymores, no B’s or Bobbis, but I tried anyway. No luck, just bad tempers. I spent a restless, tumbling night, and the next morning I was up early. Alarming developments on the Today show: the Kent State aftershocks. There was violence in Little Rock. In St. Paul, 80,000 people stormed down Summit Avenue, and there was public mayhem in the streets of Philadelphia. It was epidemic. Arson in Tallahassee, a bombing at Fort Gordon. Surreal maybe, or maybe not, but I imagined the Committee’s contribution to all this. Sarah calling shots, Tina quoting Chekhov. I could hear Ollie Winkler’s squeaky giggle: “The chef and the terrorist—they’re finally cooking!”

No matter, though. I was disengaged. I turned off the television and closed the curtains and began dialing.

At Columbia, the registrar had no record of a Bobbi Haymore. I tried NYU, then Brooklyn College, then several others. All dead ends. At noon I went out for a walk down Sixth Avenue. Vaguely, without dwelling on it, I realized I was chasing air. Bobbi, I’d think, but the name was more than a name. Its meaning—the crucial meaning—was like grass. She was real, yes; the hair and the eyes and the voice; but the reality was also an emblem. “Bobbi,” I’d say, which meant many things, possibility and hope and maybe even peace.

A pipe dream, I knew that.

But the future is always invented. You make it up out of air. And if you can’t imagine it, I thought, it can’t happen.

I ate a hearty lunch.

Afterward I returned to the room and opened up the phone book: N this time, as in Nelson or navigator. The trick was confidence. There were eighteen Andrews, five Andys, but I hit it on the second shot.

“Bobbi?” he said, as if puzzled.

Then he laughed.

There was some belligerence before he sobbed and hung up on me. I gave him ten minutes and tried again.

It was not a cheerful conversation. Mostly silences, then quick gusts of misery; the man was obviously navigating without charts or compass. Split, he said. She’d walked out in January. Left him for a poet-translator named Scholheimer. Scholheimer, he said bitterly—big-shot Nazi. Very famous. Her teacher at NYU. Admired her poetry—midnight office hours—claimed she had promise. At the word promise there was weeping and the man excused himself and dropped the receiver. In the background I heard a toilet flush. Ditched, I thought, and I pictured a 727 floating belly-down in the mid-Atlantic, the navigator strapped in and struggling, much panic, Bobbi smiling and waving and paddling toward the horizon in a bright yellow life raft.

I tried not to take pleasure in it. I wrote down the data on a note pad: Ditched. Scholheimer. Nazi. NYU—question mark.

Later, I commiserated as best I could. Sad, I told him. A general ungluing of things. It was the fundamental process of our age: collapsing valences and universal entropy.

Then I cleared my throat and asked where to find her.

No luck at NYU, I explained. Urgent business—I had to make contact.

The man blew his nose.

“You, too,” he said.

“Not necessarily.”

“No?”

“Just urgent. A personal matter.”

“Personal,” he said. “I’ll bet.”

He laughed.

There was a conspiratorial, almost friendly note to his voice when he said, “Fuck you.”

It didn’t matter. The last act was easy.

Scholheimer: only one listing.

There was no answer all afternoon but I enjoyed the dialing. That was the pleasure. A kind of pre-memory, dialing and listening and anticipating the rest of my life. “William,” she’d say, instantly, without hesitation.

And then what? A dinner date. An Italian restaurant. Pasta and checkered tablecloths. Quiet talk. A ferry ride past the Statue of Liberty. A twinkly night sky. She’d smile and hold my arm, not clinging, just holding, and she would nod with full understanding when I confessed to the possibility of madness. I’d tell her everything. I’d start with the year 1958, when I first went underground, that night in May when I grabbed my pillow and blankets and ran for the basement and slept the one great sleep of my life. “Am I crazy?” I’d ask. I’d tell her about Chuck Adamson and the Cuban missile crisis and unevacuated bowels. I’d look her in the eyes and ask it bluntly: “Am I crazy?” Everything. Exile, dislocation, Key West, the events at Sagua la Grande, flares and tracers and guns in the attic. “How much is real?” I’d ask. “The bombs—are they real? You—are you real?” Quietly, in graphic detail, I’d tell her about ball lightning striking Georgia; I’d tell her about a Soviet SS-18 crossing the Arctic ice cap, how I could actually see it, and hear it, but how no one else seemed to notice, or if noticing, did not care, how no one panicked, how the world went on as if endings were not final. “Am I crazy?” I’d ask. All afternoon, as I dialed and waited, I worked my way through the scenarios. A rooftop bar with piano music and dim lighting. The way we’d dance, barely moving. Her steady blue eyes. Then a taxi ride through Central Park. The clicking meter. Her hand coming to rest on mine. I imagined rain. There would be rain, yes, and umbrellas and fuzzy yellow streetlights and the sound of the taxi tires against wet pavement. And she’d smile at me, that secret smile, which would give me the courage to suggest a lifelong commitment. I’d ask her to save my life. I’d say, “Bobbi, I’m crazy. But save me.” And she’d listen to all this with grace and equanimity. At the Royalton we would no doubt undress and move to the bed and lie there listening to the rain. Maybe sex, but maybe not. And then later, near dawn, I would issue proposals. I would promise her happiness, and fine children, and a house with sturdy locks and heavy doors. No more running, I’d say. No nightmares. A happy ending in which nothing ever ends. “It’s possible,” I’d tell her, “it’s almost plausible, we just have to imagine it,” and after a time Bobbi would turn toward me and smile without speaking, placing her hand against my heart, holding it there, mysteriously, shaping the possibilities, and that shining smile would mean Yes, she could imagine these things and many more.

The dialing, that was the true pleasure. It was almost a disappointment when she finally answered.

Not grief, really, just an empty place where all the pretty pictures used to be. She was kind about it. She quoted Yeats: We had fed the heart on fantasies, the heart’s grown brutal from the fare. She wished me luck. She was flattered, she said. She didn’t laugh when I told her about the chase, how much she meant to me, how foolish I felt, how crazy, but how I had to go with my dreams. She said she admired that. She was smiling, I could tell. She said dreams were important. Then she told me her own dreams. She needed space, she said; NYU was fine but there was no space; she’d dropped out in April. She was happy, though. She was going to Germany—Bonn, she said—and there was a married man she was going with, Scholheimer, and the married man was her husband. She laughed at this, lightly. Dreams were lovely, she said, but they could be dangerous, too, which is when she lowered her voice and quoted Yeats: We had fed the heart on fantasies, the heart’s grown brutal from the fare.

But it wasn’t grief. Not even sadness. If you’re crazy, I now understood, you don’t feel grief or sadness, you just can’t find the future.

I spent a few days reassembling myself, and on the evening of May 29 Sarah met me at the Key West airport. Understandably, her mood was dark. I’d been out of contact for some time; I’d skipped out on my responsibilities. “Globe-trotter,” she muttered, “back from his magical mystery tour.”

In the cab she applied irony.

I wasn’t ready for it. I took her by the wrist and dug in with my fingernails.

“Don’t push,” I said quietly. “Don’t even nudge. Just this once—total silence, I mean it.”

Sarah nodded.

And for two weeks she treated me with something just short of respect. I went my way, she went hers. It was unlived-in time. Like blank film, no images or animus, no pretty pictures. At the dinner table, Ollie and Tina would keep up a nonstop banter about the current political situation, the screw-turnings and incipient terror, but none of it really registered. I couldn’t make visual contact. I’d stare at my plate and try to construct the contours of a world at perfect peace: Bobbi’s smile, for instance; binding energy; things to hope for and believe in; the city of Bonn with its spires and castles. But nothing developed. Blank film—I’d lost the gift. If you’re crazy, it’s a lapse of imagination. You stare at your dinner plate. You can’t generate happy endings.

The postulate was obvious. If you’re crazy, it’s the end of the world.

Which is how it felt. Just nothing.

When there’s nothing, there is no sadness. There was a war on, but it didn’t matter, because when there’s nothing, there is no outrage.

One evening Ned Rafferty knocked on my door.

For a moment he stood there waiting, then shrugged and came in and sat on the bed. He wore a beard now, and wire-rimmed glasses, but he still had strength.

Nothing was said.

It was late and the house was quiet. Rafferty leaned back against a pillow. He was simply there. At one point he got up and turned off the light and then came back and touched my shoulder and held it for a while and then sat down again and waited. His glasses sparkled in the dark. A humid night, dense and oppressive. I took a breath and tried to keep it inside, but it came out fast, and then I was choking and telling him everything I could tell. The tears surprised me. I didn’t feel any great emotion. Ding-Dong, I thought, but I couldn’t stop choking and saying, “Crazy.” Rafferty was silent. He didn’t move or speak, but he was there. I told him how crazy I was. The fucking Ping-Pong table, I said. The flashes and missiles and sirens, and the fucking war, the fucking draft, the bombs and shrapnel and guns and artillery and all the shit, the fucking sun, it would fucking fry us, I said, or we’d get fried by the fucking physicists, or else the silos and submarines and fly-boys and button-pushers—all the assholes out to kill other assholes—fucking Nixon, fucking Brezhnev, fucking Ebenezer Keezer and Nethro and Hitler and Crazy Horse and Custer, my father, too, yes, my father, the way he died out at the fairgrounds every summer, just died and died and died, how he wouldn’t stop dying, every fucking summer, all the heroes and corpses, the fucking Alamo, fucking Hiroshima and Auschwitz—No survivors!—everybody killing everybody else—yes, and the so-called peace movement, the fucking underground with its fucking slogans and riots, the fucking dynamic—what good was it?—those guns in the attic and Ollie with his fucking bombs—where was the good?—No survivors!—it was all so crazy, I said, just absolute fucking crazy—and then I laughed and shook my head and told him about Bobbi.

Pie in the sky, I said.

I quoted Yeats.

I told him about obsession and fantasy.

I told him you had to believe in something; I told him how it felt when you stopped believing.

“It feels fucking crazy,” I said, almost yelled, then I caught my breath and said, “That’s what craziness is. When you can’t believe. Not in anything, not in anyone. Just can’t fucking believe.”

I was sobbing now, but it wasn’t sadness. It was nothing. For a few minutes I lost my balance—I’m not sure what happened exactly, a kind of fury, thrashing around and yelling “Crazy!”—and then Rafferty had me pinned down by the wrists and arms. I could smell his sweat. He was leaning in hard, saying, “Slack now, lots of slack, let it unwind.”

Then the quiet came.

“There,” he said, “let it go.”

I closed my eyes and cried.

“Just let it out,” he said.

A nice guy. Nice, that was all I could think, and I told him so. “Nice,” I kept saying, “you’re a nice, nice, nice guy. You are. You’re nice.”

“A prince,” said Rafferty.

“For sure. Fucking prince.”

“Don’t say fucking.”

“I apologize. Not fucking at all. But nice.”

Rafferty filled my glass.

“What we should do in a situation like this,” he said, “is drink to how nice I am.”

We finished the brandy. The hour was late but Rafferty suggested a sea voyage, which seemed fitting, so we hiked down to the Front Street marina and exercised the right of angary over a handsome wooden skiff and aimed the vessel Gulfward. A mile out, we cut the engine. We drifted and breathed the air and looked back on the sad white lights of Key West.

I felt much improved. A quiet sway, and the skiff rode high and neat.

Rafferty laughed at something.

“Nice guy,” he said. He lit up a joint and passed it across to me.

I wasn’t a smoker but I liked the ritual of it. I liked him, too. And the smells and water sounds. There was largeness around us. When the joint was gone, Rafferty asked if I wanted more, and I said I did, so we smoked that one and then another, letting the currents take us, and presently I was made aware of numerous unique perspectives. It was all in the angle. The moon, I noticed, was without third dimension. I was intrigued by the concept of hemispheres. I detected a subtle crease at the horizon where the global halves had been stitched to perfect the whole.

Ned Rafferty nodded when I explained these matters.

“Nuts,” I said. “Haywire. I warned you, didn’t I?”

“I believe it was mentioned, yes.”

“Loose screws. Did I say that? Sometimes I feel—you know—I feel—there’s a word for it—not depressed, not just that. Like when you can’t cope anymore.”

“Desperate,” Rafferty said. “I know.”

“That’s it. Desperate. Did I tell you about Bobbi?”

“You did.”

“Married. Off to Bonn in Germany.”

“You told me.”

“Scholheimer.”

“A turd. You told me.”

“Desperate,” I said.

“Desperadoes.”

“That’s it.”

Rafferty sighed and removed his glasses. Funny angle, the dark and the Gulf and the dope, but it looked like he’d pulled out his eyes and placed them in the pocket of his shirt. The shine was gone. He leaned back and looked at me without his eyes.

“One thing,” he said. “To clear the air.”

“Anything.”

“About Sarah. This relationship we had, Sarah and me. It’s over. Never really got started. I love her. She loves you.”

“You don’t have to—”

“No, I want it out,” he said. “She loves you. Breaks my heart, but there’s the fact. Understand me? Loves you. Wants you back. Rio, that’s all she talks about.” He reached overboard, splashing water to his face. The skiff was gently fishtailing with the tide. “I do care for her, you know. Emotional thing.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Rio, for Christ sake. What the hell’s Rio?”

“Nothing,” I said. “A fantasy.”

There was silence while Rafferty reflected on this. After a time he issued a complex noise from the bottom of his lungs.

“Fantasy, I can respect that,” he said. “Obsessions, too. You’re obsessed, I’m obsessed. Look at Tina—big fat killer obsessions. Our Lord Jesus Christ, the man was obsessed, who isn’t? Ollie Winkler—walking obsession. Thing is, you have to respect people’s obsessions. Like with me. You want to know my obsession?”

“What’s your obsession?”

“Will you respect it?”

“I will.”

“My obsession,” he said gravely, “is Sarah. I’m a nice guy, you’re right, but you know something? I’d do anything for her. Drown your ass. Right here, if I thought it would do any good, I’d just drown your ass. Can you respect that?”

“I certainly can.”

“Maybe we should have another smoke?”

“Yes,” I said.

“I am a nice guy.”

“Of course. But you’d have to drown me.”

“You understand, then.”

“Completely and absolutely,” I told him. “Obsession, it’s nothing personal.”

Rafferty laughed and stood up to light the joint. He seemed stable enough. The boat was sliding sideways to the current but he kept his balance, passing the smoke and then turning and staring out at the sad lights across the water.

“Stoned,” he said, “but not all that stoned. You want to hear my fantasies?”

“Very much,” I said.

“Get the hell out of here. That’s the A-one deluxe fantasy, just split. With Sarah. Drown your ass and kidnap her—drugs or something—a sea voyage—take her away.” He paused a moment, shook his head violently, then pointed at the town lights. “I hate this place. Key West, it sucks. Everything we’re doing, the gangster shit and the guns and Ebenezer Keezer, everything, I hate it. Don’t believe in it. Got to believe, man, and I don’t. Never did. Ranch kid—I ever tell you that? Grew up on a ranch. Dumb cowboy. Home on the range. All I ever wanted, some cows and dope and git along little dogie. And Sarah. Not a damned thing else. That’s why I’m here. No other reason. Just Sarah.”

“A good fantasy,” I said.

“Nifty lady, Sarah.”

“She is.”

“Different fantasies, though. I want her, she wants Rio. That’s the thing, nobody has the same fantasies.”

Rafferty swayed and sat down heavily.

“Anyway, there it is,” he said. “Obsession. You and me, two peas in the same dipshit pod.”

“Crazy,” I whispered.

There was a short silence. When he spoke, his voice seemed firm and exact, fully sober.

“Not crazy,” he said, “but here’s a word of advice. Sarah, she’s real. Take it and run. Get out. This whole situation—the guns and shit—we both know how it ends. Badness, that’s all. Graveyards. Forget the dreams, man, do something positive. Grab her and start running and don’t ever stop. The world-famous gist: Go with reality. Take off.”

“And you?”

“Gone. First chance, I’m gone. Home on the range.”

“What about—”

“Just go.”

He smiled and held up a hand, palm forward.

“Peace,” he said, “the gist of the gist.”

There was a feeling of comity and goodwill. A fine human being, I thought, and we sat back and smoked, and for a long while I concentrated on the hemispheres. I watched the scheme of things, the constellations, the moon veering toward Europe, peace with honor, Bobbi and Bonn and Rio and Vietnam and the violet glow of uranium dioxide in the Sweetheart Mountains. I was not afraid. I knew where the future was. Later, as Rafferty slept, I watched without alarm as a black submarine surfaced to starboard, its conning tower cutting like a fin through the placid dark. I felt no dismay, only wonder. Here, I deduced, was how it would be when it finally came to be. It would be quick. Out of the blue, a blink and a twitch, here then gone. I could see it. I could hear the sonar. The submarine rose up in profile, buoyant, circling the skiff, and I nodded and closed my eyes and gave myself over to how it had to be. There was a slight trembling. A shower of yellow-white sparks, then the missiles ascended, but to my credit, I stood fast. I studied the ballistics. I admired the gleamings—reds and pinks spilling in the Gulf. There was grace in it, I thought, and the beauty that attends resolution, as fire is beautiful, and nuclear war, things happening as they must happen and always will. I was brave. I’d seen it all before, many times, and now there was just gallantry.

The question declared itself: Who’s crazy?

Not me.

When the submarine slipped away, I was smiling. Imagination. I had the knack again.

For the next year, up to April 21, 1971, the casualties kept piling up on all sides. People were dying. In Vietnam, there was steady concussion; in Paris, the peace talks dragged on into the third year of stalemate; in Georgia, Lieutenant William Calley went on trial for murder; in Cambodia, there were fires. There was a war on, yes, but for me it was mostly blank time. Which is to say I can’t remember much—the present never quite became the past.

What happened? How much is memory, how much is filler?

If I close my eyes, if I ignore the hole, I can see Sarah reclining in a lawn chair on the back patio at Key West. We’re lovers again, though not exactly in love; we’re both waiting, though for what I don’t know. She just lies there in sunlight. She wears a blue bandanna and a white muslin blouse. Her skin is dark brown. The hair at her calves is bleached silver, and at the corner of her mouth is a lumpish blister—herpes simplex, but the complications will prove unhappy. In her lap is a copy of Newsweek. A celebrity now, she smiles at me from the magazine’s cover, or seems to smile, and says or seems to say, “I warned you. Years ago, I told you I was dangerous, big dangerous dreams, and here’s the proof. Now I belong to the ages.”

Blank time, but great speed, too. I can see Sarah’s eyes going cold. “I’m dead,” she whispers.

Mid-November 1970, and a butchered pig was deposited on the steps of the FBI building in downtown Washington.

There was a bombing in Madison.

A startling image—is it real?—but I can see Ollie Winkler in a rented airplane. He’s wearing his cowboy hat and aviator goggles, a yellow scarf flapping behind him, and he’s squealing and dumping homemade ordnance on the nation’s Capitol. It did not happen that way, but it could’ve happened, and still can, and therefore I see it.

“I’m dead!” Sarah cries. That much did happen.

In December they redecorated the Lincoln Memorial.

In January 1971, they released a dozen skunks in the carpeted hallways of the Rockefeller Foundation.

Not quite terrorism.

“Skunks,” Sarah said, “that’s a prank. TNT, that’s terror. You have to know where to draw your nice fine lines.”

I remember nodding.

Pathetic, I thought, but things were clearly moving toward misadventure.

The guns, for instance.

When I look back, I can see those plywood crates stacked in the attic. One night I heard noise up there, so I investigated, and I found Ned Rafferty sitting cross-legged before a candle, alone. Just cobwebs and guns. “How’s tricks?” I asked, and Rafferty snuffed the candle and told me to get the fuck out. “Just go!” he said, and he sounded angry.

What else?

A minor hurricane named Carla.

I can hear the wind, I can feel Sarah up against me in bed. Maybe it’s then when she says, “My God, I’m dead.”

Slow time, but it seems fast.

I remember Ollie eating grapes at the kitchen table. The seeds make plinking sounds in a metal wastebasket; he talks about hitting banks; he seems serious; he doesn’t laugh when he says, “Why not?” A seed goes plink in the wastebasket and he says, “Why not?”

Tina Roebuck on a crash diet.

She’s determined. She papers the refrigerator with photographs from Vogue. “Just once in my rotten life,” she says grimly, “just this once, a lean mean killing machine.”

But it doesn’t happen. The pressures intervene and she checks out as a heavyweight.

Are the dead, I wonder, ever dead?

The hole laughs and says, Believe it.

I believe it. The dead, perhaps, live in memory, but when memory goes, so go the dead.

There is no remembering when there is no one to remember. Hence no history, hence no future. It’s a null set; the memory banks are wiped out; there is no differentiation—all the leptons look alike—believe it.

For now, though, I have a dim recollection of Ebenezer Keezer briefing us on coming attractions. Volatile stuff, no doubt, because I remember the brittle sound to his laughter. There was talk about crime. At one point, when Ned Rafferty brought up the subject of penalties, jail and so on, Ebenezer removed his sunglasses and looked heavenward for some time. Then he shrugged. He grinned at Nethro. “Freedom,” he said, “is just a dependent clause in a life sentence. Don’ mean nothin’.” There was a pause before he entertained suggestions as to how the guns might be most properly used. “Let’s discuss climax,” he said, which is all I remember, except for walking away.

And Sarah.

Sarah in a cotton nightgown with lace and blue ribbons, her hair in curlers, puffy booties on her feet. Sarah sunbathing. Sarah baking cookies. In late January, I remember, she put on her old Peverson letter sweater to watch the Super Bowl, and afterward we went out for dinner, the two of us alone. It was a terrific time. We had some drinks, then several more, and on the way home she giggled and leaned up against me and asked if I believed in dreams.

She seemed a little unsteady.

“Dreams,” she said, “can they come true? Like with a crystal ball or something? Can you dream your own life?”

“Well,” I said, “let’s hope not.”

“No, I’m serious. Is it possible?”

I smiled and took her arm.

It was near midnight and we were walking through a park of some sort and I could smell flowers and cut grass. After a time Sarah stopped and looked at me.

“What I mean is… I mean, there’s a dream I keep getting. Not a dream, really, just this wacky idea. You won’t laugh?”

“Of course not.”

“Promise?”

I nodded.

There was a hesitation while she thought it over. Her eyes, I remember, were like ice; you could’ve skated on them.

“All right, then, but you have to use your imagination.” She bit down on her lip. “War’s over. No more battles, it’s finished, we all pick up and go home. You and me, we get married, right?”

“Right,” I said.

“Babies. Lots of travel. Settle down. But then what? I mean, I’m still young, I’m famous, I’ve got certain skills. So what do I do with myself?”

“The dream,” I said gently, “let’s hear it.”

Sarah sighed.

“You’ll think I’ve flipped. It’s like—I don’t know—just weird.” She giggled again, then swayed and kissed me. There was the smell of gin and lipstick. Drunk, I thought, but something else, too.

She shivered and hugged herself.

“Don’t laugh,” she said. “Pretend it’s Super Bowl Sunday. Like today, sort of. Packed stadium. Bands and floats and celebrities. National holiday. Bigger than Easter, bigger than Christmas. Hospitals shut down. Nixon’s got his phone unplugged. All across America—people adjusting the color on their TV sets, opening up that first beer. Whole country’s tuned in. Showdown time—Dallas versus Miami. You have to close your eyes and just picture it.”

I closed my eyes.

When I looked up, she was sitting on a park bench. She gazed at the sky for several seconds.

“Super Bowl,” she said. “Greatest show on earth. There I am. I’m a Cowgirl.”

“Cowgirl,” I said.

“War’s over, I’m bored, I need the spotlight. That’s me, isn’t it?—the glitter girl—this huge appetite—I just need it. Goose bumps. All the noise and dazzle and music. Very warm and mysterious, like having sex with ninety thousand people. Can’t explain it. Just Cowgirl magic—I’m wearing the blue and silver. Those little shorts, you know, and those sexy white boots. I’m there.”

I sat down and put my arm around her.

A hot night, but she was still shivering, and it occurred to me that this was a very desirable but very frightened woman.

Presently she laughed.

“So there I am,” she said. “Super Bowl. All the pre-game stuff goes as usual—welcoming ceremonies, lots of color and excitement—but then a funny thing happens. The teams don’t show up. Overslept or something—who knows?—they just don’t show. Two hundred million people waiting. No teams.”

“Nice,” I said.

“No teams. No football.”

“A good dream.”

Sarah shrugged.

“True,” she said, “but here’s the stunner. Nobody cares. Nobody notices. Because yours truly is out there blowing their dirty little minds with cartwheels. Cartwheels you wouldn’t believe. Nobody’s even thinking football—cartwheels, that’s all they want. Crowd goes bananas. Super Bowl fever, they’re all screaming for more cartwheels… Curt Gowdy’s shouting the play-by-play… TV cameras zoom in on me—instant replay, slow mo, the works. I’m famous! Fans swarm onto the field and… And that’s when it finally happens. Cheerleading, the main event. No sidelines crap—it’s me they want—they came to see me. Just a billion beautiful cartwheels. They love me. They really do, just love-love-love. Who cares about football? War’s over. Just love. It’s all completely reversed. At half time the two teams trot out for a cute little twenty-minute scrimmage and then—bang—back to the action—me and my cartwheels.”

There was a moment of quiet, then she nudged me and lifted up her sweater.

“My breasts,” she said, “they’re nice, aren’t they?”

“Fabulous,” I said.

“For a Cowgirl, though. Not huge or anything, but they’re—you know—they’re nice. I don’t need a bra.”

“I see that. Cover up now.”

“I’m not too old?”

“Just right,” I said.

Sarah frowned and examined herself.

“And my legs. I’d probably have to start shaving again, but they seem—”

“Very pretty legs.”

“You think so? Be honest.”

“Perfect,” I said. I helped her up. She wobbled a bit, laughing, then straightened up and took my face in her hands and kissed me hard. I could feel the structure of her jaw. When she pulled back, there were tears in her eyes.

“The dream,” she said softly. “You see the point?”

I didn’t but I nodded.

“Love,” she said.

She didn’t cry.

She smiled and said, “Love, that’s all. I want it. God, I do want it.”

The rest seems to slide away.

I remember her black eyes, flecks of orange and silver, how she kept smiling at me. “Love,” she said.

And then what?

Hindsight, foresight. But which is it? I can see her jerking up in bed that night, or perhaps another night, still trembling, hooking a leg around me, and maybe it’s then when she says, “I’m dead. I’m all alone.”

Is it possible? Can we read the future?

Do our bodies know?

I remember holding her.

“No,” I tell her, “just a dream.”

Which is how it was and still seems.

A curious year, fast and slow. I can see Sarah practicing cartwheels in the backyard. She winks at me and yells something—I don’t know what—then she goes up into a handstand, ankles locked, toes at the sky, and she holds it like that forever.

Or I see her squinting into a mirror. She winces, shakes her head, and begins applying a coat of Blistex to her swollen lip. After a second our eyes meet in the mirror. Sarah cocks an eyebrow. She nods and says, “All right, tiger, Congress is in session. But no fancy lip action.”

Naturally there were realignments in our relationship, certain taboos and touchy subjects, but over those months we more or less patched things up.

It was an exercise in tact; the questions were always implicit.

One evening she found me paging through a world atlas. I was studying topography, tracking the Rhine toward Bonn. Sarah came up behind me. I didn’t see her, or hear her, and it was a surprise when she placed her fingertips against my throat.

“Wrong continent,” she whispered, “wrong woman,” then she left the room.

In the morning the atlas was open to South America. Rio was circled in red. Europe was missing. At breakfast, as we were finishing our coffee, Sarah sniffed and said, “Love and war. If necessary, I’ll wipe out the world.”

For the most part, though, the days simply vanished.

I remember watching the war on television.

The same old reruns. There was a malaise, I remember, a weariness that imitated despair.

Ned Rafferty came down with the flu—a vicious case, fever and diarrhea. I remember dipping a washcloth into a basin of cold water, wiping his face, thinking what a nice guy he was. Even sick he looked strong. I can see his gray eyes aimed at the attic, how his beard framed a smile when he turned toward me and said, “Get out, man. Go. You’re crazy if you don’t.”

A slow recovery, but he made it.

And then chronology.

On Valentine’s Day, Ollie and Tina announced their engagement. They were married a month later—Nevada, I believe. The telegram mentioned a honeymoon in Mexico.

On March 29, 1971, Lieutenant William Calley was convicted of premeditated murder.

My father died on the twenty-first of April.

“Sit down,” Sarah said.

Then she told me. I forget the sequence—network sources in Montana—a hot line—and then she told me. All I remember is when she said, “Sit down.”

Forty or fifty hours seemed to drop away.

Daylight, then dark, then airplanes and a rented car and telephone poles and mountains and patches of snow. I suffered tunnel vision. Objects popped out at me: the A&W off Main Street, my father’s Buick parked in front of the house.

“You understand the problem?” Sarah said. “About the funeral. We can’t… I mean, it’s a problem.”

We spent the night in a motel up in the foothills. Rafferty was there, and Sarah, and the hours kept falling away. I remember sitting under cold water in the shower. Then daylight again, and Sarah cut my hair, and I was wearing a suit and a blue tie and black shoes.

A car ride, I remember that.

Then climbing.

“I’m sorry,” Sarah said. “You understand, though?”

I watched through binoculars.

Ned held me by the arm. Sarah stood off to the side. We were on a hill overlooking the cemetery and I could see the entire valley below, the highway running east-west through town, the golf course and the water tower and the slim white cross over the First Methodist Church. The sky was a smooth, dusty blue. There were birds, too, and cattle grazing along the hillside, and a brisk wind that pressed Sarah’s skirt flat against her hip. Farther down, the sunlight made sharp elongated shadows where it struck headstones and human figures.

I tried to focus on physical things. A good man, I thought. There was nothing worth dying for, but he always died with such dignity.

The binoculars gave it perspective—close up but also distancing. I studied the lead-colored coffin. That square jaw of his. He never ran or wept. A brave, good man. The wind was high and chilly, but there was bright sunshine as I brought the binoculars to bear on a mat of artificial grass at graveside. My father would’ve laughed. “Plastic grass,” he would’ve said. He would’ve looked at me and rolled his eyes and muttered, “Plastic.” I felt myself smiling. I could see him dying under floodlights at the county fairgrounds. He always died so beautifully. “Well,” he’d say, “let’s get this show on the road.” He’d wink. He’d tell me to look smart. “What the hell,” he’d say, “at least you got yourself a haircut.”

But it wasn’t worth dying for.

Nothing was, and I would’ve told him that.

Sarah touched my arm.

“All right?” she said.

I nodded and gave her the binoculars. After a moment she handed them back.

“If you want,” she said, “there’s some brandy. He wouldn’t mind, would he? Your dad?”

“I guess he wouldn’t,” I said.

“Just a drop, then. To beat this wind.”

“One drop,” said Rafferty.

We moved to a cluster of granite boulders and passed the flask. Rafferty slipped an arm across my back. It was a brilliant day, but the wind made my eyes ache.

I fixed on dignity.

Down below, things seemed much too small. I recognized Doc Crenshaw and Sarah’s father. It was all in miniature, the coffin and the hearse and the flowers and my mother. Even with the binoculars, she looked curiously shrunken. Worn down, I thought, and much too old. She wore gloves and a brown coat and a small dark hat, but no veil, and she stood slightly apart from the others, facing my father’s coffin. She seemed nervous. When someone offered a chair, she made a quick motion with her hand, as if startled, then shook her head and remained standing. Surprise, I thought. We know it can happen but when it happens there is always surprise. I felt it myself. Grief, too, but the surprise was profound.

“Your mother,” Sarah said, “she seems okay.”

They were praying now.

To the north and east the mountains were bright purple. While they prayed, I thought about chemistry sets and lead pencils and graphite. Odd thing, but I finally saw the humor in it. I was an adult now; it didn’t matter. I would’ve told him that. “Graphite,” I would’ve said, “what a moron.” I thought about how things happen exactly as they have to happen, but how even so you can’t help feeling some bewilderment.

When the prayer was finished, the minister moved to the head of the grave, the wind ruffling the pages of his Bible. There were no voices, of course, but it was easy to imagine.

The binoculars helped.

I brought the hole into focus. I saw my father kneeling in front of a Christmas tree—colored lights and ornaments—and he was smiling at me, holding out a package wrapped in silver paper. He wanted to say something, I know, but he couldn’t move or speak… I saw him mowing grass in deep summer. He had his shirt off, the hair wet against his chest, the smell of gasoline and cuttings, but he was locked behind a lawn mower that wouldn’t move… I remembered a game we used to play. The Pull Down Game, we called it. He’d lie on his back and I’d hold him by the arms and he’d struggle and try to get up, but I’d keep pressing down—I was a child, six or seven, I didn’t know my own strength or his—and after a while he’d give up and say, “You win, you win.” I had him pinned. He couldn’t move, like now. I saw him lying flat and looking up at me without moving… I saw him that way… At night sometimes, when he drove off to sell real estate, he’d flash the taillights at me—it was a special sign between us—but one night he forgot to flash them, and I was furious, I couldn’t sleep, and when he came home I wanted to grab him and hit him and ask why he forgot to flash the goddamn taillights. I wanted to yell, “Why?” And there were other questions, too. A million questions I didn’t dare ask and never would. What about Custer Days? The fairgrounds—why did he die? What was the point? Honor? Irony? What? I wanted to know. “I was just a kid,” I would’ve told him, “I hated it, every fucking summer you always died.” I would’ve pinned him down. I would’ve demanded answers. The Ping-Pong table—better than nothing, wasn’t it? Why the jokes? Why bring up graphite? What about the bombs? Real or not? Who was right? Who was wrong? Who’s crazy? Who’s dead? I would’ve climbed all over him. “You son of a bitch!” I would’ve screamed. I would’ve yelled, “Why?” Why so gallant? Those bright blue brave eyes—the world could end—he didn’t flinch—no one did—why? The world, for Christ sake. Why didn’t he cry? Why not dig? Why not do something? Dig or cry or something? Right now, it could happen, couldn’t it? Yes or no? Why such dignity? Why not anger? Why did he have to go and die? “Bastard!” I would’ve yelled. Through the binoculars I could see him squirming. I had him, though—he couldn’t move—so I’d fire the questions at him. The war, for instance. The whole question of courage and cowardice. Draft-dodging: Was he embarrassed for me? What did he tell people? Make excuses? Change the subject? Secretly, in his heart, would he prefer a son with medals and battle ribbons and bloody hands? I would’ve kept after him. I would’ve hugged him and held him down and asked all the questions that had to be asked. I would’ve told him what a great father he was. Such a good man, I would’ve said. I would’ve said all the things I wanted to say but could never say.

You brave son of a bitch, I would’ve said. I love you.

I tried to say it but I couldn’t.

It was all grief now. I looked away, at the mountains, and later Sarah laced her fingers through mine and said, “I think it’s finished.”

Below, people were mingling and shaking hands, sliding off toward their cars. Doc Crenshaw had my mother by the elbow. For a long time I kept the binoculars up, but finally there was just that relentless wind.

“William,” Sarah said.

I nodded.

“Another minute,” I told her. “Go on ahead, don’t worry. Just one minute.”

I smiled to show I was in control.

When they were gone, I watched the sky and tried to find some words. A bright, sunny day, but the wind made it hard. I wanted to talk about my life. Apologize, maybe. Tell him I’d be making some important changes. How it was time to stop running, and how I’d need help, but how, when the moment came, I’d pretend he was right there beside me under the yellow spotlights.

I had a last look through the binoculars.

The coffin was still there, unburied. I studied it for a while and then said goodbye and followed Sarah and Rafferty down the hill.

The hours fell away.

We had dinner that night at a restaurant near the motel. Around midnight Sarah went to bed and Rafferty and I stayed up late making plans. When I mentioned the guns, he looked at me and said, “You’re sure?” and I said I was, and he smiled and said, “Positive thinking.”

I slept hard for the rest of the night.

In the morning I took a wrinkled scrap of paper from my wallet, went to a pay phone, dropped in some quarters, and placed the call.

“What you have to do,” Chuck Adamson said, “is make it quick and clean. Cold turkey. Move, that’s all I can say.”

“I’ll need time,” I said.

“Time. That can be arranged.”

“A place to go.”

“That, too,” he said. “Time and place, I’ll handle it. From there on you’ll have to draw your own map.”

Behind him, the capitol dome had lost some of its shine. Otherwise not much had changed.

Adamson slouched in his chair, taking notes.

He was older, of course, and balding, but he still had those sad copper-colored eyes. Still jittery and preoccupied. I felt at home. I could almost hear him groaning—“You think you’ve got problems”—but instead he opened a desk drawer and took out a photograph and examined it for a moment and then handed it across to me. Surprise, but I was smiling. A handsome child: blond hair and a cowboy shirt and a big smile.

Adamson reached out and touched the photograph.

“Square one,” he said, “tell it to me.”

It took nearly a week. I started with the binoculars; I told him that I’d come to appreciate his fascination with telescopes. “That’s what it feels like,” I said. “My life, it feels like it’s happening inside a telescope.”

Over that first afternoon I laid out the chronology, or what I could remember of it. Peverson State and my poster and Ollie and Tina, and then Sarah, and the war, and Ebenezer Keezer and Nethro and life on the run, and then Bobbi—it was hard to get the order straight—but then Bobbi—and a missile rising over the Little Bighorn, and guns in the attic, and uranium dreams, and my father, and a sleek black submarine, and how in retrospect it all had the shape and logic of a chain reaction, cause becoming effect and then cause again.

When I finished it was dark.

“Well,” Adamson said. Then he rubbed his eyes and took me home with him.

It wasn’t what I expected: a huge old house on the outskirts of Helena, white clapboard with black shutters and a wraparound porch, and a cocker spaniel and a pretty wife and four terrific kids, the youngest just a baby. He put me up in a spare bedroom. At dinner that night, it felt as if I’d rejoined the world. Lots of laughter. Adamson clowning with the kids, a parakeet diving through the dining room, his wife shaking her head and smiling at me—a madhouse, she meant.

After dinner we played Careers. And then late at night, when we were alone, Adamson dished up ice cream and we ate it standing up at the kitchen counter.

I laughed.

“Well,” I said, “this explains it.” I made a gesture that encompassed the entire house. “I mean, listen. Now I know why you’re so miserable.”

Adamson licked his spoon.

“Right,” he said. “We’ll talk about it in the morning.”

But we never did. For the next five or six days I led him through the chronology again, slowly. It wasn’t therapy; it was purely practical. When I told him about Sarah, he asked the essential question: Why didn’t I go with her? There was no answer for it. Trust, I said. Or no trust. Did I love her? I did. Did she love me? She no doubt did. Then why? I shrugged: there was no answer for it. It wasn’t our universe. I didn’t know. Not our universe, that was all I could say, except no trust, or not enough, or the inability to see how it could end happily. But I didn’t know.

If you can’t imagine it, I said, it can’t happen.

I told him about Bobbi.

That much I could imagine. Why? he said. I didn’t know. It seemed possible.

I told him about Ned Rafferty. A person is defined by the quality of obsession, I said, and Ned Rafferty was a quality person. Ollie Winkler was not quality. Nor was Tina Roebuck, nor Ebenezer Keezer. Sarah was high quality.

“And you?” Adamson asked.

I thought about it. Up in the air, I told him. My obsessions were sometimes quality and sometimes not. Nothing lasts: that was not a quality obsession. But there was also Bobbi, and peace, and that was quality.

For many hours we went over these things, shifting back and forth, but the purpose was never therapeutic, it was always practical.

A serious problem, Adamson said. There were legal issues. There was the question of surrender. How exactly to go about it, and when and where, and all the attendant logistics. There were consequences to consider. Prosecution, maybe. Maybe jail. And beyond that, he said, there was the whole matter of deciding on a future for myself. “Not just any future,” he said, “we’re talking quality” and then he asked the simple, practical questions. Did I want a house to live in? I said, Yes, I did, very much. Did I want children? I did. What about a career? Geology, I said. What about love and happiness and peace of mind?

“The point,” he said quietly, “is that you have to try to picture the exact circumstances. The shapes and routines, the things you want. A blueprint. Then go out and make it happen.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Do you?”

“Yes, I think so. Take charge, you mean.”

Adamson shook his head.

“What I mean,” he said, and paused. “I mean you’re not a child anymore. Nowhere to hide. It’s a grown-up bitch of a world.”

On the last day we spent a few hours in his office and then he drove me over to the bus station.

It ended where it began.

“Cold turkey,” he said. “Time and place, I’ll set it up. From then on it’s your life.”

There was a final trip to Key West. When I explained my decision to Sarah, she nodded and said she’d been expecting it. “No hard feelings,” she said.

It took a full day to pack up my things.

That evening we sat in the backyard, just holding hands, letting the sim go down.

In bed, she said, “I have to ask this. Did you ever love me?”

“Right now,” I said.

The next day she took an early-morning flight for Miami. She was gone when I came down to breakfast.

“It’s you and me,” Ned Rafferty said.

We ate pepper omelets and drank Bloody Marys. In the afternoon we switched to gin, and then later, after dark, we rinsed our glasses and drank vermouth.

“Among the spirits,” Rafferty said, “we are presently well spiritualized, I would say.”

“I would say so.”

“To the spirits, then. To spirituality in all its diverse guises. To firewater.”

“And firesticks,” I said.

“Of course. Firesticks, too. But that comes later, does it not?”

“Later, I apologize.”

“Think nothing of it.” He bowed and smiled. “Firewater now, firesticks later. One must approach it with orderly spirit, must one not?”

“One must,” I said.

We drank vermouth on ice until the ice ran out. There was a winding-down feel to the occasion, a happy sort of sadness, and for a while we permitted ourselves the quiet to let it happen.

Later I felt myself smiling.

“You want the gist?” I said.

“Definitely. Couldn’t do without it.”

“The gist,” I said, “is I’m pretty damned fond of you.”

“That’s the gist?”

“That’s it.”

He looked at me. “I accept with pleasure. Finest gist ever spoken. I recommend we spiritualize it.”

“We shall,” I said.

There was no ice but I stood and made a speech about how we had become like brothers over the years, many scrapes, many untold thicknesses and thinnesses, and then Rafferty made his own speech, which was eloquent, and then we paused to remember our absent colleagues, which required solemnity and the last of the vermouth.

“To dear Tina,” Rafferty said, “and to Ollie, our honeymooning brethren. May they find joy in the overripened flesh.”

“Poignant,” I said.

“I thank you, sir. And to Nethro. And—let me think—and let us praise Ebenezer Keezer. May he stew in stir. May his darkest dreams come true.”

“And Sarah,” I said.

“Certainly. And God bless Sarah Strouch.”

I looked at my watch.

“So now?” I said. “I believe firesticks might be in order.”

“I believe so. Shit-faced, I believe.”

“The attic, then.”

“Most definitely,” said Rafferty. “The spirit most definitely beckons.”

It was a two-hour job. Earlier that morning, after Bloody Marys, we’d rented a van and tacked up curtains along the rear windows. The Gunmobile, Rafferty called it. We worked as a team, hauling the plywood crates down to the kitchen, then pausing for spiritual sustenance, then loading up the van.

I drove, Rafferty rode shotgun.

“Advance to the front,” he said loudly, “we must commence without compunction. Destiny, all that. Compunctionless. No more compunctions.”

I was intoxicated but not stupid. I took it slow up Roosevelt Boulevard, past a glitzy strip of neon along the Gulf side, both hands on the wheel, one eye closed, hitting the turn signal when I swung north onto Highway 1.

The road went dark after a mile or two. Rafferty switched on the radio and sang with The Doors.

After a time he put his head back.

“I am overindulged,” he said. “I am not well. I am the victim of impacted spirits.”

“Pull over?”

“No. Commence. Impacted upon.”

Then he chuckled and sang with the music. I measured the road with one eye. The hour was late and the universe was not entirely stable. To our left, I calculated, was the Gulf, the Atlantic to our right, but otherwise we were navigating a course between topographical unknowns. The Doors sang and Rafferty harmonized—We’re gonna set the night on firrrre. I concentrated on the center line.

The darkness was not altogether comforting, nor the unknowns, and I was down to one eye.

“How far?” I said.

“Firrre!” Rafferty sang, then shrugged. “I have no compunctions. Two miles, I would gauge. The running of guns is not—how shall we say it?—not yet an exact science.”

“An art,” I said.

“Quite so. Art. Artsy craft, even crafty craft. Could be a song in it.”

“There could.”

“Shall I sing?”

I took a bead on the center line.

“Firrre!” he sang.

There was no traffic. The road was flat and seamless, very narrow, and the sound of the engine mixed nicely with his baritone. The darkness amazed me. I thought about Sarah for a while, with something like passion, but then I decided it would be better to stop thinking. Then I thought about Ebenezer. This would not please him, I thought, nor Tina, nor Chekhov, so why then think about it?

Ahead was the smudge of Lower Sugar Loaf Key.

Deceleration, I thought, and I let it glide. I pulled off onto the shoulder, backed into a rest area at the Atlantic side, cramped the wheel, set the emergency brake, switched off the systems. Each operation demanded diligence.

For a few minutes we sat listening.

The blackout was total. Rafferty sat up straight beside me, holding his head.

“I detect no light,” he said soberly, “at the end of this particular tunnel.”

“Ready?”

“Of course. No light, no compunctions.”

Outside, there was a strange sort of silence, flying insects and tidal splashings along the roadbed. Commando vibrations: comportment was paramount. Dignity, I decided, and I felt brave and competent as we established a beachhead.

When the guns were unloaded, we took off our clothes and waded in with the first crate.

It rode low and heavy. Awkward but it floated. Close in, the water was warm and marshy-smelling, barely up to the knees, then cooling as we waded out. I had both eyes open. I could see birds and fireflies off in the mangrove. Vaguely, I wondered where the stars had come from; there were flashings, too, and reflections, but for once I felt powerful.

We steered the crate straight out.

When the water came thigh-high, we pried open the lid. The guns lay muzzle-to-stock, oiled and fleshy, overlapping, like tinned sardines.

“Such beauties,” Rafferty said. “You’ll have to grant the obvious. They are true, ball-breaking beauties.”

He touched a tooled barrel.

“Works of art,” he whispered.

Then he said, “Oh, well.”

We tipped the crate sideways and pushed it under and waited for final sinkage. There were soft bubbling noises. Presently a sheet of oil rose up and gathered in flecks of orphan light.

“In a way, you know,” Rafferty said, “it amounts to tragedy. Just in a certain way.”

“It’s a token,” I said.

“That’s what I mean. Tragedy. Fucking token.”

He ducked underwater. While he was gone I watched the oil spreading out, smooth and shiny. Even in the dark it had some color.

Rafferty came up smiling.

“Token,” he said, “I guess that’s something. Something positive, isn’t it?”

“I think it is,” I said.

“No compunctions?”

“None.”

There were fourteen crates altogether, then the ammunition. It was sobering labor. The footing was slippery with turtle grass and coral; in the mangrove to the east there was the nighttime babble of birds and reptiles and creatures I didn’t know. Mostly, we sank the crates whole. Once, though, we took turns disposing of the weapons individually, which was gratifying, standing naked in salt water and grasping a cool black barrel in both hands and using the shoulders as a pivot and spinning with the arms, then a howl and a snap of the wrists, then listening for the splash, and then saying, “Well done,” or saying, “Positive dynamics,” and then laughing.

Otherwise it was mechanical, just sinking guns. We inclined toward silence. We pressed the crates under and watched the bubbles. At one point, as we waited for a car to pass by, I found myself telling him about Chuck Adamson. Cold turkey, I said. Had to be a clean break. Too bad about Sarah—I did love her, I said—it just wasn’t our universe. Did he understand this? I shook my head and said I didn’t understand it myself, but did he understand? She was in the world. I was out of it. Did he understand this? She wanted engagement, I did not—was this understandable? Different universes, I said. Rafferty lay back in the shallows, floating faceup, and after a moment he said he understood, but he reckoned he would have to stick with her anyway, because he only knew about one universe, and here it was, and that was his way of looking at it. But he understood. Then he asked what my plans were and I told him I was trusting Adamson to work things out. “Just go,” I said, “anywhere but crazy.” Rafferty laughed and said crazy was a wonderful place not to go.

Then we hauled out the last crate and pried it open and committed it to the bottom.

In the van, heading for town, I thanked him for his partnership. More than a token, I said. Something positive. For my father, partly, but mostly for myself.

He sat with his eyes closed.

“Men of virtue, are we?”

“No,” I said. “Just positive.”

At the house I showered and put on a coat and tie and inspected myself in a full-length mirror. I looked presentable. The smile was straight and full, almost happy. The skin was copper brown, the hair was just a shade short of blond, and the eyes had a bright blue clarity which gave me pleasure.

I have a theory. As you get older, as the years pile up, time takes on a curious Doppler effect, an alteration in the relative velocity of human events and human consciousness. The frequencies tighten up. The wavelengths shorten—sound and light and history—it’s all compressed. At the age of twelve, when you crouch under a Ping-Pong table, a single hour seems to unwind toward infinity, dense and slow; at twenty-five, or thirty-five or forty, approaching half-life, the divisions of remaining time are fractionally reduced, like Zeno’s arrow, and the world comes rushing at you, and away from you, faster and faster. It confounds computation. You lose your life as you live it, accelerating.

Which is my theory, and which is how the next eight or nine years went by.

Chuck Adamson’s word was gold. Time and place, he’d promised, and he set me up in a small cottage in the foothills outside Fort Derry—no frills, but comfortable—eight miles from home, close to the old sources but far enough away. Always, to his credit, he was practical. He covered the rent, helped to furnish the place, bought me a pair of hiking boots and a beat-up Volvo and a Geiger counter. “Time and place,” he said, “so draw your map.” He never pressed me; he let me surface in my own way. On weekends, sometimes, he’d come to visit, but for the most part the time was my own. I became a householder. I learned how to regulate a wood-burning stove and how to spend the hours of night without terror. Just the simple things. Doing dishes became an important piece of business; it seemed civilized and honorable, a matter of consequence. Once a week there was garbage to dispose of. There was a floor to sweep, a woodpile that required vigilance and wise husbanding. Eventually, I knew, I would have to begin squaring the legal circles, but for that first year it was enough to let the days accumulate. I camped out and collected rocks and devoted many hours to my Geiger counter. It was all acceleration. Alone, listening through headphones, I followed the trace elements along a stream that led where it had to lead, as I knew it would, and at the source there was just the steady click of a geological certainty. It was my secret, though. I lived with it. Naturally there were times when the solitude pressed in hard, and I’d think about Sarah and the others, but then I’d think about the mountains and tell myself, No, that’s finished. Here it is, I’d think. Right here. Lying in bed at night, or sitting at the stove, I’d take satisfaction in the shadings of sound and temperature, the most minute increments in the density of silence. I noticed how even cobwebs cast shadows. I noticed how geopolitics made no perceptible difference in the movement of dust against a lighted lamp. For me, at least, the war was over.

The rest was a silhouette.

June 1971. I drove into town, parked on Main Street, and walked home. My mother did not seem much surprised. When I came in the back door, she said, “I knew it.”

There were changes. Her hands, when she touched me, were raw and bony, smaller now, and her hair, when we kissed, was thin and gray against my cheek. Her eyes were milky. Her voice was like straw when she said, “I did. I knew it.”

But the silhouette was my mother’s.

That night, and the next night, I slept at home. And my mother slept with me, in the same bed. It was just closeness, but we did sleep together. I explained that it wasn’t quite over yet. Not everything, I said. I told her I’d made the break. I held her when she cried—she was my mother—and I told her about the cottage and how Adamson had arranged it and how I was close by now and how I needed to be alone to sort things out. “But I’m here,” I said, “I’m home,” and we talked quietly and then slept together, but it was nothing except what it was.

Christmas Eve 1971. I remember a fine long-needled spruce and a pitcher of eggnog and my mother getting tipsy and a card from Sarah which said: Love me?

November 7, 1972, an electoral landslide, but it didn’t mean a thing.

Then Christmas again, and Nixon bombed Hanoi. Eleven days. Forty thousand tons of high explosives. But I reached out and found quietus: It was someone else’s war. Just a silhouette, form without content.

Then early spring 1973, a Sunday, and Chuck Adamson and my mother came to dinner. There were blizzard warnings. A hard wind, I remember, and sleet turning to snow. The cottage windows frosted over, but things were snug inside, and we ate turkey and drank wine and played Password.

“Pencils,” my mother said, and I said, “Graphite,” and Adamson was amazed.

Acceleration.

That half decade of rapid-fire history. Like a wind tunnel, wasn’t it?

On August 9, 1974, Richard Nixon said goodbye. He received his pardon on September 8.

In January 1975, the North Vietnamese Army began its final push. Ban Me Thuot was overrun on March 11. On March 20, Hue. On March 30, Da Nang. And then Quang Ngai and Chu Lai and Pleiku and Qui Nhon and Nha Trang and Kontum.

That fast. There then gone.

On April 17, Phnom Penh fell to the Khmer Rouge. The city was empty within four days.

A wind tunnel—am I wrong?

Silhouettes. Four days, an empty city. Form without content. And in Vietnam it was full retreat now. Children dangled from helicopters, and NVA troops were playing pinball at Cam Rahn Bay, and on April 30, 1975—that fast—the decades collapsed into a twenty-second dash up the steps of the presidential palace in Saigon, and then it was finished.

Take a breath and it’s 1976.

There were fireworks and tall ships. Amnesia was epidemic. Gerald Ford: My life was like his presidency; it happened, I’m almost certain.

In late summer of that year, 1976, there was another card from Sarah. It was a Kodachrome photograph of Rio at twilight, a little slick, but pretty, pinkish-blue reflections on water. I felt a kind of smiling sadness, though not really sadness, because in that water I saw what our world might have been, and in a way, I suppose, now was. I saw what she meant by commitment and passion, and it was present in that other universe, as love was also present, and as it would be present always. I thought about her a great deal; I’m sure she thought about me.

On my thirtieth birthday, October 1, Chuck Adamson suggested that now was the time. And I agreed.

There were lawyers, of course. It was not easy but it was not hard either. Like visiting the dentist: You squirm and tighten up, and maybe there’s an ache, but then it’s over and you touch your jaw and shrug and walk away. There was no jail. There was no trial. There were formalities and papers to sign, even pleasantries, and in the end it was almost a letdown, not enough hurt.

On January 21, 1977, President Jimmy Carter issued a blanket pardon—ten thousand draft-dodgers shot full of Novocain.

I began my graduate studies in February. Geology, it was a natural, and for the next two years I went underground in an entirely new way. I was an adult. I learned about the world we live in, all of us, which was finally a world of real things, sandstone and gold and graphite and plywood and art and books and bombs and the particles which make these things, and how each thing is vulnerable, even Bobbi, who was no longer a fantasy, but real. My dreams were glass. There were no flashes, not even a glow. I was hard and sane.

I completed my master’s in June 1979.

A time of miniaturization, it seemed. Our cars were shrinking; our daily affairs were printed on microchips. Across America, the streets were quiet. Richard Daley was dead and Gene McCarthy was in seclusion and I spent the last summer of that decade in the Sweetheart Mountains, deciding. Before me was the rest of my life. What I wanted above all was to join the world, which was to live and to go on living with the knowledge that nothing endures, but to endure. It was a matter of choice. I didn’t give a damn about missiles or scruples, all I wanted now was my life, the things of the world, a house and whatever hours there were and the ordinary pleasures of biology. I was hard and sane and practical. I wanted Bobbi, who was real.

And I knew where to start.

If you’re sane, I realized, you take the world as you find it.

Science dictated: The uranium had to be there, and it was.

All summer, and through the fall, I followed the trail up into the high ground, homing in, and by mid-October there was no doubt.

On New Year’s Day 1980, Sarah and the others came to visit. In a sense, I suppose, I was expecting them. Except for the years, nothing much had changed. There was some gray in Ned Rafferty’s beard, a few extra pounds at Tina Roebuck’s beltline, the usual wear and tear. It was good to see them. Ollie Winkler was a Christian now, and before dinner he led us in prayer, then we ate lamb chops and talked nostalgia. For the first time I felt at ease in their presence. Like family, I thought, and I was one of them—hard and sane and practical to the end.

Around midnight, after the others had turned in, Sarah and I sat on blankets in front of the wood stove.

“Son of a bitch,” she said. “Almost nine years. Not a word.”

She meditated for a while, then put her head in my lap.

“Kiss?” she said.

Later we held each other. Her skin felt cool and foreign. She laughed when I told her about the uranium.

“Well,” she said, “it’s a crime, isn’t it?”

I said, “No.”

Then I laid out my plans. It wasn’t crime. It wasn’t selling out. I was an adult, I said. I was able to take the world as I found it, and to use it, and to make what I could of it. When she asked about morality, I shrugged. When she asked about the flashes, I smiled and quoted Yeats: We had fed the heart on fantasies, the heart’s grown brutal from the fare.

Sarah thought about it.

“Oh, well,” she said, “at least we’re rich.”