The Nuclear Age (18 page)

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

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

“Off what?”

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

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

“It won’t happen, angel.”

“Tomorrow. In the morning.”

“Won’t happen.”

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

“Don’t say goddamn.”

“Goddamn,” she mutters.

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

“Can’t tell you.”

“Early?”

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

“Better hadn’t, then.”

“I already
did
.”

“You did, yes. Thanks.”

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

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

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

But it doesn’t stop me.

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

“Daddy!” Melinda wails.

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

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

“Baby,” I say.

“Now!”

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

I clamp on a bear hug.

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

“Better now?” I ask.

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

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

“Can’t happen.”

“Mommy said so.”

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

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

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

I know what must be done.

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

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

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

“I wouldn’t.”

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

Composure, I think.

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

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

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

“Done,” I say.

“What?”

“Relax, princess. All under control.”

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

Two things are clear.

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

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

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

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

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

Dig
, the hole says.

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

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

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

I won’t be blackmailed.

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

Dig—it’s my life.

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

Oh, yeah
, the hole says.

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

“Love,” I say.

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

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

I cut the telephone line.

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

“Good work,” Sarah would say.

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

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

The hole seems impatient.

So then. Get on with it
.

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

I return to the tool shed.

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

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

“You guys,” I say, “I love you.”

I perform each task as it comes.

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

Next the two-by-fours.

Speed is critical.

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

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

I nail a board flush to the door.

“Daddy!” she shouts.

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

“God!” she yells.

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

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

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

I kneel at the door.

The shakes have got me, and for a moment or two it nearly spills over into sentiment.

Melinda jiggles the inside knob.

“Well,” she says, “I hope you’re happy.”

“Almost,” I say.

“The
door
doesn’t work.”

“No, it doesn’t.”

She gives it a sharp tug. I hear a squeak but it’s solid. For a time the house seems impossibly silent, as if a furnace had shut down, then from behind the door comes the sound of a latch turning, a window sliding open. There’s a conference in progress. No doubt about the topic. Bobbi’s a poet, Melinda’s a child. It adds up to a paucity of imagination.

“Forget it,” I say gently, “I’m years ahead of you.”

My pace is brisk.

Not rushing, not dawdling either.

When I step outside, the night has become treacherous. A heavy rain now, and the Christmas lights seem blurry in the dark, almost mobile, like the lights in a dream, fluid and shapeless. There is an absence of clarity.

I find the ladder, place it against the house, climb nine rungs to the bedroom window. I take great care. I don’t want broken legs, not mine, not theirs.

The window is wide open. The gauzy white curtains billow inward, and through them I watch my wife and daughter. It’s a touching scene. Bobbi stands at the center of the room, in profile, her lips drawn in concentration as she ties the bedsheets together. She wears green cords and sneakers and a yellow cotton sweater. Poignant, I think. The bedsheets make me smile; it would be funny if it were not so poignant. A gorgeous woman—the breasts beneath that cotton sweater, the places I would touch, the things I would say. But now she tests the knot, frowning, and I can’t let it go on. Behind her, wearing a raincoat, Melinda sits on a blue suitcase, waiting, her eyes excited with thoughts of escape.

I feel sadness in my backbone.

If I could, I would climb through the window and take them to me and crush them with love.

If I could, I would.

Softly, though, I close the shutters. If there were any other way. But I pull the hammer from my belt and drive in the nails.

“Hey!” Melinda shouts.

It’s a two-minute job. If I could, I would do otherwise, but I
can’t. I seal up the window with two-by-fours. Guilt will come later. For now it’s just heartache.

“We’ll starve!” Melinda screams, but of course they won’t, I’ll figure something out in the morning.

The rain seems hot and dry.

There are no shapes, the night has no configuration.

The hole says,
Beautiful!

Inside, I take a bath, then shave, then busy myself with little household chores. I’m optimistic. I’ll reason with them. I’ll explain that it’s love and nothing else. I’ll be logical. Bowl them over with my own sanity. I’ll show them photographs of an armed nuclear warhead—that’s what I’ll do—I’ll do mathematics—I’ll slip the equations beneath the door.