The Nuclear Age by Tim O'Brien

Author:Tim O'Brien [O'Brien, Tim]
Language: eng
Format: epub, mobi
Tags: General Fiction
ISBN: 9780002230155
Publisher: Knopf
Published: 1985-01-01T05:00:00+00:00

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.

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