And Sarah Strouch.
Sarah was Fantasy Number One.
Ever since high school, our relationship had been a classic love-hate affair, and at Peverson State there was no change. Two different people, two different worlds. She was a campus superstar—a cheerleader, of course—vapid, vain, cruel, and beautiful. The combination intrigued me. During our first year at Peverson, we crossed paths fairly often, in the cafeteria, or walking to class, but Sarah’s eyes would always slide over me with a kind of queenly indifference. She didn’t nod or wave. She didn’t smile. The signals, I thought, were not encouraging, so naturally fantasy took over. There was Sarah-as-she-was and there was Sarah-as-she-should-be.
At certain hours of the night she would slip into my room and put her arms around me and say, “Well, now, here we are. Just you and me.”
Or she’d sit quietly on the bed, smiling a secret smile while I finished my homework.
Not crazy.
Not mere whimsy.
To the contrary, those feats of imagination kept me sane. They were a means of connecting the dots, locating the hidden scheme of things. Who could become a surgeon, for instance, without first visualizing the surgical event, slicing open a human breast and prying apart the ribs and dipping into blood and gore? Our lives are shaped in some small measure by the scope of our daydreams. If we can imagine happiness, we might find it. If we can imagine a peaceful, durable world, a civilized world, then we might someday achieve it. If not, we will not. Therefore Sarah Strouch would say, “Imagine this, William—I’m all yours.” And it was somehow real. Or at least a kind of reality, the reality of what could be and might still be. Lying back, smiling with her eyes, she would perform uncommon acts of generosity and understanding. She would allow liberties—holding, touching. “Very nice,” she’d whisper, “just keep squeezing, don’t stop.”
It’s true, I lived in my head, but my head was a secure residence. There were no fracture lines. Sometimes I’d feel a little slippage, even some inexplicable sorrow, and yet with luck, with immense willpower, I made it through my freshman year.
I put up No Trespassing signs outside my door.
I papered my walls with obituaries.
No problem, I was fine.
Strange goings-on, however.
January 1966, a sophomore slump, and there were some disconcerting nighttime occurrences.
I watched a missile rising from the plateau beyond the Little Bighorn. Yes, a rocket, bright white with blue markings and a silver nose cone. “Ah me,” I said mildly. But there it was, sleek and conspicuous against the night sky. I could read the letters USA on its midsection; I could see the tail fins and the peeling paint at its rear quarters. This was not, I realized, a dream. This was a missile. At the time, which was well after midnight, I was situated in a reclining position at the riverbank. I was alone. I had no future. “Ah me,” I said, then came a high whining sound. The missile rose at a slight northward angle. It passed across the face of the moon. For a moment I feared the flashes might come, but there was just the missile climbing against gravity, beyond the football stadium, toward Canada and the Arctic Ocean, a smooth, graceful parabola that was not without mystique and beauty.
The omens were obvious. It occurred to me that the world’s mainspring had tightened up a notch. Much later, when I looked up, the missile had vanished and there was a light snow falling, soft and deadly.
“No sweat,” I said.
Imagination, that was my strong suit. I pretended nothing had happened.
But it happened, and it kept happening.
In February I watched thirteen marines die along a paddy dike near Chu Lai.
I recall an encounter with napalm.
Voices, too—people shouting. In the hours before dawn I was awakened by Phantom jets. I saw burning villages. I saw the dead and maimed. I saw it. I was not out of my mind. I was in my mind; I was a mind’s eyewitness to atrocity by airmail. There were barricades before public buildings. There were cops in riot masks, and clubs and bullhorns, and high rhetoric, and Kansas burning, and a black bomb pinwheeling against a silver sky, and 50,000 citizens marching with candles down Pennsylvania Avenue. I heard guns and helicopters and LBJ’s nasal twang: This will be a disorderly planet for a long time… turbulence and struggle and even violence.
Disorder, I reasoned, begets disorder, and no one is immune. Even Chicken Little got roasted.
But I held tight.
Day to day, I waited it out. February was dreary, March was worse. Delusion seemed optional. I couldn’t quite choose; I couldn’t unburden myself. In the bathroom, pants at my knees, it was easy to envision a set of circumstances by which I would ultimately expire of unknown causes in the confines of some public toilet stall—in a Texaco station outside Tucson, or behind a door marked “Gents” in a Howard Johnson’s along the road to Cleveland. It made a poignant image. A night janitor would find my corpse; the autopsy would be brisk and businesslike. For a month, perhaps, my remains would lie unclaimed, and afterward I would go to a pauper’s grave, in an aluminum box, and there I would present my modest tribute to the worms.
No question, I was depressed. Scared, too. One evening I picked up a scissors and held it to my throat. It was a ticklish sensation, not unpleasant. I drew the blade upward. No blood, just testing.
The time had come, I decided, to seek help.
Quickly, I dropped the scissors and walked down the hallway to a pay phone and put in a call to Chuck Adamson.
No answer, though.
So while the phone rang, I talked about the facts of the case. I told him I was boxed in by disorder. I described the pressures. “I swear to God,” I said, “it’s like I might explode or something. I keep seeing things.” Then I told him about that missile over the Little Bighorn. Nothing mystical, I said. It was there. I went on for some time about napalm and Phantom jets, how things were accelerating toward crack-up, high velocity, how I couldn’t cope, how I couldn’t make any headway with Gromyko and LBJ, how it was down-the-tubes time, the scissors, the temptation to call it quits, how I couldn’t shit, couldn’t sleep, couldn’t find my place in the overall pattern of events. “Otherwise,” I said, “I’m doing pretty well.” Then I pressed the phone tight to my ear. There were cracklings on the line, long-distance buzzings, but I paid attention while Adamson explained that he’d gone through the same experiences back in college, a tough time, and that it was finally a question of maintaining mental traction, keeping purchase on slippery winter roads.
“The first step,” he said, “is to stop talking to yourself.”
I nodded and said, “What else?”
There was a pause.
“These visions of yours. You have to figure out what’s fact and what’s—”
“It is fact,” I said sharply. “The war, it’s a fact.”
“True.”
“So?”
Adamson seemed pensive. “Imagination,” he said, “that’s your special gift, but you have to use it. Take charge. And stay away from scissors.”
There was a sharp clicking sound. The phone kept ringing, no answer, but for a few moments I was back in his office again. He winked at me. His eyes were clear and lucid. Smiling, he swiveled in his chair and stood up and went to the window. And there it was: the shining dome on the state capitol, buffed and golden. “Politics,” he said, “give it some thought.”
I was no radical, not by a long shot.
But what does one do?
I recovered. I spent the next six months seeking traction. Finally, though, what does one do?