“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.