The Nuclear Age by Tim O’Brien Read Free Book Online Page A

and if it hadn’t been for the headaches and constipation, I would’ve come through in good shape. Problem was, I couldn’t shit. Which brought on the headaches, which led to other problems.
    In any case, I spent the Cuban missile crisis squatting on a toilet. It was painful business, and embarrassing, so one morning on the sly I slipped down to Elf’s Drug Store on Main Street and swiped the laxatives. Except nothing much happened. A slight bellyache, a throbbing at my temples. I doubled the dose and drank a couple of Cokes and dragged myself off to school.
    That’s where it hit me.
    One minute I was sitting quietly in study hall, finishing up some geometry problems, then a dizzy-scrambly feeling came over me. A fun-house experience—topsy-turvy, no traction. In a way I felt very loose and relaxed, letting things spin, lying there on the floor while everybody yelled, “Give him air.”
    I almost laughed.
    I didn’t
need
air. I needed peace. I started to sit up, but then I felt a cool hand against my forehead. “God,” someone said, and right away I knew who it was. All those fake phone calls. “Man alive,” Sarah muttered, “just look at this, just look.”
    She unbuttoned my collar and began fanning me with a notebook.
    I closed my eyes. The situation, I realized, was not romantic, but still I felt a sparky kind of human contact. That thick voice of hers: “God,” she kept saying. A few seconds later, when I opened my eyes, the first thing I saw was one of her kneecaps, smooth and shiny. I could’ve licked it, or kissed it, but instead I jerked my arms and pretended I’d gone into a deep coma.
    “Wow,” Sarah whispered.
    I ended up in the school nurse’s office.
    One thing led to another, thermometers and ice bags, and a half hour later I was ass-up on Doc Crenshaw’s examining table. “Don’t sweat it,” I told him, “I’m all right,” but Crenshaw didn’t listen.
    His eyes sparkled. “Well, well,” he said.
    I never saw a man enjoy his work so much.
    He was a quack, though. He didn’t cure me. A week later my insides were clogged up again and the headaches were worse than ever. I was even running a temperature. Crenshaw put me through every test in the book, but at the end, when the results were in, he just wagged his head and told my mother that it didn’t seem to be anything physical.
    “Not physical?” my mom said.
    “You know. The opposite.”
    “Opposite.”
    “You know.”
    My mother allowed herself a half-smile.
    “Yes,” she said. “Yes, well.”
    Calmly, I tried to explain the situation. A huge mistake, I said. A plumbing problem, nothing else.
    My mother stared.
    “William,” she said, “stop hiding it.”
    “What?”
    “Please, I wish you’d—”
    “Hiding
what?
” I said. “Go on, let’s
hear
it.”
    Her eyes seemed to frost over. She was a thin, delicate woman, with tiny wrists and ankles. She hesitated, toying with her wedding band. “William,” she said, “just listen to me.” And then she rattled off the facts. Apparently she’d been doing some detective work at school, because she knew about the telephone gimmick and the fake dates, how unpopular I was, no friends or prospects.
    When I denied it, my mother stiffened and crossed her legs.
    “No arguments,” she said. “There’s someone we want you to see. Someone to talk to.”
    “Talk how?” I said.
    “Just talk. A counselor up in Helena. A nice man, I think you’ll like him.”
    “Jesus,” I said.
    “It might help.”
    “I don’t
need
help. I don’t need—”
    “William.”
    “No way.”
    “We’ll find a way,” my mother said, very thickly, very decisively. “It’s your future we’re talking about.”
    It was hopeless.
    I raised hell, of course, but two days later we made the drive to Helena. I didn’t say a word the whole way. Arms folded, I sat there in the backseat, staring out at the mountains and trees and telephone poles. Treachery, I thought. Who could you trust in this