Going All the Way Read Free Page A

magazine he had stuck in his hip pocket, and plunged into it right at the hardest part, foreign affairs. As well as doing daily exercises in the fruitful, new life that the young man was going to begin, he had also promised himself he would keep his mind in trim, stay up on things, be alert and informed, and as part of this resolution he planned to read Newsweek magazine each and every week, not just the sports and entertainment sections but the world and national news and the art and literary parts. Most everyone read Time , and the young man figured he might have a little edge by being a Newsweek reader, might just be a little more in the know than your average citizen.
    The big world news was about the “crisis” of the Fall of Dienbienphu, the French bastion in part of the Commie Orient. It sounded pretty bad. The magazine said that
    While it might turn out to be only a heroic incident in the continuing struggle to contain aggressive communism, it might prove to be the cataclysmic event that would trigger a chain reaction culminating eventually in a third world war—this time an atomic war of unimaginable deadliness and devastation.
    Fuck it all. More of his kind of luck—the next world war not only wouldn’t be any fun, it would probably kill everybody. He often had this feeling that maybe if he ever got settled down, married to a great, sexy-looking babe who was also very tender and motherly—sort of a cross between Marilyn Monroe, Grace Kelly, and old Jane Gallagher of The Catcher in the Rye —and he had a great job that paid a lot of money and a couple of beautiful kids and had just moved into a cozy house with a lot of fireplaces and a white picket fence, he would go out to pick up the mail and look up in the sky and see a monstrous mushroom-shaped cloud, and that would be the end. He regarded the H-bomb too as a personal menace, a weapon uniquely and insidiously devised to scare the shit out of him, until it finally blew him to smithereens.
    He couldn’t finish the article about the latest world crisis, and he flipped through the magazine in search of some less depressing stuff. “Business Trends” said that the Atomic Energy Commission was encouraging colleges to expand their courses in “nuclear studies.” Senator Joe McCarthy was fighting with the Army, making more of his famous “points of order,” trying to scare everyone about the Reds in government. The first jet transport plane was almost finished. Roger Bannister had broken the four-minute mile. That was something, but the soldier already knew about that. He turned to the book section, hoping to improve his mind. There was a story about some philosopher who a lot of eggheads thought was hot stuff. It said:
    Sören Kierkegaard, a melancholy Dane of a century ago, is a triple-threat hero among modern intellectuals. He unwittingly fathered the gloomy philosophy of Existentialism. He anticipated the rise of modern remorse by developing a twentieth-century sense of guilt in the heyday of the optimistic nineteenth.…
    Shit. The soldier figured he was even born in the wrong damn century. The century of gloom and guilt. Wouldn’t you know it? He finished his beer and looked up to see if he could flag down the grumpy, indifferent waiter. A foom of the air-compression door announced the entrance of somebody new in the club car, and the young man turned to look.
    At the entrance to the car was the soldier whose face had floated up to haunt him from the steam of the hissing train on the platform. He was tall, built in an angular way with broad shoulders that sloped in a V to a narrow waist and hips, and long, slightly bowed legs. His face was lean and dark from the kind of a beard that never quite shaves completely away, leaving a permanent five-o’clock shadow. The face was naggingly familiar to the chubby young soldier who was staring at him, and yet he couldn’t quite place it. The tall soldier