The Nuclear Age Read Free Page A

scooted me in for a hot bath, I could hear them hooting it up, making jokes, finally tiptoeing down to the basement for a peek at my handiwork. I didn’t see the humor in it. Over breakfast, I tried to explain that radiation could actually kill you. Pure poison, I told them. Or it could turn you into a mutant or a dwarf or something. “I mean, cripes,” I said, “don’t you guys even think about it, don’t you worry?” I was confused. I couldn’t understand those sly smiles. Didn’t they read the newspapers? Hadn’t they seen pictures of people who’d been exposed to radioactivity—hair burned off, bleeding tongues, teeth falling out, skin curled up like charred paper? Where was the joke in all that?
    Somehow, though, I started feeling defensive, almost guilty, so finally I shut up and finished my pancakes and hustled off to school. God, I thought, am I crazy?

    But that didn’t end it.
    All day long I kept thinking about the shelter, figuring ways to improve on it, drawing diagrams, calculating, imagining how I’d transform that plywood table into a real bastion against total war. In art class, I drew up elaborate renovation blueprints; in study hall, I devised a makeshift system for the decontamination of water supplies; during noon recess, while the rest of the kids screwed around, I began compiling a detailed list of items essential to human survival.
    No question, it was nuke fever. But I wasn’t wacko. In fact, I felt fully sane—tingling, in control.
    In a way, I suppose, I was pushed on by the memory of that snug, dreamless sleep in my shelter. Cozy and walled in and secure. Like the feeling you get in a tree house, or in a snow fort, or huddled around a fire at night. I’ll even admit that my motives may have been anchored in some ancestral craving for refuge, the lion’s instinct for the den, the impulse that first drove our species into caves. Safety, it’s
normal
. The mole in his hole. The turtle in his shell. Look at history: the Alamo, castles on the Rhine, moated villages, turrets, frontier stockades, storm cellars, foxholes, barbed wire, an attic in Amsterdam, a cave along the Dead Sea. Besides, you can’t ignore the realities. You can’t use faggy-ass psychology to explain away the bomb.
    I didn’t need a shrink. I needed sanctuary.
    And that’s when the Pencil Theory hit me. I was sitting at my desk during the final hour of classes that day, daydreaming, doodling, and then bang, the answer was there like a gift from God. For a second I sat there frozen. I held the solution in my hand—a plain yellow pencil.
    “Pencils,” I said.
    I must’ve said it in a loud voice, too loud, because the teacher suddenly jerked her head and gave me a long stare. I just smiled.
    The rest was simple.
    When the final bell rang, I trotted down to the school supply room, opened up my book bag, stuffed it full of No. 2 soft-lead pencils, zipped the bag shut, and hightailed it for home. Nothingto it. I didn’t like the idea of thievery, but this wasn’t a time for splitting moral hairs. It was a matter of live or die.
    That evening, while my mom and dad were watching
I’ve Got a Secret
, I slipped down into the basement and quietly went to work reinforcing my shelter.
    The theory was simple: Pencils contain lead; lead acts as an effective barrier against radiation. It made perfect sense. Logical, scientific, practical.
    Quickly, I stripped the table of everything I’d piled on it the night before, and then, very carefully, I began spreading out the pencils in neat rows, taking pains not to leave any cracks or spaces. Wizard, I thought. I replaced the lumber and bricks and rugs, added a double layer of charcoal briquettes, and then crowned it off with an old mattress. All told, my shelter’s new roof was maybe three feet thick. More important, though, it now included that final defensive shield of solid lead.
    When I got upstairs, my father didn’t say much. He just frowned and shook his head and told