The Nuclear Age Read Free Page B

me to hit the sack.
    “Sleep tight, tiger,” he said—something like that. Then he closed his eyes.
    Later my mother came by to tuck me in. I could tell she was worried. She kept clucking, smoothing down the blankets, touching me.
    Finally she sat on the bed and hooked her fingers into mine and asked if things were okay, if I’d been having any problems.
    I played it cool. “Problems?” I said.
    “You know—” She smiled tentatively. “School problems, friend problems. You seem
different
.”
    “Really?”
    “Really,” she said. “What is it?”
    What could I do? I couldn’t just blab it all out, tell her I’d been having visions of the world blowing up. Mothers don’t like to hear that sort of thing; they start blaming themselves. Besides, the whole business embarrassed me in a funny kind of way.
    I shrugged and rubbed my eyes and told her everything was fine, no problems at all.
    My mother patted my stomach.
    “You’re sure?” she said.
    For a long time, nearly a minute, she gazed at me in that scary way mothers have of psyching you out, getting you to spill out your deepest emotions just by staring you down. It made me squirm. It was as if she were digging around inside my head, actually touching things, tapping the walls for trapdoors and secret passageways.
    “I’m okay,” I said, and smiled. “Perfect.”
    But she kept staring at me. I forced myself to look up to meet her eyes, but the next thing I knew she was pressing her hand against my forehead, checking me for a fever.
    “You know,” she said softly, “your father and I, we love you a great deal. Bunches and bunches.”
    “Yeah,” I said, “thanks a million.”
    “You understand that?”
    “Sure I do.”
    “Seriously. We love you.”
    “I
said
thanks.”
    “And so if things are bothering you, anything at all, you shouldn’t be afraid to talk it out. That’s what moms and dads are for.”
    She went on like that for several minutes, gently prodding, coaxing me to talk. Finally I couldn’t take it anymore. Just to reassure her, to make her feel better, I manufactured a story about how I’d been getting weird flashes in my sleep, like lightning—bright zinging flashes—and I must’ve laid it on pretty thick, because my mother’s face suddenly seemed to freeze.
    “Flashes?” she said. “What kind of flashes?”
    I shrugged. “The usual. Just flashes, the regular ones.”
    Her lower lip puffed out at me.
    “Red flashes, white flashes?”
    “All colors,” I said. “Pink, mostly. And blue and green, you name it. It’s sort of beautiful, really, like a rainbow, I guess, or like shooting stars with great big tails, and then they start mixing together, they mix up into one gigantic flash, a huge one, and then everything sort of blows apart. It’s fun to watch.”
    “William,” she whispered.
    “But it’s okay now,” I told her. “I haven’t had a flash in a long time. Two weeks, I bet.”
    My mother scanned my eyes. “William,” she started. Then she stopped, touched her lip, then started again. “William, darling, I think it’s time for a checkup.”
    “Checkup?”
    “I think so, yes.”
    “The doctor, you mean?”
    She nodded gravely. “Just to be safe.”
    Clucking her tongue, speaking in the softly modulated tones of a school nurse, my mother explained that there were all kinds of diseases around, polio and mumps and so on, and then she kissed me, a long kiss, and told me I wouldn’t be going to school in the morning. “Right now,” she said, “I want you to get some sleep. In bed. No creeping down to the basement, promise me? No Ping-Pong.”
    “God.”
    “William?”
    I pulled the pillow over my face. “Ridiculous,” I groaned, but I promised.
    Next morning, first thing, Doc Crenshaw showed up with that black bag of his. I felt like an idiot. In the first place, I was perfectly healthy, not even a headache, and in the second place I hated Crenshaw with a passion you feel only once or twice in