Nuclear Option. Dorothy Van Soest

he stopped reading, then started again.

      At first, the mushroom clouds are far away, but they’re getting closer and multiplying. There are people lower on the hillside. They’re not high enough to see what I see. I call out to warn them. “The end of the world is here! Hug your children. Hold your loved ones. Tell them you love them. Say good-bye to them.” But they all laugh at me. They think I’ve gone mad. They turn away as if they don’t hear and go about their business as if I don’t exist.

      A woman in a long white robe appears before me with arms outstretched, palms up in a meditative pose. “Do not give power to fear, my dear,” she says. “Bring love to your fear.” I scream at her that it’s not just fear, it’s real, and we’re all going to die. But she just looks at me with a condescending smile and says “Bring love to your fear” again and then disappears.

      Norton tightened his grip on his journal.

      A young man in his twenties comes toward me and tells me I worry too much. He talks to me as if I’m a young child or a senile grandfather. “Our military has been on the cutting edge of missile defense systems for the past sixty years,” he says. “Nobody’s going to get nuked. They won’t let it happen.” I scream at him, tell him to wake up. Don’t you see? Don’t you see? He rolls his eyes and walks away, laughing. I fall to my knees and cover the back of my head with my hands just as I was taught to do during atomic bomb drills in public school. I howl. But no one hears me. No one will listen.

      He stopped reading and sighed. Then he gathered me in his arms and his dream became mine. We clung tight to each other for a long time, bound together by a shared terror in the depths of our souls, a terror not felt by others.

      After that, things were different. Something had changed between us.

      “My wife is like the woman in my dream who told me not to give power to my fear,” he said after we finally broke apart. “Chloe’s a good person, but her only goal in life is to be happy.”

      “I envy her that,” I said.

      “It’s so different with you, Sylvia. You understand me. We understand each other.”

      I knew he’d just crossed the invisible line that up until then we’d both honored. And I liked it, despite the tsunami of guilt sweeping over me. I waited for him to continue, wanted him to cross that line again, and he did.

      “Chloe and I see most things differently. She’s not keen about my involvement with the coalition, to put it mildly. She says she doesn’t know why I want to be such a killjoy.” I should have stopped him. Instead, I downed another glass of wine.

      From that point on our conversations deepened, became more and more personal. Norton told me stories about his son, Corey, whom he adored and lived for, whose future he’d be willing to die for if necessary. I told him about being married to Frank and living and teaching in the Bronx, how we’d moved back to the Midwest to live off the land in a one-room cabin and then divorced after I left for university to get a master’s degree and never returned. I told him stories about what it was like to be a foster care worker in a broken child welfare system. He told me stories about people he’d worked with at the post office for twenty years. As time went by, we dug further and further into our histories as if searching for special places where our lives converged, times when similar experiences meant we had somehow known each other before we even met.

      It seemed like we could talk about anything, that nothing was off-limits. Until one night, when he said he’d enlisted right after graduating from high school.

      “What was it like to be in the military?” I asked.

      That was when I learned that a distant look could take someone away from you in an instant. He guzzled his beer, then raised the empty can to signal for another one. When he finally spoke again, he didn’t answer my question.

      “You know, Sylvia,” he said. “It’s the accidents and near misses that scare me the most. Like last year, when the Soviets thought a nuclear attack from us was imminent and the officer in charge had only twenty-three minutes to respond. He told his superiors it was a false alarm even though he had no evidence that it actually was.” He stared off into space for several more seconds. “That man saved the world, Sylvia. That one man.”

      Then, without warning, he jumped to attention and looked at his watch. “Time to call it a night.”

      I longed for him to come home with me, longed to hold him, love him, have him hold me, love me, longed for him to let me in. “One more drink?” I said.

      He shook his head. “Tomorrow’s Good Friday.” He stood up and slapped a twenty-dollar bill on the table. “The vigil starts early in the morning.”

      I gulped down the rest of my wine, so drunk I could hardly walk, much less do anything else, and went home. Alone. Norton didn’t answer my question about his military service that night, and I never asked it again.

      ##

      At six o’clock the next morning we met in front of the sign that said “Headquarters of Nectaral: Worldwide Heating and Cooling Systems.” No mention of cluster bombs or guidance systems for first-strike nukes and cruise missiles. No mention of Nectaral being the biggest military contractor in our state. Over a hundred protesters were already huddled together on the sidewalk, bundled up in wool and shivering against a biting early morning wind. Some wore religious attire, their somber Good Friday mood blending with the muted colors of the two- and three-story homes in the historic neighborhood that circled the corporate compound.

      The gate to Nectaral Plaza opened onto an immaculately groomed park shaded by large trees. Benches were strategically placed around a profusion of flower gardens for visitors who, unless informed, would never suspect, from such beautiful surroundings, that they were sitting in the belly of an agent of death.

      Martin Lind, director of the Peace and Justice Coalition, shook all our hands and thanked us for coming. Martin had told us once that when he was in the army, some guys shouted “Jew boy” at him and then beat him with a duffel bag filled with rocks. I couldn’t help but wonder if Norton had witnessed something like that when he was in the military, if that explained his strange non-answer to my question last night.

      Martin’s deep, booming voice cut through the morning chill. “Even after years of protesting, the monster inside these walls keeps growing and growing. Which is why we have moved from protest to resistance. So . . . how many of you are willing to risk arrest this morning?”

      Many of those gathered were in affinity groups, support systems for people planning to commit civil disobedience in orchestrated situations such as this. They had been trained in nonviolent behaviors, strategies, and tactics. Half of the group raised their hands in response to Martin’s question, but this time I wasn’t one of them. After the police moved in, Norton and I planned to leave and spend the rest of the day together.

      Martin smiled at all the raised hands. “My dear friend Meridel Le Sueur says you can’t live in this century and be for anything that is true and just without going to jail occasionally.”

      “So do you think they’re going to arrest us today, Martin,” someone asked.

      “I met with Bigger yesterday, and he didn’t tell me how they planned to respond to our action today. Maybe they don’t know yet themselves.”

      Another voice rose up from the back of the crowd. “Who’s Bigger?”

      “Thomas Bigger is the CEO of the Nectaral Corporation.”

      Norton let out a snort and commented out of the side of his mouth, “Yeah, the charitable guy who adopted two orphans during the Vietnam War.” He snorted again. “Their parents were probably killed by his cluster bombs.”

      Jim, who was in an affinity group with Norton and me, stepped to the front of the crowd. He had a wooden crucifix strapped on his back to which a replica of a nuclear missile had been nailed. In silence, we formed a single line behind him and with slow, laborious steps walked toward the main administrative building in the middle of the plaza. A soft