Ob-La-Di, Ob-La-Da

The neighbors were going to toast the bomb. While we were running down into our basement/fallout shelter with canned beans in our hands, they were dragging lawn chairs up onto their roof and pouring piña coladas.

I heard them invite mom and dad over. One last big blowout before the end of days, they said. Come watch the mushroom cloud blossom with us. Mom said no, thanks, and made dad barricade the front door.

Mom herded us into the basement and we gathered around the emergency broadcast radio. Dad tuned into the CONELRAD frequency to listen for the first of seven trumpets to sound until it was fuzzed out by the EMP and then we huddled together on the floor and wept for the futures we had lost.

Sister Susie cried for the prom. She was sweet on a boy from school and just knew that he was planning to ask her. Now he probably never would. He either died in the blast or was soon to be drafted into the counter-offensive against the Soviets as cannon fodder.

Brother Billy and I cried for all the baseball games we would never get to play. We didn’t know it then but radiation from the bomb had also fried our testicles and given our swimmers seven heads like the dragon God showed to John at the end of the Bible. Had we known that I’m sure we probably would’ve cried for our mutant children too.

Mom cried for her parents and for the grocery store. Where would we go for Christmas Eve and Thanksgiving and Easter now? Where would we get food? Shoes? It was all too much for her to think about.

Dad was silent. I expected him to cry about work or about his car or about anything at all but he didn’t. If anything he seemed happy. The rest of us cried ourselves to sleep that night.

In the morning dad said we should go topside and see what was left of the world. Dad led the way up the stairs, clutching the pistol he had ordered from the Sears-Roebuck catalog a few months before when the Reds first started getting uppity. He looked back at us one last time and pushed the door open.

We all expected to poke our heads up into a crater. With our house blown away by the atomic blast we would be exposed to the raw reality of nuclear holocaust: MiGs wheeling vulture-like through the air in search of survivors to kill, packs of bandits and looters picking through the rubble, that kind of thing.

But our house was still standing and almost everything was as we had left it the day before. Mom, Susie, Billy and me sighed in relief. Dad seemed disappointed as he tucked the gun into the waistband of his pyjama bottoms.

The only thing that was different was the silence.

Up until then the house was never quiet. In the summer the sonic space was filled by the buzzing of the air conditioner; by the rattling of the heater in the winter. Failing both of those there was always the refrigerator humming quietly to itself in the kitchen. But now with the power gone the walls and rooms that made up our home seemed inert; somehow less than before. Too sturdy to groan in the wind that blew in off the fields on the edge of town and too new to creak with age, the absence of electrical life made the sterility of our prefab house too clear to ignore.

I ran to the television and started twisting knobs, more out of an urge to kill the silence than a real desire to watch anything. The cathode tubes behind the glass stayed dead.

“Dad,” I said. “I can’t get the TV to come on.”

“The bomb took out the power,” he said. “Find something else to do.”

“Will I be able to cook us breakfast?” mom asked from the kitchen.

“Is the electric stove you wanted electric?”

“Yes.”

“Then what do you think?”

Mom went to the pantry and pulled a dusty box of cereal from the top shelf. She told Susie to set the table and Susie did. Dad motioned for me and Billy to come over. He was prying the boards off the front door.

“Hold these nails,” he told us. We held the nails.

When the boards were off, dad opened the door and the three of us walked out onto the stoop. The neighborhood looked like it always had. White picket fence after white picket fence, emerald green lawn after emerald green lawn. It was hard to believe that this was the apocalypse. The only proof that anything had happened at all were the bleach-white skeletons clutching Poco Grande glasses on the neighbors’ roof.

As we stood there taking it in, I saw the paperboy pedaling down the street towards us. When he reached the end of the driveway, dad called out to him.

“What’re you doing, son?”

“I’m delivering the paper, mister,” the boy replied.

“Didn’t you hear?” dad asked. “The world ended last night.”

“I know, mister. But I gotta deliver these or I won’t get paid.” The boy tossed a newspaper at our feet and pedaled off and away without glancing back.

Dad shook his head and bent to pick up the paper. The front page was dominated by a story about the high school football team. The Bobcats were going to the playoffs. We watched him flip through it until he hit the third page.

Printed there in big black block letters was the headline MILLIONS DEAD ACROSS AMERICA IN NUCLEAR BLAST. Dad smiled as he read about how the commies had gotten the jump on us and cremated most of the country in the span of a single evening.

Then he blanched when he read that the word of the day was to be normalcy. We must continue on in spite of the near-fatal blow the Russians had dealt us. Johnson decreed that all surviving men were to report to work, all surviving children to school. That was the only time I’d ever seen dad cry.

He walked back into the house. Me and Billy stood on the front step and talked about nothing much until dad came back out in his suit and tie a few minutes later and got in his car. As he pulled out of the driveway that morning to go to work I saw him staring up at the neighbors’ grinning skeletons.