Geoffrey OBrien - Dream time

This book made available by the Internet Archive.

We are what we think, having become what we thought.

The Dhammapada

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SUBURBS

Once upon a time in the suburbs the nine-year-olds stood on the playground talking about Hiroshima. As their ice cream dripped on the asphalt they felt their way toward the enormous structures of the grown-up world. Like little adults, they huddled together exchanging serious information. The acrid fumes of a cap pistol were incense to evoke visions of blood and battle smoke and armored battalions.

My daddy fought in Germany in the war. My uncle has a Japanese sword. A torn flag or the loading clip from a Luger were relics of a chaos outside the playground and its blue sky. The chaos had been the world. It happened just before their memories began. On long sheets of brown paper they crayoned their imaginations of it: red and orange and yellow bursts of flame.

To their senses the school building and the driveway and the network of suburban lanes had always existed. In that unwobbling geography of rectangular lawns and sliding picture windows the

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seasons revolved on schedule. The death of summer was calmly succeeded by Halloween, Thanksgiving, and Christmas.

In the classroom they sat through film strips of hungry faces and diseased bodies. These were the people of other lands. The teacher once wrote on the blackboard the word refugee and asked: Does anybody know what this means? In the corridor it turned out that somebodys mother had been a refugee once, in Vienna, in the other world.

Among the boys on the playgroundfor pleasure, to educate one another, out of a sense of the fitness of thingsan oral epic came into being, incorporating garbled fragments of Munich and Pearl Harbor and Stalingrad, of Rommel forced to suicide and Mussolini strung up in an Italian square. This was History, like in the Landmark Book of Alexander the Great , the Golden Stamp Album of Napoleon , or Jimmy Stewart in The F.B.I. Story. Everything was part of History. They would grow up and be part of it, too. It was something that happened in public, a kind of display. It was big and final. It had something to do with the awesome sleek shapes that filled the skies of Strategic Air Command or the arsenal of missiles poised to launch at the slightest tremor of the DEW-Line. They had seen the four-color diagrams in Junior Scholastic. Somewhere down at the end of every road of thought were the brave blue jets lined up on the runway for eventual takeoff toward dimly imagined Soviet mountains.

And that was called World War Three. It would happen, unquestionably. The label itself ordained it, because where there is a one and a two there must be a three, for completion. A childs logic is invincible.

They lived in a civilization that brought them things. They could count on a new crop of toys each Christmas, always a little more technologically advanced than last years models: tin robots that

Suburbs

spoke and walked, plastic rockets with a range of up to thirty feet. New television programs were provided each September to set the tone for that autumns play, whether the props were Davy Crockett hats or Zorro capes or a rifle like Chuck Connors used. Life was to be a succession of surprise presents from the entertainment companies. With the same regularity that the world produced new snow, new tulips, or new calendar years, there would always be new games, new dress-up disguises, new launchers, and new wired tracks; new jokes, new adventure stories, exciting new designs on packages of bubble gum.

Life in the future was going to be fun, and American kids were going to have the most fun of all. There would be telephones with picture screens. People would live on the moon under bubble domes. Electronic ramps would glide noiselessly into vast siloes. Everything would be shiny and in bright colors.

The future had a style all its own. That style was foreshadowed by the glassy houses that were coming to birth around them, new gleaming homes emerging out of empty lots with their disorder of thickets and vines, out of leftover chunks of forest littered with wire and rusted cans and torn bedding. The last tangled corners were annihilated. Dawn rose on leveled ground that was now a hard-edged lawn of unvarying green, in whose exact center a clean and seamless structure had poked up.

Older housesthe ones that still predominatedwere elaborate forms full of hiding places. Darkness gathered in their winding corridors and tall cupboards, basement labyrinths and tiny dormer-windowed attics. But in the new houses light was everywhere. It streamed across the patio, glistened on the chlorinated water of the aquamarine pool, lit up every corner of the airy living room. All the heavy furniture of the old architecture, the armory of plasterwork and banisters, had been flattened out and translated into broad sweeps of color, empty spaces of undefined function,

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rooms that seemed to open into one another. Here there was nothing to be afraid of. It was a bright world of light and space and calm water.

In the world of the old houses, no space was free of some reminder of its use. You always had to think about what you were supposed to do. But in the new houses there was space which you could make into whatever you wanted it to be. There were wide areas where you could roll back and forth and around. On the walls there were paintings that were not pictures of anything. If the old houses seemed repositories of secrets, the new houses were glass-bottomed boats in which the distinction between inside and outside began to blur. People wore swimsuits all summer and slung towels across the armless couch. When they bathed, sunlight enveloped them.