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Kingdom of Fear
by Brant
Goble
Shortly before the U.S. entered
the Second World War, my grandfather joined the Navy, not because he was
drafted, but because he thought he might be. He ended up being
trained as a medic and stationed in California, nearly two thousand miles
from his family's home in Manchester, Kentucky. As far as I know, he had
no interest in science or medicine and even less in the California
sunshine. Still, it was a job, and they had to do something with the fat
bastard.
I was a nervous kid—all pallid
flesh and epileptic tics—who'd break out in hives at the slightest
provocation. Heights, snakes, poisonous things, and short-tempered
teachers (probably most of all)—I had all the normal phobias, but more
than that, I was simply afraid—seconds away from panic at any given
time. And my nerves only got worse as I grew older, and my stomach became
one great churning mass, until my fearfulness and anxiety reached a sort
of plateau. There's only so much adrenaline in the human body, and only so
many hours a day to be stricken with trepidation.
When, at the age of thirty, my
grandfather was finally palmed off onto my grandmother, he didn't own a
pair of shoes that fit, and, so the story goes, he was wed in his father's
shoes by a justice of the peace. His family—teachers, most of them—weren't
really poor. Rather, after he was discharged from the Navy and had
completed his degree at UK, he had moved back in with his parents, where
he stayed, stuffing himself on anything and everything put before him,
including raw onions and potatoes (which he ate like apples), chatting up
waitresses at the local diners, and substitute teaching three days a
week.
This was all he did for four
years.
I am always braced for
something, anticipating disaster at every turn, and I have almost
grown numb to it, and I wake more than a little surprised to be
alive.
I watch with fascination when
confident men crumble under the first shock of panic, as though they've
never experienced it before (and perhaps they haven't). These are
dangerous animals, apt to trample anyone who gets in their way, and
ruthless even to their own kind.
When my grandfather finally made
the (not very distant) move from shoeless proto-slacker to Federal
employee, he was armed with a Geiger counter and a box full of Civil
Defense pamphlets. This was all pointless, of course, by the old man's own
admission—duck and cover isn't much protection against thirty years
of fallout—except that it gave people hope to complement their
fear, making complacency that much easier.
Yet he went along with the farce.
He coveted prestige—the high esteem of very important persons—too greatly
to do otherwise, though he was never much willing to work for it. More
than that, he dreaded their criticism, his psyche's skin as thin as body's
skin was thick. Everyone with a mouth had a little power over him.
***
On the train ride to California,
the thing my grandfather dreaded the most, was not being sent oversees—the
thought of death of dismemberment never occurred to him—but rejection from
the Navy and the subsequent trip home alone, without the
companionship of his friends.
I am not as fragile as he was—as
easily shaken or intimidated and bullied into submission—and I'm not
entirely sure why, other than that I already expect the worst of my
neighbors, always previsioning their ill designs. Am I truly the better
for this, or of a sounder mind, or just more a cynic? At least I am not as
easy to rule, as passive and easy to placate with false promises of peace
or security; I, more citizen than subject in the kingdom of
fear.
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