But he had had sense enough not to attend any more demonstrations. That much, anyway. He kept away from them. They were poisoning him. When he got drunk, however, his mind – whatever the booze had left of it – returned obsessively to the subject of the reactors, the core rods, the containments, the inability to slow down a runaway once it really got going.
To the nukes, in other words.
When he got drunk, his heart got hot. The nukes. The goddam nukes. It was symbolic, yeah, okay, you didn't have to be Freud to figure that what he was really protesting against was the reactor in his own heart. When it came to matters of restraint, James Gardener had a bad containment system. There was some technician inside who should have long since been fired. He sat and played with all the wrong switches. That guy wouldn't be really happy until Jim Gardener went China Syndrome.
The goddam fucking nukes.
Forget it.
He tried. For a start, he tried thinking about tonight's reading at Northeastern – a fun-filled frolic that was being co-sponsored by the university and a group that called itself The Friends of Poetry, a name which filled Gardener with fear and trembling. Groups with such names tended to be made up exclusively of women who called themselves ladies (most of said ladies of a decidedly blue-haired persuasion). The ladies of the club tended to be a good deal more familiar with the works of Rod McKuen than those of John Berryman, Hart Crane, Ron Cummings, or that good old drunken blackout brawler and wifeshooter, James Eric Gardener.