Authors: James Reich
In another twenty-four hours, the first Saturday of April, the Trinity bomb site would be opened briefly to buses loaded with tourists. Even as she moved through the desert night, she pictured the tourists sleeping in their motels at that moment, waiting to visit the scene. As she closed in on it, she knew that the tourists were all dreaming of a giant fist over the badlands. Men would arrive dressed in reproduction Hawaiian shirts, khaki shorts, and navy blue caps embroidered with the word “Veteran,” and they would wear photochromic aviator sunglasses, the new uniform of the colonial. They would convene there glazed in a salt wave of sweat, breathing quietly through chapped lips, holding out their hands in supplication to the torrid wasteland. They would wait, as though testing for ineffable Japanese spirits in the air, tasting the nervous perspiration of a bomber cockpit dripping like brine from a can. The tourists would assemble, aching for the dim crackle of the original radiation. They were perverts. She hated them. Cash imagined the wives, traitors to their sex, clambering down from the stinking buses, zinc oxide on their lips, and sunscreen drawing a plastic sheen across their exposed skinâmannequins, target dummies.
Let it be said, she thought, imitating the revolutionary women's voices that struggled in her skull, let it be said that all tourism now is atomic tourism. And let it be said that atomic tourism is misogyny and self-loathing, that useless females will dress themselves in the twentieth century's most hallowed and fetishized fashion: the bikini. She will wear it as though a radiation burst and thrash of heat had torn and burned the clothes from her
back, so that she can get fucked. Let it be said that she will take laxatives and emetics and she will starve herself to wear the bikini; and that starvation is the insult of the bourgeoisie against the dispossessed, the evicted, the shivering sick island communities of the Bikini atoll, whose fishing grounds were vaporized, eviscerated, and destroyed forever by radiation, fallout, and sinking heavy metal wrecks. She fears melanoma from the beautiful reactor in the blue sky, but is unaware of the radiation shadowing the pale sands of her leisure, and the cities and the suburbs. Let it be said that a few years have separated the people from their carelessness and cruelty. This is the tourism of the Cold War and the postâCold War years: perverse leisure in the shade of specious power. You can bomb the shit out of Japan, but they still want to dress as Elvis. Aloha from Pearl Harbor!
Cash reached Trinity ground zero. Skeletal tumbleweeds gathered at the perimeter fence encircling the site. Otherwise, the only marker was a primitive twelve-foot obelisk of junk lava with its plaque: T
RINITY
S
ITE
W
HERE THE
W
ORLD
'
S
F
IRST
N
UCLEAR
D
EVICE
W
AS
E
XPLODED ON
J
ULY
16, 1945. This was what she had come for. From ground perspective, through the fluorescent green and black shadow of her binoculars, she could not see the graded circumference of the original hydrogen explosion that focused the old photographs, nor the curve of WSMR Route 13 skirting it, smutted with pale sand. As she lay on the desert floor, at the smeared lip of what had once been a thousand-foot crater of radioactive trinitite, the site was almost blank. The crater that defined the twentieth century had been cautiously, shamefully, filled in. The irradiated, pale-green hailstones of fallout had been interred, or bulldozed and shoveled away. The only sign of the detonation was the black monument, like a stone Typhoid Mary, pinning death to the subtly depressed dirt.
Cutting through the cyclone fencing, she bellied over the dust. She had studied this degenerate tourist trap from satellite library images and
magazine photographs, ripped sheets from
Life
, and copied from microfiche. She had inscribed the scene and the first blast within her. She remembered film of the vaporized tower that had suspended the bomb. She saw the device falling in frozen frames, black and shrouded in wires, a wrecking ball plummeting from a broken chain. She saw the façades of the test cities, artificial worlds that would be built and blown apart: Hollywood suburbs populated with department store mannequins, sidewalk scenes. In the distance, she summoned images of the scientists lying prone in the monochrome dirt, their hands to their blinded eyes as the fireball bloomed, eight miles high.
The volcanic minerals and jagged burrs of the Trinity obelisk caught the moonlight. The quadrilateral black cone, like a rotten fang, appeared taller than she had expected. The stone mimicked the shape of the metal tower that had suspended the bomb above the earth, an irony that made her want to vomit. It was as though an obscure cargo cult had recreated a rocket with mud and sticks. Approaching it, a distant silver glow falling over the plaque, Cash remembered a photograph she had seen of a family posing before it, laughing. She saw the obliterated tatters of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, skin hanging from bones in the flash; and she saw the inexorable burning of Chernobyl. She was repulsed by it, by everything that it represented. If she could find that laughing family, she would kill them. She felt her nerves, lobes, and lymph illuminated with hatred and depthless grief. Her breathing came with difficulty and her eyes began to tear. She tried to picture her mother, but there was no image. Her father was gone also. She had never felt so alone and alienated, confronting the sick phallic symbol of the slow death of the universe. She was afraid to touch it. Shivering, she removed her backpack. Unfastening it, she reached inside for the plastic explosives, the detonator and timing mechanism she had constructed, black and shrouded in wires. At last, touching the point of origin, fingering the mystery of a heat indistinguishable from that of her birth, Cash traced
over the large, raised letters of the plaque: N
UCLEAR
. She forced herself to embrace the obelisk, wrapping her arms around it as she fixed her putty charges, entangling it in the ivy of her cables. The rough stone grazed her face, bringing a gauzy streak of blood. When she spoke, addressing the monolith, it was strange to hear her voice after so many hours of silence. “
I've got you now, fucker
.”
Cash activated the timing mechanism and watched the first digital seconds of its ninety-minute countdown flicker away on the glowing red display. She retreated, scraping her torso along the grit of the crater zone, pushing her knees into the surface. A small metal structure modeled on a half-submerged bomb shelter had been constructed close to the monument for the atomic tourists. It had a shallow roof of corrugated metal with windows that would permit the tourists to look down into the sparkling green maw of the original nuclear blast crater in the same manner in which a glass-hulled boat permits a view of the floor of the ocean. Beside it a wall of a dozen rented portable toilets had been arranged. Cash hurried to the last of these and found it unlocked. The interior had been cleaned in advance of the tourists arriving in the morning. It smelled of domestic disinfectant. In the unlit plastic shell, she pulled her Polaroid camera from her backpack. Hastily, she grabbed for the rolls of electrical tape and the typewritten manifesto sheet she had prepared to leave as her death card. Shivering with cold and tension, she held the camera up before her face to shoot her self-portrait. This she would also leave behind. The flashbulb blinded her. There was no time to wait for her vision to adjust or to try to see the resulting photograph through her night-vision lenses. She shook the photograph in the cold air and blew upon it for a moment. With her teeth, she cut a strip of the electrical tape to fix the photograph to the back of the toilet door, hoping that it would survive, trusting that it would be searched for evidence. Below that she fixed the page of her manifesto. She would
give them a little of her identity to work with. Her photographic image slowly coalesced as she fled from the scene.
Three miles to the south, once more she passed within spitting distance of the MacDonald Ranch House. The adobe building had been restored and held in suspension to appear as it did in 1945 when it had been the folksy scene surrounding the final assembly of the mechanism of the atomic bomb. It was dangerous to approach it, moving on a missile route road, leaving boot tracks. Kicking through the mesh of the padlocked screen door and shouldering the weak antique interior door from its hinges, Cash pushed inside. Locating a museum case in the darkness, holding her breath, she crashed her elbow through the glass, casting burning matches onto the maps, photographs, and documents arranged inside it. Raising a flaming match ahead of her, she saw a crude computer-printed sign: P
LUTONIUM
A
SSEMBLY
R
OOM
. A cardboard display of old photographs leaned against the wall. Stacking it on a wooden desk in the corner of the room, she pictured it flaming toward the ceiling beams. Making certain that this was lit, Cash burst from the wrecked door frame, vaulted the low moonlit wall, and sprinted south.
Away from the restricted roads, she stumbled often, cutting her legs and bloodying her hands as she scrambled across the rocks, leaving thin trails of skin as though she were being ripped up in a coral forest. She navigated with the luminous face of her compass, struggling to work out her distance from the bomb. Her lungs ached in the frigid night air. Looking at her watch, eighty-six minutes had passed. It was time. Finally, she knew that she could stop running and face the remote blackness of Trinity. Ten miles from the blast site, her breath coming in raw heaves, Cash turned to watch her explosion. Nervously, she checked her watch again. In her obsessive plans, she had calculated that this was the same position Doctor Julius Robert Oppenheimer must have occupied as he watched his detonation
in July 1945. Then, across the gulf of rust-red rock between her and the beginning of the atomic age, the first flash came.
After the flash, she watched the mushroom cloud of her own bomb rising, an accusing ghost extending its arms, a bulbous fire head inclining and swiveling beneath the stars. Cash wished that she could have been closer to it, for time to crawl so that she might have watched the Trinity obelisk being blown apart in endless frozen frames. She pulled the heat into her, the smithereens and shrapnel of black lava and pallid mortar ripping through the night air. She wanted to see the dark plaque warp in the concussed night, glowing hot in the blast and smashing into the buckled net of the perimeter fence. It took several seconds for the sound of the explosion to reach her, a punch of pain from the ancient dirt. She saw Warhol's silk screens of the atomic bomb, death and disaster. Fragments of the obelisk were blown into the dark. Flaming meteorites of tar and lava rained down on the metal shelter. The portable toilets were blasted from the surface of the blast area, their sandbag moorings torn open, some with melting doors sending reeking chemicals into the crystalline desert night. Inside the flames, she saw Valerie again: her lost love, the wired golem waving her gun in a schizoid tornado of typewritten sheets, humiliated, rising out of the silver elevator of her rage toward the failed assassination of Andy Warhol. She shot him. She saw silk screens of electric chairs. These would never hold her. In the freezing dark, Cash was sweating from the fusion of her strange natal wounds with the livid constellation of the new wounds that she was about to inflict on America. Working alone, she would ignite more warning flares like this one, and she would accelerate into murder and shutdown.
On 5:29:45 am, All Fools' Day, the memorial obelisk at Trinity was destroyed.
AS CASH'S BLAST SPLIT THE LAST HOUR BEFORE SUNRISE, IN
confusion and disbelief, almost hesitantly, sirens groaned and howled across the infertile hills. She listened to the scrambling of jeeps and helicopters and saw the febrile web of searchlights gathering and blazing across the site. Alarms sounded across the wasted canyons. Blast doors sealed the Virgin Galactic spaceport and flashlights scanned the billboards and the concrete facility, illuminating the machines that had been used to construct the runway. Pressing herself between two rocks, she drank a pouch of orange juice and gagged as she sucked rations from another foil packet. She needed to run again. A helicopter passed directly overhead, its rotors coating her in loose dirt. It seemed that it did not detect her. It had begun. Through the dawn, Air Force firefighters fought to extinguish the brush ignited by Cash's explosives. Small piñons flamed like twisted effigies in the rising sun. Forensics crews in HAZMAT suits waved Geiger counters at the scene of smoking lava and twisted metal where the monument had stood. They studied the smashed glass of the
crater shelter and examined the scattered plastic toilets. Cash had made the decision to escape the desert and the region of White Sands Missile Range by retreating to the Southwest, rather than scraping north toward Highway 380, where she would almost certainly encounter more roadblocks and roving military police. Instead, she made her way toward I-25, the Rio Grande, and the town of Truth or Consequences. The route would be fifty miles to the interstate, retreating across bleak terrain, keeping herself invisible among the red and black rock formations, the furnace of day and the freezer of night. She planned to cross the river where it narrowed to the north of Elephant Butte and hitch the final stretch down to Radium Springs and her motorcycle. Sometimes she would hear a distant military jeep, the barking of a dog, or the transit of another chopper investigating the scene, looking for whoever had penetrated and attacked the site. These attentions buzzed like flies around an open sore.
April 2, 2011. The Trinity bomb site was not opened to tourists. The earliest buses were turned back, and all others canceled. Cars were halted before Stallion Range and permitted no further. No one would sell hot dogs. No one would pretend to be caught in a blast for cameras. Cash reached the Rio Grande at early evening. The final blood red swell of sunset gathered and poured into the canyon as she descended, and the darkness enwrapped her once more as she lowered herself toward the sound of water. Early April was too soon for rattlesnakes, but the rocks and scrub were themselves barbed enough to bite at her combat fatigues. The trees along the lip of the vermilion-lit crevasse recalled a strip of atomic blasts silhouetted against the oncoming night. When the stars penetrated, she saw them reflected in the river, bright as fuel rods, their radiation pulsing through eternities of decay, lethal forever. For a moment, she thought that she heard voices, yet as her ears sought the sounds, she discovered coyotes calling one another along the opposing watersides. The river grew louder
as the shale and mud slipped beneath her boots. The sides of the canyon spread blank black walls between her and the rising moon. Cash forced herself down and the freezing river stole her breath, stiffening her lungs and slowing her muscles as she fought to swim with the pack on her back and her clothes becoming dead weight. Water flecked and then poured into her windpipe as the current hauled her down. Cash began to drown, kicking weakly and reaching blindly into the nothingness that swallowed her. She coughed water into water. Silver bulbs exploded. Suddenly, she was caught on a hump of stones. Twisting and contorting, she found herself kneeling, vomiting across a shimmering mosaic of rocks. There, Cash lost consciousness.