Authors: James Reich
Whenever she thought of the past, the nodes of history came with a neat, perverse rhythm. The clean succession and collisions of dates informed her that her assault on the nuclear industry was inevitable, fatal. Twenty-five days until her twenty-fifth birthday and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the meltdown, the death of the city. So few years ago, the Berlin Wall
still stood as a calloused membrane between East and West, between twin impulses of consciousness separated by gun towers and klieg lights. The lightning of schizophrenia flashed over Europe like probe beams over the shivering lobes of an exposed brain. Merely twenty-five years ago, during the Cold War, in the Sex War, the Stasi were still masturbating at the spy holes of the Eastern bloc, abducting women from lamp-lit corners. Reagan, the wounded President, the Hollywood star, was running America by astrology and chance. Gorbachev, the peasant farmer, his brow stamped with a red birthmark in the eerie pattern of what would become the Zone of Alienation, ran the other side, what was then her side. Later, she had discovered that her side was her sex, and that the end of the world could come with strange erotic sideshows and the invention of new wombs, fuselage sluts and distended factories, atomic submarines swimming in uterine seas. When she was born, only forty years had passed since the maiming of the Bikini atoll in 1946. Sailors and scientists, drunk on zombies, watched the bomb strip the palm trees. They watched it kill test animals chained to the decks of the dummy ships in the target zone. Those ships that were not sunk by the blast or the tidal waves that followed were scuppered to line the sea with contaminated metals. When she was born, only twenty years had passed since the 1966 Palomares Incident, when a shining B-52 bomber decorated with smiling pinup girls collided with its refueling plane, destroying both aircraft and dropping three hydrogen bombs on a small AndalucÃan fishing hamlet, leaving nets of radiation. The umbilicus of the refueling plane unraveled between sheets of metal, flame pouring from the ripped hose across the stockings of an airbrushed rip-off of Jean Harlow. A metal grin detached from the nose cone. A dislocated sex symbol, a girl, fell to the earth. A fourth bomb spun screaming into the Mediterranean Sea, the muted explosions scattering nuclear material and drawing a pigmented mist of plutonium across the village and its surrounds, a small, new Guernica for the back brain. As with the Chernobyl disaster, the Luftwaffe bombing of Guernica also occurred on April 26.
Neat numbers. Men called aborted nuclear weapons “broken arrows,” and she thought of the arrow shafts of the Aztecs splitting against the boiling breastplates of the Spanish, the sharpened points of the Indians' weapons futile against the conquistadores on their zombie ride up to Trinity. The Cold War and the Sex War: a mirror of terror, and a glare that men cannot meet directly. Like Freud petrified in the wet halls of Medusa, Colonel Paul Tibbets had his mother's name painted upon the shining fuselage of the B-29 he was to pilot over Hiroshima to drop the atomic bomb. Enola Gay Tibbets was transformed into a bomber. Recast in a parturiency of metal and rivets, she opened her womb and delivered the weapon they had named Little Boy from 31,000 feet. Children flashed into flame and were blown and scattered as ashes across the blackening ground.
The bloody afterbirth of the atomic age: red waves of fear and permanent nuclear alarm. Across the suburbs of the earth, fallout shelters echoed the quiet holocaust of women because the fallout shelter was little more than a kitchen policed by threat of extermination: the post-apocalyptic world would be a pantry under siege.
These realizations made Cash sick. Men watched the rising of twin tides, feminism and communism, with profound anxiety. These two socializing instabilities threatened their privilegesâa pair of precipitous dominoes, terrorizing them with psychic enslavement and physical impotence. During the mania of the McCarthy witch-hunts, all intellectuals were suspects, and, more than ever, men could not afford an intellectual class of women. Therefore, the rates of lobotomy spiked as agitated, intellectualized, sexualized housewives fell under the ice pick like Leon Trotsky.
In Madrid, a coyote whimpered. It was getting late. Cash decided to walk over to the Coalmine Tavern to drink and to eavesdrop. The bar also had a TV, which she did not. She put on her green cat's-eye glasses and performed
a dozen bicep curls to ease her tension, watching the muscle swell beneath her pale skin. For a moment, she saw through her skin as if in X-ray.
Behind the Coalmine Tavern were great slag heaps, seams of coal and black dust, and the hulk of a black locomotive fusing with its overgrown rails. The desolate coal train was choked with dead memories like the final train out of Chernobyl. Cash garnered a weird comfort from it, and from the entombed mines, and untended hills of coal. These were the same slag heaps that David Bowie struggled down portraying the alien Thomas Jerome Newton in the movie
The Man Who Fell to Earth
, a decade before her birth, the stronger gravity threatening his bird-like bones, his rust-red hair concealed beneath the hood of his duffle. Newton descended and walked before the dead train, tracked from a distance by a CIA agent dressed in a formal suit. Atomic power had destroyed the alien's home five times over. This new zone of alienation menaced the alien with corruption. That is why I am here, she thought, of all places, with the radon gas haunting the rocks. Varvara, Varyushka, the alien, the foreigner, in a place of outlaws where the horrific and absurdist games of the Atom, the Martian, the Illegal, the quick and the dead are played out. She thought of the Aberfan coal disaster, 1966; the alien on the slag heaps, 1976; Chernobyl and her birth, 1986. Ten-year pulses mimicked her heartbeat. She said to herself: They're so strange here, the trains . . .
The bar of the tavern was as long as a mess hall, dark with crude beams and murals of the locomotive and mining past of the town. The ceiling was collaged with dollar bills and remote currencies, wagon wheel chandeliers with plastic electric candles. At the far end of the room, a small empty stage created a vaudeville and carny space that could draw drunks like iron filings to a magnet. Cash took a seat at the bar without removing her hat. A Chihuahua dragged the remains of a hamburger across the floor.
“Cash, hey.” The bartender, Carla, strutted over in her cowboy boots. Her hair reminded Cash of dark seaweed moving in a heavy current. Carla wore a black T-shirt, knotted to expose her navel, where a red jewel caught the light. “So, what's up?”
“Not much. Long day.”
“Yeah, what happened to your face?” Carla leaned across the counter and took Cash's chin between her blue fingernails, turning her cheek.
“Oh, nothing, I just grazed it on a rock.” In the litany of pains from the attack on Trinity, Cash had forgotten the way the ragged monument had brought blood to her cheekbone as she embraced it, setting her explosives.
“Hope you gave as good as you got!” Carla laughed and began wiping a damp beer glass.
“Yeah, I fixed it.”
“Get you a drink, honey?”
“Vodka. Vodka gimlet, thanks.”
Carla brought the drink and Cash put her money on the bar. The ice in the green-tinged booze reminded her of the trinitite she now wore about her neck.
Carla asked: “You see the shit-storm from White Sands yet?”
“Uh, no . . . ” Cash squinted, removed her glasses to wipe some dirt away.
“The boys are expecting some developments. Ten o'clock news is coming up.”
“I guess I should stick around for the action.”
Cash began to watch the television that was suspended by a pair of heavy chains in the corner of the room. It was tuned to the local news station. Glancing around as she drank her gimlet, she realized that the hot plasma screen had the attention of almost everyone in the bar. The local news began reporting her attack on the Trinity monument. She finished her drink, and Carla delivered another with the efficiency of a glamorous machine. As the network teased out the exposure of the story, Cash froze with the drink obscuring her mouth and nose like a glass mask, listening without looking at the screen.
“Mystery continues to shroud the blaze that destroyed the historic MacDonald Ranch House close to Trinity, claiming the life of a Socorro firefighter after a burning viga fell upon the crew trying to save the building. The firefighter suffered head and neck injuries and passed away before arriving at hospital. Trinity is known as the site of the first nuclear detonation, and adding further to the mystery facing investigators is the explosion that destroyed the site's historic marker.”
Cash sat impassively, drinking, assimilating the news of the dead firefighter. If she were to be diverted by any death it might be that of a firefighter, those who had perished on the superstructure of Reactor IV, Chernobyl. Yet, this first collateral death at Trinity passed through her conscience without disturbing it. She permitted herself the narrowest of smiles. She passed the test of pragmatism. The news went on:
“There has been some speculation but no information regarding the identity of the so-called Trinity bomber. Now, however, as officials at White
Sands and Kirtland insist they are not unduly concerned and are refusing to overreact, they have released materials discovered at the scene. In a moment, the photograph that was found with this, this message at Trinity . . . ”
The station went to a commercial break: a Victoria's Secret advertisement for their summer bikini range was shown; wolf whistles rose in the bar.
The news returned.
The bar fell silent.
Finally, Cash was able to raise her eyes to the television to watch a beautiful Hispanic woman in twin set and pearls holding a transcript of Cash's typewritten message. Her eyes flickered toward a space beyond the cameras, as though waiting for permission. Her lip gloss shone beneath the studio lights. When it came, her voice trembled with nerves.
“Atomic energy, nuclear power is Russian roulette,” she began, modulating her tone. Cash knew the words and mouthed them silently into her vodka:
“I was born in what is now a wasteland. I cannot return. My city existed for sixteen years only. It took only sixteen years from construction for the nuclear reactors at Chernobyl until the meltdown with which you are all familiar. The reactors employed my family and the citizens of my city. No one did anything but tend the hive. The hive could not be sustained. Thousands of us were killed in a slow invisible fire. I was born in that fire on April 16, 1986. I am writing this because I want you to understand this twenty-five-year time span. Here, in April 2011, it is only twenty-five years since the incident, the accident, the horror that created the Zone of Alienation, and machined a sarcophagus from a womb. This is my warning.”
The newsreader paused. The camera closed in tighter. There was tension in the woman's face. Cash's manifesto trembled her hands.
“Many of you in Washington, California, Arizona, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Iowa, Montana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maryland, New Jersey, and Connecticut are oblivious to the fact that you are playing the same game of Russian roulette with 104 aging nuclear reactors. You are betting on death chambers. Their disposal tanks and containment shafts are overflowing. Let's not be sentimental, New York . . . ”
She hesitated again. The camera pressed closer. Her brow contracted.
“Let's not be sentimental, New York: an incident at Fitzpatrick, Indian Point, Nine Mile Point, or Ginna would make 9/11 look like the snuffing of two birthday candles. At any moment, swathes of land, cities, or entire states might have to be abandoned to radiation. There are no contingency plans for emergencies or for the encroaching waste. There are no vast concrete shafts in the earth to hide it in. It cannot be contained or disposed of. It is almost my birthday. I am inviting you all to a party. It is a party where everyone dies.”
A blow-up of Cash's Polaroid self-portrait appeared on the screen.
Her heart fell through her body. I fucked up, she thought. The snapshot showed nothing but a fuzzy exposure of cheek, a blurred blue eye, and a flash of messy black hair beneath her desert cap. The image was not even definitively female. Nevertheless, a hand clapped down hard on her shoulder and shook her so that her drink splashed from its glass.
“Hey, Cash, girl! It's you!” The man pulled at the peak of Cash's hat.
“Yeah,
right!
” she said, and the silent bar exploded into laughter.
She finished her drink in one long draw and left the bar with the sound of that laughter still ringing in her ears.
APRIL 3, 2011. ROBERT DRESNER ONLY KNEW HIS DIRECTOR AT
the CIA as The Voice. Dresner was at the head of a group of five other agents at Langley, a covert rendition unit known by the code name Cross Spikes, or sometimes as The Hand. He knew Cross Spikes as a name from sixty-five years ago. It had been explained to him. The Cross Spikes Club was the name of the gin-soaked watering hole frequented by the sailors, scientists, and journalists stationed at the Bikini atoll during Operation Crossroads. Dresner, his director, and the men of his watch communicated through ghost phones on an undetectable off-grid exchange.
In his sharp herringbone suit accented with a red silk necktie detailed with small elephants, Dresner strutted along the crowded concourse of Reagan National Airport. He walked like a pair of chrome garden shears. Fixing his grin, he shouldered between travelers. After a job, every face that swam before him was split with violence and the atrocities he might commit upon it. Looking around for a shoeshine stand, Dresner eyed the sleek calves of
a blond flight attendant, imaging them pressed against his shoulders as he fucked her, his left hand slapping idly at her pale breasts, his right choking her and releasing her, over and over. He always cooled off the aftermath of rendition by distracting himself with sex. People became ciphers, nameless mannequins under his blue-eyed gaze. His single testicle shifted in its sac as his pulse raced. The other had succumbed to an adolescent cancer.