An Atomic Romance (10 page)

16

The next afternoon, after five hours of sleep, Reed padded barefoot outside for the morning newspaper, slung in its plastic duvet into the grass, which was wet from a light shower. At the bottom of the front page, a two-line heading stretched across a three-column story:

BLUE FLAMES AT PLANT MAY BE
SIGN OF NUCLEAR REACTION

Reed emitted an involuntary low whistle. Standing in the moist grass, he skimmed the story. It was about the blue fire on the scrap heap at the edge of the wildlife refuge. A couple of scientists from Boston claimed that the flames were from an underground criticality—a nuclear chain reaction. Goose pimples on Reed’s legs began a chain reaction of their own and rippled to the back of his neck. He read on. Possibly the fire was Cerenkov radiation—charged radioactive particles from a nuclear reaction could give off a blue glow in water.

“Cerenkov radiation, my foot,” Reed said to Clarence, who was waiting impatiently for Reed to join him in a game of knuckle-bone toss.

One of the scientists wanted to fence off the scrap heap and take core samples. Taking a core sample of a criticality-in-progress was a novel idea, Reed thought. Enrico Fermi didn’t think of that one. The newspaper reported the blue flames as if they were as rare as the aurora borealis. But Reed himself had seen them probably a dozen times. He felt almost possessive toward the phenomenon.

When Reed arrived for his shift that night, he learned that a federal team had been there earlier and had left without comment.

“Blue fire when it rains?” Jim said with a laugh. “Well, now, that must be a nuclear bomb! Or else special effects from Hollywood!”

“It’s aluminum shavings,” a balding machinist nameless to Reed volunteered. “Or maybe uranium shavings. They’ll bust out burning when they hit air.”

“I’m sure uranium shavings are out there,” Jim said.

“You can have hydrogen come out of a chemical reaction when water is there,” Reed offered. “Or methane. Anything like that will cause a blue glow. Beryllium will catch fire if it hits the air.” He added loudly, “Not that anybody would admit we have a beryllium problem.”

“Don’t ask me,” said Jim, twisting his shoulders in an exaggerated shrug. “But if it was a chain reaction, wouldn’t it have blown the whole place up by now?”

“I haven’t seen it glow blue in months,” a big guy known as Beau said. He had recently transferred from the tails station, where the depleted uranium was withdrawn from the Cascade.

The blue flames appeared just after Reed dreamed of the dead woman. The dream had visually faded, but she still lingered in his mind, the way the strontium-90 in global fallout settled in children’s bones. He was grateful that he had not shared the blue flames with Julia.

He clocked in, a buzz of voices surrounding him. He checked his work package; he would be replacing a valve on the recirculating water system that cooled the Cascade. He wouldn’t need the moon suit for that. After changing into his snot-green scrubs, he grabbed the man lift and shot upward.

Reed towed his toolbox down the painted lane to the job site and stopped at a stairway to a catwalk. Eisenhower was a ghost, just a smear of white on the toolbox lid.

“Farewell, Eisenhower!” Reed shouted to the cavernous space above him. “You were a good soldier—for a bird.”

From a supply wagon, he selected a drive-impact wrench, about seventy-five feet of air hose, and a couple of chain come-alongs to pull piping. He carried them up to a section of catwalk above the cell rows, then returned for his oxyacetylene rig. It was hotter up there on the catwalk. Gazing up at the skeletal steel structure of the building, he imagined himself working lights at an arena concert, as his son, Dalton, had done one summer. While he manipulated his burning rig, his mind seemed to clear, along with the eyepieces in his goggles, as if he were peering through a retro crystal ball. The radioactive waste products from bomb-fuel processing had been left to accumulate and idle like abandoned old farm machinery. And now they were leaching into the ground and the water. Workers used to climb inside the large drums and cylinders to scrub them out with deadly cleaning chemicals like trichlorethylene, TCE, that got flushed into the soil. His father had done such jobs before him—without a respirator, without a TLD, without the anti-C suit and other precautions Reed took for granted. If his father hadn’t died in a chemical accident, would he now be suffering from leukemia or liver cancer? At the plant there were plenty of cases right now, stark emblems of a hidden past, although the doctors would not draw that conclusion because they hadn’t done the proper studies. His father and his coworkers had sacrificed their personal safety for the safety of the country. It was always put that way. Reed felt a spasm of grief, a longing for his father.

Of course the plant had hot spots, but he believed them to be contained. The plant was like a resort for wildlife. Raccoons and foxes played under the lights at night, and pigeons roosted on the steel stairways on the exterior walls of the Cascade. Just the other day, Reed saw a skunk scurrying beneath a piece of corrugated metal flashing. The old feed plant, where the UF
₆
had been concocted, served as a storage shed for old equipment that was too hot to de-con. He thought of his mother at Sunnybank, stored among the useless and decrepit, warehoused. The idea that his mother would die in the relatively near future still struck him as idiotic, a notion he couldn’t bear. But from time to time another emotion suffused him: he might be glad when it was all over.

He remembered Nurse Linda saying, “Now don’t let’s have a pity party, Miss Kitty.” He reminded himself that he would ride his hog off a cliff before he would have a pity party for himself in one of those final-home joints. The thought lifted his mood. He accidentally dropped a bolt through the steel grating of the catwalk and cursed.

Minimizing his motions, he finished the welding, repacked his tools, and carefully descended from the catwalk.

“I’m sorry to hear about your bird, Reed,” said Kerwin later.

Reed nodded. “Eisenhower was a magnificent bird.”

“He was great. I’m going to miss him!”

“He was no trouble at all. He was always waiting for me. Never complained.”

“If the stuff we’ve collected here is so powerful, why hasn’t somebody been building dirty bombs with it?” said one of the guys who had gathered to smoke. They were facing the cylinder yard, where hundreds of fourteen-ton cylinders of depleted uranium hexafluoride waited. Reed was gulping a can of orange soda and wondering whether intelligent life in other solar systems would take string theory seriously. The cylinders gleamed in the hard mercury lights.

“A lot of people love trying to churn up trouble, but we’re talking jobs,” said Ron. “I’ve got two babies to support.”

“Hell, they could shut the plant down if this kind of thing keeps up,” another of the younger guys said. “You know how these investigations go. And they could take the centrifuge somewhere else.”

Jim, bearing a backpack, had appeared on his ten-speed personal transport.

“Nobody’s going to shut the plant down,” he said. “Corporate wouldn’t do that—we’re making too much money. It would take a federal investigation and an act of Congress to shut it down.”

“Is that official?”

“They can talk about that blue fire on the scrap pile till they’re blue in the face, but there’s nothing new going on, really,” Jim said. “It’s what we’ve been dealing with all along—legacy waste. We didn’t make that mess.” He departed on his bicycle, its reflectors washed out under the vapor lights.

Reed was standing by the small grassy patch beneath a low exhaust vent. A clover plant was in bloom, big purple heads nodding in the flow of moist air from the vent. In winter the green spot turned to moss.

At home after work, Reed ate a head of lettuce over the sink and a can of beef stew—cold from the can. He felt like a slob, but nobody would know. He was dead tired. He took a long, hot bath, while studying illustrations in the Hawking book. A proton has two up quarks and one down quark, and a neutron has two down quarks and one up quark.

That day he slept soundly, heavy drapes darkening his windows. He dreamed that Albert Einstein was learning the fandango. The dream was long, with many practice sessions. Einstein seemed on the verge of getting the knack of the fandango, but then he would mess up. Then Reed dreamed that Enrico Fermi was eating an intact peach with a knife and fork. No one tried to stop him.

17

The next afternoon, when Reed arrived at Sunnybank, the director, a fashionably dressed but overweight woman with flawless makeup, informed Reed that his mother had eaten a good lunch, played miniature golf, and participated in a game of oral history.

“Oral history is a game?” Reed said, then slapped himself inwardly. Why was he always mocking people? He didn’t mean to. He tended to forget that for most people irony existed only on the simplest level—jokey prattle about quotidian trivia.

In the hall he greeted a man, bald from chemotherapy, who was wearing pantyhose on his head; the legs had been cut off at mid-thigh and tied in a topknot. Although Reed recoiled, the thought of his own head in the crotch and belly of a woman’s garment sent a wave of warmth over him, and then when he saw his mother, he had a distinct visual image of being born, descending from her belly, his bald head emerging from her like the tender tip of a penis. Did men spend their lives seeking that reconnection? Was that why women sometimes said that men think with their penises? He wondered if his brain was merely twirling on elementary Freud. He didn’t really want to get into this with Julia.

When he entered his mother’s apartment, she was standing by the window watching a bird feeder outside.

“Shhh!” she said.

There was no bird that he could see. Her bird clock, across the room, was silent. After a few moments, using the walker that she still had not mastered, she crossed the room awkwardly and sat down in her chair. He sat on the sofa—the old sofa she’d had for years.

“Gee, Ma, this is just like home. I hit that same spring on this cushion every time.”

She smiled. He thought she still appeared drugged, even though the doctor had lowered the dosage of one of her pills. She sighed.

“No place like home,” she said.

“Mom, I need you to talk to me about Dad,” he said gently. “Can you think back and tell me what you remember about him?”

“What must I say?”

“Just tell me about when you met him, and what you did together, and were you happy? It’s been a long time since he’s come up in conversation.”

She stared at the floor, and he was afraid he had provoked sad memories.

“Bones,” she said. “No, never mind.”

“Bones? Broken bones?”

“Bones and trouble. No, that’s not what I mean.” She paused, groping for words. “We had some trouble at the beginning. He’d start in the minute he got home, wouldn’t have a drop all day, then he’d go through half a bottle of vodka. It looked like water in the glass.”

Reed was surprised. “Did he get drunk?” he asked.

“Who?”

“Dad.”

“No, he never got drunk. He didn’t drink.”

Reed realized she had been talking about Mort, her second husband, whose poisoned, corroded liver had killed him. She never acknowledged his drinking problem. She called it a touch of lumbago.

“Mom, get Mort out of your mind.”

“He comes around here, just daring me to throw a pie plate at him. He had a woman with him. She laughed at me and said, ‘I’m his sugar bun now.’ What does he want from me?”

“Maybe he just wants to be waited on again. But you don’t have to put up with him, Ma! Throw them both out.”

“Hit the road, Jack,” she said with a smile.

“That’s right. You don’t need him. He caused you enough trouble.”

“Maybe Danny Daly will come back. I wouldn’t mind seeing him.”

“Oh, not Danny Boy! Haven’t you met some fellow here who could entertain you? Isn’t there anybody here you could strut around with?”

“These old men can’t hop and bounce.” She giggled. “There’s one who always has his hand in his pocket, playing with himself! Shoot! Life’s too short to mess around with these fools.”

Reed kept probing—ruthlessly, he thought with regret later. She just wanted him there; she didn’t want to rehash the bitter past. When an aide came around with a snack cart, his mother selected hot tea and macaroons.

“We’re having afternoon tea, like the English,” she said, as she fumbled with the plastic packet of cookies. She smiled. “Mort won’t catch me now.”

“The return of Mort,” Reed said to Shirley on the telephone later that day. “Mom said he came back just to annoy her. He’s been sneaking around. And he’s got another woman. He’s telling lies about Mom, blaming her for not taking care of him as well as this new woman does.”

“I thought you talked to the doctor about her medicine,” Shirley said.

“He’s trying to calibrate it. But a nurse told me that this behavior is to be expected. Transition fantasy or something.”

“Actually, that sounds just like Mom—only more so.”

“She mentioned his drinking. She never did that before.”

“She couldn’t have taken care of him all those years if she thought he was an alcoholic.”

“Well, I know she can’t be happy with Mort around,” Reed said. “And I sure don’t want to run into him myself.”

“Oh, Reed. Can’t you ever be serious?”

He berated himself for waiting until too late to talk with his mother about the early days of the plant and her memories of his father. She probably knew little of the actual secrets, but she would know about the atmosphere of secrecy. He suspected that there was something crouching in the background that was larger than just the sieving process of isolating uranium isotopes. He didn’t want to call Uncle Ed, who was a useless source, loyal to the core and given to platitudes. Reed wondered if he could find some answers in the library. Everything in his life seemed compartmentalized, like classifications in the Dewey decimal system. But at the library, instead of researching the history of atomic energy, he checked out a couple of books on molecular biology, so that he could have a conversation with Julia about her field—if the subject ever came up, and if he ever saw her again. She had told him on the telephone she was busy studying. He wasn’t sure if she wanted to see him again.

Both nuclear physics and molecular biology were about secrets, he thought, mystery worlds within worlds. The books lay around on his coffee table, and every time he opened one, colorful diagrams of abstruse cellular processes jumped out at him like bouquets hidden in a jack-in-the-box.

One remarkable photograph grabbed him: the front parts of an unidentified insect magnified hideously forty times. It was a science-fiction monster with long, curved eyelashes and a hairy mouth and pincers and a shapeless shiny hard sheathing.
The Creature That Ate
the Earth,
he thought.

The microscopic had a frightening character, not large and grand and soothing like the design of galaxies and nebulae. And Julia had insisted that he go right on down through the subatomic to the vibrating little strings. What was beyond or beneath the strings? Was it infinite? Wouldn’t it be the same as Einstein imagined space-time—looping back on itself, seeming to be infinite but because of curvature finite without boundary? He thought of the doormat his ex-wife had once woven out of recycled flip-flops. He was plodding along by guesswork.