An Atomic Romance (21 page)

40

Reed filled out forms for the health screening at the walk-in clinic.

“Make a fist for me, dear,” said a lab tech in a flower-print smock. “Good. Now you’re going to feel a stick.”

The tiny woman seemed to be a trainee, but she appeared to be as old as his mother. A nurse in a blue cardigan helped to guide her hand, but the stick into Reed’s vein went awry.

“A rolling vein,” the nurse said. “Back it up a little.”

Reed wondered if senior citizens were infiltrating the medical establishment in order to monitor its abuses. She poked him again. Even though it hurt, Reed stayed silent. The nurse said, “Here, Miss Bonnie, follow my hand. Back it up a little.” The old woman seemed frightened. Her rubber gloves were loose. The nurse hovered as the geriatric lab tech drew several tubes of blood. The tubes in the tray tinkled like a distant shattering of glass.

“You’re getting the works,” the nurse said to Reed.

“I’ve already had the works.”

He got the breathing tests and the chest X-ray; he gave a urine specimen; he scheduled a colonoscopy for one week hence. A physician’s assistant examined his prostate. She was unattractive, with frizzy hair and a thick waist. His prostate felt healthy as a peach, she said.

“Did I leave out anything?” he asked. He was covered, ass to elbow.

He drove straight to the cytopathology lab where Julia worked. It was on the third floor in the rear of a nondescript medical building near the Interstate. He ran up the stairway instead of waiting for the elevator. Passing through the hallway of bulletin boards covered with research posters on ticks and viruses, Reed entered the outer office of the lab. There Reed asked the technician on duty if he could speak with Julia Jensen. A personal matter. Urgent, he added.

“I think she’s still out of town.”

“Can I find out how to get in touch with her?”

“I’ll ask Sandra. She may be able to help you.”

Sandra appeared, a short-haired woman in glasses. “She went off in a hurry, after her exams were over. She took a course in microbiology, and she’d been talking about going to the University of Chicago.” The woman squinted, sizing up Reed. “I think she may have gone up there to see about registering.”

“It’s molecular, not micro,” Reed said. “Wasn’t she supposed to be back at work by now? Haven’t you heard from her?”

“We expected her back last week, but I believe she called and asked for an extension.”

“So you’ve heard from her? Is she quitting her job?”

“I didn’t speak to her myself, and I’m not sure what her plans are.”

“Do you know how I can get in touch with her?” Reed jingled change in his pocket.

“I have no idea. Sorry!”

“Could I leave her a message?”

“Well, if she calls I could give her a message. Just write down your name and number.” She handed him a notepad bearing a drug ad logo at the top.

“Tell Julia I love her,” he sang. Did he really sing that? he wondered later, after he had written down the information and left it with Sandra, who tucked the notepaper in the pocket of her strangely cerulean lab pants.

In the vacant lot, the grass was drying to brown. The sky was clear and blue, with no hint of rain. Clarence was fetching a squirrel toy, his favorite.

“I’m going to Chicago,” Reed said to Clarence, who cocked his head and listened. “Burl’s going to look in on you at the kennel and make sure they’re treating you right. And when I bring Julia back, we’ll all go camp out at the lake and watch the meteor showers.”

Clarence seized his squirrel toy and began gnawing on it.

“I’m going to Chicago, Clarence,” Reed said, easing the squirrel from the dog’s mouth. “Forget Atomic Man. Just call me Captain Plutonium.”

He threw the squirrel and Clarence ran for it.

Reed rescheduled his shift so that he didn’t have to come in until Friday night. Then he called Julia’s machine and told it, “O.K., Miss Julia Jensen. It’s me again, one last time before I haul my ass off to the Windy City and come looking for you. I know you’re secretly checking your messages. Here’s my message: I want you to meet me at that sculpture at the University of Chicago. I’ll be hanging around there tomorrow, Tuesday, between one and four in the afternoon. I’ve got a bone to pick with Enrico Fermi. You be there then and we’ll have a
nuclear exchange.
You and I together can decide the fate of civilization.” He paused, then blurted, “And by the way, I want to see you because I love you.”

41

Reed stuffed his good duffel, e-mailed Dalton and Dana, said good-bye to Clarence at the kennel, and tanked up his truck. Riding in the truck was jarring, like driving over speed strips, but his car needed some transmission work. As he headed out of town, he nostalgically recalled the night last summer when he and Julia went in the truck to the cartoon festival at the drive-in movies, like some country couple out on a date after hauling hay on a long June afternoon.

Anonymous on the Interstate, he felt the warm rising of desire for her. He had so much to tell her: the plutonium in the deer, the science-fiction experiments, the night at Fort Wolf, the Celtic warrior, the church pageant. He could leave out Hot Mama. Julia had told him he was being dishonest with her, holding things back. That was true. But he would tell her everything now. She would be glad that he got the physical. His breathing tests were damn good, he thought. She would probably go critical over the plans for renewed bomb production.
We’re in this together,
he would say to her.

Once again Reed was hitting the road, letting loose. The astronaut Michael Collins once said that the point wasn’t to go to the moon but to leave the earth. Reed thought that was an easy rationalization for Collins, who must have been disappointed that he didn’t get to walk on the moon with Armstrong and Aldrin. For as long as Reed could remember, he had been leaving, but never really going anywhere, except in his imaginary Reedmobile. Today, though, he wasn’t an intergalactic tourist. He had an earthly mission. He was going to bring Julia back home. He couldn’t believe she would enroll in the University of Chicago without telling him. The lab gals must have been mistaken.

He held his breath and swept downhill past the silver anonymous box of an eighteen-wheeler. It could be carrying shipments of shoes. Or toxic sludge bound for Yucca Mountain—to wait in line until Yucca Mountain was approved as the national nuclear-waste dump. Maybe someday it would qualify for the National Register of Historic Places—with a plaque, he thought, so that no one would forget what was there. His mind wandered away then, and melodies surfaced. He wished he could make up a song for Julia. When he was a boy, he formed the idea that men always knelt and sang when proposing. A song could be direct, yet general, without sloppy barbs of reality. A song would go straight to the heart—making love or staying alive or getting by or shuffling off to Buffalo. If he could write songs, he would write about longing, like gases oozing out of the mud of his heart. Better still, he’d write a song about working, to say what he wanted to say to her in a form that embodied feeling more than talking did, with all its evasion and embroidery. A man’s work gave him identity, meaning, structure, a fucking raison d’être! He tried to think of some Delta work chants. Tote that barge. How did you tote a barge? Tow? He thought of his grandfather working on the levee, in mud and baking sun. His father heaving greensalt with his bare hands. Surely there was a personal song in all that.

It seemed impossible to think of an original melody. He tried a few lines, but each line he could think of went to the tune of “Eve of Destruction.”

Come on, baby,

We’re the Atom and Eve of destruction.

He envisioned Julia’s mind cruising blithely through the intricate pathways of molecular biology. What would she want with a cell rat? He was only a maintenance engineer; however complex and highly paid his job was, he still was a fix-it specialist, while she was exploring the unknown. It was like the difference between a fry cook and a chef. He remembered eating meat loaf in front of her during their first meeting. But he had made her laugh.

His mind boiled as he rolled down the road. Actually, he was still angry with her. She had wounded him. She was rude in not answering his calls. And she was so absorbed with viruses and her large plans that she wasn’t considering him. But his desire for her wasn’t just a gonadal flare-up. She was different, just different from all the other women he had known. He would be angrier if he weren’t so worried. She had told him so little about her sister’s troubles that Reed was free to imagine them. He entertained several scenarios dealing with drugs, guns, hospitals, jails. Something must have happened to Julia. He tried to remind himself that it wasn’t her habit to call.

Julia could be either alive or dead in Chicago, and until he knew which, she was both. If Einstein’s mind couldn’t accept indeterminacy, how could Julia expect Reed to fathom string theory? Physicists had probably thought up strings just in order to tie up loose ends. He wondered if the strings at the itty-bitty Planck level were analogous to the miles of DNA strands inside a cell. He made a mental note to ask Julia if DNA strands, like the p-branes in string theory, could warp in and out of dimensions. Through his windshield the world was commonplace: gray asphalt, broken lines, fast-moving vehicles, speeders zooming around him, green signs, azure sky, emerald corn, and yellow-green wheat. Bugs spattering the glass.

After all that had happened recently, he was surprised that he could add two and two. If he could just burst through his own subterfuges and talk straight to her—tenderly—then maybe they could face the darkness together. He would have to tell her about his exposures, his numbers, but maybe that would backfire. He felt she was standing in radiant light while he crouched somewhere in a shadowy corner of a dank basement. In recent months he had been bombarded with challenges from all directions, like neutrinos zinging through him on the road to nowhere, and his inherent cheerful-ness had deflated. But he believed it would return, as simply as a pop-up on his computer screen, if Julia came back to him.

But what difference would it make? Some dark, mysterious force was pulling the universe apart. The universe was expanding at an ever-increasing rate, like a burst of fireworks shooting into oblivion. Reed’s mind jumped backwards and forwards billions of years. How could it be that he was here now? How could it be that the human race existed, and that he was here to observe it? Sometimes he could not distinguish between his imagination and cold, bare facts. Now it hit him more deeply than ever what an unlikely pinprick in the absurd fabric of space-time human existence was. He slammed his hands on the wheel. He hated being stuck in his own head.

As he drove past immense cornfields, a thick green rug, he went over and over his situation. Every angle of vision revealed a different story. Each version was like a cornfield maze, shaped by a visionary farmer on a state-of-the-art tractor. You could see it only from afar, the way the pictures etched by Incas made sense only from the air. Either the Incas were trying to guide extraterrestrial visitors to a landing zone, Reed thought, or they could fly and enjoyed Sunday outings in the air to view this art form.

He exited and found gas and a chain restaurant that served baked chicken with brussels sprouts and braised fennel, which befuddled him and made him feel as though he were a time traveler—but from the past or future? He wasn’t clear on fennel. He felt better after eating, and he had a second cup of coffee.

When he returned to the truck, he noticed a sign, NO SEMI-PARKING IN THIS LOT. To park or not to park? he wondered. Or semi-park? Indeterminacy abounded. A misty rain had fogged his windshield, but as soon as he reached the speed limit on the highway, the sun broke out.

Reed was grateful when the skyline finally appeared, black towers illuminated in the late sun. The gleaming spires rose out of the prairie like stalagmites—a mutant village, overgrown, hardened from minerals dripping down from the poison sky. A city at a distance conveyed this freakish aspect, its surreal gravestones—underworld thrustings—reaching for the sun as if to pull it down.

Reed could imagine a dirty bomb hitting Chicago—limited fallout, some radiation sickness, more fear than damage. And he could imagine one well-dressed itinerant, wired with a backpack, ambling along Michigan Avenue. But a chain-link security fence shielded the mind from staging expansive nuclear theatricals—a self-protective function for which Reed was immensely thankful. The plutonium experiments had shaken him, but now they were easing into a restful little nook in his memory.

The traffic began to thicken and swirl, like flocks of starlings in an early evening sky. Reed shifted into the new rhythm, alert and slightly crazed. He was tired and hot, ready to have a shower and roam the city. He had always been fond of Chicago, even before he knew Julia. It had authority and pizzazz. It would do him good to have some time here before he met her tomorrow afternoon. As he swooped into the city, he felt hopeful. The complex of towers and tunnels and rails and neighborhoods jumbled together in a million mysteries. He glided along the expressway that led toward the Loop. A couple of years ago he came here with a woman named Frances whose goal in life was to shop at Marshall Field’s in her eternal search for the perfect purse. Reed had walked miles in the bitter wind while she shopped. Now he realized how much he had changed since then. He knew Julia would take him to someplace meaningful, like the Museum of Science and Industry, or the planetarium, instead of a department store.

After locating a chain hotel, he instructed the enthusiastic parking valet on driving his truck.

“You have to nudge it a little when it’s out of gear,” Reed said.

“I never drove a pickup like this,” the valet said. “What kind of mileage does it get?”

“Cool,” he said when Reed told him.

His beat-up truck was an old friend. He remembered the chartreuse Beetle ride in the rain, how Julia wanted to show him her new car.

His room was on the tenth floor, with a view of a brick wall. He pulled the curtain cords and closed his drama into its own place. The room was comfortable, with large pastels of old-fashioned street scenes on the wall. Exhausted, he stretched out for a nap. It had not occurred to him until he woke up an hour later that the room had a TV set, hidden behind cabinet doors like a prowler in the closet. He did not turn it on, though. He liked the silence. It was quiet enough to hear a mouse pissing on cotton.

At the lobby newsstand, he bought a map and went out walking. It was growing dark, and the streetlights were blazing. Some youths were banging on drums improvised from plastic buckets so loudly the sound hurt Reed’s ears. On a street corner he saw a spray-painted man—metallic all over, clothes and skin and all. Jiggly coil springs decorated his cap. The figure, blowing a noisemaker, staggered along—a titanium robot. A woman dropped a coin in his lunch box, and he jerked his hand into his coat pocket and teased out a lollipop.

At a noisy café Reed ordered pan-seared shrimp in a Dixie-beer reduction sauce and rosemary corn bread. Rosemary orzo, he recalled. So many sensations reminded him of Julia. He stayed for the music, a band reminiscent of the sixties, and ordered another beer. The music made him feel he was in a war, heavy artillery surrounding him. He wouldn’t have been surprised if a dirty bomb sailed through the door. He didn’t stay long. His ears ringing, he meandered through the flashing colors and adrenaline rush of the city. The spectacle of lights spiraled around him, as though he were in the center of a far-flung galaxy. Oddly, a surge of excitement was growing in him about making his pilgrimage to the shrine of Enrico Fermi, a man who, like Julia seeking the eradication of disease, had a dream of figuring out the essence of reality.

A fter sleeping well in his high-rise cocoon of silence, Reed bought a pocket guidebook and browsed through it while he ate breakfast at a café on LaSalle. Then he walked the city, wondering where Julia had been, where she would go now. He was on the alert for a chartreuse Beetle. He tried to remember places she had mentioned. She had said that a downtown shopping center—with one big store and a string of little ones—was called Fat Man and Little Boy. He had no idea where it was, or what its actual name was. He had asked the bellman at the hotel, who said Reed must be joking.

He walked along the lakeshore, where strips of sand rimmed what might well be an ocean for all you could prove by the view. He passed the pier with its Ferris wheel slowly winding up through the sky, floating down. In a park he saw a woman sleeping face down, her possessions beside her in a bag on wheels. A roller-bag lady, he thought, a witticism to tell Julia. It always unnerved him to see homeless people displayed in public like waste heaps. He glimpsed a tall ship far in the distance, its rigging shining in a trick of light. A cool breeze from the lake felt good. He noticed a man swimming parallel to the shore, a serious swimmer, swimming freestyle as if he were practicing to swim Lake Michigan. The water appeared gray and unforgiving. All of these sights moved Reed as something esemplastic, one interlocking set of sensations. He was thrilled to be alive.

From time to time, Reed was jerked to a standstill by the operations of his own mind. He was a single quark clattering around in an electron cloud, seeking another. He was a strange quark and Julia was a charmed quark. Here he was, in Chicago, alone, knowing no one except the valet at the hotel who had parked his truck, and Julia, who had disappeared. The sun was shining and it was a fair summer day, not too hot. Anything at any time could happen, and until then he was free.