An Atomic Romance (23 page)

“I bet you could dry your underwear really fast in one of those,” Reed said. He made her laugh.

As they ate sandwiches and drank coffee at a campus café, Julia chatted offhandedly about the kinds of courses required for a degree in molecular biology. Around them, students were studying and drinking coffee. A young Asian woman was methodically skimming through piles of papers. The students seemed sloppy, nondescript, like laborers. Reed thought he really should shift course—take up astronomy, carry a backpack, drink latte at coffee bars, get to know some intellectuals.

“I’ll be right back,” Julia said. “I have to go to the restroom.”

“I’ll be here,” he said. She hadn’t touched the other half of her sandwich.

Even though he felt he was in a foreign land, he did possess a great deal of experience—even wisdom, he suddenly thought with confidence—that these younger students around him did not have. His technical expertise counted for something. He listened to a couple of students discussing perturbation theory and bounds for eigenvalues. He couldn’t decide if they were discussing math, physics, or movies. They kept using the word
matrix.

“How’s your job going?” Julia asked him when she returned. “Anything happening?”

“Finding out that your job has screwed you is hard to take,” he said. “It’s like coming to the end of your life and realizing you’ve lived in vain.”

“We do live in vain,” she said. “I mean, when you consider the larger picture.”

“I still think I’ve done a good job, and an important job.”

He was surprised when she said, “I know, Reed. You’ve done a great job. I never said you didn’t.”

“If you lived here, would I ever see you?” he asked.

“I told you it’s hard to get into the program.”

“Suppose you did get in.”

She sipped her decaf latte nervously. He thought perhaps he should never have come.

“Do you want another cup of coffee?” he asked.

“No, thanks.”

“Don’t you want your sandwich?”

She shook her head no.

“You’re really serious about going to school, aren’t you?”

She nodded. “You know I want to do
something.
Even if I just found some kind of gene match in a BLAST search that would apply in some small way—that would be great! I want to at least help in some way.”

“Test tubes and mice?” he said. “I thought you didn’t want to kill anything.”

“No, you can do a lot on computers. Do you remember telling me that quantum mechanics was more like metaphysics than physics? Maybe there
is
a physics of the imagination. Maybe there’s a physics of the soul.” Her face was brightening now.

“And maybe Alice went through the looking glass,” he said. “Anything is possible. But I’m sure you could figure it out, Miss Superstring. You’re dangling me on a cosmic string.” He grinned widely. “You’ve got me so wound up in strings I thought I was going to disappear into a wormhole and come out the other side of time.”

“What? You don’t get it yet?” She laughed, teasing.

“I’ve got my shorts twisted in a wad over how many quarks in a quart and how many strings in a p-brane. My mind is worn out. I still can’t grasp it. It just seems unbelievable.”

“I didn’t say you had to believe it.” She smiled.

He slapped his forehead. “
Now
you tell me.”

She laughed. “You’re getting me off track. I’m studying microbes and molecules, not quarks and strings. All that was just for fun.”

He nodded and reached for her hand across the table.

“I’m with you,” he said. “If you want to study germs, that’s what you should do.”

“Let’s go sit outside,” she said, drinking the last of her latte.

They deposited their trash into designated black holes. He followed her outside, and they found a bench.

“Come here.” She reached in her purse for her lip gloss and applied it to her lips. “Now I can kiss you better.”

“Is it germicidal?”

“No. But it tastes good.”

“Yes, it does,” he said after sucking her lips. “But you taste better.”

Reed wanted to express all his profoundest regrets and apologies, but he knew that would be inadequate. He just wanted to hold her. He felt a long wail arise in his chest. Letting the wail come out, even halfway, almost silently, was a way of translating his painful desire into the long, sustained pleasure of an ending musical note.

“O.K. Level with me,” Reed said after a moment. “What’s been going on? I know there’s something wrong.”

They were sitting close together, his hand on her leg, and the western sun was glittering through some shade trees, dappling Julia’s complexion. Her mouth started to curl—a grin or a frown? It was a slight frown, he thought.

She said, “I don’t know how to tell you this, Reed.”

“You’re engaged to some other guy.”

“No! Don’t leap to conclusions.”

“You’ve got cancer!”

“Good grief, Reed. Stop leaping.” She laid her warm hand in his lap, sweetly close to his privates.

“What is it, Julia? If you just—”

“I’m pregnant.” She clapped her hand over her mouth as if she had uttered a dirty word.

“Heaven and earth!”

“It’s true.”

Was he grinning? He wasn’t sure. “I’ll be damned,” he said. His heart seemed to be doing some kind of Texas two-step.

“You’re the lucky one,” she said. “The only one.”

He wasn’t sure if she was going to cry or laugh. “I’ll be damned,” he said.

“I didn’t want to tell you.”

He could feel the blood drain from his head. He was afraid. He felt a hit of aphasia, a moment of self-consciousness that lacked context. On the verge of fading out, he could see himself, stunned, in this moment, unable to grasp who he was or where he was. He could see himself questioning himself. Then he returned.

“How are you going to cure disease if you can’t even keep from getting pregnant? That’s like not using rubber gloves when you’re in the monkey-pox ward.”

“I don’t have monkey pox. I’m pregnant.”

She was irritated, he saw. “I didn’t mean to be sarcastic,” he said. “I’m just stunned. I’m flabbergasted. Whopper-jawed.”

“I really surprised you, didn’t I?”

“Heaven and earth.”

“You said that.”

“What should I say—heavens to Betsy?”

She shifted her legs on the bench and stroked his arm. “I got all your messages, but I was afraid to call back. I had to think it through.”

He gave a low whistle. “How did this happen?”

“The presence of initial conditions—of a high order. Unpredictability,” she said. “One sperm with a hairy tail wins the race. He can wiggle the fastest and he gets to the egg first and bores a hole into it.”

“Aiming,” said Reed, nodding. “What did I tell you?”

“It’s violent!” she protested. “What did I tell
you
?”

“When did this happen?”

“That morning rush-hour—remember?”

The tender little scene came rushing back. Reed was speechless. His feeling came in waves of mingled breathlessness, glee, horror, giggles, anticipation. Exhilaration and dread. He ran the back of his hand over his eyes. He was frightened, and he was flooded with love. His whole life rushed around him—reconsidered, reconfigured. He was a man reassessing his whole life—let alone the fate of civilization—in light of new information. Atomic Man and Captain Plutonium were just Halloween costumes compared to this.

She was alarmed. “It’s O.K.,” she said, caressing his face soothingly. “You don’t have to feel responsible. I’ll handle it.”

“I imagine you getting an abortion on your lunch hour the day you found out.”

“Do you really think I’d do that without asking you? It hurts me that you’d think that.”

“I’m sorry. I’m a horse’s ass.”

She worried with some strands of hair. “But I haven’t ruled out anything.”

“This will get in your way.”

Reed wanted to ask if she was worried about birth defects, or if some kind of test could tell. Now wasn’t the time to tell her about his exposures.

“Have I ruined your life now?” he asked.

“Don’t talk that way.”

“What about school? All your plans?”

“Shh! Finally it was the fact that you said ‘I love you’ on the phone. I don’t think you ever found that easy to say.”

“But you always knew I loved you.”

“You never really said it.”

“Well, neither did you! I never knew what you felt about me. You were always disappearing.”

Impulsively, he issued promises. “I’ll take care of the baby so you can go to school. We’ll move to Chicago. I’ll take my retirement early.” She didn’t answer. “Or whatever you want to do,” he said. “We’ll join the circus.”

She laughed; together they laughed, like children, at the fix they had gotten themselves into. This was the fourth time in his life a woman had said the words
I’m pregnant
to him. The first was Carol, in high school. She went to Chicago with her parents and got the abortion. And then Glenda briskly announced first Dalton and then Dana, their children, shortly after each conception, as if they were seeds that had come up in her garden, little to do with him.

Some prematurely yellow leaves were drifting down from some tall ash trees. A bell in a stone tower began to chime. Reed felt a preview of mortality, as if he hadn’t paid attention all his life, until now, to the tolling bell of his heart.

“Why didn’t you call me and tell me?”

“I didn’t want to bother you.”

“You should have bothered me.”

“I had to think about it.”

He pondered that, and then he faced her squarely. “The thing is, you should have bothered me. And I don’t mean because of my pride, so that I could take charge. It’s so you can have somebody with you. A person can’t do everything alone.”

“I didn’t want to intrude.”

“You wouldn’t have. And maybe all I could do was just be there.”

She nodded.

“I want you with me,” he said. “If you live by yourself, you come home and you’re alone. I talk to Clarence, but he doesn’t give a shit about string theory, and he’s got bad breath. Maybe you can talk to somebody on the phone, or somebody comes over, but whoever it is has his own life and can stick around yours only so long. So you end up online or at some titty bar or god-awful hangout, meeting somebody that makes your skin crawl.”

She pushed her hair from her eyes. “That sounds terrible.”

“I’m not begging, Julia. I’m just saying that if the human race is doomed to die from nuclear mischief, then that’s pretty sad, and the best we can aim for is a giggle and a smooch. How about it?”

She gave a long sigh. “You’re like what you said about those transuranics in the pipes. You’re in my system and I can’t get you out.”

He grinned. “That’s me, Transuranic Man.” He felt hot. “Do I look strange?” he asked her. “I feel like I’m giving off a weird blue glow.”

She scrutinized him. “The sun is shining on your T-shirt.”

“Wait till you see me in the dark,” he said. “I’m a virtual walking criticality. I’m a criticality in your life.”

“No, you’re not. You’re critical to my life.”

Something about the scene was like the unreality of a movie ending, he thought—the warm, phony wrap-up. He tried to stop himself from seeing through it, from having the cynical suspicion that the walk into the sunset was an unending descent into flames. For a mere speck in space-time, that warm moment that
glowed
was essential. If you could have one or two in your life, that might be enough, but you had to have at least one before you went cold.

He stood, feeling that they needed to move along.

“Wait,” she said, her fingers twiddling a loose eyelash. “I have something in my eye.” She plucked the eyelash and then examined it closely, as though she was trying to see all the way past the resident microbes and mites on down into the dark, dancing strings that played the cosmic hum, the imaginary music he always heard in the pipes of the Cascade when he was working.

Acknowledgments

Works I consulted include
Making a Real Killing: Rocky Flats and
the Nuclear West
by Len Ackland;
The Elegant Universe
by Brian Greene;
Atoms in the Family
by Laura Fermi;
A Brief History of
Time
and
The Universe in a Nutshell
by Stephen Hawking;
Cell
and Molecular Biology
by Gerald Karp;
Hubble Space Telescope: New
Views of the Universe
by Mark Voit; and
The Plutonium Files
by Eileen Welsome.

I am grateful to various individuals for their gracious help in my explorations: Philip Crowley, Marty Curtis, Mark Donham, Kristi Hansen, Kristen Iversen. Thanks to Judy Krug, my enthusiastic tour guide in Chicago; to Suketu Bhavsar for his thrilling and poetic astronomy lectures; to Dale Bauer for the use of her Twinkie theory; and to Joe Gorline for his inspiration, generosity, and wit.

And I owe my personal thanks to Dottie, Roger, Sharon, and Sam.

An

ATOMIC ROMANCE

Bobbie Ann Mason

A READER’S GUIDE

An Interview with the Author

Q: An Atomic Romance is your first novel in ten years. Readers have come to expect your fiction to take place in a small town in Kentucky. Why did you change the setting for this novel?

Bobbie Ann Mason:
I deliberately set this in an indeterminate place in the heart of the country to suggest that it could take place anywhere in America. Not just the romance in this romantic comedy, but the troubling hint of nuclear mischief that lies underneath it, a threat that affects us all, wherever we live.

Q: What is an “atomic romance”?

BAM:
The romance between Reed and Julia is fired by a shared sense of wonder. They are essentially rational, looking to science to answer their questions. They are open to possibility and fun. They are entertained, not threatened by, the possibility of the indifference of the universe. They play with the nature of the basic, and extreme, contradiction of contemporary science: the order and design of the Einsteinian universe vs. the randomness and indeterminacy of the subatomic, found in quantum mechanics and string theory.

Q: Reed Futrell’s fascination with the cosmos is key to his character. Why did you choose to immerse Reed in this unconventional hobby?

BAM:
Reed is a dreamer. He dreams of traveling through the cosmos in his zippy little “Reedmobile,” freed from gravity and time. He contemplates the images from the Hubble telescope. And he tries to make sense of his own exposure to radioactive elements by arranging on his computer screen images of the planets that those elements were named for.

The book is about aspiration, the yearning toward the ultimate. People always want to find some higher meaning or transcendence, especially nowadays, in our post-9/11 angst. Reed and Julia are more attracted to Stephen Hawking’s questions about time and space than they are to easy answers to who we are and why.

Q: Julia is the second player in this “romance.” Tell us a bit about Julia. Do you admire her?

BAM:
Although Julia is practical, no-nonsense, not caught up in illusions, she dreams of making a scientific discovery that will cure disease. She is sensual and vibrant, ready to have fun with string theory or Hawking’s space-time. Julia says, “Who knows what might be out there waiting to be discovered?” I love Julia. I like the way she doesn’t care about her appearance and yet Reed finds her so sexy. I like her confidence.

Q: An Atomic Romance sets Reed’s working life in opposition to his love life. Why is Reed so dedicated to the plant?

BAM:
Reed is proud of being a working man. Most of the characters Reed encounters are seen while they are at work—the mini-mart clerk Rosalyn, the gun shop owner Andy, Burl the Bobcat contractor, and numerous others. Reed believes his job is important because he helps maintain the safety of the plant. He works at a uranium-enrichment facility, which prepares fuel for use at nuclear-power plants. Formerly it made fuel for atomic bombs. During the Cold War workers proudly contributed to national defense, but the carelessness and haste in handling toxic waste created a nightmare of pollution for subsequent generations. Reed is struggling with the weight of his legacy.

Q: What inspired you to use a scientific motif in the novel?

BAM:
It was inevitable, given the nature of Reed’s work. Working in the atomic industry, Reed is involved in the most deadly scientific developments in history. He has to come to terms with it and its history. He inherits a pride in working to defend the country by helping to build atomic bombs. Now, with proliferation, radioactive contamination, and the dirty secret we are afraid to talk about—nuclear terror—Reed has to consider what his job means. Moreover, he works for a corporation making fuel for power plants now, a peaceful if debatable process, but he has to go to the nucleus, so to speak, of the question: who were the scientists who thought of atomic energy? What were they thinking?

Q: How did you research the scientific aspects of the novel? Did you have to brush up on your string theory a bit?

BAM:
My expertise doesn’t go beyond the popular books. I think I’m probably not even up to Reed’s level, but I can grasp enough of quantum mechanics to feel the wonder of it. Physicists must feel they are in the most exciting field in the world. Their minds must be afire. What was especially fascinating to me is the way the cosmos—the infinitely vast—is perhaps mirrored by the infinitely small, the subatomic. This is Julia and Reed, looking in different directions but then trying to tie things together with strings, just as scientists are trying to find the Theory of Everything—and it might be strings.

Q: What do you feel is the major theme of the book?

BAM:
It’s all about dancing, I think. A romance. Spinning, whirling, dancing are central images: the spinning of the liquid uranium compound through the gaseous-diffusion process; the whirling of flocks of birds, centrifuges, minds and moods; the dancing of Reed’s parents to the Artie Shaw big-band song “Dancing in the Dark.” And what music are Julia and Reed listening to as they dance? Why, the cosmic hum, no doubt—the vibrating strings at the bottom of it all.

I think of the title,
An Atomic Romance,
as a celebration of the life force in the face of indeterminacy and chaos. That’s dancing in the dark. It’s one of the most exciting phrases I know.

Reed’s favorite poem is the familiar Coleridge poem “Kubla Khan.” I could hear words from that poem—“ceaseless turmoil seething,” “dancing rocks,” mighty fountain,” and “tumult”—echoing in the atomic fuel processing system, the Cascade. It was exhilarating to me to think of that central tension between the destructive power of the tyrant and the creative power of the artist. It seems so prophetic and apt. Maybe it’s about dancing in the dark.