An Atomic Romance (5 page)

6

Two social workers waylaid Reed in the doorway of his mother’s room to say that the hospital wanted to send her to a nursing home in a couple of weeks, when she was discharged—for physical therapy. Her right leg had to be retrained, they said. The social workers—attractive women with fashionably severe hair-cuts—stood before him with clipboards. He didn’t trust people with clipboards. He knew guys at work who carried clipboards around just for effect—low-level managers inflated with self-importance because they didn’t actually labor.

“We don’t have any openings on our transitional-care floor here, and we feel she needs physical therapy from a qualified facility.” The blonde continued to state her case, her recitation dry as a stream-bed, until Reed interrupted.

“You’ll have to take her in a straitjacket,” he said. “She’ll refuse to go to a nursing home.”

“Let’s ask your mother,” the other woman said, her voice soaring like a hostess or a salesclerk working on commission.

“I’m too young for a puppy mill,” his mother said to the social workers hovering by her bed. They kept using the phrase “transfer to a facility.” Her speech was only slightly slurred. Her right hand worked in slow motion. He suddenly noticed his own hands—the rough-textured skin hiding crumbling bones.

Reed spoke briefly with the doctor, who made a pop-up visit after lunch. Briskly, the doctor, while writing his notes on the chart in the nurse’s station, told Reed that his mother’s health would likely deteriorate over time and that she could continue to have little strokes. “But she’s improving,” he said. “For the short term, she can probably regain most of her function. We’ll see, once we get her in a nursing facility.”

Reed met Burl in the lounge at the end of the corridor. Burl was pacing, his thumbs crooked in his jeans pockets. Reed could tell that Burl’s mind was flying in a hundred directions. Burl was brilliant in an oddball way, with so much creative energy he couldn’t contain himself. When Burl’s mind went into freewheeling mode, Reed would often glide into his slipstream, just for the ride.

“Hey, Burl, how are you doing?”

“Oh, I’m day to day. How’s your mom?”

“The doctor said she’ll probably get better, but then she’ll have more strokes later on.” Reed sat down in a vinyl armchair. “They want to send her to a nursing home.”

“If I know your mom, she’ll tell them to piss off.”

“It’s not good news. This can’t all be happening, Burl. I can’t get my mind around it.”

“I don’t know about your mama, but I know what you might need,” Burl said. “Colonic irrigation.”

“I will if you will. End of conversation.”

“Well, they say it takes the poison out of your system.”

Burl’s motto was “Happy to be anywhere.” Once, he had joined a troupe of entertainers on a riverboat. But he jumped ship before they reached landfall—he said he got river-sick. He had a license from a mail-order church, the Infinite Love Circle Church, to marry people. Burl himself had never been married. He couldn’t keep a woman interested because of his drinking. So when a woman ditched him, he drank more, or took speed. He attracted women easily enough, but then he mooched dinners off them.

Burl was dark haired and stocky. He wore his hair long, and he often sported a two-day growth of beard for several consecutive days. Reed wondered how he achieved that—and why. Both Burl and Reed spurned fashion. Reed wouldn’t wear a T-shirt with words on it. Burl did, because so many T-shirts that had ads on them were free.

When Burl was eleven, his father kidnapped him from his mother—after a custody battle—and took him to Detroit. It was two years before his mother found him, and she kidnapped him back. But his parents worked it out somehow and even got back together briefly after Burl’s mother took a liking to Detroit.

“What’s going on out there at Atomic World?” Burl asked, sitting in the chair next to Reed. It was early in the day, and he was sober.

Reed grunted. “I just do my job. I don’t know anything. I’ve got too much else to think about.” In truth, he realized, he was almost glad that his mother’s illness was diverting him from workplace woes. He said, “Julia probably thinks I get about ten rem a day just by going in the door out there.”

“How are you coming along with string theory?” Burl asked, playfully slapping Reed’s knee. “She’ll probably want to give you a quiz.”

“I’m studying it. But it’s like a magician’s bag of tricks.”

“A string bag?” Burl made Reed laugh.

A few months ago, Julia had challenged Reed to read the sequel to Hawking’s book on time. She said it was easy to browse around in it, and it had pictures. And she gave him a couple of other books on quantum mechanics and string theory.

“Ever hear of Schrödinger’s cat?” Reed asked. “Schrödinger was one of those quantum mechanics. He said put a cat in a lead box, then drop a capsule of cyanide in the box and seal it up. Now we don’t know if the cat is dead or alive, because we don’t know if the capsule broke, so technically it’s
both
until you open the box and find out which.”

“Won’t the cat suffocate anyway? Or starve?”

“You don’t wait that long to open it.”

“Well, then you might get a whiff of cyanide too.”

“That’s not the point!” Reed was trying to remember the point. “It’s subatomic stuff—something about how a particle can be in two separate states at once. Or, it’s about how you can’t pin down the subatomic stuff. It’s all indeterminate.”

“This is the kind of shit Julia’s jerking you around with?”

“It’s O.K. It keeps me from thinking other thoughts.”

Burl jumped up and bounded toward the vending machines. Then he turned to Reed. “You know it was scientists meddling with the atom that got you in the trouble you’re in at the plant.”

“Well, so what can anybody do about that now?”

“They tampered with Mother Nature!” He sawed one index finger against the other in a “shamey-shamey” gesture.

Burl found a couple of quarters and pinged them into the soft-drink machine. Reed shook his head no when Burl asked him if he wanted something.

“You know, I’m sure Julia’s blaming the whole fucking nuclear industry on me,” Reed said. “I kept telling her people have to have jobs.”

Burl opened his can of cola. He said, “If we don’t get the centrifuge this town will be going to its own funeral.” He pointed to the telephone cubicles. “Call her,” he said. “I dare you. It won’t hurt.”

Reed did. If he had waited any longer, he would have thought too hard about it. He got Julia’s answering machine, and he left a brief tongue-tied blurt of need.

T he Comet Hale-Bopp blazed westward, trailed by a twelve-billion-year-old star cluster and a young cluster of blue stars. Behind the stars were more stars, behind the galaxies more galaxies. Reed never tired of the Hubbles on his screen.

In his daily life, Reed’s frustrations could send him to the wilderness with a pistol to shoot targets. But when he contemplated a spiral galaxy or a massive globular star cluster, or even something as common as a comet, he swelled with imagination. In some miraculous mode of transportation that transcended the speed of light—the Reedmobile, that little ego-cart of a vehicle his mind had possessed since childhood—he wandered through the gas clusters and nebulosities, a tourist cruising the cosmos, protected by a radiation-proof shield, with windows. The time would be now wherever he was. Somehow, he thought that if he went on such a voyage deep into the universe, he would never feel lonely.

7

As his mother slowly improved, Reed got more sleep, but he still went to the hospital to see her every morning after his shift. In the early light, as he drove along the bypass from the plant toward the hospital exit, he had a clearer view of the changing city. It was growing, smothering and ingesting cornfields and pasture-land. A large farm that once sold its produce in a roadside stand had, in the last two years, transformed into a poultry-processing factory. Its water tower, a pale sphere on a tall stem, pressed against the sky like a painted moon. Dead chickens often littered the shoulder of the highway. Today Reed counted four white leghorns. Did they fall from the delivery trucks? Or did they escape from their coops at the factory, flapping and screaming in their short, hopping swoops toward the traffic? The dead chickens were becoming familiar, like icons on his computer screen. He considered scooping up a chicken for Clarence. But he didn’t stop.

A bundle of bones topped with a red wig—a scarecrow—had shared his mother’s room for the past two days. In the bright light today, Reed realized that the wig was actually the woman’s own hair, bleached strawberry blond, the roots a gray shadow. The woman sat upright, open eyed, impassive. She looked at least a hundred, but yesterday Reed had learned—through eavesdropping—that she was only seventy-eight.

“Is that you?” his mother asked, stirring from her sleep.

“I just got here,” Reed said, giving her a quick kiss. “How are you feeling, Mom?”

“Terrible. They keep poking me with cattle prods. I just get off to sleep and here comes another one. Is that candy over there?”

“No. Mouth swabs.” They did resemble lollipops. He offered her one and she took it eagerly. “Did you know there’ll be an eclipse of the moon this week?” he asked.

“I don’t care if they go to the moon,” she said, sucking on the swab. “If there’s not any grass, what’s the point?”

Her speech was clearer and her color improved. Reed cranked the bed so that she slowly rose into a sitting position. Bunches of her frizzy silver hair aimed in several directions.

“You look pretty today, Mom,” he said.

“I’m not ready to head for the pea patch yet,” she said. “Hand me some water.”

Her right hand flailed, tubes dangling from it like fringe. He removed the swab and held the plastic cup for her. The bend of the flexible straw was segmented like a hard-shell centipede. She took a few small sips, then eased herself back against the pillows. “Don’t you need to be at work?” she said.

A lab tech with a lab tray interrupted, and Reed stood aside while his mother’s blood was drawn.

“You’re going to feel a little stick, darling,” the girl said amid her procedure. Reed thought about Julia, in her lab coat. He longed to call her again but knew he shouldn’t. He had not heard from her. He knew he shouldn’t have called her.

He made some small talk he was not sure his mother heard, and the aide finished her work, withdrawing the tourniquet with a snap and slapping a piece of cotton on the wound. Another aide arrived and replenished the plastic water pitcher. The TV was tuned to the House and Garden channel, but not loud enough for Reed to hear. In a while, his mother was asleep again. He studied the lines in her face. She had on no makeup, and age spots speckled her skin like the camouflage pattern on a quail. It did not seem possible that she could have grown so old.

His chair fit in the meager space between the bathroom and a metal cupboard with two drawers. A drawer face was loose; the soap dispenser on the sink had lost its plastic cover. At the bottom of the drape on the window, a long string dragged the floor.

He stared out the window. He had a wide view of the plant, several miles distant. The weather had been cool and the steam clouds were well defined. He watched the steam rising, rolling and accumulating into marshmallow clouds on the horizon. From this perspective, he could see his life tamped down by the sky, with its illusory lightness and fluff. To the far right of the cooling towers, the twin smokestacks, skyscraper tall and fishing-pole thin, were puffing a precise line of gray smoke trails—as if the Cascade were exhaling its dragon breath. He observed the necks of the construction cranes rising above their dark hole. In the foreground, gas-station signs rose on high stork legs; a brick office park occupied a large portion of the near view. The highway interchanges and access roads and ramps cluttered the view below the hospital and across the parking lot. An S.U.V. was leaving, and as it drove out the exit lane, the orange mercury-vapor lamps along the street turned off, one by one, as if the vehicle were deactivating them as it passed.

He stood frozen at the window, his mother perhaps dying behind him, his future blowing before him like smoke rings. He tried to imagine what an astronaut would see, peering down on that patch of green earth with its gray scar, the earth still steaming from its little wound.

H is mother had not been strict with him, as she had been with Shirley. He had spent his childhood looking for trouble, and he had found his share. Foibles. That was his mother’s term for his failings—foibles. It was a gesture of forgiveness, he thought.

He remembered the time he went to see her just after her third husband walked out on her. When Reed arrived, buzzed on a little weed, she offered him some Old Crow, and they watched a tape of an old musical-variety show. He remembered her kick-stepping along with the June Taylor Dancers, a group from the days before aerobics classes. In the middle of her dance, the telephone rang and she answered, “Rainbow Room.” It was her nosy aunt Willoughby, who told her she had seen Danny Daly, the wayward third husband, with a woman at the mall. The woman was wearing a dog collar above her knee like a bracelet, and they were shopping for camping gear. Reed’s mother, radiant with the bourbon, spouted to Willoughby, “I guess they plan to shack up together, if you can do that in a tent.” She giggled. It struck Reed that his mother was astonishingly sexy, with a streamlined figure and bouncy, tennis-ball breasts. He could see how a man would fall for her and couldn’t see why Danny would go for a woman with a dog collar on her leg. Reed had an impulse then to make everything up to his mother, but all he could do was mumble and pull a joint from his shirt pocket. To smoke a joint with one’s mother seemed to Reed at that moment the height of sharing.

That was years ago. Reed was still angry at the living ex—“Danny Boy,” now a retired freight agent. Reed had always thought Danny Boy was a con man. He exuded false charm in proportion to the scheme he was promoting. One plan was a mobile unit—like the bookmobile—that offered appraisals of antiques and heirlooms; another was organized trips to the casinos in his van. Reed imagined a produce truck packed with illegal immigrants.

Reed hung around the hospital all morning. He meandered down the corridors. Every time he passed the door to radiology, the yellow radiation-warning sign jolted him—a safety reflex from his training. When he spied a tower cart of lunch trays in the hallway a few doors down from his mother’s room, he decided to get her meal and help her with it. The staff simply plunked down the trays in front of the patients (who could be helplessly supine or asleep), jerked the metal domes from the plates, and vanished.

Each meal was identified with a room number and menu selections on a pink slip of paper. He found hers on the bottom tier. When he stood up with it, he heard “Hello, Mr. Futrell” behind him.

Reed had been avoiding the social workers, who he imagined were stalking him with their clipboards, but here was the pretty blonde. She had been looking for him, she said. She wanted to know his decision about the nursing home, and she told him again that his mother needed physical therapy. “Speech, walking, and occupational rehab,” she added.

“She doesn’t need occupational rehab,” he said. “She’s retired.”

“Occupational means help with grooming, dressing, transferring. There are six life-activity criteria—”

“Oh. I thought you meant learning welding or something.” He waited for her smile but got nothing.

“We would be glad to fax out to the nursing homes in the area,” she said, brandishing her clipboard. “Do you want us to fax out?”

“I’d like to fax you out, baby.”

“I beg your pardon?”

“My mother loves irony,” he said, knowing he wasn’t making sense.

After helping his mother with her lunch, he drove to a Mexican place and bought a pair of hot tamales, a chimichanga, and a twenty-ounce orange drink. He ate in the truck with a big-bands medley blasting on the CD player, but he hardly heard it. His mind was a blur. He knew his mother wanted to be cared for by her family, not by a SWAT team in hospital scrubs. But what could he do? His natural pursuits involved machinery—motorcycles, old trucks—although he didn’t care for the typical stuff like tractor pulls and NASCAR. He wasn’t a gearhead. He was a stargazer, and it probably showed in his off-kilter personality. He felt helpless to deal with his mother. He wasn’t a hand-holder. Still, it bothered him that women attributed so many failures to men: men couldn’t show feelings; men didn’t know how to plump pillows or select place mats. It was wrong that his sister was in California while he was here. Yet he doubted that Shirley could care for their mother any better than he could. Shirley, married to a systems analyst, managed a small balloon-delivery company. She didn’t clean her own house or go to flea markets or bake.

He longed for Julia’s company. She was serious, but not like his sister, whose thoughts came boxed, with instructions. Julia would listen with deep delight to any fool thing he said. He remembered her tickled gasp when he told her about the praying mantises that used to collect in the filter rooms at the plant.

“We’d find hundreds of them stuck in the filters. That was before the safety standards got uprated.” He exaggerated a little. “I got a trophy mantis that barely fit in my lunch box.”

“Does the safety manual tell what to do about a praying-mantis invasion?” She was teasing.

He laughed. “Probably. I don’t see many around anymore.”

“They probably heard the Rapture was coming,” she said.

Her hands swept the imaginary swarm of praying mantises into the sky.