Underworld (55 page)

“You know about the school not far from here. This is not rumor now but fact. I've been there and seen it. The Abo Elementary School and Fallout Shelter. A real place down in the ground.”

“Just like us.”

“We're not real,” Eric said. “They're only kids. It's a grade school. They still have a chance to be real. I was sent there to speak to them.”

“As a bombhead.”

“As a clean-cut younger member of the military industrial complex. A diversion at recess type thing.”

“What did you say to them?”

“There's a water tank at the edge of town. State Champs in bright new paint. And rows of neat homes. Then you come upon the school but just barely. Some trailerlike structures and a couple of basketball courts and finally you spot an entrance and you open the steel door and go down the stairs and there's a lot of concrete and steel and the lighting's slightly eerie. The classrooms, the bedding, the canned food, the morgue. No window breakage. That's one of the features. Because there aren't any windows of course. But the point is. What's the point, Matty?”

“I don't know. Tell me.”

“Did they do all this to protect the kids from Soviet bombs or from our bombs and our fallout?”

“I don't know. Both. What did you say to the kids?”

“I spoke in tongues,” Eric said. “I mean think about it. I'm standing in an underground room at the northern edge of a great desert with filtering systems for fallout and a fully equipped morgue and there are crayon drawings pinned above the blackboard of piglets and cows. Incidentally.”

“What?”

“I have a chess set in my room. What about a game?”

•    •    •

The Pocket was one of those nice tight societies that replaces the world. It was the world made personal and consistently interesting because it was what you did, and others like you, and it was self-enclosed and self-referring and you did it all together in a place and a language that were inaccessible to others.

Janet Urbaniak was Matt's girlfriend, a registered nurse. They were off-and-on serious, mostly on, often impatient with each other but always strongly joined, the kind of star-matched couple born to meet and disagree.

He called Janet on her days off and she told him where she'd gone and what she'd seen or bought, and who with, and for how long, and he listened and commented and asked for details.

She worked in a trauma unit now. She told him about her nights there but he said almost nothing about his own work and of course she understood and did not probe.

Janet called his mother twice a week to find out how she was doing and then she called Matt to give him a report and then Matt called his mother to confirm everything, to clarify the particulars of an ache or pain, and he liked all these calls, the ones he made and the ones he heard about—they gave him a life outside the Pocket.

He drove his borrowed jeep past a protester alone, a woman struggling to keep the sign upright in a dry stiff wind that beat across the flats. He wanted to stop and talk to her. Give her a hand, have a chat. He wanted to show his tolerance of her viewpoint, allow himself to be convinced by some of her arguments, make certain trenchant points of his own and then drive her to the nondescript room where she lived at the edge of this or that town, with a partial view of the mountains, and have soft, moaning and mutually tolerant sex in her rumpled bed, but he slowed only slightly as he drove past.

Later someone told him the protesters lived in a ruined school bus
in the Sacramento Mountains. Matt kind of liked that. He liked the idea of people leaving everything behind to pursue an idea. He thought of Sister Edgar in sixth grade talking about desert saints, pillar saints, stylites, and she hoisted herself up on her desk and crossed her legs under the habit, a saint lotused on a column in the Sinai, and spoke to the class in snatches of Latin and Hebrew and he remembered liking that—he liked to think of a godstruck band of wanderers haunting the test ranges and silos of the West.

It was part of the reason he'd come here in the first place. For the questions and challenges. For the self-knowledge he might find in a sterner life, in the fixing of willful limits.

Did you do grad work on solar energy? Did you do a paper on the trigger principle of nuclear fission? Do you go to the dentist every six months for a prophy and a polish? Are you a physicist with a grudge against your mother? Are you a systems engineer who masturbates in secret while your wife is watching reruns of “The Honeymooners”? Do you wish to hell you could see a tower shot with all the special effects, with the sun coming up ass-backwards and the trees casting shadows in the wrong direction, the spectacle of the unmattered atom, the condensation cloud arranged split-secondly on the shock disc, sort of primly place-centered, and the visible shock approaching, and the biblical wind that carries sagebrush, sand, hats, cats, car parts, condoms and poisonous snakes, all blowing by in the desert dawn?

Eric kept after him to play chess. But he didn't want to play chess. He didn't talk about his chess. His chess was old dark difficult history, suppressed forever. The history of a chess homunculus. No one knew about his chess. Janet knew a little and only Janet and no one else but his mother and brother and Mr. Bronzini, of those who might tend to remember.

“You don't get the point,” Eric said in the jeep.

“You're spreading rumors you don't even believe. That's the point,” Matt said.

“They had to throw up roadblocks because the cloud was moving into populated areas. Neuroblastomas. Beta burns. Two-headed lambs. Or entire herds of sheep dead in the fields. Or you wake up one morning and your teeth start flipping out of their sockets, painlessly and bloodlessly.”

Two or three teeth, say. Sort of gently expelled with the faintest kind of squishy sound, Eric said. And you wrap them in cold wet gauze and jump in your car and drive to the dentist's office confident that he'll be able to reinsert the teeth because don't doctors do amazing things with severed limbs. Or he will not reinsert the teeth. He will send the teeth to a lab at the new medical center where they have equipment so advanced it can learn more about you in a passing glance than you could figure out yourself if you lived to be a thousand.

But at the first red light you take the gauze out of your pocket and unfold it for a brief peek, Eric said, and there's nothing there but a small mound of powder because your teeth have completely crumbled. These hard strong reliable structures designed for biting and gnawing, for tearing flesh. These things that last a million years in the jaws of prehistoric people, in the skulls that we dig up and study. Turned to dust in your pocket in six frigging minutes.

He called Janet and talked. He talked and listened. The smaller the talk, the better he felt. He took satisfaction in the details of her day, the matters of barely passing interest that struck him in his lonely love as items of privileged witness.

Sometimes she talked about her work, trauma duty deep in the night, and she was matter-of-fact about it, bodies flopping on the just-mopped floor of the corridor, relatives dragging in a knife victim or OD, the uncle and mother gripping the man's head and legs and a cluster of small kids at the edges, two to each arm.

She described scenes that were like paintings of the European masters, the ones who did miracles and wars.

Her strength in these matters made her beautiful to him. She was a smallish woman, they were both fairly short and Janet was slight as well, and he liked to imagine her in a scrub suit plunging a fist into
someone's chest cavity and coming out with a bullet or a chicken bone. Her shyness did not conceal her eloquence of mettle and will. He saw and heard it often. She clung to him persistently to make a point.

He thought they were too damn earnest. They wanted a family and each other but were periodically beset by the complexity of the undertaking, the plans, the chances, the cities, the idea of marriage and children and jobs and how hard it is to do everything right, and they agreed and bargained and argued, they planned and fought.

He looked at Landsat photos shot from space a year or two earlier. The pictures were false-color composites that revealed signs of soil erosion, geological fracture and a hundred other events and features. They showed stress and drift and industrial ravage, billion-bit data converted into images.

He saw how remote sensors pulled hidden meanings out of the earth. How sweeps and patches of lustrous color, how computer fuchsias or rorschach pulses of unnamed shades might indicate a change in water temperature or where the dwindling grizzlies go to forage and mate. He looked at spindly barrier beaches that showed white as shanked bone. He found sizable cities pixeled into mountain folds and saw black lakes high in the ranges, kettle holes formed by glacial drift.

He could not stop looking.

The photo mosaics seemed to reveal a secondary beauty in the world, ordinarily unseen, some hallucinatory fuse of exactitude and rapture. Every thermal burst of color was a complex emotion he could not locate or name.

And he thought of the lives inside the houses embedded in the data on the street that is photographed from space.

And that is the next thing the sensors will detect, he thought. The unspoken emotions of the people in the rooms.

And then he thought inevitably of Nick.

•    •    •

He wanted to call his brother many times. He thought he'd like to talk to him about the work he was doing here. He'd be able to give Nick a general sense of things, let him know that the kid was doing important work but that it troubled him now and then.

One day he might find himself putting together a physics package, the explosive components of a nuclear device—true-blue bombhead country.

Matt wasn't sure he could deal with this himself. He could if he had to, and Janet would help, she'd have a clear position he could set against his doubts, but he wanted to talk to Nick. He wanted to hear his brother's voice coming down the phone line, the slightly bent stresses that carried a literal lifetime of associations.

Nick had a graveness that was European in a way. He was shaped and made. First unmade and then reimagined and strongly shaped and made again. And he was somber and self-restrained at times and not free-giving but maybe he would give the kid advice about the moral and ethical aspects of this kind of work. Mainly what Matt wanted was a show of interest. This was more important than outright counsel, a recommendation or judgment, but he wanted that too—a judgment in his brother's voice.

He didn't know what his brother might say. He might say this is the way you define yourself as a serious man, working through the hard questions and harrowing choices, and if you stick with it you'll be stronger in the end. Or he might say, Fool, what kind of mark will this make on your soul when you become a father like me? Think of the guilt of raising children in a world you've made—your talent put to such desolate use. Speaking softly now. And who knows the ticklish business of weapons better than I do, brother?

But he'd never make that last remark, would he? And Matt didn't make the call. They didn't often talk, or they talked about their mother, or they hassled each other routinely, but maybe he'd call later when he felt the urge again.

When the wind gusted out of the mountains it rebodied the dunes and if you were up out of the Pocket and sitting around at home with
a beer and a snack you saw your laundry go horizontal on the backyard line, all of it, sheets, hankies, boxer shorts, pajama bottoms, like people of all sizes and shapes snapping from the pressure, letting their souls fly forth to the gypsum hills.

“But that's not the point,” Eric said. “You keep mi, mi, missing the point.”

It was raining in the mountains.

Eric had a fake stutter he liked to use to texture the conversation, a thing he'd developed to mock himself or his listener, although neither one of them stuttered, or maybe he was imitating some nightclub comic or simpy character on TV—it wasn't clear to Matt.

He looked out a window of Eric's bungalow. The rain was a wall of smoky shimmer that hung across the limestone bluffs. Eric sat on a sofa that was still wrapped in warehouse plastic amid a mess of scientific journals, UFO monthlies, supermarket tabloids, half a dozen Playboys and some lost food.

“Even though huge amounts of territory were affected and large numbers of people were exposed, it remains a major secret to this day.”

“So secret it may not be true,” Matt said.

“Do you believe it's true?”

“I believe mistakes were made.”

Eric enjoyed this. His shadow smile appeared at the far end of the sprawled body. It came and went, like some inner dialogue he was conducting that ran parallel to the spoken lines, a thing of elusive drift.

“But the point is, pure and simple.”

“What's the point, Eric?”

He picked up a magazine and leafed through it aimlessly, speaking in a tone that was slightly impatient but mostly, now that he was finally coming to the point, a little weary and bored.

“It was done deliberately,” he said. “They knew the tests weren't safe but they went ahead anyway. They marched troops to zero point after the detonations. They sent manned aircraft through radiation clouds. They injected people with plutonium to track its course through the body. They did this deliberately, without telling people what the risks were. They exposed troops to the atomic flash and some of them were
given protective eye filters and some were not. They experimented on children, infants, fetuses and mental patients. They never told the Navahos who worked in uranium mines what the dangers were. The dangers were considerable as it turned out. They zapped the testicles of prison inmates. They basically grabbed you by the balls and zapped you full of x rays. This is the story I hear. Do you believe it?”

“It's awfully, I don't know.”