An Atomic Romance (17 page)

29

At home he found a message on his answering machine from Julia: “Hi, sweetie, I’m taking off for Chicago right now. The girls are going to meet me up there for a couple of weeks. I’ll call you when I get back. Don’t worry.”

Reed cursed himself for missing her call. He had hoped to see her again this weekend. He wanted to gaze into her sharp eyes and touch her smooth skin and study her freckles. He felt hollow with longing, wishing he hadn’t gone to the library. It was odd that she left so abruptly, and he wondered if she had been summoned by some emergency.

After trying unsuccessfully to reach her on the telephone, he drove to her house, but her Beetle wasn’t there, and no one answered the door of her garden apartment. He peered through the glass panes and saw only a corridor, with a peg rack and a row of worn shoes. He walked around to the tenants’ entrance at the front of the house and entered the vestibule. The second door was locked. Through the glass he could see a corridor, with two closed doors, and at the end of the corridor was a small table with a yellow bowl on it. He heard a radio playing upstairs, up a white stairway.

Back at home he called the cytopathology lab and learned that Julia had left work two hours before. He called her home number again and left a message on her answering machine. “You’re turning me into a radionuclide, Julia—my heart is breaking at the rate of thirty-seven billion disintegrations per second. Or thereabouts.” Later, he regretted saying that. He kicked around his place aimlessly. On the kitchen counter, two aging tomatoes had leaked rot. He threw them out against the fence. Clarence cast him a critical glance.

He contemplated the planets floating across his computer screen. Then he found himself playing with his photo files, tossing the planets around, ejecting them from the solar system, aiming them at black holes. Then he made a greeting card, with blue, glossy Neptune on the front. Beneath Neptune, he wrote,
I’m coming to you
from Outer Space.
Beneath the silver marble of Pluto, he wrote,
I’m
just a frozen gas-ball. I’m getting lonely waiting here in my Fortress of
Solitude. Yours forever, Captain Plutonium. He decided not to print it.

That evening he brought pizza to Burl’s, and they watched two violent movies Burl had rented. Reed had the satisfaction of watching people and buildings blow up without having to feel anything personal about them. Burl, cozy with his pint of bourbon, seemed wrapped up in the fate of the characters. He watched with the purity of a child, Reed thought. Burl’s facial expressions ricocheted between terror and pity. Now and then he laughed when something exploded. Reed didn’t want to bring Burl down, so he didn’t mention his numbers. He didn’t mention Julia. Since his divorce, Reed thought he had come to know himself more keenly. He saw a pattern in his past mistakes; he thought about the way he did things; he recognized his blind spots. And all that had happened to him recently—Julia, his mother’s stroke, the atmosphere of uncertainty at work—catapulted him along the stages of self-examination. He could see himself in parallax, jumping back and forth, depending on which eye was watching. The Great Red Spot of Jupiter, remarkably like a whale’s eye, was watching.

Reed slept fitfully, the familiar body-clenches and moans punctuating the night. The next day, Saturday, he swabbed his truck, paid bills, mowed his neighbor’s yard. She was an elderly widow who didn’t trust boys with machines, so he helped her out with her yard work. His weed trimmer had quit, and he suspected a terminal was loose. He found mud-dauber nests in the recessed circles around the screw heads. The mud patches were neatly formed, as if the insects had spackled bullet holes in a wall that was to be painted. As he jammed his electric screwdriver into the holes, dirt flew out. He discovered nothing wrong with the terminals, so he investigated the trimmer head. As he probed that, he realized the whole head was stripped. The thing was junk. Methodically, he joined the parts back together.

He was restless. He didn’t know where to find Julia in Chicago. He didn’t have the number of her cell phone, the one she used only for emergencies. All his women were like the dead woman in the dream: his ex-wife had gone, exited into some alternate universe in Iowa; Rosalyn was too nice for her own good. Jennifer’s mother, whose name he still couldn’t remember, was long gone. All the other women were casual acquaintances, no one to keep up with. He had stopped reading the e-mail responses to his ad, which were still trickling in even though he had canceled the ad weeks ago. He had written a few enigmatic notes to Hot Mama. The last time he checked, she was ranting about the poetry of connection. When people most wanted connection, they screwed it up somehow, he thought. It was like damaging the terminals.

30

In the Sunnybank lounge, Reed looked for the fish among the roots in the globe of greenery on the piano and was startled to see it hanging motionless and apparently shriveled down to bones and skin. The fish hung against the roots in a pose of horror, like someone locked in a closet who screams until he starves to death. Probably no one had noticed that the fish was in distress.

Reed’s mother waved to a woman who was steering a rolling walker, which she scooted along too far ahead of her, as if she were pushing a grocery cart. The woman was dressed in a floral wrapper, with pale aqua scuffs on her tiny feet.

His mother called, “Come here, Mrs. Valley, tell my son what you did!” Reed waited what seemed like five minutes for the woman to reach them. He felt suspended, like the fish.

“Tell that story again,” Reed’s mom urged her.

Laboriously, Mrs. Valley sat down. “I was just a little squirt,” she said, puffing from her exertion.

“Listen, Reed. A—what were they called—aeronauts? Aviators? An aviator landed in her father’s field, and . . . Mrs. Valley—” Reed’s mother prompted. She was clear headed, in good spirits, Reed thought, while he was empty and fuzzy.

“He landed in my pappy’s pasture,” the woman said. She cleared her throat. “He had a copilot with him. And the neighbors all gathered around, and the airmen went and got some gasoline. And the pilot said he’d take us up for rides, and there was a little neighbor girl that wanted to go too, so my daddy said yes and he went up with me and the other little girl. . . .” Mrs. Valley paused to recall the other child’s name. “Rose. Rose Barn? And he took us up. Oh, the noise that thing made! And the wind whipped our cheeks. And we saw the river and all the trees—my, it was trees as far as you could see. And he found his way back to the same field and set us down right where he picked us up!”

“Get on to the main part, Mrs. Valley.”

“Well, it was two years later, when Charles Lindbergh’s picture was in the paper, for flying across the ocean. And there he was, with the St. Louis Spirit! That was our pilot! And our plane! Lord, we never could have imagined.”

“And you saw it again, Mrs. Valley,” Reed’s mother said.

“Yes—in the Smithsonian.” Mrs. Valley looked straight up at Reed, who was still standing. She said, “My daughter took me there in 1990. And there it was. The very airplane.”

“That’s a great story, Mrs. Valley,” Reed said.

“I have such a delightful son,” said his mother, turning her attention to him as an aide came to accompany Mrs. Valley to her manicure.

“That wasn’t the
Spirit of St. Louis,
” he said to his mother. “The
Spirit of St. Louis
didn’t even have a copilot’s seat.”

She squeezed his hand. “But it might have been Lindbergh. He went barnstorming around the country after he flew to Paris.”

“But wasn’t this episode before that?”

“Well, he must have flown around before, to get practice.” She shrugged. “You never know what might be true.”

31

Plutonium had been found in the body of a deer at Fort Wolf. It was a weighty piece of news, heavy like the heavier-than-uranium, transuranic, stupefyingly titanic heavy metals. Plutonium-fed deer. The news flew around the plant, like the joke of the day. Q. “How do you know if there’s plutonium in your venison?” A. “If you can jump-start your truck with it.”

Reed floundered in perplexity. He didn’t know if this was an immediate crisis or just another toxic-modern doomsday theme to carry around in the same pocket with global warming and the perforated ozone layer. What kind of assurance could he offer Julia now? He did not know how much plutonium you could ingest and survive. Evidently the deer had thrived, until the wildlife biologists shot it to find out if it harbored anything life threatening.

“How do you imagine plutonium got into that deer?” Burl asked when Reed arrived at Burl’s early on a Friday evening. “Is it in the water or on the trees or what?”

“That’s not what killed the deer,” Reed said.

Burl tossed Reed the keys to his truck. Reed was driving. Exactly three weeks ago, he had been shucking corn on his porch with Julia. He had had no word from her, and he was becoming anxious.

“A dirty bomb,” said Burl, slamming the passenger door. “A hot deer! Just hurl a deer through a plate-glass window into a mob of shoppers.”

“It wouldn’t work that way,” Reed said. “Alpha rays don’t go very far.”

The truck’s flank scraped some overgrown bushes as he backed out of Burl’s driveway.

“The hunters won’t care if the deer have plutonium or kryptonite or turnip greens in their bones,” Burl said. “They just want to shoot something.”

“Maybe they hunt because supermarket food is tainted,” Reed said. “Maybe they’re hunting for something pure.”

“Maybe if I ate plutonium I’d turn into Superman.” Burl laughed.

Reed shrugged. Burl beat a rhythm on the dashboard.

“I’m telling you, Reed, that place is going to eat you alive. Wonder if that deer felt funny, or glowed? Could it still have Bambis—or would they have two heads and fins? I mean, do they know any of this stuff, Reed? Do they really know what kind of danger we’re dealing with?”

“Maybe they do. Or there wouldn’t have been so many secrets.”

“Maybe so.”

“I give a urine sample every month and every month they tell me I’m safe. And lately we’re getting
negative
numbers on uranium.”

“What kind of sense is that?”

“They seem to be saying that I get less uranium at the plant than my mother does at Sunnybank.”

Burl laughed. “They want you to feel good about yourself, Reed.”

“Oh, sure. I feel really positive about my negatives.”

The sun had set, and Reed switched on the lights. Thick lines of cars were headed toward the malls, and parking lots at the chain restaurants were jammed. Instead of his own more reliable vehicle, Reed drove Burl’s hapless, multicolored truck because Burl loved it so. Burl talked in a stream. Sometimes with him, Reed felt as if they had gone off on a tangent, like a space probe that went too fast, escaped gravity, and went speeding out into space.

Burl’s truck was a throwaway vehicle, like the cars in Clawber’s Dead Car Museum, which they were passing now just outside of town. Clawber still had every vehicle he had ever owned—and many others—displayed in his yard. There were about twenty old hulks, their lives spent, their engines dead, their fenders rusted, their tires piled into an old-tire graveyard beside his house. Each beloved old car was deposited at its final roosting place like a spectacular new model in a show window.

Burl was eating peanuts and talking. “Man, Clawber’s place sure is neat! He’s keeping it mowed pretty good, and he weed-eats around the cars. He ought to make a place for dancing, and a band-stand.” Burl raced along on that topic for a mile, then switched abruptly to methods of brewing coffee, followed by nanotechnology, Merrill Lynch, and the French Revolution. His jumpiness was accelerated today, making Reed feel uneasy.

They were driving out into the country to see Burl’s cousin Beloit, a childhood pal from Michigan. He was a man who didn’t mingle and who returned to Lansing for months at a time. He had been arrested a few times for petty thefts, and last year he had been charged with cooking methamphetamine, but the charge was later dropped.

Reed said, “Burl, I swear you’re going to end up in the penitentiary if you keep fooling with Beloit.”

“Oh, he learned his lesson.”

Apparently Burl’s cousin had siphoned several gallons of anhydrous ammonia from a farmer’s tank in a remote cornfield. It was corn-planting time, and the farmer had rolled the tank out to his freshly plowed field, intending to apply the fertilizer to the soil. In the dead of night, Beloit had attached a hose and siphoned off about three gallons of it. Suddenly a searchlight turned on and Beloit skedaddled.

Reed said, “Anhydrous ammonia will soak right through you. It’ll burn the hide off of you.”

“Can’t be worse than plutonium now, can it?”

“Touché. You need to get your cousin to go to church with you and straighten him out,” said Reed. “Which one is your sister dragging you to now?”

“Pilgrims’ Rest. It’s a new church, with a big new brick building and a rec hall.” Burl laughed. “The preacher gets his sermons off the Internet.”

“Those new religions scare the pudding out of me,” Reed said.

“They’re going to have a pageant,” Burl said. “They wanted me to play one of Christ’s disciples.” He laughed. “But I told Sally I didn’t think I could give that role my all.”

Reed said, “On second thought, Burl, if you join some cult that’s going to blow up something or meet flying saucers or commit mass suicide, then I’ll feel obliged to step in and become a cult-buster.”

“I’m not that stupid,” said Burl, wadding his peanut package into his shirt pocket.

“I didn’t mean that.” Reed glanced at Burl’s face, still faintly pockmarked from teen acne.

“But if I get drunk and join up with some TV evangelist, I’m counting on you to come and bail me out.”

“What else am I good for?” Reed asked. “Just call on me. I’ll be there.”

“You know I’m not a fool. I’m not taken in by these things,” Burl said, swigging whiskey from the bottle in his paper bag. “But if your sister’s out dancing with the holy spirit, you can’t just make fun of her dancing. Sally’s so purely ordinary that she broadens my mind in some strange way. And I’m always learning something useful when I’m around her, something that makes me feel holy.”

“That would do it.”

In a way, Reed thought, Burl was the holiest person he knew. Burl seemed to know that the world’s complications were far greater than his understanding, and he had his life worked out in some obscure, irrational linkages of myths, dreams, adages, angels, prayer rituals, rosary beads, Guatemalan worry dolls, hexes—a moral juggling act balanced against the indifference of everyday facts. Reed often thought that Burl, in his diffuse enthusiasms, made more sense than the average person who lived by the simple tenets of commerce and acquisition and clockwork regularity. Reed had read that 15 percent of Americans comprehended the scientific process, and 60 percent believed in psychics. Burl could interweave psychics and physics and still sleep soundly.

Burl was taking a shopping bag of supplies to his cousin. Reed couldn’t see what was in the bag because Burl kept the top folded over. When it popped open, he held it closed with his foot.

As Reed turned onto a blacktopped country road, Burl asked about Julia. Reed, jolted by the question, found himself swerving to avoid a Rhode Island Red rooster that was scooting across the road.

“Julia’s still in Chicago,” Reed said, his heart quickening. “I haven’t heard a word. Her sister was in some kind of trouble.”

“Hold it,” Burl interrupted. “Was that a rooster? What’s a rooster doing out after dark?”

“I don’t know. I was wondering that myself. Furthermore, why was he crossing the road? Anyway,” Reed said, hitting the high beams, “I wanted to take her up there to Chicago myself. She’s treating me like Schrödinger’s cat. She puts me in a box and just leaves me there. She doesn’t know if I’m alive or dead.”

“Did you hear about Dan Forgy’s cat?”

“No. That cat he’s so crazy about?”

Dan Forgy, an old friend, ran Forgy’s Hardware. Burl told about

Dan’s hyperthyroid cat, Boone, who had been isolated in a cage at a veterinary hospital for ten days after being injected with radioactive iodide.

“The cat had no toys, no music, no voices, not even a tuffet to sit on!” Burl said.

“They nuked his thyroid,” said Reed.

After the cat came home, Dan had to isolate Boone, in his yellow collar that said RADIOACTIVE, for ten more days, Burl explained.

“Boone was so glad to see Dan he just danced with joy. Dan wasn’t supposed to touch him—no snuggling, they said! And this cat was just wild to get ahold of him, climb up in his lap, and purr in his ear. He leaped up on Dan’s shoulder, and Dan was afraid his thyroid would be zapped.”

“They probably didn’t give the cat more than a few millicuries of radioiodide,” said Reed. “The cat didn’t need to be in a deprivation chamber at home. They’re just covering their ass.” Reed slowed down, for he was driving down an unfamiliar road that seemed to have no shoulders. “How’s Dan’s pussy now?”

“Calm as a footstool. That cat was always scared and jumpy, but I guess he had time to think things over when he was in solitary. That’s what it’s like in the pokey. Yep, you get a lot of quality mental time when you’re doing time.”

“They didn’t have to keep that cat shut up that long,” Reed said. “That’s cruel. If those rules applied at an atomic plant, we’d all be in an isolation booth half the time.”

Reed listened in a trance as he drove, as Burl continued speculating and humming alternately. Burl was going on now about mind over matter, wondering if it applied to cats.

Their destination, a house on the outskirts of a village across the county line, was a crumbling premodern relic, with weathered gray siding and a patchwork roof. The porch, covered with a shredding outdoor carpet, sagged. The house had a visible concrete cistern, fed by a downspout from the roof gutter.

“Drive around back,” Burl said.

As he got out of the truck, Burl disclosed the contents of the bag of supplies he had brought for his elusive cousin—oranges and bananas, garbage bags, cans of vegetables and soup, and a large bargain box of chocolate Easter bunnies. Reed didn’t offer any judgment; the discount-eclectic assortment seemed innocent enough. He waited in the truck while Burl entered the back door with the bag of goods. Reed had read newspaper reports of cops finding meth labs in bathtubs or in motel rooms, or even in vans rushing down the highway. If Beloit was cooking meth, it was easy enough to accumulate the ingredients from various drugstores—plastic tubing, lithium batteries, ether, ephedrine pills. If this place got raided, it would be by a Haz-Mat crew in moon suits, Reed thought. He felt like the secretary of defense touring bombed-out neighborhoods. The landscape of his life was reduced to assorted toxic-waste dumps.

Chemicals had always been Reed’s friends, because he treated them with respect. But they had turned on him. He held the truck door ajar for air, forcing himself to concentrate on the moment at hand. Here he was, sitting behind a ramshackle house where a man might have messed with liquid fire. Reed wondered what he was supposed to do. He didn’t believe Burl was involved with meth. But Burl embraced life to such an extent that he was pulled in many directions and too often made excuses for others’ failings.

Burl emerged from the dark house and slipped into the truck. In the dim interior light, he appeared older. He had a small cut on his finger, from a metal snag on the screen door. He opened his wallet to locate a bandage strip he carried amongst his condoms. In the layers of bills, Reed saw fifties. The worn, off-brand condom packages appeared almost antique.

Reed saw himself moving from one fantasy island to another. His workplace was science fiction; this seedy house was like an old juke joint without the music; Reed’s own house, neglected and cluttered, was like a rundown hotel; the hospital where his mother had been was like the government of a small dictatorship; and Sunnybank was a madcap Utopia, like first grade without a future.