Bombshell (6 page)

“I can't let you in there, ma'am.” She imagined the security guard to be middle-aged, and bored. She saw a man struggling with a salary that he resented.

“But I was just
in there
, already. I'm a reporter. I was being shown a tour by, oh, shit, what was his name? It was on his hard hat . . . William Gibson.” She stole the name from
The China Syndrome
. “He told me which way to the restroom, but I guess I stumbled out of an exit. I feel so stupid. Look, if I hadn't come from inside, I'd be soaking wet like you. Look at my hair: dry as a bone. I'm a reporter with credentials and an invitation.” She would pull her lapel forward for the security guard to see. “Everyone thinks this place is dangerous. I'm going to tell the truth about Indian Point. I'm not your enemy. Come on, do I look like a terrorist?” She would swivel one foot on the toe of her pumps, showing a seam of stocking.

In her left jacket pocket, she would finger the small flask of chloroform and her silk handkerchief, subtly unscrewing the cap. In the other pocket she would carry condoms and a plastic zip bag of raw meat. In her sleeve, she had fixed her gun. There was a chance that she would have to kill or give one of the perimeter guards or the dog handler sex to get in. She would finish whatever was necessary, spit in the floodlit gravel, and advance toward the turbine hall and the control room. It would be April 26. On this twenty-fifth anniversary, she would make herself into an arrow that would be impossible to break or deflect.

Finally, she saw herself in the control room of Unit Two. This rehearsal fantasy of the end of her life caused her heart to beat wildly. The effort of regulating the palpitations and sweats would leave her with a fierce migraine pain, yet these dangerous apparitions of her assault on Indian Point were irresistible. She moved through the bittersweet ache of their inevitability. In the control room, she would wear a tape recorder fixed to her belt, and she would hold the old-fashioned interview microphone on its curling flex in her left hand. Her right hand would remain in her pocket. She planned to discard the chloroform having gained entry. The snub barrel of her silent gun would only barely protrude from the hole that she would have cut from her right jacket pocket, so that she could shoot, and shrug. She would approach, smiling and extending her microphone. Suddenly, holes and wounds would appear in her enemies as though spontaneous explosions had burst their torsos and blasted open their white scientific coats and overalls. Disembodied, she watched herself moving seductively between the instrument panels like Medusa. Sometimes, dying eyes would stare at her in disbelief. She would fully understand the appeal of her soundless gun to the KGB. The combat would spread to the whitewashed gantries and through the vast bulbs of the machine.

Security gunfire would echo through the cathedrals of cancer, black clouds over the containment domes. She would abandon her disguise as the violence raged out of control. Her enemies would try to hold their fire, fearful of damaging the electrical circuits that maintained the rods and safety of the reactor. Some would hesitate to harm a young woman. She would bring chaos, inflicting wounds and terror. The computer monitors would be spattered with blood. Gauges would crack in the spray of her bullets. Red warning lights would revolve in the metal corridors. Hatches would slam shut and a song of complete despair would arise from their throats. Men would calcify in her gaze and turn to ash in her sights. Yet, gradually, the firewall would close. She envisioned
herself wounded and losing consciousness on a high and bloodied walkway, closing her eyes on the glowing reactor core.

Cash mapped that the twin reactors of Indian Point were just over forty miles from Manhattan, and an unfavorable wind could bear the glittering death rain of fallout down the Hudson in minutes, shrouding the city, delivering the million damnations of radiation sickness, cancer, and the hollowing of the state, the liquidation of New York from Buchanan down through White Plains to the Statue of Liberty. One hundred and fifty warning sirens would howl over a ten-mile radius. There would be an emergency shutdown, a SCRAM. She planned the assault on Indian Point to force the Final SCRAM, to protect the world from the false promises of a lethal technology.

America had seen this before, but was forgetting . . .

1979. The old man stared into the camera, his voice low and measured:

“The world has never known a day quite like today. It faced the considerable uncertainties and dangers of the worst nuclear power plant accident of the atomic age. And the horror tonight is that it could get much worse. The potential is there for the ultimate risk of meltdown at Three Mile Island . . .”

Walter Cronkite spoke into the cameras of CBS News on the evening of March 30, twelve days after the release of the nuclear power plant disaster movie
The China Syndrome
. Then Cronkite stood before a rudimentary map of Pennsylvania: “Earlier on this incredible third day of the accident, confusion, contradiction, and questions clouded the atmosphere like atomic particles. Plant officials predicted radiation will continue to leak at least
five more days. Governor Thornburgh considered then rejected the evacuation of a million residents in four counties surrounding the plant: York, Dauphin, Lancaster, and Cumberland. But the governor urged that pregnant women and young children within a five-mile radius leave the area.” A profound sense of doubt and distrust snaked along the Susquehanna River, as the huge hydrogen bubble in Reactor 2 continued to swell, blasting grotesque plumes of radioactive xenon gas across the hollowing town, a decade of exposure in moments. Middletown officials declared a curfew. Cash had researched what followed: six months after the near-meltdown and the smothering of the streets, homes, farms, and fields of Dauphin County by the gas cloud, catastrophic increases in infant mortality and instances of cancers within a ten-mile zone of the plant. The site of Three Mile Island Reactor 2 was still dirty, and would never be clean . . .

In Madrid, a light snow began to fall as Varyushka Cash descended from the slag heaps, surfing on low waves of black silt as the pain in her skull threatened to wipe her out. Below her, she could see the dark locomotive fused with rust to the broken iron railway that extended 100 yards behind the Coalmine Tavern before disappearing into the weeds. She knew all the problems with coal, but if it burned, you could extinguish it, and it would not kill you if you ate it. As she slid sideways down the face of minerals and stray grass, her fingers trailed in it. At the foot of the hill, she brushed her black hands on her jeans, smelling the carbon. She vaulted the guardrail and walked along the road beneath the garlands of lights toward her cabin. Wind chimes toned from leafless trees. Her neighbor's house was in darkness and her car was not in the unpaved drive. Cash ran her fingers over the cold tank of her motorcycle before opening her own front door.

Cash's mining cabin consisted of three rooms. The front door opened onto a small kitchen where a yellow-and-green-tiled Mexican table was arranged at the center of the floorboards she had painted with thick gloss. The living
room was defined at the point where the bare red floor gave way to a series of rugs, a small couch, and bookshelves improvised from crates. On the wall was a large banner, an orange background with the black silhouette of a seven-headed cobra. An antique wood-burning stove and the black chimney cans that rose into the ceiling and out of the roof heated the house. She checked it and found the embers strong. Otherwise, the only other spaces were her bedroom and cramped bathroom. Cash opened her refrigerator and reached for a bottle of filtered water. The tap water in Madrid was full of sulfur and mostly non-potable. Magnets held a photograph to the door of the freezer compartment, at her eye level. It was ten years old. The photograph showed Cash and another girl, arm in arm, on the streets of San Francisco. The other girl wore heavy Cleopatra eyeliner. The girl was dressed in a black and green Cramps T-shirt. She had a camera around her neck on a red plastic cord. In the background were billboards and bright lights and sweating crowds outside the Fillmore. Cash turned away, moved slowly to her bedroom, and collapsed. Shards of memory intruded, faces swam before her, memories of her friends, her surrogates, imaginary lovers, and suspected enemies. She would have need of all of them.

CASH STOOD AT THE BROKEN PANES OF THE THIRD-FLOOR WARD
window, holding her palms up, touching the blank space where the glass had been, the lost substance of the hospital. She stared into the irradiated plaza. Abandoned intravenous drips stood with their collapsed sacs and tubes dangling where the evacuees had been hastily disconnected. The ripped dark blue vinyl and yellow foam upholstery of a capsized wheelchair had become the nest of a pair of furtive albino swallows. A rusting gurney had shunted up against a gray streetlight. The sunlight across the metals and paving and probing the windows was without warmth, devoid of qualities. She turned back to the ward and the rows of Plexiglas incubators that lay beneath a haze of dust, her spectral presence among them like the supervisor of snatched coffins. There were Cyrillic name tags lying on the scuffed blue-green linoleum floor, an elegant code that she could not decipher. When the delayed evacuation had come at last, it had come swiftly, the Passover of a terrible gray angel.

She stalked the drained corridors. Faint greenish light reflected from the peeling paintwork. The ward desks at the reception areas were laced with cobwebs, X-ray prints hung black against dead light boxes; charts and files were scattered across the floor. She came to an operating theater with an observation window and a group of chairs arranged for medical students. For some moments, she could not make sense of the decomposed mash on the blood-black operating table, huge lamps crooning over it. Flies droned within it. This anesthetized creature had been left behind, its wounds wide and vivid as the hospital was cleared. She retched and pushed out through heavy plastic curtains and stood panting inside a lifeless elevator, reflexively punching at the buttons. She made her descent of the dust-clung stairs, spitting the poisonous air from her mouth. The glass in the exterior doors had been smashed, and shards of it lay blown across the five stone steps that approached it. Outside, weeds shrugged and corkscrewed between the paving slabs. Thorns and tendrils had overrun the desolate verandas of the city and piled limp against the gray concrete. There were still traces of snow on the ground from a recent fall as she made her way to the remains of the amusement park.

Cash stood beneath the radiant Ferris wheel, its canary yellow gondolas whining on their corroded hinges. She was afraid to touch it. Close by was the disintegrating deck of the simple carousel, an octagonal steel frame suspending a few wide benches. The electric dodgem cars on their rink resembled Cold War fantasies of rocket cars and hovering sedans—cracked fiberglass and broken headlamps, and everywhere were the threads and canopies of encroaching wilderness. It was strange for her to think of Pripyat as a place of youth and amusement, where most of the inhabitants, the workers, had been below thirty years of age; stranger still to think of these desolate arcades as the place of her birth. If she had been able to ride the yellow gondolas, from their zenith, she would have
been able to look out across the white tower blocks, and to see the cooling tower and sarcophagus of the reactor. Hot waves pulsed through her flesh and bones.

She awoke, asphyxiated from her nightmare, struggling from her sheets as though they were part of the winding net of natal memories that had dragged her back to the dead city. She swung her legs from the mattress and looked up at the poster of Valerie Solanas over her orange vinyl headboard. She asked: “Where were you last night?” On the nightstand, her untouched bottle of water rested beside a stack of disintegrating Wonder Woman comics. The kitchen floor was cold as she went to make coffee. Cash showered, scrubbing the fallout of her dreams from her pores, lathering her rough crop of black hair over and over, as if the memories, or whatever they were, could be washed out of her head. She turned her face into the hot shower jet, gulping at the hot fog until she felt she was drowning, new sensations to make her forget. When she brushed her teeth, there was blood in the mint froth that she spat into the sink. She wondered if there would be any further news reports, now that her manifesto had been delivered on local television. It had been late at night. Those who had seen it would tell others, but more people needed to see it, she thought. She needed to see a television, but the bar would not be open yet. Molly, her neighbor, had a television.

Varyushka Cash met Molly Pinkerton in 2006. She was the first person that Cash spoke with in Madrid. They were both crossing the drag to the Coalmine Tavern at the same time, the only figures on the vacant street. Cash had her khaki pack thrown over one shoulder when their eyes met and they drew together. Molly struck Cash as being over six feet tall, with silver-blond hair whipping from beneath the green and white of her trucker cap as the wind rinsed down from the slag heaps and stripped
trash out of the back of a rusting truck. Molly was wearing black thermal leggings and a ripped muscle shirt revealing thick-veined biceps and broad shoulders. She was wearing Dia de los Muertos–styled Nike Dunks, pumpkin and black with skeletons. Cash guessed that she was in her early fifties. Sitting at adjacent barstools, they exchanged names. They were the only patrons in the bar that early morning. Molly explained that she was sixty years old, or she had just turned twenty, counting only the years since her gender reassignment surgery in Mexico.

“So, we're almost the same age,” Cash said, raising her Black Russian. “
Budmo!
”