by Don DeLillo
“And in this case,” I say. “In our case, in our age. What we excrete comes back to consume us.”
We don’t dig it up, he says. We try to bury it. But maybe this is not enough. That’s why we have this idea. Kill the devil. And he smiles from his steeple perch. The fusion of two streams of history, weapons and waste. We destroy contaminated nuclear waste by means of nuclear explosions.
I cross the body of the aircraft to get my cap refilled.
“It is only obvious,” he says.
I see that Brian’s eyes are opened.
I return to my seat, an arm out for balance, and I sit carefully and pause and then knock back the scotch and blink a bit.
I look at Brian.
I say, “The early bomb, Brian, they had to do the core material in a certain way as I understand it. They had to mate this part to that part. So they could get the chain reaction that’s crucial to the whole operation. One design had a male element fitted into a female element. The cylinder goes into an opening in the sphere. They shoot it right in. Very suggestive. There’s really sort of no escape. Cocks and cunts everywhere.”
I see our plane racing through the wind and rain.
Because I knew unmistakably now, I was completely certain that Brian and Marian, whose names sound so nice together, a good friend now and again, that he and my wife were partners in a deep betrayal. In my jet-crazed way I could almost enjoy the situation we’d found ourselves in. I was so time-zoned, dazed by fatigue and revelation, so deep in the stink of a friend’s falseheartedness that I started talking nonstop, manic and jaggy, babble-mouthing into the plane noise, hinting—I hinted insidiously, made clever references. Because I knew it all now, and here we both were, and there was no place he could go to escape our homey chat.
At the gate we are given badges to wear, gauzy strips that register the amount of radiation absorbed by the body in a given period. Maybe this is what makes the landscape seem so strange. These little metered tags put an element of threat into the dull scrub that rolls to the overwhelming sky.
Brian says the gate resembles the entrance to a national park.
Viktor says don’t be surprised there will be tourists here someday.
The car is driven by a Russian, not a Kazakh. He wears pressed fatigues and carries a radiation meter to go with the two badges clipped to his shirt. Far from the road we see men in white masks and floppy boots bulldozing the earth and when we come to a rise we are able to see the vast cratered plain of recent underground tests, depressions of various diameter but all seemingly well-figured—pale-rimmed holes formed when dirt displaced by the blasts slid back into the gouged earth.
The driver tells us that the test site is known as the Polygon. He tells us a few more things, some translated by Viktor, some not.
Farther on we see signs of the old tests, aboveground, and there is a strangeness here, an uneasiness I try to locate. We see the remnant span of a railroad trestle, a sculptured length of charred brown metal resting on concrete piers. A graveness, a spirit of old secrets gone bad, turned unworthy. We see the squat gray base of a shot tower, most of it blown away decades earlier, leaving this block of seamed concrete that rises only seven feet above the stubble surface, still looking oddly stunned, with metal beams ajut. Guilt in every dosed object, the weathered posts and I-beams left to the wind, things made and shaped by men, old schemes gone wrong.
We ride in silence.
There are mounds of bulldozed earth around a camera bunker daubed with yellow paint—yellow for contaminated. The place is strange, frozen away, a specimen of our forgetfulness even as we note the details. We see signs of houses in the distance, test dwellings blown off their foundations with people still inside, mannequins, and products on the shelves where they’d been placed maybe forty years ago—American brands, the driver says.
And Viktor says this was a point of pride with the KGB, to assemble a faithful domestic setting.
And how strange it is, strange again, more strangeness, to feel a kind of homesickness for the things on the shelves in the houses that still stand, Old Dutch Cleanser and Rinso White, all those half-lost icons of the old life, Ipana and Oxydol and Chase & Sanborn, still intact out here in this nowhere near Mongolia, and does anyone remember why we were doing all this?
I say, “Viktor, does anyone remember why we were doing all this?”
“Yes, for contest. You won, we lost. You have to tell me how it feels. Big winner.”
Brian sits next to me, sleeping now.
We see a rusted tank with yellow brushwork marking the turret. There are roads that end abruptly, weeds pushing through the asphalt.
The car reaches the site of the test, our test. It is a slightly elevated tract of land cleared of brush and graded nearly flat. I wasn’t going to be the first one out of the car and for a moment nobody moved. Drill towers stand in the middle distance. There are a dozen trailers arrayed on the flat, all packed with equipment that will analyze the blast.
The driver opens his door and we all get out.
The wind comes with a labored drone. Several technicians and military men stand talking nearby. Viktor lights a cigarette and approaches them. He looks misplaced in his long leather coat. Out beyond the road we see bluffs scarred white by earlier detonations. I keep glancing at the driver for signs and portents.
Viktor comes back and points to a corner of the cleared area where thick cables snake away from several pieces of equipment set in a pale square of earth. He says this is ground zero. We stand there nodding in the wind.
He says the shot will be fired in granite about one kilometer down. Reactor waste and cores from retired warheads are packed around a low-yield nuclear device. He says the hole drilled from the surface to the firing point has been tamped and plugged to keep radiation from venting.
The driver puts a finger to his tongue and rubs some dirt off his sleeve. I check my sleeve for dirt. Then the driver heads back to the car and we all go with him.
He drives us to a bunker complex some distance away. About four dozen people are assembled here. Generals with braided caps, uranium speculators, a man and woman from the Bundesbank. We are introduced around. Many chesty bureaucrats with interchangeable heads. There are industrialists, bomb designers, official observers here to monitor the test. And every one of us wears a badge that measures off the rads. I follow Viktor into a briefing room where tureens and serving plates are spread across a table, heaped with smoking food. I meet executives from Tchaika and high officials of several commonwealth ministries. There is a palpable wave of expectation. Dark young men in round caps serve glasses of peppered vodka cradled in porringers of crushed ice. I talk to a veteran of the Polygon, a weapons scientist looking for work. A Russian tells a joke to a huddle of burly men and I stand on the edge, startled to hear the name Speedy Gonzalez mixed into the rolling narration. I look around for Brian. I want Brian to be in on this. The joke teller is in uniform, his middle finger extended skyward, his face going ruddy as the plot winds down. He does the punch line very well, speaking the words to his lifted finger, and the line comes back to me as he does it in Russian—back in English, of course, after so many years. The huddled men nod and rock, sending plosive noises from their moon jowls.
Caviar pulsing in chilled bowls. There are geologists and game theorists and energy experts and a journalist with a book contract. I see waste traders and venture capitalists, piroshki and skewered lamb. There are arms dealers looking to make bids, Viktor says, on the idle inventory of weapons-grade plutonium floating at the fringes of the industry.
“And this explosion,” I say. “Not banned by international accord?”
“Banned, not banned. We are exception. Test site was closed by local decree. But we are exception. It is necessary to do a trial demonstration. Plutonium waste is getting to a point that’s very crazy. Worldwide, who is counting? Maybe twelve hundred metric tons.”
“More.”
“More. Okay. Has to disappear somehow.”
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The food makes me happy for a time. I eat everything I can reach. Meat, fish, eggs, my appetite is enormous. The vodka looks beautiful, with a lucent ruby softness that belies its spice and bite. I fill myself to near capacity, feeling rebuilt, fundamentally sound and content, proteinized, and I watch Viktor mingle with the nuclear brass. He looks a little lost among those mainframe bodies. He needs to get adjusted to an environment in which fixing and hustling have come out of the shadows of black-market speculation to create a wholly open economy of plunder and corruption. I’m not sure he can forget all the things he has to forget before he can become a man who flourishes here.
I talk to a woman with a pastry flake fixed to a corner of her mouth. Eating saves us from the fatedness of the landscape, from the dosage meters we wear on our bodies. We talk about this. How nice that the unprinted record of some stray pleasure might rebuke the exclusion out there, the forces that make it chancy for us to take a simple breath of air.
I go looking for Brian Glassic. The bunker complex is set on several levels with one large section clearly off-limits to guests—sealed and guarded. I go looking in and out of map rooms, sleeping quarters, a medical setup, down concrete passageways, often ducking my head under low openings. An economist from the U.N. is searching for a toilet. I ease myself down a hatchway that has an iron rail and hobnail steps and there he is in a small room, asleep again.
A chair, a cot and a sink. I’m carrying a plate of food. Not for him—food for me. I sit and watch him sleep and I eat my food. He is wearing his loden coat, one of those hooded Tyrolean things of coarse cloth with wooden toggles for buttons. How right for his old-fashioned face, narrow and boyish, that I could probably crush with five earnest blows. I imagine this with some satisfaction. Dealing a serious blow. But we don’t do that anymore, do we? This is a thing we’ve left behind. Five dealt blows to the pinkish face with the paling hair. But I sit there and watch him, you know, and I’m not sure I want to hit him.
Brian thought I was the soul of self-completion. Maybe so. But I was also living in a state of quiet separation from all the things he might cite as the solid stuff of home and work and responsible reality. When I found out about him and Marian I felt some element of stoic surrender. Their names were nice together and they were the same age and I was hereby relieved of my phony role as husband and father, high corporate officer. Because even the job is an artificial limb. Did I feel free for just a moment, myself again, hearing the story of their affair? I watch him sleep, thinking how satisfying it would be, ten serious smashes to his prep-school face. But it was also satisfying, for just a moment, to think of giving it all up, letting them have it all, the children of both marriages, the grandchild, they could keep the two houses, all the cars, he could have both wives if he wanted them. None of it ever belonged to me except in the sense that I filled out the forms.
I don’t have to get out of the chair to kick the side of the cot. I just extend my leg and kick.
Then I watch him come awake.
“So. The fastest lover een Mayheeko.”
“What’s that?”
“Old joke. You don’t know this joke?”
“Jesus, I was dreaming. What was I dreaming?”
“A guy’s worried about his wife because there’s a famous lover on the prowl. What, you don’t know this joke? The Speedy Gonzalez joke. Goes way back. Took decades, this joke, to get from there to here.”
“From where to here?”
“Fuck you. That’s from where.”
I kick the bed again.
He says, “What?”
“How long, Brian?”
“How long what?”
“You and Marian.”
“What do you mean?”
“What do I mean?”
I kick the bed. He sits up and puts his hands over his face and begins to laugh miserably.
“We used to talk more or less. That’s all.”
“Don’t contradict me.”
“We used to exchange, all right, a confidence now and then. We were close that way but it didn’t last long.”
“I’m smoking a cigar and drinking a brandy. Don’t contradict me.”
He looks at me. I don’t have a cigar and I’m drinking vodka.
“I mean now? Is this the time we want to discuss the matter? Here? Can’t we think about finding a more suitable?”
“She told me everything.”
He looks away.
“I’m prepared to be very open about this but I think we need to reconsider the timing,” he says.
I lean over, the plate in my left hand, and I cuff him with the right. I throw a right, openhanded because we’re being open about this, hitting him with the heel of the hand on the side of the head—a token blow that improves my mood. It is even better than eating. It is better than the meat, the fish, the eggs, the fish eggs and the vodka. I feel good about it. I think we both feel better.
Once he adjusts to the knowledge that he has just been hit, he looks at me again. I know what he sees when he looks at me. Someone bigger than he is, readier to act, sitting between him and the door. This is the message that hums in the air. Not the words, the personal histories, the moral advantage or disadvantage, whatever maneuvers of bluff and counterbluff might ornament the moment. It’s the force of the body. It’s which body crushes the other. Not that he has anything, really, to worry about. But maybe he does.
“When you say she told you everything.”
“She told me everything. We talked for a long time. The talk we had lasted a couple of days, on and off. She said a lot. She told me everything. Then I got in the company car and went to the airport and there you were.”
He grins at me.
“Fucking women. Can’t trust them for shit.”
I hit him with the flat of my hand across an ear. His head jerks impressively. It is not a hard blow. It is a token blow and the head-jerk is overdone.
“Watch what you say about her, Brian.”
He lowers his eyes, looking for a fetch of sympathy. Here he is, hungry, thirsty, jet-lagged, unkempt, being held prisoner, sort of, cuffed around in a basement cell. But I don’t think he has serious reason to worry.
“She told you about the heroin?”
“She told me everything.”
“Only once, I swear. Scared the shit out of me.”
He reaches over and takes some food out of my plate and begins to eat it. I watch him. He keeps his head down, reaching into my plate, eating and reaching, and I let him do it.
“I’m sorry, Nick. Kill me. I want you to. But I have to tell you it didn’t last long. And I have to tell you I was not always—how do I want to put this if I don’t want to get hit again?”
“She told me.”
“I was not always willing.”
I watch him eat.
“I’m the one who was reluctant and I’m the one who was scared you’d find out. And when you didn’t find out, she told you.”
He reaches and eats, head down. I let him go to the sink and splash water on his face. Bomb or no bomb, he says, that’s a boring bunch of people out there. We head back to the room with the food. The guests are spread through several areas, drinking coffee or tea or brandy, some of them, or holding dessert plates up to their chins, those who are standing.
We feel a ground motion, a rumble underfoot. There is a guncotton thud, some far-off shift or heave that is also a local sensation, a hollow body sound. Someone says, “Da” or “Ja.” Then people begin to head for the exit, one by one, leaning under the low portals, room to room, trying not to be overeager, a chain of rustling sighs, and we gather outside the complex and look toward ground zero although there is nothing to see, really, but the sweep of the Kazakh plain.
We stand and look for some time, a few of us speaking briefly, soft-voiced, and there is a sense of anticipation left dangling in the wind. No ascending cloudmass, of course, or rolling waves of sound. Maybe some dust rises from the site and maybe it is only afternoon ha
ze and several people point and comment briefly and there is a flatness in the group, an unspoken dejection, and after a while we go back inside.
We spend the night in the city of Semipalatinsk drinking warm beer and eating horsemeat paté and in the morning, instead of flying back to Moscow first thing, Viktor Maltsev decides we ought to see something.
He takes us to a place he calls the Museum of Misshapens. It is part of the Medical Institute and I note how Brian begins to shy away, to fall back a bit even before we enter the museum proper, a long low room of display cases filled with fetuses. Viktor is a man who evidently likes to deepen the texture of an experience. The fetuses, some of them, are preserved in Heinz pickle jars. There is the two-headed specimen. There is the single head that is twice the size of the body. There is the normal head that is located in the wrong place, perched on the right shoulder.
We look into the jars in silence. We go slowly from one display case to the next because the occasion seems to demand a solemn pace and we say nothing and look only at the jars and never at the walls or windows or each other. Then Viktor says something but not about the jars. He talks about the years of testing. We look into the jars and listen to Viktor and move slowly from one display to the next. Five hundred nuclear explosions at the test site, which is southwest of the city, and even when they stopped testing in the atmosphere, the mine shafts they dug for underground detonations were not deep enough to preclude the venting of dangerous levels of radiation.
He looks at me when he says this.
Then there is the cyclops. The eye centered, the ears below the chin, the mouth completely missing. Brian is also missing. We find him outside, standing by the taxi and looking through factory smoke at the low mountains that run across the steppe. But we don’t take the taxi to our hotel to pick up our luggage and go to the airport. Viktor gives directions to a radiation clinic on the outskirts of the city and we drive out there in a mood of some disgruntlement (Brian and I) even if we are unresisting, too stilled by the pickle jars to make an open complaint.
