I got on the Los Alamos Mesa Public Library catalog and found a small-press book about Mora titled Valley of the Witches. I sent the call numbers to my phone and left the office at 10:15, informing Golz over my shoulder, “Interview.”
I brought a pen and an empty notebook and walked a brisk half-mile back across the parking lot to the Spider. Although I always typed drafts of my profiles on the office computer, I still preferred pen and paper for interview notes. It set most subjects at ease better than a geek wielding a laptop or tablet between them, and there is no substitute for blank paper when literally drawing connections between topics and themes. Besides, I like to cross my legs when sitting for an interview. Try typing on crossed legs.
I parked in the shade of a cottonwood in front of the residence of my subject: Harumi Ogawa, a Japanese physicist famous in the field of systems analysis. The week before I had requested a brief from Operations Protocol. I reread it now on my phone:
Chief Criticality Officer from 1945 until his retirement in 1983, now 94 years old. Cannot easily walk or stand. His wife, 20 years younger, helps him get comfortable before guests are admitted. Hobby: microminiatures. N.B.: Do NOT raise the subject of the criticality accidents.
As chief criticality officer, Ogawa’s job had been preventing the occurrence of a criticality accident, which was a pretty way of saying someone, while conducting an experiment, catching a fatal dose of radiation. For four decades, his record promoting safety at the labs had been almost impeccable, except for two early accidents involving a radioactive sphere that had earned the nickname Demon Core. I knew the story from all the Los Alamos history books: a fourteen-pound, melonsized ball of plutonium had gone supercritical in two separate freak accidents in 1945 and 1946.
Harry Daghlian worked alone on August 21, 1945, just days after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He hovered over a nickel-plated plutonium sphere weighing 6.2 kilograms. The sphere had not yet been dubbed the Demon Core.
Daghlian took several tungsten-carbide blocks and stacked them around the plutonium sphere. He moved a block to take a measurement and dropped it accidentally into the center of the assembly. It touched the sphere. There was a superprompt—that is, micromomentary—spike in the neutron population: radiation, heat, and finally a blue flash when the air became ionized around the neutron burst. His hand shot out in reflex to remove the dropped block, but he was flashed by a radioactive dose estimated at 510 rem. He suffered acute radiation poisoning, and four weeks later he was dead.
The following year, a scientist named Louis Slotin held a screwdriver between two half-spheres of beryllium and the same core. It slipped and the core went supercritical. The radiation killed him nine days later.
Operations Protocol said this topic was off-limits, so unless Ogawa brought it up I would stick to his hobby. For leisure, Ogawa had engineered the fabrication of atomsized sculptures, most recently a microscopic noodle bowl with chopsticks just two atoms thick.
Ogawa’s wife showed me into the living room. Along with my notebook I carried a bag emblazoned with the CB Fox logo.
Ogawa was waiting in his chair with his hands folded on his lap, no newspaper or open book. He gazed benignly while I performed an informal bow, back straight and hands at my sides. Ogawa nodded slightly. His wife bowed and backed out of the room.
I put down my notebook and opened the bag, took out a gift box, and lay it on a footstool before Ogawa. “Ohayõ gozaimasu … it only amounts to a symbol of my appreciation, but …”
Ogawa opened the box. Inside were alloy salt and pepper shakers from Nambé designs. “Thank you. They are very stylish.” Ogawa’s wife reappeared to take the shaker set away.
Ogawa offered a little boxed gift as well. From the size and weight, I guessed it was a folding fan or a set of serving spoons.
“You should not have gone through the trouble.”
“It is just a little something, nothing much.”
“Thank you, Harumi-san.” Ogawa did not ask me to open the box, so I observed etiquette by laying his gift aside quietly to open later.
“You have traveled in Japan?” he asked.
“I have never had the privilege.”
In fact, I had merely Googled Japanese custom and spent ten minutes on Wikipedia.
“Then you have worked or lived among Japanese here?”
I smiled and gave a half-nod so as not to contradict the venerable scientist. I could mention the freshmanyear roommate from Japan, but that might lead to questions of where, and to be honest I had never found out.
He had been a bookworm and computer nerd and we rarely spoke to each other much less spent time together, although he once helped me through a nasty hangover by fixing up some strong black tea.
I took out my pen. “Dr. Ogawa, please tell me about your incredible noodle bowl.”
We had a long conversation during which the questions I had prepared wove naturally through a weft of pleasant solicitude. I obligingly played the familiar part of the fawning graduate student, volleying Ogawa’s anecdotes with exclamations like “Interesting,” “Fascinating,” “Amazing,” and all the time taking notes, nodding, squinting with an intensity that said, Your story—your cleared story—means something to me, to the people who will read it in the magazine.
Ogawa’s wife served hot green tea and he mused on the team at the Tokyo University of Agriculture and Technology that had extracted gasoline from pressurized cow dung.
I sipped my tea and found my mind wandering: a spike of light shooting from my chest … a dog dragging a bag of bones out of the woods … I recovered from my brief distraction and realized Ogawa was looking at me, waiting for the next question.
I went to stock: “What book have you recently read that impressed you?”
“Ah, have you read Murakami’s Underground?”
“Yes, I know the book—about the 1995 sarin attacks on the Tokyo subway.”
“Yes, sarin—here is a gas twenty-six times more deadly than cyanide. The pain in the eyes and lungs must have been terrible in the subway cars, and yet the passengers did not talk to each other to acknowledge their rising discomfort until the pain had become almost unbearable.”
Ogawa drank his tea in three steady gulps. He put down the cup, paused with eyes shut, and said, “Now, let me tell you about the Demon Core.”
I leaned forward, my expression impassive. Ogawa had brought it on himself.
He sighed, motioning at the mantel where he kept some of his medals. “You are familiar with the object?”
“Certainly.” I gave Ogawa the worried frown, the pursed lips, the sympathetic-puppy look of the interviewer-confessor. “But I would be grateful for your story.”
Ogawa nodded and peered into the near-empty cup as if to divine from the leaves a best means of inception, but how to speak of the unspeakable? There is no good way to recount a great horror.
Ogawa closed his eyes and said, “I wish to tell you something I have told nobody. When I heard how the first man touched the brick to the core, I thought I had failed to account for something, anything, which might have been foreseen to prevent such an event. But the second man with the screwdriver—I realized there is no such thing as prevention.” He looked somewhere back in his skull. “I have often wondered: what is it that draws men to self-destruction?”
“What they call ‘tickling the tail of the dragon’?”
Ogawa shook his head and fluttered his hand in the air to wave this jargon away. “I do not mean suicide, or tempting fate by flirting with danger. Something more complex. It is the power of what this man is holding—something so small that can be so destructive. He perhaps doubts it could be true. He forgets his physicality.”
I finished taking notes quietly, closed the notebook, and said, “I am grateful, Harumi-san, for the fascinating interview. I will of course courier you a draft of the layout to approve all quotations attributed to you before publication.”
He made a slight gesture to rise. I stood and bowed.
Not bad, that last part, and an exclusive too. I wouldn’t use it in Surge. I would save it for a commissioned piece in the mainstream press someday, maybe an obituary. Enough major articles in national periodicals, and I’d collect the best in a book, a memoir of a cub in Los Alamos. I’d tell how much I learned about the range of human characters from authoring these biopics of mad scientists.
Never befriend them. It was death to befriend them. Just like high-profile journalists or certain expensive shrinks, there was the serious risk of getting stuck with a stalker, a subject who says to himself: you coaxed out my story, you gave me fifteen minutes in the spotlight, you seemed to care, and now I’m going to keep telling you every time I finish another needlepoint (I’m really making strides in my art!) or when the peppers yield an incredible crop (my thumb is even greener than I thought!).
Get the story and get out of there before the coffee is cold. Golz would rebuff the how-ya-doin? follow-ups. I gave her a little shortlist of excuses to lob at callers at random: he’s at a conference, in an all-day meeting, on assignment on an atoll. Never befriend them, and yet leave them feeling like they made a friend—one they’d never see again.
It was high noon and scorching hot outside. I got back to the car and tossed Ogawa’s box on the passenger seat. Then I thought about it again before starting the car and opened the top of the box. It was a pen—a really nice pen—a Parker, ballpoint, but with a space-age nib and a streamline stem. I slipped it in my breast pocket and drove back to town.
I didn’t feel like returning to the office, so I stopped at the Mesa Public Library to check out the book on Mora and to take a piss after the long interview and all the green tea.
Someone had Sharpied on the tile above my urinal: NAZIS. Nice. Every once in a while some old-timer making a pit stop here must get really shook up seeing that accusation in midstream.
I made a swing through the New Mexico history aisle and found the book on Mora, Valley of the Witches, a hand-bound manuscript that looked like it had been put together at a copy shop. I stopped by the checkout and gave the librarian my card to scan.
Out in the blistering-hot parking lot I threw the book in the backseat of the Spider and swung by Smith’s on the way home to get myself a half-pint of Jägermeister for a bracer.
I walked into the kitchen and found Kitty talking with one of the ladies from her women’s group. The friend—what was her name? Alina, Adelina, Analina?—cut me a look like, You monster.
“What?” I said. They immediately fell silent.
Kitty wanted to have a talk about the dog. Oppie had been brooding all day since she had picked him up from his haircut. “When you dropped him off in the morning, you didn’t achieve adequate closure.”
“Not this again.”
“Lars says you have to say See you soon instead of Goodbye, and tell him who will be picking him up and in approximately how long.” Fucking Lars, the pet psychic I’d never met but who I could already tell Kitty wanted to fuck—if they weren’t already fucking.
“I told Oppie you’d pick him up by ten.”
“Not what time, dumbass, how long. Dogs don’t follow the clock. Oppie has containment phobia—you know that. It’s different from escape compulsion or separation anxiety. And one other thing: stop fucking giving Oppie cheese!”
“I don’t give him cheese.”
“I know you give him cheese. Le Salon told me. It’s the cheese from your fucking morning panini.”
“Jesus! What do they do, examine his fucking shit?”
“Yes.” She shot a look at her friend to screw up her courage. “James, have you been drinking?”
Shit. She was calling me James.
“I’ve got work to do,” I said, leaving Kitty with her support-group friend.
I went into my study and woke up the PC. I had to post something on Surge this week for the next round of sackcloth-and-ashes protests. I rolled a joint, poured myself a scotch, and got started on my research.
A lot of what I found on the Pax Kyrie website was not all that extremist. There were announcements for planned actions in Los Alamos for the Trinity Birthday on July 16; there were melodramatic diatribes from Father Jim Darling, S.J.; and there was a page called Evidence from Their Own Mouths with the predictable epigram: Those who live by the sword shall die by the sword.
I watched a YouTube of last year’s Birthday affair.
It was cheap and cheesy: mic stands, speakers, hippies handing out little plastic baggies of ashes to the milling crowd. Fr. Jim Darling, their leader, speaking over the crackling PA in Ashley Park:
All right, people, at 2:45 we all drop our ashes on the ground. Then you sit wherever you are and we commence the thirty minutes of prayer. While you talk with God, Pax Kyrie invites you to ask for the miracle of nuclear disarmament. Right at 3:15, after the thirty minutes of prayer is over, we all come back and sit down on the lawn. If anyone has any questions, ask Bud here in the red hat. Now, take a deep breath. Relax. Enter into the presence of the God of Peace who asks us to be His witness. Bless us as we commemorate the horrific suffering of the victims of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Lord, disarm our hearts as we come before You and pray, “Spare Los Alamos from your wrath that all may see the error of their ways. Let men put on sackcloth and cry mightily to God, turning from their evil ways and from the violence that is in their hands. Disarm the nuclear arsenal in Los Alamos and all the nuclear weapons on the planet.” We ask this in the name of the God of Peace. Ah-men.
Nice prayer. Where had he lifted that line? I Googled sackcloth and violence in their hands. There it was in the Old Testament, Book of Jonah.
I created a new post on the Surge blog and typed:
The sackcloth-and-ashes people will be back this month. They model themselves after Jonah of the Old Testament, but Pax Kyrie activists should read a little closer in the good book: Nineveh was already exonerated before Jonah came along, and all his doom-mongering was irrelevant. If the leaders of the sackcloth-and-ashes protests stopped taking verses out of context to suit their demagoguery, they would realize that they are destined to end up alone, like Jonah, under the withered squash blossom: embittered, alienated, and ultimately suicidal. Modern pariahs, they only embarrass themselves. It’s all right there in the OT.
Save draft. E-mail Golz for a declassify in the morning.
Kitty went up to bed without a goodnight and I started to get a headache. I lay down on the living room couch.
The bedside clock says 6:20, and Ned is already out on his immaculate lawn. I go outside and step over the Los Alamos Monitor.
“Good morning! Did you hear a noise?”
He squints at me through the plastic goggles. Never mind. Was it just the sound of myself jerking awake?
Ned stoops to yank the cord, once, twice. The streetlamps burn on Pajarito Road, the asphalt disappears, my eyes follow the curve, and I see a cloud of smoke and ash coming around the bend.
“Ned! Look!”
He turns, reels. The storm is almost upon us.
A truck roars out of the cloud, darting back and forth on Pajarito Road—the rattling wheels, the racing engine. Through the windshield I see the driver and feel myself shudder. His clothes are on fire.
I have to warn them.
The truck crashes up on the sidewalk, barely missing me and mowing Ned right under the axle. It grinds to a stop and the driver falls out on his hands and knees, his clothes on fire. He is clawing at his face, raking at his eyes.
Tell them what you see.
Tuesday, July 9
I awoke with a start. My fingers and hands were numb. The nightmare had left me with a terrible feeling, as if the skin had been torn off a moment that was yet to be, a reality bound to happen.
I stayed awake drinking coffee and went into work early. Golz said, “I declassified your Pax Kyrie post and emailed you a new CLR.”
Classified Leak Response.
It came across my desk as a veiled rebuttal in the passive voice from SAP.
The Lab usually admitted to wrongdoing only when there had already been a leak.
Los Alamos National Laboratory acknowledged this week that several thousand drums of radioactive waste had been stored on pallets in tents just a mile upwind from White Rock, but that situation has been mitigated.
I poked around the Pax Kyrie site some more. When I scrolled down, Evidence from Their Own Mouths contained a long list of safety violations at Los Alamos, and many links to documentation on the Department of Energy’s own website.
I was amazed at how much of it was unclassified. Some of it was actually on Wikipedia. One memorandum detailed a contaminated-waste storage pit known as Technical Area 54, Area G.
The National Laboratory announced a plan to reinforce Technical Area 54. 20,000 drums are still temporarily buried at Area G, and thousands of additional drums are slated to arrive for above-ground storage, adding up to about 50,000 drums now or soon to be stored above ground at Los Alamos.
When I dug a little deeper, I learned that buried could mean that one layer of drums was under two inches of sand while the rest were stacked four pallets high beneath plastic tents.
Somewhere in the back of our minds, all Lab employees suppressed images of the drums. They were metal, fifty-five gallons, emblazoned with the radioactive warning, and there were a lot of them. Perhaps it was human nature for us to remain willfully ignorant as to the exact number.
Albeit among the biggest, Area G was just one of the Lab’s 1,900 solid-waste sites in and around Los Alamos.
There are hundreds of thousands of drums of radioactive and explosive waste stored under big tents all over northern New Mexico.
Curse the Names Page 7
