Curse the Names

by Robert Arellano

  I was thinking about finding the pages with my name. The bad shit had intensified after I went back to the house and found my articles on the wall. I decided not to say anything more about Sunshine. What could I tell McCaffery: My pot dealer introduced us?

  My last trip to Mel’s preceded the meeting with Sunshine, and McCaffery had only mentioned Española, not Pojoaque, so I didn’t say, Sunshine works at the Roadrunner Diner. I did not tell McCaffery that I had searched out Sunshine—or why. Instead I said, “I think I better call that bank back.”

  “This isn’t so good for your dossier, Oberhelm. You have a privileged stump in the Los Alamos community. You have access to powerful communication lines. Your words are read by thousands of scientists and military personnel monthly. But you’re exposing yourself to unclassified individuals, possible criminals, who could have contacts in foreign governments. People who could influence you.”

  “I write about retirees, about hobbies like fly fishing and flag collecting.”

  “There are many ways people can manipulate you useless you’re aware of the possibilities.” McCaffery finished his near-beer and pocketed the coaster in his blue suit jacket. He left me alone in the bar to finish my light beer.

  I called the bank back and learned that indeed all three of my accounts—checking, savings, and money market—were overdrawn. I spoke very slowly and clearly: “That is impossible. There should be over one hundred thousand dollars in the money market.”

  “That’s an awful lot to keep in a money market, sir,” a banking advisor told me. Nobody was a banker anymore; everyone was a banking advisor, and no one could tell me exactly how bad the damage was.

  Charges were still coming in. And because it had been a check card, not a credit card, which automatically accessed the money market for overdrafts, it was not covered by the same fraud protection.

  “We’re not sure of the total damage yet, sir. We’re still getting wire-transfer orders from overseas.”

  I drove down to the valley in a daze and stopped at the Roadrunner Diner. There was a different cook but the same waitress, and she remembered me. I asked her if she had seen Sunshine.

  “You mean Harold? I was about to ask you the same thing. When you drove away Sunday he left without punching out, and he hasn’t shown up for work the past three days. Far as I know he quit, but if he didn’t, he got fired.”

  This was not just about identity theft. This was about the pages on the wall, the nightmare, and what had happened to Oppie, what was happening to me. This was predatory.

  I went back home to an empty house. I smoked weed, drank scotch, and popped an oxycodone. It took me minutes before I was back to slumming like a bachelor, shuffling around in my underwear and eating dinner over the sink.

  The nightmare had come two nights in a row, and I did not want to let myself fall asleep.

  I woke up the PC and Googled various combinations: Earthquake, Los Alamos, Technical Area 54, Area G.

  I found one report I had never seen before: Final Documented Safety Analysis (DSA) Technical Area. Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration.

  The shitty, fax-style scan might have come off the copy machine in the physics department at the local community college. A PDF opened to 200 percent in the browser with cribbed notations in the margins—I thought it might have been from a classified conference of criticality nerds. Pen marks on tables like Revised Accident Analysis Summary* (Unmitigated Offsite Doses**), where the first asterisk said, Calculations based on “nonconservative assumptions in analysis” could put damage estimates 20 percent higher, and the second asterisk said, These are worst-case scenarios from an offsite dose consequence standpoint.

  Offsite, of course, meant the town of Los Alamos. The thing that got me is they already had standpoints. Somewhere within a baseball throw of my backyard there was probably a standpoint for offsite dose consequence. ODC.

  One analysis put it at 1,795 rem.

  One mile from ground zero, Hiroshima, doses of 150–300 rem yielded a 50 percent mortality rate. So about ten times what killed 200,000 at Hiroshima. A catastrophic fire stoked by hurricane-force winds—a firestorm—would be expected. I could use that sentence in only the passive voice.

  Of the ten (10) scenarios screened into the accident analysis, the largest dose to the MEOI is the result of an earthquake or an aircraft crash into the waste storage domes … the maximum dose calculated by LANL of 1,795 rem.

  MEOI meant Maximum Exposed Offsite Individual. Brilliant—I hadn’t realized that they’d already created an acronym for the victims. MEOI: that’s you and me.

  That calculated by LANL made me think about my job at the Lab. Eventually they were going to tell me to sugarcoat this word. It might take the form of Golz forwarding me an MQR with the message and asking: See if you can make this readable. And there it would be, five hundred words on aircraft-disaster drills. Get ready to lie down in the middle of Trinity Avenue on Monday morning, I told myself. You’ll look just like the sackcloth-and-ashes folks on July 16!

  NNSA’s evaluation of the accident analyses shows that using conservative values for the MEOI parameters would lead to consequences being about 20 percent higher.

  In other words: don’t say we didn’t tell you that it’s actually worse than we’re telling you. P.S.: make that 2,154 rem.

  The consequence analysis even without a potential 20 percent increase is seen to produce offsite doses to the MEOI that are significantly above the DOE Evaluation Guideline of 25 rem.

  No shit, assholes. What would I rewrite this trash as? The shit that’s going to come down is going to nuke North America?

  What would ten times the Hiroshima dose of radiation do to you? I Googled it. Wikipedia had an article on radiation poisoning.

  At 500 rem:

  Nausea, dizziness, leukopenia

  Cognitive impairment

  Also hemorrhage

  At 800 rem:

  Rapid incapacitation

  Nausea, vomiting, severe diarrhea

  High fever, shock

  Get into the thousands and you have seizures, tremors, ataxia, death. In other words, that much radiation would pretty much cause what happened in my nightmare.

  I ate a couple more oxycodones, smoked more pot, drank more coffee, watched more cable. I woke up the PC and tried to log on at work, but I could not access Surge. I tried three more times to be sure it wasn’t a typo. Three more times I was denied. I couldn’t believe it: had Golz cut off my authoring rights?

  * * *

  Toward dawn I could no longer resist. After a few seconds of falling I touched bottom, and I was back in hell on earth. The nightmare arrived immediately. I did not want to get kicked again—tell what I see.

  Tell them what you see.

  People, parents and children—my neighbors—come into the street, clawing out their own eyes.

  Yea. Go on.

  There are women in the street. There are children. Bleeding from the nose, the eyes, the ears …

  The mountains quake at him, and the hills melt.

  They cry, Make it stop! Make it stop! Make it stop!

  The city on the Hill shall be exiled and carried away.

  Thursday, July 11

  I woke to find the sheets wet with sweat. Kitty was not there. I was alone, but the cries echoed in the room. My neighbors were asleep in the houses up and down Pajarito Road. The bloody eyes—what were they beseeching me? I couldn’t make sense of it. I was beginning to think I had to tell someone about these dreams.

  When I got to the office I put my hand on the ID screen and the door did not open. I called Golz. “Sheila, what’s going on?”

  “It’s on account of the identity theft, James. We have to reset all your clearances until we can confirm there has been no security impact. It’s just temporary. Take a few days off until we can iron this out.”

  “Can’t I come in for a minute to get some stuff?” I couldn’t think of any stuff I needed to get, but bef
ore I conceded taking a day off I wanted to feel this situation out a little further.

  “Don’t sweat it,” she said. “Just take a sick day or two.”

  “Is that it? Is this how it comes down?”

  “I’m sorry, James.”

  “I can’t believe this.”

  “I’ll call you when I know something, okay?” She rang off, as they say in Europe. Don’t say she hung up on me.

  It took me all day Thursday to get my identity back, and by the time I did it was worthless. The money market had been a little too closely connected to the checking account. Now all of my accounts were frozen, and everyone I spoke to told me to call back next week.

  I did not sleep. I smoked weed. I had already smoked half my week’s weed. I knew that if I slept I would return to my nightmare. And I knew I would miss Kitty worse when I woke up.

  Every time I started dropping off I shuddered in reflex before letting go. Every time I shut my eyes my nightmare hit like a punch in the gut, blowing the wind right out of me, so that the mercy of sleep was shot to hell. Don’t close your eyes! The edge of sleep a shadow always receding, then the awful seizure—torture. Pass along the message. Can’t I just shut my eyes for a second and give myself a break? It would feel so good to just doze off … Don’t!

  I went to the fridge, raided Kitty’s cheese drawer, lay on the couch with a big wedge of brie and Valley of the Witches, and read:

  A brujo might choose his victim deliberately for reasons of vengeance or at random to sharpen his art. Slowly, secretively break down that person’s physical and psychological resistance. Poison, harassment, and hexes gradually sicken and kill a rival, a husband’s mistress, or a boy in the village who was just a bit too beautiful.

  Friday, July 12

  On Friday morning I went into the garage. The ash on my car had been baked by Thursday’s heat and solidified by the cool of night. I remembered my financial situation and took the change jar from the laundry room. I had no idea what the day would bring, but I didn’t feel like being caught off the Hill again with only Lord Calvert in the stores. My accounts were frozen and Oppie’s ceremony had burned up all my remaining cash, so I went into my study and got the liter of scotch. I stuffed it under the driver’s seat and put Kitty’s pills and the change jar on the passenger seat.

  At Starbucks I paid $12.75 with quarters and left eight cents in the tip jar. I couldn’t even eat my morning panini after realizing I wouldn’t have anyone to give the cheese to. A big lump rose in my throat, and when I tried to melt it with a twenty-eight-ounce Café Heeganty I almost choked. I threw my breakfast in the trash and went back to the Spider for a slug of the scotch.

  I had an appointment to talk about the latest lipid tests, and I sat in the reception area at Farmer’s clinic. They got me in an examination room and a few minutes later Farmer came in wearing his doctor duds. He closed the exam room door.

  “James, you look awful.”

  “Nice to see you too.”

  “Mary told me about Oppie.”

  “I’ll stop by for a drink after work and tell you the whole story. Meanwhile, can you prescribe me something that will let me get some sleep—the dreamless kind?”

  “I can’t give you anything. I can’t even offer you a drink.” Farmer slid into doctor mode and handed me the blood results. “I’ve got to take you off the statins immediately. Your liver is off the charts, and look at the lipids.” He pointed to the LDLs. These were not the happy lipids. “Have you been taking any additional medications? Tylenol?”

  “No. Unless …” I thought about Kitty’s pills. “What is it they cut codeine with?”

  “Jesus, James. Let me look at that hand.”

  “It hasn’t been hurting.”

  “Not if you’ve been popping oxys it hasn’t.” He lifted the bandage from my tent-stake wound and made a not-so-bedside-mannerly face. “Look at the redness around the edges, the swelling. We’re going to have to put you on a series of antibiotics.”

  “Hank, lately I’ve been thinking it’s possible something might be going to happen.”

  “What?”

  “Have you ever thought about the possibility of an emergency in Los Alamos? A really big one?”

  “Sure, we’re all trained for it one way or another.”

  “Ten times more radiation than they got at Hiroshima—what would that do to you, you think?”

  “Nausea, severe leukopenia.”

  “What’s leukopenia?”

  “A decrease in light blood cells, the kind you get with chemotherapy. There might be a sudden and severe destruction of platelets, and that might result in some bloody discharge.”

  “How about a hundred times more radiation?”

  He frowned like someone playing a doctor on TV. “I don’t know. Seizures, tremor, ataxia. Total breakdown of the nervous system.”

  “Could it make a sane person claw his own eyes out?”

  Hank caught himself. Or Dr. Farmer caught Hank. “You’re under a lot of stress, James. It’s only natural for the mind to make irrational associations, especially at a time of psychological vulnerability.”

  “Shit, Hank, did you just say psychological?”

  “You know what I have to recommend, and it’s not just for professional liability—I’m saying this as a friend.”

  “Aw, hell no, Hank. Stop. I’m not listening. Just let me go.”

  He made me take a scrip for penicillin, but I was past the point of worrying about a little cut on my hand. I didn’t tell him about the nightmares.

  Back in the Spider I checked the phone for my schedule. The week before I had made an appointment for a Surge interview with a scientistgardener, and I thought it would be best for things at work if I just proceeded as normal and kept the date. Miss one month’s paycheck now and everything would end up underwater: the car, the house, my life … Connect the dots.

  I was sitting across from a kindly old scientist in thick-lens eyeglasses. I didn’t have a fresh notebook, so I was taking slapdash notes on the backs of some tire store receipts I’d found in the glove compartment. I wasn’t keeping control of this one. Instead of telling me about his philodendrons, the subject was talking about his prostate. But I was still supposed to be taking notes. I was always supposed to take notes.

  “It wasn’t the full surgery—not yet. It was more like a scrubbing to clean out the garbage disposal. You know, like a bottle brush …”

  It was a hot summer afternoon. The cookies, Pepperidge Farm Chessmen, glistened on the plate. It was getting late. We hadn’t even touched on his hobby. He wheezed to his wife, forty years younger, to set an extra place. We’d go on talking over lunch. This was against all my rules of protocol: get the story, get out, never befriend them. I caught glances of the poor wife through the kitchen door and saw an expression on her face that said embarrassment mixed with homicidal rage, like, He’s caught another one, and now I’ll have to listen to the same crap all through lunch for the hundredth time while he bosses me around.

  I interrupted: “There’s a house I’ve been going to.”

  The subject stopped short. “What?”

  “There’s a house I’ve been going to, over the mountains in Mora County.” He looked at me quizzically. “Nobody has lived there for years. I think it’s got some strange energy to it, though. Witches meet there—modern witches.” The wife peered in from the kitchen. Drying her hands on her apron, she cocked her head to the side and looked at her husband. The subject’s expression transformed before my eyes, and I realized he saw me for what I really was: unkempt, unshaven, a kook. Outside at the edge of his pristine lawn, the Spider, caked with ash, was parked like a car advertising a horror show. I continued, “Or teenagers with a dark obsession …”

  The phone rang and the subject stood up. When he walked past me, he glanced over at my pad and saw what I had been doodling while he spoke: little L-shaped boxes. I heard him in the kitchen: “I see … No problem at all. Yes, we’ll do it another time.�
�

  The subject suddenly remembered that he and his wife had other plans for lunch. He had to get ready to leave. Would I mind showing myself out? He would call the editor in the morning to set up another time for the interview …

  Humiliated, I stumbled out of the house with my pen and scrap paper and climbed into the Spider.

  My cell phone vibrated. No ID.

  I figured I couldn’t afford any more bad news, but I also couldn’t afford not to get good news, so I took the call. “Hello?”

  There was the clunk and clatter of a desk phone coming off speaker. “Oberhelm?” It was McCaffery.

  “Yes.”

  “Are you aware that you’ve been suspended from service on administrative leave?”

  “Maybe. Yes, I guess. This morning my hand didn’t work in the scanner.”

  “You shouldn’t be there right now. You have to desist all work related to the Lab.”

  Through my mind flashed a mental list of things so far that had gotten fucked up: laptop, camera, bank accounts, credit cards, Oppie, Kitty, liver, and now job. I said to myself, Ever since I went to that house, my whole life has been going to shit. Connect the dots.

  McCaffery said, “Meet me on Pajarito Road, your house, in fifteen minutes.”

  “Are you sure—”

  Click. McCaffery hung up.

  I reached between the seats for the pill bottle and shook out another oxycodone, chewed it. I tossed my nonsense notes on the floor and put the Parker back in my shirt pocket. That’s when I felt a soreness in my chest. Was this it already, the coup de grâce? But the pain was superficial, more a burning on the surface of the skin than anything arterial. I unbuttoned my shirt and noticed a long red welt rising like a badge on the skin above my left breast. Now what? I buttoned back up and drove home to Pajarito Road. The pill kicking in, I started to loosen up.