Fallout

by Sara Paretsky

  I gathered those up along with the books, which ran the gamut of conspiracy theories, from who killed JFK to reports of UFOs descending on Roswell. Clouds Without Witnesses: Secret Weapons Tests on Human Populations was a thick volume, but heavy even for a book. I opened it to find that Sonia had cut out the interior. A pint of vodka, almost empty, nestled inside. Sonia had written “You’re So Ignorant” on the endpaper with a broad-tipped red Magic Marker, accompanied by an R. Crumb–like caricature of a man in a U.S. Army uniform.

  I flipped through the rest of the books, but they were all just that, books. I lay on the floor to look under the bed and pulled out her two suitcases. One was empty, but the other held a jumble of legal pads and notebooks, covered with a sprawling hand.

  I put the books and articles inside and sprinted down the hall and stairs. I made it back to Free State just as the receptionist was starting to lock the outer door.

  42

  Sonia, April 1983

  “Sustain me with raisin cakes, refresh me with apples, for I am faint with love.”

  Hidden under her bedclothes, she murmured the words into the T-shirt. All the little hairs on her arms stood up, almost as if his hands were there, stroking her. The shirt smelled of ash and sweat, not myrrh and lilies, but she knew her beloved’s sweat, and it was sweeter than wine.

  One of the girls at school was born-again, and she thought it was her duty to convert Sonia. Apparently bringing a Jew to Jesus earned you buckets of brownie points in heaven. Gerri thought Sonia’s family were doubly damned, because not only were they Jews but Sonia’s father was a scientist who believed in evolution.

  Gerri had left a Bible on Sonia’s desk, with a letter that explained her mission: “Read Genesis and you will know the truth about the creation of the world.”

  Sonia thought the creation stories were ridiculous. They were followed by pages and pages of who was whose daddy. The rest of it looked equally dull—long lectures on how wicked everyone was, or page after page of genealogies. Still, she’d toyed with pretending to be converted—it would drive Daddy and Mother into a frenzy of shouting and door slamming and screaming at each other over whose fault it was that their only daughter was such a loser.

  But then Sonia had stumbled on the Song of Solomon, buried in the middle of some incredibly boring proverbs. “Upon my couch at night I sought the one I love—I sought but found him not. I must rise and roam the town.”

  It was like the story of her life, or the story of her love, roaming through the town, looking for her beloved, peering into the windows of the bars downtown until she saw him at the Diamond Duck. It was eleven o’clock, and neither parent knew or cared that she wasn’t home. Matt was having a beer with Jennifer Perec, of all people. Stupid Jennifer.

  Sonia imagined sauntering in, feigning surprise at seeing him. “Just passing by, I’ll join you for a minute if I may. Let me have a beer.” The bartender would try to throw her out for being too young to drink, and Matt would get to his feet, fling a few bills on the table, and say curtly, “She looks too young to you because you can’t see beneath the surface, to the quality of her soul.”

  She couldn’t quite bring herself to do it. If she’d had a friend, someone to egg her on, double-dare her, maybe she would have, but she didn’t have friends.

  Lucinda, the lab tech, said to leave the poor boy alone, find someone her own age in high school, but the high-school boys were all acne and gross jokes, and anyway, what difference did it make when deep down Sonia knew the truth, that she was fat, lumbering, unlovable? Her life was working in Nate’s lab, then home to do homework—that was pretty funny, everything at home was work. She washed the dinner dishes while Mother passed out in front of the TV and Daddy was at some seminar or his experiment was running late. Or he was pecking the Magpie, that was Mother’s claim.

  She’d taken Matt’s T-shirt out of the trash. She was in the lab, wondering if she could filch one of the petri dishes Matt had put in the tub, when she smelled smoke and heard him swear. He’d bent too close to the Bunsen burner and his T-shirt had started to smolder. He ripped it off before it actually burst into flames and thrust it under the cold-water tap, but when he pulled it back, the front was full of blackened holes.

  “Don’t tell your dad,” he’d said to Sonia, who was looking at his bare chest, wide-eyed. “He already thinks I’m the clumsiest SOB who’s ever set foot in his lab.”

  She shook her head dumbly. She should have leaped on him and saved his life, but instead she’d stood stock-still, her hands in the soapy water. He tossed the shirt into the trash and buttoned his lab coat up to his neck, but later, when he went to collect something from the cold-storage locker, Sonia grabbed the shirt and stuck it into her book bag.

  Later she took one of her brother Stuart’s razors and cut the Song of Songs out of the Bible to keep, then put the book on Gerri’s desk with a note that said, “I must accept my fate of eternal damnation. You will do detention for thousands of years in the afterlife for failing to rescue my lost soul.”

  Sonia 2007

  Dickheads and Drunks I Have Known

  1. Dan Bors, creep, probably not drunk. I go to collect my drugs and he says, You back home, Sonia?

  No, dickhead, this is my doppelgänger. She goes out in public to talk to assholes like you.

  So of course everyone in the place turns to stare. Oh, Sonia Kiel’s back in town. Might have known that potty mouth without looking. Couldn’t make it in Boston, could she? Poor Shirley, poor Nathan, having their grown daughter back on their hands again.

  Sonia could read the thought balloons over their heads. It was one of the side effects of her illness, or maybe her drugs. People smiled and said one thing, but the thought balloon said the opposite.

  Therapists who tried to read Sonia’s thought balloons only ever saw a cloud so dense they couldn’t make out the words. They imagined anger when it was usually sadness or fragility.

  2. My agent. Molly Pierrot. I’ve tried every gallery in the Northeast, Sonia, but I warned you that the days of big abstract installations are over. And these pieces lack coherence. They’re derivative of Louise Nevelson. Blah, blah, blah.

  Sonia couldn’t remember with great clarity what happened next, but she’d been caught on a surveillance tape smashing the front window of the Zivany Sculpture Gallery on Newbury Street with a fire extinguisher and then posing in the show window naked except for a placard that read abstract expressionist going-out-of-business sale, 50¢ or best offer. Her arms and feet were bleeding from where she’d sliced them on the broken plate glass of the gallery window.

  Sonia thought her exhibition was witty, but the cops thought it was criminal trespass. Why is it art when Marina Abramović stands naked onstage and cuts herself but criminal trespass and indecent exposure when I do it? Sonia had demanded, first of the arresting officer and then the assistant DA handling emergency warrants that night. No one answered, just a lot of eye-rolling.

  She didn’t have money for bail and found herself in a holding cell with five other women, one of them puking all night, two of them delusional. She’d been there . . . a day? A week? She wasn’t sure.

  And then Nathan suddenly appeared, explained to a judge that she had diminished responsibility. Waved around those papers that CheeseNuts, winner of first place in the dickhead competition, the dickiest head of all, signed when she was fourteen. That was twenty years ago, ancient history, she said, but the DA murmured sympathetically with Nathan. Balloon overhead saying, Didn’t need a piece of paper to show me she’s nuts.

  The Zivany Gallery said they wouldn’t press charges if Sonia, meaning Nathan, replaced the window. The DA’s office said they’d let everything go if Nathan took her back to Kansas. Back to CheeseNuts, DDH. Dr. Dickhead.

  Molly called yesterday to say she’d sold three pieces, one to a private collector. And two to the Zivany Gallery, oh, irony of ironies. There’s excitement attached to a piece by a certified crazy person. Molly acted as though she�
�d created the drama just to help my career. Maybe a woman can’t be a dickhead, but she can show more sliminess than most of the male varieties. Bitch, wormhole, you get 35 percent and you want me to thank you for taking it. Fuck off.

  Sonia didn’t tell her parents about the sale. They would have taken the money in the name of protecting her from her impulsiveness. Or to cover the bills Nathan had paid in Boston.

  3. Shirley Kiel. Greatest drunk I’ve known.

  Sonia underlined her mother’s name in her journal with such heavy strokes that the pen tore through the paper. Nathan was hard to live with. Okay, Nathan was impossible to live with, but when Shirley was younger, she hadn’t wanted to leave him. She’d rather sit with a cup of vodka—sort of disguised as coffee—muttering under her breath, rehearsing all the insults she would slam him with when they sat down to a burned-up dinner.

  Now that Shirley was almost eighty, she would never leave. Where would she go?

  Sonia thought about putting fluoxetine in her mother’s vodka bottles. Supposedly it diminished your desire for alcohol, even if you couldn’t admit you had a drinking problem.

  Fluoxetine, olanzapine, her own cocktails. Prescribed by CheeseNuts, hovered over by Dan Bors. Dan had been a creep in first grade, and he was still a creep when they graduated from high school twelve years later. He’d crept off to pharmaceutical school and now he was rubbing his sweaty palms against Sonia’s pills, going home, telling his grinning bottle-blond wife— What was her name? It sounded like Jaundice. Jaundice did something or other at the university.

  Of course, Nathan would have told everyone in his lab about his latest bout of martyrdom at the hands of his unstable daughter. He’d stopped teaching eight years ago, but he still kept his lab, still dabbled in experiments, still had a couple of graduate students, faithful unto death, as Shirley put it. They work with the lab mice but they don’t understand they’re lab rats themselves, clinging to your father like a piece of decaying driftwood far out to sea.

  Shirley had studied English and drama when she’d been an earnest undergraduate, and even after decades of vodka she could still quote reams of poetry. Most often Amy Lowell, ending with “Christ! What are patterns for?” so many times that Sonia and her older brothers used to chant it as a chorus to any complaint.

  Like the night that Larry took the car without permission and drove to Kansas City with his buddies to watch the Smashing Pumpkins at the Starlight Theatre. Larry drove off the road on their way home. He’d been picked up by the sheriff for drunk driving, and the car had to be towed out of the drainage ditch. Somehow a branch had lanced the radiator.

  Nathan was predictably furious, so Shirley took refuge in mordant laughter. When Nathan finished with his tirade, Larry and Sonia and Stu shouted, “Christ! What are patterns for?” which of course made Nathan and Shirley even more furious. It seemed strange that Nathan had lived to be eighty without popping a blood vessel.

  And then there was the night that Sonia— That saga had ended not with Amy Lowell but CheeseNuts. Whose name was on the bottles she’d picked up from sweaty Dan Bors. Twenty years later and she was back where she’d started.

  * * *

  Sonia October 2016

  I don’t know what is real, / I can’t touch what I feel, / And I hide behind the shield of my illusion

  She’d been reading old copies of the Douglas County Herald on the group home’s computer when she saw the report of the air force sale of the land east of the silo. It wasn’t reported like that, not as a story: United States Air Force sells sacred ground to greedy grubbing corporation. It was a report in the legal notices: sale of 15 acres, lat: 38.946021, long: −95.120369, from a line extending from one-sixteenth mile north of North 1420 Road and so on.

  Sonia knew those numbers, knew every inch of that land, every way of describing it. In his sympathetic moments, Randy tried to get her to admit how exhausting such knowledge must be: It weighs you down, Sonia, keeps you from moving on.

  She didn’t want to move on. She’d seen Nathan, she was sure she’d seen him, heard him yelling at Matt: You subhuman specimen, how could you do this to me? Do you hate me that much?

  Matt had fallen over and hadn’t gotten up. Had Nathan hit him? She thought it was the heavy blows from the words, not from her father’s fists, that had sent him to the ground.

  She’d been watching from behind one of the tents, the tent where Jennifer and her baby had lain, both of them pretending to sleep so they wouldn’t have to face Nathan. Jennifer had even kept her eyes shut when the soldiers carried her to the car.

  When Matt fell over, Sonia stood like the witless lump her father often called her. It was like the day in the lab all over again. The memory made her hot with shame and finally gave her strength to move over to him. I will heal him, and he will be forever grateful. Jennifer isn’t moving, she doesn’t really care. How beautiful is my beloved.

  Her heavy legs, she walked like a polar bear, maybe she’d been half transformed when Stu and Larry played polar bear with her. She’d never grown fur or big protective claws and teeth, had acquired only the lumbering, uncertain gait of a bear on its hind legs.

  She’d flung herself on Matt, hadn’t she? Sonia rolled so that she blocked Jenny’s view. The Magpie appeared from nowhere, and then Nathan, crazy with fury, came back. Fury with her or the Magpie or both of them? A baby was crying. Magda was telling Nathan he had to do something about the baby.

  Sonia looked up from Matt’s body. She found her polar-bear voice and growled, Nathan doesn’t have tits, you ignorant bitch! He can’t nurse a baby, and he for sure never changed a diaper in his life, so don’t expect him to look after a baby for you!

  She bent over Matt to give him mouth-to-mouth resuscitation, but the Magpie pulled her away, screaming in bird talk, and Nathan joined her, the two of them yanking on Sonia’s arms, dragging her away from her beloved. She went limp, the way the protesters did at the silo, and Nathan let go of her. Dusted his hands: I’m washing my hands of you.

  Nathan strode away, got back in his car, but the Magpie kept hopping around, looking for treasures. Sonia saw the movie, but the soldiers were arguing with the Magpie, so no one else was watching.

  The soldiers left, the Magpie left, no one paid attention to Sonia, lying on the ground with her arms around Matt, his blood oozing onto her breasts—we are joined now for eternity, we are blood brother and sister. She heard a baby crying, but it seemed so far away and she was too heavy to move.

  The fire came. Some man screamed—She’s alive!—and they lifted her into a truck. Come along unless you want to be burned alive. I want to be burned alive. I want you to burn me up with Matt.

  First she thought they had: burning, freezing, lungs aching for air, a sound like ocean waves. Only slowly did she realize that the ocean waves came from a machine making her breathe, in, out, until someone said, She’s going to make it, she’s breathing on her own, but then when she tried to sit up, her head had been stuffed full of cotton.

  Gertrude Perec, Nathan’s secretary, liked to tell about the time her mother filled banana skins with cotton and glued them together so carefully they looked untouched. Then she handed them out to people as a joke. My head is a banana skin sewn full of cotton.

  That was CheeseNuts, but she didn’t realize it until much later, of course. CheeseNuts had filled her head with lithium. He agreed with Nathan that she had dreamed up the whole scene at the silo. Vivid imagination turning into delusions. They’d all tut-tutted sadly, even Shirley, looking at her with a malevolent eye that said, You lost. You didn’t know you were in a race, and you’re already so far behind you might as well give up.

  Why should I give you or Nathan or CheeseNuts the satisfaction of putting my obsession aside? she said to Randy. No one tells you that memorizing every variety of grass in the Midwest is exhausting. No one tells CheeseNuts what an imbecile he sounds like when he starts talking about terroir and how 1883 was the best year for horse piss but 1992 was bette
r for cow manure.

  When she read the legal notice—three years old by the time she saw it—that old itch came over her. She had to get out to the land, see that his grave was secure. She’d hitched a ride partway, walked the rest of the way. Not so bad when you didn’t have a job you had to get up for, you could spend a night walking those country roads.

  The sun was coming up when she finally got there, and Sonia could see that it was worse than she’d thought. A fence slicing through the graveyard, plants—corn or alfalfa or some stupid farm crop. And then like some nightmare, there was the Magpie, hopping along, stealing the seeds. She was older, and her hair was bleached so it looked like strings.

  You shouldn’t bleach your hair. The chemicals make it ropy, Sonia said, and the Magpie said, Who the fuck are you?

  Some men were with the Magpie, of course—there were always men with her—and they laughed and said, Who is that?

  One of her fans. I saw you at the movies, hopping along between the tents. When your hair was red and your tits were full of useless milk. Why are you despoiling Matt’s grave?

  The Magpie lunged at her, but Sonia backed away. The men said Sonia was a lunatic and leave her alone, and she hitched a ride back to town. After that, though, she couldn’t stay away. She kept coming back, watching them desecrate the grave. Until the night she saw trolls digging it up! She’d tried to stop them, but the sheriff came just as he had thirty years ago, threw her into his truck, bad girl, Sonia, get off the land.