Gold Fame Citrus

by Claire Vaye Watkins

  She liked the compression of his weight above her and the cool, ungiving concrete deck below. They moved together in silence, eyes closed, feeling everything. Across the bubble, Ig slept.

  After, they washed each other. She felt all the parts of his body she’d been curious about: his broad and hairy shoulders, his plump butt and the scoop of sacrum above it. They clung together, weightless, and whispered to each other.

  “I can’t stop reading the primer,” Luz said. “It’s . . . magic.”

  “It’s science.”

  “I can’t believe they’ve ignored all this.”

  “Believe it.”

  “Are they just incompetent?”

  “I wish they were.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “We’re told this is a wasteland because they need it to be a wasteland.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  On the lounger, Ig sighed, then settled.

  “I’m going to be honest with you,” said Levi. “I feel I can and should be. Are you prepared for that?”

  She was.

  “What I’m about to tell you is big. Not the kind of thing you can unknow. I want you to be aware of that before you decide. I don’t want to force you into anything.”

  “You’re not.”

  He nodded. “We’re told we don’t exist because they need us not to exist. They need to take control of the Amargosa. ‘Stop it,’ everyone says. ‘The unrelenting march.’ That slogan. Of course, this is a natural process we’re talking about. This is the inevitable result of our own savagery. And we want to stop it because it reminds us of our tremendous neglect and of the violence we’ve done to this place. Your friend Powell knew that. The Amargosa reaches outward on all sides, toward Phoenix and Vegas, San Diego and Sacramento. To Mexico and Canada and New York and Washington, DC. Not good for national morale. Hard to sleep in the green East with a mountain of sand bearing down on you. Step one: establish that it’s barren. Step two: destroy it.”

  “But they’ve tried that. They’ve tried everything.”

  “Not everything.”

  He took her back to Albuquerque, where he had taken to sleeping in the lab to avoid the woman whose spurning had slashed the thin membrane restraining her outright hatred of him. There, one night, he heard a new call, behind the voices from the sample cabinet, which were always gossiping, behind the murmurs of the biomass slivers pressed between slides. There was something urgent in the call, something that pulled him deep down into the subterranean bowels of the National Labs, swiping his Zed clearance badge along the way. Something was trapped in that bunker, he knew, something freest of free now caged in a coffin, a tomb, he could feel the confines against him even as he slid silently down the concrete stairs. The call engorged as he approached the bottommost level. The corridor was dark but the call urged him onward. Two MPs sat on stools. One nodded at his badge, the other leaned away from him, unnerved by the wildness in his eyes. The voice, Levi realized, was a Utah voice, a call from home, and he had not heard such a thing since he left. Things were aligning inside him, and yet there was chaos in him too. He had to act. He swiped again, pressed his thumb to an electronic pad for another guard without even realizing it.

  In a room lit yellow the call became a chorus, a tabernacle choir stretching out a mournful note. A dozen warheads nested in pens, like livestock. From within the physics packages his ex-lover had designed came that Utah calling, his mineral brothers, his isotopic kinfolk, twenty-eight thousand pounds of Moab uranium-235 teetering on the cusp of fission, descendants of Trinity, Operation Crossroads, Operation Greenhouse, Ivy Mike, Castle Bravo, Operation Argus, Operation Dominic, Operation Storax, Operation Plowshare, all humming to be free.

  “A nuclear bomb?” Luz asked.

  “Bombs,” he said. “And not just any. What they call nonconforming design. I’d seen the plans. I’d listened. That woman, the one I was with, she thought I didn’t understand her work. She would leave schematics out to belittle me. ‘Careful,’ she’d say. ‘You’ll go cross-eyed.’ I let her think she was teaching me something; I asked her stupider and stupider questions until she couldn’t help but correct me. That package wasn’t designed to detonate underground. Not a burrower, like they said. The design was retro, clunky, humongous. Nothing that would fit in a suitcase. The kind they drop from the sky. The OGs: Fat Man, Little Boy. Operation Glassjaw, they call it.”

  Strands of rot swayed from the black rope, the serene water suddenly choking with them, but Luz blinked these away. “I don’t . . .”

  “I didn’t believe it either. Despite everything I’d seen. And then they sent me here, to survey. That’s what they said. An exhaustive survey to address lingering concerns from local environmental interests. But I knew what they meant: find nothing. They need this to be a dead place so they can kill it.”

  “But why? Just to make people back East feel better? It doesn’t make sense.”

  He tucked a wet strand of hair behind her ear. “What do you know about nuclear waste?”

  “It’s poisonous. Lasts forever.”

  “Pretty much. Unequivocally lethal for longer than we’ve been upright. Two hundred fifty thousand years, then tapering. To compare, the pyramids aren’t even five thousand years old.”

  “And there’s a lot of it.”

  “Making more every day with the last of our water.”

  “And they have nowhere to put it,” she said.

  “Barnwell, Clive, Deaf Smith. All failed.” He nodded. “Even Yucca Mountain. About a hundred miles from here. Have you ever been? It’s finished now—the tunnels, trains, even the warning monument. Landscape of Thorns, they call it. All on hiatus until the timing’s right.”

  “‘Not in my backyard,’” said Luz.

  “Exactly.”

  “But it has to go somewhere.”

  Levi nodded again, perhaps a little disappointed. “Industry would be delighted to hear you say that. ‘It has to go somewhere’ is one of the most expensive, most effective covert jingles of our time. See, it only ‘has to go somewhere’ if it remains as deadly as it is. To establish a national repository is to promise we will use nuclear power forever and never hold the industry responsible for making its waste safe. It becomes the state’s problem. They make a product that is poisonous and they’ve managed to change the conversation so that we accept that as a given: it will always be poisonous, so ‘it has to go somewhere.’ The question is where? That’s not the question—it shouldn’t be. It’s a motherfucking shell game.”

  He lowered his voice. “We should be spending money on technology to neutralize the waste—industry should have to fund that research. They should have been doing that from the beginning instead of ditching the shit in storage pools and saying it’s everyone’s problem. But the research is expensive, slow. Last bit of funding was diverted from neutrality to storage after Fukushima. Believe it or not, nuking the Amargosa is cheaper than holding the industry responsible for its waste. Not to mention infinitely more politically viable.”

  “So they’ll put it here.”

  “No one’s backyard anymore. It’s a wasteland, remember. All these years have been an elaborate performance, a theater of due diligence so they can conclude that there are no living things here.”

  “But then what? How do they stop it?”

  “Blast it to glass. That’s what the National Lab was really working on. They weren’t looking for aquifer. They were building a nuclear fireball.”

  “Then pick up where they left off at Yucca Mountain?”

  “Exactly. The Southwest is a dying limb. This is how they’ll amputate.”

  “When will they do this?”

  “The minute we leave.”

  It was true, Luz knew. She should have been afraid, should have been disturbed, but the water was making its own mournful music and really it was ju
st such a relief to finally see, such an effortless swoon. How long had she felt doom coming? Ruin, cataclysm, destiny, etc. It was nice to know how.

  But she knew something else too, there in the silky green slickness of life. The white light of the dune sea shone into her heart, and she reached for him again. The air thick with impossible moisture and her chest heaving. Like this she could believe all things, the ghastly and impossible truth, plus the lie she needed badly, needed in order to put one foot in front of the other: the baby would never die.

  Though it was the colony that moved across the desert, the reverse felt true. It wasn’t long before the swimming pool oasis left them—save for the water they drained from it, and the chairs, ropes, sheets of fiberglass, peels of tin and other salvageables they pried from it, and the algae, which Jimmer scraped from the bottom and dried for his concoctions. This was life at the colony: the solid, grounded, unyielding world getting up and walking away. Ravines, canyons, ranges, alluvial fans and gardens of boulders, all folded beneath them. They pilfered from abandoned Indian casinos and deserted truck stops. The sturdy was no longer something to hold on to.

  Luz needed Levi more in the face of annihilation, though she would not have characterized it that way. She was drawn to him with such simple urgent magnetism that it was impossible to attribute her feelings to trauma, circumstance, or the context of emotional catatonia into which he entered. One seemed to have nothing to do with the other.

  She began spending her nights in Levi’s herb-garlanded dome, where they shared a long finger of brute root and where he undid lies long knotted within her. She saw for the first time the way we fill our homes with macabre altars to the live things we’ve murdered—the floral print of the twin mattress in her childhood bedroom, stripped of its sheets when she soiled them; ferns on throw pillows coated in formaldehyde; poppies on petrochemical dinner plates; boxes and bags of bulk pulpstuffs emblazoned with plant imagery the way milk cartons are emblazoned with children. A rock on a window ledge, cut flowers stabbed in a vase, wreath of sprigs nailed to the front door—every house a mausoleum, every house a wax museum.

  She saw water fetishes everywhere—fountains and saunas and ski lodges. She saw the National Parks for the tokens they were. Everything she once knew of the natural world was revealed to be propaganda or at best publicity. There were interests everywhere. Meanwhile, all that seemed fantasy she hadn’t even the imagination to conjure throbbed in the primer, which she memorized.

  The others knew some, Levi said, but not as much as she. Even she could not know everything, not yet. He had a plan, but could not yet tell her what it was. Yet everything was coming together and she would know as soon as he could possibly tell her, and then they would act instantly and grandly and finally. Meanwhile, at bonfire his talks sculpted the colony’s existence into a conical shape, rising in a taper and pointed, climax somewhere in the very near future. He spoke feverishly of culmination, of plans and meaning and our obligation to answer when called.

  Privately Luz needed—she knew this without his saying it—to be beside him every possible minute. What mad ecstasy were these nights up late and early, talking, then touching each other to surrender, then talking some more. Levi had an unhurried way about him, sturdy and mellow, even when the enormity of his words brought him tears. His easy openness drew tears from Luz too, and also words, all words except her three secretmost—we took her—which would die within her, one day, and which she hardly recalled now, so lost was she in unloading the injuries of her lonely girlhood in the wasted West. When Levi spoke, all was weightlessness, even when he spoke of the horrors to come. When he left to dowse Luz did nothing much but succumb to her longing, an enjoyable ache.

  At the Blue Bird, Dallas watched over Ig without being asked. Luz took the scarf and the Leatherman off the shelf. She should have thrown them away—should have let the wind take the scarf, should have let the dune bury the Leatherman as it had its owner. But instead she forced both into a cushion through a small tear in its seam.

  One night after bonfire Dallas said, “To Levi again.”

  “‘Again’?” Luz said.

  “Baby, do what you want. But own it.”

  “Is that how you really feel?”

  “How should I feel, Luz?”

  “Maybe you think I shouldn’t be moving on. Maybe you think I’m disloyal. Maybe you think I’m a whore.”

  Dallas laughed. “I don’t believe in whores, Luz. My worldview does not accommodate the concept. Your process is your own.”

  “Maybe you think I’m not good enough for Ig.”

  “You’re her mother. Good enough doesn’t enter into it.” Dallas lifted Ig. “I’ll take her. I’ll always take her. But don’t make the mistake of thinking I’m doing anything for your sake. There’s a whole great goddamn world out there that has nothing to do with you.”

  Luz should have gone then, should have kissed Ig and whirled away and onward, but some imp inside her whispered push. “Levi, then,” she said. “You’re doing it for Levi.”

  Dallas said nothing, and the peculiar quality of her silence helped Luz put things together. “Oh Christ. That’s why your milk was in.”

  Dallas pressed Ig to her and turned away.

  Luz, quieter, asked, “What happened to it?”

  Dallas said, “He came out dead.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  Dallas waved one hand in the air. “Not meant to be.” She was doing her best to believe it. “That’s what Levi said. The Amargosa had other plans for us. It curates, he said. Then you showed up.”

  “I didn’t know.”

  “Seems you’re the plan, now. Apparently the Amargosa requests I be your wet nurse.”

  Luz wanted to go to her, but something about Dallas’s posture, the private way she held Ig to her, would not allow it. “I didn’t know, Dal.”

  “Don’t call me that. I’m not your pet.” She began to nurse Ig, rubbing one finger along the bridge of the child’s nose. The motion always soothed them both.

  Then, “He may be a bastard, Luz, but he’s all we have. He grasps things we can’t. He has an incredible gift. I believe that.” She paused in her stroking to gaze upon Luz. “After everything, I do believe that.”

  Levi continued to make his excursions—he rose while Luz still lay in his cot, dressed, kissed her good-bye and tugged on her earlobe, his reminder to listen. She rose after, to watch Levi and Nico disappear into the dune on the rumbling, shuddering lorry.

  At his leaving, Luz returned to the Blue Bird, where Ig and Dallas slept curled side by side as if in a womb. These early mornings, as Luz watched Dallas sleep, she did listen, as Levi implored her, listened for rustling soft chomping life beyond. But she heard nothing, saw instead: Levi with his arms around Dallas, Levi taking Dallas’s heavy breasts in his hands or mouth. Nights after bonfire, Levi needed Luz. In the ember light they made love, rowdy and vital, and after he plummeted into sleep she extracted herself and pressed her palm to the dirty arch of his bare right foot, lopsided with its two smallest toes missing. A zone of vulnerability, according to Jimmer, with potential for thought transference. What she wanted to know was whom he dreamt of, and how.

  Most times, she dreamed of the day she’d just had. Not dreaming so much as remembering. She wondered if a person could go insane this way.

  One morning, as Levi was about to exit the tent, the lorry grumbling outside, a desperate question escaped from Luz where she sat on his cot.

  “What happened between you and Dallas?”

  Levi turned and let the tent flap fall closed behind him. “Dallas is a dear friend,” he said.

  “You had a child together.”

  “We did.” He took a root from where it hung on the ceiling. He sat beside her on the cot and cut himself a sliver.

  “Tell me, please.”

  He offered her some root.

 
She shook it away. “Don’t make me beg you.”

  “What would you like to know?”

  She watched the coals, expiring now to ash. “Were you in love with her?”

  “We loved each other, yes. But that love existed only between us. It had no greater dimension. It was . . . of a measly scale. The baby’s death was a symptom of that. It was an intervention of sorts, a resetting of my path, though I didn’t see it at first. Not all doubt is spiritual doubt.”

  The grumble of the lorry rose, then idled. Nico was waiting.

  “Dallas and I buried the child together. We set him on an altar at the mountain. It had been completely still that day, but the moment we placed the body, the Amargosa took him. It lifted that trauma from us. I heard nothing then. I knew the mountain was comforting us, Dallas and me, by its actions, but I couldn’t hear anything. I was utterly alone. I could barely make my way back to camp. The mountain was shunning me. I wandered, hoping to hear, trying to reconnect. I went three days without it. Our water supply dwindled. Still, the mountain would not guide me. Such utter, encompassing loneliness. It was the darkest my life has ever been. I considered leaving. Can you imagine? Abandoning everything we have here. Rejecting the mountain and everyone who relies on me. But I was prepared to go. And then I heard the bighorn.”

  Luz curled into herself, crossed her arms over her ugly knees. “You could have told me. You should have.”

  “Listen to yourself. Come here.”

  He pulled at her but she jerked away, saying, “I feel like a fucking idiot.”

  “Luz,” he sighed. “These are the smallest concerns on this Earth. They’re too small for you. That’s what my relationship with Dallas was like, in the end . . . earthly”—as though the word had a foul aftertaste—“I wouldn’t even call it a bond. You and I have something larger. More expansive. Or I thought we did.”