The People's Republic of Everything

by Nick Mamatas

  I was playing around in this neat car I found that had a steering wheel that still moved around when Dad came running up with his own garbage bag. He’d found like twenty. “How many ya get, Lovebug?” he asked, then he frowned and mentally counted to ten when he saw the empty bag next to me. “Herbie, we really need to find these materials. Did you even look?!”

  I shrugged. “It’s hard. What do you want me to do? I can’t look everywhere all at once.”

  He waved me out of the car. “C’mon. You just have to go about it systematically.” He walked to the closest pile of garbage and then started going through it, one bag at a time. We pored through all the bags in one pile, tossing aside the smaller white plastic bags full of disgusting toilet paper, cardboard boxes with pictures of lasagna and fried chicken on them, newspapers from last week with headlines about the White Menace (Canada), gloppy leftover food mess sprinkled with white maggots, and all sorts of other junk. And then I found a smoke detector, at the top of the tenth bag we opened. Daniel gave me a big hug for that. “Now you can do the rest of this pile yourself. I’ll be in that quadrant over there.” Saying “quadrant” made him feel military.

  Long Islanders are pigs. I found another smoke detector in the middle of a greasy pound of red spaghetti, but that was it. Everything else was just gross, from the moldy bathroom rugs to little baby clothes smeared in grease. Dad found me a bit later, his bag a little fuller. “Scored twelve all together. Let’s get home, quickly now.”

  And that’s what we did every morning. There was new garbage every day, plus there was always a chance we had missed something. Daniel printed out a list of things that might have some Americium-241 in them. Smoke detectors, and some medical testing equipment, and moisture density gauges all use the stuff.

  “You know what a moisture density gauge looks like, Lovebug?” Dad asked me one morning.

  I read his mind, then told him.

  “You’re such a smart boy.”

  We didn’t find any moisture density gauges at the dump, but we did find some cool-looking stuff from the public hospital. They’d lost beds due to budget cuts. As the days wore on, we had more competition in the dump. Daniel was the only one after smoke detectors, but some poor people were spending their days at the dump, looking for old shoes or funny lamps or computer monitors to sell on eBay. I saw one guy cart away a giant bag full of stiff old bagels. Even he didn’t know what he was planning on doing with them, but I could just picture his family in a dumpy living room: the kids all had dirty faces and crooked teeth, their little fists wrapped around mismatched forks and knives, and they wore white napkins around their necks like bibs. Then their dad would walk in and pour all the bagels onto the middle of the door he had put up on sawhorses to use as a table, and they’d all dive in at once, screaming, “FOOD!” It was so funny.

  One of the poor people got really upset because he was poor and took it out on me, yelling and screaming that I was stealing garbage from his spot. Daniel came running, ready to tackle the guy but stopped, frozen with fear, when the poor guy picked up a rusty muffler and swung it over his head. “I’m a workin’ man!” he shouted, “I’m working here in the dump, trying to get some food for my family.” Inside his mind I could see him turning over, going from normal to crazy. The dump guys finally came out of the trailer, where they watch TV all day, with some crowbars to chase him off.

  Most of the poor people were normal, though. They were used to being poor, but just started coming to the dump because they had gotten poorer after the taxes went up or after they lost their job at a gas station. The worst poor people were the ones who used to have money. They really went crazy. I hoped that after Daniel became afraid we’d stop going to the dump, but he really wanted that Americium-241. We just went earlier in the day, while the poor people were still asleep on their couches, dreaming along with an infomercial or the national anthem on TV. It was fine after that, except for one time a black lady yelled at me for stepping on a pie plate she thought was a collector’s item.

  It took all month to get 5000 smoke detectors, plus a few things from the hospital. Daniel spread them out over the basement and put me to work plucking the little silver bit of Americium-241 out of each of the detectors. I wore a nose mask that Daniel wasn’t sure would work, rubber gloves, a smock. I used tweezers and a big magnifying glass connected to the table. Daniel worked on the other end of the basement—we kept the material in different piles so it wouldn’t achieve critical mass and kill us.

  The day Geri was laid off she nearly found out what were up to. Her sadness and anger preceded her into the driveway by nearly a minute, so I told Dad that I heard the car and we rushed upstairs, just in time to slam the door to the basement behind us and nonchalantly stand in front of it, while still wearing our masks and smocks.

  “Hi boys,” Mom said. She carried a cardboard box full of little doodads from her cubicle with her. A frame with a picture of me from the two weeks I was in Little League stuck out of the top. Her misery evaporated as she took us in. “What are you two doing?”

  “Ships in bottles!” Dad said.

  “Model trains!” I said, because that is what Dad was thinking right before he changed his mind.

  “Ships in bottles . . .” he started.

  “They make up the body of the model trains, you see,” I explained to Mom. “I’m learning how to reduce the resonant vibrations by altering the track gauge so the bottles don’t chip or crack.”

  “Indeed,” said Dad.

  Genius stuff, thought Mom, then she said, “I lost my job today. No severance package.” She tried another smile. “I hope these shipping trains in bottles aren’t too expensive.”

  “They’re not, dear.”

  “I got a grant from the Department of Defense!” I said. They laughed at that, Dad a little too hard.

  I slipped down to the basement to let my parents have their fight about money in peace.

  I was getting pretty bored with the dump and a rat almost bit Daniel, so we stopped going. Dad continued to leave early in the day, leaving me with Geri, who started vacuuming the carpets a lot. I mean she did it every day. She called me downstairs to move the furniture and everything. Daniel got me a reprieve one day by taking me with him to the UPS building. I waited by the loading dock with him.

  “What are we waiting for? Did you buy a bunch of smoke detectors?” I asked him so he wouldn’t know I knew that he bought commercial grade uranium online.

  “No, I bought commercial grade uranium online. Perfectly legal.” About ten minutes later, he signed for his uranium and put the box in the trunk of his car. Then we drove to the FedEx shipping center a few blocks away. There he answered to “Jerry Wallace,” Mom’s maiden name, and quickly flashed her old passport that he had put his picture on and then re-laminated to claim another box. That one went on my lap for the drive home. I wasn’t too happy about that because it was heavy and radioactive. Since the sample was only twenty percent Uranium-235 I didn’t have to be that worried, but you know, testicles.

  He parked the car a block from the house and we cut through the Pasalaquas’ so that we ended up on the side of the house. I squirmed through the basement window Daniel left open, then dropped down to the floor. Daniel walked the block back to get the first box, which I placed against the western wall, and then the second box, which I put against the opposite wall. Our Americium-241 loads were north and south, of course. Upstairs, Geri was watching one of those shows where your neighbor paints your living room orange.

  Once we had the uranium, we were back in business. I pretended to join the chess club so that Daniel and I could drive around to get the rest of our supplies. Ever since the ferry across the sound to Bridgetown exploded thanks to sabotage, downtown Port Jameson was really suffering economically, so it was easy to buy some hydrofluoric acid from the glass etching guy, except that he was napping when we came by so we had to bang on the doors till he woke up. We poured it over our samples to make uranium tetrafluoride.
I’m not a genius or anything, I’m just telling you what Dad was thinking. He got the recipe out of some old hippie magazine called Seven Days, and his schooling took care of the details.

  Anyway, getting to uranium tetrafluoride was the easy part. The basement’s ventilation was too poor to handle the fluorine gas we would need to create uranium hexafluoride, and once we got that we still had to separate the U-235 we needed from the junk U-238. The hippie magazine was no help there. It said: “Fill a standard-size bucket one-quarter full of liquid uranium hexafluoride. Attach a six-foot rope to the bucket handle. Now swing the rope (and attached bucket) around your head as fast as possible. Keep this up for about forty-five minutes. Slow down gradually, and very gently put the bucket on the floor.” That’s funny because except for this one thing, the article wasn’t a joke.

  Dad thought he could sneak into his old job, but security was tightened after the tuition riots, and all his old cronies had also been laid off and escorted from campus. They didn’t even get to pack up their stuff—their little toys and family photos were mailed to them afterwards. Our uranium tetra-fluoride wasn’t exactly improving with age either. The next morning, Geri was at her networking club downtown. Dad checked me for hair loss and melanoma, made me some eggs, and then left in the car. Two hours later he came back home on foot and with shoes full of smelly hundred dollar bills. In the basement, Dad handed me a copper pipe and told me to smack him in the head with it, hard, but not too hard, a few times.

  “And watch the teeth, Lovebug.”

  So I did.

  Dad gave me the credit card and had me buy a centrifuge on eBay from my computer while he lay on the couch and told Mom some story about two big black guys carjacking him.

  We bubbled the fluorine gas into our uranium tetrafluoride to get uranium hexafluoride and for safety’s sake did it in the pool shed. Then all we had to do was get a jar of calcium pills from the vitamin store in the mall, crush them to powder, and add it to the uranium hexafluoride. The reaction was pretty neat; it sizzled and smelled like a playground jungle gym. Then we had calcium fluoride, which just looks like salt, and flakes of U-235. We separated that with a colander, and just used hammers to smash the U-235 filings together. Dad did half, then he sent me with the rest of the gunk to the basement to hammer together my U-235 mass.

  Are you getting all this? I’m sorry if you’re bored, but building your own nuclear bomb may be important for your future later. We’re almost at the good part.

  Daniel dug the old garden gnome out of the garage and used a blowtorch to open it at the seams. He cut open a tennis ball and put the two sub-critical masses of Americium-241 on opposite ends of it, sticking them to the inside of the ball with rubber cement. That went into the gnome’s head. One of the two sub-critical masses of U-235 went right below it and the other into the gnome’s base. Then he took apart one of my remote control cars (the cool Sidewinder Neon that does wheelies and 360s, if you’re into radio control). One of the servos and the battery box were wedged into the gnome too. All Dad had to do was press a button on the controller. The tennis ball would be squeezed together, making the Americium go critical. That would send the U-235 mass in the head crashing through all the Styrofoam noodles we packed into the body of the gnome and into the U-235 mass in the base, and then that would go critical too, setting off a one- megaton explosion.

  “Dad, maybe we should take the batteries out of the radio control,” I said. He nodded. “Yeah . . .” he said, slowly, “but you can never find triple-As when you need them.”

  “I’ll hang on to them for you.”

  “Okay, Herb. Don’t misplace them.”

  Once we put the gnome back on the lawn and achieved neighborhood nuclear superiority, there were only two things left to do. Tell the world, and declare independence. And tell Mom.

  2

  We had to tell Geri first because her laptop was the only one with an anony-fax/modem. She used to like to send cranky faxes to different companies about there not being enough filling in a Pop-Tart or whatever, to get coupons for free stuff. We had a lot of faxes to send too. Daniel paced the house, trying to decide what to tell her first. Hi Geri. I love you. That’s why I want to send peace treaties to all the members of the Brotherhood of Evil Nations. Also, I built a nuclear bomb and possibly irradiated Herbert. Or would the bomb news be a better lead? Honey, you know I only want what’s best for you and Herbie, and in this topsy-turvy world, I really feel that we need a one-megaton nuclear weapon. It’s not even half a Hiroshima. Don’t worry about breaking the law, we’re our own country now. And a nuclear power to boot!

  When Mom came home from running her last errands as an American, Dad quickly made his decision. “Hi Geri,” he said, then kissed her on the cheek. “Borrowing your laptop. Need to fax some resumes. C’mon, Herb, help your old man with something for a change.”

  I had a whole bunch of ideas for what to call our new country—Nuketown, Gnomeville, New America—but Dad just said “Weinbergia” and that was that. So much for democracy, I guess, but I didn’t get to name the United States either. He wrote up a quick one-page treaty, offering peace and free trade to any signatory. Then we started faxing, thanks to numbers we found on different government websites or The CIA World Factbook. We did ten numbers at once, and with only 140 other countries, we were done in no time. Of course, most of the foreign countries were in different time zones, so who knows how many faxes our treaty would be buried under in the morning? Maybe some Mongolian janitor would think we were joking, sign the treaty on behalf of The People’s Republic of The Second Floor Utility Closet, and start his own national movement by mistake.

  Or on purpose. Like you.

  “Okay, now we’ll . . .” Daniel said.

  “Tell Ge . . . uh, Mom?” It’s hard to call my parents Mom and Dad sometimes. I hear them thinking of themselves, and one another, by their real names all the time.

  “Yes.” Then he blinked the thought away, still afraid of Geri. “No, we need a press release first!” Dad posed, hands over the keyboard, ready to create his very own Declaration of Independence. “Herbie, you think we should mention the A-bomb?”

  “Mmm, not yet,” I said. I was worried about snipers.

  It was easy enough to find email addresses and fax numbers to the only TV station near Port Jameson, the one that had nightly news in between all the M*A*S*H and Seinfeld reruns. Port Jameson doesn’t have a daily paper, but it does have a weekly, The HeraldTimes-Beacon. My picture was in it last year when I won the Brainstormers Academic Bowl trophy for the district. I could have gone to State up in Albany too, but I get sick on long bus rides, so I took a dive on a few questions about physics, ironically enough. Looked like my picture was going to be in the paper again.

  Daniel wrote up the press release, and recited it in a loud and goofy “Greetings And Salutations” voice as he composed. “I, High King Daniel the First of Weinbergia, do hereby claim the property that was once known as 22 Hallock Road as my demesne and grange, free and independent from all law or governmental incursions of the United States of America . . .” It was funny, like an old cartoon. So I decided not to tell him that Mom had come home and was downstairs listening to his voice booming through the drop ceiling.

  King Daniel continued, “And the brave people of Weinbergia, in the spirit of peace and the brotherhood of all men and women, propose to offer the olive branch of peace to the many and varied warring nations. Let our example guide you all in a quest for understanding and human rights. But be aware, the Kingdom and Realm is prepared to defend itself against interlopers and enemies external and in . . .”

  “What the hell are you doing, Dan?” It was Mom, in the doorway, bemused. Dad didn’t quite know what to say. He wanted to call her his beautiful Queen and make it seem like a joke so she would laugh and all would be back to normal.

  Daniel wasn’t even sure why we had built that bomb after all, except to make him feel that he was in control of things. That under his roof, he h
ad some power.

  Dad smiled. “Remember how we used to be, back in college? Protesting apartheid, living with Crazy Rob in the vegan house?”

  Geri just raised an eyebrow. “You’re not . . . writing our congressperson, are you? They’ll send the FBI here for sure. You can’t fool around like that anymore, not since the wars,” she said, more annoyed than worried.

  Dad quickly hit the return key, and stood up. “Oh no, nothing like that. Let’s have lunch.”

  The FBI was at the Weinbergian border by the time I was eating my post-lunch ice cream sandwich. They didn’t invade. It was a recon mission, two agents. They asked the Pasalaquas if Daniel was nuts. The Cases they asked if Daniel was an alcoholic, recently divorced, or “one of those hippie types.” An agent asked the Levines if Daniel had ever said anything anti-Semitic. Tanya, the wife, asked, “Anti-Semitic? Like what?” The agent suggested, “Well, something like ‘I hate the Jews’ or ‘You’re a dirty Jew,’ perhaps?” Tanya just shut the door on him.

  The feds left after taking a peek at the catalogs Geri left behind in the mailbox, and parked a few blocks away. When the coast was clear, our border station (the porch) was besieged by foreign nationals.

  “Yo Danny! You in there!” Joe Pasalaqua shouted through the screen door. A few feet away Nick Levine parted the top of the bushes obscuring the dining room window and peered in. “I don’t see anyone. Are they home?”

  “The car’s here,” Tommy Case pointed out. He was on our lawn, right by our little garden gnome NORAD, actually. “They must be home.” Nobody in Port Jameson walks anywhere, it’s true. “Let’s just call.”

  “What if the lines are tapped, Tommy?” Nick asked.

  “What if the feds have a parabolic antenna pointed at us from three blocks away?” Tommy said.