An Atomic Romance

by Bobbie Ann Mason

“You’re not. You look good.”

  “I’m not gaining weight because I won’t eat that slumgullion they concoct here. I fix myself a little something here in the room. I microwaved popcorn last night and watched An Affair to Remember. Did you ever see that, Reed?”

  “Probably. I’ve forgotten.”

  He listened to her summarize the story. He liked to watch her animated hands, which followed the enthusiastic, girlish trills of her voice. It made him feel better to know that she always made the best of a situation.

  “Have you seen Julia again?” she demanded.

  “No. She’s still mad at me.”

  “Haven’t you apologized?”

  “I guess.”

  “I know you—you’ll fool around and she’ll get tired of waiting. You always did put off what needed to be done.”

  “It’s not that easy.” Reed took a deep breath.

  “Go after her! You’ll fool around and lose her if you don’t.”

  “Any more orders?”

  Abruptly, she inquired about his work. “Reed. Listen—are they going to cancel the new plant?”

  “Don’t know. We’ll have to see what the D.O.E. says about how long the cleanup will take.”

  “I’m so afraid we’ll lose the new plant. We need the jobs.”

  “Oh, we won’t lose it unless the D.O.E. makes the whole place a Superfund site.”

  “I doubt if they would take that much interest,” she said, twisting a curl between her fingers.

  Seizing an opportunity, Reed said, “Talk to me about the good old days, Mom, when toxic waste was what you found in the cat litter pan.”

  “Ha! Good old days! That’s the biggest fallacy in the kingdom.”

  He didn’t know how much she knew about the current troubles, and he didn’t want to worry her. He didn’t see a newspaper anywhere in her crowded living room. The family pictures covered several surfaces. His eyes rested on the photograph of his father. He was handsome and clear eyed, a confident man in a tweed jacket and striped tie. Reed recalled his parents dancing to their favorite instrumental from the big-band era—Artie Shaw’s “Dancing in the Dark.” They glided across the hardwood floor of their small living room as if they had all the space in the world.

  He said, “I thought you were pretty happy when you started out—when I was little and my dad was alive.”

  “That’s true.” She smiled. “He loved his job. It was so important to the national defense.”

  “Everybody was fighting the Communists.”

  “I don’t believe we ever saw any,” she said with a laugh. “We just believed they were there, like elves.”

  Reed had often heard the old-timers tell about how the bomb-fuel plant was the salvation of the community after the Depression and the War. The plant was shrouded in secrecy then.

  “Maybe things seem a little different nowadays, Mom.”

  “I’m afraid of what they’re finding out,” she said. “I’m afraid it’ll kill the new plant. Will it?”

  “I doubt it,” Reed said to reassure her. “They’ve stopped construction while they do site assessment—that’s what they’re calling it. But I don’t think it’ll take long.”

  She roused herself from her chair to reach a garment from a table.

  “Look at this crazy thing,” she said, laughing. It was an apron she had made in crafts. It had at least a dozen pockets.

  Reed said, “I could use one of these at work.”

  “It’s just silly!” she said. “They think we’re going to lose everything. They think we’re liable to lose our heads.”

  “Looks to me like you could put insulation in those pockets and go to the North Pole,” Reed said. “Or carry your camping gear. You’d be prepared for anything.”

  “I’ll have to carry my head in this side pocket,” she said, laughing.

  Whenever she laughed, Reed felt heartened. He laughed with her, and he stood up, swinging the apron around his shoulders like a cape.

  “Look! Up in the sky! It’s a biker! It’s a maintenance engineer! Yes! It’s Atomic Man!”

  3

  Reed drove his truck to work early, to beat the rush. He followed Constitution Avenue past the Jewish temple, the medical-supply stores, the farm store with a forest of spring bushes and hanging baskets outside, a line of auto-hardware stores, then a fast-food strip. He dipped under the viaduct just as a train trundled overhead. The sunrise at the end of Constitution flashed in front of Reed as he emerged. A soft luster surrounded the sun.

  At work, the buzz of the day was beryllium. Lately, it was one alarm after another. The morning TV news had reported that over the years a number of workers at the plant had been exposed to beryllium, which could cause a lung disease. Reed, whose TV had broken a year ago, had missed the latest revelation. A group of his coworkers in the main process building were talking about it, but no one seemed especially concerned except Teddy, an instrument mechanic who had been there for only ten years, fewer than most of the guys.

  Teddy followed Reed into the process workers’ break room. “I’ve got all the symptoms,” he said. “It’s in my lungs. I wheeze and spit.”

  “I thought beryllium disease was an allergy,” Reed said. “Not everybody gets it.”

  “I never even heard of beryllium before.”

  “It comes from emeralds.” Reed released coffee from a spigot into a foam cup.

  “How do you know that?”

  “Chemistry 101.”

  “They say you have to breathe it.” Teddy coughed for emphasis, and his coffee dribbled down the side of his cup.

  “It’s spring,” Reed said. “It’s pussy willows.”

  “Aw, Reed, you’re not taking this seriously.”

  “If I’ve got it, I don’t want to know about it.”

  Reed tasted his coffee. It resembled sewage sludge and tasted worse. He stored his sandwiches in the refrigerator and his cap and keys in his locker.

  “Don’t worry, guys,” said Jim, the shift superintendent. He entered the break room, with his newspaper rolled into a tube. Jim was a small, pale-skinned man with a prissy little goatee that Reed never could match with Jim’s congeniality or complexion. Dispensing reassurance like baby oil, Jim said, “We don’t have enough beryllium to be scared about, and even if we did, by God”—he used his newspaper like a light-saber to stab at the air—“if we did, we’d kill that snake dead.”

  “Is it radioactive?” Teddy wanted to know.

  “I wouldn’t think so,” Jim said. “Not like the scrap piles.”

  He distributed the work packages containing the permits and other paperwork for the day’s jobs. Reed went out to the floor. A bunch of guys were laughing near a supply office.

  “Hey, Reed, how hot did you get that last time?” said Kerwin, one of the guys Reed had worked with for years.

  “Don’t remember. I didn’t pay attention to the numbers,” Reed said, sounding like a politician insisting that he ignored polls.

  “I’ve been hot four times,” Alberto bragged. “Hell, the numbers were higher than the stack, but I thought, hey, what the hell.”

  “I figure the company will take care of us,” Kerwin agreed. He was writing on his work papers, turning them sideways to write marginal notes, as if he were writing personal commentaries.

  “The union will,” said Alberto.

  “You get more in a year from doctors than from what we do here,” Jim said, hurrying past. “X-rays. Dental stuff.”

  “Oh, hey, Jim,” said Alberto. “We figure you’re watching out for us.”

  Jim waved his light-saber, grinned, and walked away.

  Reed dismissed beryllium, as if it were an annoying insect. But he liked knowing it was derived from emeralds.

  He changed into pale-green doctor scrubs and whammed his clothes into his locker. After chugging a cup of water, he ascended to the second floor, where it was at least a hundred and ten degrees and eighty-five decibels. It sounded like jets taking off. Although th
e fourteen-acre building was probably large enough to fly a plane in, it could be claustrophobic—with the rows of cells, the overhead maze of Freon piping, the noise, the dusky light, the swirl of dust, the giant fans.

  Reed was a cell rat. On the second level of the largest process building he crawled inside dark, dusty enclosures to repair machinery that yelled in his ears. When he worked on those risky jobs, he wore his yellow astronaut suit. He liked working in the outfit, with its fire-retardant coveralls, plastic socks, and rubber shoe scuffs. To top it off, a cloth hood with a long cape and a respirator with an ultraview plastic face protected him. It was his job to help keep the vital enrichment system, the Cascade, going flawlessly, and he always approached the task like a surgeon with an unwilling patient. Even though the enrichment technology was somewhat antiquated, and dealing with it was tricky, Reed was still awed. It was astonishing, really, that the system could separate out radioactive uranium isotopes like forty-niners panning for gold. But it was a colossal operation. Liquid uranium hexafluoride was fed into autoclaves and heated to a hundred and fifty degrees to change it into a gas. Powerful electric motors sent the gas spinning and shooting through hundreds of axial-flow compressors and into converters, where barriers with tiny holes filtered out the heavier isotopes. The tumult of hot gas hurled through all the stages hundreds and thousands of times until the final product could be drawn off into cylinders. This was the system, his friend and his enemy, the multiplex of little cascades forming a giant Cascade. Reed, armored in his moon suit, felt he was the master.

  When the out-of-state reporters began snooping around last fall, there was general suspicion throughout the workforce. They weren’t local, and no one knew their motives. The reporters—in khaki pants and plaid flannel sport shirts—had been in and out for over two weeks, following workers, poring over documents, roaming around the junk piles. They were friendly, professing amazement at the operation, admiring the intricacy and grandeur of the Cascade with its miles of piping, empathizing with the employees who worked on the high-risk jobs. So it was like a criticality-warning siren when the news reports eventually emerged about toxic leakage from secret landfills out in the Fort Wolf Refuge and contaminated scrap heaps inside the plant’s fences. The out-of-state newspaper had assembled a tight, explosive little package. Code words for fear floated out of the paper like thought balloons. Radioactivity. Uranium. Cancer.

  Those reporters were hunting their Tulip Surprises, Reed thought now. If the situation at the plant were a movie, he thought, some superhero character would save the whole place from a melt-down. Here, there was no nuclear reactor to melt down, but the movie would have one, photographed from sinister angles. A shiny actor-hero in a magic military chem suit would seduce an energetic blond FEMA investigator in the swank downtown Palace Hotel. Then a resplendent special-effects earthquake along a conveniently located fault line would magnify the nuclear havoc. The greenery of the wilderness would capsize and sink into muddy soup, with the animals screaming in panic. Throngs of refugees fleeing. Hogs swimming. Big turkey stranded on a roof.

  A bird was flying above him, its flight meandering and desperate. Birds slipped in under the eaves and often couldn’t find a way out. The bird’s wings fluttered silently. It crashed against the ceiling and the walls. Now and then it perched on a girder. Birds died here, delirious in the heat. The heat desiccated them, sucked out their juices and kept them preserved like mummies. Or beef jerky. Reed had a pet dried bird he called Eisenhower. He had found him lying atop the asbestos housing of a cell. The bird was handsome, with black feathers and yellow streaks on his wings and face. He was a little thin, but with those crazed eyes he seemed fully alive.

  Eisenhower stood on Reed’s toolbox, his feet taped down. He was upright and realistic, with a mortician’s grin. For verisimilitude, Reed had added a few white spots of caulking beneath the bird’s tail. Everybody on the floor knew Eisenhower.

  Reed took a deep breath and cut off his oxyacetylene torch. Big-band music filled his head, but the melody was indistinct, vapors of wandering sounds within the howling of the Cascade. He resumed his welding. Even though the plant no longer enriched uranium for bomb fuel, but instead supplied nuclear-power plants, Reed was still proud of doing this dangerous kind of work. In college he had majored in chemistry, after a guidance counselor steered him away from astronomy, saying there was little money to be made in that field and that he would need graduate school to go into research. After college, Reed had to earn a lot of money quickly, so that he could marry Glenda, whose expectations included a king-size bed and fancy vacations. New jobs were opening up at the plant, and the money was exceptional. He was following in his father’s footsteps, and he had grown to love the work. Now Glenda was gone, their kids grown, and the same stars were still shining in their mysterious canopy.

  But it was Julia he wanted now. In the deafening noise of the Cascade, Reed heard her name whispered over and over. Her name was always near his lips, the song bearing her name a deep undercurrent in his being. With her perfect self-possession, she always seemed to know clearly what she was doing. She never overindulged. She wasn’t overweight. Her moves were so graceful they seemed unconscious. It was a discipline she learned from tai chi, he was made to understand.

  Julia had the casual air of a fashion model, the kind of person who would look good even in a tow sack and kneesocks, but she didn’t seem to need to shop or complain about her hair. She seemed self-guided, like one of those museum tours with headphones. She was the opposite of most women he had known—dolls with every hair pasted in place, the skin paved like asphalt with brilliant makeup, the gestures calculated and coy. Julia possessed a kind of aloofness that self-confidence produces—she was never beseeching, needful, weak, or self-conscious. Even when dressed in her lab wear, with aqua cotton pants and sneakers, Julia was cool.

  Usually women simply disregarded things about him that didn’t appeal to them, such as his interests in quasars or chemicals or asteroids. But Julia would cheerfully study anything, like a forensics expert with a lapful of dirty bones. When he showed her his Hubble slide show—hundreds of stars and galaxies on a CD-ROM—she was astonished, gasping at the Starbirth Region of Nebula NGC 604 as if she were witnessing it at an IMAX theatre. With Julia, he ranged through the Cat’s Eye Nebula, the Eagle Nebula, the Crab Nebula, and the Horsehead Nebula, fading then into the diseased-looking Cone Nebula rearing its phallic sea-worm head and belching out stars.

  “Here comes a supernova,” he said, ducking. “A star on its deathbed.”

  “We need 3-D glasses,” she said.

  “If you let your eyes go out of focus a little, you can imagine you’re inside.”

  She squinted and stared. “Very nebulous,” she remarked. “I see what you mean.”

  Together, they traveled light-years through the universe. She began to recognize the repeats. She liked the dense, busy print designs of millions of stars.

  “Oh, there’s a face in that one.” She pointed out the beady eyes, the mustache, and the chin at the center of a nebula. “My ex-husband,” she said.

  “Burl says it’s God.”

  She laughed. “My ex-husband thought he was God.”

  “I get lost in these,” Reed said, moving the cursor to click a new folder.

  “Close-ups of disease germs look a lot like this,” she said. “Under a microscope, a lot of them are like impressionist paintings. Anthrax is really pretty.”

  He pointed out a spiral galaxy, its arms flung out as if trying to grasp the whole universe.

  “Everything spins,” she said. “Doesn’t that seem to be true? Galaxies, planets, people’s lives?”

  “That must be why the record industry is so big,” he said.

  That was months ago, early in their relationship. But now she was angry with him for taking her out to Fort Wolf that sunny day in February. He never meant to deceive her; he would never take her anywhere dangerous. But he was afraid she was making excuses. He was afraid
they were worlds apart.

  Reed needed a break to chill. He loved the luxurious moment when he emerged from the cell and burst out of his suit like a butterfly. He was dripping wet. He always told people he took saunas because he felt as if he had just stepped into a Nordic climate. Leaving his yellows inside the contamination zone, he went to an air line to blow off until he was dry.

  He grabbed the handholds on the man lift, a little platform on a continuously moving belt. It shot him down through the hole in the floor, and he deftly stepped off at just the right instant on the floor below. It was like knowing when to go in and out of the window of a turning jump rope, he had told his daughter when she was a child. He could do it with his eyes closed, he boasted.

  Reed’s uncle Ed, his father’s brother, who had retired from the plant a few years before and moved to a Florida condo, had often told him that the chemicals they handled were safe. His loyalty to the plant was absolute. Although his uncle’s slow, old-timer manner made him impatient, Reed decided to telephone him about the developments at work.

  “I’ve heard some of the news, but I don’t know what to make of it,” Uncle Ed said.

  “They’ve stopped work on the centrifuge building till this gets straightened out,” Reed said. “Most guys at the plant are more worried about their jobs than what’s out in the woods.”

  “I would be too. I heard that new plant’s going to cost two billion.”

  “Ed, listen. I was wondering if you ever knew anything about beryllium being there.”

  “I heard about that berry stuff they found. What did you say it was?”

  “Beryllium.”

  “They said it on CNN, but I still can’t repeat it. What is it?”

  “It’s something that’s been here all along, but it just didn’t come up before as a topic of conversation.”

  “I don’t remember any such thing.”

  “It’s used in nuclear reactors to make bombs,” Reed said. “So how did it get here?”

  “Beats me. What are they telling you?”

  “They don’t know how it got there. They just say don’t worry.” He explained about beryllium disease. “They’re probably nervous about whether anybody’s going to file a claim.”