An Atomic Romance

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  A spiral galaxy was cruising by. With a touch of one key, the up arrow, the cosmos disappeared, and he checked his e-mail. Hot Mama! She had written, “I totally understand and respect your line, sex not a requirement, because I totally know if we met each other and either one of us was turned off, it’s good to have that shield between us, so we don’t have to do anything. That is cool with me, and who knows, we might hit it off. I have twelve years’ experience dealing with the public—as a waitress and therapist. I like to fish. I cure my own hams (and double-smoke them). I love Beethoven. I like to sit on the porch in the rain and just enjoy the freshness of the air. I love collecting. I own a complete set of Blue Ridge pottery, which I’ve chased down at every flea market and antique store in this part of the world.”

  Reed, in his fancy, flitted through a lengthy meeting with the mystery woman, in which they screwed five times and gorged on double-smoked ham, and he was about to reply in the affirmative, but he read her message again. She was becoming more intriguing. But no, it was too complicated. This woman wanted a relationship. The Blue Ridge pottery gave her away.

  He stared at the e-mail until the screen went dark and his Hubbles appeared. He could always count on the Andromeda galaxy.

  He had to sleep. He adjusted the curtain to shut out the daylight, then got in bed and read about dark matter. Dark Matter in the Afternoon, he thought, as if he were doing something illicit. Dark matter and dark energy involved MACHOs and WIMPs. MACHOs could be black holes. WIMPs could be neutrinos. Nothing was for sure.

  13

  Rumors were flying around like lost neutrinos. The newspaper one morning early the next week reported that radioactive scrap metal from the plant was being recycled commercially and might end up in such items as barbecue grills and tooth fillings. Outside the maintenance shops Jim told a knot of his workers not to talk to the press.

  “They haven’t proved anything,” Jim said. “They’re just trading in rumor and innuendo.”

  “A roomer with a Nintendo?” Reed asked.

  Jim didn’t laugh. “It’s a game the press plays,” Reed offered. “How many radioactive elements can you find in this picture?”

  “People will see things that aren’t there when they have them on their mind,” Jim said, turning to the work permits he was signing. His hair bushed out today, as if he had forgotten his conditioner, but his face was grim and shadowy.

  “I wonder if you could get a knee replacement made out of recycled radioactive scrap metal,” Reed said. “That would put a spark in your step!”

  He became conscious of the fillings in his teeth, imagining they were radioactive. What a clever invention—a built-in flashlight in the mouth! He didn’t have an opportunity to say this. Guys around him were wandering away. Jim was talking on his cell phone. When Jim finished, Reed spoke up.

  “Hey, Jim. Seriously—what’s going on here? If we’ve got that much stuff spread around, we won’t get cleaned up by the next millennium.”

  Jim clipped his phone onto his belt and gazed at a girder. “Reed, I wouldn’t lie to you. It’s a hell of a mess. But it’s not enough to put us out of commission. And if the D.O.E. comes in here wanting to start up a new phase of production, we can be ready.”

  “You’re talking nuke talk, Jim.”

  Jim grinned. “If it comes to that, they’re going to need us, and toxic waste be damned. Whatever the D.O.E. wants to do, I think we can handle it.” He stroked his hair. “You know the talk around about new start-ups—and I don’t mean just power plants.”

  For some time, they had been hearing about research on a new type of bomb. And at a couple of sites workers were replacing the aging plutonium triggers on nuclear bombs. A trigger was a bomb in itself—just the right size for a little job, Reed thought.

  Jim’s phone was ringing. Before answering, he said, “Once we get the new centrifuge, we could turn this operation around and do weapons-grade enrichment.”

  “If you say so, Jim,” Reed said.

  Up on the cell floor, he hitched his industrial half-ton toolbox to a tractor tow and hauled it to the job site. He opened his toolbox carefully, so as not to disturb Eisenhower. The bird grinned at him foolishly.

  “You know something, don’t you?” Reed accused the bird.

  He hung his lanyard of I.D. badges, including his rad permit and his TLD—the thermoluminescent dosimeter for detecting radiation—on the toolbox to get it out of his way. Then he began removing some of the particular tools he would need for replacing a control valve in the converter piping—an air grinder, a crescent wrench, and a chipping hammer.

  Kerwin the old-timer and a sometimes belligerent guy called Double Ass worked with him, but they said little in the cacophony as they prepared the site. Even though the job could be done by one person, safety required three, with one as monitor outside the C-ZONE. That was Double Ass. Reed didn’t trust a lard-ass in the cells.

  Two days before, operations had shut the gate valves to the cell, taking it off-line, so that it was cool enough to work on. A couple of health-physics techs arrived to swipe samples on paper swatches from the area and check them with their rad rods. While they strung the yellow boundary rope around the work site, Double Ass hauled in the wagon that held the bagged anti-C clothing, and Reed and Kerwin geared up: yellow coveralls, plastic booties over their boots, scuffs, thin glove liners, long rubber gloves. With a magician’s finesse, Reed wrapped his wrists with duct tape.

  Today’s job was routine process work, nothing out of the ordinary. Yet something had shifted slightly, Reed thought. It was like being in a story where nothing was what it seemed, where anything in the scene might transmogrify, spontaneously shifting shape—into a dragon, maybe, or an alien life-form reminiscent of the squid.

  At a signal from one of the HP techs, Reed pulled on his cloth hood and adjusted his respirator. The suit wasn’t state-of-the-art, like a military-issue chem suit, which he coveted. Without an impermeable inner layer, it wasn’t even a Haz-Mat suit.

  Double Ass was goofing off, pretending he was throwing a bowling ball down the painted lane, then hooking a basketball up into the crane bay. Reed remembered a wild yellow cloud spewing from a pipe—the cloud so thick he couldn’t see the crane operator thirty feet above. Reed and a crew had been hammering on a troublesome pipe, trying to loosen it. Suddenly UF6 hit the air and hydrofluoric acid leapt out, with invisible tongues of fire that could etch glass. It left a residue of yellow powder. Thick clumps of it, like cornflakes, landed all around, way beyond the C-zone.

  Now, in the murky bowels of the hell-hot cell, with Kerwin as his lookout, Reed—wedged in a tight space—was painstakingly scarfing out a flange with his burning rig. He concentrated hard, to keep his attention from wandering off the hot flame of the scarfing tip he was using to melt the weld on the flange. The heat in the cell was so intense it seemed to roar. He had learned to time his stay so that he did not pass out or cook his mind. He was aware of a harmonic vibration beginning on the west side of the building; then one began on the east side. They rolled like waves toward each other, and with a crescendo they overlapped. Reed could hear patterns inside the noise. He could feel the vibrations surfing through his body. He was so used to the sound of the machines running—in him and around him—that he always noticed any subtle changes. He could tell by listening if anything was wrong.

  Reed went for a long ride on his bike. The rush of air was soothing, the landscape variations abrupt and arbitrary. Afterward, he could not have reconstructed the route in his memory. At loose ends, he stopped at a house in the Hawthorne subdivision, where Burl was running his baby earthmover, called a Bobcat. Burl had learned refrigeration at a vocational-technical school, but primarily he worked on construction crews. After he bought his own Bobcat, he was able to earn up to sixty-five dollars an hour, as much as a custom dozer with a much larger machine.

  From the driveway, Reed could see two Mexicans on aluminum stilts, sanding drywall seams on the ceiling of a new garag
e. Outside, at the controls in the air-conditioned cab of the Bobcat, Burl was moving dirt in quick, successive front-end shovel loads. He turned and pivoted and spun the thing like a kid driving a bumper car.

  When he saw Reed, Burl braked to a halt and cut the engine. He called out, “I’m moving the mountain to Mohammed.”

  “Hey, Burl, you were hot-dogging it there. You looked like a teenager in a dance contest doing some dirty dancing.”

  “Dirty dancing! That’s me. You see here seven loads of river-bottom dirt trucked in this morning.” He emerged from the Bobcat, stretched his hamstrings, and opened the cooler in the cab of his truck. “Want a beer, Reed?”

  “No, that’s all right.”

  He chose a guava soda instead. Burl picked a soft drink too, saying he was dehydrated.

  “What’s up?” he asked.

  “I just wanted to watch you work your Bobcat. I wish I had one to play with.”

  “I wish I could just drive it down the highway. I’d sell my truck and take off.”

  “That’s an idea.” Reed leaned against the Bobcat, surveying the house with its imitation redwood decking and gas grill, and the yard with its lily pond and sculpted shrubs hugging the perimeter of the house. The swimming pool was sunk into a ring of fiberglass rocks arranged to resemble a rocky stream with a waterfall. The curved deck bordered the pool. The treeless front yard had pea gravel instead of grass and was scattered with what appeared to be heavy boulders from one of Jupiter’s moons.

  “Isn’t this place the biggest pile of shit you ever saw?” Burl said.

  They laughed together, enjoying the warm June afternoon. Reed felt improved.

  He was leaving the ringer on these days because of his mother. Just after he had descended into successful sleep late the next morning, one of the social workers telephoned to inform him that a bed on the transitional-care floor at the hospital was available. His mother could get physical therapy there and not have to move anywhere for a while.

  He wasn’t sure what he said. He felt delirious—confused, relieved. The woman jabbered on through the bureaucratic switch-yards of Medicare. He wasn’t sure which of the social workers she was. Their names and voices had overlapped in his mind.

  Reed didn’t know if it was night or day.

  It didn’t seem like a nursing home. It was just another hospital floor, but the rooms in transitional care had decorative touches, such as plastic bouquets and colorful posters and tulip-bordered wallpaper. Reed knew his mother was too tired to notice, or she would have said something sarcastic.

  Glad that she was no longer lashed to an I.V., he rolled her down the corridor in her recliner chair. “We’re flying too fast,” she protested.

  “What’s going on in your head, Ma?” he said.

  “You wouldn’t want to know,” she said.

  She didn’t ask about his kids, and Reed didn’t mention them. Their indifference to their grandmother pained him. Dalton, who kept in touch by e-mail, had sent him pages and pages of Internet mumbo jumbo about nuclear doom. After receiving one particular nuclear-winter scenario, Reed shot back an e-mail: “Dalt, if I’m gonna glow, at least you’ll be able to find me when the lights go out.” Reed no longer mentioned his mother to either of his children, because they never inquired about her, even though they knew she was in the hospital. Reed would have admonished them for their neglect except that he knew he had done worse with his own grand-parents. Now that they had been dead for years, he felt wistful about them, wondering what they had known that he needed to know now.

  In the lounge, which was equipped with a mega-TV, game tables, and a kitchen nook, Reed paused before the aquarium so that his mother could see the parade of yellow sunfish kissing the glass, but she was nodding sleepily. Parking her there, he stepped across the room to the window. He was on the seventh floor, so he had a broad view of the plant, with the plumes rising out of the gray area. The rest was green. Green from ear to ear, he thought. He felt bolted in place, with his mother behind him, this expanse before him, and Julia nowhere in sight. Even though he apparently had been spared, for now, the impossible job of caring for his mother, he felt anxious, suspended. His mother was here now, alive, but anything could happen. This was one of those moments of clarity that visited him from time to time, when he saw himself in context. Sometimes it was frightening.

  14

  At the food court in the mall, Reed bought a calzone smothered with tomato sauce. It was lunchtime on Saturday, and the place was crowded. He found a tiny table, with a wadded napkin and a smear of ketchup on it. A family sat down at the table next to him—a small girl and boy, parents. The children snatched at their burger bags, but the father firmly held them out of reach.

  “You can’t have them till I get the prizes out,” he said. “I’m going to kill somebody if this doesn’t stop. Now sit down. Let me have those bags.”

  Reed cringed. He could remember being in the same scene, when he had young kids.

  The man’s temper had sulled the wife into silence, Reed noticed. She calmly laid out her napkin, her knife, her fork, and opened her own bag of food. Her husband rummaged in the children’s bags, removed the cookies and the plastic toys, and then handed the bags to the children. “You can have these if you eat all your hamburgers,” he said.

  The children didn’t seem to notice their father’s murderous temper. “I wanted a ladybug, but I’ll get the tiger,” the little girl said to no one. “Do we get to stop at the slides?” the boy said.

  Nobody answered. The man said, “Not one more peep out of you. I’m going to see some good behavior here or nobody’s getting out of this state alive.”

  Reed could have been watching a movie of his younger self. Dalton and Dana were always testing him, whining. He didn’t know what to do except play the stern father.

  The man munched his sandwich. He had sandy hair and a thin mustache. The wife had straight bleached-blond hair pulled back severely above her ears and tied in back with a purple elastic ruffle. She drank some Coke, blotted her lips, then reached for her husband’s head. She leaned toward him, kissed him on the cheek, and resumed eating. Glenda never did anything like that, Reed thought. The man chomped a large hunk from his sandwich. The kids bounced in their seats, flailing as if they were listening to built-in CD players.

  The way the wife kissed her husband touched Reed, that she would put up with the guy in spite of his ill temper and his need to assert his power over his family. She was trying to calm him down so he would be less of a jerk.

  Reed finished his calzone and threw the trash into a bin. The calzone hit his stomach hard. He wondered if colonic irrigation would help him. Burl swore by it—not that Burl had tried it, but he knew a guy who had tried it after a consultant told him he was going to die from dirty entrails. The guy felt like a new person, Burl reported. Here at the mall, Reed always felt he needed a cleansing.

  Where was Julia? She had said one o’clock, but she was not here.

  He was going to see Julia. The fact hadn’t quite registered. He had wolfed his lunch mechanically, in a daze. She had finally called and agreed to see him, but she had a biology class and offered to pick him up at the mall so they could go for a drive in her new car. He didn’t follow her elaborate reasoning for meeting him at the mall. He wondered if she meant to avoid his house—with his receptive, springy beauty-sleep mattress waiting—because she was afraid to get involved with him again.

  He waited for a few minutes, and then he heard his name being paged on the P.A. system. His intestines flipped and twisted as he searched for the customer-service kiosk, where he received her message on a note. “Julia will meet you at the west entrance at 1:15.”

  Relieved, he sat on a bench by the fountain. Teenaged girls—with melanomic suntans already—promenaded past in skimpy dresses and shorts, and boys with skinny, sunken frames slouched along with them. When he was a teenager, kids didn’t go shopping on dates. But now boys took their girlfriends to the mall—to show them off;
the girls wanted to try on clothes to see how their boyfriends would like them. When he was a boy he liked to stomp around outdoors. He wanted a motorcycle. And he wanted girls to stick on the bike behind him.

  At one-ten he went out the door into a spirited rain and dashed down the sidewalk to the west entrance. Under the canopy that extended alongside the building, he waited, shaking the rain from his thin shirt and watching for Julia to pull up in her car. She hadn’t told him what kind of car she had bought, and he found it odd that she wanted him to see it.

  At the Live Bait machine beside him, an auburn-haired woman in shiny black pants was trying to feed a five-dollar bill into the machine, but it kept rejecting the money. Her car was idling at the curb.

  “It gets wet and keeps coming back,” she said with a frown.

  Reed said, “In this rain, I bet you could find some worms in your backyard.”

  “I don’t have time to dig worms,” she said. “I have to host a turtle-burger party tonight, so I wanted to get the bait now and be ready to go fishing when the sun comes up.”

  Reed and the redhead, who was obliquely attractive, stood in the rain, yakking about bait. He was so glad about Julia that he was rippling with anxious, friendly feeling. He was about to jump out of his skin. Turtle burger? He’d have to think about that one. The woman tried inserting the bill again. The machine had a sign: “Our live bait is guaranteed to catch fish or die trying.” The machine offered wax worms, premium night crawlers, crappie minnows, and red minnows.