An Atomic Romance

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  Minimizing his motions, he finished the welding, repacked his tools, and carefully descended from the catwalk.

  “I’m sorry to hear about your bird, Reed,” said Kerwin later.

  Reed nodded. “Eisenhower was a magnificent bird.”

  “He was great. I’m going to miss him!”

  “He was no trouble at all. He was always waiting for me. Never complained.”

  “If the stuff we’ve collected here is so powerful, why hasn’t somebody been building dirty bombs with it?” said one of the guys who had gathered to smoke. They were facing the cylinder yard, where hundreds of fourteen-ton cylinders of depleted uranium hexafluoride waited. Reed was gulping a can of orange soda and wondering whether intelligent life in other solar systems would take string theory seriously. The cylinders gleamed in the hard mercury lights.

  “A lot of people love trying to churn up trouble, but we’re talking jobs,” said Ron. “I’ve got two babies to support.”

  “Hell, they could shut the plant down if this kind of thing keeps up,” another of the younger guys said. “You know how these investigations go. And they could take the centrifuge somewhere else.”

  Jim, bearing a backpack, had appeared on his ten-speed personal transport.

  “Nobody’s going to shut the plant down,” he said. “Corporate wouldn’t do that—we’re making too much money. It would take a federal investigation and an act of Congress to shut it down.”

  “Is that official?”

  “They can talk about that blue fire on the scrap pile till they’re blue in the face, but there’s nothing new going on, really,” Jim said. “It’s what we’ve been dealing with all along—legacy waste. We didn’t make that mess.” He departed on his bicycle, its reflectors washed out under the vapor lights.

  Reed was standing by the small grassy patch beneath a low exhaust vent. A clover plant was in bloom, big purple heads nodding in the flow of moist air from the vent. In winter the green spot turned to moss.

  At home after work, Reed ate a head of lettuce over the sink and a can of beef stew—cold from the can. He felt like a slob, but nobody would know. He was dead tired. He took a long, hot bath, while studying illustrations in the Hawking book. A proton has two up quarks and one down quark, and a neutron has two down quarks and one up quark.

  That day he slept soundly, heavy drapes darkening his windows. He dreamed that Albert Einstein was learning the fandango. The dream was long, with many practice sessions. Einstein seemed on the verge of getting the knack of the fandango, but then he would mess up. Then Reed dreamed that Enrico Fermi was eating an intact peach with a knife and fork. No one tried to stop him.

  17

  The next afternoon, when Reed arrived at Sunnybank, the director, a fashionably dressed but overweight woman with flawless makeup, informed Reed that his mother had eaten a good lunch, played miniature golf, and participated in a game of oral history.

  “Oral history is a game?” Reed said, then slapped himself inwardly. Why was he always mocking people? He didn’t mean to. He tended to forget that for most people irony existed only on the simplest level—jokey prattle about quotidian trivia.

  In the hall he greeted a man, bald from chemotherapy, who was wearing pantyhose on his head; the legs had been cut off at mid-thigh and tied in a topknot. Although Reed recoiled, the thought of his own head in the crotch and belly of a woman’s garment sent a wave of warmth over him, and then when he saw his mother, he had a distinct visual image of being born, descending from her belly, his bald head emerging from her like the tender tip of a penis. Did men spend their lives seeking that reconnection? Was that why women sometimes said that men think with their penises? He wondered if his brain was merely twirling on elementary Freud. He didn’t really want to get into this with Julia.

  When he entered his mother’s apartment, she was standing by the window watching a bird feeder outside.

  “Shhh!” she said.

  There was no bird that he could see. Her bird clock, across the room, was silent. After a few moments, using the walker that she still had not mastered, she crossed the room awkwardly and sat down in her chair. He sat on the sofa—the old sofa she’d had for years.

  “Gee, Ma, this is just like home. I hit that same spring on this cushion every time.”

  She smiled. He thought she still appeared drugged, even though the doctor had lowered the dosage of one of her pills. She sighed.

  “No place like home,” she said.

  “Mom, I need you to talk to me about Dad,” he said gently. “Can you think back and tell me what you remember about him?”

  “What must I say?”

  “Just tell me about when you met him, and what you did together, and were you happy? It’s been a long time since he’s come up in conversation.”

  She stared at the floor, and he was afraid he had provoked sad memories.

  “Bones,” she said. “No, never mind.”

  “Bones? Broken bones?”

  “Bones and trouble. No, that’s not what I mean.” She paused, groping for words. “We had some trouble at the beginning. He’d start in the minute he got home, wouldn’t have a drop all day, then he’d go through half a bottle of vodka. It looked like water in the glass.”

  Reed was surprised. “Did he get drunk?” he asked.

  “Who?”

  “Dad.”

  “No, he never got drunk. He didn’t drink.”

  Reed realized she had been talking about Mort, her second husband, whose poisoned, corroded liver had killed him. She never acknowledged his drinking problem. She called it a touch of lumbago.

  “Mom, get Mort out of your mind.”

  “He comes around here, just daring me to throw a pie plate at him. He had a woman with him. She laughed at me and said, ‘I’m his sugar bun now.’ What does he want from me?”

  “Maybe he just wants to be waited on again. But you don’t have to put up with him, Ma! Throw them both out.”

  “Hit the road, Jack,” she said with a smile.

  “That’s right. You don’t need him. He caused you enough trouble.”

  “Maybe Danny Daly will come back. I wouldn’t mind seeing him.”

  “Oh, not Danny Boy! Haven’t you met some fellow here who could entertain you? Isn’t there anybody here you could strut around with?”

  “These old men can’t hop and bounce.” She giggled. “There’s one who always has his hand in his pocket, playing with himself! Shoot! Life’s too short to mess around with these fools.”

  Reed kept probing—ruthlessly, he thought with regret later. She just wanted him there; she didn’t want to rehash the bitter past. When an aide came around with a snack cart, his mother selected hot tea and macaroons.

  “We’re having afternoon tea, like the English,” she said, as she fumbled with the plastic packet of cookies. She smiled. “Mort won’t catch me now.”

  “The return of Mort,” Reed said to Shirley on the telephone later that day. “Mom said he came back just to annoy her. He’s been sneaking around. And he’s got another woman. He’s telling lies about Mom, blaming her for not taking care of him as well as this new woman does.”

  “I thought you talked to the doctor about her medicine,” Shirley said.

  “He’s trying to calibrate it. But a nurse told me that this behavior is to be expected. Transition fantasy or something.”

  “Actually, that sounds just like Mom—only more so.”

  “She mentioned his drinking. She never did that before.”

  “She couldn’t have taken care of him all those years if she thought he was an alcoholic.”

  “Well, I know she can’t be happy with Mort around,” Reed said. “And I sure don’t want to run into him myself.”

  “Oh, Reed. Can’t you ever be serious?”

  He berated himself for waiting until too late to talk with his mother about the early days of the plant and her memories of his father. She probably knew little of the actual secrets, but she would kno
w about the atmosphere of secrecy. He suspected that there was something crouching in the background that was larger than just the sieving process of isolating uranium isotopes. He didn’t want to call Uncle Ed, who was a useless source, loyal to the core and given to platitudes. Reed wondered if he could find some answers in the library. Everything in his life seemed compartmentalized, like classifications in the Dewey decimal system. But at the library, instead of researching the history of atomic energy, he checked out a couple of books on molecular biology, so that he could have a conversation with Julia about her field—if the subject ever came up, and if he ever saw her again. She had told him on the telephone she was busy studying. He wasn’t sure if she wanted to see him again.

  Both nuclear physics and molecular biology were about secrets, he thought, mystery worlds within worlds. The books lay around on his coffee table, and every time he opened one, colorful diagrams of abstruse cellular processes jumped out at him like bouquets hidden in a jack-in-the-box.

  One remarkable photograph grabbed him: the front parts of an unidentified insect magnified hideously forty times. It was a science-fiction monster with long, curved eyelashes and a hairy mouth and pincers and a shapeless shiny hard sheathing. The Creature That Ate the Earth, he thought.

  The microscopic had a frightening character, not large and grand and soothing like the design of galaxies and nebulae. And Julia had insisted that he go right on down through the subatomic to the vibrating little strings. What was beyond or beneath the strings? Was it infinite? Wouldn’t it be the same as Einstein imagined space-time—looping back on itself, seeming to be infinite but because of curvature finite without boundary? He thought of the doormat his ex-wife had once woven out of recycled flip-flops. He was plodding along by guesswork.

  18

  Julia’s into something a lot scarier than what I do at the plant,” he told Burl one afternoon as they were driving to the lake with their fishing tackle. Clarence was riding between them, alert, polite, watching the road intently. Reed was at the wheel of his truck.

  He tried to describe the library books for Burl. “Molecular biology is like trying to get a swarm of bees under a microscope so you can look for lice.”

  “Isn’t that angels dancing on the head of a pin?” Burl said.

  Reed laughed. “I haven’t got past p-branes and quantum chickens, but now Julia’s probably into genetic mutation. If I could get cloned, maybe she’d pay more attention to me.”

  “I thought that’s what she was afraid of,” said Burl. “You and all those chemicals.”

  “Let’s catch some fish.”

  “Hey, good buddy, you’re talking my language.”

  The outing to the lake, to a certain inlet that Burl was fond of, was restful. Clarence explored the woodsy shore, then settled down nearby while Reed and Burl fished, using the old cane poles they had had for years. Now and then they tossed Clarence a stick. The day was pleasant and not very humid. Out on the lake some motor-boats seemed to be racing, their occasional roar tearing the day. Late in the day a pair of F-15s from the nearby military base screamed down the lake, low and so fast they were almost hallucinatory.

  “Cruising,” said Burl. “Looking for girls.”

  The crappie and catfish had gone to deep water, and it was too hot to go out in a boat. Using a packet of crickets from a bait store, Reed and Burl fished from late afternoon till nearly dusk. They caught enough small-mouth bream to be satisfied, and they roasted a few of them over charcoals in a little throwaway foil kit someone had given Burl. After they had finished eating, he toasted some marshmallows over the dying coals. They tasted like fish. He had a six-pack, not enough to get drunk on. He wasn’t in the notion, he said. His drinking followed its own internal rules. Reed had learned not to discuss the topic with him.

  Leaning against some boat cushions in the truck bed, Reed and Burl watched the stars, old friends popping out like pixels as the dark deepened. It was peaceful here, away from Sunnybank and the plant. Clarence scrambled into the truck bed and lay on his side, his hot breath fanning Reed’s legs. Mars was hanging in the sky, as brilliant and orange as the fat, bejeweled abdomen of an orb weaver.

  “Man, Mars sure is a sight,” said Burl, when Reed pointed it out.

  Reed finished his beer and crumpled the can. He said, “Sometimes seeing the stars stops me in my tracks and makes me wonder who the hell I think I am.”

  “You should have studied astronomy. Then you wouldn’t have been poisoning your guts.”

  “I don’t have the patience for the math. But maybe I should study astronomy to keep my mind sharp—so I won’t get Alzheimer’s.” They laughed. Reed said, “It’s bigger than me. I know that. I look out there, and it seems like nothing much here matters.”

  “No, it’s the other way around,” Burl said, twisting away from Clarence’s heavy breath. “I look out there, and I see that this is all that matters, right here and now.”

  “But that’s where we get in trouble.”

  When they located Orion’s belt, Reed said, “Did you ever hear about Project Orion?”

  “C.I.A. or FBI?”

  “NASA. Or whatever NASA was before it was NASA. Project Orion was a spaceship powered by atomic bombs.”

  “No shit. You’re making that up.”

  “No. The idea was that one spaceship would carry a couple of thousand bombs to power it. One would go off every few seconds and shoot the ship out into space.”

  “That’s the wildest idea I ever heard,” Burl said. He actually guffawed. Reed was not sure he had ever heard a genuine guffaw before. Burl said, “It sounds like a rough ride.”

  “Might be. But if you’ve got them going off in a regular rhythm, then it would be like a putt-putt boat. Nuclear putt-putt.”

  “What if it exploded on the launch pad?”

  “They’d launch it from orbit. This spaceship could accelerate to three percent of the speed of light! You could go to Mars for the summer.”

  “Did they do a test model in the lab with firecrackers?”

  “Probably.”

  “How come they never built it?”

  “The nuclear test-ban treaty.”

  “Right.”

  Reed had always been fond of doomed Project Orion. It was the prototype for his Reedmobile, one of the warp-speed breakthroughs that would allow him to whiz throughout the universe. As a kid, he liked to fantasize that the plans for the spaceship would be resurrected by the time he was grown, so that he could launch out to see the moon and the planets and the stars. He learned about Project Orion when the astronauts landed on the moon, and the thrill of space travel absorbed him throughout his adolescence. He always drew pictures of rockets in his school notebooks, and girls thought he was drawing penises.

  “The Orion spaceship was shaped like a bullet,” Reed said. “It had a huge plate on the tail, with shock absorbers, and the bombs would blast out the back in a big spray of fire and mushroom clouds.”

  “Man, Reed, you expect me to believe all that? You don’t know Uranus from your elbow.”

  “Did you know there were rings around Uranus?”

  “Like hell there are.” Burl guffawed again. “Hey, see Orion’s belt. Three stars? You know how he got his belt?”

  “No idea. Karate?”

  Burl said, “Orion put his belt on, but found he had gained weight and it wouldn’t quite fit. So he asked Cassiopeia to let him borrow one of hers. She was a tad chunky herself. She flung him the belt, but its jewels were loose and they scattered across the sky: Venus, Mars, Saturn, Jupiter. Those are the big babies we notice. But there are many more, all over the heavens. At least that’s the story I told my little niece.”

  Reed’s imagination ranged beyond the planets. He tried to picture himself outside the Milky Way, in the large Magellanic Cloud, watching as Cassiopeia flung her baubles across the universe. Pin-wheels of flashing colors whirled before his eyes.

  19

  Reed had been off for four days. Lately his
schedule was four on, three off, three on, four off. He arrived at work at seven p.m. for his shift. He had slept all day with his ringer off and hadn’t listened to the radio. When he reached the plant, he thought it was odd to see official state cars there so late. His first suspicion was a security breach, but the plant was well guarded. What could terrorists do, hijack a million-dollar cylinder of enriched uranium and drive it up the Interstate? Or perhaps they would go after a fourteen-ton cylinder of depleted uranium, but they would need a crane to get it out of the cylinder yard. Either way, they would need centrifuges to concentrate the radioactive isotopes. As for making a dirty bomb, he doubted if a terrorist could scrounge up enough fixings here among the piles of scrap.

  He flashed his I.D. badge and was waved on through. “What’s up?” he asked the first person he saw in the parking lot, a lanky woman from the machine shop who was coming off shift. He couldn’t remember her name.

  “Haven’t you heard?”

  “Guess not.”

  “Some reporter is saying we’ve got plutonium leaking out. I don’t believe it’s true, though. We don’t even use plutonium here. The media’s so full of shit they don’t know which end to sit on.”

  “Plutonium? Heaven and earth! I didn’t even see the paper,” Reed said. Because he was late, he had left it in the yard, under a bush, where the paper boy had tossed it.

  “It wasn’t in our paper; it was on the front page of the Chicago paper. How come they’ve heard of it and we haven’t?”

  In the process building several of Reed’s coworkers were clocking in.

  “Here I am, the innocent babe,” Reed said as he punched his time card. “Fill me in. I overslept.”

  “Hell, Reed, it’s all over television,” said Teddy. “If you don’t get your TV fixed, you’re never going to know anything that’s going on.”

  “Did I know anything when my TV worked?” Reed picked up the messages from his mail hole. “So what’s this about plutonium?”

  “They don’t know how it got here, but those news snoops found it all over the place. Inside the fence and out.” Teddy, still fearing beryllium disease, spat with projectile force into a waste can. He had been threatening to join the class-action suit, and he had filed a medical claim.