An Atomic Romance

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  Reed grasped Julia’s small, damp hand. “Is this the sister with all the kids?”

  “Yes. Diana. She had her first baby when she was seventeen—and she’s got four kids now and she’s only thirty. She had two bad husbands, and she hasn’t been very happy.”

  “When are you thinking of going?”

  “I’ve got two weeks’ vacation coming, but I really do need to see Diana, and maybe I’ll just go for a weekend. I want to help, but she’s so independent.”

  “What could you do?”

  “Well, I don’t know. I just have to go see. She needs to know she’s loved.”

  “I could take you up there.”

  “No, that’s all right. I need to handle this myself.”

  “I wish you had told me about this.”

  They reached the center of the plaza outside the stadium, where a postmodern fountain flung river water to the sky, while a spotlight paraded over it, colors shifting. Around the perimeter of the fountain, jets spurted water into the air at a specific velocity so that it fell down in a straight line of perfectly spherical drops, like hail. The little water bombs rained precisely, and their rush and plop created a semblance of music.

  “I love this,” Julia said, standing so that the drops bounced on her. She squealed. “They sting! Come on, stand right here and let the drops hit you.” She maneuvered him around. “There!”

  They laughed, standing side by side, holding hands, letting the large drops of water pummel them until they were soaked and felt they had had expensive massages.

  On the way home, they drove by Burl’s house, but he wasn’t home. His vehicles were there, but only his porch light was on.

  “He must be out with Rita,” Reed said. “She’s been giving him rides since he lost his license.”

  “Is he serious about her?”

  “Is Burl ever serious?”

  “Am I too serious?”

  “No, you’re just right—Goldilocks.”

  He got her to laugh. The bank marquee had gone down to 82.

  Reed wanted Julia to lean on him. He wanted to go along with her to Chicago. He had plenty of time to make the trip next weekend, since he was working three on, four off during the coming week. But she didn’t bring up the subject again, and he didn’t push it. She spent the night in his bed—a hot, unexpected bundle, her little whistly breaths like faint music.

  In the morning, she was ready to leave his house without any breakfast. Once again she was a woman with a mission, a hundred things on her mind—school, daughters, telephone calls, errands, the Jiffy Lube. Her red tank top had grease stains on it from the chicken they had eaten the night before. Her hair had frizzed in a peculiar way, from all the heat and action in bed, he thought. She scooped her panties—a little silky black heap—from the floor and stuffed them into her shoulder bag.

  Barefoot, and carrying her book satchel, he followed her out the door. He set her bag in the passenger seat as she slid behind the wheel.

  “I meant to hose off your car,” he said.

  “That’s all right.”

  He walked around the car to her window.

  “Can I see you again next weekend?”

  “I’m sorry, Reed. I love to be with you, but I go nuts sometimes over this crazy business you’re in.”

  “You know I love it.”

  “I don’t want to insult you, Reed, but you don’t work in national defense. You work for a corporation out for profit. What do they care about you?”

  She turned the key. The car purred.

  “Don’t you think maybe you’re being a little dishonest with me?” she said. “I always feel you’re holding something back. I’m like somebody in those dreams you were describing. What did you call them? Detached dreams. That’s how you look at me sometime.”

  “Let me take you to Chicago then,” he said. “We’ll find your sister.”

  She shook her head. “No, I need to do that myself. Don’t worry.”

  “I wish you’d let me help.”

  “Bye-bye,” Julia said, waving from her car.

  “You forgot to take some tomatoes!” he called, but she didn’t hear him.

  He watched her car turn at the end of the block and head toward the boulevard. He was angry with himself, but he was a little angry with her, too, although he could see her point of view. If she knew about his exposures, perhaps she would be sympathetic, but he was afraid she would retreat. Why would she take a chance on him if she knew?

  Reed picked up the newspaper from the grass and flipped through it as he walked back into the house. The radio was playing Saturday Classics. He poured a second cup of coffee and nursed it while he skimmed through the news.

  Every day there had been lively letters to the editor about the plant. Today a civic leader had written an op-ed column with the headline, GIVE PLUTONIUM A CHANCE: SURPRISE HEALTH BENEFITS. Reed read a breezy account of the healthful qualities of plutonium and radiation in general, not only in nuclear medicine—where would we be without the old-faithful cobalt treatments?—but in life-giving traits. The essay traveled from normal background radiation to X-rays to irradiated foods. The civic leader had personally been cured of lung cancer with cobalt. And countless prostates had been treated with implanted radioactive seeds that zapped cancer cells. The writer concluded, “The flap over plutonium is just one more example of how our society is trying to test and examine everything to death. The human race cannot survive this kind of willful tizzy.”

  Reed sat in his kitchen and laughed, the first good laugh he had had in a while. He wanted to say to Julia, “You’re in a willful tizzy.”

  24

  When Reed got Burl on the telephone, Burl said, “Rita and I drove past Atomic World yesterday. That place was crawling with all kinds of official cars! I thought there must be a grand opening with free giveaways.”

  “They’ve been there all week.”

  “I wish they’d find that plutonium and get it out of there,” Burl said.

  “Yeah. Julia’s giving me a hard time.”

  “I don’t blame her.”

  “Burl, tell me what you think I ought to do, and I don’t mean colonic irrigation.”

  “I don’t know, good buddy. I guess you need to get checked out. Just keep on trying to find out what’s going on, like you’ve been doing.”

  “I guess so. Thanks.”

  “Man, if anything happens to you because of this, I don’t know what I’ll do. Somebody’ll have to pay. I’ll take it to the Supreme Court.”

  “Thanks, Burl.”

  “I mean it.”

  “Do you need a ride to your job site next week?”

  “No, that’s all right. I’ve already got my Bobcat out there. The boss came and got it. I’m O.K. I’ll bike over.”

  “See you later.”

  Reed tried to nap, so he would be alert for work that night, but he was wide awake, his thoughts whirling. If Julia really cared, she would let him go to Chicago with her. Maybe he should tell her what he knew about his exposures, but he couldn’t bear for her to regard him as some scarred victim. It would send her into a tizzy of another kind. What did she want him to do? It was as though she had shown him one of her more mysterious experiments with T-4 viruses and said, “Look. You just don’t want to understand this.”

  He rose from his nap and searched for T-4 bacteriophages in the index of one of the molecular biology books from the library. He found a photograph, magnified 275,000 times. The thing resembled a nuclear-powered spaceship. Project Orion! Its head was the bulbous crew compartment, its body was the long cargo/fuel bay, and the pod end carried the nuclear shield. The monster was covered with fuzz and had button eyes. It was the virus Julia was spending her time with. Here it was. An ugly bastard.

  While browsing through the book, he noticed a section on radioisotopes. Julia had not mentioned working with radioactivity. He realized, of course, that in nuclear medicine, radiography used tracers like technetium and hydrogen isotopes. But th
ey were low level. It would be very safe, he told himself. Not worth mentioning.

  With a bit of time to spare before he clocked in, Reed stopped at the crossroads near the plant. A flea market had sprung up in a parking lot on Saturdays. In the fifties, a scrap dealer had built an underground fallout shelter there. It was a private bomb shelter, stocked with Playboy magazines and cans of soup and a foot X-ray machine from his brother’s shoe store. The man had parties there for years, until nuclear fears eased and he retired to Arizona.

  Today an emaciated guy with long, dark hair was selling ammunition packing cases—ammunition for cannon projectiles—for three dollars apiece.

  “Hey, these wooden boxes would be nice for tools,” Reed said.

  “Tools, or anything you want to put in them,” the guy said, with minimal movement of facial muscles. “Old tarps, shoes, buckets.”

  “They’re not big enough for buckets,” Reed said. “You could put tackle in them. Or ammunition. There’s an idea.”

  “You can plant petunias in ’em for all I care.”

  Reed bought two. He was surprised when the man whipped out a laptop computer from his truck and began entering his sales.

  “You’ve got to keep up with technology or go set on the porch,” the guy said.

  Reed bought a watermelon from another trader, a friendly counterpart to the sinister ammunition-box peddler. “That watermelon patch in Georgia looked like a field of jewels,” the man said with a watermelon smile.

  Reed loaded his purchases into his car. The watermelon made him recall the dummy A-bomb that once sat on a post here at the old scrap yard. It occurred to Reed that the place had collected its scrap metal from the plant—barrels, drums, siding, tons of it—and that it was probably contaminated. Reed had bought some scrap pieces himself, pipes for plumbing repairs and assorted metal rings. That was another house, another life. It was the house his children grew up in. And for all he knew, it was as hot as sunshine. Little readjustments like this were coming hard and fast, reconsiderations of his whole life.

  The entrance to the plant was a pleasant parkway with a median of geraniums. It opened out into the military-gray expanse of structures, like a cluster of forbidding fungi popping out of a fertile ground. Its deadening familiarity seemed to shift now, like a hologram.

  Reed had been coming here for more than twenty years. He could see that the place was getting old. Its grayness seemed a feature of its age, although it had always been gray. With a career in skilled maintenance, Reed knew the structure, the innards, the joints and seams of this place. Sometimes he faced difficult jobs that seemed impossible to solve. He had to be innovative then, and the more complicated the problem, the more he came out shining.

  Tonight he moved through his work with the usual surge of energy he demanded of himself. He had to be charged up when he was on the job, even if the place had kicked him in the balls. First he worked on the operating floor resetting the pitch on some fan blades that were drawing too many amps, and then he went upstairs to work on the Freon systems. Even such small tasks indirectly helped keep the Cascade flowing, the stream running like blood. It wasn’t brain surgery, but it was delicate, demanding work, and he loved it.

  At midshift, some of the men were laughing about the newspaper column on radiation. But Strom, who wore a little pigtail at the nape of his neck, said, “That guy was dead-on. He really told it straight.”

  “Oh, come on, Strombo, you know they crapped it up from the start here,” said Teddy, who still held a grudge against beryllium.

  “But we’ll clean it up. It hasn’t hurt anything,” said Strom. He laughed. “Hey, Teddy, how are you coming with your medical claim?”

  “It’s a fucking pile of paperwork, but I’ll go ahead with it. Somebody’s got to start the ball rolling.”

  “You haven’t been here long enough to get beryllium disease, Teddy Bear,” said Strom. “And you don’t work in processing. We do real work here, not that pussy stuff you do in shop.”

  Teddy sauntered over to Strom and said, “The guy in the paper was talking about plutonium-238, not -239. But he didn’t come out and say so. There’s a world of difference.”

  “Radiation is good for you—right, Stromboli?” Reed saw himself making fun again. He stopped. People always believed what they wanted to believe, he thought.

  The talk echoed in Reed’s mind as he continued his work that night. There had been a time when he might have agreed about the healthful qualities of radiation. He had always thought that idle allegations got exaggerated and twisted into myth. But he knew that hundreds of tons of depleted uranium were lying around in cylinders like aliens waiting to burst from their pods. He knew of half a dozen guys who had come back from the first Gulf War with vague symptoms of illness. He knew that tons of D.U. had been dropped in Iraq in warheads. D.U. metal was used in tank-killer artillery and in armor plating on tanks because of its impenetrability. He didn’t know what all that added up to. He knew that a former frontline manager for the Cascade had liver cancer. And one of the industrial chemists had died of a rare sarcoma last year. Guys in their fifties.

  He wondered what images of the future ran through Madame Curie’s mind as she worked through her eight-ton pile of dark-chocolate pitchblende searching for the golden needle of radium. He had always thought of Marie Curie as an iridescent, undulating French babe, a cure-all earth mother beaming out of the darkness. But now he felt a sort of radiation sickness of the spirit.

  25

  Reed rearranged the planets. He was coming home from the stars and checking in with the neighbors, in the one solar system familiar to humankind. For several hours on Sunday, in the loneliness of his computer, he played with these planets as if they were marbles. He created a new slide show, scanning in photographs of the planets from his astronomy books and pulling in Hubble images from cyberspace. He flipped painfully scarred Mercury on his side. He beheld a spectacular view of russet-green-and-blue Venus, her clouds dissolved by the magic of infrared. He tossed in the white-swirled whole blue Earth and her acned moon; cinnamon Mars; and then that great hog, Jupiter, with his evil eye, followed by gently haloed Saturn in a ladies’ Sunday hat. Saturn had always been his favorite through the telescope.

  He paused on Uranus—and his twenty-seven playful moons, most named for Shakespeare’s women. Uranus and Neptune: giant gasbag planets, blue balloons so enthralling he forgot to breathe. Uranus, a pale blue sphere, beautiful, with delicate rings; Neptune, ethereal and deep blue, with a Great Dark Spot that had since disappeared. Neptune and Pluto, the transuranic planets.

  There was no good photograph of tiny Pluto, nearly invisible from earth, a distant icy spot, a mystery at the periphery of the solar system. It tilted funny, had polar caps. Neptune’s winds were off the charts; no one knew how hard the wind blew on Pluto. Jupiter and Saturn were perpetually stormy. Mercury couldn’t do wind, and the winds of Venus were all up in its topmost clouds. Reed imagined he was a solar meteorologist whipping up the night’s forecast.

  Uranus and Neptune were hydrogen, helium, and methane. Little but frozen methane was known of lonely, frosty Pluto and his big moon Charon—the god of the underworld and his satellite shining into caves of ice.

  26

  Reed had Monday off. The humid weather was suffocating, and he was too distracted to work on any of his projects. He stayed only briefly at Sunnybank, where his mother was participating with some difficulty in a spelling bee. He told one of the aides he was going out to grapple with his midlife crisis, and she told him to be careful—as if he had said he was going rock-climbing. Overcome by the nagging awareness of a permanent fatal error in his system, Reed drove out to the plant, parked in the side lot, and marched straight into the Records Office of the Administration Building, where he asked for the records of his 1980s exposures. Young Nancy, with her name badge affixed to her dosimeter, received him. He had not seen her around before. She was wearing plaid and tiny glasses.

  “I’d be delighted t
o help you,” she said, her smile shooting across her face like a fish. “How many events are we looking for?”

  “There were three incidents,” he said. “Not events. An event is a point in space-time with four coordinates. Nowadays, an event is planned—like a birthday party. But an incident occurs without warning.”

  “You still have to fill out a separate form for each one.”

  “Do I have to know the exact dates?”

  “We can run a search.”

  “Don’t you have all my records in one folder?”

  “Probably. But we have to have all three forms.”

  Talking to Nancy, with her regulation procedures, was as dull as the old-fashioned atmosphere of the office, with wall calendars and scattered piles of paper. He expected to see a mimeograph machine.

  Nancy said, “The records are in the vault, and we open that only on one day a week.”

  “Which day?”

  “I can’t say.”

  “What if there was a medical emergency and I needed my records?”

  “I have this other form that you fill out.” She began hunting in a drawer for the form.

  “No, no. It was a hypothetical question. I don’t have a medical emergency.”

  “But you seem to have some kind of emergency.”

  “Only with my girlfriend,” he said. “No, forget that. Do you have records back to 1962?” It occurred to him to ask for his father’s records too.

  He waited while she checked with a supervisor and returned with the news that early plant records were in the D.O.E. archives in Washington. “I can’t get those,” she said.

  “Well, just get my records then. When can I pick them up?”

  “We’ll send you a notice in the mail.”

  He began filling out the form, then stopped. “If you mail me a notice, that means you’ve gotten my records out of the vault. And if they’re here waiting for me, then they’re no longer protected by the vault. Had you thought of that?”