An Atomic Romance

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  This was new. He had not been told about plutonium on his tests before. Or had he misremembered?

  The paper in hand, Reed stood up, as if he were levitating above his body like a patient who would later claim to have died briefly. He read on.

  Mr. Futrell was protected from airborne radionuclides by the full-face respirator with canister. His in vivo results are acceptable.

  Maybe he had stashed all this in the back of his mind, knowing his safety suit had protected him. Now he realized that the body counter couldn’t register plutonium, but if neptunium was in his body, then an equal amount of plutonium was there too, like a shadowy twin. The 0.15 nanocuries of neptunium from this incident was matched by the same amount of plutonium. He thought of fund-raisers on the radio seeking matching contributions. Airborne radionuclides, like radio waves.

  But a flyspeck of plutonium packed a bigger wallop than a flyspeck of neptunium, he realized. The numbers wouldn’t match at all.

  He set the papers on the table. Under the ceiling fan, the top sheet fluttered almost imperceptibly. The numbers might not foreshadow anything at all. Nobody really knew. His trusty moon suit had shielded his lungs—maybe—from a large airburst of transuranics. No problem. He took a deep breath.

  It really wasn’t much, he thought. It was far short of the permissible body burden for rad workers. But Julia had insisted that there was no safe level.

  Sure, he thought of saying to Julia. I smoked plutonium a time or two. But I didn’t inhale.

  In an oblique way, he had been informed long ago that plutonium was present, and he had chosen not to ask questions. His own life was a reflection of his father’s. In incremental bits he had trespassed upon his father’s fate. He felt closer to his father, seeing the parallel. They were both willing participants.

  Reed sorted the planets, edited and cropped them, made a new arrangement of the nine—two gorgeous goddesses and seven action-hero gods. He thought about what it would be like to see Neptune from the surface of its largest moon, Triton: how Neptune would be a huge blue breast rising from the horizon, filling half the sky. He made a special pop-up feature on Uranus and the transuranics, Neptune and Pluto, stranded out on the edge of the solar system. He had internalized them. Gazing at them made him feel as if he had vaulted out of earthly gravity into warped space-time. He had a modicum of power. He sped the planets through their orbits. He really was Atomic Man.

  When Reed returned the overdue books to the public library, he ordered from interlibrary loan a book on plutonium and one about Rocky Flats, the nuclear-bomb plant that produced most of America’s arsenal and was then condemned, with a shit-load of plutonium in its backyard.

  At the library, he decided to look up his father’s obituary; he didn’t remember ever seeing it. An attractive librarian in high heels helped him find the microfilm from 1962 and set up the reel on the reading machine. He chatted with her for a while, noticing the curve of her breasts when she bent to insert the microfilm.

  “Do you have anything about the history of the atomic plant?” he asked her.

  “I bet we do. I’ll check.”

  Whipping through the pages of microfilm, Reed quickly located his father’s obituary. Robert Futrell, age thirty-six, worked at Main Atomic, as it was known then, and he left a wife, Margaret (“Peggy”), and son, Reed, six, and daughter, Shirley, two. Reed had forgotten that his father was a member of the National Rifle Association, and that he attended the Baptist church on Grand Avenue. It was a brief story. It said his father died shortly after an accident at work.

  Turning the knob back, Reed searched for a story about the accident. The swift, jerky motion of the microfilm was unsettling. He found nothing. But he treasured the small facts he had found in the obituary. He remembered his father walking through the front door, hanging his hat on a peg, walking down the polished hardwood floor of the hallway, then making a sharp L-turn and sitting down to play the piano. Would he have gone directly to the piano? Didn’t he want to play with Reed, his little son, age six, first? Did he embrace Reed’s mom? Hoist baby Shirley to his shoulders? Reed tried to remember what his father played on the piano. Something fast and loud. And his mother danced. That was how his parents said hello to each other at the end of the day—in a burst of joy. She skipped down the hardwood hall, scooped Reed up in her arms, and presented him to the piano-playing pop, like a prize at the end of the number. And then they had supper.

  His memories of his father, and the bits and pieces people had told him, had long ago combined into an image, the way George Washington or Abraham Lincoln is summed up by a single visual image. His father was simply his father: guy who worked at plant, played piano, died in accident. Reed had long ago ceased to ask questions about the pleasant face in photos. When Reed turned thirty-six, he was acutely aware that his father had died at that age. At that time, Reed rolled over the memories and images in his mind quite frequently, but he and Glenda were raising kids then, and he didn’t pursue his questions. Now Reed wished he knew the textures of his father’s working life—the feel of black oxide and greensalt, the heat and noise in a darker, more reckless time.

  The librarian was at his side, with a folder. “I found this in Special Collections. I thought it might interest you.”

  “Thanks.”

  “I wasn’t supposed to take it out of the room. So be careful you don’t tear anything, and if you take notes, use a pencil.”

  “Thanks. I’ll be careful.”

  The folder contained a newspaper feature about the plant, printed as a special section of the paper in 1955. The principal features of the gaseous-diffusion process of enriching uranium were unexpectedly detailed, with photographs of the compressors, the cylinders, the pipes, the drums, the skilled-maintenance department, the railroad cars.

  The story covered several pages, with splashy photographs of the building interiors. He stared at a bank of fluorine generators in the old feed plant, where his father had been burned. He could see the copper buss work connecting them above. The fluorine cells—like coffins on legs—were set on spring shock absorbers attached to a metal frame. He saw how his father could have tripped over the network of framing on the floor. Although the picture was bright, Reed knew the area was dim, like the lighting in a movie theater. Atomic energy dawdled in the dark ages. Gaseous diffusion was to a centrifuge what a hot-air balloon was to the Wright flyer. The technology was crude; the machinery sported sharp corners and ungainly protrusions. It would be precarious moving around the old feed plant, which kept up a steady tremor while the fluorine cells jiggled on their shock absorbers. Even though it had advanced somewhat since his father’s time, the enrichment process struck Reed as absurd. Making atomic fuel was a witches’ brew; it was like Dr. Frankenstein rigging up his crazy-quilt monster with baling wire and eyeballs from an organ depository and screwed-in limbs and mismatched feet.

  The newspaper section was presented as a civic promotion, a celebration of the city’s good fortune. The lead article said, “We’re not revealing any secrets. Some procedures and materials remain highly classified.”

  “The KGB wouldn’t give a shit how many welding rods I use,” Reed said aloud, startling readers at the other microfilm machines.

  29

  At home he found a message on his answering machine from Julia: “Hi, sweetie, I’m taking off for Chicago right now. The girls are going to meet me up there for a couple of weeks. I’ll call you when I get back. Don’t worry.”

  Reed cursed himself for missing her call. He had hoped to see her again this weekend. He wanted to gaze into her sharp eyes and touch her smooth skin and study her freckles. He felt hollow with longing, wishing he hadn’t gone to the library. It was odd that she left so abruptly, and he wondered if she had been summoned by some emergency.

  After trying unsuccessfully to reach her on the telephone, he drove to her house, but her Beetle wasn’t there, and no one answered the door of her garden apartment. He peered through the glass panes and sa
w only a corridor, with a peg rack and a row of worn shoes. He walked around to the tenants’ entrance at the front of the house and entered the vestibule. The second door was locked. Through the glass he could see a corridor, with two closed doors, and at the end of the corridor was a small table with a yellow bowl on it. He heard a radio playing upstairs, up a white stairway.

  Back at home he called the cytopathology lab and learned that Julia had left work two hours before. He called her home number again and left a message on her answering machine. “You’re turning me into a radionuclide, Julia—my heart is breaking at the rate of thirty-seven billion disintegrations per second. Or thereabouts.” Later, he regretted saying that. He kicked around his place aimlessly. On the kitchen counter, two aging tomatoes had leaked rot. He threw them out against the fence. Clarence cast him a critical glance.

  He contemplated the planets floating across his computer screen. Then he found himself playing with his photo files, tossing the planets around, ejecting them from the solar system, aiming them at black holes. Then he made a greeting card, with blue, glossy Neptune on the front. Beneath Neptune, he wrote, I’m coming to you from Outer Space. Beneath the silver marble of Pluto, he wrote, I’m just a frozen gas-ball. I’m getting lonely waiting here in my Fortress of Solitude. Yours forever, Captain Plutonium. He decided not to print it.

  That evening he brought pizza to Burl’s, and they watched two violent movies Burl had rented. Reed had the satisfaction of watching people and buildings blow up without having to feel anything personal about them. Burl, cozy with his pint of bourbon, seemed wrapped up in the fate of the characters. He watched with the purity of a child, Reed thought. Burl’s facial expressions ricocheted between terror and pity. Now and then he laughed when something exploded. Reed didn’t want to bring Burl down, so he didn’t mention his numbers. He didn’t mention Julia. Since his divorce, Reed thought he had come to know himself more keenly. He saw a pattern in his past mistakes; he thought about the way he did things; he recognized his blind spots. And all that had happened to him recently—Julia, his mother’s stroke, the atmosphere of uncertainty at work—catapulted him along the stages of self-examination. He could see himself in parallax, jumping back and forth, depending on which eye was watching. The Great Red Spot of Jupiter, remarkably like a whale’s eye, was watching.

  Reed slept fitfully, the familiar body-clenches and moans punctuating the night. The next day, Saturday, he swabbed his truck, paid bills, mowed his neighbor’s yard. She was an elderly widow who didn’t trust boys with machines, so he helped her out with her yard work. His weed trimmer had quit, and he suspected a terminal was loose. He found mud-dauber nests in the recessed circles around the screw heads. The mud patches were neatly formed, as if the insects had spackled bullet holes in a wall that was to be painted. As he jammed his electric screwdriver into the holes, dirt flew out. He discovered nothing wrong with the terminals, so he investigated the trimmer head. As he probed that, he realized the whole head was stripped. The thing was junk. Methodically, he joined the parts back together.

  He was restless. He didn’t know where to find Julia in Chicago. He didn’t have the number of her cell phone, the one she used only for emergencies. All his women were like the dead woman in the dream: his ex-wife had gone, exited into some alternate universe in Iowa; Rosalyn was too nice for her own good. Jennifer’s mother, whose name he still couldn’t remember, was long gone. All the other women were casual acquaintances, no one to keep up with. He had stopped reading the e-mail responses to his ad, which were still trickling in even though he had canceled the ad weeks ago. He had written a few enigmatic notes to Hot Mama. The last time he checked, she was ranting about the poetry of connection. When people most wanted connection, they screwed it up somehow, he thought. It was like damaging the terminals.

  30

  In the Sunnybank lounge, Reed looked for the fish among the roots in the globe of greenery on the piano and was startled to see it hanging motionless and apparently shriveled down to bones and skin. The fish hung against the roots in a pose of horror, like someone locked in a closet who screams until he starves to death. Probably no one had noticed that the fish was in distress.

  Reed’s mother waved to a woman who was steering a rolling walker, which she scooted along too far ahead of her, as if she were pushing a grocery cart. The woman was dressed in a floral wrapper, with pale aqua scuffs on her tiny feet.

  His mother called, “Come here, Mrs. Valley, tell my son what you did!” Reed waited what seemed like five minutes for the woman to reach them. He felt suspended, like the fish.

  “Tell that story again,” Reed’s mom urged her.

  Laboriously, Mrs. Valley sat down. “I was just a little squirt,” she said, puffing from her exertion.

  “Listen, Reed. A—what were they called—aeronauts? Aviators? An aviator landed in her father’s field, and . . . Mrs. Valley—” Reed’s mother prompted. She was clear headed, in good spirits, Reed thought, while he was empty and fuzzy.

  “He landed in my pappy’s pasture,” the woman said. She cleared her throat. “He had a copilot with him. And the neighbors all gathered around, and the airmen went and got some gasoline. And the pilot said he’d take us up for rides, and there was a little neighbor girl that wanted to go too, so my daddy said yes and he went up with me and the other little girl. . . .” Mrs. Valley paused to recall the other child’s name. “Rose. Rose Barn? And he took us up. Oh, the noise that thing made! And the wind whipped our cheeks. And we saw the river and all the trees—my, it was trees as far as you could see. And he found his way back to the same field and set us down right where he picked us up!”

  “Get on to the main part, Mrs. Valley.”

  “Well, it was two years later, when Charles Lindbergh’s picture was in the paper, for flying across the ocean. And there he was, with the St. Louis Spirit! That was our pilot! And our plane! Lord, we never could have imagined.”

  “And you saw it again, Mrs. Valley,” Reed’s mother said.

  “Yes—in the Smithsonian.” Mrs. Valley looked straight up at Reed, who was still standing. She said, “My daughter took me there in 1990. And there it was. The very airplane.”

  “That’s a great story, Mrs. Valley,” Reed said.

  “I have such a delightful son,” said his mother, turning her attention to him as an aide came to accompany Mrs. Valley to her manicure.

  “That wasn’t the Spirit of St. Louis,” he said to his mother. “The Spirit of St. Louis didn’t even have a copilot’s seat.”

  She squeezed his hand. “But it might have been Lindbergh. He went barnstorming around the country after he flew to Paris.”

  “But wasn’t this episode before that?”

  “Well, he must have flown around before, to get practice.” She shrugged. “You never know what might be true.”

  31

  Plutonium had been found in the body of a deer at Fort Wolf. It was a weighty piece of news, heavy like the heavier-than-uranium, transuranic, stupefyingly titanic heavy metals. Plutonium-fed deer. The news flew around the plant, like the joke of the day. Q. “How do you know if there’s plutonium in your venison?” A. “If you can jump-start your truck with it.”

  Reed floundered in perplexity. He didn’t know if this was an immediate crisis or just another toxic-modern doomsday theme to carry around in the same pocket with global warming and the perforated ozone layer. What kind of assurance could he offer Julia now? He did not know how much plutonium you could ingest and survive. Evidently the deer had thrived, until the wildlife biologists shot it to find out if it harbored anything life threatening.

  “How do you imagine plutonium got into that deer?” Burl asked when Reed arrived at Burl’s early on a Friday evening. “Is it in the water or on the trees or what?”

  “That’s not what killed the deer,” Reed said.

  Burl tossed Reed the keys to his truck. Reed was driving. Exactly three weeks ago, he had been shucking corn on his porch with Julia. He had
had no word from her, and he was becoming anxious.

  “A dirty bomb,” said Burl, slamming the passenger door. “A hot deer! Just hurl a deer through a plate-glass window into a mob of shoppers.”

  “It wouldn’t work that way,” Reed said. “Alpha rays don’t go very far.”

  The truck’s flank scraped some overgrown bushes as he backed out of Burl’s driveway.

  “The hunters won’t care if the deer have plutonium or kryptonite or turnip greens in their bones,” Burl said. “They just want to shoot something.”

  “Maybe they hunt because supermarket food is tainted,” Reed said. “Maybe they’re hunting for something pure.”

  “Maybe if I ate plutonium I’d turn into Superman.” Burl laughed.

  Reed shrugged. Burl beat a rhythm on the dashboard.

  “I’m telling you, Reed, that place is going to eat you alive. Wonder if that deer felt funny, or glowed? Could it still have Bambis—or would they have two heads and fins? I mean, do they know any of this stuff, Reed? Do they really know what kind of danger we’re dealing with?”

  “Maybe they do. Or there wouldn’t have been so many secrets.”

  “Maybe so.”

  “I give a urine sample every month and every month they tell me I’m safe. And lately we’re getting negative numbers on uranium.”

  “What kind of sense is that?”

  “They seem to be saying that I get less uranium at the plant than my mother does at Sunnybank.”

  Burl laughed. “They want you to feel good about yourself, Reed.”

  “Oh, sure. I feel really positive about my negatives.”

  The sun had set, and Reed switched on the lights. Thick lines of cars were headed toward the malls, and parking lots at the chain restaurants were jammed. Instead of his own more reliable vehicle, Reed drove Burl’s hapless, multicolored truck because Burl loved it so. Burl talked in a stream. Sometimes with him, Reed felt as if they had gone off on a tangent, like a space probe that went too fast, escaped gravity, and went speeding out into space.