An Atomic Romance

by Bobbie Ann Mason

  Julia could be either alive or dead in Chicago, and until he knew which, she was both. If Einstein’s mind couldn’t accept indeterminacy, how could Julia expect Reed to fathom string theory? Physicists had probably thought up strings just in order to tie up loose ends. He wondered if the strings at the itty-bitty Planck level were analogous to the miles of DNA strands inside a cell. He made a mental note to ask Julia if DNA strands, like the p-branes in string theory, could warp in and out of dimensions. Through his windshield the world was commonplace: gray asphalt, broken lines, fast-moving vehicles, speeders zooming around him, green signs, azure sky, emerald corn, and yellow-green wheat. Bugs spattering the glass.

  After all that had happened recently, he was surprised that he could add two and two. If he could just burst through his own subterfuges and talk straight to her—tenderly—then maybe they could face the darkness together. He would have to tell her about his exposures, his numbers, but maybe that would backfire. He felt she was standing in radiant light while he crouched somewhere in a shadowy corner of a dank basement. In recent months he had been bombarded with challenges from all directions, like neutrinos zinging through him on the road to nowhere, and his inherent cheerful-ness had deflated. But he believed it would return, as simply as a pop-up on his computer screen, if Julia came back to him.

  But what difference would it make? Some dark, mysterious force was pulling the universe apart. The universe was expanding at an ever-increasing rate, like a burst of fireworks shooting into oblivion. Reed’s mind jumped backwards and forwards billions of years. How could it be that he was here now? How could it be that the human race existed, and that he was here to observe it? Sometimes he could not distinguish between his imagination and cold, bare facts. Now it hit him more deeply than ever what an unlikely pinprick in the absurd fabric of space-time human existence was. He slammed his hands on the wheel. He hated being stuck in his own head.

  As he drove past immense cornfields, a thick green rug, he went over and over his situation. Every angle of vision revealed a different story. Each version was like a cornfield maze, shaped by a visionary farmer on a state-of-the-art tractor. You could see it only from afar, the way the pictures etched by Incas made sense only from the air. Either the Incas were trying to guide extraterrestrial visitors to a landing zone, Reed thought, or they could fly and enjoyed Sunday outings in the air to view this art form.

  He exited and found gas and a chain restaurant that served baked chicken with brussels sprouts and braised fennel, which befuddled him and made him feel as though he were a time traveler—but from the past or future? He wasn’t clear on fennel. He felt better after eating, and he had a second cup of coffee.

  When he returned to the truck, he noticed a sign, NO SEMI-PARKING IN THIS LOT. To park or not to park? he wondered. Or semi-park? Indeterminacy abounded. A misty rain had fogged his windshield, but as soon as he reached the speed limit on the highway, the sun broke out.

  Reed was grateful when the skyline finally appeared, black towers illuminated in the late sun. The gleaming spires rose out of the prairie like stalagmites—a mutant village, overgrown, hardened from minerals dripping down from the poison sky. A city at a distance conveyed this freakish aspect, its surreal gravestones—underworld thrustings—reaching for the sun as if to pull it down.

  Reed could imagine a dirty bomb hitting Chicago—limited fallout, some radiation sickness, more fear than damage. And he could imagine one well-dressed itinerant, wired with a backpack, ambling along Michigan Avenue. But a chain-link security fence shielded the mind from staging expansive nuclear theatricals—a self-protective function for which Reed was immensely thankful. The plutonium experiments had shaken him, but now they were easing into a restful little nook in his memory.

  The traffic began to thicken and swirl, like flocks of starlings in an early evening sky. Reed shifted into the new rhythm, alert and slightly crazed. He was tired and hot, ready to have a shower and roam the city. He had always been fond of Chicago, even before he knew Julia. It had authority and pizzazz. It would do him good to have some time here before he met her tomorrow afternoon. As he swooped into the city, he felt hopeful. The complex of towers and tunnels and rails and neighborhoods jumbled together in a million mysteries. He glided along the expressway that led toward the Loop. A couple of years ago he came here with a woman named Frances whose goal in life was to shop at Marshall Field’s in her eternal search for the perfect purse. Reed had walked miles in the bitter wind while she shopped. Now he realized how much he had changed since then. He knew Julia would take him to someplace meaningful, like the Museum of Science and Industry, or the planetarium, instead of a department store.

  After locating a chain hotel, he instructed the enthusiastic parking valet on driving his truck.

  “You have to nudge it a little when it’s out of gear,” Reed said.

  “I never drove a pickup like this,” the valet said. “What kind of mileage does it get?”

  “Cool,” he said when Reed told him.

  His beat-up truck was an old friend. He remembered the chartreuse Beetle ride in the rain, how Julia wanted to show him her new car.

  His room was on the tenth floor, with a view of a brick wall. He pulled the curtain cords and closed his drama into its own place. The room was comfortable, with large pastels of old-fashioned street scenes on the wall. Exhausted, he stretched out for a nap. It had not occurred to him until he woke up an hour later that the room had a TV set, hidden behind cabinet doors like a prowler in the closet. He did not turn it on, though. He liked the silence. It was quiet enough to hear a mouse pissing on cotton.

  At the lobby newsstand, he bought a map and went out walking. It was growing dark, and the streetlights were blazing. Some youths were banging on drums improvised from plastic buckets so loudly the sound hurt Reed’s ears. On a street corner he saw a spray-painted man—metallic all over, clothes and skin and all. Jiggly coil springs decorated his cap. The figure, blowing a noisemaker, staggered along—a titanium robot. A woman dropped a coin in his lunch box, and he jerked his hand into his coat pocket and teased out a lollipop.

  At a noisy café Reed ordered pan-seared shrimp in a Dixie-beer reduction sauce and rosemary corn bread. Rosemary orzo, he recalled. So many sensations reminded him of Julia. He stayed for the music, a band reminiscent of the sixties, and ordered another beer. The music made him feel he was in a war, heavy artillery surrounding him. He wouldn’t have been surprised if a dirty bomb sailed through the door. He didn’t stay long. His ears ringing, he meandered through the flashing colors and adrenaline rush of the city. The spectacle of lights spiraled around him, as though he were in the center of a far-flung galaxy. Oddly, a surge of excitement was growing in him about making his pilgrimage to the shrine of Enrico Fermi, a man who, like Julia seeking the eradication of disease, had a dream of figuring out the essence of reality.

  A fter sleeping well in his high-rise cocoon of silence, Reed bought a pocket guidebook and browsed through it while he ate breakfast at a café on LaSalle. Then he walked the city, wondering where Julia had been, where she would go now. He was on the alert for a chartreuse Beetle. He tried to remember places she had mentioned. She had said that a downtown shopping center—with one big store and a string of little ones—was called Fat Man and Little Boy. He had no idea where it was, or what its actual name was. He had asked the bellman at the hotel, who said Reed must be joking.

  He walked along the lakeshore, where strips of sand rimmed what might well be an ocean for all you could prove by the view. He passed the pier with its Ferris wheel slowly winding up through the sky, floating down. In a park he saw a woman sleeping face down, her possessions beside her in a bag on wheels. A roller-bag lady, he thought, a witticism to tell Julia. It always unnerved him to see homeless people displayed in public like waste heaps. He glimpsed a tall ship far in the distance, its rigging shining in a trick of light. A cool breeze from the lake felt good. He noticed a man swimming parallel to the shore, a seri
ous swimmer, swimming freestyle as if he were practicing to swim Lake Michigan. The water appeared gray and unforgiving. All of these sights moved Reed as something esemplastic, one interlocking set of sensations. He was thrilled to be alive.

  From time to time, Reed was jerked to a standstill by the operations of his own mind. He was a single quark clattering around in an electron cloud, seeking another. He was a strange quark and Julia was a charmed quark. Here he was, in Chicago, alone, knowing no one except the valet at the hotel who had parked his truck, and Julia, who had disappeared. The sun was shining and it was a fair summer day, not too hot. Anything at any time could happen, and until then he was free.

  42

  At the hotel Reed showered and changed into a royal blue T-shirt and black jeans. He positioned his star-studded leather belt with the silver buckle and checked his look in the mirror. He had dialed up his messages at home three times, and he tried one last time before he left the hotel. Nothing.

  Because of the hassle of retrieving his truck, he rode the train to the campus. A Seeing Eye dog, a placid yellow Labrador, sat facing him, with a long-haired young man Reed took to be a student, who was reading a book in Braille. Both dog and student exited with him, and Reed thought about following them to get his bearings, but he didn’t want to make the dog nervous. Crowds of young people, dressed in cutoffs and flip-flops, sauntered along with their inevitable backpacks. Like meal portions at restaurants, textbooks must be heavier these days, Reed thought, as he tried to imagine himself a student again. It was gratifying to think of the students’ eagerness, their confidence in starting out, bolstered by their privileges. They probably did not think of their privileges, he realized.

  With time to spare, he checked his map and detoured through some of the streets of handsome brick houses. Most of the houses had small front gardens enclosed by wrought-iron fences. Reed wondered how people braved the steep stoops when there was snow and ice. He felt uneducated, out of place, probably under suspicion.

  As he walked down a residential street toward the library he thought he saw Julia, far ahead of him. It wasn’t. He was fooled by a general outline and a motion that evoked her lope and head bob. He knew, of course, that she wouldn’t come. Either she hadn’t received his message, or she had chosen to ignore it. Or perhaps she wasn’t able to reply. Maybe she had been injured or was sick from some exotic disease she was studying in her lab work. Hantavirus or Ebola. E. coli, perhaps, or the Nora virus. Or some new unknown-to-the-C.I.A. strain of Boola-Boola flu. She was just busy, he told himself. She might even be back at work, while he waited for hours at the site of the old Met Lab, where Enrico Fermi, more than sixty years before, had played with plutonium.

  It was beyond a group of buildings ahead, on the far side of the library. He drew nearer to the library. Its panels of cold concrete reminded him of a startlingly new nuclear-bomb plant. The style was called the Architecture of Brutalism, the guidebook told him. Staring at the vertical grooves and slit windows of the massive building, Reed contemplated blankly the Architecture of Brutalism. Fermi had split the atom in an underground squash court, under Stagg Field, which was replaced now by the brutal library. Reed walked around the library, anxious about seeing the sculpture Julia had told him about on the day they first met, the day he so crudely wolfed meat loaf in her presence.

  The Henry Moore sculpture was a dark spherical blob in the center of a large area of scored concrete. Coming closer, Reed saw that passageways ran through it. He moved slowly around the sculpture. It was a twelve-foot bronze dome, thrusting above him. It was a bald head, a skull, a brain case with an empty face. It was a helmet. It was, also, conceivably—in its smooth roundness—the mushroom cloud. The head and shoulders rested on four shapeless, knobby feet, as if the torso and legs had been excised. Reed leaned against one of the openings. The metal, warm from the sun, was pleasant to touch.

  Henry Moore intended it to feel like a cathedral when you poked your head inside, Reed read in the pocket guide. If he said some kind of prayer—some Burl pearl—would it aid him in his quest at all? But he didn’t want Julia to catch him here with his head inside this thing saying a prayer.

  The design on the concrete paving that surrounded the sculpture was like broken sun rays, lines radiating out from the symbolic figure, or perhaps converging toward it. Little Boy exploded and Fat Man imploded. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The uranium bomb and the plutonium bomb.

  Reed was used to being around atomic energy every day, but being right here at its birthplace jangled him. He could imagine old eager-beaver Enrico below ground here—right here, in the catacombs beneath the soccer stadium here at the University of Chicago—daring to meddle with the basic structure of nature itself. It was terrifying. He felt goose bumps rise on his arms as he thought about the gaggle of scientists huddled over their deadly endeavor. Their experiment was such a tight secret that the citizens of the city didn’t have a chance to imagine an uncontrolled chain reaction, a disaster that would have made the great Chicago fire seem like a wienie roast. Maybe, Reed thought, other worlds had consumed themselves by some invasive cracking of their essential building blocks. It could all be undone. A solar system could become a black hole, like the state of nothingness before the big bang. That was one theory of the beginning of time. He glanced at his watch—five to one.

  People passed by, unaware of what happened on this spot on a cold day in 1942. Enrico Fermi, charging forth like a medieval knight, had tickled the dragon’s tail. In amongst his patchwork pile of graphite bricks and uranium chunks, he placed cadmium rods to cushion the neutrons and keep them from going wild. When the time came, Fermi calmly started the chain reaction by directing the removal of the rods. One by one, they were pulled out, until the pile fairly roared with its energy. Fermi stayed cool. Put the rods back in, Fermi said at just the right moment. He had succeeded in controlling a chain reaction. Now he knew how to produce enough plutonium to make atomic bombs.

  A man and woman approached, tourists in khaki and sun hats. Reed moved aside. The man said, “The famous story is that they had a test tube of plutonium in the lab down underground here, and they all went to lunch and when they came back it was gone. The janitor had poured it down the drain. They had to go after it with Geiger counters—through the entire sewer system of Chicago.”

  “Did they get it all?” the woman asked, like someone inquiring about a cancer operation.

  “They thought so. Who knows?”

  “Do we have time for a drink before we meet Tiffany?”

  The man consulted his watch, and the couple hurried away. Reed didn’t believe the story. He returned to the sunny dome, which was becoming a buddy. Half-sitting in the sun-warmed seat, virtually inside the skull-cloud, he felt protected, even cozy. He was accustomed to heat. He could imagine the team of scientists toiling below him, beneath the rays scored in the concrete under his feet. He could feel the audacity, the egomania of some of them, the cliquishness of their fraternity—their pride, their rationalizations. He did not know if Fermi was afraid. Probably he wasn’t.

  Atomic energy was so seductive. Reed’s seat in the nuclear-energy sculpture felt warm. He was peaceful. Good old Fermi.

  Even though this heavy-metal transuranic memorial seemed as hard as a D.U.-enforced military tank, Reed was growing comfortable with it. He laughed to himself, remembering what Sammy Blew had said about large women. Then, after removing the guidebook and map from his hip pockets, Reed found himself easing into the niche within the giant head. Pushing himself in rearward, he entered the opening. Curled up tight, he just fit.

  In his fortress, he joined with nuclear energy, communing with its monstrous power. He was snug with the sun’s warmth, but shaded from its glare. Its stored energy radiated through him. This could be an arthritis cure, he thought.

  Realizing his behavior might seem suspicious—he could be stowing a bomb—he wriggled out and resumed his position, waiting for Julia. He did a few calf and hamstring stretches to prevent
cramps. His knee still bothered him from time to time.

  He did not wait long. He could see her coming down the street. She wasn’t yet distinct, but he knew her shape, her hair, her walk, even those thick-soled leather clogs, with the floppy straps. Impulsively, he hid behind the sculpture. Then, as she drew nearer, he crawled inside it again, twisting around so that his head was in the opening that faced her. He was Captain Plutonium in his Helmet of Invincibility. And when she saw him at last, he was grinning.

  “May I take your order?” he said.

  “This sculpture is talking,” Julia said, turning to an imaginary companion. “Darth Vader is flirting with me.”

  “I’ve been toddling all over this town looking for you,” he said as he struggled out of his nest.

  Their reunion wasn’t angry. She was glad to see him, and she let him kiss her. Something about her lip gloss was unfamiliar. Had she been kissing someone? Some people walked past, not heeding them. He was so glad to see her, so relieved that she met him at the sculpture, that he could not find fault with her. She was alive, and she was here. She was wearing jeans and a gray cropped top with elbow-length sleeves. She was carrying a small, flat bag that hung on her shoulder by a thin strap of leather. There were never any extras with Julia—no artifice, no decoration. She wasn’t hidden beneath any distracting frills.

  “So,” she said. “What have you and Enrico Fermi been up to?”

  “I’ve been trying to figure out if Fermi was just doing his job, or if he should have just said no.”

  “There’s no answer to that.”

  “I was wondering, would this thing withstand an atomic blast?”

  “Who would need to know?” she said.

  She was holding his arm, leaning into him. “You’re warm,” she said.

  “From Humpty Dumpty here.” He put her hand on the warm metal. “Put some earrings on this guy, and you’ll have Buddha,” Reed said. Something had shifted inside him. Gas? His knees felt a little wobbly.