by James Reich
Molly’s eighties television flickered into life after displaying nothing but a bright oscilloscope line that left a ghostly trail across the screen for the first several moments. Cash snatched up the sticky remote from the beer crate that stood in for a coffee table as she and Molly flopped back on the red velour couch. They watched in silence for minutes as the news cycle began to repeat itself.
Cash became agitated: “That’s the strangest fucking thing. Now they’re saying what? That they don’t know if it was vandalism, an accident, or a lightning strike? Lightning strike? All we get today is some footage of some fat sunburned tourists in their Hawaiian shirts and baseball caps, whining because they can’t go to White Sands and jerk off? They’re walking this back and killing the story. Someone is screwing the lid down tight.”
“Local news, man. What were you expecting to see?” Molly scratched for something under her blond hair.
“Well, I’m sure I didn’t dream that someone attached explosives to it and blew the shit out of it.”
“Maybe you did.”
“Now, it’s so . . . so quiet. Maybe that means that they’re taking it seriously?”
“Exercises. Cash, I’m not certain what you are talking about because I was out late being ignored in a gay bar, but whenever we have excessive military helicopter action out here, which is often, you know that it is always exercises, or the Man looking for meth labs or fields of marijuana. No, we are not hunting flying saucers. No, there is nothing rotten in the Land of Enchantment!” Returning to the kitchen for more cream, Molly continued: “Say, did I ever tell you about the time I was in a post office in Hunt, Texas, where they had an FBI wanted poster for Osama bin Laden? As if he’d be stupid enough to turn up there. This woman with steel wool for hair behind the counter said, ‘Oh, I call him the Q-Tip, because he kind of looks like a Q-Tip with that darn thing on his head.’ Don’t you just love innocent country folk?”
Cash wanted to tell Molly everything, but did not dare endanger her. The Blackhawks had been stood down, the temporary roadblocks had been dismantled, and the red earth went on, innocent and unsuspecting. But Cash knew that they would be hunting her now in the quiet cracks of America, in subtle dislocations of the street. She would leave in the morning, moving toward the city, making certain that she was being noticed.
They watched television until, as it often did, Molly’s satellite dish lost signal and the screen turned to a monochrome fuzz of static and white noise. She would hit Los Alamos. The day after that, she would be gone.
6
APRIL 5, 2011. MANY OF CASH’S DAYS WERE WASTED TO NAUSEA. She slopped from the shower stall, naked and soaking, almost ripping the shower curtain from its rail, and skidded over to the toilet, vomiting into the bowl. Cash fingered the goiter at her throat. It had always been with her, this pulsar beneath her skin, moving though its spectrum, marking time. The goiter was a symptom of her thyroid cancer. Her cancer came from Chernobyl, when a sparkling dust entered her infant throat, a misshapen crust of death, as it did thousands of others in the old haunt of the Amazon women. It was an invasion, a rape. Staring into her steamed mirror, she saw that the lump had enlarged. Since she did not exist, she could not afford health care. It was, she concluded, only the force of her will that postponed the victory of cancer. She ran her fingers over the bulbous skin once before the nausea pulled her back down to the lavatory. Brushing the taste of bile out of her mouth, Cash stifled the tears that threatened to overwhelm her.
She dressed in her black Malaria! T-shirt and dirty white jeans that clung to her thighs before lighting a fire in her wood-burning stove. She felt weak. There was nothing that she could do but sit numb at her kitchen table, sipping coffee and trying not to puke. In the corner of the room was a turntable in a scuffed red suitcase. Cash put on her cat’s-eye glasses and thumbed through a selection of vinyl, lining up some records to play as she waited for the sickness to pass: Lizzy Mercier Descloux’s “Herpes Simplex,” X’s “White Girl,” Yoko Ono singing “Listen, the Snow Is Falling.” Even with her glasses, she struggled to focus her eyes on the record sleeves. Her guts twitched and heaved slightly. Reading was almost impossible, but this was her habit. She picked through ragged volumes, a rum-ringed edition of Monique Wittig’s Les Guérillères, Friedan, De Beauvoir, Cixous, and returned to Valerie Solanas. Valerie’s SCUM feminism was based on mutation and violence. As the nausea passed through her in cold waves, Cash wrapped her bicycle chain necklace over the goiter, the trinitite concealing it, even as the sickness fought to remake her flesh, to violate the soft atomic code of her skin.
As flames gathered in her stove, she thought of the wildfires that had threatened Los Alamos nine months ago, the wildfires that she had set in solidarity with her remote Ukrainian Amazon sisters who had started fires in the forest regions of Russia, the forest lands where fallout from Chernobyl had settled. The ash from these new fires was dispersed as far as Moscow, where a gray pall descended upon Red Square and the lurid minarets and bright bricks of the Kremlin. The people continued to work and shop, wearing white cotton masks across their faces. They were not told immediately of the origin of the ash and what the sickening smoke might contain. Broken only by thunderstorms, a nuclear autumn had come to Mother Russia. The reportage of the so-called wildfires only briefly expressed the fear that the spreading blaze could agitate 1986’s contaminated earth, and that the fallout could be revived by the burning winds, before that imagery was suppressed. Here, Cash reflected, was a continental militant strike achieved with nothing more than one box of matches and favorable weather. At Los Alamos, nuclear materials were stored under tarpaulins in the open air. Even from forty miles away, from the slag heaps of Madrid, Cash could watch the fires consuming fir trees in columns of flame and closing in on the site and its drums of radioactive waste. She did not want the fires to reach the corroding barrels of plutonium, only for a blast wave of panic to rinse the landscape. Yet, if they did, she was prepared. Death was coming to America, inexorably, by generations of poison slipping from radioactive topsoil into the Rio Grande, from the gentle glitter of strontium clouds, and from the creep of cesium in young bones. Or it might come suddenly, carelessly. Perhaps it could not be stopped. And as much as she set her will against it, she knew also that she embodied it. She was, as she thought of herself, the atrocity to conclude atrocities. There would and must be deaths, but not yet.
According to Valerie Solanas:
“Both destruction and killing will be selective and discriminate. SCUM is against half-crazed, indiscriminate riots, with no clear objective in mind, and in which many of your own kind are picked off. SCUM will never instigate, encourage, or participate in riots of any kind or any other form of indiscriminate destruction. SCUM will coolly, furtively, stalk its prey and quietly move in for the kill. Destruction will never be such as to block off routes needed for the transportation of food or other essential supplies, contaminate or cut off the water supply, block streets and traffic to the extent that ambulances can’t get through or impede the functioning of hospitals.”
It was evening before Cash felt well enough to work on the improvised rocket-propelled petrol bomb she had intended to launch, and she found herself too depleted to make even the short journey to the north of Santa Fe that she had imagined. Cash called her petrol bomb the Harry K. Daghlian Jr. Memorial Rocket, and it was to be launched at the Los Alamos National Laboratory’s Area G facilities. It would shriek above the trees and across the barbed-wire fences, leaving a comet’s tail of bright green sparks. Where it crashed, the gasoline would ignite and start a fire close to the plutonium barrels. Attached to it would be a small metal canister. This she intended to survive the fire, but to be discovered by forensics investigators almost immediately. Inside the canister, shining from the scorched earth, agitating the leaching radiation in the dirt, they would find a Xeroxed photograph of Harry Daghlian’s radiation-burnt palm and his wretched fingers. She had little sympathy for Daghlian, a man who had irradiated
himself in one of the deathly waves of 1945. He perished from radiation poisoning after dropping a tungsten carbide brick upon a plutonium core at Los Alamos. She had no time for the complicit—for the pilots, the engineers, the nuclear physicists, in weaponry or power—unless they walked away in rational disgust. She told herself that she had no sympathy even for the workers at Chernobyl, for they toiled in the service of nightmares without end. That included her father. She had lost a day. It would have to wait until the following night.
April 6, 2011. As night fell, Cash rode her motorcycle north to Los Alamos. Her lips curled as she tracked through the dire names high on the ominous mesa skirted by Omega Road and split by Trinity Drive and decorated with the quaintly referential Manhattan Loop. Nearby lay Oppenheimer Drive, Bikini Road, and Eniwetok Drive. Los Alamos National Laboratory had developed and spread across the mesa and canyons of the region, but Cash rode toward the point of origin: the crest where Los Alamos Ranch School for boys had once been; alma mater for William Burroughs and Gore Vidal, elder statesmen of Queer. Here was the incubation space of the bomb, another tourist trap. She studied the cops loitering along Bathtub Row where the Oppenheimer House stood. Evidently, her attack on the Trinity marker had made someone edgy. Yet, this was not what she had come for. Cash arrived at her target, wearing her black jeans and a black leather jacket. Her khaki pack was slung over her back. Between the Jemez and Pajarito roads lay Material Disposal Area G, sixty acres concealing sixty thousand cracked plutonium drums under tarpaulins or partly submerged in sand pits, surrounded by a blackened vista of deforestation where the wildfires had blown in.
Cash parked her motorcycle beside the moonlit road through the Pajarito Canyon. She lay in the dirt shoulder and dug the shaft of her rocket into the cold-hardened ground. When it would not dig in, she hacked into the surface with her ignition key. Making subtle adjustments she decided the trajectory, as she had practiced covertly when she and Molly would drink tequila and shoot fireworks from the black hills surrounding their town. She taped the improvised timing mechanism to the pole with the rocket. At the moment when her timer struck, and the touch paper of the Harry K. Daghlian Jr. Memorial Rocket was lit, she would be at least five miles away.
The rocket poured its luminous glittering tail over the forest, a radium-green arc howling above the pines and bombing down toward the rusting barrels. A security guard watched it fall toward the tarps and threw himself to the ground, his Doberman barking into the brittle black tree line. The rocket fell rapidly, weighed down by its metal canister, showering the scene with brilliant ivy embers. There was a low concussion as it smashed against a metal office building, and gasoline flames splashed the wall and set light to the surrounding brush. The guard grabbed for his radio as the threat of wildfire ruptured the silence of the mesa.
Cash rode out of the forest to where the Douglas firs, pines, and Gambel oaks gave way to swarms of tenacious piñon and juniper foregathering in the moonlight along 502 and onto Highway 285. She had been born in a city surrounded by such a great forest as this one, but the trees had been destroyed by the dragon-vapor of Chernobyl before she could lay her eyes upon it. The nights of New Mexico were so clear; the profound fires of the Milky Way arched over her. It was a nuclear universe. Tomorrow, she would leave New Mexico forever, and travel east.
She gazed down on the stardust strip of Madrid from a tall slag heap, coal slipping from beneath her boots like melting black ice. There, far below her, were the iron locomotive and derelict boxcars from the Santa Fe Railroad. Pale lanterns swiveled on wires in the limbs of the trees flanking the narrow line of Highway 14 that was the spine of the town. She felt herself to be an alien, charged with the perils of saving her distant dying planet from a catastrophe. Moonlight stroked the green and colored beer bottle walls between some of the disintegrating casitas. Wind chimes pealed along the boardwalk of gallery shacks, with coyote feedback in the nubs of the hills. In the darkness, she vacillated between acute sorrow and a profound awareness of her own power. Listening for the throb of their rotors, she watched remote helicopter lights moving toward Los Alamos.
She reeled her bicycle chain necklace from inside her T-shirt, pulling the shard of weakly luminous trinitite away from her small, muscular chest. She let it hang in front of her, a cursed firefly.
It was after midnight. Before packing her bag, Cash colored her hair. She bleached the black out of it with peroxide, putting in a deep red dye. In the small bathroom, the pigment splashed the shower curtain, dripped onto the pale concrete, and flecked the mirror over the white enamel sink. The scene looked as though someone had been murdered.
AT HIS HOME ON CONSTITUTION AVENUE IN WASHINGTON, D.C., Robert Dresner’s ghost phone rang at 3 AM, startling him from sleep. Without switching on his lamp, he clawed at the modern bureau at his bedside, finally locating the call. The chrome voice on the other end penetrated the vinous fur of his exhaustion and the whisky he had forced down to help him sleep against the flow of his jet lag.
“Robert, there’s been a firebomb attack at LANL. Almost setting fire to Area G.”
“A firebomb? Jesus. It’s got to be linked, right?”
“Almost certainly.”
“How did they get close enough? I thought we had firewalls.”
“You should be able to assume that, but no. Los Alamos is gentrified. The one witness, a security guard, stated that it resembled a large green firecracker launched over the tree canopy, or what’s left of it.”
“So, what about the uranium or plutonium pits?” Dresner climbed from his bed and felt for the switch for the overhead lights. The room blurred before him: the pale blue walls, the beige carpet, the copy of Hustler splayed out on his black micro suede comforter. He paced toward the bed and straightened the magazine so that he could study it while he talked with his director; beside the brunette in her underwear, he read the pink and gray headlines: BUILDING A BETTER VAGINA (WE HAVE THE PHOTOS!)
“The fire was a minor one. Also, an obscure reference to Harry Daghlian.”
“Who’s Harry Daghlian?”
“I’m sending you a scan of material discovered at the site.”
“Casualties?”
“Negative. Not that gentrified.” The metallic Voice attempted an ironic tone. “But we are culling information from the sundry New Mexican authorities, including any traces, glimpses, or suspicions they had but couldn’t resolve regarding the wildfires that made news last year.”
“Those were set deliberately, yes, right. I’ll call Langley and make certain that any and all incidents related to nuclear facilities, however abstract, are forwarded to me. If this is our alien, we can work on the nexus.”
“Someone wants our attention, Robert. Give it to them.”
Dresner pulled on his white cotton robe and paced dully to his kitchen, where he would make coffee before descending to his basement office to pick up the scans. The basement was warm from the machinery there, a soft electronic drone played in the gloom. He signed in, and the screens at his desk lit up, making him squint and complain. The light from the screens illuminated the other items scattered across his desk, the strange typewritten letter from the Trinity bomber, and his amorphous photograph, the blade of black hair across his brow like a cartoon Nazi. There was more. Greenish night-sight images and video stills that the terrorist would not know Dresner possessed, drone camera images of him crawling along the desert floor, part-deflected lurid thermal photographs of the bomb being attached to the obelisk. He studied the images, estimating the build of the figure. He guessed that the saboteur was approximately five feet six inches tall—short for an American, but perhaps not outside of expectations for one born in the Soviet Union without first-world nutrition. What do you want? He had seen exploits similar to this before. The problem was always that where the enemy believed they were taunting, they were transparent: the narcissism of terrorism. Lower-level CIA operatives would be scouring the speed cameras and traffic flow sentinels for a target vehicle to cross-re
ference from Radium Springs and Los Alamos. Sipping his coffee, he clicked open the feed and a series of photographs appeared before him: a close-up of a dog sniffing the tattered cardboard of the projectile, a narrow metal canister beside a strip of measuring tape. “I don’t care about the scale of the thing, just what’s inside it.” The final image was evidently a scan of a monochrome photograph that was not contemporary. It was the image of a man’s stricken hand, having sustained some kind of wound, the skin stripped from the palm, and the fingers contorted and blistered. Dresner wondered if the hand was an amputation. There was handwriting on the photograph, from a black ballpoint pen. He enlarged the image to read the scrawl that was evidently so agitated that it had nearly torn through the glossy paper it was written on. Reading, his jet lag made him panic.
This is the Hand—the Hand that takes . . .
7
APRIL 7, 2011. THURSDAY MORNING, HAVING BARELY SLEPT, AFTER struggling though thirty push-ups and fifty abdominal crunches, and coughing up bile, Cash called on Molly. Stray dogs roamed the strip as the sun lit the rough-seamed hills.
“You changed your hair,” Molly said as Cash let herself in.
