Bombshell

by James Reich

  Janelle Gresham stared at him for a moment, before lifting her glass and draining it with one motion. “How can I explain it? Okay, so, I knew her first as a five-year-old, and now I see her at, what, almost twenty-five. She was a messed-up kid. I wouldn’t say that she has remained exactly childlike, but something about her was still back there. Stuck, someone else called it.”

  “Five years old? Is she autistic or something? And you’ve known her that long? Jesus Christ. I don’t remember any five-year-olds.”

  “No. I told you, not childlike. Corrupted, maybe.”

  “In my book,” Dresner sympathized, “there’s personal integrity, and then there is stagnation. That’s one reason why I never go to reunions.”

  “To be honest, something threatened me in a way I can’t fathom.”

  “Huh. Did you feel guilty that you’ve never been ‘stuck’ like her?”

  “No, not exactly. But you know what it felt like, suddenly seeing her again? It felt less like a visit, and more like a warning.”

  “A warning against what?”

  “Cash said something during the night. We were pretty hammered, so I’m paraphrasing what was probably a long, militant rant on her part, but she said that for her, ambition is not about moving further out, but about moving deeper in. And I have moved further out, I suppose.”

  “What did you say her name was?”

  “Cash. Varyushka Cash. I know her from Portland.”

  Dresner let the red wine run from his mouth, back into his glass, lowered his eating utensils and wiped his lips. “So why was she in town? Just to see you?”

  “No, she was on her way to New York. I put her on the train this morning. Want to see a picture of her? I have one on my phone. It’s boring, I know.”

  “Excuse me, darling. Bathroom.” He put down his napkin and rose trembling from the table. A slight sweat of panic broke across his brow as he moved between the other diners. He emitted a silent scream that hurt his skull and threatened to shatter his teeth as he ground them violently together. In the bathroom, he coughed up a little of his ravioli and struggled to render himself calm as he reached for his phone, shivering as he activated it. He abandoned immediately any thought of reporting what was happening to him. There was nothing to say.

  Robert Dresner beheld the smooth surface of his own panic, the endless white curve of a wall that entrapped and possessed him as though he were an irrational animal slipping and twitching inside a laboratory. He leaned over the enamel basin, cupping his hands beneath the cold faucet and tossing the water into his face, holding his eyes open, feeling the slow freeze in his sockets. He imagined his fiancée alone at their table and he gagged on himself. He floundered in a freak constellation of knowledge obtained by chance. “Bitch,” he said, “fucking bitch.” Tap water flowed between his bright teeth. In saying that he referred to Varyushka Cash, his fiancée, and the feminine in which he now identified the universe and all the pratfalls of his fate. He saw the fallout surrounding him. His phone flashed the dead bodies of Frederick and Evelyn Winters. He should have gone to New York immediately. He should have prepared more warning. He would have to return to the dining table where Janelle waited for him, and he would have to endure the spoiled meal, asking delicate questions without revealing himself, and knowing that his life as he had come to understand it had been destroyed. Where he had anticipated a night of sex, now he knew only impotence, shock, and disorientation. He could explain it to no one. Varyushka Cash was a fragment, a remnant, a shrapnel piece, a drop of poisoned rainwater, a ghost of the Cold War that had lashed out at him even as the battlefields were cleared, a mortal blow struck after the tolling of truce.

  Their taxi moved slowly through the April rain, lamplight flooding the interior intermittently. Janelle reclined in Dresner’s jacket. The glow passed over her pensive features, a soft investigation, and a gentle voice. The meal had been strangely tense for her. She felt that Robert had returned from the bathroom to their table with his demeanor shattered, and that they had pretended to dine, as mannequins behind glass, with dialogue that someone else had prepared and imposed upon them, and with waxen props for food. He watched her front teeth press upon her lower lip and listened to her inhalations, as though she was about to speak, but she did not. Back at her apartment, Dresner walked in his bare feet across the spaces where he imagined that Varyushka Cash must have stood, seeking to pull her ghost in by osmosis, superstitiously testing for disturbances in the atmosphere. He had picked up cushions from the couch and held them to his face, inhaling, hunting for a scent of her. Janelle stepped from the bedroom to find him standing beside the mantel, staring at the television, his naked legs amber in the firelight.

  “Do you want to make love?” she asked.

  Reluctantly, Dresner turned toward the sound of her voice and regarded her denuded in the pale doorway. “No.” His own voice came as metallic, disappointed and terse as that of The Voice, his director, would from the earpiece of his phone. He fought to control himself. “I mean, no, I don’t. I’m sorry.” The television showed the exterior of the Winters Corporation building. A female reporter was describing the crime scene within.

  “Neither do I,” Janelle said, moving toward him, extending her hands. “I was worried about you this evening.”

  “Shut up a minute, will you?” Frantic and sweating, he began to recover his clothes. “Please, just shut the fuck up.”

  “Robert?”

  “Listen to me. I’m leaving now. I won’t be back.”

  Slamming the door and throwing himself down the steps, Dresner ran along the slick paving to his apartment. The moon struggled though the trees above the street. In the instant that he reached his home and closed the door behind him, his phone began to vibrate next to his thudding heart like a pacemaker. He boiled. “I know—they’re dead. I fucking know already! So I’ll take my fucking mop and bucket to Manhattan and clean up. I’m a janitor. Don’t disturb yourself or anyone else because I already fucking know everything!”

  There was a pause.

  The Voice said: “Actually, Robert, there is something else . . . ”

  19

  APRIL 17, 2011. IN WASHINGTON, D.C., DRESNER CONVENED THE Cross Spikes Club at Beachcombers’, a bar with fishing nets hanging from the walls, tiki heads behind the counter between the sticky spirit bottles, surfboards and international flags tacked across the low ceiling. It was as though the room was caught in the churn of a great wave of colorful junk, somewhere between Hemingway and the B-52s, between Melville and the Beach Boys: plastic marlins, sock puppet lobsters, lava lamps, fishing tackle, autographed bikinis, photographs of Easter Island statuary, Pearl Harbor, forgotten Mexican surf guitar bands and tanned girls in grass skirts and leis, monochrome prints of tattooed sailors in chinos, smoking pipes, deck shoes and deep-water wristwatches. Beachcombers’ was also one of the thousands of bars opened by men who had returned from World War II with a heightened appreciation for chaos, the exotic, and the existential need to talk, put up photographs, and never grow old. The original proprietor was called Ivy Mike, but his gregarious presence had been almost erased since he succumbed to cancer and his son Declan Collins had taken over. He was unsentimental about his father. He referred to him as a brawler. “If it wasn’t the USA, it would have been the IRA. My dad would have gone home to fight some other way.” Declan did not like to look at photographs of the dead, but he did retain one picture of his father’s ship, the aircraft carrier USS Saratoga.

  Dresner ordered a round of blue zombie cocktails for his team as they hunched together in a semicircular blue leather booth with a lava lamp between them on the table. No one spoke, except for Dresner making the drinks order. Surf music clanged from the PA speakers at the back of the room where a man in white overalls mopped at the circular space that passed for Beachcombers’ dance floor as Declan Collins brought their drinks over on a plastic tray. “I didn’t bother with cocktail umbrellas for you boys, okay? Are you all right? Someone die?”
>
  “Sort of,” Dresner answered.

  “God, I’m sorry,” Collins said. “Shall I be turning the music down?”

  “No, no. The music is fine.” Dresner smiled with effort and looked around the table as Collins moved away, trying to convey respect in his gait. Without Spicer, the Cross Spikes Club numbered five, including himself. The men—Gordon, Jones, Green, and Royce—were dejected. They fixed their eyes on anything but each other—plastic submarines dangling on wire, stuffed fish, the rims of their cocktail glasses—or they nervously picked at their candied cherries. Dresner drummed his fingers on the veneer of the table. Someone cleared his throat.

  Christ, thought Dresner. “So,” he said, “the cunt’s in New York.”

  Previously, he had been their lightning rod and their generator. He could, through the hierarchies of the job, his masculinity, his reputation, and his confidence, inspire his men with the will necessary to dehumanize their targets. Rendition was brutal, but he had managed the group with dispassion, and they followed him. They seemed now to follow his depressed mood.

  “Being twenty-four hours ahead of us—”

  “Ahead of you,” he thought he heard Green murmur as he tugged on the peak of his plain black baseball cap. Dresner noticed that all of his men were dressed in black, not their rendition fatigues, but merely the dark of melancholy and mourning. He continued.

  “Being twenty-four hours ahead of us, she managed to get to both Evelyn Winters and his son Frederick, inside the Winters Corporation building.”

  “I don’t think that it would be appropriate to blame their private security,” Gordon interjected. Dresner’s eyes flashed toward him. The colorful lights of the bar shone in the gel that Gordon had slicked through his buzz cut as it had grown out. His eyes appeared bitter, his hard jaw set like machinery with artificial tanned skin spread over it.

  “I didn’t say that.” Dresner heard the defensiveness in his own voice.

  “You implied it,” from the corner of Green’s mouth.

  “In short, we are behind the game. But we have tapes from the Winters Corporation and the subway surveillance system, up to a point. This is being worked on. We can go to New York and move on rendition when she exposes herself. I still think that she intends to, somehow.”

  “Why?” Gordon again.

  “April 26 is her date. This can’t be it, yet.”

  “Who cares what she said her date was? She’s killed them already.”

  Before this April, he had never thought of the contracts between them as being so fragile. He had never had a group member KIA before Spicer, and killed by a false target at that. Subjects had never died on his waterboarding table before Jack Torma. That was why he was trusted to administer enhanced interrogation. Two weeks ago, he had never heard of the Winters Corporation. What did he care for any of this? His engagement was in tatters because his fiancée’s old girlfriend was a terrorist. Incongruously, the face of his personal disaster was Varyushka Cash. Agent Jones’s shrill voice broke the silence.

  “How do you propose to proceed?”

  “Yeah, that’s it.” Green spoke aloud, nodding his head.

  “What are you, Green, the chorus of West Side Story?”

  “You would probably admit that your usual operational hygiene has been absent in the past two weeks.”

  “Operational hygiene? What the hell would you know about ‘operational hygiene,’ Jones? Was it not you who left his credit card in the bar in Miami when we took Al-Zahrani? You thought I didn’t know? Jesus . . . ”

  Static and silence now separated them. Dresner knew that it would have to be he who spoke next.

  “Listen, I’m as torn up about Spicer as the rest of you.” Unconsciously, he glanced at Royce, finding him glaring back. He was possessed of the same stricken look Dresner had witnessed when he emerged from Varyushka Cash’s cabin bearing the plastic grocery bag of Spicer’s remains. He was shaking. “He put his trust in me,” Dresner explained.

  Still trembling, Royce sipped at his drink before speaking. His eyes glossed with sorrow. Feeling his words gathering, the rest of the group all lowered their faces slightly toward their glasses or blank spaces on the table.

  “Anthony Spicer was my lover, Robert, you son of a bitch.”

  The surf music clanged overhead, a bright blue wave suspended, vast and coiled yet never breaking, like an old Japanese painting.

  “I’m sorry.” Dresner’s head fell involuntarily toward the sticky table. He began to speak, barely audibly. “Please, there is something else . . . ” He needed to get out what The Voice had told him after the assassination of Evelyn and Frederick Winters in the wreckage of his engagement to Janelle Gresham, who was to have been his salvation. Royce sniffed mucous, still lost inside the tremors and ripples of his grief. As Dresner raised his face, he saw that he had the attention of Green, Jones, and Gordon, if only for a moment, if only because he himself appeared so pathetic and desperate. “There has been an incident at Indian Point, a nuclear reactor plant only forty miles north of Manhattan on the Hudson River.” If his voice did not strengthen, it was at least swollen with his hatred of Varyushka Cash and her detonations within him. “Indian Point is a Winters Corporation plant, so this may not be over. I can’t tell you, the agency could not tell me, whether the incident is serious in any way. With the Winters Corporation in mourning and chaos, The Voice informed me that the risk of this incident had not been determined. We cannot be certain, yet, that she is responsible, but I believe that she is still in the city. This is not her date. So we need to go in and get her, even as, hypothetically, there might be a minor risk of this undetermined incident at Indian Point revealing itself to be significant, and with that, bringing a significant risk of the contamination of Manhattan.”

  Slowly, the men rose from their seats. Royce was the first. Dresner wanted to call out Wait! We’re not finished! But he could neither speak nor prevent images of Royce and Spicer exploding like queer strobe lights across his consciousness: Spicer’s cock dripping with lubricant as he banged Royce in a Miami bathroom stall; Spicer turning to ash, disintegrating as though blown by a nuclear wind as they kissed, Royce’s tongue coiling around the bleached jawbone, the only remnant of the fire. He was disgusted. How could he lose them to this? How had he not seen the conspiracies of internal loyalties gathering beneath him? The others had all known about Spicer and Royce, he realized. His own victimization was overwhelming. Now he found himself abandoned, washed up on the gaudy atoll of his career. Across that dead beach, he perceived in the warping distance the figure of Varyushka Cash. She had come to destroy him. If Cross Spikes tried to return to him now, it would be too late. Self-piteous, he resigned himself to their protest. He took the dregs of each of their cocktails, alternately finishing them and pouring them into his own glass, until it ran over with the luminous blue of the undead. Pussies. Stray corpses.

  Seeing him alone, Declan Collins approached the table. “Your fellas there don’t like zombies, then?” He indicated the direction of the door, inclining his head. “I’ll get you another of your own, my friend.”

  He considered running into the street after them. Even if he had not told them of the potential for a nuclear incident, he recognized that, shaken by Spicer’s murder and immolation, they would not have followed him into the risk of radiation sickness. He would finish the rendition of Varyushka Cash alone. He would shame them with his loyalty, his talent, his vengeance, his atonement, even if it was fuelled by desperation, despair, and the futility of any other future.

  20

  APRIL 18, 2011. THE QUEEN OF THE AMAZONS WITH A LOBOTOMY haircut, Cash thought, of the framed poster of Bettie Page in her leopard-skin bikini on the wall of the Domino bar, and of herself, resting against the counter, nursing a vodka gimlet, staring at her skinhead cut in the mirrored glass over the bartender’s shoulder. She rubbed the dark fuzz on her scalp with her palm. It felt good, clean, and pure. It was almost the time for which she had been anticipating he
r entire life. With the Winters men saturated in their own blood, she would move against Indian Point, and she, Varyushka Cash, looked like a warrior. Finally, she would be able to stare down the trail of corpses and ghosts behind her, far back along to the fireball of her birth. It would be over soon.

  In the distance, in the salted ossuary of her memory, Cash stood at the edge of the Black Sea, hundreds of years ago, recollections of the Eurasian steppes giving way to the freezing monochrome water; twelve centuries past, twenty-five centuries past. I am Hippolyta, bound by the flow of pores, fingernails, menstrual fluids, hair follicles, indelible teeth, lips in scream and orgasm, running in the plain grass into the horizon of wormwood trees, sometimes lacerated by exfoliants of frost and blown ice on the wind, sometimes standing like a denuded X in the rays of dawn. Centuries ago, we stood at the shore of the sea, immaculately self-possessed, realized, individuated, female, Amazons. Ukraine, the old lands belonged to us, and our ink-embroidered skin. Our citadel was in constant motion. Our city was our body, arteries, cardinal points, lymph nodes, heartbeats, and nerve terminals. Cash receded from yellow taxicabs to golden chariots, and she was the monarch at the head of an army of women, at the end of a civilization . . . Angular pectoral muscles daubed with paint during the radiant blood of evening. The women wore conical leather caps and woolen breeches. Their weapons were short bows, javelins, and swords. The cavalry archers had flat chests and their bows were composites of supple wood and animal horn. Riding without reins, their torsos twisted and contorted; they learned spine bends, allowing firing angles only known to the female. The javelin throwers had powerful shoulders and long muscles through their arms. They wore bands of cloth strapping across their breasts, like some of the archers and the sword girls, narrowing the target silhouette, focusing the flesh in a vortex of lethal power, and in this manner captured male breastplate armor was appropriated as the bodies fell. The Amazons did not mutilate their own flesh, removing their right breast or beating their figures flat with hot irons or wooden tools. These mutilations were part of the processes of male fantasy, and anathema to the Amazons, just as they did not circumcise, they did not hack away and diminish themselves. Because the body was a city besieged, they brought their weapons to bear on he who would garrison them, invading them with laws. The Amazons would move to gain control of the future city of Pripyat, dismantling the state apparatus. During the final night assault, the males lose control of their nuclear reactor and the future city is contaminated with radiation, inky oriental clouds of rose, blood, milk, and gold, like the infernos of Nagasaki and Hiroshima. Certain male captives were removed to the sperm banks, as was the annual custom of the Amazons. The males were shackled and attached to genital pumps and rubber hoses before television screens of pornographic movies on a cyclical program. The males, shivering in the smudged gore of battle, were ingratiating and grateful, at first. Slowly, the jars filled with ejaculate and the prisoners began to complain. They began to understand that they would never be released from the breeding cycle until they could produce no more. Their flesh became gray and emaciated. Testosterone injections caused their hair to fall out. They ate only meals of protein powder and zinc lozenges. Finally, they expired in white powder. In the seasons that followed, the women suffered miscarriages, breast cancers, thyroid cancers, uterine cancers; the sperm bank was contaminated from the meltdown of the males’ source of power. The Zone of the Amazons was a cobwebbed womb . . .