Bombshell

by James Reich

  “You dig Bettie Page?” The bartender who suddenly addressed her wore a black and red bowling alley shirt and ancient Lee 101s, a fifties-styled young man with pomaded black hair, a tattoo of tumbling dice on his left forearm, and a viper on the right. “I saw you looking at the picture, up there.”

  “She is, uh, ubiquitous.” Cash smiled, touching her buzzed hair again.

  “Huh? You got me there. What does ‘ubiquitous’ mean?” He struggled over repeating the new word to her.

  “It means she’s hot,” Cash said.

  “Yeah, cool.” He wiped the counter with a canary yellow cloth. “You can tell the girls that get her, even if they don’t have the bangs, right?” The bartender eyed Cash’s skinhead cut. “She was pretty edgy too,” he explained.

  “Well, she was pretty naked. Can I get another drink, please?”

  “Sure, another gimlet?” He reached for her empty glass.

  “Can you make me a Manhattan, please?”

  “Definitely. When in Rome . . . ”

  A police officer came in from the light rain that was falling outside and the cold wind from the northeast. He hesitated, looking back over his shoulder, questioning the weather as though it were pursuing him. He sat down on the stool beside her at the bar. What would Valerie do? Before she could organize her thoughts, the greaser brought her the Manhattan and greeted the policeman.

  “Yo, Schmalix! How’s it hanging? You look depressed. Not retiring yet?”

  “No, kid, not yet. I’m not as old as I look, you know? But I’m supposed to have a real boner because a pair of rich guys got shot in their office yesterday, and it’s overtime for the moneyed stiffs. I don’t care if they were rich. I scrape up poor people every day and look here, no boner! Do I look excited, I ask you?” Water dripped from the soft spikes of the cop’s cap and ran from his slouching shoulders.

  “Not really. Who exactly got killed?”

  “I can’t tell you that, Johnny, come on.”

  Johnny appeared crestfallen.

  “Ah, you’ll probably see it all on the TV news anyway, so screw it, I’ll tell you: It was the father and eldest son from a company called the Winters Corporation. Energy tycoons.”

  “Never heard of them.”

  “No, of course we haven’t, they’re too big.”

  “You’re here for your daily Guinness, Officer Schmalix?”

  “It won’t affect my arousal. Pour it, friend.”

  Schmalix removed his soaking dark blue cap and laid it on the bar counter and waited for his drink. He looked to be about fifty years old. He and Cash were the only customers drinking up at the bar. Others haunted the red padded booths, or shrugged disconsolately in front of the pinball machine. Schmalix eyed Cash as his drink arrived.

  “It’s okay, I’m not on duty anymore. Cheers!” The cop raised his dark glass toward her Manhattan, and Cash held her glass towards his.

  “Budmo!” she said. “That’s Ukrainian.”

  “Oh, how about that? You’re on holiday, a tourist?” The cop was warming up, relieved to be off duty.

  “Uh-uh.” Cash shook her head as her lips met her cocktail glass.

  Schmalix swiveled on his barstool to better talk to her. “My family, the dead part, was from Europe, kind of eastern-central. I don’t know. I’ve never been there. There might be another Schmalix or two at the big synagogue, but I never go.” He sipped his Guinness. “People assume that all old cops are Irish, anyway. It’s vague, lost.” He spoke without sentiment, waving his hand in a sweeping gesture at the word “lost.”

  “Here’s to forgetting where we come from,” Cash offered.

  “Budmo!” Schmalix tilted his glass and smiled. “I like you, kid. You’re all right.” He looked up at the old television suspended by chains at one end of the bar, where a baseball game was in silent progress.

  Her tears began, almost imperceptibly, minute bulbs of glass against a white field, dark lashes swelling and drinking like desperate tendrils in a tragic arbor. Cash stared at the pocked planes of Schmalix’s face, the moisture in the goat curls of gray hair about his weathered ears. There is a moment, she told herself, in any series of dramatic acts when one can simply decline, walk away, or surrender. There is a flickering moment when it is still possible to avoid the shattering, the exposure, and the violence that one has planned for so long. She saw Valerie Solanas in her mind, inside the Factory elevator, watching the floor buttons illuminate as she rose toward the fourth floor and her assassination attempt on Warhol, electricity shaking her flesh, a storm of desire and profound anxiety, a struggle that continued even as the bullets flew across the office. In the bar, beneath the defused sexuality of Bettie Page and in the comfortable presence of the police officer, Cash understood that she might be experiencing one last opportunity to quit. There was something nostalgic about this moment of crisis; it seemed to take place in the past, and all she had to do was hold out her guilty hands, surrendering between atomic age sex and the law. No. That was bad faith. There remained distance to traverse. She was still to wreak havoc at Indian Point, the lone skinhead girl in Jane Fonda drag shooting up the gangways. She had to prove their vulnerability. She knew that she could not turn herself in, as Valerie had done, because unlike Valerie, the white-hot spotlight of her life had not yet found her. Schmalix gestured toward the television, lowering his glass from his lips.

  “Johnny. Hey, turn this up. They just interrupted the ball game. This might be important.”

  The old man stared into the camera, his voice low and measured: “The world has never known a day quite like today. It faced the considerable uncertainties and dangers of the worst nuclear power plant accident of the atomic age. And the horror tonight is that it could get much worse. The potential is there for the ultimate risk of meltdown at Indian Point . . . ”

  “That’s impossible . . . ” Cash reached her hands to her head, almost imperceptibly clawing at the suede of her hair. The nightmare on the hot television could not be. It must be a conspiracy designed to force her to break cover after her massacre. Someone had discovered her plan for an assault on Indian Point, and they were attempting to preempt it. She whispered to herself: “Clever bastards.” With Schmalix beside her, staring at the screen, she fought to restrain fury. The calendar on the wall behind the bar had its elapsed days crossed out. Taurus was not yet over Indian Point; this must be a hoax. Yet, another fear imposed itself over her doubt. Something had changed, as though a knot had been tied in the cord that she had long ago strung between April 26, 1986, and April 26, 2011. Now the cord did not reach its endpoint. History, her zodiac, had a fault, a jolt in its rhythm. Had she predicated this by killing the last heads of the Winters Corporation too soon?

  She slugged her drink down. “Okay, fuck it.”

  She knew what she must do, and she had to do it immediately.

  “I need to talk to you, Officer Schmalix.” Cash rose from her barstool and inclined her head toward the door. “Can we step outside?”

  “What is it?” The cop held his Guinness an inch from his lips.

  Cash leaned closer, made a show of casting her gaze to the corners of the bar and whispered huskily behind her hand. “I know something about the woman who killed those men at the Winters Corporation, but we have to go now, okay?” Schmalix smelled of the cologne of a middle-aged man, diluted with city rainwater.

  “What are you saying?” He wondered: How could this skinhead girl know anything about it? She wouldn’t even know where the Winters building was located.

  “Not here,” she said.

  “Let me put my coat on.” Schmalix tossed several bills on the bar and drained his glass in a series of strong swallows. “See you later, Johnny.”

  “Do you have a car?” Cash asked, when they were in the wet street.

  “It’s a block away, but—”

  “A partner?”

  “Gone home. Clocked off.”

  “Good.” Cash gripped the soaked sleeve of policeman’s coat. �
��I’ll tell you what I know while you drive us, and I can repeat it all down at the station. We have to hurry.” When they reached the white patrol car and Schmalix unlocked it, she spoke sternly. “It’s going to be difficult for you to believe some of what I’m going to tell you, but you have to take this seriously.”

  “Okay, okay, but you’re supposed to sit in the back.”

  “That won’t work,” Cash declared, closing the passenger door.

  Schmalix shrugged in his seat and started the engine.

  “Take us north first.”

  “You’re going to tell me then?”

  “If you deviate from what I say, I’ll shoot you in the face.”

  Schmalix turned his head to see the barrel of Cash’s pistol thrust toward his right eye. He flinched, inhaling sharply, and then letting out a slight groan. “I don’t think I like you so much anymore, kid. Please be careful.”

  “Turn off the radio and don’t try a fucking thing.”

  Schmalix did what he was told.

  “Now put on your lights and siren and get us out of this traffic. You’re taking me to Indian Point.”

  “Indian Point?”

  “Get us onto 87, and we’ll follow the Hudson north. I just need an hour of your life, Officer Schmalix. Do it!”

  As the patrol car flashed along the railings of Central Park West, Cash noticed that tears were beginning to swell in the cop’s eyes. She broke the silence:

  “It’s an unusual name, isn’t it: Schmalix?”

  He nodded and snorted mucous as the first bright tear began to roll into a dry rivulet in his right cheek.

  “If I didn’t know better, I’d swear that someone was fucking with me.”

  Schmalix drew upon some final drying reservoir of courage and cleared his throat. Still, he struggled with his words. “What do you mean?”

  “Thing is, I’m not certain that no one is fucking with me. Schmalix was the name of the cop who arrested Valerie, see?”

  “I’m sorry, but I don’t know anything about who you’re talking about. Please, don’t become agitated, but I’ve never arrested anyone named Valerie.”

  “No, no. You’re probably right. You’re still too young . . . ”

  “You have me confused with someone else, I think.”

  “Perhaps. Something is very wrong . . . Very wrong . . . ”

  “But can we talk about the Winters shootings, like you wanted?”

  “I killed them. My name is Varyushka Cash. Write it up later.”

  “Why are we driving to Indian Point?”

  “I have things to do there.”

  “It sounded like it might be too late, for whatever.”

  “Fucking with me . . . ,” she whispered.

  The Winters Corporation had been Varyushka Cash’s lion of the triple night. Those dead men were mere gatekeepers in the war as she approached her assault on Indian Point. What she did not know, as the bodies of the last two heads of the Winters Corporation hydra lay smoldering on the pile of their corporate carpet, silently mouthing and rattling toward their end, was that they would never be buried. There would never be a funeral for the man-head and scions of Winters Corporation. Their last resting place would be the autopsy table, naked on cold metal under blue light. There would never be another funeral in New York City, except for that of the city itself. No one would have anticipated the scale of the abandonment that left the city as a husk, its young body of steel and stone purged and empty, the bulimia of the metropolis letting out its molecular citizens. She did not know that packs of stray dogs would inhabit the subways, the hollow catacombs of the city, and its open arteries. She did not see the street gangs cavorting in swathes of abandoned penthouses.

  Everything was closed north of the Cross Westchester Expressway, and traffic was being diverted into the New York State Thruway and out over the cold water of the Hudson, across the Tappan Zee Bridge, to the west side of the river, away from the reactors. Cash told Schmalix to pull over. For a moment, they sat in silence, both staring blankly at the windscreen wipers hissing across the glass and the headlights wheeling slowly toward the bridge. The rain had stopped. Only the spray from passing vehicles obscured their vision. Cash spoke. “Turn on the radio for a moment, but say nothing. I want to listen.” A pair of fire trucks passed them as they waited on the shoulder. Cash watched as they were admitted beyond the roadblocks. “Follow the next one through,” she said. “This is bullshit.” They pulled in close to the subsequent engine, and cops in black plastic capes waved them through the temporary barriers with their flashlights. “No one knows what’s going on,” she said. The radio squelched with conflicting voices.

  Finally, there it was.

  Indian Point was in flames.

  The fire clawed out of the containment building, huge fallopian whips of flame extending over the boiling river. Titanic nebulae of steam jettisoned white heat out of its ruptured body. Dials cracked in the control room where she had seen herself in Jane Fonda drag, emptying her ammunition. Gantries glowed and twisted before breaking from their moorings. The cooling towers would buckle and collapse. Lethal embers flowed upward into the night, parodies of red stars. She saw the firefighters and Liquidators of Chernobyl and knew that even as war was waged against the inferno at Indian Point, even those who might survive the night were already dead. The worst of it could not be perceived. Yet, Varyushka Cash saw it: the vast aurora of radiation hanging in the dark. The goiter in her throat pulsed in perverse rhythm with its flaring sheets. Transfixed by the ache at her larynx, the breaking of her heart, seduced, all that she was able to do was to watch it extending. It stretched a glittering green placental veil over the reactors, across the Hudson, dripping over Buchanan, a spectral burlesque flowing toward Manhattan, a scintillating wall of death.

  “You can get out now, Officer Schmalix.”

  She turned the patrol car back toward Manhattan as the torrent of flame climbed to 600 feet. The blast filled the wind with strontium, plutonium, cesium, and iodine. Deadly shrapnel set the trees aflame. Arms of hydrogen reached into the night and a pearlescent steam and smoke cloaked the fractured turbine halls. Back on the highway, staring into her rearview mirror, it seemed to Cash that she dragged it in her wake, back to the city. She pictured the gantries and the control room, hundreds of warning lights turning red before everything was vaporized. Soon, the dead would be counted in the hundreds, and soon after that in the thousands and tens of thousands as the radiation swept the land.

  She could feel the reactor plant splitting open like the hemispheres of a burning skull, hollowing fires gouging the death cradle out of the ground beneath it. She saw it, the embryonic little boy form of it, the certain death latent in its organism. Indian Point was becoming a heavy metal fireball, blooming. It was being brought to her on the spiteful north wind. She pictured the aurora of fallout extending down to the island of Manhattan. She had dreamed of it, the radioactive storm drawing a glittering hand over Trinity, Manhattan, extinguishing the city forever. New York was about to become another Zone of Alienation.

  Cash turned on the lights and siren and the contaminated police cruiser began to part the traffic moving to the south on I-9. As she drove, she struggled to contain convulsions of shock and grief from not having been physically present at Indian Point when hell was loosed, an occluded grief like that of her mother, anesthetized and distant as blinding white light poured from her body, nebulae of bloody steam, a raw cry racing in banshee torrents from the wardroom and outside onto the cold stone steps of Pripyat Hospital, as her red and bawling girl was drawn from her wounded body as data from a dying star, the open city of skin. She understood that it was not possible to bear witness to one’s own birth. That cracked hull sending steam and terror down the Hudson was her mother’s womb. She split from it. Varyushka sprung from a fissure of love and flame. Tears came. Lava. Cities swam in it together. What had she done, and failed to do? Indian Point fell without her. She had spent her life stalking a demon, only to disco
ver that the demon had died of old age.