by John D'Agata
Psychologists were still debating the criminality of suicide as late as the 1970s, claiming that women who kill themselves after committing adultery—or, in the professional terminology of the time, “morally fallen women”—will usually commit suicide by jumping from a window. That gay men who feel ashamed of being “sexually penetrated” will stab themselves repeatedly until they are dead. Or that anyone who is maddened by “poisonous thoughts” will likely succumb to gas.
“I’d say the taboo surrounding suicide is the number one reason I get sued,” Ron said.
Earlier in the week, Ron had been in court for a trial in which a suicide victim’s family had sued him to change his classification of their only daughter’s death.
“Apparently, when I called it a suicide I prevented her from going to heaven.”
He scratched his beard and looked away.
“And I understand their motivation, as silly as it seems. The whole cultural psychology of this city is obsessed with convincing ourselves that this is a place of leisure, that no one can get hurt here. But this is a city just like any other city. We don’t live in the hotels, we don’t eat dinner at the buffets, our wives and daughters aren’t all feather dancers at lounges on the Strip. Las Vegas is our home. And it can be wild and it can be fun, but it’s also a place with more suicides than anywhere else in America. Now, obviously I understand why the city doesn’t include that in any of its brochures, but my point is that we can’t fix the problem if we don’t actually acknowledge it.”
Behind Ron Flud in his downtown office was a portrait of George Washington mounted on a horse. A thin brown folder was on his wide, polished desk. Inside it, the cause of that boy’s death at the Stratosphere Hotel—“multiple head and body traumas”—typed into the box that was labeled BODY in his three-page coroner’s report.
“Anyway,” Ron said. “Guess we should move on to why you’re really here.”
He opened and closed the folder intermittently as we talked, massaging out of it facts before then molding them into stories.
He said, for example, after glancing at a photograph of that boy’s body after falling, that the worst damage done to a body in a fall is “internal, not external…believe it or not.”
He said, “Did you know there’s a maximum air speed our bodies will reach, no matter how high we jump from or how heavy we are?”
He told me a story about a woman in New Zealand who fell out of an airplane on a flight over mountains.
“She fell twenty thousand feet into a pile of snow, and she survived without major damage.”
But he did not say that afternoon in his office, even after I asked him two or three times, whether it is likely that one would lose consciousness in a fall, such as that one from Stratosphere.
He did not say, as Albert Heim once did, a nineteenth-century geologist who studied mountain climbers, that “there is no anxiety, no trace of despair, no pain, no regret, nor any sadness as one falls from great mountain heights.…Instead, the person who is falling often hears beautiful music while surrounded by a superbly blue heaven that is filled with roseate clouds…and then, suddenly, and painlessly, all sensations are extinguished immediately from the body at the exact moment that the body makes contact with the ground.”
In other words, Ron Flud did not explain how it was that this boy’s sneakers in the Polaroid he showed me, lying twenty feet on the brick pavement from his body, were knocked off at the moment that his body hit the ground, even though his sneakers look unscuffed in the photo, unstained, still laced, and even double-knotted.
I suppose Ron knew that there are facts that do not matter.
“Okay, kids,” Blair said, when our bus came to a stop. “I want you to show your school identifications to the soldier.”
We were stopped at the southeastern guard gate of the Nevada Test Site, the checkpoint for entering the Yucca Mountain project. The Test Site encompasses 1,300 square miles of rocky Nevada desert, just a small portion of the 87 percent of the state that the federal government owns. It’s on the Test Site where 900 nuclear weapons were tested between 1951 and 1992, where 129 of them were detonated above ground, and where the National Cancer Institute has subsequently determined that enough radioactive iodine has gradually been released to cause 75,000 cases of latent thyroid cancer.
GUNS ARE PROHIBITED, read a sign inside the gate.
Also, PETS.
The guard who approached our bus was tall and bereted and flak-vested and armed, and as he walked he kept his machine gun erect in front of him.
“D’Agata?” asked the guard, when he stepped onto the bus.
“John D’Agata,” he repeated.
“John, that’s you,” whispered Blair.
I raised my hand.
“Here.”
“You’re on another bus, sir, come with me,” said the guard.
“They’re my ride back to Vegas, though. Are you sure?” I asked.
“Another bus,” said the guard, then waited for me to move.
I grabbed my bag.
Stood.
“Dude,” said a boy, as I walked past him up the aisle, “they’re taking that guy away.”
Outside, a second guard opened an idling Jeep’s door.
“I’m really only supposed to be going to Yucca,” I explained.
The other got in the Jeep.
The driver started it up.
We pulled away from the bus and then went suddenly into desert.
During the nuclear testing that was conducted on the site, scientists made experiments in which chickens were blown up.
Horses, monkeys, pigeons, rats.
Cows were fed contaminated grass in experiments.
Bank vaults were built, and then they were bombed.
Whole railroad bridges, and then they were bombed.
Wood and stucco houses were built and then furnished, iceboxes stocked, bookshelves completed.
They sat mannequins in living rooms to enjoy a quiet evening.
Father in his chair, Mother on the couch, two kids on the floor pushing a ball back and forth.
After the bombing tests, clothes were removed from the mannequins and tested.
What kinds of fabrics should be worn in an attack?
Polyester stuck to skin. Cotton burned off it.
Patterned fabrics attracted light, while white reflected it.
In a nuclear attack, the testers concluded, wear white cotton clothes in a concrete house and your chances for survival improve.
There is a bowling alley still on the grounds of the site. A movie theater, steakhouse, post office, bank. A row of twenty newspaper vending machines that haven’t been restocked since 1994, the year we signed the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty and sent most of the employees of the Test Site home.
Just south of there, however, between the Yucca Mountain project and the city of Las Vegas, the Natural Resources Defense Council has reported that one of America’s seven National Nuclear Stockpiles contains the fourth largest concentration of warheads in the world. Fourteen hundred missiles await decommission there, ten miles away from downtown Las Vegas.
“We have glorified gambling, divorce, and other doubtful pursuits—all in an effort to secure a national reputation,” wrote the Las Vegas Review-Journal’s founding editor about the site, months before its opening in the early 1950s. “But now we can be part of the most important work being done by the United States federal government. We have found our reason for existence.”
The Las Vegas Chamber of Commerce did its part during this time by distributing free twelve-month color calendars inscribed with the schedule of the site’s atomic tests.
The Atomic View Motel would boast “the best views of the blasts from anywhere in Vegas!”
At the Sands they held an annual “Miss Atomic Bomb” pageant.
And at a women’s hair salon inside the Flamingo they lifted women’s coifs into a bundled-up creation that they called without irony “the mushroom ’do.”
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br /> In the late 1950s, Elvis Presley appeared in Vegas as the “Atomic Singing Kid,” and when he later returned in the 1970s for his comeback tour, marquees were still billing him as the “Atomic Entertainer.”
Later, in the nineties, Miss Nevada praised the state’s long heritage with the bomb in a local news report entitled “Miss Nevada, Newly Crowned, Supports Yucca Mountain.”
And even during the summer that we first moved there, just weeks before the U.S. Senate would vote on Yucca Mountain, 250 people in the state of Nevada petitioned their legislators for a new novelty license plate that featured a mushroom cloud.
As we drove toward the mountain in the white Jeep that day, two black jets in the distance sped by. They swept low against the desert. Then each dropped a bomb.
“Fuck yeah,” said a guard as we paralleled the explosions.
“Fuckin’ A,” said the other.
A fascination with how the world will end is not particularly new.
God initiated this obsession of ours when he explained to us in Genesis that everyone would be killed by a single giant flood.
Roman prophecy said it’d happen in 600 BCE, the year in which Romulus was told in a dream that his empire would be destroyed.
It will happen before I die, said Confucius to his pupils.
It will happen twenty-nine times, said the Sibyl throughout her life.
Four hundred eighty-three times, St. Clement later revised.
In 968, there was a solar eclipse.
In 981, Halley’s Comet appeared.
New Year’s Eve brought the end in 999.
Then the plague brought the end in 1346.
Brought the end again in 1349. Thirteen sixty-five. Seventy-one. Ninety-six.
On pain of death, said the Vatican’s Fifth Lateran Council of 1516, there shall be no more predictions of the end of the world.
But the planets aligned in Pisces in 1517, so the end of the world was predicted by way of flood again.
The young American prophet Jacob Zimmerman predicted the end in 1674, the year in which he led a group of men into the forest, christening them “The Society of Women in the Wilderness.” Mary Bateman’s magical chicken in Providence, Rhode Island, predicted that the end would come in 1813. John Wesley, the founder of Methodism, concluded that chapter 12, verse 14 in Revelation—“the time, times, and half a time”—meant that the world was going to end in 1836.
In 1910, a group of thirty-one adults in Oklahoma City sacrificed a ten-year-old girl to stop the end.
In 1938, during War of the Worlds, the end was heard live on CBS Radio.
In 1948, with the establishment of Israel.
In 1954, according to Charles Manson.
When Atlantis reemerged in 1968, Gulf Stream currents dramatically were altered, thus producing a string of tsunamis worldwide, then hurricanes, then earthquakes, and then the end of the world, as predicted by Edgar Cayce.
On September 21, 1982, the Trinity Broadcasting Network canceled its regularly scheduled programs in order to air a full day of instructional videos about Armageddon’s approach.
And on October 28, 1992, the end was predicted by sixteen-year-old Korean prophet Bang-Ik Ha, who claimed that “50 million people will die in earthquakes,” “50 million people will die in traffic accidents,” “50 million people will die from fire,” and “50 million people will be crushed by falling buildings”—an announcement that caused 5,000 people to quit their jobs in South Korea, eight to kill themselves, and one to seek an abortion the day before the end because she feared she’d be too heavy for God to raise to heaven.
I guess it made some sense, therefore, that during the same summer when a decision of such destruction would be made about Las Vegas, 250 locals would sign up to have a mushroom cloud license plate printed.
By then, a study by the RAND Center for Terrorism Risk Management entitled Considering the Effects of a Catastrophic Attack named the local Vegas stockpile of 1,400 warheads “a primary domestic target in a nuclear attack.”
Perhaps those 250 residents had already figured out that in the event of such a strike on that stockpile of warheads, ten miles away from downtown Las Vegas, the resulting blast would only take a millionth of one second. It would expand into a fireball ten miles across. It would travel at 758 miles per hour, and its temperature, according to The Effects of Nuclear Weapons, a 1979 study by the Department of Defense, would be “five times hotter than the sun.”
And so perhaps those 250 residents had already assumed that if the temperature of the Sun is, as The Effects of Nuclear Weapons estimates it is, about 25 million degrees Fahrenheit, and if five times that amount is 125 million degrees Fahrenheit, and if the temperature at which a human body combusts is 1,600 degrees Fahrenheit, and if such a blast of heat would reach their bodies, ten miles away from the site of detonation, in approximately four and a half millionths of one second, and if pain impulses in the human body are believed to travel 382 feet per second, and if all of this is shorter than the time it takes to climb by elevator or to climb by foot or to climb inside one’s own private mind above the city’s lights—looking down at them from the stratosphere for one final view—then it is more than likely that in the event of a nuclear strike on the nearby National Stockpile, just a few miles away from anyone in Vegas, the minds of most Las Vegas residents in the path of that blast would literally not know that they were being destroyed until sixteen hundredths of one second afterward.
“All right, sir,” said a guard, when the Jeep came to a stop. “They’re meeting you inside. Say you’re here for Yucca Mountain.”
I entered a large building that was the same brown as the earth.
Inside a man named Wally said, “Hi, John, I’m Wally Lee.”
He handed me a badge and then he asked me what I thought.
“Is this Yucca?” I asked.
“Not yet,” Wally said.
I followed him outside to a dark waiting van.
“Wally,” I asked, “did I do something wrong?”
“No, no,” Wally said. “I’ve got you going with the press. Better tour, that’s all.”
“But I’m not with the press,” I said.
“Oh, yeah? What’s your project?”
“I’m not really sure.”
“No problem,” Wally said. “That’s just what we call this tour.”
Inside the van were three young congressional aides. There was a professional blogger. There was a famous chef. There was a man with a plan to build the city an indoor ski resort. There was a man from Time, one from the Post, and a photographer from the Associated Press.
We drove with Wally seven miles further into desert, north a couple miles and then east a couple miles and with no one saying anything until Time asked, “No guards?”
“Nothing yet to guard,” Wally said.
So we drove.
A high pile of brown rock eventually emerged. It was labeled with a white sign posted on a stake: “Caliche #1.” We turned right and bent around it and saw another pile staked—“Caliche #2”—then a third one, a fourth, and then finally in white outposts as large as the rocky piles there were six plastic tents with domes and metal frames. The tents had names like “Lab F,” “Workshop,” “Medic Treatment Storage.”
Wally stopped the van beside a tent without a sign and said, “Everybody out. Here we are. Leave your bags.”
“What about our notebooks?” asked the Post.
“No notebooks,” Wally said. “We’ll give you notebooks inside.”
Inside the tent brown mud was splattered up the plastic walls. A sound like something metal being forced into a mold. There was a Good Humor ice cream novelty machine.
Also Pepsi.
Cappuccino.
Nuts and candy.
Hot broth.
Wally said, “Okay,” then called us over to a closet. He handed us each a yellow hat, earplugs, safety goggles, orange vest, lamp.
“Now this,” Wally said, “is a persona
l self-rescuer,” a rubber mask and metal tank that lashed around our waists and that Wally demonstrated how to wear in case of fire.
“The mountain is basically a very long cave,” Wally said, “so in a flash fire everything is going to burn very quickly. If you put on the self-rescuer, you’ll be able to breathe through the smoke for a little bit of time.”
“How much time?” someone asked.
“Three minutes,” Wally said.
The tank, he explained, converts carbon monoxide into carbon dioxide through a chemical reaction that will occur in our mouths.
“It’s going to burn like hot coffee being poured down your throat, but that’s how you know it’s working, so don’t get freaked out.”
“Carbon dioxide isn’t safe to breathe, though,” someone said.
“Little bit,” Wally said.
We walked outside.
Maybe noon.
There were machines not in sight doing something to each other, a low idling hum underneath them in the air, yellow dust, yellow hats, 99 and 105 and higher in degrees.
“What about our notebooks?” someone asked.
“Oh, yeah,” Wally said, then turned and yelled to a man in the cage of a machine. “We got any more notebooks?”
I don’t know, shrugged the man.
“No more notebooks,” Wally said.
We walked single-file past a “Hospital” white tent, a large piece of plywood leaned against its plastic side. We walked around it. Rubbed our eyes. We passed a group of men who stared and stood and ate their lunch. There was a horn that was sounded. But there was no reaction. There was a sound coming from someone up ahead within our line. Our heads watched the ground and the mountain bits of litter. There was a small rectangular bulge in the back pocket of Time. Someone said, “I’m hungry.” Someone else behind was coughing. There was a brightness attached to everything and then exposing it too long.
“Goggles on!” Wally yelled as we came up against a wall.
“Earplugs now!” Wally yelled.
“Okay, lamps!” Wally yelled.
Beside us was a rocky wall and inside it was a hole. Twenty feet in length and very black within its center. Around the hole were spots of brown which Wally said was natural. He called it “desert varnish,” the substance Anasazi carved to make their petroglyphs.
