by John D'Agata
Now around the hole were just long stripes of indentations, the holes that had been drilled to blast away the mountain’s rock.
Rail lines ran inside the hole and quickly disappeared. Three black cables hung above until they disappeared. A long accordion silver tube beside them disappearing.
“This is Yucca,” someone said.
“This is Yucca?” someone said.
The mountain coughed up gusts of tiny granite shavings.
“Get on!” Walled yelled when we reached the mountain’s hole, climbing onto a tram with five benches on the rails.
I sat beside Time. He sat beside the Post.
“Hold on!” Wally yelled as he honked us through the hole.
The three congressional aides in front of us yelled, “Wee!”
We were traveling through the mountain at seven miles per hour, maybe five miles per hour, past alcoves to the sides of us that were lined with black fencing, some bolts attached in patterns to hold back the Yucca rock. Above us was more fencing and some concrete spackled patches.
We passed “Exploratory Studies Lab” in alcove number three, an underground facility in which a two-year study tested what would happen if Yucca Mountain were ever struck by tidal waves.
Wally stopped the tram. Said “something” “something” “water” “water.”
This mountain looks dry, it’s not, he said, wet…safe…like trying to dissolve your toilet in “something” “something” “water” “water.”
Two aides looked at Wally, then each other, raised their hands. “Something” “something,” one aide said.
Absolutely, Wally said.
We moved on.
Wee!
I asked Time if he could hear. He pointed to something nodding, it was blackness on the wall.
We passed “Drift Scale Heater Test” in alcove number nine, a lab in which a vent was heating rocks inside of Yucca to 384 degrees Fahrenheit. Imagine, Wally said, your home heating bill!
One aide started laughing.
We moved forward.
Someone, Wee!
We passed more lunchers eating, passed stoplights on the blink, passed NO VISITORS BEYOND THIS POINT and then beyond that point: we passed a three-mile stretch of nothing as the tram sped up and heads flipped back and the lamps on all our helmets swished small circles on the walls, the back of Wally’s head, someone’s white and wide-eyed face, the walls where blackness happened, and then Time at blackness, Post at blackness, cufflinked aide at watch and then at friend and then at blackness. We’re going down! yelled the guy from the desert ski resort. We were either going down or very quickly going straight. One aide turned and pointed at some blackness on the wall. Time quickly nodded at him and then pointed up ahead. I looked over, then at him.
I still saw only black.
When I started to volunteer that summer at the Las Vegas Suicide Prevention Center, what I thought it would do is give me something to say about Yucca Mountain.
“Some people say it’s drugs, and others say it’s stress, and of course there are always people who blame our suicides on the gambling,” explained Marjorie Westin, the director of the center. “But I’ve been studying this city’s problem for my entire adult life and none of those theories are right. The truth is that there isn’t any answer to this problem.”
Marjorie Westin founded the Las Vegas Suicide Prevention Center when she was a still a graduate student, thirty-five years ago. There are twenty-three people who volunteer for the center, one of whom is on duty at any given time, receiving calls in his or her own private home. This is a variation on the standard hotline procedure in which two hotline counselors usually answer calls together, providing each other support in a centralized location. But given the volume of calls that the hotline receives, plus the dearth of volunteers who are available to work, the Las Vegas Suicide Prevention Center employs a local answering service to screen its calls first, then to forward the important ones to a volunteer on duty.
“I wish we had the luxury of an office,” said Marjorie. “And if we had the right funding and enough volunteers, of course I would prefer that we have a whole team of people helping each other out every evening on the hotline. But every year, without fail, there are three hundred suicides in the city of Las Vegas. That’s one every twenty-six hours. So if I’ve got twenty-three volunteers taking six-hour shifts, well…you do the math. We’re fighting a losing battle.”
In comparison, the Suicide Crisis Call Line upstate in Reno is a twenty-four-hour center with a rotating staff of sixty-five volunteers, each of whom receives fifty-six hours of professional training, and all of whom are certified by the American Association of Suicidology.
“Some people assume the Reno center is better than ours,” said Marjorie. “But their hotline is in a city of four hundred thousand people, and every year their budget is a hundred thousand dollars. Las Vegas has a population almost five times that size, and a suicide rate that’s six times higher. The most I ever get in funding is fifteen thousand dollars. So Reno’s hotline isn’t better than ours. It’s Reno itself that’s better. Theirs is a city that cares.”
One night, toward the end of the city’s centennial celebrations, my mom and I attended a cake-cutting downtown. It was hosted by Sara Lee in an indoor sports arena, and it featured what was advertised as “the largest birthday cake in the history of the world!”
“All weekend people have been coming up and asking me, ‘Mayor, why have you built such a big birthday cake?’” the mayor was heard recounting for reporters in the arena. “And you know what I tell them? I say that it has to be this big, it has to be the best, the greatest, the most exciting cake that anyone’s ever made. Because that’s what Vegas is! This whole cake is very symbolic of our city.”
It was seven layers high and the size of a basketball court.
It came on seven refrigerated semitrucks in 30,242 pieces. In 18,000 pounds of sugar, 24,000 pounds of flour, 135,000 eggs. An estimated 91 million calories.
At midnight, those of us who had marched in the Centennial Parade were asked to gather around to watch the mayor cut the cake. I counted eight other people who had marched in the parade. Plus my mother. Dignitaries. Maybe another 200. Maybe 250.
We cut the cake and then some volunteers passed it out.
It was good. A yellow pound. The frosting was very sweet.
There weren’t any plates so we had to use cardboard. Then there wasn’t cardboard so we had to use our hands.
There was enough cake, someone said, for everyone in Vegas.
“That’s the real reason it’s so big,” said the president of Sara Lee. “We wanted to make sure that everyone had a chance to taste the cake, because it’s their birthday, too. And we all know that it’s bad luck not to eat your birthday cake!”
At the end of the night, only 5 percent of the cake had been consumed.
Instead of distributing the leftovers to nursing homes and local schools and homeless shelters, though, the birthday party organizers arranged to have it bulldozed, then driven fourteen miles to a ranch outside of town where sixty-seven pigs were corralled to finish it.
That summer, after the Senate’s vote approving the Yucca Mountain project, after documents leaked by workers at the Yucca Mountain project showed proof that scientists were falsifying their studies, after my mom moved out of Summerlin to a studio apartment when the job she went to Vegas for disappeared within three months, and after a spate of suicides convinced the County Coroner that the local suicide record would be broken yet again, reports began to appear about strange fish at Lake Mead: genetically mutated, physically deformed, their spines twisted in knots and the females all infertile.
It turned out that in its haste to divert more water for its growing population, Las Vegas had built its pipeline only six miles downstream from where it also dumps its waste, risking what biologists were calling that summer “the beginning of the extinction of human beings in Las Vegas.”
During my tra
ining as a hotline volunteer, I learned about what Marjorie called “the perfect hotline call”:
“The best call,” she said, “will result in five answers to these five basic questions.
“First of all, who are they? Obviously, the reason you want to know who they are is so that you can use their name to help them feel more comfortable while you’re talking to them.
“Then, what are they planning on doing? Do they just want to chat, or do they have a gun in their hand?
“Where are they? Are they home, in their car, in a public place? We have a lot of hotels here in Las Vegas, so ‘How to Handle Calls from the Major Hotels’ is the chapter in our manual that will help you deal with that.
“When are they going to do this? There’s a difference, of course, between someone who’s having a bad day, and someone who’s just swallowed a whole bottle of Seconal.
“And that brings us to ‘How.’ We’ve talked about guns and we’ve talked about pills, but of course there are many other ways that we can kill ourselves. There’s suffocation, there’s cutting, there’s hanging, immolation…”
“What about ‘why’?” I asked during class.
“No,” Marjorie said. “We don’t ask ‘why.’”
“Why not?” I asked.
“Because ‘why’ is what gets asked in therapy with a counselor. It’s not something we can handle on our hotline, hon. We’re here to offer information to our callers, like where to find a therapist so they can get themselves some help. But asking ‘why’ opens up a whole new can of worms. And trust me, it gets messy. You don’t want to deal with ‘why.’”
“I have often wondered why,” wrote suicidal artist Edvard Munch in his journal, “the art I’m most attracted to is that which has been painted with someone’s own blood.”
Born the oldest son in a family of five, Munch created his best known work before he turned twenty-nine. By that time, his mother had died of tuberculosis, and his father had also died. Munch’s older sister had died as well, and so had his younger brother. By the time he finished The Scream in 1893, the only remaining member of Edvard Munch’s family was committed to an asylum for “unnatural nervousness.”
It was a time when child slavery was legal in Norway. When young women were sold to brothels that were sanctioned by the state. When four out of nine workers at Norwegian matchstick factories could expect to lose an average of two fingers on the job.
“I was walking along the road with two good friends one day,” he wrote. “The sun had just gone down, the evening coming slowly. I felt a heavy weight of sudden sadness in the sky: it had become a seething red. I stopped, leaned against a railing that was bordering the harbor, and looked out at the flaming clouds that were hanging there like swords, their blood-red blades reflected in the water. My friends had already passed. But I was frozen there. A loud and piercing scream was shaking through the air.”
It was once described by Carl Jung as “man at the shoreline of reason and doubt.” It was once described by Jackson Pollock as “the destruction of every painting that had ever come before it.” And it was once described by Edvard Munch as “I live with the dead every day.”
A cardboard sheet two feet by three, wax pastel scores of red and yellow and green, a boat mast clipping the long horizon like a cross, the sea too blue with current, the infected spinning sky, and against the wooden railing looking at us, but not out, a small and frightened figure whose expression we might recognize from William Blake’s drawing of his angel Uriel, standing guard at Eden’s gate and shrieking at intruders.
We can see it in the sculptured gasp of Bernini’s black Damnata.
Caravaggio’s Medusa.
Masaccio’s Expulsion.
In the grip he feels before he dies in Laocoön and His Sons.
It is there when Arnold Schoenberg’s nameless woman screams at nothing.
When Clytemnestra in Strauss’s opera screams for three full metered measures.
When Hamlet finds Ophelia, Othello Desdemona, or the wind catches up with Macbeth.
It was there in Darwin too, at the nineteenth century’s end, when he announced in his study called The Expression of Emotions in Man and Other Animals that “all human emotions can be easily diagnosed” for they are “instincts that we can trace back to our cells and nothing else,” a theory that diffused all unknowing from that painting, any sadness, any doubt, any lingering threats of wonder, such that now a century after Darwin’s revelation we are able to sell the painting as a plastic blow-up doll—
“Work! Kids! Taxes! Deadlines! Politics! Diets! Mondays! Arrgh! When you can’t make life any better, make it funnier…with the Giant Scream Inflatable!”
—or in commercials for General Motors’ new Pontiac Grand Am—
“This car drives like an absolute scream!” says an animated version of the painting’s frightened figure
—or in print ads for M&M’s new dark chocolate candy treats, featuring a cartoon M&M playing hopscotch in The Scream—
“Dark just got fun!”
“Why do you feel like the world is going to come to an end?” I asked a hotline caller my first night of volunteering.
“Because it isn’t going to come to a beginning.”
I was home, at my mom’s, taking the calls that the answering service forwarded to my cell.
We had the television on.
The cat was on her back.
My mom was beading jewelry to make some extra cash.
One man called to masturbate while he whispered, “I’m so lonely.”
A lot of people hung up after silence or just breathing.
One woman called while crying during the local evening news, screaming at me “Whore!” when the weather forecast started.
I sat that night with the manual for six hours on my lap, sometimes opened up to the chapter DO’S AND DON’TS—“Don’t ever dare a caller to ‘go ahead and do it’”—and sometimes to the chapter on SUICIDE FACTS AND FABLES—“suicide is believed to be contagious among teens”—and sometimes to the chapter on USEFUL INFORMATION—“if somebody’s calling you, they probably want your help”—but I could never figure out which information I should use, how much talking I should do, how much listening, be how friendly, exactly how much to feel.
What I never figured out while volunteering all that summer is what it was I thought I was doing as a hotline volunteer.
I do not know how to fix a problem if that problem is someone’s solution.
People would call the hotline and I would start to understand. Instead of saying, “no,” “you’re overreacting,” “everything will be fine,” I would sit sometimes and nod, forgetting that there were answers I was supposed to have to give.
I do not think that Yucca Mountain is a solution or a problem. I think that what I believe is that the mountain is where we are, it’s what we now have come to—a place that we have studied more thoroughly at this point than any other parcel of land in the world—and yet still it remains unknown, revealing only the fragility of our capacity to know.
But as each new caller reached the line, instinctively I reached out to grab that hotline manual, its lists of things to do, a bag of Swedish Fish, my mother for a stick with an orange feather on it, and my mother’s cat, with just her eyes, for some movement in the air.
It was Saturday and hot and the wind was blowing hard but did not come in the house.
The moon began to show up. Only half of it arrived.
A young boy called briefly, didn’t say very much.
And then my shift continued on through Hitler and the Occult and Trading Spaces: Boston and the local late-night news, on which a white and mottled sheet was shown rumpled on the ground. Blue lights. Someone’s shoes. The red pavilion entry of the Stratosphere Hotel, around which a perimeter with yellow tape was drawn.
WHY
“The reason why we scream,” explained Aaron Sell, a fellow at the Center for Evolutionary Psychology, a research center at the University of C
alifornia at Santa Barbara, “is because we need someone’s help. It’s really as simple as that. It’s an instinct that we developed hundreds of thousands of years ago before we had any language, and it’s so simple a call that is so deeply ingrained in us that we can understand the meaning of a scream from anyone.”
His research primarily explores the phenomenon of “instinct blindness,” our tendency to take for granted our impulse for survival.
“Other animals share the same impulse, of course, but we’re the only ones with the ability to ask why we possess this impulse,” he said. “And yet, we seldom ask ‘why?’ It’s odd that when it comes to this very fundamental question, we usually just avoid it, or we assume we know the answer. Why do we protect ourselves? Why is screaming instinctual? Well, among most mammals it’s also an instinct of altruism. Those animals that tend to have a lot of kin, and who tend to live with those offspring, also happen to be the ones who make a lot of noise.”
Reptiles, explained Aaron, rarely say anything. That’s because most reptile species are solitary, seldom raising their offspring. East African vervet monkeys, on the other hand, live in massive families, and they’ve not only evolved the ability to make a lot of noise, but they’ve also developed several dozen variations of screaming.
“They have a specific scream for snakes,” said Aaron. “And in experiments, if you play it for them, they’ll jump into the trees to try to get out of danger. But when they hear the scream for birds, they scamper down and try to hide closer to the ground. They even have a special scream that’s specifically pitched for rain in order to better penetrate the acoustics of moist air.”
And humans aren’t very different.
“We conducted a study with a tribe of people in Bolivia called the Tsimane,” Aaron said. “We asked them to scream a variety of statements in their native language, and then we played those screams for undergraduates here in Santa Barbara. Now, even though none of these students had any idea what the Tsimane were actually saying, about sixty-five percent of them were still able to understand the general gist of those screams. And that’s especially impressive considering how few of us in the U.S. live in the kinds of environments in which understanding the subtle differences between screams is necessary. We can still do this, though, because screaming is one of those traits that we developed as a very primitive species. It’s inherent in all of us.”
