by Lydia Millet
Clint scoffed. —You got no ambition!
—I’m what they call risk-averse.
To her it was a modest but satisfying triumph. It would pay for her room for all three nights if Larry forgot to offer.
Oppenheimer stopped playing and was drinking and smoking at the bar, engrossed in a conversation about waves with Boogie the surfer. It involved the word quantum. Boogie had pushed his face up close, listening and nodding rapidly, and Oppenheimer was nursing a martini. She tried to catch his eye as she walked past but did not want to interrupt his disquisition, and anyway she was tired.
She felt more alone than usual in her room, having slunk away and left the crowd with the night still ahead of them. The floor vibrated and hummed beneath her and she found herself wishing they weren’t going to the test site in the morning, that they were never going to the test site and that, in fact, Szilard would abandon his desperate quest for fame, or whatever it was. She wished the noise of his fruitless ambition would cease and they could all go somewhere else in the morning, somewhere silent, cleaner and more serene.
Or she could stay here. They all could. There was food, there were swimming pools, and in the theater were stage magicians with frosted hair wearing pancake makeup and smiling permanently.
It was the amateur quality of Szilard’s activities that she resented. Or maybe it was Szilard himself, never asking what she thought even though it was her world he was living in, hers he needed to know, and she was the one who had given him a home here. She had always wanted the scientists to go forward; she did not wish obscurity for them. She wanted them to be prominent and moving, to shimmer over the crowds and be seen for what they were: at least a startling event, at most a revolution. But this was nothing real. Szilard was making himself foolish, and by extension the other two. He passed out fliers to men with body odor who were lying on the cement pretending to be dead and to blowsy, vague-eyed women patrolling above them carrying poorly worded signs. It was pathetic in its futility. Szilard mistook himself for an adult, but being born fully formed into a world where he was already dead had made him a boy again.
Only the gullible flocked to listen. They were on the fringes now and there they would remain, with their small crowd of hangers-on who had nothing better to do than follow them around, cheerlead and gobble the free food. Szilard and Oppenheimer believed they were pursuing a vision, they had said earnestly. This was it?
She had no idea what else she had expected. She had no vision herself, only aversions.
Darkness yawned at her and she felt herself on the far reaches of a crowd with no one seeing her or knowing she was there. The main rush of the world was streaming past her just as it would if she did not exist; she had led herself blindly away from the middle of life down a tunnel where there was no air or light. She had done it all by herself: it was her fault.
She rolled over in the bed, reaching for the phone in the dark, for the light, reaching past it to fumble with her bag and slip a phonecard out of the wallet. The numbers blurred as she dialed.
—Ben?
When he picked up she started to cry.
Ben listened closely and warmly as she made almost no sense, attentive as she cried and said she felt guilty, how sorry she was for being missing, how she was also lost. She did not know if he could also feel the thin line of longing that extended past him, stretched outward, a line he could not answer.
Hanging up she turned out the light and laid down her head again, on her side between the sheets of Egyptian cotton, but she still could not close her eyes into sleep. She still could not close out the bright, slowly shifting letters of MANDALAY BAY from the window. Where was the real Mandalay Bay, with the sun rising over lapping waves? Or was this concrete monolith the real one, and the other only a pale reflection?
Silence rose around her and the still room turned into foreboding, deathlike and cold. It was a box that would be here after she was gone, after her flesh had melted on her bones, here with its sterile walls.
Here she was, briefly alive, and into the long gray fall of time hopes were folding.
He was not as desperate anymore: he had come to a tranquil stand, or felt as though he had. It might be temporary, but still it lightened his step.
We may be born with a predisposition to personality, he thought, but as for the rest, it is ours only because we touch it.
The world gives us our soul, he went thinking lately, and it opened him.
3
Ann and Oppenheimer lingered at the door to the adjoining suite waiting for the others, both clutching styrofoam coffee cups. Beside them Szilard ate a cherry Danish that left crumbs on his jacket.
Ann had dressed hastily in jeans and a T-shirt, clothes that conformed to the Bechtel regulations for the test site tour: Sturdy shoes. No shorts, no skirts, no sandals.
—I don’t know, said Leslie, coming out of her room two doors down. She took her own herbal teabags with her everywhere and was now drinking a cup of Chai Spice. —I mean I’m already a survivor. I’ve had radiation treatments. A little blown-up sand is going to hurt me?
—Do you want to have kids or not, Ice Queen, said Clint.
—None of your business, said Leslie.
Webster the yoga practitioner had been uncertain about the Test Site field trip when they discussed it the night before. He liked to keep his body pure and preferred a macrobiotic diet. But he was coming with them anyway, mostly because he did not like to be far from Oppenheimer, whom he tended to follow around. His scrawny body was sheathed in bright canary yellow, in what looked to Ann like a high-tech drysuit. But Adalbert the Belgian food activist had refused unconditionally. He was staying in his room. He had told Larry there was no way he would be able to find safe food to eat in “this incredibly toxic agribusiness city.” Preemptively he had launched an all-liquid fast as soon as they touched down from the Marshall Islands. His custom-blended juices, often containing blue-green algae from Klamath Lake, were delivered to the room daily by a gourmet food store.
There were too many of them to fit in a single elevator, so Ann waited with Tamika and Leslie and Clint and Big Glen for the next.
—Did you see the posters? Clint asked her, standing too close. His pigtail shot up from the back of his head, gathered on the crown instead of at the nape of his neck as per usual with a black leather cord.
—I did.
—Awesome, huh? They’re like three-D.
—I like three-D, said Big Glen solemnly, in his deep voice.
Outside between the black statues of Anubis they waited for the stretch limousine. When it pulled up in front of them Larry herded them in eagerly.
—2621 Losee Road, Szilard told the driver before the door slammed, —and make it quick. We have to be there by 7:20.
Plutonium-239, the isotope best suited for nuclear weapons and most often used in them, has often been called “the deadliest substance known to man.” Yet in the years since Trinity, underground nuclear tests have left more than eight thousand pounds of plutonium in the ground, while aboveground tests—with a total yield roughly equivalent to twenty-nine thousand Hiroshimas—have put at least nine thousand pounds into the atmosphere.
Scientists estimate that a single pound of the substance, if it were distributed directly and uniformly among all the people of the world, could induce lung cancer in everyone.
Glenn Seaborg, who discovered plutonium in 1940, later had six children with a woman named Helen.
It was Fermi who first noticed the gray sedan parked down the street from the mansion. They were on their first break of the morning, drinking the strong coffee he had brewed and poured carefully into his small thermos.
—You know that car has been there three days in a row, he said to Ben, and nodded toward the road beyond the high wall as he sipped from the thermos lid.
—So? Isn’t it the neighbors’?
—But there’s always someone in it.
After that Ben found himself watching the long car often th
roughout the morning, walking with studied casualness across the mansion’s flat roof to get a glimpse of it. He would kneel on the roof as though tying a shoelace or bend to fish a tool out of his five-gallon bucket, which he had set down near the edge. Once he climbed into a tall spruce and pretended to be pruning the cottonwood beside it.
Fermi was right: there was always a man in the driver’s seat, his face indistinct behind the tinted windshield. The silhouette was visible and he seemed to sit without moving. Occasionally the tilt of his head changed slightly, or he lifted his hand to his head and Ben imagined he was talking into a telephone.
—You think he’s one of the ones who threatened you or Oppenheimer? he asked Fermi finally.
—How should I know? asked Fermi, and shrugged.
Ben crept around the corner of the house where he could not be seen from the car and called Ted the lawyer on his cell.
—Are you still being followed?
—I’m not sure. I haven’t seen them in a while, but I guess they might just be doing a better job of staying out of view.
—The guys who were following you, he said. —Do you remember what they were driving?
—You know, a car you don’t really notice. American-made, of course, said Ted.
—Do me a favor, said Ben. —Would you drive by and take a look at a car that’s parked here? I’m at work.
—Shit, said Ted. —I mean, if it is them I don’t want to piss them off.
—Borrow someone else’s car, said Ben. —Wear a disguise.
From the informational materials of the Nevada Test Site: Pregnant women are discouraged from participating in Test Site tours because of the long bus ride and uneven terrain.
The bus that takes tourists to the test site, however, is merely a comfortable, air-conditioned chartered bus, equipped with a bathroom and compact video monitors for watching movies. Visitors may watch old propaganda reels, transferred to video, on the way to the Test Site, or they may watch something less educational, purely for their viewing pleasure. When Harry Met Sally, say, or Saturday Night Fever.
The ride to the Test Site, which is not unduly rough since it travels smoothly along the interstate at a high and steady rate of speed, lasts a little more than an hour each way.
—OK, said Ted, calling back a while later. —I’m pretty sure it’s them.
—Shit, said Ben.
—Is it them? asked Fermi, leaving his trencher behind and approaching.
—What can I do? asked Ben. —Call the cops? Is there a legal basis for that?
—You have nothing.
—Ben! called Lynn from the back door. —The crane’s coming!
—Thanks, Ted. I should go, and he snapped his phone shut.
—It’ll be here in fifteen minutes.
—What crane?
—Didn’t Yoshi tell you?
—No, he didn’t.
—They’re bringing a crane over to drop the boulder.
He studied her for a second, noticing her lipstick. It went outside the lines of her lips.
—So, he said slowly, —exactly how big is this rock?
—Ladies and gentlemen, said the elderly tour guide, standing at the front of the bus talking into a mike as they pulled away from the Bechtel parking lot. —Welcome!
He was a small man, wearing a black cowboy shirt embroidered with white eagles in flight and sporting a large belt buckle that said NEBRASKA. —Thankya very much for taking the time off your busy schedules to visit the Test Site with us today. I’m Virgil Williams. I’ll be showing you around. I used to work in the testing program, in fact I worked in the program for fifty years starting the first year of the program back in 1951. I worked at the Test Site till I retired and started volunteering here on the tours. Give some young fella a chance, is what I said! I been present at over seventy atmospheric nukular explosions. These are the explosions that tested the weapons we need for the defense of our country.
Szilard, sitting in the very front row on the right, pulled out a small silver laptop Ann had never seen before, flipped it open on his knees and powered it up.
—I make no bones about it, said Virgil Williams, ignoring the laptop next to him. —I’m just a little hard of hearing, so speak up you folks in the back if you need my attention. I do apologize to you, ladies and gentlemen. I am a little hard of hearing.
Ann noticed that his two hearing aids sprouted thin filaments of wire like the stamens of a flower.
Ben watched the crane lower the rock with Lynn standing next to him, arms crossed. She was touching the side of her body to his in a way that suggested she was merely huddling close for convenience. As she leaned toward him she was pretending, he suspected, that the point of the exercise was to lean away from Yoshi, who stood on her other side.
He remembered moments like this from high school and he allowed her lengthwise flirtation because to move away from the contact abruptly would be obvious. A sudden movement would be construed as an insult. He was planning for the future: as soon as someone else spoke to him, say when a worker called him over, then he would separate quickly and neatly, a tuck of air between them and he would be gone.
It had rained earlier and the day was cold for late August so they were both wearing layers. This protected him but he was still aware of the slick nylon of her jacket as it brushed against the grainy beige canvas of his own. It was a steady distraction.
The rock loomed above the size of a modest home, and his stomach actually turned over as it dropped lower, lower, lower in small, jerky increments.
—It’ll be a focal point! said Lynn excitedly, and Yoshi gave a small, tight nod Ben could barely see when he leaned forward to glance past her profile at Yoshi’s. The boulder swayed slightly, whether because of its weight or because of a breeze Ben did not know. It was close to the crown of the aspens. He feared for them.
He wished he could leave: he wished to stop working at the mansion instantly. He wanted to get away from Lynn and her whims and move to a different job, start anew. Bad taste is not a crime, he said to himself, even though it should be.
That was it: if the world gave us our souls, why were the souls so impoverished? Most of them were so thin you could see right through them.
We have obscured the world, he said to himself as he stared up at the rock, taken it over with our flesh and nests and leavings, and all we see is our things. We have forgotten what the world is.
We believe we are it.
We can’t see past ourselves to the world, he thought.
—What? said Lynn.
—Did I say something?
—You whispered. Were you telling me a secret?
—I don’t have any secrets.
—Oh, come on, said Lynn slyly. —We all have secrets.
Across the interstate from the Test Site gate was a cluster of small tents and beat-up cars, a few motorcycles and an old Airstream, people camped out on what looked to Ann like a long-term basis.
—Pull over, would you? said Szilard to the bus driver, as though he was the boss.
—No sir, I’m afraid the tour does not stop here, said Virgil the tour guide, smiling.
—I said stop!
—If you want to talk to the protesters you’ll have to do it on your own time, sir, said the driver.
Virgil the tour guide nodded.
—We’re due at Badging, he said. —I make no bones about it: the Test Site does arrest those people sometimes. Peace groups, Indians, A-bomb survivors from Japan and so forth, your religious folks, nuns and priests and so forth. They protest what we do here, testing the nukular weapons that we need in America to defend our country. We put them in that jail right there.
As they turned into the Test Site gate she saw where he was pointing: a fenced-in enclosure on bare sand, bisected by another fence and decorated only with two blue port-a-johns.
—Sometimes around Easter—that’s when they like to come out, you know, that’s when they mostly come protesting here—we sometimes got t
hree or four hundred people in our little jail there. We got a ladies section and a gents section too. See? Company named Wackenhut does the security. Now ladies and gentlemen, they’re a private company. We don’t do it ourselves. You know, it’s these guys that arrest the protesters. It’s not us personally.
—Criminal thugs, said Szilard loud and clear.
—They also give you your badges, here at Badging, said Virgil as the bus pulled over and parked. —OK ladies and gentlemen, just come on off the bus and follow me. You’ll need just your ID here ladies and gentlemen. Remember, no cameras, recording equipment, or binoculars with us today. That’s the deal. I do appreciate your cooperation here folks. OK? And now folks, please follow me.
In the plain concrete-block building marked BADGING they waited in line beneath fluorescent lights. Behind a formica counter men in brown-camouflage, proto-military gear signed them in.
—Fascists, man, said Clint. —You know what these guys are famous for? They beat the shit out of people doing civil disobedience. They work for like the IMF and Three Mile Island.
—Just sign here, said a uniformed man with a crewcut, impervious.
Back on the bus Virgil described the rigors of life as a security guard.
—These guys have to be able to run an eight-minute mile, or they won’t be employed here too much longer, he said. —See? There’s the track they run on.
They passed a nondescript track and crept down a low street of ugly, temporary buildings. It looked like a small gray city, except that no one had bothered to plant any grass or trees. Everything was drab and barren, official sterility.
—Now I personally, ladies and gentlemen, I never worked security. However, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to tell you, I did have the honor and privilege of escorting some Russians around. They visited here in ’92 to see the facility. Unfortunately soon after that the moratorium went through under President George Bush Senior. So we didn’t have more tests after that, and I never got to go to Russia and visit them. I’ll tell you one thing those Russians told me, ladies and gentlemen: a family in Russia gets only one half-pound of beef every week. That’s for the whole family.