Refresh, Refresh: Stories

by Benjamin Percy

  “You want to tell me what’s going on?” she says.

  He holds up his hands, palms up, as if to say don’t shoot. Her eyes focus in on them and her eyebrows come together. He notices his fingernails, how the cracks that crisscross his knuckles and palms are scabbed over with a reddish dirt that looks more than a little like blood.

  He hurries them into his pockets and feels something there—the Snickers bar he bought last night from the gas station. “I got something here,” he says and removes the candy bar from his pocket and holds it out before him. “Something for Cody.”

  She lets his hand hang there without acknowledging it. Her mouth purses around a question she hasn’t yet figured out how to phrase. Her eyes are probing his. Her eyes are midnight blue and he sees the remnants of last night reflected in them.

  And they, father and daughter, look at each other, they simply look at each other, with Jim standing on one side of the doorway and Anne standing on the other, with the clouds coming together in the sky above them, bringing a dark color to the air.

  Meltdown

  November 23, 2009 was a bad day. At 8:00 p.m., the crew at Oregon’s Trojan Nuclear Power Plant—in accordance with new antiterror legislation, in response to recent al-Qaeda threats—ran a test to see how long the turbines would spin if their electrical supply vanished. Not long, it turns out. Within twenty minutes everything went off-line, including the automatic-shutdown safety mechanisms.

  At quarter past eight, the coolant water stopped altogether, the heat increased sharply, and Trojan’s managing operator, Rick Townsend, decided to do something about it. He brought the system back online and in doing so caused a sharp power surge, caused a steam explosion, caused the nuclear-containment vessel’s 2,000-ton cap to dissolve. Just like that.

  Air rushed in, igniting the graphite insulating blocks. Three hundred control rods melted, along with Rick Townsend, and the plant’s radioactive core lit up the night sky, replacing the stars with a cranberry glow.

  Soon thereafter the president declared the Pacific Northwest, and then the West Coast, and then the Upper Midwest, in a state of emergency. Parades and bowl games and turkey dinners across the country did not happen. Giving thanks was the last thing on people’s minds as they drove as fast and as far away as they could, or moved underground, or flew to other countries for extended vacations, afraid of the deadly thing they could not see, could not smell, could not feel, many of them dying weeks later when the poison completed its slow crawl through their system.

  You can never really extinguish graphite once it starts to burn. Fourteen days and 20,000 tons of sand, water, clay, and boron later, the fire was controlled, but not out. During this time a hot wind blew east and spiked the atmospheric radiation as far away as Maine.

  Five years pass and five million people are dead, the fire is still smoldering, and Darren Townsend, on his Harley Night Train, rips along the mostly abandoned roads of Oregon and Washington with a Geiger counter strapped between his handlebars.

  Though radiation will stick to the Pacific Northwest for the next 50,000 years—the government says—give Mother Earth another 1,000 to heal, to purge and dilute the most dangerous elements, and humans can safely begin repopulating the area. In the meantime—the government says—stay out.

  Darren could care less what the government says.

  He gave eight years to the Army. Right after 9/11 he dropped out of Portland State and enlisted—and because the government told him to, he killed men and women and children, some of them by accident, some on purpose. He remembers sending mortar shell after mortar shell into a Fallujah apartment complex believed to house Shiite insurgents. He remembers walking through the chalky debris afterwards, the stone shifting beneath his feet, the body parts rising from the rubble like weird plants. He remembers the flies crawling across the faces of the dead, and then lighting on his own face, near his eyes and mouth, to taste him. If he had not been in Iraq, doing what the government told him to do, tiptoeing around booby traps, dodging bearded men screaming yi-yi-yi-yi with plastic explosives strapped to their bellies, maybe by some twist of fate his father, Rick, wouldn’t have been at Trojan that night—maybe they would have been sharing a beer or picking out a turkey instead—and then maybe none of this would have ever happened.

  Darren doesn’t know why he drives 70, 80, 90 mph, the road moving away beneath him as he slaloms past the potholes and abandoned cars, bones—he only knows he likes the way the air whips around him, his body bulleting through its gusts, just as he likes the sting of the occasional hail pellet and yellow jacket splatting his face. Anything that wakes him up, even for a second, he likes.

  When he tucks his body into his bike and when he slides along so fast the world becomes indistinct, just a blur of colors, he feels a sense of freedom like a great heaviness shed, and it is as if he is rising off the road, into the pale empty sky, flying.

  The noise of traffic, laughter, Muzak trembling from shopping-center sound systems, all of it gone, leaving behind a scary silence that seems to tell him something he strains to hear: life is everywhere and it is nowhere.

  Coyotes slink through the aisles of Safeway. Elk engage in rut-combat in Portland’s Pioneer Courthouse Square, their horns locked together beneath the vine-choked billboards. In the fields and in the streets are semis and tanks and planes, rust-cratered and woolly with grass, looking like dinosaurs, fallen and decaying, the remnants of some lost existence that no longer matters.

  The Dead Zone—as the media has branded it—reminds Darren of Thundarr the Barbarian, that old Hanna-Barbera cartoon about a postapocalyptic world where men, the leftover men, become barbarians, their life reduced to fighting beasts, scavenging the abandoned and moss-laden cities. As a child, as a teenager, even as an adult, on the Cartoon Network, Darren enjoyed Thundarr for the what-if possibility, dreaming of the day this world—of carbohydrates, of Michael Jackson, of 0% introductory APRs, of turf-eating golf spikes, of laws and contracts and bills that in their collective choke-collar feel more constrictive than all the prisons in the world—would end.

  Now, in the summer of 2015, more than five years after the meltdown, that world still exists, elsewhere. Sometimes he considers returning to it—using his veteran status to land a post-office or law-enforcement gig, putting aside some cash, getting married, raising brown-haired athletic children—but only sometimes. Just after he and most everyone else got yanked from the mess in Iraq to clean up the mess at home, he tried that life and didn’t like it.

  His first assignment: to manage a Texas tent city, one of hundreds of thousands set up to accommodate the newly homeless and to quarantine the newly infected, many of them covered in sores and vomiting blood. Then the dead bodies started piling up. Then the riots started. For obvious reasons he hated it there, but it was a less obvious reason that made him leave. The Texas sky. With no mountains to interrupt it, he felt blotted out, weighted down by its enormous size.

  He requested a transfer into toxic cleanup, and got it. It was the assignment no one wanted. They sent him home, to Oregon, to the place from which everyone else had fled, to join over 100,000 liquidators already there. That’s what the Army called the microbiologists and doctors and botanists and cleanup and construction crews: the liquidators. Many of them—some 10,000—have since died from radiation poisoning, the gamma-ray intensity and the long-term exposure about as healthy as a shot of mercury to the jugular.

  In a radiation suit straight out of Buck Rogers, Darren helped construct a chain-link barbed-wire perimeter, nearly five thousand miles of it, and then manned its checkpoints with a dosimeter crew, keeping the curious and the crazies and the Mexicans out, treating with chemical showers all those who traveled within. He liked the work and he liked how the world felt empty here—how he felt like the only man alive—especially in the half-light of dawn, when he got up before everybody else and could hear a coyote munching on a field mouse from a half-mile away.

  At this time there was a girl, K
atie.

  Darren was not a bad-looking man, and before—before the world turned upside down—if he was at a bar, sitting at a booth with his buddies, and the right kind of song came on the juke, the girls with moisture shining in their cleavage would single him out to dance. Katie was a private under his command. She had that special shade of hair, sometimes red and sometimes brown, depending on the light. Back in high school he might have ignored her, called her plain, but out here, in the zone, with nothing but men and wild dogs to keep him company, Katie was beautiful.

  Now he thinks of her often, the hard bud of her body, her West Virginia drawl like a mouthful of honey, their conversations about everything—about love, for instance. “I love my family,” Darren said, “but I don’t think I’ve ever been in love. Like, movie love. Like, can’t-think-straight head-over-heels love.”

  In the barracks, in his private quarters, a square concrete cell with a sink and a bed and a bookshelf, she laid on top of him, naked, so small he often joked about putting her in his mouth like a piece of candy. She had an ear to his chest so she could listen to his heart. “Everybody always says they want life to be like in the movies,” she said and combed her fingers through his chest hair. “Now it is. Now life is like a movie. But it’s the wrong movie.”

  He said, “You said it,” but he wasn’t really listening. He was too busy with his own thoughts, all mangled in his brain like a snarl of junk metal. He understood love as a theory, but he could not grasp it as fact. He ran a finger up her spine, into her hair, then back down to her lumbar vertebrae, where her shoulders narrowed into her neck. He circled the spot and she hummed and said, “I like that.”

  He wanted to say, “You shouldn’t,” but didn’t. This circle he traced was a sort of bull’s-eye. Here you put your knife if you wanted to paralyze someone. As much as it horrified him, every part of her body he considered both a soft, curved, perfumed thing—and a target. Which gave him a sick feeling at the bottom of his heart he recognized as both the beginnings of love and the opposite of it.

  “Sometimes,” he said. “Sometimes I feel like I’ve got this filter, and all the stuff that’s supposed to go in and out, between the world and me, it gets muffled.”

  He had never told anyone this before, but it was true. He didn’t know whether it was Iraq or the Trojan meltdown, or both, but physically, emotionally, he hadn’t felt anything in a long time. This loss of desire and direction, this mixed-up mood, was maybe why he had returned to Oregon, seeking some source he could shoot with his gun or stomp beneath his boot or blast with a chemical shower.

  His heart had all but disappeared into a dark corner of his chest, a tiny flickering speck, and Katie, to give her credit, tried to fan its ember, to purse her lips and blow it into a spark. But when his enlistment ran out, so did he, retreating into the Dead Zone.

  When she asked him why, he said, “To figure some stuff out. Just for a little while.” She shook her head, but didn’t question him further, and he appreciated that.

  That was three months ago and in one of their FMTVs, a five-ton tactical truck, she drove him and his duffel bag beyond the perimeter, to Ashland, to a Harley dealer he had spotted during one of their Geiger surveys. He broke its window with a rock and stood there with the glass all around him like the thousand jagged and glittery possibilities waiting for him in the zone. Before he stepped inside, he turned to look at her, where she waited in the idling truck.

  “Well,” he said. “That’s that.” He blew her a kiss.

  “Missed,” she yelled, like he was far away, not ten feet from her—and then, unsmiling, she drove away and left him there.

  He first fell in love with motorcycles back in high school, when a biker gang showed up at a football kegger. On the porch Darren was kissing one of the cheerleaders, hoping to take things one step further, upstairs maybe, when a great bunch of noise announced a dozen Harleys grumbling up the street, over the curb, onto the lawn, revving their engines in quick bursts so they peeled away the grass beneath them. For a good minute they circled, blasting their motors, making mud scars on the sod, until they knew their presence was known.

  Then their engines clattered quiet and they sat there, not saying anything, just grinning.

  The football team huddled together and tried to look tough, but that was it, nobody had the guts to say anything when the leathery tattooed men clomped up the porch, into the house, the kitchen, finding there the keg. They filled their plastic cups and drank them and hoisted up the Michelob half-barrel and hauled it outside, dumping it in a sidecar. Then they left as they came, loudly.

  “A loner on a Harley?” Katie said when Darren told her where he wanted to get dropped off. “Isn’t that kind of cliché?”

  “Yeah,” he said. “But it’s my kind of cliché.”

  All these years he couldn’t get the image of the bikers out of his head. They had such power. Had they showed up in a fleet of Volkswagen Beetles or Mazda Protegés, who knows, it might have turned into a big fight. But with the bikes—with Harleys—that was like carrying a rifle into a shopping mall, announcing to the world in blinking neon lights you were a dangerous thing.

  Exactly the image Darren had been cultivating for years, as a sergeant, and now wishes to maintain, as a man alone in a wasteland, with gangs of looters and who-knows-what-else roaming around. Here, outside the checks and balances of society, bad things can happen, he knows.

  The Night Train is a big bike, 75 horsepower, with high handlebars and a wide comfortable seat for long road trips. Darren has taken it up to 120 mph on a flat stretch outside Pendleton, and the air became so sharp and clean it made him forget, just for a second, who and where he was.

  Aside from one episode of oil starvation, the bike hasn’t given him any trouble. From the beginning he knew his way around an engine, but he decided it couldn’t hurt to study up, so he stole a few books from Willamette Tech College and has since made some cosmetic upgrades, installing a double headlight, Billet mirrors, six-piston differential-bore calipers, a four-piston rear-brake system, and finally, after screwing around with front- and rear-sprocket combinations, he decided on a 15-front, 45-back combination for the best acceleration for quick getaways, for the best mileage for long hauls. It is a menacing piece of art, a radiant metallic wonder, a revelation.

  More important than any other upgrade is the Geiger counter screwed between his handlebars, and when Darren rides, his eyes bounce between it and the road.

  Like Chernobyl, Trojan now lies entombed beneath an enormous concrete sarcophagus, containing the radiation. Not that this makes the Dead Zone safe. The damage has been done. The soil, the trees, the animals have been infected. But because asphalt does not retain radiation, Darren knows he is relatively protected here, in the middle of the highway, following the meridian, its yellow-on-black coloring like the poisonous desert snakes he checked his boots for every morning during the war.

  When he hugs the shoulder on a tight curve, the radiation doubles. If he leaves the asphalt, with every step he takes the Geiger count will triple, quadruple, and so on. He knows this because he does this, often, to pick up supplies or investigate a fire or poke through a house. He takes precautions, but living in a place like this, precautions are about as superficial as a helmet at 100 mph.

  A microrem is a unit of radiation. 1,000 microrems equals one millirem. 1,000 millirems equals one rem. Before the explosion, the average American received—from a combination of cosmic radiation and medical and industrial sources—between 200 and 300 millirems per year. Before the explosion, in the center of Portland, the average radiation was somewhere around fifteen microrems per hour.

  During the explosion the reactor emitted between 5,000 and 50,000 rems per hour. A sudden dose of 500 rems is enough to kill a human, whereas it takes over 5,000 rems to kill a cockroach. Needless to say, gamma rays fried to a radioactive crisp anybody within a thirty-mile radius. A good chunk of civilization fell within that thirty-mile radius. A good chunk of civilizat
ion can still be found seated in restaurants, lying in bed, curled up at the bottoms of shower stalls. Many remain on their porches, just a bundle of bones, forever frozen in the place they gathered to watch the terribly beautiful cloud blooming from the nuclear reactor, their skin long ago ashed away by the atomic wind or nibbled away by the many wild animals who now roam wherever they please.

  Here, along the Columbia River Gorge, the radiation is 200,000 times the normal rate. At night the trees glow a faint red, as if magic, and it is not unusual to see a raccoon as bald as a baby slinking across the highway, a tree-full of featherless birds squawking and hopping from branch to branch, like some poisonous fruit, unable to fly. To step off the road here, to expose yourself to the intense pockets of radiation, would be like stumbling through a minefield wearing clown shoes.

  The closer Darren gets to Trojan, the closer to the still-smoldering graphite nuclear core, the more the air feels packed with gunpowder, as if one wrong move, one sneeze, could blow everything to bits. In this way the Dead Zone feels to him like Iraq, full of unseen danger, like one big booby trap. Familiar, in other words.

  On his Night Train, zooming across the high deserts of Central Oregon, the rolling green fields of the Willamette Valley, growling up the Cascade Mountains, diving down Portland’s abandoned streets, he feels as if he is entering some nexus, the coordinates by which his family and so many others became ghosts. And though he doesn’t think about it much, though he isn’t into any of that touchy-feely higher-power happy-crappy shit—as he refers to it—he supposes he is trying to connect with that wavelength, breathing the same air under the same sky over the same ground.

  It’s complicated, but to Darren, living with danger, living with ghosts, living with pain and trying to conquer it, that feels more like a victory, somehow. That feels more like being alive.