I can sense the posture of his pride, though I have never met the man. In my mind’s eye, it makes him dogged. I wonder if he gave up everything for this pride, or if, at an early age, it seemed that everything was taken from him, so that pride was his only recourse.
Men, the way they have been shaped from childhood, and because of this pride, do not suffer well the loss of a livelihood. They will risk a great deal to keep it. In 1957, before a unit of Marines was ordered into trenches three miles away from the experimental explosion of a nuclear weapon, they were told, What you are about to do is very special and for the benefit of all mankind.… Your country will be proud of you.
Afterward these men crouched down in trenches. They were told to cover their faces with their hands and wait. There was a long slow countdown. And when it stopped a very bright light, brighter than the sun. Though their eyelids were shut, they could see the bones in their hands. It was as if the world had turned inside out and nothing could be relied upon to be as it had been before. The sound of the explosion was shattering. And then the ground began to shake violently. Several more miles away, a woman thought she felt an earthquake. Some men were quickly buried in earth. And all this instilled a particular terror, so that even men who had been close to death in combat were frightened and lost control. Some were weeping. The light was still blinding when a powerful wind, a wind which threw even men half buried in the earth on their backs, began to blow. A mushroom cloud formed over the sky. And a thick dust began to fill the air so that no one could see more than a few feet in any direction.
Moments before this bomb went off, one man who had gone through another explosion wanted to stand up and shout, Stop! Stop! We don’t deserve to die this way! This explosion was to be more powerful than the first he had experienced, but he did not know the danger he was in. He was told his body was in no danger from the radiation, and he could not see it or taste it himself. Yet I believe there was something he felt, not palpable to the senses as we know them, but there.
He had been through four years of a military academy in the South. He had had the ambition of becoming a Marine Corps officer and now he was one. One of his teachers in the basic officers’ training had told him that the greatest honor he could achieve would be to die on the battlefield.
His body shook uncontrollably but still he did not speak, and only feared, along with his body’s terror, that this shaking might be seen by the men he was commanding.
Shall I call her Nelle, the woman whose name I cannot tell you? I name her after my great-aunt, who was born in southern Illinois, which is almost like the South. When I imagine her father forcing himself up a hill and into the mines, I imagine his hands trembling, as my own hands have trembled when I am overtired. And I can imagine Nelle trembling too, after her father had forced himself upon her, trembling, and not knowing where to take this trembling.
The men who emerged from the trenches were deeply impressed by the devastation they saw. Tanks were melted. Heavy equipment had become cinders. There was a kind of confusion. No one seemed to know quite what to do. Men appeared in clothing designed to protect them from radiation, clothing the Marines did not wear. Some men were directed away from areas which had been called contaminated. On a mountain range several miles north, yucca trees were burning. The men could not find equipment they had been ordered to operate. But still, they formed columns of twos and marched in time over this landscape.
I can imagine these men standing at attention the morning after this explosion. They have on clean, pressed uniforms. They are washed and shaven. It is before breakfast and they are hungry. Each man is relieved to pass inspection. As they wait for their next orders, do they hope against hope that it will not happen again?
When I ask this I think right away of Nelle’s mother. When her first daughter was raped, two others had already been born. I try to become her and immediately I have a feeling for the event. I find myself gripping the edge of my desk as if the ground were shaking violently.
And as the violence of my imagination stops, there is a kind of numbness, and a kind of confusion. Things somehow have got to go on, I say to myself. And over time, I begin to forget why I do not let my oldest daughter come home until I am home. That’s just how things are, I say to myself. Mercifully, like a nightmare whose images give me only a vague feeling of discomfort in the daytime, this violent event recedes from my consciousness. But nightmares recur. There are other daughters.
Iphigenia was not the first child whom Clytemnestra saw Agamemnon murder. The great general had abducted Clytemnestra when she was already married. He had slain her husband and then torn her child from her (the text as set down by Euripides reads from her breast) and smashed it to the ground before her eyes. This is as violent an image as I can imagine, yet Clytemnestra all but erased it from her memory. She said she grew to love this man. And thus, when he sent for his daughter to be brought to his military camp, telling the queen that the girl was to be married to his greatest warrior, Achilles, Clytemnestra believed him. She remembered the death of her first child only when she learned that her daughter was not intended for marriage but was instead to be immolated as a sacrifice to Artemis, because Agamemnon needed wind for his sails, so that he could wage his war.
Pleading for her daughter’s life, Clytemnestra warned Agamemnon that he would not be able to kiss any of his living children, for they would be afraid of him in the future. But this did not happen. His other children, Orestes and Electra, remained loyal to him.
Orestes was only an infant when his sister was murdered by his father. And thus one can argue that it was in ignorance that he killed Clytemnestra for murdering his father. Yet he could not have been entirely ignorant. He knew, and his knowledge haunted him. He was pursued afterward by the furies.
No detail that enters the mind, nor the smallest instance of memory, ever really leaves it, and things we had thought forgotten will arise suddenly to consciousness years later, or, undetected, shape the course of our lives. And this is also true of the effect of radiation on the body. The body does not rid itself of radiation, and thus exposure is cumulative. Years and years can pass between the exposure to one X ray and another, but the effects of the first X ray are still in the body, which can take fifteen to thirty years to exhibit damage. And if radiation has damaged a chromosome, the damage may not show up until the next generation or, in cases where the inherited damage itself is genetic, the next generation after that. Paul Cooper was twenty-one years old when he was exposed to radiation from the explosion of a nuclear bomb in 1957. It was not until 1976 that he learned he had leukemia. He died two years later, in 1978, at the age of forty-four. William Drechin was nineteen when he witnessed a nuclear explosion at Bikini from the deck of the U.S.S. Ottawa, in 1946. Eight years later his wife gave birth to a son with cerebral palsy. And the next year she gave birth to a second son with the same disease. Nine years later the younger son had died. And eleven years after that death, the oldest son died too.
Israel Torres was half buried in a trench by the explosion of a bomb in 1957, and he began to vomit immediately. When he came out of the trench he was still nauseous and his vision was blurred. These symptoms did not go away but instead they worsened. He began to suffer from severe headaches, dizziness and muscle spasms. But his illness was not taken as a warning sign of things to come in the lives of the other men who had been exposed. Instead the doctors denied that the radiation to which he had been exposed could have caused his illness.
For years the connection between coal dust and black lung disease was officially denied. And there are still doctors today who work for insurance compensation companies or the mines who deny that coal dust does damage to the human body. Israel Torres was ridiculed and even warned by one doctor that, were he to continue returning for sick call, he might endanger his career in the marines. But the marines meant his life to him. The same way his work, his ability to do his work, meant life to Nelle’s father. He had to feel the illness in him, feel eve
n the coal dust entering his lungs. I can feel what he felt, sitting there on the edge of the bed, pausing to catch his breath before he pulled on his shoes, standing to pull up his pants with a certain amount of pride that he could keep going, a pride in his manhood.
Despite his illness, Israel Torres joined his brigade in a march for a hundred miles with a forty-pound weight on his back. He wanted to prove his loyalty, and that he was physically fit. The day after the hike he could not walk; his whole body was numb, and he was sent into surgery.
There was a joke in our family, never openly laughed at, but still a subject of ridicule, whose cruelty astonishes me now. It was about Nelle, not the Nelle of this story, but my great-aunt. She was never married. She was thus a spinster. And somehow the implication was that therefore she had failed as a woman. Is there a worse shame to carry than to be failed as a man or a woman? The father of the other Nelle, the Nelle of this story, did not fail as a man. And the same masculinity that pushed him toward his own death in the mines somehow brought him to commit a rape against his own daughters. But this masculinity was not in his body. He had to torture his body at times, to make it conform to what he called male.
There are those who say that rape is part of male nature. Human error is often blamed on nature or the gods. Orestes blamed his fate on Apollo. And, in the first play Euripides wrote about Iphigenia, it was only when Orestes could recognize that his own father had sinned against him that he could be freed from the torment of the furies.
I don’t remember my father ever speaking in love or in hate about his father. Someone else in the family told me how they used to work together in my grandfather’s business, delivering ice. Did they ever speak to each other about anything of consequence? I have no evidence for that. I think whatever feelings existed between them were as silent and invisible as radiation.
Once, years ago, when I was eleven years old, my father and I went in search of radiation. He had rented a Geiger counter, hoping to locate a uranium mine and make us rich. My father was a workingman, but in an unambitious, oddly innocent way he had dreams of clever inventions that might win him a fortune. What a strange pair we made, father and daughter, wandering aimlessly among the rocks of a California canyon, straining to hear if the strange machine my father held might make a clicking sound, and not really knowing, either of us, why we were there.
He knew little of the history of the atom bomb, or of the other uses to which uranium might be put. He did not know what the effects of radiation were on the body. He did not know that Marie Curie herself had died of radiation poisoning. That the women who painted radium dials on clocks, and moistened their brushes with their tongues, died of cancer of the mouth. That the air around us was contaminated with fallout from atomic tests which might make either of us fatally ill in twenty years. He had a naive belief in the wonders of science, an appreciation, and a trust. And I trusted him, and trusted what he trusted, and his knowledge of it, which seemed like a kind of magic to me. The night he fixed the radio, when I was five, I hunkered by him, watching his efforts, certain I would soon see tiny people emerge from the set, and then mystified that somehow he could make those wires produce human sounds. And I remember our trips to the Sears, Roebuck down the block to buy shoes. That was my favorite store. I always asked to go back there, because they had a machine which let you see the bones in your feet through a green light. And I looked at my feet again and again, amazed and awed.
In my circle of friends, in the last three years, five have developed cancer. And Zoe has died.
1957. We were not thinking about radiation. This was an eventful year. The year of Sputnik. I remember it well. I was fourteen years old. The papers were full of drawings, a round object perpetually made a concentric circle around the earth. I was just entering high school. Studying my second year of Latin. Gallia est omnis divisa in partes tres. All of Gaul is divided into three parts, in the mind of the Roman emperor. We memorized his words. In another class on current events we debated the emerging movements for African independence. Kenya. Nigeria. Strange places on a map.
This is the year in which the United States begins to take space seriously. Is Von Braun hopeful now? It is only a matter of time. The best way to conquer space, he tells Congress, is to establish a national agency for its exploration.
In the films of the first moon landing the flag looks as if it is blowing proudly in a strong wind. But there is no wind on the moon. Later I learned the flag was made permanently erect with some plastic material. For some reason this reminds me of the crinolines we wore in the decade before the moon’s capture. These starched flounces gave our skirts at one and the same time a lip of excitement and a barrier of stiffness. This style, an invitation and an impediment to intimacy, was not an aesthetic born of girlhood so much as it belonged to the larger system by which girlhood was determined. Can it be true that a hidden aspect, the dark face of a father’s abuse of his daughter, or of the exploration of the moon, is an ambivalence toward closeness?
Leaping over a gray lunar surface, an astronaut declares that, despite all strangeness, there is something overwhelmingly familiar about the moon. Perhaps what is feared in intimacy is far less what is strange than what is somehow familiar yet still not entirely known in ourselves.
After Israel Torres was given a medical discharge from the military, it became a question of vital importance to him to establish that his illness had been caused by radiation. The Marine Corps denied that this could be possible, explaining that the level of gamma radiation was too low to cause any harm. Just after the blast, a machine that was passed over Israel Torres’s body began to tick wildly. He was not told the measurement the machine registered, but the man who held the machine said to him, Marine, you have had it … and this he did not forget. When he wrote to the military asking for the reading on the green badge he wore to record his exposure to radiation, he was told that they had lost his particular badge. In 1982 a man who had been a medic in the army at the same test site in 1957 suddenly decided that he would tell the truth, if not about Torres, about the readings on the badges. He had been ordered, he said, to lie about the amount of radiation registered on each badge. He had kept two sets of books, one with the true figures and another with lower, false figures.
But there is more to this story. Even low levels of radiation are harmful to the body. It is a common form of reasoning in this century to reassure those who are wary that the amount of radiation given off by a nuclear power plant, or a nuclear waste site, or a missile, is less than one is exposed to during a medical X ray. But the work of medical statisticians has revealed that X rays cause a great deal of harm to the body. One X ray of the whole body can lower immunity, so that the age at which we are more susceptible to leukemia or heart disease occurs roughly one year earlier. In fact, the rate of leukemia and heart disease has risen consonant with the years of atomic testing, and the average age for those conditions has lowered.
And there is another part of the story, still. The bomb that exploded and lit up the bones in Israel Torres’s hands was designed at Livermore laboratory. In those years that laboratory was developing thermonuclear weapons. And they were trying to design what they called a clean bomb because it would give off more intense radiation on the ground, near the impact, but less radiation would rise in a cloud to cause fallout. It has now been established, through a letter written by a lieutenant colonel to one of the men exposed to that bomb, that it was a thermonuclear bomb. And there is some evidence that it was in fact a neutron bomb. In either case, the most intense and harmful rays from that bomb are neutron rays, but the badge that Torres and the other men wore measured only gamma rays.
Just a few months ago camera crews went to the neighborhood of Livermore laboratory and took photographs of water wells, streams and springs that had been contaminated with some kind of chemical. The laboratory denied having any responsibility for this contamination until the poison was traced to its source and then the denial had to be retracted. In th
e period of time before this denial was retracted I must have carried about a feeling of suspension in my lungs that I hardly knew about, because when I heard over the news that the laboratory had admitted culpability, I took in a deep breath.
From this small moment I can imagine how Israel Torres must have felt as again and again the military denied that his illness, which finally became leukemia, had been caused by that bomb. There was a period when he wanted to give up, when he felt an apathy. Before the laboratory announces its mistake I felt a moment of rage, and then a certain exhaustion seemed to penetrate even my heart. The task of garnering proof seemed too large. I gave up, and in my giving up, everything around me seemed to dull. You can see this look of dullness in the eyes of certain children, and it does not come simply from too little food or from fatigue.
Children who have been abused will turn inward, but there is something that will wake them, bring them back into a circle of humanity. And that is if the abuse to which they have been submitted is named and admitted to be true. And they long especially to have this abuse admitted by the one who abused them. Yet it is most common for a man who has raped a child to deny that the rape occurred. And to imply that the child made the story up, or, if evidence is presented, to claim the child initiated the rape by seducing him. And these claims cause a second suffering as terrible as the first.
But there is another phenomenon among these children. A child beaten to within an inch of her life will reach out longingly for the parent who is separated from her. She will attempt to protect this parent from the scrutiny of the world. And she will mimic her father’s logic by blaming herself for his abuse of her.
A Chorus of Stones Page 4