A Chorus of Stones

by Susan Griffin

  The board is shaped in a horseshoe and contains literally dozens of gauges, meters, knobs and switches, many of which look alike. To make matters worse, new technology has required additional gauges and switches, but instead of redesigning existing boards, manufacturers have simply made panels to be added. Often these are placed in back of the operator and in some cases across the room. Even for a well-educated operator the task is difficult.

  But at the time she did her study, not even the senior licensed operators who supervised other operators were required to have an undergraduate degree in any field of science. The nonlicensed operators were not even required to have a high school diploma. This placed a heavy burden on the training programs.

  By far the most neglected area of training was in general knowledge. Few training programs taught their future operators the principles of thermodynamics. Few of those who operated the boards daily would be required to know what really causes an explosion and why, or even how nuclear energy is generated.

  One would hope that at least the future operators, lacking the education they needed to make intelligent decisions in a crisis, would be called upon to repeat certain procedures until they became habit. But very few of the training programs provided drills or simulated trials even for emergency procedures. Most practical experience was acquired on the job while using an activated board with all the attendant risks of failure.

  What then was being taught and how? Answers to specific questions, those the industry knew would be on the licensing examination, were fed to the candidates in classrooms or on the job. Certain procedures were memorized but never practiced. Further, the examinations were half oral and that half was graded subjectively by the examiner, who was hardly qualified to judge. (This particular job was not popular, and so examiners had to be chosen from those who had been rejected for other jobs.) Finally, the industry was self-regulating, meaning that the examiners were hired by the industry, and the industry, always short of operators, wanted candidates to pass the test.

  I imagined then a new employee, perhaps just licensed, sitting at a control board. As his or perhaps her hand reaches for a particular lever, does she know what process she sets in motion, can she follow the consequences of what she does all the way down the line, or does she make this motion through a fog of reassuring language, any sense of danger or her own ignorance dulled by the seeming normalcy of all her surroundings?

  Perhaps this is why in one plant a worker could decide to use a microwave oven, which was provided for employees to heat their lunches, to dry out a piece of radioactive equipment. Or why, in another plant, workers attempted to mend a hole in a pipe with a basketball.

  It was chilling now to think of the power plant near my home in Diablo Canyon. Never mind that it is built on an earthquake fault. Was that the plant in the study that offered only four hours’ training in radiological protection and control? Or was it one of the twenty-one out of forty-seven plants that offered no training in this field? Was it among the sixteen plants that did put their operators through drills? Was it among the seventeen plants that did not train senior licensed operators in systems design features and operating responsibilities? Was it the plant that offered its supervisors less than an hour of instruction in fuel handling? Or was it among the eighteen that did not train their supervisors how to handle fuel at all?

  To protect the city against siege a high wall is built around it.

  One likes to believe that somehow there is someone or something safe and infallible standing between oneself and cataclysm. I remember watching a public service film at my grammar school that showed firemen being trained to put out fires. Was that my father standing in the tower? He wore a blue uniform just like my father and jumped as my father was taught to jump from a high place into a net. Even as children, we understood the purpose of this, just as we understood our own fire drills. In case of emergency, you need to be ready. And practice makes perfect.

  How then could those who made these decisions fail to provide drills for the operators of nuclear power plants when the flames there would be so much fiercer, so much more difficult to put out, spreading toxic fumes over an unimaginable expanse of space and time? And how could anyone, once the evidence was clear, choose to bury the document that sounded the alarm?

  Yet perhaps it is the very extremity of the danger, bordering as it does on the continuity of life itself, the desire for safety as an ultimate state that seals away all fear as if into a foreign country, the wish for a miraculous, mysterious security won not so much by practical effort, or even through theoretical understanding, but by the determination to keep on in one direction despite every indication of trouble, hence vanquishing not only this danger but all catastrophe and every mortal mistake by a sheer act of will, a terrible fear of danger that causes this denial of danger.

  But illusion has its own costs. There is also the fear that the unspoken will be spoken. I was intimate once with a woman who told small lies as a matter of habit. She would forget the telling of them, but still they seemed to accumulate, encircling her inner world with a hostile environment. Many old friends and acquaintances were shunned and feared, as if their very presence might endanger an existence based on falsehood. Knowledge that is denied at the core is often pushed to the periphery. Is it not then predictable that one day the periphery will be observed making an assault on even the most carefully built fortifications?

  Before the development of the first cell it is speculated that by accident a protein spiroid engulfed nucleic acids and enzymes.

  Is it in defense of illusion that violence has come to surround the nuclear industry. The death of Karen Silkwood is one of several mysterious deaths that have occurred in many different locations. Who were the murderers? No one knows exactly. This contributes to the strangeness of the events. Lee and I talked to a doctor whose life had been threatened after he began organizing protests in his community. Many of his patients worked in the plants, and they continually told him about small accidents, emissions of radioactivity into the air, and so he was concerned about the health of his children. But the danger to his family became greater when bullets were fired into his home. He quit his practice and moved to another town.

  Lee and I speculated about the report. The data were old. The industry could claim that everything had changed in the years since the study, though Lee doubted that it had. There was the scandal of the burial. The fact that the report never reached Congress. The lies implicated in this concealment. But was this enough to inspire violence? We assured ourselves it was not. Still, when I left, I wrapped the two reports in green shiny paper tied with a red ribbon to make them look like a Christmas present.

  The Aurelian wall built around Rome in the third century is nineteen kilometers long and strengthened at thirty-meter intervals with 381 square towers.

  What was I to do with what Lee had told me? Even if I never mentioned her name, she would be easily traced. I had promised to keep silent. And I did. What we both knew existed for a while in a kind of limbo, a borderland of disquiet and irresolution, that same silence into which so much had already fallen.

  While I was visiting her in Oak Ridge, Lee told me one other story in passing. Oak Ridge Associated Universities had participated in radiation experiments in the late sixties. They used terminally ill cancer patients. Lee thought some of them were the children of military personnel. The story stayed with me. It reminded me of what Israel Torres had seen, the men in the compound. And, of course, I could not help but think of the medical experiments performed in concentration camps that occurred in a distant geography during the first years of my life.

  It is probable that the next great advance took place when larger cells engulfed smaller cells.

  It was only several years later that I was able to verify Lee’s story about the experiments. Neither the patients nor, in the case of children, their parents, were fully informed about the nature of the treatments offered. The study was funded by NASA. They wanted to know preci
sely what amount of radiation would produce nausea. Men were soon to be sent to the moon. If an astronaut, breathing through an oxygen mask, were to vomit, he would not survive.

  I am thinking now of the mother of one of the irradiated children. When she looked on her son’s small body, struggling to live, she was thinking neither of astronauts nor of the moon. He weighed less than thirty pounds now. There was so much that he had endured in his six years of life. When was it that she grasped that something more than a simple process of dying was taking place? Was there a slow widening arc to her discomfort, a sense that would not be still, of wrongness? Or was the injustice of it revealed to her suddenly, even if unnamed and obscure in its reasons, in a stunning moment of clarity?

  In the 13th century changes in classical Roman fortification are imported from the East by Crusaders. At Carcassonne, a second fortification encircles the first. A large round barbican joins the flank. The towers are hollow from the base, and galleries projecting outward are built of stone.

  This knowledge of course does not quiet the mind. One wonders then how such a thing came to pass, a child suffering in this way to bring men to the moon. The mind travels backward in time, tracing first this thread and then that, hoping to unwind the tangle and reach some clear place of origin.

  But of course a solitary understanding is not enough. One wants others to know. How grateful was Israel Torres that I heard his story and believed him. And Nelle’s story too sought a listener. Or a land of listeners, where all that had happened might come to rest, in the intelligent and curious mind of a shared grief.

  For each solitary story belongs to a larger story. Now what took place cannot be told by the witnesses alone. So many of those who might remember—Von Braun, Truman, MacArthur—have died. Yet the story is still told if only as a mute legacy of deeds endured and enacted by the living.

  All plants and animals are made from cells.

  Lee finally left Oak Ridge in the summer of 1985. We are talking about/ leaving where we aren’t seen/ to go where we are more visible, she had written in a poem. It was just nine months before the explosion at Chernobyl. History repeated itself. Once again there was denial. The evacuations were too slow. Many children suffered. Many are still ill and will fall ill in the future, unto many generations.

  The ideal city of the Renaissance is conceived as radial in plan since this connects the defensive resources at the center of the city to the protective outer walls at the periphery.

  Nowhere is there a record of all that has happened in human history, except in living consciousness. And does the truth each of us knows die along with us unless we speak it? This we cannot know. Only we know that the consequences of every act continue and themselves cause other consequences until a later generation will accept the circumstances created of these acts as inevitable. Unless instead this generation tries to unravel the mystery. And if they penetrate the secret whose scent persists in all eventualities, will they say, finally, this death, this wound, this suffering, was not necessary?

  The cells of the human body are differentiated according to function. There are cells which make up bone, muscle, blood. Cells which create immunity, send messages from one part of the body to another, cells which remember, understand, see.

  The last part of the story Nelle told me is not as dramatic as the vision of Israel Torres. Yet it has weight as consequence and cause. The nuclear power industry and the factories that produce parts of nuclear bombs are situated not too far from the coal mining area of the Appalachia near the Kentucky-Virginia border. Thus it is not uncommon for the unskilled children of coal miners to migrate sixty miles and take up jobs in which, like their fathers, they are exposed to substances dangerous to their health. Nelle wears her protective clothing. She is mindful of the regulations. And yet accidents happen. This is one she told me about that did not get reported in the newspapers. The water from the cooling system of the plant where she works got mixed in somehow with the water provided for the workers to take showers. The men and women who work with plutonium are supposed to shower so that they can be decontaminated. But that day this mixture was not detected until after they took their showers. Every one of them set off an alarm as they attempted to leave the building because the showers had made them radioactive.

  Because of the introduction of firearms the radial plan is no longer essential, and fortifications which become more important in the Baroque period, are now hexagonal.

  This story doesn’t have an ending yet. Except an old ending we’ve seen and known before, and learned to accept as if the gods had made it so. There are memories that perhaps we’ve buried together. And, as the song goes,… the faces of my friends and kin are scattered just like straw in the wind.

  III

  EXILE

  In 1827 Giovanni Battista Amici corrects the major aberrations of optical lenses. Cells become visible.

  I am thinking of the wind and all it carries. A boy rides his horse through the hills, down into the valley, through thick brush. As the horse makes its way through the brush it struggles and sweats as if moving against an invisible weight. The night the boy returns he goes to bed ill. His head is aching. His skin has broken out. He is nauseous. In the morning the horse is dead. The boy learns that just on the other side of the mountain in the direction of the wind several bombs have been detonated. In a few years he too will be dead.

  In 1862, a rapid-fire gun designed by Dr. Richard Gatling is tested at Indianapolis. With this gun 200 shots can be fired each minute.

  It is a decade before the boy rides his horse through those hills. There is no perceptible wind in the laboratory. Men in overalls have worked for days to make large piles of graphite and uranium. They do not know the meaning of what they do. Enrico Fermi is about to create the first chain reaction. The general has asked him if there is any danger that the chain reaction will go on forever, blowing up Chicago, destroying Illinois, North America, the world. Fermi tells him the risk is negligible. He has designed certain safety measures. A mechanical apparatus will insert a rod to still the reaction after just a few moments. During those moments some of the scientists present will fear the reaction is going to be infinite. But even if the mechanical apparatus were to fail, Fermi has assigned a man to stand with an ax next to a rope which has the rods suspended from it. And if the ax should fail, two other men stand nearby with buckets of a chemical which will also stop it. The experiment is successful. At Enrico Fermi’s bidding a chain reaction is started, and then it is stopped.

  Every cell arises from a cell.

  It is Thursday, the twelfth of July 1945. Many objects are taken out of the laboratory at Los Alamos and moved along a secret road to a site simply labeled “S.” In that place, the many objects are assembled into one, and this is moved to a stretch of desert known as Jornada del Muerto, Tract of the Dead. There it is hung on a scaffolding high up toward the sky. On July 14 and 15, heavy thunderstorms break out over Los Alamos.

  The United States Army buys 100 Gatling rapid-fire guns. Within twenty years, this weapon is to be used in the Franco-Prussian War, the Russo-Turkish War, and in Egypt, Cuba, West Africa …

  It is 5:30 A.M., July 16, and, very silent, Enrico stands just more than five and a half miles from the scaffolding. He is holding two pieces of paper, one in each hand. There is a white light that brightens the earth. It stuns the surrounding hills and swallows the sky. Enrico Fermi lets the pieces of paper fall from each hand. A ball of fire appears and grows larger and larger. And then there is a sound so loud it seems more than sound, to be force itself. But Fermi does not hear this sound. He is watching the paper fall, looking to see how far the paper, in its trajectory toward the earth, is moved off its course by the ensuing wind. In this he hopes to guess the power of the explosion.

  Like the stone in a cherry, the nucleus of the cell is in the cell’s center. And inside this center are the chromosomes, the coded knowledge, genes. When the cells divide, to duplicate this knowledge, each chromosome splits in
two.

  There are conversations that go on wordlessly with the dead, with animals, with the very young or very old. It is years ago in Italy in the life of a boy not yet fourteen. This boy had a brother closer to him than air to skin, and this brother has just died. The two boys had spent hours alone together building electric motors, drawing designs for the engines of airplanes, the movements of their hands, their minds inseparable. The grief of the living boy is great. But now Enrico Fermi trains himself to walk past the hospital where his brother has died, without crying. To console himself he immerses his mind in the study of science.

  By 1903, the year of his death, Gatling saw his weapon improve. Loose powder and percussion ignition were replaced with primed metallic cartridges, using smokeless powder. And the hand crank was replaced with an electric motor.

  On this earth there have been many diasporas, many refugees, and many living, hence subtle and intricate, communities torn apart that were once whole. There is a way that we are all connected. Even through the eyes of science we can see it. One need not be a mystic to know this. Common sense gives us a daily taste of our union with all kinds of beings and phenomena which we have imagined, in other moments, to be separate from us. That gray haze which settled over the city across the bay has now been diffused and all the water and the sky are dim in color. The wind that diffuses it blows through the open doors of this room, and right now I breathe in some of that grayness.

  Cells are not static. Continually they break down, rebuild the material of their own lives, always changing what they are at any given moment.

  It is August 5, 1945. Carefully a pilot goes over the last details of his flight. Tomorrow he will fly over Hiroshima. He has made a decision. He gives an order to his maintenance crew. Before the night is over the name Enola Gay shall be painted in clear block letters on the side of his plane.

  An invention made in 1986, the center fire metallic cartridge, combining propellant, primer and bullet in one case, makes possible the invention of magazine rifles, automatic pistols and machine guns.