Nowhere Man

by Aleksandar Hemon

  “Don’t know,” Rachel said, “ask our foreign resident philosopher.”

  “They send the light, and then they die, and then the light comes to the earth.”

  “Still don’t get it,” Dallas said.

  “It could be another billion years before the light reaches the dark recesses of your fucking brain,” Rachel said.

  Vincent chuckled, still looking out. They passed large white cisterns huddled by the road, ladders on their sides like scars.

  “When I was a kid,” Rachel said, “my mother told me that these cisterns were full of orange juice, and that those steel mills produced cookies.”

  “Maybe they are,” Pronek said.

  “Don’t think so,” Dallas said.

  “Yeah, mothers tell you things like that,” JFK said. “When I was a kid I fell off a pickup truck and was in the hospital for a month and my mom told me that it was because I didn’t pray enough.”

  “Jesus,” Rachel said.

  “Exactly.”

  They drove through a wooded stretch where the cobwebby fog still clung to the feet of the trees. There were a couple of does grazing calmly in a ravine.

  “Look!” Rachel exclaimed. Pronek leaned toward her window and their shoulders rubbed. His left hand was on the seat behind her, nearly touching her neck. He imagined his fingers gliding down the tip of her spine, then between her shoulder blades.

  “I used to be very smart,” JFK said, “before I fell off the truck.”

  It was cold in Ohio. The van pushed against the wind, smashing snowflakes on its windshield. Snow whorls fidgeted on the fringes of the road. A silhouette of a person followed by a silhouette of a dog walked across a prairie patch, a cloud of snow twirling around them. A silvery train glided across the horizon. In a car passing them, there was a boy asleep in the back seat, strapped and peaceful. Then a monumental truck cast its shadow over them, the word MOVING appearing in Pronek’s window, letter by letter.

  “Let me tell you about Oak Ridge,” JFK said, one hand on the wheel, the other on his pate. “Although you probably know everything already.”

  “Oh, enlighten us, our kind leader,” Rachel said.

  “Let’s hear this song out first,” Dallas said. The voice was whining: “Mom and dad have let me down . . .” JFK turned off the radio.

  “It’s a great song.”

  “Sorry, cowboy.” JFK cleared his throat. “Oak Ridge was built under a cloak of great secrecy during World War Two. It was part of the Manhattan Project. The plutonium they dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki came from Oak Ridge. A hell of a lot of plutonium they put in warheads after the war came from Oak Ridge.”

  “Can we stop to piss?” Dallas said.

  “Now they produce who knows what. So there’ll be an action there, we’ll do a little demo, some might get arrested, the usual stuff.”

  “I can’t get arrested,” Pronek said.

  “Can we stop to piss?”

  “Perhaps you can be quiet?” Vince said, with a deep tranquil voice.

  They stopped.

  It was still cold—cloudlets of steam escaped their mouths. Pronek smoked, trotting in place, his left hand in his pocket. A man in a fedora was sleeping in a decrepit Cadillac in the parking lot, his hat pulled over his eyes. Vince and JFK were in front of a vending machine in the rest-stop building. Rachel embraced herself, lifting her gaze toward the sky, as if expecting something to come down. Pronek looked up, and there was nothing but endless grayness.

  “My grandfather worked at Oak Ridge,” Rachel said.

  Pronek shook his head, disbelieving her to make her tell more. He stuck the cigarette in his mouth and put the other hand in his pocket.

  Her grandfather, she said, survived Auschwitz. His entire family perished, except for an uncle who had moved to Chicago after World War I. Her grandfather was in his late twenties, but he looked older. He came to Chicago and stayed with his uncle, sharing a room with his two teenage cousins, boys who only cared about girls. They despised Rachel’s grandfather—he was skinny and rugged and exuded the scent of European death and sickness, the fetid refugee smell. They pegged their noses with their fingers when he walked in the room. He slept on their couch, and sometimes he would open his eyes and they would be leaning over him, sniggering. He left after a month—he had a biology degree and found a job in a butter factory. She imagined him walking between the vats of butter, Rachel said, his hands greasy, his heart soaked with sorrow.

  “Let’s go,” JFK said.

  He didn’t want to work in a butter factory. He wrote a letter to the University of Chicago. It was in broken English, but he managed to convey that he was a biologist and that he had studied with a famous scientist in Prague. He didn’t mention that he was an Auschwitz alumni, because he thought that they wouldn’t want to hire him.

  “Where’s Dallas?” JFK asked them.

  “He’s urinating,” Vince said.

  “Right now,” Rachel said, “he’s holding in his hand what he likes most.”

  They could see him at the far end of the parking lot, standing in the dry, frozen grass up to his knees. He shook it off, zipped up, and ran toward them, flapping his arms as if flying.

  “Why couldn’t you use the facilities like everybody else?” JFK grumbled.

  “I’m Mother Nature’s son,” Dallas said.

  “Well, Father Society might get you arrested and have your ass whupped,” Rachel said.

  They filed into the van.

  “I reject society,” Dallas said, “and its stupid rules.”

  “Buckle up!” JFK ordered.

  He got a letter from the University of Chicago and they offered him a job in the lab, studying the effects of radiation on living organisms. The person who offered him a job sent him back his letter with little grammar lessons in the margins. It was at the University of Chicago that he met her grandmother: she was an astronomy student, but worked part time as a secretary for the nuclear people. He asked her out and they went to the Aragon Ballroom, where he could not jitterbug or swing or whatever they danced, all he knew were waltzes and polkas. They fell head over heels in love. Rachel’s grandfather lived in a basement in Humboldt Park, and Grandmother lived with her parents, moral Hyde Park Jews, so all they could do was dance. Anyway, he would go down to Oak Ridge. They would expose plants and mice to radiation, plutonium and isotopes and shit, and watch what would happen.

  “Yeah,” JFK said, “there is an African-American community called Scarboro there, and they lived downstream from the lab, you know, kids swimming in a radioactive stream. Sometimes they’d let the steam out too. And they watched what would happen.”

  “What happened?” Pronek asked.

  “Oh, you know, the usual stuff, kids born without a spine, cancer, tumors.”

  “Shit!” Dallas said.

  “Proud to be American,” Vince said.

  Rachel’s grandfather went down to Tennessee every once in a while with a driver, because he didn’t want to drive. He sat in the back seat writing letters to Grandma, describing the landscape and all his thoughts and all his love. They would stop somewhere and he would mail the letter, and start a new one immediately. It took them two or three days to get down there and she would get ten, fifteen letters. He would stain the letter with grease and write “Kentucky grease” below. He would send her flowers and dry tree leaves pressed in the envelope. When he saved up money, he bought a camera and had the boys at Oak Ridge develop the film and make photos and he’d send them to her—he wanted to be with her all the time, all the time.

  Rachel had seen the letters: his English was bad, no articles, no tenses, scrambled sentences, but they were beautiful, she said, brimming with old-fashioned, old-worldly schmaltzy love.

  They passed houses tiny on the horizon, and clouds above them, a shadowy curtain of rain hanging down. They passed furrowed fields and mall clusters with gas stations and McDonald’s and Subways, then the van would sink between hills and go up and down into valleys
with vapid ponds. Pronek imagined writing letters to Rachel, describing these hills and how they reminded him of places in Bosnia.

  He would do his experiments thinking of Grandma. In those days, they didn’t care much about radioactivity—in fact, until the day he died, his bones rotten, he claimed that radioactivity was harmless. Anyway, he would stir uranium in a pot, as if cooking, no masks or gloves, nothing, and he would be thinking of Grandma, her alabaster thighs and her gentle hands, whatever, and a drop of uranium would leap out of the pot and land on his lip, and he would just wipe it off.

  Rachel moved her thumb across her lips, slowly, then licked them, while Pronek watched, mesmerized.

  “Where did you get that corny shit?” Dallas said.

  “Shut up!” Vince said.

  The spot where the uranium drop fell burned and he wrote to Grandmother that his lips were burning to kiss her.

  They drove through Kentucky, over high bridges spanning lumpy red and ochre hills. They drove through towns consisting of boarded-up houses and a Jiffy Lube shop. They drove past tranquil grazing horses, tall and lean, raising their heads to look into the distance, then moving, trot by trot, until they were galloping in circles enclosed by a white fence. Pronek imagined them rising and jumping over the fence, but then was afraid that they might break their legs landing.

  “I have the friend,” Pronek said, “who likes horses very much. My best friend in Sarajevo.”

  “Does he have a horse?” Rachel asked.

  “I had a horse,” Dallas said. “My grandfather in Texas—”

  “That’s nice,” Rachel said. “Except nobody asked you.”

  “Oh, no, he doesn’t,” Pronek said. “But he always dreamed about the horses. I will show you his letter that he wrote me. It is very sad.”

  “The letter he wrote you,” Rachel said.

  “Right,” Pronek said.

  “Not his letter that he wrote you.”

  “Okay.”

  “I noticed,” Dallas said, “that you use a lot of the’s.”

  “The what?”

  “The none-of-his-goddamn-business the!” Rachel hissed.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you?” Dallas slammed his hand against the dashboard—a puff of dust rose under the Kentucky-hill light.

  “Nothing the fuck is wrong with me. I just can’t stand you.”

  “Hey, hey, hey!” JFK said.

  “I will read you the letter,” Pronek said. “I have it at the home.”

  “At home,” Dallas said. “At home.”

  They slept in the same tent, Pronek squeezed between Dallas and Rachel, JFK on the far end with Vince. They felt the chilly night pasting the frost on the tent, the moon scintillating through the walls. Pronek lay on his back, feeling the warmth of Rachel’s body through the sleeping bags. He heard her breathing, peaceful and deep. He inhaled the smell of her hair, her sweat, and her fatigue. Dallas was snoring, JFK was tossing and turning. Pronek turned toward Rachel and watched her face under the feeble, diffuse moonlight seeping through. Her forehead unwrinkled and her eyelids curved beautifully, her eyelashes still. Her lips were motionless, no word forming in her mouth. The sleeping-bag hood framed her face, as if holding it up for Pronek to see, a stray lock resting on her temple.

  Then she opened her eyes.

  Pronek was petrified. She gazed at him from her depths, she clearly knew he had been watching her. She blinked without fuss, comfortable with Pronek’s look stroking her face. She moved her head toward him, closed her eyes, and planted a kiss on his lips. Pronek was so frozen, the unreality of the moment stiffening the muscles in his back and neck, that he couldn’t respond, until he felt her tongue parting his lips and he let it in.

  “If you press your dick against me one more time,” JFK said, “you’re going to have to sleep outside. How’s that?”

  “What the fuck are you talking about?” Dallas said, and turned toward Pronek. Pronek felt the heat of Dallas’s body on his back, but Rachel’s hand was moving across his face, and he closed his eyes, his lips burning.

  They had a couple of hours before the protest, and JFK dropped them off at the American Museum of Science and Energy. Rachel made Pronek stand under an American flag, got down on her knees at his feet, and took a picture of his face, headed by his chin, the flag limp over him. Pronek had woken up that morning thinking that he might have dreamt it all. Rachel gave him no reassurance: she busied herself with excavating a toothbrush from her backpack. She’d look up at Pronek smilelessly, wearing the CONFUSION IS SEX shirt, which he could not help finding ominous. On their way to the museum, she sat in the front seat, and he was convinced that whatever peaks of love they had reached last night, whispering and softly kissing, they tumbled down to the bottom this morning. JFK drove them through the fields of forlorn malls, parking lots, and fast-food joints, like forts, on their edges. They went by a pond on which a couple of swans floated with their heads bowed, but Pronek could not tell whether they were plastic or real. The possibility that the world could never respond to his desires tortured him.

  The museum was full of elderly women in floral jackets, their wrinkles made-up, their glasses magnifying their eyes. One of them said: “Well, if you want a chain reaction, you gotta have graphite,” with a thick Southern accent, and Pronek was afraid that they might address him in their general enthusiasm—his accent would sound even more foreign and conspicuous. He anchored himself to Rachel and followed her like a shadow, hoping all along that she would give him a signal that would make last night real. She paced slowly through The Secret City room, her hands in her back pockets.

  There was a prophet, a panel on the wall said, whose name was John Hendricks. In the 1890s, the prophet had put his ear to the ground and heard a terrible voice saying that this valley would be flooded with strangers seeking salvation, arriving here to unleash the soul of the stars. Rachel frowned at the panel and walked on toward a poster of a red-haired forties beauty pouting her thick, gorgeous lips—WANTED! FOR MURDER! HER CARELESS TALK COSTS LIVES! the poster read. But Pronek wondered about the prophet, what had happened to him. Had they hung him? Had they rolled him in tar and feathers? Had he become their leader? Could he have known what would happen in the end? Rachel was standing in front of black-and-white pictures of mud fields and “Negro Hutments” in their middles. There were pictures of a herd of smiling white-clad nurses; of women happily smoking in a prefabricated house; of uniformed, unsmiling guards searching through Santa’s bag, his hands up. Pronek wanted to ask her about last night and kept rehearsing the question, but could not get it right. The question-forming addled his brain and he stood in front of the pictures uncomprehending. There were boys playing marbles and a theater marquee reading IS EVERYBODY HAPPY? There were Geiger counters and nylon hoses in glass cases. There were army officers standing next to a uranium cache. Pronek could smell Rachel: the wet-autumn-leaves scent of unchanged clothes and slumber sweat, the scent that had entered his nostrils last night and would not leave. There were two young women, with their legs prudently together, sitting in front of a wall of containers populated with lab mice. In the Big Boy room, there were nuclear mushrooms swelling in leaps in the desert. Rachel stopped in front of the mushroom pictures and rolled her eyes and shook her head, and Pronek feared that the old Southern ladies might see her, think it unpatriotic, and start admonishing her for her behavior, just as he was about to ask her about last night. He caught up and stepped in front of her. “The last night . . .” he murmured. She rose on her toes and kissed the Y between his eyebrows, her hands still in her pockets, as the old ladies ambled and swerved around them, scoffing.

  Pronek watched a couple of Greenpeace people chain themselves to the gate of the Laboratory, while bodies lay strewn on the driveway, eager to passively resist, Rachel’s body in the center, her arms at her sides, her palms pressing the concrete. He stood across the road with the sign saying WE WANT THE FUTURE! and feared for Rachel. He saw security climbing over the gates, moving swif
tly and angrily, yelling at the chained people. A couple of guards started cutting the chains, the rest started picking up the bodies and telling them their rights as a Black Maria came from around the curve as if it had been hiding there all along. “One two three four we don’t want no nukes no more!” Pronek chanted, standing next to a midgety guy with pork-chop sideburns and heavy boots. He occasionally corrected the chant: “One two three four we don’t want any nukes anymore!” and the midgety guy looked at him askance as if suspecting him to be an FBI spy. Two tough-looking security guards picked up Rachel, one grabbing her ankles (Pronek imagined them delicate and fragile), the other grabbing her armpits (Pronek knew the smell), and she slumped between them, her butt almost touching the ground. He closed his eyes, and mumbled to himself: “Bring her to me,” as if sending a telepathic message. But the men in uniform did not receive it and packed Rachel away into the Black Maria. Pronek envisioned himself in jail with Rachel, then getting away with her. They would drive across America together, and then sail across the Pacific.

  The South Side factories still spewed fire and smoke. Pronek saw the Chicago skyline on the horizon, the boxy shapes alight against the navy-blue sky, cold and splendid.

  “This is pretty,” he said, to no one in particular, as everybody except JFK was asleep: Vince put his Chip-and-Dale bag under his cheek and leaned against the window. Dallas drooled in the front seat. Rachel had her head on Pronek’s shoulder, her hand touching his thigh. Warm air was coming out of her nostrils down his arm, her hair tickling his cheek. His back was tight and it hurt, but he didn’t want to move.

  “Yeah, it’s pretty,” JFK said.

  Rachel slept on the El, still pressing her temple against the tip of Pronek’s shoulder, despite the hellacious noise and a posse of kids rapping over it about their life in the Robert Taylor homes. Two young women sat close in front of them, their long dark hair falling over the handlebars. Pronek saw the left one leaning toward her friend, touching her ear with her lips ever so slightly and saying: “I love you.” The train surfaced from the underground and the lights of the city glared through the grimy windows. The women got off at Belmont, holding hands.