About the Book
“Reading Death Valley is like going on a road trip into the hallucinatory landscape of the CIA’s repressed memories. Hypnotic and startling, with a cast of troubled artists and agents, this sensual novel is a lush fever dream of power, politics, betrayal and revenge. With scenes so vivid and unflinching and downright bizarre, this novel gets under your skin like the desert sand at its core.”
JENNIFER LOVE GROVE, author of Watch How We Walk
“Equal parts Twin Peaks and Alice in Wonderland, Susan Perly’s Death Valley is a Film-Noir-Spy-Western – hallucinogenic, thought-provoking and bizarre enough to satisfy anyone who thinks about art, nuclear fallout, classic films, conspiracies or love. It’s wild enough to be fiction, and real enough to blow your mind.”
MICHELLE BERRY, author of Interference
Love is complicated. It’s 2006 and Vivienne Pink, a photojournalist with an eye for war, is flying to Las Vegas to capture images of servicemen deploying for combat in Iraq. Together with her novelist husband and their housemate, an intelligence operative, Vivienne plans a side trip to Death Valley to confront an old enemy, but her scheme is soon complicated by a handsome young soldier on his way to war and a retired counterterrorism agent wearing a bird suit. Together they begin an atomic road trip through empty canyons, old film locations and the Nevada desert’s nuclear test site, where reality shifts like sand beneath their feet. This is Death Valley, and the fallout is hilarious and harrowing.
for Dennis
The harvest is past, the summer is ended,
and we are not saved.
– JEREMIAH 8:20
In other words, through the medium of a camera,
I experienced an encounter with a deeper space-time.
– DAIDŌ MORIYAMA
Contents
1: THE ATOMIC AGE
2: THE BURNING MONK
3: PINK LEATHER JACKET
4: NEON
5: THE BIRDMAN OF PARIS
6: VAN GOGH IN HIROSHIMA
7: THE MISFITS
8: OVER THE RAINBOW
9: CHEMICAL DONNY
10: KING UBU
11: AUTOPSY ON THE AIR
12: NAGASAKI, NEVADA
13: A SINGLE MUTANT SHEPHERD
14: NUCLEAR PHARAOHS
15: THE JACKRABBIT SPOKE
16: THE HAWK MOTH
17: A BETTER EDEN
18: IN THE KINGDOM OF RHYOLITE
19: ROOM 214
20: THUNDERBIRD
21: WALK, AMBLE, TROT, GALLOP AND LOPE
22: ENEMY WATER
23: FEAR FACTORIES
24: TWO VIEWS OF MANZANAR
25: THE UBEHEBE CRATER
26: DEATH VALLEY ODALISQUE
27: ARROGANT BASTARD
28: ATOMIC PYTHON TATTOO
29: THE NEW DRONES
30: SWITCHEROO
31: FALLOUT ALICE
32: LASCAUX IN CALIFORNIA
33: FIVE DAYS
34: BIGHORN
35: THE DEAD BIRD
Acknowledgements
1
THE ATOMIC AGE
THE CHILDREN WALKED with their necks set up as evolutionary magnets. Who knew that our thyroids attracted radioactive iodine? Who knew that when the iodine flew over grass, flew over cows, flew over furniture, it flew into the bodies of children, it flew into their parents? Who knew that reindeer in Norway had radioactive thyroids from Chernobyl? Who knew that cesium-137 lasts for centuries? Who knew that the rocky land we look at from a plane is not done with us yet? Who knew that the radioactive dust from 1957 was still sitting in the rocky canyons below, in 2006?
Vivienne Pink, photographer of war, sat at the window of a plane making its way west, ascending from the sea level city of Toronto on the shores of Lake Ontario. Her final destination was the northern Mojave Desert, where fighter jets began their routine flights to Iraq and Afghanistan, where airmen were trained, and tens of thousands of servicemen had worked and become atomic veterans. Military land, where unions were tough and strong and boldly Western, and the sky took up the top two-thirds of any landscape. Vivienne Pink and her Olympus OM-1, by her side for thirty-three years, were taking a forced break from conflict zones. She was on an assignment to photograph fighting men before they deployed. Men on their last night before they flew out to die. She had made the assignment herself. She had her book half-done. It was December 26, 2006. She had five days to get a bunch of keepers.
She looked down at the Earth, the eyes of the avid hunter scanning over the wing to the canyons rising and falling in their mosaics and tunnels – rust, purple manganese, pale powdery green, mica, iron, gold, silver, red rock, red earth. The skin of the nation. Vivienne got out her camera: crusty patches appeared, white crust sinking into dark cratered areas. A shiny dome popped up beside a deep cut. Maybe it was an industrial cyst. Ahead pale green liquid swirled into red earth, bumps rose in purple and the world looked like a slide under a microscope, a cell with a story. This was the thrill. This was why you sat at the window. The greatest abstract art exhibit was right down there, on the planet. Well, it was the planet itself. Inside her body, similar-looking cells came and went, galaxies floating through her bloodstream.
A neck of rock appeared. She snapped it, seeing a folded part that looked like an ear. The first ear. The last ear of a damaged man. A polished chute. Vivienne looked at her right arm at the window. There was a three-inch white patch on her pink-olive flesh, a white patch with a distinct red rim. Down below she saw the fractal of her arm passing under the wing. Our flesh is the cousin of the earth, with the illusion it is unrelated. The white patch had first appeared after she was in Iraq in 1986 at Samarra, investigating the underground mustard gas facility of Saddam Hussein. She had gone up the famous minaret and shook in the wind going round and round the narrow spire with no handrail, trying to see from the heights if any of the poison gas trucks could be spotted. Nothing. But her skin afterwards had started scaling, and her lungs became more prone to pneumonia, and the Mesopotamian sand she breathed in grated her lung passageways more than it had before. The doctors said her lungs thought they had been placed in enemy territory and so her passageways attacked her body, becoming fiery and inflamed. A cloud tower came to the window and peeked in. She loved clouds as seat companions. This, too, was why you sat at the window: clouds were swell seatmates, they kept silent.
Vivienne kept her nose pressed against the window: the earth was a homeless cell, and still it stood tall and it was a glorious ruined beauty. A billion years was a drop of water.
Nobody sat beside her in the middle seat or the aisle, but on the other side of the aisle three men sat: two with real short hair, one of them in khakis with a pressed crease on the legs. He was looking out the window. The other, in the middle, was in light grey wool pants and watching a movie on the television screen: Sean Penn and Naomi Watts in a car. Naomi’s eyes were closed, she was drunk, and Sean Penn loosened her seat belt; Sean the man with a newly transplanted heart, the heart of Naomi’s dead husband. It was 21 Grams. The first time she saw it, bootleg in Fallujah, was with her pal intelligence agent Val Gold in a windowless room in a safe house. Val said, “Imagine another man is using your husband’s heart to live. Imagine your body without water. It will weigh only twenty-one grams.”
Vivienne lifted her camera, watching the man in the middle as he moved his face close to the tiny screen. His eyes met the eyes of Sean Penn. For a moment the tender emotion the actor brought to the screen transferred to the viewer, who moved his head closer as if to solace the distressed woman in the car. Vivienne grabbed that shot.
The man in the aisle seat had greasier hair and looked too pale for his white skin, like he might smell of last night’s beer drama. He had on a harmless
checked shirt in non-saturated blues, the shirttails out, giving away that he had buttoned in a hurry – one button off. He scratched his hair and the semi-permanent-looking sweat stains under his arm showed. He had a large backpack that he rested his big white sneakers on, blocking the clean-cut spit-and-polish men from getting out if the plane went down. Vivienne pictured him as a rock climber flying to the Nevada canyons, a guy in a hurry with low blood sugar. And those shoes: way too new. Average height, average weight, Caucasian, late thirties, kept that pack close, afraid to even put it up top. Why? No bombs today, please.
The drinks wagon came by. Vivienne ordered an apple juice, no ice. Never trust ice on a plane. Never trust ice, anywhere. The pleasant thin steward put ice in the plastic cup. Vivienne repeated, No ice, adding a darling, smiling and putting her eyes into the smile. The steward did not mind, he gave a mea culpa smile back, dumped the ice out, filled the cup with the apple juice and handed her the can, too. Plane and shadow flew over the empty land. Mountains rose up to meet the wings.
The plane headed right for the side of a mountain, then it tilted and banked over the last mountains hiding the surprise sparkling down in the military valley.
It was their destination, the glittering cup in the desert. Area 24. Also called by its Spanish name, Las Vegas.
Here in the northern Mojave the light was prodigious, it was the beaming of plenty, a wide-open crystal clinic showing how the desert bent objects and bent light itself, how the sky seemed stoned and nutty and bright. Fighter planes rose and fell, shuttles flew men to work at weapons testing areas and jet testing areas and nuclear waste storage areas and war rehearsal areas and explosives practice areas and counterterrorism and remote drone piloting areas. Men sat in casinos who were third- and fourth-generation locals who had worked the hard land and serviced the hard war work. This had been a military valley for half a century; it was busy and employed, for now the country was in its fourth year of a new big war. And this was a key spot.
Before there was Chernobyl wind, before there was Three Mile Island rain, there were the Nevada Nagasakis, there were the Nevada Hiroshimas. This was the nuclear valley inside the nuclear ranges. And the iodine waited for your neck, that radiation magnet. The wind sought even the birds of flight.
VIVIENNE PICKED UP her hard-shell red suitcase and waited for a cab outside the civilian terminals at McCarran airport. She had her Ray-Bans on. Cheap sunglasses were great if you did not work with your eyes, but even with polarized lenses, she was squinting.
Vivienne Pink, sniper of light, hunter of subjects, late of Baghdad and Kabul and Beirut, rolled through Godzilla Canyon. The Santa Ana winds were blowing in, bending the tall sentry palms lined up on the boulevard, rocking the cab, hurling paper cups and girlie brochures and shards of mystery items against the vehicle’s sides and windshield. Desert cities used to be horizontal with miles between short hotels that looked more motel-like and imitated the land, thin strips with tall sky around them. Now the desert burgs had grown vertical and the sky was like cut slices of blue peeking between the concrete towers and tens of thousands of glass windows taking up the space that used to be air. The metastasizing hospitality tumours galumphed across the desert land like Japanese horror movie Godzillas, eating air, eating old radiation, burping up clouds, refluxing forgotten legs and arms in dead elevator shafts, surrounding tarmacs for a showdown, eating the tiny planes, the Jeeps, the tiny soldiers leaving for wars on a map. From drought to drought.
Traffic was light. It was that lacuna between Christmas and New Year’s. A seven-minute ride from the terminal and Vivienne was checking in to the Flamingo hotel, she was up in the elevator, into her requested good-luck room 27117, and unpacking her red suitcase with clothes of pursuit, laying them out on the bed. Her clothes were part of the tools of her hunt: khakis, a tight army-green long-sleeved jersey, shiny tie-up patent-leather shoes and her lucky pink leather jacket. She checked inside the right-hand pocket. Good. That Swiss Army knife was still there.
Vivienne liked company in a hotel room so she switched on the TV: there was Humphrey Bogart, getting out of a car at Ed’s Gas Station. Vivienne changed clothes, watching Bogart. Love it, she thought, High Sierra. Bogart was talking to the gas jockey who was not young; he was telling Bogart, “That there mountain is the highest in the United States, Mount Whitney.” Bogart, the ex-con, Mad Dog Earle, on the lam into the Eastern Sierra of California, told the gas jockey he was going to the mountains for his health.
There she was in the mirror. Five-foot-four, one hundred thirty pounds, nice waist-to-hip ratio, that inward curve men liked, set off by the tight jersey, good bra with good uplift for her good breasts, khakis not too tight, black patent shoes polished before she left Toronto. Lizard earrings just limey and shiny enough to attract a man, arouse his interest. On TV, Bogart at Brown’s Auto Court was showing the girl with the club foot the stars. “It’s always like this out in the desert,” Bogart said. “Look…that’s Jupiter…that’s Venus.”
Vivienne leaned into the mirror, applied a wand of black-blue mascara to her lashes, rose gloss to her lips (it had a nice scent), a bit of gloss to her dark, carefully arched eyebrows. Eyebrows were key, eyebrows made the frame for a face. She wet her fingers, messed up her short auburn hair. Done. She left her long neck scar untouched.
She walked back to the bed, picked up the camera and in the reflection of the TV screen showing the manhunt, a white salt playa where the tiny black car of Humphrey Bogart drove up a tiny thread road, Vivienne shot a photo of herself, Baby Pink, Self-Portrait, December 26, 2006. She put the camera back on the bed, left the room and closed the door to 27117.
Down the hall, down twenty-six floors in the elevator, across the gaming floor, past roulette, slots, sports book, video poker, real poker, wheelchair men with oxygen tubes, one-eyed men, Vivienne went up the Tropical Breeze coffee shop ramp, past a group of cowboys here for the winter rodeo. A legless man alone was swinging through his crutches, his eyes dead set on Vivienne, his eyes saying Reconsider me and he passed on by.
At the entrance to the coffee shop, she scanned the room. Tables and booths full. Then her eyes caught on a white T-shirt sitting one hundred feet away. The back of a man sitting at the far counter. Her gut took a picture of the man’s back – good shoulders, nice neck, short buzzed hair. She needed to make real what she had just visualized. Her heart was pounding like a calmly paced athlete, a nice controlled emergency rate. The room of eaters became a soft blur. Her forearms felt hot. The T-shirt man looked around, as if he heard a call. She locked the photographic prey into her sight, moving to him, seeing no seat near him, moving in the steady tunnel pacing, fifty feet, seeing a couple to his right pick up their cheque, moving quickly ahead with purpose, forty feet, twenty, ten and slipping into the one vacant seat. Her hands reached for her camera between her breasts, but of course it wasn’t there. Her mind knew it, but her body reacted with muscle memory. No cameras were permitted on the gaming floor. She better work fast to get him to come with her, and pose for her in that white T-shirt. If logic came in, the photograph was gone.
The waitress appeared. DAYSEE by name tag, from San Antonio, Texas. Daysee wore the customary Culinary Workers Union button. Vegas was not only a military town deep in the mountain valley, it was a big union town. Everybody in Vegas was in service.
Mister White T had a newspaper open in front of him.
He did not look at her. He had come to be in a busy coffee shop, militantly alone. It was an urban thing. You could not do it in a small town, where everybody knew you. Urban people liked to be out, watching and ignoring each other. So he probably came from a city. He was super fit, so he worked out or he was in the service. He looked as young as twenty-two or he could be in his early thirties. His cheekbones gave off the micro-glitters of an easygoing but angry man.
He tore one sugar pack, two sugar packs and three. He let the sugar pour into his coffee cup, which was half full.
The waitress asked, “Algo a comer
? Something to eat, sweetie? A drink? Café? Coffee, anything, mi reina?” Por supuesto, of course, this was Vegas, a Latino-infused town.
“No gracias, nada a comer, I’m good,” Vivienne said. “No food, maybe later, but ahora, right now, Mamita, I’d kill for a coffee, por favor. Sin azúcar, oscurito, por favor, mil gracias.” Daysee was pouring hot coffee out of the Pyrex pot into the plain white mug by the time Vivienne said por favor.
Vivienne sipped her coffee, warming her winter fingers around the mug. Good. Now the white T-shirt knew she spoke Spanish, he knew the sound of her voice, that was key.
He knew what she looked like, what she sounded like, how she talked to service people. How she liked her coffee. Very black, no sugar. Vivienne added for good measure, “Soy bastante dulce, pues no necesito azucar.” I am sweet enough as it is, I do not need sugar. Flirt woman to woman with the waitress, use the agency of the waitress to flirt with him, the stranger.
She looked down to see his shoes, because that would tell her a lot. Some intel men Vivienne knew started with the shoes, profiling the way a Spaniard dresses, from the shoes up. He had on black shoes, laced well, new laces, well-polished.
He stretched his neck, turning it around and around to get the cricks out. It was a good neck, unblemished, muscular. He was a white boy and pale. But he could have been pale in the way intelligence men or men with dodgy titles or State Department men in tropical locales or desert missions are pale. Working in the shadows of sun-drenched places, working at night, working inside, travelling in tinted windows through the revolutions they set in motion. Maybe he put a dark jacket over his white T-shirt in those circumstances. He could be the ensign or he could be a young captain. He might fly for the navy. He might be an airman. There were tens of thousands of them from way up at Fallon outside of Reno and for thousands of square miles down here to Mojave 24 environs. She needed this one. She could already feel the look of his back by a window at dusk, in that white T-shirt. How someone might see the photograph and feel what she felt, the first time she saw him.
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