Vivienne stopped at the maps, just inside. She liked the look of all the maps of Nevada, California and Utah lined up by the store window, with the gas pumps outside and the rock desert beyond. She lifted her camera. A short woman with a gravel smoker’s cough appeared at Vivienne’s armpit. She had on an olive green jumpsuit. In scripty gold writing a pocket said FRED. “No pictures of maps. No can do. Put it away.” Vivienne kept the camera up. The gravel-voice said, “Orders of the military.”
Vivienne laughed. “You can buy these same maps in any hotel in Vegas. They’re road maps.”
“I could call the authorities. Or how’s abouts I don’t call the MPs and we just fit you out with some nice quiet popcorn chicken.”
Vivienne was relentless. She was holding her camera in one hand, bouncing it up and down. “Miss,” the woman said, “you do happen to know we’re at war, don’t you?”
“Not me. I’m Canadian.”
“Well, la-di-fucking-da, ain’t she a party on a plate.”
Val walked over and kissed the gravel-voiced woman on the back of the neck. “Gold,” the woman said. “You termite, when did you blow into the desert? I got a package for you been waiting what is it, six months? You don’t write, you don’t call.” Coughing and chuckling at the same time.
Val had a cigarette lit for her, “Here, Jolene, we gotta get rid of that cough for you. Vivi baby, Jolene’s been servicing flyers since the stone age.”
“Are they secure?” Jolene asked. “Are they source-reliable?”
“You can trust them,” Val said.
“That is not what I asked, Gold.” Jolene pushed back the sleeves of her jumpsuit. She had a risen purple-red scar from her right wrist bone to her elbow. Vivienne took her camera in her own right hand, held it at her hip and took a shot of Jolene’s keloidal scar. That Olympus had such a nice quiet shutter.
“I want to check how Simtown is looking, Joley,” Val said. “It was pretty damn weather-beaten the last time I was in. We might want to freshen up the kitchen. Maybe refresh the autopsy.”
“Gold, the government is out of money.”
“Get a loan,” Val said. He was all matter of fact. “They’ll put up a third mortgage on this place.”
“You know as well as I do this is owned by the Feds.”
“Good. All the better.” He gave her a peck on the cheek. “Now now, Jolene, there’s always money for nukes. It’s in our self-interest. Iran is looking iffy, Kim Jong-il is looking dicey, Israel is looking dodgy –”
“Let’s call the whole thing off,” Vivienne said.
“Jolene, meet my girl Vivienne.”
She extended her left hand. It had that regular drought look of the desert people, filigreed white pathways all over the skin. It had rained 1.3 inches in the last six months.
“And this,” Val said, grinning, “is my girl Vivi’s husband. Johnny, meet Jolene. Jolene, this is Johnny.”
“So, this is the pair they set you up with,” Jolene said.
“What is she talking about?” Vivienne asked. “‘Set you up?’ We invited you to live with us, after we met you at the draft-dodger counselling.”
“No worries,” Val said. “Jolene, take the people out back. Is Jack on the premises?”
“Jack’s always on the premises, Gold. You know that.” She spoke into her jumpsuit pocket. “Three for the EVOC.”
Val, Vivienne and Johnny walked to a red door at the back of the store, behind the shelves of cans and tape cassettes. When Val opened the red door, it was an IMAX landscape.
They were in a parking lot full of white, red and black cars. A yellow steam shovel was parked at an angle. Motorbikes were parked there together. There were no people coming or going. Next to the parking lot was a railway crossing, the familiar black-and-white lettering, the blinking lights, the brown boxcar sitting still. To the side, a white Ford Falcon was stopped at a stop sign, two figures inside. Vivienne tried to take in the whole scene: miles of desert all around, open land with far-off jagged mountains lit white with winter snow on top. Into this massive emptiness, the parking lot, the railway crossing, the cars had been placed, as if it were a film set.
“Bring them to the EVOC,” a voice said. “They will practice the PIT.”
A wheelchair rolled up; a man in the same olive green jumpsuit Jolene had been wearing, with the same name, Fred, on the left breast pocket, waved for them to follow him across the sand.
Johnny said to Vivienne in a stage whisper, “What the hell has your boyfriend got us into this time?”
As they walked past the parking lot, Vivienne took a shot of the white Ford Falcon. The two people inside it were dummies, she could see now. A woman in a white shirt, just like the one Vivienne put on this morning; a man in a black cowboy hat with a wide brim. “Seriously?” Vivienne said to Johnny. Were these the famous mannequins used in atomic tests? Good job they didn’t bleed or scream. Stuffing on fire tends to say nothing.
Where the hell had Val taken them? And what about Jolene’s comment about Val being placed with her and Johnny? Sure, Val was a spy. But wasn’t he their best friend?
Val was up ahead, chatting with the man in the wheelchair.
With thousands of acres of nothing on either side, a simulated city alley lay. The man rolled away. Val waved them forward down the alley. Vivienne walked past cute little piles of “urban” garbage. No rats, no raccoons, no stray dogs, just clean litter. And back stairs all tidy, fresh paint, geraniums in pots. Geraniums, Vivienne thought, snapping pics all the while. What did they think this was, the Costa Brava?
There was a white police vehicle ahead. Vivienne peered in the window, snapping the mannequin in his patrol blues. Fire extinguishers lined up behind each dwelling, neat, tidy, no people in sight yet. Vivienne Pink was born in a city; her people had lived in cities around the world for hundreds of years. No one ever spoke of fire extinguishers lined up in alleys. Was it possible that the big dogs in charge of setting up simulations didn’t know what it was they were actually simulating? Vivienne stepped into a puddle. There was no rain. Everything was dry yet there were puddles. At the end of the alley, a mannequin sat on a step, wearing rubber boots.
The voice spoke: “Take them to LASER VILLAGE.”
A real white car drove towards them. The driver wore a light grey suit, white shirt, no tie. Vivienne, Johnny and Val got in the back. Across the sand, then pavement began, then they were on a two-lane highway. Everywhere around them the land was a thin strip, the sky was filling Vivienne’s eyes. She felt lulled by the bright light. The highway was grey and perfectly maintained and empty. They stopped at a sign that read HOTEL BUILDING.
The front door was off a hinge, open. The man in the light grey suit walked in, and the three of them followed. There was a counter, with a cardboard sign folded on it, RECEPTION. There was an old-fashioned metal bell to ring for service. An orange lazy boy recliner sat in front of the reception sign. Its vinyl skin was torn, with flat stuffing sticking out. The wooden floor, dark and wide-planked, had gold metal rounds of ammunition all over it. A white plastic side table had a big screen TV on it, large and flat with wires out the back attached to nothing.
Mr. Grey Suit said, “Bringing them to the kitchen.”
They went past the reception and through a door to a room with a light grey table and metal curved legs. A sign on the table: KITCHEN.
There was a large white fridge covered in graffiti, which looked like the idea of graffiti sprayed by someone who had heard of graffiti but had never seen it except in movies where the graffiti was done by people who had only seen graffiti in movies. JAPAN said a poster on the wall, showing a latticed pavilion with a green mossy roof.
Another poster said, “‘I am Temujin…Barbarian… I fight! I love! I conquer…like a Barbarian!’ HOWARD HUGHES presents JOHN WAYNE · SUSAN HAYWARD. THE CONQUERER. CINEMASCOPE TECHNICOLOR.”
Beside it on the whitewashed kitchen wall was another poster: ONE-EYED JACKS. Marlon Brando was in a cowboy hat,
a jacket and a belt of ammunition, lying on a wide arc of sand, a rifle in his left hand, a pistol in his right hand, creased crinkled mountains in the distance and pinched sloping sand dunes closer behind him. “I know those dunes,” Vivienne said to Johnny. “That’s the Death Valley Dunes; that’s our dune, honey. There’s Marlon in Death Valley.”
“Be good,” said Mr. Grey Suit. “Don’t talk too much.”
The stove in the kitchen was copper brown. A dummy in camouflage clothing lay in front of the stove, headless. Where his head would have been they had stuck a wooden two-by-four and wrapped it in layers of thick plastic. There was a venetian blind on the wall just to the left of the stove to give the illusion of a window. Low-rent trompe l’oeil as interior decorating for the fake houses meant to be exploded. Your tax dollars well spent.
They returned to the car and drove on. The highway was clean, kempt. An oil tanker truck lay on its side ahead, on the sand shoulder. They kept driving. A man in a grey suit like their driver stood at the side of the road waving a pistol at an oil tanker truck that had yellow-and-red lettering on it. They stopped behind the long silver truck. The man with the pistol came around to the driver’s side window, he pointed the pistol and shot. “You cannot drive to Iran,” he said. “You cannot drive to Syria, turn around.” He shot into the window again. He got in and drove the tanker truck down the highway himself. They took a side road, where clouds of dust far off showed other vehicles present. A sign at the side of the road read in yellow on black: SOUTH OF MOSUL SIM.
Trucks appeared in great numbers, shining like tin and silver, waving perilously as wind came up, shaking, tipping.
Vivienne’s head was hurting. Pain started making its familiar route along her jaw, shattered back in Iraq, from her left ear to her lips. In her own body, she had a real place called Painville. Painville had its own roads, byways, eight-lane pileups. She got out of the car.
Here in the Nevada desert, they were simulating Iraqi highways she had been on, with petrol tankers through the northern Kurdish territory to Turkey, desert winds shaking them crazy. Her facial nerves got in on the glass jaw, and she bent forward, fighting the invasion inside herself, the embedded pain flashes not stopping. She kept taking pictures of mock-Iraq in front of her. Big space was a magnet for the dreams of men.
She got back in the white vehicle. Val had his eyes closed, unworried. Johnny squeezed Vivienne’s hand. The driver stopped at a small stucco cube. Over the door, in red neon, it said ON AIR. “Only her,” Mr. Grey Suit said, pointing at Vivienne. Val and Johnny stayed in the car. Mr. Grey Suit took Vivienne into the stucco cube and down a hallway to a glass wall. “Look in,” he said. It looked like an operating room. In lit red neon a sign said AUTOPSY ON AIR. On a metal table lay another wooden post with a mannequin head stuck on it. Two mannequins wearing headsets sat on either side of the dummy head. There was a microphone on the table. A knife lay near a yellow pad of paper.
“So,” Vivienne said to Mr. Grey Suit as he took her back outside to brightness. “Did all your medical examiners train at Two-by-Four U?”
He wasn’t laughing. He opened the back door. “Get in the car.” Val and Johnny were down the way, walking across the sand without her.
She got back in the white car, which drove on paving through the sand. A pile of dummies was burning on the side. The car stopped. Vivienne hopped out of the back, her camera up, snapping a man in an olive green jumpsuit kneeling, cutting open something furry. It howled. It bled. The kneeling man put a small dummy, a child mannequin perhaps, inside the still bleeding fur. Another green jumpsuited man standing nearby had an old-school rotary phone in his hand. He twirled it around and back. The real creature with the dummy stuffed in it blew up, scattering canvas arms, canvas legs and fur into the air. “Get in,” Mr. Grey Suit said. She did not know why they had taken her, and not the others.
They drove past further fires. Lobo scraps, mouse bits, pack rat portions, jackrabbit ears lay on both sides of the simulated highway, then they re-entered that fake back alley. The mannequin with rubber boots had not moved, the garbage lay undisturbed, the geraniums were perfect. One of the homes was on fire. “Time now,” Mr. Grey Suit said to Vivienne. “Get out.”
She walked what she thought would be a couple of feet down the short alley to the open sand, but she was still walking fifteen minutes later. She exited the alley finally. Six blocks of salt with nails in them sat in front of her. She walked alone across the sand. Signs she hadn’t seen before were lined up: SIMUNITION. DANGER SIMUNITION. NO OUTLET.
The air was blowing sand into her eyes, her nose, her mouth, her shoes. This was forever-sand. Vivienne knew this sand from Iraq. It lived in your armpits, your luggage. It fell out of books years later. She could see that parking lot, that railway line ahead. Where was Johnny? What had they done with her husband? Was it Val? What did that Jolene mean Val had been placed with them?
She had been clear she wanted to drive directly to Death Valley. What was the big deal about stopping here? Wait a minute, she thought, did Val set me up? What is his angle? Am I in an experiment? Has he been a fake friend all these years?
Hundreds of dogs ran towards her. Hundreds of white dogs. They stopped short of her feet. They began to eat sand. Their eye sockets glowed.
Ahead, two blurry figures wibbled in the windy light. Maybe that was Johnny and Val.
A Jeep drove up. A man at the wheel said, “I will take you to Control Point. Come along.”
12
NAGASAKI, NEVADA
THIS GUIDE WAS in regular clothes. Pale chinos, a pale blue work shirt. He drove to a lookout. “Down below,” he said.
It looked like a little army village. A small barracks by a huge white lake. On the right a set of jutting mountains with a deep road zagging up them, white on dark grey. That led to a small set of lower mountains on the other side of the lake.
In front of the white lake the land was flat, rolling here and there around large white circles. White roads had been cut through the grey-green earth, long flat metal roofing sat with upside-down Vs over buildings where rows of tiny vehicles were parked. “We’ll take you down to see one of the control rooms,” the guide said.
THEY STOOD IN a control room that looked like it was a set for a low-budget B movie, a space invasion scare. This was an actual control room for setting off an atomic explosion.
Two old office chairs, vinyl or bad leather, green, metal arms and back, with casters to swing up to the control panel or back to the high wall of blinking lights. Two large lamps hung from a ceiling beam. Harsh lighting, cold metal corners, white flooring. This was a utilitarian space, outfitted for maximum ease in atomic tasking. A reel-to-reel tape recorder, boxy amplifiers, grey drawers with metal handles, the blinking lights. On a separate table, a telex machine, bulky, stolid, on its own pedestal.
“This is where they…?” Vivienne asked.
“That’s right, ma’am. Try it out.”
Vivienne sat down in one of the office chairs, the guide pushing her right up to the control panel. It had a ledge and tilted back, three sections.
“Go ahead,” he said. “Push a button.”
She gave him a look. She smelled smoke. She could see Val’s reflection in the shiny panel. “What the hell, Val? Where were you?”
Val said, “Hello, Vivi.” His cigarette bobbing up and down, stuck to his lower lip. “That’s my girl, chief.”
The guide raised an eyebrow. “No smoking, sir, regulations. You’ll have to step outside.” Val kissed the back of Vivienne’s neck. He left the control room.
“Just you and me,” the guide said. “Go ahead, push the button right there.” He tapped an innocuous button on the panel, silver with a black rim. “Go ahead, it’s decommissioned, nobody’s going to get hurt.”
“That’s what they said in the old days,” she said, giving him more of that bold skepticism in her eyes.
“No, ma’am. If I may, that was never said. Go ahead.”
“I thi
nk I won’t,” Vivienne said.
“Then I will.” He reached past her left arm and pressed the button. A siren went off, a rising-falling wail. An air-raid siren: someone somewhere, or some thing unseen was coming for them. Vivienne saw no menace, but the siren kept going.
“Where are we?” she asked.
“Oh down by Frenchman Mountain. You’ll see Yucca Flat and Frenchman Flat outside the door.” They left the control room. The grey and white desert opened up. Val looked far away and also a footstep away. Desert optics are the original high definition. The guide pointed to the white salt playa and the mountains. “This is what they call Area 6.”
“How big is Area 6?” Vivienne asked. The siren stopped.
“Oh not too big, ma’am. Maybe eighty-two or eighty-three square miles.”
“Manhattan Island is twenty-five square miles.”
“You got that right. Now you take your Area 5, where the motels are.”
“Motels? You can stay here?”
“No ma’am, we have an excellent selection of motels we blow up. Or, ahem, blew up.”
“But you are still doing tests out here, I mean if you are blowing up motels.”
“President Bush cancelled Test Divine Strake. No, ma’am, nothing going on, no worries. No preoccupation. Everything’s good in the areas. Now Area 2 had seven tests, that was back in the ’50s. Now Area 3, well Area 3 is one of the big stars out here. In just six years they did seventeen tests. So you do the math.”
Vivienne was trying. Six years, seventeen atomic tests. “That is three,” she said. “Call it,” laughing, “two and a half or two and three-quarter nukes a year.”
“Call it three, ma’am. But that’s nothing. How about our Area 9, one of the, if I may be so bold as to say, biggies? Area 9 hosted 113 detonations. You’ve got your Area 7, which hosted oh somewhere in the nineties of detonations And now you’ve got your, well ma’am, you’ve got your underground bunkers, you’ve got your goat farmers, you’ve got your bad soil buried, you’ve got bunks for the men who don’t want to commute back home, but if they do, you know we shuttle them by plane back to base, end of day.” Sure, all those planes up and down in the sky over Vegas, and some of them were even civilian. Here came Val walking towards them, getting smaller as he got closer. The guide went on, “But now I’m leaving out the tests they did after they signed that Limited Test Ban Treaty. I bet you knew that the treaty was to end above-ground tests. Nothing about testing below. They got good use out of Area 3 then, twenty-five more tests after the peaceniks forced them underground.”
Death Valley Page 11