Death Valley

by Perly, Susan;

  15

  THE JACKRABBIT SPOKE

  A SHORT PERSON with tight grey curls, wearing that same green jumpsuit with Fred on the pocket took Vivienne, Johnny and Val to the vault. The vault had been loaded on a plane, flown to the desert and dropped right there. What was built to hold securities had been tortured. It had been set on fire, had bombs blown up inside its steel skin and now Vivienne snapped a pic of its steel hanging in bent filigrees of commerce untended. The guide motioned them to walk inside, past the door hanging off its hinges.

  The inner sanctum of the vault was like a darkroom. Vivienne was used to the dark cave, used to her pupils dilating, growing large, her eyes seeking out spots of light in darkness. She could see the slightest line of light along Val’s Roman nose.

  At the doorway, Vivienne saw a figure lit from behind – a jackrabbit. She had seen them before.

  The desert hare, Lepus californicus, the black-tailed jackrabbit, with that little black tail, the black eyes to go with it, the big black-rimmed ears. Those ears, classic. One-third of the creature was ears. Nothing to do with cuddly little bunny rabbits; jackrabbits were desert creatures, dark buff and black, what they called an agouti fur: fur chiaroscuro. Jacks liked the night. They gathered in big-eared groups by moonlight. The creature’s eyes, set back in its head, shone at the doorway, weird, malign, compelling.

  But wait. This jackrabbit was a big mother of a jack. Vivienne watched as its big body filled the doorway, its ears were still going where the doorway stopped.

  The jack wore a knee-length dress – full at the breasts, with a definite waist, an hourglass figure – and a thin black belt. It was a silky dress, shining in dark blood red and dark moss green stripes. A flattering lace collar revealed a nice swatch of the agouti dark-light fur below the neck. The sleeves of the jack’s dress were elbow length, on the left the sleeve led to a foot instead of an arm, on the right the sleeve led to a long pole with a hook on the end of it, a hook in gold.

  The hook was at Vivienne’s face. The jackrabbit spoke: “You’d better come with me.” The jackrabbit’s voice was flat and nasal, as if it had been taught to speak English by a human who spoke like a computer, emotion hidden. “Come with me.” The tiniest of twitches played around the jackrabbit’s mouth, by the facial pads and tufty whiskers. “I am not going to hurt you.” The one flat tone made the voice sound terrified.

  “Hey Sam,” Val said. “Got a smoke?”

  “No smoking,” the jackrabbit said. “I am not Sam.”

  Johnny was still scribbling away in his cardboard-backed Moleskine.

  “Come with me. All of you. Everybody.” The jackrabbit in the proper lady’s dress swung the hook through the dark, and paused, backlit in the doorway.

  The biggest covert war the US had ever waged was right here, in the Nevada desert. The jackrabbit stood with eyes black as poison plates. “Do not worry. Don’t you worry,” the giant jack said, tall as basketball heaven walking towards the eastern flats. “No worries.”

  “Worry,” Val said, walking between Vivienne and Johnny behind the jack’s red-green-striped sateen dress, its hem blowing in the windy sun. The shine blew around, light being blown by air motion. They walked further into global forgetting.

  A set of bleachers came into view, filled with spectators.

  Johnny was writing things in his notebook, walking, looking around, keeping his footing, doing thumbnail sketches of the jackrabbit, their feet, the bleachers ahead. “You need to sit here. You’re guests of honour,” the jackrabbit said. The flat tone made guests of honour sound like guests of death.

  “They’re dummies,” Vivienne said, lifting her camera. The jackrabbit had made no attempt to take it away from her. The bleachers were filled with dummies holding cameras. They looked like flour sacks with smiley faces on them. Their cameras were soft, made of sewn canvas, with lenses drawn on with Sharpies. Some test dummies had been placed, head on a neighbour’s shoulder, in a coy vignette of the photographers, here to witness an event at a test site in the desert.

  “Sit down,” the jackrabbit said. Those black plate eyes seemed to have come straight from a jackrabbit asylum. But the figure was womanly. In the transformation of genes, creature and beast, fur and pelt, Jill and Jack had become one figure.

  Things were things in this bigness; so big even God could doubt religion.

  Vivienne was snapping wildly, capturing whatever was on the go. A car came out of the sunny dust towards them. As it came close, you could see the top of it was a woman’s body, wearing the same green-and-red striped dress as the jackrabbit. Close at the breast, hourglass to the waist where the steel car began. The woman’s hips were the roof of the car curving out to the headlights. She had arms lifted up as if to dance or cheer. On both sides of the car-woman lockstep figures marched in Marine Corps uniforms. As they came close you could see they were all leashed together as if by the Great Dog Walker in the Sky, and now Vivienne saw that the leash holders were other giant jackrabbits, not in dresses, but in black morning coats.

  “We blow the balloon tower,” said the jackrabbit. “No swearing. No coarse language, discretion is advised, we have young ewes on the premises. Hold your horses.”

  The sky went dark. The great outdoors went dark as a darkroom.

  “Welcome to the Divine,” the giant jackrabbit said. “Presenting: Divine Strake!”

  AND SO IT was on that day, December 27, 2006, one hour outside the metropolis of Las Vegas, an atomic bomb exploded. All eyes were diverted to Iraq at the time.

  Vivienne Pink was a witness. The bomb went off. The bomb test was called Divine Strake.

  The neck of the world rose up from the desert, alert to the light and the fissionable extravagance of damage this scientific spree was on; and the neck rose in hot colours, and the colours of hell pushed ground to sky. Hot blues, icy reds, lush oranges on a jag to make Earth an unnatural planet. The spine of Earth rose out of itself in an orgy of atoms. The witnesses, trapped in heat and fire glare, prayed to be released to heaven below as hell enveloped them. Crazy punching winds flailed in nine directions. Thereupon, the brain stem of Earth separated from the neck and rose in a coral twist to the stratosphere, and the supporting foundations rose inside it, all the time pushing the brain matter skyward. The planet’s spine split the atoms of its vertebrae, which loosened and flew and became shaken. The silt, the stealth desert sage, animal pelts, human clothing, Jeep steel, bleacher wood and soft cameras became weaponized as the air became weaponized from the shock wave, roaring like desert-based speed-of-sound barrier trials. The air became a tsunami. A rolling thunder of hot punishing air.

  This was the harvest of atoms.

  This was the play of men. The sucking vacuum, the suppurating sky wound for which there is no suture; the susurration of the woolly sheep, the helpmeet horses as they received the fire onto their manes; the confined squeals of a thousand pigs tied to barbed wire, fashioned in different clothing; the look of the psychotic century no cold war at all but a fiery self-inflicted furnace, a slow centurial suicide by nuclear bomb.

  Here was the cradle of global warming. They overheated the Earth hundreds of times. They baked the planet heat-viral.

  What Vivienne saw was not the shape of a mushroom. It was that spine, that cervical twist rising to the neck in abasement, scorching higher and higher, until it bloomed like a blunt-force-trauma pounded brain, splitting, blooming with its fiery brain matter. The sky now owned the core, the core was heaving. This the brilliant men made: the evolution of our self-poisoning.

  Here was the land of the primary lesion.

  The wind lifted Vivienne Pink up and knocked her down. Pummelled her, shook her crazy, dropped her on gravel sand. Vivienne Pink, photographer, predator of light, sat in the smoke rain.

  The neck of the world turned blue and burned on.

  World, I am afraid there will never be another you.

  The ground began to sink, the bleachers with the test dummies began to sink, the land got p
ocked with sinkholes like new burial grounds in the desert. The Earth’s brain matter became hooded in a sky cave of fire. The air became a monstrous x-ray machine. The bones of all creatures glowed; all flesh was made onto itself a skeleton.

  Vivienne held up her camera, her arm glowed. With her left hand she took a picture of her right arm. Yes, her bones were glowing. She could see her humerus lit up from the shoulder to the elbow, she snapped that, lifting her arm, showing to herself this living x-ray of her elbow, then down along the ulna and the parallel radius to her wristbones.

  “I can see my invisible self,” she said. “I can see my own lies.”

  A roaring train at speed knocked her in the face – the sound of the next shock wave. Sand was crawling in all her crevices. Her mouth was jammed shut with sand. She couldn’t hear. Where was Val? There was Johnny, his bald head wearing a sand pyramid. His eyes popped out of his cheeks gone wild in high G-forces. The next shock wave rolled at them, sucker-punched them, smashed their faces. Uppercut, left hook, below-the-belt gut slam.

  The test dummies were on fire. The test dummies were still smiling. It was commonplace to dress the female test dummies in white simple frocks, the better to deflect the atomic heat from them.

  We could not cage the sky, but we could poison it. We had art, but the world was our toy.

  Vivienne watched a Jeep melt down into the sand.

  We are the infant planet. What things in early days did we do to the newborn universe? Before its strange beauty was revealed to us, we began to torture it. Because we could.

  And so did the newborn universe spread its fallout atmosphere to the baby teeth of the newborn children.

  THE JACKRABBIT SPOKE: “They that did feed delicately are desolate in the streets: they that were brought up in scarlet embrace dunghills.”

  “Is this something you have known?” she asked.

  “It is something I have known. It is something I have been. It is something which will come around again.”

  “Was this just a bomb?” Vivienne asked.

  “It was a bomb test,” the jackrabbit said. “Divine Strake. George W. spoke of it. They that did feed at the breast of fear did not much report it. The president announced a bomb test on home soil, but the flock was busy being shepherded by that toothsome wolf, Dick Cheney. The Pentagon put eyes on Iraq and began to test bombs again, here in the Nevada desert. Those bad boys. It’s all misdirection. Government? It’s all bad magic.”

  Vivienne lifted a clump of her red hair from her scalp. Small pieces of thick skin came off with the hair. Her luxuriant tresses were now dry, old. Gone in sixty seconds.

  The jackrabbit’s eyes were rotating in its head. “Their visage is blacker than a coal; they are not known in the streets: their skin cleaveth to their bones; it is withered, it is become like a stick.”

  “Eikhah,” Vivienne said, using the Hebrew name for the book of Lamentations. “I remember Jeremiah from cheder.” The jackrabbit’s eyes were focused on her as she spoke. “Eikhah, How, the wail. How could they do this, how could they allow Jerusalem to burn, how can I abide this, how can we bear this as a nation, how, how, how. Tell me, Jack, how can we rent and tear our clothes when the A-bomb takes over the favour? We cannot wail anymore, the world is too much with the kvetching.”

  The jackrabbit kissed her cheek.

  Vivienne went on, “We’re in the desert. Where is Jeremiah? We studied it, I was just a kid, I mean you’re six, seven, you’re nine years old, what do you know from Jeremiah? The Ketuvim. I’m nine, I’m wailing with Jeremiah about Jerusalem, Shabbos morning at Beth Sholom; Shabbos matinee I’m going to the Nortown to see Sinatra in Pal Joey.”

  “They shall bring out the bones of the king of Judah,” said the jackrabbit.

  “Did Judah get nuclear radiation?” Vivienne asked. “Were the princes x-rayed by God?”

  The Earth had become the sick hidden basement. The secrets were the world in its open daring. To be a con man was where men went, in the modern. What was a man? Was this desert a radioactive shul, was this original awe? And yet here she was, chatting with a mutated black-tailed agouti-shaded giant jackrabbit off Interstate 95, the ribbon through the military test zone.

  “I can take you to the bones of the prophets,” the jack said. “They are not far from here.”

  “Where? You’re telling me what?” Val’s face was coming towards her and the jackrabbit was a bright pink, the colour of flesh on the inside of a body, throbbing, pulsating. Val didn’t seem to realize he had a head like a fluorescent disco peach. Vivienne felt super-present in a circumstance. “Come here, honey,” Vivienne said. “Jack’s seen the bones of kings. She says they’re somewhere out here.”

  “They have a test area,” Jack said. “Area 109. We call it Damascus Gate. The bones of prophets are kept there.”

  “Jack, honey, talk Haftorah to me,” Vivienne said.

  “I can’t cry. My eyes are dried up.”

  The air around Val changed, his ions re-upped into interest. “Who are you?” Val asked, with the tone that made Vivienne remember he could still pull it out, be the intel man, be soft, be working. “What’s your job, ma’am?” Sensing something in the jackrabbit.

  “I was one of the first women to come to the tests. I used to ride cleanup. We came on horses in the morning. It was a beautiful place back then. Beautiful horses all over the wild country. I grew up riding in the canyons. Wild manes. I loved to be around horses from the time I was a little girl. I thought I would grow up to be a cowboy. This was my grandmother’s dress. They let me wear it. I am a woman from the waist down. A jackrabbit was standing nearby when the test went off. The jackrabbit got blown by the shock wave into my face. When the fire was over and the shock wave, the jackrabbit had a woman’s head and I had its face. Somewhere out there is a thing with paws and tracks, with the face of an eighteen-year-old girl. When my hands got severed by the wind, the docs sewed on a foot and put in an old ski pole.”

  “The docs?” Val asked.

  “They were actually women who did laundry. They had some thread. They would not let me have a drink, they said it wouldn’t be legal. They did let me drink the ether. You never know, do you? You feel like you are not in the right body, growing up, being a teen, then one day you wake up and you are half jackrabbit, half girl and you are addicted to your five o’clock ethertini. I’ve seen worse.”

  Johnny, off on the side, had that adrenalized air of the old reporter he was, in on history, down with the sand beetles in the tsunami shock wave sand, scribbling with his hot paws the eyewitness story. He did not notice his singed fingers, nor how shock and thrill gave the same writerly adrenaline.

  Val was on the ground, staring off into the deep blue sea. There was no deep blue sea.

  Vivienne walked with the frocked jackrabbit. “Tell me,” she said, “how far were we from the bomb detonation? It looked like it was right next to us at the bleachers. Does that mean it was miles away?”

  The jackrabbit said, “If it was fifteen hundred feet away, you’ll be dead any day. If it was a mile away, you might have a thirty per cent chance of being alive next birthday. Now, if we’re talking over a mile distant from the scorching detonation, you’ll probably live; I can’t speak to the damage. But then, much like the gaming tables, you could be one of the ones who does meet Lady Luck on life’s highway. But then, sweetheart, if that bomb was over two and a half miles away when they set it off, you might win at life’s penny-ante slots.”

  “But do you know?” Vivienne asked.

  “Anybody’s guess, when it comes to the rogue afterlife of radiation.”

  The jackrabbit then came closer to Vivienne, and began to speak in a lilting whisper. She spoke about how her father was stationed in Okinawa during the Vietnam War when Japan was used as a staging area for American soldiers. About the American base at Kadena, about the fifty thousand and more American troops stationed then in Okinawa, this world of American military, three hundred miles away from main Japan. Vi
vienne had smoked the Japanese Pink cigarettes with Andy back in Area 24, knew they were from Okinawa, but had not known that Okinawa was an American place in Vietnam War days. “We’re in the pink.” Smiley, smiley, all over the world. Smiley, smiley, and the invasion nightmare.

  The jackrabbit said, “Pop used to say that the word went out that the US had planted nuclear weaponry in Okinawa. The Japanese used to buy cigarettes from Pop and tell him that he should tell his superiors the Japanese did not want any nuclear war on their homeland. I don’t know if it happened.”

  Vivienne felt ill. Could it be? You drop bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and then twenty years later, like some thug let out on probation going back to the crime scene, you get your atomic ducks in a row in, are you kidding me, Okinawa, Japan?

  Sure, every journalist knew the quote from Ambrose Bierce: “War is God’s way of teaching Americans geography.”

  But what bad dream could lead the US to have positioned nuclear warheads in Japan during Vietnam? Was Vietnam the US’s last great affair? The one that got away? Was Vietnam the Moby Dick of American military history? The jackrabbit did say it was a story her dad had told. Maybe good old Pops knew a good story, no more.

  “He used to sell the locals Lucky Strikes, they used to give him anti-war pamphlets.”

  Vivienne stood looking south across the thin strip of land, the low fires across the low land and the high sky, singeing out the purples, the acid greens, the pale pinks with fireballs of orange travelling like sunspots, an atomic mirage that was true. The atomic light bulb burned black edges on the sky. This was the end of lamps. This Nevada desert was the original ground zero.