CLANDESTINELY, HUNDREDS OF photographers made thousands of movies and still shots of the mid-century atomic blasts being detonated in the desert. A secret movie studio was formed in Los Angeles for this purpose. The studio compound was known as the Lookout Mountain Laboratory. Its field photographers were USAF airmen of the 1352nd Photographic Group. Between 1947 and 1969 the secret studio on Wonderland Avenue, making films for the Defense Department and the Atomic Energy Commission, was actually the biggest movie studio in LA. The studio developed new camera technology to film the bomb blasts at long distance.
Then, in the same way that they moved soldiers at the actual bomb test sites ever closer to observe and collect data, they sent the secret cameramen out, all with top clearance, to get close and personal at the bomb sites to photograph the atomic bombs going off, and to hide the footage in vaults.
The secret studio compound sat on an LA hill, lit day and night, with thousands of workers coming and going, and nobody saw a thing. (Or did they?)
And the photographers, too, suffered the close nuclear rain; their bodies, too, over the years, felt the workplace damage of the fallout. Their shop floor was the open desert.
THE TRANSCENDENT BLUR of a B-52 lifted its shadowy power above the ghost world. Zigging and zagging a speed stain, its beautiful nose lifted. The American planes at Okinawa so familiar to the local Japanese were tested here in Nevada, their testing grounds also familiar to this citizenry, home and abroad living at the behest of American bases. Their skies looking so much the same, steel birds lifting one by one or in formation from the military aviary below.
The jackrabbit reached into into her bosom and pulled out a small photo: a lanky blond, white, bare chested, skinny, fair faced, crew-cut of the era, baggy silky shorts, tennis shoes, a white gob hat, a pack of Luckies in his shorts’ elastic band; a Japanese woman, twice his age, doubled over, laughing, a soft dark pageboy, a pullover sweater, a pencil skirt, high-heeled pumps, glasses with winged jewelled frames. They were standing, arms around each other’s waists in front of the Club New Formosa. Off to the side, two young American sailors in uniforms and white gob hats. “This one here,” Vivienne said, tapping the face of one of the young sailors, “this one looks like an old flame of mine. He was Navy. He shipped out of Brooklyn to San Diego. He went to Japan during Vietnam.”
“It could be,” the jackrabbit said. “Stranger things have happened. I cut this out of a book. Tōmatsu, the great photographer. This was the United States in Okinawa.”
The stranger thing had happened. The jackrabbit had given up the monotone and was speaking with Vivienne in a poly-tone, speaking like a full human. Had the portal to the Hebrew books been kind to the scorched fur? “Give me a quote I can carry, little Jack,” she said. Had a mutated jack at the atomic testing grounds become her provisional rabbi?
“The harvest is past, the summer is ended, and we are not saved.”
She said, “Travel safely, have a good trip,” and it sounded like old field blues sung by the desert Hebrews.
“We have got to get going,” Vivienne said. “We are on a trip to Death Valley. Hasta luegito, Jackito.”
“Hasta luego, Viviennita. Bienvenido al Valle de Muerte.” The jackrabbit waved her right ear. Her eyes stayed with their black plate menace. She was down on the ground re-ingesting black scat, looking up at Vivienne. She took a photograph of the jack, eyes daring, mouth liquid brown at the edges. A drop fell on the dress’s white lace collar. She moved her body up, the red and green sateen shone, and she bounded off to the south. Vivienne was shooting like a mad thing, grabbing at least one keeper: the jackrabbit, a creature with tall ears, a vision in a Dora Maar frock, high in the air, bounding past sand depressions burning with fire, past collapsed conveyances, and exploded simulation villages. Meanwhile, the adult test mannequins in suits and dresses, and the child mannequins in overalls, and the mock photographers sewn of canvas split apart or smouldered. But since test dummies have no thyroids, and mannequins have no tissue, what could a nuclear test mean?
They were back at their car. They got in. Vivienne pulled the sun flap down and looked in the mirror. Her hair looked like a dusty fright wig. Her fingertip felt a small metal button rising on her scalp. Her eyes were red. She had bruises on her face, and a bump was sticking out on the right-hand side, swollen as if it were filling with bacteria. Johnny at the wheel looked very pale. His eyes stared straight ahead; he was in some mental capsule. He drove with his left hand only, at eight o’clock on the wheel, his right hand held his Moleskine notebook; he was writing with his right hand, and driving with his left. His face looked almost turquoise.
Val, for his part, lay stretched out in the back seat. Vivienne turned around with her camera, hearing small chirps. Val was weeping. Vivienne snapped him. The sky in the back window was black with gold claws. The sky became cement.
Danny was inside the trunk, banging to be let out.
16
THE HAWK MOTH
VAL OPENED THE trunk. Danny lay there, with his bird suit on. “The person of a foreign service agent shall be inviolate,” he said. “They shall not profane him.”
“Oh, God,” Val said. “Here we go again.”
“Thou shalt not profane an agent of the person of your country.” He smelled to Val like old wet leaves in a northeast rainy season.
“You are not a foreign agent, Danny,” Val said. “You carry the water to conference room B. You’re a fixer.”
“I demand my rights. I demand to be taken to my embassy.” His head was small with sweat locks.
“This, you septic excuse for a spy,” Val said, “is your embassy. Welcome to sanctuary. You knew all about this bomb test, didn’t you?”
Danny stroked his crotch. “So what?”
“You knew this was coming. That’s why you stayed in the trunk. You knew they were going to finally test Divine Strake today, didn’t you?” He picked up a tire iron.
“No,” Danny said. “I did not. Stop accusing me. I want my gofer, I have immunity.”
He lay back like an outsize baby bird. “Does anybody know the whereabouts of Johnny? Matters on the ground speak to the immediacy of contact.”
“We’ll see about that. Don’t worry. You will be going to Rhyolite. At Rhyolite, we will take you to the bank. No problem, it’s right on the border of Death Valley.”
“I demand my gofer.” He wrestled with his bottom half, trying to get in to scratch his southern hemisphere, but gave up. “Have you got my mobile? Where the hell is my mobile?”
“No reception,” Val said. “You can’t use a cellphone out here in the desert. Oh wait a minute, what am I thinking? I have a cell you could borrow. Special issue.”
“Very good. I am going to ring through to the president. He will be on you in a minute. I was personally put in charge of public security for the country.”
Val pulled an orange cellphone out of his jacket pocket. A special ops issue, unknown to and unavailable to the public. He pressed a white button. A small hawk moth flew out of the cellphone. Val pressed the button a second time. The tiny hawk moth landed on Danny’s cheek, right below his left eye. Val pressed the button a third time. The hawk moth sent electric jolts into Danny Coma’s eye area. It flew to the back of Danny’s head where it joined his body. It flew to his crotch. Sending strong silent electricity at each stopping station.
Danny’s whole body shook with spasms, he writhed back and forth, hitting his arms on the trunk’s sides. He looked like he was having an epileptic seizure. Val knew from experience that Danny was in what a chromotherapist would call red, the blood speeded up dangerously. Val pressed the white button a fourth time. The hawk moth lifted off Danny and flew back to the cellphone, inserting itself flat against the cell’s body. Val put the orange device back in his jacket. Danny’s bird body was wet with urine and small bits of blood. His face was pale. “You should’ve noticed something at the Boston airport on September 11th, Danny boy. We have you on CCTV sitting right across the
way from the 9/11 bombers in the pre-boarding area. You never saw a thing.”
Danny lifted his head to Val. “They put me in economy. After all I’ve done. I told the bastards they should be grateful to have someone like me offer to tell them how to run their damn departments, but no, not them. You people.” He threw up on the bird suit.
“Now look what you’ve done, Dan,” Val said. He closed the trunk.
“I am in charge of national security,” Danny shouted from inside.
Vivienne was posing Johnny at the edge of the vehicle, to show his reflection in the hood, all funhouse-mirror melting. The wind blew burnt matter off her scalp. “You coming?” she asked Val. “Val. Baby, you promised you would not go to the orange phone right away.”
“I’ve been watching Daniel Coma coast for years. He doesn’t even know that Val Gold is way above his pay grade. He has no idea I am his superior.”
“Vamos,” Vivienne said.
“He wants diplomatic immunity. Call ahead to the vultures.”
17
A BETTER EDEN
THEY DROVE THROUGH the skull of time. Inside the skull, the penetrating light of experiments shone. The skull curved and inside it, dead cows lay with skin hanging. The wool of sheep clung to the wet parts of the skull, floating teeth attached to bone and ate it away, exposing the wire nerves. The world’s sand had been heated to glass. They drove along the glass jaw, the flashing nerve highway. This was Nevada, the atomic state.
Vivienne pulled out a piece of something hard sticking out of her jawline. She put it on her thigh, taking a photograph of it against her khakis. White, charred, sharp at the edges, folded in a small hem, with hairs sewn on it. Her bowels and lungs felt tornadic. It is the gas-filled organs that the atomic bombs affect first.
IN 1946, THE United States of America had stockpiled eleven nuclear weapons.
In 1958, the United States of America had stockpiled 9,822 nuclear weapons.
In 1962, the United States, already in Vietnam, had stockpiled 24,111 nuclear weapons.
Over a period of sixteen years, the USA stockpiled 24,111 nukes.
That’s fifteen hundred nuclear weapons per year, give or take a nuclear weapon. That is thirty nukes hoarded per week. Crazy Uncle Sam was on a shopping spree. From 1946 to 1962, the US acquired an average of four new nukes every day. When the state is a hoarder, can we blame Citizen Sam for having one house and twenty-four thousand dead cats in the parlour?
By 1964, the USA had 30,751 nuclear weapons stockpiled.
By 1964, the USSR had 5,221 nuclear weapons stockpiled.
AND SO, ON the route between the nuclear testing grounds and Death Valley, Vivienne, Val and Johnny arrived at the ghost town of Rhyolite. On a rise, the skeleton of the Cook Bank stood like Hatra, an archeological ruin in pink stone. Grand and gone. Constructed of the surrounding hills’ abundant soft pink rhyolite. They stopped, as travellers do, to rest in the ancient shell of commerce.
Until the year 1904, Rhyolite was unbuilt desert. Then gold was spotted. In 1905, Rhyolite had ten thousand people. But the boom fizzled. In 1910, Rhyolite had six hundred people. The last mine closed in 1911. The last train pulled out of the station in 1914. Rhyolite was born and died in ten years.
As the town of Rhyolite lay dying, the Nevada-California Power Company had no pity; it removed the electricity from the townspeople. The money people, well, they lived mostly in San Francisco, and they had their 1906 earthquake rebuilding to attend to, and so they pulled their money from the mining enterprises. The financial panic of 1907 panicked more men to pull more money out of start-up Rhyolite.
That panic erupted in the fall of 1907 when big money tried to corner shares of copper mining stock out in Butte, Montana. Money men bought and sold short, using that very phraseology, and other money men spoke of the short squeeze, trying to squeeze the short sellers to pay for their short sells. And the copper cornering attempt brought down the banking of New York City, and Wall Street was filled with panicked men, as banks went bankrupt during a recession. Back when bonds were suspect, when the public lost confidence in banks and trust was lost, and broken trusts and contagion filled the nation with money panic. When J. P. Morgan famously said that before money or property, he considered character when deciding if he would loan a man money. If he did not trust the man, then all the bonds in Christendom would not matter.
The story is told that there was one lone man left in Rhyolite, Nevada, by the year 1922. They sing of the one cow waiting on the train platform for the last train to pull out, but that old last train had long been and gone and nobody told the cow. They say that the bovine skeleton waits to this day on the platform at Rhyolite, Nevada. For the train to take her to a better dust in a better place, somewhere where booms don’t go bust every day.
To take her out to San Francisco, west, or back south to Las Vegas, which was already incorporated back in 1905, a desert city older than Tel Aviv.
And yes, in Rhyolite, Nevada, in the midst of the mines and the miners’ union hall and the stores and hotels inside the pink buff land, the igneous air, the soft silica, the mains of quartz and alkali feldspar, where volcanoes had erupted, and gold and silver were rushed like mirages in the rock land, in morphic lava and water stops, where the lava had cooled and stopped and made breccias and cooled obsidians, foundries and machine shops once did bloom, and children on their way to school did dot the desert land.
And of the three banks, the Cook Bank was the palace. Standing three stories tall, built of the local rhyolite hills, it stretched impressively along the concrete sidewalk. Or so the ancient photographs do show us. It had magnificent tall showy windows and a grand entrance, where a miner might enter in with wages to the opera hall of capital in the newly hot nowhere.
How fast the showpiece becomes a skeleton, the bones tempting as a location for a movie. The money palace called the Cook Bank of Rhyolite lasted but one year. The child born with weak lungs and a scary cough, who prevailed and lived until she died at age three, lived longer than the bank in the boom town where she was quietly buried.
Val took Danny into the bank bones. Johnny, in his long black coat, and Vivienne, in her pink leather jacket, left them alone and walked up an old mining hill. Val sat Danny down in the currency rubble. Why spoil the holidays by going abroad for your special rendition? Why not be a patriot, and do it at home this year?
18
IN THE KINGDOM OF RHYOLITE
“LET’S GO BACK a couple years to 2004, my friend,” Val said, sitting beside Danny. “What were you doing in Burgos?”
“I have never been in Spain,” Danny said, not looking at him.
“I did not say anything about Spain.”
Val opened Danny’s hand and began to stroke the flesh on Danny’s palm. Be like the date he wishes he had, who showed curiosity about his life as man.
“I understand you are quite the spiritual fellow. I understand you walked the pilgrim trail to Santiago de Compostela, Danny.”
“Who told you that?” A man suspicious of all things will become suspicious that someone knows the very thing he might brag about.
“Oh come on, Danny. Walking all across Spain and into Portugal. I myself would do it if I had half the time.”
“Time? I have no time. The wife wanted to go.”
“Ah, of course. The wife. She who must be obeyed.”
“You’ve got that right. Don’t worry, she kept busy. She was quite the figure in Rio. She whipped those Brazilians into shape.”
Nice, Val thought. A little bread crumb about Danny’s wife.
Val watched Vivienne and Johnny up the hill. They stopped and kissed. Vivienne arranged Johnny’s black coat, pulling the wool collar up, kissing him again. Taking his photograph. The grass is always greener, even where there is only dust.
Danny was at the windowsill of the bank, trying to pet a raven. Val walked over to him. “I hear Burgos is a lovely town on the Santiago walk.”
“Burgos, my dear man,” Dann
y said, “is one of the choice medieval towns of España. We stayed at a parador. A parador is an inn that is supported by the government. Subsidized, if you will.” Val knew what a parador was. He stayed steady, sucking up Danny’s condescension. The raven flew to Danny’s shoulder. “High wooden rafters, not my thing. But the missus insisted.” Chuckling. Talking like he and Val were on the same team – the put-the-blame-on-the-dame team of men. Val, however, had a different game.
“I’ll tell you what I like,” Val said. “That Spanish ham.”
“Jamón Ibérico,” said Danny, who moments ago under the witness of the big blue sky had sworn he had never been to Spain. “Ibérico, the Jamón Serrano is my special favourite.”
“How about that sausage?” Val said. “The blood? Love the blood.” Switching his voice into a somewhat British musical mode. “I do adore la morcilla de Burgos.”
Danny cupped his hand to Val’s right ear. “Don’t tell anybody, but we discovered this quite marvellous spot, where one can procure possibly the best blood sausage in Spain. A butcher shop, right there in the lovely town of Burgos.”
“Right on the Camino? Where the pilgrims walk to see Saint James’ bones?”
“The very Camino. On our way to Compostela, we bought the sausage from the butcher in Burgos, and voila! – my word. Simply splendid. Dark. Not with onions, as Don Quixote, if I may say, might have found in La Mancha.” Danny rubbed his hands. “That rain-jacket-thing they assured me was waterproof? Not even resistant. We sat down, soaked as ducks, and thanked god for the blood sausage.”
“But you do know about the butcher of Burgos, Danny?’”
“I just told you.”
“You do know he was in the papers.”
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