A plain-looking man with a wide sad face came in. On second glance his face was not sad, it was surprised. The surprise looked permanent, just as the fused feet and hand of the man in the chair did. He sat down, the plain-faced man, in the booth back of Vivienne and Andy. Andy returned the paper to its broadsheet folded state. “So, where now?”
A pretty woman walked in, caught Vivienne’s attention. She had eyelashes six or seven inches long, like little hairy dogs on each eye. A man came in with her, his head was on sideways. The waitress said hi. They sat down in the booth on the other side of Vivienne and Andy.
“You said you wanted to go to Lone Pine,” Vivienne said. “We’re in Olancha.”
The waitress came over, “You two okay? Can I get you anything you need?”
“How far is it to Lone Pine from here?” Vivienne asked.
“Lone Pine, John, how far to Lone Pine?”
John looked over from his table. “You folks visiting? Where you from? Not from around here I’ll wager.”
“You just won your bet,” Vivienne said. “Canada. We’re Canadian.”
“Canada,” John said. “Nice place. Nice place, nice people, good luck, you’re going to need it in this wind. You and your hubby there might want to stop the night somewhere, heard there was an oil truck blew up near Bishop. Where you two from in Canada?”
“Toronto,” Vivienne said.
“Toronto. Nice place. I was in Vancouver once. In the army. Very nice people. Good luck to the two of you. Newlyweds?”
“Peggy Sue got married,” she said.
“Buddy Holly,” the man said. “A personal favourite of mine.”
Vivienne went into the pocket of her pink jacket where there was a secret zip compartment. She took out a piece of newspaper, folded many times, black and white and yellowed. She unfolded it. Andy was curious. “Honey,” she said. “Remember the day we first met, when we were lying on the bed in the hotel room? I was telling you about the Quaker who self-immolated under the Secretary of Defense’s window, during the war in Vietnam?” She read from the clipping: “‘Baltimore Quaker with baby sets self afire, dies in war protest at Pentagon… Pacifist releases girl as flames engulf him in front of building.’” Vivienne looked up. She knew the next part by heart. “His daughter was a year old. Her name was Emily. In Vietnam a poet wrote an homage to her, ‘Emily, My Child.’ It became a well-known poem in Vietnam. They named a street in Hanoi after him. They issued a postage stamp to honour Norman Morrison. They called him Mo Ri Xon. His name is legend, he is a hero. My cousin Jeff in Chicago, he got hold of one of the Vietnamese stamps honouring Morrison, the FBI came to his house and seized it. It was illegal in the United States to own a stamp showing an American Quaker, because the Vietnamese issued the stamp. Okay. So, remember a couple years later, when protestors occupied the Pentagon in ’67?”
“I wasn’t born yet,” Andy said.
Oh Jesus. Oh, okay. “Well, protestors were holding a sit-in in May of ’67 at the Pentagon, you know, about the war, and they occupied the Pentagon for four days. But at the start, they kicked it off with a vigil for Morrison. So, he was still a name to know eighteen months after he lit himself on fire under McNamara’s window.”
Andy’s eyes asked, Why are you telling me this? And she did not know.
Who knows? It was windy in the dry land, so she thought about fire.
There was a new three-year war, so she thought about a new baby. They were heading to one more hideout of the minor walk-on cameo Carlita Manson, so she thought about the major hero, Norman Morrison. Somewhere there was a forty-something woman named Emily, whose father sacrificed himself for the love of country. She put the clipping back in her jacket’s inner compartment. That Baltimore Sun clipping, November 3rd, 1965.
Andy waved for the bill, doing that air-signing Vivienne remembered from the coffee counter in Vegas.
They drove out of Olancha on the 395, through Cartago, towards Lone Pine. The grey strip of highway stretched through the open soft low tumbles on the right, and the mountains rising and shrinking and etching deeper with more snow cover accompanied them on the left as they rode north. They passed a ghost gas station near Cartago, and found one alive near Lone Pine. Vivienne and Andy got out and stretched their legs in the chilly temps. The gas guy, as he filled the tank, said, “You folks heading up to Mount Whitney?” He pointed west and up. “The highest point in the lower forty-eight.”
Vivienne said, “We’re going to the Alabama Hills for our health.” Andy took a pic of her saying this, with her droll smile, and her hand riffling the metal buttons growing in her hair.
“That’s the idea,” the gas man said. They drove on. Mount Whitney was up there amid its posse of grey jags of prominence against the winter blue.
They entered Lone Pine. They drove fast down Main Street, and hung a left at Whitney Portal Road, Vivienne saying, “A half-hour before I first met you, I was watching High Sierra in my hotel room; Bogart was on the lam from the law, speeding right here through Lone Pine, beating it up to Mount Whitney right there to make that fated escape.”
“I was trying to escape you,” Andy said.
“I was trying to escape you,” Vivienne said.
“How’re we doing?”
As they climbed higher, just like Bogie, they entered the Alabama Hills. “We’re at the movies,” she said. Barren conglomerates of rocks stood tall and pointed, clustered like evolutionary teeth. These pinnacles had entered the minds of moviegoers through the hundreds of movies made here, shaping our dreams of American cowboys. That archetype of the American West, which blew into the minds of moviegoers, that rock canyon DNA, those modern canyon lobes, had their origins here, in the Eastern Sierra just up from Lone Pine.
They hung a right at Movie Road, passing the ghost of Yellow Sky, which had been constructed as a ghost town for Yellow Sky; passing the Lone Ranger Canyon, just in from Gene Autry Rock and just shy of The Charge of the Light Brigade a little bit south of Gunga Din bridge, Stuntman Canyon and High Sierra. Vivienne and Andy got out of the car at Rawhide. “I know these rocks better than my cousins,” Vivienne said. “Look. Here’s where the Rawhide Station stage pulled up. Here’s where Jack Elam was going to shoot the baby girl.” Andy took a picture of her with her arms wide open.
“Let’s go up Movie Road to Bogart Curve,” she said. The movie was over, but the movie never stopped showing Bogart climbing the rock face and falling.
31
FALLOUT ALICE
ON BOGART CURVE, a large cat with a brown bowler hat stood alone by the pinnacles. She had big mascaraed lashes, two little red dots on her cheeks and she wore long ginger robes. She was waving to Andy and Vivienne.
They got out of the car.
The cat waved them closer. From behind one of the classic western rocks an item dollied forth: an orange toadstool with a green-coloured baby reclining on it, smoking a hookah. “I like to lie on the Big Lie,” the green baby said. “How about you?”
On closer examination, the baby looked more like a caterpillar. The legs did not exist. It had multiple shortened hands, stubs. Its face was lined, leathery. Its eyes were rheumy. “The plutonium?” the caterpillar said. “Dude, nothing but Pluto with some knee ’em.” He, she, it pressed a button, and out of the orange toadstool popped four yellow sunflowers in plastic, each with a written message. The first sunflower said Safe. The second sunflower said Nuclear. The third read Progress, the o made into a smiley face. The fourth read Power. The sunflowers sang in unison, “Nuclear Power, Our Safe Progress.”
Across the Alabama Hills, a white rabbit came hippy-hopping, decked out in a blue naval uniform. He carried an item on a chain, which Andy and Vivienne first thought, using the classic Alice in Wonderland story, was the White Rabbit’s pocket watch, his guide to running late.
But in Andy’s telephoto, it showed itself to be a dosimeter, smaller than normal, used to measure radiation. “I declare, the future is with us, the future has arrived,” the Na
val Rabbit said, coming to them. “I was there when they dropped the bomb on Nagasaki. I am a double survivor. I saw Hiroshima, I saw Nagasaki. What man could do! We were late! We better get moving, otherwise the rest of the world would own progress, and we would be left behind. There is a saying promoted in Japan: ‘Nuclear energy: a correct understanding brings a prosperous lifestyle!’ We face the sea; many plants face the sea. We have another saying, ‘You must never speak of the harbour waves!’ If the schoolchildren learn not to say the words, you would be surprised how little they will worry.
“Once upon a time, I heard my ancestors speak of Cat Dancing, crazy cat suicides into the sea, Minimata disease; Mr. Eugene Smith who came and took pictures of the new babies, the old people crazy from mercury. That was a very bad idea. We removed the pictures. No need to worry young girls with tales of sick fish. Now our Alice will take you at your earliest convenience to a scale model of Unit One at our Shika nuclear plant, located on the Sea of Japan. Alice was trained at the Shika publicity building. She will give you a pill, and you can join her in touring the scale model.”
“I think they’re making the big movie,” Andy said to Vivienne. This was, after all, a long-time movie location. But if it was a movie, where was the director? Where was the camera? If a bomb falls in the desert, did it happen if they hide the pictures? Vivienne’s lungs were breathing into a photo. Her arms were feeling the phantom organ her camera had been at the end of her fingers, its delicate shutter.
She looked at Andy, the new recruit to camerawork. The model had fallen in love with the camera. Like the actor who begins to direct, Andy seemed a natural. He was close up to the rabbit, asking, “Is this some kind of Western-in-Wonderland going on here? I bet you’re the Nuclear White Rabbit. Kind of kooky. The sidekick, right?”
“We saw the power,” the Rabbit said. “We could be a player on the big stage. No more Emperors! Cast off the past! Nuclear power is clean and efficient.”
“So,” said Andy, “if you think negative thoughts, bad things will come your way? That the idea?”
Alice in her pinafore came over, she tipped her brown bowler hat, and said, “All is well.” She held out her school-style pinafore at the edges, as if to curtsy with her clothes.
The green caterpillar called from his toadstool, “Anybody got a doobie for the Dude? I hear there’s some fierce Purple Haze coming out of Bogotá.” He seemed content, however, to put his hookah in his mouth, and to lie back, and let the bubbles roll. “Tell them, sweet Alice.”
“Wow!” Alice said. “Absolute Safety! We do not speak of earthquakes or tsunamis. If the nuclear plant goes rogue, we have the water trucks standing by; no worries. Situation aces! The police are ready to water bomb the rioting leakage.”
“You know,” said Andy. “If you put me in charge, I’d get those robots I’ve been reading about to do all the work. You get a plutonium spill, what’s it to a robot?”
Andy shot a pic of the giant White Rabbit, in his waistcoat, looking at his pocket watch, saying, “Poor Mooty. We thought Mooty the Robot was the way. We had to admit our own mistake. Mooty went moot.” He walked over to the caterpillar, who handed the White Rabbit the joint. He took a toke and handed it to Alice, who sucked in the marijuana. “Ah, we had to lay off Mooty,” the rabbit said. “The sight of a robot at a nuclear plant could make the people think an accident could happen. Since no accident will ever happen, why build robots? Why hire those Mootys? We put Mooty on the dole and we built exhibits and hired guides to explain to the people what the zero risk of nuclear means. We hired adorable Alice.”
Vivienne’s eye caught smoke coming up from a far dusty patch.
“You see,” the White Rabbit continued, “buying insurance for the nuclear plants encourages the growth of fear. We prefer to grow an economy, right, Alice?”
“I am proud to be a plutonium princess,” Alice said.
The White Rabbit handed Vivienne the joint. She inhaled. “Hey, Alice, baby,” the Caterpillar called from his toadstool. “Need another toke?”
Alice came to Vivienne and said, “After Chernobyl, we began our education progress. You will find no Chernobyl in our textbooks now. Only positive thinking. If children hear the sad tales of the misfortunes of others, it makes them want misfortunes of their own.”
“Yeah, that pretty much sums up my days in school,” Andy said. “I had to learn about nuclear fallout from this pretty lady, right here.” He let the camera fall by the strap to his chest. He put his arm around Vivienne. “She was in a bomb blast, when was it, Vivi?”
“I can’t remember,” Vivienne said. “A few days ago, I think.”
“It is safe for the fertile women,” Alice said.
“I think it’s probably real safe for the fertile mannequins,” said Andy.
Vivienne felt altitude ill. Her hometown genes from TO on Lake Ontario were set at around three hundred feet above sea level. The Alabama Hills were about four thousand feet above sea level. She had exchanged low for high, wet for dry, married for separation, camerawork for eyes burning in the vivid pictures not taken.
The White Rabbit said, “We do not speak of anti, we speak of for. We do not look back, we look forward.”
“I’m all for that,” Andy said, kissing Vivienne’s cheek. She wandered off, using her eyes without a camera. She scanned the Eastern Sierra land. How many giant rabbits of different dimensionality and breed had the nine hundred nuclear explosions in the Western States created? What gene jive happened? Were any of the grand mountains left unaffected? Were any of them pure rock anymore? Did rock climbers endanger their health by breathing in the plutonium and the dead hand radiation dust drifting off them, for decades? Did the atomic age leave even basin and range as dangerous dust-emitting nature?
Under the sight of Mount Whitney, the highest point in the contiguous United States at 14,495 feet, it was only eighty miles to Badwater, the lowest point at two hundred eighty-three feet below sea level, back down in the heart of Death Valley. Charles Manson had had his shack back near Badwater, and Manson had run right here to the Alabama Hills, where he was finally captured.
The White Rabbit smiled with cheesy buckteeth at the camera. “My dear boy, if you hold a full emergency measure test, the people will become alarmed. It is best to relegate emergency measures to the back office. That way, you do not show the public any fear. You spare the public the unnecessary hysteria of seeing their leaders in a panic.”
“You mean,” Andy said, speaking from behind the camera, “as the Zen sensei of FEMA might say, ‘When in doubt, do nothing.’”
“Exactly!” the White Rabbit said.
The moon face and the sun face of Mount Whitney rose and fell in copper and granite. The rock pinnacles of the Alabama Hills began to meld, in the early part of dusk.
Invisible miscreant rain kept falling, falling. Who knew that the muscles of fish, the glands of humans and the rocks of the planet were everlasting collateral now? Who knew that movie set rocks emitted zombie poison? Who knew that the beloved hoof dust of Westerns was now forensic bad fortune? Who knew a nation of empire could be an ecological disrupter of pharaonic proportions, and not even know it? The planet knew it. We had disturbed the Earth. We played with hot stuff, the earth got hot, the passengers flying overhead in a plane looked down on the heated Earth, they flew through the disturbed air. And we say to ourselves, If the earth is so overpopulated, why do I stand here, so alone? We are glandular magnets to the iodine as we walk through Earth’s stuff.
The green caterpillar crawled out from the cowboy rocks. He tried to straighten his off-kilter middy blouse and smoothed his Black Watch kilt, leaning forward to Vivienne, “You got any dirt from The Conqueror?” Vivienne ached to take the caterpillar’s picture. Her life was a habit she was finding hard to break.
The green caterpillar took off the kilt and put it around his shoulders over the middy blouse, a nonchalant négligé cape. He sucked on a desperate end of a roach.
“I had a guy down
here once on one of the tours, claimed he had the original Howard Hughes suitcase with that dirt from The Conqueror. I heard that Howard Hughes shipped sixty tons of the radioactive dirt out of the location of The Conqueror, west to Hollywood, to have the same look back on set. The movie workers on location in Utah got cancer, and the guys back in Hollywood got to breathe in the authentic nuclear ground dirt. A guy came to work, a gaffer or a dolly grip, and he went home with embryonic cancer. Who knew? What did Howard Hughes know? What did anybody know? All on the down low I pass along the rumours. I don’t want the suits coming in here to Aliceville to mess with the larva, you know what I’m talking about?”
“The story goes that everybody who worked on The Conquerer got cancer,” Andy said.
“Handsome,” the caterpillar said to him. “Let us not exaggerate. Not everybody. Just like I don’t know like maybe totally massively, you know, like 50 or 85 per cent.”
The White Rabbit put his paws together in a steeple. “Dick Powell, the director, got cancer. John Wayne got cancer. Susan Hayward got cancer.”
Andy was holding Vivienne’s camera she had given away to him. His back looked straighter to her, his feeling towards the camera something like the soldier-nursing he gave her back in the high piney air of Panamint Springs in room 15 of the small oasis hotel. He held the camera in one hand, the way pros do, cradling it like a preemie baby. “They shot The Conqueror near St. George, Utah, right near the Nevada border. They were shooting the movie at the same time they were setting off one of the biggest nuclear tests in history.”
“Series,” the White Rabbit said. “Sir. No, sir. It was a series. A miniseries of tests.”
“The Rabbit is right,” Vivienne said. She swallowed a blockage. “The Nevada Test Site. Sixty miles from Vegas. The test, yes, series was called Upshot-Knothole. They did eleven nuclear tests, set off eleven bombs between March and June of 1953. Each one of the bombs was the equivalent of Hiroshima or more. Some of them were three times as powerful as Hiroshima. John Wayne and Susan Hayward, Pedro Armendáriz, Agnes Moorehead. They say that of two hundred twenty people who worked on the film, ninety-one got cancer, forty-six died of it. The experts said they had three times the usual percentage of cancer. Actors died for their art, the government killed John Wayne. America killed America’s symbol.”
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