Curse the Names

by Robert Arellano

  I had always known we were living within the perimeter of a certain amount of high explosives and radioactive waste, but I never realized just how much.

  After typing up my notes from the Ogawa interview, I went into Golz’s office and said, “I want to propose a story about a house.”

  “You mean like the house at Otowi Bridge? You did one of those last fall.”

  “Not a Los Alamos house. I want to do a profile on a house over the mountains. I found it when I went camping.”

  Golz frowned. “What’s this all about?”

  “It’s got a history that’s kind of interesting, and it’s been stuck in my mind ever since I went there. I think a little feature might be the way to get it out.”

  “We don’t do features on houses. We do features on people. Our people.”

  At lunchtime I decided to leave work early and play a round.

  I got the golf bag out of the garage and popped the trunk to load up the clubs when I heard Kitty snarl at me from the kitchen: “Where the fuck is Oppie?”

  “Fuck if I know.”

  “I haven’t seen him all day. Didn’t he sleep downstairs with you last night?”

  “I thought he slept in your bed.”

  Oops: our bed.

  “James, where the fuck were you on Sunday?” She was calling me James again … and implying that if I hung around the house a little more frequently I might have seen him.

  “On assignment for the magazine. Don’t worry, Kitty, he’s probably taking a nap somewhere. Have you checked the laundry basket?”

  “I’ve checked fucking everywhere!” She began to cry. “I knew we should have gotten that chip implant …”

  “That’s crazy, Kitty. You’re treating Oppie like a goddamn child.”

  “He is a goddamn child!”

  “Listen, I’m going to play a round. If you haven’t found him by the time I get back, we’ll try the pound.”

  “Oh, Christ, not the pound!”

  I slammed the trunk and started the car to drown out Kitty’s sobs, blasting Vivaldi while backing out of the garage, telling myself, It’s hard to believe I put up with this.

  I hurtled off the Hill to the valley below, past the stone marker at the switchback, the Spider hugging the curves with a gravity that nailed me to the bucket seat, the clubs rumbling around in the trunk.

  I skidded in the gravel of the Black Mesa clubhouse parking lot and jumped out of the car. It was almost one o’clock. It would be difficult to get a tee time, so many doctors taking the afternoon off.

  When I popped the trunk I got hit with the stink of dog shit. Have I parked in it? A corner of my hand towel stuck out from beneath the golf bag. Something lumpy was twisted up in it. I whipped the towel away to the perfect sucker-punch: Oppie, his body rigid, smeared in his own shit, eyes bulging forth and tongue sticking out the side of his mouth like he had been strangled.

  Although the smell was repulsive, I lifted Oppie out of the trunk as if I could resuscitate him. He must have jumped in when Kitty and I were bickering, the house collar, not the travel collar, around his neck. I had slammed the trunk without realizing Oppie was in there, blasted Vivaldi so I didn’t hear the growling, the whining, the scratching. He’d been jolted by the collar and rolled around beneath the bag of clubs for a while, then been subjected to twenty minutes in an oven—the temperature in the trunk reaching close to 120 degrees. Probable cause of death: cardiac arrest.

  The evening of the accident (the accident—that’s what I was calling it; Kitty called it murder), Kitty moved in with Oppie’s psychic, of all people, until she could sort out “whether or not to stay in Los Alamos,” whether or not to stay with me.

  Stupefied, I surfed cable all night, rolling joints and watching nothing in particular but changing channels every time a dog came on the screen.

  I stood in front of the medicine cabinet. Kitty had all these unused oxycodones for her wisdom teeth. Without her around, nothing was stopping me from enjoying a few of her surplus pills. You’re not supposed to chew these things, I told myself. When you crush one you break its little clock, and a million invisible springs shoot out in every direction. I shook one out and munched it up, chased it with a swallow of scotch, and made a pot of coffee.

  I woke up the PC and decided to kill some time by surfing the antinuke websites. Los Alamos Study Group sounds like the name of a book club, but they archive some pretty interesting leaks from actual Lab documentation.

  The Lab is supposed to close TA-54, Area G, by 2015, but in the past few years it instead expanded from sixtythree acres to ninety-three acres. Who is monitoring the Lab? Answer: the Lab. Since World War II, this branch of the DOE has been the only government agency that enjoys self-regulation, despite the fact that they are sitting on the most volatility. Only the Lab, with its selfoversight and “voluntary consent” status, could get away with saying they were working on cleaning up a hazardous waste site, meanwhile piling on the radioactive and explosive material.

  The Lab planned on “temporarily storing” a lot of by-products of weapons experiments in Area G over the years. What I had not known, but could see verified on the public website of the DOE, was that there already was a surplus of highly radioactive material in that area, over ten million cubic feet of hazardous waste, and they couldn’t or wouldn’t move it, and were currently building an eight-billion-dollar reinforcement as quickly as possible, shitting their pants that someone or something—an earthquake, another fire in the surrounding national forest, a terrorist—would target it.

  A link from LASG led me to a study on natural and man-made disasters by the DOE’s own National Nuclear Security Administration showing that a large earthquake or airplane crash could cause all that waste to explode.

  I had always known we were living on top of quite a bit of nuclear waste, and I suppose I had always known it would be explosive, but I hadn’t realized it would be so easy to detonate.

  I Googled Area 54, Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, safety guidelines, leaks, risks.

  In the past several years the chatter had spiked. It was there for anyone to see in declassified material: the head of DOE writing to the head of the Lab in 2010 that current risk exceeds federal guidelines—as in, if there’s an explosion or a wildfire, there’s not a fucking thing Los Alamos can do about it. The vice-chairman of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board complained that the Lab had been disregarding compliance with the department’s radiation safety guidelines. And everyone pointed the finger at the National Nuclear Security Administration, a division of the DOE, for abandoning the past fifteen years of safety practices that guarded against dangerous radiation leaks.

  I Googled Los Alamos, NM, switched to map mode, satellite view, and toggled southeast, following Pajarito Road. Area G was not hard to find. It lies less than five miles down Pajarito Road. Arcing into the sky like a sports arena, over an acre of huge fabric domes. I counted twelve roofs. The four biggest tents lined up side by side, covering two football fields. Each tent could cover more than four thousand drums, up to 2.2 million gallons of radioactive waste five miles from Central Avenue, one mile upwind of Grand Canyon Drive in downtown White Rock.

  As a footprint, the satellite view of Area G looked a little like Kokopelli on his knees, or a giant squirrel rooting on Pajarito Road. I zoomed in. Google Maps goes close! Jesus, how much detail was I going to get? Tents—the giant tents, floating over the big top. And traffic—I could tell the make of different cars. On satellite the tents were all there. 35°49'51" N, 106°14'22" W. It lies just five miles from here.

  Even the Albuquerque Journal had headlines like: Quake Could Cause Leak.

  The federal government’s approval of continued work at a Los Alamos plutonium lab despite the risk of dangerous radiation releases in a major earthquake “undermines the principles of providing adequate protection of the public, workers, and the environment,” federal nuclear safety auditors complained. The right kind of accident “could lead
to fires and plutonium-contaminated smoke inside the building as glove boxes break open, and … safety systems designed to contain the smoke could also fail, allowing the dangerously radioactive material to escape.”

  The right kind of accident … One fire, one earthquake, one bomb—connect the dots.

  I decided I’d read enough for now, so I lay down on the couch. Too exhausted to shift away from the stabilizing bar pushing into my spine, I eventually fell asleep.

  Morning, the lawn, the newspaper on the sidewalk. My neighbor Ned, the Weedwacker, the cloud of ash and smoke.

  The runaway truck, the driver on fire, Ned crushed beneath the wheels.

  Smoke, ash, ammonia, plutonium, uranium.

  Fallout.

  Awful things: more neighbors—parents and children—coming out of their houses, writhing on the ground, clawing out their eyes, their own eyes, in agony, bleeding from the nose, bleeding from the mouth, bleeding from the ears and eyes, bleeding out.

  Cars storming through the streets like lightning, destroying everything in their path. The rattling wheels, the racing engines, the crashes.

  The noise of the explosions, the sirens, and everywhere the screams, the moans, the grieving cries of men and women, of children and animals, gone insane with horror and pain. Make it stop! Make it stop!

  Tell them what you see.

  See?

  Yes, see—see when the eyes are closed.

  Make it stop! Make it stop!

  Wednesday, July 10

  Something like a kick to the gut made me shudder and I bolted upright from my nightmare, drool all over my chin.

  I got up and stood in the dark living room. The house was quiet. My heart sank into my stomach.

  I remembered Oppie and Kitty and the psychic. The thought of getting in that car—the car that had killed Oppie and further fucked things up with Kitty—was too much to take straight. I popped a couple more of Kitty’s oxycodones, chasing them with the scotch. The thing I liked about Kitty’s pills: they mellowed me out enough with little bounces to my perspective that made me forget the dismal setbacks of the past few days for thirty or forty seconds at a time: Look how the sun shines off that aluminum utility pole! And so it was I faced the day, with a swoon.

  It was a gray morning on the Hill by the time I drove myself to the cremation ceremony alone.

  At the corner of Third and Main I saw a sackcloth-and-asher, a cute teenager who I could tell even through the burlap had a nice figure. I thought maybe I could cheer myself up with a little token gesture of peace. She held out a sunflower while I idled at the light.

  I reached out, and just as she was handing it to me through the driver’s-side window, a bearded guy came up to the passenger side. “Put down thy sword!” he cried, dumping a bag of ashes all over my roof. Then he spit on my windshield, the fucking freak!

  The light turned green and I peeled out, trying to move before the cloud of soot drafted in my window, but the breeze shifted and blew it right back in. Trailing ash, I smoked across the intersection.

  I drove up to the Eternal Friend Pet Mausoleum and a gallery of horrified, hostile expressions. How ridiculous I must have looked with my bedraggled self in the filthy Spider! You’re a horror show, Oberhelm.

  When the elevator lowered the little casket into the earth, I was the only one standing on my side of the hole. The brass rail was there to keep the bereaved from jumping in after the deceased domestic. Kitty sobbed in endless Kleenex and I kept my eyes on the dirt. The few times I looked up, the ladies from her support group averted their eyes, but not before I could see the resentment burning in them for what I’d done to Oppie, what I’d done to Kitty.

  There was one guy I didn’t recognize in an expensive blue suit. I figured it had to be Kitty’s pet psychic, Lars. Great, so this is the guy I’ve given Kitty an excuse to shack up with: handsome, monobrow, intense gaze.

  In a crowning disgrace, my nose started bleeding.

  Nobody handed me a handkerchief. I ruined the sleeve of my wool suit jacket.

  At the end of the service, the director handed me the bill and intoned, “Payable upon interment.” I gave him my check card, and a minute later the pet mortician came back expressing condolences. “I’m afraid it was declined.”

  I didn’t have the strength to argue with the guy and tell him to run it again. He took all the cash I had in my wallet and said he would send me a bill for the balance.

  I drove my ash-covered sports car to the lot behind the Central Avenue Grille and took myself on a one-person wake for Oppie. I guess it’s a lie to say there are no bars on the Hill, but the Central Avenue Grille counts only in emergencies.

  I parked on Central Avenue, and since something was wrong with my check card, I dug in the Spider’s ashtray for coins and managed to come up with $4.50. I almost considered going to Smith’s instead, where this chunk of change would buy me two twenty-four-ounce Cheladas, but then I would have to drink in the parking lot, and I was already having a string of bad luck.

  I pushed my change across the bar, just enough for the special: a shitty light beer. This goddamned Hill!

  I was staring at a boxing match on the TV for less than a minute before I heard someone down the bar order an O’Doul’s. I felt him staring at my reflection in the mirrored bar back, and when I looked up it was Monobrow, the handsome guy from the funeral.

  “Did you buy a Rolex this morning?”

  A Rolex? No, but it felt like I just invested in a halfstake in a doggy mortuary. “What the hell are you talking about?”

  “I think you might need some help,” he said.

  I didn’t feel like getting touchy-feely with my wife’s new boyfriend, even if he was Oppie’s psychic. I hit my beer. “Ashley Pond is right up the road, buddy. Why don’t you fuck a duck?”

  My phone rang and I flipped it open.

  “James Oberhelm?”

  “Yes?”

  “This is the fraud investigations department at Los Alamos National Bank. We noticed a spike of activity on your account. Did you purchase a designer wristwatch this morning?”

  “Hold on a second.” I said to the guy in the blue suit, “You’re not the pet psychic?”

  “The pet psychic?”

  “Yes.”

  “No, I’m not the pet psychic.” He lifted his near-beer and showed me the coaster. I recognized the design at once, but it wasn’t a beer logo. It was the purple dragon of Security Awareness Protocol.

  He flipped the coaster over and the dragon was gone. Now it was St. Pauli Girl with her purple bodice and big steins.

  “Hang up,” said the man from SAP, “I’ll tell you a lot more than that bank flunky can.” He came down the bar to the stool next to mine.

  Under my breath I said, “You’re from SAP.”

  “SAP is not a place. It’s a process.”

  Conversant in SAPese, I corrected myself: “I meant to say you’re part of SAP.”

  “We’re all part of SAP.”

  “I know.”

  “What exactly do you know?”

  “That there’s nothing to know,” I recited, “only what to forget.”

  He nodded. “My name is McCaffery.” He didn’t extend a hand. In a daze I muttered my name and he said, “I know. And the other day you shared a drink at the seediest bar in Española with a short-order cook who I’d be surprised if you know even 10 percent of his rap sheet today.”

  Shit. Think quick! Shuffle through the events since you met Sunshine at Red’s. There had been nothing confidential, nothing FOUO in any of the subjects or contexts, and it hadn’t involved any other Lab employees. As far as McCaffery was concerned, it should be no big deal, and it had started at Red’s.

  “Nothing, nothing at all. I just met him at a bar and found it interesting that he called himself Sunshine, an old hippie from back in the day.”

  “It’s in our interest to determine whether this Sunshine is a Person of Suspicion.” Nice word choice. Our interest: did that mean thei
rs or did it mean yours and mine? McCaffery had me by the balls: the last thing I needed on my record was a POS.

  “I’m a reporter for Surge, as I’m sure you know, and I thought he might tie into my journalistic research.”

  “Do you have clearance for this research?”

  “No, but …” I wanted to tell him, I don’t need your fucking clearance.

  McCaffery flipped open his phone and showed me a mug shot of Sunshine, a.k.a. Harold, a.k.a. Shorn Anderson. “Your identity thief,” he said. “On Sunday, when you went to pay the check at Red’s in Española, he followed the waitress and said he wanted to charge it to a different card instead. By last night his associates had emptied all your accounts: checkings, savings, and money market.”

  Son of a bitch! Well this fucking sucked.

  “Did you give him anything else? Any logins or passwords to computers at the Lab?”

  “No … I mean, hell no!”

  “Is there anyone else involved in this?”

  I might have told McCaffery that I didn’t know anybody else I would ever consider meeting at Red’s in Española, but then I remembered he didn’t yet know I had gone there specifically to meet Sunshine. The harm to my credit had been done but could be repaired. My primary concern now was to contain the damage that SAP might do to my job.

  “No. Nobody. I was just stupid with my check card around a guy I barely knew, that’s all.”

  “What about the pet psychic?”

  “The pet psychic?”

  “You just asked me a minute ago whether I was the pet psychic.”

  “Oh. He’s just a jerk I’ve never even met. When I saw you at my dog’s funeral this morning I thought you might be him.”

  “If you’ve never met him then how do you know him?”

  “I think he’s my wife’s … new friend.”

  McCaffery cocked the eyebrow. “Anything else you want to tell me?”

  I was thinking about my father. When I was a boy they had started asking me questions about him: the doctors, the cops, my mother. And I answered. I told them things he said, the hours he kept—anything they wanted to know. This was natural, of course. I was just a kid, and they were all grown-ups, and something seemed wrong with Dad, and I was sure the other grown-ups wanted to help him out. But in the end all they did was put him away, and that had stayed with me.