Curse the Names

by Robert Arellano

The rain comes on quickly, tricking me into thinking it might be a brief shower.

  It is too early for the monsoon-type rains of midsummer in these mountains. I have no change of clothes, the heater in the Spider doesn’t work, and it is cold, so I decide to wait it out.

  I keep digging.

  Before I’ve chipped very far, I put down the tire iron to step out on the portal. The shower has become a steady downpour. I will have to wait for it to clear.

  I pace around to keep myself warm. Soon the rain is coming down so hard that I know I will get soaked just stepping onto the portal. It is pounding on the roof, loud, annoying like a dinner guest who gets suddenly, rudely drunk.

  It is getting on night.

  I decide to leave. I will run to the car. I will get wet. I will start the car and shiver all the way back down that road. I can be down to the Mustang in twenty minutes, and there is still some loose change in the car. A hot chocolate with Lord Calvert will stop my teeth chattering. Maybe there will be a cheap, dry T-shirt: Mora, NM. Leave here and never come back.

  I make a break for it.

  I splash up the drive, jumping clumsily between potholes filled with water, getting soaked within seconds. When I arrive at the car the arroyo is running. The water in the ditch has come up above the tires.

  I open the door and the floor of the car is choked with mud.

  I try starting it even though I know it is stupid—not a cough, not even a click. I splash back to the house, remembering something from the Discovery Channel: once you get wet, you’ve lost half the battle. My shirt is cotton. What do they call it? The death fabric. The rain keeps pounding.

  I stand shivering under the portal and look back at the valley, but there is nothing to see, no lights on the other side. Everything is in cloud.

  You will have to spend the night in the house.

  The wind blows the rain slantingly onto the portal. I turn and go back inside. The birds will not let up squeaking now, loudly, incessantly, as if some understanding in their miniscule brains makes them declare full alert. I wish there were some way I could tell them: It’s okay, your mother will be back soon. I think about their mother. Hell, when this rain lets up, I’ll bring you some food.

  I decide to build a fire in the middle of the floor. The absentee owner will be angry when he next comes around and discovers the damage. I don’t care. I have my lighter. There is dry wood inside. Wet, cold, stranded, I have to burn it. I am taking heroic measures.

  I gather what scrap wood I can find from around the floors: an old chair leg, splintered floorboards, planking I cracked off the padlocked door with my tire iron. I don’t have very good ventilation. A little smoke never killed anybody, I tell myself. Yes, it does—so does a little lead paint.

  The pages of Surge are too glossy and won’t get the wood going. There is only the Bible for kindling. I take my lighter out of the Altoids tin and light the onionskin pages.

  I mumble a lapsed-Catholic apology in my head. It’s only the heat I’m after.

  I tear out a good chunk of pages and stoke the flames. A black arc sweeps across the stack, shrinking and leaving behind a pile of ash.

  I start to feel better when the fire burns up a little, but I have to be right near the flame to feel warm. I am still wet, and the second I back off from the fire I get cold.

  I take off my clothes, spreading them out on the planks to try to dry them.

  I stand exposed in the firelight, shivering in damp underwear. I want a blanket. A sleeping bag would be better, something to wrap around myself.

  I pace the floors. I have to keep moving.

  Where is my marijuana? I might have thrown it in the fire. It happens all the time, people burn something of value to them by mistake.

  I am growing tired. It rains.

  Now it is full-on night. I pass between the bird nest and the fire. The baby birds peep weakly. A mother won’t return to her nest when a person has messed with it. It’s I who am keeping her away.

  I fill a bottle cap with some water and hold it to the mouth of the nest. Do I feel them pecking at it? I can’t tell. My hands are shaking.

  Keep moving.

  The chair legs burn to cinders. I use the tire iron to break up the crude table that held the Bible. I have to add paper to keep the fire going, so I throw in the glossy Surge articles.

  I am getting better at managing this fire. How long has it been pouring? Four hours? Even if it is the monsoons, no one storm could last much longer. A warm, dry front always pushes through a cold storm system.

  I collect all the trash I can find on the floor and burn that. I cast around for more wood. I take the tire iron and pry up the floorboards at the edge of the room. I burn them.

  There is no noise coming from the mud nest hanging from the viga. Nothing. I should have helped them while I could still do something. Is it my fault their mother hasn’t come back? I’ll get them some food as soon as this rain lets up, go out in the mud and dig up some worms.

  I find a rusty soup can and let water stream straight into it from the holes in the roof.

  I have to piss, but I don’t bother getting up and going onto the portal. I go in the corner.

  I see something burning at the edge of the fire. It might be my marijuana. Or it could be the business cards from my wallet. It is impossible to tell, but I keep on looking at it in fascination. A neat trapezoid of ash has folded upon itself like an ancient and decaying silk shirt: a sleeve, a cuff, a collar. It is beautiful, and it soothes me to see it.

  I feel damp, but not cold.

  The cloudy sky starts to lighten a little but still the rain is not letting up. I go back into the other room and keep chipping at the wall.

  I am tired. I go back into the main room and crawl onto the mattress to lie down. The springs groan, comforting my aching spine. I do not mind the foul odor.

  I swoon with fatigue and listen for the sound of the rain, convinced that it has stopped and what I heard in my ears was just a ringing in the head of a man gone mad. Then I feel the floor lurch a quarter-turn, the room spin into place, and the sound come on louder than before: rain, more rain, on the roof, in the corners, puddles, pools outside, filling higher, deeper.

  Trying to remember: why did I come here? Don’t I have a job, a house, a wife? I just need to leave. Walk away. All I have to do is get up and walk away.

  You tried that. You tried that last time you left. But your name was on the wall, so you came back.

  When I go into the other rooms to pry up more splintered chunks of wood, my teeth begin chattering. I would be relieved if someone showed up and caught me trespassing, rescued me, arrested me, called an ambulance—ended the ordeal—but this wish is just a diversion from the real problem: I have to keep coming back here.

  Execrate. My life has been execrated, dead on paper, dead credit, medically dead. All dead. Abandon them to ashes.

  Streams of water from the ceiling are leaking all over the room and the fire has died down. My teeth are chattering uncontrollably. That’s a sign of hypothermia. So I run out into the rain in my underwear and slog through the mud to the car. I dig in the glove compartment for something to use for kindling and find the Los Alamos telephone directory. Back inside the house I light my lighter and tear out the yellow pages to make a torch. While they briefly blaze, I search around the room and find some trash to burn. I sit on the mattress close to the fire.

  I don’t want to let sleep come again, but I am desperately tired. The storm clouds are low and it is a dark day, but I am unclear whether it is dawn or dusk.

  Still raining. No dogs barking, no coyotes. Everything is in its den.

  Something on the floor catches a glimmer of firelight: a rusted paperclip. I unbend it and hold the tip over the fire, heating it until the sliver of steel is orange. I touch it to my skin, to the back of my left hand and wrist, shooting pain through myself to stay awake.

  My adrenaline begins to dry up and I torture myself at the edge of consciousness. I
spit on a piece of wood at the rim of the fire. The water burns off leaving an archipelago of mucus in the shape of a backward J. The moldy stuffing warms me, rocks me to sleep.

  I see a town of ten thousand people reduced to ashes. I see people coming out of their homes in agony. Smoke blots out the sun, fills the sky. A noise beating down on the earth makes the dying clasp hands desperately over their heads. How horrible to foresee death so clearly.

  Someone does come, a man in a Western hat and a long oil coat that reaches to his cowboy boots, the rain dripping from his brim and cascading off his back. I cower like a wet animal while he shines a flashlight around the room to take in the squalor.

  What must this look like? My pathetic fire smolders amidst the splintered boards. My clothes in the corner make a wet, filthy knot. I am worse than the sackcloth-and-ashes people. At least they don’t move into your living room in their filthy rags and use your furniture for kindling.

  The man says, “I seen your car stuck in the mud, figured you could use some help.”

  This strikes me, after many hours of animalistic toil, as so human, so sympathetic, that I convulse into a great sob.

  There are neighbors and people around who call this valley home, and I came here to this abandoned house and turned it into a demon obsession. I have made my mark on this forsaken place, but I know that I have been bitterly defeated. It all seems preposterous, now that help has arrived. The pages with my name are ashes, but the superficial scars I have left behind are nothing to the house, just scratches in the plaster. The bite it has taken out of me will fester for a long time, maybe kill me.

  There is no blanket to put over my shoulders, and the man’s coat is dripping wet. He waits while I let it out. When finally I have calmed down to the point I can breathe, I say, “It’s a mistake.”

  The stranger nods. “You wouldn’t be the first.”

  He walks past the fire and I briefly glimpse his face: it is the red, deeply lined face of a tough old man cultivating a relaxed rage. He bends over me and takes out a pack of cigarettes, a brand I buy now and then when I can’t sleep. I nod and the stranger fishes out two, lights them both, and hands one down to me.

  I shiver on the floor in my underwear. The cigarette tastes terrible but the heat and smoke in my lungs are soothing.

  The stranger does not speak of the broken boards or the scorched floor as it is clear that a greater depravity than mere vandalism led to these.

  He says, “You been working on that wall?”

  He walks to the splintered door and shines his flashlight into the next room at the place where the tire iron juts out between bricks.

  He turns back and fishes in the breast pocket of his overcoat for a bottle of pills. “Want some?”

  “What is it?”

  “Sedatives. Take some.”

  “No thank you.”

  “They’re very good drugs. The sort you like.”

  “What?”

  “Everybody likes these.”

  “No. Not from you.”

  He shrugs, gazes at me strangely. There was already some in the cigarette. I am almost down to the butt by the time I notice the taste.

  “You put my name here?”

  He turns and looks at the wall. “Not I. The chain of names began long before this, and today you stand at the head of them all.”

  He goes to the viga where the nest is suspended, reaches up, and squeezes his fingertips through the hole in the nest, taking one of the baby birds in his hand. I hear a weak chirp. This one is barely alive. He turns and dangles it down before me. “You let them die.”

  “What?”

  “The swallows. You let them die.”

  His face contorts into a hard, red mask. The wrinkles on his forehead settle sideways.

  I don’t know what to say. “They were already dead.”

  “Who are you that these birds should die for?”

  The man drops the chick on the floor. With a prescient revulsion I turn away. When I hear the small bones crush under his heavy boot, I bow my head and vomit.

  I search the floor. For what? The tire iron? It is lodged in the wall, and it will do me no good against this one.

  “Don’t touch that wall no more, you peckerwood bastard.”

  A boot to my stomach knocks the wind out of me and leaves me gasping for air, wishing I could vomit again so that the convulsions might relieve the sharp pain in my voided abdomen.

  I don’t speak, but the old man seems to know what I am thinking through the pain.

  “Yea, I built this wall with my own hands, eight hundred bricks, each brick thirty pounds—twelve tons of earth, and more of mud between.”

  “I do not believe any of this. I do not believe that you are even here.”

  “That is a great error,” he whispers close to my ear, “for we are both really here.”

  He goes to the wall and yanks out the tire iron, marching back across the room with it raised like a club. I cover my head in my arms.

  “What animates a man like you? Women flicker onto the screen like little pictures. You smoke your drug and drink your bottle.”

  “You were there.”

  A foul grin tells me he knows I am beginning to understand. “Ye did not come easily to the realization. You had to warn the people.”

  “Why me?”

  His smile is small and ugly. “Nahum does not go to Nineveh.”

  He takes off the overcoat—wearing nothing underneath. It is not easy to look at, his ass a great sagging heap that flaps around his hips. Don’t try to describe the thing that’s shriveled in a nest of gray pubic hair between his pockmarked thighs.

  “What is it you are going to do?”

  “Naked I came out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return …”

  Wednesday, July 17

  Curled in a ball, shivering. A splitting headache. Vomit all over my shirt. Stomach throbbing from all the heaving.

  Waking up to two men in hazmat suits standing over me. One of them breathes my name: “James Oberhelm?” I nod in my own vomit. PVC gloves grip my upper arms and I am sliding out of the house.

  The spacemen get me outside on a stretcher and I am loaded into an ambulance and covered with a reflective blanket.

  I come to slowly, the aching all over gradually worsening. I wish I could either die or go back to sleep, but the paramedics inject me with something meant to keep me conscious.

  I am held at the Los Alamos Medical Center pending blood-test analysis. They put me on intravenous antibiotics for the hand, which they tell me has become infected. They inject chemicals intended to counteract other chemicals they say I have ingested, deliberately or not.

  We meet in an interview room that smells like piss, the SAP agents and I.

  Look into their eyes: that infuriating, patronizing vacancy. They think you’re a drug addict. Make them understand your work. You’re an interviewer, one of the best in the in-house publishing industry. You came to the Lab for the money, the bennies, the Cadillac health care.

  There is so much you do not tell them. You do not tell them about Mel Woburn or Ritchie Motherfucker. You do not tell them about how when the hippies went to cremate Ritchie, they found out it wasn’t so easy to burn a body.

  You do not tell them about the wall. You do not tell them about the rain, the birds, or Fourth of July. You do not tell them about the bones or the photo. Do not tell them about the blood tech. Why not? Because you’ve got to get to her first.

  “You put it on Surge. You posted it on the feed.”

  They have me there. I posted. Or someone with the administrator’s password posted. It was only up briefly, but it was early in the morning on Tuesday, July 16, the Trinity Birthday.

  All the scientists were home drinking coffee, reading e-mails and articles for pleasure, when a message got posted to Surge. It looked a little like haiku.

  TA-54—

  B49 CSU

  LLSW

  RLW

  Pu-239

>   drum seepage

  critical mass

  earthquake

  seismic: 7/16 18:06:06

  mag: 7.1

  Someone posted:

  local fallout: 919 rem (+/-100)

  burning eyes

  burning lungs

  radiation poisoning

  mortality: 100 percent

  avg. life expectancy: 12 hours

  B49 CSU is the name of a container storage unit, larger than your average industrial storage container. It could hold more than fifty large oil drums in a single layer on pallets. LLSW is low-level solid waste, RLW is radioactive liquid waste, and Pu-239 is plutonium. Anyone in Los Alamos with an elementary education can tell you what 919 rem means. Plus or minus a hundred … In case anyone didn’t understand, the post included mortality and average life expectancy.

  That was the message. It read just like an emergency bulletin, something someone would send out when they got some very bad news through official channels that they only had time to copy-paste. It read like a collateraldamage assessment on a classified military broadcast: cold, precise, appalling. It read like something a scientist would type.

  Panic ensued. As luck would have it, in an unrelated accident, before dawn a delivery truck skidded and jackknifed on its way up the Hill, closing down the road to traffic for six hours while a tow team maneuvered it out of the way. The driver got a citation for two hundred dollars; he should have taken the White Rock Road.

  Most Tuesday mornings, this would have proved a nuisance to a few hundred Los Alamos residents going down to the valley to shop. Anyone important trying to drive anyplace important, like to a meeting with the governor in Santa Fe or to the airport in Albuquerque, would have just turned around and taken the back road out of town.

  But people were looking at the alarming posting on their phones, they were texting and retweeting each other the message, they were calling each other and saying, There’s an evacuation notice, but the road is closed, and now they’re saying it might be a terrorist attack, and it all went viral.

  The traffic was snarled all the way back through town. If you were trying to get to the medical center, you came up against mobs who had taken the gridlockfrustration into their own hands: using both lanes of narrow streets to point their cars toward the valley even though nothing was moving.