by James Reich
In the late morning, Cash returned to her home, a mining cabin in the sometime ghost town of Madrid thirty miles southwest of Santa Fe. She leaned her motorcycle against the remains of the adobe wall that had once separated her cabin from her only neighbor. Carbon hills drew cowls about the sparse cabins situated at wide intervals along the slopes that flanked the drag. Without undressing or removing her frayed high-tops, she collapsed into a numb and dreamless sleep. Madrid was a place for ghosts, a smoky antique scene for the dispossessed and disappearing. Madrid was a short scud of a tourist trap along Highway 14, otherwise known as the Turquoise Trail, a destination for bikers—at least the bar was. There, the speed limit dropped and the dun hills gave way to an isolated half mile of new age schlock stores, galleries, jeweler shacks, and New Mexican kitsch: turquoise, silver, serpentine, iron pyrites, quartz, a general bonanza of cheap minerals and stones. The road was strung over with lights between the trees and telegraph poles. Yet, behind the over-painted and decorous snare of the brief drag, Madrid was dark with mysterious shacks, a taxidermy of wrecked and rusting vehicles that no one could repair or move, disintegrating and melding with the charcoal dirt. Dogs roamed the track roads, trash-blown anonymous spaces off the single paved tourist street. Nothing was considered unusual in Madrid. Guns discharged randomly. Small hysterias echoed. Trash burned in oil drums. Skeletal vehicles were overcome with sand and coal dust. It was a settlement that had been abandoned, reclaimed, and that could be abandoned again at any moment. There were resident credentials to be honored and each day was a hungover carnival. The residents rotated their improvised costumes: hippie, Vietnam vet, draft dodger, biker, cowboy, digger, artist, dissident, marijuana activist, beatnik, earth mother, or deluded middle-class white medicine woman, some hybrid of those. If there were children in Madrid, Cash thought that they must be hidden in those occult outhouses on the black slopes, behind beer bottle walls, prayer flags, and sun-bleached folk art.
Her sleep had lasted until the evening, when she rose, showered, and watched aircraft lights moving over the darkened landscape from beneath her tin portal. Cash regarded the Blackhawk helicopters and V-22s from Holloman and Kirtland Air Force bases scanning low over the desert and the mountain ranges of Sangre de Cristo, Ortiz, and Jemez and the Cerrillos hills. Their rotors droned and receded. Military exercises and drug busts were not uncommon along the spine of the state. Yet, now she wondered if they were looking for her. Had she touched a nerve? Were downtown areas of Albuquerque restricted by plastic stripes of yellow police tape in the hunt for the audacious terrorist who had dared strike at the sentimental nexus of the American nuclear dream? She decided that she was almost certainly hoping for too much, too soon. It would be necessary for her to unfold her plans for those with eyes to detect them. She pulled a bottle of tequila from the freezer compartment of her old refrigerator. The slight frost along the bottle bit her fingers. Cash drank as the chopper lights roamed the sky.
Cash recalled that when Robert Oppenheimer observed the first evil flowering of the atomic bomb over the New Mexico desert, he had at that moment taken for himself the person of Shiva, the Lord of Destruction. Sitting and drinking beneath the stars, Cash envisioned Oppenheimer running a hand across his unshaven jaw, flicking sweat into the sand from his death-tainted fingertips. As she had shadowed Oppenheimer, she had subverted him. This burlesque was the opening of her war on the nuclear industry. Cash told herself that she was performing acts of corrective sabotage. In her wake, a wasted phallus in the desert; ahead of her, power plants and cruel billionaires, men with atrophied consciences. She thought of the men who had worked on the Manhattan Project, developing the most devastating weapon in history. How could they work, suspending what nightmares must have troubled them? These men razed Hiroshima, Nagasaki, sent waves of death over Japan, and set their glittering sword of Damocles over every city of the world, forever. Superimposed over footage of unspeakable missile arrays, she saw Oppenheimer’s face in a strobe light, forming a rictus of disingenuous astonishment with his hair shining under the glare of television studio lamps. She tried to envision her father, as he must have been in the Soviet Union before she was born. She did not know his name. She did not know her mother’s name. Absent any photographs, she thought of her father as resembling Robert Oppenheimer. What she could not conceive, as her father brought her mother to Pripyat in 1970, was that he was unaware of the danger. Cash saw his eyes shifting and complicit in the Soviet sleet. Chernobyl. Her mother and father disappeared after they had escaped with her from the Soviet Union. The dislocation, the alienation required purpose or atonement. By now, she did not doubt that her parents would have succumbed to cancer from the radiation bequeathed to them by the sphinx at Chernobyl on April 26, 1986, as they smiled at their boiling newborn in her bloody wraps.
Cash had been stolen away from the land of the Soviets almost twenty-five years ago. She ached for her dead abandoned city, for her transplanted youth. It was for only a matter of days after her birth, under the glittering smoke and contamination of Pripyat, that she had ever been a Russian-Ukrainian girl named Varyushka. Her name was derived from varvara, meaning “foreigner,” and “barbarian.” She had been cut off. The only means Cash had to revisit the artificial city of her birth was through her dreams and the hot fluid grip of natal memories, hallucinations gnashing together, arranging the burnt dust into seductive reconstructions, a virtuality of her blood and skin. The site of her birth had become a place of terror that teenage boys visited in video games. She was a shadow, an alien remnant, as though she had exploded like a monster from that new womb that men had made. It was in America that she had resolved that the creep of atomic cities must be stopped. If she was not born to protect the crimson forests and steppes of the Amazons, then she would protect the great plates of the United States, the old antagonist.
Whenever she thought of the past, the nodes of history came with a neat, perverse rhythm. The clean succession and collisions of dates informed her that her assault on the nuclear industry was inevitable, fatal. Twenty-five days until her twenty-fifth birthday and the twenty-fifth anniversary of the meltdown, the death of the city. So few years ago, the Berlin Wall still stood as a calloused membrane between East and West, between twin impulses of consciousness separated by gun towers and klieg lights. The lightning of schizophrenia flashed over Europe like probe beams over the shivering lobes of an exposed brain. Merely twenty-five years ago, during the Cold War, in the Sex War, the Stasi were still masturbating at the spy holes of the Eastern bloc, abducting women from lamp-lit corners. Reagan, the wounded President, the Hollywood star, was running America by astrology and chance. Gorbachev, the peasant farmer, his brow stamped with a red birthmark in the eerie pattern of what would become the Zone of Alienation, ran the other side, what was then her side. Later, she had discovered that her side was her sex, and that the end of the world could come with strange erotic sideshows and the invention of new wombs, fuselage sluts and distended factories, atomic submarines swimming in uterine seas. When she was born, only forty years had passed since the maiming of the Bikini atoll in 1946. Sailors and scientists, drunk on zombies, watched the bomb strip the palm trees. They watched it kill test animals chained to the decks of the dummy ships in the target zone. Those ships that were not sunk by the blast or the tidal waves that followed were scuppered to line the sea with contaminated metals. When she was born, only twenty years had passed since the 1966 Palomares Incident, when a shining B-52 bomber decorated with smiling pinup girls collided with its refueling plane, destroying both aircraft and dropping three hydrogen bombs on a small Andalucían fishing hamlet, leaving nets of radiation. The umbilicus of the refueling plane unraveled between sheets of metal, flame pouring from the ripped hose across the stockings of an airbrushed rip-off of Jean Harlow. A metal grin detached from the nose cone. A dislocated sex symbol, a girl, fell to the earth. A fourth bomb spun screaming into the Mediterranean Sea, the muted explosions scattering nuclear material and drawing a pigme
nted mist of plutonium across the village and its surrounds, a small, new Guernica for the back brain. As with the Chernobyl disaster, the Luftwaffe bombing of Guernica also occurred on April 26. Neat numbers. Men called aborted nuclear weapons “broken arrows,” and she thought of the arrow shafts of the Aztecs splitting against the boiling breastplates of the Spanish, the sharpened points of the Indians’ weapons futile against the conquistadores on their zombie ride up to Trinity. The Cold War and the Sex War: a mirror of terror, and a glare that men cannot meet directly. Like Freud petrified in the wet halls of Medusa, Colonel Paul Tibbets had his mother’s name painted upon the shining fuselage of the B-29 he was to pilot over Hiroshima to drop the atomic bomb. Enola Gay Tibbets was transformed into a bomber. Recast in a parturiency of metal and rivets, she opened her womb and delivered the weapon they had named Little Boy from 31,000 feet. Children flashed into flame and were blown and scattered as ashes across the blackening ground.
The bloody afterbirth of the atomic age: red waves of fear and permanent nuclear alarm. Across the suburbs of the earth, fallout shelters echoed the quiet holocaust of women because the fallout shelter was little more than a kitchen policed by threat of extermination: the post-apocalyptic world would be a pantry under siege.
These realizations made Cash sick. Men watched the rising of twin tides, feminism and communism, with profound anxiety. These two socializing instabilities threatened their privileges—a pair of precipitous dominoes, terrorizing them with psychic enslavement and physical impotence. During the mania of the McCarthy witch-hunts, all intellectuals were suspects, and, more than ever, men could not afford an intellectual class of women. Therefore, the rates of lobotomy spiked as agitated, intellectualized, sexualized housewives fell under the ice pick like Leon Trotsky.
In Madrid, a coyote whimpered. It was getting late. Cash decided to walk over to the Coalmine Tavern to drink and to eavesdrop. The bar also had a TV, which she did not. She put on her green cat’s-eye glasses and performed a dozen bicep curls to ease her tension, watching the muscle swell beneath her pale skin. For a moment, she saw through her skin as if in X-ray.
Behind the Coalmine Tavern were great slag heaps, seams of coal and black dust, and the hulk of a black locomotive fusing with its overgrown rails. The desolate coal train was choked with dead memories like the final train out of Chernobyl. Cash garnered a weird comfort from it, and from the entombed mines, and untended hills of coal. These were the same slag heaps that David Bowie struggled down portraying the alien Thomas Jerome Newton in the movie The Man Who Fell to Earth, a decade before her birth, the stronger gravity threatening his bird-like bones, his rust-red hair concealed beneath the hood of his duffle. Newton descended and walked before the dead train, tracked from a distance by a CIA agent dressed in a formal suit. Atomic power had destroyed the alien’s home five times over. This new zone of alienation menaced the alien with corruption. That is why I am here, she thought, of all places, with the radon gas haunting the rocks. Varvara, Varyushka, the alien, the foreigner, in a place of outlaws where the horrific and absurdist games of the Atom, the Martian, the Illegal, the quick and the dead are played out. She thought of the Aberfan coal disaster, 1966; the alien on the slag heaps, 1976; Chernobyl and her birth, 1986. Ten-year pulses mimicked her heartbeat. She said to herself: They’re so strange here, the trains . . .
The bar of the tavern was as long as a mess hall, dark with crude beams and murals of the locomotive and mining past of the town. The ceiling was collaged with dollar bills and remote currencies, wagon wheel chandeliers with plastic electric candles. At the far end of the room, a small empty stage created a vaudeville and carny space that could draw drunks like iron filings to a magnet. Cash took a seat at the bar without removing her hat. A Chihuahua dragged the remains of a hamburger across the floor.
“Cash, hey.” The bartender, Carla, strutted over in her cowboy boots. Her hair reminded Cash of dark seaweed moving in a heavy current. Carla wore a black T-shirt, knotted to expose her navel, where a red jewel caught the light. “So, what’s up?”
“Not much. Long day.”
“Yeah, what happened to your face?” Carla leaned across the counter and took Cash’s chin between her blue fingernails, turning her cheek.
“Oh, nothing, I just grazed it on a rock.” In the litany of pains from the attack on Trinity, Cash had forgotten the way the ragged monument had brought blood to her cheekbone as she embraced it, setting her explosives.
“Hope you gave as good as you got!” Carla laughed and began wiping a damp beer glass.
“Yeah, I fixed it.”
“Get you a drink, honey?”
“Vodka. Vodka gimlet, thanks.”
Carla brought the drink and Cash put her money on the bar. The ice in the green-tinged booze reminded her of the trinitite she now wore about her neck.
Carla asked: “You see the shit-storm from White Sands yet?”
“Uh, no . . . ” Cash squinted, removed her glasses to wipe some dirt away.
“The boys are expecting some developments. Ten o’clock news is coming up.”
“I guess I should stick around for the action.”
Cash began to watch the television that was suspended by a pair of heavy chains in the corner of the room. It was tuned to the local news station. Glancing around as she drank her gimlet, she realized that the hot plasma screen had the attention of almost everyone in the bar. The local news began reporting her attack on the Trinity monument. She finished her drink, and Carla delivered another with the efficiency of a glamorous machine. As the network teased out the exposure of the story, Cash froze with the drink obscuring her mouth and nose like a glass mask, listening without looking at the screen.
“Mystery continues to shroud the blaze that destroyed the historic MacDonald Ranch House close to Trinity, claiming the life of a Socorro firefighter after a burning viga fell upon the crew trying to save the building. The firefighter suffered head and neck injuries and passed away before arriving at hospital. Trinity is known as the site of the first nuclear detonation, and adding further to the mystery facing investigators is the explosion that destroyed the site’s historic marker.”
Cash sat impassively, drinking, assimilating the news of the dead firefighter. If she were to be diverted by any death it might be that of a firefighter, those who had perished on the superstructure of Reactor IV, Chernobyl. Yet, this first collateral death at Trinity passed through her conscience without disturbing it. She permitted herself the narrowest of smiles. She passed the test of pragmatism. The news went on:
“There has been some speculation but no information regarding the identity of the so-called Trinity bomber. Now, however, as officials at White Sands and Kirtland insist they are not unduly concerned and are refusing to overreact, they have released materials discovered at the scene. In a moment, the photograph that was found with this, this message at Trinity . . . ”
The station went to a commercial break: a Victoria’s Secret advertisement for their summer bikini range was shown; wolf whistles rose in the bar.
The news returned.
The bar fell silent.
Finally, Cash was able to raise her eyes to the television to watch a beautiful Hispanic woman in twin set and pearls holding a transcript of Cash’s typewritten message. Her eyes flickered toward a space beyond the cameras, as though waiting for permission. Her lip gloss shone beneath the studio lights. When it came, her voice trembled with nerves.
“Atomic energy, nuclear power is Russian roulette,” she began, modulating her tone. Cash knew the words and mouthed them silently into her vodka:
“I was born in what is now a wasteland. I cannot return. My city existed for sixteen years only. It took only sixteen years from construction for the nuclear reactors at Chernobyl until the meltdown with which you are all familiar. The reactors employed my family and the citizens of my city. No one did anything but tend the hive. The hive could not be sustained. Thousands of us were killed in a slow invisible fire.
I was born in that fire on April 16, 1986. I am writing this because I want you to understand this twenty-five-year time span. Here, in April 2011, it is only twenty-five years since the incident, the accident, the horror that created the Zone of Alienation, and machined a sarcophagus from a womb. This is my warning.”
The newsreader paused. The camera closed in tighter. There was tension in the woman’s face. Cash’s manifesto trembled her hands.
“Many of you in Washington, California, Arizona, Nebraska, Kansas, Texas, Louisiana, Minnesota, Iowa, Montana, Arkansas, Mississippi, Wisconsin, Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, Tennessee, Alabama, Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, North Carolina, Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Vermont, Maryland, New Jersey, and Connecticut are oblivious to the fact that you are playing the same game of Russian roulette with 104 aging nuclear reactors. You are betting on death chambers. Their disposal tanks and containment shafts are overflowing. Let’s not be sentimental, New York . . . ”
She hesitated again. The camera pressed closer. Her brow contracted.
“Let’s not be sentimental, New York: an incident at Fitzpatrick, Indian Point, Nine Mile Point, or Ginna would make 9/11 look like the snuffing of two birthday candles. At any moment, swathes of land, cities, or entire states might have to be abandoned to radiation. There are no contingency plans for emergencies or for the encroaching waste. There are no vast concrete shafts in the earth to hide it in. It cannot be contained or disposed of. It is almost my birthday. I am inviting you all to a party. It is a party where everyone dies.”