Bombshell

by James Reich

  Cash mapped that the twin reactors of Indian Point were just over forty miles from Manhattan, and an unfavorable wind could bear the glittering death rain of fallout down the Hudson in minutes, shrouding the city, delivering the million damnations of radiation sickness, cancer, and the hollowing of the state, the liquidation of New York from Buchanan down through White Plains to the Statue of Liberty. One hundred and fifty warning sirens would howl over a ten-mile radius. There would be an emergency shutdown, a SCRAM. She planned the assault on Indian Point to force the Final SCRAM, to protect the world from the false promises of a lethal technology.

  America had seen this before, but was forgetting . . .

  1979. The old man stared into the camera, his voice low and measured:

  “The world has never known a day quite like today. It faced the considerable uncertainties and dangers of the worst nuclear power plant accident of the atomic age. And the horror tonight is that it could get much worse. The potential is there for the ultimate risk of meltdown at Three Mile Island . . .”

  Walter Cronkite spoke into the cameras of CBS News on the evening of March 30, twelve days after the release of the nuclear power plant disaster movie The China Syndrome. Then Cronkite stood before a rudimentary map of Pennsylvania: “Earlier on this incredible third day of the accident, confusion, contradiction, and questions clouded the atmosphere like atomic particles. Plant officials predicted radiation will continue to leak at least five more days. Governor Thornburgh considered then rejected the evacuation of a million residents in four counties surrounding the plant: York, Dauphin, Lancaster, and Cumberland. But the governor urged that pregnant women and young children within a five-mile radius leave the area.” A profound sense of doubt and distrust snaked along the Susquehanna River, as the huge hydrogen bubble in Reactor 2 continued to swell, blasting grotesque plumes of radioactive xenon gas across the hollowing town, a decade of exposure in moments. Middletown officials declared a curfew. Cash had researched what followed: six months after the near-meltdown and the smothering of the streets, homes, farms, and fields of Dauphin County by the gas cloud, catastrophic increases in infant mortality and instances of cancers within a ten-mile zone of the plant. The site of Three Mile Island Reactor 2 was still dirty, and would never be clean . . .

  In Madrid, a light snow began to fall as Varyushka Cash descended from the slag heaps, surfing on low waves of black silt as the pain in her skull threatened to wipe her out. Below her, she could see the dark locomotive fused with rust to the broken iron railway that extended 100 yards behind the Coalmine Tavern before disappearing into the weeds. She knew all the problems with coal, but if it burned, you could extinguish it, and it would not kill you if you ate it. As she slid sideways down the face of minerals and stray grass, her fingers trailed in it. At the foot of the hill, she brushed her black hands on her jeans, smelling the carbon. She vaulted the guardrail and walked along the road beneath the garlands of lights toward her cabin. Wind chimes toned from leafless trees. Her neighbor’s house was in darkness and her car was not in the unpaved drive. Cash ran her fingers over the cold tank of her motorcycle before opening her own front door.

  Cash’s mining cabin consisted of three rooms. The front door opened onto a small kitchen where a yellow-and-green-tiled Mexican table was arranged at the center of the floorboards she had painted with thick gloss. The living room was defined at the point where the bare red floor gave way to a series of rugs, a small couch, and bookshelves improvised from crates. On the wall was a large banner, an orange background with the black silhouette of a seven-headed cobra. An antique wood-burning stove and the black chimney cans that rose into the ceiling and out of the roof heated the house. She checked it and found the embers strong. Otherwise, the only other spaces were her bedroom and cramped bathroom. Cash opened her refrigerator and reached for a bottle of filtered water. The tap water in Madrid was full of sulfur and mostly non-potable. Magnets held a photograph to the door of the freezer compartment, at her eye level. It was ten years old. The photograph showed Cash and another girl, arm in arm, on the streets of San Francisco. The other girl wore heavy Cleopatra eyeliner. The girl was dressed in a black and green Cramps T-shirt. She had a camera around her neck on a red plastic cord. In the background were billboards and bright lights and sweating crowds outside the Fillmore. Cash turned away, moved slowly to her bedroom, and collapsed. Shards of memory intruded, faces swam before her, memories of her friends, her surrogates, imaginary lovers, and suspected enemies. She would have need of all of them.

  5

  CASH STOOD AT THE BROKEN PANES OF THE THIRD-FLOOR WARD window, holding her palms up, touching the blank space where the glass had been, the lost substance of the hospital. She stared into the irradiated plaza. Abandoned intravenous drips stood with their collapsed sacs and tubes dangling where the evacuees had been hastily disconnected. The ripped dark blue vinyl and yellow foam upholstery of a capsized wheelchair had become the nest of a pair of furtive albino swallows. A rusting gurney had shunted up against a gray streetlight. The sunlight across the metals and paving and probing the windows was without warmth, devoid of qualities. She turned back to the ward and the rows of Plexiglas incubators that lay beneath a haze of dust, her spectral presence among them like the supervisor of snatched coffins. There were Cyrillic name tags lying on the scuffed blue-green linoleum floor, an elegant code that she could not decipher. When the delayed evacuation had come at last, it had come swiftly, the Passover of a terrible gray angel.

  She stalked the drained corridors. Faint greenish light reflected from the peeling paintwork. The ward desks at the reception areas were laced with cobwebs, X-ray prints hung black against dead light boxes; charts and files were scattered across the floor. She came to an operating theater with an observation window and a group of chairs arranged for medical students. For some moments, she could not make sense of the decomposed mash on the blood-black operating table, huge lamps crooning over it. Flies droned within it. This anesthetized creature had been left behind, its wounds wide and vivid as the hospital was cleared. She retched and pushed out through heavy plastic curtains and stood panting inside a lifeless elevator, reflexively punching at the buttons. She made her descent of the dust-clung stairs, spitting the poisonous air from her mouth. The glass in the exterior doors had been smashed, and shards of it lay blown across the five stone steps that approached it. Outside, weeds shrugged and corkscrewed between the paving slabs. Thorns and tendrils had overrun the desolate verandas of the city and piled limp against the gray concrete. There were still traces of snow on the ground from a recent fall as she made her way to the remains of the amusement park.

  Cash stood beneath the radiant Ferris wheel, its canary yellow gondolas whining on their corroded hinges. She was afraid to touch it. Close by was the disintegrating deck of the simple carousel, an octagonal steel frame suspending a few wide benches. The electric dodgem cars on their rink resembled Cold War fantasies of rocket cars and hovering sedans—cracked fiberglass and broken headlamps, and everywhere were the threads and canopies of encroaching wilderness. It was strange for her to think of Pripyat as a place of youth and amusement, where most of the inhabitants, the workers, had been below thirty years of age; stranger still to think of these desolate arcades as the place of her birth. If she had been able to ride the yellow gondolas, from their zenith, she would have been able to look out across the white tower blocks, and to see the cooling tower and sarcophagus of the reactor. Hot waves pulsed through her flesh and bones.

  She awoke, asphyxiated from her nightmare, struggling from her sheets as though they were part of the winding net of natal memories that had dragged her back to the dead city. She swung her legs from the mattress and looked up at the poster of Valerie Solanas over her orange vinyl headboard. She asked: “Where were you last night?” On the nightstand, her untouched bottle of water rested beside a stack of disintegrating Wonder Woman comics. The kitchen floor was cold as she went to make coffee. Cash showered, scrubbing the f
allout of her dreams from her pores, lathering her rough crop of black hair over and over, as if the memories, or whatever they were, could be washed out of her head. She turned her face into the hot shower jet, gulping at the hot fog until she felt she was drowning, new sensations to make her forget. When she brushed her teeth, there was blood in the mint froth that she spat into the sink. She wondered if there would be any further news reports, now that her manifesto had been delivered on local television. It had been late at night. Those who had seen it would tell others, but more people needed to see it, she thought. She needed to see a television, but the bar would not be open yet. Molly, her neighbor, had a television.

  Varyushka Cash met Molly Pinkerton in 2006. She was the first person that Cash spoke with in Madrid. They were both crossing the drag to the Coalmine Tavern at the same time, the only figures on the vacant street. Cash had her khaki pack thrown over one shoulder when their eyes met and they drew together. Molly struck Cash as being over six feet tall, with silver-blond hair whipping from beneath the green and white of her trucker cap as the wind rinsed down from the slag heaps and stripped trash out of the back of a rusting truck. Molly was wearing black thermal leggings and a ripped muscle shirt revealing thick-veined biceps and broad shoulders. She was wearing Dia de los Muertos–styled Nike Dunks, pumpkin and black with skeletons. Cash guessed that she was in her early fifties. Sitting at adjacent barstools, they exchanged names. They were the only patrons in the bar that early morning. Molly explained that she was sixty years old, or she had just turned twenty, counting only the years since her gender reassignment surgery in Mexico.

  “So, we’re almost the same age,” Cash said, raising her Black Russian. “Budmo!”

  “What’s that?” Molly raised her tequila, mirroring Cash’s gesture.

  “Ukrainian. ‘Long life.’”

  “Bitchin’.” Molly slammed her drink. “Let’s get another.”

  “Do you live here?”

  “In this bar? Almost.” Molly grinned, revealing a silver incisor. “In Madrid, yes.” She eyed the slim paperback book protruding from the breast pocket of Cash’s oversized black utility shirt. “The SCUM Manifesto. Long time no see. Do you go for girls?”

  “I did.” Where the ceiling of the bar was collaged with currency, Cash saw Zelda’s face dripping from every bill.

  “Now you’re an angry young man.” Immediately, Molly saw the nitroglycerin sheen of tears foregathering in Cash’s blue eyes. She knew that it was not a consequence of her words, but of something that had been waiting to break. “Fuck, I’m sorry. Something bad happened. I get it. Okay, let’s get out of here.” Molly threw a mangled collection of dollar bills on the bar counter, calling out, “Later, Carla.” She took Cash’s arm and directed her from the bar and into the street. They wound into the hollow hills toward Molly’s cabin. “See these bottle walls?” Molly said, gesturing at the misshapen mortar and glass, “that’s your emotions, glinting, rocked in capsules, pretty little compartments of pain. You’re bottled up. I’m gonna show you my place, and you’re going to stay in the cabin next to it. Been empty for a year. Stay. Get your shit together. I used to cry spontaneously like you too, like I was about to blow, but couldn’t quite do it. Suddenly, I realized I needed to cut my prick off in Mexico.” Molly felt Cash slouching against her. As the day turned into weeks and now years, Molly had become Cash’s closest friend and only confidant in New Mexico. Molly was also Cash’s mechanic and landlord. Cash would assist her in her car repair and customization business. Since she spoke without a trace of an accent, Cash’s Soviet birth was only known to Molly, just as the more prurient details of Molly’s years hustling for estrogen shots and pills in the Castro and Chinatown were only fully known to Cash. Molly forged Cash’s vehicle license for her. It was the ostracism that followed her sex change that had brought Molly by motorcycle to the isolation of Madrid twenty-five years ago. On the coatrack inside her thin front door, Molly kept the M65 field jacket she had worn in Vietnam. The rest of the cabin was pinned with Molly’s tattoo designs and the illustrations she had created for hot rod magazines back in San Francisco.

  April 4, 2011. When Cash stepped outside to visit Molly, she found the residue of last night’s snow. Her breath misted in the morning air, and her boots cracked ice. Molly’s house was adjacent to Cash’s cabin. Between them was the low wall where Cash leaned her motorcycle and a telegraph pole stripped of its wires. There were no other immediate buildings. The dun hills of Madrid rippled about them, cupping them in silence. Madrid’s old mining cabins and crumbling adobes were scattered apart, separated by raw ground. The air was clean, but it bore the faint tinge of a trash can fire from the night before, somewhere closer to the drag. Molly’s home was larger than Cash’s. Sparks illuminated the ancient greenhouse that the older woman had converted into a mechanical workshop; several panes of glass were missing and thin vines and bindweed ate into the whitewashed frame. Molly was inside, working on a large engine.

  “Hey, Moll!” Cash waved as she pushed through the chicken wire gate.

  “Hi, Cash, how’s it shaking?” Molly removed her welding goggles and disentangled them from her long gray-blond hair. Her biceps, inked with serpents and skulls, daggers and dolls, were glossed with sweat from the work. She wore torn blue jeans and an MC5 T-shirt. To Cash, Molly resembled a more beautiful six-foot Iggy Pop with tits. Her eye shadow, lipstick, and lipliner were permanently tattooed.

  “Pas mal, lady, pas mal. What about you?” Cash touched a part of the engine, crushing the grease between her fingers.

  “Oh, I’m recovering, I guess.” Molly put one of her muscular arms around Cash’s shoulders, a scent of sweat and grease. “C’mon chica, let’s go inside.” As they entered her house, Molly continued: “I went to that new gay bar in Santa Fe last night. You know: Manolete’s.”

  “I saw that your car was gone.” Cash said. “You have a margarita hangover?”

  “Jesus, no, I wish! I’m totally depressed. It was awful. No one wanted anything to do with me. Pardon me for sounding melodramatic, but I’ve discovered that I am at the lowest level of the queer hierarchy. The voluntary, experimental, heterosexual, post-op trans-woman.” Molly steered Cash toward her couch, ushering her audience.

  “Really? That is a predicament to be in.”

  “It was the same when I was in San Francisco and all the pre-ops on the street hated me because they thought I was making fun of them, when I was the only one that had actually gone through with it. I always wondered how my having a vagina was making fun of them? Anyway, the drinks were thin and the Muzak was an enema. The dykes aren’t into me or curious the way they used to be. So, I thought I’d head out to the workshop this morning and hit things with hammers, but I’m pleased to have company from my best and only neighbor!”

  There were chrome hubcaps on the white plastered walls of Molly’s studio home, and a collage of tacked-up pen-and-ink sketches that had been influenced by Louise Bourgeois and Raymond Pettibon. Weird plastic flowers stood stiffly in vases filled with gravel chips and glass beads; Triffids in an aquarium. The light through the windows was beautiful, that penetrating clean light redolent of the atomic age in New Mexico. It stroked the bright colors of a series of postcards that Cash recognized as Hindu deities. She recognized the elephant-headed form of Ganesha and the blue skin and many arms of Kali.

  “Who is this?” Cash indicated a conjoined form, a killer staring out over an imaginary battlefield. Its right breast was a flat strong pectoral plate, while the left was opulent and female.

  “That’s Ardhanari, the hermaphrodite form of Shiva.”

  Cash thought of Oppenheimer.

  “I just enjoy the pictures,” Molly said, disingenuously. “But, really, if I’m going to be reincarnated on this wheel,” she patted her modified genitals through her jeans, “I want to give them something to think about.”

  “Wanna just watch television for now, though, before reincarnation?” Cash asked.

  “O
kay, sure. Switch it on. I have coffee. Do you need some?”

  “Never refuse it.”

  “Sorry if I dragged everything down with my self-pity.” Molly called from the kitchen. She laughed: “Love’s a fuckin’ battlefield, man.”

  “Ain’t it the truth,” Cash called back.

  Molly returned from the kitchen, waiting for the percolator. “So, how’s your love life, Varyushka?” She called her by the name that they only used in private.

  “Aw, you know . . . ”

  “You do get asked out, at least. I know you do.” Molly adopted a sarcastic tone. “All those hot dreadlocked chicks over at the Coalmine!”

  “True, yeah.” Cash stared nervously at the walls. “But, after Zelda . . . ”

  “I know, I know.” Molly stroked Cash’s hair, tenderly. “I’m sorry.” Molly looked around for a means to change the subject. She walked over to a slanting architectural draftsman’s table. “Hey, check it out: I’m going through some of my old portfolio,” Molly explained, indicating a stack of soft-core airbrush work that was something like fuselage pinups of old bombers. “Those are from the hot rod magazines. Then there are these,” she said. Molly handed Cash a sheaf of photographs. Molly returned to the coffee percolator, absently knocking her brow against the pans that hung over it. “Coffee, cream, agave. There, we have everything. I’ll switch on the tube, and you get the lube. Just kidding young lady.”