Bombshell (18 page)

“You took us there!”

“You do not understand.”

“You're right. You're absolutely fucking right.” Cash pushed the accelerator. He seemed petrified, unable to react to her anger. His face contorted with shame. She knew that she resembled him. After some moments, he inhaled sharply, as if from a sudden comprehension.

“At this moment”—he looked at the glowing dials of the clock in the dashboard—“your friend Nona Laveau is standing beside her empty couch, touching it to see if it is still warm from you. Ah, she is moving to the window and looking out into the dark street, and she realizes that you have gone. She is aching from the grip of her reminiscences . . . ”

“Shut up.”

“She is thinking of all of the many things that she told you when you were young and in her care. Scenes are flickering inside her. She is crying.”

“Motherfucker, enough.”

“She did her best.” The voice warped. “She worked at the riddle of the sphinx you might say. She showed photographs to you, of the place where you were born, of the reactors, and the fire, remember? What she could deduce, she dispensed. And you began to despise . . . ”

“You're saying that it's her fault? The trauma?”

“No. No, but perhaps, again, some of what seems to be imprinted . . . ”

“You took us there.
You!
”

The road was dead straight, pitch black and deserted. Cash unfastened her seat belt and inclined her body toward his. Her mouth shook with grief,
but she shaped it to kiss his pale angular cheek. There was a faint click, lost in the engine noise, as she unfastened his seat belt. Leaning closer, her eyes fixed on his, penetrating back into the soft hollows of his skull, the neon flecks that had congealed.

“Is that why you could not tell her about Zelda?” He asked. His voice was distorted with heartbroken sympathy. “Because you do not trust Nona with the possession of the truth?”

She reached further across his body, so that her small breasts crushed against the radiating glass tubes in his pocket. Her fingers found the chrome latch of the passenger door. He registered the danger only when it was too late. She caught him before he could brace himself against her blow. She shoved the black painted nails of her fingers into his throat. A primal surge of strength pulsed through her and in that instant, she forced him from the passenger door, the perverse voice lost in a slow howl. The car door ricocheted back from the guardrail, slamming shut. She knew that it would be futile to look for him in the rearview mirror, picturing the ghost slipping into Lake Pontchartrain, luminous and spectral. Once more, she was isolated on the road, suspended over the waters, watching shafts of moonlight like submerged fuel rods.

Between the confrontation and the slamming against the guardrail, when Cash reached into her bag for her cat's-eye glasses to help her night vision, she discovered that they had been smashed. Cash drove through her fatigue and sickness until she could no longer see the moonlit road. From Louisiana, the car had roared northeast into Mississippi on I-59. Picayune, Poplarville, and Hattiesburg receded from her mirror. To her northwest, she could almost feel the vast chimney of the Grand Gulf Nuclear Station erupting out of Port Gibson between the crescents of Hamilton and Gin Lakes on the marshy banks of the Mississippi. This was another part of the
Winters Corporation. In the moonlight, it shadowed the bald cypress trees that clawed out of the river. She thought of the sickness spilling out of it. But more, she thought of the furious cobra that had once been her spine.

The clock showed something after 4
AM
but her vision blurred as she tried to read it. She reached Meridian and from there crossed into Alabama as the sun rose. Shivering, she forced herself into another bland motel room in Tuscaloosa. All motel rooms were trapped in the Cold War. She reached for the yellowing telephone at her bedside and dialed to speak with Molly. She did not answer. Cash dialed the number for her own house. Again, there was no answer. She undressed and tried the shower. She switched on the television. The irradiated rod of her grief bore through the dirty carpet, through the delicate carapace of the earth, downward, unstoppable. It sucked time into its black hole like the television when she switched it off and fell back upon the motel bed. Everything swam and boiled.

1986. THE FIRST CONTAINER SHIP, WITH ITS RUSTING RED
iron hull, had carried them from the port of Odessa, across the chill of the Black Sea to the sprawl of minarets, cranes, and high-rise hotels of Istanbul. Telegraph wires cast black rubber webs across the pale suburbs, prayers distorted from bullhorns and air raid sirens; television aerials weaved into the rosewater dusk. The second iron ship bore them from Istanbul along the glittering languid Mediterranean to Tangiers, beyond the ape-strewn slope of Gibraltar. Each container vessel was greater than the last. The final ship departed from Tangiers with a full moon upon the Atlantic, ghostly gulls pursuing her as though something precious was being stolen from the land. The man and woman experienced the vessels in the manner of mice between vast metal coffins. They held their infant daughter between them, huddling in the canyons of cargo, wrapping her in the folk-patterned wool wraps and bright-knitted clothes they had made for her and had been unable to give up. Their colony, the dream arcades of Pripyat, were abandoned and condemned. There was nothing
that they could salvage that was not contaminated with radioactive fallout; even the soft, sentimental baby clothes were a risk. They worried about the milk. The tiny girl seemed to be asleep in the metal drone of the engines. This third ship would take them to Veracruz.

“I feel like Leon Trotsky,” her father said.

Her mother answered: “I think we will feel better in Mexico, and afterward.”

Something more than the heavy shadows of the bulkheads hung over them, the certainty that Reactor IV had lain death upon them, that even now the worm was at work in their child. Everything was tainted. Every word that they spoke trailed with Geiger counters, the scratching, fragmented buzz of broken speakers; their breath and blood carried mutation. They wondered when the sickness would hit them, but knew that their baby was the most vulnerable of all. It could not be voiced, only experienced in the yearning shafts of their breasts, the screaming hollows of their sleep. They felt that they could see it in her, that tiny spark of cancer, awaiting some breath of ignition. In the Atlantic darkness, the ship's horn recalled the alarm of the meltdown. Her father said: “Toptunov must have been exhausted.”

Two weeks passed before they saw the lighthouses of Veracruz, the stones of the humid port spread out in the gathering morning, huge cranes straddling other ships, raising the colossal containers onto the dock.

Her mother sniffed the air. “When Cortez landed here, he didn't speak the language either.”

“It will be weeks before we can get to the border. We'll be fluent by the time we reach Juarez and the connections,” he laughed. “And from there, God knows. Perhaps we should just try to defect, become dissidents.
Romantic
.”

“Your American friends won't fail us, will they? You all barely know one another, except through physics papers and correspondence.”

“My love, scientists are incestuous, and they thrill when they have a secret that must be maintained. That's why totalitarian states hate intellectuals, because intellectuals love to make heroic narratives of their selves, and they can do it in code, formulae, or poems. We use a different language.”

“Varyushka will grow up without speaking her own language.”

“She'll find her own.”

After weeks of riding the chicken buses, hitching in the hot emerald landscape, they reached Juarez and met their connections after making a series of calls from vandalized pay phones. They crossed the U.S.-Mexico border hidden in the ventilated trunk of an old car driven by two middle-aged American scientists. In their Hawaiian shirts and espadrilles, mirrored sunglasses and greasy baseball caps, the two men gunned the car toward El Paso and the first chance to let the aliens out and into the rear seat before the Texas heat suffocated them. Later, as they drove, her father pointed out a sign to her mother. “Radium Springs,” he said.

“Yeah, we're in
New
Mexico,” one of the men called from the passenger seat in front of them, sweat dripping from his eyebrows as he turned to speak. “This place out to your right, here, they call it the
Jornado del Muerto!
We'll go around it! It's a bitch, and mostly top secret government installations anyway.”

“Where do we go?” her mother called out, as the wind beat through the open windows.

“Silicon Forest. That's what they call the part of Oregon you're going to. Lots of good people there—hippies, scientists, freaks, and even some communists! No one is looking for illegal aliens in Oregon, unless there's a crackdown on Canadians. The West Coast is in permanent revolution, comrades. We'll take you so far, and then some friends will take over, and so on. It's like the Olympics. You're the flame!”

“You see, Varyushka?” her father said. “They
love
this.”

APRIL 11, 2011. HER OWN VOICE, GENTLY PLAYING IN HER SKULL:
Heavy metal sediment radiates from inside the body, the robot part. It outlasts everything; the skin and tissues peel back, the ribbons of muscles fall away, the bones disintegrate, as though they had only ever been the soft sheathing of an eternal machine. Robots work in the zones of alienation. One millionth of a gram enters and begins rewriting the body.

It was late afternoon when she awoke. She looked out into the parking lot from her motel room. Even from that vantage she could see the scratched paint and smashed metal of the low-rider's passenger side door. Fortunately, the window had not broken. The damage to the car would attract even more attention if she were to drive too much in daylight. She switched on the television as she prepared a hot bath, allowing the white noise from the faucets to drown out the soundtrack. She could see that the weather report showed high winds affecting most of the South and Tornado Alley.

As the steam obscured the bathroom, she lay in the hot water thinking of Molly. There was a painful lump in her throat. She thought of Nona. She pictured the vacant snakeskins of grief that she had left all behind her. She began to scrub at her skin, scratching into it with her short fingernails. Abruptly, she stopped. She sat upright in the bath, feeling the water run down her back. She pulled her knees close to her breasts, holding her shins with her forearms. There was no time to be sentimental. No time for ghosts. She was moving deeper into the territory of the Winters Corporation.

Cash climbed out of the bath. Without drying her body, she performed push-ups beside the bed. As her muscles burned, she made a mental inventory of the dangerous facilities that surrounded her. She was an intimate catalog of the salamander crawls of hundreds of reactor fires in the bulbs and crevices of a flawed architecture of horror, of the leaks of radioactive wastewater, of missing lengths of isotopes and fuel rods, of radon gas clouds hanging spectrally over impoverished towns, the unseen glittering of particle storms, tornado strikes, droughts, tritium bleeding from wounds in pipes and stone, boric acid dissolving monstrous cavities in reactor cocoons, the near-meltdowns, the paper-thin difference before ruptures and fallout; she apprehended them and absorbed them into the atoms of her flesh. It was necessary for her to become inscribed with the truth, to be the truth. Like an interstellar virus, more than fifty reactor plants sprawled from the South and along the eastern seaboard, where Cash would make new constellations, new zodiacs of anxiety. The bathwater dripped from her taut athletic frame onto the beige carpet. She counted 100 sit-ups, and then dressed. There was nothing but to wait for the darkness that would allow her to move more freely.

April 12, 2011. When the time came, Cash drove three hours through the gloom of Alabama northward to Wheeler Lake, between Decatur and
Athens, arriving there at midnight as Monday passed into Tuesday. She followed Browns Ferry Road close to the wildlife reserve. She imagined herself as a trace upon a map, and saw herself as a bright light snaking down from New Mexico to Louisiana before curling back up to the northern edge of Alabama. Those who would be following her would assume that she would be continuing northward, but she would instead pivot south again to Savannah, Georgia, before finally blazing up the East Coast.

At Wheeler Lake, she pulled over on the south bank and stared down the danger across the starry water. She stood ahead of the car, feeling her boots sinking slightly into the soft ground. Lit with industrial lamps, the reactor in the darkness across the river appeared monstrous. She had researched the Winters Corporation's reactors there: the Browns Ferry Nuclear Plant. It was as old as Chernobyl. Its first reactor came online in 1973, three years after its blueprints had been abandoned and their license revoked and the ill-formed machinery had been shut down and restarted several times. Within two years, on March 22, 1975, the reactor suffered a near-catastrophic fire. Without the knowledge of the plant workers, it had burned unseen and uncontrolled within the electrical conduits of the containment building for seven hours. Four years ago, drought had left insufficient lake water to cool the reactors. Watching from the muddy banks, Cash tried to imagine the insides of the reactor. There would be other fires, other droughts.