Curse the Names (11 page)
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
theirs
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.
I was thinking about finding the pages with my name. The bad shit had intensified after I went back to the house and found my articles on the wall. I decided not to say anything more about Sunshine. What could I tell McCaffery:
My pot dealer introduced us
?
My last trip to Mel’s preceded the meeting with Sunshine, and McCaffery had only mentioned Española, not Pojoaque, so I didn’t say,
Sunshine works at the Roadrunner Diner
. I did not tell McCaffery that I had searched out Sunshine—or why. Instead I said, “I think I better call that bank back.”
“This isn’t so good for your dossier, Oberhelm. You have a privileged stump in the Los Alamos community. You have access to powerful communication lines. Your words are read by thousands of scientists and military personnel monthly. But you’re exposing yourself to unclassified individuals, possible criminals, who could have contacts in foreign governments. People who could influence you.”
“I write about retirees, about hobbies like fly fishing and flag collecting.”
“There are many ways people can manipulate you useless you’re aware of the possibilities.” McCaffery finished his near-beer and pocketed the coaster in his blue suit jacket. He left me alone in the bar to finish my light beer.
I called the bank back and learned that indeed all three of my accounts—checking, savings, and money market—were overdrawn. I spoke very slowly and clearly: “That is impossible. There should be over one hundred thousand dollars in the money market.”
“That’s an awful lot to keep in a money market, sir,” a banking advisor told me. Nobody was a banker anymore; everyone was a banking advisor, and no one could tell me exactly how bad the damage was.
Charges were still coming in. And because it had been a check card, not a credit card, which automatically accessed the money market for overdrafts, it was not covered by the same fraud protection.
“We’re not sure of the total damage yet, sir. We’re still getting wire-transfer orders from overseas.”
I drove down to the valley in a daze and stopped at the Roadrunner Diner. There was a different cook but the same waitress, and she remembered me. I asked her if she had seen Sunshine.
“You mean Harold? I was about to ask you the same thing. When you drove away Sunday he left without punching out, and he hasn’t shown up for work the past three days. Far as I know he quit, but if he didn’t, he got fired.”
This was not just about identity theft. This was about the pages on the wall, the nightmare, and what had happened to Oppie, what was happening to me. This was predatory.
I
went back home to an empty house. I smoked weed, drank scotch, and popped an oxycodone. It took me minutes before I was back to slumming like a bachelor, shuffling around in my underwear and eating dinner over the sink.
The nightmare had come two nights in a row, and I did not want to let myself fall asleep.
I woke up the PC and Googled various combinations:
Earthquake, Los Alamos, Technical Area 54, Area G.
I found one report I had never seen before:
Final Documented Safety Analysis (DSA) Technical Area. Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration
.
The shitty, fax-style scan might have come off the copy machine in the physics department at the local community college. A PDF opened to 200 percent in the browser with cribbed notations in the margins—I thought it might have been from a classified conference of criticality nerds. Pen marks on tables like
Revised Accident Analysis Summary* (Unmitigated Offsite Doses**)
, where the first asterisk said,
Calculations based on “nonconservative assumptions in analysis” could put damage estimates 20 percent higher,
and the second asterisk said,
These are worst-case scenarios from an offsite dose consequence standpoint
.
Offsite,
of course, meant the town of Los Alamos. The thing that got me is they already had standpoints. Somewhere within a baseball throw of my backyard there was probably a standpoint for offsite dose consequence. ODC.
One analysis put it at 1,795 rem.
One mile from ground zero, Hiroshima, doses of 150–300 rem yielded a 50 percent mortality rate. So about ten times what killed 200,000 at Hiroshima. A catastrophic fire stoked by hurricane-force winds—a firestorm—would be expected. I could use that sentence in only the passive voice.
Of the ten (10) scenarios screened into the accident analysis, the largest dose to the MEOI is the result of an earthquake or an aircraft crash into the waste storage domes … the maximum dose calculated by LANL of 1,795 rem.
MEOI meant Maximum Exposed Offsite Individual. Brilliant—I hadn’t realized that they’d already created an acronym for the victims. MEOI: that’s you and me.
That
calculated by LANL
made me think about my job at the Lab. Eventually they were going to tell me to sugarcoat this word. It might take the form of Golz forwarding me an MQR with the message and asking:
See if you can make this readable.
And there it would be, five hundred words on aircraft-disaster drills.
Get ready to lie down in the middle of Trinity Avenue on Monday morning,
I told myself.
You’ll look just like the sackcloth-and-ashes folks on July 16!
NNSA’s evaluation of the accident analyses shows that using conservative values for the MEOI parameters would lead to consequences being about 20 percent higher.
In other words: don’t say we didn’t tell you that it’s actually worse than we’re telling you. P.S.: make that 2,154 rem.
The consequence analysis even without a potential 20 percent increase is seen to produce offsite doses to the MEOI that are significantly above the DOE Evaluation Guideline of 25 rem.
No shit, assholes. What would I rewrite this trash as?
The shit that’s going to come down is going to nuke North America
?
What would ten times the Hiroshima dose of radiation do to you? I Googled it. Wikipedia had an article on radiation poisoning.
At 500 rem:
Nausea, dizziness, leukopenia
Cognitive impairment
Also hemorrhage
At 800 rem:
Rapid incapacitation
Nausea, vomiting, severe diarrhea
High fever, shock
Get into the thousands and you have seizures, tremors, ataxia, death. In other words, that much radiation would pretty much cause what happened in my nightmare.
I ate a couple more oxycodones, smoked more pot, drank more coffee, watched more cable. I woke up the PC and tried to log on at work, but I could not access
Surge
. I tried three more times to be sure it wasn’t a typo. Three more times I was denied. I couldn’t believe it: had Golz cut off my authoring rights?
* * *
Toward dawn I could no longer resist. After a few seconds of falling I touched bottom, and I was back in hell on earth. The nightmare arrived immediately. I did not want to get kicked again—tell what I see.
Tell them what you see.
People, parents and children—my neighbors—come into the street, clawing out their own eyes.
Yea. Go on.
There are women in the street. There are children. Bleeding from the nose, the eyes, the ears …
The mountains quake at him, and the hills melt.
They cry, Make it stop! Make it stop! Make it stop!
The city on the Hill shall be exiled and carried away.