Underworld

  Eric kept after him to play chess. But he didn’t want to play chess. He didn’t talk about his chess. His chess was old dark difficult history, suppressed forever. The history of a chess homunculus. No one knew about his chess. Janet knew a little and only Janet and no one else but his mother and brother and Mr. Bronzini, of those who might tend to remember.

  “You don’t get the point,” Eric said in the jeep.

  “You’re spreading rumors you don’t even believe. That’s the point,” Matt said.

  “They had to throw up roadblocks because the cloud was moving into populated areas. Neuroblastomas. Beta burns. Two-headed lambs. Or entire herds of sheep dead in the fields. Or you wake up one morning and your teeth start flipping out of their sockets, painlessly and bloodlessly.”

  Two or three teeth, say. Sort of gently expelled with the faintest kind of squishy sound, Eric said. And you wrap them in cold wet gauze and jump in your car and drive to the dentist’s office confident that he’ll be able to reinsert the teeth because don’t doctors do amazing things with severed limbs. Or he will not reinsert the teeth. He will send the teeth to a lab at the new medical center where they have equipment so advanced it can learn more about you in a passing glance than you could figure out yourself if you lived to be a thousand.

  But at the first red light you take the gauze out of your pocket and unfold it for a brief peek, Eric said, and there’s nothing there but a small mound of powder because your teeth have completely crumbled. These hard strong reliable structures designed for biting and gnawing, for tearing flesh. These things that last a million years in the jaws of prehistoric people, in the skulls that we dig up and study. Turned to dust in your pocket in six frigging minutes.

  He called Janet and talked. He talked and listened. The smaller the talk, the better he felt. He took satisfaction in the details of her day, the matters of barely passing interest that struck him in his lonely love as items of privileged witness.

  Sometimes she talked about her work, trauma duty deep in the night, and she was matter-of-fact about it, bodies flopping on the just-mopped floor of the corridor, relatives dragging in a knife victim or OD, the uncle and mother gripping the man’s head and legs and a cluster of small kids at the edges, two to each arm.

  She described scenes that were like paintings of the European masters, the ones who did miracles and wars.

  Her strength in these matters made her beautiful to him. She was a smallish woman, they were both fairly short and Janet was slight as well, and he liked to imagine her in a scrub suit plunging a fist into someone’s chest cavity and coming out with a bullet or a chicken bone. Her shyness did not conceal her eloquence of mettle and will. He saw and heard it often. She clung to him persistently to make a point.

  He thought they were too damn earnest. They wanted a family and each other but were periodically beset by the complexity of the undertaking, the plans, the chances, the cities, the idea of marriage and children and jobs and how hard it is to do everything right, and they agreed and bargained and argued, they planned and fought.

  He looked at Landsat photos shot from space a year or two earlier. The pictures were false-color composites that revealed signs of soil erosion, geological fracture and a hundred other events and features. They showed stress and drift and industrial ravage, billion-bit data converted into images.

  He saw how remote sensors pulled hidden meanings out of the earth. How sweeps and patches of lustrous color, how computer fuchsias or rorschach pulses of unnamed shades might indicate a change in water temperature or where the dwindling grizzlies go to forage and mate. He looked at spindly barrier beaches that showed white as shanked bone. He found sizable cities pixeled into mountain folds and saw black lakes high in the ranges, kettle holes formed by glacial drift.

  He could not stop looking.

  The photo mosaics seemed to reveal a secondary beauty in the world, ordinarily unseen, some hallucinatory fuse of exactitude and rapture. Every thermal burst of color was a complex emotion he could not locate or name.

  And he thought of the lives inside the houses embedded in the data on the street that is photographed from space.

  And that is the next thing the sensors will detect, he thought. The unspoken emotions of the people in the rooms.

  And then he thought inevitably of Nick.

  • • •

  He wanted to call his brother many times. He thought he’d like to talk to him about the work he was doing here. He’d be able to give Nick a general sense of things, let him know that the kid was doing important work but that it troubled him now and then.

  One day he might find himself putting together a physics package, the explosive components of a nuclear device—true-blue bombhead country.

  Matt wasn’t sure he could deal with this himself. He could if he had to, and Janet would help, she’d have a clear position he could set against his doubts, but he wanted to talk to Nick. He wanted to hear his brother’s voice coming down the phone line, the slightly bent stresses that carried a literal lifetime of associations.

  Nick had a graveness that was European in a way. He was shaped and made. First unmade and then reimagined and strongly shaped and made again. And he was somber and self-restrained at times and not free-giving but maybe he would give the kid advice about the moral and ethical aspects of this kind of work. Mainly what Matt wanted was a show of interest. This was more important than outright counsel, a recommendation or judgment, but he wanted that too—a judgment in his brother’s voice.

  He didn’t know what his brother might say. He might say this is the way you define yourself as a serious man, working through the hard questions and harrowing choices, and if you stick with it you’ll be stronger in the end. Or he might say, Fool, what kind of mark will this make on your soul when you become a father like me? Think of the guilt of raising children in a world you’ve made—your talent put to such desolate use. Speaking softly now. And who knows the ticklish business of weapons better than I do, brother?

  But he’d never make that last remark, would he? And Matt didn’t make the call. They didn’t often talk, or they talked about their mother, or they hassled each other routinely, but maybe he’d call later when he felt the urge again.

  When the wind gusted out of the mountains it rebodied the dunes and if you were up out of the Pocket and sitting around at home with a beer and a snack you saw your laundry go horizontal on the backyard line, all of it, sheets, hankies, boxer shorts, pajama bottoms, like people of all sizes and shapes snapping from the pressure, letting their souls fly forth to the gypsum hills.

  “But that’s not the point,” Eric said. “You keep mi, mi, missing the point.”

  It was raining in the mountains.

  Eric had a fake stutter he liked to use to texture the conversation, a thing he’d developed to mock himself or his listener, although neither one of them stuttered, or maybe he was imitating some nightclub comic or simpy character on TV—it wasn’t clear to Matt.

  He looked out a window of Eric’s bungalow. The rain was a wall of smoky shimmer that hung across the limestone bluffs. Eric sat on a sofa that was still wrapped in warehouse plastic amid a mess of scientific journals, UFO monthlies, supermarket tabloids, half a dozen Playboys and some lost food.

  “Even though huge amounts of territory were affected and large numbers of people were exposed, it remains a major secret to this day.”

  “So secret it may not be true,” Matt said.

  “Do you believe it’s true?”

  “I believe mistakes were made.”

  Eric enjoyed this. His shadow smile appeared at the far end of the sprawled body. It came and went, like some inner dialogue he was conducting that ran parallel to the spoken lines, a thing of elusive drift.

  “But the point is, pure and simple.”

  “What’s the point, Eric?”

  He picked up a magazine and leafed through it aimlessly, speaking in a tone that was slightly impatient but mostly, now that he was finally
coming to the point, a little weary and bored.

  “It was done deliberately,” he said. “They knew the tests weren’t safe but they went ahead anyway. They marched troops to zero point after the detonations. They sent manned aircraft through radiation clouds. They injected people with plutonium to track its course through the body. They did this deliberately, without telling people what the risks were. They exposed troops to the atomic flash and some of them were given protective eye filters and some were not. They experimented on children, infants, fetuses and mental patients. They never told the Navahos who worked in uranium mines what the dangers were. The dangers were considerable as it turned out. They zapped the testicles of prison inmates. They basically grabbed you by the balls and zapped you full of x rays. This is the story I hear. Do you believe it?”

  “It’s awfully, I don’t know.”

  “Of course. It’s very hard to believe. That’s why I don’t believe it,” Eric said. “Not for a tenth of a second.”

  The rain line came dragging across the flats and the wind kicked up. The poets of the desert nations told stories about the wind. It bucks and swirls and turns you around and knocks you flat. But it also speaks so softly only your inner spirit can hear it and this is how you correct your path.

  Eric said, “They never told the test subjects they were sub, sub, sub, sub.”

  “Subjects.”

  “I don’t believe it,” Eric said. “But you may feel differently.”

  Matt didn’t know how he felt. But he didn’t think the story was completely far-fetched. He’d served in Vietnam, after all, where everything he’d ever disbelieved or failed to imagine turned out, in the end, to be true.

  Then one day he stopped to talk to her, the woman alone with the protest sign. He parked the car on the opposite side of the road and walked on over. She held one post cradled in her arms, one eight-foot-long upright piece, and the other was planted in the dirt with rocks piled around the base, and the sign itself, a spray-painted sheet, extended wind-whipped between the posts.

  He stood there and started talking. He talked to her in a reassuring, trite and slightly compulsive way, like a first-timer nervous in a singles bar. He realized her wrist was padlocked to the post. He’d never noticed this before and it seemed, well, a little self-dramatizing maybe. Or fanatical and irrational and victim-wishful. She looked at him briefly as he spoke. He’d finished the get-acquainted part and was talking about the need for readiness and the folly of being naive about the other side’s intentions.

  He didn’t use words such as American and Soviet. They seemed provocative somehow. Or NATO and Europe and the East Bloc and the Berlin Wall. Too soon to be so intimate.

  She looked at him only briefly. It was not a hostile look but it was brief. There was something scoured about her, a sense of rubbed surfaces, a willing away of normal accretions and gleanings, and he thought she carried the countermarks of the rural poor.

  He talked to her about the need to match our weapons to theirs, even when the numbers become absurd, because this is the only seeming safeguard against attack by either side.

  She was fair-skinned, etched and fixed, with lank hair, string hair, and he thought she was true and impressive and unreachable.

  They stood on a stretch of flat straight highway, beautiful and lonely, and if you’re going to do this kind of work, isn’t it necessary, he thought, to be fanatical? World War III Starts Here. Isn’t this exactly what he wanted from these people, a kind of sunstruck religious witness?

  He told her he was completely willing to listen. But she would not talk to him. She stood padlocked to the post and looked off down the road somewhere. He could not despise her arrogance because she wasn’t arrogant. She wasn’t smarter or more sane or less guilty. They are armed, he said, and so we have to be armed. She clutched the upright and looked down the road, blue-eyed, with an inbuilt wince, and he went back to the car and drove away.

  Eric’s laundry jumped on the line. It shot straight out and held stiff in the wind.

  “I think of my days in the glove box,” he said. “Handling that hot pluto. Mistakes were made even in the small narrow sealed limits of the box. Better believe it. With all the safety procedures and data sheets and supervisors, people still made amazing mistakes. And I’d stick my hands in the gloves and think oddly of my mom, who was a super sensible lady and used to wear rubber gloves to do the dinner dishes back in the placid days when we were bombing our own people.”

  “I’m leaving tomorrow,” Matt said.

  “Let me have that jacket when you go.”

  Matt wore a lightweight calfskin jacket, the kind of soft leather that scuffs and unscuffs at a touch, and Eric often remarked his wish to own it whatever the difference in their sizes.

  “I think I’ll probably take it with me for the not so rugged parts of the trip.”

  “The taste is metallic according to downwinders. You open the door and step outside to get the newspaper that the newsboy on his bike has tossed on the porch and you taste a kind of metallic grit in the air, like salt made of metal shavings. Coming to our party tonight?”

  “Wouldn’t miss it,” Matt said.

  “Your child is born with eyes that are pure white. No discernible pupil or iris. Just a large white eyeball. Two if you’re lucky.”

  Eric lifted the Playboy off the sofa and held it sideways, letting the centerfold swing open so he could see the monthly subject full-length.

  He said, “Where are you going exactly?”

  “Someplace remote.”

  “Remoter than this?”

  “I’ve been looking at maps.”

  “But remoter than this?”

  “Where the paved roads end.”

  “You’re a city kid, Matty.”

  “I’ve been looking at southwest Arizona maybe.”

  “I want that jacket if you die.”

  When the bombheads threw a party you couldn’t expect to emerge into the world you’d always known. And last night’s affair seemed to overlay the landscape as Matty drove west on Interstate 10 through a town called Deming, which was Eric’s last name of course, and how clammy was the hand of coincidence—faces, places and provocative remarks all running through his mind.

  He’d smoked something that had made him immobile. But not just immobile. Matt was not a user except at parties, where he’d go through the sociable motions, taking a pull on a long-stemmed pipe with a clay bowl that was tamped with grassy substance. But the thing he’d toked last night was either a rogue strain of hashish or standard stuff laced with some psychotomimetic agent. And he was not just immobilized. And somebody sat in front of him and spoke thickly into his face in a ridiculous movie accent evidently meant to be Prussian.

  “You can never underestimate the willingness of the state to act out its own massive fantasies.”

  It was Eric of course. But even if Matt understood this, he could not place it in the jocular context of broad bombhead sport. Because he was not just immobile—he couldn’t think straight either. He was surrounded by enemies. Not enemies but connections, a network of things and people. Not people exactly but figures—things and figures and levels of knowledge that he was completely helpless to enter.

  The villingness of the shtate.

  You can never unterestimate the villingness of the shtate.

  Eric went on in his stupid voice, talking about problem boxes and minimax solutions, all the kriegspielish stuff they’d studied in grad school, theory of games and patterns of conflict, heads I win, tails you lose, and Matty sat there stoned totally motionless.

  He was locked to his chair, mind-locked and gravity-trapped, aware of the nature of the state he was in but unable to think himself out. He was bent to the weight of the room, distrustful of everyone and everything here. Paranoid. Now he knew what it meant, this word that was bandied and bruited so easily, and he sensed the connections being made around him, all the objects and shaped silhouettes and levels of knowledge—not knowledge exactl
y but insidious intent. But not that either—some deeper meaning that existed solely to keep him from knowing what it was.

  To ahkt out its own massif phantasies.

  Eric was still talking, stirring a drink with his finger, and it occurred to Matt in the morning, driving his car through Deming, that maybe the accent was not supposed to be Prussian at all but Hungarian. Eric was paying tribute to the original bombheads, all those emigrés from Middle Europe, thick-browed men with sad eyes and roomy pleated pants. They came to do science in New Mexico during the war, an overnight sprawl of trailers and hutments, and they ate the local grub and played poker once a week and went to the Saturday square dance and worked on the thing with no name, the bomb that would redefine the limits of human perception and dread.

  He sat in the chair studying someone’s shoe.

  He knew he wasn’t part of some superficial state that people like to borrow from when they say they’re feeling paranoid. This was not secondhand. This was real and deep and true. It was all the one-syllable words that mean we aren’t kidding. It was also familiar in some strange paleolithic root-eating way, a thing retained in the snake brain of early experience.

  He studied the shoe on the foot of someone seated near him. It was an Earth shoe, one of those functional, sensible, unsexy, shallow-heeled and vaguely Scandinavian items of fad footwear, the shy, androgynous and countercultural shoe, unthreatening to the environment or the species, and he wondered why it looked so sinister.

  Eric was stuttering now.