I shiver on the floor in my underwear. The cigarette tastes terrible but the heat and smoke in my lungs are soothing.
The stranger does not speak of the broken boards or the scorched floor as it is clear that a greater depravity than mere vandalism led to these.
He says, “You been working on that wall?”
He walks to the splintered door and shines his flashlight into the next room at the place where the tire iron juts out between bricks.
He turns back and fishes in the breast pocket of his overcoat for a bottle of pills. “Want some?”
“What is it?”
“Sedatives. Take some.”
“No thank you.”
“They’re very good drugs. The sort you like.”
“What?”
“Everybody likes these.”
“No. Not from you.”
He shrugs, gazes at me strangely. There was already some in the cigarette. I am almost down to the butt by the time I notice the taste.
“You put my name here?”
He turns and looks at the wall. “Not I. The chain of names began long before this, and today you stand at the head of them all.”
He goes to the viga where the nest is suspended, reaches up, and squeezes his fingertips through the hole in the nest, taking one of the baby birds in his hand. I hear a weak chirp. This one is barely alive. He turns and dangles it down before me. “You let them die.”
“What?”
“The swallows. You let them die.”
His face contorts into a hard, red mask. The wrinkles on his forehead settle sideways.
I don’t know what to say. “They were already dead.”
“Who are you that these birds should die for?”
The man drops the chick on the floor. With a prescient revulsion I turn away. When I hear the small bones crush under his heavy boot, I bow my head and vomit.
I search the floor. For what? The tire iron? It is lodged in the wall, and it will do me no good against this one.
“Don’t touch that wall no more, you peckerwood bastard.”
A boot to my stomach knocks the wind out of me and leaves me gasping for air, wishing I could vomit again so that the convulsions might relieve the sharp pain in my voided abdomen.
I don’t speak, but the old man seems to know what I am thinking through the pain.
“Yea, I built this wall with my own hands, eight hundred bricks, each brick thirty pounds—twelve tons of earth, and more of mud between.”
“I do not believe any of this. I do not believe that you are even here.”
“That is a great error,” he whispers close to my ear, “for we are both really here.”
He goes to the wall and yanks out the tire iron, marching back across the room with it raised like a club. I cover my head in my arms.
“What animates a man like you? Women flicker onto the screen like little pictures. You smoke your drug and drink your bottle.”
“You were there.”
A foul grin tells me he knows I am beginning to understand. “Ye did not come easily to the realization. You had to warn the people.”
“Why me?”
His smile is small and ugly. “Nahum does not go to Nineveh.”
He takes off the overcoat—wearing nothing underneath. It is not easy to look at, his ass a great sagging heap that flaps around his hips. Don’t try to describe the thing that’s shriveled in a nest of gray pubic hair between his pockmarked thighs.
“What is it you are going to do?”
“
Naked I came out of my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return …”
C
urled in a ball, shivering. A splitting headache. Vomit all over my shirt. Stomach throbbing from all the heaving.
Waking up to two men in hazmat suits standing over me. One of them breathes my name: “James Oberhelm?” I nod in my own vomit. PVC gloves grip my upper arms and I am sliding out of the house.
The spacemen get me outside on a stretcher and I am loaded into an ambulance and covered with a reflective blanket.
I come to slowly, the aching all over gradually worsening. I wish I could either die or go back to sleep, but the paramedics inject me with something meant to keep me conscious.
I am held at the Los Alamos Medical Center pending blood-test analysis. They put me on intravenous antibiotics for the hand, which they tell me has become infected. They inject chemicals intended to counteract other chemicals they say I have ingested, deliberately or not.
We meet in an interview room that smells like piss, the SAP agents and I.
Look into their eyes: that infuriating, patronizing vacancy. They think you’re a drug addict. Make them understand your work. You’re an interviewer, one of the best in the in-house publishing industry. You came to the Lab for the money, the bennies, the Cadillac health care.
There is so much you do not tell them. You do not tell them about Mel Woburn or Ritchie Motherfucker. You do not tell them about how when the hippies went to cremate Ritchie, they found out it wasn’t so easy to burn a body.
You do not tell them about the wall. You do not tell them about the rain, the birds, or Fourth of July. You do not tell them about the bones or the photo. Do not tell them about the blood tech. Why not?
Because you’ve got to get to her first.
“You put it on
Surge
. You posted it on the feed.”
They have me there. I posted. Or someone with the administrator’s password posted. It was only up briefly, but it was early in the morning on Tuesday, July 16, the Trinity Birthday.
All the scientists were home drinking coffee, reading e-mails and articles for pleasure, when a message got posted to
Surge
. It looked a little like haiku.
TA-54—
B49 CSU
LLSW
RLW
Pu-239drum seepage
critical mass
earthquake
seismic: 7/16 18:06:06
mag: 7.1
Someone posted:
local fallout: 919 rem (+/-100)
burning eyes
burning lungs
radiation poisoning
mortality: 100 percent
avg. life expectancy: 12 hours
B49 CSU is the name of a container storage unit, larger than your average industrial storage container. It could hold more than fifty large oil drums in a single layer on pallets. LLSW is low-level solid waste, RLW is radioactive liquid waste, and Pu-239 is plutonium. Anyone in Los Alamos with an elementary education can tell you what 919 rem means. Plus or minus a hundred … In case anyone didn’t understand, the post included mortality and average life expectancy.
That was the message. It read just like an emergency bulletin, something someone would send out when they got some very bad news through official channels that they only had time to copy-paste. It read like a collateraldamage assessment on a classified military broadcast: cold, precise, appalling. It read like something a scientist would type.
Panic ensued. As luck would have it, in an unrelated accident, before dawn a delivery truck skidded and jackknifed on its way up the Hill, closing down the road to traffic for six hours while a tow team maneuvered it out of the way. The driver got a citation for two hundred dollars; he should have taken the White Rock Road.
Most Tuesday mornings, this would have proved a nuisance to a few hundred Los Alamos residents going down to the valley to shop. Anyone important trying to drive anyplace important, like to a meeting with the governor in Santa Fe or to the airport in Albuquerque, would have just turned around and taken the back road out of town.
But people were looking at the alarming posting on their phones, they were texting and retweeting each other the message, they were calling each other and saying,
There’s an evacuation notice, but the road is closed, and now they’re saying it might be a terrorist attack,
and it all went viral.
The traffic was snarled all the way back through town. If you were trying to get to the medical center, you came up against mobs who had taken the gridlockfrustration into their own hands: using both lanes of narrow streets to point their cars toward the valley even though nothing was moving.
Even the Pax Kyrie protesters who were coming up in cars and church buses from the valley had to turn around and postpone a planned action. They got stuck behind the delivery truck.
And nothing happened.
No explosion. No earthquake. Not the slightest tremor on the Richter scale.
SAP, the DOE, and Homeland Security call me a national security risk. The agents’ arrest report describes me as
filthy and having a foul odor
; it says I was
raving
and had to be restrained. I remain in custody, under medical observation, and on administrative leave from the Lab.
The
Los Alamos Monitor
calls me
The Surge Tweet-ker
and the
Journal
and
New Mexican
blow the dust off journalistic chestnuts like
Chicken Little
and
Benedict Arnold
. I ask the SAP investigators how they found the house.
“Unidentified caller. Can you tell us why the pages of the Los Alamos telephone directory were stuck to the wall with human excrement?”
“My excement?”
They glare.
“Can I ask to speak to McCaffery?”
“Well, you can ask
…
” Interrogation dissimulation: they say there is no McCaffery.
I tell the SAPers to talk to the bartender at Central Avenue Grille. He tells them he remembers me, “the ashes guy”—he had to wipe down the barstool after I left—but he testifies that nobody else was drinking at the bar so early that morning and that I had been muttering to myself “like some kind of meth head.”
I tell them check my cell phone. They analyze the SIM card and determine that I did get a call on July 12, the day after I was placed on administrative leave, with no caller ID, but they trace it back to a banking advisor in Los Alamos. She had been trying to update me on the fraud investigation when, according to her testimony, “He babbled something about his hand, how it didn’t work in the scanner,” and then I hung up.
Golz announces her resignation. My life savings has been pillaged and I get no paycheck. I have no money for a lawyer, but on Thursday the eighteenth I learn that the ACLU has made me a cause and retained a defense attorney. The Jewish-sounding “Katz” inspires confidence.
We meet in the same interview room as the men from SAP. “Don’t ever talk to those assholes without me in the room.” I want to tell him how good I have been. I did not tell them about Mel Woburn. I did not tell them about the blood tech. He hands me a business card:
Cahats
.
Things are always not what they seem
.
I tell him the truth: I was drinking, I was despondent, I have no memory of posting that message on
Surge
, but whoever did made it impossible to prove it wasn’t me.
You never know how people can manipulate you …
I do not tell Cahats either about Mel Woburn or the blood tech.
For the moment I am suspect, soon I will be defendant, and then I will be convict.
I have no money for the bond. At the arraignment on Friday the nineteenth Cahats makes a case to get me out until the trial on the basis of a few technicalities: I am a U.S. citizen, I did not hurt anyone, and the toxicology tests conducted at my arrest determine that I cultivated a brief but serious addiction to painkillers. Cahats cites expert pharmacological testimony that oxycodone, with the right megadosing (ten or twelve pills in a twenty-four-hour period), especially when mixed with alcohol, can create dependency literally overnight.
I
am released and placed on nightly house arrest and daily, court-mandated detox rehabilitation. Cahats loans me some money for groceries and counsels me to take however long I need to recover from “that bump on the head.” The bump. In front of the judge he called it “schizophrenia resultant from accidental poisoning.”
My first night out I watch a lot of cable. I flip through the infomercials, workouts, and reruns: everything looks the same. I forget how long I’ve been flipping the way you forget the last stretch of drive late at night on the highway. The only things that can make me forget the shit my life has become for a few seconds at a time are comedies from the ’50s and ’60s turned up as loud as the TV will blare:
I Love Lucy, Leave It to Beaver
,
My Three Sons
. I don’t hear what they’re saying, but the black-and-white relieves my eyes and the laugh tracks are a kind of white noise for my consciousness.
My cell phone has been confiscated as part of the investigation, and for me there will be no more computers for a while. The laptop was fried. The PC has been seized for a complete hard-drive search, the kind where they can recover even deleted data. They impound the Spider. Evidence. I am left alone on Pajarito Road to knock around the house in the night, and I know how bereft I am.
All the little things she did to keep me presentable.
What did Kitty used to do? Iron, button, fold? All I can do each morning is make it to the dryer to get the day’s clothes.
I lie awake cycling through all that went wrong. This was your fault. This wasn’t your fault. It makes no difference. This is all your fault.
I sit in the living room and turn on the TV, find an infomercial. My eyes stray to the dining room. The slider. The curtain covers all but a sliver of glass. I get up and pull it all the way to the edge. Is the latch closed? The latch is closed.
I lie down on the king-size, springless, formaldehydefree bed. There are no more nightmares. Now what is worse is when I awaken.
I could have a drink. A drink would make me feel better. It might not be as easy as just going to the cabinet in my study—they took away the bottles when they took the computers and the phone—but I could still walk down to Smith’s, pick empty bottles and cans out of trash barrels on the way, redeem them for a nickel apiece. How many would it take for the price of a twenty-four-ounce PBR? How many would it take for a forty-ounce malt liquor?
I could stand in front of Smith’s and spot one of my old coworkers or a former subject and ask for a buck. Make up some excuse: locked my wallet in the car, lost my keys, left the cell at the house, need to make a call on a pay phone. Are there any more pay phones?