a sealed glove box. He wore protective gloves, he wore overgloves attached to his sleeves, he wore layers of treated clothing equipped with a number of film badges and rad-detectors and he worked with bomb components- the neutron initiator, the detonators, the subcritical pieces, the visceral heat inside the warhead.
He was doing something else now and Matt didn't know what it was. He wore a Q badge with yellow edges and spread astounding rumors.
The bombheads loved their work but weren't necessarily pro-bomb, walking around with megadeath hard- ons. They were detail freaks. They were awed by the inner music of bomb technology. Matt watched them. He went to their parties and learned their language. They carried an afterglow of sixties incandescence, a readiness to give themselves compulsively to something.
They thought he was angling for a transfer in, ready to become one of them, wear the coded badge, the Q- sensitive access that would get him through the last gate and into the tunnel that led to bomb design.
But Matty was sneaking looks at outdoor magazines, at camp bags and dome tents, because he needed time to get away and think.
He had doubts about the Tightness of his role.
Down route 70 a ways, near the sign for the missile range, an area that is white on your map-this is where the protesters stood, seven or eight men and women, sometimes only two or three, and they carried a sign stretched between wooden uprights,
Matt liked seeing them. He counted on it in a way. It began to be important to him, knowing they were there, four, five, six people, usually women outnumbering men, or maybe two grim figures clinging to the uprights, never saying a word as military vehicles passed, or flatbed trucks with draped objects, or civilian workers and construction crews, the odd finger flipped their way.
The white places on your map include the air base, the army base, the missile range, the vast stretch to the northwest called the Jornada del Muerto and the interdunal flats as well-the flats were map-white, on the page and in living fact, and a few low buildings were situated here, fenced structures with propane tanks, to service the underground operation in the Pocket, where weapons were conceived and designed.
They worked to strict deadlines. There were always deadlines to meet. The bombheads complained about this. They were the people of superior sensibility, the ones who'd gained a rational mastery over themselves, who were not subject to moral ambivalence, to the sentimental babyshit of consequence and anguish. They were the ones who understood the hard-ass principles of the conflict and they did not like bureaucratic pressures exerted from the surface.
But the deadlines persisted. There were deadlines all the time. There was the urgency of war without a war.
Eric said, 'Hear the latest secret?'
They were walking beyond the bungalows at sunset, totally alone on the sand plain, and Eric kept looking around for eavesdroppers, comically of course, and he affected a side-of-mouth murmur that might frustrate even a lip-reader recruited to study surveillance tapes.
'It's an old thing just now surfacing,' he said, 'in the form of very faint rumors.'
'What old thing?'
'Workers at the Nevada Test Site in the days of aboveground shots.'
'What about them?'
'And people living downwind. These people have a name, incidentally, that totally defines their existence.'
'What is it?'
'Downwinders,' Eric said.
They ambled out past low growths of saltbush toward the electrified fence.
'What about them?' Matt said.
'Nobody's supposed to know this. It's something that's more or less out in the open but at the same time.'
'What?'
'Secret. Untalked about. Hushed up.'
'What's the secret?' Matt said.
'Multiple myelomas. Kidney failures. Or you wake up one morning and you're three inches shorter.'
'You mean exposure to fallout.'
'Or you start throwing up one day and you throw up every succeeding day for seven, eight weeks.'
'But isn't this something we have to expect? Occasional miscalculations. It's dangerous work, you know?'
Eric seemed to enjoy this remark. No, he seemed to expect it, he seemed to find it encouraging. They walked out past a large parabolic dune and it was so draggingly hot out here that the air seemed a form of physical hindrance.
'Little farm communities downwind of the tests. Nearly all the kids wear wigs,' Eric whispered.
'Doing chemo?'
'Yeah. And here and there a kid that's born with a missing limb or whatnot. And a healthy woman that goes to wash her hair and it all comes out in her hands. She's a ravishing, you know, brunette one minute and totally bald the next.'
'Where?'
'Mainly southern Utah, I hear, because it's downwind. But other places too. Adenocarcinomas. Old Testament outbreaks of great red boils. Great big splotches and rashes. And coughing up handfuls of blood.
They walked along the electrified fence past a warning sign graffiti'd by a protester or some apostate working slyly in the Pocket.
'You think the stories are true?'
'No,' Eric said.
'Then why do you spread them?'
'For the tone, of course.'
'For the edge.'
'For the edge. The bite. The existential burn.'
Matty was six years old when his father went out for cigarettes.
Eight days later, when his father hadn't come back and hadn't called or sent a message through a friend, the boy took all the change he could find in the apartment and started walking.
He'd never gone alone past the Third Avenue el in this particular direction but that's where he walked. Then he crossed the avenue where the trains ran through the long corridor below street level from the suburbs all the way down to Grand Central Station. That Nicky would one day throw rocks at. That Nicky would stand at the railing in plain sight throwing rocks at the trains running right below him.
Then he climbed the long set of steps up to the streets near the Concourse. He'd climbed these steps with his mother to go to the movies and get a sundae at the ice-cream parlor nearby and now he climbed the steps alone, going to the Grand Concourse, where the movie theater stood, the Loew's Paradise, and there were sixty or seventy steps and buildings on iron stilts, like another country altogether.
He sees himself from this distance in the white sands standing across the street looking at the great Italianate facade of the Paradise.
He sees himself staring up at the clock and the roof balustrade and the ornate stone cupola.
He sees himself buying a ticket, barely able to reach the window hole, and he pushed the coins through the hole and watched the ticket woman hit a thing that sent the ticket out of a slit.
He walked into the lobby. He felt an enveloping sort of warmth rise from the thick carpet like the happy repose of a stroked dog. There were goldfish swimming in marble basins. He looked at the etched glass chandeliers. There were a number of jutting balconies where paintings hung in gilded frames. He thought this was a thousand times more holy than church.
