Vernon thanked the mixers, thanked Hugh, thanked the company president and bowed them all off his property, politely declining to lend his name to their ads. Then he inspected his new room. He estimated the job would have cost him roughly $2500, or one-eighth the price of his house. The increase in resale value was probably less than that, perhaps around $1000. The doorway was only 2’ wide, to restrict radiation from that direction. To assist the blower in ventilation, there was no door, but since radiation, like Chinese demons, travels only in straight lines, Hugh had built a baffle wall just inside the doorway.
Curious about the room’s effectiveness against radiation from an atomic blast, Vernon dug up some shielding data from his cache of unclassified RAND documents. The part of the shelter most exposed to direct radiation was the ceiling, which consisted of 6” of concrete, 15” of packed gravel, and 3” of topsoil. Radiation shielding was measured in halving thicknesses, that is, the thickness required of any material to reduce radiation by half. Approximately 4.5” of soil equaled one halving thickness. The density of a material was roughly proportional to its shielding strength. Soil had an average density of 1.25 g/cm3, whereas concrete was 2.4 g/cm3, and thus, 6” of concrete provided the same shielding as approximately 11.5” of soil. Gravel was around 1.68 g/cm3, so 15” of gravel equaled about 20” of soil. Thus, the top of his shelter had the equivalent of 34.5” of soil, or 7.67 halving thicknesses, which would cut radiation by a factor of 200. Radiation through the buried walls would be virtually nonexistent. The open doorway was harder to calculate, but the baffle wall alone would reduce radiation by a factor of nearly 35, and the preexisting basement might do approximately the same. On the whole, then, the room provided significant protection. If one assumed Vernon had any interest in surviving a nuclear war.
He hired a contractor a few days later to remove the baffle wall. The rest he did himself, hanging a screen door, mounting electrical raceways with masonry screws, an antenna wire conduit near the ceiling, easing his disassembled desk through the narrow door and rebuilding it in situ, etc. Gradually over the years he has improved the radiation cladding by augmenting the walls with a 12”-thick layer of polyvinyl chloride, also known as his record collection. LP vinyl, at 1.3 g/cm3, is slightly denser than soil. Additionally, it offers higher protection against some forms of radiation because of its high hydrogen content. But ignoring this last factlet—electromagnetic shielding is pretty far outside of Vernon’s wheelhouse—his LPs would still reduce radiation a further 85 percent. Thank you, Beethoven, Babbitt, Bacewicz, et al. Not to mention providing additional field insulation against the idiot ham radio operator four houses away, plus better sound insulation against barking neighborhood dogs, crying children, loitering teenagers, road traffic, ambulance sirens, top-40 crap played by other people’s outdoor contractors, birdsong, Good Humor trucks. In other words, life.
Vernon heads up the stairs to the ground floor. 11:25 p.m., no sign of Imogen. Carlos’s apartment is ten miles away, which is a pretty long drive if you’re drunk as a skunk. Gen used to berate him for sleeping soundly when Susan was out late. She said it was proof he only cared for himself. Now he sits up and worries about Gen, and she sees it as trying to control her.
He leaves the back door unlocked, the porch light on. Checks to make sure the front door is locked. Heads upstairs to his bedroom, consciously lifting each foot high enough. Worries that she’ll kill herself. Worries that she’ll kill a family in the opposing lane. Wonders if she and Carlos do more than practice Spanish. She dotes on him, quotes him. He’s an Old World man, with his dark shabby apartment full of books and his ascot, for God’s sake. (Vernon’s never been there, but on the fridge there’s a photograph of the lion in his den.) He needs a señorita to take care of him and apparently none of his five ex-wives fit the bill. Imogen jokes about that. “He’s terrible,” she says, and seems to mean it.
Maybe what she feels is more sisterly. She was lonely, growing up.
He gets ready for bed, climbs in. Stares at the darkness, kicks against his mortality.
The first thing he noticed, maybe ten years ago, was that he was frequently catching his toe against the riser of a stairstep. Then he observed his handwriting getting smaller. Sometimes in the middle of writing a sentence his hand would stop and he’d stare at it, unsure how to make it move. It also seemed as though his gait had changed. He shambled. He made an appointment with a neurologist and read these and other symptoms from a list he’d drawn up the night before. The man was impressed at his observational powers. “You’ve given a textbook description of the onset of Parkinson’s disease,” he said.
Vernon was relieved. He’d thought he had Alzheimer’s. He would surrender his body before his brain any day. He didn’t know then that many Parkinson’s patients eventually develop something called Lewy body dementia. Well—he sure knows now. Sometimes he fades out. This intermittency is one of the things that distinguishes LBD from Alzheimer’s. He’ll fade out more as time goes by, until it will be more useful to speak of the times he fades in. His periods of clarity give him opportunities to stand back
