The second clip is filmed from inside one of the houses in Operation Cue. A mannequin of a boy maybe ten years old has been placed near a window. He’s wearing what might be a dosimeter on a long chain around his neck. Farther from the window and partly out of the frame sits his mother, who is opening one hand toward him. The Venetian blinds have been closed to test whether they will effectively shield the boy from the x-ray flash. When the flash comes, the blinds start to smoke, and vaporized plastic billows into the room as the light darkens from the approaching dust cloud. But the boy appears to be unhurt. That is, his face isn’t smoking. Then the blast wave hits and in an instant everything in the room—boy, mother, sofa, recording camera—is annihilated.
The films were propaganda designed to inspire in viewers the confidence and determination to protect themselves. Instead, they shocked everyone into hopelessness and inaction. No one, in the years afterward, has ever called that eerie settlement Survival Town. It’s always referred to as Doom Town. See, Sherlock? Surprise.
In 1954, Susan was born with strontium-90 in her skeleton. Mark, in 1959, was born with more. Half-life, 29 years. Effect, increased incidence of bone cancer and leukemia. By 1963, children in the United States were being born with 50 times the level of strontium-90 in their bodies compared with those born before 1950. By 1960, the pasteurized milk in sterilized glass bottles delivered to the back door every third day by the immaculate dairyman dressed in white contained iodine-131. Half-life, eight days. Effect, increased incidence of thyroid cancer. This is to say nothing of the army troops deliberately and openly exposed, or the downwind civilian populations deliberately and secretly exposed. Not one becquerel of this was thanks to the Soviets. No, it was thanks to our own military, thanks to Buster-Jangle, Tumbler-Snapper, Upshot-Knothole, Teapot, Plumbbob, Hardtack. Scrappy names for our team of streetfighting little rascals.
In the fifties, newspaper ads for suburban housing developments touted the fact that they were outside the radiation zone. While the pasty and sedentary Herman Kahn indulged fantasies of the entire population living underground, others proposed redesigning our cities as donuts, with industry and residential areas in a ring around a hollow core, so that Soviets would either obliterate the worthless center or have to waste megatonnage dropping bombs ring-around-the-rosy style. As with all other theories of civil defense, no one except paid consultants gave this plan a second thought. Then white people in the sixties accomplished it magnificently, not in order to escape the bomb, but to escape the blacks. Maybe some cultural memory lingered, since suburbanites began referring to inner-city ghettos as “bombed-out areas.” Surprise.
Now smarty-pants Vernon can’t count his own pills. At night, instead of dreaming he can fly, he dreams of a new impossible thing: that he can run. He examines his Beethovens in the catacomb they built him for free.
After Végh, he bought a set by the Bartók Quartet, on Hungaroton. By then, Mark was in high school getting straight As and Susan was God knows where. She’d dropped out of Tufts after one semester, lived for a while in Somerville, maybe waitressing—she’d more or less stopped talking to either Vernon or Imogen—then hopped on a plane at twenty and flew to Sri Lanka. She called from the airport to say nothing beyond the fact that she was going. Mark probably knew more, but both Imogen and Vernon saw that the one mistake they could perhaps not make was to try to leverage Susan’s lingering feelings for her brother. She would no doubt have sworn him to secrecy.
The Bartók Quartet was a return to old-school dominance by the first violin. Vernon went back to listening to the Végh and the Yale, and in 1977 bought a reissue on the Columbia label of historic EMI recordings done by the Budapest in the 1930s. By this point Vernon owned seven complete sets, and he was about to pay for Mark’s college, so with a mixture of embarrassment and regret he decided he’d indulged himself enough. But then Mark graduated in 1981, so in 1983 Vernon bought the complete set by the Cleveland Quartet on RCA Red Seal.
He pulls it down, slips out Opus 135.
Where was Susan in 1983? In Copenhagen, in that squatters’ settlement? Or that nutty organic Belgian farm run by that manipulative deviant? She’d been back in the US for a couple of years around 1980, mainly on the West Coast, but she did come home for one of the Christmases. She and her mother smoked and argued politics—Imogen left-wing, Susan left-fringe—and Susan radiated more than a tinge of superiority regarding her wide experience of the world, compared with the parochial shut-ins she called her parents. But she hugged them both when she left and from then on she sent a couple of letters a year. Maybe she was finally growing up, learning not to blame every last thing on her upbringing. Toward the end she even went back to college. She was in so many ways a stranger. And in other ways, the same stubbornly independent child and turbulent teenager he’d been so angry at so often, and now unaccountably missed.
Vernon cradles the disk, wipes it clean, places it gently on the turntable.
Her letters were terse, mostly information about where she was and the bald assertion that she was fine, but in one of the last ones she added a postscript, hey dad, I’m often reminded here of that thing you always used to say, that not all the crazy people are locked up; this place would drive you up the wall. Vernon was surprised how moved he was that she’d remembered anything he’d ever said. Or that she thought of him at all
