Chapter 3 (I): No place of honour

Pearl and her father are stood in the desert among a group of twenty people. Their bodies are silhouetted against vast horizontal pastel plains, vulnerable in the midday sun. Bombarded with heat from all sides they fan themselves with leaflets and baseball caps, some, better prepared, have electric fans or even spray water bottles with fans attached. Pearl and her Dad share a big bottle of water, but the water inside has become hot. Their noses are running from going between the aggressively air conditioned tour bus and the extreme desert heat, far too intense for the amount of layers Pearl was swaddled in. She looked like the invisible man, her little face smeared white with suncream beneath oversized insectile shades. A knee length t-shirt with trailing sleeves gave her the appearance of having shrunk, or sinking in quicksand. It was the kind of heat where any movement brought the body to its knees.

The morning had been very strange. Pearls mind swirled with some kind of vertigo or deja vu, a nausea of the senses that had begun with an orgiastic all-you-can-eat hotel breakfast buffet at 6AM, which she could only stare at blinking and bleary eyed from a disturbed and jet lagged sleep.

While Pearl had abstained from touching anything except a few petals of a pretty rose shaped radish garnish plucked from an open casket of lobsters, she now felt as if she had eaten the whole thing with her eyes. The excessive sequence of the last 24 hours had bloated her senses and she was all out of proportion. Pearl and her parents had arrived only yesterday, and too much had happened since then, the offerings of Las Vegas so beyond their life in Seascale that she felt like a blown fuse, a wire that needed earthing, and now in the infernal heat, enduring this bomb experience, or whatever it was called, she was melting.

It was Gerry, her father’s, work trip disguised as a holiday. Pearl should have known better, she had fallen for her father’s rouse so many times before that she felt quite foolish. Daddy promised the tour would be fun, and since it was promoted on the bottom of a leaflet right next to an exotic animal sanctuary and a waterpark emblazoned with the words ‘It’s a blast’ in a top secret looking font, Pearl believed it. As sweat mixed with suncream, dripped down her forehead and into her eyes, the image of her mother floated by, sunbathing alone on a lounger, smiling to herself, painted toes separated by foam, sipping on a drink with a little umbrella. When they got back to the hotel she would say she was sorry for missing all the fun, and of course not be sorry at all. Her patience had long grown thin when it came to the excessive demands of Gerry’s job and she liked to make this especially clear on work trips disguised as holidays.

For Gerry, his work and play were holistic and he wished that his daughter and his wife would at least try and garner some enthusiasm for their time away together. His daughter was a good sport but Oona could have been in paradise and resent it just the same. It did not help that on the first day of their ‘holiday’ he had wanted them all to get up at 5AM and walk around a radioactive desert looking at blown up buildings and nuclear waste dumps. As the alarm, yes, the alarm, alerted them to dawn before even the birds could be bothered, Oona told him ‘Give me a break and take Pearl.’ All she could possibly do today was to make the most of the expensed hotel. But of course she couldn’t relax, her book was crap and lying poolside by herself gave her all the time to world to worry about Pearl and Gerry, it was blistering today, were they drinking enough water? It wasn’t often he was alone with Pearl and he could be so damn absent minded.

’I’d get more respect working the strip’ Gerry blurted out to Pearl, as she fixated on the water bottle, wishing it to turn cold. He would say this often, a running theme that spoke both to his wife and the world.  Working the strip meant selling sex in Vegas. Putting two and two together Pearl gathered her father’s work was seen as dirty. Many a pleasant conversation had turned stupid and sour at the mention of his work on Yucca mountain, the site where he and his daughter now stood staring into a dark tunnel emerging at its base. The whole group swayed and shimmied aimlessly waiting for the tour to begin, watching the hustle of diggers and drill rigs manifesting their plans, carving up the natural environment. It had been designated to become the countries first geological repository for the disposal of highly radioactive nuclear waste. The plan to turn the waste into glass and bury it deep inside the mountain was pretty taboo in the local community. The Nevada state governor had been using it as the whipping post of his re-election campaign. Pearl didn’t know much about politics but knew the governor was an ‘Enemy of progress’ stoking fear by building apocalyptic pictures in the popular imagination, of tons of nuclear waste careening through the desert highway and bottlenecking in Vegas. His grizzled, gnawing face was perfect for delivering this message. But he could only swoop down all star spangled to stop the toxic freight with Your Vote.

The ‘Atomic Experience Tour’ funded by the Northwest National Laboratory was all part of an optimistic counter effort by the Department of Energy to re-frame the decimation of Yucca Mountain as a legacy project. An important and necessary part of the countries national defence mission with the waste recast as an ageing war hero, who yes, might now stink of piss and alcohol, but who once fought for your freedom so don’t you forget it. It was the residue of defeated Nazi’s and deserved a good send off, to be draped in the stars and stripes, immortalised by spikes, and what better place for it than next to Vegas! The city and the mountain, two peaks of Promethean spectacle were now wed in perfect sense, shorthand for human folly, neighbours from hell.

Pearls‘ Dad and his colleagues were testing it out, special guests had been invited, some local press, some bringing their kids to bond, and why not see how the message landed with a broad demographic. For Pearl it hadn’t so much landed as grown wings, she wanted to lie down in the shade and took her fathers hand only to steady herself from the dizzying carousel of images which crowded her vision like the tweeting birds of a concussed cartoon character.

They had taken the tour bus across desolate plains to a fine black point, Doomtown, a haunted house lying in wait. They were the first visitors to the house in years. In the Nevada desert, as far as you could get from the picket fences of suburbia, this was a typical American town that had been created, built with the sole purpose of being destroyed by a Nuclear blast. Operation Doorstep was an experiment to see the atom bombs effect on civic infrastructure. The towns’ inhabitants had all been mannequins from a department store called JC Penny, who once roamed the streets of parked cars and pylons, perversely as if shopping. It had all been obliterated by an atom bomb called Annie. Now all that remained was the house, and the mannequin family who had lived inside.

The house was surreal against the bright blue sky, a giant concrete skull sinking in sand and dirt, unwelcoming as an unmarked grave.  The windows were hollow, cast in rich, dark shadows. They were instructed not to touch the walls, but Pearl ran her fingers along its charred shell. It was uniformly bumpy, fragments of paint chips from the original exterior still remained like peeled skin. A piece got stuck in her finger, flicking it away drew a prick of blood, and she imagined herself as sleeping beauty, at once falling into a radioactive coma, fusing forever with this haunting material.

Inside the house, the family posed in various static scenes of domestitude, as if they had finished their day in a shop window, and returned home to put their feet up. It was like a giant dolls house, but instead of a chubby little hand reaching in to play, 16,000 kilotons had torn them limb from limb. The baby mannequin lost its head. Its body strewn at the amputated leg of its mother. Pearl was entertained in a creepy way.

Gerry was intrigued by her obsessive reading of the display boards, she looked forensic in her curiosity, what story was she building? Pearl had found the language especially peculiar. Each member of the family was accompanied by a photograph of themselves before the blast, and a written description which paid particular attention to the effect of the bomb on their clothing, as if the JC Penny 1953 Spring/Summer collection was an epidermal layer, significant as flesh and blood. It seemed that in Doomtown a missing button is equivalent to a missing limb. It was all topsy-turvy, and gave Pearl an eerie feeling, there were no answers, just a demonstration of chaos. In reviewing the destruction, she wondered what emotion was truly on display, as the bomb’s trace represented the whims of a monster, a mad king.

Before: Rayon floral printed blouse, black and white checked orion acetate wool skirt, nylon stockings, black leather mary janes.

After: Head twisted off – face smashed and head split open from ear to ear – Blouse has buttons torn off, mannequin torn apart at the waste – small cuts in skirt – missing left leg – laddered stockings. No sign of damage done to the shoes other than dust and plaster from the fallen ceiling.

Pearl could not help but translate the words to life and for an exhilarating and horrifying moment saw the mannequin death animated in the way that people see statues of the Madonna cry blood. Its’ torn head floated up toward the window, split in half, opening to reveal its hollow core, a mangled face framed in darkness.

The head spoke in her mothers voice. “Are you having a good time without me?”

Pearl said nothing.

“I asked if you are having a good time without me?”

“I would prefer if you were here. I’m very hot, I’m too hot.”

“Well we know how that feels, it’s hotter than hell in here. Look, Daddy’s cravat is all burnt.”

“…huh?”

“Daddy’s cravat is all burnt, I’ll have to sew it up.”

“y-y-yes.”

“Do I look okay? Its only I feel a bit funny.”

The head floated back to her decapitated body to examine it. “Oh my goodness, I have a ladder in my tights!”
Turning back towards Pearl, the head seemed all of a sudden very angry, like it was Pearl’s fault. “Why on earth didn’t you tell me?”

Pearl ran back to the stationary bus as fast as she could and hid under her fathers jacket. The bus had gotten terribly cold and she began to hear a strange wheezing sound coming from behind her which was not the air conditioning. The blood drained from her face as she realised the floating head must have followed her. She dared to turn around.

A teenage boy was panting on the back seat, he was dressed head to toe in camouflage, maybe thats why she hadn’t noticed him in her rush to seek cover. It was just the two of them on the bus.

“I saw her” he said, panting.

He was out of breath. Had he seen the head too?

“saw what?”

“Annie”

“the head?”

“4, 3, 2, 1…”

His sound made Pearl jump and tapered off into a nothingness that made everything seem even quieter than before.

“She was so bright that I could see my own bones.”

He held up his hands in worship or surrender, then rotated his hands towards him, bringing them closer to his chest, studying them intensely, he gazed back at Pearl, staring right through her too. She zoned into the boys eyes, his black pupils had turned white, the iris glowed like the blue part of the flame.

Pearl looked closer in a kind of nausea, the white of the eyes rippled and threw her back in horror, out of the resulting haze walked Gerry, back on the bus to find Pearl in their seats wrapped in his jacket. Gerry got close to her, Pearl was shivering, he put his arms around her and as she nuzzled into him her whole body seemed to calm. These moments of physical closeness were becoming increasingly rare and he savoured them, taking note of the warm sensation it gave him.

As they pulled away from Doomtown Pearl watched the decrepit house recede from the window until it became a tiny dot at which point she truly questioned whether it had been there at all. Her head rested on her father’s shoulder for the entire two mile ride across the desolate Yucca flat.

When the bus finally stopped, Pearl didn’t want to move, she was so comfortable leaning against her fathers chest that she could fall asleep. He gently nudged her dozy body forward, putting his hands on both her shoulders to motion her toward the exit. They stepped down from the bus to a magnificent site, an enormous crater that made the desert look like the moon.

They walked over towards its periphery like astronauts, feeling calm and sedate from the cool pause of the bus ride. Gerry put an arm around Pearls’ shoulder and they stood with the rest of group gazing into the deep pit as it pooled with their reflections on what God could have created it. Standing next to Gerry was a bird-like old man, he cleared his lungs into a handkerchief and began speaking, gesturing a figure of eight with his walking stick, its tripod base gave his arm a claw-like extension. His voice was languid and throaty.

“People used to come from all over the country to Vegas, and watch the bombs go off from penthouses! Like new years eve, the most spectacular firework display ever made, brighter than the sun. It was real popular back then! Everything was atom bomb, atom bomb this, atom bomb that, they’d watch the bombs and drink atom-bomb cocktails, Stardust Martini, Bomb-island-iced-tea, Tequila Planet, Red Russian… or was it dead Russian! [he laughed abruptly] It was a very fun thing to do, tremendous… until they all learned about radiation poisoning!”

The man burst with laughter spiralling into a tone deaf cough. Gerry clapped him on the back and said ‘fascinating’, the man doubled over, Gerry kept patting him, now more practical than friendly, and at this precise moment Pearl noticed the old man was armed. She let out a cry and grabbed her father to warn him.

“Pearl” her father scolded, “what’s got into you?” as if the man wasn’t carrying a gun. Pearl wondered what her mother would think about them being stranded in the desert with a weird man and a gun and vowed to tell her when they got back. Some force was making Pearl see her father in a different light, he was fallible and his foibles made him look small in the stark Nevada sun. She hadn’t seen these sides of him before. Father and daughter rejoined the group separately.

The guide was offering an explanation, “When the dangers of radiation were better known, the entire atmospheric testing operation was moved underground, and when the bombs exploded beneath the surface, they took huge sections of the earth down with them in these giant craters.” The guide then crouched down at the perimeter of a deep crescent, sifting sand through her fingers as if searching for gold, the performance of a good storyteller. She held a piece of compacted shining dirt aloft to catch the sun, “Trinitite” she said, which sparkled prettily as it was passed between fingers of the tour, she told them how the fireball had made the sky rain glass.

“Sand was beamed up from the desert, fused into glistening beads by the intense heat and showered back down to earth as a newborn element.’’

Inconspicuous as dirt, this tiny fragment of split atom contained the seed of something terrible and powerful that Pearl felt was special and might give her strength or luck if it belonged to her. Turning the piece of Trinitite over and over in the centre of her palm, feeling like it might jump down her throat, take root and grow, ginormous as a beanstalk but inwards, she waited until the guide had changed subject, “A real town was built here once too”, attention had strayed, and placed the magic little pill beneath her tongue “a place called Mercury…”

A nudge jolted her forward, she expected Daddy’s hand to appear in front of her face as a makeshift spittoon but in fact he just wanted her to behave and pay attention. As they were driven across the flats to their final stop, she kept her eye on the armed man, but felt protected by the charm she held inside her mouth. The group were all exhausted now, the bus sleepy and quiet.

Wearily they disembarked at the foot of Yucca Mountain, back to where the tour had begun. A cavernous opening in its side yawned wide. They were split into groups of five, fastened into yellow hardhats and marched into open air trucks which took them though the tunnel, encasing them in cool and welcome darkness, the air, dank and humid, soothing their sunburned cheeks. The waste would be buried there, in labyrinthine tunnels deep below. The bumps in the road and sonorous drone of machinery lulled Pearl half to sleep, she dreamed of the waste, perfectly still, forever encased in glass.