Chapter 3 (II): No place of honour

The soporific tunnel opened into daylight and Pearls’ arm jerked up in front of her eyes like a vampire. As the truck wound up the side of the mountain, and closer to the blinding sun, the Nuclear Waste Markers emerged into view, growing up from the earth like hair sprouting from the back of an enormous beast. Pearl squinted up at their highest point; a concrete apex which pierced the sky. The tour guide shouted to be heard over the mechanic whirr coming from deep inside the mountains’ bowels, reverberating through the giant spikes. Gerry had looked forward to this part for Pearl, he imagined for a child the spikes would be exciting, overwhelming even. He hoped they wouldn’t give her nightmares.

The tour guide, “And here we are, at our final stop, the most important part of our legacy mission, Yucca Mountain, where all the waste will be safely buried in the countries first geological nuclear repository! The site is being designed by a team of specialists, called The Future Panel, many of whom are here today…”

A few of the men affirmed her statement proudly with nods. The repository was unseen, far too deep for the tour to have gone, they were in closer proximity when riding through the base, but the spikes now sung with the building of this cavernous hole and the invisible maze of the tunnels were somehow more present. The semiotics of a siren.

“Lets hear it for you guys!”

The tour guide raised her hands and clapped, a few others joined in to form a sparse round of applause. Pearls’ father directed a meek and knowing smile towards his daughter, and then around the grouping of colleagues who formed the hubristically titled ‘Futures Panel’, bristling from the acknowledgement of the young woman who they all had noticed at the same time was uncommonly attractive. They were lucky to have hired her, she was a talented stage actress but it was low season, the job was interstitial bread and butter. The days’ tour was the first she had led, it had been easy enough but if this was the regular demographic then she would have to wear loose fit pants and big t-shirts as they’d been staring at her ass all day. One of the panel piped up, unable to resist now that she had inadvertently paid him attention.

“Excuse me Miss, we’re called The Futures panel, it’s with an S, Futurrreesss Panel”

“Alright! of course”

“Thank You!”

“Yes many futures not just the one! even better…ok” she laughed through gritted teeth and returned to the script “So the ‘Futures’ panel” placing great emphasis on the S with a hint of sarcasm…’have designed the nuclear waste markers meticulously with one aim; to correct the time-born cultural distance between us and the far future, as a warning to our descendants…”

He interrupted, again, “Thats right ma’am absolutely. But you see these here aren’t quite the final thing ok, these here are the full scale mock ups, so we can envision the concept properly, because we really do care about getting it absolutely right, if it aint safe, it aint happening…”

The Futures panels’ collective aim was to design a system of prediction that would safeguard the mountain and protect the buried waste until it no longer posed a radioactive threat to humanity. An estimated 10,000 years. Together they composed speculative analogues that defined the threats posed to the wastes’ isolation, delineating all possible future ecologies that may arise. Ranging from earthquakes to extraterrestrials to radical feminist cults and ‘diseases that effect the mind and emotions’, these troubling potentialities congealed to form a paranoid fever dream that perhaps drew more deeply upon their own fears and psyches than the rigour of their disciplines… ‘2091: Women dominate in all society, numerically through the choice of having girl babies and socially. Twentieth century science was discredited as misguided male aggressive epistemological arrogance.’ All the analysis seemed to point toward an irrefutable truth that future humans, Jezebels or otherwise, cannot or should not be trusted any more than those in the present.

Myth would pose the greatest threat. All trace of the burial site must either disappear from the face of the earth or be permanently memorialised and understood with crystalline clarity, anything between these two polarities would pose a critical risk. The partial memory of something buried, of something precious and mysterious, would be a temptation so alluring to future humans that it would almost certainly provoke their intrusion. The panel member continued with what had become a rather long and impassioned speech.

“So you see, the idea of these spikes here, is that they suggest danger to the body. They are archetypal wounding forms, like nails or thorns…’

‘Or Pricks’ whispered a slightly older girl under her breath and in the vicinity of Pearls ear. Pearl knew what a prick meant, was immediately impressed by the joke and wanted to be friends. She didn’t look towards the girl for fear of getting the giggles, or incase she had been talking only to herself, but had noticed her earlier because she was wearing really cool blue eyeliner.

‘These sharp hostile shapes convey a sense of foreboding, of something threatening and super-human, that could move the future human subject on a pre-lingual, visceral level to be wary of the contaminated site”

“Yes ok, thats fascinating, and thats pretty much exactly what I have written here on my script’ looking at her watch ‘May I continue…?”

Little Pearl had been tenderly holding her Dads’ hand, Gerry enjoyed that she had hardly broken away from him all morning, she wore an expression that he had seen before, something between unwrapping a gift and being told no. When perceiving his daughter, he felt a suffocating need to protect her, a fear that if anything happened to her, it would be entirely his fault. All of the men on the panel shared a conceit that their dedication to the project was for the safety of their children, and their childrens’ children, but he was more cynical, or perhaps more honest. To him this site was an eternal grave that would somehow bear his hand, his life’s work. The spikes would stretch into the furthest imaginable reaches of time. Just like the act of procreation, it was not selfless. It was their desire, like most, to matter.

It was also true that he had woken feverishly from nightmares of Pearl in the midst of one of the many catastrophic futures inscribed by the panel. The intrusive behaviours of human descendants, drilling into the earth, to extract, to inject, releasing penumbras of toxicity into the environment, into their children, Pearl will inhale it, not just one Pearl but a Matryoshka set of Pearls, each one smaller and more delicate than the last, stretching into eternity, struggling to breathe the toxic air around them. In the light of day he would try and calculate the probability of Pearls happiness, doing the best he could with the inputs, but ultimately concluding that it was a totally unknown quantity, the course of her life, after a certain point, would be as unknowable to him as the next 10,000 years. Involuntarily he squeezed her hand too hard and she let go. It had almost made him cry when recently she had asked him not to kiss her on the lips anymore, saying it felt sloppy, and although she was young for her age she would soon be too old to sit on his knee. He could feel how big he was in her eyes, and they looked just like his, through her, he learned to love himself.

One of Gerrys’ colleagues sidled over to start a conversation, looking a little defeated. “So what do you think of the ‘atomic experience’ or whatever it’s called?”

“I think it works, the guide is good” 

“Yeah, you really think so Gerry?’

“Mmm – hmm”

“Her name is Melissa, apparently she’s an actress, I was just talking to her over there”

“well she certainly looks like an actress” “how old is she do you think…?”

“Oh i dunno, I’m no good with age, maybe thirty’ “And what do you think young lady…?”

“My name is Pearl not young lady”  

“Pearl” Gerry said, annoyed

“Thats alright Gerry, she’s quite alright, so what do you think Pearl not young lady, Do you think we’re all safe?”

“The desert is very hot”

“A perfectly scientific description”

“Thats because I want to be a scientist too, like Daddy” She smiled up at her father cheekily, perfectly aware she was being sickening. Gerry was beaming, for him, this was something of a reward for all his worry. She would at least be safe somewhere in his legacy.

According to her Mother, Pearl was a Daddy’s girl and Daddy was a pushover, which was said with pride and the knowledge that it must be so, for a father is perhaps the first man a girl ever learns to manipulate and for him to allow it is perhaps one of their most practical and generous uses. Pearl had learned that the best way to be close to him, to please him, was to flatter the thing he loved most. It was something of a sibling, his work, she had to compete with it for his attention, while he, nursed its ambitions, made sacrifices for it, spent nights by its side.

“Oh well isn’t that something, we did a good job i suppose, Pearl, how old are you?’

‘nine and three months almost exactly’

‘Well you just wait until you’re Lora’s age’

He pointed to his daughter, a sullen teenage girl whose face was hidden with bangs, glasses and blue eyeliner, the one that had whispered something funny near Pearls’ ear. 

’You won’t wanna do anything but eat and sleep, isn’t that right Lora?’

‘Is that right, Dad?’ Lora rolled her eyes and looked at Pearl as if they had shared a joke, Pearl was delighted and it was easily the best thing that had happened all day. She hoped that she might some day be as lazy and indolent as her Dad’s friend was describing.

She wondered if Lora had a workaholic father too, she seemed to be older than Pearl, emoting in eye rolls and sighs, more jaded perhaps. Pearl’s demonstrations of interest and emulation weren’t entirely the seductive rouse of a Daddy’s girl, she didn’t hate hearing about it, elements stirred a feeling inside of her, a sense of massiveness, as big as aliens and dinosaurs, and when she stretched to catch a concept, he would reward her with praise, for becoming like him, for following in his footsteps (and since she couldn’t be a pretty girl, she would be a clever one.) In his office there was a little scale maquette of the mountain where they now stood, a cross section that cleaved itself in half to reveal the tunnel system underneath, Pearl sat on his desk and played with it while he worked. How strange to think, as it enveloped her every horizon, that last week she had been peering down at it like a god.

“Inscribed on each spike, is the message: “This is no place of honour. This place is best left shunned and left uninhabited. What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.”

But now she was up close, to scale, she couldn’t grasp it at all. It seemed that Lora felt the same way, whispered to Pearl under the guide’s yammering.

“You know what they remind me of…?” 

“What?” asked Pearl, hoping for another rude word.

‘Those stupid spikes on buildings that stop birds from roosting. But instead of getting rid of pigeons, these are supposed to communicate a clear message to future humans through the unknowable reaches of time and space. Don’t you think thats crazy? the whole things moronic if you ask me”

“I like the idea of future humans as oversized pigeons” Pearl said, half aware of the joke.

Pearl felt that Lora was saying very important things, stuff that Pearl wanted to hear, maybe Lora had got her period already and could therefore decode the mysterious periodic table, she seemed like a fully grown woman. Pearl thought she might know something about what Lora was saying, for example, she felt herself a freak of nature, but her mother told her she was a miracle and Daddy certainly didn’t believe in those.

“Using the logic of the rosetta stone, the warning is written in 50 languages! This gives people in the future a better chance of decoding it.”’

Could it be true that her Daddy was a moron like Lora was suggesting? Even Pearl knew that bodies and brains are far too complex to be moved unanimously in a herd ten thousand years from now, and she was only nine and three months. It seemed quite reasonable to her that even if the message were understood totally it would still have the opposite effect, that the waste would be unearthed someday by humans or whatever replaces them. Its’ lifespan made a joke of human time, funny but not in a laughing way. Curiosity is perhaps the only thing that connected her to the neanderthal that discovered fire. For a moment Pearl hugged herself, feeling her smallness against all this magnitude. Wondering if her clothes would outlive the body that wore them. Her Dad knew what he was talking about, but if he could see into the future, did he need to hold her hand so tight?

Lora seemed to be arguing with her father, who was very uncomfortable and was trying to hush her.

’So you’re saying that the spikes speak – that they convey danger through being shapes that wound the body. That this will stop future humans from entering the mountain, drilling into it, whatever they wanna do’

“Yes darling, thats the scientific principle”

“Ok, sure, so what about mummies? They were locked away with all these curses which we read and still dug them out and put them in glass boxes and scattered them all over the world. Maybe we are all cursed and we don’t even know it! This…(making bunny ears with her fingers…) “common ground of bodily experience” that you’re speaking about. What if future humans don’t have bodies?”

“And that’s exactly what The Futures Panel is for” her Father said, matter-of-factly

“You, you mean?” Lora started laughing ‘We’re fucking doomed.’

“Lorraine, thats enough.”

It should just be silent, Pearl thought. Just nothing, invisible to look at, acting the same way as any other patch of the desert. Pearl had been taught in her short life that silence was the best way to hide bad things. If you talk about them, you give them form. She would hear her parents talk about them sometimes, strain to hear the secrets, and from these murmurs a shadowy figure had emerged about whom she wanted to know everything. A person who one day in the not too distant future, she would meet. He looked something like Annie.