Bombshell (12 page)

“In 1960, the Food and Drug Administration of the United States approved the oral contraceptive pill, just as the French conducted their first nuclear bomb test in the atmosphere above the Sahara desert during the Algerian War; Algeria, the birthplace of Hélène Cixous and so, of
écriture féminine
, defiant, gorgonian, elliptical, bisexual, unzipping the patriarchy of language. The publication of Betty Friedan's
The Feminine Mystique
followed hard on the boot heels of the Bay of Pigs, and the midnight horror of the Cuban Missile Crisis. Ruth Handler created the Barbie doll, and would later create prosthetic breast implants for cancer patients. Valerie Solanas's
SCUM Manifesto
shadowed the Tet Offensive in Vietnam; radical women protested the Miss America pageant in New York; Brezhnev sent tanks into Czechoslovakia to destroy anti-Stalinist liberal reforms in Prague. The U.S. bombed communist enclaves
in Cambodia; Libya aligned itself with the Soviet Union; the Redstockings fought for abortion rights. The Vietnam War ended;
Roe v. Wade
, 1973;
On the Beach
through a cone of cinema cigarette smoke; and
Threads
on BBC television, deformed babies, melting milk bottles,
Town Bloody Hall
, children wept beneath school desks, women were lobotomized, etcetera, etcetera, etcetera . . . Second-wave feminism lasted until the end of the Cold War in 1991, the dissolution of the Warsaw Pact and the Soviet Union. How much would we give to fuck without the anxieties of the bomb, the nuclear age? The bikini, the tiki grotesques, the phallic designs of rocket cars, the cocktails, the antidepressants, the analysis, postcards of Shiva, anything to avoid looking directly at the bomb again. In the atomic age, all sex work is cliché. The hot girls are imported and traded from the radioactive forests of Eastern Europe; hot because their bones are riddled with cancer, and hot because they are emaciated, impoverished, supplicant to the skin trade, their eyes wide from postnatal visions of the scorched earth. The Cold War, the analog of the Sex War, did not end on December 25, 1991, as according to Bush-Yeltsin. It continues in sequined self-loathing and nostalgia. Also, it is played out with new, sexually repressive, puppet proxies in the Middle East. Under the logic of secularism, the French who tested their nuclear weapons on human conscript-subjects in the dunes of North Africa until April 26, 1961, have instigated a state-enforced striptease; the burka is burlesque in Paris, and they want it over with because of the agonies of Algeria. Burlesque is erotic parody: the parody of a sailor's kiss in Times Square on VJ Day; the parody of American culture by Japanese teenagers; the parody of the bombing of Hiroshima by Paul W. Tibbets before a crowd of 40,000 cowboy-ghouls at Rebel Field, Harlingen, on the Gulf Coast of Texas in 1976; repeated mushroom clouds shadowing the oily waters. In the atomic age, all sex work is cliché. Every day is a martini glass, and a gorgeous peeled stocking, a bikini, and fucking on the beach before the ocean catches fire.”

Finally, Molly fell asleep at Cash's kitchen table.

There was a sound from the living room behind her, a series of faint tones, as though a telephone had been left off its hook. She stood with some effort, stiff from her bruises and torn muscles, and from being fixed in the small kitchen chair for so much of the night. She limped from the linoleum floor to the whitewashed floorboards, listening and scanning for the source of the sound. Suddenly, she saw it. It was the camera, pitched on its side, close to the couch. She wondered how she could have forgotten it. She picked it up, feeling her cracked ribs. Turning it in her hands, she stared at the small LED screen where a series of lights tracked horizontally with each electronic tone. They increased their rhythm and became a short solid sound before the screen resolved an image of the floor where the camera was aimed. Moments later, Molly watched the screen turn blue and a message appeared there with the tolling of a thin electronic bell. Molly felt nausea rise. The camera had finally established a satellite Internet connection.

Upload Complete—Files Deleted From Device

April 8, 2011. Molly Pinkerton dragged the dead agent, enshrouded in Cash's blood-soaked rug like a drag-king Cleopatra, through the cabin to the back door and the shared scrub of ground between Cash's house and her own. Setting the rigid body down, she forced enough of it into a rusted oil drum that she could raise it upright. One section of the rug peeled back to reveal the corpse's face. The batteries in the flashlight had failed during the night. In the pallid sun the face retained its fixed rictus of desperation. From information on the camera she learned that the intruder's name was Spicer. With a can of gasoline from her makeshift garage, Molly doused the body and threw empty six-pack boxes, aborted artwork, and the remnants of Spicer's camera that she crushed underfoot into the can. The blaze sent a plume of gray-black smoke across the slag
heaps of Madrid in the early morning. Her heartbeat came hard in the bright New Mexico sunlight, ordained as she was now with an anxiety that would never pass from her. She knew that the camera had sent images of not only Cash's archive, but also of the final flash-lit moments when she had killed the intruder. As the smoke poured into her lungs, she imagined the photographs rendered on a distant computer screen, and knew that the ones that had tried to take her, or to take Cash, would return. There had been one common note in the dissonant archive that Molly also cast upon the flames: the date April 26.

ROBERT DRESNER AWOKE FROM A RESTLESS SLEEP TO THE SOUND OF
data downloading to his cell phone and the laptop computer at his bedside, a series of regular alarm tones and pulsing blue lights. It was not yet 6
AM
. It must be Spicer reporting in at last, he thought. He rolled toward the lamp and searched for the switch, suddenly finding himself wincing in the artificial light of the room. He called them ghost hotels, the suburban black-op sites. This one was in Albuquerque, on Coal Avenue close to the university and the green diamond where the Isotopes played baseball. He had retired there after Green had driven them down to Sandia Labs. His phone and computer were receiving different files. He listened to the thin buzz of the signal amplifiers as the files were drawn down into the hole where he was concealed beneath the adobe bungalow. Dresner connected the telephone to the computer, so as to see the files on a large screen when they finally came in. The files reaching his cell phone must have been sent by Spicer from the house in Madrid. He was confident that Spicer would have got out long before he would have been disturbed, even without his being able to send Spicer a warning. The other incoming data, he reasoned, must be from the LANL: the results of DNA tests and
criminal cross-references on the hermaphrodite, or whatever it was the rendition team had rejected on the road last night.

He climbed the metal ladder from the blank bunker space below the house and emerged in its utility room; shining unused washing machine, neatly folded piles of laundry like props and scenery from
The Stepford Wives
, he thought. Then, all of the trapping of New Mexicana, the gaudy
retablos
, dried red chilies hanging in peasant
ristras
, images of Our Lady of Guadalupe simpering from her turquoise and gold webbing. Dresner loathed the abode architecture of New Mexico. “It all looks like nests of shit rolled up by beetles,” he had said as the Cross Spikes Club drove into Santa Fe in their sinister van. He tucked a bottle of mineral water beneath his arm and carried the pot of automatically brewed coffee back down to the bunker. Stupid, he thought, if anyone ever used this place they would have figured out putting some of these things downstairs. He reclined on the bed and pulled the computer over and rested it on his naked chest. He opened Spicer's photographs first. The serial numbers told him that he was seeing the latest images first, the file in reverse order. He struggled to assimilate what he was seeing, saying aloud: “Jesus fucking Christ, what's this?” Suddenly, he recognized that he was staring at a photograph of blood pumping from Spicer's legs in a scarlet arc, hissing over the crawling form of the transsexual, who seemed to be in the motion of hacking at Spicer with a blade of some kind; Spicer down; some kind of frozen struggle; light pouring from Spicer's mouth; Molly Pinkerton leaning close to his face, crushing him. Dresner coughed vomit into his mouth. There was a time when even this shock would not have disturbed him. He suspected that it was because he was going to be married, and that part of his unconscious recognized that he would have to become a normal man. The introspection embarrassed him. He had seen enough to know what he must do.

Detaching the ghost phone to make his call to The Voice, his only consolation was that the conversation would be brief, if he could control himself. He had not yet confessed the aborted rendition of Molly Pinkerton. Shivering, he wondered if one of his men would betray him, even without a direct line.

“Spicer's dead.”

“Extract him, whatever condition.” The distant tones were without emotion. “What about the bomber? Did the bomber get Spicer?”

“No. But I know who did. We'll take him this morning.” Dresner wondered if he had consciously avoided saying “her,” and if so, why?

“You fucked up.”

“Yes. We fucked up,” Dresner admitted.

There was a momentary silence, the silence of a conscience deliberately recalibrating. Did he detect in The Voice's hesitation an implication that there would be consequences for him? It spoke again, dismissively: “Spilt milk. Do you have a script on this accomplice?”

“Name, DNA samples, and . . . ”—now his own hesitation—“and Spicer's photographs. Royce is running the tests, and we'll put it all through the database, see what history we have on Spicer's murderer. It's coming through right now.”

“Fix this, Dresner.”

“Affirmative.”

The Voice disconnected the call.

DECEMBER 1991. CASH WAS FIVE YEARS OLD, SQUATTING IN A DUPLEX
house in Portland, Oregon. It was Christmas Day at the women-only refuge. With its pale green sidings, leaf mold gutters, and boarded windows, it was home to Cash and three young women, her surrogates. The punks had taken her in and adopted her as one of their gang. Sleet lashed against the house and the stripped rose bushes of the garden. Inside, the entire house was strung with Christmas lights and improvised decorations. Brightly colored paper lanterns shifted in the warm air currents from the space heaters; cables stole electricity from the grid. Cash stood transfixed by the beautiful pine tree in the corner of the living room. It reminded her of something that she could not properly recall, a fragment, an impression of home. Surrounded by paper-cut birds, and wrapped in foil garlands, scarlet ribbons, and day-glo bootlaces, it loaned its scent to the entire house. Years later, she would recall reddening pines wreathed in glittering poisonous rain. The punks called the house Herland.

The young women had told her about something they called post-traumatic stress disorder. They felt that Cash suffered from it. There was a time when no one knew what this trauma was, not even Cash. Yet, slowly, the unexploded bombshell charged with the secrets of her birth had been uncovered from beneath layers of ashen dust. The young women took it as their responsibility to lure the withdrawn girl from the dark cavity where she seemed to exist, shaking and preoccupied.

Nona was the eldest at twenty-five. Nona told Cash about women with strange names: Sojourner Truth, bell hooks; and she introduced Cash to
Wonder Woman
comic strips on yellowing paper. Even as a child, as she stole sips of beer, Cash understood that this Christmas was special. Herland resounded with blasts from mix-tapes as Cash struggled to carry the black plastic ghetto blaster from room to room. They danced together in the disintegrating living room, kicking clots out of the carpet, pulling strips of yellow wallpaper from the plaster walls. Most of all, Cash watched and listened to Nona as though she were the whisper at the eye of a storm. Nona had almost symmetrical freckles on her brown cheeks, and she kept her head shaved down to soft dark fuzz. She called herself a Creole. She had left an abusive boyfriend in Louisiana and driven to the Northwest, where something magical and radical was happening. In her red leather biker jacket, Nona approached Cash through a wall of feedback and gave her another stash of crumbling vintage comics and clippings that looked as though they had been bartered away from pack rats. Nona explained:

“Cash, do you remember how I told you that Wonder Woman is from a tribe of powerful women called the Amazons? Her priority is truth. That's what she cares about, exposing things to the light.” Nona smiled tenderly and stroked Cash's cheek.