Bombshell (14 page)

Crapricorn (Dec.22nd – Jan. 19th): You are a thrill-seeker, and this week you find yourself deciding to leave your mace spray at home. Take a gun instead. Locate a dark, forbidding alleyway full of muggers, rapists, dude-ranch rejects, and forlorn wife-beater businessmen, and simply wait for the party to get started. Just Say No to “gang rape” (which is another way of referring to the “glass ceiling” at your office). Libra(tion) (Sept. 23rd – Oct. 22nd): Just Say No to sexual intercourse with males until the Equal Rights Amendment is a ratified reality. Since you are not a person, your husband or boyfriend should not want to fuck you, any more than he would want to fuck his own office chair. He might, grudgingly,
grant that you are a person of sorts, but not an equal. Therefore, your abstinence from all sexual activities with males will protect his conscience from the revulsion and guilt he would suffer when confronting the fact that he is fucking a slave. Vir(a)go (Aug. 23rd – Sept. 22nd): You are about to have an abortion, because it is your right, and because you were raped by the tall, handsome stranger we mentioned last week. In other areas: Just Say Yes to political acts, political thought and imagination. Build your muscles not to give better hand jobs, but to give yourself a fighting chance. Taurus(t in me) (Apr.20th – May 21st): This week, you find yourself contemplating how few women work at nuclear power plants, in oil drilling operations, coal mines, dropping bombs, using flame-throwers, machine guns, etc. Chivalry is a male protection racket, keeping you stupid and clean. It might be time to get your hands dirty

—Nancy Reagan Astrological Society Horoscope Bulletin;

           
Number 17, 2003.

OUTSIDE OF THE ATOMOGRAD OF PRIPYAT, BEYOND AND SURROUNDING
the state blocks and high-rise dormitories, there was a green belt called the Wormwood Forest. Cash thought that this must have been where she was conceived. Sperm flashed up against the bright atoms of egg in her mother, a series of divisions and diffusion resulted in a girl, splitting and decaying like radioactive material until it became unrecognizable, safe and contained by society's concretes. Her parents were strange Soviet ghosts. She could only believe that when they smuggled her into America, they were already sick and dying from the inferno at Reactor IV. They hoped to take her so far, toward medicine, toward promises made by friends, before resigning themselves to dust.

They went hurrying along Lesya Ukrainka Street, or Lenin Street, desperate to escape the radioactive raindrops, weeping at the desolate ticket booths at Yanov Railway Station, and not knowing if there would ever be another train to bear them out of the holocaust. They clutched her
to their breasts on the poisoned platform, with wind through the wires, distant whistling, and bizarre new birds curling their talons around the signals. Irradiated cloaks of steam and hot rain mutated and killed the Wormwood Forest. The pines turned blood red and resembled rusted pylons as the radioactive shroud settled in their branches and began to drip into the soil of the forest floor. Everything turned red. The dirt cackled back at Geiger counters. The wild horses that the evacuation abandoned had their thyroid glands eaten away by fallout and they died in the prickly grass. Radiation penetrated the dairy herds. The thyroids of the surviving cattle ceased to function, leaving strange stunted animals. The limbs of the red forest contorted toward the dirt, tangling into cages of unnatural agony. Thousands of hectares of brushland, scrub, and small flora died. What remained was mutated, ultra-thin birch and spruce, and discolored pines with gigantic needles.

She watched as the contaminated trees of the Red Forest were bulldozed into mass graves of blood-colored leaves, needles, and twisted limbs. Long trenches were carved from the ground to the west of the sarcophagus. Machines operated by remote control to collect vast dunes of ash and carcinogenic rubble, the colorless detritus of the evacuated city. And she saw that men and women also worked at the decontamination as if the radiation could be swept away, hosed down, incinerated, or buried; a million Soviet drones clothed as human beings toiled fearlessly, disregarding their flesh. These Liquidators were imported from all across the Union. Their work took their lives by the tens and hundreds of thousands. The few survivors would wear a badge of honor in their lapels, a button-sized image of a drop of blood on a blue field, crossed by broken branch lines symbolizing the progress of alpha, beta, and gamma radiation particles into their bodies. It was an unofficial medal of death. Many of the Liquidators were conscripted to Pripyat from their military service, and others were miners, firemen, engineers, scaffolders, and builders.
Cash suspected that all of the firemen were dead. No one could understand compulsory bravery of this nature anymore, work of unimaginable futility and fatality . . .

Cash would endure nightmares like these as she lay in her musty bed in Portland, at the Herland house as she was growing up. The cold rain and Northwestern winds would rattle the old windows as she contemplated her small plastic hospital identification bracelet by candlelight, its tiny Cyrillic loop returning her again and again to the coordinates of her birth in space and time. The older girls, Nona, Janelle, and Zelda, might still be awake, punk rock girls singing from cassette players through the nostalgic peeling walls. She would imagine the Soviet gypsies, who had moved into desolate areas surrounding the radioactive city, and she knew that Europe was still desperate and dark; swathes of totalitarianism and fascism were still cast across her map of the world. Europe is an orphanage without walls, she thought. The contaminated countryside, Ukraine, womb of the Amazons, was filled with skinhead girls who had lost all hope. Wolves pissed against the yellow telephone booths outside the hospital. Weird birds laid eggs in the eaves of the metal and concrete sarcophagus of Chernobyl. Yet, what of America? Cash would ask herself. How was she to discover her place within it?

April 8, 2011. Cash awoke to the humidity of a Shreveport motel room. Silver-gray wallpaper and a black television cabinet blurred into her view. The bed was damp from perspiration. She had made it out of Texas and into Louisiana. Something brushed her cheek. Beside her on the pillow was the photograph of herself and Zelda in San Francisco that she had taken from her refrigerator door in Madrid and brought with her. She rose and checked the air-conditioning unit that protruded from the window. It was barely functional. After fifty push-ups and 100 crunches, she switched
on the television and found it tuned to a porn channel before she found the news. She switched on the small electric kettle and ripped open a packet of instant coffee while she waited for any news about her mission, or the killing of Kern. Nothing. Downstairs, she paid $35 cash for the room. She needed more gas for the car, and pulled into the nearest station.

She reached New Orleans after another five hours of driving. On her map, the city of New Orleans was constructed in triangular pieces, reminding her of the shape of Pripyat. Both cities had seen disaster and were haunted and strange. Time was overlaid. She drove slowly past Cemetery No. 1, seeing the palm trees growing between the graves, the statuary pale as a clarinet reed and plain, the faces missing, worn as sugar skin under rains. Blood-red bricks split like muscles, drowned in avenues of the dead, pale sentinels dreaming another Egypt as St. Charles flooded. Brown waters filled the neutral ground between the trolley tracks. Mardi Gras beads hung from streetcar cables and dueling oaks, and everything dripped with star-kissed seed. The dead swam in their ripped cloaks on Canal Street; red lanterns bled and smoldered from enervating balconies and tombs broke open against the sky, the Nile hanging death cult dark. Cash pulled out the old postcard that she had received years ago and hoped that her friend would still be at the same address that she had given then. She crawled the car beneath the overhanging trees, trying to read the house numbers in the humid twilight.

Cash needed to see Nona Laveau one last time. The prospect made her nervous, recognizing the fact that there would be silences, things that she could not reveal, even as she interrogated her own motives for wanting to see her. Nona was the closest semblance that Cash could find to a mother figure, more so than Molly Pinkerton, who was split across the sexes; more so than Janelle Gresham, who was cooler; and more so than Zelda, who had become her lover. Cash knew that this deception would be the most difficult: refusing to reveal Zelda's death, the perverse guilt that it conferred upon her, her
fear of the look of sorrow and disappointment she would have to face in Nona. Since she had nourished Cash's obsessions in childhood, it was now more important than ever that Nona should proffer Cash her approval.

Nona Laveau lived in a shotgun house on Oak Street, in the Garden District. Cash had not seen her in ten years. At the end of their time in Portland, when Cash and Zelda had moved to San Francisco, Nona had returned to her birthplace in New Orleans. There was a knocking at her door, and a female voice called her name. Nona pulled one of her blinds aside to regard the girl on the porch before opening the door.

“Oh. My. God.
Cash
? Baby girl!” Swift tears shone across Nona's eyes.

“Nona! You're still here.” Cash swayed slightly from motion sickness, the nausea of the goiter hidden beneath her necklace.

“Shit, girl! Of course I'm still here! Come here, and then let's get you inside before the mosquitoes eat you alive. You got a bag?”

“Just this one.” As she spoke, an ache formed in Cash's throat. Inside the ache was a scream: Zelda is dead! And I am dying! Flickering images of the cop, burning in his patrol car at Pantex; a flash of herself running on the gantries of Indian Point. They embraced in the lamplight and spinning insects of the wooden porch. The swell of Nona's flesh ameliorated like a maternal drug. Cash felt the pain of suppressing the confession passing from her, the beating near her larynx slowing and dissipating.

“Come on in.”

“Wait.” Cash stopped at the threshold, “Do you have a car cover that I could use?”

“You mean like a tarp? Sure.” Beside her house was a fiberglass storage shed. Nona returned from there with a blue plastic sheet. “That is one hell of a car.”

“I borrowed it from a friend, and I promised to take care of it.”

They spread the sheet over the low-rider and Nona placed a sandbag on the roof to hold it in place. “It ain't gonna be windy tonight. That'll fix it,” Nona said, tugging at the fringe of the tarp.

The interior of Nona's narrow house resembled an uprooted voodoo shrine interrupted with a comic book store and a library, and this collision was being restored to a form of chaotic beauty. Wonder Woman memorabilia and rare issues broke piles of familiar books. Candlelight from wax-encrusted bottles illuminated framed prints of the Widow Paris and Wonder Woman. Plastic figurines stood garlanded with bright shining beads. The air in the house was redolent with sugars, chicory, and turpentine. Red and purple gauze curtains hung at the screened windows. Ceiling fans rotated while a swamp cooler unit hummed overhead. Exhausted, Cash leaned against a cream-painted wall.

“This is an amazing place,” she said, running her fingers along the bookshelves. The room shifted beneath her feet and the walls pulsed. Motion sickness and fatigue threatened to catch her off balance. Cash had reached the point of being unable to take any tiredness for granted: always, the goiter at her throat, the seemingly endless hangover of radiation contamination swam within her. She heard Nona calling to her from the kitchenette. In the corner of the room was an easel with an abstract painting in progress. Cash noted the thick red pigment. Perhaps she could use it, mixing up the bloody powder with water in plastic bags.

“You're a painter, now,” Cash called out.

“Not much of one, but I'm trying. You look tired. Are you doing okay?”

“I'm holding it together. You know how it is when everything feels as if it's floating away down a long dark river?”

“That's New Orleans, girl. I'm bringing you some tea.”

“It's been a rough few days from New Mexico.”

“Oh yeah?”

“A cop even tried to feel me up.”

“What the fuck? What happened?”

“I shot him,” Cash laughed, for a moment impressed with her own ease. “You look so beautiful, Nona! It's been too damn long.”

Nona stared at her, deciphering. “Oh, come on. Don't tease. It has been a long time, though. Remember that old house in the Portland rain, our little shack-board island?” Her voice was full of the music of nostalgia. Then she picked up one of her figurines, waving it for Cash to see. “Hey, you remember Wonder Woman, of course. We're still tight.”

“Always,” Cash agreed, sipping at her tea and lounging against a red velvet pillow on Nona's antique chaise lounge.

Nona leaned forward, smiling. “How's Zelda?”

Cash stared at the floor, paralyzed by regrets and desolation. She heard the grinding of her skull upon her vertebrae. She saw herself floating on her back
in a cooling reservoir, suspended above 10,000 radioactive fuel rods glowing beneath her. She rolled over in the water, diving down toward the burning spears of her anguish. “I lost her. I don't know where she is.” Forcing herself into the present moment, Cash raised her eyes to Nona's and fixed a disingenuous, encouraging smile. “So, you came home to Louisiana.”

“I always told you that, at heart, I was a Creole woman. I had to come back down here to do any real good. Stuff that I couldn't do in Portland, so much.”