myna corbett and the responsibilities of beauty were to occupy me on and off for the rest of the year. I don't know exactly what it was I felt for her, or thought about her, or expected to give or receive. There are a thousand kinds of love. The simplest thing to say is that she made me feel comfortable. She created a private balance of nature, a sense of things being right, or almost right, both in themselves and against a larger requirement. So this love in a way was ecological; she made me feel at peace with my environment and maybe on my better days I did the same for her. Since my examinations of life sometimes ended in oblique forms of selfmockery, and since my investigative projects often manifested themselves as parodies of hunger or grief or exile, it was refreshing to seek in this woman a perfect circle whose reality overpowered the examiner's talent for reducing in size and meaning whatever variety of experience he was currently engaged in sampling.
Myna owned half a million dollars and membership in a sciencefiction book club. There, by most standards, her attraction ended. She weighed about 165 pounds. Her face had several blotches of varying size and her hair hung in limp tangled clusters. She bit her nails, she waddled, she never shut up. We had two classes together, Mexican geography and a sort of introduction to exobiology. Myna was the only female in the geography class (traditionally a course for football players) and seemed quite serious about the layout of Mexico. We got along well from the very beginning. I enjoyed listening to her talk and I liked the total liberty of her clothing. There was a sense of cavalcade to the way she dressed. Any number of fashion eras were likely to be represented at a given time. The feeling was warm, colorabundant, distinctly antihistorical.
We had mock picnics behind the Quonset hut— chopped almonds and Gatorade. Myna would usually bring along a sciencefiction novel. She'd eat and read simultaneously, bouncing slightly on the brown grass when she reached a particularly invigorating passage. It was during our third or fourth picnic, on an unseasonably cool day, that we got involved for the first time in the responsibilities of beauty. Myna wore a carved plastic bracelet, meshed gold chains around her neck, and a handembroidered? Victorian shawl over a silk gypsy blouse and floorlength patchwork skirt. Her boots were studded with blue stars."I've just realized what's really curious about you," I said. "Somehow you don't transmit any sense of a personal future."
I'm a now person, Gary.
That's good because I'm a then person.
I know, she said. "That's why I like you. I need some perspective in my life."
You'll hate me for saying this, Myna, but I think you're one of the prettiest girls I've ever known. Man or boy. Pound for pound.
People are always telling me that. What a pretty face I have. It's just a thing you say to fat girls. It's supposed to make us guilty so we'll lose weight.
But it's true, I said.
I know it's true. All I have to do is lose fifty pounds and go to a skin doctor. But I like myself the way I am. I don't want to be beautiful or desirable. I don't have the strength for that. There are too many responsibilities. Things to live up to. I feel like I'm consistently myself. So many people have someone else stuck inside them. Like inside that big large body of yours there's a scrawny kid with thick glasses. Inside my father there's a vicious police dog, a fascist killer animal. Almost everybody has something stuck inside them. Inside me there's a sloppy emotional overweight girl. I'm the same, Gary, inside and out. It's hard to be beautiful. You have an obligation to people. You almost become public property. You can lose yourself and get almost mentally disturbed on just the public nature of being beautiful. Don't think I haven't thought about it. You can get completely lost in that whole dumb mess. And anyway who's to say what's beautiful and what's ugly?
There are standards.
Whose?
I don't know. The Greeks. The Etruscans. You can't escape some things. History forces you to listen and to see.
You have to balance history with science fiction, she said. "It's the only way to keep sane."
We'll have another picnic tomorrow
Jesus, can we?
We can do anything we want, Myna.
Can we bring something besides chopped almonds? Can we bring vegetable pancakes and maybe brownies?
We can bring anything we want as long as it's humble and meatless.
Can we not bring this blanket? Can we bring a different blanket? I don't like this one. It makes me think of dead baby rabbits.
It's been in my family for generations.
The way you say some things. I actually believe you. I think you're serious. Then it hits me that something's not right. Can I bring my book again?
Of course.
Can I wear my orange dress that you like so much?
You look like an explosion over the desert. Yes, you can wear it.
Can I bring my tarot cards with me?
Of course you can. Absolutely. It's a picnic.
Thank you, Gary.
most lives are guided by cliches. They have a soothing effect on the mind and they express the kind of widely accepted sentiment that, when peeled back, is seen to be a denial of silence. Their menace is hidden with the darker crimes of thought and language. In the face of death, this menace vanishes altogether. Death is the best soil for cliche. The trite saying is never more comforting, more restful, as in times of mourning. Flowers are set about the room; we stand very close to walls, uttering the lush banalities.
Norgene Azamanian's name did not seem ridiculous for long. We knew that nothing is too absurd to happen in America. Norgene, the man and the name, soon became ordinary, no less plausible than refrigerators or bibles or the names for these objects. When he died, of injuries sustained in an automobile accident, we repeated certain phrases to each other and dedicated our next game to his memory. A local minister called him a fallen warrior. An article in the school paper quoted the president, Mrs. Tom Wade, as saying that his untimely death at the age of twentyone would serve as a tragic reminder that our destiny is in the hands of a Being or Force dwelling beyond the scope of man's reason. Norgene wasn't a very good football player. But death had overwhelmed even his mediocrity and we conspired with his passing to make him gigantic. For many of us it was a first experience with death. We beüeved the phrases. He was indeed a fallen warrior; we were unquestionably reminded of our destinies. We took the field on the night of Norgene's memorial game and played like magnificent young gods, not out to avenge death but only to honor the dead, to remake memory as a work of art. That was the first half. In the second half the whole game fell apart. There were fights, broken plays, every kind of penalty. We still won easily. But the last hour left a bad taste (as the saying goes) in everyone's mouth.
Several weeks later, sometime bet veen three and six in the morning, Tom Cook Clark shot himself in the head with an ivoryhandled Colt .45. Emmet Creed referred to him in a eulogy as one of the best football minds in the country. He was also a molder of young men and a fine interdenominational example of all those fortunate enough to have been associated with him. Creed himself assumed the deceased man's responsibilities with the quarterbacks. The wake was held at the funeral home in town because there was nowhere in particular to send the body and no family to send it to. Everyone commented on how good the embalmed corpse looked. This became the theme of the wake. We assembled in the anteroom, clinging to walls, avoiding the center of the room for some reason, and we told each other how good the dead man looked, as if he were not dead at all but only waxed and welldressed as part of some process of rejuvenation and would soon be buzzed awake, thinner than ever and quite refreshed. We reacted to the impact of death in this way, exchanging comical remarks in all seriousness, consoling each other with handshakes and slogans. Major Staley came to pay his respects. The major commanded the Air Force ROTC unit at the school. He saw me and came over. We shook hands, slowly and delicately, foregoing on this special occasion all intimations of virility.
I understand he was despondent because of ill health, the major said.
We heard about the collision right away. It happened only about a quarter of a mile from campus. It was about ten at night. State troopers stood on the road, writing in their little books, copying from each other. They identified Norgene from the contents of his wallet. There were three others dead, one a girl (passenger, female, white). Her legs stuck out of the wreck, terribly white, the only white things in all that blood and swirling red light, the only things quiet in the voices and noise. I wondered who she was. I also wondered why her death seemed more wasteful than the others. I kept looking at her legs. Then I went back to my room, thinking about the extra syllable in the fallen warrior's Christian name, how it had shamed tradition and brought bad luck.
This was Major Staley's first year here. His father was the school's most famous alumnus, a threeletter man and a war hero, one of the crew on the Nagasaki mission. The major was about thirtyeight years old. He taught just one course, Aspects of Modern War. Since I wasn't part of the cadet whig I had taken to seating myself in the last row, a bit of civilian humility. One day I asked the major how many megatons would have to be contained in the warhead of an antimissile missile in order to guarantee interception of aa SS9 missile with multiple warheads.
You'd probably need in excess of a twomeg warhead to get the kind of xray pulseintensity you're talking about
I was fascinated by the way the state troopers copied from each other's little books. One trooper stood writing, another at his shoulder writing what the first one wrote. They checked each other out until it was apparent that they had reached an accord. It was a safeguard against errors and stray facts. There couldn't possibly be a mistake if they all had the same information.
In my room that night, before falling asleep, I tried to imagine where Tom Cook Clark came from, what he thought, what kind of life he led. I don't know what made me think of him that particular night. (At that point, of course, he was still alive.) I tried to understand who he was and what made him whoever he was when he seemed no more than a face, a hat, a certain way of talking. He existed (then). I lay in bed thinking of him as I had thought of only several others in my entire life, all casual acquaintances, blanks more or less. I could guess nothing about him. I could imagine nothing. I could invent nothing. Why did he remain so blank? It made me feel stupid and weak. Perhaps the man had a need to live in another man's mind. His existence might be threatened if he could not be brought to life in perhaps the only mind that had ever tried to reconstruct him. It was strange that he would kill himself in a matter of weeks. Maybe the failure was mine, the ill health mine, that blank life a kind of notebook in need of somebody else's facts, those facts a mass of jargon for the military mind, this jargon resembling cliches passed from mourner to mourner in the form of copied notes. But it was just another of my philosophic speculations, to think his life depended on what my mind could make of him, existence turning on a wheel, numerical, nonbuddhist, the notes comforting the notebook, numbers covering the words used to cover silence. He was a scholarly man, I thought (in the anteroom of the funeral home), remembering that he smoked a pipe and did not use profanity.
Given three warheads per missile and an accuracy factor of a quarter mile, they'd need four to five hundred of the SSnine classification to achieve firststrike destruction capability of ninetyfive percent relative to what we could hit back with in terms of Minuteman counter capacity, the major added.
Billy Mast, who roomed two doors away from me, worked every night at memorizing a long poem in a language he'd never read before, never spoken, never even heard except in one or two movies. Billy got extremely high marks in everything. Scholastically he ranked in the ninetyninth percentile. In several of his classes, prorated scoring systems were devised according to the standards he set. Every night he did more work on the elegy. I'd visit him sometimes just to hear the sounds he made, his guttural struggle against those grudging consonants. He liked to hit his desk with both hands as he recited. Billy's course in the untellable was restricted to ten students. Knowledge of German was a prerequisite for being refused admission.
Closing my eyes, finally, on the night of the accident, I wanted to dream that I put my hand between the dead girl's legs. Arousals of guilt had considerable appeal to me, particularly on waking. I liked to lie in bed, viewing afterimages of morbid sex and trying to apportion guilt between the conscious mind and the unconscious. But that night's sleep turned out to be a restless one, empty of remembered dreams.
WHO was the greater man? Bloomberg said. "You get just one try. Sir Francis Drake or the prophet Isaiah? Take your time answering. It's not as obvious as it seems."
How can you compare them? Andy Chudko said. "They were in two different fields."
The answer seems obvious only at first. Be very careful.
I don't think it seems obvious at all, Chudko said.
I stood in the doorway. Bloomberg and Andy Chudko occupied the beds. Anatole was supine, two pillows beneath his head, hands folded on his chest. Chudko sat on my bed, facing the doorway, his right foot (extended to infinity) at a 45degree angle to the door (when closed). I noted other angles, elevations, intervals, and then situated myself carefully on the chair by the window, between the beds, facing past both men toward the open doorway, toward the corridor or trade route. Chudko's head and torso met without benefit of a neck. His whole body in fact seemed welded, part joined to part in bursts of heat and pressure. His silver guitar was on the other chair, the chair by the door.
I don't understand you, Bloomers. Gary, you room with this guy. What do you make of him?
Our next secretary of defense.
My roommate will be glad to hear that I'm off my diet as of an hour ago. I think he'll rejoice in that.
I do. I definitely approve.
I've seen my mistake, Bloomberg said. "I thought I would become more efficient if I ate less. I thought the discipline of dieting would be good for me. It would make me quicker in body and therefore quicker in mind. It would give me a sense of physical definition and therefore of spiritual awareness. This was all wrong. I thought I would feel better if I weighed less. I thought I would have more respect for myself. I thought I'd gain in selfassurance and in the general loftiness of my ideals. None of this happened. It was all part of the Jewish thing, you see. I thought the selfcontrol of dieting would lead to the selfcontrol needed to unjew myself. But it didn't work out that way. As I lost weight, as I continued to struggle against food and its temptations, I began to lose the idea of myself. I was losing the idea of my body, who it belonged to, what exactly it was, where all the different parts of it were located, what it looked like from different angles and during the various times of the day and evening. I was losing the most important part of my being.
Obesity. What I had considered selfcontrol was really selfindulgence. To make me pretty. To give me quick feet. I realize now that these things aren't important, that they're nothing compared with my individual reality. I dropped to twoninety, then to two eightytwo. My selfawareness started to fade. It was a terrible shedding of the skin. I was losing more and more of myself. I was losing more of the old body and more of the newly acquired mind. If this disappearance were to continue, I would soon be left with only one thing. Gentlemen, I allude to my Jewishness. This is the subsoil, as it were, of my being. It would be the only thing left and I would be, in effect, a fourteenyearold Jewish boy once more. Would I start telling silly jokes about my mother? Would I put some of that old ghetto rhythm in my voice—jazz it up a little? Would the great smelly guilt descend on me? I don't want to hear a word about the value of one's heritage. I am a twentiethcentury individual. I am working myself up to a point where I can exist beyond guilt, beyond blood, beyond the ridiculous past. Thank goodness for America. In this country there's a chance to accomplish such a thing. I want to look straight ahead. I want to see things clearly. I'd like to become singleminded and straightforward in the most literal sense of those words. History is no more accurate than prophecy. I reject the wrathful God of the Hebrews. I reject the Christian God of love and money, although I don't reject love itself or money itself. I reject heritage, background, tradition and birthright. These things merely slow the progress of the human race. They result in war and insanity, war and insanity, war and insanity."
I got up and closed the door. Then I returned to the chair by the window. I turned it around and sat with my arms over the back of the chair. I faced the closed door Bloomberg raised his right arm, maintaining that position—body supine, one arm bent across his chest, second arm in the air—for the length of the ensuing narration. He appeared mad, an imprisoned prophet or a figure in a very old painting, a man about to die, his last word spoken to a finger tip of light.
As the world's ranking authority on environmental biomedicine, I have been asked to lend the weight of my opinion to yet another tense seminar on the future of the earth. My friends, there is nothing to fear. Soon we'll harvest the seas, colonize the planets, control every aspect of the,weather. We'll develop nuclear reactors to provide the Englishspeaking world with unlimited energy, safely and cheaply. Our radio astronomers will communicate with beings at the very ends of the universe. We'll build hydraulic robots to make automation obsolete. We'll manufacture plastic lungs and brains. We'll reprogram human cells with new genetic information to wipe out inherited disease. Obsolescence itself will become obsolete. We'll recycle everything. Shoes to food. Candles to paper. Rocks to light bulbs. The philosophical question has been asked: what will become of death? Gentlemen, I have the answer right here. The sealed ,nvelope please.
Andy Chudko looked at me. He got up, took the guitar from the chair by the door and then opened the door and left, closing it behind him. Bloomberg began to speak again. I was sorry Chudko hadn't left the guitar. In some obscure way, its presence would have been a comfort.
the motel was about two miles from campus. I walked out there along the edge of the road. Fragments of glass flared in the sun. I passed a number of dead animals, just scraps of fur now, small pieces of flesh completely macadamized, part of the highway. Finally I reached the motel. It was a gray bunding, barely distinguishable from the land around it. Major Staley had been staying there since the school year began. I didn't know what kind of car the major drove so I went into the office 'and got his room number from an old woman halfasleep over a bowl of Shredded Wheat. The major had a towel in his hands when he came to the door. He was wearing his uniform trousers and shirt, the shirt unbuttoned and outside the pants, sleeves rolled up around the forearms. Some blue ROTC manuals were stacked on a table. Above the bed was a threedimensional picture of mountains.
Wife and kids are still up in Colorado. I sure as hell miss them. I hope to have them down here real soon now. Our house should be ready in ten days. I've lived in more places than, a stray cat.
There's a kind of theology at work here. The bombs are a kind of god. As his power grows, our fear naturally increases. I get as apprehensive as anyone else, maybe more so. We have too many bombs. They have too many bombs. There's a kind of theology of fear that comes out of this. We begin to capitulate to the overwhelming presence. It's so powerful. It dwarfs us so much. We say let the god have his way. He's so much more powerful than we are. Let it happen, whatever he ordains. It used to be that the gods punished men by using the forces of nature against them or by arousing them to take up their weapons and destroy each other. Now god is the force of nature itself, the fusion of tritium and deuterium. Now he's the weapon. So maybe this time we went too far in creating a being of omnipotent power. All this hardware. Fantastic stockpiles of hardware. The big danger is that we'll surrender to a sense of inevitability and start flinging mud all over the planet.
We're talking about a onemegaton device. All right, you're standing nine miles from ground zero. If it's a clear day, you get seconddegree burns. Guaranteed. One hundred megs, you may as well forget it. If you were seventyfive miles out, you'd still get seconddegree. Depending on the variables, your house might even ignite. That's just the first flash. After that comes the firestorm, like Tokyo, like Hamburg, like Dresden, like Hiroshima. Structurally the older cities in the U.S. are very susceptible to firestorms. Building density is high and combustible material per building is high. Tucson might escape a firestorm. New York, Baltimore, Boston—forget it. Nagasaki didn't get too much burn. They had a low density and the wind was blowing right. Hamburg was something else. Hamburg was a hot place to be. Over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit if you can imagine what that's like. They found bodies naked except for shoes. That was heat that did that, not fire. Heat disintegrated d the clothes. They found bodies shrunken, dry as paper. That was the intense heat. The other thing in a firestorm is carbon monoxide.
I've had a checker ed career at best.
I think what'll happen in the nottoodistant future is that we'll have humane wars. Each side agrees to use clean bombs. And each side agrees to limit the amount of megatons he uses. In other words we'll get together with them beforehand and there'll be an agreement that if the issue can't be settled, whatever the issue might be, then let's make certain we keep oar war as relatively humane as possible. So we agree to use clean stuff. And we actually specify the number of megatons; let's just say hypothetically one thousand megs for each side. So then what we've got is a twothousandmegaton war. We might go further and say we'll leave your cities .alone if you leave ours alone. We make it strictly counterforce. So right off the bat you avoid the fallout hazard and millions of bonus kills, or deaths from fallout. And at the same time you eliminate citytrading and punishing strikes against the general population. Of course the humanistic mind crumbles at the whole idea. It's the most hideous thing in the world to these people that such ideas even have to be mentioned. But the thing won't go away. The thing is here and you have to face it. The prospect of a humane war may be hideous and all the other names you can think of, but it's still a prospect. And as an alternative to all the other things that could happen in the event of war, it's relatively acceptable. My fellow coliberals are always the first to jump all over me when I talk about something like humane warfare. But the thing has to be considered. People close their minds. They think nuclear war has to be insensate, both sides pushing all the buttons and the whole thing is over in two hours. In reality it's likely to be very deliberate, very cautious, a kind of thing that's almost fought in slow motion. And the limited humane variant is the most acceptable. Negotiations could easily take that turn. A war may have to be fought; it may be unavoidable in terms of national pride or to avoid blackmail or for a number of other reasons. And negotiations, whatever remains of negotiations, whatever talking is still going on, this could easily lead both countries to the humane war idea as the least damaging kind of thing in the face of all the variants. So they hit our military and industrial targets with any number of bombs and missiles totaling one thousand megatons and we do the same to them. There'd be all sorts of controls. You'd practically have a referee and a timekeeper. Then it would be over and you'd make your damage assessment. The sensing devices go to work. The magnetic memory drums are tapped. The computers figure out damage and number of casualties. Recovery time is estimated. We wouldn't be the same strong industrial society after one thousand megs but our cities would still be standing and the mortality rate would be in the fairly low percentiles, about eight to twelve percent. With no fallout in the atmosphere, or a relatively minimum amount, we'd have no problems with environmental stress, with things like temperature changes, erosion, droughts, insect devastation, and we'd avoid the radiation diseases by and large, the infections, the genetic damage. So we'd get going again relatively soon. It wouldn't be nearly as bad as most people might expect. On the other hand this entire concept is full of flaws.
Nagasaki was an embarrassment to the art of war.
The nuclear nations have a stockpile of fissionable material I would estimate in the neighborhood of sixty thousand megatons in terms of explosive power. That's a personal estimate, based on whatever techdata I've been able to accumulate in the journals and bulletins, accurate within a factor of maybe three or four. But just for the heck of it, figure that out in terms of pounds of TNT. That's pounds now, not tons. I bet you can't do it without paper and pencil. The trick is to keep count of the zeros.
War is the ultimate realization of modern technology. For centuries men have tested themselves in war. War was the final test, the great experience, the privilege, the honor, the selfsacrifice or what have you, the absolutely ultimate determination of what kind of man you were. War was the great challenge and the great evaluator. It told you how much you were worth. But it's different today. Few men want to go off and fight. We prove ourselves, our manhood, in other ways, in making money, in skydiving, in hunting mountain lions with bow and arrow, in acquiring power of one kind or another. And I think we can forget ideology. People invent that problem, at least as far as the U.S. isconcerned. It has no real bearing as far as we're concerned. Obviously we can live with Communism; we've been doing it long enough. So people invent that. That's the grotesque sense of patriotism at work in this country. Today we can say that war is a test of opposing technologies. We can say this more than ever because it's more true than it ever was. Look, what would our cartoonists do if they wanted to satirize the Chinese, if we were in a period of extreme tension with the Chinese and the editorial cartoonists wanted to stir up a little patriotism? Would they draw slanted eyes and pigtails the way they drew buck teeth for the Japanese in the forties? No, no, they wouldn't make fun of the people at all. They'd satirize the machines, the nuclear capability, the weapons and such of the Chinese. They'd draw firecrackers and kites. War has always told men what they were capable of under stress. Now it informs the machines. It's the best test of a country's technological skills. Are all your gaseous diffusion plants going at top efficiency? Are your ICBM guidance and control mechanisms ready to work perfectly? You get the answers when war breaks out. Your technology doesn't know how good it is until it goes to war, until it's been tested in the ultimate way. I don't think we care too much about individual bravery anymore. It's better to be efficient than brave. So that's it then. It's regrettable but there it is. And your technology isn't any good if it can't beat the enemy's. Your weapons have to be more efficient than theirs, more reliable, more accurate, more deadly. Your technology has to reach peak efficiency. It has to stretch itself out, overreach itself; it has to improve itself almost instantaneously. It won't do this without the stress of war. War brings out the best in technology.
Major, there's no way to express thirty million dead. No words. So certain men are recruited to reinvent the language.
I don't make up the words, Gary.
They don't explain, they don't clarify, they don't express. They're painkillers. Everything becomes abstract. I admit it's fascinating in a way. I also admit the problem goes deeper than just saying some cryptoGoebbels in the Pentagon is distorting the language.
Somebody has to get it before the public regardless of language. It has to be aired in public debate, clinically, the whole thing, no punches pulled, no matter how terrible the subject is and regardless of language. It has to be discussed.
I don't necessarily disagree.
Look, Gary, if I go out and talk to different groups about this sort of thing, it doesn't make me some kind of monster who likes to expound or whatever the word is on the consequences of nuclear exchange, who likes to stand up there before a group and talk about mass death and all the rest of it. If I try to inform people so they'll do something about the situation, the gravity of it, then I'm performing a service, or at least it seems to me. I'm not some kind of monstrous creature who enjoys talking about the spectacle of megadeath, the unprecedented scale of this kind of thing. It has to be talked about and expounded on. It has to be described for people, clinically and graphically, so they'll know just what it is they're facing.
I don't necessarily disagree, major.
The greatest thrill of my life was getting a ride in the XBseventy. That was the greatest thrill of my life.
Weapons technology is so specialized that nobody has to feel any guilt. Responsibility is distributed too thinly for that. It's the old warriors like myself who have to take the blame for what the socalled technocrats and multidimensional men are up to.
What did you want to see me about exactly? "Just nuclear war, sir. What it might be like."
First to sixth hour after detonation the groundzero circle is drenched with fallout. By the end of the first day the doserate begins to slow down. After a few months it slows down considerably. It all depends on the megatons, the fission yield, air or surface burst, wind velocity, mean pressure altitude, descent time, median particle size.
Ten megatons of fission produce one million curies of strontium ninety. What does that do to milk calcium levels? There's a factorfour discrimination against strontium in the human body. Newly forming bone attains a level eight times greater than the level that's acceptable. Then there's cerium one fortyfour, plutonium two thirtynine, barium oneforty. What else have we got? Zinc sixtyfive in fish. Also radioiodine. That's milk, children, thyroid cancer.
The average lethal mutation in an autosome persists for twentytwo generations.
The aging process, the natural aging process means there's a slowdown in cell turnover, cellular turnover. Now you get a cell population exposed to a particular radiation dose and what you have is an aggravation of the slowdown thing, the radiation on top of the natural degenerative body process. The average life span undergoes a decrease. If you're exposed to threehundredR wholebody radiation, say within seven days of when the thing hits, and then say another hundred R over the entire first year, you lose about eleven years, you undergo a lifespan reduction of eleven years. Sublethal doses also cause reproduction problems. There are problems with microcephalic offspring. There are abnormal terminations and stillbirths. There's a problem with inferior skeletal maturation of male and female progeny. There is formation of abnormal lens tissue in offspring. There are chromosome breaks. There is sterility of course. There is general reduction of body size of male offspring six years of age and under. However, the Japanese data indicates that congenital malformation frequency would not necessarily vary from the norm as far as the first postbomb generation is concerned.
The rate is six per thousand per one hundred R. That's twentyfour hundred lethal genetic events per four hundred thousand people exposed to one hundred roentgens. Hiroshima supports this formula.
The sun. The desert. The sky. The silence. The flat stones. The insects. The wind and the clouds. The moon. The stars. The west and east. The song, the color, the smell of the earth.
I headed back to campus through the desert. The sun was low, swept by slowly moving clouds in its decline, a crust of moon also visible, more pure in silence than the setting sun. I walked quickly, the only moving thing. Nothing else stirred, not even waning light folding over stone and not the slightest flick of an bisect at the perimeter of vision. The sound of my feet was the only sound, my body all there was of moving parts. I counted cadence for a few beats in a pleasantly regimental voice, nonchalant and southern. The wind was light and dry. The plants did not move in the wind. I remembered the black stone, the stone painted black. I wondered if I'd be able to find it. It was important at that moment to come upon something that could be defined in one sense only, something not probable or variable, a thing unalterably itself. I ruled out the stone, too rich in enigma. I began counting cadence again. I managed the southern accent fairly well. I had a talent for accents, although I didn't make use of it very often because it seemed too easy a way to get people to laugh. I marched a bit longer. Then I saw something that terrified me. I stood absolutely still, as if motion might impede my understanding of this moment. It was three yards in front of me, excrement, a low mound of it, simple shit, nothing more, yet strange and vile in this wilderness, perhaps the one thing that did not betray its definition. I tried not to look any longer. I held my breath, fearing whatever smell might still be clinging to that spot. E wanted my .senses to deny this experience, leaving it for wind and dust. There was the graven art of a curse in that sight. It was overwhelming, a terminal act, nullity in the very word, shit, as of dogs squatting near partly eaten bodies, rot repeating itself; defecation, as of old women in nursing homes fouling their beds; feces, as of specimen, sample, analysis, diagnosis, bleak assessments of disease in the bowels; dung, as of dry straw erupting with microscopic eggs; excrement, as of final matter voided, the chemical stink of self discontinued; oSal, as of butchered animals' intestines slick with shit and blood; shit everywhere, shit in life cycle, shit as earth as food as shit, wise men sitting impassively in shit, armies retreating in that stench, shit as history, holy men praying to shit, scientists tasting it, volumes to be compiled on color and texture and scent, shit's infinite treachery, everywhere this whisper of inexistence. I hurried toward campus. All around me the day was ending. I crossed the highway and walked along the side of the road. There was a car in the distance, coming toward me. The wind picked up briefly. The low clouds moved across the horizon. In time the college's buildings would come into view. I looked down at the road as I walked. The wind picked up again. I thought of men embedded in the ground, all killed, billions, flesh cauterized into the earth, bits of bone and hair and nails, manplanet, a fresh intelligence revolving through the system. Once again I rebuked myself for misspent reflections. I could hear the car now, just barely, a small murderous hum, as of unnamed sounds at the end of a hall. Perhaps there is no silence. Or maybe it's just that time is too compact to allow for silence to be felt. But in some form of void, freed from consciousness, the mind remakes itself. What we must know must be learned from blankedout pages. To begin to reword the overflowing world. To subtract and disjoin. To rerecite the alphabet. To make elemental lists. To call something by its name and need no other sound. I looked up. The car passed me, an army staff vehicle with a large circular antenna. Soon the campus lights were visible and I stopped for a few seconds, watching the day burn out.
The sun. The desert. The sky. The silence. The flat stones. The insects. The wind and the clouds. The moon. The stars. The west and east. The song, the color, the smell of the earth.
Blast area. Fire area. Bodyburn area.
myna corbett sat next to me in our exobiology class. The instructor was a little man named Alan Zapalac, who liked to be called Zap. He was about five feet four inches tall, not much older than the rest of us, and very mobile in his teaching methods. He had a distinctly limited stride, moving back and forth across the front of the room as he spoke, sometimes stalking the aisles. He spoke quickly, flowing over his own words, laughing almost in embarrassment when he said something he knew was quite perceptive. He waved his arms a lot and smiled maniacally at our more ridiculous statements. Every so often he sat on top of his desk or on the windowsill, his small feet pedaling the air.
Formic acid trickles through the great halls of the universe. Way out there the thing is evolving, has evolved, is about to evolve, whatever synthesis you can guess at, methane, ammonia, hydrogen, water vapor, all acted on by present or unknown forms of energy to form amino acids which in turn are developed into proteins which in turn are acted on by nucleic acids to give us life in neon lettering across the sky, what harmony, what religion. Dextrorotation, think of it. I look at your faces and see no sign that this word rings any kind of bell. Somebody give me a sign. The person making any kind of intelligible comment gets to clap the erasers after class. The real point is how to grasp it, how to get beyond pure formulations and discussions of isotope content and get into the mystery of it. Four point five billion years. Science is religion, did you know that? Consider what it is we're talking about. Earthly origins, meteorites dropping from the heavens, creation of the solar system. But in approaching each other to discuss this thing we have to get through all the barriers imposed by all the allied sciences and disciplines—that of multiple definitions, that of crossreferences nobody's even begun to put in any coherent form, that of terminologies which are untranslatable, that of expensive duplications, that of inconsistencies in even the most sophisticated testing equipment, that of speed outrunning itself in terms of who in what discipline is developing unforeseen procedures which completely wipe out soandso in what other discipline. Let me tell you about my childhood in Oregon.
Myna had a few words with Zapalac after class and then we left with two friends of hers, sisters, Esther and Vera Chalk, and had a picnic behind the Quonset hut. Myna had made meatless and breadless organic sandwiches; one of the Chalk girls brought along raw carrots and celery tonic. The sisters complimented Myna on her funky crystalbeaded suede dress. Then the three of them talked about me as I lay on the blanket with my arms crossed over my eyes. They said nice things mostly, how wellbuilt I was, how my nose was slightly offline in a pleasant way. Esther lifted my arms off my face during the part about the nose; she wanted to confirm something. Then we ate lunch and listened to Myna read a short story about a solar system inhabited by oxycephalic creatores who give birth to their own mothers. When it was over, Vera Chalk poured her tonic into a plastic cup.
Zapalac gives me goose bumps, she said.
I just adore that little man, Esther said. "He conveys a real primitiveappeal type thing."
Did you hear him on electron bombardment? I swear he made poetry out of it.
I like his teeth, Myna said.
They're real white, Esther said.
It's not that so much. It's how small they are.
Remember daddy's teeth? Vera said.
They were gruesome.
They were horse teeth. Gaa. I have a shit fit just thinking about them. Gaa.
They were gruesome beyond belief. They were the perfect teeth for someone like him.
My father's teeth are okay, Myna said. "It's the rest of him."
Raw carrots are good for the teeth, Esther said. "Most people think it's carrots for the eyesight, milk for the teeth. But it's dumb to subdivide things that way. Carrots nourish the body and all the extensions of the body. It's carrots for wholebody harmony."
She's into carrots pretty heavy, Vera said.
How you chew them's important. You sort of project your jaw outward and then chomp down hard. You're supposed to think of the numeral seventeen while you're chewing them. The numeral seventeen is a numeral of immortal life. Raw vegetables have a linkup with certain forms of numerology.
I don't know how Zapalac's teeth could chew anything, Myna said. "They're so small and tiny. I picture him eating a lot of soup and a lot of strained foods."
Tell them about daddy's thumbs, Vera said.
Don't remind me please.
Our daddy had these gross thumbs. They were huge. They were immense, Gary. And they were so ugly they'd make you physically sick just to look at them. But we used to sneak little looks anyway and we were always afraid he'd catch us.
Then he'd bite you with, his horse teeth, I said.
Gaa.
Talk about something else, Esther said.
Remember his thumbnails? They were brownish yellow. They didn't have any pink at all. They were scab colored.
Oh God please, Esther said.
It was real scary being anywhere near those thumbs. They were horriblelooking things. And he liked to use his thumb to pick his nose.
Oh please no.
We're here to comfort each other, Myna said.
After the picnic I went to my room. Bloomberg, wearing shorts with little slits in them, was on his bed, turned to the wall, asleep. After a while I was called to the telephone. I assumed someone in my family had died. On the way to the phone I wondered who it might be, which death would cause me the most grief, whether it was an accident or natural, and whether I would have to go home for the funeral if it was just an uncle or aunt. Then I picked up the phone and heard my mother's voice.
How's your laundry? she said.
Fine—how's yours?
I wasn't particularly relieved that no one had died. When we were finished talking I returned to my room. Anatole was on his back. His body rose and fell through a tidal sleep. I spent the afternoon looking out the window. That evening we went down to a team meeting. Tweego and Hauptfuhrer yelled at us for our performance of two days before, our sixth game. We had won 2710 but it had been our worst game by far. We lost the ball four times on fumbles. Bing Jackmin missed an extra point and three field goals. The defensive unit wasn't aggressive, giving up just ten points only because the opposition was so pathetic; we knew it wouldn't be much of a contest when we saw their quarterback wearing number 78. Garland Hobbs didn't show much either. He threw only long passes in the first quarter, as if a sustained drive was too much trouble, and he missed his first six and then got intercepted before Creed placed a hand on his shoulder and spoke softly into his face. All these thing we were reminded of as we sat in the long low stone room under Staley Hall. Coming up was Centrex, the game that would make or break the season. In six games we had scored 246 points and given up 41. It didn't mean a thing if we couldn't win the next one.
You got five days to get ready, Hauptfuhrer said. "This isn't Snow White and the seven dwarfs you're facing this time. This is a bunch of headhunters. They like to hit. They have definite sadistic tendencies. This isn't another humpty dumpty outfit. This is a squad that's big and mean. You people got a long way to go in meanness. You think you're mean but you're not mean. Centrex is mean. They're practically evil. They'll stomp all over you. It'll be men against boys. You better execute out there. And you better play mean. They're headhunters. They like to humiliate people. That's their stock in trade. You better get ready for the worst."
Let me tell you about their head coach, Tweego said. "I know Jade Kiley. I've known him for years. I know every wart on his hide. And he's mean."
You better believe it.
And his boys are mean.
They're quite a contingent, Hauptfuhrer said. "They like to hit."
A Jade Kiley team likes to hit. That's been his trademark down the years. I've known Jade Kiley I don't know how long. His teams have always liked to hit. Jade Kiley doesn't let you put on a uniform unless you like to hit. Jade Kiley teams are hitting teams.
They like to humiliate people. They're quite a contingent.
You got your work cut out for you, Tweego said. "You got five days to get ready. We can help you get ready but we can't play the damn game for you. We can take you right up to kickoff. Then you're on your own."
They'll stomp blue shit out of you, Hauptfuhrer said.
Creed didn't make an appearance. As the season progressed he had become more remote. We saw him only at practice and at the games. He no longer had his meals with the squad. At practice he stayed up in the tower or sat alone in the last row of benches in the small grandstand section used during the baseball season. During the games he remained in one spot on the sidelines, right at the midfield stripe, letting his assistants make all the decisions and control the flow of players. He seemed to be losing weight and he moved slowly now, with a slight limp.
When the meeting ended Raymond Toon and I went up to his room to watch television. I wanted to look at the replay of a game between the Detroit Lions and the Minnesota Vikings. It was a little early but he turned on the set anyway and we watched a program composed of film clips of hurricanes, tornadoes and avalanches. It was one of the most fascinating things I had ever seen. Raymond, stretched out in his chair, nearly spanned the walls.
What do you think? he said. "Can we beat them?"
I'm watching this.
They'll be tough. We've had it too easy all year. It'll make them seem that much tougher. But I guess all we can do is go out there and do the best we can. The man upstairs decides these things.
Who do you mean, Toony?
The man upstairs, he said. "It's up to him what happens. All we can do is use our talents to the best of our ability. We can run, we can block, we can tackle, we can kick the ball and catch the ball. If the man upstairs decides we don't deserve to win, then we won't win. Gary, I'm a substitute tackle. I've done all I can to earn firststring status. I play my heart out every time I get in there.
Maybe I'm not mean enough. That's a criticism that's been leveled at me more than once. I know I try my best. I go all out on every play. I give one hundred and ten percent just like Coach demanded of us back last summer. It's like the notion of valuation in the hard market, Gary. Practitioners link the measurement of earnings magnitude to the need for assessing the variability that's expressed in the multiplier rate. This way you avoid doublecounting the risk allowance. But I can't crack the starting lineup. And if the man upstairs wants it that way, that's good enough for me. He has his reasons."
What are they?
I wouldn't even try to guess, Gary. I just know they're good reasons. But they're probably beyond our scope.
Toony, this shit about the man upstairs. Is the man upstairs supposed to be synonymous with God or what? Because either way it's an outmoded concept. It's a concept that's incredibly outmoded. It makes absolutely no theological sense.
Don't try to get me in a discussion, he said.
John Jessup walked in then, Raymond's roommate. The game came on and we all watched it, marveling at the pros, how easily they did the things we stumbled over. In slow motion the game's violence became almost tender, a series of lovely and sensual assaults. The camera held on fallen men, on men about to be hit, on those who did the hitting. It was a loving relationship with just a trace of mockery; the camera lingered a bit too long, making poetic sport of the wounded. We laughed at the most acrobatic spills and the hardest tackles and at the meanness of some of it, the gang tackles and cheap shots. We laughed especially at the meanness. After about ten minutes Raymond turned down the sound so he could practice his sportscasting. Jessup leaped for the set and turned the sound back up.
I've had enough broadcasting from your big dumb face.
I have to practice, Raymond said.
This goddamn set is not to be goddamn touched. Now I'm serious about that.
It's my set, John.
I don't care if it was a gift from your grandmother who knitted it herself.
John, I've never hurt a man on purpose in my whole life.
And you ain't tonight, shitfinger.
Jessup was standing in front of the set now, guarding it. Raymond began to ease himself from the chair. I moved my head in order to see what the Lions would do on fourth and one inside the Minnesota 5. The fieldgoal team came on and I reached over and grabbed Raymond's arm.
Go easy, I said. "We've got a hard week ahead of us. You're both tense. It's the tension. I feel it. Coach feels it. We all feel it. We're all tense and knotted up. Let's save the combat for Saturday. It's bound to be a long hard week. Toony, shake the man's hand."
I was right about the kind of week it would be. We did everything wrong in practice and the coaches raged at us. I spent a lot of time with Myna. Nothing helped very much. Wednesday's practice was the worst of the year and when we were only slightly better the next day, Creed issued word that Friday's light workout would be canceled. He also called the team captains in and suggested we have a beer party that night, Thursday, no coaches, no females, no time limit. The throwing of the beer cans started half an hour after the party began. It went from there to fights, to mass vomiting, to singing and comradeship. A defensive end named Larry Nix kept punching a door until he busted through. A few people fell asleep in their chairs or on the floor. There was a pissing contest with about twenty entries trying not for distance but for altitude—a broom held by two men being the crossbar as it were, the broom raised in stages as contestants dropped out and others progressed. It was the most disgusting, ridiculous and adolescent night I had ever spent. The floor of the lounge was covered with beer, urine and ketchup, and we kept slipping and falling and then getting up and getting casually knocked down again by somebody passing by. Clothes were torn and there was blood to be seen on a few grinning faces. There were tagteam wrestling matches, pushup contests, mock bullfights, and other events harder to classify. A bunch of men jumping repeatedly in the air with their hands at their sides. Seven people in a circle spitting at each other's shoes. Lloyd Philpot Jr. ate nine hamburgers in twentyfive minutes. Link Brownlee chugged a bottle of ketchup. Jim Deering and his brother Chuck traded ten quick bolo punches to the midsection, apparently reviving a boyhood tradition. It was a horrible night. They took off Billy Mast's clothes and threw him out the front door. Somebody pushed Gus de Rochambeau and he skidded past me over the beer and piss and put his hand through a window. I took out my handkerchief and bandaged him. Then we sang one of the school songs, Gus and I, and I didn't know whether I was singing seriously or making fun of the song and in a very short while I didn't know whether I was singing at all or just listening to Gus sing. I thought I could hear my own voice but I wasn't sure and so I stood there with Gus, not wanting to leave if I was still singing, and I watched my teammates slip and fall into the beer and get up sick and laughing.
Since there was no workout scheduled for Friday, I thought it would be a good idea to end the week as it had begun, a picnic with Myna and the Chalk sisters. The cyclic redundancy might be beneficial. I needed a feeling of restfulness, of things content enough in themselves to begin again, and I thought the warm drawling chatter of an identical picnic might put me at ease. Myna was available and so was Esther Chalk. Vera had a class but we talked her out of it and assembled behind the Quonset hut. I lay on the blanket with my arms over my face.
We could all live somewhere, Myna said. "I have all this money that's in my name. We could go to Mexico. A friend of mine knows where to get good stuS in Mexico City. We could buy a RollsRoyce and pick up some stuff in Mexico City and drive into the mountains."
You have money? Esther said. "Gary, she has money?"
Half a million.
Oil depletion, Myna said.
Half a million dollars?
My father wanted to send me to Bryn Mawr. So I had this decision to make. Either I could lose all my excess weight and kill my blemishes with cobalt or whatever they use and go to Bryn Mawr and be a beautiful and charming young lady and risk being supermiserable because of the responsibilities of that kind of thing. Or I could come a little west to out here and be emotional and do what I want. They're both better than staying home and out here you don't get nagged by responsibilities like the responsibilities of beauty.
What are you going to do with the money? Vera said.
Gary, Esther said, "what's she going to do with the money?"
I don't know.
She should keep it.
She should do whatever she wants, Esther said.
She should keep it, Vera said. "She should hold on to it."
I don't know much about things English. But the idea of riding around in a RollsRoyce sounds pretty neat. And it's her money.
But she shouldn't just throw it away. She should do something positive with it. Maybe open a shop. I'm into handicrafts, Gary. We could think up something worthwhile.
She can throw it away if she wants to. It's her money, Vera.
Don't call me that. You know how much I hate that name. You know how much I loathe and despise that name, you damn bitch.
Our mother named her after herself, Esther said.
She should have named you Vera. You're the damn Vera. I'm not that damn person. I'm just me. You're the Vera. You're more her than I am.
She gets this way, Gary. It's a real laugh and a half, isn't it?
You're the only damn Vera in the vicinity that I know of. It's the honesttogoddest truth, Gary. She's the damn Vera, not me.
Quiet, I said.
We can all go live somewhere in Mexico, Myna said. "We can live in a house in the mountains with a garden that's always full of flowers, the wildest colors in Mexico. We can buy a RollsRoyce and go. Gary, you drive."
We can buy four RollsRoyces, Esther said.
You don't need all that money to go to Mexico and live in a garden, Vera said.
But we're getting four RollsRoyces.
I think we should get just one, Myna said. "That way we stay together."
That's right, Vera said.
That way we insure staying together. And we can all study the works of Tudev Nemkhu who's this Mongolian sciencefiction writer who's got a real big underground following. He's in exile in Libya because his government frowns on scifi.
All of us in the mountains smoking our little pipes, Vera said.
We sat around for a while longer. Myna read to us, bouncing on her haunches, pausing after certain passages to bite her nails. We heard the wind then. It came up suddenly, fanning sand into the air. We tried to cover ourselves. Esther wore a large button with the word carrots printed on it.
the football team filled two buses and rode a hundred and twenty miles to a point just outside the campus of the West Centrex Biotechnical Institute. There the buses split up, offense to one motel, defense to another. We had steak for dinner and went to our rooms. All evening we kept visiting each other, trying to talk away the nervousness. Finally Sam Trammel and Oscar Veech came around and told us to get to bed. There were three men to a room. The regulars got beds; the substitutes were assigned to cots. Bloomberg and I had a reserve guard, Len Skink, sharing our room. For some reason Len was known as DogBoy. In the darkness I listened to the cars going by. I knew I'd have trouble sleeping. A long time passed, anywhere from an hour to 'three hours or more.
Is anybody awake? Len said.
I am.
Who's that? he said.
Gary.
You scared me. I didn't think anybody would be awake. I'm having trouble sleeping. Where's Bloomers?
He's in bed.
He doesn't make a sound, Len said. "I can't hear a single sound coming from his bed. A big guy like that."
That means he's asleep.
It's real dark in here, isn't it? It's as dark with your eyes open as when they're closed. Put your hand in front of your face. I bet you can't see a thing. My hand is about three inches from my face and I can't see it at all. How far is your hand, Gary?
I don't know. I can't see it.
We better get some sleep. This stuff isn't for me. I remember the night I graduated high school. We stayed up all night. That was some night.
What did you do?
We stayed up, he said.
In the morning we went out to the stadium, suited up without pads or headgear and had an extra mild workout, just getting loose, tossing the ball around, awakening our bodies to the feel of pigskin and turf. The place seemed fairly new. It was shaped like a horseshoe and probably seated about 22,000. Our workout progressed in virtual silence. It was a cool morning with no breeze to speak of. We went back in and listened to the coaches for a while. Then we rode back to the motels. At four o'clock we had our pregame meal—beef consomme, steak and eggs. At fivethirty we went back out to the stadium and slowly, very slowly, got suited up in fresh uniforms. Nobody said much until we went through the runway and took the field for our warmup. In the runway a few people made their private sounds, fierce alien noises having nothing to do with speech or communication of any kind. It was a kind of frantic breathing with elements of chant, each man's sound unique and yet mated to the other sounds, a mass rhythmic breathing that became more widespread as we emerged from the runway and trotted onto the field. We did light calisthenics and ran through some basic plays. Then the receivers and backs ran simple pass patterns as the quarterbacks took turns throwing. Off to the side the linemen exploded from their stances, each one making his private noise, the chant or urgent breathing of men in preparation for ritual danger. We returned to the locker room in silence and listened to our respective coaches issue final instructions. Then I put on my helmet and went looking for Buddy Shock. He and the other linebackers were still being lectured by Vern Feck. I waited until the coach was finished and then I grabbed Buddy by the shoulder, spun him around and hit him with a forearm across the chest, hard. He answered with three openhand blows against the side of my helmet.
Right, I said. "Right, right, right."
Awright. Awright, Gary boy.
Right, right, right.
Awright, awright.
Get it up, get it in.
Work, work, work.
Awright.
Awright. Awriiiight.
I walked slowly around the room, swinging my arms over my head. Some of the players were sitting or lying on the floor. I saw Jerry Fallen and approached him. He was standing against a wall, fists clenched at his sides, his helmet on the floor between his feet.
Awright, Jerry boy.
Awright, Gary.
We move them out.
Huh huh huh.
How to go, big Jerry.
Huh huh huh.
Awright, awright, awright.
We hit, we hit.
Jerry boy, big Jerry.
Somebody called for quiet. I turned and saw Emmett Creed standing in front of a blackboard at the head of the room. His arms were crossed over his chest and he held his baseball cap in his right hand. It took only a few seconds before the room was absolutely still. The cap dangled from his fingers.
I want the maximal effort, he said.
Then we were going down the runway, the sounds louder now, many new noises, some grunts and barks, everyone with his private noise, hard fast rhythmic sounds. We came out of the mouth of the tunnel and I saw the faces looking down from both sides, the true, real and honest faces, Americans on a Saturday night, even the more welltodo among them bearing the look of sharecroppers, a vestigial line of poverty wearing thin but still present on every face, the teenagers looking like prewar kids, 1940, poorly cut short hair and a belligerent cleanliness. After the introductions I butted pads with Bobby Hopper and then bounced up and down on the sideline as we won the coin toss. The captains returned and we all gathered together around Creed, all of us making noises, a few prayers said, some obscenities exchanged, men jumping, men slapping each other's helmets. Creed said something into all the noise and then the kickreturn team moved onto the field. I glanced across at Centrex. They looked big and happy. They were wearing red jerseys with silver pants and silver helmets. We wore white jerseys with green pants and green and white helmets. My stomach was tight; it seemed to be up near my chest somewhere. I was having trouble breathing and an awful sound was filling my helmet, a sound that seemed to be coming from inside my head. I could see people getting up all over the stadium and the cheerleaders jumping and a couple of stadium cops standing near an exit. I could see the band playing, the movements of the band members as they played, but I couldn't hear the music. I looked down to my right. Bobby Iselin and Taft Robinson were the deep men. Speed and superspeed. About sixtyeight yards upfield the kicker raised his right arm, gave a little hop, and began to move toward the ball.