An Atomic Romance (22 page)

42

At the hotel Reed showered and changed into a royal blue T-shirt and black jeans. He positioned his star-studded leather belt with the silver buckle and checked his look in the mirror. He had dialed up his messages at home three times, and he tried one last time before he left the hotel. Nothing.

Because of the hassle of retrieving his truck, he rode the train to the campus. A Seeing Eye dog, a placid yellow Labrador, sat facing him, with a long-haired young man Reed took to be a student, who was reading a book in Braille. Both dog and student exited with him, and Reed thought about following them to get his bearings, but he didn’t want to make the dog nervous. Crowds of young people, dressed in cutoffs and flip-flops, sauntered along with their inevitable backpacks. Like meal portions at restaurants, textbooks must be heavier these days, Reed thought, as he tried to imagine himself a student again. It was gratifying to think of the students’ eagerness, their confidence in starting out, bolstered by their privileges. They probably did not think of their privileges, he realized.

With time to spare, he checked his map and detoured through some of the streets of handsome brick houses. Most of the houses had small front gardens enclosed by wrought-iron fences. Reed wondered how people braved the steep stoops when there was snow and ice. He felt uneducated, out of place, probably under suspicion.

As he walked down a residential street toward the library he thought he saw Julia, far ahead of him. It wasn’t. He was fooled by a general outline and a motion that evoked her lope and head bob. He knew, of course, that she wouldn’t come. Either she hadn’t received his message, or she had chosen to ignore it. Or perhaps she wasn’t able to reply. Maybe she had been injured or was sick from some exotic disease she was studying in her lab work. Hantavirus or Ebola. E. coli, perhaps, or the Nora virus. Or some new unknown-to-the-C.I.A. strain of Boola-Boola flu. She was just busy, he told himself. She might even be back at work, while he waited for hours at the site of the old Met Lab, where Enrico Fermi, more than sixty years before, had played with plutonium.

It was beyond a group of buildings ahead, on the far side of the library. He drew nearer to the library. Its panels of cold concrete reminded him of a startlingly new nuclear-bomb plant. The style was called the Architecture of Brutalism, the guidebook told him. Staring at the vertical grooves and slit windows of the massive building, Reed contemplated blankly the Architecture of Brutalism. Fermi had split the atom in an underground squash court, under Stagg Field, which was replaced now by the brutal library. Reed walked around the library, anxious about seeing the sculpture Julia had told him about on the day they first met, the day he so crudely wolfed meat loaf in her presence.

The Henry Moore sculpture was a dark spherical blob in the center of a large area of scored concrete. Coming closer, Reed saw that passageways ran through it. He moved slowly around the sculpture. It was a twelve-foot bronze dome, thrusting above him. It was a bald head, a skull, a brain case with an empty face. It was a helmet. It was, also, conceivably—in its smooth roundness—the mushroom cloud. The head and shoulders rested on four shapeless, knobby feet, as if the torso and legs had been excised. Reed leaned against one of the openings. The metal, warm from the sun, was pleasant to touch.

Henry Moore intended it to feel like a cathedral when you poked your head inside, Reed read in the pocket guide. If he said some kind of prayer—some Burl pearl—would it aid him in his quest at all? But he didn’t want Julia to catch him here with his head inside this thing saying a prayer.

The design on the concrete paving that surrounded the sculpture was like broken sun rays, lines radiating out from the symbolic figure, or perhaps converging toward it. Little Boy exploded and Fat Man imploded. Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The uranium bomb and the plutonium bomb.

Reed was used to being around atomic energy every day, but being right here at its birthplace jangled him. He could imagine old eager-beaver Enrico below ground here—right here, in the catacombs beneath the soccer stadium here at the University of Chicago—daring to meddle with the basic structure of nature itself. It was terrifying. He felt goose bumps rise on his arms as he thought about the gaggle of scientists huddled over their deadly endeavor. Their experiment was such a tight secret that the citizens of the city didn’t have a chance to imagine an uncontrolled chain reaction, a disaster that would have made the great Chicago fire seem like a wienie roast. Maybe, Reed thought, other worlds had consumed themselves by some invasive cracking of their essential building blocks. It could all be undone. A solar system could become a black hole, like the state of nothingness before the big bang. That was one theory of the beginning of time. He glanced at his watch—five to one.

People passed by, unaware of what happened on this spot on a cold day in 1942. Enrico Fermi, charging forth like a medieval knight, had tickled the dragon’s tail. In amongst his patchwork pile of graphite bricks and uranium chunks, he placed cadmium rods to cushion the neutrons and keep them from going wild. When the time came, Fermi calmly started the chain reaction by directing the removal of the rods. One by one, they were pulled out, until the pile fairly roared with its energy. Fermi stayed cool.
Put the rods back in,
Fermi said at just the right moment. He had succeeded in controlling a chain reaction. Now he knew how to produce enough plutonium to make atomic bombs.

A man and woman approached, tourists in khaki and sun hats. Reed moved aside. The man said, “The famous story is that they had a test tube of plutonium in the lab down underground here, and they all went to lunch and when they came back it was gone. The janitor had poured it down the drain. They had to go after it with Geiger counters—through the entire sewer system of Chicago.”

“Did they get it all?” the woman asked, like someone inquiring about a cancer operation.

“They thought so. Who knows?”

“Do we have time for a drink before we meet Tiffany?”

The man consulted his watch, and the couple hurried away. Reed didn’t believe the story. He returned to the sunny dome, which was becoming a buddy. Half-sitting in the sun-warmed seat, virtually inside the skull-cloud, he felt protected, even cozy. He was accustomed to heat. He could imagine the team of scientists toiling below him, beneath the rays scored in the concrete under his feet. He could feel the audacity, the egomania of some of them, the cliquishness of their fraternity—their pride, their rationalizations. He did not know if Fermi was afraid. Probably he wasn’t.

Atomic energy was so seductive. Reed’s seat in the nuclear-energy sculpture felt warm. He was peaceful. Good old Fermi.

Even though this heavy-metal transuranic memorial seemed as hard as a D.U.-enforced military tank, Reed was growing comfortable with it. He laughed to himself, remembering what Sammy Blew had said about large women. Then, after removing the guidebook and map from his hip pockets, Reed found himself easing into the niche within the giant head. Pushing himself in rearward, he entered the opening. Curled up tight, he just fit.

In his fortress, he joined with nuclear energy, communing with its monstrous power. He was snug with the sun’s warmth, but shaded from its glare. Its stored energy radiated through him. This could be an arthritis cure, he thought.

Realizing his behavior might seem suspicious—he could be stowing a bomb—he wriggled out and resumed his position, waiting for Julia. He did a few calf and hamstring stretches to prevent cramps. His knee still bothered him from time to time.

He did not wait long. He could see her coming down the street. She wasn’t yet distinct, but he knew her shape, her hair, her walk, even those thick-soled leather clogs, with the floppy straps. Impulsively, he hid behind the sculpture. Then, as she drew nearer, he crawled inside it again, twisting around so that his head was in the opening that faced her. He was Captain Plutonium in his Helmet of Invincibility. And when she saw him at last, he was grinning.

“May I take your order?” he said.

“This sculpture is talking,” Julia said, turning to an imaginary companion. “Darth Vader is flirting with me.”

“I’ve been toddling all over this town looking for you,” he said as he struggled out of his nest.

Their reunion wasn’t angry. She was glad to see him, and she let him kiss her. Something about her lip gloss was unfamiliar. Had she been kissing someone? Some people walked past, not heeding them. He was so glad to see her, so relieved that she met him at the sculpture, that he could not find fault with her. She was alive, and she was here. She was wearing jeans and a gray cropped top with elbow-length sleeves. She was carrying a small, flat bag that hung on her shoulder by a thin strap of leather. There were never any extras with Julia—no artifice, no decoration. She wasn’t hidden beneath any distracting frills.

“
So,
” she said. “What have you and Enrico Fermi been up to?”

“I’ve been trying to figure out if Fermi was just doing his job, or if he should have just said no.”

“There’s no answer to that.”

“I was wondering, would this thing withstand an atomic blast?”

“Who would need to know?” she said.

She was holding his arm, leaning into him. “You’re warm,” she said.

“From Humpty Dumpty here.” He put her hand on the warm metal. “Put some earrings on this guy, and you’ll have Buddha,” Reed said. Something had shifted inside him. Gas? His knees felt a little wobbly.

“Do we have to decide the fate of civilization?” she said, kidding.

“I don’t know if we have time for that. God, I missed you,” he said, hugging her. “I need a scintillation counter to keep track of you. You’re flitting and flashing around like a firefly.”

“Isn’t that their courtship method?”

“You tell me.”

She shifted her purse from one shoulder to the other, and examined the concrete surface at her feet. “I’m sorry if I caused you to worry,” she said. “I was in over my head—so to speak.”

They moved away from the sculpture into the shade of some trees.

“Hey, look at me,” he said, turning her face toward his. “Tell me, are you going to the University of Chicago? I heard you might quit your job and come up here to go to school.”

“Is that what they told you at work?” She laughed. “It’s a tough school to get into.”

“But you’re smart enough,” he said, caressing her face.

Suddenly she burst into tears. Uncertain what to do, he wrapped his arms around her and was murmuring, “Hey, what’s the matter?”

“I’ve had a hard time,” she said, putting her head on his shoulder. His T-shirt soaked up her tears. “This has been a hard trip.”

“What happened?”

“Oh, nobody died or anything. I’m just stressed—family stuff, you know.”

“Well, I’m here, I’ll take care of you. We’ll make it better.” He felt rather pleased to discover some vulnerability in her. She needed him to lean on. She needed for him to pet her. She sobbed briefly, uttering sentence fragments about the fate of civilization. She had seriously considered his message on the telephone, he thought. He didn’t care about the fate of civilization right now.

“How’s your mom?” she asked, breaking away from his hold.

“Dandy. Infinitely better. No worry. I’m here to take care of
you,
” he said. “We’ll work it out. I don’t think it ought to take the grand unified theory to get us back together.”

“But we might have to pull a few strings.” She smiled and blew her nose with a tissue she pulled from her pocket.

He stroked her hair. It had grown longer since he saw her last. “I don’t ever want to be away from you again long enough to see that your hair has grown,” he said.

“I’m going to let it grow out,” she said.

“Good. I’d like that. I think I’ll grow a ponytail again,” he said. “You never saw me with a ponytail.”

“That would be swell. We’ll just let our hair grow until there’s some sense in the world,” she said, turning away from Reed.

She was walking across the converging/radiating lines past the sculpture to the sidewalk, and he hastened to catch her.

“Hey, how come you stayed away so long? How’s your sister?”

“She’s O.K. I was worried, but I think she’s back on her feet. Feet? In over my head? Why am I speaking in body parts? Anyway, it’s a long story. I had to go up to see my parents at their cabin in Michigan. Diana’s going to stay with them for the time being. Come on, let me show you around campus.” She clasped his hand, leading him.

As he walked along with Julia past huge gray Gothic masses, he felt overshadowed by his own ignorance. He wondered what it would be like to study astronomy here. He remembered his own college days as a long, drunken party, but he had the impression that the students here were suiting up to run the world.

Looking up at the ancient, worn architecture, Julia pointed out goofy, grotesque gargoyles with their tongues protruding and full-feathered angels in bonnets reading books.

“Aren’t they hilarious?” she said. “They’re keeping an eye on us.”

“Spies,” said Reed.

They laughed together.

She led him to a spookily postmodern brick building with a security entrance. Julia knew how to get inside with a code on a keypad—from an acquaintance, a boyfriend? He wouldn’t ask. The noiseless, sterile white corridors seemed like a futuristic version of a hospital—perhaps an online hospital, Reed thought, where doctors removed gallstones in Oklahoma by remote control from Chicago. Julia paused at a bulletin board, where graduate programs and conferences were posted. A professor of microbiology was lecturing on retrovirus proteolytic processing. And another professor had published a paper on turnip vein-clearing tobamovirus. Along the corridors, Reed saw several white mobile units like miniature labs for weapons of mass destruction. Or perhaps they were only storage carts. Then Reed recognized a yellow radiation-warning sign and an emergency shower for washdowns. The shower was in the hallway, as matter-of-fact as a water fountain. Through a glass pane, he saw a desktop centrifuge in a lab.