The local townsfolk call it Old Albert’s Place, located on the north side of the crater, near the bunkers, a few miles off of Route 18. “Can’t miss it,” they tell me with raised eyebrows. “Just follow the dirt road to the end. It is still passable, despite the winter rains last year. Watch out for the potholes and radioactive stuff. Good luck, mister!”
And so I walk…
The sunset appears like red hot melted butter, spreading over the long fetch of desert sand and scrub. A single cumulonimbus tower appears in the distance, sunlit at the top, shadings of black to gray from the bottom upward, the middle a mishmash of hues. The gigantic complex mushrooms into the stratosphere, like a silent eruption. I ponder the distance, wondering how I’m able to view such a monstrosity, without hearing even a whimper from it. Almost on cue, five F-15 fighters fly overhead in formation, filling the quiet with a deafening roar, proudly showing off their mighty afterburners.
I pump my fists. “America to the rescue! Yay!”
I’m thinking back to that afternoon with Dad at the Hanscom airshow. That was so long ago. I miss those days, hanging out with Dad at the airbase and meeting his cronies in the dark sunglasses from the weather service.
You’d love to see this, Dad, the planes are here too! Wish you were here. Having fun! Love, your son.
The jets diverge to the north, south, east, and west; circumnavigating the horizon before converging again at the base of the cloud. From a distance, they resemble a flock of migrating birds hopping from limb to limb, frantically zigzagging around the cloud, seeding it with something, and then disappearing over the earth’s edge.
Dad loved the clouds, studied them at the weather service in the mountain, he told me. I inherited the cloud photograph that once hung over the living room couch. It was his pride and joy, so much so that he framed it and dated it in brass lettering. He called it cumulonimbus, and I never challenged him on that, but knew better after we’d studied World War II in history class.
I’m inclined to walk towards the cloud, since it is the locus of activity, thinking that Albert’s place is somewhere in that direction. I’ve got nothing else to guide me: no signposts, no route numbers, and too many dirt roads, all of them nameless. So much for all those Helpful Henrys and their directions: “Watch the potholes and radioactive shit,” they told me. There ain’t nothing but desert, cactus, and a big cloud out here. Maybe they were trying to scare me.
“Don’t go near that cloud, dude,” a voice calls out to me. Turning around, I spot him poking his head thru the cab window. His tank truck is parked on the side of the road, across from me. I’d not noticed it earlier, nor heard him approaching. He flings open the door, steps off the rig, and adjusts the crotch of his pants. He’s a tough, grubby looking guy with about three days of neglected beard growth; a thick, silver mustache; and front teeth in need of repair. He’s sporting a t-shirt that says, CAUSE & EFFECT IS A BITCH, in big, bold fluorescent lettering, like a neon sign; and wearing a cap with the logo, E = mc2, his white, stringy hair spilling out at the edges.
“Hey, how are ya?” I say to him, after crossing over. “What’s the deal with that cloud?”
“Radioactivity, dude. Remember the nuke tests before they dropped the big ones on Japan?” He spits on the ground. “I swear, that uranium dust gets into my teeth! We shouldn’t be out here, not without PPE gear. How’d you get out here? What ya doin?”
“I know of the tests, but that was about 75 years ago. They happened here? I’m looking for Albert’s place…can you point the way, Mr. Trucker?”
“Close to here…the mushroom cloud over there…that’s where.” He points at it. “That ain’t no regular cloud. Those Helpful Henrys gave you good advice! Watch yourself there!”
“Albert’s place is ground zero?”
“Yeppers!”
“I’ve noticed the cloud…kind of odd looking, but 75 years? All of that should’ve dispersed a long time ago. Tall dark clouds sometimes look like the apocalypse from a distance, but most likely a bad thunderstorm, nothing more.”
“No, dude, that last test bomb ripped open the sky, fucked up time and space too. Those geniuses, like your dad, never figured out how to stop something once they started it. They played God after discovering old Albert’s formula of E = mc2…causing 225,000 dead in Japan, the cold war, weapons of mass destruction, Chernobyl! They’ve created something like the sun with my formula, but never considered the consequences: nuclear fission that goes on and on, but never knowing how to pull the plug on it. Now it will last as long as the sun!”
Your formula? I’m puzzled. A Freudian slip maybe? Is he pretending to be the great Einstein? Maybe he’s just rambling too much for my comprehension.
“Wow, that really sucks, but this is a dream right? Those atomic events do their thing and then stop, leaving their toxic residue and collateral damage, but a perpetual mushroom cloud…still going 75 years later? Sounds far fetched to me, Mr. Trucker.”
“It’s different here, not the same rules. Keeps me in a job, though!” He chuckles and bangs on the tank attached to his cab.
“And what’s your job? If you don’t mind me asking, of course.”
“Hauling tons of water there every day, pretending to put out the flames. Playing that game until it finally decides to stop on its own accord, finishing its lesson with me.”
“Ten billion years of firefighting! Like watering the sun, huh?” I do my Al Pacino nod, with a smirk and wink. “That is what I call long-term job security.”
He knocks on the tank again, and says, “Like knocking on wood.” Spits again too. “Hey, it’s a job, dude! Yeah, I’m getting nuked daily, no hazard pay for it, and the man upstairs ain’t sending any PPE gear this way, not to dreamland or hell, or whatever this place is. He don’t care about our guilt trips, but no biggie. We all carry the burden of our sins and omissions, learning our lessons eventually: you, me, dear old dad, the scientists…even those Helpful Henrys sending you off to wander aimlessly.”
He stops and takes a deep breath, as if he hyperventilated on his words, but looks at me with concern on his face, like he just noticed a bug on my forehead. “By the way, you never did answer me. What are you doing out here?” he asks me.
“Looking for someone, I think.”
“Ok, hope you find him or her. Hope it ain’t me, cause I’m not staying long. Need to attend to that cloud.”
There are several moments of silence between us. The two of us intermittently glancing at each other, alternating between standing still and pacing by the side of the truck, kicking the dirt around like boys do, having a moment of wordless communion of some kind. We move to the front bumper of the cab, park our butts down and mindlessly gaze at the mushroom cloud billowing into a hundred different shapes, like a bouquet of white roses blossoming before us…sunlight and shadows twisting around the enormous tower. We remain so long that the cloud becomes illuminated with lightening against the darkness of dusk, as if putting on a light show for us. So much beauty, even within our most evil creations.
I’m thinking about E = mc2 again, God’s magic formula for transforming a tiny point of mass into the energetic Big Bang, and then back to mass again. Alternating mass with energy, two sides of the same coin, creating the galaxies and planets with it, and finally earth and mankind, as depicted in Genesis.
E = mc2 : The magic elixir of creation. Fucked up in the hands of man. So noble in its original intent, but corrupted by human will. Yeah, that cloud will dissipate long before we fix ourselves.
I’m wishing that Dad were here to see this, he would’ve loved it, being so proud of his creation, just like the cloud in the framed photo. I stick a cigar in my mouth while pondering the moment. Although, I don’t remember ever smoking before. The smoke smells and tastes familiar, puts me in a different mindset.
“You still smoking that crap, Sigmund?” the trucker asks me.
“Apparently so!” I pull the cigar from my mouth, examining it, trying to dredge up a memory of it.
“How is that jaw of yours? The one that gave you the cancer, ending your illustrious head shrinking career!” He gives me a wide, silly looking grin.
“Still hurting pretty bad, 81 years later.” I play along with his game of mistaken identity, and then have an epiphany.
“Hey, Dad, why are you are in my dream, hiding out here, disguised like Einstein moonlighting as a trucker and fireman, fighting that cloud you helped create or think you did?”
“Why are you playing shrink, Son?”
“Just trying to figure out stuff: your feelings of guilt and that cloud. Did you really love the clouds, or just the one you helped create?”
“My feelings of guilt? This is your dream.”
“Did you ever feel bad about it?”
“What? The stuff we did to Japan?”
“Yeah”
“Nobody was the sole author of the big one. It takes a village to create and implement something bad like that. Sorry to borrow from you Hillary!”
“How come you never took me to work with you? You know, showing your son around the office?”
“It was a secure facility inside of a mountain. We wouldn’t have let you in there. We blamed it on security protocols, but we were too ashamed of what we were doing, even though we wanted to know if we could do it. I wanted to know! You know what they say, Curiosity killed the cat!”
Dad buries his face in his hands, moving them up and down, rubbing his face and eyes, and then revealing himself to me again. He looks like my dad now, as if he rubbed off the disguises.
“Dad! Missed you so much!” I just about leap to him, burying my head in his chest, my arms around him, his strong arms around me. My clothes feel about three sizes too big. I’m just a boy again.
“I love you too, Son!” He pushes me back to look at me and continue talking.
“You need to understand something. We thought so much about splitting atoms that we finally did it, using the energy of thought to create an idea that acted on a mass of uranium, releasing its enormous energy. We weren’t prepared to control it though…didn’t think that far ahead. We were like kids playing with matches, not thinking about the consequences of burning down someone’s house. In this case, many thousands of houses…I was the photographer, though, nothing else.”
“That is a cop out, Dad, and you know it. You could have released your photos to the world, before it was too late. You could have let me in on things. I would have told my teachers. They would’ve done something maybe. You should have taken me with you, snuck me inside the mountain or the test site. I would have dragged you out of there, taken you back home to Mom and me…not letting you get involved in that crime against humanity…you know, building a weapon of mass destruction!”
“That is the mature you talking. You never asked to go with me, not at your young age when you wanted dad to be larger than life. You never wanted to know what dear old dad was really doing, not when you were 12 years old. Your head was in the clouds, as it should have been at that age. Your precious little mind was floating on puffy white clouds. Dads don’t fuck with a child’s innocence at that age!”
“Remember my weather hobby? I snipped out and collected the weather maps from the daily paper, made my own maps even. I wanted to be just like you Dad, a weatherman, until I saw your cloud photo in a history book…and what it had done to all those people.”
“I was just a photojournalist, recruited by…well, I can’t tell ya, it’s classified. I appreciated your weather hobby though…installed all your weather gadgetry on the roof, remember? The rain gauge, barometer, anemometer? You predicted the weather better than those overpaid TV geeks. Remember our trip to the hurricane center in Florida? And watching Von Braun’s rockets go off at Cape Canaveral? Don’t forget those times, son.”
“Fuck the weather and the rockets! You watched it being made and tested. You photographed it, but did nothing about it? You knew what it could do to people!”
“That was my job! To document it! Nothing more!”
“Well, I will keep you here, in your dream job, putting out the fires in that cloud you photographed, until either I forgive you or God does!”
“Get to work, Mr. Fireman!”
We stare each other for a few moments, tears rolling down my cheeks. The cloud belches out 3 quick flashes of light, temporarily blinding us. A fresh plume of cloud mushrooms upward, refreshing the original cloud. I move over to Dad’s side, our shoulders side by side. He puts his arm around me and says, “What a fucking mess, huh?”
“Yeah, Dad, it is bad.” I look at him. He’s a fragile old man now, bent over slightly, a tremor in his hand, yellowed eyes like an old book.
“Can I help you put it out, Dad?”
“Hop in the truck, Son. You can ride shotgun! Put on your PPE. I saved it for you a long time ago. They don’t make PPE with this quality anymore.”
“Probably not, Dad. Yeah, let’s try to dampen that cloud this time.” Dad pats me on the back, and I give him my Al Pacino nod of approval, perfectly executed this time.
As if on cue again, the five F-15 fighters fly over us in formation, doing a few stunts this time, letting out colored streams of smoke too, as if saluting us, since nobody else is out here except us. The jets head back towards the beautiful monstrosity of a cloud, in a roar, afterburners in full throttle. Both of us pump our fists and give a shout-out in unison:
“Yay! Go Go Go!!!”
© 2020 David M. Rubin. All rights reserved.
“If you see what needs to be repaired and how to repair it, then you have found a piece of the world that God has left for you to complete. But if you only see what is wrong and what is ugly in the world, then it is you yourself that needs repair.”
~ Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson
Notes from David 