Nuclear Reaction
Patrick Fealey
The sun got lost in a fog and then I saw the beach. I saw where the wires were going to, or coming from. Looming in the overcast, a gigantic dome sat by the beach. The surf was frothing in a hard onshore wind, the waves were shit. Knee-high whitecaps pawing the sand at the foot of a nuclear power plant. The plant was a dark gray, concrete painted the color of a warship, ocean camouflage. My skin peeled off in red sheets.
I drove Weederman across a great wide lot to where there were cars and people, a young couple walking close through the sand, an older couple too, others tossing a Frisbee and dogs running free. The members of a family dressed in pink and purple windbreakers were eating cheese sandwiches and tossing some to floating gulls. There was one guy out, fighting with the water. Bobo would have attributed his attempts to radiation. He was a kid and you could tell he could surf and also that he knew better. He lacked restraint, maybe sense. It’s called addiction. Those six-inch waves were kicking his passionate ass. Bobo would have been unable to watch. I would have agreed with him, for once. This was no more than a windswept puddle. I hung out for a while because it was a beach and I had driven a way to get there and all I had to go back to was a house full of hung-over strangers and Stick. Stick and I were not getting along. We had an aversion on the particle level. Also, we lived in opposite planes.
I watched the Frisbee get pushed around in the wind, the loose and smiling dogs, and the people, who seemed to have found a spot of enjoyment in the shadow of the giant dome. I never saw any of them look at it. I guessed they were used to it. There was little to look at, anyhow. It was deflective and cold. It was sealed and resistant. It was hidden out in the open, gunmetal and silent. There were no visible workers about, just wires tightly strung on insulators. The lines were impressive from an engineering standpoint. I was not opposed to nuclear power, but I had never been close enough to have one grab the landscape from me. There were practical reasons to put them by the ocean. There were reasons to put them elsewhere.
I went down to the beach and sat on the concrete wall. There were not a lot of women around, but that didn’t mean a goddamned thing. It only took one and a brunette in her twenties walked by in grey sweats and white sneakers. I didn’t know it yet, but her name was Julia. I could see that she was tall and beautiful, but I didn’t know she was Italian and she had bought a copy of William Blake in a used book store that morning. My first impression was that she was a graduate student at Cal-Poly and she was. Mathematics. I thought I’d lost her, but she walked back to me and it was do or die. We smiled and said hello at the same time. She was standing before me.
“What are you doing?” she said.
I said, “I’m looking for a woman to talk to while trying to keep the seagulls from reading my thoughts. I’m not having many thoughts, but I don’t want any seagull picking one up.”
She said, “I knew you would still be here because I would be coming back. I’m glad you are.”
“My name’s Tommy.”
“Julia. Nice to meet you.”
“Nice to meet you.”
She sat down and we talked. We had all the subjects available to us. She was a most confident and attuned and open girl, if a little enthusiastic. Things moved fast, but she was comfortable with that, good at that. I was the one being seduced. Two hours passed.
She brought up the fog and suggested we sit in her car. Having seen that she was driving a compact, I suggested Weederman. She agreed. As we stood up, I stepped into her. I was not at all nervous. I liked her. She kissed me back like she wanted everything on the sand. We stopped at her car so she could grab her purse and then we went in through Weederman’s side door. We were out of our clothes in seconds.
“You have a ten-inch cock!” she said.
“Right.”
She found her purse, produced a tape measure, pulled out a foot of tape and aligned it. “You’re right. It’s only eight. But it’s not even all the way hard.” She put her mouth on me. I didn’t want her to stop, but-
“Get that ruler - is cold - offa me!”
“You know how many dicks I’ve seen?”
“I don’t want to know.”
“You might be number two out of hundreds. Three-hundred.”
“Three- hundred?”
“No, okay, two hundred.”
“You’re a lying whore.”
“You can’t handle the truth.”
“You can’t measure the truth.”
“More than a hundred. Less than three hundred.”
“Who’s number one?”
“The first or the biggest?”
“Whichever you can remember.”
She lit up. I was wilting. “He had a twelve-inch cock.”
“Adjusting for your excitement and exaggerations, that would be a ten-inch cock,” I said.
“No, it was a twelve-inch cock. Just like this ruler. Don’t worry. I wouldn’t go out with him again. He’s too big. It hurt. And he’s fucked up. He’s a real fucked-up person.”
“So I’m number two?”
“I think so.”
“Am I also fucked up?”
“Well, look at you.”
“So, truthfully, you can only remember number one for sure.”
“Well. You’re up there with him.”
“No I’m not. He’s 50-percent more. He is the biggest and then there are the rest of us.”
“You’re perfect.”
“Yeah, I’m here.”
“Do you know how many dicks I’ve endured that were no bigger than a hot dog?”
“Five-hundred?”
“No, but they’re out there and you never know when someone’s gonna spring one on ya.”
“I’ll take your word.”
“Think about a cock the size of your pinky, what would you say to that?”
“I don’t know. ‘I’ll have a hamburger?’”
“Mercy is no place for mercy, I mean bed isn’t. Trust me, you have a huge cock. I can’t believe no one’s ever told you that before.”
“Just the guys in the shower making jokes.”
She laughed. “Males of all species, assemble and brawl it out.”
“If they hadn’t, I might not believe you. I don’t know. There was a girl who brought down the house every time, a thousand times, and all she ever said was, ‘I have no complaints.’ I guess I really didn’t need to ask her.”
“The bitch was playing poker.”
“You’re the first chick.”
“Yes. I’m the only woman for whom size matters.” she laughed. “Size is presence. Simple as that. Sex is about being there, right? Don’t you agree?”
“And getting there.”
“The amazing thing about cocks, to me is how much they can grow. Look at you now. You must be down to two inches.”
“Get that thing away from me!”
Afterward we sat in Weederman’s front seats and laughed. Then we were staring at the weathered Pacific through wiped windows, the life gone out of us. It wasn’t that the sex was all we had and we had nothing to say. It was the realization that we had no future and we might have had one. The sex had been monstrous after she put away the tape measure, though she said it was not unusual for her to come four times in one hour. I’d finished from behind and it was a better view when she moaned from deep inside and I came and fell onto her white back. Then we laughed. But our journey led us to silence. I was leaving in the morning. We went to different schools six-hundred miles apart. We didn’t delude ourselves. We’d made something that would live one day. We wrote down addresses and numbers and I left her at the beach where it started and drove back feeling like I’d been forced to give back something I’d just won. I was satiated and I threw her address out the window.
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