The Nuclear Blast
Don Berry
When I was about seven my mother gave me a book called Our Friend the Atom. It was by then about fifteen years old, published in the mid-fifties, and extolled the wonders and virtues of atomic power and all it could give us to make our lives richer.
My grandfather lived with us at the time. He’d had a stroke about six years before, and while he still had his faculties he’d lost the use of half his right arm and had trouble walking.
He’d had to retire early from his job at the jet engine plant and now lived on a pension.
My mother had told me never to show this atomic power book to him.
I showed it to him.
He’d taken one glance at the book and began tearing the pages out. He threw the book into a corner of the living room. I cried.
He had destroyed something I thought at the time was beautiful; a book that talked in children’s terms about wonders and made me want to dream and hope and have faith in science and how it could do incredible things and make our world better in the long run.
And he had ruined it.
I hated him for the rest of the week and avoided him.
When I saw him coming out of the bathroom in the morning or when I came home from school at night I stayed clear of him. I had told my mother what he did but she not only looked at me and said that she wasn’t surprised.
“He has had some bad things happen to him, Gage. Showing him that book only brought them back.”
I didn’t understand at the time how things in the past could come back at you or how simple objects like a book could bring them back.
That following Saturday when he was sitting on the front porch,, which was rare because he never liked to sit in the sun or look into the cloudless blue sky, I asked what my mother meant.
He asked me to sit down next to him and told me that he owed me an apology for destroying the book. “Ruining your book won’t change what happened,” he had said.
He had all of my attention and he talked for about a half an hour, but it seemed much longer than that, and next to him he had a book of his own, a slim brown leather bound journal of some kind. I had never seen him with it before and it looked beaten and very old.
He squinted up at the sun once in a while as he talked.
“I joined the army during the war but right at the end so I never did any fighting on the ground or in the air. Not like in the TV shows. I was in a special kind of Army that didn’t fight with anybody.”
He saw how perplexed I was at this.
“We experimented with different kinds of weapons.” When he still saw that I didn’t comprehend he looked at me with eyes that even for a man his age looked ancient and stretched into a deep primordial sadness, as if he was trying to take on all of mankind’s worst sins.
“Gage, they made us experiment on each other. Nerve gases, chemicals that made us sick, paralyzed us, messed up our minds, make us see things that weren’t there.”
He saw my next question before I could ask it.
“The work we were doing was supposed to save lives. Because in the next war, whatever it was, they knew these kinds of weapons were going to be used. And if we made then first and know hoe they worked we could keep our soldiers from getting killed, protect and equip them properly.”
He paused and swallowed.
“Then there was the atomic test. A couple of generals called me into a room one day and sat me down at a steel table and showed me pictures from the atomic bomb blast at Hiroshima.”
He said that I wouldn’t find any stories about Hiroshima in my book.
“They dropped an atomic bomb there, to end the war with Japan, and make them want to surrender. The bomb leveled the city like a cardboard city in a hurricane. These generals showed me pictures, the aftermath of the explosion. There was one of a man, naked, burned all over, standing by a stream. He was holding something in his hand. I realized after a minute that it was on of his eyeballs.”
“They told me that this is what I was getting into. This could happen to me. But they could take steps to protect me. You see Gage, they wanted to set off anatomic blast in the middle of the desert and put me and some other soldiers in a trench nearby and then see what it would do to us.”
He pointed now to the sun, sitting in a cloudless blue sky.
“Gage, you know that looking into the sun hurts your eyes. But even with the goggles they gave us, myself and another guy, they called him Fred, it was like looking into a dozen suns at once. When they set that thing off, the sound was like the Earth was coming apart from inside out. The vibration shook our muscles, our bones, our teeth, it was like they were being taken apart and put back together again.”
“Then there was the wind. Like a hot desert wind but it was more than that. It had a form, a shape, like a gigantic ballmiles high, pushing and pulling us, like we were rag dolls. But wewere in the trench you see and maybe that doesn’t sound like much protection but somehow it was enough to keep us from getting leveled or sucked away.
Did it hurt, I asked.
“Maybe that was the worst of it, because no, it didn’t. Fred and I expected it to, but it didn’t.
No pain. But there were voices. Fred and I both heard them. A chorus, like a million voices all screaming. I’ve thought about that part of it more than any other other over the years and I think that maybe, somehow, when you split atom open and let out all that energy its like going all the way back to where life started. It was like everything that ever lived calling out.”
He leaned back and reached for a cigarette with his good arm.
“I’ve read some stuff since then, and they have theories that maybe everybody’s atoms are mixed in with everybody else’s.”
He lit his cigarette and exhaled the smoke slowly. I couldn’t help but watch the burning end, a tiny red inferno.
“The air we breathe right now might be the same air that a dinosaur, or a caveman, or Shakespeare breathed a long time ago. Well maybe that was what we were getting back then except that the blast was squeezing everything into a few moments instead of millions of years.”
He paused. I knew it had taken a lot out of him to tell me all of this. And at my age it was a lot to take in.
I had a can of coke in front of me and I picked it up to take a sip. The sweet syrupy fizz hit my tongue and I thought, atoms, millions of atoms, inside this beverage, in the can itself, all waiting to be smashed open, to let loose their energies, like the ones in the desert with my grandfather so long ago.
“After it was over we spent a year or so in a special hospital. The did tests. And things happened to us, our bodies did start to change. I had a lot of problems with my mind, I slept a lot, sometimes two or three days straight. I had dreams, most of them were about the blast, about being there. But I also dreams about becoming transparent. Like my skin was Plexiglass. All the nerves, and veins, muscles. I could see everything. But it must have been real because one time a doctor showed me a picture of myself, my transparent body,walking around my room.”
I asked if he still ad the photo, looking at the leather bound volume next to his chair.
“The doctor said he wasn’t supposed to show me the picture. But that he figured that a man had a right to know if people could see into him. That doctor didn’t seem to like what was going on, the tests, the other things at this hospital. A couple of days later he stopped coming and he was replaced by a different doctor.
I never saw Fred again after the blast. Although I heard nurses and doctors talking. Somehow he’d been affected differently. Maybe his mind more than his body;. It was like he couldn’t take what had happened and what was now happening to him. I think he lost his mind, Gage. Thank God that didn’t happen to me.”
I asked if he was stronger than Fred, or was Fred weak.
“I got the know Fred when we were waiting in the trench for the blast. He seemed as tough as me, tougher maybe. Sometime being tougher doesn’t mean you’ll make it. Maybe he was too tough to understand what was happening to him. I think I just let it pass through me, but Fred tried hard to fight it. But how do you fight something that big.”
He sighed and stubbed out the cigarette on the porch floor boards.
“It’s been thirty years since that day in the trench. But I still hear those voices sometimes. Millions of them. Reminding me that it happened and that I’m part of it all. Never letting me forget.”
I asked him if he wanted to see a doctor now. Maybe they have some up with ways to help him, after all this time.
“Gage, nobody would believe me. No one has. The Army shut the project down years ago and most people have forgotten they even did those bomb tests. The generals are all dead now and probably most of the doctors as well.”
I heard my mother’s voice calling us in for dinner.
I asked him if my mother believed him.
“She doesn’t really know. She was a little girl when I came home that summer from the hospital. She knew I was different. I tried to explain. But she was young. Younger than you. And she is not the believer-type. Some people are. Some people aren’t.”
“I believe you,” I had said, with the plain matter-of-factness of children.
After we ate I did my homework and was in my room getting ready for bed when my grandfather came in.
He held the copy of Our Friend the Atom in his hands. He had repaired it with Scotch tape, putting back the pages he had town out the week before. He handed it back to me.
“I’m sorry for what I did to your book. I don’t agree with all of what’s in here. Just becaise it leaves out so much. But now you have the whole story. The whole story of the atom. You can make up your own mind.”
He laid the book down on my bed and turned to go. Then he stopped and looked at me.
“I would give anything to go back. To the desert, another blast. To feel what I felt back then, all over again. One last time.”
There were tears in his eyes.
The next morning he was gone. We searched the neighborhood, then called the police late that day and filed a missing persons report.
We called the news stations and had his picture pout on TV. We waited for word; days, a week, then a month. We never saw him again. He had taken the leather bound book with him.
My mother didn’t take it that hard. Looking back on it now, maybe she didn’t believe that his story was true. Maybe because he was old and didn’t have much time anyway, and that makes it easier for children to let go of their parents.
But I knew what he wanted. And even now, I have no doubts that after that night in my bedroom he went out for the desert. Hoping to find his nuclear blast and all of the sensations and clarity that it must have brought him that first time so long ago.
Nowadays people talk about moments of epiphany that they get from literature, or movies, or religion, or sexual encounters, but for my grandfather maybe the only real moments that he lived were when he was caught up in the man-made inferno.
For many years now, there have been nights I lay awake next to Keira at our house in New Mexico, with the bedroom windows open hoping to hear that chorus of voices,, of all thinking an feeling creatures calling out to me across the desert and across time.
And I quietly weep.
