Cullin Mitch - The Post-War Dream

Except the words were different on that summer night, surprising Hollis by how morose they sounded. “Was terrible,” Lon had muttered. “What a mess,” he whispered into the darkness, his beer-saturated voice hinting at something lingering beyond the confines of Nine Springs. Aside from crickets and a breeze rustling in mesquite branches, little else was heard or forthcoming. With the silence continuing, Hollis now discerned an oppressive quality in the air which made it difficult for him to say anything. Instead, he sipped at his beer, turning his attention toward the crickets and the breeze — and the tiny ripples of water spreading out on the illuminated surface of his swimming pool. Then he pondered the words Lon had said, drawing his own conclusions while his friend remained stock-still beside him.

Maybe, Hollis decided, it wasn't William Levitt's vision Lon was calling terrible. Maybe, he thought, the mess wasn't the sprawl of suburbia; rather, it was, perhaps, the inapprehensible sight Lon had witnessed as a young sailor aboard the observer ship USS Mount McKinley (Baker Day in the Bikini Atoll, July 25, 1946, at 0835 hours, nine miles from zeropoint), the subject of which had been mentioned from time to time since meeting on the golf course, discussed beneath the punishing sun, brought up by an inebriated Lon without prompting but addressed in a detached, guarded manner as if it were the gravest of secrets: because what Lon had seen on the deck of the Mount McKinley , what had erupted before him in an instant — pure white, brilliant, awe-inspiring — was the first post — World War II nuclear disaster, unleashed by an underwater atomic bomb which shot a massive column of ocean water nearly a mile into the Pacific sky, decimating a fleet of abandoned battleships which were deliberately positioned at the zeropoint (“target vessels,” Lon had called them, “thrown about and sunk like toy boats”).

In truth, the human eye wasn't capable of processing the entire phenomenon, nor had there been appropriate definitions available beforehand to explain it. As a result, two months following the bomb test, scientists organized a conference — reviewing the data from Bikini Atoll, analyzing military film footage — whereupon a vocabulary of thirty expressions was developed, including terms such as “cauliflower cloud,” “dome,” “base surge.” For Lon, however, the recollection of the detonation seemed crystal clear: the monstrous dome which rose immediately before him on that day — geysering among the target fleet and blanketing the ships all at once — stretched upward and upward, briefly usurping the natural firmament during its white, expansive birth. In fact, the explosion was so incredible — so immense, so much greater in scope than anything his mind had expected — that it left Lon gazing openmouthed, even as others around him could not suppress their loud gasps or ecstatic shouts of delight. No intelligible thoughts seized him, and he was moved to the point of tears; for it looked as if creation itself was at play, as if he were glimpsing the beginnings of a new world: mutable mountain ranges swirled within that dome, snowcapped peaks shimmered in the light of a second sun.

At the very moment the explosion propelled millions of tons of saltwater toward the heavens, an enormous crater fractured the ocean floor, extending two hundred feet deep; as surrounding water filled the gap, the ocean lifted and fell for several moments, and a series of huge waves were set into motion — swelling and churning and sweeping forward, abruptly rocking the observer ships. The largest waves known to mankind were created that morning, rivaled only by those which came with the eruption of the island of Krakatoa in 1883. My lord, Lon found himself thinking as the high waves approached, someone made a mistake, someone miscalculated. About forty seconds after the blast an otherworldly, demonic roar swept over the Mount McKinley , inciting a newsman to shout, “Why doesn't the captain get us out of here?” But already the massive column of water had begun to collapse, settling into a circular cloud of radioactive material, carrying its lethal spray, mist, air downwind for more than seven miles. With the column's disintegration, a heavy fog — like bank of steam, some two thousand feet high, rolled across the target fleet, enshrouding the ships.

Three and a half miles away from zeropoint, on the recently evacuated island of Bikini, coconut trees swayed violently when the shock wave jolted the deserted island at a rate of 3,500 miles per hour. And standing not far from Lon on the Mount McKinley — snaggletoothed, dark-skinned, compact, wearing Marine Corps utilities (khaki trousers and shirt, black navy-issue shoes and no socks) — was His Majesty King Juda of the people of Rongerik, formerly of Bikini, observing the spectacle without amazement while others beside him grimaced or smiled, watching impassively as his tropical kingdom was laid to waste and, Lon realized in hindsight, seemingly no longer shocked by anything white men could do to him, or his people, or his beloved islands, or themselves.

“It was an awful sight,” Lon had once told Hollis, “and it was so beautiful, too. I've never been able to reconcile that disparity. You've never seen anything like it. Trust me, the movie footage doesn't do it justice. You couldn't even begin to understand what it was like to see something that unimaginable unless you were there.”

You don't know what you're talking about, Hollis had wanted to say but refrained, hoping instead Lon might manage to hear the voice of silence. I've seen things just as awful if not worse, he thought. Smaller-scale indicators of the apocalypse, lacking the impersonal grandeur, the sublime aspects, the disquieting majesty of a single nuclear explosion beheld from afar. No, he thought, I've stood before macro destruction, the slow-moving, close-range, tangible mechanisms of human annihilation — and none of it, regardless of how he had tried recasting it in his head, offered a remote hint of paradoxical beauty or unexpected reverence.

“Yep,” Lon had said, “it was something else, and I'm surprised I haven't paid for it yet. God knows plenty already have. I knew a guy there who ended up having a malignant tumor removed from his thyroid, and another one who died of a rare kind of adenocarcinoma, and another from chronic leukemia, not to mention all the ones who got colon and liver cancer, or lost their entire immune systems, or that bunch of others who became sterile. But, you know, I've been lucky so far, pretty damn lucky. Doesn't matter much now, though. Not many remember all that stuff these days, no one talks about it anymore. But I'm fairly certain I saw the very beginning of our undoing — that exact second when the world started losing its mind for good.”

Realizing his wordless communication had failed to pass between them, Hollis had simply nodded, casting his eyes to the concrete ground. Fifty-three years ago for you, he calculated. Forty-nine for me.

The place where Hollis's cactus garden now grows was once square, lifeless, about five yards of hard earth. Whenever wind swept through the backyard, small brownish gusts rose from it and blew out over the swimming pool, like the futile encroachment of a miniature desert. While still setting up the house, they would go there, he and Debra, to ponder the garden they had talked about building with mostly wildflowers, some rocks, maybe a prickly pear or two. They would go there even at night — often in the night, so that they could avoid the summer sun — when the concrete was tolerable to their bare feet and the dirt patch before them was dissipating the heat it had absorbed during the day.

Debra would recline on a deck chair set away from the future garden. Hollis, shirtless and wearing Bermuda shorts, would remain standing while considering the possibilities; it was always he, never Debra, who strolled the concrete perimeter of the patch, where — upon reaching the other side, the dirt between them like a void — he would offer his thoughts: “I'm thinking we can fill it in with gravel, but only when we get everything planted. How about that?” A shrug of indifference would bounce from her shoulders, as if her mind was on something else. He would nod his head in response, suddenly unsure of what, just seconds ago, had seemed like a decent idea. Soon enough, though, Debra would forgo any involvement in the garden planning, encouraging him instead to landscape the area as he saw fit, while also freeing herself to decorate their new home without his input.