The World Is on Fire Page 7

  But you can get more than you bargained for. What did I come here to see—aftermath or prophecy? It’s not a tourist trap, my sister says, because there’s nothing to buy. But this isn’t the worst of it.

  A pleasure ground needs to be crowded or it feels strange. Waiting in line is part of the ritual; someone else must want what you want. It helps to have something to crunch between your teeth—popcorn, fish scales—and a pocket full of quarters. Drop a coin in the slot, and nine brown Skee-Balls come rocketing down the chute. This is the game’s sweetest moment, anticipation made tangible by spheres of hard, sweat-oiled wood. Take one in your hand, lean back, and let it fly, rolling up the ramp and onto the rim; it drops into the hole marked one hundred and vanishes from sight. And here’s your next chance, right at hand. You could do this all day, waxed cup of cola sweating a ring on the floor. Time passes without your noticing, your back to the open arcade door, eyes on the prize. In the background, a pneumatic hiss and thump as the heavy zinc ball exits the air gun and knocks down the clown. The alarm-bell ding ding ding from another player’s high score, sweet fumes of cotton candy and hair spray and WD-40, a clink as a red plastic ring bounces off a milk bottle. By the time you turn to go, it’s dark outside. You shake your head to clear it.

  A pleasure ground’s natural features, if there are any, must in fact be engineered in order to create a particular effect. Its river becomes a flume upon which people ride in fiberglass boats shaped like dugout canoes. Its trees are oases of shade under which children sit and eat fried dough. And the sun at a pleasure ground always seems to shine more brightly. You’ll get the worst burn of your life and won’t even feel it until you leave, spiriting the heat away under your skin.

  The Salton Sea feels like a pleasure ground that people abandoned years ago. But don’t be fooled by the burned-out trailers on the edge of the water that say this story’s been told. Look more closely. At the water the color of beef broth, so full of salt and herbicides—atrazine, bentazon, diquat, metribuzin—it’s two steps from solidifying, like aspic. I’ve eaten my share of spinach and grapes and strawberries from the Imperial Valley; their runoff is here now, reducing every minute under the powerful summer sun. Look around. This is what happens when the money runs out and nobody’s left to clean up the mess. This is what’s next.

  We’re back on the road now, making good time. Wendover Air Force Base sits a ways to our north, but it would have been an easy hop for the pilots flying their Silverplate B-29s. God, how they blinded you to look at them.

  But all of that came later. Before they built the hangar, before they painted ENOLA GAY on the forward fuselage, the men needed a water source, a barracks, and a target range. When they built the range on the Bonneville Salt Flats in ’42, they used what they had. They built a city of salt.

  MIRAGE: 1942

  It’s hell on a blade. The salt eats the steel and the sand nicks the edge, but you fight that with the whetstone you keep wrapped in old shirt flannel. You have to feed the stone with oil or it gets squirrelly, dry climate like this. Only shade here is what you make yourself. Everything here is temporary, and the brass are planning something big, keeping it quiet. Salt City hurts to look at, once it’s done, blinding white during the day, and at night, you can’t help but dream about it, its silence, how it glows softly on the Flats. When dawn comes, you’ll bomb the dickens out of it, practicing for the real thing.

  When Paul Tibbets arrived at Wendover, in September of ’44, he was almost thirty years old and considered the best pilot in the United States. And even though his mission was top secret, people all over the country were involved in his work. He flew a Nebraska-built B-29, from which he would drop a new kind of bomb, if the boys in Los Alamos could finish in time. SAFETY STARTS BETWEEN THE EARS, read the sign on the wall in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, where a boomtown had grown overnight to support the enrichment of the uranium that would power Little Boy. Wormholes in the Arizona desert showed where Navajo yellowcake miners had been. And in Washington State, the new town of Hanford, charged with collecting plutonium for Trinity and Fat Man, sat just up the bluff from the old Hanford, abandoned because of contamination. Hurricane fencing separated the shuttered high school from the toxic trees surrounding it.

  From October 1944 through August 1945, Tibbets flew practice runs from Wendover to the California desert. On August 6, 1945, he would pilot Enola Gay over Hiroshima. But he couldn’t have known that then, not really, as he sped over the sand and the cholla, dropping fake A-bombs into the Salton Sea.

  Inert bombs are called “pumpkins” or “shapes.” They aren’t real, exactly, but they show you how the real thing is likely to behave. They’re weighted like the real thing, dull bulbous metal like the real thing, and when they crashed to the Sea floor, they raised clouds of silt in the dark water. They must still be down there, dozens of them, resting on acreage to which the Desert Cahuilla still hold title. Just like anything else, you have to get a feel for it, practice until you get it right.

  I think I get it now. The Salton Sea pulled me in as a haunted place—anyone could see that—but once I stood on its edge I knew in my bones that it was more. When you need to try out a new kind of bomb, come to this uncanny Sea, a place caught between ground zero and a city of salt. The Salton Sea’s surface at midday is bright as Mylar but its waters are dark, oily, forced to contain everything we hide.

  “The only trips we ever made were to funerals,” I read in an old letter to Ann Landers. So when you visit the Salton Sea, wear closed-toe shoes. Carry water and a camera. Don’t approach the birds, or scribble down the real-estate agent’s phone number. This water keeps its own counsel, claiming salt miner, soldier, burnout, pulling them near. Resist the urge to jump. Look past the rust-eaten bus out onto the open desert, marked by signs but no streets, twists of black plastic, a go-cup that skitters and skips in the wind. This is as good a place as any to watch and wait. For a rain of fire to lick up the windrows of salted fish. For a crooner and a band. For a long-forgotten bomb to explode.

  Backstage with John the Beloved Disciple

  James the Less is looking mighty rough. Half of his face might have gotten the worst of a bar fight—creases and bruises around the eye sockets, maroon-blue smears on his right cheek, jawline seamed, neck sore and stippled.

  The makeup artist holds a Styrofoam head in one hand and a dripping brush in the other. She paints James’s right side pretty thick, but because he’ll have his face turned toward Christ, the left stays almost bare. She checks his face against the Styrofoam reference, touches up his shadows. “I’m gonna rob a Chick-fil-A after I leave,” he says. “Police report’ll say, ‘He got away with two number ones and eight dollars.’” Simon, Peter, and Andrew laugh. James is a mess.

  Good Friday a year ago, I found myself sitting in this auditorium with my mouth open, unable to tell which figures were painted and which were real people. I didn’t know anyone still did tableau vivant anymore—I’d only read about it in Victorian-era novels—and I didn’t know it could be done so well. Years ago, tableau vivant used to be an evening’s entertainment, akin to putting on a play, but static. The goal is to come as close in real life as you can to an original piece of art.

  I had to know the trick, so I called the director, who invited me to go backstage before the show. He explained how he sources images from the ceilings of European cathedrals, and showed me the lighting secrets that make a body look flat from a distance. He’s had to cast men as women in order to make the forced perspective work. Think Mary Magdalene washing Christ’s feet with her hair; you just can’t find a woman tall enough. And in the stained-glass tableau, the makeup artists paint eyeballs on the actors’ closed lids lest the whites of their eyes ruin the effect.

  IT’S A SIN TO DO LESS THAN YOUR BEST, says the sign on the wall. Well, I’ve always believed that myself. We’re standing in the sewing department, a sunny room on the theater’s top floor stocked with bolts of gorgeous fabric, spools of brilliant thread, plastic-z
ipped capes and ball gowns and robes from past productions. Potted philodendrons send out green vines along the windowsills.

  The wig-maker demonstrates technique, her graceful hand flicking strands of invisible hair and securing them to the lace’s open weave with a curved needle, a few strands at a time. Nobody knows how to do it the old-fashioned way anymore. Once a woman came from Hollywood to give a workshop on the finer points of wig-making and offered this artist a job on the spot; she didn’t take it, but it’s nice to have options. The sign outside the door says BUT THE VERY HAIRS OF YOUR HEAD ARE ALL NUMBERED.

  In spite of his ghoulish makeup and paint-matted wig, John the Beloved Disciple is a knockout, in an all-American, Bible-Drill-Champion kind of way. The director needed someone tall, the only way to make the perspective work, and he’s six feet three. (The bodysuits are prepared in a downstairs room called the Body Shop, which I can’t visit. Just as well.) But it’s more than that. There’s a sweetness about him; I can tell that he wants to get it right. During the actual tableau, it’s very hard to stand perfectly still, but he lets me in on his secret. “I focus on the emergency exit sign in the back,” he says. He counts the letters, reading them over and over again, trying not to waver.

  I walk around backstage, staring up into the fly space where old sets dangle from chains three stories above. Velcro stripes the current sets where costumes will attach. Here’s a hole cut through plywood where Pilate pushes his shoulder, or where Christ kneels. A block for a footrest, padding for a bended knee.

  Golgotha’s ground is paved with Styrofoam pebbles, beanbag fill. The centurion’s life-sized horse is Styrofoam too, roughed out with a chain saw, carved with a hot wire, and coated with Elmer’s for a smooth finish. But the cross that dominates the scene is made of yellow pine, pressure-treated and kiln-cured. Midway up, Jesus has a bike seat and a woven belt to keep him from falling. It will hold him invisibly, buckled under his robe.

  Showtime. The disciples file out of the greenroom, onto the stage, and take their places: Thaddeus, Peter, John, James, Judas Iscariot. Little hooks screwed to the underside of the table hold watches and eyeglasses. Christ sits in the middle, and though the audience can’t see it, he’s wearing Nikes.

  When the curtain rises, the disciples sway slightly and blink, but they’re as motionless as they can be, until the chorus of the song plays—“In Remembrance of Me.” Then they start to move, their lips forming silent words, silently laughing, silently gesturing. “We don’t animate the Christ figure,” the director whispers to me. And suddenly I realize—how had I missed it?—that it’s Leonardo da Vinci’s famous Last Supper they’re portraying, the one in Milan. As many times as I’ve seen reproductions of it, I hadn’t recognized it here. It’s a gift, to see this familiar painting with fresh eyes, to get a real sense of the sorrowing Christ, unmoving as the rest of the group celebrates. He knows what’s coming; the rest, for now, are just sharing a meal.

  Usually when you look at a work of art you can trust your senses. They are a given, as little investigated as the parquet floor beneath your feet. The painting in the frame is two-dimensional; lean close and you can see the brushstrokes. But tableau vivant obscures the boundary between inside and outside the work. You attend wanting to be tricked, to flirt with your own basically trustworthy (yet fallible!) senses. To push the translation between seeing and understanding what you see. This man seems to be part of the painting, and for a time he can pretend to be, fitting himself to the shoulder-shaped hole cut to hold him. Then the shifting stage lights reveal the truth. When the music ends, he drops his eyes and steps offstage.

  I wait in the wings, staring, with John the Beloved Disciple, at the lighted sign in back that says EMERGENCY EXIT, holding very still and fixing on those black letters as the reality of what’s about to happen dawns on the men and the sky grows dark beyond the window of the upper room. When the curtain drops, they climb down slowly, each one waiting for his brother at the bottom of the stepladder. Ready, should he stumble, to break his fall.

  Something Like the Fire

  NEVADA TEST SITE, 1953

  Put yourself in his shoes: cold, Army-issue, treads packed with sand. Rise before dawn, climb into the truck and bump down the road to the work site, and as the convoy tops the last ridge, narrow your eyes at the rising sun’s brilliant seam. Showtime. Up the ladder you go, sun already warm on your neck, roof shingles softening underfoot, nail heads gleaming silver.

  The day wears on in pounding and shouts as you move down the line, lapping layers tight enough to turn any water, although this roof will never see rain. Down below, masons raise the chimney a row at a time, scraping the excess mortar free. Next to them, painters spray the siding, not bothering to tape the windows. Saltbush shivers on the ridge as you ride back to Base Camp Mercury, day’s work done, clothes heavy with sweat and tar, paint and dirt, tacky with sap from lumber that six months ago was a tree. A world away.

  OPERATION DOORSTEP-SHOT ANNIE, 1953

  See how easy it is to make a family, twins sprawled on the floor, Baby in his high chair, Mother bending near, a spoonful of pear in her shapely hand. J. C. Penney provided mannequins and wardrobe for publicity: rompers for the twins, footed sleeper for Baby, and for Mother, a sensible skirt, button-front blouse, clip earrings. (Father’s at work, offstage.) Just before dawn. The bomb will detonate in a minute’s time.

  See the desert, scraped bare, hash-marked with distances.

  Abandoned tanks wait in arrow formation. Testing instruments nestle in the cold sand. Standing on a little hill, journalists press dark goggles to their faces, to give their hands something to do.

  There must be sound, but it’s been edited out. So all of this unspools in silence, Mother’s face lighting up, bleaching white, catching fire. Then the blast wave punches in the wall, shattering the window and knocking Mother off her stool. There must be the sound of glass splintering, a noise lost in the roaring wind that snuffs the blazing bodies, shreds the curtains, shears the door from its hinges. Then the house collapses in a raw hex of timber. Two seconds all told, the roof blown straight to hell.

  “THE RIVIERA: A NEW HIGH IN THE LAS VEGAS SKY,” 1955

  Sixty-five miles south of the test site, in Las Vegas. The audience waits in the darkness, new chandeliers glowing pink on their dimmest setting. A man unwraps a peppermint, and taffeta rustles as someone crosses her ankles, high heel scrubbing an arc in the floor. But quiet for being so many; the Clover Room seats one thousand, every cough muffled by layers of gray and green, drapes the colors of new money.

  A click as the mike goes live, and a spotlight snaps on. Ladies and gentlemen. Cut left; drumroll. The Riviera is proud to present. And he strides on from the wings, this man in his prime, smile bright as his gleaming jacket. Waving to acknowledge the applause, he seats himself at the piano and flips his coattails free. He starts with something serious—the opening fanfare of Tchaikovsky’s Piano Concerto no. 1, maybe, a few commanding chords—and slides from there into the “Beer Barrel Polka,” sweeping that famous grin over the crowd. Undercut the highbrow, that’s his game, native son of West Allis, Wisconsin. His long fingers trill and flutter, and the piano’s mirrored fallboard makes it look like two sets of hands playing. If he misses a note you can’t hear it for the thicket of others, the melody’s narrow path winding and weaving through the embellishments. (How would he play if nobody was listening?) His brother leads the backing orchestra, parrying the between-song banter. Does he make that stuff up on the spot? The songs unreel, one after the other, and when the audience stands for the final ovation they’re exhausted, stuffed full. Well, we saw it, they say, shuffling out the door. What a show. They don’t know the half of it.

  Operation Doorstep-Shot Annie was one of a hundred or so nuclear weapons that exploded in the sky above Nevada from 1952 until 1962. I’m mesmerized by their names’ blunt cadences: Ranger-Able, Ranger-Baker, Ranger-Easy. Tumbler-Snapper; Greenhouse-Dog. Fox shot rose in three ice-capped steps. Climax made
a narrow stem, a wide-beamed cap, and a batch of skinny tracers. Buster-Jangle-Charlie was a textbook cloud, opening in classic mushroom shape. Upshot-Knothole, in motion: a tidal wave of dust pushing across Frenchman Flat, strewing tires, twisted chassis, and an upended tank in its wake, track lying on the ground like a zipper. (After Operation Hot Rod, the Federal Civil Defense Administration warned citizens not to think of their cars as “rolling foxholes” that would save them.) I watch the old clips, listening as the narrator calls this landscape “the desert,” or the “dusty precursor-forming surface.” Bombs exploded, sometimes once a day, and tourists visited Vegas—the “Up and Atom City”—to watch the shots, as I’ve said. As one observer pointed out, the “visual show” proved to be “very spectacular.”

  I wonder about those tourists. What would she have thought of, she who might have—as I would have—talked her husband into rising early from a rented bed to stand in the cold desert dark, waiting? Did she say, Drive faster; I don’t want to miss it? Or I brought my sunglasses; you wear yours too.

  We don’t have much time. What’s a minute worth? Ten seconds? Counting down, nine, eight, seven. Did she squeeze his hand and think of unbalanced bank statements, piles of stale bedsheets, relics of another age? Moments long past, safe now in the warm light of memory. Nothing like this stark, blinding flash.

  Standing there on the hill, did she gasp, or shout? Did it thrill her, the searing blaze, the weird shadows the greasewood threw, just like she’d seen in the news clips? Rumbling. Wall of dust racing across the flats toward her, howling in her ears and crusting her lips with powder. Her sunglasses hung at her throat; a kerchief covered her hair.

  Afterward she was tired, windburned, sick of the Geiger counter’s staccato clicks. Now everything was tainted: stones, the newspapermen’s laced-up shoes crushing gypsum to powder, cars, cactus, road, bird. Even her husband. Even herself, empty face reflected in the smudged windshield. A sheet of notebook paper jumped across the desert, whirled high on air currents, and caught on a yucca, some forgotten detail or maybe still just a blank sheet, an open mouth with nothing to say.