INTO THE FORBIDDEN ZONE

"The reason that I unalterably oppose nuclear power is so obvious to me that I remain astounded that everybody on earth is not likewise against it: Dangerously radioactive nuclear wastes must be stored and guarded for periods insanely in excess of any civilization's frame of reference." 

—page 21, Into the Forbidden Zone: A Trip Through Hell and High Water in Post-Earthquake Japan by William T. Vollmann.

Read an excerpt from the book HERE.

BLUEPRINTS OF THE AFTERLIFE

I kept seeing a title of a book crop up on Facebook, Twitter feeds, local alternative newsweeklies, the websites of Elliott Bay Books and Powell's City of Books, and various literary blogs and review sites.  The book was Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot.

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One night, I found myself wandering the stacks of Elliott Bay, killing some time until my writing group began, and there it was: Blueprints of the Afterlife, its cream cover adorned with "AFTERLIFE" spelled out in the skyline of New York (Alki) under construction.

(The layout of the cover alone, both inside and out, is attractive and enticing.)

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On the front of the book: the sticker: "Autographed Copy."

And inside: a line drawn through "Ryan Boudinot," a few humps of squiggly ink lines, and a cat body drawn upon the Black Cat imprint logo.

Mr. Boudinot had read from Blueprints the night before, when I was unable to attend.

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The cover was strewn with names dropped and blurbed like nobody's business.  Comparisons are many.  Philip K. Dick (many times over).  China Miéville.  Kurt Vonnegut.  Charlie Kaufman.  Thoman Pynchon.  Neil Gaiman.  Neal Stephenson.  Chuck Palahniuk.  George Saunders.  William S. Burroughs.  Aldous Huxley.  David Foster Wallace.  Haruki Murakami.  J.G. Ballard.

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Other authors they could have name dropped and blurbed, but didn't.  Jeff Noon.  William Gibson.  Paul Di Filippo.  Bruce Sterling.  Rebecca Brown.  Kathy Acker.  Matthew Sharpe.

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Anyway, it looked and sounded like something I would read, so I skimmed a few pages, bought it, and brought it home.

I was instantly snared within its pages once I sat down and began to read.

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Blueprints of the Afterlife is one of those books that really defies comparison.  The authors that Boudinot were compared to speak in their own voices, as does Boudinot.  Even though he may share elements here and there with each of them, his voice is unique, his vision his own.

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"I tried to determine if these sad thoughts were just the results of growing old.  Probably, but that didn't make them any less real.  Maybe I had lost so much myself—my family, my friends—that I couldn't help but project my grief onto the world at large.  It was no longer enough for me to grieve for a lost mother, father, sister, or friend.  Now my grief intended to encompass the planet."

—page 333, Blueprints of the Afterlife by Ryan Boudinot.

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The novel takes place a couple hundred years in the future, after the Age of Fucked Up Shit, or FUS.  Time is measured as pre-FUS and post-FUS.  We get glimpses of the FUS—a marauding malevolent glacier apparently bent on eliminating human life, robot (newman) armies fighting against corporate militias (Boeing, Microsoft, Coca-Cola, and the like) for the control of the United States, hinted-at cataclysms.  The world isn't in good shape, but has been somewhat put back into place, albeit with a lot fewer people.  Some areas have been rebuilt and some areas are abandoned.

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Much of the action of the novel takes place in the Pacific Northwest.  Bainbridge Island figures prominently as it is the site where New York Alki (a to-scale replica of Manhattan) is being built.  Seattle, Portland, Lake Chelan, and Vancouver BC all make cameos.

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To say too much about the story ruins it.  There are plenty of things that go unexplained.  The novel is a labyrinth filled with turns, twists, dead ends.  Its minotaurs are giant floating heads that communicate with some of the characters.

Strangeness abounds.

There are plenty of false starts and stops along the way.  Storylines are sometimes introduced or dropped without warning, although the core stories that emerge feel like the right ones.  In the end, the novel feels as "complete" as it's going to be, which, for me, was alright.

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Blueprints is a hypercube onion, with layers peeled back to reveal other possibilities.

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I feel a bit pummeled and sore (and sad) at the novel's conclusion.  What was it that I just experienced and witnessed?  It was compelling and unlike most other novel's I've ever read.  It reminded me a bit of many of the novels and short stories of Philip K. Dick, but perhaps was a closer cousin to Sesshu Foster's Atomik Aztex or the novels of Jeff Noon (Vurt, Pollen, Automated Alice).

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I highly recommend this novel.  It is not one you will soon forget.

And don't let the list of science fiction authors Boudinot was compared to on the cover of the book scare you away.  This is not your dad's science fiction, and definitely not your grandmother's.  This is a good, solid read that will make you examine your own life, the culture we share, the world we live in, and what we are currently doing to each of them.

NUCLEAR DREAMS

President Bush's Statement on North Korea Nuclear Test
Diplomatic Reception Room

9:58 A.M. EDT

THE PRESIDENT: Last night the government of North Korea proclaimed to the world that it had conducted a nuclear test. We're working to confirm North Korea's claim. Nonetheless, such a claim itself constitutes a threat to international peace and security. The United States condemns this provocative act. Once again North Korea has defied the will of the international community, and the international community will respond.

This was confirmed this morning in conversations I had with leaders of China, and South Korea, Russia, and Japan. We reaffirmed our commitment to a nuclear-free Korean Peninsula, and all of us agreed that the proclaimed actions taken by North Korea are unacceptable and deserve an immediate response by the United Nations Security Council.

The North Korean regime remains one of the world's leading proliferator of missile technology, including transfers to Iran and Syria. The transfer of nuclear weapons or material by North Korea to states or non-state entities would be considered a grave threat to the United States, and we would hold North Korea fully accountable of the consequences of such action.

The United States remains committed to diplomacy, and we will continue to protect ourselves and our interests. I reaffirmed to our allies in the region, including South Korea and Japan, that the United States will meet the full range of our deterrent and security commitments.

Threats will not lead to a brighter future for the North Korean people, nor weaken the resolve of the United States and our allies to achieve the de-nuclearization of the Korean Peninsula. Today's claim by North Korea serves only to raise tensions, while depriving the North Korean people of the increased prosperity and better relations with the world offered by the implementation of the joint statement of the six-party talks. The oppressed and impoverished people of North Korea deserve that brighter future.

Thank you.

END 10:01 A.M. EDT

[from www.whitehouse.gov]

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"The 'real' world has become stranger than a Steve Erickson novel."
—Troy's Work Table, "on THE NIGHTSTAND," Thursday, October 05, 2006

I stand by my previous statement.

I am not the only one who has the dreams. Obviously, so do the people of North Korea. In addition to the populations of China, Great Britain, India, Pakistan, France, the republics of the former Soviet Union, and the United States. You can also be sure that the people of Israel are having the dreams, but they aren't talking. And, the people of Iran may be beginning to dream.

It is interesting how easily "intolerable" can transform into "diplomacy." But dream language is fluid and disjointed. It doesn't have to make sense. We make sense out of it later. We construct sense. We fill in the gaps and holes. We create narrative.

So, let me drift into slumber again. And dream. And dream. And dream...

NUCLEAR DREAMS

I remember 9/11 of 2001 as though it were today. The day is very vivid for me.

It was one of the rare mornings that I was not listening to NPR as I drove to work, which at that time was as a receiving manager for Barnes & Noble. It was an additionally rare morning, in that I didn't turn on NPR as soon as I was in our receiving room. I was unloading pallets in relative silence when someone rang the buzzer for our front doors. It was Diane, one of my coworkers. She was frantic and wild-eyed. She spoke of the two towers of New York City's World Trade Center as having been hit by airplanes and of the collapse of the first tower. I told her that she probably misheard what they were saying on the radio. We both walked rather quickly back to the radio in the receiving room and I turned on KPLU, Tacoma's local NPR station.

The voices of the national commentators were restrained but not calm. There was fear and agitation lurking within their reportage. The second tower collapsed. They recounted it in detail. Soon, another plane crashing into the Pentagon. Then, another plane crashing somewhere in Pennsylvania. Reports of up to ten planes missing from radar. Misinformation. Exaggeration, as though that were even possible after what the world had just witnessed. Flights forced to land at the nearest airports. Airspace shut down over North America. The skies overhead were quiet, eerily quiet, for we were directly under the flight path of many of the flights for both Seatac International Airport and Boeing Field.

The radio was a buzz all day, as was the receiving room. NPR ran all day. Drivers were updating us with the images they had seen of the planes slamming into the towers, of the towers collapsing. Employees were wandering through, talking out their fears and worries. Everyone seemed dazed and numb. I kept waiting for more. More planes, more attacks, a nuclear detonation. I kept waiting for retaliation.

I felt dizzy. I felt sick. I was angry. I was mournful. I prayed. I tried to wrap my mind around the unfathomable, the deranged.

I drove home with my mind in a haze, the sound of NPR reporting as a constant humming in the background.

I didn't see the footage of the attack and its aftermath until I walked in the door. My wife was there with the television repeating the images over and over and over. I remember sitting there for hours afterward, trying desperately to understand, to make some sense of it. It was the most time I had spent continuously watching news coverage since CNN had aired the aerial bombardment of Baghdad in Gulf War I, 1991.

I couldn't dream at the time, although I knew they would come. The flash, the heat wave, the blinding white, the cloud. Fueled by the madness of other men. Fueled by a faith that is no faith, a faith that is without hope.

The dreams roll over me as the wave does in the dreams. All I can see is darkness, the abyss, the Pit. The swirling waters of the Pit. All I can do is cry out with the Psalmist who declares:

Bless the Lord, O my soul, and do not forget his benefits—who forgives all your iniquity, who heals all your diseases, who redeems your life from the Pit, who crowns you with steadfast love and mercy.
—Psalm 103:2-4

But I cannot forget...

NUCLEAR DREAMS

It is clear the dreams are not mine alone.

I do not know who shares them with me. The grocer? The barber? The police officer? The librarian? Perhaps.

I do not know on which side they stand. Vision or nightmare? Friend or foe?

NUCLEAR DREAMS

The evening is quiet. There are no wanderings tonight. Only games with the child. Feeding babies with bottles. Feeding monkeys "mushy-mush." Camping with frogs, turtles, chickens.

I dream of Yucca Mountain National Nuclear Repository. The desert is aflame.

The Woman labors and grunts. The Dream of 1862 is reborn in this wasteland: an iron leviathan, rather than The Child, snakes forth, hauling its poisonous cargo toward the waiting maw of the mountain's tunnel. Leviathan rumbles through Caliente Canyon and Murphy Gap, ever closer to the North Portal. It trundles on rails anchored in boulders prematurely crushed and ground into gravel, clacking along over creosote-soaked timbers.

I hear the ghosts of timber barons singing, chanting. The ghoulish inside traders and venture capitalists of yesterday's tomorrow harmonize. I hear the moans of Nevada as she suffers at court, the judiciary in collusion with the priests of legislature and the executive. We never talk anymore, these places and times erased from our lives. The birds disappear, go silent. We do not notice when their singing ends.

These names are scrawled on City in the desert: Union Pacific Railroad, Central Pacific Railroad, Southern Pacific Railroad, Northern Pacific Railway, Great Northern Railroad. They are the words that make leviathan's entry possible. From Sacramento, Seattle, Topeka, St. Paul, Omaha, New Orleans, Chicago, New York it comes: the food to feed this five-headed hydra, this monstrosity of iron and wood and coal. The food to propel it deep into the heart of the earth.

The earth cries out. I can hear it speaking to me in the middle of the night. Unlike us, it speaks sweetly, succinctly. I listen attentively. I nod off. I awake again. This is fever I tell myself. You do not stir.

The desert is aflame and I am small. I do nothing because it feels right, comfortable. I speak to no one. I know nothing.

I am quiet, compelled to keep to myself.

The Woman cries out from the edge of City. I hear her panting. A monster is being born.

NUCLEAR DREAMS

I dream of the abyss. Not because I want to but because it is there, because it makes itself known. I dream of the abyss because it has loomed over my entire life. I have never known the world without The Bomb, without the power of The Atom. I can hear it singing to me at night through the darkness of the room. It signals me from the nightstand in the neon red glow of the clock radio, the numbers blurred when viewed through bleary eyes.

When I was young, I was certain that the world was going to disappear in mushroom clouds. I lived in a maelstrom of crosshairs: Puget Sound Naval Shipyard, Bangor Submarine Base, Keyport, McChord Air Force Base, Fort Lewis. I had a plan to grab a lawnchair and sit out on the roof of my family's house, put on sunglasses, open a soda, eat some potato chips, and melt away in the wave of fire and heat that I knew was surely coming.

On the Saturday morning that my lung collapsed in spontaneous pneumothorax, in my seventeenth year of life, the radioactive cloud from Chernobyl was heading toward the United States. I assumed that this was the new way to go: when my body was at its weakest, my lungs compromised, that The Cloud would have its way with me. And yet... And yet... I am still here. But that is little consolation.

What of those who have tasted of death from The Elements? I have had the opportunity to read two books that are eyewitness accounts to the very abyss that I have feared. The first, Hiroshima Diary: The Journal of a Japanese Physician: August 6 - September 30, 1945 by Dr. Michihiko Hachiya, is the diary of someone on the ground in Hiroshima the day that the United States, the only country to use a nuclear weapon in warfare, dropped the first atomic bomb. It was extensively quoted in the recent book Shockwave: Countdown to Hiroshima by Steven Walker who nicely balances the countdown to the bombing and its aftermath from the viewpoints of various persons involved in the event. Shockwave only gave glimpses into the horror that Dr. Hachiya experienced though. When I found Hiroshima Diary with the bargain books at Barnes & Noble, I knew that I would have to read it. Not to ambulance chase, but to hear Dr. Hachiya speak to me, calmly, quietly, about his life, his experience, his horror, his nightmare. I have not read the whole thing yet, but am reading it in small portions, and allowing the enormity of the event, of the experience, sink deep into the marrow of my soul.

The second book, a collection of eyewitness accounts of those living in The Zone around Chernobyl, Voices from Chernobyl: The Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster by Svetlana Alexievich, captures the horror of belief and faith in systems that destroy us. Many of the monologues from the victims of Chernobyl express the faith in the Soviet system, the faith in The State, even as it operates in opposition to their personal welfare. I have read the book twice, and am starting a third time, in order to understand why we as humans want to hold such great trust in our ability to control things that are perhaps ultimately beyond our control, things that are perhaps better left in the hands of God. And, as the coup de grace, the author Alexievich, during the three years she spent interviewing victims and officials she put her own life in jeopardy. In fact, she now suffers from an immune disorder most likely "contracted" due to time in The Zone.

And, why should we care? Because these voices are our voices. Or, they could be. Another book that should really be read by a larger audience is Mother Country: Britain, the Welfare State, and Nuclear Pollution by Marilynne Robinson. It examines the blatant disregard that nation-states, in this case Great Britain, have for their citizens, especially those who are poor. You have to read this book to see what the future holds for us if the hints in The New York Times Magazine article "Atomic Balm?" (July 16, 2006 - by Jon Gertner) are indicators of what is coming. Mother Country is a difficult book to find, however. You most likely won't find it as backstock on your local bookstore's shelves. When I special ordered it, it took me three attempts. Barnes & Noble couldn't seem to obtain it both times I tried, but Amazon finally procured a copy for me. And, if you actually live in Britain then good luck. Greenpeace (yes, the environmental group supposedly opposed to nuclear weaponry and nuclear reactors) sued Robinson for slander and won. Therefore, the book cannot be sold in Britain. Greenpeace merely had to show that the book could potentially damage them and slander would be proven, which it was. Robinson definitely does not paint a good picture of Greenpeace, but, hey, when there are funds to raise to keep your organization viable then by any means necessary. Right?

The Bomb is not going to go away. If anything, we should be worried now more than ever. Iran and North Korea are saber rattling as they move ever closer to developing The Bomb; Israel, which may have The Bomb, is running rampant over its neighbor Lebanon and its Palestinian citizens in Gaza and The West Bank; and the United States has considered using tactical nuclear weapons against bunkers in a potential invasion of Iran. It amazes me that the only country to use an atomic weapon in war would even consider it again. Maybe some of the planners need to sit down with some of my suggested summer reading...

So, I dream of the abyss again. I listen to the faint ticking sound of The Elements as they decay in the earth outside the concrete of my basement bedroom's wall. The atomic lullaby brings me ever closer to slumber. Eternal. Final. Forever and ever. Amen.