Count Geiger's Blues Read online

  Over the day, it became clear that an accident had occurred at Plant VanMeter. At a news conference telecast live at 6:30 P.M., officials of Consolidated Tri-State admitted it, but said operator error had had nothing to do with the release of an “acceptable level” of radionuclides from Reactor No. 4. The failure had been a relief valve’s in the core-cooling system, but neither negligence nor faulty maintenance had led to the accident.

  Well, what had? everyone demanded.

  The engineer who’d supervised the construction of the reactors explained that the valve in question—yes, the physical valve—had given way of its own accord, cracking in spite of its alleged invulnerability to such behavior, because some cases of metal fatigue were altogether unpredictable. This explanation made no one happy, least of all the Urbanite’s Metro/State reporters.

  The next several questions snapped off at the Con-Tri representatives bristled with scorn. “How much radiation was vented?”

  Not much. About four curies, about a quarter of that released at Three Mile Island. And everyone should note that in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster about fifty megacuries of radionuclides as pernicious as cesium 137 and iodine 131 had escaped. By that standard, Plant VanMeter’s “event” was a triviality—hardly a reason to evacuate the surrounding areas or to demand the total closure of the facility.

  “What’s the operational state of Reactor Number Four right now?”

  Plant operators were working steadily to achieve cold shutdown, a “scram” state they would effect within the next few hours. Decontamination procedures and repair work would then begin.

  Because of design modifications effected as a result of the Three Mile Island accident, the reactor would likely return to full operational capacity in six months—nothing like the seven years necessary to put the damaged reactor at the Susquehanna facility back on line. It would cost, and cost quite a lot, but Con-Tri, accepting full responsibility for the gremlinish valve failure, would bear this expense without a rate increase. Members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission were being kept abreast of developments, as were members of the Institute of Nuclear Power Operations, and the President would visit the plant to show there was no real danger now and never had been.

  “We’ve come a long way handling breakdowns resulting neither from negligence nor operator error,” said Plant VanMeter’s spokesman. “The public should applaud the speed with which we detected it, and with which we’re remedying it.”

  “Any breakdown is unacceptable!” a reporter said.

  “Hey,” said another, “how can the public applaud the idea that some breakdowns are random? That we can’t prevent them? That we’ve got to cope with this unpreventable crap after it’s happened?”

  “That’s not what we’re saying, only that omniscience in any complex mechanical-technological enterprise isn’t to be had. We’re not gods.”

  “Then what gives Con-Tri the right to play God with us and our children’s lives?”

  Another correspondent said, “Letting a kid juggle marshmallows is one thing, giving him a boxful of live grenades is another.”

  “The public can take confidence,” the sweating spokesman said, “from the fact we don’t claim infallibility. If we did, we wouldn’t be as vigilant as we are.”

  “Look,” said the engineer, “every important human activity has risks. You can sit in a padded room doing nothing, or you can go climb a mountain. You may fall into an abyss, or you may gut it on out to the summit and find out how big the world is. But you won’t end up with upholstery sores on your fanny.”

  “Hear, hear,” a reporter said sarcastically.

  After the news conference, Ivie Nakai buttonholed Xavier in the corridor. “You were up there. Placer Creek’s only fifteen miles from Plant VanMeter. Can you point to anything that might’ve tipped you off to the accident?”

  “No.”

  “You didn’t see or hear anything?”

  “Are you bucking for an investigative reporter’s job?”

  “No, sir. It’s just hard for me to be blasé about anything nuclear. I had family at Nagasaki.”

  “Okay. I understand. But the accident took place yesterday morning. At least, the recognition of the problem occurred then, and by that time I was on my way home. I couldn’t have had a clue to what was going on over there because even the folks at Con-Tri didn’t know what was happening yet.”

  Xavier rode EleRail home. He was convinced that his adventure above the power station, his near-capture by a security guard while spying on those antlike workers and that circling helicopter, had taken place only in a dream. A vivid dream (he could still see the urinous sheen enveloping the facility and the huge termite cones of the cooling towers), but still a dream.

  After all, Consolidated Tri-State wasn’t playing cover-up; they had released all the facts at their disposal. Now, the President would visit the plant to reassure the nation that nuclear power was still the safest, most economical, most practical sort of energy generation available to the American people.

  This visit duly took place. Plant VanMeter remained open, and Reactor No. 4, which achieved cold shutdown as predicted and stayed off line for 167 days for decontamination procedures and repairs, was brought back to full operational capacity at the end of December. Radiation studies authorized by the NRC and INPO found that only five curies of radiation had escaped into the atmosphere—only slightly more than the figure acknowledged by Con-Tri. The accident wasn’t a “disaster.” A real disaster would have been to shut down the facility, depriving three progressive Southern states of a safe, cost-effective source of electrical power.

  Xavier agreed with these conclusions. By September’s end, he had ceased to think about his . . . dream.

  It was opera season. Salonika’s young but accomplished company had scheduled works by Bizet, Handel, Verdi, and Wagner. Because Ivie Nakai had spent her summer covering hoary farces and musicals, Xavier told her that she and Donel could divide the opera openings between them. This was his way of apologizing for shutting her out of the Shaw festival.

  “Hot damn!” Ivie cried, banging her fist on the desktop. “Hot damn!”

  5

  Bari Carlisle

  That same September, Xavier met Bari Carlisle. He met her on one of the polished hardwood ramps curving about the skylighted atrium of the Upshaw Museum. Today, this ramp was housing a traveling exhibit of African masks, statuary, and carvings, and Bari stood there on it with two photographers and three long-legged models. The models resembled Giacomettian parodies of human females. None of these women, to Xavier’s eye, was as beautiful as their boss, Bari Carlisle, a young fashion designer whose line had won acclaim not merely in the U.S., but also in London, Milan, Tokyo, and Paris.

  Bari’s of Salonika was her logo, and Xavier approved on practical as well as aesthetic grounds almost every garment bearing this eponym. The women modeling Bari’s creations might resemble shaved giraffes, but the clothes were bright, functional, even elegant. Her cleanly made sportswear would not have been out of place at a formal dinner or a chic society soirée, for she knew how to make sailcloth look like acetate and denim like satin—or, at least, to drape a woman’s body so strikingly that even “common” fabrics acquired a classy sheen.

  In the Upshaw, Bari recognized Xavier because his photo ran in the Urbanite beside his column, “Thus Saith Xavier Thaxton,” and Xavier recognized Bari not only because she was such a high-profile figure in Salonika but because he’d once attended a fashion show in her atelier, a remodeled textile mill on the Chattahoochee. Today, she was directing her models and photographers, working to assemble a catalogue of her fall-winter line for a Dallas retail house. Xavier, meanwhile, was studying the Senegambian artifacts for his next column.

  “You can’t be here now,” Bari told him as he ambled by.

  “Pardon?”

  “I was told I’d have sole access to this exhibit from four o’clock until closing.”

  “I was told, a month ago, I’d
have sole access on the afternoon of,” consulting his watch, “yes, fourteen September.”

  “That’s today. Clearly a scheduling error. Why don’t you go downstairs and have them make you another appointment, Mr. Thaxton?”

  “Sorry, Ms. Carlisle, but I have a deadline.”

  “And I’ve got models and photogs to pay. Even here in the gracious old state of Oconee, they don’t come cheap.”

  Xavier knew that Bari’s investment in the matter was indeed greater than his own. “All right. I’ll withdraw my claim. But I’d like to set two conditions.”

  “And they would be . . .?”

  “First, let me watch the shoot. I want to see what Salonika’s finest couturière has been doing lately.”

  Bari said neither yes nor nyet. She wanted Xavier to state his second condition.

  He obliged: “Second, let me take you to dinner when you’ve finished here.”

  After a brief hesitation, Bari agreed. Xavier was surprised. His photo appeared in the paper a few times each month, but he didn’t make the money in a year that Bari’s of Salonika took in every fortnight (if not every day); and he was such a minor celeb that it embarrassed him—made him feel like an imposter—if anyone approached him to thank him for a column or to request an autograph. But Bari was willing to go to dinner with him. Did she know what she was doing?

  Well, she had agreed, and although the shoot required five hours and dozens of costume changes, she said goodbye to her models and left the Upshaw with him at 9:17 P.M. After a twenty-minute wait, they got a table at Lesegne’s and dined on blackened pompano with a bottle of Meursault white burgundy. They made each other laugh, enjoyed each other’s talk, and rubbed noses good-night on an ornate little drawbridge in front of Bari’s red-brick atelier, set in a remodeled rivershore neighborhood thick with elms, sycamores, and willows.

  This could be the start of something big, Xavier thought in the taxi on his way home, humming and snapping his fingers.

  It was the start of something big, this sporadic romance. Its sporadicity resulted not from their lukewarm feelings about each other, but from Bari’s work, which took her out of Salonika at least once a month. She knew several famous designers, including Kawakubo in Tokyo and Alaïa in Paris, and to sell to her retailers abroad and to renew contacts with her mentor-peers, she had to fly off to see them.

  Everyone in the industry advised Bari to leave Salonika, to set up a studio in New York, London, or Paris; but one of her goals—as quixotic as it seemed, even to Xavier—was to turn her city into a respected international capital of fashion. This goal made Bari seem to him not merely an intelligent woman but a soul mate, for just as he hoped to elevate the tastes of the masses, she hoped to show the sachems of haute couture that a city in the southeastern state of Oconee could waltz, gracefully, with the elite.

  Chances to date Bari sometimes arose, and these dates kept Xavier from regarding their relationship as doomed. For example, after attending a performance of Twilight of the Gods by Salonika’s Rivershore Opera Works (Donel Lassiter praised the orchestra; Ivie Nakai criticized the singers’ acting), he and Bari had a martini together and took a cab to her studio.

  Inside, he found that the old mill housed not only a big second-story work area, but also quarters downstairs for seven of her firm’s twenty employees. The other thirteen men and women had their own homes or apartments. Bari lived in the loft and slept on a mattress under a drafting table. She’d learned this time-saving procedure from the Tunisian, Alaïa, who had also told her to secure her workers’ loyalty by showing concern for their welfare, eating with them, and taking every available chance to talk to them. As a result, she had a kitchen on the studio floor, and she and her hires prepared a communal meal at noonday: a monstrous chef’s salad, three or four baked chickens, or a host of cucumber-and-pâté sandwiches.

  Xavier admired this setup on one level, but found that having seven workers on the premises at all hours sabotaged not only his peace of mind but also his libido. So he often tried to persuade Bari to come to his place. When she did, they enjoyed themselves in every way that two people can. He appreciated her body, the breadth of her learning, the near-flawlessness of her tastes. And, knowing so little about haute couture, he asked her to teach him about it. Bari declined. He hadn’t had to tutor her in the rudiments of contemporary art, music, and literature—so if he wanted to learn about her profession, he could burn the midnight oil. After-hours shoptalk was not Bari’s idea of a stimulating evening. Xavier was her sole refuge from fashion, and she didn’t want to give it up by conducting an off-duty tutorial.

  Getting each other as they did, they became a couple, and Xavier accommodated himself to her hours, her flights away from Salonika, and the fact that she was far better known locally than he, no matter how often his picture appeared in the Urbanite.

  Still, he was delighted to make these adjustments, for he had fallen, chapeau over cordovans, in love.

  6

  For Love Designed

  A couple of things did bother Xavier about Bari. Minor things, sure, but he had to work to keep them in perspective.

  First, Bari’s daily habit of recording a dreckish soap opera called For Love Designed and watching it every evening on her outsized TV before crawling under her drafting table and going to sleep. Once, she used the master remote to turn on the VCR just as Xavier was about to kiss her goodnight. He stood there bemused, until she pulled him down into a pile of pillows and made him watch the program with her.

  The soap opera, as he soon learned, dealt with two sisters who at birth had been Siamese twins joined at the spine. Fortunately, their father, the head of a multinational corporation, had been able to hire a renowned French surgeon to separate them. The girls then had relatively normal childhoods, growing up beautiful and much desired.

  Because the sisters had been nonidentical Siamese twins, one was dark and one fair—each with a personality and a character metaphorically at odds with her coloring. In short, the fair sister hated the dark sister, while the dark sister struggled daily to keep from hating the fair one. After going to private schools in Switzerland, the twins began careers as fashion designers. Competition between them accelerated, not only in their work but also in their romances.

  And so the title, For Love Designed, which also had something sinister to do with the operations performed upon the sisters as infants. In the episode he watched with Bari, the French surgeon had just reappeared in their lives, a Byronic figure of mystery and menace. . . .

  “This stinks,” Xavier said. “Bari, it’s so bad it makes my teeth hurt.”

  “Well, for the past fifteen minutes, you’ve been grinding them.”

  “I’m not kidding, Bari. Why waste good tape to preserve it?”

  “It’s so bad it’s amusing.”

  “It’s so bad it’s abominable.”

  “I do this to wind down. Do you think I’m an airhead for watching a soap opera?”

  Xavier said nothing, having already shown his hand.

  “You’re always tossing Nietzschean sayings at me. Let me turn the tables. Who said ‘The more complex the mind, the greater its need for simple play’?”

  “Oscar Wilde. But that isn’t simple play, it’s a schlocky crime against humanity. As with currency, bad drives out good. By watching such shameless crapola, you’re an accomplice to the debasement of taste. You, of all people.”

  Bari began to laugh.

  “This isn’t funny. It’s a matter of real consequence.”

  “ ‘A reviewer who expresses rage and loathing’ for a work of the imagination,” Bari quoted and paraphrased, “ ‘is like a person who has put on full armor and attacked a hot fudge sundae or a banana split.’ Kurt Vonnegut.”

  Xavier waved an arm at the soap opera. “That isn’t a work of the imagination, Bari. It’s the vapid dramaturgical excreta of a script-writing committee.”

  Bari patted Xavier’s knee. “Why don’t you go home and let me finish debasing th
e American taste by myself?”

  Xavier did, aware that he’d behaved like an asshole, but still convinced that For Love Designed stank. It deserved permanent encasement in an iron cassette cartridge and immediate deep-sixing in the Chattahoochee. Why would Bari “wind down” with such stuff? Why not a flute concerto by Bach or an essay chapter from Tom Jones or Moby-Dick? Resorting to a soap opera evidenced a lack of seriousness about life’s earnestness or possibly a submerged lack of respect for oneself.

  Even if Bari was the most poised and self-reliant woman he’d ever met.

  Xavier put Bach’s “Sheep May Safely Graze” on his stereo. Such beautifully soothing music. But only a few seconds later he had a humdinger migraine. He resisted taking an aspirin, but, as the music unraveled, the pain intensified. Xavier staggered to the bathroom, fumbled at the cotton in the neck of an aspirin bottle. His face, there in the medicine-cabinet mirror, bore an odd resemblance to that of the actor who played the French surgeon in For Love Designed. His mind prowled back over the lurid episode he’d watched with Bari.

  Lord! He was dwelling on a stupid soap opera.

  Disgusted with himself, he dug at the stubborn plug of cotton, knowing that he would go quietly berserk if he didn’t take an aspirin soon. But, remembering a melodramatic scene in which the fair sister had confronted the dark sister in a swank restaurant, he realized that his headache was gone. He felt fine. There was no need to take an aspirin. None. He stuffed the cotton plug back into the bottle and returned to the living room. “Sheep May Safely Graze” had concluded. Xavier put on another CD, this one a Pergolesi composition. Less than a minute into it, his headache came raging back, worse than before. Xavier removed the CD, struggled back to the medicine cabinet, popped an aspirin, and waited for it to do its stuff.