Chapter 7

Gridboy

4/09/48 First test drop into Sea made by a B-29 aircraft. Unsuccessful.

4/28/48 Second test drop into Sea made by B-29. Detonation successful. Disappearance of approx. 800 thousand cubic feet of sea water.

5/01/48 AEC, AFSWP and Z Division personnel inspect facilities and project status at SSTB.


Sam sat in his office. Every phone call was being sent to voicemail. He knew one of those would Mr. Turing, angry that Sam hadn’t checked in last evening. He’d talk to him, just not right now. He’d loaded the pictures from the previous afternoon onto his PC and was mindlessly clicking through them. Samantha by her panels, the image compressed by the telephoto. He had several of those. She was beautiful. He could see how an insecure man like Turing would be scared to death of her. He could email them but Sam wanted the opportunity to present them in person, providing context, keeping control. He set up a weekly meeting schedule with Turing at Turing’s office. Sam had made up his mind he would not send the bedroom pictures. He flipped through them on the screen, ten in total. Half were too dark, no surprise there. The rest came in loud and clear. He was stunned at her perfect figure. She lay on the bed underneath this unknown guy, her torso long, waist narrow, hips round, cylinders and spheres interacting, overlapping. Each shot was one of desire, desperation, ecstasy, of the moment. It was lovemaking that almost seemed spiritual. They were beautiful. It didn’t seem dirty watching them but more of a sacrilege. He didn’t know if his hesitation was due to knowing his job would be over if he provided Mr. Turing with evidence of his wife cheating or if he was worried that the photos would put her in danger. Of the 50 or so of these fidelity cases he had done over the years there had been no fallout other than divorce, and in seven cases (a statistic that Sam used to justify his work to himself) the marriage had become stronger. Sam saw that the one constant of infidelity was familiarity. No one had cheated on their spouse with a stranger. It was almost always a workmate, a spouse’s bother or sister or the spouse’s best friend. When people fall, they fall into what is known and familiar.

Sam called Mr. Turing at work thinking it would go directly to voicemail. He picked up.

“… We didn’t hear from you and I didn’t see you parked down the street when I came home.”

“I apologize. There was a car crash.”

“Were you hurt?”

“No, I wasn’t involved. I was helping. There were two people killed.”

“Oh – that’s terrible. We can talk later, that sounds awful.”

“I appreciate that. Look, I got sidetracked around 4:30, so there was a period there where I wasn’t following her. I’m pretty sure she was on her way home, though. When did you come home?”

“About 6:00.”

“…So there was maybe 90 minutes when she wasn’t observed.”

“I’m guessing she didn’t get into any trouble during that time,” said Mr. Turning.


Doug had the mist machine on.

Clouds of evaporating mist spewed from the overhang on the back porch. These were all over the Southwest, where the unique conditions of intense heat and no humidity allowed the simple device to cool surrounding air by as much as twenty degrees. One hundred fifteen-degree heat was almost bearable. There was a similarity between Doug’s modest house and the expansive Robert Annenberg estate just 45 minutes up the road in Palm Desert. An aerial photograph of the latter’s Palm Desert compound appearing in one of those “Above California” books, showed a boundless desert abruptly halted by a giant Euclidean-perfect rectangle. If you flew over Doug’s more downscale acre lot you would see the same effect at 1/100th scale.

Doug awoke and found himself on his sofa. He looked at the VCR timer and noticed that it was 2:00. The sunlight blaring into the living room quickly reset his bearings and he realized that he had fallen asleep while watching the Weather Channel. The walls of his house on the edge of the desert were bare, with the exception of an old Joy Division poster from college that he had framed. The band’s depressing music was a soundtrack to the romantic, tortured melancholy of his high school and college years – and when the group’s singer, Ian Curtis, had managed to hang himself on the eve of their first American tour, so much the better. But gloom and doom is the privilege of the young and immortal. By the time Doug had reached his thirties he realized that the world supplied such an abundance of darkness that to attach any romantic notions to it was decadent. Nevertheless, the poster was cool and he wasn’t going to throw it out.

The Weather Channel droned on in the background, the volume level just barely audible, “...the Northeast will be seeing mostly sunshine today with the exception for northernmost New England where there is a good chance for late afternoon thunderstorms...” Doug kept the Weather Channel on in the background continually. The ceaseless weather updates by cheerful announcers provided a comforting abstraction of the real work. There was no pain, disappointment or dread in the universe of the Weather Channel. Sure there were floods, hurricanes, droughts and blizzards – and people were killed – but fatalities were never shown during those video clips, only mentioned “off-camera”. The world was a series of grid lines and isobars on a map. If, as the Buddhists said, “the map is not the territory”, so much the better.

That blue. That blue on the weather map was the same blue that had been dropping in on Doug his entire life. The first time was in the Caribbean when he was twelve. The white sand beneath the water gave the water a backlit, gleaming green-blue, some kind of heaven. It was the familiar Caribbean image that he had seen in brochures and magazines but it took seeing it in-person for the hook to be placed. He could never get that color out of his mind again. Many years later he visited Greece during a college trip during January. His group had arrived to a rare snowstorm. While the bus was traveling along the coast, Doug looked out the window at a beautiful white beach bookended by a rocky cove. It was his crystal blue water again, as lovely as the beaches of Saint Kitts. But it was thirty degrees outside – there was snow accumulating on this beach. Doug’s worldview was shattered; it was like being told by Copernicus that Earth wasn’t the center of the universe. Here was his universal image of warmth incongruously stranded in a snowstorm. Doug wanted the bus to stop; stop so he could run over to that blue water and prove that it was warm and there were coral reefs just a couple hundred yards off-shore.

“... It’s monsoon season again in the Southwest and of course we’ll be watching for thunderstorms in Arizona and New Mexico this afternoon...”

He had spent 10 years in sales and had made some money, turning enough into savings. Now that he quit he would do something interesting. When he had moved out west eight years ago, he bought this house in the dilapidated Salton Sea area to be kitchy and ironic. Now that he was unemployed, the funky house and $400.00 per month mortgage was now more than a lifestyle statement, it was his escape hatch.

Doug was in that mid-day, after-nap daze that’s the closest thing to waking up from anesthesia without going under. Still groggy and disoriented, Doug stared at the TV. The weather map was blue, lines of pressure were yellow and states were outlines in faint white. Arcs of parallels and meridians crisscrossed to make grids; grids that if measured out would be a hundred thousand square miles in area. The flat blue of the landmasses evened out the uneven landforms, uneven lives.

“... The Michelin driving report is coming up next. See if torrential rains along the Florida gulf coast will be affecting your travel plans...”

So now he would wait for the blue, the isobars and the wide, even meridians to wash over him. He could stay inside and wait but it might be more fun to sit out back and watch. The blue would come from the east sweeping over the Chocolate Mountains, down into the sea like the Navy F-14’s that were always flying across the lake. It would zoom up the shore by the ruins of the Salton Bay Yacht Club, then covering Salton Sea Estates. Doug could then run to the front yard to watch the blanket of blue continue towards Borrego Springs and finally to San Diego and the Pacific beyond.

Doug grabbed a beer, shuffled out to the back porch and sat down staring at the mountains across the sea while the hissing of the mist machine’s cloud of vapor fell down around him. A group of maybe ten green balloons blew out of the desert behind him. He watched as they rolled along the ground, then gained a little altitude, five or six feet perhaps, then bounced along the ground again. They rolled through his back yard, bounced against the patio furniture, then gaining speed, racing out of sight along the side of the house.

His job search was half-hearted and hap-hazard. Doug posted his resume on a couple web sites and sat back, waiting for the recruiters to call. Since he was in now in no hurry to go back to what he had been doing, when a recruiter did call Doug was rude and abrupt, putting so many conditions on his job placement that they lost interest. But because his track record at the Tribune had been so successful the recruiter calls kept coming.

Doug didn’t have high hopes for the interview with the guy from High Flight but he needed a diversion. High Flight made CD-ROM’s in the shape of business cards. A company could put an entire multi-media presentation on one of these cards – a sales presentation, an annual report, etc. They were looking for account managers to hawk this product in the Palm Springs area. The recruiter told him that they were only one of a few firms in the country who have equipment to manufacture this product.