People clapped again, even more loudly. I didn’t know if it was the promise of money or the excitement of seeing an explosion or coming face-to-face with the postapocalyptic boogeyman, the nuclear boogeyman on the brink of destruction, but everyone was interested in being a victim.
Chapter Twenty-Seven
Mr. Truitt was setting up the VCR. Movies were the greatest thing to happen to a class since the time we got to play Heads Up, Seven Up when we had a substitute teacher.
“Someone get the lights,” Mr. Truitt said.
“What’s going on, Teach?” Rodney asked, flipping the lights off.
Mr. Truitt didn’t answer. Instead, Rodney pressed play and went to his desk and sat down.
Dr. Doomsday or: How to Start World War III Without Even Trying—a play on the cinematic title Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb[65]—subtitle: History of Atomic Fusion.
Our title: What in the hell have we/they done?
The man’s voice was so robotic, rattling off so many statistics, one after another, and another, and another:
W-53 Titan II Thermonuclear Missile has a blast yield of nine megatons. Has been in service since 1962. It weighs over 8,000 pounds and is at least 600 times more powerful than atomic weapons dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945 at the end of World War II.
There are two types of assaults, that being Surface and Airburst. At the end of either, this is what you might expect in a generalized rural location.
Surface
3,100 dead; 9,460 injured.
Airburst
7,420 dead; 49,690 injured.
It is said that Airbursts don’t produce any appreciable fallout, but ground bursts produce a great deal.
Distance from blast: 5 miles. Fallout will begin in 20 minutes.
Distance from blast: 25 miles. Fallout will begin in 1 hour.
Distance from blast: 100 miles. Fallout will begin in 3 to 5 hours.
Victory to the country that recovers first after a nuclear war. However, the only creatures guaranteed to survive a nuclear war, we are told, are cockroaches. For humankind the problems caused by radiation and the fallout seem insurmountable.
The screen went white, then got brighter, then there was a blast so loud that I thought it was going to knock out the television speakers.
I screamed. I couldn’t help it. A shiver went down my spine, like someone was walking over my grave—as the saying went.
Everyone turned their head. I was having a panic attack. Mr. Truitt rushed toward me. He tried to calm me down. He grabbed my shoulders to keep me from shaking, but I kept struggling in his arms. I couldn’t breathe. I could see my reflection in his silver tie-clip. The look on his face made me just as afraid as he was. My face was bright red and covered in tears. Rodney ran to get the nurse, and she came in just as fast as he’d left with a brown paper bag.
“Laura. Laura. Laura,” the nurse said over and over again, “just breathe.”
Mr. Truitt stopped the tape and turned off the TV. Kevin turned on the lights and we sat quietly. What was there to say? I had nucleomituphobia.[66] Like my teacher in ninth grade told us, “Don’t worry about the possibility of war. If it happens, the school will be a target in the primary strike zone, and our obliteration will be swift, instantaneous, and painless.” He was going through a divorce, and he was fired the next week after many of the parents complained.
Class was pretty much done after that until the bell rang. I kept breathing into my brown paper bag. I saw Mrs. Martin during gym class, where I talked about my feelings. I knew that I could never show my face again in chemistry. I was the girl who got freaked out over a fake nuke; what would I do if there was ever a real thing? A brown paper bag wasn’t going to save me.
I didn’t want to think about what happened in chemistry or Mrs. Martin’s assertion that if I didn’t come to terms with my nucleomituphobia, I would most definitely have a nervous breakdown. So I focused on the comic and how our superheroine looked. Max kept on talking about her boobs. I wanted something different, and it always went back to her breasts. Ugh. Human nature, I guess. Everything about life is about the human body and sex. Bombs are very phallic. War is very homoerotic. I probably shouldn’t be writing this. Future generations will read this and think humans were strange creatures obsessed with sex, but afraid of its destruction just the same. Oh, what complicated creatures we were/are.
Anyway, I couldn’t describe her right, and Max and I were arguing over whether he was going to make her a brunette, a redhead, or a blonde. When Terrence came home and saw us basically at a standstill, he suggested we make her black. “I’m guessing there’s not a lot of black superheroes,” he said.
“Besides Vixen, Monica Rambeau aka Captain Marvel, Nubia—you know, Wonder Woman’s twin—and Storm,” Max said.
“You know your superheroes,” Terrence said.
“I know my superheroes.”
“Don’t forget to add the boobs,” Terrence said.
“See, no matter what she has up here, it’s all about what’s down here,” I said pointing to my head and then to my boobs, for emphasis on my comic character.
“Gross! You’re my stepsister.”
Since Max wasn’t showing me any of his drawings for Big Sister, I decided to take a crack at it.
“What’s her name?” Terrence asked.
“I don’t have one,” I said. “Nothing seems right.”
“Destiny,” said Terrence. “That’s her name.”
I looked at her once again. She was Destiny. She had a destiny. It might have been too on the nose, but who cared. She was our Destiny. (Our goal was to finish our comic and show it to the producers, who had to know someone big in publishing.)
“So Rodney told me what happened in class today,” Terrence said, sitting on the couch next to Max.
“I don’t really want to talk about it,” I said.
“But it happened again,” he said.
Okay, yes, it had happened before. The first time was after gym class—a year ago. We played this game where we started in the middle of the football field and the teacher would blow his whistle and we all would run home, touch our front doors, and run back. If we could do it under fifteen minutes, the school would let us go home if the nukes were coming so we could die with our families. Kids ran around Griffin Flat, dodging traffic in the streets. If you couldn’t, you’d stay put in the fallout shelter in the basement. The second time was in English when we were reading about Orson Welles’s biggest practical joke ever, The War of the Worlds.[67] During Halloween week, we listened to the radio broadcast, and I started having a panic attack in class. Mrs. Barnes had to stop the tape. Can you imagine thinking it was real when it wasn’t, and freaking out that of all the ways the world could end—this was it, aliens?
65
A political satire black comedy that premiered January 29, 1964, directed by Stanley Kubrick and starring Peter Sellers in three roles. Also starring Sterling Hayden, Keenan Wynn, Slim Pickens, and Darth Vader himself, James Earl Jones.
66
Nucleomituphobia: the fear of nuclear weapons. Some people with this fear believe they will die because of a nuclear weapon. Also called nucleomitaphobia or nucleomitophobia. Associated words: fallout, radiation, thermonuclear warfare. Causes: external events and internal predispositions. Symptoms typically include extreme anxiety, dread, the fear of going outside and standing under the bomb, which would result in turning into a skeletonized version of a fleshless body, and of course anything associated with panic, such as shortness of breath, rapid breathing, irregular heartbeat, sweating, excessive sweating, nausea, dry mouth, inability to articulate words or sentences, and shaking. There is no cure.
67
An adaptation of H. G. Wells’s novel,