"An astronaut could've seen the hunger in my eyes from space"
Lately Dylan and I have been parceling out ways to fill our time: shows we’ve meant to catch up on for years, laundry to do, plants to water, and so on. A few days ago we drove along the Lake Erie Coastal Trail for a while, following the lakeshore for 40 miles to the place where the Perry Nuclear Power Plant sits in the midst of unplanted fields and young forest, exhaling a silent plume of steam from one cooling tower. I’ve never been that close to a nuclear plant before. They are quiet places, still and empty, almost alien in affect and of a scale that is hard to understand, which is saying something in the Midwest. Being near one made me think about Alex Garland’s adaptation of Annihilation, or Sunshine, by Danny Boyle. It made me think about the enormous mass of radioactive silicon dioxide that sits beneath the remains of the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant and has for 34 years. It made me think about the difficulty of creating warning signs for nuclear waste disposal sites that must outlast language as we think of it now. In 1993, the Sandia National Laboratories produced a report about what those signs should say.
This place is a message… and part of a system of messages… pay attention to it!
Sending this message was important to us. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture.
This place is not a place of honor… no highly esteemed deed is commemorated here… nothing valued is here.
What is here was dangerous and repulsive to us. This message is a warning about danger.
The danger is in a particular location… it increases towards a center… the center of danger is here… of a particular size and shape, and below us.
The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours.
The danger is to the body, and it can kill.
The form of the danger is an emanation of energy.
The danger is unleashed only if you substantially disturb this place physically. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
These are the hauntings that we create, the afterimages that will outlive us by centuries. There is a certain genre of fiction that evokes this: “Copenhagen” by Michael Frayn, which I’ve written about before; “A Dark Room,” by Michael Townsend. It is rare to see those ghost stories being written contemporaneously, to see it laid out so simply. We considered ourselves to be a powerful culture. Sending this message was important to us. This place is best shunned and left uninhabited.
I love shunned places and haunted houses, places that feel lonely and abandoned and hurt. It is that edge between the known and the unknowable, the slackline of uncertainty, the sense of feeling your way along in the dark. For years I have loved spomeniks, Yugoslavian monuments of World War II battle sites.
What is the half-life of fear? What places are inherently intelligible now that will be incomprehensible in just ten years? I’ve been wondering what it would be like in twenty years to explain the concept of happy hour, for example, or movie theaters, to a child born in the age of pandemic: “Once upon a time we went and did these things which we now do alone and in private with large groups of other people and in public, because we had been doing that for a long time and learned that it could be enjoyable. We always had the option to do them the way we do now, and it was always as much of a health risk as it is now, but we didn’t care until one day we learned that we were wrong.” The danger is still present, in your time, as it was in ours. No highly esteemed deed is commemorated here.
Today is an anxious one for me. Gov. Mike DeWine (R-OH) is expected to announce when salons will be allowed to reopen, which means I will find out when I have to tell my job that I am not going back.
“We’ll see,” said my coworker who knowingly pals around with rapists. “I know there’s a good amount of states that are already back.” (There are not.)
Anyway. At some point today the governor will either announce a plan to open salons in the near future or defer the question for a later time. I don’t know what will happen next. I think I am very, very sad about the answer, either way. The salon was an important place to me at a time when I needed one very badly, which was how it functioned for most of the people who worked or got their hair cut there. It was a place you could go when you couldn’t hold any other job, whether that was because you were too crazy (as I was) or because you needed hours that worked around childcare or because for whatever reason you simply couldn’t perform the exhausting work of fitting into a corporate environment’s so-called culture. I loved it the way I loved New York, which is to say so much that for a long time I couldn’t imagine being anywhere else — so much that I was willing to compromise almost all of myself in order to be a part of it. That, for me, has something to do with the meaning of love — the willingness to give like that, freely, to someone or something that doesn’t ask it of you. Very Catholic, I know, which is probably from my mother’s side of the family. In any case, love like that is one side of a coin, and the other side is grief, the kind with a half-life longer than most human lifespans, the kind you can feel sometimes in a room that was particularly loved and then closed up, or in a place that once mattered a great deal and is now only an exercise in warning signs, in messages that could be poetry, that reach right down our spines and into the nerves that thrum with memories that are not ours: the inception point of myth.
—R.