The World Is on Fire. Joni Tevis
redwood painted over to look like birch, and you’ll see she was doing what an artist does—leaving her mark and seeing what happened; working through an idea via metal, wood, and space; expanding the notion of what life is all about.
After we left the Winchester House, we stopped at an Army Navy store and bought a duffel bag to replace the battered coffee-pot box for the trip home—a step in the right direction. But long after I dragged the duffel through the door of our new place and started unpacking, I couldn’t let Sarah go. Dangerous, maybe, to take a big trip like that, when you’re between stages of your life, looking for work, unsure of who you are. I kept coming back to a postcard we bought in the Winchester House gift shop, a reproduction of the one extant photo of Sarah. She’s seated in a carriage behind a driver, and even though she’s at some distance, there’s a smile on her small, expressive face. She looks content, someone with work that needs doing. In that moment, she’s far away from the morning she buried her child, farther still from her husband’s rattling sickbed, and just like that she passes through the one safe exit into the realm where time shunts away and hours, days, thirty-eight years pass and she follows the unspooling line of her thought to its ragged end and looks up to see the marks she’s made. Floor, ceiling, wall; this covers me; this crowns me; this pushes me forward. Self-help is the best help: perhaps she believed it. But Sarah’s story ends not with a tidy moral but a dashed-off map. The movers, at least, would find that useful.
She could have filled scores of rooms with visitors. But in the end, the memory of her lost ones was enough for her. We are the crowd she never invited. (What are all these people doing in my house?) Now every day is filled with the tread of feet, the whisper of hands sliding along her banisters, the hum of conversations she can’t quite make out.
We signed a year’s lease on a brick cottage outside Apex. I spent my days running among libraries: an elegant domed one with a smooth marble floor, barrister’s tables, and an echo; the main one, eight stories and two sub-basements crammed with no-nonsense metal shelves; the zoology one, where I read Fabre in a cozy little carrel; the geology one, with maps of historic earthquake activity and potted succulents growing in deep-silled windows. I read an article about scientists feeding LSD to spiders to see how it affected their webs. I read that earthquakes leave coded messages in the earth around them, and that San Francisco politicians tried to deny the 1906 quake after it happened. That an old Roman myth tells of a gown made of moonbeams, and of the pages, with eyes sore and bloodshot, who carried it to Hera. That barbed wire used to be called “the devil’s rope,” and that you can tell the construction date of a house by the nails that bind it together.
At the time, it didn’t occur to me that I was obsessing over the details of someone else’s house even as I craved a place of my own. When our year’s lease was up, we moved to yet another state, where we’ve been ever since. Now we live in a tidy little bungalow with green shutters and a tight roof we paid for ourselves, with gleanings from those steady jobs we scoured the country to find. From this place of greater stability I see the Winchester House in another light: maybe an art installation, as I initially believed, or maybe just something to fill Sarah’s time.
Still, nights when I can’t sleep, I walk the halls of a darkened library, a place Sarah bequeathed to me. Her ramshackle house provided me plenty of work, paragraphs to draft and revise again and again, dry little suns to gnaw on, morsels sweet and tough by turns. Even now, telling these secrets, slick pages whisper beneath my fingertips and I smell marvelous old dust and glue. I breathe in air that carries with it words tucked between heavy covers, tales spelled out one letter at a time.
Remove this sheet and keep it with you until you’ve memorized it.
SURVIVAL UNDER ATOMIC ATTACK,
OFFICE OF CIVIL DEFENSE, 1950
Buddy Holly, View-Master, and the A-Bomb
OK. So then when you get sent out to the test site, first of all I’m curious what your impressions of that were, because you are now in the middle of a desert compared to a—
It’s damn cold.
Yes, the desert’s cold in the winter.
In February, it’s damn cold.
First impression: cold.
And it’s dry, except when it rains.
—Robert Martin Campbell Jr.,
atomic veteran (Navy), describing his initial
impression of the Nevada Proving Grounds, 1952
Click through the images, one at a time. VIEW-MASTER ATOMIC TESTS IN 3-D: YOU ARE THERE! reads the package. The set’s reels show the preparations for the 1955 Apple-2 shot, its detonation, and the Nevada Test Site today. Three reels, seven images each.
Of the hundreds of atomic devices exploded at the Nevada Test Site from 1951 until 1992, the ones that stand out are those featuring Doom Town, a row of houses, businesses, and utility poles. It makes sense: the flash, the wall of dust, and the burning yuccas are impressive on their own, but without something familiar in the frame, the explosion can seem abstract. Doom Town—also called Survival City, or Terror Town—makes the bomb anything but theoretical. These are the images I can’t forget.
Click. Here’s Doom Town’s iconic two-story house, a classic Colonial with shuttered windows balancing a front door. Neat and tidy, with white-painted siding and a sturdy red-brick chimney: if this were your house, you’d probably feel pretty good about yourself. But something’s wrong. The vehicle parked in the drive isn’t a Dodge or a Packard but an Army jeep; on the chimney’s edge, a bloom of spray paint shows the siding was painted in a hurry. This is a house nobody will ever live in. Its only inhabitants are mannequins with eyes like apple seeds.
All part of the plan, and the planning took far longer than the event itself. A crew unloaded telephone poles, jockeyed them upright, and drilled them into the alluvium. Down in Vegas, men bargained for cars and stood in line for sets of keys. Imagine the hitch and roar of a ’46 Ford, ’51 Hudson, ’48 Buick, and ’47 Olds as they pull onto the highway, headed for the proving grounds. Click. Here’s one of the cars now, a pale-blue ’49 Cadillac with 46 painted on its trunk in numbers two feet tall, marked like an entrant in a demolition derby.
You could say the whole country pitches in. Fenders pressed from Bethlehem steel, lumber skidded out of south Georgia piney woods, glass insulators molded in West Virginia, slacks loomed and pieced and serged in Carolina mills. And mannequins made in Long Island, crated and stacked and loaded onto railcars.
Click. In an upstairs bedroom, a soldier tucks a mannequin woman into a narrow bed, the mattress’s navy ticking visible beneath the white sheet. Outside the open window, the white blare of the desert at noon. Downstairs, another soldier arranges a family, seating adults around a table and positioning children on the floor, checking the dog tags around each of their necks.
What’s a plan but a story, set not in the past but the future? Someone in the Civil Defense Administration already decided how many mannequins this house will hold, what they’ll wear, whether they’ll sit or stand. But surely this soldier can allow himself the freedom to choose, say, which game the children on the floor will play. For Brother and Little Sister, how about jacks? A good indoor game. And Big Sister, let’s set her off from the rest, next to her portable record player, its cord lying on the floor like a limp snake. Father leans toward the television, one hand on his knee and the other on the pipe resting in the hole drilled in his lip. The