An Atomic Romance by Bobbie Ann Mason

Burl. I can’t get my mind around it.”
    “I don’t know about your mama, but I know what you might need,” Burl said. “Colonic irrigation.”
    “I will if you will. End of conversation.”
    “Well, they say it takes the poison out of your system.”
    Burl’s motto was “Happy to be anywhere.” Once, he had joined a troupe of entertainers on a riverboat. But he jumped ship before they reached landfall—he said he got river-sick. He had a license from a mail-order church, the Infinite Love Circle Church, to marry people. Burl himself had never been married. He couldn’t keep a woman interested because of his drinking. So when a woman ditched him, he drank more, or took speed. He attracted women easily enough, but then he mooched dinners off them.
    Burl was dark haired and stocky. He wore his hair long, and he often sported a two-day growth of beard for several consecutive days. Reed wondered how he achieved that—and why. Both Burl and Reed spurned fashion. Reed wouldn’t wear a T-shirt with words on it. Burl did, because so many T-shirts that had ads on them were free.
    When Burl was eleven, his father kidnapped him from his mother—after a custody battle—and took him to Detroit. It was two years before his mother found him, and she kidnapped him back. But his parents worked it out somehow and even got back together briefly after Burl’s mother took a liking to Detroit.
    “What’s going on out there at Atomic World?” Burl asked, sitting in the chair next to Reed. It was early in the day, and he was sober.
    Reed grunted. “I just do my job. I don’t know anything. I’ve got too much else to think about.” In truth, he realized, he was almost glad that his mother’s illness was diverting him from workplace woes. He said, “Julia probably thinks I get about ten rem a day just by going in the door out there.”
    “How are you coming along with string theory?” Burl asked, playfully slapping Reed’s knee. “She’ll probably want to give you a quiz.”
    “I’m studying it. But it’s like a magician’s bag of tricks.”
    “A string bag?” Burl made Reed laugh.
    A few months ago, Julia had challenged Reed to read the sequel to Hawking’s book on time. She said it was easy to browse around in it, and it had pictures. And she gave him a couple of other books on quantum mechanics and string theory.
    “Ever hear of Schrödinger’s cat?” Reed asked. “Schrödinger was one of those quantum mechanics. He said put a cat in a lead box, then drop a capsule of cyanide in the box and seal it up. Now we don’t know if the cat is dead or alive, because we don’t know if the capsule broke, so technically it’s
both
until you open the box and find out which.”
    “Won’t the cat suffocate anyway? Or starve?”
    “You don’t wait that long to open it.”
    “Well, then you might get a whiff of cyanide too.”
    “That’s not the point!” Reed was trying to remember the point. “It’s subatomic stuff—something about how a particle can be in two separate states at once. Or, it’s about how you can’t pin down the subatomic stuff. It’s all indeterminate.”
    “This is the kind of shit Julia’s jerking you around with?”
    “It’s O.K. It keeps me from thinking other thoughts.”
    Burl jumped up and bounded toward the vending machines. Then he turned to Reed. “You know it was scientists meddling with the atom that got you in the trouble you’re in at the plant.”
    “Well, so what can anybody do about that now?”
    “They tampered with Mother Nature!” He sawed one index finger against the other in a “shamey-shamey” gesture.
    Burl found a couple of quarters and pinged them into the soft-drink machine. Reed shook his head no when Burl asked him if he wanted something.
    “You know, I’m sure Julia’s blaming the whole fucking nuclear industry on me,” Reed said. “I kept telling her people have to have jobs.”
    Burl opened his can of cola. He said, “If we don’t get the