Books have been used by many, consciously or not, as a form of therapeutic relief. I plunged into them as desperately as I usually seek my morning coffee. Each Christmas, I have a habit of returning to old favourites that complement the mood, such as Jane Eyre. Sometimes, to seek refuge from the bitter cold, I run back to the heat that I am used to, so will read a lot of books set in Africa. Whenever the cold becomes too much to bear, I reach for Titsi Dandaremga’s Nervous Conditions. One character in the book, Nyasha, embodies the mental disparity of girls who have grown up balancing cultures, the archetypal diasporic woman caught between her cultural customs and western ideals.
Before his death, Chad filed a claim for federal benefits, joining more than 1,400 people who said they became sick from radiation exposure for work done within the last 20 years at the lab, according to data obtained by the Santa Fe New Mexican under the Freedom of Information Act. An additional 335 dead workers also had claims filed on their behalf.
Angela would later discover that Chad’s personnel file contained little mention of the radiation exposures and no record of the safety scares her husband had told her about over the years.
Now, in the church, she listened to the country music playing softly and to the minister in prayer. After his treatments, Chad would laugh and tell his friends, “I get more radiation sitting in my office at Los Alamos.” Even when he was suffering and in pain, he would smile and say he was living the dream.
Looking at his closed coffin, Angela wished she could go back 18 years and tell him to find a different job, far from laboratories and nuclear weapons.
When I was a little girl, my parents told me that crying, while not necessarily for the weak, is most definitely for the categorically dramatic. Tears, they informed me, should be private. If you really had to cry, for God’s sake, take it to the bathroom and make sure that when you returned, you didn’t look like a heap of histrionics.
For me, this required mastering geometry and gravity. Geometrically speaking, I would clean my tears with the sharpest triangular point of a neatly folded tissue. The slightest daub of pressure would quickly remove any inkling of human emotion. Because tears, like all else on this damned earth, follow the law of gravitational force, it’s impossible to make them run upward—which meant standing very still, head thrown back as if possessed, unblinking, making sure the tears retreated into my ducts.
So you can imagine my conundrum when, after days of consecutive defeats, I needed to bawl, in the open, on a New York subway train.
Morgan is very good at the mild, pleasurable alienation of unexplained but workable-out vocabulary items: “immies” are VR entertainments; a very powerful gun, of the sort Veil used to wield against troublesome ship mutineers, is a “deck broom”.
Most of all, Tak Veil’s first-person narration is addictive and deceptively highly wrought: it’s casual and coarse, as befits a former mercenary, yet highly imagistic and sensuously attuned. He’s the hero who has seen it all before and didn’t much like it the first time round: in his jaded refrain of “So forth” there is an echo of Kurt Vonnegut’s “So it goes” in Slaughterhouse-Five. Same shit, different planet. By the end, rather unkindly, you hope he gets sucked back into it in a sequel.