from “The Kármán Line”
Daisy Atterbury | The Kármán Line | Rescue Press | October 2024 | 180 Pages
Uranium Yellow
I drive south on I-25, ten miles over the speed limit.
I suck sunflower seeds, salty, sing to the radio—baby your song—until it turns to static. I listen to the static to distract from my own thoughts, until I’d rather remember everything that has ever happened. Roughly five minutes. So now I am thinking about here. Specifically here. I have not lived in-state for ten years. Yet it’s where my body knows home. It is, at least, where belonging was first negotiated in my nervous system.
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge writes, When your experience ardently links to an object or person where you live—husband, tree, stone—you try to hold onto the visibility of this object and its location.
But I wish to evacuate.
My parents moved to Shiprock, NM, when I was less than a year old. I believe they intended to stay for one to two years, but remained for seven. My mother was a doctor for uranium miners. Her patients endured cancers from lifelong exposure to radiation. I believe my parents figured this period contained, like a neat house. The work, outside. Our family inside. Or perhaps they didn’t think, just did—work, run labs, make lists, write scripts. Then call governors, meet with lawyers, talk renumeration. Things, political.
School photo day, my combed blonde hair blobbing visible and unnecessary in the hall. Home, my parents young, limber and brunette, overworked, cooking mashed potatoes. Grief-stricken, my dad’s brother has killed himself.
Do we or are we allowed to refuse coalescing language around those foundational experiences that form our sense of the world? Can we tell a story by other means?
Most uranium deposits are found near the Four Corners, where Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, and Utah touch each other. Uranium mining for nuclear bomb production is this place’s secret story, a deadly legacy, for which the government has only begun to make amends.
It’s an eternally unfulfilled wish, that governments could make amends.
I want to ask, what do colors look like on your Mars. Is your yellow still yellow in the simulation?
Of course it is, you’d say. It’s Earth.
Most people know uranium to be yellow. Its natural color is a dark silvery-gray. When uranium is in a compound with oxygen, it forms a yellow oxide called uranyl peroxide. The peroxide group contributes to the color by causing a shift in the electronic structure of the uranium atom, affecting the way it interacts with light. The yellow of uranyl peroxide is produced through the absorption of certain wavelengths of light by the compound, and the reflection of yellow light. The uranium atom in uranyl peroxide has an oxidation state of +6, meaning it has lost six electrons from its natural state and is now highly reactive.
If you were here, I’d tell you about Demian DinéYazhi´, whose sculpture, my ancestors will not let me forget this, is uranium yellow. Installed at the 2019 Honolulu Biennial, the work is all neon signage, aluminum, and insulated wiring. It illuminates:
EVERY
AMERICAN FLAG
IS A WARNING SIGN [1]
On the radio, a man, I think he calls himself a neurobiologist, says, we are thinking a lot about mindset. The research proves that our relationship to stress determines our physiological response to stress. I zone out for a moment. I will try to love stress, I decide.
I know about a whole history of relations with my body. But I’ve forgotten my body, substituted its telling for some other stories, partial, compelling, alienated, remote. Easier. I admire DinéYazhi´’s artwork and what it does to my body. I note its activation energy (n., chemistry, 1889), the minimum quantity of energy which the reacting species must possess in order to undergo a specified reaction.
The first time I heard the words I didn’t know what they meant.
The hundredth time I heard them, fireworks of mutiny detonated behind my eyelids.
Uranium poisoning.
Last year, in Albuquerque, I’d gone to a dance party to de-stress. A man unknown to anyone got in a fight and had to be escorted out. When he came back with a gun, a butch cook shuffled us through the back door. We were crouching in a scene I thought could appear as cell phone footage. We’re going down, should I text someone? I wanted to text the cook. Later we learned he did not have a gun, but a machete. Later we learned the police had him on the ground outside for hours.
The southwestern US is constructed in layers. These layers are histories of here, of elsewhere, of colonial inheritance—names, dates, stories, treaties, contracts, coordinates, signs. This desert basin, here, or volcano crater, there, exist outside language—yet they’ve become places, narrated by discourses of nation, produced through imaginaries of space.
I notice you look to scale
I notice before we get started
Vocation reduced to labor
stings so often settled time drags
In the night outside script sometimes
the road has no cover
If you’d been in the car at this point, we’d have stopped at the Very Large Array. Contact holds a sway I admit I associate with someone else, but I’d stop anyway, with company. You’ve seen it: a giant field of 27 white radio telescopes, mounted on railroad tracks, all turned toward the sky. [2]
Instead I pull off to Walgreens, listening, in the parking lot, to their classical music aggress. I sit in the car and watch people go in and out. When I enter, everything is behind plastic locks.
I have only read the golden lettering of DinéYazhi´’s sculpture in the blue light of my laptop, but the block of text is alive, not only in the way all matter is alive (What makes us think that matter is lifeless to begin with [3]), but also in the way an electric current passes through and animates neon gas, exciting it into emitting a bright orange light.
Electroluminescence. In Walgreens, Takis Blue Heat look poisonous, but I know blue is the secret best flavor.
Fluorescence. Natural uranium does not glow in the dark, but under certain conditions, it can emit light. When uranium is exposed to UV light, it absorbs the energy and re-emits it as visible light, giving off a bluish glow.
Radioactivity. Uranium glow isn’t radioactivity. The radioactivity is actually the emission of particles from the nucleus of the unstable atom, which can cause damage to cells, DNA, and tissues. This leads to radiation sickness and cancer.
Back on the road, I turn up radio static, ignoring thoughts of damage. I imagine the sculpture’s electric hum and remind myself that the excitation of atoms is a promiscuous material process, a response to energy coming in and stimulating what’s already there. I whir at the thought, remembering why I’ve returned to New Mexico after ten years away.
I still feel the burn of where you touched my gut. I try not to go back to that time in my mind, but memory plays like a movie reel and distorts my sense of the present.
There’s something infantilizing about the life I lead now, bare feet on carpet, beer half drunk in the fridge. I’m here. I live in this town. I’ve left the tag on my shirt. Oh it must be beautiful they say, referring to 36 Hours in ——, or a postcard. Or perhaps they visited in 2004.
I pass a billboard for a personal injury lawyer. I swipe right on a Tinder bio that says, I ain’t good.
•
Where you go today
I’ll see you in your environs
where Did that shop close
I’m craning my damn
I avoid the highway
I read you the way I walk these lanes
here but not here, here But 100 years ago
and I’m reading
100 years ago, here
But there’s so much
history, and this lot
There are ways to be in love
with how blistering hot
how workaday where
I’m reading my stories
and looking for shade
How maddening, the yous standing in for you
At this point I could laser them off
like moles
You’re my benign skin flap
the bit of me I knew was
almost alien
I think I did you
wrong once
What pains
in my approach
is something puts me on trial
Here
I do my best over text
I’ve been here before
I’m in a former seabed, awaiting
the moon’s full funeral rites
I pay bills well into the future
with credit from times of plenty
Someday for Free.99
I’ll be an ash sampler
out Earth orbit sprayed
where the moon is ill and I
have no sense of periodicity
I’ve mourned your passage
and I’ll do it again in fiction
where sleeping dogs
howl at the moon
•
[1] "EVERY AMERICAN FLAG": Demian DinéYazhi´, my ancestors will not let me forget this, 2019. Glass, neon, aluminum frame. 42 x 22 x 23 in, displayed in the Hub at the 2019 Honolulu Biennial
[2] "You've seen it": Michael Hainey, “Postcards from the Astronauts’ Lounge,” Wired, 2016
[3] "What makes us think that matter is lifeless": Karen Barad, 389