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Gathering Evidence

Carcanet Press Ltd

    Avalanche

    When the avalanche came down on us

    it did not come down on us in a holy light,
    flickering between this dimension and another

    ultraviolet one. It did not shower its sermon upon us
    in meaning-ful, vowel-less sounds like stalactites.
    It did not come down on us at all. It came up, up, over

    and around us; all around us in a pall. It met our bodies
    in a hail, hail, hail, not a wall but heavier than water
    if we were sitting at the bottom of the sea. We heard it crack
    and sizzle on the ground. It filled the valley like a steam engine;

    its clotted vapour urging forward to some terminus beyond us.
    We watched it soar and could not inhale enough air between
    the screams. Our lungs made fists. I thought of lips freezing shut
    once and for all, the uncommon cold, no human fingers to close
    the lids nor chance of rescuing the bodies, stiff as candy canes

    striped red, white, red, white, grey. Your hands were fifty feet away,
    your mind another hundred. My cries could not contend with this parade
    of physics. You were wordless, as if the snow were slow motion surf
    or a weir devouring its atmosphere. Was it fluid dynamics, glaciology
    or meteorology you surveyed? There was something of the shock
    wave about it, no doubt about that. The space between us

    prolonged. I should never have collapsed in love with a physicist.
    I saw the fort my brother built from bales of hay, whose tunnel
    should never have been trusted. Oh, to make a hay citadel!
    'When the fields are white with daisies,' my father would have said.
    The ice wave rose and darkness fell. I doubted how well my elbows
    would act as pick-axes, if it were to be a catacomb. I had once been told
    that knowing which way is up is key: that the whiteness is homogeneous;
    that people dig madly, burying themselves in the immortal white. I panicked:
    would he have a better chance than I, with his gall; his practicality?
    No, the snow was nothing like confetti. It would not applaud any small boys
    or any small girls, no matter how insolent. We braced ourselves, finally.
    Later, you described the form of a loose snow avalanche as a teardrop;
    born of some great disparity between the tensile gift of snow layers
    and their compressive heft. The angle of repose was soft, you allowed,
    as we stood in the catchment area, making observations and vowel sounds.

    Gathering Evidence

    He would have been a fan of Newton, the householder
    who guzzled his millet gruel and malt beer one bitter
    morning in Wales and ran outside to capture hailstones.

    'An extraordinary Shower of Hail,' he recorded, 'broke down
    the stalks of all the beans and wheat ... and ruined as much glass
    at Major Hansbury's House as cost 4 pounds the repairing.'

    'Some of the Hail were 8 inches about; as to their Figure,
    very irregular and unconstant, several of the Hail-stones being
    compounded, as the Major judged, who saw them.'

    He wore nothing more than rhinegrave breeches
    gathered at the knee, garterless stockings, vestless
    but for a ruffled shirt – slashed sleeves furled, meaning business.

    Gravity had been newly named, so he willed himself to see
    the hail as being drawn, not thrown forcefully from the Heavens.
    The orbs burst on the ground like meteors or fleshy white melons.

    To measure their diameter before they dissolve is to grasp
    the hard idea before the thawing thought, he held. If he could secure
    a hailstone in a wheelbarrow, with solid algebra, he could square a circle.

    To square a circle! He might as well have measured the Garden
    of Eden if he could master this binomial expansion. He handled
    the pellets like enormous diamonds: what could they reveal? The world

    was so full of revelation in those days. One could drop a needle
    in a haystack and pinpoint the magnetic field. One could begin a conversation.
    He looked at the frozen rain and saw concentric rings as in an axed tree;

    he swallowed one like a lozenge, half-hoping a golden band would be left
    on his tongue, half-not. His wife pleaded him in to safety. He was ecstatic.
    He bellowed how the stones had wed through their seven-mile drop.

    What did that mean? His evidence was dissolving; the ghoulish green sky,
    lightening. He had not been stunned. He had felt the world upon him,
    but the welts it left would not be proof enough. As the Major judged,

    if the fellow could only have captured a skyful, he could have squared it.
    The esteemed witness was vital. Else, all he would have been
    left with was a wife who would not nurse his fever, and indefinite vital signs.

    The Transit of Venus

    They will lift their pencils and angle them like life drawers,
    sizing up Venus against Sol with abstract sums, stiff deductions.

    They may see the lead and sniff at how far we have arisen.
    They may see and sigh at the recursion. A sun is a sun is a sun.

    The telescope is a spyglass into the future, into the slip of the past;
    filtering out strata – the lustre that would insult the vitreous mass.

    They will watch the brave black circle coming into prospect,
    slipping into the bull ring of incandescence, at 3.846 × 1026 watts.

    By optical device, they will learn that lead would melt on Venus;
    that H2SO4 spells neither Hello nor SOS. A salute to Helios?

    They will recoil to crows in cornfields, witches on straw brooms,
    Tintin, perhaps, the relapse of the Earth to aphelion, the grinning moon.

    They will contend with the hundred and fifty million kilometre void;
    the inbetween of centaurs, bullion meteors, trojans, asteroids.

    They will imagine being James Cook rounding the bravura bend
    of Tolaga Bay with its hard-wearing people, its unpolluted sands;

    shaking hands with Tupaea, or pressing noses – who knows? –
    trading crops, brushstroke techniques, a woe is a woe is a woe;

    meeting the far removed tangata whenua, agreeing on the beauty
    of the country, the plants, the splendour of astronomy, the mortal duty

    to understand the recurring error, hold the warning in their hands:
    to persevere with the endeavour to bridge the long, reluctant lands.

    Pacific Rim

    Since moving further along the Pacific Rim,
    I've been waiting for the ground to get a shiver down its spine;
    a bit of lust perhaps for the heat at the centre of the earth.
    It is more disconcerting than geologically interesting:

    not the likelihood that the room will shudder, give way,
    quaver (which is more fearsome and frantic than quarter beat
    rhythms, I believe what they say), but the anticipation
    and possibly unwarranted dread weigh of granite.

    It might as well be the twelfth of July in Antrim
    with the prospect of pent-up bonfires and reactionary teenagers
    spitting beneath their hoods around every unsafe corner, flicking
    fag stubs at teenage mums enjoying the smell of petrol
    and the orange-coloured blaze a little too intimately.

    Police vans with their implied apocalypse, unoccupied cages,
    batons swinging by their hips, are almost as threatening.
    Reverberations Past might as well be hovering
    like knockabout poltergeists graffitiing the ruptured pavements
    with convoluted rebellion like palimpsests like prayers however grim.

    Children lose their footing, crying: 'Pop goes the ceiling';
    cathedrals spill their bricks of hymn upon their neighbours;
    flags drop to their knees; gardens split like freshly baked loaves.
    The thundering ground, fissuring walls, the sound of history's footfalls.

    The Moon Should Be Turned

    The cells that were scraped and cut from her
    beleaguered cervix – permission neither required
    nor sought – were no longer, the court ruled, her belongings.
    Flesh could be dissevered and commercialised at will.

    Put this specimen into culture, then take your sterile scalpels to the tumor tissue.
    Add so many drops of chicken plasma. Lo and behold immortality!

    Henrietta's weren't any cells: they were dark marvels,
    endlessly dividing and swelling like so much yeast.
    The Petri dish was no substitute for tableware,
    but her martyrdom was fish and bread and butter, if unwitting.

    When it comes to cancer cells, there's pretty nearly no products –
    other than bullets – that work so well on all people.

    Lacks died by the cell that reached the uterus, spleen, lung;
    that got so far as Moscow, if not the moon; that contaminated
    the heart cells of white men; that was found in the pipe-
    dreams of physicians who hoped to smoke out its truth.

    The amount of money being spent on medical research, well, it's just piddling.
    You won't believe this: less is spent on cancer research than on chewing gum.

    However durable, prolific, HeLa cells were political.
    They had to make campaign promises. Nixon declared
    A War on Cancer, to Culminate in Complete Control; Conquer Death,
    which was named a virus. HeLa cells would be its soldiers.

    The time has come, in America, when the same concentrated effort that split the atom,
    and took man to the moon, should be turned toward conquering this dread disease.

    Though the battle wasn't won, Lacks was named, allowed a headstone.
    Her children forgave George Otto Gey, the white pharmaceutical brokers;
    forgave some twenty tons of their mother that had been grown,
    that was living on outside her body; the hostile culture.

    King of the Castle

    Chicago Pile – 1


    The Russians could not come to terms with its construction
    in a 'pumpkin field'. Was this some kind of funniness,
    or did it conceal a coded meaning; a low-lying, thick-skinned legion?
    They might have imagined a Cinderella coach erupting
    in chain reaction at the stroke of midnight –
    the order of things irreversibly changed.

    It was not a pumpkin field but a squash court
    under the derelict Western stands of Stagg Field Stadium
    where the pile was built: the Metallurgical Laboratory.
    Uranium pellets and graphite bricks were wrought from gold and grind.
    American science must have seemed like alchemy:
    minuscule neutrons splitting heavier atoms into two.

    But Fermi had seen it simply: greater radioactivity
    on a wooden tabletop than on his own Italian marble.
    He had lunched on its mahogany. Mushrooms. Broccoli.
    Meat stew. He ate in moderation, then digested slowly: in his gut
    he knew it was hydrogen atoms in the wood that slowed the neutrons.
    The math would follow. Okay, he told himself calmly. O.K.

    K was the reproduction factor, which must equal more than one
    for a chain reaction. This was quite a bending of the spoon
    for the Italian, as there is no K in his mother tongue. Only Chi. Che.
    Who. What. How much would be critical. Laura took his plate away
    and mouthed, 'Yasher Koach.' He read: 'The curve is exponential,'
    though the arc of lip was not. He put it down to fatigue and axial confines.

    Later, he stood on the squash court's balcony, watching the grey
    balloon-cloth envelope billow – a cloud obscuring the autumn sun.
    It masked the structure of brick and timber that would reinforce
    the universe: square at the base, a flattened sphere on top.
    He choreographed the pile's construction like a painter basking
    in perspective; ordering colours, colourlessness, patient brush strokes.

    The paintbrushes were cadmium-coated rods that absorbed the neutrons.
    At Fermi's command, withdrawing the rods would increase neutron activity,
    causing a self-sustaining chain reaction: an émigré Italian controlling
    the energy of the atom; calculating the chiaroscuro of the sun.
    Re-inserting the rods would dampen the reaction, of course, if his math
    were not at odds. If it were, Chicago would blush in solar flare.

    As the fissile material approached critical mass, each scientist held air
    in his lungs a moment too long. Palms sweated sums of last-minute ink to vapour.
    The reactor had neither radiation shielding nor a cooling system.
    They had not considered cancer sullying their stomachs like slugs; lymphomas
    suckling their spines, lymph nodes; exponential neutrons on their neuron piles.
    Bn came to mind. Perhaps Fermi had gauged that the sickness would level off.

    The most densely populated region in America was safe in his equation, after all.
    The clickety-clicking of counters accelerated as the train approached.
    They watched the climbing needle the way Isaac Cline watched the barometer
    falling in Galveston: rail lines vanishing like gutter grills in overflow; the self-
    contained cyclone of suspense whirling in the eardrum. Everyone clambered
    to the second storeys of their minds, boring holes in the floor to allow for flooding.

    The clicking steadied and began to slide. 'Let's go to lunch,' Fermi said.
    The group felt their stomachs land. He had ordered the hourglass to stop its sand.
    There was no pep talk. No one mentioned the hazard. They were back
    on the court in no time. Weil withdrew the rod like a stick of dynamite,
    though he might have handled it like a hundred thousand sticks of dynamite,
    as Fermi gave the nod. 'The trace will climb and climb.'

    His fingers operated the slide rule like a surgeon threading an intestine.
    The men and woman present were silent in the steady brrrr of revolution.
    Grim-faced, Fermi turned the rule and jotted meaning on its ivory backbone.
    The balcony purveyors had crowded in to eye the instruments,
    craning their necks for the split-historical-second. Had they missed it?
    Would it be announced like the time of death or birth in a theatre?

    Fermi's face broke into a smile: 'The reaction is self-sustaining.' Applause
    upturned hands in hesitation. The palms were wilted. They crackled.
    The world's first nuclear chain reactor purred for twenty-eight minutes
    before he announced it done. It was a long time to trust in foreign physics;
    to witness the canvas of the world stretched until one cannot see where the sky begins.
    'O.K. Zip in,' Fermi called to Zinn, who held the emergency rod.

    The time was 3:53 p.m. Abruptly, the counters slowed, the pen slid
    across the paper in a flattening lifeline. Man had started a nuclear reaction
    and had stopped it. It was all over. What had it begun? A phonecall
    from Compton to Conant in impromptu code: 'The Italian navigator has landed
    in the New World.' Conant: 'How were the natives?' Compton: 'Very friendly.'
    They poured Chianti into paper cups and drank solemnly, without toasts.

    They drank to success, to hope they were the first to succeed, to sleep.
    Little would the Russians know how much could be harvested in a pumpkin field.
    A small crew was left to straighten up, lock controls, feel the chill of wine spills
    on their lapels. As the group filed out from the West Stands like first-time bettors,
    a guard asked Zinn: 'What's going on, Doctor, something happen in there?'
    The response might have been: 'Oh, nothing death-defying. A game of dominoes.'

    This Is What Makes It Go Bang

    Take your fired cases
    and place them in the chamber.
    Hear the hollow thud.

    Insert the decapping rod,
    then tap the top to rid spent primer.
    You will need a soft-faced mallet,
    if you can acquire one.

    Insert the case, deprimed,
    into the body of the dye.
    Hammer so the case seats flush.
    The body of the case should be fire-
    formed to the chamber, should be fire-
    formed for truthfulness.

    Insert a primer to the chamber.
    Place the case, still in the dye,
    into the chamber after.
    Insert the priming rod, then tap the top.
    Do this on a solid surface.
    One in every thousand rounds or so,
    one in every thousand will go off.
    Wear eye protection. If desired, gloves.

    Put the primed case, still in the dye,
    in the decapping chamber.
    Then tap the top to knock the case loose
    in the dye. Hear it drop.
    The case still in the dye
    and decapping chamber,
    add your chosen powder.
    Use a funnel to pour,
    so as not to spill.
    So as not to squander.

    The case still in the dye
    and decapping chamber,
    insert your chosen bullet,
    be it brass or bullion. More likely
    lead alloy with antimony.
    Soft-pointed, boat-tailed
    for less acrimony.

    The case still in the dye
    and decapping chamber,
    insert the handle of the mallet
    then tap the top to seat the bullet.
    See that it's snug as an ink cartridge
    in a fountain pen.

    'Make of it what you will,'
    one man instructs another
    sitting on spread tabloid,
    newsprint and primer on his thumbs.
    Tomorrow, they will hunt
    bare wither, flank, tree branch
    antler, brawny shoulder.

    The one who educates leans forward.
    He already plans to conceal
    the sound of their approach;
    to hide the gamey flavour
    in smoked venison roast, bacon-wrapped
    tenderloin medallions, meatloaf.
    He knows how to exploit
    the potential of the earth
    with gunpowder and curry powder.
    He has patience to braise,
    broil, poach; to bond the bitter acids
    by soaking in buttermilk.

    The pupil listens to the instruction.
    He leans on the soft-faced mallet
    like a crutch. He tells himself to shoulder
    the occasion; to drop the case into the body
    of the dye; to hammer
    so the case seats flush.
    One in every thousand rounds
    is few and far between.
    He practises long silences.
    Spills concentrate.

    He hammers so the lean cheeks flush:
    they are fire-formed for truthfulness.
    Hear the hollow thud.

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Excerpted from Gathering Evidence by Caoilinn Hughes. Copyright © 2014 Caoilinn Hughes. Excerpted by permission of Carcanet Press Ltd.
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