Years ago, I knew the war was over when the bombers left the plants with their aluminum skins unpainted. No need to camouflage the Boeings with that European forest green. It was only a matter of time. Hair, too, a matter of time. My hair would grow back. I watched as wave after wave of silver Forts lumbered over, climbed above the sound, the pounding of their engines rattling the bones in my head, my bare neck chilled by the breeze blowing in off the water.
“The hair, it is dead,” Mister Pepe whispered in my ear. This was later when I first came here. He rinsed my hair of color, the tarnished yellow coiling down the drain. He had me peer into a microscope in the back room of his salon. Curling in behind me, he tweezed the knobs on the machine. I saw the shaft of the hair he had plucked from my scalp rip apart then reassemble, watched as my sight dove right through the splitting hair, my vision melting then turning hard.
“There,” I said when it came into view, kinked and barked like a tree limb, blue as ice.
“Let me see,” Mister Pepe said, wedging in to look. “It is damaged, no? The overtreated hair. The frazzled ends. You need my help, yes?”
And years before that the general had said, “You cannot tell anyone why you cut your hair.” I was a young girl in Seattle. My parents stood in the doorway of our kitchen hugging each other as they watched the WAC snip a few locks. She held them up to the light, then draped the strands across the outstretched arms of a warrant officer. He slid the hair through his fingers, stretched it out straight, and lowered it into a box like the one florists use for long-stemmed roses.
I was a blond, and my hair had never been crimped or permed or ironed. I never knotted it up into braids, only trimmed the fraying. It was naturally straight. I brushed it every night a hundred times and shampooed it with eggs and honey. When I slept, my hair nestled in behind me like another person slipping up against my back as I breathed, a heavy purring weight.
“It’s a secret,” the WAC had said, evening the ends. “Let me look at you.” She held my chin in her palm, her fingers squeezing my cheeks. “You look all grown up now. Not a word until the war is over. Tell people it was too much bother, a waste of water washing it.” She plucked one single strand that clung to my sleeve as if she were pulling a stitch through me. She pulled until the other end swung free, and then she placed it with the rest in the box.
And only last week with my hair all done up, I was flying. From the air, the Rockies looked flattened down. The way the shadows fell fooled me into thinking the peaks were really craters. Then the clouds piled up below, and the jet climbed to evade the weather. The Air Force had bought the seat next to me for the bomb sight. It was in its crate sitting there.
The cadets in Colorado had given it to me. An honor guard had marched across a checkerboard courtyard. And now it is home on the coffee table with the magazines, a conversation piece. It looks as if it should be potted with some viny plant, its tendrils hooking on to the knobs and buttons. Flying home after the ceremony, I wrestled it out of the box and plunked it down on my lap. It had the heft of a head, a lover gazing up at me and me stroking his hair. I leaned forward, lowering myself to the cold metal. It smelled of oil and polish. I squinted through the lens as the plane bumped beneath me, riding the turbulence over the mountains. There was just enough light, a white dime-sized hole of light. I saw the crosshairs, crisp and sharp, my dead hair, half a century old, sandwiched between the glass deep within the machine. Outside the clouds broke apart, and in the Great Basin, the lights of each tiny city lit up as the sunset fell on each of them.
And now, I have been staring at this Redbook spread on my lap, and my eyes won’t see the words. The dryers want to lull me to sleep. From up here, the letters on the page look like the ruined walls of buildings, remains of burned foundations, blocks of pitted houses, alleyways that lead to nowhere. I follow the footprints of bombs. I was reading about hair, about its history, about its chemistry, about how we know more about it now than ever before. Below me, the words explode as I read them. One after the other. There is the roar in my ears. I sit here waiting. Soon it will be my turn again.
PENSÉES: THE THOUGHTS OF DAN QUAYLE
On the Highway of Vice Presidents
Even from this distance, it looks like a brain. As big as an Airstream trailer and shiny like polished, dented aluminum, its skin is shrunk and crinkled, pitted and fissured.
My notes tell me it is a bioherm and that I am to blow it up, which I do. It is one of my first acts as Vice President. I am wearing a yellow hard hat when I ram down the demolition plunger as they do in action movies. The plunger makes a ripping sound like fishing line being stripped from a reel by a well-hooked bass. The engineer had told me this is the sound of an electric current being generated, rrrrr like a siren. We wait.
It surprised me that it took a while for the electricity I had generated to reach the charge. They had showed me the dynamite, red paper sticks bundled together with black electrician’s tape. It looked like dynamite, but the fuse didn’t burn like it does in cartoons. We followed the wires back to the black box where someone stripped them and attached them to the plunger by turning thumbscrews. Then another person raised a flag, a whistle blew, and a siren went off that sounded throaty and hoarse like the sound of the plunger I pushed when they said I should. We waited.
And I thought for a second about the old dinosaurs, the huge ones with long necks and long tails, and how they had walnut-sized brains and needed all these other littler brains to relay a message from the tip of the tail to the bigger brain in the head. Hey something is biting you back here. Hey something is biting you back here. Hey something is biting you back here. Until it got the message: Hey something is biting me back there.
Boom! The charge goes off. The brain-thing, which was, just the moment before, sparkling with a slick fluid of light as if it had been freshly scooped from a skull, now bursts into a brain-shaped cloud that hangs there for the longest time. Its different hemispheres bulge, contracting and squinting like it is thinking real hard. I imagine it is thinking: What the hell happened?
The engineer had told me that a bioherm is an ancient fossil reef built over centuries by shells of dead mollusks sinking to the floor of an ancient inland sea, cementing themselves together layer after layer. To think that Indiana was once the bottom of such a sea. I looked hard at the bioherm before we blew it up. We stood around, a group of us, having our pictures taken in front of it. I wore a yellow hard hat. I saw things that looked like snails and worms, whelk shells and mussels and clams all stuck to one another like different kinds of noodles fused together after being left in a strainer in a sink overnight. But bigger. Much bigger.
I thought about my own brain made up of all those tiny cells, each one storing the flesh of something special, a memory, say, like this one when I blew up this huge rock that wasn’t a rock at all but a kind of bone sponge to make way for a highway that will bypass my hometown. I have not talked to any experts about this. It is probably the case that a brain does not work this way at all, that the cells in my head are not like ranks of offices along long corridors that account for just one scrap of information each. I shuffled through these thoughts as I thumbed through my index cards. I read a little speech then.