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The podcast is narrated by , a writer and voice actor living in LA.
If the world’s going to end, it’s going to end with a man and a woman at the helm, which is just how God started it all, she said with an accent. Your grandma was making fun of the then-president of the United States, my father explained. This guy talked in a funny way that became iconic. And he was a soldier in the greatest war there ever was, a moral war, just like the Cold War. And then they killed him with an ice bullet. But he did a lot of amazing things like start the space race and put the first woman pilot in a nuclear bomber, he said. He paused. Mom wanted to do it. Drop the bomb. She was ashamed to tell me that.
Back then, thirty years ago, she boarded the plane in Little Rock, Arkansas, the ground crew watching her with their loose-hanging cigarettes, a news crew swarming, covering her every footstep. The president wanted the Russians to see. America First, he said, America First in every way it could be first. Not like women could have bank accounts and black and brown people could go to school together…But I digress, she said.
Mom turned and waved at them confidently. Inside, the flight crew sneered and snickered. Get a load of this, they laughed. All but one joined in. Inside the cockpit she made herself as comfortable as she could. Mother was larger than most men back then. They had always tried to buckle her down, bottle her up, make her smaller and more compact. It rarely worked.
I’m Tim, her copilot said. He was the one who didn’t laugh at her.
Esther, Mother said, though they’re calling me Eve, the Mother of death.
Who does that make me? The proud father? Jesus, Tim said.
They got settled, checked their instruments, my Mother taking extra time so nothing would get blamed on all womankind if they crashed on the runway. She caught Tim looking at her often. Neither wore gloves or wedding bands; they both liked to feel the yoke on their bare skin.
You married? Tim asked.
Yes, Mother said.
As Mother told it, the flight to the island was routinely beautiful. The Caribbean looked perfect below. Mom banked to get a better look. It was always funny to her: One ocean looked the same as the next. This one just like the one on her honeymoon; her husband—my grandfather—didn’t wear a shirt the whole time and got the worst sunburn. She looked great in her bathing suit. They radiated happiness. When I saw that picture, I thought wow what a looker. Makes you wonder what happens to your youth. But she told me it was Tim, not her husband, on her mind right then, while looking at that ocean. She was under a lot of pressure, she said. She would never have done anything otherwise, she claimed. Sometimes grown-ups get silly ideas just like kids, she explained. Desire doesn’t end the day you say ‘I do’ or even after the affair. It always comes back.
As the island drew near, she pounded Dr. Pepper until her chest and stomach felt ready to burst and the sugar made her hands shake. A minor vice. Tim was smoking a dark cigar in the cockpit. The navigator was taking swigs from a flask. The bomber crew, deep in the gullet of the beast, were popping amphetamines. They vibrated if you looked at them. Turbulence hit the plane. Up so high, the weather wasn’t the same balmy as below.
Prepare for drop. Prepare for drop, the navigator called. His voice was tight, constrained, like he’d been kicked in the chest.
Like they trained, Tim and Mother broke the chains of their arming key necklaces, flipped the plastic lids on the switches, and armed the nuke. Or nukes. That part I don’t remember. Next, all they had to do was pull the bomb bay levers to start the chain reaction. It all began with gravity: as the bombs fell out, safety mechanisms detached, beginning an internal timer, releasing a parachute, channeling an electric current; then the frantic getaway before a new sun blooms on the Earth.
Green jungles, jagged mountains appeared below. Farms and terraces, dirt roads like little worms climbed across the low peaks. Mother saw the smog of the city and wanted to erase it from the map. Not because she hated the people there or anything. Just because all they ever talked about was duck and cover, drop the bombs or not drop the bombs, to wage war in every human sphere or let freedom die. My mother wondered why everything came down to binaries like kill or be killed, communism or democracy. The drop zone approached quickly. They were one minute out. The entire crew filed into the cabin. They were sweating. They were excited like how school children gather up to watch an animal die.
Abort! Abort! came the order over the radio. No one replied.
Tim and Mother kept flying straight. They shared a look: Maybe we drop it anyway. Maybe this is all there is: potential energy and the explosion.
The city clawed up at them from below. All those dots. All those grays and reds and blues: the tapestry of human life could so easily be burned away. They removed their hands from the bay door levers, twisted their keys back to the disarmed position. They turned the plane around and spoke of plans to get to the beach, any beach, once back in Little Rock.
The bomber crew and navigator returned to their posts, disappointed, spitting disgust, having been ready to watch the world burn. Everyone had been. The navigator even got a photo. Here, look: Mother and Tim trying to hide it, but see how let down they are? See their hands brushing each other? You might wonder if they went back to their families. They did. But Mother soon had me, her last kid. She hadn’t been home for forty-five days according to the calendar her husband and kids used to track her time away. Some things can’t be bottled up, my father said. Some things can’t just remain the same forever.
Distant engine whines came through my open window. A silver-white plane streaked across the air, carrying people wherever they wanted like an aluminum can of wish fulfillment. He asked, If you were bottled up, shaken, prodded, zapped at your whole life, what would come out of you? Death or life? The question left me afraid. I didn’t know what was inside me. I never wanted to find out.
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