A short fiction for Mental Health Awareness Month

“Tacos al Pastor”`  

Thank you.  OK, two tacos al pastor for the out of towner, coming up.   

Sure, what?  I can cook and talk.  

Yeah, I guess I seen some stuff here.  I mean, 20 years on a corner of a plaza in this city, you gonna see some stuff.  It’s a little less going on than when I started but always something.

Well, like big city stuff, sabes? Other people’s dramas.  Monday was a medical emergency over by the fountain.  Big fuss, 911, cops, ambulances.  Old guy, he trip, he fall.  I think he OK.  Before that last week, some punk skateboarding on the fountain, she didn’t fall good, broke something.  Lotta that sort of stuff.  There were the big demonstrations a couple years ago.  That was actually good for business.  Weddings and proposals too, some folks think that fountain’s romantic or something, get the photographer and the lights and all.  I think my cart is in the background of a lotta folks’ wedding pictures.  See more of that nowadays, instagram and stuff.  They come here afterwards.  You want funny, you watch someone eat a taco and keep their wedding dress clean But you know, you serve up tacos the same place for 20 years, same place, you see stuff, ¿sabes? 

No, nobody famous.  Least I don’t know.  There was a guy, a few years ago, Hamid—the shawarma guy over there—got all excited about him, selfie with the cart, autograph.  No idea who he was, sports maybe, forgot his name.  Hamid still got the picture on his cart.  

Salsa verde?  Roja?  Chipotle? Guac?  Crema?  All on the end there.  

No, I don’t mind, kind of slow right now.  You early.  Half hour, I won’t be able to breathe, never mind talk with a tourist.  Where you from?  

Nice.  Never been there, got a cousin there though.  No, he don’t have a taco cart, I hope you don’t meet him, he’s a lawyer.  I mean, Chano is nice and all but even if he’s on your side you’ll come out poorer.  

Yeah, lot of lawyers.  Tall buildings like this get a lot of lawyers and guys like me and Hamid to feed ‘em.  Visitors like you.  Lot of everybody, all sortsa people.  I’m never bored, there’s always something or someone.  

Funny question.  I mean, I’ve learned taco guy stuff—some people are just too generous with the guac, or don’t tip, or tip a whole lot—one guy must have just won, he tipped me a hundred!  They take a ton of napkins, or say they want spicy but they don’t really.  Some people good, some, eh…

Ok, so there was this one chica a couple weeks ago.  Maybe new lawyer, maybe paralegal, younger, really put together.  Not expensive clothes like you see on some of them, really just put together.  She walk, she dressed, the makeup, the chispa—not like she fancy beautiful or rich, but really put together, you know what I mean?  Put together.  So, nothing unusual, she order the al pastor, like you…she smile and wave at someone across the plaza.  There’s something, a sense, the way she move and look…I sorta guess she from…well, near my hometown.  

Now, I’ll tell you, friend, a taco isn’t just a taco.  I’m here twenty years but my tacos still taste like mi mami’s in San Lázaro de Cruz.  I make everything just like her.  Pues, this girl take one bite and ¡WOOOSH!—like water balloon, just all of a sudden all the put together comes apart and she crying, no more put together.  I say I’m sorry but she don’t say nothing, she mostly pulls it all back.  She take a whole lot of napkins, it’s OK I don’t mind.  Her face put together again but her eyes still real crying.  She say thank you—not “gracias”—she walk away, she she don’t finish the taco, but she walking a little different, I don’t see her ever again.  

No, no.  But like, we all like that.  You ask what I learn here, that’s what I learn.  We all water balloons full of tears, man, we all got that inside us, we miss home, we lost, we work hard and hope hard and it don’t work out, we carrying it around, close it up, in a suit or the way we walk or joke, think it’s closed up and safe.  But we all got a spot, we all got it, you just touch it and it all busts out.  You got that weak spot, I got it too, even if I don’t know where it is until it get poked.  You don’t know.  It’s a word, a picture, a song, a taco that taste like home…we all carrying that, we all ready to bust.  

Everyone.  

No, no, some people got happy tears.  I seen that my own eyes!  But yeah, most people don’t, not happy tears, and that…pues, man, life is hard, you know?  

You know what else?  We all got something that will make someone else bust, that pokes that weak spot on them.   It make me look at people different, ¿sabes?  You know that’s there, you gotta be careful, man…you walk through a city full of water balloons full of tears and you got pins all over you like cactus, you gotta care, man, be NICE. That’s what I learn here.  Be nice.  Be nice.

Yeah.  Sorry to get all serious, man.  Sometimes you get more than taco for lunch.  Taco good?  You like?

Gracias.  That’s the taste of San Lázaro de Cruz.  

Nah, I wouldn’t.  There’s not much there, and you can get the taste here, without stepping in pig…you know.    

Two hours before you gotta go?  Go to the museum, the big one, it’s like four blocks, modern wing, first floor, room 901.  Kathe Kollwitz, “Las Madres.”  It’s…ah…ay… … …sorry.  There’s other good stuff there, too.  Enjoy the city and if you see Chano when you get home—and pray to the saints you don’t!—tell him “hi from Lejo and don’t sue me.”  

You’re welcome! Hello what can I get you, miss?

A short fiction for Valentine’s Day:  

Dedicatee’s preface to the First Report from the Blueberry Institute.

I don’t like the idea of billionaires.  As a class, their wealth almost always has some taint of unethical, immoral, or illegal behavior.  With their vision warped by wealth and their voice amplified out of proportion, they do untold damage to society.  In this era, it is difficult to identify positive things they have done.  To this critique, I will admit one exception—my wife.  

There are good things that one can do with hyper-wealth, if one’s soul is not poisoned by a vast amount of money.  One can fund charitable organizations, and she does that, anonymously.  One can patronize the arts, and she does that through various foundations that give her invisibility.  These applications are good, if unimaginative, and this path to using wealth for good has been taken by a handful of self-aware ex-spouses of the mega-wealthy who had the foresight to draw up strong pre-nups.  

Aside from the way in which my beloved helps these causes (I will preserve her and my own anonymity), she has drawn inspiration from an even smaller group of wealthy people.  In deciding how to use her wealth, she looked to individuals such as Peter Mitchell, Jaime Campomar, Svjata Msiseck, Charles Babbage, and Charles Darwin, who used their considerable personal fortunes to pursue research interests that were far enough from the mainstream that they would never secure funding, but could change the world.

I met my wife when we were both far from wealthy, as grad students in the sciences tend to be.  Our research interests barely intersected, but when we met…whew!  It was at a divisional colloquium, and even from a brief meeting while standing in line for the free mediocre pizza, we clicked:  the weather changed, heavenly choirs started singing, the earth got wobbly—every cliche you can imagine for love at first sight, we both experienced it.  I am honestly flushed, feeling an echo of that physiological response, just writing about it these decades later.  Such is love.

We both worked on our degrees, completing our theses at roughly the same time.  Both were pretty good; mine was impressive enough, and my advisor prominent enough, that I was able to land a very good postdoc position.  Hers was better and more imaginative, though the topic was niche and her advisor a young professor.  She was able to secure a lectureship at the same institution that I would be working at.  The middle chapters of her dissertation were adapted from patent applications for a technique she developed to pursue the main thrust of her research.  Five years later, those patents became instrumental for the development of a near-universal tool in all biotechnology, and she started to become very wealthy, and then very, very wealthy.  

All that time, and ever since, we have been besotted with each other, as well as devoted to research.  Twelve years ago, she quietly founded the Blueberry Institute (Blueberry was our dog—a vessel of pure love with fur and paws—who died a year earlier).  With a handful of picked colleagues she set to work on an esoteric and impossible problem that no sensible agency or foundation would fund.  An interesting group of people appear when you offer the absolute best and brightest young researchers virtually unlimited money, a beneficent Institutional Review Board, and a noble cause, in exchange for dedication, sharply curtailed publication, and utter discretion.  

I am, I must note, not professionally affiliated with the Blueberry Institute, nor should I be—my research in soil bacteria is far from its focus, and in all honesty, I am not the caliber of researcher that belongs there (she loves me just the same).  I do keep up with my beloved’s work as best I can, though, and I have been helping her with the editing of this, the Institute’s first publication, as academic spouses do.  Even so, I was surprised and pleased to find myself in the company of Blueberry, and Blueberry’s successors Eleanor and Dudley, as the dedicatees of these volumes, and named as their inspiration.  It is in that capacity I write this foreword.  

It turns out that the answer to “Who Wrote the Book of Love?” is my wife and her collaborators, and you are holding its first volumes.  She has channeled her vast wealth into answering a question planted in her beautiful mind at that grad school colloquium.  Over the last decade plus, she and her staff have subjected love to intense analysis—physiological, biochemical, psychological, metabolic, genomic, evolutionary, and more.  You read here the first fruits of this work.  

With wearable devices, her institute has captured the very moment of falling in love, located it in the brain, seen its flashes and sparks.  In the laboratory, she and her team has unmixed the intoxicating cocktail of love and lust, then put it back together.  She has distilled love’s literal essence from Buddhist masters, from teachers and students, from newlyweds, and from dogs and other animals (you probably won’t be surprised but dogs are full of it).  She has seen how love is basically the same constellation of material phenomena whether in suburban Los Angeles, a tribal setting in Myanmar, or a village in Siberia.  She can see the difference—and the underlying similarity—between a crush and devotion, between the bloom of young love and the maturity of love celebrating its golden anniversary.  She has seen lovers’ fights with unsparing detail, and how they can heal with love or curdle and turn sour.  

You may wonder, for the question is not answered anywhere in these volumes, whether she has subjected our love to this analysis.  She has not, for sound professional and personal reasons.  You may also wonder why she would devote much of her vast fortune and genius and years of her life to unweaving this particular rainbow—have not Shakespeare and others given us enough to think on?  As the person who loves her best, I can answer this, and if you ask this, you are probably not a scientist who has been in love.  She has a powerful drive common to most in the sciences.  We see something we don’t understand—in this case something unimaginably powerful and seemingly beyond comprehension—and we must understand it.  To her, to me, this is perfectly normal behavior, it’s just that no one before has had the combination of money and genius and technology to approach the work in this way (and to be sure, Shakespeare emerges from this unharmed).  

However, there is another, deeper reason for this subject to be my beloved’s life work.  Love is good.  My beloved doesn’t want to just understand love, but magnify it.  It turns out that this is another thing that can be done with lots of money if you have a good heart.  I won’t go into any detail, but the way many billionaires have used their money to support division, bigotry, hate, and degraded personal habits, my beloved is beginning to use her money and the fruits of this research to promote love.  The methods are subtle and barely noticeable, though Blueberry Institute research has proven them to be effective.  

My understanding is that these volumes are by no means the last report from the Blueberry Institute.   I am hopeful that subsequent volumes will document a deeper understanding of love, and project reports on the Blueberry Institute’s efforts at promoting love in societies around the world.  In the meantime, our personal project—the life and love shared by my beloved and me—remains as yet unfinished, and we pursue it with the same ardor and dedication that we have over these previous happy decades.  

Anonymously,

Blueberry, Eleanor, and Dudley’s dogparent, and my beloved’s spouse.  

BOOK REVIEW—COMMAND AND CONTROL by Eric Schlosser

 A weird confluence of incidents reminded me of a book that I had been meaning to take in, and as luck would have it, the library had the audiobook.  I had a kind of a freakout after Trump’s demented speeches at Davos, realizing that this mentally compromised person was the sole and absolute commander of a few thousand nuclear weapons.  This mad king has also been making noises about resuming atomic weapons testing, which is both illegal and immoral.  Then, my sweetie, who has been catching up on back episodes of the “Welcome to Night Vale” podcast listened to the episode “The Deft Bowman,” which is a riff on a real-life, barely-averted nuclear war in the 1980’s caused by a NATO exercise called “Able Archer.” So I’ve been listening to Eric Schlosser’s “Command and Control: Nuclear Weapons, the Damascus Accident, and the Illusion of Safety.”  

The nuclear genie has been out of the bottle for 80 years.  We are not all dead from blast, burns, radiation sickness and nuclear winter.  There has not been a nuke used in war since America bombed Nagasaki.  There has not, as far as can be determined, ever been an accidental nuclear detonation.  After taking in this book, one realizes that those three things are miraculously improbable.  Also, one realizes that the movie “Dr. Strangelove” is damned close to a documentary.  Having grown up in the ‘70’s and ‘80’s, and having visited Hiroshima in my teens, I’m probably a little more attuned to the threat of nukes than the average American, and the combination of recent events and this book leaves me very jittery indeed.  

The development of the atomic bomb and the thermonuclear bomb is an amazing story, with human heroes and villains and staggering feats of intellect and organization.  The very early decisions about its construction, use and control are the stuff of movies and opera (literally…as I write I am listening to “Doctor Atomic”).  There is inspiration to be found in that story.  But the first several decades of the our existence with the bomb were improvisatory, shaped by ignorance, heedless urgency, stupidity, paranoia, politics, and other ugly human traits.  

Schlosser highlights the conflicts that determined the early history of atomic weapons.  Presidents Truman and Eisenhower insisted on absolute civilian control of the weapons, but the military hated this.  The United States insisted on absolute sovereignty over these weapons, but NATO allies (at whose bases the weapons were stationed) hated this.  Generals wanted more and more weapons, down to the battalion level, but strategists hated this.  Weapon designers grew increasingly concerned about safety and robustness to accidents—that is, making it less likely for a bomb to go off—and the armed forces hated this, because it increased the likelihood of a dud.  All the while, there was political pressure from presidential candidates agitating about “bomber gaps” and “missile gaps” (perceived shortcomings in the arms race) to field as many bombs and weapons systems as possible, safety be damned.  

By Kennedy’s time the world could very easily have been destroyed by accident.  Hundreds of fragile atomic bombs were distributed throughout NATO countries.  Command of these weapons had been “pre-delegated” to field commanders far below General rank.  American control of these American weapons was nominal at best.  The weapons were often poorly secured, guarded by a single sentry armed with a rifle for an 8-hour shift.  The weapons were excessively delicate and hastily constructed.  There were no “fail-safe” systems, they could be triggered by a single rifle shot or static electricity, and inspections found items such as screwdrivers and Allen wrenches had been accidentally left in the bombs.  The early ballistic missiles had a less than 50% successful launch rate, and the strategic bombers using new technologies such as jets and aerial refueling had a tendency to catch fire, spontaneously release bombs, or crash.

Worse, there was no real strategy for using nukes beyond “use them all, and use them all at once.”  Each branch of the armed forces had its own target list, so that a single target would be hit by several nukes.  The “SIOP” (Single Integrated Operational Plan) was supposed to rationalize this, but it confirmed total commitment and allowed no flexibility, no pause for negotiation, no limited use…and no planning for what comes after.  Presidents from Kennedy to G. W. Bush hated the SIOP, but never did more than tinker with it.  For much of this time, America had a “Launch on Warning” strategy, that would trigger—with very few checks—a massive attack on the warning that enemy missiles had been launched.  

This book focuses on American command and control systems, because that’s where the information is.  The president is still the one person with ultimate launch authority, and the system is designed to obey, but the president’s choice sets off a fairly rigidly-specified chain reaction.  The Soviets (later the Russians)—ironically, because they were totalitarian—had more flexibility, but chose not to use it.  They created a “dead hand” system, like that in “Doctor Strangelove”—if any unknown nuclear explosion were detected in Soviet territory, a massive attack would automatically, autonomously be triggered.  Like in the movie, they did not announce the existence of this system, and whether it is currently in effect is the subject of strategic ambiguity.

“Command and Control” focuses on what can and has gone wrong, both on a policy/strategic level, and in a highly detailed, minute-by-minute account of an accident at an American Titan II missile silo in Damascus, Arkansas in 1980.  The tick-tock of the Damascus incident is gripping and suspenseful, and knowing how much could go wrong with hypergolic fuel, oxidizer, and a hydrogen bomb in a contained space, terrifying.  The longer saga of how close calls—not a few, not tens, not hundreds, but thousands of close calls—brought us to the edge of the abyss will keep you awake at night for a long time.  A flock of geese, a weather rocket, a misloaded computer tape, a misplaced foam cushion, a tired pilot, a blown tire, a capricious leader, a paranoid leader, a drunk leader…all of these things and too many more have nearly killed us all hundreds and hundreds of times over.  

Mostly, we’ve learned mistakes, albeit grudgingly and with resistance from various establishments.  Most of America’s ICBMs are solid-fueled, and somewhat safer than the Titan II.  Most of our warheads (shame on the Navy!) have been modified to use stable explosives rather than highly unstable compounds to trigger the atomic reaction.  Most of the computer hardware is relatively up-to-date, and inventory and control systems are improved.  Until Trump, we had moved away from the SIOP and Launch-on-warning.  

But there are still problems.  Complex, massively integrated systems run by humans are inherently sensitive to failures that ramify well beyond a single point.  Our nukes occasionally get sent to the wrong base, or loaded on the wrong system.  There are fewer bombs than at the peak of the Cold War, but more countries—including some worrisome ones like Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea—have them.  With the United States under Trump alienating its allies, other countries are considering getting into the game.  While I was writing this, I learned that the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists has moved their famous “doomsday clock” to 85 seconds before midnight: “Catastrophic risks are on the rise, cooperation is on the decline…” 

We are part of the problem.  Each citizen who can vote elects presidents seemingly without ever considering that we are electing a single individual who can irrevocably, without reason, issue a command to end humanity.  The situation is too much like Kurt Vonnegut’s “Cat’s Cradle” in which, by a combination of whim and accident, a suicidal dictator takes the entire world with him to the grave—only, in America, we choose it.   

Trump himself is uniquely terrifying.  His weird psychology makes him want to use maximum force and bluster, so he wants more nuclear weapons and to restart testing just so he looks strong.  He is also increasingly non compos mentis, but nobody in his political party seems capable of saying no to him.  There is no precedent or plan for this in our command and control systems.  In the last months of Nixon’s administration, he was paranoid and using too much alcohol, but:  his advisors made it clear that generals should check with them before acting on his orders.  It’s not clear that there is such a check on Trump.  Picture him, at 2:00 AM one of those nights where he is just posting and posting on his phone, aggrieved because a Black, female mayor or governor smacked him around politically and publicly embarrassed him, needing to lash out to restore his ego…

Schlosser’s book is definitely worth a read.  Misery loves company, and I would like your company in the misery of better understanding the world we live in.  The account of the Damascus incident is gripping, although the book is occasionally disorienting as it goes back and forth between that and various times and places from 1945 to 2013.  It’s a long-ish book, and it certainly won’t help you to sleep better at night.  However, it will make you appreciate the miracle of your continued existence, help you understand more about some of the forces important in the world, and maybe change your mind about nuclear weapons.