BRETT BIEBEL
Heavy Water Brewing Company
At Heavy Water Brewing Company, Gripp said the future was going to taste like plutonium, and I wanted to know what he meant. This was on the patio. Outside downtown Seattle. I was drinking a Dirty Bomb while he tried to shield his eyes from the sun.
He said back in Idaho, back when we still had a paper, the editor sent him out to Hanford to write about the most toxic place in America. The story was supposed to be about the Trinity Test Site. About manufacturing the raw material. It was supposed to be about the cost of nuclear superiority, or maybe the lessons of history, but all Gripp wanted to do was drink a glass of radioactive water from the Columbia River, and he imagined it would taste like ash, or Tang maybe, like rocket fuel, or else this moonshine they used to make at Old Man Hector’s, which I think must be closed now too. I told him, I said, seems like you never managed to do it, or else you wouldn’t be here now, would you, and he laughed until he coughed. He called me a fucking idiot. He said the drinking was way less dangerous than the sneaking away, and by the time he got down to the river and back to the tour group, they’d practically called the FBI. The other reporters were whispering, and the lady in charge, she did head counts every ten minutes for the next hour, and this old man who said his name was George kept looking at him like, hey, Son, did you manage to bring any back for me? Finally, Gripp just had to admit what he did and tell him no, no he didn’t bring any water back, and George started begging to know what it tasted like. Gripp stalled, mostly on account of he had no idea what to tell him until they got up to the old Hanford High, which is filthy and black and generally about as bombed-out as any place you’ve ever seen, and finally he said, he told him, the thing is is it tastes sort of normal. A little like fish shit and algae, maybe, but otherwise no different than what you might get at a hotel two states over, or it could be my palette just ain’t sharp enough, and George laughed at that. He said, what did you think, you was gonna grow wings? Because they say there’s some guy out there who actually did or does, who thinks you can turn yourself or your grandson or your great-great-grand-somebody into some kind of like actual bird or Godzilla, maybe, and then start like a whole new race of human. Just keep on drinking until you become a mutant or X-man or what have you, and I heard this guy set up camp somewhere near the B-reactor, and I have to confess, the whole reason I’m here is just so maybe I can catch a look. Gripp nodded, he said. And then spent the rest of the tour trying to stay the hell away.
What do you mean, I said, and it sounds like that was the real story, right there, and why didn’t you write about that? About urban legends and little atomic cults right here in Washington state?
He took a deep breath. His eyes called me an asshole. He said, you sound like my goddamn editor, and he told me I missed the lede, and this was the problem with young reporters is that our whole generation is shaping up to be a shitbath fucking waste. He said what they’ve been telling me for years, and I know you heard it, and this time it came out like, Kid, you’ll never amount to nothing. There’s no motivation, and your whole problem is you ain’t never had the guts to just put your head down and then follow your ass right on through.
Brett Biebel teaches writing and literature at Augustana College in Rock Island, IL. His (mostly very) short fiction has appeared in SmokeLong Quarterly, the minnesota review, The Masters Review, Emrys Journal, and elsewhere. 48 Blitz, his debut story collection, is available from Split/Lip Press.