On ‘Plainview 1’ We’ll start with our first visit to Plainview – it’s June 2002, and Martin Sorenson is eleven years old. If you’re reading this after June 2002, you’ll just have to take that date as the moment where my make-believe world and the real one diverge. I’m relatively certain that nothing needs explaining here.   Plainview 1 – June 2002   I did it just to wind her up. I knew she wouldn’t know the answer, and that she would freak when she realised why I was asking. But I was just an eleven year-old kid. I guess at the time I thought of myself as pretty smart, but the fact was that I was a run-of-the-mill annoying brat of a kid who did everything reluctantly except misbehave. She was doing something mom-ish at the kitchen counter, baking cookies or arranging some flowers in a cut-glass vase. It was baking, I remember now; she had an apron on and her hands were dusted with flour. I came downstairs from my room, and said as sincerely as I could: "Mom, do you know where Dublin is?" She frowned, and her nose wrinkled at the same time, pushing her big round glasses up her face. "I don’t rightly know, hon. Doubling? Could be out on the east coast somewhere." She threw some more flour down from her flour shaker and used her rolling pin to flatten out the dough. On any other day, I’d have whined and wheedled for a taste, but hey; today was no ordinary day. "Uh-huh," I said. I wanted to convey a slight disbelieving tone. I wanted to make her suspicious. Without looking up, she asked: "Why do you want to know, hon? School project?" "I was channel-grazing. Someone said something about a bomb going off." And still I kept a straight face. I was good at this. "Those poor people," she said. It was her standard response to any catastrophe. When the neighbour’s dog got backed over by an Amtrak truck she said it. When half of some African country was drowned in flood water she said it again. "And you watch too much television, hon." "Yeah." There was a TV on the counter, the remote in the cutlery drawer. I thumbed it on before she could object. There it was, in glorious technicolour. Dan Rathers, looking grave and grey. I hadn’t seen him so upset since, well, since the last time. Mom’s frown grew and grew until her lenses were pressing against her eyebrows. She was reading the banner at the bottom of the screen over and over again, but not comprehending it one little bit. "Looks bad, Mom." Outside, the sun was burning bright. There were a few high clouds like sugar strands, cut by the criss-cross of contrails. It was a beautiful day, too fine to be sitting inside watching the tube. I contrasted the scene through the window with the swirling blank hell resolved in a million phosphor dots. The rolling pin slipped from her hand. It hit the counter, rolled to the edge and dropped onto the linoleum with a bang. She didn’t twitch a muscle. It occurred briefly to my pre-adolescent conscience that I might have gone a little too far on this one, that perhaps it was something for her to come to terms with first and then sit me down and talk to me. Maybe get Dad to have a mano-et-mano while shooting some hoops. She seemed paralysed. "Mom? You okay?" She came to. She shook herself like she’d been in a deep sleep and just realised where she was. "Honey, go and get the big atlas from your father’s den." She wiped her hands on her apron. "I’m going to give him a call at the plant." "Sure thing." It was a big deal. I was never allowed in the den without an adult being there. I turned my back on the screen that boldly proclaimed ‘Irish capital destroyed by nuke’, and headed off to my father’s private lair.     It was forever dark in the den. There was only one small window, and the curtains were always drawn. I didn’t know why this room was so special; Mom insisted that curtains were opened and windows flung wide at slightest excuse. Even when I flicked the light switch, the shaded bulb shed only enough light for me to determine where the furniture was. There was a standard lamp behind Dad’s ruby-red leather armchair and a desk light poised over his rolodex. I turned both of those on, and it gave me enough illumination to work with. The bookshelves weren’t exactly full of books. There were trophies and shields won by a younger and more energetic father than the one I had now. He’d played college football. Now he played golf, but to his shame, he wasn’t so good at that. But there were books; his high school yearbook complete with cheesy photographs of him and Mom, big coffee-table books with few words and lots of pictures, some military stuff – great battles and greater generals – and the big Bartholomew’s atlas. I heaved it down from the shelf and put it by the door. I could hear Mom on the phone, her voice rising in hysteria and falling again in pitch as Dad tried to calm her down. She’d be a while; time to have a root around. I had to be careful. For all I knew, everything had its just-so place, and Dad would pick up the fact that it’d been moved the instant he stepped into the room. I went to the desk and opened some of the drawers at random. There were letters in some, receipts and bills in others, stapled together in date order. I didn’t know what I was looking for, let alone know what I might find. But opportunities to sneak around didn’t present themselves often. Some of the other kids had done the same thing that I was doing then. They’d reported back with hushed words about the treasures they’d uncovered. Pictures of naked women were commonplace, so much so that even kids whose fathers didn’t have a stash of porn were made to have one to appear more normal. One kid, a mixed race boy called Leroy, had found an automatic pistol in an unlocked drawer. There’d been a box of shells next to it, and he’d taken one to show us. Live ammo; it was cool to a bunch of fifth graders. There was other stuff. Mikey had once opened up a briefcase and discovered his father’s Masonic regalia. Except that he’d never heard of the Masons then, and he’d spent the entire summer convinced that he was about to be used as a child sacrifice by Satan worshippers. We laughed about it for years afterwards, to the extent that we were still pinning Mikey to the ground and drawing 666 in felt tip on his forehead. It got kind of smudged if he struggled a lot, so it was important that someone wedged his head between their tightly-gripping knees. So I opened the filing cabinet, the big office surplus one that growls and rumbles when you pull on the drawer. I inched it open. Right at the back, behind all the files marked ‘Insurance’ and ‘Checking account’ was a hardback book, plain cover, no writing on it at all. Mom was still talking on the phone. Breathlessly, I lifted it out, making sure to note which way up it was and whether it was leaning front to back or vice versa. Inside were the most incredible drawings I’d seen in my life. Pen and ink illustrations that were not just technically accurate to the tiniest detail, but that breathed life with an intensity that was impossible in the sharpest of photographs. Studies of birds, of spiders, of the way clouds banked up as a storm front came over, of the corner of the smile of my Mom’s mouth, of the flaws in the whorls on the end of my sister’s finger. There were words, too. Poetry, scratched out in the same fine-nibbed fashion, unmistakably my father’s handwriting. I closed the book, put it back the way I’d found it, and rolled the drawer gently shut. I was burning with embarrassment. I really would have to pretend I’d found porn instead. I turned the lights off and beat a hasty retreat, barely remembering to pick up the atlas on the way out.     Almost the first page of the atlas was map of the whole world, coloured so that no two countries of the same colour shared a border. I had no idea until years later how difficult that was, especially with Brazil which had ten other countries stacked round it. The map looked kind of funny. Greenland was huge, as big as a whole continent. Africa was tiny. Alaska was about the same size as the rest of the US. It made me distrust what I was seeing, but Mom didn’t seem to mind, or even to realise that things weren’t quite right. I knew where Dublin was, of course. I’d looked it up on Encarta before coming down stairs. After a few moments searching, I pretended to discover it and pointed at it with the tip of my scuffed fingers. "See, Mom. It’s miles away. There’s a whole ocean between us." She tucked a stray hair behind her ear and she bent low over the map. "And where are we precisely?" The nearest city marked was Minneapolis, but the Missouri was wriggled in in blue. "Just about there, where the river bends." Mom looked sceptical. I could see her trying to judge the distance by the only way she knew how – how long it would take to drive there. The Twin Cities were almost a day’s journey; between breakfast and dinner. She multiplied that out across the country and across the Atlantic, and was finally reassured. "Okay, hon," she said. She turned her eye to the television. There’d be nothing else but news for the rest of the day, and I knew that peeved her. "Why don’t you go and play? I’ve got to fetch some shopping." "Sure. Okay if I go and see Pete Mayer?" She’d picked up a pen and a spiral pad of paper. She’d started a list. I caught a glance before she covered it with her hand: candles, bottled water… "That’s fine, hon. Back for dinner?" "Okay." True. "And wear your helmet." "Okay." Lie. I headed out to the garage. My sister’s revolting pink fairy bike was leaned up against mine. I tossed it carelessly aside onto the concrete floor, and threw myself onto the saddle of my own machine. The tyres bulged a little, but they held enough air to get me to Pete’s. I set off down the dusty street, hoping and praying that he hadn’t had seen the news yet. I’d picked Pete out of all my friends to see that day because, chances were that he’d be out trailing round after his dad. Everyone else would have heard, and Pete was my last possibility to spring a surprise on someone.     I rode up the track to the country club, spitting dust out of my mouth and hoping to find Pete soon. It called itself a country club, but it was just a golf course and a club house, nothing fancy. We didn’t have lots of rich folks in Plainview; just the way it was. Pete’s dad was the groundskeeper and I had never asked Pete what the deal was with that. There was no Mrs Mayer, which was kind of strange, and Mr Mayer was the smartest man I knew. He knew all sorts of stuff that my dad didn’t know, and while my dad got to be supervisor at the grain mill and order the other dads around, Mr Mayer cut the grass and raked the bunkers and fixed the sprinkler system like some dumb no-nothing. He was smart enough to have been a college professor but he seemed content to get his hands dirty and work out in all weathers. I never heard him complain even the once. He had a little house in the grounds of the country club, not much bigger than the caddy shack on some east coast golf course I’d once seen on TV. I dumped my bike on the porch and looked for the note that would tell me where they were. There wasn’t one, so I wandered around the back. Mr Mayer was fixing the engine on the John Deere, tools laid out on a once-white strip of cloth beside him. I watched him for a while. My dad’s job involved a lot of walking around with a clipboard, ticking boxes and checking that the loaders weren’t goofing off again. This seemed more like real work. Every so often, his hand would snake out, drop a wrench or box spanner back on the cloth, and snag up another one. All without looking up. How come other kid’s dads were always cooler than your own? Eventually, I cleared my throat noisily. He took his time to look round; he finished what he was doing first. "Hey, Mr Sorenson. What can I do for you?" He always called me ‘Mister’ the first time, and he said it the same way he addressed my father. There was no disrespect meant, and believe me, none was taken. "Hey, sir. Is Pete around?" "I sent him up to the fourteenth green to turn on the sprinklers." I must have looked a little confused. "Thataway about two hundred yards." He pointed with a crooked hex wrench. "Thank you, sir." The golf course boasted some of the only trees for miles around. Anywhere else, you could have climbed up on a fence and seen all the way to the horizon. I started off through the little stand of pines, when Mr Mayer called after me. "Marty? Anything the matter?" "Not rightly sure, sir. May be it’s best if you take a look at the news." I ducked down under the branches before he could interrogate me further. I found Pete sitting on the crest of a tiny artificial hill, watching the sprinklers make rainbows in the summer morning air. The grass was emerald and bright, without a single patch of brown. Mr Mayer knew how to tend his grass. So did Pete. He waved me over, making sure I didn’t walk on the green in my sneakers. "Give it another ten minutes, and it’ll be done," he said sagely. "You hear about Dublin?" I said, eager to share my momentous news with someone other than an adult. He shaded his eyes with his hand as he looked up. "What about it?" "Bang. Gone. Some crazy has just nuked it." I made the appropriate hand actions, big and dramatic. "Geez," said Pete, and leaned back on his elbows. "We’re talking about Dublin, Ireland here, right?" "Sure we are. CNN are saying there’s like nothing left. Big bomb. Huge. Everything just…" I shrugged. I’d run out of superlatives. "Who would want to do such a damn fool thing?" "Betcha it’s them Arabs." Some of Mr Mayer’s smarts must have rubbed off on Pete. He wasn’t a straight-A student, but I reckoned that he wasn’t trying, or even paying attention most of the time. "I’m not saying that they’re as thick as pig you-know-what, but you need some education to build yourself an A-bomb. Then you need special explosives, radioactive stuff, and my dad says that’s real hard to make right." "May be they bought a whole one." "They don’t sell that sort of ordinance at gun shows." "Russians?" I said. "It always used to be, didn’t it? Back when they was all Communists. But no, I saw our President and their president shaking hands and getting on just fine, like folks from here and Pierce after a football match." Pete sat up again. "I don’t know, Marty." "You want to go and watch the TV?" "I got to do fifteen through eighteen when I’m done here, before the sun gets too high. Scorches the grass like a million little magnifying glasses, sun through water drops." He thought about matters for a moment. "If I show you what to do, we can be done in half the time." "Sure." We ran off together in the direction of the next green, clothes damp from the sprinkler spray.