Sanctuario de Singularity

Both my sons stared at me Saturday morning. I sat on my bed, surrounded by piles of product, padded envelopes, my heart determined to catch up with work. My arms couldn't meet my desire, shook from fatigue as I carefully inspected each item.

"C'mon, Mom. Let's go do something. We haven't gone anywhere in weeks." My oldest son, 11, accented weeks as though he were a prisoner in solitary confinement fed on moldy bread and stale water.

"Yeah, Mom." 9 picked his nose as he agreed with his older brother. I leaned over, grabbed him a tissue from the night-stand.

"All right. We'll go on an adventure. But I get to pick the destination!"

The boys helped me fill sport bottles with the mineral-laden town water. I threw cheese puffs and trail mix in a large zip-lock bag and added a handful of chocolate chips and a generous portion of chopped walnuts. I stood, bare feet on kitchen linoleum, and decided what wilderness we would visit. Someplace quiet. Somewhere gentle. The village of Chimayó. I almost left the house without Avon, but tossed ten samples of the new Avon Super Shape Anti-Cellulite Stretch Mark Cream in my purse.

Two hundred years ago, a Chimayó friar was performing penances when a brilliant light burst from the hillside. He dug into the ground where the light appeared. His hands found a crucifix. The head priest brought the crucifix to a fancy church far away, brought it to be venerated, but three times it disappeared and was later found back in its hole. Then the miraculous healings began, healings associated with the dirt surrounding the artifact.

I told the boys this story as we drove through the parched mountains west of my town, told them about the Chimayó chapel, and the way the newly-whole left crutches and before-and-after photographs in thanksgiving.

"Geeze, Mom. You believe that stuff?"

11 spoke with a mouth full of snacks in the backseat. He cocked his head to the left, the way he always does before he explodes in a torrent of intellectual excess.

"According to historical research, there is no evidence that Jesus was divine. In fact, one could make a case that he never existed at all."

11 continued, his words some kind of middle-school version of the DaVinci Code. 9 didn't pay attention. He leaned against the car door, a clipboard balanced on his knees, as he drew illustrations of penguins in space.

I didn't answer. I kept my hands on the wheel, let my car slide past one herd of antelope, then another. They raced the wind, thirty, forty, fifty moving as one beast, a mass of delicate antler, of striped flank, of hoof-earth unison. Even though it was Memorial Weekend, we didn't pass another car.

Chimayó snuck up on us. We fell from the mountains into the desert, with short sun-faded scrub and piles of white sand, fell into a village of a few adobe houses, a shack selling last fall's pinon and cheap religious trinkets, and the old chapel of miracles. A small dirt parking lot sat in front of the chapel with enough room for perhaps three dozen cars. Handicapped Parking Only. The blue sign spoke of hope, of the people who pilgrimage to Chimayó. We parked half-a-mile away, under the sparse shade of a mature cottonwood.

The church welcomed us with a sheath of red desert roses overhanging the open wooden door. We filed inside, behind an old Latina in a wheelchair and her young caregiver. The chapel looking like nothing and everything at once. The walls were cracked brown adobe, tired, carrying the energy of a million broken people. Low wooden benches rested in uneven rows. Twenty or so visitors knelt on hard pine kneelers, their hands clasped in prayer, their eyes on the painted altar. Mexican saints surrounded us, their peeling fingertips pointing toward Heaven. The boys watched the flicker of a thousand votive candles. I pointed to the famous crucifix, to the hundreds of rags and crutches and photographs piled along the church sides.

11 found the holy dirt site first. A depression sank into the church floor, a child's orange plastic shovel helpfully left inside. He bent low, dug into the ground, handed me a shovelful of healing dust. I found a tissue in my purse, opened it, let the dirt collect inside, folded it as carefully as I could. We left.

"Mom. Mom. Are all those crutches fake? Did people really leave those behind because they were better?"

11's face crunched in an expression of confusion. I could hear his brain cells whirling with information he could not process. 9 shrugged his shoulders, picked up his penguin portrait as I gunned the car engine, one eye on the map.

"Of course it's real. You don't know everything just because you're two years older than me. Haven't you figured out yet that there are mysteries?"

9 sighed long and loud. I smiled, but the boys didn't see.

"Well, boys, to be honest, I don't know anything except that many people believe it's real. Sometimes believing in something makes something real, makes things happen. 9 is right about one thing. There are mysterious things that we don't understand. Maybe some day we will. So. It's still early. How about we drive to Los Alamos?"

The boys ate handfuls of our homemade trail-mix as we bypassed Santa Fe and hooked a left onto the isolated freeway toward Los Alamos. The road was lined with safety signs dictating an unusually low speed limit. Safety Corridor! Do Not Pass! 40 mph! We wound through three unoccupied lanes snaking through a heat-stroke landscape pock-marked with a million dinky wind caves, my foot hovering over the brake.

"Mom! Why do we have to go so slow? There's no one around."

9 stuck his hand out the window and let it rise and fall with the turbulence surrounding us. 11 considered the question, and I watched him in the rearview mirror, his mind sifting through all the possible explanations.

"Well, the road isn't that steep. And it doesn't look like it gets a lot of traffic. Maybe they're doing road construction? But why's this road so big?"

He shook his head to himself. He knew he wasn't right. It didn't compute.

"Guys, I know the answer. This is the only road that takes you to Los Alamos. Here, look at the map."

I passed the folder paper to the boys. Two police cars huddled in the desert median, radar guns at attention. I continued to crawl through the hills.

"Los Alamos is where the Los Alamos National Laboratory is. Everyone in the entire town either is a scientist, a researcher, an engineer, or works for the lab or to help support those who work in the lab. This town is all about science. Nuclear science, for the most part. Sometimes they have to transport hazardous materials to and from the lab. The road has to be kept safe and slow for those trucks. You don't want a nuclear spill. I'm going to take the main exit. There's a science museum that tells all about the lab, so let's head there first."

The boys grinned. I heard the rustle of the map as they pinpointed our position, heard them whisper to each other about the space wonders they might see. I wondered, too, what to expect when we rolled into town. Our local paper liked to mention that Los Alamos held the greatest per-capita income in the entire state. Would the streets be green, lush, filled with sprinkler-soaked lawns? I rolled off the exit ramp, onto the streets of Los Alamos. My boys hung their heads out the window like smell-starved hounds.

The town didn't notice us. It looked beat, tired, somehow more poor than my own cowboy town. Old cars lined the streets. I didn't see any Mercedes, any yuppie SUVs. Weeds poked through the sidewalks. The famous laboratory perched above the town like a high-tech falcon, claws gripping a mesa rife with juniper and rattlesnake, the only entries into its nest a series of gleaming security checkpoints. I pulled the car into a strip mall and cut the engine. The Bradbury Science Museum loomed before us.

"Ok! This is the official museum of the Los Alamos National Lab, gang! Let's see what the hoopla is all about! Time for some science!"

The sign on the door listed the rules: No Food! Free Admission! Cameras OK! The boys didn't stop to read. They tore through the entrance and bounded into the exhibit hall. Dr. Robert Oppenheimer and General Leslie Groves greeted me with stony silence. I stared at their cement faces, tried to understand what drives a man to consider atomic annihilation.

The museum surprised me, the way the town surprised me, the way it snuck mental weeds in its paved displays, the way it catalogued and supported defense, destruction, the cheerful stewardship of our nation's nuclear stockpile. My boys ran from poster to computer, from a replica of the Fat Man and Little Boy bombs to a six-minute loop film extolling the virtues of weapons testing. This wasn't what I wanted my boys to see. I wanted to see the forward gallop of new technological discoveries balanced by the karmic weight of our nuke-dropping past. I wanted reflection, a sense that we are tiny in this cosmos, that we make mistakes and strive to learn from them. I wanted the awe of new discovery placed in context with the blood money it took to arrive. I wanted to leave.

I didn't expect my boys to see the museum the way I saw it. I watched them press buttons and slide cards, imitate the motions of super secret scientists. I sat. The loop film started once more. The narrator began again, spoke in chipper voice about the Manhattan Project, explained that we dropped two bombs to end World War II. The camera cut from serious researchers to a mushroom cloud to waving American flags, a crowd of cheering, excited people. No mention of the deaths that followed, the way the land still carries shattered echo. I pulled a pen from my purse and drew a dove on the back of my business card. I set it on the empty seat to my left along with an Avon Super Shape sample. Two middle-aged men sat in front of me. They grunted approval when the loop ended. I noticed their laboratory badges.

"Mom. Let's get out of here."

11 tapped my shoulder. 9 stood behind him.

"Mom. This place is all about death."

I grabbed their hands, and we ran for the car, left the heavy glass door to shutter behind us. I pointed the car home, back down the slow safety hill. We didn't speak for miles, not until the sunset-hue structures of Santa Fe filled the horizon.

"Mom."

11 leaned close to the back of my head. I could feel his breath on my neck. He sounded on the verge of tears.

"Mom. We started at a place that's all about healing. And we ended at a place that's all about death. It seems like everybody believes too much. Those church people don't question things. They just believe it. And maybe those scientists who work on weapons don't question things outside of their science either. What's the difference? I don't want to end up believing in nothing."

I opened my mouth to speak, to tell him he's right, that science is a religion sometimes, that people get immersed in their world and forget it's a huge universe, but 9 beat me to it.

"Well if you ask me, they should marry each other. Then they would have kids that can think about both things. Because that's what's real. Both things. But right now all those people are lopsided. Isn't that right, Mom?"

"Yeah, 9. That's exactly it."

11 lay back in his seat. Santa Fe faded behind us with the sun. We pulled off the road at Pecos and watched a lone coyote hunt rabbit. She lifted her head to the twilight stars.