Of the moment
A story about a timely matter.
12, March 2025
A.A. Balaskovits —
Chicago Pile-1 - Nuclear Energy
Is it a skull? A helmet? A monument. I walk past it several times a week on my way to the office, but I never know what I am looking at. If you asked, I would say, it is the skull of a man gripped by the hand of the divine - there are indentations for godly fingers to grip - in the moment of being torn from his neck. It is bronze. It is, and will never not be, the marker for where Enrico Fermi crafted the first man-made, self-sustaining nuclear reaction. It is not a mushroom, neither fungal nor cloud - the promise of bloom after rot.
In the Autumn or Spring, someone threw paint on the bronze. Red paint. It splattered, a head wound, dripping gore down to the stone foundation. On the side, in bright letters, was written Free Gaza. The message would not last, but the response was fast. That day, men on ladders with gas-powered torches engulfed the top of the skull in flames. A lesson, perhaps: one way to clean a wound is to cauterize it.
*
On a Saturday, I go on a walk to the Japanese gardens with my partner. It is winter and dead. We say, this will look beautiful in the spring, in the summer. It looks beautiful now. My phone tells me the garden is a gift from Japan. I ask, why don’t cities give gifts to one another, instead of what we often give instead? My partner jokes, perhaps they planted a bomb underneath the bridge, the cherry blossoms, the winding gravel. I laugh, because we deserve it, as much as anyone deserves having devastation dropped on them, which is no one, though it happens every day. I can watch it on the phone in my pocket. This was my second thought. The first, immediate, visceral: not Chicago! Not here! This is the place Japan thought to gift an Eden, a garden of Hesperides, a small Koraku-en, a bounty for the eyes.
I forgot what I walked past nearly every day, as one often forgets the things they see all the time: the helmet. The skull. The monument. The great science that taught the new fear to all the world in an instant.
*
It is still winter, and there is snow on the ground. Enough to build a person. Someone has packed the snow into three balls - a snowman - in front of the skull, the helmet, the hand of god. The snowman has no arms, legs or face. It is only a few feet tall. I do not think, but I do not know, if it will be removed with fire. One way, or another, tomorrow the man will not be.
A.A. Balaskovits is the author of Magic for Unlucky Girls and Strange Folk You'll Never Meet. She has been published in Kenyon Review Online, Indiana Review, The Journal, the minnesota review and many others.
artwork by Jonathan Yubi