A Novel with No Title (as yet)

A work in progress

5 min readNov 3, 2023

A work of fiction

Prologue

In the 1960s and early 70s, three underground nuclear explosions were detonated beneath the island of Amchitka. ‘Cannikan’, in 1971, was the largest underground nuclear blast in U.S. history. The underground explosion caused the surface of Amchitka to rise and fall twenty feet, registering seven on the Richter scale, resulting in the formation of a crater a mile wide and forty feet deep. Oliver Robinson, a Marine Biology student at the University of Monterey Bay, California, was among the hundreds protesting outside the Whitehouse, with the dubious distinction of being arrested twice for incitement to cause damage.

The Amchitka nuclear test program was all but forgotten by the time Dr. Oliver Robinson had met Rebecca Schofield, a twenty-five-year-old ballet dancer living in New York. Two years later, they married, and on the eve of their first wedding anniversary, Rebecca announced excitedly to her husband she was pregnant, initiating a move from their home in Yonkers to Cape Elizabeth, Maine, where they bought a decaying bed and breakfast hotel, rimmed by craggy shores and sandy beaches. Rebecca immediately retired her classical dancing ambitions, while Oliver took up a teaching post in Maine. Over the next couple of years, they restored the building to its former glory.

Katherine grew up without the insult of poverty looking over her shoulder. It wasn’t a religious upbringing, but it was proper. By age fifteen, she never thought herself pretty, teased by boys in high school for lacking their ideal breast size, but too bright academically to let those immature preferences affect her. Nevertheless, Katherine had indeed inherited her mother’s genes regarding good looks, single-mindedness, and the integrity by which she sought to do everything well. Her father, with a brilliant mind, was a genteel slob, wearing what was closest to hand, entirely oblivious of coordination or the weather or how other people saw him, and it was precisely these genes Katherine inherited from him.

Katherine loved the stories her mother told, anything that stretched her imagination toward the sea, and the sea, in turn, made its calling. She was obsessed with photographing the waves on the shoreline, and so she learned the language of aperture, shutter speeds, and macro settings in her desire to capture its majesty. Her future looked bright until the day a cruel disease called cancer came calling and bowed her mother’s head with pain, but it could never bend her good spirits or make them stoop. The great room downstairs became Rebecca’s bedroom, never again climbing the old wooden staircase.

Once a day, every day, Katherine wheeled her mother around the garden, never speaking of illness, just nectarines and peaches, those her mother planted, persevered with and nurtured in a difficult climate. She watched her mother weaken from being a tall, graceful person to one who could barely hold her head up. Her father frequently looked awkward and frightened. His eyebrows shot with pain whenever he looked at his wife.

Rebecca Robinson died on April 29, 2004.

Speaking at his wife’s funeral, Dr. Oliver Robinson said: “In facing death, some of us only want to be what we might have been. Rebecca, well, she was exactly what she wanted to be, a good wife, a loving mother, and never did she put her love of dancing before those two things.” He broke down.

For a couple of months, he busied himself strolling among the melancholy-looking yew trees or the firs, picking up red berries or fir apples, good for nothing but looking at. In March 2005, after ten years as head of the “Department of the Environment,” Dr. Oliver Robinson was appointed by President Bush to head Alaska’s “Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.” He left two years later to take up a position as head of the “Department of the Environment.”

In his occupancy as head of DOE, Oliver Robinson made enemies in the Whitehouse, most especially since 9/11, voicing publicly his skepticism that an airplane struck the Pentagon, an assessment made after he expressed concerns about the radiation levels recorded as distant as fifteen miles from the point of impact; and why those findings should have been kept from becoming public knowledge. Dr. Oliver Robinson, an unintentionally humorous man, controversially admitted that such results pointed to, in his opinion, “…some kind of attack, but hardly one by a commercial airplane.”

In a recent Scientific Paper, the Doctor again upset Whitehouse officials, stating that three divers, all of whom had spent a weekend in July collecting blue mussels, octopus, and different species of fish in the waters around Amchitka, had become violently sick with radioactive contamination.

Further interrogation revealed two other divers, on that same weekend, were checked out, and the contamination was confirmed. But the water around Amchitka was one of many common denominators for three divers who worked at the Pentagon. Two others worked at the old military base on Amchitka. All complained of being easily fatigued, suffered joint and muscle pain, vision problems, nerve damage and a list of neurological symptoms.

On September 26, 2008, Dr Oliver Robinson disappeared.

Part Two: