The Somebody People

by Bob Proehl

  The city moved through the cool damp morning with a gold rush hustle that reminded Kevin of New York. If he didn’t look up and see the borders of Santa Fe, where it dropped off into the void of the desert, he might feel at home. Without the forward momentum of the train or the drunken buzz of Raymond’s skin against his he thought about turning back. He couldn’t go back to Columbia. His academic life would be over, and it was not impossible he’d be arrested for desertion.

  The sense that he was nearing something historic was terrifying and reinforced things Raymond had suggested about the future as something that already existed, a space he could move away from or toward. Santa Fe seemed like a way to hover in the orbit of that future without toppling into it. Before he could make a decision, he was out front of the office at 109 East Palace Avenue, Raymond grinning broadly at him from the doorway.

  “I guess we can drop the pretense,” he said. He held the door, and Kevin stepped inside.

  * * *

  —

  They were told they should never call it Los Alamos. It was Site Y, or Project Y, or the Hill. For the sake of any written correspondence with outsiders, of which the less the better, it was Post Office Box 39 in Santa Fe. Greetings from Box 39, WAC girls wrote on postcards to boyfriends back east, blank on one side and black with redactions on the other.

  They were briefed on security by a dull lieutenant droning about the city, the project, all the things they weren’t allowed to say and who they weren’t allowed to say them to. Information radiated outward in dissipating concentric circles, and they were the bright burning light at the center. Robert Serber, not anyone interesting or famous, not Oppenheimer or Fermi, caught them up on the state of the project. There are men who can make the thrilling drab, and Serber was among them. Kevin would come to appreciate his ability to render complex concepts into plain language, but the orientation lecture nearly put him to sleep.

  He was assigned to work on the gun assembly, nicknamed Little Boy. It was the less elegant road to chain reaction: the “bang two rocks together” approach. They would fire two pieces of fissionable material at each other and hope that they would not simply explode but keep exploding. Raymond was on Fat Man, or the implosion assembly: a meticulously machined metal sphere around a fissionable core. The plates had to match up perfectly and fire off within milliseconds of one another to have a prayer of working. “Even if we get the science,” Raymond said, “we’ll never crack the engineering.” He called it the Triple F: Fussy Fat Fuck.

  Being assigned to separate projects meant they saw each other only in passing as they rushed from lab to lab within Tech Area. They timed the beginning of their days so they’d meet at the checkpoint each morning. They talked dirty in code as the MPs inspected their clearance. Raymond would mention how he hoped to inspect Kevin’s shaft if he could fit it in. Kevin told him he’d been thinking about him the previous evening when he had a predetonation mishap. Puerile but sustaining. It turned out a lifetime of saying without saying had prepared Kevin for top-secret military work. Proper nouns vanished behind their vague code names. He never thought the word bomb, only Gadget. Los Alamos became the Hill. Fucking Raymond became fusion, both the euphemistic and actual meanings theoretical.

  The labs ran twenty-four hours with a constant population of sleepers in the paper-walled dorms. There was no time or space to be together, but the Hill wasn’t without social functions. There were movies and civic events. Oppenheimer hosted scientists at his house for chamber music and stiff drinks. It was Oppenheimer who taught Kevin to mix a martini, treating the components as if they were volatile. There was the canteen, which devolved over the course of each evening from a cafeteria to a rathskeller, its culture and appearance shaped by the transported Brits and their need for something approximating a proper pub. They imported dartboards and sabotaged the coolers so the beer was flat and tepid to their liking. The social world of the Hill was very public and very straight.

  Raymond met Mona while playing errand boy for Szilard, running the day’s computations across campus to the barracks where the women worked. Mona Dawson, one of the girls in the “steno pool,” took pity on two boys in love. The steno girls were human computers: they crunched the numbers Fermi and Szilard threw off as intellectual by-product, the way a lightbulb emits heat. Mona and her ilk spent their days hunched over sheets of calculations but in the evenings devoted whole hallways of the women’s dormitories to parties. Some were coed; most were exclusively for the calculators. Mona, sensing something about Raymond, invited him to one of the girls-only gatherings in a way that wasn’t accusatory or threatening. She told him he could bring a friend. He brought Kevin.

  Mona held court at the dormitory parties whether they were coed or just the girls. At twenty-five, she had lived everywhere and done everything. A cocktail sloshed in her hand as she flitted about the room playing matchmaker, pairing girls with boys and girls with girls. Nothing made her happier than uniting two closeted Sapphics, and the night she led Raymond and Kevin upstairs from the revels and handed them the key to her room, she crowed, “I love love!” before carefully shutting the door on them.

  It became routine, and routines were dangerous. It allowed Kevin the comfort of forgetting he wasn’t normal or entitled to normal things. He was so tired of carrying his fear around, he set it down at the first opportunity and neglected to cloak himself in it when he went back out into the world, where it was necessary that he not be seen.

  It was high summer, and in the summer the girls got drunk fast, guzzling gin like water. Sweat-drenched, Raymond and Kevin came downstairs after midnight to find a tableau of passed-out women strewn dramatically about the room’s sofas and armchairs like an audition for fainting Southern belles. They tiptoed through the minefield of bodies to the front door and emerged into the cool of the evening holding hands—such a small thing, the barest sign of affection.

  “Bishop,” called a voice from across the yard. His hand reflexively pulled away from Raymond’s and shoved itself into his pocket. It was Todd Harris, one of Kevin’s colleagues from Little Boy. Harris was a Harvard grad with the ingenuity of a stump. Rumor had it Oppenheimer wanted him out because he was an embarrassment to the Crimson, but Groves didn’t want any scientists spit back into the real world for fear they’d be snatched up by the Germans. Harris stayed on, getting more and more bitter because of his failure to contribute. Kevin was the next one from the bottom of the ladder on Little Boy, and Harris’s enmity for him was special.

  “What the hell are you doing out at this hour?” he asked.

  “I could ask you the same thing,” Kevin said, trying to echo his standoffishness. Raymond, drunk, stood too close, his chest brushing the back of Kevin’s shoulder. It would have been better if they’d run into a guard. They would be assessed a demerit—an empty mark on their records came with being found out after hours—but there would have been no consequence. The way they stood together told Harris everything he needed to know.

  “Fermi was running tests in C lab,” Harris said. “He asked me to help.” He said this with smug pride, as if they didn’t know Fermi was in the habit of recruiting the Hill’s most expendable to stand near the C lab tests to see if they’d get ill from the radiation.

  “Some of the girls needed tending to,” Raymond said, pressing up against Kevin. “They asked us to help.”

  “What would girls want with a flower like you?”

  “A scorpion,” Kevin said. “In the shower. You know how women are about—”

  “You two make me sick,” Harris said. “Say what you want about Hitler, but he’s got the good sense not to let fairies into the German army.”

  “What’s his policy on idiots?” Raymond asked. “Is he as open to them as Uncle Sam is?”

  Harris went through Kevin to get to Raymond, shoving Kevin aside with one arm and throwing his punch with the other. Kevin heard the crack as Raymond
’s nose shattered and blood arced through the air, landing in dark black drops on the dirt path.

  “Don’t be out after dark again, little flower,” Harris said. He spit on the back of Raymond’s head as Raymond pulled himself up out of the dirt.

  “We should report him,” Kevin said.

  “We’re not in a position to without giving ourselves away,” Raymond said. “Fermi’s experiments have probably sterilized him. The next generation won’t have to deal with little Harrises running around.”

  They went back to the women’s dorm, where bodies rose from the dead. Mona patched Raymond up, knocking his nose back into shape with a shove as brutal as Harris’s punch.

  “You need a disguise is what you need,” she said.

  “Tomorrow it’ll look like he’s wearing a mask,” Kevin said, tenderly tracing the beginning of a shiner under Raymond’s right eye.

  “I’ll be the Lone Ranger,” Raymond said.

  “You need a girlfriend,” she said.

  “That is the last thing I need.”

  But Kevin got what she meant. He’d kept himself secret long enough to know how. People might have doubts about him, but their uncertainty wouldn’t be more than an itch at the back of their brains. Raymond presented himself as different. Even if you didn’t guess exactly what it was, you could tell there was something worth fearing or hating in him. Something that needed to be covered up.

  That night, at Kevin’s insistence, Raymond Glover and Mona Dawson became a couple.

  * * *

  —

  Mona wanted Kevin to find a girl for himself. “Four is a better number,” she insisted. But none of the girls she threw at him stuck. Whatever flicker and spark sexual interest generates, he couldn’t fake it, and the girls he met at the dormitory parties were unwilling to live without it.

  After a month, Mona and Raymond applied for and got an apartment together in H Lot, which neatly solved the issue of Raymond and Kevin being together. The story was that Kevin suffered from misophonia, unable to sleep in the tumult of the dorms, so Raymond and Mona offered him permanent residence on their couch. In truth, the couch was Mona’s and the bed belonged to Raymond and Kevin. But the apartment was all of theirs. They hosted parties for sympathetic girls and their unwitting boyfriends. Raymond cooked and Kevin mixed drinks while Mona took the stage. Once the last guest was seen out the door, Raymond and Kevin would kiss Mona good night and go to bed. It was an amazing year, a lesson for Kevin that normal was a term that encompassed many things and that he was as deserving of them as anyone.

  As part of the Fat Man team, Raymond was cleared to watch Trinity with the elite in the observation tower near Alamogordo. Kevin and the rest of Team Little Boy were left to sulk around the campus. Raymond declined, and they made a picnic of it, the three of them. They requisitioned a car and drove south through a downpour to Tularosa, a few miles northeast of the test site in Alamogordo. They brought gin, vermouth and ice, summer sausage and Ritz crackers, and Kevin mixed martinis in the car as they waited for the rain to let up. It relented before dawn, and they relocated to a ridge that looked out across what seemed like all of New Mexico. Like all of the earth.

  Repeat a word over and over again and it loses all meaning. The same happens with a name or an image stared at too long. Kevin saw the mushroom cloud so many times in the years afterward —in memory, in nightmare—it meant nothing to him. The first time it was terrifying: a pillar of fire like something out of the Bible. A new sun.

  The cloud hung in the air, the image hung on his retinas, and Kevin felt as if something reached through the heart of the blast, through his forehead between the eyebrows, and gave the lightest tap to a spot in the center of his brain. The initial sensation was one of connection, as if time split open and allowed him inside, except there was no inside or outside. He could perceive everything that was or would be, but he could see it from a hill in Tularosa, in the shadow cast by Trinity. This perception faded, and he had the sense a bell inside him had been rung and continued to reverberate in his skull. It twinkled with a song, its melody faint and indeterminate. In its undertone, he could hear Mona’s mind screaming at the horror of what she saw. When he looked over at her, she wore a tight smile, as she did when a romantic pairing she’d put together seemed to be hitting it off. She sipped her drink, never taking her eyes off the site of the blast, but her mind was a slurry of random words and emotional aggregates. Kevin would come to understand this was due to his inexperience with other people’s thoughts, which were largely incoherent, a torrent they winnowed into speech, panning a river for words the way a miner pans for gold.

  He heard Raymond’s mind, a clear and noble tenor. Beautiful, it said. My God, it’s so beautiful.

  What have we done? Kevin wondered, putting the thought out into the same space, the chamber into which Raymond and Mona’s minds had “spoken.”

  Only Raymond turned toward him. Mona stared at the ghost of the blast.

  We won the war, Raymond’s thoughts said.

  “Show’s over, darling. Should we head back for some sleep?” Raymond asked Mona.

  She nodded dumbly and collected herself. “Of course,” she said. “It’ll be all basking in glory for you boys tomorrow while the girls and I sift the ashes.” Her mind thrummed with a low refrain of no no no no as she gathered up their meager picnic and loaded it back into the car.

  There was an inkling in Kevin’s mind of how he had changed in the wake of the blast. It was as scary as the bomb itself: newness come into the world. But there was comfort, too. Raymond was with him, and he was not alone.

  * * *

  —

  The question Kevin came back to was: Why him? It was an attempt to attribute will to something that had none, but it was a natural impulse even for an atheist like Kevin. People wanted order; they saw the complex ways natural systems interacted and assumed history had a similar design element.

  His first assumption was that whatever it was chose him in order to lift him up, to give strength to something weak. It spoke to the way he thought of himself at the time. He saw his sexuality as a flaw, if not an illness. Choosing him, the universe compensated for something it had failed to give him.

  As he came to terms with who and what he was and watched whatever Resonance was moving through the world and making its choices, he came around to the opposite way of thinking. It found those who made themselves strong, whose differences and preexisting otherness tempered something inside them—a wire in the blood along which a unique strength was conducted through the body, latent but ready to be called upon. Maybe it was none of that. Kevin might have turned the echoing boom of expanding superheated air in the lightning’s wake to the sound of angels’ trumpets. He might have been mythmaking to help himself sleep.

  The day after Trinity, neither Raymond nor Kevin got out of bed. Mona, who was back to work on an hour’s sleep, attributed it to the gin. The truth was that their abilities had set upon them, after only a glimmer the night before. But as with gin, sometimes a little is preferable to too much. In full bloom, Kevin’s ability was a blazing brightness upon his senses. He experienced everything seen, thought, smelled, or touched by anyone on the Hill on a day when emotions were already extreme. The girls were working: there was data to be analyzed, adjustments to be made before the sun they created in the desert could descend upon a populated city. He was with Mona and the girls as they calculated the bomb’s payload, then recalculated when the men said the numbers were four times what anyone expected and must be wrong. He was in the map room with Groves as he drew circles around Japanese cities, estimating how much of each one would be destroyed by what they’d built. He suffered in bed with a hundred hangovers. He was both halves of nihilistic couplings in the barracks and dorms, pairs of people barely attracted to one another but needing assurance their skins had not been made monstrous. He wept in twenty rooms at once, an
d in three rooms he sat staring, beyond tears, hefting a bottle of sleeping pills, a razor, and a service weapon, contemplating the obliteration of himself.

  On a calm spring day in a sparsely crowded park, this multiplicity of senses would have been maddening, but on that day, in that place, he was lucky he survived. He was blessed that in the next room Raymond suffered under the same onslaught of sensation. Their minds found each other, two notes played on separate instruments. Harmonics are a matter of math, of agreeable simple ratios. Raymond and Kevin resonated with each other, amplifying each other’s note so that it could pierce everything else.

  Language was insufficient to describe what they had become. It shunted everything down the path of a single sense. When Raymond and Kevin decided to call it resonating, it was because the language around sound had roots in science and math, whereas vision was tainted by poetics. They could think about it in terms of ratios and harmonics. It was limiting and excluded parts of their experience. It imposed the interaction of sound and space, the idea of lag time, on what was instantaneous. It cut out the heart. But it gave them somewhere to begin.

  * * *

  —

  In the absence of anything but estimates, they assumed they’d killed everyone. Hence the party.

  Fermi proposed it in his odd English. His sentences spiraled upward like citrus twists dropped into poisoned drinks, giving the impression he might be joking, or the option to claim he had been. At the test site, he took cash bets from terrified NCOs as to whether the Gadget would ignite the oxygen in the atmosphere, incinerating all life on earth.

  The party was a victory dance and a wake for uncountable strangers. Its motives and goals were inscrutable, and it surged with nervous energy, the men jittery drunk, sweating in the dry oven heat of New Mexico in August. The nights were supposed to be cooler. Some nights, Kevin could even sleep. But that night, the sun’s departure gave no relief. Hadn’t they created a new sun? Maybe Fermi would win his bet and the world would end in flames, gradually rather than all at once. He was smart not to put a time limit on the wager.