by Lydia Millet
It had taken everything.
The people he had known, he’d been with yesterday, all gone, gone from him now or he was gone from them, a robbed soul, a victim. He felt it like a tearing loss, felt it weaken his knees as he sat there, how they had all disappeared in the blink of an eye, in the space between seconds. He felt at once the outrage of his absence from that scene he had made, the production he had authored, with its ponderous massive godhead looming over the land.
Kitty. Where was his wife? Was she dead now, or had she only forgotten him? And the children, taken. Where were they? He felt panic rising. Other people had known them, but not him.
All that was what it claimed to be, if this was the future and time had gone on without him.
They had worked together, he and all of these men. They had striven so hard all these weeks, so earnest in the enterprise, laboring in a fever of concentration and letting their families fall by the wayside, knowing they were the priesthood of the atom. They had believed staunchly in Roosevelt before he died and in Niels Bohr, the great man, his own mentor, a scientist for peace. They had known they were fighting the good fight, but then again—it was clear to him now as the cloud rolled outward—by the same token they had believed everything, they had been like children. They had been willing to accept every word he said to them, he realized suddenly, and there had been no deception: he had believed the words himself. And yet while he was reassuring them, plying his logic and his wit and gracious speech—he would admit it, he rose to the occasion, occasionally even he with his mere gifts was capable of eloquence—he had actually known nothing.
That was what he saw now. All he had known was how to make science into faith, or at least that had been his pretension. He had known nothing, despite his erudition or maybe because of it, possibly the layers of information had smothered what lay beneath. He had known nothing at all, finally, and now his own ignorance stunned him.
He ran the footage from the Trinity shot repeatedly, pressing the button that started the video again and again. As he watched the shot, the cloud that transformed itself as it rose, he finally forgot about individuals, forgot about the others who had been there with him. At first he had remembered their gestures and habits, the texture of them had come home with startling force as he watched the cloud rise and burgeon, its pregnant violence spread rolling and tumbling over the sky, spectacular and obscene birth.
But now he was losing them as he began to see the cloud for what it was, grandeur and mass. It took so many forms: at first it was a dome, then a bell, then a jellyfish. People called it a mushroom cloud: he heard it all around him.
At first he had not fathomed its enormity. When he was there, although it had been awesome, it had also been too near to see clearly. He had seen close instead of clear. But still he knew it for what it was and it had struck to his heart and to the hearts of all of them.
And now the longer he watched the more clearly he saw it, as though from far away, through space and time that had left him. He forgot the families of the men, their wives and kids, all of whom he had met, most of whom he had known by name, handed drinks at parties or patted on the head—wives drinks, that was, and children heads. Their faces faded and his mind wandered to other matters, to vast sights and abstractions, darkness and light.
Finally what he recalled as he sat there, as he pushed the button and watched the cloud rise over and over, mesmerized, was a distraction, a tangent. He digressed, with the cloud rising before him on the small screen, and it struck him how hopeful he had been when he was young. As a child he had dreamed of heaven: even as a child, before he even knew the rigors of adversity, he had clung to the idea of another place, a flawless and gentle place beyond and after this one.
Despite what had been taught to him at the Adler school, the politely benevolent atheism, despite the secular learning of those he most respected he had still, as a child, dreamed of heaven almost rapturously. It had been a quasi-Christian heaven, possibly, he reflected as he sat watching the cloud. It smacked of the pearliness and sentimentality of Christian visions, not his own family’s faith, such as it was, now that he thought about it. He had been assimilated even then: it had begun when he was very young.
But whether heaven was on earth or elsewhere, futurist utopia or a return to the garden of Eden, a worker’s paradise or a rich man’s material indulgence, he had held fast to this vision. Men could make an empire of peace, an empire of perfect comprehension. Somewhere, future or dream, this city of God must exist.
He wondered how old he had been, whether it was ten or twelve, when he had first begun to cling to this. He wondered whether his last sandcastle on the beach had been built and washed away before then.
It occurred to him fleetingly that this might be a test, that his presence here, in what appeared at first glance to be a sterile and terrible future, was not real but only a test, a test of faith, moral fiber, a test of integrity.
At last the old woman beside him, disgruntled, complained loudly that he was “monopolizing the button.” She heaved herself up from her chair and crept away swaying. Stray children wandered over and sat down but they quickly became bored with his trigger finger and he was left alone at the monitor, motionless and staring.
After an hour or two—it might have been longer, he did not know—he began to cry.
This was contrary to his usual practice. He wept, like most adult men, so rarely that there were often years between outbreaks.
Finally another visitor to the museum, a young woman wearing open-toed suede sandals, put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder as he sobbed. She stood behind him and watched with him patiently as the mushroom cloud rose and blossomed first tens, then hundreds of times; she shook her head sadly at the blossoming, touching and rubbing his shoulder gently but firmly.
At first he was taken aback by this intrusion, by the sudden intimacy and forwardness of the gesture, but presently he became grateful for it. The hand was warm and soft and linked him to a person who, unlike all the others he knew, had not yet disappeared. When she squatted down behind him to watch the screen at his level he could see the shape of her head reflected in the monitor, the braids on either side of her face and the long earrings whose complicated beadwork swayed with the slow movements of her shaking head.
She left with a final pat to his shoulder and the whispered word Peace.
He was greatly comforted by this.
Later, telling of his encounter with the woman at the museum, he would repeat the phrase She had such a generous heart! In fact he would always be moved by the smell of patchouli, which in and of itself he found fairly unpleasant, because it reminded him of kindness.
After that he left the museum and walked through the streets looking for his old house, which he failed to locate. Kitty and the children had been living there only the day before yesterday. Only the day before yesterday, this was where he came home to, this but not this, here but not here, and his wife and children were no longer wife and children: all they were was all gone.
If everything he knew had not been swept away they would be living here still. When he came to the place where he guessed his house had once been he sat down on a bench, his hat beside him, and wept again. His eyes were dry but his throat rasped with sobs.
A passing youngster lobbed a quarter onto his hat brim.
After three cups of coffee and nine cigarettes in a nearby dive he walked to the lab complex and inquired after physicists and engineers and even secretaries and file clerks he knew, hoping one of them would still be present, working there. He wracked his brain for the names of the youngest employees of the Project, the ones he’d known when they were in their very early twenties, who might feasibly still be around, postponing their retirement because they were wedded to their work. But not surprisingly none of the names he gave to security were recognized, and finally they turned him away.
Firsthand accounts of the Trinity test make clear it was a sight that could never be captured by photograph
y or by words. It was a moment that had to be felt in the stomach, seen with the eyes. The singularity of the sight of the first atomic bomb is clear in all descriptions by the physicists who were present. It turned scientists into poets.
Enrico Fermi wrote: Although I did not look directly towards the object, I had the impression that suddenly the countryside became brighter than in full daylight. Robert Serber wrote: At a height of perhaps twenty thousand feet, two or three thin horizontal layers of shimmering white cloud were formed. Luis Alvarez wrote: My first sensation was one of intense light covering my whole field of vision. Victor Weisskopf wrote: The path of the shock wave through the clouds was plainly visible as an expanding circle all over the sky. Phillip Morrison wrote: I observed an enormous and brilliant disk of white light. Ed McMillan, the test director, wrote: The whole surface of the ball was covered with a purple luminescence, like that produced by the electrical excitation of air.
Oppenheimer read his own comments about Trinity too. He read the line his other self, the shell of self that had witnessed the explosion and continued living in its own time, had apparently selected from the Bhagavad-Gita to describe the experience. It was a line that had been famous, almost as famous as he himself, the line I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.
He saw himself pronounce these words on film. On the grainy gray film stock he was a white-haired old man, old beyond his years, careful and worn, his eyes misty.
Every night Ann walked alone. She walked home, she walked down the street, she walked to meet Ben at a restaurant or a friend’s house or occasionally a bar. She made sure that she walked alone.
As she walked she became all abstract.
The opposition between the small and the big, the idea of the miniscule and the idea of the vast, she thought, is not far removed from the opposition between the mundane and the sublime.
And if the question were asked: What is more real, the mundane or the sublime? most would hesitate before they gave an answer.
On the one side details: say, the aftermath of a breakfast, dirty chipped plates in the sink, their rims encrusted with egg yolk. Against this, the unnameable: small aching heart with boasts, what can you know? Outside the cage of everything we ever heard or saw, beyond, outside, above, there lies the real, hiding as long as we shall live, there stretch and trail the millions of names of God burning across the eons. When all through this our end will come before we even know the names of us.
For many the egg yolk prevails.
He did not know what was real but for the time being, until he got his bearings, he allowed himself to believe what was being proposed: he had been displaced in time and the man whose story had been told in history books, this other impostor self, therefore could not be and had never been him. How could it? Here he was: this was he.
He also read other people’s descriptions of him. He pored over these, attempting to glean from them a sense of his own wonder secondhand. He was disturbed by one description of him “swaggering” as he left the Trinity site after the test, as he stepped into the car. He felt that this comment was unfair. He was not, and never had been, a man to swagger. He would not have strutted like a cowboy from a sight like that.
He was downcast for some days at the betrayal of intimates. Haakon Chevalier had written a novel featuring Robert himself, thinly veiled, as an cruelly rendered protagonist, an arrogant and self-deluding intellectual. This drew from him a shaken and wounded astonishment. Haakon had been a close friend, or so he had believed: but in fact to judge from the text Haakon had not known him, had not known him at all, clearly. And then there was the report that Teller, during what appeared to be a right-wing political witch hunt in the 1950s, had spoken ill of him and doomed him to a senescence of obscurity.
Reading these accounts of the past, accounts that he read as though they were fiction, he was struck dumb by the spite of people, which was sadly not outweighed by the charity of others, no matter how generous it might be.
He knew he had been robbed but he was not sure exactly what had been stolen from him.
Leo Szilard, brilliant gadfly, meddler, inventor, physicist, molecular biologist, friend of Einstein, inveterate seeker of patents, crusader for peace, amateur policy analyst, writer of exceedingly dull fictions, and would-be savior of the world, was born in Budapest, Hungary, in 1898. There, the oldest of three children, he lived in a house designed by his uncle Emil, which looked like a fairy-tale castle. In the garden of the castle Leo played with his brother and sister and their cousins. Later, in the wake of the fall of Bela Kun, persecution and war following him, Szilard left Hungary for Berlin, Berlin for London, London for New York. Szilard was always one step ahead of catastrophe.
After curing his own bladder cancer with a self-designed course of radiation treatments, Szilard died suddenly in 1964, in La Jolla, California, of a heart attack.
He had moved to La Jolla for the sunshine.
Unlike Oppenheimer, Szilard did not dwell on his former life, his former ties, his lost family when he found himself transplanted into the twenty-first century. This was partly because none of his personal ties had been too close. He had always been too busy with destiny to have much truck with minor details of emotion and sentiment.
Instead he immediately set himself the task of catching up on history, ravenously, tirelessly, processing information at a high rate of speed and storing it for reference in the near future. He was instantly as busy and as full of zeal, as unfazed and as tunnel-visioned as he had been in the 1940s.
The walks that Ann had begun to take soon became, if not a compulsion, at least a necessary hinge. It was hills that she liked, hills and hidden corners.
She set herself tasks of thinking when she left on a walk, small tasks such as: What counts as mundane? If mundane just means “Of, pertaining to, or typical of this world” how it is that over the years the mundane has become allied with the trivial?
The word mundane derives clearly from the Latin mundus, the world. Why is the world—which after all is all we have—so much maligned? Why does familiarity breed contempt? When she thought of being familiar she thought of bed, and Ben. There was no contempt there but it was certainly the case that when they were first together there had been a voluptuous turbulence, now settled into routine.
She knew this was just what happened. She knew that Ben liked the routine and had been relieved to trade uncertainty for stability, and she did not mind. But why desire had to change when the new became old she did not know and walking by herself she lamented it. When there was not less love why was there always a slacking off?
She stopped to watch a thin coyote trot across the road and disappear in a thicket and decided it was this: that familiarity breeds not contempt but affiliation, and affiliation is the opposite of urgency, of focus and ardor and intent. Affiliation is a linking of arms in which the subjects move forward side by side. Because they are looking ahead into the world, watching the road and making sure not to stumble, they no longer look each other in the eye.
Thus the opposing tension of two people standing face-to-face dissipates.
As soon as he had raised himself from the gutter and wandered through downtown Santa Fe long enough to assess his surroundings, pat down his pockets to discover a wallet fat with cash, and secure a hotel room, Fermi collapsed.
For several days he existed in a state that might fairly be described as mild catatonia, sitting on the edge of his hotel bed and staring.
Contingencies. Had the German military had access to an A-bomb during what they call World War Two, it is unlikely that strategic planners in the Third Reich would have forfeited the opportunity to drop said device on an English or American city.
Had the physicist Werner Heisenberg, who was heading the Nazi A-bomb program, decided to use graphite instead of so-called heavy water to slow down neutrons in his chain reaction experiments, the Germans might well have beat the Americans to the bomb.
Had Fermi and Szilard, when they discovered th
at graphite could be used for this crucial purpose, published their findings, Heisenberg would have known about graphite.
It was a man named George Braxton Pegram, physicist at Columbia University and an avid tennis player and canoeist, who told Fermi and Szilard not to publish.
This might, among other functions, serve as a parable for those who do not believe in the power of the printed word.
Evidently the mundane is by nature massive, even all-powerful. Once a few particles can exterminate people by the billions, never again can it be argued that small and trivial are in the same family.
The public library was a sanctuary. Ann liked the calmness of the stacks, which she felt as the presence of thousands of minds, many sympathetic. In the silence she sometimes thought she could detect a low hum, all of them murmuring.
On the day in question, however, the sanctuary was no protection.
Around two in the afternoon the other librarian stepped out to lunch. Moments later a thunderclap sounded and heavy rain drummed on the roof. Ann leaned on her counter listening to the rain and wondered what Ben was doing, whether the inventors of the leveraged buyout were calling him into the kitchen for tea. Or maybe he was going to sit sketching at the drafting table with Yoshi the landscape architect. They did not speak each other’s language and they had no interpreters, Ben had told her. Hence instead of talking they drew on a paper, and passed it back and forth politely, bowing their heads. They were polite men, Yoshi meek, Ben quiet, both of them eager to please.
She was thinking about this when Mr. Hofstadt came to her desk with one of his reference requests. Mr. Hofstadt was a man in his early fifties with thinning red hair and thick bifocals and liver spots on his trembling hands. He was partial to Ann, whose shyness he saw as a welcome. For months he had been coming to Reference every other day. His questions had become increasingly arcane, in fact it seemed to Ann that they were arbitrary. He had sought information on the natal chart of one of the lesser Marx brothers and on volcanism along the Mid-Atlantic Ridge; once he had told her he was studying the life cycle of hermaphroditic gastropods. On that occasion he had rested his elbows on the counter, leaned in and confided in her, in a wheedling voice, —In, for example, Lymnaea stagnalis, the pond snail, the penis is located immediately adjacent to the vagina. Not so the apple snail!