by Lydia Millet
She herself held a paperback, a dog-eared, doleful Russian novel in which a gloomy family marched steadily toward death.
Despite this she kept smiling.
Later he commented on the book. He said the book had it wrong, that it was not happy families who were all the same and unhappy families who were different but the reverse.
And a while after that he had uprooted a spindly, homely plant with minute yellow flowers the size of pinheads, and held it out to her.
—These are called London Rockets, he went on softly. —They’re an invasive exotic. As the name suggests they came from the Old World, all the way across the ocean. They never evolved here. They’re tourists.
That night, lying awake, she had repeated “invasive exotic” to herself. She had repeated even “as the name suggests.” She called him again the next morning and he said it was a relief to hear from her, because he had thought about it at some length and decided the yard was not finished.
It might not be finished for years, he said.
And now he came walking toward her leaving the frail mother behind the flowers and the photograph, and a white-gray light streaming through the Easter window.
The room was almost empty by then.
The same night she curled into the fetal position and he held her cold toes in his hands to make them warm. They were lying in bed and she told him about the dream of the atom bomb, the squirrel, and her mother as a young girl. Days or weeks had passed since the dream, enough for her to forget how long it had been. She did not tell him she suspected herself of being half-awake when she dreamed it, of in fact thinking it more than dreaming, because she wanted to have been held hostage to the dream. She wanted to look passive, like someone who had received a bad gift but was polite to the giver.
The dream was embarrassing.
—I used to have dreams of mushroom clouds when I was thirteen, confessed Ben.
—But not since then.
—Never, said Ben. —There are too many other ways the world could end.
She gazed up into the mosquito net that hung from the beam above them on its circular frame, turning and turning back at a leisurely pace in the stream of quiet air from the fan. They had not unfurled the net; it hung above them knotted, gauzy and white, untouched, awaiting the plague.
She thought: being hurt and forgetting, the two easiest tasks in the world. Millions and billions we forget every day, we forget the others.
She closed her eyes to shut it out though there was nothing before them, nothing but the rotating net and the curtains in the dark. Between the two curtains was a strip of window, and outside a bluer, paler dark than the thick felt dark of the room. She thought: We can’t even live without forgetting.
Ben put his lips behind her ear and then pressed them against her temple.
—I mean, what is there to be afraid of? he asked gently. —Endings? The end is simple. One day all of this will be gone.
At work she studied the history of Los Alamos when she was not helping patrons. She found a book that contained a blurry photograph of two men: Dr. J. R. Oppenheimer and General L. Groves, it read, Scientific and Military Leaders of the Manhattan Project. They were standing beside the twisted remains of a steel tower. Oppenheimer wore a suit with a button on the lapel, and his hat shaded his features; General Groves was in an army uniform, a fat man with a caterpillar mustache and a babyish face.
The steel tower had housed the first bomb, the one exploded in the test named Trinity. It had stood a hundred feet tall and after the explosion lay crumpled on the ground. The sand had fused into a green glassy rock they called Trinitite.
When the “gadget,” as they called it, exploded, Oppenheimer and another physicist named Kistiakowsky, who had designed the bomb’s trigger, were watching from a control station five miles from Ground Zero. General Leslie R. Groves, along with physicists Fermi, Rabi, Morrison, and others watched from a base camp ten miles from Zero, Fermi through a hole in a board covered with welding glass. Physicist Robert Serber watched with the naked eye, twenty miles from Zero; physicist Luis Alvarez watched from a B-29, at a distance of about twenty-five miles. Leo Szilard, who had catalyzed the A-bomb project but subsequently been cut out by Groves, was not in New Mexico at all but at the University of Chicago.
There was a flash, there was a bright expanding disc and then a roiling ball of smoke, red and orange, which rose to more than thirty thousand feet on a purple column, growing and swelling and pushing out a wall of dirt in a vast ring on the land below it.
Beneath the violet pillar, in the vacuum before the roar of the cloud, there came a soft sound that might have been heard by those who listened closely: the gentle sigh of an idea unbound.
After the explosion all the men watching, the physicists and the technicians and the Army men, knew the world had changed and that this change could never be reversed. Science, like time, seems only to move forward.
Some of the men who saw Trinity had high hopes, others were chilled to the bone and would never recover. Groves said, rather optimistically as it turned out, “This is the end of traditional warfare.”
Oppenheimer said later—maybe a little too neatly—that he’d thought of a line from the Bhagavad-Gita: “I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.”
Kenneth Bainbridge, the British physicist who was the official test director, shook Oppenheimer’s hand and said only, “Now we’re all sons of bitches.”
Kistiakowsky said: “I am sure that at the end of the world, in the last millisecond of the earth’s existence, humanity will see what we have just seen.”
People living hundreds of miles away had seen the flash too. For them it was something quick and bright and inexplicable on the horizon. They were not told what it was until some years had passed. The day after Trinity, in fact, they were given misinformation. The New Mexico newspapers bore stories claiming the flash had been a munitions warehouse exploding—an explanation that came to them from the Manhattan Engineering District’s PR man.
So the people saw the flash but could not see in the flash, as the scientists had, the shudder of history petrified.
It had been out of the question, Ann saw, for the physicists of the Manhattan Project to abandon their good idea before they had followed it as far as they could. They were men on a road with no choice but to walk it: they only wanted to keep going.
And they adored the idea, pursuing it with a devotion they never considered could be anything but virtuous. With their minds they had fastened onto a secret, which went on and on forever and had never before been known.
Further they justified it this way: once the good idea was had at all, they said and knew, it would be had again. Across the globe the good idea would spread, and if they did not bring it to fruition surely someone else would do so instead.
Across the globe, they said, some other so-called geniuses, because they could, would take the good idea and run with it. And so, in perpetuity, the mere presence of so-called genius would guarantee the final efflorescence of knowledge.
In the second book she flipped through there was another photograph of Oppenheimer, a portrait. He was hatless in it. She stared.
Stunned, she peered down at the photograph from different distances, different angles, trying to find points of distinction between the man in the portrait and the man who had been smoking at the bar. Finding none she began to mull it over: an Oppenheimer relative? Oppenheimer’s son? She scoured the indexes of several books to confirm that he had a son, and he did, though she could not find a picture of this son as an adult. There were only baby pictures. The son, she read, lived in the hills of New Mexico, not far away from Santa Fe. He should be in his late fifties or early sixties, she deduced from the mention of his birth, and the man she had seen looked younger than that: but people age at different rates, the bar had been dimly lit, in fact the bar had been a hall of shadows.
It was a coincidence, certainly, she thought: first a bad dream about Oppenheimer, then a sightin
g of someone who looked just like him. Then it occurred to her that of course not, it was not a coincidence at all, and she felt ashamed of her simple-mindedness. She was exaggerating. Probably the man in the bar had borne a slight resemblance to the man in the photograph, and the rest she had fabricated. She had been affected more than she knew by Eugene and his death. She was looking for a mystery like a child who wished for a secret. She was on the brink of hysteria, even.
Oppenheimer also had a daughter, she discovered, but she had been subject to periods of depression and finally, with a broken heart, had killed herself.
It had been slow at the library since the shooting, so slow that Ann could spread out books on the Reference counter without interruption, smoothing her hands over the pages, the rounds of her elbows settled on thick cushions of paper.
The Manhattan Project had been housed, at first, in the Los Alamos Ranch School for Boys, where for decades spindly, pasty specimens from wealthy families back East had been sent to find hardiness, to grow robust and manly in the sun and pines. The school had been commandeered by the Army almost overnight, condemned, shut down, and unceremoniously cleared of all boys. Two scientists calling themselves “Smith” and “Jones” came to supervise the eviction. The school was also cleared of headmasters, faculty and staff, stunned, sad, and marooned, who left for the Manhattan Engineering District their garbage pails, pie plates, and mustard jars, their bunk beds, horses, and bales of hay.
Oppenheimer had chosen the site because of his fondness for the desert, she learned. She also learned that the scientists and their wives were under a security quarantine on the high, isolated mesa for the years they lived there, and could rarely venture outside. Partly due to the dearth of entertainment, the birth rate in Los Alamos was so high there were diaper shortages.
And though all traffic through the official gates of the supposedly high-security compound was strictly controlled, the children on the mesa regularly escaped to play outside the top-secret Site Y through unnoticed holes in the fences.
The next day she pored over pictures of the Trinity test in its first seconds, a black-and-white, stop-motion sequence of the rising and billowing mushroom cloud in the Alamogordo desert. She cast her eyes slowly over photographs of the Army barracks the scientists and their families had lived in, up on the mesa in World War Two, over Oppenheimer and his brother on horseback and scenic vistas of the Sangre de Cristo and Jemez mountains, snow-covered pines against a clear winter sky. She saw grainy, blurred shots of the bombs made at Los Alamos and then dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The first bomb, called Little Boy, was rocket-shaped and used rare uranium 235. The second bomb was called Fat Man. It was rotund and used plutonium, which could be produced in bulk.
Finally she looked at portraits of the scientists themselves, rows and rows of men, many of them so-called geniuses. Among them was Fermi, a Nobel Prize winner and refugee from Mussolini. It was Fermi who had produced the first chain reaction in piles of graphite and uranium under the bleachers of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. He was the one who had found a way to manufacture plutonium, the one who enabled the Allies to beat the Nazis to the bomb, and the one who made the bomb infinitely buildable.
He was also the spitting image of the short, balding man in the trench coat. His first name was Enrico.
When she saw the photograph of Fermi she closed the book she was reading and then deliberately, carefully closed the other books spread out at her elbows. She stacked them neatly in a pile beside her; she sat with her hands folded in her lap and watched the second hand tick on the clock on the wall. At five o’clock she made the usual rounds, flicking off lights and checking for stragglers, of which she already knew there were none.
Then she left.
Though Oppenheimer would say later that implicit in the invention of the bomb was its use, while he directed the Manhattan Project he did not choose to frame it that way. Instead he chose to argue that the bomb, if its design succeeded, would be so terrible, so awesome in its power to destroy, that it would bring an end to all wars. Like no other weapon before it, the atom bomb would be an instrument of peace.
But for a brilliant man, Oppenheimer was relying on a surprisingly impoverished logic, the logic of a man attempting to rationalize. For clearly an undiscovered threat is no threat at all. For the idea of the bomb to emanate such awesome power, of course, the bomb would have to be used.
Ben had promised Yoshi they would join him for cocktails at the mansion. He had promised Yoshi despite the fact that Ann rarely enjoyed a party, despite the fact that he knew this and usually tried to turn down such invitations, because Yoshi was uncomfortable with Roger and Lynn. Lynn was prone to ask him questions about Japanese culture in a loud, carrying voice, stressing the subjugation of women.
Ann was often anxious before social events but today she was curiously indifferent. Stepping out of the shower she stood behind Ben, who was shaving over the sink with a straight razor, and put her arms around his waist. She saw the soft pinkness of their skin in the mirror and the hardness of the tiles.
He turned to brush his foam-rimmed lips along hers and then away again, and she stood on tiptoe and rested her chin briefly on his shoulder, watching them in the mirror side by side. She marveled at their differences, how the two of them could be limited to their separate spaces in air, their outlines distinct.
Letting go and crossing the room, dabs of white on her chin and nose, it occurred to her that something was missing and she stopped mid-stride, spinning on a heel, afraid for a split second she had left it behind.
—Ben?
—Uh huh?
—Oh. Nothing.
The split-second had passed and she knew she hadn’t forgotten anything specific: just part of her had vanished before she even knew what it was. Something had escaped.
She stood still and tried to bring it back but could not. Instead she thought of Roger and Lynn in their adobe palace, holding their drinks in hands spangled with silver and turquoise, faces bored and expectant. Usually she was alarmed when she thought of people like that before she had to see them, usually it was dread, but now she saw them in their element, certain that the ground would never move beneath them unless they ordered it, and felt no apprehension. They were arrogant and they were right, they had always been right: the world was safer for them than for anyone else. They moved between adobe and a penthouse on Park Avenue and an alpine chalet on Interlaken and a beach home in the British Virgin Islands. The boards of their companies were peppered with men of girth with Pacemakers, men who had worked for tyrants. They would never be proven wrong.
Their smugness could be trusted, she told herself.
Always before this had bothered her, it had grated on her and rung with injustice, but now, oddly, it seemed like relief.
Then the next second, standing in the bedroom and looking back at the open door to the bathroom without moving, she saw the deep-blue tiles and caught a glimpse of a flash of metal as Ben flicked the razor along his jawbone. The relief was gone and she felt liquid, trembling from the center.
She had the fleeting recognition: I am not afraid of them now.
And then the next moment: Because I have more to fear.
She turned and opened the closet doors slowly and saw the worn shoes lying piled on the floor, the familiar grain of the closet door’s wooden trim, the winter sweaters folded and piled sloppily on the shelf, a paper clothes-hanger jacket that read We Our Customers.
Nothing routine could alarm her again: she was sealed off. Briefly this braced her, buoyed her up as though she’d won; but then the feeling was weak, with something dark and yellow behind it.
She thought: As long as I am surrounded by the life we all know.
The life we all agree on.
As they walked down the sloping street to the mansion Ben held her hand and told her that Roger and Lynn wanted waterfalls built for them, small hills and ponds sculpted in their garden. They wanted him to plant
wildflowers that bloomed “at all times,” lupines and Colorado columbine and penstemon and evening primroses and Indian paintbrush. —They have to bloom at all times, Lynn had said to Ben. When he told her that would require constant replanting and constant vigilance she shrugged. Also, he told her, there was the niggling problem of winter, the pesky revolution of the globe around the sun. She waved her hand and said—Fine! Just remember, we want them to be blooming at all times. Through the snow. If you have to heat the ground, whatever, put in heat lamps or whatever, just do it. As long as the lamps are hidden by leaves or something.
Roger wanted a one-hole golf course, Lynn wanted his golf course concealed with ornamental shrubs. Ann thought: The world we all agree on. With its terrible gardens.
She clutched Ben’s hand and closed her eyes as they went down the hill, telling herself to let go of everything.
Ben decided to stay close to her at the party to ensure she did not wander off as she sometimes did in clients’ homes, wander off and stand alone in a dark walk-in closet where it was silent, or sit in an armchair in a neglected corner staring at some useless object she’d picked up off a shelf.
Because it was acceptable to pay attention to objects, and far easier than facing people she did not know, she would fasten herself to them sometimes to get away. Her lack of interest in the object was irrelevant: what counted was the envelope they made together, protected from intrusion.
Caterers in white shirts and black bow ties carried trays of rich hors d’oeuvres through the crowd, goat cheese and rosemary and foie gras and puff pastries full of crab from the Bering Sea. Lynn took Ben by the arm and walked them through the other guests introducing him, and then Ann as an afterthought. Ann was not anxious, only pleasantly bored, but wished Lynn would not introduce her at all. She wanted only to observe the party, to watch the others from a quiet and concealed position.
After they had run the gauntlet they were given drinks and left in a corner to talk to Yoshi, who stood alone beside the beehive fireplace. He was smiling a slightly embarrassed smile and politely holding an untouched martini at arm’s length. He said a few words to her, —Hello, my name’s Yoshi, and then: —How are you?