by Lydia Millet
—united by some cohesive force under a specific set of conditions. Since our final memories immediately coincide with the Trinity test, it’s been surmised that there was something in the event, something anomalous and unprecedented, that managed to duplicate us over time, essentially move a copy of us, as it were, while the originals remained, forward through—
—Time travel? This is like science fiction?
—I make no claims as to genre. My point is, there have been a number of suggestions, but none of them make much sense. And believe me, none of them have anything to do with you.
He paused
—Incidentally, you would be—?
—I work at the library downtown. A man who said he was Dr. Szilard came in a few days ago—
—Leo! I see.
—He asked my—another librarian a number of—
—Leo is the opposite of discreet. Always was. He’s a one-man assault on good taste.
—But I have to ask you, I mean—if you are who you claim to be—how did you—?
—One minute we were down in the desert near Socorro counting down to the test. I was very tense, there had been forecasts of inclement weather and I was worried about what you now call “fallout,” and worse, what if after everything we’d been through we had a complete bust on our hands anyway—I wasn’t sure it would work, I really wasn’t—and we were under T-30 seconds, under T-10, and I was holding on to a post, so nervous I could barely stand. Then it went off. And it was …
—What?
— … It was something no one should ever see. But seeing it, we were transformed instantly. Like the matter itself. I don’t expect you to understand that. My colleague has suggested that possibly we too became energy. But then again, here we are. We seem to be animals as always. We still have the same old bodies, and we sleep. And we breathe.
—When I passed out you carried me, she said vaguely, thinking of their real legs as she fell, their real feet.
—And then I was here. In a motel.
—A motel?
—Sadly yes. I recollect waking up in a bed with a lumpy mattress. There was a print on the wall of a naked child holding a nosegay. Crass.
—You’re saying you went from—
—First it was ’45—the early hours of July 16th, around 5:30 to be precise, and then here I was in the next millennium. Purportedly.
—So you just materialized in a motel, you’re telling me.
—Actually I was lucky it was a motel. Fermi fetched up in the pouring rain on a street just off the Plaza, lying in a gutter. He was almost run over.
—You understand it’s not—I mean it’s obviously not believable, you being who you say you are.
She tripped: a blunt, burnished tongue of metal sticking out of the packed dirt of the road. Recovered but felt itchy on her skin, the swell and tingle of awkward humiliation. It was not good to trip during a first meeting. She had already been nervous.
—I hope you won’t take offense, but as far as what you may or may not believe, I’m indifferent, frankly, said Oppenheimer, amused.
—You claim the world is unreal, you’re real but the whole world is unreal.
—There is a real world, of course. This just isn’t it.
—Right.
—Clearly the vision, presentation, landscape—whatever it is—is dystopic. I mean you don’t expect me to believe …
He gestured at a house they were passing, whose backyard, grass still brown from beneath winter ice, was full of rusted motorcycles and bright red and yellow-painted totem poles bearing the caricatured faces of movie stars. An old man with a gray beard sat on a stained toilet in the middle of them, watching a talk show on a small television on a stump.
— … You don’t propose that this is the world, I hope.
Then they emerged from the alley onto a bright, wide street, and Oppenheimer waved at a short man on the other side. She recognized him: Fermi.
—Anyway, a pleasure, said Oppenheimer lightly, and shook her hand in dismissal. —Excuse me.
She pulled up short and watched him walk away.
—She says Szilard is here too, Oppenheimer told Fermi, whom he was trying, as usual, to extract from a trance.
—Insult to injury, murmured Fermi.
It was early afternoon when they emerged. She had gone into the coffeehouse once for a glass of ice water and watched them with mugs at their elbows, bent toward each other in conversation. Above them hung a spider plant, brown at the points of its leaves. They were sitting at a window. She had gone outside again and perched on the curb for a while, her feet in the gutter. She could see Fermi’s shoulder and arm if she looked in from the right place.
She had paced an arc around the side of the building, leaving a wide berth, waiting. And finally they came out, and she walked behind them, keeping her distance.
Behind them as they moved along the sidewalk, Oppenheimer lighting up as usual, tossing a burnt match into a jojoba bush, Fermi shaking his head, she skulked at a fair distance, too far to hear them, too close to lose sight. There was an aimlessness to their walk, it was brisk but going nowhere, somehow, and she was drifting too.
Then in the turn of an instant Oppenheimer leapt off the curb into the street to flag a passing taxi. Of course there was no other taxi near. She noted the name on the door and squinted to make out the number as they stepped in and the car pulled away; then she raised her cell phone to her ear and dialed 411.
But the dispatcher would not tell her where the cab was going and she watched as the car crested a hill and disappeared.
She had lost them, but at least she had talked to Oppenheimer and the salient details had been established. If he was a pretender he was immaculate in the pretense, down to the yellowed fingertips and the frail, pompous gentility. And she had been neat and quiet behind them, unassuming and respectful.
Leo Szilard, it turned out, was none of these things.
It was two days later that Investigative Services delivered the goods. He had not been difficult to locate. He was urgently attempting to transact business all over northern New Mexico. He had spoken without success to several newspaper reporters, an assistant at KUNM who would not let him past the front desk and whom he accused of being narrow-minded, and finally, apparently desperate, a reviewer of modern dance from Taos, who was very open-minded indeed.
He was checked into a cheap motel on Cerrillos Road, and was taking most of his meals, which exceeded three per day, in nearby ice-cream and pizza joints.
Ann drove to the motel during her lunch hour and knocked on his room door. When he answered Szilard was wearing a white terrycloth robe. Drops of water stood out on his pink face and the bathtub gurgled and sucked behind him, draining. A talk show droned along at low volume on the television.
—Sorry for the intrusion, but—are you Leo Szilard?
—Yes! said Szilard, and smiled. —Yes I am!
—I read your book, said Ann, — The Voice of the Dolphins.
—Indeed! beamed Szilard. —I have not yet had the pleasure! I did read a synopsis, however. On the Internet.
He opened the door, stepped back and padded across the indoor-outdoor carpeting in his bare feet, to root around in a suitcase and pull out a pair of balled socks. She stepped in and stood beside the veneer-top table, littered with papers marked PRESS RELEASE in large letters and stapled lists of addresses.
—I work at the library, said Ann. —You were there the other day and I heard about it. And I—I saw Robert Oppenheimer. I talked to him.
Szilard, sitting on the edge of his bed and pulling on a sock, looked up quickly.
—He’s here too?
—And Fermi.
—Enrico!
—I should say, men claiming to be Oppenheimer and Fermi, and now you, claiming to be Szilard.
—Claiming correctly, said Szilard. —I am Szilard. This is good! I was expecting them, I knew they would come. I had no concrete indication, however. Until now.
—B
ut you—Szilard is dead.
—You shouldn’t presume, said Szilard, struggling with the second sock. —It’s irrational. We know next to nothing about death. It is an undiscovered country.
—Where did you come from then?
—Anyway I can prove it. They would have to pull my files, this is the problem. Somewhere the armed forces may have my fingerprints. Could be the Army, the Air Force, the Department of Defense—they definitely had Oppie’s and Fermi’s, everyone who worked on the project. It was under military jurisdiction, as you may know. If you know about us. Do you know?
—I’ve been doing homework. But that was a long time ago.
—Don’t be fooled. The military has a long institutional memory. So where is Oppenheimer? And where’s Enrico?
—I don’t know, said Ann, —do you mind? and pulled out one of the chairs to sit down. —I’ve tried to follow them but I always lose them. They haven’t been, uh, making public appearances like you. So I can’t trace them as easily.
—Call expensive hotels, said Szilard. —Guarantee you, that’s where Oppenheimer will be. Only the finer things for that guy. He’s a snob. I need to talk to them. There’s a directory in the nightstand there, see?
It was in a black plastic binder dangling a broken chain, clearly stolen from a payphone.
—You’re asking me to call?
—Yes please, said Szilard. —I’ll go get dressed. You call please.
He plucked pants and a shirt off a rack and trundled into the bathroom, slamming the door behind him. She heard something crash, a rattle as it fell, and then the toilet flushing.
She had called in sick to work and made it through seven hotels when he emerged, unkempt-looking, his hair toweled into a short frizz, his shirt wrinkled and buttoned wrong and too tight around the midsection.
—Nothing yet, she told him. —Could he be registered under another name?
—I don’t think so, no need, said Szilard. —He has nothing to hide. Hand it over, I’ll do a few.
They met Oppenheimer in the lobby of the La Posada. —Step outside, shall we? he said, tapping a cigarette out of his pack. —They don’t allow smoking in the lobby. In other respects I’m quite satisfied here.
—Nice place, nodded Szilard.
—Also, they claim to have a ghost, a female ghost who wears a hood. I myself have not, uh, seen her, needless to say. Probably only comes out for the tourists. In any case, I enjoy the courtyard, and the casitas are nice.
He paused to light the cigarette.
—Where’s my old friend Fermi? asked Szilard eagerly.
—Just around the corner, at La Fonda, said Oppenheimer, and exhaled a plume of smoke. —He prefers it. And where are you, Leo?
—A motel on Cerrillos. I was in Chicago, on the campus. But then—
—You came here.
—I had to come. This is why, you and Fermi. I knew I wouldn’t be the only one. I’ve always had good timing. Got me away from the Nazis. Also, there was nothing for me to do in Chicago. And it was cold.
He turned to Ann.
—But what’s your interest?
—Just, said Ann, —that I found you.
Oppenheimer glanced at her sidelong.
—Lunch please? asked Szilard. —I’m hungry.
Oppenheimer’s old summerhouse in the tropics, on the Virgin Island of St. John, is a decaying yellow bungalow in a well-hidden cove. Unlike most other houses on the island it is built directly on the sands of the beach instead of up on a hill. At the top of the driveway down to this small beach is a decrepit wrought-iron gate on top of which only the letters P HEIMER BEACH remain.
After Oppenheimer died, his ashes were scattered off a rock by his wife Kitty. Five years later Kitty herself died; another five years later their daughter killed herself. Eventually the house passed into the hands of a nearby village, which, being poor and having no convenient use for the house, neglected it. In the decades following, the ocean slowly encroached upon the house and waves began to lap against the wooden deck.
Children played on the beach. One or two of them treasured the house and the salty palm fronds that brushed across its dust-covered planks in the gentle trade winds. They assumed that the house, in all its dereliction, was a permanent fixture. One or two of them would remember the house fondly when they were grown up as that old house on the beach, never having noticed the letters on the grail gate, never knowing it had also once been known as the Oppenheimer house.
But as they played their parents knew that the house was on its last legs. Their parents knew that one day soon the house would be eaten up by the sea.
Szilard hinted at fried chicken but Oppenheimer turned him down demurely. He did not like modern fast food. It was bland. The grease did not bother him, the probability of Bovine Growth Hormone, the potential for E. coli. He had read about these but he was not particularly unnerved by them. The world had never been sterile, he said. Why should it?
No: it was the lack of seasoning that was unacceptable to him. Flavor, he rebuked Szilard in gentle tones, as though talking to a baby.
For lunch he often patronized a restaurant across town. They would be his guests, he said generously.
Ann explained her situation to them as they walked to her car to drive to the restaurant, Oppenheimer striding with his jacket flapping loosely, Szilard bustling. She felt out of place but oddly secure, more solid herself between figments.
Unlocking her car doors and ushering them in, she said to Szilard, who stood beside her apparently waiting to have the car door opened for him, —You say I’m a figment of your delusional system but that could be a part of my mental illness. All your complicated theories? Just my mind. Refusing to recognize its insanity.
—Hmm, said Oppenheimer, trying to fold his long legs into the passenger seat of her Toyota, —but haven’t you already recognized the insanity? Frankly you seem quite eager to accept it. This car was made for a midget, I think.
—You can push the seat back, said Ann, and Szilard leaned around from the back seat and raised the lever on Oppenheimer’s right.
—They don’t say “midget” anymore, said Szilard. —I saw it on the Internet. They say “little person.”
—Oh for Chrissake, said Oppenheimer. —Perfectly good word, wasn’t it? What’s wrong with “midget?”
—The midgets don’t like it.
At first she’d been panicked, she told them. —On the brink of hysteria, actually, if you want to know, she said, —which you probably don’t.
But now she was caught up in the proposition that they were real—a miracle, or a revolution. It fell to her to move with the fluid currents, observing, paying close attention. She would pretend she was in gentle waters to stay afloat, retaining her buoyancy.
But she was choking.
—Could you at least roll down the window, please? she asked Oppenheimer, who had not discarded his cigarette.
—Of course.
—Can I ask how you’re living? asked Ann. —I mean did you show up from the afterworld with a credit card?
—Personal checks, though if you’ll permit me it’s hardly your business, said Oppenheimer. —My checkbook was in the suitcase. And I can do without the sardonic inflection.
—Stop the car! yelled Szilard. —I think I see Dick Feynman!
Oppenheimer glanced out the window, mildly bored. Szilard pointed. Ann flicked her blinker on and started to pull over, but the driver of the hulking SUV behind her leaned on the horn insistently.
—I said pull over! urged Szilard. —Pull over!
—I’m doing my best, she snapped, and finally pulled in at the head of a line of parked cars as the SUV surged out from behind her, horn wailing.
Szilard jumped up and got out, moving with surprising agility. The car door stood open as he jogged back along the sidewalk.
—So, said Ann, —where’s Fermi today?
—He stayed in, said Oppenheimer. —I think he may be a little down. He was always very ration
al. A practical man. No time for frivolities like, say, philosophy or religion.
—This is hitting him hard, huh, said Ann.
—He used to talk about taking early retirement and going back to the land, mused Oppenheimer. —He came from peasant stock. Piacenza, in the Po River valley. He said he wanted to be a farmer when he was finished with physics. Personally I had trouble picturing it. But apparently he died before realizing the dream. At the ripe old age of fifty-three, if I’m not mistaken. He’s a first-rate mind, Fermi.
Someone rapped on Ann’s window: a cop.
—This is a no-parking zone, ma’am, he said, when she rolled down the glass.
—I’m sorry, I was just waiting—
—Fine, but you just want to pull up and around the corner there. You see? Right there, across from the mailbox.
—Sure. OK. I’ll pull up.
—And you sir, you been wearing your seatbelt?
—What business—
—He was just relaxing while we waited for—
—Make sure you do.
The cop slapped the roof of the car and she pulled around the corner.
—I thought we beat the fascists, said Oppenheimer.
—Well, it’s all for—we know some things about public health we didn’t know then, said Ann. —Statistics—
—It wasn’t him, burst out Szilard, sliding into his seat again. —It looked like him but it wasn’t. I had a feeling it was just the three of us here, but I wanted to make sure. Why’d you move the car? I thought I’d lost you.
—We were fugitives on the lam, said Oppenheimer. —The law was after us.
—It was a no-stopping zone, said Ann. —Can we go now?
—Dick Feynman, bright young man, mused Oppenheimer, as Ann pulled away from the curb. —But sadly, deranged. I just read it yesterday: he once locked himself up in Bob Serber’s basement. He was trying to teach the dog to speak English.
The restaurant had a full bar and apparently, in Oppenheimer’s opinion, it was never too early for bourbon. Ann left the two scientists at the table and called Ben, standing outside the front door with the phone hot against her ear, in the shade of a honey locust.
—I’m with Oppenheimer and Szilard, she said, —I’m trying to find out if I’m dreaming them or they’re dreaming me.