by Lydia Millet
Even on a gray day, it occurred to her, you could not stare at the sky. I should go in, she thought: what if I get shot too?
But she sat with the dead cat. She thought quickly that she was having a nervous breakdown, but then she forgot this thought and lost herself staring up at the sky, tears dripping down her cheeks because she refused to blink.
She picked up the cat, which was limp and heavy, and held it in her lap, her cheeks wet, her throat aching. She felt the terrible loneliness of its dying. I am all it has, she thought, now, in its last moments: and I too am small and don’t go far. How narrowly contained is all the knowledge of a life.
We want to feel infused, she thought, her arms around the cat, holding tight. We want to be dear to the leaves and the sky. I know what it is to long, we say across the air of time, I know what feeling is. We want to think we will be there, always with the others that were and will be. We want to glow in the dark.
2
After the bomb was dropped ostensibly to ensure that the emperor was removed from his throne, the emperor was not in fact removed from his throne. Far from ousting Hirohito, whose stubborn refusal to surrender unconditionally had allegedly provoked them so far that only the atom bomb could spell peace, American authorities kept him on the throne for decades.
For some, this appears to reinforce the notion that the bomb was dropped not out of wartime desperation but as a combination political maneuver-field test. It insinuates that the hundreds of thousands of Japanese men, women and children who died, either through instant vaporization or through long months or years of suffering, were the first American sacrifice to the care and feeding of the infant Cold War.
After the war the Allies did, however, force Hirohito to reject his claim to divinity. Japanese emperors could no longer be descendants of the sun goddess.
Ann told Oppenheimer about the cat and together they carried the body to the neighbors’ house, wrapped tenderly in one of Ann’s mother’s old scarves. Later they told Szilard, who dismissed it as the work of a child with a BB gun.
When he came home from work she also told Ben, but only that the neighbors’ cat had died and she had found it. She did not tell him how.
She felt a pang of guilt at this but reassured herself that it was for his own good: he would only worry.
She also told herself that if the shooter had wanted to aim for her he would have: it was a campaign of intimidation. And it was working; often she was afraid, now, when she was by herself. But it did not deter her when it came to the scientists: they were still her charges. And because she was fearful when she was alone, she tried to stay with one of them at all times, with one of them or with Ben. When she was not with the scientists in the course of a day she dwelled on them, admitting her need for them, to feel chosen by them. The desire to feel chosen was sad to her, in part for being a child’s longing that stretched out over a lifetime. But even though it was sad she could not dismiss it. It was never to be outgrown, sad in its futility, sad in its solitude.
Still it is there, she thought, no matter how clearly you see it. And it persists past anything.
Fermi had acquired the habit of following Ben around the vegetable garden when he got home from work, asking questions about native chili and squash and new varieties of tomato. He became familiar with the drip irrigation system and began to study xeriscape gardening, something he had not learned in New Jersey in the 1930s.
He still did not want to go to Japan. He was sick of movement in general and did not wish to be moved. He felt he had already been forced to travel more than he had ever wished to, already had to adjust where adjustment was next to impossible. He had been shunted from Rome to Pisa to Leiden and Göttingen to Florence and back to Rome and through Stockholm to New Jersey to Chicago to Los Alamos, and then, final insult, from 1945 all the way to 2004.
It was the last leg of the journey that left him embittered.
Little Boy, the uranium bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, killed between seventy thousand and one-hundred and forty thousand people instantly. It is often estimated that over the next five years the death toll reached two hundred thousand, though U.S. government estimates tend to be lower.
Fat Man, the plutonium bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki three days later, killed fewer though it was a more powerful device. The mountains served as barriers.
In Nagasaki estimates of the dead range up to one hundred thousand.
There were instances in which Ann and Ben felt euphoric with each other, hysterical and giddy as children. It was a wave that rose and swept them up, catapulting them forward and beaching them on the sand.
The euphoria came when they escaped their houseguests. They would steal out of the house together to a bar or a restaurant or to walk down the street in the dark, quietly, as they had always walked in the days when there were no scientists. Ben remembered this ebullience from the months when they first met, in the excitement of novelty. He had not felt it since then. And it went far: on the basis of a few occasions of abandon, he could survive for weeks.
Because they had this privacy in snatches and the strange elation that covered them when they escaped, he could almost believe at times that he was learning to overlook his wife’s new faith, though he continued to anticipate a lifting of the scales from her eyes. After all it was only one ripple on the surface where there could be far more.
And in the long days between their privacies he reassured himself: She is still who she was.
Szilard spent hours every day lobbying Oppenheimer and Fermi to join him in a campaign. It was not clear to Ann what Szilard was proposing: she knew only that Fermi ignored him and Oppenheimer was opposed, that despite the evidence Szilard apparently marshaled and brought to him he only waved his hand and shook his head.
Yoshi told Ben that there was still a Japanese emperor, in name only, but virtually no politics since one party had ruled for decades and there was no significant opposition. In Japan, he said, little remained but industry: the whole country had been given over to corporations and was now skyscrapers and concrete, interspersed with rice paddies.
It was what America was planning to be in the future, he said.
He told Ben that the spaces were small in Japan. He had never noticed when he lived there, he said, but now, when he went back, even outside he felt claustrophobic.
His own brother’s apartment in Tokyo was so narrow that you could not open an umbrella.
—I think there is no air, he said.
They would be staying with his wealthy art-school friend in Tokyo: he had set it up for them. He told Ben how to bow and say “Thank you very politely.” He also said Ben should tell the others not to eat or drink while walking. It was considered rude. There was much, he said apologetically, that was considered rude.
But Ben did not need to worry, he said: Ben would be fine. Ben was American.
The scientists had never seen mass commercial air travel. From the moment they got to the airport in Albuquerque they had to be herded like sheep. Fermi walked at a measured pace, looking around cautiously; Oppenheimer plowed along with businesslike focus but was privately elsewhere; and Szilard rubbernecked. He was drawn to the other passengers and speculated on their mode of dress, marveling at the sheer number of gates and airlines, at what he thought were obscure destinations on the digital boards and at the swollen newsstands with their critical last-minute dental flosses and tampons and hundreds of magazines. He strayed over to the rack and picked up a copy of Cat Fancy, holding it up to Ann with a quizzical look.
Ben had barely slept the night before and in a daze he bought an expensive pack of nicotine gum. The flight would exceed ten hours and none of them told Oppenheimer he would not be allowed to smoke. Ann had a prescription for sleeping pills from her doctor chiefly so that Oppenheimer, if he succumbed to the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal, could be decommissioned. Or she could tranquilize him with blue tablets her friend Sheila bought by the hundreds in Mexico and had given her when her paren
ts died. She was retaining her options.
As they approached security Szilard proclaimed in stentorian tones X-ray scanning machines! Do those show hidden explosives?
—Shut up, hissed Ann. —Just don’t say anything! OK?
—They can’t arrest me for talking, can they?
—In a second, said Ben. —So shut up.
—And with the fake ID, forget it, said Ann. —They’ll send you to Guantánamo and you’ll never be seen again.
—I think we should gag him until we get to Tokyo, said Oppenheimer. —What can it harm?
—Great idea, said Ben.
—They gang up on me, said Szilard. —They impugn me. Enrico! Don’t listen.
She was nervous about the passports but they passed through the X-ray machines with only the usual pat-downs. Fermi was brusquely instructed to remove his shoes and he slipped them off with no evidence of affect and set them neatly beside his feet. Then he sat with his back ramrod straight on a hard chair beside a long brown table. As he waited for the security woman to pass the shoes through the X-ray machine he blinked every now and then, but otherwise he was immobile.
Standing beside him, a quick reassuring touch to his shoulder to show him this was normal, that he did not need to be nervous, Ann knew he was still depressed. Beneath her hand his body felt inert.
Their first flight was delayed and in the lounge she could not concentrate for long enough to read. She was restless and followed the gate personnel with her eyes. One of the attendants was a tired woman with her dyed yellow hair in a twist, wearing orange pancake makeup and blue eye shadow. She tapped endlessly on her keyboard, held mesmerized by its gaze. Beside her an effeminate man of extreme friendliness addressed all passengers brightly. She hoped they would not notice the passports were fake; she hoped they were thinking instead about their personal lives.
No one else was worried so she was alone in her tension. Even law-abiding Fermi was indifferent, since he did not wish to get on the plane; and Oppenheimer had confessed a new disregard for the rule of law. In being no one, he said, there was immense freedom. He had uncovered in himself a calm and perfect neutrality.
She looked at the gate attendants, willing the tension to drain from her and failing. Szilard leaned over a spread-out newspaper as he unwrapped a cheese Danish, Fermi took out a book about organic farming in arid landscapes, and Oppenheimer strode off manfully in search of a place he could smoke.
Ben held her hand and said nothing as they waited, as the fingers of her other hand drummed on the arm of her plastic chair. But when they boarded the tired woman at the gate barely glanced at the scientists’ fake passports, and then they were in the airplane and settled in their seats. Beside him Ann walked more lightly, actually smiled and flicked her hair back carelessly as they sat down.
All the scientists paid close attention to the speech on safety precautions, listening with solemn faces as though great wisdom was being imparted. Szilard was so intent on the flight attendant’s instructions about what to do in the unlikely event of a water landing that he spun in his seat and hissed out an angry Shh! to two Japanese girls chattering excitedly behind him.
Ann heard them begin to giggle hysterically as Szilard turned smugly to face forward again, pleased with himself for a job well done.
—You can barely feel it move! he crowed as the plane rose off the runway.
—We are inside a building that flies, said Fermi quietly.
—What? asked Oppenheimer a minute later. —Did they just say you can’t smoke in here?
—We could go into one of the bathrooms, whispered Ben as the aircraft began to level off. —While everyone is sleeping.
—I don’t think those bathrooms would put me in the mood, she whispered back. —They smell bad.
Reflecting on her reluctance she wrote in the margin of her book: In the end, saying that happiness is superior to pleasure is an insult to the body. It was a book about the war in the Pacific and she was finding it difficult to concentrate on. Also, it assumes the mind and body are separate.
They are not, she thought. They are not.
And she realized she was relieved to be airborne, leaving the country. She was relieved to be flying away from whoever was watching them.
One moment everything was as usual in the city. It was a sunny morning and people rode their bicycles to work, hung laundry, pruned bushes, ate breakfast. Schoolchildren, called to work duty instead of class to do their part for the war effort, assembled by the hundreds in open fields where they waited to be assigned to their tasks for the day.
Only a few seconds later the city was leveled and black. Over the scorched earth where streets had been just seconds before, where buildings and tall trees had been and now only their twisted skeletons remained, husbands, wives, small children walked in a daze. Some of them appeared to be intact, though confused. Others moved forward with their arms held up in front of them, zombie-like, and the skin hanging off their arms and faces in strips. Some dropped to all fours and groped blindly along because their eyes had been liquefied and were dripping down the cheeks.
Around Ground Zero, everything and everyone was vaporized except a European-style building that later came to be called the Atomic Bomb Dome. Further out the occasional structure remained and a few people lay in the dirt maimed but still breathing; here and there a dead horse or dog was visible, splay-legged on its side on the ground.
In the hours and days that followed the blinding flash many thousands of people wandered around the devastated city, which was almost nothing but rubble, as animated corpses. Some of their body parts were already dead while others, such as the brain, were stubbornly functioning. A few people who had been instantly incinerated left their images like shadows on the concrete, shadows cut into stone by the blinding flash of the blast.
All who were left alive but wounded to the brink of death, flesh melting, disfigured, shirts forever fused to their chests, shoes fused with their toes, were overcome by a terrible thirst. Many wanted nothing but a drink of water before they collapsed, and wandered or crawled through the ruins begging for it. Some threw themselves gratefully into rivers, and drowned in such numbers that the logjams of bloated bodies had to be skimmed from the water and burned in piles.
But such is the power of culture that the residents of Hiroshima, walking melted or burned through a scene of black and red and orange that many would describe later as hell on earth, watching a mother or father burn to death pinned underneath a house or stumbling over the charred skull of a three-year-old child that on further examination proved to be their own, would often greet each other as politely and formally as ever. They offered humble apologies to those they encountered along the way. In some cases they apologized for the offensiveness of their mutilated appearance, in other cases for their inability to offer help.
In some cases, when those they were addressing had suffered an obvious great loss—say, were carrying a dead baby or pulling themselves along the ground dragging two stumps of legs—they even apologized for being spared.
Szilard exclaimed at the monitors built into the backs of the seats in front of them. —You can choose from ten channels including four different movies! he crowed. —Just by touching the screen!
He ripped the clear plastic bag off his headphones with greedy haste.
—My God, said Oppenheimer under his breath. —Look at this. A chicken in every pot, and in every airplane seat a television.
—It’s the American dream, said Ben.
Szilard shook his head.
—Modern man can’t bear to be left alone with his thoughts for a second, can he?
—What thoughts, answered Oppenheimer, and pulled out a book.
He read about Hiroshima as they flew. Most of what he read was a list: timelines, decisions, destroyed buildings, the dead. They were litanies, chants with the solemnity of a judgment.
The bad acts of which people were capable seemed to him to have grown and swelled in magnitude through hist
ory. Of course, he did not have the figures in front of him. It might be an illusion, this conviction of a trail of dead widening as time passed. It might be an illusion that everything was collapsing as the culture dreamt itself forward in time, on over the long fields to the burning gate.
As soon as we saw history as a line we also saw its end, he thought: because then it was not merely our deaths that we had to contend with but our extinction.
But it also seems to be the case, he thought, that what goes on and on has to be going somewhere, finally. And litanies were well-suited to the expression of an outrageous grievance. In litanies there was a repetitiousness that bordered on maniacal, and with it the growing weight of the deaths that came not instantly but in the unfolding time of the aftermath. In litanies there was both the longevity of the bomb’s effects and the tedium of hopelessness.
He had seen a movie with Ann that was set in Washington D.C. It featured a scene near the Vietnam War Memorial, a dark, sleek and impersonal thing at first glance, with a very long list of the names of the dead. Modern memorials no longer featured the faces of men, he thought. Instead they were often abstract. Statues of human forms had all but disappeared as public art, he thought.
Now they looked old-fashioned, absurd. Even he could see that.
A survivor of Hiroshima said, “I just could not understand why our surroundings had changed so greatly in one instant.”
Minor turbulence over the ocean caused Fermi to clutch the arms of his seat nervously, and even when it subsided he remained wary for some time, staring out the window.
Two seats away from Ann Szilard watched a movie and lectured loudly about its shortcomings. The movie promised to be about Albert Einstein yet featured almost exclusively the perky grin and yellow tresses of Meg Ryan. He declaimed loudly at the movie’s flaws in the realm of factual accuracy, poking first Fermi, then Ben on the shoulder to call their attention to this. Apparently Meg Ryan, whose character in the movie purported to be of great intelligence, did not appear to Szilard to give a credible imitation of being intelligent. This irked him. Not only were the movie-makers and their audience apparently stupid, he complained in a droning voice, they were incapable of even pretending to be smart. Furthermore Walter Matthau, playing a particularly spry and fun-loving Einstein egged on by mischievous friends who, like the famous relativity theorist himself, sported ludicrously thick crypto-European accents and zany mad-scientist hairdos, was an insult to the great man. It might as well be a minstrel show, said Szilard.