by Lydia Millet
Meanwhile Oppenheimer, growing increasingly agitated as nicotine withdrawal set in, lost his customary polished calm and became desperate to use all means at his disposal to sleep through the ordeal: first a tranquilizer, which put him out for two hours, then three sleeping pills, and finally a fourth and fifth sleeping pill. After that he consumed Ben’s entire pack of nicotine chewing gum voraciously, pacing up and down the aisles as he chewed.
—You know what, he confessed to Ben, —I’ve actually never been deprived of these things.
It left him disgruntled, drawn, mint-smelling and tense with exhaustion. There were not enough newspapers and in-flight magazines to keep him occupied, and he had packed and checked all his scientific literature, so he finished the flight standing at the back amid flight attendants busy shelving food items and passengers waiting in line for the bathroom, chewing the final piece of gum—long ago drained of chemical merit—and jiggling one leg as he leaned against the wall, distractedly flipping through a well-thumbed paperback called Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.
This last had been donated to him selflessly by a twelve-year-old girl who noticed his hands shaking and took pity on him.
On their arrival in Tokyo he shifted from one foot to the other while he was waiting to file off the plane and then bolted up the walkway. But inside the terminal he slowed between Ann and Ben, shoulders crumpling: he was getting no glimpse of the outside and continued to be denied any such glimpse as, among tired, slow-moving crowds, all of them gave in to the current and slogged their way to customs.
Finally he excused himself and stepped away out of the crowd to light up in the men’s rest room where, even if someone objected, he was unlikely to be arrested for the offense. The others waited for him on the shining white linoleum outside the rest room in silence, except for Szilard who, seated on his duffel bag, energy seemingly unflagging, continued his indignant exegesis of the documentary failures of the Meg Ryan Einstein movie. It reflected, he said, a rampant disregard for intellectualism itself and in fact entirely repudiated the life of the mind as a cultural value.
Fermi yawned.
Without nicotine Oppenheimer had been a different man. Ann liked him much better when he was smoking, though she did not like the staleness of cigarettes on his breath and his hands.
When he came out of the bathroom he regained his customary elegance and walked beside her in serenity, his faith in the immediate future restored.
Oppenheimer struggled to remember the last time he had been deprived of cigarettes or a pipe, and could not. It must have been years.
He thought of the non-smoking rule on the airplane and what punishment a minor regulation could bring. The law, he thought, and everyone. Ridiculous. Damn it, he thought, America did not sacrifice the few to the many very often—far too seldom, in fact, as the communists had rightly argued before they were driven out of the culture squealing—but here was an instance.
—Crowds aren’t bodies, are they, said Ann as they waited at baggage claim, watching suitcases pass. —I mean individual bodies.
—It depends on the crowd, he said.
—What?
—Whether the crowd is familiar or not. Crowds of Americans, you know—those are considered human, I think. At least by their own government.
The bodies of those in other states actually had no rights at all, he guessed. The bodies of absent masses cannot be known and so their minds cannot be imagined; a mindless body can be hurt with impunity, hardly more complex than a side of beef.
This is the irony of the dualist, he thought, watching one of Leo’s legs stick out and get caught on a passing field-hockey stick. As Szilard tripped, falling higgledy-piggledy onto the small child beside him and loudly blaming the child, he thought: The mind can be fondly imagined, but only the body can be known. The mind is revered but unproven. So the dualist pretends to elevate the mind, but in a sense he is an unbeliever.
Some of the citizens of Hiroshima felt fine immediately after the bombing and were relieved at the lack of physical harm, but in the weeks that followed developed strange symptoms.
These were not pleasant, of course. Weakening, they lost their teeth and their hair, were infested by maggots as their flesh turned necrotic, and finally threw up the dark, fluid remains of their internal organs. Some bled out through the skin, their blood, unable to coagulate, leaking out through the pores. Many died of this new disease they called “radiation sickness” with no medical care and no painkillers or shelter or comfort, their children or parents sitting near them, watching.
As soon as they got out of the airport and into the train for Shibuya station they were overwhelmed.
Standing surrounded by the close-packed throng of fellow passengers she watched Fermi begin to sweat, Oppenheimer press his lips together, and Szilard start to complain. She found herself hoping no one else in the train spoke English but knowing she hoped in vain.
—My God! squeaked Szilard as a short businessman reading a comic book jostled him against a door. The strap of the duffel bag he was lugging, which was full of books and papers, had worn a red rut into his plump, white shoulder and he was irritable. Over the businessman’s shoulder Ann could see a cartoon picture of a large-breasted, naked woman with flowing hair. —Look how many there are! How can they live like this?
—Please, Leo, said Fermi. —Shut your mouth just for once.
Distant bodies are excluded from the world of the mind, Oppenheimer was thinking as a small woman in a gray suit beside him ground her elbow into his lower ribcage, because they are both abstractions and matter, a sheerly living whole and an insensate mass but also a pure idea of flesh, hopeless in their plurality. Each man or woman alone we can love, but a carpet of them teems like ants.
As they bustled out the doors, all of them tall between short, slim strangers, he looked back and saw Fermi staring slack-jawed at a poster for a movie about a transvestite.
—Enrico! Hey! Move! We’re getting out! called Ben.
It was even worse when they changed from the train to the subway system, not knowing where they were supposed to be. Ben was laden with suitcases and bags, Ann grasped an open phrasebook as she walked, and people surged rapidly around them as they gathered with their clutter of luggage at a ticket vending machine. Ann and Szilard stared together at the hundreds of colored buttons bearing characters they were powerless to interpret.
And when they emerged from the subway station at their final destination in Tokyo Fermi gasped audibly. The throng was infinite, infinite and intimidating, and the navigational proficiency of all of its parts was far superior to their own. Around them blocky gray and white skyscrapers loomed close, the streets were almost treeless and neon glared and flashed in oppressive profusion. Ben felt grateful he was not epileptic. The pavement of the street, a vast intersection, could not even be seen beneath the crowd, so dense and wide, a drifting continent of heads and limbs.
—I don’t like it here, said Fermi, and stopped walking, dropping his bags heavily on the pavement.
Commuters surged around him.
—I want to go home, he said. —Now.
—Yeah right, said Ben, in his first-ever expression of impatience with Fermi.
—Come on, Enrico, said Oppenheimer paternally. —You’ll be all right. —It won’t be like this everywhere.
—I don’t like it, said Fermi stubbornly. —I don’t want to be here. It’s already too full!
—Listen, said Ann. —Let’s get out of the crowds. We’re going to get a taxi. We’re going to Yoshi’s friend’s apartment. You can rest there, you’ll have peace and quiet, OK? You can’t stay here, anyway, can you? Here, on the sidewalk? Where it’s the worst?
Fermi stood stock-still until finally, reluctantly, he stooped to pick up his bag again and followed them to the curb, looking down at the ground as he shuffled.
And so a crowd does not receive our love, but only individuals, alone. Staring out the taxi window Oppenheimer saw a man walking by h
imself along the sidewalk and thought he was magnetic: and behind him the crowds were dull.
Some of the survivors of Hiroshima, known in Japanese as hibakusha, carried deforming keloid scars from radiation burns on their faces and bodies for the rest of their lives. A few would later say to psychologists that they felt that they had in fact actually died on the day of the bombing, that subsequently, for the rest of their days, they felt they were living what they called a “death in life.”
Many spoke of the quality of their lives after the bomb as muga-muchu: without self, in a trance.
Yoshi’s friend Larry’s apartment was palatial and almost empty, with large, light rooms floored in tatami mats, tall, long-leafed plants casting soft shadows from corners and wide windows overlooking the squat gray clusters of buildings around them.
When the maid ushered them through the front door into the living room Larry, who wore a T-shirt and faded blue jeans generously ripped at the knees, stubbed out his long black-and-gold cigarette in an egg-shaped glass ashtray and rose slowly to greet them.
Oppenheimer saw the cigarette and instantly asked if he could light up.
—Sure, man, said Larry.
And the Coordinator of Rapid Rupture was finally released.
Ann excused herself and went to wash her face. The bathroom was lined in black marble, cold and slick, but there was space all around them in the apartment and that was what mattered. They were not hedged in by the millions.
When she got back to the living room Larry was explaining that in Tokyo smoking was allowed everywhere. Oppenheimer told him that Santa Fe was a virtual prison for smokers, or rather for what seemed these days to be called “nicotine addicts” by a culture that pathologized, said Oppenheimer, each and every single human behavior.
—In fact, Oppenheimer went on, after a long and satisfied exhalation, —the tendency of the culture to pathologize is so compulsive and so chronic that it might itself be described as a pathology. In other words, the culture is pathologically prone to pathologize, that is, as it were, pathologically pathological.
—Whatever, man, said Larry, and smiled. —But no worries, you can smoke anywhere. It’s the nonsmokers that suffer here.
Nothing could go wrong for Oppenheimer after that, and where Fermi was sour and quiet, his demeanor oppressively sullen as he brooded at the corner of the table, Oppenheimer was effusive.
—Surfing! he exclaimed, fixing his eyes on a photo on the wall. It was Larry on a surfboard, riding a wave. —Is it a profession these days?
—More like a religion, said Larry.
A Japanese photographer assigned to Nagasaki after the bombing said this of the scene he surveyed: “I tried climbing up onto a small hill to look. All around the city burned with little elf-fires, and the sky was blue and full of stars.”
Later they sat around a low enamel table cross-legged on cushions on the floor, drinking beer from overlarge Asahi bottles and waiting for their sushi. Except for the fact that his long legs were tucked uncomfortably beneath him, the knees jutting upward at acute angles, Oppenheimer was the model of leisure. He savored one of Larry’s expensive black-and-gold cigarettes with his beer and watched with a gratified smile as the drift of smoke was sucked without a trace into a filtering device near the ceiling vent on the wide, bare wall.
—My father likes Cuban cigars, said Larry, following his gaze, —but his wife has asthma.
He picked a brass-framed photograph off a nearby mantelpiece and thrust it at them. There stood his father and stepmother on a beach on their recent honeymoon, spiky palm fronds blurring the foreground. The father was a red-faced old goat of about seventy with stick-like arms and a fat, fish-white belly above a tight swimsuit that did not flatter his physique. The stepmother, who Larry said was twenty-one, was a smiling, deeply tanned peroxide blonde, whose royal-blue string bikini did flatter hers.
Neither the cigars nor the asthma was negotiable, Larry told them, so the ventilation system in the apartment was state-of-the-art. Oppenheimer was highly appreciative.
—Here it is, said Larry.
The maid bent over them with trays of sushi.
—Excuse me, said Fermi, after staring down at a piece of tuna for some time, unmoving. —This fish has not been cooked!
—Never had sushi before? asked Larry. —You kidding? Where you guys from, anyway?
—Another world, said Ben, and picked up his chopsticks.
Ann had introduced the scientists by their real names, hoping Larry would notice nothing amiss. In fact he had noticed only the strangeness of the names and asked where Szilard came from. He had asked one of his father’s assistants to prepare a train schedule for them, with stopping points at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Tickets had been purchased and seats reserved for them on the bullet train, green car.
—The green car’s first class, he said. —Don’t worry about it. It’s on me.
—You’re kidding! said Ann. —But that must be, I mean, hundreds of…
He waved his hand dismissively and pushed the schedule toward her as he picked up a piece of sashimi.
—Thank you so much, she said, casting her eyes over the columns of times and seat numbers. —But isn’t that too much—a gift that’s—I mean—for us to accept?
—My dad’s footing the bill, said Larry. —He doesn’t know it and he never will, but don’t worry about it. He’s got more money than God. Worse personality, though.
—I don’t know what to say, said Ann. —That’s very nice of you.
—Thank you kindly, said Oppenheimer.
—And you wanted to talk to bomb survivors, right?
—Survivors, said Oppenheimer. —Yes we do.
—If possible, survivors with a science background, put in Szilard. — They’ll be able to tell us more. We haven’t read the first-person accounts, except for Oppenheimer. We want to hear it from the horse’s mouth.
—You guys are, what? You doing a movie or something?
—They’re researching the Second World War, put in Ann. —They’d like to know about the bombings from the biological and physical standpoint. Eyewitness accounts, personal stories.
Larry nodded and said he had asked the assistant to set up appointments for them. He himself had little interest in the subject.
—Ancient history, he said. —No one cares about that anymore. They barely even teach it in school.
—Really? said Szilard brightly. —Then it’s seen as, what? A minor historical episode?
—I dunno, said Larry, shrugging and smearing wasabi sauce on his saucer. —I guess so. It’s like, why make a big deal out of it. It’s already gone down. So do you guys smoke?
—Just Oppie, said Szilard.
—Foul habit, said Fermi.
—No, I mean smoke, said Larry. —You know. Pot.
He opened a drawer in the table, removed a packet and started to roll a joint.
—Pot? asked Szilard.
—Marijuana, said Ben.
—Reefer, said Fermi sagely, nodding. —Reefer madness!
—Not for me, thank you, said Oppenheimer, gesturing with a cigarette. —I have everything I need right here. One vice at a time.
—It just puts me to sleep, said Ann. —But thanks anyway.
—Sure, said Ben, who rarely indulged.
—It was popular with the Negroes, in my day, said Oppenheimer. —Tea pads. I remember when New York City was full of them. You ever go to one, Leo?
—Negroes? said Larry. —Dude, not too PC. Where you been? And whaddaya mean in your day? You’re like barely, what? Five years older than I am?
—For Chrissake, Oppie, they don’t say “Negroes” anymore, said Szilard. —How many times do I have to tell you?
—African-Americans, said Oppenheimer. —Jazz musicians in particular. They were very fond of marijuana before it was made illegal.
—It used to be legal? asked Larry curiously.
—Till they passed a law in the late ’30s, said Oppenheimer. —’37, if I�
�m not mistaken.
—That’s rad, said Larry, and lit up. —What comes around goes around, know what I mean? So, Robert. Are you like a history teacher?
—Not history, said Oppenheimer. —Physics. Though I’ve always been interested in the humanities. As a young man I studied Sanskrit.
—Physics, cool, said Larry. —I tried to take a physics class once. It was astrophysics or whatever, the whole Stephen Hawking thing? Because I saw that trailer for the documentary about him where he’s in the wheelchair looking all blissed out and retarded and shit but we know he’s actually this supergenius? And then they show the stars and galaxies and the voiceover goes, in that freaky robot voice he’s got, you know, “And we—can—see—the mind—of God.” I thought that was pretty cool so I enrolled in this class at the university. But then the guy who was teaching the class is giving this talk the first day and he said there was no life in the rest of the universe. So I bailed.
—Quite a disappointment, nodded Oppenheimer sympathetically.
—What do you think, man? Are there aliens? Extraterrestrial life and all that? Are there, like, bizarre alien fish swimming around deep down under the ice on Europa? I read that somewhere. You know Europa, one of the Jupiter moons? They think there’s these weird alien fish there, swimming around and shit. But what I want to know is, have the aliens already landed here on Planet Earth?
—It’s not my area of expertise, said Oppenheimer, amused.