by Lydia Millet
—This peace clock is a hopeful clock, said Keiko, continuing to smile pleasantly.
—Hopeful? asked Oppenheimer.
—When all nuclear weapons are abolished from the earth, then it will stop ticking forever. But until then, it will just keep on ticking.
Fermi shifted impatiently from one foot to another. He had no patience for melodrama.
—Hope the thing is built to last, said Ben.
—Well then, said Oppenheimer, —why don’t we buy our tickets and go in?
—They are very cheap, said Keiko, and smiled again. —A bargain!
Reason, like bombs, can be deployed from far away. Closer up there is nothing but feeling.
When Ann and Ben emerged from the museum at the end of the day the skies had lowered. It looked as though it might rain and Ann welcomed this.
They sat on a bench beside a tree that had been scorched by the bomb, burned black up one side of its narrow trunk, and was still leafing out more than half a century later. It had been moved from its original site, further out from the hypocenter, to a carefully maintained plot on the lawn beside the museum. Visitors could inspect the damage and marvel at the tree’s longevity.
Ann had not eaten since breakfast and was feeling pangs of hunger. Inside the museum in the sight of atrocities she had not thought of hunger but now that she was safely away from it she remembered herself and then felt guilty. She was callous to even think about her minor aches; she was humiliated. Ben confessed he was hungry too but he had learned to savor hunger a long time before, had learned to coast on it, so a day without food was nothing.
The scientists, who had been behind them in the museum, finally exited the lobby and came walking slowly across the concrete, Oppenheimer limping. He and Fermi wore tight leather shoes with leather soles and no rubber components. Szilard, by contrast, had made Ann buy him new shoes, and as a result now had a spring in his step. She had driven him to a mall in Albuquerque, where he had purchased some bulky cross-trainers. Only the women’s model had been on sale and Szilard, impatiently waving off a protesting salesman, had selected a pair with garish purple and turquoise trim.
Oppenheimer, wearier than ever, sat down heavily on the bench beside them. As he was fumbling in his jacket pocket for his cigarettes Fermi, still a few feet away, stopped walking abruptly, turned, and began to run away from them, pell-mell toward the parking lot, his arms windmilling.
—Stop him, said Oppenheimer, and then more urgently, to Ben, — Stop him! I can’t run!
Ben dropped his camera on her lap and dashed off, and Szilard, moving at a slow jog that resembled race-walking, reluctantly took up the rear.
—Sorry, said Oppenheimer to Ann. —But I have blisters. I never had one before. In my real life I would ride for days in leather boots and never have a problem. Now both heels are torn. I could barely walk by the end of the tour.
—What’s going on with him? asked Ann.
Oppenheimer shook his head, as if too tired to speak, and slipped off a shoe to reveal a gray sock-heel caked in brown blood.
—There are Band-Aids in my suitcase, offered Ann softly as she gazed at it, thinking nothing.
A few minutes later Ann had nowhere to go and Oppenheimer slumped beside her, silent and smoking. All he said before he fell silent was that he had not expected the weight of the evidence.
In the years after the war, survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were often shunned for their disfigurements and illnesses. Many became pariahs, their scars a great source of shame.
Szilard and Ben came back exhausted and dragging, without Fermi.
—I couldn’t catch him, said Ben. —He was surprisingly fast. He just kept on going. He pulled ahead and ran around that Starbucks on the corner and when I got there and looked down the street he was gone.
—Quite fast, nodded Szilard, whose empurpled cheeks shone with sweat. —Must be all those Alpine hikes.
—We’ll probably see him back at the hotel, said Ann, and turned to Oppenheimer. —Do you think he was—did he run because he was upset by what he saw?
—Upset? asked Oppenheimer. —Upset?
He pulled on his cigarette and did not elaborate.
—By what he saw, said Ann finally.
—Upset, mused Oppenheimer, exhaling two plumes from the nostrils, dragonlike. —Yes. You could probably call him upset.
—He hadn’t read anything before, said Ann. —About the bomb effects. Had he.
—Are you upset, Robert? asked Szilard.
—Upset, repeated Oppenheimer flatly, and nodded.
He sat with his bare feet touching the ground, bloody socks balled neatly on the bench beside him. The blisters on his heels had burst, his shoes had rubbed off the skin, and the bony, naked heels were raw meat, glistening wet near the cement beneath them. Ann looked at him, waiting for him to say more. His profile was that of an aristocrat but his feet were torn like a beggar’s.
After he inhaled he tapped his cigarette carelessly and Ann watched the flakes of ash fall down. One settled on an exposed heel and stuck to it.
She winced.
—You have an ash— she began, but he was ignoring her, staring off at the museum’s elevated walkway.
—Upset, he said again.
Eventually they got up and walked toward their hotel, only four of them now, Oppenheimer carrying his shoes on two crooked fingers, smoking with the other hand, none of them saying anything.
As the sun set they passed beneath overhanging branches and saw a large red billboard for Coca Cola looming over the museum, dominating the parking lot, the peace monuments, and the trees that grew over Ground Zero.
3
Ben woke up damp from the weight of a heavy floral coverlet in the weakly cooled room, tossing off the bedspread, the furry blanket beneath it and the sheets. He got up to find Ann already in the bathroom, brushing her teeth, face drawn with worry. They had stayed in their room the night before, drinking beers Ben bought at a convenience store on the corner while Szilard ate on the bed in the next room, Oppenheimer drank overpriced mini-bar whiskey in an armchair, and all of them separately were silent. Ben and Ann had blearily watched Japanese television until they fell asleep, staring half-comprehending at a dreary sequence of greasy cooking shows shot on video in fluorescent kitchens, pastel-colored dating shows, and the best of the lot, shows that featured dogs and cats, sometimes dragged by their owners, struggling bravely through obstacle courses.
—Fermi hasn’t come back, she said, and already as he reached out to stroke her shoulder in consolation his strength was sinking at the prospect of a dull and thankless day.
When he went next door to talk to Oppenheimer he found only Szilard in the room, reading an English-language newspaper and drinking off-white coffee.
—Where’s Oppenheimer? he asked.
—He went out, said Szilard, not turning.
—I can see that, said Ben, and through gritted teeth: —Where? When?
—Said he’d be back for breakfast, said Szilard. —Actually, I’ll join you. Should be ready to eat again by about ten. I just had a little chocolate croissant from Starbucks.
—Uh huh, said Ben, and retreated.
But Oppenheimer did not come back for breakfast.
Ann and Ben walked idly through the city, along the riverbanks and over the sandy walkways of the Peace Park, between the poorly sculpted death monuments, muddy perimeters trodden and flattened by tourist shoeprints in intricate geometric patterns. Beneath this grassy mound lie the ashes of a hundred thousand soldiers.
—If this is the form public memory has to take, said Ben once in the Peace Park, —I would rather be publicly forgotten.
They left the sculpture gardens finally, worn out by the cold shapes, and went to a shopping district where they wandered into stores distracted, barely looking at the English-language T-shirts, sweatshirts and glossy jackets that bore such enigmatic slogans such as BABY COOL FLIES and HIGHWAY 66 RED SHERIFF NOW. They ended up at a noodle shop for lunch, wh
ere they ate miso soup laden with tan-brown fish flakes.
Ann became agitated as the day got old, insisting one of them should go back to the hotel just in case, but Ben would not agree to this and stuck to her side, and presently she gave up.
By night Oppenheimer had still not returned. Fermi did not come back either.
The next morning there was a note for Ann at the lobby desk. It was from Oppenheimer. It said he was on his way to a retreat at a Buddhist monastery.
—Jesus Christ, said Ben.
Through her annoyance she wondered: At what point did the pain of others become too much? It was overwhelming to Oppenheimer because of his nearness to the cause: and the farther you were from the cause, the freer you were to forget.
Oppenheimer’s close friend Robert Serber had written of his tour of Hiroshima in his autobiography, which Oppenheimer read just before they left New Mexico. Shortly after the bombing Serber had been sent to the city to make scientific observations of the bomb’s aftermath, to measure and describe its destructive capabilities. He wrote his account completely without color or detail, as clinically and remotely as possible, barely mentioning the dead or the suffering or his own emotions. It was a report written by a robot.
To read his description of the devastated city without knowing Serber, thought Oppenheimer, was to be inspired to dislike him; yet Oppenheimer had been fond of Serber and could not shake the old fondness, even after he was told about Serber and Kitty. And watching a videotape of Serber made in his dotage in the 1990s, Oppenheimer had thought his old friend a kindly, humorous man, almost a caricature, with a creaky voice and a grating, infectious laugh. Apparently, sometime in the postwar years, he had developed a penchant for wearing comical glasses and blindingly bright-colored jackets and ties.
—They’re sensitive, said Szilard, perched on the side of the bed in Ann and Ben’s room the third night in Hiroshima.
He had come in bearing a tattered copy of the New York Times, New York metro edition, cajoled off a businessman in the lobby. He was eager to discuss global diplomacy as it pertained to the American government, against whom he always inveighed in moments of conversational lull. But Ann was quiet and deflated, bereft, feeling the loss of the other two scientists as her own failure, a lack of vigilance, lack of charisma, a flaw in herself she could not quite pick out. She could barely nod at Szilard’s opening sally, which consisted of the assertion that The birth of the limited liability corporation was the death of freedom.
Szilard, recognizing in a rare flash of insight that now was not the time for his usual lecture, adopted the air of a country doctor. He sat heavy and near on the bed, patting Ann’s hand and cocking his head in a listening posture. But Ben had spent the day trying to offer solace, frustrated by the stasis of the predicament, Oppenheimer’s self-indulgence, Fermi’s flight, Ann’s attachment to them in the first place, the useless digression from real life that this represented, from the life that had been happening before. Szilard-GP was just as irritating as Szilard-PhD.
—Sensitive, repeated Ben, with an edge to his voice.
—They’re in shock. Sure. And I’m not. You understand: my position is different. It’s not as painful for me.
—How’s that, Leo, said Ben.
—His opposition, said Ann. —He wasn’t behind it like them. He isn’t directly responsible.
—I am responsible, said Szilard. —Of course I am. All of us were implicated. But I was not, you know, I was just not in power. I was not institutional. Not part of the team like them. Groves tried to have me thrown in jail, for Chrissake! Just for disagreeing with him!
—So you’re telling me, Leo, said Ben, —that these guys are having nervous breakdowns or something?
—I mean what do you think happened? asked Szilard. —You saw how Enrico took off.
—But you don’t suffer breakdowns.
—No I don’t.
—Just grandiose delusions.
—Whatever, said Szilard.
Distracted, Ben was thinking this might be the break that would end it. Severe shock could sever the delusional from their delusions—hadn’t that been the idea behind electroshock therapy, something like that?—and if it could, then maybe the trauma of this upsetting experience would liberate the so-called “Oppenheimer” and “Fermi” from their assumed identities. Realizing with nauseous certainty that their heroes of genius had been chiefly civil service cogs in a vast war machine, tools like any other, less martyrs to science than weak-chinned gunsmiths with hungry women and thin-armed children in their crosshairs, Oppenheimer and Fermi would admit their real names were, say, Runsen and Hodges, Al and Fred, and sheepishly return to their jobs teaching physics and chemistry at an underfunded high school for gifted students in Omaha, a drab Canadian university full of future electrical engineers, someplace mundane and familiar from which they had fled.
There would still be the problem of Szilard, of course.
—It’s not their fault, said Ann, —they’re upset.
—Enrico hasn’t gone far, said Szilard. —Ten-block radius maximum. I guarantee it.
She lay on the bed and half-wished she was sick in a hospital, waited on by neat, placid women in white. Of course sickness was bad, but on the other hand it brought gifts. The relief after pain is a flood, a swelling freedom: it gives a great lift of hope before complacency sets in.
But there’s no recovery from chronic irritation, she thought.
She wished Ben would put down his magazine and turn the light off but since he wasn’t complying, was failing annoyingly to read her mind, she pulled up the sheet and the coverlet, turned away from the light, closed her eyes and tried to stop the light from coming through her eyelids.
In giving a glimpse of death, in showing what is possible, pain brings a storm to the body. But minor complaints never bring storms: they give to the experience of moving through time only a fretful monotony.
After she set the digital alarm clock and Ben turned off the bedside light they lay with their heads close together, not touching but facing. This was a waiting position, one they assumed at times when they were not sure they were ready for sleep but were tired, no more to offer than a warm silence.
He smelled the cheap cotton of the hotel pillow, a cotton like old age in a hospital, antiseptic and musty, and heard the sounds of the street out the window. It was not chaotic noise, like Tokyo, only a faint rush and now and then the whine of a moped. From her slightly open mouth he could smell toothpaste, and her face was eclipsed by the dark round of the pillow between them, no features, only steady breath.
In the second before he said it he was anxious but hopeful. This was his chance to return to the old routine, the worn, gentle routine, the routine that he craved. Here it was, the escape hatch, within reach, inches off.
—Listen, honey. They’re gone. Two of them just took off, and here we are with no one but Szilard, who by the way is eating us out of house and home. Food is expensive here. He’s impatient now because he’s seen what he came to see and he wants to get home, back to where the action is, or as he puts it he can “be effective.” Why don’t we just do what he wants and cut our losses? We can change the dates on the plane tickets, we can leave tomorrow morning if you want. And go back. The other scientists can find their way home later.
Ann hesitated, a span of restraint that stretched out painfully. Briefly he thought maybe she was asleep. Then he felt the curt, tidy shake of her head on the pillow, the back and forth of her forehead against his own.
—I can’t, she said. —You know I can’t. I could lose them.
He waited for her to say more, trying to send the message unsaid toward her that her clinging to the dead scientists, this devotion, this adherence above and beyond what they asked of her, past common sense and reason and way past entertainment, was not self-explanatory. He knew what her instinct would be but he wanted to know if she would still realize that she should explain herself, whether she would still have the benefit of perspectiv
e or whether she was too far gone.
—This is just—this is a problem, she said. —It’s an obstacle. But leaving is out of the question. I can’t leave without them. They could disappear. I might never see them again. Then all this would be for nothing. Wouldn’t that be the worst?
—But what do you want from it? What do you expect anyway? I mean what’s the happy ending?
—I can’t abandon them here.
—We would still have Szilard, said Ben, feeling desperate. There could be no weaker boast.
—But I can’t leave Robert here. I can’t leave Fermi. You know that. I mean you knew that before you even asked me.
There was an early knock on the door at 7 a.m. and she opened it to Keiko the interpreter, who entered in a flurry of bowing and smiling, as usual, just in time to catch Ben towel-waisted, coming out of the bathroom, and turn away blushing, covering her mouth with a raised hand as she giggled.
—Excuse me, said Ben, and Keiko smiled and bowed again as she retreated to stand as far away from his half-naked body as she could, backed up against the heavy floral drapes of the window, so embarrassed it was almost painful to look at her.
—She’s been kind enough to offer to help me make some phone calls, said Ann.
—Dial-a-Buddhist? asked Ben. Then he felt stupid, a teenager with an attitude. He picked up clothes from his suitcase, retiring, holding the towel tight at the hip just in case, offering a slight bow himself in the general direction of the drapes before he shut the bathroom door behind him again, Keiko meekly averting her eyes.
He had been given the job of babysitting Szilard—as though anyone could effectively guard Szilard, who in his purple-and-green cross-trainers, powered by processed sugar and adrenaline, could make off anywhere, trundling, turbo-charged, at the drop of a hat.
Together they would scour the city for Fermi. Ben did not relish the prospect of picking his way through the humid, narrow streets with Szilard, bickering as they always did. Elsewhere Ann would be moving forward without him, free of the burden of Szilard, her interpreter mincing along beside her, helpful, self-effacing, and unlike Szilard more than willing to just shut up.