by Lydia Millet
“I was happy, full of life before I saw that bomb,” he told a photographer years afterward, “but then I understood evil and was never the same.”
He had been a thin young boy from Utah. Later he grew fat and paranoid and claimed he had been held at a psychiatric facility where they were doing something with the top of my head. There they had told him to forget what he had seen.
He was clinically paranoid, but other troops had told the same story.
Above the Pacific in a 747 Oppenheimer laid his head back on the headrest and waxed nostalgic. He daydreamed of the remote islands of the tropics.
He did not think fondly of the Marshalls, for they were sad ghettos created by the military and it had made his throat close to see what the people had endured and how, even still, his countrymen treated them like slaves. Also, the seas were rising as the planet’s atmosphere warmed, according to his colleagues in the earth sciences; and the poor Marshall Islands, seven feet above sea level, were sure to be among the first submerged.
He thought of the Virgin Islands of his first life and then also Hawaii, where they had recently stopped. Islands with mountains: there a man could retreat, to look out on the sea. He remembered sailing in his twenty-eight-foot sloop the Trimethy, the first boat he ever owned, out around Fire Island in the roaring twenties. Lately he had begun to miss islands with a thirst he did not recall feeling before. He would find himself lost in thought and realize he wanted nothing more than to be back in his old beach house in St. John with Kitty and the children, the house that was now, he had read, empty and slowly collapsing, scoured with salt and nearer the waterline every year. He recalled the large, waxy-leafed bushes that shaded the porch, the steep incline of the hillside path down to the cottage where it was nestled in its bower of palms on the sand.
But if he left all this now, looking for that subtle peace in the scent of red-blooming flamboyant trees and trade winds, he would only get there and find himself alone. He had no one to share it with since all the people he had ever held dear had suddenly become dead.
Without them there was no refuge anywhere.
He was a man with no future, a man who might as well sit forever facing forward in this same airplane seat, hands on his sharp-boned knees as they were now, eyes glazed over, and outside his white metal capsule the neverending clear cold blue that was too thin to breathe.
By the time she had played a few hands of video poker and decided to go to bed, the scientists and their followers had still not arrived. Their tour of the test site was supposed to leave from an industrial park in North Las Vegas at seven in the morning.
The bed in her room was comfortable, hieroglyphs crawling all over it, the covers printed with them, the headboard engraved with them. But even in comfort willing herself to fall asleep failed, as all acts of will seemed to fail recently, despite the soothing influence of the cobras, storks, vultures, and dogs marching across polyester. She tried to suppress her irritation. It was how she spent her time these days: she suppressed herself. She waited on the lip of time, always anticipating a moment that never came, a change that never occurred, a surprise unveiling.
They might be injured, stranded somewhere without telephones. What felt like neglect could be hardship, and she should be worrying about their welfare instead of her own inconvenience.
But then this was always the way she rationalized their disinterest. She could see it now. She forgot about herself by worrying about them.
In reference to the possibility of radiation from bomb tests hurting those who lived near the Nevada Test Site, one of the commissioners of the Atomic Energy Commission said to another in 1955: “People have got to learn to live with the facts of life. And part of the facts of life are fallout.”
The same year, the public was invited into slot trenches to watch the Shot Apple-2 at a distance of two miles from Ground Zero. Shot Apple-2 was a twenty-nine-kiloton shot, larger than Little Boy.
A New York Times article called “Watching the Bombs Go Off” supplied a list of upcoming test dates to its readers, encouraging tourists to visit Nevada on the test dates to watch the splendid mushroom clouds rise from vantage points along the highways and in the nearby mountains.
Along with the series of test dates, the article provided the reassurance that “there is virtually no danger from radioactive fallout.”
In the morning she woke up at six and called down to the desk. Still they hadn’t showed up. She slammed the phone into the cradle and felt enraged, a welling up of fury. Larry hadn’t given her their flight information and they hadn’t called her either. In fact, in fact, she barely existed for them since Larry had begun to foot the bills, in fact they-didn’t-bother-to-tell-her-anything-anymore-they-did-not-care-that-she-put-herself-out-for-them-or-that-she-was-here-just-waiting-depending-on-them-and-receiving-nothing-nothing-nothing!
She got up and walked lightly across the soft sage-green carpet to stand at the slanted window that comprised the outer wall of her room, the outer skin of the pyramid, and saw the massive mirrored structure of the nearby casino-hotel reflecting the sunrise: Mandalay Bay. Its broad surface was copper and violet. Nearby she could see a vacant lot, blank and flat, all light-brown sand with a massive orange crane leaning up into the sky.
She would miss the tour, they all would: not that she cared. What she cared about was the chance to see them again. Now she had to decide whether to keep waiting for them senselessly or fly home again without contact, admitting to herself that she was at the very furthest margins, left out, overlooked. She could fly home to wait as she was always waiting these days.
She called Szilard’s cell and got no answer, Larry’s cell, no answer, and finally Ben to make sure they hadn’t called him. Fermi picked up the phone and right away she felt calmer. Ben was not alone.
She washed her face and went down to eat an omelet in the Pyramid Café, where the waiter looked all around the room while she ordered but never at her. The omelet was professionally fluffy and symmetrical and she ate it slowly, sipping coffee and reading her free copy of USA Today.
The headlines were all boring and the stories even more so. She found it difficult to concentrate on what was happening. The newspaper was the diary of a whole culture, she thought, but it worked so diligently to say nothing. It was actually more like the greeting card of a culture, meant to catch the eye and be discarded rapidly.
If a country were more like a crowd, with feeling rippling among the ranks, instead of a network of institutions all distant from each other, she thought, then it would not control itself with such coldness and such economy. If a country were more like a body, then it might have a chance to know itself.
If a culture could be like a single person, she thought, then it could scream.
—I like first class, said Szilard. —The food is better.
—Hey, Oppie. That longhair over there’s been staring at you, said Larry, and pointed.
Oppenheimer turned and followed his finger. A hollow-cheeked man with a beard gazed at them from his seat in coach, eyes glassy.
—He looks like he really needs a shower, said Tamika.
—Oh, him. I met him when I was in line for the bathroom, said Szilard. —He’s crazy. All he does is talk about God.
She had paid for her meal and was headed outside to take the Free Tram! To Excalibur! when a disturbance in front of the long reception desk to her left caught her and spun her around.
—Call security! someone yelled.
In relief she recognized the voice: it was Larry.
At the very long desk, the clerk raised the phone to his ear and she saw all of them there, Szilard and Larry leaning over the counter, demanding, a pile of suitcases on carts behind them, some of the others standing watching Oppenheimer in the background, Oppenheimer who was backing up, cringing slightly with his hands raised in front of him as a weeping man knelt on the slick, shining floor at his feet.
He had heard the phone ring and known it had to be her but resisted g
etting up. Their bedroom window was open and he could hear Fermi walking past, out into the garden, the soft soles of his shoes on the stones. The wind chimes moved in the morning breeze and early light dappled the wall, a pattern of shadow leaves dipping and fluttering.
Nothing was like the light dance of leaves.
He would just give her time, he thought, and wait for relief. Time returned things to themselves.
It was good to lie watching the silhouettes of thin branches shivering, good to breathe the moist air the breeze carried in through the window, filling the curtains.
He moved a hand under the blanket.
—Leo! What’s going on? she asked as she came up behind them.
Szilard was wearing a tropical shirt with palm trees on it. It made her uncomfortable.
—A religious fanatic, he said.
Larry was bent down in front of Oppenheimer trying to pull off the kneeling man. With one hand he patted the weeping man’s back as though to console him, and with the other he tugged stubbornly at the man’s stringy arm, which was grasping at Oppenheimer’s Italian-leather-shod foot.
A Japanese family stood staring.
—Let me kiss it! cried the weeping man, but then hotel security converged, tanned well-dressed men with thick faces.
—He’s crazy! said Szilard.
—Wait. He’s not violent, cried Oppenheimer, as the security men hauled the weeping man off him by the back of his shirt. —Don’t hurt him! Be careful!
—What is this? asked Ann, but none of them noticed her. Oppenheimer’s nose was sunburnt, his cheeks tanned.
—Why don’t you come with us, sir, said one of the security guards to Oppenheimer as the others hustled away the weeping man. —We’ll sit you down and get you a glass of water.
—He’s been following us, said Szilard to Ann, and then turned. —We’ll meet you in the room, OK Larry? Yours? I can take care of this.
And they followed as the guards walked Oppenheimer through a staff door.
Ann turned and looked behind them, at the weeping man twisting and kicking as they marched him outside.
Children playing, thought Ben, lying in the bed with his right hand motionless, the wet fingers were irritating, but he did not want to get up to wash them. He was considering going back to slee, but in the meantime he was thinking of the child they were failing to conceive; in particular he imagined the childhood this nonexistent infant would never have.
See Spot Run and a world of picket fences, a suburban dream world: that had been the world Oppenheimer and his colleagues had left to people in the fifties, to their fellow Americans. When Ben’s parents were teenagers it was the world they grew up in, See Spot Run, civil defense, fallout shelters, Atomic Fire Ball candies you could buy at the corner store and pop in your mouth. School drills where they taught children how to get under the desks when the nuclear bombs began to fall. Duck and cover.
What is there so idyllic in that fifties vision, he thought, that pastel-colored propaganda of a simple life. It was a wishful return to Eden after the Fall.
He held in his mind the quaint picture of a tarry black road surface melting in the warm sun, the green grass, the mother in her cotton dress lying on a white hammock under broad weeping willows, teasing a foot through the dandelions, watching the children play. And while they laughed under the sky with its wispy white clouds she reached for a tall yellow glass and drank the cool lemonade.
But the memory was not his. Where he grew up there had been no hammock, no grass and no lemonade. The fences had been mesh festooned with razor wire and he had been content with that, wandering in the empty lots, among the piñon and juniper bushes fringing the trailer park outside Albuquerque, the dry arroyos and the pale sunsets over the dereliction. Still he had known no other place, so where did the gardens of weeping willow come from?
Suddenly it seemed to him that his memories were plucked from the air, mere impressions that rested on him.
Of course, he realized, of course. Nothing came from inside: you were born with no soul. The world gave it to you.
He sat up then, bolt upright in bed, instantly convinced. A soul was made of love, and love was made of time.
We are born without souls. The world gives them to us.
It is the world with its animals, its washed-out cold pink sunsets and dry arroyos, its lakes and rivers, rocks and swamps and forests, its moon, tides and seasons, he thought: it is the world that gives us such a soul as we have.
It gives us its life and we call it our own.
—I want to make sure the other guards didn’t hurt him, said Oppenheimer stubbornly, waving a way a cup of water.
—He wasn’t hurt, sir, said the security guard with the water. —I assure you.
—You should have let them call the police, said Szilard. —You could have pressed charges. Now how are we going to get rid of him?
—Who was he? asked Ann impatiently.
—Just some guy, said Szilard. —He was on the plane beside me coming back from Hawaii.
—He was an enlisted man once, said Oppenheimer.
—The Army kicked him out because he’s mental, said Szilard. —He said they called it “excessive religiosity.” The guy prayed all the time. Anyhow when I told him who Oppie was he fixated on him. He thought he was holy.
—I told him I was a Jew, said Oppenheimer to Ann, with a wry smile. —But he said so was Jesus.
—Nut job, said Szilard. —Wacked.
—He was clearly so devout that it interfered with the discharge of his duties, said Oppenheimer, and cocked his head. There was a wistful quality to him, Ann thought, as though he envied the man.
—I had an uncle like that, said the guard, nodding and popping the tab on his Coke. —He got fired for talking too much about Jesus. But he wasn’t in the Army or anything. He worked at a Jiffy Lube.
—I’ll reschedule at the Test Site, said Szilard when they got to the suite. It had a jacuzzi underneath the slanted glass wall facing the skyline. —They’ll fit us in.
—You can use your cell phone in the bathroom, said Larry, —if you want peace and quiet. There’s reception there.
—Annie! said Tamika, coming out of the bathroom as Szilard went in, wearing a rainbow-striped bikini and tanned nut-brown. —You so should have gone with us! It was awesome.
—Leo and I found it disturbing, said Oppenheimer, who sat cross-legged in armchair with an ashtray on his knee. —Larry. Coffee possibly?
—Coming right up, Oppie, said Larry, and picked up the phone.
—Chocolate croissants! called Szilard, sticking his head out the bathroom door and then retracting it.
—We got a tour of this giant clam breeding facility? said Tamika.
—First there was Kwajalein, said Oppenheimer to Ann. —We chartered a small plane and did a flyover. It’s a large military compound with the natives for servants. The soldiers and their families live like kings and the Micronesians who clean their toilets live like beasts of the field. They have practically no medical services.
—The scuba was great though, said Tamika. —We have to be positive, right? Do you want to come to the pool with me, Annie? You can borrow a suit if you didn’t bring one.
—Thank you, maybe later though.
With Tamika on her way out Oppenheimer said in a low voice to Ann, —The relentless positivity. It’s exhausting, frankly.
—Lar? I’m gonna pick up the girls in their room and go for a dip, OK?
—And I did the best wreck diving of my life, said Larry, hanging up on room service. —I took pictures for these guys of the ships sunk off Bikini. By the bomb tests, right? There was the ship from the bombing of Pearl Harbor, right Oppie?
—She was called the Nagato. Commanded by Admiral Yamamoto.
—So I went into this aircraft carrier, the Saratoga? It was a shallow dive just to get there, the deck was like forty feet under or something, but then it’s technical after that. Thing’s bigger than the Titanic. Eight decks. We�
��re talking major size. It was excellent. Plus there were sharks. Want to smoke out?
—No thanks, said Ann.
—They were circling pretty close, I’m telling you. I wished I had one of those cages you see in the movies. But you know, sharks are basically pussycats.
He began to roll a joint.
—It was strictly business for Leo and me, said Oppenheimer to Ann. —I gave a short speech to some of the islanders. Good people, very warm. Leo wanted to, as he put it, establish contact with them. He got me a speaking engagement at a church. The topic was world peace.
—You shoulda seen it, said Larry to Ann. —He rocked. He did. These people were digging him, I’m telling you.
—What was the point? asked Ann. —They live in the Marshall Islands! What use could they be to Szilard?
—We’re an equal opportunity employer, said Szilard, bustling out of the bathroom with his cell phone in hand. —I’ve got some of them coming over. New recruits.
—Are you kidding? Coming over for what?
—For the campaign, said Szilard, —what else would I be doing?
—They ran the article in the New Mexican, said Ann.
—Of course they ran it, said Szilard. —We made fourteen papers nationwide. Including the Dallas Morning News.
—I was surprised myself, Oppenheimer told Ann. —Leo’s always so confident.
—I’ve been on hold for forty minutes, said Szilard angrily to the cell phone. —This is unacceptable.
—Forty minutes? said Ann to Oppenheimer. —He just called them a few seconds ago!
He shook his head and ground out his cigarette. She noticed he had changed from Lucky Strikes to Dunhills under Larry’s patronage.
—But worse, said Oppenheimer, as Szilard withdrew to the next room with his phone, —we were approached by a man in military dress who warned us to withdraw the lawsuit.
—You’re kidding, said Ann, and felt her stomach turn.
—He implied they were willing to harm us if we didn’t.