by Lydia Millet
At first he was an independent contractor to the Forest Service and was surprised to learn that most of his salaried coworkers did not like to work at all. Rather they drove over the old logging roads hour after hour in their government vehicles, looking for ways to waste time. One of them drank cheap beer all day long, driving over the rutted mud with his windows rolled all the way down, red dirt caking his hair, fishing the cans out of a cooler on the passenger seat of his truck as he drove. Whenever he saw Ben he offered him a can, and when Ben did not want it he shook his head with a smirk to let Ben know he did not suffer fools gladly.
But Ben was stubborn and worked hard and though they mocked him at first and even called him a “pretty boy,” soon they dropped the mockery and he thought he might have won their grudging respect. They continued to do nothing themselves beyond driving around and fielding phone calls from their wives and girlfriends, but they allowed him to work without railing against him.
In return, every so often he accepted a warm can of Schlitz in the morning.
As he drove to the forest at dawn, uphill all the way, he often had a view of the peak of South Baldy Mountain ahead, looming at over ten thousand feet. He liked this and he liked the crystalline frost patterns on his windshield and watching them melt softly from the edges as he drove. Within months he had seen mule and whitetail deer, elk, a black bear, a golden eagle, and herds of pronghorn antelope running fast alongside the highway.
After a while Ann went back to work too, cataloguing images of celestial bodies at the Very Large Array. She drove there every morning in their old car with no heater, her fingers and toes growing numb as she listened to the radio.
She loved the pictures of the celestial bodies and would lose herself in concentration. The images were not actual photographs, since no optical telescope could reach as far as the radio telescopes did, but rather false-color images in rainbows of yellow, green, red and violet. Because these images were all she looked at during the day she began to see outer space as the radio telescopes saw it, an infinite blackness punctuated by explosions of spectral color.
She learned about the celestial bodies as she catalogued them, but she never assumed that what she was learning was real. It was a story the astronomers liked to tell and had a singular beauty, and she found the words for the bodies as lovely as the pictures of them. We have seen these bodies, she would think, and even long after we are gone some particle in the universe will hold a memory of the words we once used to describe their beauty.
There were galactic sources: supernovae, star-forming regions, pulsars, black holes, and planetary nebulae. There were active galactic nuclei, including quasars, radio galaxies, and Seyfert galaxies.
There were also hypernovae, black holes that formed after the death of massive stars.
Once or twice a month Ben searched internet news archives for word of the scientists, but as he expected there was none. They had never been seen since the day of the birds.
Some of their fan groups remained active, selling souvenir mugs and T-shirts on their web sites and reporting on the sluggish progress of various old Szilard-authored petitions through minor committees of the United Nations. Several list-serves notified interested parties on the release of videotapes of the scientists’ public appearances. Obscure sources documented clearly spurious “sightings” of men meeting Oppenheimer’s and Fermi’s and even Szilard’s descriptions, in isolated locations as far-flung as Luxembourg and Beijing.
When he told all this to Ann she did not seem interested. She neither spoke of the scientists nor asked about them, even when she caught a glimpse of what he had on his computer screen. In fact she rarely discussed any of the events of the past year and he was mildly surprised to find out she corresponded occasionally with the well-mannered, unassuming minister from Peace Camp. Father Raymond had given away all his worldly possessions after the day of the birds, renounced his U.S. citizenship and left the country. He was ministering to war victims with the Red Cross in Africa.
The worldly possessions, Ann told Ben as she read aloud from a letter, had amounted to a 1985 Volkswagen Jetta, some cooking pots inherited from a great-aunt, and a rotary telephone.
Larry called the house once after they had moved but it was not to discuss Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard or their erstwhile world-peace mission. Rather he had become convinced of the veracity of certain UFO sightings in Pennsylvania. The sightings involved Amish widows struck dumb by what they called ghost lights descending from the sky. He was impressed by the eyewitness accounts and hired a highly qualified team of parapsychologists and UFOlogists to help him investigate them. Some of the Amish widows, he said, had not spoken since they saw the lights. They refused to speak though there was nothing physically wrong with them. But others, he said, had actually lost the use of their tongues.
—If you guys want to come along it’ll be free room and board and transportation, he told Ben on the phone. —Just like before, and we’d like to have you, man. Plus some of the old crowd would be there.
Ben said no and told him it sounded frivolous to him, but Larry did not take the slight personally and changed the subject without a sign of discomfort. Had Ben heard that Leslie was getting married to a woman? They were having a commitment ceremony in Oregon. Adalbert the food activist had gone back to Belgium.
He was good-humored as they hung up the phone, saying Take it easy, brother. And a few weeks after Christmas they got a card that featured a photograph of him and Tamika, arms around each other, smiling. There was a Christmas tree in the background and both of them wore brown-felt antlers sprouting from their heads.
It was hard to remember sometimes that history had ended. The trees and the sky felt no different unless she stopped herself from moving and listened to them. Even then they were the same: only she was different.
When the ground was so real and the evidence of solid life was all around her, it mostly seemed out of the question that anything had changed.
Only in strange moments would she be stopped as she walked or closed a car door or moved between rooms. She would be stricken then, shot through with a panic, convinced for a fleeting fraction of a second that what she was seeing would be the last sight seen.
And then she went on, back to the everyday world she could touch, which could all disappear in a flash.
Letters from Father Raymond reminded her that she was not alone in this. They were parchment-thin and exotic, the stamps ornate, the envelopes lined in red-and-blue airmail stripes long since outmoded in the U.S. They seemed to her to come not only from another place but from another era and because of this she handled them gently, stacking them carefully alongside each other in a small cubbyhole in her desk. She allowed herself these letters in which to examine the past and hear its echoes reverberating, but aside from the letters, which only came every few months, she turned away from it and tried not to remember the details. She was wary of the danger there, the danger of dwelling on what she would never know, and anyway all there was for her was what was at her fingertips. Once she had loved the past and the future best, but now they both were off limits.
Now and then she would ask him a question when she wrote back, such as: Do you think Oppenheimer was right? And he would respond, in his deliberate, neatly slanted handwriting: He once told me he did not think the end would come from bombs because there was not time. He thought it would come earlier than that, from all the changing of the world and the destruction of it. He said to me once: it is the mind that made the bombs that is killing the world. For that purpose the bombs are not needed.
They were not unhappy but there was the sense between them that what was beyond their presence was shimmering and unreal. The super-world, the world of trade and great cities and daily news, was only an image of itself anymore. On television, in the magazines, nothing was said about what was real: only the surface was touched. And even on the grainy plastic dashboards of their cars and in the spidery cracks in their dusty windshields as they drove f
orward through the desert there were textures of loss and forgetfulness. Both of them believed that human time spun on only for the sake of a machine, and the machine was far greater and more monolithic than anything weak and living.
Inhabiting this afterlife, which was less life itself than the memory of a life passed away, it was safer to spend time in the wide open spaces of the ancient plains than the cramped roads and stores and homes of a newer geography whose end was already foregone. It even hurt her at times to be in the city, to see the weak and living animals whose time was marked, so precious and unsung, their children, their art, their gardens.
At least what was remote and wild in the country could be relied on to go on nearly forever: the sky, the curve of the earth, the sun.
—When I was a kid, she said to Ben one morning when they were afraid to get out of bed because the room was cold and the floor was cold and their feet would have to touch the floor, —I would stand in my parents’ house when I was bored and wait to be told what to do. There was this static feeling right then, this feeling of being frozen. With this reluctance and at the same time a sense of anticipation. Feeling torn between doing something and doing nothing.
She pulled the comforter up to her chin and sat back against the headboard.
—I didn’t recognize it back then but now I see what it was.
—So what was it?
—It was how I was going to spend the rest of my life.
In a late afternoon in the early spring they walked down into an arroyo together and trailed their hands over the sage bushes to lift their fragrant fingers to their faces. A breeze moved the brush and ahead of them the sun was setting, and because there were no clouds it was a wide and vacant sky.
Stepping over rocks on the crumbling red soil he asked her if it was wrong to want to have a child when their paralysis was so clear, when they lived already in a present that could not go forward and only longed for what had already been and was gone.
—It is not wrong for people to want something, she said quietly, —but our problem is we want everything.
She was walking ahead of him by then and since she did not turn back toward him to speak her answer was carried away from him on the wind.
By the beginning of the twenty-first century the men who had been central to the design and construction of the atom bomb a half a century earlier were dead. The bombs they had conceived remained, of course; the bombs in their various silos, trucks and trains, their submarines and aircraft, had been dispersed over the globe like seeds, and lay quietly waiting to bloom.
But the scientists had lived thoughtful lives, weighing their responsibilities gravely. They were not warlike men. Mindful of the moral dimensions of their work, they were inclined for obvious reasons to value reason over instinct. They were duly troubled by the implications of the first great weapon of mass destruction. They had built the first device under the shadow of Hitler, and they dedicated it to him. But finally they were driven by something far simpler than fear or anger.
They worked because they wanted to see; they worked because they worshipped the structure deep within the universe, what was sweetly unknown and could only with great perseverance be drawn into the light. As others might feel tenderness for a child or a home, so they cherished and nurtured their science.
It was love that led them to the bomb.