Forget the Sleepless Shores

by Sonya Taaffe

  THE TRINITITE GOLEM

  It is easy to destroy a life. Take thirteen and a half pounds of δ-phase plutonium-239, stabilized by alloying with gallium at three percent molar weight and hot-pressed into solid hemispheres of slightly more than nine centimeters in diameter; electroplate with galvanic silver to reduce chemical reactivity and encase within a seven-centimeter tamper of neutron-reflecting uranium-238. Enclose within another spherical shell, a shock reflector of aluminum eleven and a half centimeters thick—some admixture of boron prevents the scattering of spontaneous fission neutrons from the tamper back into the pit. Place the whole assembly at the center of thirty-two hexagonal and pentagonal lenses of high explosive, tripartite blocks interlocking in the pattern of a soccer ball—each two-thirds high-velocity Composition B and one-third slower Baratol—and ring with explosive-bridgewire detonators whose shockwave converging on the plutonium pit will compress it, crushing the fragile gold-and-nickel urchin of the neutron initiator at its center and releasing, from the instantaneous mixing of polonium-210 and beryllium-9 and the bombardment of the latter’s atoms by the alpha particles of the former, the nanosecond-pouring stream of neutrons which will trigger a chain reaction in the supercritical plutonium. Thirty meters over the sands of the Jornada del Muerto, the fireball ruptures the sky like a second sun. Five hundred meters above wood-framed houses, cathedral spires, cloud-covered steep hills, only shadows remain.

  **

  It is easy to destroy a life. Take one theoretical physicist who has not published a paper in four years, who a dozen years ago made himself over into a director and administrator as thoroughly and ruthlessly as he once metamorphosed a misfit rock collector from Riverside Drive into a mesmerizing polymath with quotations in nine languages at his Chesterfield-callused fingertips, the benefit being the A-bomb, the cost being all the rest of his concentration, and then in open court and the public eye strip him of all authority and trust. A brilliant and distractable, self-despairing and ambitious man, tailor his cross-examination to his frailties and insecurities, his fracturing discomfort in his own taut skin: show him that he is unreliable, unstable, artificial, found out, no better for marriage and the Manhattan Project and all those covers of Time and Life and Physics Today than the tightly strung student his friends used to find collapsed in a depressive heap on Cambridge floors, and when he falls back on the pose of a victim, make all of the helplessness and none of the sympathy stick. It is not as clean-cut as martyrdom, Galileo-like though he will look. He was important, inventing the atomic age, arrogant with his creation as well as appalled; he gave up names to the same McCarthyist frenzy that now sweeps him over. Revoke his security clearance. The process will take about four weeks. For thirteen years after, he will speak about nuclear proliferation and write on science and ethics and oversee the researches of others at the Institute for Advanced Study, he will receive medals from two presidents, he will sail the peacock-bright waters of Hawksnest Bay and recite the Odyssey softly to the night, and contemporaries and historians will agree that something broke in him that spring of 1954, beyond healing or repair; he will not fight back. He will die of diffidence and five packs a day, a thin spiral of sand-white smoke finally burning out.

  **

  For some weeks after the hearing, he had known he was being followed. He was not surprised; he knew the joke about paranoia. Letters had been pouring in for days, some spiteful and vindictive, others aghast and supportive, the rare handful from friends that he was glad to read and the phone ringing off the hook until he hoped it was still tapped and giving someone in the FBI a headache. Surveillance swirled around him like a cloud of ash, a soft stain on the fingers of anyone who touched him. He watched the slight figure in the trenchcoat hanging back from the students on the station platform and the maple-lined bricks of Fuld Hall and did not wonder if it was a reporter or a gawker or a G-2 man; he could not see what difference it could make anymore, the last aftershock of plaster rattling down after the building’s collapse. There were no more guards outside his office door like angels at the gates of knowledge, no more Washington on the line, no more classified papers and no more safe to store them in. He chain-smoked, read Newsweek, thought about St. Croix. If the watcher followed him home, down the dawning summer shade of Olden Lane to solemn-eyed Toni and Peter with his chalk-scrawling protests and fierce, brittle Kitty turning a martini glass between her hands as though it were just the strength of Teller’s neck, he did not see it.

  He saw it in late June, standing quietly in his office where the half-raised blinds made white cross-hatches of the morning light. At first he wondered if he was seeing some kind of eccentric prank, a coat rack from another office or a mannequin from some department store in town scarecrow-dressed in a tightly belted trenchcoat and a soft hat pulled down far enough to camouflage its absence of face, but he could not imagine who at the Institute would try something so pointless and juvenile, or to what end. He was a restless man, nerves ticking in the absentminded click of teeth or cigarette-worrying fingers; he was not given to jumping at shadows or unwanted guests, only the inside of his own head. He said sharply, “Are you here to audition for a part in this farce?”

  In the silence, he heard for the first time the faint turntable hiss, the staticky nail-scratch of a Geiger counter registering only a little more radiation in the room than the background presence of a sleeping body. He could not hear breathing. The pulse in his wrists was suddenly quick as the blood in his ears, a clear cold shock that was not surprise. The figure by the window, as haloed by summer haze as a gunman by shadows in a gangster film, said, “I have been a long time looking for you.”

  If it had spoken in any language other than English, or sounded anything other than tired and a little like some of the voices he had known as a child at the Ethical Culture School, he thought afterward that he might have left the room then, as carefully and steadily as a man who knows he is undergoing a breakdown, picked up his hat and walked out across the lawns until either the trees or a passing scholar stopped him; he would have had no idea what to say. If he had seen, as it raised its face to him, the charred blood of Nagasaki ground zero or the throat of Shiva Nīlakaṇtha, poison-blue as a cloudless New Mexico sky—if it had been his own face, heavy-lidded, tight-haired, its fragile ascetic look aged as sharply as radiation sickness under the comfortable brown brim of his pork-pie hat. He saw a human face in glass as green and foamy as a breaking wave, hollowing the light against itself like jade. It was no one’s he recognized, Pompeii-cast from the melted sands; its owner shifted its weight a little in the slatted light, the first unconscious movement he had seen it make, and he saw a hard-traveled man with quick dark brows, a mouth that might have been humorous if it had not held itself in so hard, eyes as green as the rim of a bottle of Coca-Cola.

  Yiddish, he thought, as forthright Rabi, who had once asked him why not the Talmud? with all the argumentative assurance of an atheist from the Lower East Side who could nevertheless call a row of Orthodox men at prayer my people and introduce himself in prewar Germany with the unflinching ich bin ein Aus-Jude, and he knew then what his visitor was.

  The golem said in its unremarkable voice, “Undo me.”

  He was neither mad nor dreaming, the desk under his hand as real as the cigarette forgotten between his fingers and the phantom of a Geiger–Müller tube still crackling its faint caution. Oppenheimer said, “I can’t.”

  “None of the others can. That leaves you.” He saw the burnt desert flicker again as the golem smiled, a sunset-green flash. It reminded him a little of Feynman, except that it did not, at all. Its voice was light with irony: “Destroyer of worlds.”

  He could smile a little himself, thinly. “At present, the world appears to be surviving me.”

  “Yes.” The golem, taking one step forward, was abruptly on the other side of his desk, swift as a shockwave; its hands were still in its pockets, its hat pushed back only enough to see. “So. Don’t let me.”

  The plaster fal
ling, which was the last weight of the building after all. As suddenly and hopelessly as nausea, he wanted never again to be asked for anything, names or dates, admissions, miracles, unless it was Peter for some electrical gimmick or Toni for a hug, no accountabilities, no decisions, nothing. Carefully, steadily as he had imagined himself walking out of his life, he said, “It can’t be done. Any more than the bomb can be un-dropped, or the atom un-split.” He could not swear it was the truth, if he could take five minutes with a rock hammer and reduce an existential dilemma to a janitor’s problem, put a green-eyed man on the next train to Nevada to wait for the countdown at Yucca Flats, but in Washington he had grown tired of talk of genies and bottles; he was thinking of the sky boiling at five-thirty in the morning, Bainbridge’s handshake. Now we are all sons of bitches. He would not ask if the golem had pulled itself out of the glittering crater that night or some day long after, where it had learned to look as human as anything else born in the fallout age; he saw it riding the rails, Geiger-clicking its nights away in bus stations and hotel lobbies, one more drifter in the bright streets of tomorrow. His shoulders were stiff and slumped as if he sat on the old leather couch in Room 2022, waiting to be told how he had lied. He could take nothing back. He said softly, “I am afraid that kind of thing is out of my pay grade just now,” and remembered to brush the ash from his cigarette just before it scarred the wood.

  The golem said above him, “You don’t have to go on living.”

  Automatically and testily as if it had said something idiotic about Sanskrit or Baudelaire, he snapped back, “Of course I do.”

  He was quiet, then. He had not thought it was true.

  There was a breeze beyond the windows, ruffling the last of the dogwood blossom. The golem must have made another one of its fast-tracked, soundless movements; he registered that it had taken a cigarette from the half-empty pack on his desk, but by the time he reached instinctively for his lighter, it was already exhaling smoke. He thought of a hot white spark burning in its palm like the smallest of suns, but then he would have been dead already, like Slotin with his screwdriver, the sour taste of hard radiation in his mouth.

  “You have that choice,” it said gently. “I wasn’t asked.”

  He could say nothing to the golem. He did not want to claim its existence or its undoing; he was not Rabi or even Einstein and had never known, never wanted to know the mysticism his parents’ generation had shed long before they spoke more French at home than German and named their son for a father still alive. Prometheus was one thing, Rabbi Loew another. This thing of darkness—but Prospero had broken his staff of his own free will.

  When he met the golem’s eyes again, they were brighter than he had thought: copper salts in a flame test, a smoked-glass sunrise. Its cigarette was half gone, smoke curling about its shoulders like winter steam. He did not want to ask the question. He did not think it would lie to him.

  “Why?”

  As if it were taking polite leave of a colleague, the golem tipped its hat.

  He saw its springing dark hair, as brushy as his own in the Trinity days; he thought, as distantly as if it mattered, that it looked younger, hatless, and more Jewish, and less like anyone he had ever known. He saw the letters on its forehead, torch-cuts of white fire writing מת ,מת, and nowhere to smear out death or write the truth back in. He could not hear the noise of the Geiger counter anymore, only a dull roar billowing like the backwash of a vast tide and small popping clinks that might have been falling metal, broken blown glass, and he was less afraid than he had been every day of April in Building T-3, because the damage was already done, and more than the day after Trinity, because he had not known what it would be. There were cities burning, but he had known about those; islands, forests, children. The golem walked through blackened landscapes, carrying nothing, saving no one. It sat in hospital waiting rooms, its hat on its knee, as gravely speaking doctors passed charts and X-rays back and forth. It stood on a catwalk, looking down into a silvery plutonium swirl. It stood in the high cold air of a mesa, watching the silent fusion of the stars.

  Undeniable as atoms, a pillar of sea-green glinting Alamogordo glass, the golem replaced its hat. Something in the room went out.

  It was quiet in his office, at ten o’clock on a morning in June; it was not empty, with his books and letters and the sounds of mathematical conversation passing his door, and he heard a great silent space in between every heartbeat, after every breath. His throat was burning, as if he had breathed in a desert-blast of heat; his fingers, too, as if he had tried after all to write something in that glassy fire; when he reached for the half-cigarette smoldering in the ashtray, he found himself staring at his hand, thin muscles and wire-tendons, nails bitten down to their nicotine stains, frail as a shadow on the tabletop. It opened and tensed, aging, alive. After a moment, he used it to pick up the cigarette, and then a pen. He wondered what the FBI would make of the conversation—the disgraced scientist answering himself like a vaudeville act, or the soft white silence of blank tape, unspooling inch after inch of empty air until some bored G-man wondered if the microphone was broke? Or just a voice, weary and audible and mostly New York, just as they might see a slight man in a trench coat walking down Einstein Drive, waiting for the Dinky at the Princeton stop with his hands in his pockets, the sun in his sand-bright eyes. He would not see his golem again, he thought. It is easy to destroy a life; it is the things that come of living that are harder to kill.

  **

  We have an A-bomb and a whole series of it, and what more do you want, mermaids?

  —Isidor Isaac Rabi (1954)

  ALL OUR SALT-BOTTLED HEARTS

  For all the family he had watched go down to the sea, Anson had never before seen anyone trying to drown.

  He had dozed most of the way from Boston, slid awkwardly against the graffiti-scratched window as the commuter train rattled its way from North Station to Gloucester and the winter-tinted world passed like a show of lantern slides every time he blinked awake. Strung between his dreams, Fenway-green cantilevers of bridges had given way to post-industrial warehouses clinging with snow like ghost signs, the sudden white-and-blue dazzle of salt marshes where islands of cordgrass rusted in sepia tone, all under a bleach-silvered sky, and he stepped down onto the platform with a waking jolt, half expecting to find himself still in his tangle of blankets in Allston and the ground line blessedly quiet all night. He was standing in a slush-piled parking lot with the train pulling on to Rockport behind him; he had the address Tony had left him and a backpack of convenience groceries from the Tedeschi’s across the street from his apartment and a name that he more than half hoped was a mistake. Even in February, the salt damp of the harbor came off the wind like iridescence off a scale. But the house was real enough, steep-roofed and shingle-sided in two shades of off-cream, almost exactly a mile’s hike from the station, and there were second-floor keys in the mailbox like Tony had promised, and he felt like an idiot calling “Hello?” up the carpet-runnered stairs like the first girl in a slasher flick, but he did not want to find himself on the wrong end of a 911 call, either. There was no one in the living room with its uncurtained windows, no one sitting at the magazine-piled coffee table or sleeping on the sagging fawn-colored couch. He tapped at the door that looked like a bedroom, jammed half open with an ankle-winding jumble of clothes; he glanced into the kitchen with its dark-paneled cabinets and a refrigerator that hummed like a broken fan belt. Cold hung in the air like dust, as if no one had bothered with the heat in days. When he found the bathroom, he thought he was opening a closet door.

  In the tiny, curtain-darkened space wedged behind the sink and the toilet, something splashed, startled and sudden. Anson had just enough time to register the insufficient fluorescent bar over the mirror, the shadowy glint of spinal knobs as someone’s back curved palely away from him: a naked human figure climbing into the tub headfirst. Even so, it seemed such an awkward, improbable means of self-harm, it was not until the first strang
ling heave that he realized he should stop her.

  She fought him uncoordinatedly but obstinately, even while her breath raled and bubbled and she coughed slippery gouts of water onto his corduroys and sweater, lung-wracked and still strong enough to land a wild fist under his ribs, so that he gulped a half-shot breath himself and slid abruptly down with his back to the slopping tub, the open door of the bathroom blocking the stretch of his legs. There was a radiator crammed beneath the towel rack, ticking and clinking faintly. Displaced water was seeping into the few dry patches left underneath him and it might have been hard rain all the way up Prospect Street for the condition his coat was in. Soaked and winded, suddenly spent enough to feel the absurdity of the situation, Anson looked over his shoulder at the woman on her hands and knees in the mostly emptied bathtub and met the pearl-black of her eyes for the first time.

  He said blankly, because Tony had not warned him, “I’m so sorry.”

  “Fuck you,” Gorgo Waite said thickly, and coughed some more.

  Under its dripping gloss of water, her skin was milky as old ice, so translucent across the promontories of cheekbone, collarbone, ribcage and hipbone that he wondered that she had not simply broken in his grasp, glassy as an abyssal fish. Bruises were already coming out under the pallor like a mottle of malachite, darkening her shoulders and the thin bracelet of her wrists. He could not tell her age; her tight hips and pale-nippled breasts could have been a starved woman’s or an unfinished girl’s, all tracks of human time wiped away with the softening of her unarmored skin, preparing itself for the scales that never came to its defense. The scarlet weals under her jaw flared raggedly, still gasping for the water her obstinate lungs refused.