But most chatter will bounce off the obelisk and disappear:
I can’t believe no one died.
No one died?
Well, I heard there was cows.
They were only irradiated.
Mutated? Like with superpowers? Superpower cows?
Cooked.
Atomic burgers. We ought to open a joint that sells ’em.
But a burger truck is already set up west of the obelisk. The menu makes no mention of atomic cows, just as the official program for the Trinity Site open house makes no mention of downwinders.
By the time I was born, four decades after the Gadget’s blast, nearly every rancher in the region had a story about how his cows or his daddy’s cows had been hit by the Bomb, burned or bleached or grown a second head or mutated into elephantine beasts. The stories had become unbelievable. And this was true of our whole culture. By the time I came around the Bomb’s power had long since been subsumed into myth, the origin story for countless superheroes and supervillains. Captain Atom and the Fantastic Four, Spider-Man and the Hulk, Firestorm and Starlight and Doctor Manhattan, all born of atomic power. Even if the Bomb was never again used, we were desperate to remember that it had inside it an otherworldly thing with the power to change us. All those superheroes were not just the hope that something good could come of the Bomb but that something could come at all, more than an infinite stalemate, that the Bomb and its power could change us from the bloodthirsty thing we’ve always been, force us into something infinitely better, or, with the supervillains, at least something infinitely worse so that we’d get on with going extinct. The atomic cows were the first walking sign of our foray into this age of desperation—that epoch the scientists now call Anthropocene, the first new geological era in 1.8 million years, predicated on humans as the primary destructive force on planet Earth—just a little discoloration here, a slight burn there, one flank fully bleached by fallout and the other still that old Hereford red. As a child when I heard about my great-granddaddy’s cows bleached white on the side facing the Gadget’s blast, I spun them around in my mind, seeing on one side the dusty color of the Old West and on the other side the glowing, irradiated world of Spider-Man and the Hulk and Doctor Manhattan. All of SNM sometimes feels like that now, after the Bomb, stuck with one foot in two epochs, the ancient and the futuristic ungracefully fused, a warning or a sideshow. All of us down here have been reared in that wobble. The Gadget was designed up north, on top of an extinct volcano at Los Alamos, but then, to blow it up, they just barely dragged it across the 34th parallel, which divides our state in half, that literally divided New Mexico territory in half during the Civil War. Union up north of the 34th. Confederacy down south of the 34th. Surely the whole state has suffered from the industrial nuclear complex, but up north they get it with a side of prestige in the form of two elite national laboratories.* Down here we get one black obelisk at 33°40′38″ N, just twenty-three miles south of the 34th parallel, twenty-three miles into the underbelly of the American West where atomic cows roamed. But now the cows are little more than a joke around the obelisk, which is itself little more than a joke. There’s a lot of space between debilitating fear and ignorant nonchalance, but why do we have such a hard time walking that line? See the people with their faces painted like skulls, holding skull cutouts pasted to a stick, flashing the international symbol for radiation with a skull buried at its heart. These are the children of the Gadget. There are no superheroes, no real Captain Atom or Fantastic Four, no Spider-Man or Firestorm, no Starlight. But there are these downwinders, real people who are more than myth. They have been sick and maybe they are sick still. They have little power, super or otherwise. But they remind us, at least, of what we are dangerously close to forgetting. And that’s exactly what any superhero story must do. If the Bomb is the origin story for any superhumans, it must be these ultimate patriots.
July 9, 1945
(One Week Before the Gadget’s Blast)
“Up it went, a great ball of fire about a mile in diameter, changing colors as it kept shooting upward, from deep purple to orange, expanding, growing bigger, rising as it expanded, an elemental force freed from its bonds after being chained for billions of years. For a fleeting instant the color was unearthly green, such as one sees only in the corona of the sun during a total eclipse.”
William Laurence will publish this description in one week after witnessing the Gadget’s blast. But he’s drafting it before the blast because he wants to get it right. All the scientists have clued him in on how it will look. They’ve done all the math. There’s been talk the Bomb might light the atmosphere on fire. They for sure know there will be quite a show, but their equations say that on July 16 the world will not end, not on account of their Bomb. Laurence will be the only journalist allowed on-site for the Trinity test, has had mostly free rein for over a year to chronicle the Manhattan Project. Perhaps at this time, 1109 hours on July 9, Laurence sits in his room at the Los Alamos camp, sets aside his draft of the blast, and decides to do some official government work, begins revising a press release for the military to use after next week’s test, one that will include no purple prose about elemental forces, one that will be a simple cover story to keep the existence of the Bomb secret. Then there is commotion out in the street. The soldiers and scientists have gathered. They stare up at the sky, up at a solar eclipse, many using the same welder’s glass that will shade their eyes next week as they gawk at the first breath of the atomic age. The Los Alamos encampment is located at 35°84′ N, 106°28′ W, on top of a mesa, an extinct volcano. At this location the eclipse will reach its maximum at 1152:21 hours, when the moon will obscure 71.58 percent of the sun. Perhaps this eclipse is what gives Laurence the inspiration for his cosmic description of the Gadget’s blast.
In other parts of the world, today’s solar eclipse is total. The moon’s shadow hits like the fine point of a dagger first in Idaho, then to Montana and northeast to Hudson Bay and across the North Atlantic to Greenland, then arcs back down through Norway, Sweden, and Finland before passing just seventy miles north of Leningrad in the Soviet Union. The citizens of Leningrad, if they look up at 1413 hours, will see the moon obstructing 98 percent of the sun. But they may not look up because they are still recovering, their heads still hanging from the 872-day Nazi siege that ended last year, still hanging from the weight of over 1.5 million dead, still focused on the trials of over two thousand of their friends and neighbors arrested for cannibalism during the hunger of war. But the Nazis surrendered two months ago, after Hitler’s suicide. As the moon’s shadow moves southeast past Moscow in the sixth year after our Second World War began, a third wave of mass suicide sweeps across the defeated Nazi regime. This is why we will sometimes call the solar eclipse of July 9, 1945, the Victory Eclipse, even though the war is not yet over. The moon’s shadow finally peters out somewhere in Central Asia, just about three thousand miles east of Hiroshima, Japan.
Way back on May 28 in 585 B.C.E., another total eclipse of the sun occurred in the sixth year of a war. On that morning the moon’s dark dagger of a shadow sticks into the Southern Pacific, then drags northeast over present-day Costa Rica and Haiti and over the Atlantic to France before swooping back down toward the westernmost protrusion of Asia, where a battle rages. The fifth-century B.C.E. historian Herodotus tells it this way:
As, however, the balance had not inclined in favour of either nation, another combat took place in the sixth year, in the course of which, just as the battle was growing warm, day was on a sudden changed into night. This event had been foretold by Thales, the Milesian, who forewarned the Ionians of it, fixing for it the very year in which it actually took place. The Medes and Lydians, when they observed the change, ceased fighting, and were alike anxious to have terms of peace agreed on.
“Day was on a sudden changed into night,” says Herodotus.
Isaac Asimov, in his book The Search for the Elements, credits this moment, when the prediction by Thales of Miletus
is vindicated, as the beginning of science as we know it, the first time someone used observable facts to make a hypothesis about a cosmic event that then actually came to pass. That is, perhaps, a fairly singular pinpointing of these origins. But doesn’t it feel good to believe that the very origins of science coincided with the end of a war? Isn’t this where we have always hoped science would lead us, the commencement of peace? But then why might one eclipse have this effect and not another? If the sun were just a bit more obstructed by the moon on the afternoon of July 9, 1945, at Los Alamos, would that have made any difference? What if we could tilt the earth just a smidge so that the Gadget and its creators, exactly one week before Trinity, are in the eclipse’s path of totality? Who among us has the power to alter the movement of our planet? But a week before Trinity there is already another bomb headed toward Japan, the Gadget’s uranium counterpart, Little Boy, which requires no test, which will be dropped on Hiroshima anyway. Trinity is already just a formality. The science that maybe began with the Eclipse of Thales is now advanced enough to be confident that it can create the opposite of a total solar eclipse.
Night turned to day, says Henry Herrera.
Heaven came down.
“On that moment hung eternity. Time stood still. Space contracted to a pinpoint. It was as though the earth had opened and the skies had split. One felt as though he had been privileged to witness the Birth of the World.” This is how William Laurence will finish off his description of the Gadget’s blast next week. He will work hard to make it a beautiful piece of writing and an honest piece of writing, just as he will with all his future books encouraging our mass proliferation of nuclear armaments. But perhaps now, just after the eclipse, he heads back inside, sits back down at his desk to finish the lie that will be the cover-up disseminated in the days after Trinity. The document is modular and will tell the public what it needs to know in any scenario, regardless of the outcome of the test. The first paragraph is the only one that will be released to the public. It simply states that on July 16, 1945, an ammunitions magazine exploded on the Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range and “there was no loss of life or injury to anyone.”
A second paragraph, to be added in the event that something goes wrong, states, “Weather conditions affecting the content of gas shells exploded by the blast made it desirable to evacuate civilians.” This paragraph will not be used.
Also never to be used is a third paragraph, prepared if something goes more than wrong, goes terribly wrong. This section contains only four words, followed by lots of haunting space for use by a future writer because the current writer does not expect to survive such a catastrophe. And in that way this brief, unused third paragraph of a press release—so much blank space—is the most honest description of the Gadget and its legacy that Laurence will ever write:
Among the dead were:
(names)
AFTER THE FALL
In the Year of Our Lord 2012
Aunt Yvonne says, You caught me crying. She’s chopping onions. Enchiladas as always, she says, and pours over corn tortillas her big bags of homemade red sauce from chilies whose seeds are the kind without vandalized genes. Heirloom, I guess you call them, she says, meaning they are doctored neither to appease the weak nor punish the foolhardy. She wants to keep me busy eating so she can tell a story. She’s my great-aunt, which means she has more stories and cooks better than a regular aunt. She tells this story: One time a spaceman floated down into the corral at the old family ranch. I always wanted him to know how badly he scared us. We woke up one morning and those lights were just flashing and spinning and we jumped up and put on just enough clothes and running outside here was this balloon coming down in the corral! And then the spaceman in it—he got on the cover of Time magazine. An heirloom is something handed down from generation to generation. The family ranch was sold when I was a kid, what was left of its thirteen hundred acres anyway, after the government gobbled it up using eminent domain until the ranch house was surrounded by a missile range. Look at a map and you can see this: a vast gray stretch in the gut of Southern New Mexico, the largest military installation in the United States, its eastern border below Highway 70 straight as an arrow save one notch, where the ranch house sits, where Great-Granddaddy sat on the porch with a rifle and said, Y’all will have to go around. And they surely went around until there was nothing left to ranch and no point in keeping a house where missiles and spacemen were falling. The ranch was sold but we have these stories and our heirloom chili, peppers that melt your body until you are nothing but the air you’re sucking to cool off. These chilies make you float. And drift. This was ’59 or ’60 or sometime in there, Aunt Yvonne says. The spaceman must have realized where he was because he kinda lifted up and moved out into the pasture. And here come spinning lights on cars and trucks and helicopters and all these men jump out. Cut right through our fence. Storm the pasture like you’ve never seen. Police and soldiers and reporters and everything else. Weather balloons were always coming down on the ranch. She’d find a great wad of shiny fabric attached to a little metallic box. The box had a number to call. She’d call and the Army would answer and say thanks and then they’d come gather their balloon. And, of course, the missiles. Great-Granddaddy GB would call the Army and say, You lose one? And they’d say, Yessir. And he’d say, Well, we caught one, here on the ranch. This particular morning, in ’59 or ’60 or sometime in there, the balloon came down with a man. The man had on a space suit. Not the slick suits NASA would make famous but just a beat-up helmet and a pressure suit that looked like little more than a sleeping bag duct-taped around his body. His balloon crumpled in the pasture and then the storm of fence cutters were in a frenzy around him. Your granddaddy just walked slowly out toward the commotion, said, “Every fence y’all cut you’ll be fixing before I let this spaceman leave.” She guesses they fixed the fences. They usually did. I suck air and float. And drift. I will spend years scouring newspaper archives looking for the spaceman on the old family ranch. High-profile military balloon missions in these years called Manhigh and Excelsior were America’s first real forays into space just before Kennedy’s moon shot. I will consult Craig Ryan, who wrote all the books on these space balloons. He’ll say, We know that the first and second Excelsior flights originated near Truth or Consequences, and the third from Tularosa. I don’t have a lot of information about precisely where those flights landed. But I do seem to recall Kittinger mentioning the White Sands Ranch. Aunt Yvonne knows for sure it was Joe Kittinger. He was the test pilot who got on the cover of Time magazine by jumping out of the space balloons. He’s well into his eighties now but is on the news again talking about another balloon project he’s helping to organize, a multimillion-dollar commercial stunt called Space Dive. I keep trying to call him when he’s on the radio, just to see if he remembers, if he knows how badly he scared us, she says. But the thing about the Excelsior project in 1959 and 1960 is that Kittinger didn’t come down in his balloon. He jumped out from way up in the stratosphere. So maybe Aunt Yvonne has confused his parachute for a balloon. There is plenty of film of his last Excelsior jump, Joe speeding down from the stratosphere, then floating down toward the white sands below, landing in rings of creosote bush. He lands clearly in the vicinity of the ranch, boots touching desert that looks exactly like the ranch, but no buildings or landmarks are visible in the film to confirm the exact location. Or maybe that spaceman falling to the ranch happened earlier than Aunt Yvonne remembers, when the test pilots didn’t yet jump but rode the balloon’s float all the way back to earth. I’ve found no footage of these. The point is, a lot of weird shit happened at the ranch, it being tucked into the dark soul of the military-industrial complex like it was. The White Sands Ranch. Squeezed like a rabbit by a hungry snake, Great-Granddaddy would say. Then they slobbered all over and finished us off. The ranch has a different name now, is not a ranch anymore but sometimes is a film location and often shows up in blockbusters about the postapocalypse. Aunt Yvonne says, The po
int is, you can’t even imagine how it shocked us. That man from the sky! Worse than the missiles, even. We eat. We suck air. And drift. On these chilies, everything makes perfect nonsense. It’s a wonder the horses didn’t kill themselves when they saw that spaceman. We had one good mare onetime, in the stall. Already had her sold too. She got frightened by a low-flying fighter or one or another of those sonic booms and she bucked. Kicked around in the stall till she broke her neck. Have you ever seen a horse break its own neck? Like it is crazy looking for something that shouldn’t be there but saw it and so then—oh, Joshua, so terrible—the whole animal comes undone.
SO LET ALL THE MARTIANS COME HOME TO ROOST
In the Year of Our Lord 2013
He whimpers. And moans. He says, Ow. Or says, Oh, well. Says, I will or Oh, life. Oh, love or Ah, Lord. Oh, well. He hums from the very back of his mouth and then rolls the hum to his lips until a kind of whimper grows and a moan grows. A sadness that breathes and gasps exactly the way you want a lover to breathe and gasp and kind of whimper and moan. Blind Willie sings the loneliness that sounds a lot like the slow kinds of sex. “Dark Was the Night, Cold Was the Ground”—three minutes twenty-one seconds of viscous blues about our despondent Lord Jesus in a garden on Crucifixion Eve. Blind Willie sings it as a hymn in a makeshift recording studio in Dallas in December of 1927 with a penknife to the neck of his guitar, and he sings it as the NASA-approved expression of loneliness etched into golden records aboard our Voyager spacecrafts launched in 1977 to float forevermore interstellar, giving alien civilizations a taste of the human story, and he sings it to me poolside in the parking lot of Americas Best Value Inn on the main drag of Roswell, New Mexico.
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