Y

by Aaron Tucker

  He remembers the first full night at Perro Caliente, sitting in front of the fire together, telling her, ‘This is the place.’ As he said this she sipped and turned the lights of her eyes on him, and the fire surged on the knot of a log and she replied, ‘You’ll love it here. It’ll be your home.’

  And she sipped again and he acknowledged that small motion with reciprocity, the alcohol a fleeting deer-fly nip, and the fire popped again. He looped to that moment again later that night when he went out to piss in the outhouse, strained to hear her voice on the wind as it carried through the front door he’d left open, to hear the hooves of her voice rise and fall in rhythm and, as he walked back, he admired the tiered ponderosas around the meadow, caught the light through the equal spaces between their branches, between their long thin needles. He slept that night on the floor downstairs and let Katy have one of the two rooms upstairs, and the staircase leaned as the cabin shifted and he left that night’s fire, entering into a dream where he watched his father run his hand over a bolt of fabric, the raised ridges of his palm evaluating the weave and coarseness of the material. His father did this for a half-dozen long strokes before the rest of the background came into view and, in his dream, he saw the hated family piano behind him before he woke up to Frank tripping over him in the dark, stumbling for the door with a drunken giggle.

  Katy eventually brought him his stallion, Crisis, a ridgling that surged under the saddle so hard that he had to leverage all his weight in opposition, until he finally tamed him into a horse, enough to hold him in the direction of the mountains, up and back down again. The cabin, filled with Frank’s mail-ordered bedding and furniture, would drop behind him and he and Crisis would be off riding, often with Katy or Frank or whatever visitors were there, stomping down the grass and brush to survey new portions of the Valle Grande. Despite Prohibition, he always had alcohol, and the lack of oxygen made his strong drinks even stronger, and he would serve nasi goreng, the harsh spice right at the limit of his guests’ palates, cut back with garlic and cumin, a dish that, he would explain as he piled it out onto plates, he learned how to cook during his trip to the Netherlands.

  Mostly, he rode alone through those summers, attempting to balance the objects of the senses with the need for, as Krishna advocated, vairagya, ‘detachment’ from those objects of the world, and he found it in an intense love of solitude, a pure guna, sattva, and he was among the immense stretch of wilderness, solitary among just the cottonwoods, for him

  In hands and feet ubiquitous,

  And in unnumbered eyes,

  In heads, mouths, ears for the whole world,

  Its omnipresence lies

  and so, even now, when his mind returns to his past in New Mexico, he is almost always alone with Crisis, before he slowly converges in on a smaller, more finite body within that larger state. Often, two or three of the smaller memories will collide, and two bodies will overlap in disorientation. Now, 1945 blends into his first visit to Pajarito and the boys’ school with Katy, 1922, a mid-spring Katy looking over to him before he brushed out an auburn catkin that had lodged itself in her hair, which then collapses finally into 1942, and in that November memory he can see the stables where there is a horse under each boy’s responsibility, and Colonel Dudley asked again, ‘What do you think, Doctor?’

  ‘It’ll be like home,’ he answered, but even then he was already projecting the biting tire treads of bulldozers and the viral spread of temporary buildings that would be constructed under the growing shadow of the eradicating Gadget, and he anticipated the landscape filling up and stopped his cigarette mid-breath; he knew immediately that the stream-huddled cottonwoods would be built around, not removed, that he would preserve the deep brown heartwood and outer near-white sapwood of the almos, that their imposition, as world-openers, into this place must be in symphony with it, again the words of Herbert:

  I read, and sigh, and wish I were a tree,

  For sure then I would grow

  To fruit or shade: at least some bird would trust

  Her household to me, and I should be just.

  He would fight their lithic reduction of Nature and the mechanically inevitable weaponizing of the landscape, knowing full well he would lose, one tree knot removed at a time; he would resist imprinting himself on this space, encomienda, however impossible.

  He is weighing all of this, all of his actions, large and small, massive and minuscule, before he returns to his place at Project Y, before they use the Gadget in a few short months. The heat from his horse warms him and he syncs his breath to its, continues cataloguing his life’s work. One of his first decisions as Director, early in 1943, was made when he ran from his spartan office and halted three engineers measuring a tree, and insisted that it stay, that all the trees stay, and decreed that into what amounted to law on the plateau. At countless dinners, he retold this story every time someone mentioned the groves of shade cast by the cottonwoods and was met with polite nods and eyes that returned hastily to whatever dish was in front of them. Only Edith Warner, who would only cut down the piñons for kindling, would acknowledge him with a more precise ‘Yes’ before her Hopi partner, Atilano Montoya, ‘Tilano,’ added, ‘That’s what needed be done, Mr. Opp.’

  Before the war, Edith had manned the tea room as part of her job on the Chili Line railway, where she would wait patiently for someone from the boys’ school to pick up their supplies of food and tools and riding equipment from the railroad. When she wasn’t waiting or writing, she would pass change back to the Frijoles Canyon tourists who stocked up on water and perhaps an ice cream, already dripping down the slender cone and threatening their grasping fingers while they chattered about the Tyuonyi ruins and the cave dwellings. Initially, General Groves wanted to absorb Edith and Tilano’s home and property into the Manhattan Project. Opje and the General visited them in late spring 1943, to explain to them that she could live at Los Alamos and cook for the scientists there but he would need to claim her home. Project Y was already well underway as he spoke to her across their hand-carved table, and Edith looked over at Tilano, his braids past his shoulders, their undersides dark with shadows, then at him, before appearing to relent: she would move and her house and her abundant garden would have to be abandoned. However, as they left that night, he broke from Groves and turned back to her front door, telling her, ‘Don’t do it’; Opje knew the shade and fruit her house would provide, where they could sit at the small table outside, under the stars that hovered mere miles from the ground, touchable, bright, and close.

  It was this negotiation between himself and Groves that allowed Edith to spend the Second World War serving amazing home-cooked dinners in their blocky Otowi home to the starved and ragged scientists and staff of Los Alamos. The dining room was warmed by the wood stove in combination with the candles, filled with scientists, famished and a little drunk, a flask passed back and forth during their twenty-mile drive from the labs, those scientists from large cities like Chicago and New York and Boston, the same men and women who were initially crushed by the open field of vision, the plateau pressed down upon its occupants. These meals were gathered from the couple’s expansive garden, were simple combinations of sweet corn and beans and squash (different in winter than in summer), her relishes the nip of vinegar blended with celery and mustard seed; Edith would bring the black plates over, steaming and overfilled, and she, not much taller than the sitting scientists, in the stealth of her moccasins and a loose manta belted tight around her waist, would weave in and out of the table and conversations as Tilano tended the candlelight patiently and cleared the table when they were finished. That long slab table scattered with local pottery and men and women, elbows and knees in unnoticed contact, ragoût of lamb steaming with rosemary and tomatoes, garnished with parsley, their voices silent only when he would raise a glass of well-drawn water or strong coffee and toast, ‘To the confusions of our enemies,’ and they would all nod and sip in unison, all the tastes of the meal and drink settling inside
them. She cooked out of duty, she said, and would sell the excess vegetables and fruit and eggs from the garden behind her house to the wives down at the labs. She said all she did was the small things she could do: she could put the reddest raspberries next to her chocolate cake when she served it, she could brew the coffee strong, and she could cook for her hungry scientists. If it was Sunday, Edith would turn on the radio – even the radio and music patriotically repurposed – and they would likely hear Shostakovich’s Symphony No. 7, each cycle within the allegretto louder and more insistent, a dozen times, then a flute interlude, dainty in the waves of violins and clarinets. He would listen to the stretching horizon of music and concentrate on picking out one instrument, the xylophone, isolating it from the others, for minutes at a time, listen to it as separate within the larger system of the musical piece. Then he would allow his ears to take in the whole vista of the symphony once again, then tunnel back into another instrument, the harp, and follow its cyclical progressions, expanding out and allowing them all to converge and amalgamate again, then back in again on the finite smaller motions and notes, repeating in and out.

  This soundtrack pulls him back into the present, 1945, his horse underneath him and the mountains around him, and he imagines what the sheet music to such a symphony would look like, unique for each instrument, and he attempts to follow along to the music in his memory, staff by staff, note by note. This action reminds him of Niels Bohr’s first theory, that the state of atoms can be represented pictorially by a central nucleus surrounded by series of circles and ellipses. He knows now that this version gives a stationary misrepresentation of the inherent instability of Nature that, at its most fundamental levels, neglects, even as Bohr himself first proposed it, that atoms do not sit undisturbed and symphonies are not solitary instrumentals, but rather all smash together then shift energies into provisional quantum conditions that can only be revealed by change, and change can only be achieved by passing from state to state. He pictures Bohr (later code-named ‘Nicholas Baker’ or ‘Uncle Nick’) at the labs at Los Alamos, an expert Nordic skier who would cross the length of the plateau with unmatched speed, the graceful pull of his arms and legs in concert up Sawyer Hill, his light swishing cutting through across the powder laid on top of the snowpack. He reflects on this as he looks down onto Project Y, and thinks that by turning to this memory within his mind and then to any other past state or body, he is made volatile, and he knows that his bodies across his mind are impossible to visualize as crystallized specimens, are as Krishna explains of the gunas

  indivisible, though it seems

  divided into separate bodies

  that his states of memory, his bodies, are defined by motion, motionless, always moving, are as atoms are, without the complete mechanical Newtonian causality, and, in the same way, his desert memories, and his body within, collide and scatter, then reconvene. He recognizes then that stopping to observe, to remember, even one of his bodies or states will only ever capture one aspect of it and never all: any stilling of a memory is at its core dependent on the observer, the act of observing, and the instruments used to examine. All this is the science he undertakes and still he struggles with the notion of correspondence, a relating across theories and principles: in order for atomic physics to work, what is proposed to happen at the smallest scales of movement, of size, of elemental exchange, must also be true when expanded out to the immediately observable actions and objects that populate the world.

  And then he is in 1926 and paused at the top of a mesa after angling the horse through rock slides, and he looks at the mid-afternoon dipping of the sun, its light permeating the scrub and columbine and hooves, covering him entirely. He was with his brother, climbing over gravel slicks toward Truchas on an underestimated adventure, ten miles from Perro Caliente, past any footprints or man-felled trees, and together they rediscovered the Lost Mine, its horizontal axis still sheared and functional but the vertical submerged in water, that water tinged with the minerals from the rocks it had eroded, a film along its surface. He broke off a part of the forge from the nearby cabin and brought it home with him, a crucible that he repurposed into an ashtray, a trophy of their hard ride. That small container is an instrument that, when touched or admired, recalls a state, a stable version in echo of Bohr’s imperfect visual of the atom. However, his memories do change, and the bodies of his mind are, at best, captured once in their moment of recall, then un-reconstructible: upon each return, the timber of the mine-side cabin will be a slightly different hue, the wind blowing from a different direction, his conversation with his brother one or two words shifted.

  As the sky darkens and the pointed stars emerge, he knows he must go back to Los Alamos and finish what has been begun, and as he rides he turns his mind to light and its place in physics, and he reasons to himself that when a person takes the time to notice light, to glance up and look for it, it is easy then to think of light as an extremely viscous liquid, impossibly thin and occupying, pouring in at the slightest crack. Light is elemental, primordial, and reminds him of the light of lights from the Bhagavad Gita, in which Krishna tells Arjuna that I am in every being but also wherever a man goes, he remains in me. Light, like Krishna, is external and internal, is both the sun that hangs above a scraggled mountain switchback and the flecks in a night sky the colour of a rock from the ocean’s bottom; still, light also lies within the gaps between the interlocked fingers of lovers, is incredibly immense and yet also able to be reduced to, divided into, increasingly infinitesimal components, the building blocks of everything, light around and in everything. Light is contradictorily two divergent species at once, waves and packets, and so its collisions with other bodies and their surfaces, with other waves of light, with the macula and fovea and photoreceptors, its base emissions and radiations in reaction, bring to the surface the potential modes in which light acts. The ability of light to be many, to be packet and wave at once while still remaining singular, is how he understands this riding body, is how Krishna explains himself:

  I am the speaker’s speech; of sciences,

  That of the Oversoul.

  Of compounds, I the dual am;

  of letters, I am A;

  and this phenomenon allows him to be multiple, to split further into all the versions of his mind and memory, a set of quanta themselves, reacting and orbiting within the larger ecosystem of himself, while also allowing his body, his lungs in sequence with his horse’s, his boots in the stirrups gently steering, to be primary, central.

  He rides back toward his responsibilities, toward being the Director, toward the Gadget, while he remembers horseback discussions with Frank about Karl Marx and contrasts them with the patriotism that the American military and his country demand of him, the hostile interview by John Lansdale Jr., Groves’s chief counterintelligence officer, in resistance to granting him the initial security clearance to become Director. He twists himself further, beginning with his jealous and violent raging against his friends when they found girlfriends, then Katy, his long-ago young love that went unreturned, then he thinks of his wife, Kitty, brilliant and kept caged at Los Alamos, then how much his wife knew about ex-lover Jean, his visits to her in San Francisco, the constantly open tear left by Jean’s eventual silence. These recollections compile and, in the end, he is left to struggle with how a memory, a body, can be so incredibly vivid and solid and yet also so indeterminate and wild. With this, he turns to consider the vast amount of open space each individual atom provides, nearly all of it as empty as the night sky coming back from Otowi, dotted with electrons but ultimately, despite appearing so near, many human lifetimes from contact. Each atom in interaction with every other atom is space colliding with space and yet the world is concrete; he cannot put his hand through a wall any more than he can return exactly to that first visit to Pajarito – both are outlawed impossibilities. Yet there is comfort, for he is, as the Gita and Krishna instruct, the wise man who

  sees himself in every life,

  sees
every life that lives

  within himself.

  There is the fundamental equality that binds: if the world is both void and solid, both particle and wave, then there is solace in the notion that all beings are essential compositions of the same contradictory materials.

  He sits, the constant hum of the lab’s work pressed against the walls and door of his office, and looks again at the envelope from San Francisco and Jean’s handwriting, but makes no movement toward opening it. He recalls the last time he saw her, only months before, in June, and her repetition, ‘I’ve never stopped,’ and the light and shadows of her bedroom. From that memory he skips to the last time he had asked her to marry him, four years ago. Jean had slipped out of bed, sheets pouring from her body, looking back at him, his too-slender frame spread across his pillows and top sheet. She had left a mark just below the jutting angle of his hipbone, a jagged nail-width dragging that was barely visible in the light through his window, the light that peered slightly around the curtains he had hung, heavy and deep maroon. Those curtains were one of the only expensive items in the room; his bed was wooden and inelegant with a hard mattress. The thin blanket was balled near the footboard; near the covers, his own leg stretched over, the toes arched, then flat, as he flexed his foot and his breath settled. She glided through the door frame until just her heels were visible and he rolled his body to face the bathroom, heard her turn the taps of his bathtub, then the striking of water into the porcelain, less loud as it filled, water splashing onto water. He imagined the steam from its surface, heard her run a hand through it, testing the temperature as she sat on the edge of the tub.