Y

by Aaron Tucker

  He had carried this crisis into Christmas, when he went to visit his friend Fergusson in Paris. The sidewalks were slick and slushy with city snow, and he walked the streets with his hands stuffed deep in his pockets, barely looking up for fear of seeing another couple leaning together, kissing. His French remained in his mouth, mouldering, and he spoke little, grew even quieter when Fergusson began to show him poetry that his girlfriend had written for him. Opje was reading one of his friend’s poems, the words minutely slicing his fingers as he held the book, when Fergusson announced that he was going to marry her. Even now, there is a blank spot in his memory just after that moment, but he does remember feeling horrified, then angry, and the next memory he has is of wrapping a strap around his friend’s neck. He held his friend like that, savoured Fergusson’s panic until he threw Opje off, his thin body no match for his broad friend, and he lay there on the ground crying as Fergusson watched him, stunned. After a time, he stopped weeping and the two young men picked up the scattered books and reshelved them in silence, and he left then, walked the late-night streets, replayed his brief strangling grip of Fergusson, wondered where this violence came from and whether it would ebb away when he finally found a woman. He finds it amazing, only a month later, that Fergusson is still accepting his letters, and so, when he writes to him as he did tonight, he takes extra care to steer clear of the topic of women completely, instead focusing on their past time together, galloping against the mesa backgrounds.

  Very deliberately, he knows, he hides large pieces of himself from every letter he writes because, as he attempts to gather himself into cohesion, pull together all the parts of him that fill this sealed dorm room, he is ashamed of his own behaviour, humiliated and unable to completely understand himself, and yet he has to admit that his attack on Fergusson did not emerge from some fugue state of loneliness but rather extended a pattern that had begun the autumn of the year before, 1925, with his jealousy for his tutor, Patrick Blackett. He saw the female students slyly coax their eyes over his chest and down, his feet large and bursting from his boots. He recalls how easily Blackett would talk with women, and how they lit to him, bursting at his elbow in hallway conversations, peering over his shoulder in classrooms, always incredibly close to him. Each day his coveting of Blackett’s confidence and good looks turned one rotation tighter, until, alone again in his room, he made his plan to poison Blackett. He remembers working back through Baudelaire’s refrain – Ô Satan, prends pitié de ma longue misère – as he chose the apple from a grocery store near campus, settling on a cliché of an apple, a perfect form, its skin impossibly ruddy and vibrant, curved into his palm as he carried it, careful not to bruise it by gripping too tight; he walked through Cambridge’s silent campus, all its occupants elsewhere and busy, and as he walked, he planned his gift for Blackett, entered into the chemistry lab, solitary, and mixed the poison himself, carefully coating the apple, and when he was done, the apple still looked flawless, and he stood and waited for it to dry, the natural sheen only slightly dulled, and then placed it on Blackett’s desk, the taste of laced apple in his own mouth and driving him to sickness, back to his room, his typewriter and books.

  Blackett didn’t eat the apple, though Opje never found out how he knew not to; perhaps the abject strangeness of a pristine apple in the exact middle of his desk was warning enough; perhaps he saw the lightest fingerprint on its skin, how it warped a layer above the apple’s own; perhaps he brought it all the way to his mouth and noticed the smell, distinctly unnatural.

  He looks out his window, repulsed by his violence and his self-pity, letter after letter, and he repeats to himself that he is alone, again, doomed to forever occupy his room with the expanse of his memory and his intelligence and mulling through the crisis that beats loudly underneath.

  The hulk of Groves hunches toward him as they sit across from each other, the clip-clip of the General’s secretary’s typing just down the hall, the papers to the right of Groves’s massive arm shifting slightly closer to the edge and teetering. Opje stops himself from guiding his hand up to Groves’s elbow and nudging him backward into his seat, to a relaxed position, but of course he doesn’t dare touch the man; in reaction, he focuses his clear-eyed gaze behind the General and catalogues the pictures hanging behind him on the wall, the giant man shaking the President’s hand against the backdrop of a nondescript army base; the shot next to that, a younger Groves, still wide-faced but his skin scrubbed clean. He counts the medals adorning the General’s uniform before tenting his own long fingers together in his lap, waiting for the man in front of him to readjust his bulk from his stomach to his throat to his mouth and lips, to speak to him. The leaves are drying on the branches just outside the window behind Groves, and he can see the beautiful withering on the limbs just over the enormous man’s shoulder, the trees moving toward winter.

  ‘That is not how science works,’ he tells Groves steadily, thinking of the exponential growth of his Los Alamos labs and the scientists who have been pouring into it from all over the world, guided up the mountain from Santa Fe by Dorothy’s patience, her storefront an obvious non-space that each scientist checks into first, her presence there giving fuel to all the different rumours of what they are doing at the lab, rumours Dorothy quietly bears and passes along to Opje, and he has seen all this and assimilated it into Project Y, while at the same time bucking at Groves’s insistence that individual components and knowledge of the Gadget be siloed off from each other.

  ‘This isn’t science. You’re soldiers and this is a weapon.’

  The two men sit in that gulf, their conversation halted midway, Groves encroaching on Opje’s slight body, porkpie hat resting on his left knee, the two men filling the space between them with mutual silence, and he parallels this conversation with Arjuna at the beginning of the Gita: with the prospect of a consuming and total war, Krishna wheels their chariot through the battlefield and settles in the chasm between the two forces; Arjuna, in the abstracted moments before battle, sees all the way to its end results, to the masses of bodies stabbed and punctured and trampled and left to disintegrate, and Arjuna sank down into the chariot and dropped his arrows and bow, his mind heavy with grief.

  They are quiet, and as each waits for the other, he drifts in his memory from the office to his first time he stood across from the General, in the early summer of 1942. He had come to the lunch at Berkeley to charm Groves because he had heard that he was the gatekeeper of the new atomic project; Kitty was certain of it, and she urged him to find the man, no matter the crowd, and press his startling eyes onto him, grip his hand in conviction. However, it was Groves who flattered him, calling him Dr. Oppenheimer and then a genius, and telling him how invaluable he would be to the war effort, a scientific magician capable of solving problems from around corners; Groves, trained as an engineer and one of the men behind the construction of the Pentagon, valued a mechanical linking of logic that produced predictable stability, he explained across the noise of the luncheon, among the dozens of people orbiting their conversation, straining to hear. Groves said he needed him, the USA needed him, because he possessed an incredible intelligence, because of his motivating and sly charisma, and Groves left by saying he was the perfect man to direct the project.

  After that first meeting, he took Kitty to the small Italian restaurant near their California home and they drank deep red wine and he thought aloud to her, Kitty watching his face work, his cheekbones angled perfectly. With after-dinner drinks beside them, he asked: if he were a warrior, a land-bound Ulysses, what would his weapon look like? Would it be like a pistol or a long rifle, a weapon of distance, the grip and trigger a chain reaction extending from fingers, arms, torso? Would it be like a knife, steel, and the slice of it into the enemy intimate, a puncture driven by the force of his body, the enemy slumped over, the deadening weight falling heavier upon the warrior and his blade? Mere years ago he had considered even the most basic science behind the proposed Gadget impossible, but then Otto Hahn an
d Fritz Strassmann split uranium’s nucleus by barraging its centre with neutrons; when he heard, he immediately rushed to his chalkboard in an attempt to disprove them and was swayed only when his own student, Luis Alvarez, carried out the experiment himself; it was then that he envisioned the vague but incredible shape of that scientific breakthrough weaponized. But even this projection was clouded; the notion of an atomic explosion shook him, and the task of manifesting this impossibility into a physical form, into a device that could be carried, was a daunting and sheer mountainface: from his own position in the foothills of the challenge, he couldn’t even imagine the weapon’s form or how it could be granted into a warrior’s hands, whether that man might throw it or drop it or thrust it.

  It is true, he confesses to himself as he pulls back from that dinner with Kitty to the medals on the giant’s chest reflecting sharply into his eyes, that the mould of the weapon didn’t matter as much as its potential to end the war and purge the world of Hitler. He knew that the Nazis had been murdering their own citizens, and by the mid-thirties he was receiving letters every week, initially from Germany itself, then later from the scattered nations his friends and family had been forced into, the stamps on the envelopes in languages he recognized but couldn’t read, the handwriting morphing into faster scribbling, saying that they were expelled and needed help, urgently. There were those like Dr. Bernfeld and his wife, who sold off the family’s art collection, frame by frame, in order to flee. He gave them all money, what he had, and sponsored their passages; these acts were a function of the sense of humanistic duty he had learned during his youth at the Ethical Culture Society School. However, in contrast, the sense of responsibility being pressed upon him with the slow forming of the Gadget, here in Groves’s office, forced him to pivot to a more active position in the war, as something much closer to soldier than citizen and, with this, he tried to find comfort in Krishna, who explains to Arjuna,

  For a warrior, there is nothing better

  Than a battle that duty enjoins,

  verse that resounds in the general’s gaze at him, evening into a steady and forceful object that is thrust across the desk at him, Krishna again

  With shirking of this righteous war

  Your infamies begin:

  Your virtue and your name are lost,

  And you are sunk in sin

  and he finally breaks, to Groves.

  ‘I’m sorry, but you’re wrong. All of this science is new, all of these tests and materials are new. The Gadget is an experiment,’ and the giant widens his fingers across his desk, his fingers spanning an incredible distance when flattened and extended. A straightened paperclip sits aside his left ring finger.

  ‘Dr. Oppenheimer.’

  ‘It’s science.’

  And as he says this, his mind sparks and he acknowledges that the science of it is central to his own excitement, a central justification, and a source of his expansive pride: he will be at the forefront of the most important scientific discovery and implementation of the century, of anyone’s century. That is the first form of his sense of duty: he is a scientist, and this insistence nudges the Gadget forward, from mist into clarity. He knows that the science of it alone will push mankind forward, and the longer he thinks about the project, the more he realizes that progress, on the Gadget or otherwise, is not slowed by ethics, especially his individual qualms, and discovery marches ahead regardless and mercilessly. His own place, expanding as the Gadget progresses, is at the core, its nucleus, and from that centre he would do well to remember, to repeat on long horseback rides or hikes through the Pecos or over candles at Edith and Tilano’s Otowi dinner table, that all their work depends on the science that has come before, that they are at the front of unrelenting cumulative progress, events linked to events linked to events; they must think of science as an instrument of progress, but expertise in that specific area requires an incredibly sustained and historical knowledge and comprehension of all the science that has come before, that each person working on the Gadget is hurtling futureward, which simultaneously requires a looking backward, a remembering, an intense examination of the small steps, bodies, that have brought a person or science, both failures and successes, to the present.

  Earlier in the week, before this meeting, he tried to write through these feelings, typing to himself that the scientist and science blend into ‘an experimenter,’ extend symbiotically: ‘as the pencil in the writer’s hand ceases to be an object in itself and becomes almost a part of the writer; or a horse under a good horseman becomes for the time being not an animal to be cared for and thought about but a part of the entity ‘horseman.’ He remembers writing that sentence by drifting back to his central state, atop Crisis, inhaling the scent of mane, animal, while the horse’s sweat mixed with his own from his hands, and he would guide his fingers through the horse’s coarse hair and leave traces of himself there, take hints of the horse back with his palms; he wrote the sentence knowing full well that if science were ‘an instrument of progress’ then it was only a matter of time before someone, some government or team of scientists, succeeded in creating a nuclear explosion, an atom bomb; it was the only natural conclusion, a mere pause before pushing further into atomic energy or larger versions of the bomb. There was no way to halt science, despite whatever misgivings he or any one human had; this recognition recalled Krishna’s explanation that

  So rolls the wheel; and he on earth

  Who does not help it roll,

  has damaged the working of the world

  and has wasted his life

  and so his duty is completely in service of Action and it is his specific job to be wary of all the previous turns of that wheel and to separate out and contemplate the previous paths, mountain roads rutted by New Mexican migrants, pocked only by the prints of hooves. He told himself that he must resist passivity and keep the Gadget rolling ever forward.

  However, the second form of his duty is cloaked in urgency: sitting across from each other, he and Groves are well aware that Germany, headed by Heisenberg, is pushing for its own version, and if the Americans are to be successful, Opje will have to learn to maintain the small meticulous iterations of lab work, work toward element 93 (neptunium), then element 94 (uranium 238 blasted with neutrons, newly named plutonium), and be patient. Groves’s call to action at that luncheon and echoed in this office is grounded in a perhaps more divine set of mechanics already well in motion. But it is Groves’s years of military service that distance him from his own role; he is a man who, as Krishna describes, is able to act for the action’s sake and not be attached to inaction. His roles as Dr. Oppenheimer, as scientist, as Director, tangle as he obsesses over both the successes and failures of his actions, of the Gadget. He is not a man given easily to letting go of the fruits of his actions, to detaching; even now, he pictures his quiet and clandestine nights with Jean, then Kitty’s hand interlaced with his own as they enter every room, together, with the massive gravitational attraction that comes with being ahead of History. He wants to ask the man in front of him how to do it, how to act beyond the objects and frailties of his own ego, how to subsume himself within dutiful obligation, to his country, to science.

  ‘Some scientists on the project have deep ethical problems.’

  ‘They’re soldiers following orders.’

  ‘And if they won’t hear that?’

  ‘They are destroying the Nazis. Tell them that.’

  He rises and thanks him as he shakes the man’s hand, then leaves the General’s office, walks through the austere white halls, and exits with a slight nod to the guards by the entrance, walks back to his hotel, buying a ham sandwich and a tea at the street-level deli and carrying them up the stairs to his room. He removes his shoes and thinks of peeling the rest of his clothes off, the ever-present, stiff dress shirt buttoned to his throat, but he pauses, goes to the window; he looks down at the streets until all the motion, the cars and people, swim in hazy lines and shapes, and then he sits at the small desk in
the room, unwraps his sandwich after reaching into his suitcase for his copy of Herbert. He rereads, his tea misting on the corner of the desk, faintly mint, thinks of Herbert, a man driven continuously in his poetry by devotion and by his confidence in God, acknowledging

  Sometimes thou dost divide thy gifts to man

  Sometimes unite.

  Yet he argued that it is only Man who receives the full gifts of God and must always be in proper awe that there is honey and rain and the lemon’s juice and rind that provides for and cures Man. This sense of responsibility creates an ethics of Good in direct correlation to and in parallel with God’s complete yet unknowable wisdom, one he himself equates not necessarily to a God, Christian or Jewish, or Krishna, but rather to elemental forces at work, the Good ultimately aligning alongside his country’s opposition to the Evil of Nazism. This sort of elementary and binary battle fuels him, but for most of the scientists, appealing to military or divine orders will not compel them, despite his own singular will and example; sitting at his desk and admiring the cuffs of his shirt, round and unwrinkled, he takes a sip of tea, remembering those lonely nights in his Harvard dorm wondering about authority and leadership and his lack of love, knowing now that it is therefore his duty to be the man in between the internal, personal motivations and the external, larger machines (of war, of God). He must provide for the men and women at Los Alamos, give each the space to unearth meaning in their work, to get the Gadget completed.

  He thinks of how he has recruited other scientists to the Gadget, opposing the reluctance many of them had to joining him at Los Alamos by describing the project as ‘primarily the development in time of war of a military weapon of some consequence’ driven by the threat of Germany’s own oppositional development. At the end of each letter, he signed his name as ‘J. R. Oppenheimer,’ the erasure of first his father’s name, then his own, reduced his signature to stately medals, pronounced with a clipped efficiency that impersonally adorned the page; he allowed himself the flourish of his ornate last name, distinct, polysyllabic, and stretched long by the constant vowels, an indulgence that he hid behind the military tradition of reducing soldiers to surname. Despite his protest, Groves insisted that all the scientists wear military uniforms, act and dress as commissioned army officers, and so he had his own tailored: the originally constructed uniforms for a man his height tented out around his body and dangled childishly off his arms and around his legs, so he had the pants and shirt fitted to cling closer, sculpted them to his body and wore them as if draping himself in a flag, proud and in lucid opposition to a clear enemy. He consciously constructed his gait, a slow saunter that immediately clashed with the efficiency of his clothes, a swagger; he invited all the gazes from others at the labs, especially the young women and wives, as he moved handsome and graceful through his buildings as both experimenter and warrior.