by Aaron Tucker
Yet, as the project progressed, his example was lost on the incoming scientists, and eventually even on himself; he wrote to one of his best friends, fellow scientist Isidor Rabi, that ‘the Laboratory must demilitarize,’ seeing that the intention to unify all the men and women as a direct and visible function of the war effort was instead stepping in front of progress, halting the wheel’s forward turnings. He realized, too, that their contributions to the Gadget, and the project as a whole, could not come as orders; rather, responsibility needed to originate from a place far more internal, as citizens, and he recalled Krishna’s words that the truly wise are those who are fearless, one-pointed, that they are the people most likely to finish the Gadget, and that he had a responsibility to create the necessary space in the labs for each individual to arrive at that singular point within themselves if they were to succeed. He came to this decision while in his own office, near the centre of the ever-growing camp and labs, watching the hurried constructions around him; he saw what he thought was an excess of buildings spreading across the plateau but marvelled that each held more and more people every day, the men arriving from the East, from Britain and Canada, from the cold, and those men and their wives were meeting the early months’ warmth with surprise and confusion muddled further by the extreme rise of altitude. And he knew that they were expanding at such a rapid rate that any attempts at centralized, external control would simply wash over and disappear down the steep sides of the mountains and into the smaller arroyos, inevitably evaporating into the summer dust. Therefore, he would wear whatever uniform was necessary, knowing that, as Krishna explains,
Just as you throw out used clothes
And put on other clothes, new ones
The Self discards its used bodies
And puts on others that are new.
The verse spoke to his ability to dress in the guise that was required, to have one body that allowed him to negotiate with Groves, and another entirely for talking with his team of scientists, another for Kitty, another for Jean, each state one arm of the spiral, with his central body being the one on horseback against the dusk. That horseman would remain safely encased within the protective outer versions of himself; he was like Krishna and kept his core, dazzling, infinite, primal, hidden, and instead projected outward the versions that others needed.
There was a winter walk that he took with Bohr earlier this year not long after this realization, after Edith and Tilano had just fed them pozole, the thick soup with its enlarged kernels of hominy and slight lime and cilantro still in his mouth, and the sky was completely clear of clouds and the ground was covered with the light of stars. They swayed into each other occasionally, both speaking in their low, fragile voices, his own vocals barely beyond his cigarette smoke, rising into the night. They spoke first of Copenhagen, the cheery harbour of Nyhavn, the primary colours of the waterfront facades and how the great city came to be occupied, the bright and new swastikas and eagles so harsh against the wood buildings curled from centuries by the sea. That description brought a hush over them and so they continued between the thorny scrub brush without talking.
Finally Bohr tilted his chin skyward and asked, ‘And what are you going to do with the device once it’s done?’
‘That’s not my decision.’
As they walked, the boxy outline of Edith’s home blended entirely into the darkness, save for one tiny flame, a candle that Tilano had set out on the outdoor table so they could find their way back. Bohr did not respond to him for a number of strides, and the night gathered.
‘What happens when the war is done?’ Bohr pressed.
He did not respond, and Bohr slanted his head toward the distant car and the way back; the little waxy flicker, still bright, was growing a bit too small. They turned, and Bohr added, ‘I worry. I worry so much, Opje.’
There was a gulf of silence again and he wiped the ash from his cigarette with his finger.
Bohr spoke: ‘I pray it’s only ever tested. That it is proven possible and that no one will actually dare to use it.’
They returned to the car quietly, tentatively, so as not to further mark the landscape with sound, and they spoke little on the drive back, their eyes set firmly on the road as the headlights revealed it in small portions. On their return journey he thought about the Gadget and its eventual explosion. Not long after he became Director, two prominent scientists at Los Alamos, Edward Teller and Enrico Fermi, came to him with a vision of the earth’s atmosphere on fire, imagining that a fission bomb might fuse the nuclei of the nitrogen surrounding the earth’s surface and ignite the air, chaining further into the oceans’ hydrogen until the oceans and sky would turn to flame, so dense the sun would be completely camouflaged, and those flames would rain down in sheets upon the earth and cover and burn everyone, raze everything, man-made and natural, without discrimination, the earth a round, exploding coal pulled from the extreme heat of white, tinged-blue flames, leaving the planet a ball of char and ash and nothing. He could see the complete destruction of the planet then, from a single point of origin, from a tiny space that he himself had some responsibility in creating. The more level-headed Hans Bethe returned shortly after with his careful calculations: a near-zero possibility of the Revelations Teller and Fermi were invoking, and from there the action of the Gadget mercifully receded, now buffered by scientific theory and proofs, and the weapon became just a turn smaller, manageable, more real.
It was on that drive back with Bohr that he steeled himself for manifesting that weapon and nothing more. He knew there were men looking beyond fission toward fusion, to a ‘Super’ version of the Gadget; in fact, Teller, without Fermi, was knocking at his office door weekly to push for work on an even larger fusion bomb driven by deuterium ignition. To this point, he tried to reason through the fog of Teller’s obsession, emphasizing to him that an atomic bomb was the only way to get Hitler out of Germany, that such a weapon was enough on its own to ensure the end of the war, and peace afterwards, and so his duty was toward that victory. Yet Teller visited him repeatedly with the same speech, as each round of calculations edged closer to the point, and then, with Bohr in the passenger seat, humming and looking out the car window at the night, he decided to simply move Teller off the Gadget and onto the Super so as not to distract the others. That quarantine sealed it: the rotation of the wheel that would bring a hydrogen bomb would happen without him.
After they drove through the security gates, he dropped the elder scientist off and returned to his Los Alamos home. Kitty was in the kitchen, a drink already poured for him, and he watched her eyes as she saw him enter the room, a staggering hitch in his usual gait. She said nothing, motioned for him to sit with her at the table, and so he did; they drank, the quiet an understanding that he could not speak then. Hearing his uncertainty, Kitty reached across the table, placed her hand on his own; he welcomed the light bite of her fingernails, her eyes searching his face for a crack through which she could enter as he groped through the weapon’s complete abstraction for anything remotely recognizable, eventually equating the weapon to an extinction-level meteorite, a torpedoing arrowhead from the heavens, and, from this image, imagined masses of German bodies slaughtered, the impact crater at their centre ringing outward in perfect symmetry, ring outside ring outside ring.
That conversation with Groves rattles through him as he sits and reads in his rented room, and he resolves to hold himself rigid against the General’s demands, but also to accept all the responsibility for the Gadget. And then he hears Kitty’s words from the night that Bohr made his case: ‘They’re not Germans. They’re Nazis,’ her voice steeling around its edges, and Krishna echoes: Whence, Arjuna, in your hour of trial comes this ignoble shame? and both Kitty and Krishna collided in the god’s demand to shake off your weakness. Stand up now like a man.
Sitting across from Kitty, he reflected on Krishna’s speech to Arjuna, that within war the necessary deaths are only mortal, and therefore neither he nor Arjuna should weep for their fa
llen enemies, only momentarily dead; similarly he, the Director, need not grieve for the towns laid flat and twisted with extreme heat, the bodies scattered in such numbers that there were no individuals. He thought to himself then that to act as a god in destruction is to act purposely toward obliteration, to see the full expanse of annihilation in advance and still move toward it, confident. Yet, at his core, he still was as Arjuna was, in grief at even the mere broad and blurry strokes of such action, mortal despite the godlike weapon he constructs, wields. He remained frozen there, their house still, the guards outside the door captured mid-gesture, the sky above them unmoved from its deep and constant shade, the stars above that sky stopped in mid-death, far away but light.
It is his thirty-ninth birthday, and he is in his Bathtub Row home, on the fulcrum into a new decade of his life. The guests blur in systematic movement, patterned and observable even as each individual veers independently toward or away from the others; they juke around the furniture that has been pushed back to clear a space in the centre of the room, the voices colliding with the scratchy music, made tinny by the overused speakers, the bodies, the socked feet slipping unsteadily across the hardwood floors, as they stumble into each other, perhaps on purpose, he thinks, holding a gin sour, the drink a dialogue of ice melting into the alcohol and edged by the fresh half-lemon he squeezed in, the grit of the seeds against his teeth, the syrup left lightly on his lips with each sip. His guests dance and he focuses in on one young woman, her hair pulled back to reveal the slopes of her chin and cheeks; he catches her mid-laugh, and he remembers her from the radiology lab, Barbara, though her last name disappears before he can grab it. They talked briefly last week about winding up the skinny roads to Los Alamos, and she made eye contact and didn’t lower her voice to him, had laughed then, too, when he described how lucky she was to show up in spring, insisting that April was really the best month in New Mexico, here at this exact place, when the ground softened and the water returned to the trees and the cottonwoods would sprinkle themselves across their forearms on hikes and horse rides.
The party pulses happily but he is drunk and troubled and his mind keeps looping back to the conversation he had in his Berkeley kitchen the previous winter, at a dinner that was meant to say goodbye to Haakon Chevalier and his wife, Barbara, he and Kitty already transitioning away from the coast, and the four of them together falling into their usual patter, him asking Chevalier about his latest translations, their wives interjecting playfully. He excused himself from the table to make more martinis and Chevalier followed him into the kitchen, commented on how briskly he mixed the drinks, the sure rattle of ice, then the exquisite pouring of each into the thin-stemmed glasses, eventually steering their dialogue toward a scientist they both knew, George Eltenton. Opje had met him once before, at a dinner party Chevalier held, but their conversation had been superficial and short.
‘Eltenton asked me to ask you how much access to information you have,’ Chevalier said as he leaned on the counter.
‘Everything is still being set up. Why?’ he answered as he placed the four glasses on the tray and started toward the dining room, but Chevalier stepped nervously in front of him.
‘I know you and Frank have supported Communist causes in the past.’ Chevalier paused. ‘He wants to know if you would talk to him. In San Francisco at the consulate.’
‘I’m not a Communist and that would be treason.’ He set the tray down on the counter, the force causing the glasses to wobble, and he reached out to straighten them. In that pause before his friend’s response, he thought then that though the Soviets were also fighting the Nazis, the Gadget was beyond classified, at the greatest depths of secrecy.
He corrected one of the martinis, then picked up the tray again, moved back into the dining room, Chevalier behind him, then at his side, cheerfully handing the drinks to their wives, and later hugging their goodbyes at the end of the evening.
The night that his friend Chevalier asked him about Eltenton, he fell asleep replaying their conversation, mixing it with his chats at Perro Caliente with Frank about the benefits of Communism in the abstract, their limbs leadened from riding all day, the sun only now plunging over the mountains and casting their mouths into twilight, then darkness. From the distance of American capitalism, he explained, he saw real value in the redistribution and decentralization of wealth and power, in movements toward equality and in providing actual resistance to neglected citizens. He and Kitty had had similar conversations, and during each one she would expose one more detail about her Communist ex-husband, Joe, and his fight in Spain, would remember and recount one more phrase from the pamphlets she printed and distributed, her fingers greasing the thin paper transparent if left too long in her grip. He could then understand why he was asked: Chevalier’s request, he considered, was in line with some of those previous thoughts, and digressions, and was an error on his friend’s part, nothing more – both he and Kitty erased those impulses. An honest mistake, he thought as he fell asleep, and he would tell no one because no one needed to know.
He remembers the linger in Chevalier’s embrace that night, a second too long, and his own answer, as he drunkenly pulls himself from that memory back to his party when he hears a voice speaking to him.
‘Happy birthday, sir.’ He turns over his shoulder to greet the young man’s words, sees the face, the mouth upturned and the drink in hand tilted dangerously, Charles Stilth, one of the young engineers from California. ‘Thank you for having me in your home.’
‘Sorry to interrupt.’ Kitty slides next to Stilth, knocks into him unsteadily, looks toward the crowd as if only then hearing the music. ‘I need to talk to you,’ she says to Opje. ‘Privately.’
Stilth moves apologetically away and Kitty’s eyes follow him, flinching when the young man stops to talk with Barabara, and she grabs Opje’s arm and they move into the kitchen.
‘We’re almost out of food. There wasn’t that much to begin with, but … ’
Kitty looks over his shoulder midway through the sentence, her eyes unable to focus; he can see them bounce within her sockets and wonders how many drinks she’s had. He knows she is looking at Barbara and evaluating, measuring her calves and the length of her dress that darts around her legs, that hugs tight to her waist, her breasts, judging her open-mouthed laughter.
‘How is Peter?’
‘I’m sure he’s fine.’ The song nears its end and she nods in agreement, puts both their drinks down on a small side table. ‘Dance with me.’
She grabs him high up on his arm and they cut to the centre of the makeshift dance floor, couples parting for them, and he can feel Kitty’s weight against him, leaning on him for balance, and he guides her, slowly moves her into position, his hand wrapped halfway around her waist with his other arm held out straight from his body, foxtrot, the way he learned in high school; other couples, the younger ones, gravitate closer to each other, he observes, but as the trumpet cuts in, he glides, steering Kitty, though she’s now looking at him and gripping him more fiercely, ‘It Was So Beautiful,’ they wheel together, their stiff style thawed by his tall and graceful body at the nucleus of the party. Again, Kitty looks over his shoulder and smiles, her teeth in slight reveal, and he can hear her thoughts, her satisfaction that everyone is watching them and that she’s happy, this is where they belong, the sudden squeeze of her hand confirming his thoughts.
He turns Kitty slightly and the instrumentals build in tempest, their feet syncopated against the others on the dance floor by milliseconds, just faster, and, admiring Kitty, Je t’adore à l’égal de la voûte nocturne, he knows it is also a triumph over the small pettiness burbling out, driven too by boredom, tensions Kitty recounts over their dinners, the squabbles around who got a house on Bathtub Row and who didn’t, who was invited to what party and who wasn’t, the eggs that rotted even before they were delivered to the mesa, the electricity made sporadic by the various experiments going on in the labs, how turning the faucets often lets loose slu
dge, green and wafting iron, that there is never enough water or milk or mail or phone calls, familiar voices or trappings. Kitty, as wife of the Director, a woman, without the consuming duty of the Gadget to occupy her, endures the complaints, struggling to filter and resist amplifying them, even when she herself is most frustrated, after she tried to bake and had the altitude sabotage her efforts, a malformed cake wasted and in parallel to her botany books that lie scattered around their home, half-read and dormant. It is the image of those abandoned texts that washes guilt over him, makes most clear the toll that he is taking on her, that his work and his will are imposing on her, asking her to remain the loving wife of the Director, the wife he knows he needs while still continuing to visit Jean, to be the stabilizing force that allows him to achieve.