Y

by Aaron Tucker

  His brother had yet to return but he could hear him – Maybe he’s checking on the horses – and so he raised the water to his mouth again, cool over his tongue, throat, and thought of himself at his students’ age, diving back one-pointed, considered the poisoned apple he left for Blackett when he was at Cambridge, his own mind at that stage wobbling and unsure, his hands and face in a constant battle to describe his inner thoughts, all loneliness and failure. He saw some of the same teetering in his students and would make sure to give them an extra sentence in the hallways or his home, to speak and by doing so model a potential map out of the dense wilderness of intelligence into a place where the mechanics of the brain were in equilibrium with the sensual world, hands wiping down denim pant legs after a long day’s ride or a mouthful of red wine that swallows the spice of a hot pepper. More and more students were showing up at Berkeley and his annual class at Caltech, asking for him by name, spurred on by his work with Ernest Lawrence and his cyclotron, by his unstructured lectures driven by his restless pacing and wide-ranging discussions, his love of poetry and paintings, his shifting effortlessly between languages, all mythically preceding him. He noticed that a number of his students had started brushing the ash from their Chesterfields with the tips of their fingers, had searched out the same wide leather belts that he wore; before rounding a corner in the Berkeley physics lab, he would hear his hitches and inflections in a different register, voice, and in concert, his students talking to each other in a rough approximation of him. He encouraged them further, to read Hemingway’s excellent The Sun Also Rises and to imagine themselves not in Jake Barnes’s impotence but instead within the vitality of the novel’s settings, Pamplona and Paris, as young men simply being young men, in drink and in love. What he left unspoken is the final conversations between Jake and Brett in Madrid, Jake devouring the roasted suckling pig and Rioja Alta, finishing the wine himself when it becomes clear that Brett will never return to him, though she briefly fantasizes they ‘could have had such a damned good time together,’ Jake’s closing agreement in his own mouth, ‘Yes. Isn’t it pretty to think so.’ He reminded himself of this as he rocked in the chair on the porch in the dark and remembered Jean, the two of them in mirrored, quiet combustibility, and her rejection of him, the ‘No’ three times; she departed that night, the soft closing click of his apartment door, leaving him to regress inward into the shell of his vast and wide-reaching mind. Instead, he had forced himself to emerge from the apartment, to continue to attend parties, had met Kitty in August of 1939, only months later, and, in the dark with the sounds of his brother returning to him, he slipped off his boots and told himself that he would call Kitty when he got back to California.

  That memory of Perro Caliente burns away and he starts again.

  Dear Dr. Oppenheimer:

  In view of the nature of the work on which you are engaged

  But his mind cannot resist going back to that night in 1939 when he told himself he must be as sensually compact as possible, dense with smells and tastes, in order to be able to leave. He cannot help the feeling that, even when given the sublime stretch of the Pacific, he would always rather be in the New Mexico mountains, his body still recovering from exertion, slightly dehydrated, the insides of his legs sore from the horse, his back tender from leaning against its neck, and he takes another longer gulp and exhales, recounting that earlier summer, the ride up to the Ranch School on the Pajarito Plateau, and the low adobe houses, baking on the trailside they had cantered by. Back in California, he did get to ride a bit, to Diablo, a mountain rising out from the deep-fern-shaded chaparral, the foothills and the shrubby pines slung low along the gentle banks, the native sunflowers with their small vibrant heads that sprung along the trails. In the morning, he often found himself looking first at San Francisco, then turning opposite to admire the placid mountain, patchy as the morning fog disappeared. Locals would refer to it in Spanish as Cerro Alto de los Bolbones’or in Chochenyo as Tuyshtak, explaining that the Indians considered the mountain one of the places where their first ancestors lived, sacredly elevated as a marker where Creation took place, the name translating as ‘at the dawn of time’; when he recounted this during a party at his home, one of his students, an amateur geologist, explained that, because of where it lay on fault lines, the mountain was in fact still growing. He considered this growth whenever he reached the top, imagining the extra stride it took that particular time, the extra two it may take the time after, and, at the peak, stroked the collections of fossils that partly emerged from the rocks, shells, small coarse fans, remnants of the millennia required to surface the oceanic rock, Jurassic and Cretaceous. He built campfires there, drank from his thermos and tasted the lime and honey, but while he relished the locomotion of being on a horse and the subtle climb, the immediately vast and uninterrupted view, it only made him want to restore himself to New Mexico. That 1939 evening, although the darkness was complete and all objects erased in its blackness, the imprint of the landscape lingered and he could see every jagged edge and dramatic height superimposed on the night. He explained this to Katy, the evening before, after he and Frank rode down to her ranch, and she nodded in sympathy, her hair only slightly more grey than it was in his youth, her face still vivacious in its contrast between her pink lips and sun-darkened skin – ‘You’re still perfect,’ he told her, and she laughed and leaned her head against his shoulder briefly. As she slid away, he recalled her shocked face when, a decade earlier, a group of them had gone climbing north, camping along the peaks of the Truchas, and after waking up one morning to find two of the horses, Iris and Vixen, gone, they rode doubled on the remaining horses south to her house, arrived in the middle of a storm, the lightning chasing them down the grade toward her door, how Katy threw her arms over his shoulders, only then allowing herself a half laugh. In the morning she left to go look for the missing horses while he recovered, and from the window with a tea in hand, he marvelled at how she guided her horse out, her and horse in telepathic whisper, the two of them disappearing until they became a tree in the forest leading up the mountain’s sides. As his tea grew cold, he recalled that storm and her door again, and then saw the two horses emerge from the other end of the forest, and he ran out with his pyjamas bunched hastily into his boots, muddy and slippery, and corralled the horses back to their stables, a palm on their calmly breathing sides as he fed them hay from his other hand, murmuring soothing words, ‘You’re home, you’re home,’ into their flicking ears.

  Dear Dr. Oppenheimer:

  He sits with this memory of Katy and her ranch, knowing he is always the young man slipping flowers into the vase on her table, grass to her horses, but in 1939 he waited on the porch for Frank while he planned his return to Berkeley: he would pack his books and clothes, his objects dusted with the place, and wind back along the highway, too fast, always too fast, only this time there was an enigmatic woman at the end, a botanist, Kitty. It was during the drive between the two places, hours into the flat desert of Arizona, just before it rose in crags at the Nevada border, that he took the time to re-centre himself, to adjust his inner mechanisms toward the ocean rather than the desert, and he used the car to propel between the two places with maximum momentum, stopping as little as possible, his finger joints sore from holding the steering wheel, his knees dully pulsing from being held in the same position. On those solitary trips, he occupied his mind with other trips, one from Ann Arbor to Perro Caliente, his foot weighing the gas pedal to the floorboard as he raced alongside trains, steadily overtaking the cars, long and reversing in slow motion against the grain-yellow background as he glanced from the train to the road and back, then drove faster; it was the same trip when he ended up wearing a patch after not blinking fast enough and catching something in his eye, the Missouri doctor tweezering out the tiny particle and explaining he was lucky to not do further damage, that the scratch would heal but no more driving. He sat in the passenger seat as Frank drove, reduced to a myopic and passive calculation and, in
stead, in challenge, turned his senses toward the gasoline fumes and distant dog barks of the passing drought-dried towns, the smell of manure as they pushed along the fields, watched the flatness of the middle states morph to hills, then mountains. As they climbed upward, he told Frank that the car’s name, Garuda, was now at its most appropriate, the car the bird-human hybrid that carries Vishnu, the wheels were its wings, and then quoted Krishna’s response to Arjuna’s question about how many forms the blessed lord takes, Krishna replying that he is ‘the king of animals, the lion; Garuda among the birds’ before adding ‘of purifiers, the wind,’ the last part of the quotation lost to the speed of the car, the top down and the noise of motion wonderfully loud.

  Frank must be coming back soon, he thought through the chill of the New Mexican moon, and by focusing he could hear his brother’s steps, his fatigue betrayed by the slight drag of his left heel, Frank slowing more than himself by the day, the sun, and the ride, and he stood up then, adjusted his shoulders back, and waited, imagined again his place behind his car’s steering wheel and the end of summer. It was on those same trips back toward California that he found himself following the paths, repeatedly, from that poisoned apple to his home in California, pausing before projecting futureward, before inevitably orbiting back to Ryder, the Sanskrit professor at Berkeley; shortly after his mother’s death in 1931, when his father had moved to California, Arthur Ryder taught him to read parts of The Māhabhārata, Kālidāsa’s plays, his favourite Abhijñānashākuntala and the poem Meghadūta, the rhyming constraint of which did little to hamper the cloud view of the world and its sweeping advance over the landscape; then Ryder gave him his translation of the Bhagavad Gita, the poem a cross-section of a moment’s moment and the spiralling conversation within that instant, and he read and reread, then pressed the book, a slim pink paperback edition, into his friends’ and students’ hands, reading it aloud, to Jean, to himself, feeling the unfamiliar muscles in his mouth stretch and contract in pronunciation. He would pull the poem from his bookshelf when he was working through difficult calculations of his own, would pause and let the two languages coalesce, each clarifying the other.

  The poem was at the centre of his change in scientific focus, casting aside his youthful interests in chemistry and minerals, and he thought about stars, all those stars and yet no star in particular, a star as representative of every star that has existed or would exist, theoretical and impermanent, and saw the Gita in his new interests in quantum mechanics, on the incredibly minuscule building blocks and motions of matter, that microscopic understanding the logical extension of those who are fearless, one-pointed, and so he put himself alongside Heisenberg, beside Bohr and Dirac, the men before him who had begun to separate and illustrate the smallest components conceivable, to flail as they had, attempting to impose some system of larger rationality: Newtonian observable causality explains why a bead of condensation falls as fast as it does from his glass to the wood planks of his porch but does little to illuminate the instant when two protons fall into each other’s gravity, that precise point that transcends into inexplicability, only theories, best guesses and predictions, acts of faith.

  He had sat at the precipice of theoretical and experimental physics since moving to California, found himself fascinated by problems that, upon the flash of clarity on the path toward solving, an anti-electron or positron or mesotron, he abandoned to graduate students or other experimentalists to actually prove – Robert Serber, crawling up the Pecos and yelling to the horse ahead of him, repeated a phrase he had heard from one of his students that he felt explained him perfectly: ‘His physics are good, but his arithmetic awful.’ He had laughed when the wind carried the sentence back to him, knowing that his favourite part of any intellectual process was the beginning, where there was the unknown, where he could let his mind wander in every potential direction, let all the components of his knowledges, his languages, pool and collaborate, the synthesizing metaphors his mind would generate, like Einstein’s train, models that made concrete the mists of pure ideas. As he stood on the porch and waited for Frank, the problem he was most excited by now involved the splitting of uranium: a year earlier the Germans Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassmann had separated the heavy nucleus, and he spent the following weeks trying to visualize the process of what a nuclear reaction would look like. He would close his eyes and imagine a series of atoms splitting and amplifying into interweaving successive circles expanding outward, like infinite raindrops on the surface of an ocean.

  There was that visualization in his head as he raised his gaze upward from the porch and envisioned the sky at its creation, as one fine point, a single star, before that star ripped open and all the other stars came off that star, scattered themselves across the expanse with tremendous velocity. He blinked and sipped his water again and then his eyes moved the stars, smashing them into each other, and each time he saw the stars slam together the night became a shade brighter, brighter still as the collisions added up, brighter, until the whole sky was lit, was the blue-white colour of a noon day, the moon diffused so that every inch of the sky was a sun itself, all resplendent light.

  He is paralyzed at his kitchen table in 1943 as he remembers that night body luminescent on his Perro Caliente porch, lit by the bright frozen night, one of the last times he was able to look at the vistas uncluttered, to pronounce the Tewa and Spanish of the land without the sound of tires treading and churning in the thick Los Alamos mud. He thinks of the night-noon sky, takes that memory and morphs it into the orders he needs to give that day, his face a marker in the chain of command. He glances down at the letter from Groves on the table and reads it in full.

  Dear Dr. Oppenheimer:

  In view of the nature of the work on which you are engaged, the knowledge of it which is possessed by you, and the dependence which rests upon you for its successful accomplishment, it seems necessary to ask you to take certain special precautions with respect to your personal safety.

  It is requested that:

  (a) You refrain from flying in airplanes of any description; the time saved is not worth the risk. (If emergency demands their use my prior consent should be requested.)

  (b) You refrain from driving an automobile for any appreciable distance (above a few miles) and from being without suitable protection on any lonely road, such as the road from Los Alamos to Santa Fe. On such trips you should be accompanied by a competent, able-bodied, armed guard. There is no objection to the guard serving as chauffeur.

  (c) Your cars be driven with due regard to safety and that in driving about town a guard of some kind should be used, particularly during hours of darkness. The cost of such guard is a proper charge against the United States.

  I realize that these precautions may be personally burdensome and that they may appear to you to be unduly restrictive but I am asking you to bear with them until our work is successfully completed.

  Sincerely,

  L. R. Groves

  Brigadier General, C. E.

  He moves toward the door, through it, and out into the gates and fences of the compound, the last glow of the moon fading into the morning, the mountains, still tipped with snow in parts, one stride or length further away than the day before.

  The car stops in front of their home and its soldier-chauffeur steps quickly out to loop to the back and open up the door for Kitty, who emerges holding their three-year-old son, Peter, who squirms from her arms and runs down the path toward him, and he imagines looking through the soldier-chauffeur’s eyes at his family, a diorama of the Director holding his daughter, Toni, his son sprinting toward them and his wife grinning as she advances. He sees Kitty admiring him but feels instead the acute sting of her leaving three and a half months ago, at the ends of her tolerance for him and Los Alamos.

  The night before she left, as they both nursed a nightcap, she lying on the couch and he in his large wingback chair tucked in the dark corner of their living room, still recovering from the illness that hospitalized him in
March, the rattle of his chest interrupting his sentences as he spoke, he was trying to explain what kind of father he was to Peter and Toni by recalling the day of his father’s death in 1937. He explained to her that after his father had stayed with him for a time in California, he moved back to New York to be closer to Ella’s grave, to be buried next to her. He remembers the corpse in its own bed in his family’s Park Avenue apartment, the arms crossed across its chest, motionless, with flowers beside the bed, pink calla mixed with hydrangeas set in an opaque glass vase. When he looked past his father’s body, he could see the stems piercing the water, settling on the glass bottom, and he could smell the flowers mixing with the scent of the lotion, lilac and antiseptic, overpowering, that the nurse rubbed on his father; he considered opening a window but was startled by the threat of stray voices breezing into the room, and returned instead to the chair beside his father, rested his hands on the edge of the bed. He put one hand over his own heart, felt nothing through his thick jacket and shirt, nothing to confirm his heartbeat, but he held that position until the nurse tapped lightly on the door, and the sound filled the room and he waved her in. The nurse nodded at him as she moved briskly across the room; he stood to leave and she tugged at a pillow from behind the corpse’s back, straightening the body. ‘He was only sixty-six,’ an aside, his voice caught in the limbo between rooms, and he followed those words out into the hall, the sitting room, van Gogh’s Landschaft mit gepflügten, Feldern, hung in its customary place, and he stopped to study it, the mountains intractable further back, and he remembered himself nearly a decade earlier, charging his Chrysler along the ocean coast, a train beside them trying to pull ahead, faster, and he remembered his friend Nat Raymond, a woman with the same stubbornly fearless streak as himself, as she sat passenger side, her magpie-dark hair around her face, her hand clenched around the door handle, and then the car slid, and his hands rotated the steering wheel in large half-moons, uselessly, until they slammed into the ditch on the opposite side of the road. She’s dead, he thought, until she coughed, and he pushed a bloody strand of hair from her face, apologizing. After, he brought Nat up to Perro Caliente, retold the story, and his guilty father gave her a Cezanne drawing, a Vlaminck as well.