Y

by Aaron Tucker

  One week before he finds himself in this barrack hospital bed, he had just come over from the engineers in X-Division, crossed the thawing ground along the fenceline separating them from the Los Alamos canyon, and stopped to talk with the physicists in T-Division. The blackboard was filled with four different sets of handwriting; they had finally been making real progress on the Gadget after years of work breeding plutonium-239 and designing a gunlike fission reaction, the projectile core a hollow bullet that failed, polluted by too much plutonium-240, that single-digit separation rendering the weapon inert by a series of microscopic degrees. Instead, the solution was density and uranium-235 and the new implosion design transforming, manifesting, but he was struggling to follow the chalked symbols’ logic, the lines of math disintegrating the second he tried to connect them to the string below or above; he stopped, his mouth contorted in frustration, and in that pause he noticed how warm his skin felt against every other surface, the immediate coolness of walls, counters, and he was sweating in the lingering New Mexico winter, its late snow, the flakes shocking the mustard-coloured palo blanco and blood-bright Chinese pistache, and he took off his porkpie hat, trying to massage the headache from his temples, and saw the sweat that had soaked the headband, the light dust already staining.

  Now, one week later, the Los Alamos sirens are announcing the morning, and he surfaces from a night fever, winces at the overbright room. The sharp light jabs his oversensitive eyes and he finds his pillow is sweated through, his sheets constricted around his left leg; the sirens go off again, and he brings his hand to his face, a thin beard growing, his skin too brittle to shave, before collapsing back into the cot. He hears the doctor’s distinct rhythm, stride drag stride drag – the doctor had told him his leg was wounded in the First World War, when he tried to climb some barbed wire and cut himself, that slash grew infected, never healed correctly – What is his name again? he asks himself as he examines a rash on his own arm, small red Braille, distractingly itchy, another on his right leg, another on his neck. He tries to compartmentalize each of these sensations, fails, and rolls toward the approaching footsteps, not realizing he had been holding his breath, exhales.

  ‘There you are. How are you feeling this morning?’ The doctor crosses the room, his coat over his uniform and the colour of the sheets, What is his name again? but the doctor is moving too fast for him to read the ID badge dangling from his left breast pocket, and he comes right to the side of his bed – the doctor’s hairline is inching backwards slightly and combed over, No glasses, I thought he had glasses, and there is a slight bulge at the bridge of his nose. He takes this all in, but then his face is too close and its details crumble; it is as if he is watching a film showing only every tenth frame, the movements and light choppy and abrasive. The doctor asks him to sit up and puts a thermometer in his mouth and he swallows around it and tries counting in his mind, his eyes closed, and then a voice: ‘So the chicken pox looks to have peaked, though the nurse wrote last night that your fever was up to 104 degrees.’ The doctor pulls his face close to his own again, then adds, ‘Your eyes are very red,’ and Donne echoes, Whilst my physicians by their love are grown/ Cosmographers, and I their map, the poem’s words slow and fogged, and the doctor takes the thermometer, ‘Your temperature is still too high. You’ll need to stay here, in bed,’ and he nods in agreement, moves to lie back down. ‘Also, they weighed you when you came in – 115 pounds is far too light for a man your height. Have you been eating?’ There is disjointed portion of a Herbert poem that recites across his mind

  In my unhappiness,

  Turning my purge to food, thou throwest me

  Into more sicknesses.

  and then the doctor’s vocals are suddenly spliced with a memory of his first few weeks at the compound, 1943. To General Groves’s satisfied smirking, he had decided to take the physical and allow himself to be commissioned. Even though he wore the uniform after, the doctor had told him then that he was, at 130 pounds, underweight, that the cough that occupied his lungs was tuberculosis, and they failed him. He remembers his own mother, in the foyer of their apartment: they were on their way to go riding in Central Park and he had his boots on already, and had coughed, three barks in succession, each growing more dry, an increasingly violent hauling of air from his lungs, and his mother’s eyes ran the length of his body and she stepped forward, fretting around the collar of his coat, then circling his wrist with one of her own small hands and worried, ‘That cough, that cough,’ a repetition she would mutter as he grew, until he met Katy, the beginning of his horseman body, his first trip to the Rio Grande and its dried golden summer beds, to the Sangre de Cristos, jaggedly puncturing the pinks and purples of the sunrises, to Katy, his lungs growing stronger and stronger, his in-breath balanced by his out-breath, to the Pajarito Plateau, ‘Place of the Bird People,’ sparrows, where, now, decades later, the doctor is scribbling on his chart, his pen fast, fluid: ‘Feel better soon. Get plenty of sleep and I’ll come see you again before I head home.’

  ‘Thank you, Doctor,’ his throat croaks, and he resists plunging his fists into his searing eye sockets, registers the blunt groans of his back and knees and lies flat on his back, the bed barely sagging underneath him, and wills his body to heal, picturing the direct centre of his body, Herbert’s poetry again, Man is all symmetry,/Full of proportions, one limb to another, da Vinci’s polymath Vitruvian again, and from this mental sketch of himself he imagines the blood in his veins spreading, healthy blood that will exorcise the sickness, replace, renew his body, and he loops this image, and reverts to a childhood trick to induce sleep: he crosses his arms over his chest and pretends he is dead. In his complete immobility, he recalls holding the same pose as when he was brought onstage, a Santa Fe–staged Arsenic and Old Lace, and he was a victim of Abby and Martha’s poison, the grit of flour, corpse-white, in his eyes and hair. He remembers the giggles that grew to full laughter as the audience realized he was there among the other faux-murdered men, his physicist friends Fermi and Bethe dead, too; they laughed, too, after the show, Kitty patting the dust from his clothes, wiping it from his face with a warm wet cloth – ‘You were great,’ she said, ‘I’ve never seen anyone quite so dead’ – and now he smiles weakly at the memory as he feels his arms grow heavy, tries to ignore the flush of his rashes’ itches as sleep presses down, takes him.

  His mind surfaces, still in the shallows of unconsciousness, groggy, and there is a fuzzy silhouette leaning against the door frame, female, the quiet patience of her pose reminding him of a photo his father kept by his bed during his lonely years in New York; his eyes attempt to adjust to the raking brightness of the room and he asks, ‘Mother?’ to no response, ‘Katy?’ and he cannot focus, even as he squints and the shape enters, the body remaining indistinct, stays a shadow – Am I dreaming? and she walks past the bed, dark despite the light completely saturating the barrack, and takes up the same pose at the other end of the room, resumes her watch, ‘Jean?’

  Then he is fully awake, and the room is empty. Jean. The guard outside peers his head around at the noise of him stirring, and he pulls himself from the dream by gripping the sheets in his fists, pressing his nails into the fabric. There is a card on the small table beside him, Oppie on the envelope, and he turns it over, rips its edge, and pulls out a generic ‘Get Well’ message. He saw this card and its exaggerated machine calligraphy a few weeks ago in the compound’s commissary, and he opens it:

  Kevin and I miss you so much, though I think I miss those dry martinis a bit more.

  Get well soon!

  Love, Dorothy

  He summons her face, sees Dorothy McKibbon’s triangular chin and the bunched cheeks pulled into a smile, props the card open on the table so that it’s facing him, putting hers in front of all the others, and drifts into a memory of Dorothy’s Santa Fe adobe home, its hand-etched wood doors, centuries old. Dorothy has been working with him at Los Alamos almost since its conception, her office at 109 East Palace Avenue the fir
st gate. She welcomes each scientist with water and slowness, distracting them from the long trips that bring them and their families with conversations about the Pueblos, about the Plumed Serpent on the rock at Tsirege, about the cave drawings that sprawl across the mountains, about the abundant glossy pottery from San Ildefonso and Santa Clara, and after she makes them the passes that allow them through the checkpoints up the Hill. He had hired her because she knew all the arteries of the landscape and its inhabitants, and so it was Dorothy who harassed the Spanish-American drivers into the round trips up and down the treacherous switchbacks, had those same trucks pulled out of the deep sucking ciénaga-style bogs that the spring transformed the roads into, and she found the young physicist Richard Feynman a sanatorium for his wife so that he would move to Los Alamos, and she chased off the residents’ ceaseless questions about what was really going on: ‘It’s a place for pregnant army wives, right?’ or ‘They’re building a giant submarine in Ashley Pond, right?’

  It was nearly twenty years ago when Dorothy, like him, like Edith at her Otowi house, came to New Mexico from elsewhere, Kansas City, to circulate – in-breath, out-breath – the intense air through her; she was twenty-nine when she first came to Santa Fe, and had already watched two sisters die, one of tuberculosis, the other of a respiratory infection, heard both of them choke through each lungful until their bodies fell silent, and she told him over one quiet dinner that her mother left her at the Sunmount Sanitarium, and she wasn’t sure if she’d ever get to see her parents again, if she’d ever leave La Fonda. It took eleven months until she was pronounced cured, but still fondly harboured the piñons and sprawling twilights as she left for Saint Paul to get married, to have a son, Kevin. But she never forgot the Black Mesa’s plum-coloured lava and its small hollows filled with tiny flies that the robins would pluck out, not even after her husband, Joe, was ravaged by Hodgkin’s disease, and she fought the cancer by filling their house with antiques and making up bedside stories about their past: ‘This lamp was owned by a Boston businessman whose wife kept threatening to break it over his head if he came home drunk one more time. So he sold it and kept drinking.’ She managed only a few months with her parents in Kansas City after Joe’s death before she and Kevin drove her Model A Coupe back to Santa Fe.

  He remembers her telling him all this during one of the nights at her Santa Fe home, on Old Pecos, the antiques mixed with the sculpture-esque bultos and retablos, and she had cooked them one of his favourites, the steak medium and the asparagus crisp and buttery, the southern windows over her shoulder opening onto the bare and stretched terrain of the Manzanos, the garden dotted with the Castilian roses originally imported by the Spanish, and he had asked her how she came to live here, and she wove through her life as he smoked and ate, swiping the ash from the end with his finger. She ended her story with her house: ‘Those bricks in the living room were actually made at the old penitentiary by prisoners,’ she half-laughed.

  From his sickbed he remembers replying, ‘It’s beautiful,’ before his feverish mind linked Dorothy to Edith and her home with Tilano, both necessary sanctuaries. He had pushed Groves to allow Dorothy’s home, enabled by her Q security clearance, to become another of the rare shelters from the compound, a place the men could go, just for a night at a time, that was away from the Los Alamos labs but still secure. After Opje received Groves’s permission, she told him, she would find herself putting notes on the table for her son: All the beds are full. See if you can find a bedroll and a place to park it out back. She would look out at her front lawn, see the scientists’ cars in her driveway, sleeping bags on the front lawn, and within a few months she had filled her house with yellow aspen for a number of weddings, the bride always stationed beside the pueblo-style fireplace, its curves and small rounded mouth pouring heat into the room, the groom walking in from the kitchen. Though he did not often stay during the nights when it grew crowded, he revelled in the space’s cocooning nature, and when Kitty was away and their Bathtub Row house grew too sterile, he came down to talk with Dorothy over strong drinks: it was one of the few spaces where he actually ate, savouring the welcome fibre of the steak by chewing deliberately, and it was to Dorothy, in her kitchen, that he complained about the slow progress of the Gadget, and the urgency that plucked the flesh and muscles off his bone, thinning him, and told her about the letters he received from his fellow scientists Bethe and Teller, from the military administration, all imploring him to push the men and women harder, faster.

  He stares upward from his sickbed as he sorts all this through his mind, allowing the bodies to collide and modify each other, finds himself, as Arjuna was, exasperated:

  Yes, Krishna, the brain is fickle, strong,

  And turbulent and bold;

  I find it hard to curb as were

  The wind to catch and hold

  when he hears a woman’s voice, ‘Sir?’ turns to see Anne Wilson, his new secretary.

  ‘How are you finding it here so far?’ he asks. Her blond hair arches into a ponytail – She’s so young, she shouldn’t be here, he thinks.

  ‘I’ve just moved in. It’s so different. But I just wanted to stop by, make sure you were feeling better. But, I should go and let you rest.’

  ‘Thank you,’ and he watches her shyly pivot from the room, So young, he considers again, then Where will I find the energy to finish this? Enclosed in the barrack hospital, his body hollow with the effort to inhale, to think and remember, Anne’s footsteps receding, he wonders whether Groves has planted her. She had been working in Groves’s Washington office when Opje saw her, asked that she make the trip to New Mexico to replace his former secretary while she was on maternity leave, and so her allegiances may not be to Opje. Perhaps she’s here as a spy for Groves, she and the guard outside the door the same tools of surveillance; the previous night, Kitty warned him as much, renewing her complaints about the opened mail, black bars eradicating words and phrases at a time, about the barely audible clicking on their phone line and the soldiers that skulked blocks behind her when she shopped in Santa Fe, and he returns to Dorothy’s house in his memory, its safety, the two of them tracking through the changes in Los Alamos’s brief history.

  It hadn’t always been like this: when they had first begun to populate the plateau, there were Saturday-night dances, and fellow scientist Otto Frisch would host piano recitals, two sonatas from Scarlatti, Beethoven’s Sonate Pathétique; there were the parties, one themed as ‘Come as Your Suppressed Desire,’ and so he grabbed a napkin off his dining table and hung it over his forearm, became a waiter and walked the room subservient, taking the empty glasses from people’s hands and replacing them, mawkishly refusing any tips offered before resetting his face to the neutral role of his costume.

  He tried to keep that party in mind at the weekly colloquia he hosted, where all the scientists pooled their work in discussion; he would stand off to the side and let each lab illustrate their specific problems, their detailed diagrams covering the chalkboards, and after they finished he would open the floor to troubleshooting; almost immediately Groves wanted to shut down these open discussions, urged him to return to compartmentalized secrecy, and when he refused, ‘They need to feel they’re working together, with a single purpose,’ Groves huffed, and more security officers appeared seemingly overnight, and Dorothy added her own stories of scientist aliases and code names, how she had been told to never address anyone as ‘Doctor’ or ‘Professor,’ told him of the ghostlike G-2 agents tailing visitors after they left her office, how they often appeared at her side to clarify a small snatch of conversation, or how they might board a train or bus and sit down next to a soldier heading home for a brief break and casually try to crack the young man.

  I haven’t helped myself, he thinks, the rashes on his torso burning, remembers thinking the exact same phrase as he waited for his interrogator, his long fingers woven together into clasped hands and resting on the small table. It was early in 1943 as he sat across from counterintelligen
ce officer John Lansdale Jr.: he had just been selected as Director and needed the necessary security clearance, and had confessed, had attempted to explain his years-old kitchen conversation with his translator friend Chevalier, ‘That would be treason,’ his refusal, and Lansdale pushed for names. The windows in the room were too square, the corners of each wall meeting too flush – A perfect room, he thought with disgust – and then Lansdale interrupted him, ‘Who asked?’ ‘Who else do you think are Party members?’ and he unknotted his fingers and gave the names of Berkeley students at the Rad Lab as possibilities. Afterward, Lansdale brought in different FBI agents and they asked him the same questions, each exiting and entering through the precisely rectangular door frame, each repeating the questions again, and with each retelling they paused on certain missing or changed details: ‘You just told us yesterday that you met at noon, not one o’clock,’ each probing and exhausting him, his body slumping forward onto the table, his back bent and his arms hanging between his legs, and still the room remained perfectly constructed, not a single degree off. ‘And what are your past ties to the Communist Party?’ ‘Have you had any contact with anyone from those gatherings?’ and he thought of Kitty’s German ancestry and her ex-husband, Joe, of his brother’s affiliations, then of his past visits with Jean, her apartment and the hushed bathtub conversations (‘I never stopped’), Jean. Then he straightened himself and kept her and his friends’ names to himself, but refused to allow himself to see Jean when he returned to Berkeley despite her increasingly urgent letters, stopped reading those letters altogether, and Jean abruptly went silent. He kept all this to himself until that December when Groves himself came to Los Alamos and directly ordered him to expose Eltenton and Chevalier, granting him his Q Clearance only after admonishing him in his own office, ‘Dr. Oppenheimer,’ his voice even with fatherly sternness.