by Aaron Tucker
No, I have not helped myself at all. The weight of this thought anchors itself in his mind and he rolls it through his feverish head as a mantra until the words decay into nonsense, and he rests, a battleground between illness and health – How are we going to finish this? – sinking into shallow sleep, his fever driving unremembered dreams that skip and twist across the many states of his memory.
He readjusts his hat as he waits, listens to the faint reverberations of ocean waves, shifts his stance from one leg to the other; the empty streetcar tracks extend in either direction, and in this anxious pause he pulls his cigarettes from his breast pocket, lights one, his face briefly illuminated in the encroaching California nightfall, and he imagines the army bodyguard’s view from across the street. Groves made it very clear he was far too important to be left alone, and he wonders if his alleged guardians are hidden in a brief crowd of pedestrians or in the small café behind him, obscured by the steam of the coffee on his table, or on the bench down the block, a tableau looking past an unread newspaper; he did not know exactly which of the lowered eyes were keeping track of him, but he knew the phantoms were lurking, watching, and studiously noting how many lungfuls it took to finish a cigarette, the dates on the coins he would use to pay the streetcar fare, the precise angle his arms make as his hands rest in his pants pockets, waiting. In some senses he understands this need for surveillance and secrecy and has started pinning classified memos to the insides of his jackets so as to have them on-body at all times, but that is about Los Alamos business, the Gadget, and right now he doesn’t care; it has been three months since he and Kitty and Peter moved full-time to the plateau and he is going to see Jean.
There is a single headlight working slowly toward him, then the rattle of the wheels on the track and the slight shift of gravel underneath as the streetcar adjusts speed, and as the vehicle approaches and slows, he wonders which Jean will greet him, at the other end of this stop, which of her binary states she will have fulcrumed toward, and thinks of Baudelaire’s two Sisters of Mercy, La Débauche et la Mort and their terribles plaisirs et d’affreuses douceurs, those deux bonnes soeurs, and contemplates which he is moving in the direction of. He knows his first words to her will be an apology, that the importance of his work and the Gadget made it so that he had to break his last promise to her, to see her before he left; instead, he left Berkeley in the early morning, not daring to betray himself to Kitty with a lingering rear-view glance, the ocean and its crawling fog slowly eradicated by mid-morning sunlight and replaced by mountains as he exercised all his discipline in not looking behind him, even as they crossed through the scrub-speckled flat of Arizona and into New Mexico, then to Project Y, many miles later. In the past three months, he heard the echo of Jean in the two-tone juncos’ sharp chirpings, saw her elongated elegance in the patient blue heron, on one leg in the shallows of the Rio Grande as it studied the upstream fish, its long-wingspanned flight, flapping against the end of the day when the sun spiked the clouds pink and violet as the daylight lowered below the Jemez range; he ran back through their dinners at Top of the Mark, which continued after he and Kitty were married in 1940, had thought of her in the small snatches his mind could afford, and he grew determined to return, to say how sorry he was to have left so suddenly and to coax another visit from her, then another, reasoning to himself that his recklessness was offset by his government shadows, the cataloguing suits.
The H streetcar halts and he gets on – Which of you passengers is my polar double, my opposite companion? he asks himself before settling into a seat near the empty rear of the car so he can see everyone who enters. She is waiting for him on the other side of the Oakland Bay Bridge, and above the rhythmic tics of the Sacramento Street tracks, he revisits her expression the last time they had to say goodbye, when he made that promise he broke, and he saw her confusion in his leaving, her frustration that he couldn’t simply say why he had to leave. The reason at the centre of his guarded silence was the secret of Los Alamos, but also, louder and less obvious in his mind, and he could barely bring himself to admit it now, was that he wanted to leave, that the Gadget was to be his legacy, his contribution to History, and that he needed Kitty to do it, her sturdy and clear-headed ambition a reflection of his own future visions of himself. Jean had said no already, had said no three times, and even Kitty, one of the few who could match him atop Chico or Crisis, was barely surviving the mesa, and he knew that Jean wasn’t built for life at Los Alamos, that he couldn’t bring her to that isolated compound and expect her to weather the winter snowstorms, or the squelching mire of spring, or just being alone for so much of the day.
Still, when he thinks of the strength that would be required to sever himself from her, he imagines the extreme forces at work in bonding two molecules, then imagines the brute and opposite power required to reverse that process, imagines what it might mean to peel light from a single object in a room draped in luminescence, the cut-out shadow, the blackest of darks, that would remain from such an impossible task. He needs both of them. Kitty’s constant and linear forward propulsion allows him to admire the small plaque next to his office door and confidently navigate Groves and the scientists; the body that belongs to Kitty is the soldier, the Director, the man who can, within a single low-voiced sentence, cloud his iridescent gaze with charm before he razors the same icy eyes into a microscopic focus. But it is Jean’s delicate circling that mirrors the fragility of his youth, his poisoned apple in parallel with her and May’s balled hotel sheets, the earnest poetry they each wrote, and the streetcar slides underneath the Bay Bridge and the lanes of traffic on the upper level and he rotates his head toward an unobstructed view of both shores simultaneously, dark water between. He reaffirms that it is her acknowledgement of the mind as an instrument struggling between bodily sensations, the slide of a mouth along a sweat-salted neckline or the cool coating of water over an empty stomach after a long day’s ride, against the internal machinery of memory and reflection, Jean’s training as a psychoanalyst, Dr. Jean Tatlock, and their shared fascination with the ecosystem of the individual, that is one of the central thrusts that obliges him. At his own fearless central point, he and Jean are at their most common, are run by the same murky logics and compulsions.
Now he is over the bridge and the familiar hilly blocks of San Francisco that frame the streetcar’s straight path past Spear then Main then Beale Street, and he puts his hat on the point of his knee, eyes the backs of the two men sitting together five seats in front of him, how their heads lean together in murmurs, and he knows they won’t turn around, they won’t get off at the same stop as him; in fact, his shadows will likely already be waiting for him alongside Jean if they know the simple fact that all the Oakland streetcars that lead over this bridge converge at the ring of the San Francisco Terminal. Let them watch. I’m the Director, he mentally declares as the streetcar curves along Essex, and this thought crosscuts the vision of Jean’s fingers absently in her long brunette hair, then is purged, pushed out alongside the last conversations he had with Kitty before he left New Mexico, days ago now, about Peter and the maid’s half-hearted cleaning of the bathroom and the party they were hosting the night after he returned.
As they come to rest in the terminal, he remembers the last letter he got from Jean in late May, given to him by his pre-Kitty landlady. She wrote, I must see you once again, and in that compact stressed phrase he sensed those lines from Millay’s ‘Renascence,’ a favourite poem of Jean’s that he had taken to secretly reading in his Los Alamos office:
I screamed, and—lo!—Infinity
Came down and settled over me;
Forced back my scream into my chest,
Bent back my arm upon my breast,
And, pressing of the Undefined
The definition on my mind …
He remembers the poem now, understanding that the mountaintop narrator welcomes her own death only to yearn to live again, to exist within worldly physical constraints with full sensuality. T
hinking of Jean, he wonders if she is capable of the narrator’s eventual resurrection back to an earthly realm, and whether, because of their mutual and complete covalence, he is the only one who might be able to help her. With her pleas in his mind, he stands up and walks down the brief steps onto the streetcar platform, searches the spare crowd until he finds her, a small grin and tall body stretched further by a coat that comes to her knees, and she moves toward him one step for his two until they collide, his hands under her coat and interlocked over the arch of her lower back, and they kiss, his eyes closed and their mouths full on the other’s, her fingers pulsing in grip against his arms, and they kiss until she pulls back, reaching up to adjust his hat to a straight-brimmed rest.
‘I’m sorry.’
‘I’ve missed you,’ she returns.
They hold hands as she leads him to her car a few blocks away, and when she leans into him before unlocking the passenger door for him, he smells her soap as they kiss again, the scent haunts, drives his mind back to the years where the bar sat on a small metal rack beside her bathtub and she would leisurely run it up and down her calves, thighs, stomach, as he read to her, the scent basic, not floral or coastal, but plain, and they pull apart with her smell still on his skin and she goes around to the driver’s side as he slides into his own, watches her start the car, move into the bare street.
‘Are you hungry? I picked the perfect place to eat.’
As she turns down the Embarcadero, he answers that he is very hungry, ravenous, on the verge of consuming whatever is put in front of him, and notices they are driving toward her neighbourhood near Telegraph Hill, checks his side-view mirror to see what headlights are following, spies a pair that make the same turn onto Broadway that they do. The trailing car is invisible behind the glare, and he can’t see into its windshield, can only see the silhouette of a rigid man; as Jean drives, he fills in the stranger’s features in his mind with full, dark eyebrows that nearly swallow his eyes, the distinct slice of jaw that structures his firm straight-line smile. He is startled by Jean’s hand on his thigh and he turns to her; ‘I’m so glad you came,’ she says as her eyes return to the road, and then she motions with her neck and head to a set of windows where light spills out, and she pulls the car over to the curb. They exit and walk, her arm around his waist until they are in front of the Xochimilco Café.
They dodge a waiter bringing two steaming plates, the meat still sizzling on the tortillas, walk past other patrons’ sopa de lima, the chicken and corn piled high out of the broth, and other tables are halfway through enchiladas and burritos; they pass a small area that Jean tells him is cleared out for dancing later in the evening, and there is the plucking of a Spanish guitar from a radio near the kitchen at the back where they are seated, as the waiter places menus beside each of their elbows and offers them a drink.
She orders two tequila blancos and they turn to each other, hands in the other’s over the table. The tablecloth has two cigarette holes and the water glasses are plastic; they barely speak other than to raise glasses, toasting, ‘To the confusion of our enemies,’ Opje smiling at the thought that the men trailing him would be so immediately out of place in this restaurant, and he orders the spiciest beef burrito they have on the menu, and once the plates are set down in front of them, savours the baked beans and moist rice, the lime that fringes every bite, the citrus in balance with the peppers lurking in each mouthful, and Jean laughs at the slight lines of sweat along his hairline – ‘Too hot?’ she offers as the waiter brings more tequila.
That burning is still glazing his mouth and lips when they leave, their footsteps rhythmic as they slant into each other on the walk to the car, and that flaming lingers even as she curves onto Montgomery and approaches her apartment. He marvels at how their bodies stubbornly refuse to disconnect, their fingertips touching as their hands rest between them, lightly bumping with each patch of rough road. They remain linked, his hand on her lower back, as they climb to the top floor, and her key rattles the door open, she throws her coat and bag onto the far chair, and he pulls the lamp on as she moves into the kitchen – ‘Wine?’ and he replies, ‘Yes,’ which he repeats quietly, ‘yes yes,’ and when she returns with arcs of light reflecting off the bends of the stems and bulbs of two full glasses, she sighs and hands him his, sits next to him.
‘I’m so glad you came. I still don’t know why you had to leave. I mean, I know why. It has something to do with the war.’
‘It does,’ he admits. He knows that it needs to be built to defeat the Reich but that Jean would struggle with his justifications, and in the protest of his mind, he sees her among what he imagines to be the future, post-bomb rubble, bent and soothing the scorched skin of a child, lifting the fragile frame to her, and he repeats to her, in her apartment, ‘It does, but I can’t tell you. No.’
‘I’m just glad you’re back,’ she repeats, but this time her eyes are just slightly more animal, spooked, a horse seconds after a blinding blast of sheet lightning, and he is tentative as he moves closer to her on the couch in elemental attraction, until they are hip to hip, and she lifts her legs up and on top of his own, they intertwine, and a portion of his mind cautiously reminds him
Quand veux-tu m’enterrer, Débauche aux bras immondes?
Ô Mort, quand viendras-tu, sa rivale en attraits,
Sur ses myrtes infects enter tes noirs cyprès?
Jean as the two sisters, moons, and him caught in the path of both of their orbits, but he dismisses this despite her expanded pupils, dark planets eradicating the colour of her irises, her body tipping toward him, as if it is about to fall from a tremendous height.
‘I love you. I can’t stop.’
These words resonant across all his states, rippling through each separate yet densely interconnected body: he is sitting on Crisis, standing beside his horse as they rest, the bright riding blanket underneath the saddle the same colour as the mid-morning light. It’s cold and the sweat turns into steam off the horse’s hide, and the horse nickers, turning its neck and head toward him, and this blends without pause with Jean – ‘I can’t stop’ – and then he is walking back through the Cambridge snow with the dogs swelling his ranks, the snow bunching around his heels and hears Jean – ‘I can’t stop’ – and then his eyes are bleached by the incredible light of a Los Alamos sunrise with its illumination erasing the boundaries between the morning sky and the mountain ranges so that the whole world is blue-white nothing and he hears Jean – ‘I can’t stop’ – and hears Jean, her words permeating and slipping in between all his states, their echo growing stronger the more those bodies resound against each other, her words across all those times and landscapes.
She unwraps herself from him, stands while grabbing his hand, pulls him to his full height, and they kiss and then they are moving toward her bedroom. But she stops him as he starts to pull her shirt over her head, and tells him, ‘I’ve never stopped.’
And then they are exposed, grabbing for each other. Their clothes dissolve as if they were never there, and they press together, the two walking in strange shuffled concert to the bed with her leg in between his astride stance, their arms mixed, then bodies momentarily bent to pull pants over ankles before straightening, chest to chest, mouth to mouth, before they fall backwards together, the living room lamplight snaking into the room, and he sees her body in the snatches of this light, her hand, her collarbone, the side of her stomach as she moves underneath him, her hand around then guiding him into her, and there are no shadows, the light and dark of the room equally pure, the elements touching without mixing, and any other place or object or person or menace that is not her and him simply ceases to exist, never existed.
The thunder explodes, briefly drowning out the constant slicing of the horizontal rain against the makeshift barracks. He sits central in the hurried miniature version of Los Alamos, Trinity, three-person’d God, as an early-morning storm barrages the desert and he waits, his fingers smelling of ash from his chain-smoking, waits to
see if this mid-July squall will crack long enough to allow for the Gadget to be tested and observed for the first time.
He remembers the hunt for this test site, thinks more specifically of the third day of driving the desert, spring 1944, the third night they had been sleeping in the bed of the army truck, the soft sounds of the engine coming to rest spliced with a single coyote yowl that then doubled, tripled, until he was filled with the elongated concert of the animals’ voices marking the men as intruders. The temperature was dropping and they were wrapped in their sleeping bags in the bed of the truck – ‘It’s better this way,’ he told the men that Groves sent him out in the desert with, Kenneth Bainbridge and Capt. Peter de Silva, the three men together scouting, ‘This way we don’t have to worry about rattlesnakes,’ and the other two men fell asleep quickly, leaving him alone.
He went through the previous three days in his mind, the longest uninterrupted time he had been allowed to travel through the middle and south of New Mexico since he came to the cottonwood shade of Project Y and Los Alamos; he had seen the lava flows of the western Malpais, thin earthy film over the volcanic fields – malpais, Spanish for badlands – and as they moved through the xeric beds of the valleys, had seen the deer further up the verdure portions of the mountains where the red rock of the land hadn’t taken complete hold, the frail thinness of the herd’s legs camouflage for the tremendous speed they used when startling away from the truck. The trio passed low ranch houses ringed by tiny gardens, the placitas empty and windows immovable as their inhabitants, names that dated back to the Spanish king, families up from Mexico, and they saw the ranchers on their horses, as thin as he was, the same boots and hats he wore, testing the fences they built to keep their hulking cattle from wandering too far; the fences’ cedar posts that separated the drooping barbed wire held magpies and crows who pivoted with the wind like weather vanes. The three men drove through large flocks of sheep, their horizontal pupils and golden irises evaluating their movements and bleating at their passage; they paused for lunch under the shadows of hawks’ wingspans towering above them in circles, and they saw a group of coffee-coloured and white turkey vultures huddled around the carrion remains of an animal he couldn’t identify from a distance.