Y

by Aaron Tucker

  On the second night, hundreds of miles south of Los Alamos, after travelling the Jornada del Muerto, ‘Route of the Dead Man,’ the land even and inflexible between the Oscura Mountains and the Rio Grande, they began to return in the direction of the Jemez and the compound, passed back along villages, Paraje del Perrillo, Las Peñuelas, with the drying bricks of adobe along the sides of each building, small churches with whitewashed sides, all the buildings the same poured mud-brick blocks, and the children waved their small hands at them and the dogs jumped with excitement along the small road as they passed. They stopped near Laguna del Muerto, near the western foot of the Fra Cristobal Range, at a bosque beside the Rio Grande, and on that second night he fell asleep to an owl perched somewhere in the riparian terrain, imagined the predatory concentration generated by its giant round eyes scouring the ground for the scurry of mice. He thought then of Edith and Tilano and a recent dinner at their Otowi house, of her description of the land before Los Alamos was conquered, of the caves along the high edges of the Frijoles Canyon that housed beautifully simple sketches of antelopes and elk, of wolves and black bears, drawings of people among those animals and the surrounding weather, the roofs of the caves permanently soot-blackened. She listed the cities that once populated the uplands, Tsirege, Navawi’i, Shupinna, and Tilano and his long dark braids described the round kivas set into the ground and then recounted the ceremonies of the men and women who still lived in the pueblos, specifically describing a winter ceremony, the immense and never-still tapestry of feathers and fur and body paint, black and white spots and circles, the motion so constant it was impossible to observe the whole, only pieces like a strand of yarn dangling from a dancer, and the men and women and children sang, sang in a singular voice to the earth spirits and to the sun, and Tilano described the other dancers, eagle headdresses and arms made into wings, the plaza full of sunlight and the men transformed into sacred animals, into deer and buffalo, the children were antelope that would pass under the handfuls of pollen thrown onto them, and he fell asleep that night with those words and his name, ‘Mr. Opp,’ gently placed between the landscapes and actions they both described, and the last moment of consciousness was his attempts to track the voice of the owl in the dark.

  They returned to the compound two days later and he clinically reported to Groves where they had gone and that Bain-bridge already had a site in mind, near Alamogordo and the heart of the Jornada del Muerto, and he was confident that they would soon have a base where they could test the Gadget. In the months that followed, Bainbridge did settle on that area, the wind-whipped desert largely uninterrupted, and they evicted the ranchers from the edges of the twenty-four-mile patch and set to work buffering the dusty earth with thick-walled bunkers and a second lab, concealing the landscape with the same trucks and bulldozers and fences and soldiers that had so quickly constructed Los Alamos. They left one small original structure as the central hub of the site’s and Gadget’s assembly, the MacDonald Ranch House, the bedroom claimed as the assembly room, and they fought off the swirling dirt by coating the windows with plastic tarps. This area near the railway crossing was formerly known as Pope’s Landing, but he rechristened it Trinity, in part-reference to Donne:

  Batter my heart, three-person’d God, for you

  As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

  That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

  Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

  It was a poem Jean had adored, and inside him, at that specific space in the desert, the father, the son, and the holy spirit, and Brahma, Vishnu, and Shiva all united, and it became the mark imposed upon that piece of barren tract.

  All these memories rotate through him now as he waits to see whether the storm will clear and the test can begin. Hours before, he watched the behemoth being raised to its resting spot at the top of the hundred-foot tower in the middle of the desert; it was rounder than he expected, and its wires veined out from nearly every inch of the sphere, but it was there, realized, and gigantic, beyond any scale. The men move anxiously from door to door, wall to wall, and he is reminded of the uncertainty after President Roosevelt’s death in early April: the labs had been working without pause, sixteen hours a day, Groves had been stressing speed, urgency, by repeating that the Germans may have had one built already, when the news came over the military frequency of his radio that the President had retreated briefly to rest at Warm Springs, Georgia, still fatigued from the gruelling Yalta Conference, was sitting for a portrait when he collapsed from a stroke, the artist’s watercolour still milky and thin, unfinished. He had the death announced over the Los Alamos loudspeakers, and when a group of the scientists beat to his door, he stepped out and in his gentle impromptu voice reminded all of them that the President had been a great leader, a man they could admire for his strength in these violent and chaotic times, that he had spoken to the man and he knew that he would have wanted them to go on, that they must. He asked to be excused, explaining that there was to be a memorial service and he would speak more then, and in between he wrote, glancing occasionally at the piece of the forge from the Lost Mine and thinking of the inevitable and actual use of the Gadget and how they might bring themselves to finish.

  That Sunday after the President’s death, he walked through the fresh-fallen snow that draped the ground and buildings and machinery, past the half-raised flag and into the theatre, the bodies crowded together in rustling coats, hands clasped in prayer, and he spoke with his hat set on his seat, with only enough force to fill the room, no more, so that the men and women leaned toward him. He spoke of weeping and uncertainty, that ‘many of us feel less certain that our works will be to a good end; all of us are reminded of how precious a thing human greatness is,’ and he spoke of their hope ‘that the terrible sacrifices which have been made, and those that still have to be made, will lead to a world more fit for human habitation.’ And in their isolation, all bonded by the secret of their project in mid-wilderness, he closed with the Gita – Man is a creature whose substance is faith. What his faith is, he is – and in that line there was also his faith in them, in the path they were on, their duty, certain that their ‘good works will not have ended with his death,’ and as his friends, his family, his collaborators, filed out, he knew that he had slipped into and filled the tender cavity left by Roosevelt for those at Los Alamos, that he was the single and central voice of authority remaining.

  As the Gadget was brought closer and closer to object, the labs grew vocal, echoing Bohr’s concerns. The talk had begun even before the President’s passing, late 1944, with the chief of Los Alamos’s Research Division, Robert Wilson, organizing a discussion in Building X, the cyclotron lab, titled ‘The Impact of the Gadget on Civilization.’ They all sat among the equipment and listened to Wilson first, then Opje, justifying the bomb as such a destructive and horrible thing that it would shock the human race into never developing more or using it again; the only way to ensure a nuclear-safe world after the Gadget’s use, he said, was to make the Gadget possible and by its use demonstrate that its inhuman cruelty makes vital the entire world’s co-operation and control. They could end all war forever and it was their duty, to science, to America, to humanity, to heroically continue.

  Afterwards, the scientists returned to their work, renewed briefly in their focus, but the same questions and concerns circled through the walls and door of his office as bits of conversation that would hush as he entered a room, those same voices louder as Berlin submitted, only days before the ‘dress run’ of the Gadget, and he countered with a restricted memo, May 4, 1945, to all the labs, amplifying their courageous work, focusing then on the Pacific. He wrote that they were part of the momentum that had ‘begun to repay the Japanese for their brutalities and mass murders of helpless civilians and prisoners of war’ and that they would not quit until the Japanese were completely crushed, and in broadcasting those words he felt as Groves must, as Roosevelt must have.

  T
hree days later, he watched a momentarily converted Wilson help the groups of men load over a hundred tons of TNT onto the platform at Trinity ground zero, the explosives threaded with tubing that carried radioactive materials between the boxes, and, after he sat through two delays, witnessed the whoosh and pressure, there was the enormous fire, the crimson and yellow colours, jagged flames reaching into the sky. They used the detonation to calibrate their instruments for the actual test of the Gadget, to justify the further expansion of the mess hall and electric and telephone lines over the hard earth floor, to rationalize further the barricading of all roads in and out of the site, sealing themselves from any particle, dust, human, or animal. On that same day, May 7, he shook Groves’s hand as Germany signed their unconditional surrender.

  He thinks he can hear the rain beginning to relent and lights another cigarette, stands and walks to the map of the region laid out, Donne again, In all flat maps (and I am one), traces the topology, the Chupadera Mesa, the Los Pinos Mountains, and the pueblos and small towns alongside the thin river lines, and acknowledges the large red ink Captain de Silva had coloured over the portion of land they were standing on, hand-drawn and blocky and inorganic, in the middle of that ink, Trinity. In waiting, he thinks of Chicago, of the MET lab and the month in between the Reich’s fall and now, thinks of the Franck Report released June 11 and its reverberations through Los Alamos and Washington, its contention that the sheering pace of their work left little time to actually consider the use of the Gadget. They had a responsibility, it argued, as experts and key-keepers, as humanists, to confront the weapon and their implications, and then it put forth its proposal: to reveal their atomic weapon and invite the nations to Trinity and have them watch the weapon’s massive and divine power as it detonated across an unoccupied landscape. When he was finished, he placed the pages on the far corner of his desk and began to calculate his reply: the scientists had finished their work, and the Gadget, as it had always been, was a military device, and they were small wheels within the larger turns of scientific progress and History, Action. More importantly, the use of the bomb, and the sacrifices that its victims would make, would eradicate the need for spears and bullets and tanks and planes or any weapon altogether, and ultimately he could ‘propose no technical demonstration likely to bring an end to the war; we see no acceptable alternative to direct military use’ – that shift into first-person plural, ‘we,’ guided first by the trust that Los Alamos had placed in him, not the new President, not Groves, but the Director, the man who carried the myriad responsibilities, bodies, states, pearls upon a single thread, necessary to live and work among them.

  He is pulled back from his memory to the present, a mid-July wind and downpour as they prepare to fire the Gadget for the first time, and he finds himself mentally narrating everything in front of his eyes to Jean, as if she were across the table, across the map, from him, and for a brief moment she surfaces into his mind before he can banish her back to the edges of his memories, the coastline and water, the chili spice swallowing his mouth and the black-pepper taste of the tequila, and instead replaces her with clouds, rainclouds, the very banks that surround him now, and he wills them to move, imagines them wetting the broken desert just over and down the escarpment of the Oscura Mountains, the rainwater seeping into the land’s gaps, evaporating, and with his will the clouds move over and past him, over the deer and towhees and Michaelmas daisies and chamiso, past the San Andres Mountains, until they are gone. Their work, dharma, can be done, completed, and he repeats the past two days’ mantra, the Gita and Bhavani combined into a loose translation that he had done himself, from Sanskrit to English,

  In battle, in the forest, at the precipice in the mountains,

  On the dark great sea, in the midst of javelins and arrows,

  In sleep, in confusion, in the depths of shame,

  The good deeds a man has done before defend him

  and he waits for the storm to break with the dawn.

  It is the first anniversary of her death and he has finally steeled himself, in his closed-door office, to read the coroner’s clinical reconstructing of her – Body is that of a well-developed, well-nourished twenty-nine-year-old female – and he thinks of her letters after their last visit, ‘I have never stopped,’ and in the face of her proclamations and her continued letters, he had forced himself to stay away despite that final time together and the way her frame sat full in the lamplight, her breath still wild with tequila. He remembers the exact date, January 7, that he found out, three days after she had actually died. He had received a phone call from a man, someone who didn’t give his name but claimed to work for the FBI, and that unnamed voice explained that Jean had been found dead, her father climbing in through her top-floor window after she didn’t answer the phone or door, and then the voice disappeared into the dial tone and he looked into his darkened room, and he knew they must have been watching her, too, listening to her phone, tailing her when she left to work at the hospital or slipped out for dinner at one of the cheap bars in her neighbourhood, and those shadows had waited three days, had waited until her body had bloated through the skin of her bathwater and her dark hair spread out in chunky skeins, and had let her father walk in on his dead daughter.

  He sat at the same desk that he sits at now, in nearly the same position, so much having moved in one year, except him hunched over his desk, the same as when the knock at the door stopped him from staring at the flame resting on his desk, the wick engulfed and half-hidden by the spattering heat, and its contorting reminded him of a tree in mid-wind sway – there was a logic to its movement, despite that movement being imposed upon it, by gusts or by his breath. He had been staring uninterrupted as the daybreak trickled into his office, he could smell the wax as it burned, and he could feel the slight pinch of his belt buckle into his stomach as he sat. The room was lit only by a few candles around its edges, on the window sill, on the edge of his desk, on the cabinet off to the right of the door, and the light was unsteady and small and the cold of the office was obvious. He recalls all this and reads the letter that had mysteriously arrived that day, on this anniversary, in an unmarked envelope, the letter beginning: To those who loved and helped me.

  He stops and goes back in his mind to that morning he found out. After the knock Robert Serber cautiously entered, and without looking directly at him, spoke: ‘I’m so sorry. Charlotte just got a telegram from Mary-Ellen in California and I’m not sure if you’ve heard yet but … ’ and his friend, the man who first brought Kitty to him at Perro Caliente when the embers of his relationship with Jean were near their hottest, the man overfamiliar with Crisis’s nickering along trails up and down the valles, stopped in mid-sentence because their eyes collided.

  This memory is interrupted as he starts again – To those who loved and helped me, all love and courage – but cannot go further and instead remembers the realization in Serber’s face that he had heard already. He did not finish his sentence, instead stepped back toward the door, reluctant. He let Serber leave and he cried into his crossed forearms as he laid his head on his desk – To those who loved and helped me, all love and courage. I think I would have been a liability all my life – he cried in long hitches that wet his uniform’s sleeves, cried until his body was a drought and his eyes were red-ringed beads of ice blue, and only then did he stand and walk from his office, escaping past his guards and the commissary, the fire station, through the centre of the compound, the roads starring outward toward the technical and engineering labs, the nursery, the post office, and beauty shop and barber. He walked past the redwood water tower, past the last residences and outward until he was crunching through the stiff snow, and every knot in every pine he passed was vivid, the colours of the pastel sky hazed dull by winter clouds, doing little to stop the exaggeration of sunlight off the immaculate snow, the light a blinding scrim that annihilated the landscape and left him alone, walking, with his thoughts and her body, her corpse; Los Alamos was behind him, its mechanical n
oise and voice, its rows of half-formed houses that clouded the winter with stove smoke, burnt coal and wood seeping out and into the bright air, and it was late morning and the electricity had been out since dawn, and every building, room, was burnished with encroaching cold. He had passed the Sundt Apartments at the edges of the compound nearly an hour earlier, shadowed by his security’s rigid footfalls, and the Jemez’s exposed pines provided a skeletal archway up into the umber mountains as he struggled forward. His feet made fresh holes in the sedimentary crust of snow as he walked over unseen and hibernating ignimbrite rocks, thin grasses blended with zinnias, the hurried tracks of jackrabbits and rock squirrels, he wandered away and up into the low edges of the mountains as he pictured her corpse: she was on her back submerged in her tub, her left leg hanging over its edge, her unworried mouth and resting eyes, as calm, as smooth and soft, as lily petals, she was serene and floating and clean. He merged his image with a young poem he had written more than a decade earlier

  But for us who are not angels, for us

  You, whom the angels inhabit, are so precious

  That we learn to cherish equally

  The red angel of joy, and the pale angel of misery

  and trekked forward, without endpoint, outward.