Y

by Aaron Tucker

  He lifts his eyes to the letter and, restarting, reads, determined to finish – To those who loved and helped me, all love and courage. I think I would have been a liability all my life. I wanted to live and to give and I got paralyzed somehow – but he can’t finish, breaks, contracts abruptly, remembering back to when they were first dating, their voices in exchange, the dim evening framing her pleas to break through his own cocooning ignorance, through his own wealth and privilege, to examine the world in front of him, the breadlines, the tattered clothing of a passing child and her mother. ‘You cannot simply live in science and ideas,’ she insisted, but her didacticism was balanced by their common escapes into verse, Donne’s three-person’d god Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new, or her tranquil features as he read her the Gita’s Sanskrit followed by his own spontaneous translation, the poem’s words with him as he walked with his hands in his jacket pockets one year ago, his feet walking without him lowering his gaze in caution. He trusted the ground, looked straight and forward into the full magnitude of his vision’s ability, further than the steepening slopes and snow-covered talus, further than the peaks, Chicoma, beyond the sacred Redondo and the Pueblo hiking to its summit shrine, further – To those who loved and helped me, all love and courage. I think I would have been a liability all my life. I wanted to live and to give and I got paralyzed somehow. I tried like hell to understand and couldn’t – further, until he settles on the memory of his three days in the desert with his scouting partners, hunting for a test site, and after they had settled on that stark patch of earth along the Jornada del Muerto, to when he thought of Jean reading Donne’s sonnet to him, Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain, and that was one more turn in the wheel that named the site Trinity.

  They had been building the site near Alamogordo for months now, and he thinks of the men living there during its construction; they had been camping among the desert rocks and lava under the purple shadows of the surrounding ranges, living as Opje himself used to live, with Katy, with Kitty, with his horses Crisis or Chico, near naked under the cooling nights, muscular and limber instead of hewn all the way to his bones by the large chunky swipes of the security fences and the constant light and noise of Los Alamos.

  From this image he switches to reading the coroner’s report, remembering when Jean had stood up – Height: 5 foot 6 inches. Weight: 117 – and moved toward the frame of the bedroom’s open door, and she stopped as she did and her face was directly exposed – Eyes: Hazel. Hair: Brown – replicating his, and neither of them moved until she confessed, ‘I can’t stop,’ and she unburdened herself – Heart: 240 grams and measure 13x7x6 centimetres – and he reciprocated in the manner he could, and later he took in but brushed past the pill bottles that adorned the edges of her sink, the small cabinet behind the bathroom mirror, had completely forgot about them until he reads of all the drugs in her apartment, thoroughly catalogued – Abbott’s Nembutal C, Codeine ½ gr, Upjohn Racephedrine Hydrochloride 3/8 gr – and then the contents of her stomach – recently ingested, semi-solid food – cheap beans and rice, he wonders, continues – 4 barbituric acid derivatives, derivative of salicylic acid, faint trace of chloral hydrate (uncorroborated) – the repetition of acid driving his mind to images of her organs eroded in bubbling hunks, her beautiful, floating body being devoured from the inside out and through her skin, exposing her to the bathwater, air, so that then it wasn’t so much that her lungs filled – Cause of death: Acute edema of the lungs with pulmonary congestion – but rather her whole body, even her veins, was hollowed out and replaced with water, and perhaps then she was of one substance.

  As he continues, he imagines her father discovering her, his increasing panic in the prior days as his numerous reachings out to her came back silent, sixty-seven years old and desperately scaling the fire escape of her building and forcing one of her windows open, barely fitting underneath the propped-up pane, and breathing heavily as he entered her apartment, only a single lamp on, and he relives that moment from the perspective of her father: there are no smells, no sounds, just stillness, the sense that there hasn’t been motion in the space in days, and he walks forward and finds her in the tub, with her unsigned suicide note

  To those who loved and helped me, all love and courage. I think I would have been a liability all my life. I wanted to live and to give and I got paralyzed somehow. I tried like hell to understand and couldn’t … At least I could take away the burden of a paralyzed soul from a fighting world …

  and as he visualizes the trailing last letters, off the page and into the dead narrator of ‘Renascence’ at the point of her awakening

  For rain it hath a friendly sound

  To one who’s six feet underground;

  And scarce the friendly voice or face:

  A grave is such a quiet place.

  The tiny sprinkling of water so beautiful and simple that the narrator immediately regrets her passing, even after the drops multiply into a storm; after the clouds of the poem dissolve, she is met by wind, Into my face a miracle/Of orchard-breath, and wishes to be reborn in order to experience the full breath and beauty of God and His earth. But, he reminds himself, Jean remains paralyzed in her rain-pocked grave.

  He reads that after her father found her, her note, he carried her to her couch and then he searched the drawers and corners of the apartment, gathered up whatever personal letters and photos he found, filled the fireplace with them and then he sat awhile longer, lit only by those flames, until the papers’ edges curled off completely into ash, and only then did he call the funeral parlour. From his Los Alamos office, Opje thinks that it’s likely some of those letters were his, his weavings between her and Kitty, his rewriting of their favourite verses, his descriptions of the New Mexico mountains barring him from all sides, and he thinks of the map in Donne’s ‘Hymn to God, My God, in my Sickness’ and recalls the final warning of Millay’s narrator:

  But East and West will pinch the heart

  That can not keep them pushed apart;

  And he whose soul is flat – the sky

  Will cave in on him by and by.

  He reads on, and is left with the image of Jean’s body as it was actually found, not as he imagined on his hours in the Jemez woods the day he heard she was dead, not familiarly floating on her back, her face upward. No, her father came upon her hunched over the edge of the bathtub, pillows underneath her knees, her head the only portion of her body in the cold water.

  The good deeds a man has done before defend him, he repeats as he lies on his stomach next to Frank in the bunker, the predawn storm, its pingings against the metal roof, has since washed past down the San Andres ranges driven south by the strength of the slanting winds, they have been there for nearly twenty-four straight hours, waiting, quietly listening to the fevered mating croaks of the frogs from the pond next to Trinity, now waiting at the central point between the sun’s setting and rising, and he thinks of Krishna explaining

  From formlessness all forms proceed

  At dawning of the day;

  And at its dusk, they sink once more

  In formlessness away

  and he is between dark and dawn and the rocket, signalling five minutes until the test coils into the clearing night, setting a parabolic path for the next identical rocket that marks the one-minute countdown to the test of the Gadget, its trail briefly blotting out the stars that had emerged, but in the exact moment he hears a disembodied voice counting down over the speaker, the radio signal crosses surreally with another and Tchaikovsky intrudes, the Nutcracker Suite, and the musical strains merge with the numbers until ‘One’ then ‘Zero,’ and he knows that the control room has switched the current on, that pulse following the miles of electrical lines strung, until it reaches the tower, the Gadget, and he knows that the plutonium at its core is condensing with an incredible inward force, he is mentally tracing all this when the bomb goes off and he raises his eyes from his face-down position and looks through the bunker’s w
elder’s glass and his darkened glasses, and is transported to the battlefield where Arjuna is begging Krishna to reveal his ultimate form and, in order to see, Krishna grants him divine sight, beyond the capabilities of any prior mortal – Look! Look! – Krishna implores as he transforms

  with innumerable mouths and eyes,

  faces too marvelous to stare at,

  dazzling ornaments, innumerable

  weapons uplifted, flaming

  as the whole New Mexico landscape is obliterated by a wall of impenetrable white light – as a thousand simultaneous suns arising and standing in the noon sky, blazing – the early-morning darkness is brought immediately into daylight that quickly shades to ice blue, then violet to purple in milliseconds, the colours imprinted upon his eyes and momentarily blinding him – measureless, massive sun-flame – and in his blindness he imagines the whole universe of bodies contained within Krishna, as Arjuna describes it – Your eyes are moon and sun; you burn this helpless world entire – and pictures the bulb of the bomb’s detonation, a half sphere rising and expanding from the ground, filling itself until it lifts entirely from the earth, as Krishna’s astounding, terrifying form and his sight fades back, and the landscape begins to rematerialize, the light saturating the dry ground, the swelling foothills, the craggy sides and sharp peaks and ridges of all the mountains – As you touch the sky, many hued – and at the centre of the light, golden, then yellow burning to orange, a flaming stalk of sand erupting with enormous heat, he looks again at the column exploding miles upward and he thinks of the temperatures at the base of the detonation, so incredibly hot that the sand is instantly reconstructed into glass, and the earth that is cast up into the air is immediately solidified, those hunks raining to the ground, flashes to a vision of what those minerals might look like, clear with emerald shading from the radiation and carved with small dark pockets, those rocks blended with the support materials of the tower, combinations of metal and earth and nuclear reaction, and when he follows the explosion’s pillar he sees it topped by a reddening cloud, thinks of the warriors that line each side of Arjuna’s battlefield and how Krishna’s divine form swallows them, as Arjuna tells his god when he looks upon Him, that he sees those warriors

  Entering with hurried step

  Your jaws are fierce-fanged and dread,

  I see them with skulls crushed

  Their raw flesh stuck to your teeth

  and seconds go by, as he watches the slow blooming in mid-desert, and he has not exhaled yet, and he does not look at his brother next to him, and then he feels warmth spreading across his exposed arms, face, increasing and flushing his whole body, it is a shell over all of him, and then the heat increases so rapidly he is sweating, feels a sweaty rivulet begin to work down from his hairline, but still he does not move, not even when the pressure slams into the bunker, a solid and impenetrable current that barrages and shakes the walls of the low-slung bunker, and the sound of it simultaneously hammers him, and he tastes the grit of the desert with that air as it lines his nostrils and coats his mouth, thinks, All food forward will carry this residue, these particles between my teeth, the last piece of language that fills his mind before his body is completely overwhelmed, the pillar and cloud, the heat, the smashing force of the air, that sound beyond human or animal construction, that which could never be made by natural throat, and his body lies amazed and docile and still until one clear message surfaces, singular and completely formed, and he pictures droplets in a bathtub and the concentric circles they form on the surface, weakening with distance, and he lies and watches the mushroom as it expands in silent slow motion, he watches its full unfurling, knowing that it is essential to watch what he has made all the way to its completion and, as he stares, its shape does not change but only exaggerates, its scale now mountain-high, and recalls Krishna as Shiva – Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds annihilating all things – and his paralysis deepens until, on the cliff of desperation, he remembers the Gita’s lines only one stanza further, wherein Krishna comforts Arjuna’s struggles with having to kill his kinsmen:

  Arise, on fame, on victory,

  On kingly joys intent!

  They are already slain by me;

  Be you my instrument

  and swathes himself in the notion that Brahma, Creator, and Vishnu, Preserver, are contained within the same entity as Shiva, and that all transcend him as he lies on his belly in the desert, and he clings to this belief that he is as an instrument of motion, and he knows that the science of the Gadget was inevitable forward momentum – There is no end, but addition – and he is simply progressing forward as an instrument of Duty, to his country, to the labs and the men and women populating Los Alamos, and that his responsibility does not include how and where to use the Gadget, and, as he continues through this progression of his mind, he reminds himself that these thoughts have not sprung anew from this moment but rather are what he has been thinking to himself for weeks, months prior, that they have not wasted their years on the plateau and they will emerge immortal, that their names, his name, will echo through the rest of this century, the rest of human history, and with this fame and achievement they must, he must, live with their creation, and to do so requires the Gita, and the understanding that he must live extended beyond this singular body, this state, and accept his chaotic system of selves, as particles in incessant flux, in memory or future, that Time the destroyer is time the preserver and that he will find solace in that seeming contradiction, that he will exist in and beyond this moment – the unattended Moment, the moment in and out of time – the desert cratered at its centre by the peak of his work, by the flash, the sound, the heat that has crested and is resettling on the earth in showers of dust and rock and metal, and he knows that he is a part of Eliot’s collective from ‘The Dry Salvages’:

  We, content at the last

  If our temporal reversion nourish

  (Not too far from the yew-tree)

  The life of significant soil

  and when this last bit of poetry leaves his mind he notices the bunker awakening sluggishly into tentative applause as he lies there, and he and his brother finally find each other’s eyes, and Frank smiles as he raises himself to standing and offers his hand to help pull Opje up, and the clapping inflates and he can hear the men around him in simple exhalations – ‘It worked,’ ‘We did it’ – their stunned and delirious voices devolving into a primal mash of sounds, cacophonous in delight, in congratulations, as he accepts his brother’s help and gets to his feet, brushing his hands down his chest, flecking dirt back to the floor, and now he is tall and straight-backed as he strides across the room, the group of men parting and gathering on either side as he swaggers down the centre of them, all warriors and he the general, the Director, and he is touched by all that he passes, their straining fingers sliding from his frame, all in the room desperate to simply come in contact with him as he moves toward the door and the jeep that is going to carry him to Groves at his post a few miles away, and he enters into the now dawn light, complete.

  The light is slowly volcanic over Hermit Peak, Elk Mountain, over his porch here, and he and Kitty have been trying to speak for the past hour, talk about the bomb, the end of the war, what their future will be, and he starts to asks, ‘And if I don’t want to? If I can’t? What –’ And she looks over her morning coffee at him as he leans forward to rest on the railing that outlines the front of the cabin; he is cycling through his breath trying to calm himself, and so he tracks the light’s gradual spilling that overruns him as it continues over the Pajarito Plateau, down and between the earthen cracks of the Valles Caldera, the floor of the valley hiding the sharp tips of obsidian tools, arrowheads and knives, centuries old, mixed with shards of fired-clay pottery that once held water from the Rio Grande or Cochiti Lake, and it warms the wolves curled in sleep and the sluggish and fattening bears plodding along riverbanks as they near hibernation, it slips over the ranchers on their horses, reins in hand as they move across their field
s, fills the open-air kivas, the walls bricked and rounded in perfect arcings and centred by a hearth that held the fires burned down the past evening, and the sunrise shears up the sides of the Jemez before tipping over into the west, beyond. It is the first edges of autumn and the air carries the smell of winter snows, and, as he has since Japan surrendered months ago, he is thinking about Hiroshima and Trinity and Nagasaki, Trinity, the wedge of New Mexico made uninhabitable, a desert made more barren.

  He was with Groves, standing near ground zero just after the Gadget’s detonation, the uniformed General larger than he could ever remember him being as they shook hands over a twisted rebar skeleton half-melted into the earth, and there he admitted to the General that if the bomb had been dropped onto a city centre, anyone within three miles of the epicentre would have been vapourized. At his side, Groves’s assistant said, ‘The war is over,’ and the General countered, ‘Yes. After we drop two of them on Japan.’ He recalls Groves’s words and then the crater the Gadget created in the desert floor, five feet deep, thirty feet wide, and then the Potsdam Proclamation on July 26, President Truman giving Japan the choice between unconditional surrender and ‘prompt and utter destruction,’ and he thinks of the morning after the test, his own confession to President Truman – ‘Those poor little people, those poor little people’ – and there the magnitude of their achievement and its dwarfing destruction were simultaneous.

  He looks back at Kitty and tries again, ‘And what about –’

  ‘It doesn’t matter,’ she reassures him, and he nods, thinking about the Japanese Prime Minister, Suzuki, and how he answered with mokusatsu, and Little Boy was dropped on Hiroshima, August 6, and he forced himself to superimpose Trinity’s crater, glassed solid by the heat, onto the middle of the city so that he could witness his work, the flatness extending, the buildings reduced to scraps of leaning wood and metal, trees stripped and tilted away from the force, the rubble of bridges and churches and homes in large indistinct chunks, and fire everywhere, consuming, and the people left alive with their clothes melted into their skin, half faces half-burned as they instinctively looked away from the flash, their clothes reduced to rags, wandering through the remains, their steps uneasy around the tombstone masses of their former homes, and amidst all that, small but present, Jean’s spectre. He had seen the aerial photos of the city, its people, all transformed into blank terrain, all landmarks, natural or manmade, eradicated; he saw other photos of shadows burned onto walls, the bodies disintegrated instantly but kept frozen in silhouette.