Y

by Aaron Tucker

  ‘It does matter. I feel that –’ But then that sentence is lost in the night that Hiroshima was destroyed when he returned to Los Alamos’s auditorium and celebrated, his joy a reflection of the compound’s: they were all so proud and he, as their leader, needed to convince them that their work had had purpose and that they had succeeded, they should be proud. It wasn’t until the next day, when Japan still had not surrendered, that the horror of his visions cracked through, a woman and child picking through remains, made nomad in the smouldering ruins, a man walking a bicycle alone up a road, its tires warped and wobbling, bordered on each side by apocalypse, the dead bodies untouched, and then he heard President Truman announce the use of the bomb, exposing Los Alamos’s existence, the radio static between words. ‘The Japanese began the war from the air at Pearl Harbor. They have been repaid manyfold. And the end is not yet,’ the President promised. ‘If they do not now accept our terms, they may expect a rain of ruin from the air, the like of which has never been seen on this earth.’ And the Japanese still did not surrender.

  ‘I feel it matters that –’ But then he coughs, the same lingering hack that has plagued him since his fever peaked in March, when he lay flat on his hospital bed and sunk into semi-dreams, hallucinations, and now he violently propels his breath from his body into the morning and he doubles slightly over the cabin rail until the spasms pass and then he reaches for his pipe, packs the bowl with tobacco, a few of the stringy shavings dusting the wooden porch, lights it, and pulls the smoke and its muddy smell into his lungs then exhales, and the sun climbs higher, the light further. With this out-breath, he pictures the planes dropping their leaflets on Nagasaki, EVACUATE YOUR CITIES, the thin paper on the high-altitude currents, weaving back and forth while patiently falling toward the city, the image of a loose formation of planes on the front unloading a barrage of bombs, and, around this, a collection of targeted cities, this just days after Little Boy; the leaflet finally named the weapon, our atomic bomb, the text, all centred around possession, ‘our,’ a combination of threat and boast – a single one of our newly developed atomic bombs is actually the equivalent in explosive power to what 2,000 of our giant B-29s could have carried on a single mission – which was followed by the demand for Japan’s honourable surrender.

  ‘I just have a difficult time – ’ He begins again, looping back to when Fat Man fell on Nagasaki three days after the leaflets, August 9, and the lab’s guards and army personnel were the few who celebrated; the rest chose to quarantine themselves within their homes and he and Kitty absently occupied themselves with Peter and Toni until Groves called him to tell him directly that Nagasaki had been bombed, and that their Soviet allies were advancing. And still, Japan did not surrender for another six days.

  As he stands in the warming air of Perro Caliente, hears the waking shuffling and heavy puffing of the horses as their heads dip into their straw, just off the side of the cabin, he attempts again to imagine what it would have been like for Japan’s citizens to hear, over the radio and for the first time, Emperor Hirohito’s voice, a man descended from Yoshihito, from Emperor Meiji, a man who bridged the country’s shogun feudal history with its contemporary industrialization, a divine descendant known only through the spare pictures that filled the Japanese newspapers, often atop his own impeccably white stallion, horse and man in statue. The Emperor was a man who never spoke publicly, his silent portrait enough to fuel his country’s holy war, a mortal God raised in the long Japanese military tradition that to die a beautiful death, jewelled by honour, was the only option in war, and in his mind he listens to Emperor Hirohito’s voice in the obscure formal Japanese and his citizens, bunched around whatever radios were left and still functioning, those citizens struggling to translate the speech into the common tongue, hearing that they were to put down all weapons and finally relent.

  He gives up trying to finish his sentence and Kitty comes beside him and places her hand over his and he cannot help but think of the Emperor’s voice, placing himself in a small Tokyo kitchen, the opening, ‘To our good and loyal subjects,’ then ‘Moreover, the enemy has begun to employ a new and most cruel bomb, the power of which to do damage is, indeed, incalculable, taking the toll of many innocent lives. Should we continue to fight, it would not only result in an ultimate collapse and obliteration of the Japanese nation, but also it would lead to the total extinction of human civilization.’ Even now, his throat constricts thinking of the end of that last sentence, and, past the grasses and the small path through to his door, he settles his eyes on the distant craggy slopes, and as he coughs again he involuntarily flashes to his first visit to the curing atmosphere of the Southwest, to Katy and the lake they named after her, and marvels at how quickly that body hardened into health, sculpted by the hard rides through unforgiving landscape and the clear, clean air that passed through him, but now, when he looks upon this body, he sees those muscles gone and his skin clinging too close to his bones. He is so much harder now, smaller.

  He is walking up the driveway to his home, his cab pulling away in the early-evening background and winding back toward Arlington Avenue, the California autumn rolling down toward the ocean water, between the cedars and white pine, black oaks and quaking aspen, the fall curling into reds and oranges, and he notices that Kitty has been rearranging the front flowers, the rock roses beginning to shut into their canary centres, and there is more sedum than he remembered, spread low and plentiful in dull maroons, around the cacti and Mexican sunflowers, ginger and carrot-coloured, and he sees that Kitty has set out two wooden barrels in hopes of harvesting the coming winter rains. It is cooler than the last time he was home, the air finally moist after the dry summer months, the Pacific dragged from the bay finally manifesting in the atmosphere, and he pauses to search for his keys in his pocket, his fingers passing over the dinner receipts from his time in Washington, New York.

  He thinks then of he and Rabi, Manhattan in late afternoon, and they were walking, going whole blocks without sunlight, their footsteps in the meagre coating of early-winter snow, and he and Rabi walked close so that they could hear each other over the noise of pedestrians while the floors rose up in even lines of windows above them, until they appeared to arch over them. As they moved together, Rabi asked him about the forming of the Atomic Energy Commission, about Teller and the Super, a hydrogen bomb, and as he answered he noticed that the garbage can ahead was near overflowing, that there was a newspaper that had struggled out and was bearing down on him. As he stepped around the paper, letting it tumble down the sidewalk, a new voice broke in.

  ‘You’re Oppenheimer! I just wanted to thank you. Thank you.’ A man put his hand out toward him. He gripped the hand and shook, but he was looking over the man’s shoulder, at the two women walking by who had their heads together in a hushed conversation, their eyes excited as they passed over his face in recognition. The stranger pumped his hand again and before any response, he walked past him and Rabi. ‘You’re too famous now,’ said Rabi, and Opje smiled at his friend.

  He thinks of Krishna’s warning, Pitiful are those who, acting, are attached to their action’s fruit, and though he has repeated the phrase as a mantra the past year, he cannot help relishing those random encounters and the thrill of his power, as politician, as scientist, and as he stands on the threshold to his home he recalls the crowded auditorium lectures, the young men on campus who trail behind him, his newspaper portraits, his radio vocals, and he hears his name, as the Father of the Atomic Bomb, as Director of the weapon that ended all wars, ingests it all and proudly expands. When he emerges from this thought, he sees that Kitty is in the door frame and Peter and Toni are on either side of her, so he waves to them as their German shepherd, Buddy, bursts past Peter, the dog circling his legs as he puts down his suitcase and pets the glossy dark fur along his back before the dog returns to Peter.

  ‘I was just about to put them to bed but then I heard the cab,’ Kitty says with her hands on the middle of their children’s backs. T
he four of them, the dog weaving around, step into their home and he picks up Peter first, then Toni, hugs them.

  ‘I’ve missed you both,’ and both of them nod in return. ‘But now I need to talk to your mother. We’ll have lots of time in the morning,’ and he walks them down the hall to their rooms, Buddy lying down immediately next to Peter’s bed, and Opje pulls the covers up to his son’s chin and kisses his forehead. They exchange goodnights and he repeats the process with Toni, leaving both their doors slightly open, and advances toward the only light left on, over the kitchen table, where Kitty is seated, smoking, two glasses already sweating condensation.

  ‘You’ve been gone so long.’

  ‘I know. I’ll bring you next time. I promise,’ and he watches Kitty wince, hearing the phrase for the echo it is, the phrase he repeats every time he returns home to her and the children. ‘Everyone was asking about you,’ he offers, and Kitty’s grip on her glass relaxes minutely. ‘And I’m sorry I couldn’t call more. Washington was so busy. I was in meetings all hours of the day, trying to pull everything together.’

  She hurdles his voice, looking past him, at the cracked door. ‘Peter’s nightmares have gotten worse. More frequent.’

  ‘Does he say what they are about?’

  ‘No. He just says he has bad dreams.’ She swallows and adds, ‘But Buddy seems to help. You can’t get the two of them apart.’ She stands then, restless, and looks out the window overlooking the backyard, the dusky ashen world, and she turns back toward him. ‘And they are still watching us. I still see their cars down the block. I’m sure they are still tapping our phones.’ She paces down to the counter absently, then back to the table, and when she sits they both reach for the other simultaneously, their hands together.

  ‘I’m sorry,’ he repeats, thinking of Kitty’s dormant books in the upstairs office, then of an incident from four months prior, when the July heat had barely abated despite the clocks ticking past midnight, and the last of their guests, young students of his, were just leaving and Kitty lost her balance, fell and fractured her wrist, and he rushed to her as she rolled to sit up, martinis on her breath, cradling her injury; she didn’t yelp or cry, and he pulled her up and called a cab to Alta Bates, and he sat with her in that hospital through the morning, and there he saw the same suits that had followed him in San Francisco, now blatant and indecent, and he apologized to her then, too, sitting beside his prone love, the scaffolding of his ambitions greatly reduced.

  They rest in that kitchen tableau for a long time, unspeaking but relaxing in small degrees, the sunlight eventually descending below the water horizon, stretching the shadows of the house into a comforting black, and they continue to hold hands as they move to their bedroom. As he falls asleep that night, he offers to cook lunch for the family, eggs with parsley and rosemary from the herb pots dotting the backyard, and insists afterward that he wants to work in the garden with her, to take advantage of the last few plantings of the autumn, to work the rich topsoil into the lines of their palms together.

  He is leaving Los Alamos, but the plateau and its surrounding canyons go on as they always have, the wilderness edging right up to the compound’s fences, through the cement around the expandable trailers and common latrines, through the new pavement of the roads, intruding into the flower beds around the downtown homes, seeping into the banks and water of Ashley Pond, into every place, everywhere, everyone. He thinks that the wilderness remains, especially now that the labs are empty, and all the footprints in the thin snow lead to the auditorium where he is giving his farewell speech, saying goodbye.

  ‘There was, in the first place, the great concern that our enemy might develop these weapons before we did, and the feeling, at least in the early days, the very strong feeling, that without atomic weapons it might be very difficult, it might be an impossible, it might be an incredibly long thing to win the war.

  For a warrior, there is nothing better

  than a battle that duty enjoins

  ‘These things wore off a little as it became clear that the war would be won in any case. Some people, I think, were motivated by curiosity, and rightly so

  So rolls the wheel; and he on earth

  Who does not help it roll,

  has damaged the working of the world

  ‘and some by a sense of adventure, and rightly so. Others had more political arguments and said, “Well, we know that atomic weapons are in principle possible, and it is not right that the threat of their unrealized possibility should hang over the world. It is right that the world should know what can be done in their field and deal with it.”

  The soldier’s native duty is

  To stand his ground in fight,

  And valiant, brilliant, generous, firm,

  Deft exercise of might

  ‘And there was finally, and I think rightly, the feeling that there was probably no place in the world where the development of atomic weapons would have a better chance of leading to a reasonable solution, and a smaller chance of leading to disaster, than within the United States.

  Whatever a great man does

  ordinary people will do

  ‘I believe all these things that people said, and I think I said them all myself at one time or another.

  Our task is treble, to pray, bear, and do

  ‘But when you come right down to it, the reason that we did this job is because it was an organic necessity. If you are a scientist you cannot stop such a thing.’

  He is in memory as he speaks, in the wild and coming upon the boys’ school with Groves again, November 1942, the early snow and his breath blooming, that body, a state at a fulcrum, striving and failing to be one of the wise men who are fearless, one-pointed, and in the memory he wipes the ash from the tip of his cigarette with his finger, and he is admiring the future of the landscape, and Groves says, ‘This is the place,’ and he is both bodies and neither, and then he is speaking again:

  ‘There are others who try to escape the immediacy of this situation by saying that, after all, war has always been very terrible; after all, weapons have always gotten worse and worse; that this is just another weapon and it doesn’t create a great change; that they are not so bad; bombings have been bad in this war and this is not a change in that, it just adds a little to the effectiveness of bombing,’ and he is bathed again in Trinity’s unnatural blue light, ‘I think that these efforts to diffuse and weaken the nature of the crisis make it only more dangerous. I think it is for us to accept it as a very grave crisis, to realize that these atomic weapons which we have started to make are very terrible, that they involve a change, that they are not just a slight modification.’

  As sin is nothing, let it nowhere be

  He ends his farewell speech by pausing often, between California and New Mexico, between New York apartments, and he is talking with Jean across a table in a Mexican restaurant, her laugh balanced by the dark of her eyes, and he is watching Kitty stand as she rides her horse, her hair reckless against the sierras, and all of these states swirl around and through him as he ends.

  ‘I think that we have no hope at all if we yield in our belief in the value of science, in the good that it can be to the world to know about reality, about nature, to attain a gradually greater and greater control of nature, to learn, to teach, to understand. I think that if we lose our faith in this we stop being scientists, we sell out our heritage, we lose what we have most of value for this time of crisis. But there is another thing: we are not only scientists; we are men, too.

  These bodies come to an end;

  But that vast embodied Self

  Is ageless, fathomless, eternal

  ‘These are the strongest bonds in the world, stronger than those even that bind us to one another, these are the deepest bonds, that bind us to our fellow men.’

  As he and his horse stop, he considers the illness that has lingered in him the last months, burning his lungs, stooping him and stealing weight from his body, he sees that illness being chased from
his body, leaving him finally healthy, his strongest, prepared for the planned summer Trinity test. He advances now and sees the whole of the compound, his eyes their bluest, full and wet, and reminds himself, as Krishna tells Arjuna, All beings are transient as bodies and, yet, even though he has set himself forward, he acknowledges a slow-spreading crater in himself. He knows that if he does return to these mesas after his work on the Gadget has succeeded, to the pines scenting his climbs, to the cottonwoods shedding their cloud parachutes of seeds, to the rounded heads of fogfruit, if he is restored back to here in a physical or mental form, whatever state he takes, it will never be as he was before, descending the talus of an untravelled trail, the gravel slipping under his horse’s hooves, he will never be riding in the violet pre-night as before. In defence, he constructs a vision of himself, a lone figure on horseback, stopped and leaned forward onto the pommel of his saddle and he can see the dirt path home, barely formed, and he is pointed toward it, he is motionless save for his lips, words into the horse’s pricked ears, the actual words unmanifest, and that central version will have to be untouchable, immortal.

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