Lost, Almost

by Amy P. Knight

  She couldn’t just go knock on their door and ask what they were doing and see if she could join. Instead she went around to the side of their yard. In place of a fence dividing the properties, there were tall pine trees, and Melanie was able to get underneath their low branches.

  They were back there in the yard, Curtis and the father. She could hear them talking. They had a string tied to trees on opposite ends of their yard, cutting all the way across.

  Curtis said, “We need all that speed going in the same direction.”

  “Speed and direction?” said Adam, the father. “What kind of words are those?”

  Curtis sort of stammered for a minute, and then he said, “Velocity.” Melanie thought she would’ve said “speed and direction,” too, and gone on thinking it was correct forever. Her parents would’ve cracked open a bottle of champagne because she’d done something vaguely scientific-sounding.

  She stayed there in the trees, watching them. They were doing some sort of experiment with different formulas for an explosive, using them to propel a little length of pipe along the string, trying to see which one would send it the farthest. She couldn’t tell what the explosives were. It looked like sawdust, piled in newspaper cones. It was uncomfortable under there in the tree, with all the pine needles digging into her legs. She shifted, making too much noise.

  “Who’s there?” Adam shouted. “Show yourself.” She stepped into the yard, thinking he would recognize her from next door, but he said, “Who are you, and why are you hiding in my pine trees?”

  “It’s Melanie,” Curtis said. “From next door.” Adam didn’t seem embarrassed to not have recognized her.

  “Well,” he said, “get out or get to work.” She didn’t hesitate; she’d get to work.

  “Miss Driscoll is going to be our measurement assistant,” Adam said. He handed her a big old heavy tape measure, with a crank. He pointed to three cones of newspaper on the ground, each with a string snaking out of the bottom for a fuse, and said there were three forumlas, and they wanted the one that traveled the farthest.

  Curtis had a lab notebook—she didn’t recognize it at the time but of course that’s what it was—and he was taking notes in tiny, meticulous handwriting. His father was looking over his shoulder. Then—and this surprised her more than anything—he passed Curtis a box of long fireplace matches. Curtis lit the string on one of the cones, and they all watched it burn for a few seconds, and then there was an explosion. She jumped.

  “Stand still!” Adam shouted. Something about that spurred her on. She had to do better. She looked at the burned place on the ground and approached it with the tape measure. She set the end down.

  “Are you measuring from the center or the edge?” Adam demanded. She hadn’t thought of that. She picked the far edge, and got Curtis to hold the tape while she unspooled it to the other end, where she found the far edge of the cone across the yard. She was proud; she’d already learned something.

  “Sixty-four!” she called out.

  “Sixth-four what?”

  “Sixty-four feet.” Adam laughed disdainfully. Melanie thought she might die. Her face was hot. She realized her mistake and gave it to him in meters, a shift from which she would never return.

  They did the same thing three times, for the three different formulas. All measurements metric. When they were all done, he asked them for the winner. Melanie told him it was the one in the middle. He looked and her, and then at Curtis, and said, “Well, which one was that?” Melanie didn’t know.

  “The compositions were right there on the cones.”

  Curtis looked at her. “I thought you were keeping track,” he said. Adam looked at them both, and his face started to get red, like he was actually angry, like it was more than a Saturday afternoon play science experiment they’d ruined.

  “Never,” he said, “never, never assume somebody else has an accurate record of something you’re doing if you haven’t seen it with your own eyes.” Melanie felt like she might cry. It was her fault; she had ruined the experiment.

  “I’ll fix this,” she said. “I’ll make up for it.”

  “Me, too,” Curtis said. “What can we do?”

  The Brookses had a big two-car garage with an old blue door, and Adam wanted it painted. It was getting on in the afternoon, almost four, the hottest part of the day, and it was probably over a hundred degrees. But he pointed them toward the paint brushes and told Melanie she could go home when they’d finished it, but not a minute sooner. They’d have to sand it first and it was probably going to take two coats but he didn’t care. He wanted them to remember this. Not that she would’ve forgotten it easily. She was terribly ashamed; that’s not easy to forget.

  When she finally got home, it was dinner time, and she was happy. Someone had finally told her what she was doing wrong. Her parents were sitting side by side on the couch, watching an old movie on TV. They did that often on summer evenings, sometimes even having bowls of ice cream instead of dinner. They told her they’d saved her spot for her, right between them. Her father had this notepad in his lap, and he’d written down some notes about what had happened in the movie so that Melanie could catch up. But she didn’t want to sit. She was too keyed up. She wanted to keep going over and over in her mind all the things she had learned that afternoon. She wanted to find every place she’d ever written down something in inches and convert it to centimeters. It felt like more than she’d learned in the whole previous year and she just wanted to keep going.

  As she started to explain it to them, what she’d been doing all afternoon, they grew upset.

  “You’ve gotten such a terrible sunburn,” her mother said.

  “We were worried about where you’d gone” said her father. She feared they would call Adam to complain, although of course they were just as afraid of him as Melanie was. She tried to explain it to them, but they just shook their heads.

  Her mother said, “That can’t possibly have been worth it.”

  As she told the story, Melanie realized she had never really thought about her mother’s words before.

  “Worth what?” John asked. “The sunburn? It seems like it was worth a lot.”

  “No,” Melanie said, only then understanding as the words formed in her mouth, “they didn’t mean the sunburn. I asked them if I could have my bowl of ice cream, and my father said that you could only ever really be in one place at one time.”

  She understood, then, what he had meant, and why he’d said it, though she didn’t like it.

  “I guess their feelings were hurt,” John said. “They were thinking about themselves, not about the great things you were going on to do in your life.” She remembered the hum of the freezer, her parents’ faces in the flicker of the television. She thought of Dean, going back into the crowded restaurant alone.

  “So did he give it to you?” John asked. “The ice cream?”

  Melanie looked down at her leg in its cast. She couldn’t feel it, couldn’t feel her elbow or her shoulder or her ribs. “Yes,” she said, “and it was my favorite, mint chocolate chip.” She knew then that she would never have the place she wanted in her work, unless she was willing to go there utterly alone.

  “Well,” John said. “Your parents were terribly kind.”

  “They’re my parents,” she said. “They had to be.”

  “Are they still alive?”

  “Yes,” she said. “They’re still there, in that same house, in the desert. I haven’t been there in, gosh, seven years?” She hadn’t realized until she said this how unforgivably long it had been. And yet she felt sure that if she returned, they would forgive her.

  Footsteps approached in the hall, and she thought it must be Dean, that she could explain what she now understood, that she could apologize and he would come back to her, that his proclamation, that’s it, would be rescinded and she would have another chance, but the footsteps continued without slowing, down the hall, past her room, on to see somebody else.

  Adam
Brooks, 1961

  Adam isn’t sure whose idea it was that his crew should travel to Nevada to watch a test. Probably Stan’s; Stan is, at least nominally, in charge of his little unit, the link between Adam and the head of the T division. Stan had said that Adam should be ready at ten on Wednesday morning, and if any of his guys wanted to go, they should be ready then, too. He has two guys. They both want to go.

  Stan hasn’t meddled much with Adam’s team; he largely leaves them alone to calculate things and to dream up new things to calculate. And he isn’t meddling now; they weren’t given any tasks in connection with this test. In fact, it isn’t even a Los Alamos device being exploded, but rather, one from Teller’s lab in California. But Adam likes Stan. He drops by Adam’s tiny, immaculate office from time to time to check in. Every now and then, the two of them go to dinner. They talk mostly about science, a little bit about their wives, and once about where they might go next. Stan thinks he might like to move back to a university before too long, but he thinks Adam has a plum position and should stay put as long as possible. Where else would he have a mandate for basic research (most everyone else was pressed into service for bomb building), a team of incredibly bright guys to work with, a group of a hundred of the world’s greatest physicists within throwing distance, and no teaching or writing obligations? He had already had a good deal of success, in his four years there, and Stan thought he would only rise higher.

  When Adam arrives in the lounge area near Stan’s office at five minutes to ten, Larry, and Sol—his guys—are already there. He wonders if the two of them came over together, if they met up without him. Not that he would’ve gone if they had invited him; he spent the early morning having a long breakfast with his wife. The day still feels momentous. Perhaps it’s the two flights he’ll take, one on a small plane that will take them low under the clouds to Albuquerque, and one on a commercial jet to Las Vegas. Or maybe it’s the sheer fact that he will finally get to see an atomic bomb explode, after more than a decade of thinking about them, calculating their possibilities, feeding numbers, through circuitous paths, into them. He wonders if this is how movie directors feel when they get into the limousines that ferry them to their premieres.

  Larry has been to a test before, a few years earlier in the Pacific. Adam had been scheduled to go but his son had been born a week before so they’d sent Larry instead. Now he is talking about it. “We sat around a lot,” he says. “I mean, we got there way in advance, and there wasn’t a lot to do.” Now he has books with him. Novels, Adam sees. He wonders if he should’ve brought something to read, some journals to catch up on, transcripts of lectures. But he doesn’t want to sit around reading. He wants it all to be happening.

  Stan appears at two minutes past ten, and the five of them walk together out into the hot late morning.

  “It’ll only be hotter up there,” says Larry. “That thing might detonate itself.” Sol doesn’t say anything. He is Adam’s favorite of the three, a Cal Tech man like himself, married, though not yet with any children. He had been two years ahead of Adam at Cal Tech as an undergraduate, then gone to Korea with the army. Once when a water main had burst and none of the taps were working anywhere in the tech area, Sol had disappeared, and returned a few minutes later with a five-gallon jug of distilled water from the supply room, which he used to make their group a pot of strong coffee. All morning people were popping into their area asking if they had any left.

  When they deplane at McCarran, there is a government car waiting for them, surely, Adam thinks, because Stan is with them. His little group doesn’t merit this level of service. He checks his watch; it’s still barely four pm and the test isn’t until the next day.

  “Good thing I brought these,” Larry says, slapping the side of his bag with the books in it.

  “Don’t think you’ll be needing those,” says Stan from the front seat. “We’ve got a better way to kill some time around here.”

  “What’s that?” Adam asks.

  “You ever play blackjack?” Stan asks.

  “What, cards?” says Sol.

  “I’ve never played,” Adam says. His mental picture of casinos comes from the movies, and even this is hazy; he has been to the movies all of twice since moving to Los Alamos. He had never thought of glitzy, boozy Las Vegas as a real place.

  “It’s quite simple,” Stan says. He explains the rules. Adam listens intently, repeating each step in his mind as Stan talks.

  “All right,” he says when Stan has finished. “We should be able to beat this thing no problem.”

  “Famous last words,” says Larry. Sol still hasn’t said anything. Adam leans over Larry to look at him. He is staring out the window.

  “You okay, Sol?” Adam says.

  “Fine,” Sol says. “I’m not a card player.”

  “Slots, then,” Stan says. “Think you can manage the slots?”

  “Sure,” Sol says. “I’ll play a few. But nobody tell Lisa.”

  “Oh, mercy,” says Stan.

  “Let him be,” says Adam. He is in too good a mood to let any of this get to him.

  “Aw, come on,” says Larry when the car stops in front of a one-story white building. There’s a massive sign on the roof: El Cortez Hotel. A second sign, the letters stacked vertically on top of one another, says “Gambling.” “We’re playing here? What about the Sands? What about Harrah’s?”

  “This is the place for us,” says Stan. “They get a call from Mercury on the night before a test to let us all know it’s on for the morning. There are these blue lights in the ceiling that come on to tell us the conditions are okay, the test is going forward.”

  “No shit?” Larry says. “Inside the casino?”

  “Would I lie to you?” Stan says.

  Adam looks around. It is kind of shabby, a third-rate establishment at best, but he doesn’t care. He doesn’t need glitter and bright lights.

  The four of them walk into the casino in a straight line, Stan at the front, Sol at the back. The air is smoky, so much so that it’s difficult to see very far into the room. Larry disappears toward the poker tables. Sol stands like a lost child until Stan puts a hand on his shoulder and points him toward the slots. “You guys do this every time?” Adam asks Stan when they are alone.

  “Not much else to do around here,” Stan says. “Mercury isn’t exactly a hotbed of social activity. I keep thinking one of these days we could play out a few thousand games on MANIAC. Get the perfect formula to beat the house.” MANIAC is the supercomputer they use to run out calculations for the bombs.

  “I’ll bet we do pretty well just running the numbers up here.” Adam taps his temple. “How many decks are they using?”

  “Six or seven, I’d say.” Stan steers him toward a table. It’s dirty and smoky. He and Stan buy in for twenty dollars apiece. To his right, he can see Sol, walking up and down a row of slot machines, squinting at them.

  At first he has a little trouble keeping up with the pace of the game, remembering the rules for how the dealer will play his hand, but soon he is settled in. Each hand presents a simple question of statistics, and the entire game is a closed system for which he can account. After a couple of hours, Larry rounds them all up and they eat a cheap, greasy dinner. Adam and Larry each drink a beer; Sol declines, and Stan, who orders last, declines as well. Adam thinks maybe he should’ve passed, too.

  They hang around their table for a while. Adam starts sketching out the program they might run on MANIAC on the back of a napkin. He passes it to Larry. Larry copies it over onto his own napkin, with a few changes, and passes it back. Adam tucks both napkins into his shirt pocket. He probably won’t actually run the program; there will be more pressing matters when they get back to the lab. Still, he likes the idea. He likes the possibility of it, the fact that this entire city is full of people playing games that could be perfected by a big box of wires.

  Around nine they head back onto the floor and play some more. Adam has already won a little over two hundred
dollars, and moves to a table with a higher limit. He wouldn’t have thought he’d enjoy this, but in the end, it’s just a math problem, and he has fun with the little tweaks he can make to his play. He joins Larry at the poker tables for a while, has another beer, then more blackjack. He thinks about what he might do with the cash. He could change some of it to silver or gold coin and keep it, in case all this weapons business gets out of hand; if the world dissolves in some kind of nuclear chaos, he can’t count on currency. And beyond that, he thinks he’d like to find a nice gift for Angeline. They’ll have a fifth anniversary next year, and he hasn’t given her much of anything since the tiny engagement ring he’d scraped together from his graduate student’s stipend.

  “What would you get your wife?” he asks Stan, who has quit playing and settled at the bar. He shows him his handful of chips.

  “Well, God damn,” Stan says. “You sure you haven’t been here before?”

  He gives Stan a weak smile. “I think I’d like to get her something. A surprise, you know? I just don’t really know what she’d want.”

  “No man ever went wrong with diamonds,” Stan says. “We could stop somewhere on our way through on Friday. Maybe a bracelet. Nancy’s always admiring those on other people. What do you call ‘em, you know, a tennis bracelet.”

  “You going to get her one?”

  “I haven’t been as lucky out there as you,” Stan says.

  “Maybe you just need to play bigger,” Adam says. They sit a while longer, Stan slowly drinking a beer. Larry is nowhere to be seen, and Sol is back by the slots again.

  Without warning, Stan jumps up from his stool. “It’s on,” he says. He points to a blue lightbulb over the door that has come on. It’s almost two. “Cash out,” he says. “I’ll get the others, and we’ll hit the road.”