Lost, Almost

by Amy P. Knight

  “Are you in pain?”

  “It’s not important,” Dr. Brooks says.

  “I’m sorry to hear that,” she says, and she is sorry.

  “I don’t think Diego is a bad man. Or a bad scientist.”

  “You can help him. We’ll figure out exactly what you need to say.”

  “I’ve thought of him, even before he showed up in the news.” He lifts his coffee cup, and, finding it cold, puts it down again. “I would probably do the same again. But it never sat quite right.” She wants to grab him by the shoulders, to pull him headlong into her defense.

  “We’ll make it right,” she says. “As right as we can. Tell me exactly what happened. You fired him. Were you directly responsible?”

  “I was not what you might call the trigger man. But that doesn’t mean I was not the architect of that particular decision.”

  “And it was to do with this? With the laser?”

  “In a way.” He pauses again. He looks tired, as though this were the end of a long day, not a morning coffee. “It could’ve been any idea he was obsessed with. He only ever worked on our official projects with half his brain.”

  “What else might you have done? If you hadn’t let him go?”

  “I want to tell you—it ought to be known that—” he stops abruptly. He stares out the window.

  “Dr. Brooks? Are you all right? Do you need a glass of water?” Her throat aches, waiting for the next words.

  “I am fairly certain now that he was correct. Perhaps I should have taken that route. His route.” He closes his eyes and massages his temples. Charlotte’s mind is racing, the building blocks of her strategy rearranging themselves as she listens.

  “How much better would it be? The laser he wanted?” He doesn’t answer. She can see Dr. Salerno’s face, his certainty that he’d been doing the right thing, his insistence aimed at everyone in his path, colleagues, superiors, the FBI, and now, at her. “Are we talking about a significant waste of resources?”

  “It’s possible.” He pauses. “Would that keep him out of prison?”

  “No,” Charlotte says. “I can’t see how it could. The law will punish him for what he did, not for why. But I think it would mean a great deal to him to hear you say it.”

  “Have you seen the bombs?”

  “I’ve seen photographs.”

  “I have stood two miles away and watched. I have seen four of them.” He pauses. She can’t tell if this is a yes or a no. “Keep me apprised of this, if you would. I don’t want to see that man go to prison.”

  “I will.” She draws a breath, to ask him directly if he will help them, but she doesn’t get the chance.

  “I cannot testify to all of this,” he says. Her stomach seizes.

  “You mean you won’t.”

  “It doesn’t matter. These things take years. I won’t live that long.”

  “We could do a sworn statement. Recorded testimony.”

  “I might be able to say that hydrogen flouride lasers are a viable alternative to the system we embraced. Maybe even that they have some possible advantages.”

  “Can’t you say more? What you just told me? That he was right? That you still think so?”

  “I have been at this lab for fifty-six years.” He clears his throat. He looks toward the ceiling, letting his eyes rest there a moment. “There is a certain understanding of my tenure there.”

  “Did you know they indicted his wife, too?”

  “I did not know that.” His tone is flat; his face gives away nothing.

  “As far as I can tell, she had nothing to do with it. Diego is so upset about that.” She is desperate now, thinking this, if nothing else, might get through to him, as it did to her.

  “I don’t blame him.”

  “You can help him,” she says. “Both of them. We can help them.”

  Adam Brooks says nothing. Charlotte looks down at her hands, her unpainted fingernails, at his hands, his wedding ring, the hair on the backs of his fingers, the veins. A woman with a baby strapped to her chest in a sling comes into the café and stands at the counter. Still, Adam says nothing, and in that moment she sees them both, Adam and herself, for what they have always been: people who need to be right more than anything, more than air, more than love.

  “All right then,” she finally says. She snaps her folder shut, her notepad still blank. She shifts everything to her left hand, preparing for a handshake. But when the moment comes, when he stands, she finds she cannot extend her hand. She sees, in Adam Brooks, what she has been doing wrong all her life. She sees that he knows it too. She sees that he is almost out of time, and has, unforgivably, given up.

  She crosses back to the parking lot, the midday sun baking her shoulders and the part in her hair, barely able to think through her anger.

  She gets in the car and turns on the radio. The air conditioning is weak, and almost immediately sweat begins to soak into her crisp shirt. She takes off her suit jacket and leans back against the fabric seat of her car. It seems impossible that she might drive back to her office, where her assistant will be neatly feeding documents through a scanner and making sure there are two spaces after every period, or worse, to her home, where her morning coffee cup will still be in the sink, with no one to disturb her peace. She feels it as a personal betrayal. It is no longer just a case, a recalcitrant witness. She needs him.

  Adam Brooks comes out of the coffee shop and gets into an old Pontiac. He backs carefully out of his parking space. He turns right, then left at a stop sign, and he is gone. From the sound of it, he will have no one to tell about their meeting, no one to hear whatever version he might come up with to explain himself. Surely he is constructing it in his head, for his own benefit, even now. She has done it herself thousands of times. She has perfected the argument in her own defense, whatever she has done, and even now that she is alone, that has been the quiet end of her every day. But she would never do it—would she?—knowing it was wrong.

  It will be a long drive back, and there is much to do for Diego, but for a few more minutes, she sits under the desert sun, unable to put the car in gear. There is no conversation to have, no comment from a companion, or even from a stranger, to crystallize what has gone on. There is no one to see the map as she sees it, a sharp turn in the road. Even Diego will not see it; he is a point on the same map. It is this old building with its wooden siding and its swinging sign, the hot sun and the dust that witnessed it, and she is not ready to leave it just yet.

  Adam Brooks, 1995

  She is much more beautiful in person than he imagined she’d be. He isn’t sorry for thinking it, not even when he thinks of Angeline waiting for him in the hotel, because it is so obviously true. Of course she was always gorgeous on camera; he had seen her program more than a handful of times. But he had been sure that in person, her skin would be dull, her makeup disgustingly thick, her hair positively immobile. It isn’t so.

  He did not speak directly to her when the arrangements were made last week. A producer had called. That same producer, a young man in thick plastic glasses, is now showing him where to sit. There had been a brief discussion about whether it would be better to have him in the armchair, facing her like a celebrity guest, or at the desk to her left, like a commentator. It was decided that he should take the desk. It will be a short segment, and the topic is serious. He is not the story; he is the expert, the conduit of information.

  He had thought it was strange, at first, when the producer had said it was the treaty they wanted to talk about. He was proud of that part of his work, immensely so, but his involvement had been largely behind the scenes, and wasn’t widely known. It would have made much more sense if they’d called him to ask about the bombs themselves, or the underlying science. But they wanted what they wanted, and he knew what he was talking about either way, so he’d agreed. It wasn’t the kind of offer most people decline.

  The powder brush tickles as it sweeps over his forehead. It is not a sensation he is acquaint
ed with; he has always been a man who simply refused to be tickled. Even his son, after one attempt at the age of four, had understood that he was immune to that sort of thing. But now, this brush in the hand of the makeup girl has ruffled him. The muscles in his cheeks tighten without his directing them to do so. It’s all he can do to keep still, to prevent himself from twisting out of the way, from reaching up to swat the brush down. This girl doesn’t know him, of course, wouldn’t have any reason to see his reaction as a failure of character, as the breaking of a decades-long streak, but he doesn’t know who else might be watching.

  “It’s always the men who squirm,” the girl says. “Women are used to it. You’re all set.” She taps him on the shoulder, almost a little swat, a push, move along.

  The first part of the program goes by in a blur. The sort of organized chaos on the set is both familiar and foreign: everyone scrambles before a test, too, but the tone is nothing like this. Oddly, the tone was lighter, he thinks, when they were about to set off a bomb.

  On the producer’s signal, he slides into his place at the end of the desk. The makeup girl has swooped in and is taking advantage of this break to add powder to the anchor’s cheeks. She looks up and smiles at Adam. “Good to meet you,” she says, barely above a whisper. She flashes her dazzling smile. He nods. It’s warmer under the lights than he had imagined. It reminds him of the Nevada sun. And then everything shifts, and they are on the air.

  “Today marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Nuclear NonProliferation Treaty. The treaty was the result of a monumental diplomatic effort, and was an important step toward making us all feel a little bit safer from the threat of nuclear attack. Joining us to discuss this landmark event is physicist Adam Brooks, who both worked to develop these weapons and was active in the effort to limit their further use. Dr. Brooks, thank you for being with us.”

  “It’s good to be here,” he says, cribbing the phrase from thousands of TV guests before him.

  “You worked on developing the earliest nuclear weapons, like those we used to put an end to World War II. What motivated you to switch your efforts from development to restriction?”

  “Well,” Adam says, “I wasn’t there for the very first atomic weapons we developed and used.” He wonders if he could let the imprecision stand. But no, there will be people watching who will consider it dishonest. “I’m not quite old enough for that. My work has been primarily with the second generation. The hydrogen bomb.” She has her face arranged in a tableau of concern, but he detects a slight narrowing of her eyes.

  “Right,” she says, “of course.”

  “When the sense of urgency receded a bit, I think we all took a deep breath,” Adam says. “I was able to see a bit of the context of what we were doing.”

  “Tell us, Dr. Brooks, if you can, a little about the process of getting a treaty like this one in place. There’s diplomacy at the highest levels, behind closed doors. What is the involvement of someone like you, who comes to the table as a representative of the scientific community?” He watches her red lips as she speaks.

  “My role was mainly to communicate what I thought was possible,” he says. “What the worst-case scenarios looked like, what peaceful uses there might be for the technology, how fundamentally important it was that we do something to contain this beast that had been unleashed. I couldn’t claim to speak for the whole scientific community.” Then, impossibly, horrifyingly, she continues.

  “But you were the chief liaison between Los Alamos and Washington. When you came to those meetings, what was your approach?”

  His bladder feels very full. He wonders where she got her so-called information, if some newsroom intern handed her a set of index cards, or whether she did any of the research herself. It hadn’t occurred to him to verify their research skills. It was a major network. She was a famous anchor. He doesn’t want them to be angry with him, but he cannot let it stand.

  “I didn’t have an official role like that,” Adam says. “The lab sent leadership. Dr. Bradbury, for instance. I myself have not had the pleasure of meeting the President. The former President.”

  He sees her blink, surprised, but she doesn’t miss a beat. “What can you tell us about the significance of this treaty from a scientific standpoint?” He can smell his own sweat, soaking the underarms of his shirt.

  “I believe it’s a victory for scientists who see our work as understanding the world around us and improving our quality of life through that understanding,” he says. This is the phrase he has been repeating to himself for the last several days. “The lab’s weapons served a very important purpose, and our work continues to contribute to our lives in peace. Nuclear energy is the way of the future. Nuclear weapons are not.”

  “Without treaties like this one, would we still be here today?”

  “Who’s to say?” Adam says. “But I sleep a little better.”

  “Dr. Adam Brooks, thank you for joining us.”

  As soon as the clear signal comes, he is on his feet. “What in the hell was that?” He shouts at the producer.

  “You did fine,” the producer says. He gives a dismissive wave of his hand. Adam despises him.

  “Don’t you people do your research? Do you even have any idea who you’re interviewing?” He is facing her now.

  “We do the best we can with what we have,” she says with half a shrug. “Don’t blame my staff. This isn’t the easiest subject to research.”

  “I don’t want it shown,” he said.

  “We’re live,” the producer says. He cocks one eyebrow with such condescension that Adam has to clench his firsts to keep from taking a swing.

  “I want it pulled from any rebroadcast. I want it deleted from your archives.”

  “Lighten up,” the producer says. “We’ve had much worse. Such is television.” He looks from her to the producer and back again.

  “Sir, you need to get off the set,” the producer says. “We’ve got another segment in about a minute and a half.” So that was all; his work done, well or badly, the world was on to the next thing, and none of it was going to matter.

  Crawlspace

  When I pictured the wake, it was at the old house, though I knew perfectly well that he didn’t live there anymore and hadn’t for almost thirty years. I knew it would be in some funeral home on the outskirts of Los Alamos, that I would be staying in a Holiday Inn instead of my childhood bedroom, but still, my mental image of the event, from the moment the phone rang, had located it under the dark wooden ceiling of his house on Trinity Drive. He was my father’s father, my grandfather, though I’d never called him that, even as a child. He was instead, then and always, Adam Brooks, the great physicist.

  Just looking in the window I can tell that everyone in the funeral home has a PhD. I can see it in the awkward fit of their jackets. I could’ve stayed in New York; what did I want with a room full of people wailing over how brilliant and perfect he had been? But Robin convinced me: weddings, graduations, christenings, and big-ticket birthday parties can be skipped. A funeral can’t.

  It wasn’t the goodbye I was afraid of missing. I wouldn’t have minded never seeing him again. But this was the only chance I’d get to see his dead body lying in a casket, to be sure as you can only be when you’ve seen something with your own eyes. When I walk through the door, I march straight to him and feel a moment of profound, unabashed relief.

  Part of me wants to push my way right back out, having gotten what I came for. The room is hot and loud and smells heavily of cheap aftershave. I haven’t seen my family in a couple of years, but I don’t much want to. They’ve always followed Adam’s lead, and he never valued my talents. “Speed doesn’t solve problems,” Adam had said when I’d come home with a medal from the high school state championship. “It only makes it easier to run away.” My parents murmured their agreement. Even Katie couldn’t interrupt Adam when, at Thanksgiving the year I was twenty-four, he launched into an extended criticism of my triumphant first article in the
Times: those couldn’t possibly be the most illuminating quotations available, and who was paying me, anyway, the Democratic party, or a supposedly objective organization?

  It wasn’t a vendetta against me; even in my worst moments I will give him this much. I was just particularly prone to choices that Adam did not approve of, and particularly unwilling to give them up, so I took most of the beating, and I had no defender. But still, I couldn’t stay away. Since the news came, I have been harboring a small, foolish hope: maybe without Adam looming over us all, they will begin to understand me.

  When I summon the will to approach my family, standing in a little clump beside a gaudy flower arrangement, Katie bursts into tears and pulls me into a hug, the first I remember since we were children. Her hair is a steely gray now and she’s cropped it short. Her bony shoulders dig into my arms as I pat her awkwardly on the back.

  “You came,” she says. “Oh, Ben, we thought for sure we wouldn’t see you.”

  “Of course I came,” I say. Our parents greet me solemnly, tearily. They are too deep in their grief to say much. My father’s nose is running, and he seems to have stopped trying to keep up with it. My mother’s long gray hair is all in a tangle.

  The four of us stand together in the front corner of the room. The periodic approach of visitors alleviates the need for us to talk to one another, and anyway, I would want them to say things I know they won’t: He never was good to you. We’re sorry we had to choose. We’re sorry we always chose him.

  There are at least fifty people here, mostly scientists. In Los Alamos, even now when the lab has expanded to include other types of science, Adam’s contributions to atomic physics are akin to sainthood. Every word I overhear is a kind one: brilliant, unparalleled, groundbreaking. I recognize almost no one, though I do spot Carl Chesterfeld, a once-frequent visitor to Adam’s old house on Trinity Drive, where he had beckoned to me every time we met and produced a quarter from behind my ear. He smoked a pipe and always smelled of sweet tobacco. I see Mrs. Feeny, my ninth grade math teacher. Two of Katie’s friends from high school, recognizable through wrinkles and extra weight, are nibbling on cookies by the buffet. No one else looks familiar.