by Rain, David
Everywhere I felt the press of strangers. Natives massed against me in promiscuous streets, and colonials slapped me on the back in clubs beneath laggardly, churning ceiling fans; I found myself driven along jungle tracks or taken shooting, or hauled off to brothels by planters who had heard I was a visiting writer. Dutifully, I investigated temples and palaces and travelled on trains past squalid shacks and dazzling lakes and lush terraced hills, but nothing could assuage the loneliness that gnawed at me like physical pain. I favoured hotels near the sea. At night, lying awake, hearing the moon tugging at the tide, I would feel as if my soul were driftwood, buffeted on the waves, and wish that one day I could be washed ashore.
In Bataan, shaving one morning, I saw that my face was bloated. My nose and cheeks were red, and my eyes looked boiled. Months had gone by. I was running out of money. I suppose I thought that if I kept close to Japan I was somehow tied to Trouble, revolving, if distantly, in his orbit.
At breakfast, I paid attention to the papers. The war in China had gone from bad to worse. For months, I had seen something strained in the faces of the colonials: the same fear, the same sense of an ending. Yamadori’s threats were coming true. All across the Far East, palm trees swayed, rice paddies gleamed, rains pelted down and were soaked up by the sun, and rickshaws clattered through stinking streets: all was as it had always been, yet something was over, as if a curtain had fallen.
I sailed home via Guam and Honolulu.
Arriving in New York one blustery afternoon, I realized a destiny that had lain in wait ever since I had taken my leave from Trouble at the temple of Shofuku-ji. When I reached Gramercy Park, there were lights on in the houses. Slowly, I ascended the steep steps. The butler, with oppressive deference, showed me into the drawing room. I felt I was expected.
Trembling, I looked about me: at Kate Pinkerton, like the figurehead of a ship, unchanged in all the years I had known her, swelling majestically over the tea table. At the ornaments, the glazed spines of books, the ancestral portraits. At the guests: the lady-librarian type, hair up in a bun; this or that society lady in too many pearls; the society gentleman, sleek and neutered, whose cheeks and chin appeared greased with oil. And there, standing at the fireplace, elbow on the mantelpiece at a jaunty angle, the guest who was not a guest at all. He filled my mind like a vision: thick blond hair, neatly parted; pale grey lounge suit, with trousers knife-edge sharp; cigarette burning in a laconic hand.
As I entered, he was deep in some anecdote, but he left off when he saw me. Kate Pinkerton cleared her throat, ready for introductions, but all I could do was stand, swaying a little, in the middle of the carpet, and say softly, almost to myself:
‘Trouble. You’ve come home.’
ACT FOUR
The Gravity of Americans
Trouble had said he would pick me up in Albuquerque.
Making my way across the army airfield on a cloudless day in early summer I saw no sign of him, and my spirits sank; Los Alamos was – what? – eighty, ninety miles away and I didn’t like the idea of arranging my own transport from this sleepy-looking base. The sun beat down hotly.
In the airfield’s only building, a long, low, galvanized-iron shed, a young sergeant with too many freckles stirred himself behind a counter that looked like a bar, saluted sloppily, and told me in a drawling voice that no, no sir, nobody had come for me. Grinning, he added, ‘You part of that show at Los Alamos, sir? What do you make up there – rockets to the moon?’
The fellow annoyed me, but I let him fix me coffee in a chipped enamel mug, while I sat and waited on a pew-like bench. Mechanics and a pilot came and went. Some stopped to chat with the sergeant, leaning, elbows crooked, across the counter, as if with tankards of beer; none paid attention to Major Sharpless and I had begun to wonder if Trouble would ever come when a vehicle squealed up outside, cheers broke out, and a voice I knew well cried in triumph, ‘Forward to victory!’
It had been the senator’s campaign slogan in 1928.
Colonel Ben Pinkerton (as Trouble now was) bounded into the shed. Immaculate in his well-pressed uniform, he remained lithe and slender, the hair visible beneath his cap still blond; only later did I see strands of grey and cracks in the skin around his eyes.
He pumped my hand enthusiastically, shouldered my knapsack, and led me out to the jeep.
‘I could have got a driver,’ he said, ‘but I thought it’d be better if we could talk properly. You’re looking good. The uniform suits you – Major Sharpless!’
As I hauled myself into the passenger seat, the mechanics, hunkered in a row by the shed, studied us idly; one, a sunburned fellow with a wrench in his hand, made some smart-aleck comment I did not quite hear. Trouble only smiled, flung my things into the back of the jeep, and blasted the horn three times as he tore out of the base with a spray of gravel.
‘Popular fellow, aren’t you?’ I observed.
‘It’s not about me. It’s Los Alamos. They’ve guessed something’s up and they’re dying to know. Some of the stories you wouldn’t believe – Flash Gordon, I tell you!’
We passed through a checkpoint and swung northwards. Trouble wore dark glasses and chewed gum. On an unpaved highway he put on speed, and I snatched off my cap before the wind snatched it instead. Dust churned under our wheels, and I had to shout, ‘So it’s some big scientific show, this place at Los Alamos? You’re up there all the time these days – and the senator too?’
‘Let’s just say we’re going to end this war – and soon.’
I had never doubted it. Already the Nazis had surrendered in Europe; Japan, after the firebombing of Tokyo, seemed hardly likely to hold out much longer.
I said, ‘Do you think the Japs ever really had a chance? They didn’t, did they?’
‘Remember Pearl Harbor? Remember Singapore? An Eastern country, raining down ruin on the Empires of the West! I wouldn’t bet it’s over yet.’
Often I had imagined the firebombing of Tokyo: the B-29s crossing the dark skies like monstrous, malevolent insects, the bombs pounding unceasingly, the fires rampaging, consuming mile after mile of flimsy wooden buildings. How many thousands had died in the inferno? Roads had become rivers of boiling tarmac. There had been no escape.
Once it would have seemed monstrous that such destruction should be unleashed upon civilians. Today, air raids were commonplace: Guernica. Chungking. London. Rotterdam. Berlin. Coventry. Dresden. The list went on and on. And Tokyo had been the worst so far.
We cut along Albuquerque’s broad, straight streets, then out again towards blue-green mountains. There was something fantastical in our surroundings, something unearthly, and I wondered what the senator and a scientific base could be doing in these ancient Indian lands.
‘You’re happy?’ I asked Trouble. ‘In your role now?’
‘Role? Well, I like that!’
He had said we could talk properly. I wanted to ask him why he had come home. He had never explained. In Japan, I had believed him when he said he had renounced America. Perhaps the threat of war, when he realized it was real, had shocked him at last out of his foolish course. But he had not only come back to America; he had returned to his family as if all had been forgiven. I wished I could see into his mind, his heart. Perhaps, if I worked slowly, carefully, I could make him reveal himself. But I was not sure how to start.
He asked after Aunt Toolie, and I told him she was still happily married. ‘They have a place up in Carmel – Wobblewood West! I’m going for a weekend – next weekend, in fact, if I still get that leave I’ve booked. I do get time off after looking over this base of yours, don’t I?’
Two days had passed since I received my summons.
I had been bewildered. ‘The senator wants me?’ I said. ‘But why?’
Trouble’s voice fizzed over long-distance wires. ‘Why do you think? A new job! How about that?’
For three years, nearly four, I had been deployed in propaganda. Trouble had secured me my commission, pulling strings in his new assig
nment as Senator Pinkerton’s right-hand man. When my papers came through I was overjoyed, imagining I would spend the war in Washington, DC, with Colonel B. F. Pinkerton II perhaps only a stroll away down Constitution Avenue.
I had been disappointed. I wrote recruiting copy in an office in New York, then army information manuals in Richmond, Virginia. In Los Angeles, seconded to Paramount Pictures, I script-edited war films and for a time served as publicity officer, and minder, for a Hollywood he-man; too drunk for the forces, he stumped back and forth across the country, selling war bonds.
The road climbed between rocks and pines.
We had just turned a corner when the bright day shattered. First came the report, sharp as a whip crack but twice as loud, then the streak through the air, zinging past my ear.
‘Duck!’ cried Trouble, and I jerked back.
He accelerated wildly. Another whip crack sounded. Dust whirled up from beneath our wheels. I was almost tossed from the jeep. Crouched low, I clung to the edge of the door as we squealed around bend after remorseless bend, pain stabbing through my damaged leg with every lurch and jolt. The desperate ride had begun so suddenly; it was as if we had plummeted from one world into another, a world of wild caprice where nothing mattered but speed and flight. We almost hurtled over the edge of a cliff.
When we slowed at last, Trouble arched back his neck and I saw his Adam’s apple straining in his throat. Whether he was frightened, I could not be sure. Flushed, I clambered back into my seat.
‘What was that?’ I asked, when I could speak again.
‘Sharpless, please’ – he turned to me, earnest – ‘don’t tell the senator. Please, just don’t.’
‘What?’ I said. ‘I don’t even know what happened!’
He put on speed again. I feared he would say no more, but after I had sat in silence for some moments, numb with shock, he said flatly, ‘Sniper in the rocks. Must I spell it out?’
‘Well, yes. Why do I get the feeling this has happened before?’
‘Just don’t tell the senator. Please, Sharpless.’
We drove on down the dusty road.
Los Alamos lies on a verdant mesa some seven thousand feet above sea level. The first sentry post had been several miles from the base, a stripy barrier beside a hut stuck alone in the woods, where two crew-cut privates loitered on duty, rifles at the ready. Closer to the base came two further checkpoints: gates in fences topped with wire, opening the way to a collection of huts and hangars sprawled across the mesa like a boomtown on Mars.
‘Main Street,’ Trouble announced as we passed between stores and bars. Another jeep, driven by a corporal, nosed by us with a honk; a becalmed truck, juddering smokily, with a cargo of crates stamped us army, blocked half the road; men, some uniformed, some in lab coats, and one or two secretarial-looking women crossed Main Street here and there, but the place had about it a sense of sleepiness, as if, in these weird mountain lands, human imperatives could not count for much. None of this is permanent, the mesa seemed to say; boomtowns turn into ghost towns soon enough.
The base, Trouble informed me, had been built on the site of a school for boys called the Los Alamos Ranch School. Commandeered by the military some years before, the original school, with its stately timber buildings, could be glimpsed between the mean, low clutter that had overwhelmed it.
‘You can bunk with me,’ he added, pulling up beside a low galvanized-iron hut. Our route had taken us some distance from Main Street, weaving between lines of similar huts, and I wondered how I would ever find this one by myself. The ground outside was dusty, deeply rutted. Duckboards did service for sidewalks; laundered clothes, unstirring in the heat, hung on lines between the huts, and electricity poles jutted untidily skywards.
‘You’re not telling me the senator lives in one of these places?’
‘Don’t be silly. The VIPs are in the old school buildings. Not for us, alas. Space is tight up here.’
We made our way into a single-room apartment. The heat under the tin roof was savage. Sunlight pressed behind a drawn blind, and two metal cots, made up precisely, stood side by side; there were lockers and simple chairs, but no strewn magazines, no empty beer bottles, no ashtrays filled with butts. On the sill beneath the window was the room’s sole ornament: a twist of branch with two jutting twigs, a desiccated piece of debris retrieved, perhaps, from a desert roadside.
‘This one’s yours.’ Trouble thumped down my knapsack on a cot. ‘Tonight, it’s dinner with the senator. But you’ll want to wash up, I guess. I’ll show you to the showers.’
‘Shouldn’t you tell me what all this is about?’ I said.
‘What, and steal the senator’s thunder?’
Curiosity consumed me, but when I returned from the showers Trouble had vanished, leaving a message in neat handwriting, telling me that something was up – some sudden duty – and our dinner must be postponed. I found it strange to think of Trouble as an important, responsible man.
That night I found my way to the mess hall alone, and had applied myself to a surprisingly edible rabbit stew when a fellow across the table said to me, ‘I know you. You’re one of us.’
The voice suggested Brooklyn, and the face that blinked into mine belonged to a journalist I had met some years back, a plump, round-faced fellow who looked perpetually eager to please, like a schoolboy stabbing up his arm to answer questions in class before any other pupil had a chance.
‘Sharpless, ain’t it? I’m Miller, remember? You’ll be replacing McKenna, then?’ he asked me.
I suppose I looked blank.
‘Tell you fuck-all, don’t they?’ cracked a dishevelled, rangy fellow who bore some resemblance to the actor Robert Mitchum, complete with waggling, ill-made roll-up in a corner of his mouth. ‘And once you’re here, you can’t go back. Unless you do a McKenna.’
‘Can’t?’ I said. ‘What is this place, a prison?’
‘Hush-hush. Stands to reason, don’t it? McKenna, he went loopy. Let’s hope you don’t do the same.’
‘Raving, tearing his hair,’ said Miller. ‘This foul-mouthed bastard’s Meyer, by the way – and that one,’ he added, pointing to a young man with thinning blond hair and round gold-rimmed spectacles, ‘is Maybee – Miller-Meyer-Maybee. Think of us as the Andrews Sisters. Maybee’s LaVerne.’
‘Yes, quite an amusing little corps we are,’ said Maybee in a Boston Brahmin voice, looking me over with patrician eyes. ‘I prefer to call us the End of the World Archivists – I’m an historian,’ he explained, not without pride, and asked me what my own ‘discipline’ might be.
‘Propaganda, ain’t it?’ said Miller, and Maybee, somewhat sourly, pursed his lips.
‘Nobody’s told me a thing yet,’ I said. ‘I’m not even sure what all this is for.’
Meyer, or Robert Mitchum, laughed. ‘Fucking hell, you really haven’t heard of the Manhattan Project?’
Maybee rolled his eyes. ‘It is secret, isn’t it?’
‘What’s going on in Manhattan?’ I said, foolishly.
‘Not Manhattan – here! It’s a code name.’ Meyer called down the refectory table, ‘Hey, fellas, this fucker don’t know about the Big One!’
‘The Bomb.’ Miller puffed out his plump cheeks, then expelled a spitty explosion. Droplets sprayed my face. ‘It’s the ultimate weapon, ain’t it? Ming the Merciless! Just one and we can flatten a city. Enough of them, we can wipe out the world.’
Startled, I looked between grinning faces.
‘I told you,’ said Maybee, ‘we’re the End of the World Archivists.’
‘End of the Japs, anyway,’ said Miller.
‘Hah! If the fucking thing works,’ said Meyer.
‘It will,’ said Maybee. ‘And take the world with it!’
Meyer spat on the floor. ‘I’ll believe it when I see it. The cash they’ve wasted on this thing, you wouldn’t fucking believe,’ he said to me. ‘Billions! And all because of some rumour the Krauts were building one too. So we had to get there fir
st.’
‘But the Germans have surrendered,’ I said.
‘Noticed that, did you?’ said Miller. ‘He’s sharp, this one!’
I wanted to know more, but a girl appeared between Meyer and Maybee and asked, with a hand on the shoulder of each, if they would be at the dance that night. Meyer offered up his Mitchum smirk – ‘Sure thing, honey’ – and Maybee, who seemed awkward with women, blushed bright red.
I thought I might as well go to the dance. Confused thoughts filled my brain as I tagged along after Miller-Meyer-Maybee. In a noisy hall, leaning against the bar, I drank too many beers and watched the base’s too few girls whirling in the arms of excitable young men. I wished they would dance to something other than Miller’s namesake. Glenn Miller was missing; his plane had vanished somewhere over the English Channel, but still he haunted every jukebox in America, a ghost pressed into wax. Again and again a girl punched in the numbers for ‘Yes, My Darling Daughter’, and no one seemed to mind.
Maybee turned his attentions to me. And was I, he asked, the Sharpless who had worked with that left-wing photographer fellow, Augustus Le Vol? He said he had one of Le Vol’s books at home, and I was surprised: I had not thought the Boston Brahmin would take much to Le Vol’s work, but it seemed he admired him aesthetically, if not politically.
‘So what’s Le Vol doing in the war? Still a red?’
I wished I could change the subject. There was nothing to say: Le Vol had sailed to China and never come home. I had tried and tried to find out what had become of him, but Le Vol, like Glenn Miller, might have vanished into the air. If he had stayed on in China, I only hoped he had kept out of Japanese hands. After Pearl Harbor, with the American fleet safely out of action, a lone white man in East Asia would have been in constant danger. Le Vol might have been in a prison camp or dead.