To get our bearings, first he has me shoot from a distance too great to reach my target. He moves forward twenty paces, while I load again—Kip has shown me how—and then look up at him.
—You’re too close now, move back, I shout.
—Go ahead and shoot, he answers, his voice reedy in the thin, still air.
—Move back.
He takes some steps backward, not many, and I shoot.
Nothing; a little dust kicks up off to his left and shy of where he stands.
—What’d I tell you? You’re wasting shells, he shouts out, his hands cupped around his mouth. —Shells-ells-ells echoes neatly down the steep canyon walls. I look up. The sun is retiring over the trees. A redtail hawk is ovaling back behind me toward the east. I reload. Kip has walked up much closer now, and all this begins to make me nervous. I’m thinking, How come we got to play this game? It isn’t very fun anyway. And what happens if I kill him?
—Come on, boy! Kip is calling, and I aim dead at his dancing figure. I can’t do it, begin to lower the barrel. He is hollering, —Pull that trigger, babyman, come on, pull! Up goes the barrel again, and I hold my breath, see Kip jumping up and down, eyes closed so the bird-shot doesn’t blind him, and we both know that unless my aim’s off this time he’ll get a pelting. I squeeze the trigger, recoil, smell the metallic smoke, hear the shotgun crack. It’s like it is not me doing any of this, like I am watching someone else accomplish it all.
Kip is on the ground. He’s screaming—kind of a high-pitched squeal I’d never heard him make before—and he is writhing. I am running to him. I’ve dropped the shotgun in the dirt. I’m afraid I’ve started to cry from fear, and my breath is heavy, my chest heaving by the time I reach him. His screams sound like laughs. His face is strangely smiling, but he’s not smiling. It’s a grimace. I guess I expected blood, and yet there isn’t any blood. His face is purple-pocked, and his shirt is torn. I try to put my arm around him, but he shoves me off. He doesn’t say anything to me. If he were to speak, I know it would be to scold me for crying like I am. His chest and cheek the most repulsive sight, a negative constellation of buckshot bruises.
The peppers game.
Kip has won.
He sits silent as a monk, then when he finally stands, his first words are, —Where’s the gun, little fella? It’s your turn now.
Born in a place set apart from the cultures surrounding it, we naturally developed a deep detachment, a separateness that all of us carried forward from youth into adulthood. Growing up as we did in the afterglow of genius, in a place whose triumph it was to create the finest death machine ever conceived by human beings, we expected that our games, games like peppers, games that involved defying injury on the monkey swing, games like the one we loved where we roller-skated as fast as we could down the sidewalk that approached Central School and crashed into the wall and fell down laughing so hard our sides ached, were all games that in their childish ways attempted to match the perils we surely sensed our parents—mostly our fathers—were courting day and night in their labs.
Kip and I had been too young, of course, to have registered what was happening on the Hill before the first bomb was detonated downstate at Alamogordo, and the dream of Trinity became in one bright instant on a predawn morning, after a long night of cold rain and driving winds, an actuality.
That was July 16th, 1945, 5:29:45 Mountain War Time. Dawn in which black became white, the white of absolute death, and then white became black, blacker than the black of Otowi glaziery, as the desert gave birth to a fiery tapbell, a flowering kale of light whose unprecedented pressure of a hundred billion atmospheres caved the earth in beneath the tower even while it disintegrated everything in its immediate path, caused a blind girl a hundred miles away for a moment to see its flash, and in a matter of instants changed forever the world back home at Los Alamos, not to mention the world beyond.
Like atomic particles, emotions have half-lives. Emotional climates linger, like radioactive clouds, in rooms where human beings have lived, fought and loved, eaten and shat, worked and slept. We’d grown up, Kip and I, inside an atmosphere changed and charged. We sensed—no, we knew—we were different from anybody who didn’t live on the Hill. Trinity only confirmed this difference. We had been delivered into the midst of a birth far more significant, profoundly more potent than our own. The principles and tenets of Nature herself were being tested. Mere unfledged babes, we were set forth in the shadow of something far greater than ourselves. And we knew it.
Who would have thought a community could become so prepossessed by the invention of a device that would supply neutrons to start a chain reaction of nuclear fission? It is no exaggeration to say that never in the history of modern man—possibly never in mankind’s history, period—has a collective of individuals lived together in such isolation, defined and motivated by such clear purpose, freed of distraction, fully focused on solving a single problem. It will never happen again.
My earliest impression about what it meant to split an atom was that the atom—which I mixed up with Adam, from my Sunday school lessons—preferred to remain whole, would never want to be broken in two, in the same way that Eve would probably not want to be halved like some circus performer laid out in a coffin-shaped box and—head sticking out one end, feet the other—sawn down the middle by some metaphysical magician in top hat and ratty tails. For me, then, the horrific, miserable explosion that resulted from smashing this helpless atom was a manifestation of its unhappiness. Poor Adam the atom! Your pain seemed understandable to me. Poor bantam building block, what had you ever done since the beginning of time and space to deserve such shabby treatment? After all, you were already the littlest thing in the universe—how cruel it seemed for people to want to make you tinier again by half. After all, when I asked my father what your name meant and he told me, That which cannot be cut, didn’t I shout it was wicked to harm you? Were I an atom and they busted me like they busted you, I felt I would respond with a similar burning rage. I, too, would burst into tears of fire.
Every schoolboy knows they call it a mushroom cloud, but every schoolboy who has ever considered the contents of his undershorts is also aware it looks like a penis, a phallus with thick stem and knolled head that swells and rises into the arched, indignant clouds above. One of our wickedest games of childhood was to pants some kid—pounce on him and pull down his pants—and then, once he was revealed for all the world to see, we could cry out, —Look here, look here, the boy’s got the bomb in his britches! This game gave us the greatest pleasure until one time the boy who had been pantsed responded, with what dignified calm he could summon, —That means if I piss on you, you’re gonna wither up and then you’re gonna start to glow and bleed green gunk all over the place and then you’re gonna die! And what did he do but lift his precious little member into his hands and direct it toward us, saying, —Oh, I think I got to pee, I think I got to pee bad now, I just can’t hold it anymore, and had us running in a scattered fury, still laughing, but not so confident we shouldn’t get some distance between him and ourselves.
Hurt and disgust live near one another, maybe they’re married. Both have, over the years, been occasional companions of mine. I wonder if they haven’t been constant friends to Kip. Many of us kids from up on the Hill share an understandable ambivalence about our home, where we came from, from whom we descended. They, our parents, were, then, the good guys, or at least that was how we saw them before we knew about them from more complicated angles, which forced us to recognize that they were also the bad guys. It was the moral conundrum that defined our home. Sure, they were duped and deluded. Sure, they were naive. You build a bomb for a government, you can’t expect the government not to use it. There was a war going on. Hitler was a monster, a brute with a black blot above the lip and pale palm thrust into the sky as if he were about to punish the earth itself with a hard slap. Hirohito was a demon surrounded by a band of suicidal fiends who loved nothing better than to raze and maim and send sle
eping sailors to watery graves. Mussolini was a bully and scoundrel, pig-eyed and bullet-headed. All three of them were burned in effigy down at the Santa Fe Fiesta each August during the war. Men set torches to the huge devilgod whose name was, by tradition, Zozobra—a creature of gloom and moral pollution, an icon of papier-mâché and chicken wire hung from a pole on a hill so to be seen by the thousands of fiestagoers—but who in those years was nicknamed Hirohitlmus. To the sounds of ritual drums, the flames consumed Zozobra’s gown and climbed through its loins and up its chest to its shoulders and then its head, sparks flying high into the night to join the stars, and soon enough, just as Christ died for man’s sins, this paper statue bristled, flared, crumpled, and finally died for mankind’s sadnesses.
Yet ritualistic bonfires were not enough. Zozobra was made of paper and wood and wire, but Naziism and its kin were forged of stronger stuff. The war blanketed the earth. The war bosses were going to take our lands away from us. This was what was faced, this is what we were told. Look at Poland, look at Pearl Harbor. Our boys were dying, they were killing and being killed. They were dying in foxholes, dying on the sands of beaches, dying in air, in fire, in water, elements passing back into the elements. They were being gored and flensed and gassed. They were being tortured, blitzed, mutilated. They were suffering across the continents. It was incumbent upon us now to make a torch that would burn the living Hirohitlmus beyond resurrection. Of a flame so hot it could sear those hearts of steel. And this was why our parents came to the Hill. The Germans had been experimenting with fission, had already split an atom of uranium. It was imperative to develop our bomb first and to deploy it before anyone so much as suspected we were in the nuclear business to begin with. Even if the Germans would ultimately surrender before the bomb was ready, and even if the Japanese were considered to be conquerable without the use of the bomb, it was as if what had been set in motion had assumed an inertia and life of its own—so that once it was proven and ready, the bomb simply had to be dropped, both of them had to be used, the plutonium and the uranium, as if new laws of momentum had been awakened together with all the other revelations that those on the Hill had witnessed. And to think, all of it had been accomplished in a bubble, behind a mask. No wonder the world was so surprised.
Before our fireball atomized shy lizards and blooming yuccas, sagebrush and coyotes of the flats at Alamogordo in the Jornada del Muerto, before word got out that there was a connection between what had happened down at Billy the Kid’s old stomping grounds and what had been going on in the secluded tranquility of Los Alamos, nobody understood what we were doing up on our magic mountain. But in Santa Fe the rumors about us had always been as plentiful as they were arcane. Some said we were building electric spaceships. Some said the Hill was a hideaway for pregnant WACs. Some believed we were engaged in making windshield wipers for submarines, or even constructing submarines themselves, rivergoing subs that, when finished, would travel down the Rio Grande into the gulf and on to the seven seas. Others, less inventive, thought we were manufacturing poison gas, yet others that we were distilling scotch, or that our enclave was really a posh internment camp for dangerous, dissident Republicans.
Stories about us Hill people kept the valley people busy. I imagine them sitting in the shade under the rough-hewn portals of the Palace of the Governors on the square in Oldtown, and discussing the curious spaceship people who hid high in their covert desert perch, studying comets and the movement of planets. It seems of a childlike charm, the notion of us Los Alamos hillies riveting tin like Mars-bound elves and fashioning silver nose cones and rocket wings, or as if we were a lost tribe of industrial zealots, innocent and harmless, tipsy with ideas if not our own bathtub brine.
It was the Trinity morning that gave us our public face, at last. We were the makers of death by light. It was as if we’d usurped for ourselves what had always been God’s right—to bring on the apocalypse. We didn’t need Him anymore, but could institute doomsday all on our very own. And we were proud about it. You don’t pinch the sickle right out of Death’s hands and establish yourself as a reaper of skill and consequence without feeling some tremor of vanity. Domus felix, it’s a happy house where Master grasps the greatness of his power. Our secret was known across the face of the earth. We were horrified, and yes, we were proud.
When I think of it now, I still can’t help feeling a wave of cynicism that has matured into a numb sadness over the years come urgent, thick, and finally smothering over me. I can be walking down a street in New York, making my way toward home, say, carrying a bag of groceries, and something, the cry of a baby or the weight in my arms, anything, will remind me of the paradoxical world into which I was born and at whose creative epicenter I was reared, and it makes me gasp for air. Hill people, valley people, what does it matter if gullibility remains unaffected by our environments? What a quaint appellation was Hill people for these bittersweet geniuses who were our parents, these brilliant naifs come to save the world, uninnocent innocents—as I came to see them—betrayed not just by the Truman administration but by their own love of a scientific challenge, a warm lust to push the envelope of theoretical and applied physics to the limit, as if to test its own tensile strengths, and all under the cloak of patriotism. Hill people, what a charming designation in which to frame our industrious little community. The Project and its Gadget, such dainty nicknames for what we did and built up in that windswept aerie during the war, the very war our somber, real work brought to its garish end.
As Kip once put it, —You can paste feathers on a snake, but that still don’t make it a bird.
So what am I doing here now? New Mexico has always been a difficult place for me to return to, however evocative were the views of the front range, the vistas out toward the Continental Divide seen this morning from oval windows of the little Beechcraft turboprop, destined for Santa Fe on the commuter flight down from Denver.
What am I doing here? A fair question.
The towering clouds convene, palatial over the mountains, and the back ranges of Colorado are mantled in late winter snow, the snow brighter than the cumuli, and we are skirting along just above the thick white, from time to time catching the thermals, which pitch the plane upward heavily and knock us into a crabwalk sideways before hefting us down again. In the foothills and into the higher valleys snow collects in drifts under the conifers, the green of the pines almost black. Tracery down in the iced fields resembles ebony capillaries in the white meat of the snow—trails made by deer, or deltas of cold water rushing down declivities beneath the slushy crust—and the massive, convoluted zinc ranges interrupt long flat stretches of a soft powdery pale brown. These valleys well below timberline are dusty already, even though it is early spring. Winding across them are trees that must be hugging rivers hidden in purple shadows. The blue mountains like a photograph of primordial ocean. The ridges are waves, the clouds spume, the houses small schools of square fish. And all of it, the turbulence of this ocean and the movement of the creatures in it, is as if locked in a continuous instant.
So beautiful, it makes me ache. How lucky you were, I think. To have grown up in a place of beauty so unbroken that it invited you to take it for granted. Lucky and unlucky. Once left, home becomes an impossible place. It wants you back, it wants you out. It pushes as hard as it pulls, like some mad gravity that resists the very mass physics demands it attract.
It is true I have missed this part of the world, more than I would want to admit. But what I have missed is the world itself, and not those in it, or those who were in it. That’s harsh, though. And then I’m thinking, Are you still the same unforgiving boy who abandoned so much, or so you flattered yourself, for an idea? Or, if not an idea—because I can hear Kip’s voice, even now as it challenges me—if not an idea, then what? —It was you, Brice, you and Jessica both. You gave me no choice, I hear you say, old Kip. You were both mine and then you weren’t mine anymore, so what did you expect me to do? She wasn’t yours any more than I was, I respond
without hesitation, even though I know we both were in your thrall, each of us in a different way. And I think, as my eyes come back into focus on the world outside the window, What would life have been like had I chosen to stay in New Mexico, live my years out in Los Alamos, or in Santa Fe, and let Kip go off to follow his fate alone? That is, let him follow it even more by himself than he did. I draw a blank. For one, I honestly cannot imagine for myself a life—here, there, anywhere—without Jessica and Ariel at its center.
Reddish black lakes the color of the water when rains have been heavy and rivers are dense with runoff, and another lake, man-made, whose color is celadon with a green-lace border where the shallows come up to the shore. It has the shape of a ginkgo leaf. Seems dead, a dead lake. I see narrow roads contoured into the sides of steep slopes. Not much sign of life on them this morning, but think what persistence it took to carry dynamite in on muleback to make the initial blasts, get the cliff-hung channels mined out, think of all the hard work to level out the strait passes. Men, always busy.
“You’re not really going, are you?” Jessica had said. “I mean, it’s obviously a hoax.”
“Hoax? why would it be a hoax?”
“I don’t know. What else would it be?”
That was the day before yesterday. The budding ailanthus and Norway maple out the windows of the apartment had shivered in the weak April breeze. The sky over Manhattan was that mid-season white, a ubiquitous, brutal light that blinds even as it fails to cast a shadow. It was a bleak day when I received the letter, an overcast that would neither snow, rain, nor shine. It was indeterminate, the weather, not cold enough to warrant wearing my overcoat, not warm enough for a jacket. I’d walked home from work. The letters on a small table by the door, as always. With no return address and written in a hand I had not immediately recognized, the envelope drew no attention to itself. It lay among the daily stack until after dinner. Some bills. Law review. Read a brochure for an ornithological excursion in Costa Rica, knowing I’d never go but daydreaming my way through the description of the rainforests, rare birds and their habitats. My consciousness still maundering over some photograph of colorful plumage, I had read half the letter before registering what it proposed. —Kip? I said.
Trinity Fields Page 3