—Come on, he said, and I followed him through the front doors and down a flight of stairs and then another until we were in the basement, which was a long hallway with rows of parallel ducts and conduits hung precariously from the ceiling and with discarded desks and chairs, antiquated electronic equipment and other ditched junk in the corridor. The lights blinked and hummed as I followed Epstein down toward one end. —Look at this, Brice, he said, pointing to a small sticker on the metal door, yellow and black, DANGER, RADIOACTIVE MATERIALS, it read. —Did you know that Fermi once looked out his window on the seventh floor and said, “Imagine, a little bomb like that would make all this disappear”?
I said I did, but I didn’t. Not really.
We walked upstairs and found his old office, the door locked.
—You know what I think we ought to do someday?
—What?
—I think we ought to blow this place up.
—You’re kidding, I said.
He slapped my back and said, —Maybe so.
Pupin Hall did become his prey for a while after that, though. We rallied in front of its doors, hassled students entering and leaving, told them to wake up, urged them to cut class and join us. Epstein was eloquent about the nuclear deterrence charade, the world sitting on a bona fide time bomb, how there was no such thing as conventional war anymore because of what had happened up at Los Alamos, how we were headed on a direct course to Armageddon in Indochina because we weren’t going to win and when the hard-liners down in Washington finally saw that a ground war wasn’t going to bring us victory they would have to trundle out the bomb. —They threatened to use it in Korea, didn’t they? Hanoi is the future Ground Zero, he said, and went on to say how Hanoi would be the third and last city we were ever going to get to take out, because after that every intercontinental ballistic missile in every Soviet silo was going to light up in retaliation, and we would have to put all our birds in the air, too. —Hiroshima, Nagasaki, Hanoi, he said. —Those’d be the three cities kids would read about in their history books, the three cities America burned down clean with the bomb, except that there won’t be any history books and there won’t be any kids to read them, because it’s not 1945 anymore, it’s 1965 and we’re not the only bastards on the block with a mean streak and an inflated sense of self-worth. To quote from the SDS position paper, the “Port Huron statement” of three years ago, “Our work is guided by the sense that we may be the last generation in the experiment with living.” We can wish that this weren’t the situation, but it is. And if you and you and you and I can’t change it, then nobody will. That’s our challenge, and this is our time.
We had not been to the barricades together yet, the thousand police it would take to quell us several years hence were not even imaginable. Our major initiatives were still ahead of us, up there in our future, our soon-to-be past. I was untried, and potentially untrue, but I was willing and able. One could feel the sides becoming more entrenched even though Vietnam was, in the wake of Johnson’s continued expansion of the war effort, still a relatively unheralded adventure. Informants had begun to abound on and around the campus. An atmosphere of ferocity tempered by paranoia settled in upon all of us. Epstein, whom we naturally followed during his season (others would rise and disappear, some jailed, others disaffected), was as ascetic a guru as I would meet during those months; ascetic and potentially violent. He was bright and alive, and made those around him live more vividly or else move on. It is this aspect of the antiwar movement I remember as well as the occupation of buildings, the riots. The soldiers had their comradeship, we had ours. When all was said and done, I wondered whether we activists weren’t closer in spirit to the soldiers off in the field than those same soldiers were to the politicians who conspired to send them to Vietnam in the first place.
My life developed into a duplicity. Or rather, a triplicity. There was my new life among fellow activists. There was my life led at the edge of Kip and Jessica’s romance. And then there was the life I led with myself, by myself, often at odds with myself.
Brice—me, myself, and I—Brice living his own life was a person who wrote from time to time letters to his mother, letters that may have distorted the truth about what he was doing in New York and at school but did so only in order to insure her happiness. This is what he told himself. “Dear Mom,” this Brice would write, “things are going so well here, I can hardly tell you, learning so much each day, Kip doing all right too, both of us have made some interesting new friends, I think you would approve. Of course I miss you and I miss our beautiful mountains and the clean air, which I’d trade any day for these gray skyscrapers and brick canyons and the putrid stench that sometimes settles in on the island, but it is good to be here, and many are the times I walk down the streets and think of you and Dad here, back before I was born, and it makes me happy to think of that. I love you and send you hugs, Brice.”
Maybe my letters weren’t quite that maudlin and stilted, maybe they were somewhat more cunning—Mother probably still has them in a shoe box somewhere if I ever wanted to know for sure—but the mistruths they attempted to convey were at least this venial. Sometimes, when I wrote her, I would reread what I’d written and then, nauseated by my shallowness and insincerity, crumple the paper into a tight ball and bury it deep in the garbage, down under tea leaves and cantaloupe rinds, both out of a sense of personal disgust and in the hope that Kip would never find it. Travesties, I would scold myself, nasty horrid vain pathetic travesties. Most of the time, though I knew she deserved better, I went ahead and sent them anyway. Surely she didn’t believe half the words I wrote, but her return letters were equally cheerful and more cheering since less artificial. And her hand, that of a schoolteacher’s, gave me great comfort to look at. She represented home at its best.
Indeed, the only times I could read the words Los Alamos and not feel my stomach begin to sour were when they were part of the return address on the envelope of her letters.
I am thinking about her as I walk. The town has changed and grown. And she has grown old and changed with it, though towns don’t grow old as fast as the souls that build them. I am here in Los Alamos, I think. Here I am in Los Alamos, poplar hill.
The Hill, I think.
“The fucking Hill,” I say.
No one hears me and I walk on.
“The motherfucking Hill.”
No one there, no one responds.
What am I doing? Chants, chanter, chants is what you are up to. You’re trying to incite your own little riot. But it isn’t happening, you aren’t able to multiply yourself into many selves, like Vishnu, and then storm the barricades. You’re just Brice. Just one William Brice, eldest son of Mr. and Mrs. McCarthy, brother of Bonnie Jean, once best friend of Kip Calder, husband of Jessica Rankin and father to Ariel Rankin, daughter who carries her mother’s name rather than that of her father because that is the way things go in this world where everything is physics and physics proclaims everything to be nonlinear, of fractals and fuzzy logic and chaos, and chaos theory proposes that the universe is subject to a dynamic known as the butterfly effect—if a butterfly flutters its wings today in Tokyo, it will affect the weather next month in New York. All is elastic as warm taffy, all is connected, nothing is independent. They have people up here working on this stuff day and night. Chaos management. I can almost hear the computers humming under my feet, because they’re there, tunnels and subterranean laboratories with sleek equipment—nothing medieval or Frankensteinian—rather postmodern, values and numbers conversing among themselves across the placid faces of microchips. Nine hundred million dollars a year put in here still. There’s a reason the streets are so clean and the sidewalks so tidy, why the businesses are bustling. Los Alamos seems as friendly and normal a town as you’d ever want to visit, and in so many ways it is. With street names like Peach and Nectar, Iris and Myrtle, how could one expect it to be otherwise?
Her cottage is just that, a cottage. An adobe box is what it is, with flat roof
and copper spouts to drain rainwater at either corner. The windows are armored with decorative black grilles. The small yard is fenced and its grass is patchy. The adobe is in need of fresh whitewash, though I thought I had paid a bill just last year to have that job done. On the porch, in a wooden trough-box, not geraniums and dusty millers, but a phalanx of golden chrysanthemums. Something new. The latch on the gate is locked, and so I walk around to the side, but neighbors’ chainlink fences do not permit me access to the back so I brace my hand on the lintel of one of her fence posts, which comes to above the hip, and leap over into her yard, feeling altogether the intruder that I am.
Bonnie Jean might have been right. Probably I should have let her phone ahead, given Mom the opportunity of not being shocked by my sudden, unannounced arrival.
I needn’t have worried. She opens the door before I make it halfway across the hard lawn, and says, “Brice, how nice of you to come over.”
“Hello, Mom,” I say.
She smells of pipe tobacco, which gives me a sort of comfort. Her rooms are small and tidy. Maybe Bonnie hasn’t replicated her mother with such slavish perfection as I’d thought. Mother is frailer, and her eyes have that milky glaze of incipient cataracts. But she is a strong old lady who gives me a hug. My fear that she would not recognize me was time wasted. I also notice the fresh lipstick and powdered nose and realize my sister had done as she pleased. For a moment I’m angry, then think, This is their world, their rules apply here. And the anger is gone.
“Let’s have a drink,” she says.
Her bottle of Tanqueray stands on the table next to a glass, and her clay pipe is beside it in an ashtray. There is her Bible, opened to the First Epistle of Paul to the Corinthians. Her flowers out front may have changed but little else has, it would appear. For the next several hours I will act as audience to a rambling, provocative, even inspired discourse on the history and nature of the Pauline epistles. From aspects of Aphrodite worship in Greece to the escape from Damascus, from the troubles with heathenism and Greek asceticism to Paul’s thought about the role of women in the church—I listen to my brilliant, balmy mother range her fields of interest. The gin flows and the room fills with smoke. She pauses from time to time to ask about Ariel (“Does the poor girl ever see the inside of a church?”) and then picks up where she left off, sometimes stopping to ask me what did I think about that—what did I think about the theory that Saint Paul suffered from epilepsy, for instance? When I tell her that I haven’t given the matter much thought, she tells me I ought to read the Bible more often.
There is structure to her dialogue, but it works its way along through a complex series of stitches, thinkings and rethinkings. The gin makes no obvious impression on her, neither speeds her up nor slows her down. She has matured into a splendid character, perhaps not as sad as I’d thought, and by the time evening comes I find myself thinking, I am glad I have come here if only for these couple of hours with her.
The telephone rings and I answer. It is Bonnie Jean. “How’s it going over there?” she asks.
“We’re having a wonderful reunion,” I say.
“Are you going to want to stay here tonight or with Mom?”
I haven’t thought about this. I’d thought, in fact, to return to Santa Fe for the night. But given that tomorrow’s the day, there seems no reason to circle back to Michael and Alyse’s when I could just as easily leave from here.
“Does she have room for me?”
She’s overheard, and says, “Plenty of room here, Brice. You stay here and tell your sister if she and the rest of them want to come to dinner, it’s fine with me.”
I begin to repeat to Bonnie Mother’s offer, but she cuts me off. “You two go on with whatever you’re doing,” she says. “Is she still in Corinthians right now?”
“She is.”
“Corinthians Two?”
“One,” I say.
“I’ll talk to you later, Brice,” she says.
“Later.”
Mother, lovely wisps of white hair curling about her ears and shoulders, is telling me that though the speeches of Apollos might have been more elaborate than those of Paul, there was something to be said for the power of crudity and plainness. Apollos was the lesser orator because he could only be articulate, whereas Paul could be both elegant and unpolished in the same breath.
She has some pasta in the cupboard. I put on water to boil. I tell her to keep on talking.
“It is interesting, isn’t it, Brice?” she asks.
“It is, Mom.”
“What are you doing?”
“I’m going to make us something to eat before this gin sends us both to heaven.”
She is relighting her pipe when she says, between draws, “If you could get to heaven on gin, I’d already have booked passage a long time ago. But Brice?”
“Yes?”
“Did you know that Corinth was the home of Sisyphus?”
And she was off into her bedlam of mythology once more.
How it came to pass that I have no photographs of Kip is beyond me. Certainly photographs were taken. I can easily imagine one when our families visited Mesa Verde together during the summer of 1957. Kip and I at the foot of a long, lashed ladder, our arms over each other’s shoulders, straw hats. Watches, I believe, with flexible silver bands that dug into the wrist, matching watches whose faces caught the sunlight and flashed back at the camera, making it look like we held small suns in our hands. We two browned by summer stood against the blanched stonework of Cliff House. I envision him now as possessing marvelous and intricate crow’s-feet spreading like fans at either edge of his eyes. Maybe some smile lines, maybe not. The skin under the eyes would be limpid, possibly sallow. He was always stronger than his size might convey. Narrow shoulders, indeed the shoulder blades were pronounced and his chest was rectangular. Kip had long arms, which swung with characteristic ease at his sides when he walked, and his wrists seemed if anything too thin for his hands, which were as large as those of a workman—veins standing high between and behind the knuckles that, when we were kids, were often bruised, or cut, from the extravagance of our activities. Wide feet, and long, too—and if I remember right, yes, ankles thin just like the wrists.
Kip was as fragile as he was sturdy. As for myself, I have always been less fragile, less sturdy, and even now live in the commodious in-between. I look at my wrists and hands and see that they are of a more harmonious (or, rather, common) symmetry; I see that my fingers are neither too long nor short, but average and proportional. When I study myself in the mirror—something I seldom do, by the way; makes me feel uncomfortable—I see a man of certain purpose and energy, right there on the pivot point where youth is behind but old age is still ahead. I am in good health, good form. Lord knows I don’t do anything to keep myself fit.
—In the genes, my father’d have said if he could see me, and no doubt he’d have disapproved of my easygoing inertia. He was always the active one, the winter skier, the spring hiker, the summer rider. I’m more like Mother, I suppose, given to bursts of mental activity combined with stretches of physical indolence. My father liked to work standing in the lab, read and wrote standing—just as Karl Marx did when writing Das Kapital, as he was fond of reminding me.
—The Reds stand, we can stand, too, he’d say.
I tend now to the sedentary, and when I walk in the city I prefer to amble. Jessica has long since given up walking with me. I hold her back. She and Father would have gotten along famously as walkers if they’d ever had the chance. The stroke that brought my father down was enveloped in its own ironies. But though his regimes of exercise didn’t save him from his own dying heart—given where he lived and worked, I’m surprised cancer didn’t find him first, in the way it found so many of them who worked up here on the Project, playing with radioactivity before its effects on the human cell were fully known—I don’t fool myself into believing that by taking a different approach to diet and health (my approach is to ignore such matters) I ha
ve any better chance than my father had of tricking death into some delay.
And as for Kip? There is no telling what his genetic fate had in store for him. His parents’ death in the accident precluded our ever knowing how long a natural life they might have enjoyed.
I remember the night Kip was orphaned. Why does it come to mind just now? Because they were in the same car the night they died as they’d been in when we caravaned to the Four Corners and Mesa Verde.
Like all the accidents that descend upon us, this one seemed inadvertent, though maybe more cruel in its timing and circumstances than any I had known before, harsh and meaningless. And yet it is so meaningful in its absence of valuable meaning. So long ago and still rife with paradox. It was catalytic. I speculate that his father had suddenly diagnosed what Kip’s blue pony meant, figured it out in a deeper way than I had, and hoped to dissuade him. This may be a romanticization of their purpose in coming east, however. The engineering department at the university had been the recipient of significant grants from the Atomic Energy Commission and had begun to expand its nuclear science programs. The dean was recently quoted as having said, “Technology is liberal arts.” Maybe Kip’s father was thinking of leaving the Hill for academia, just as my father threatened to do every so often. Of course, I will never know. But I do know that it seemed to me at the time they were doing nothing else but being parents who loved their wayward son, and were on their way to be supportive of him, on their way to New York to visit him. They were coming, and though Kip had been a model skeptic, he had not been able to betray—by my sights—his subdued joy at the prospect.
They were in Pennsylvania or New Jersey or somewhere. They talked to me when they telephoned, since Kip wasn’t in. I found myself wondering what they would look like in New York, as opposed to on the Hill, but try as I might I couldn’t picture them here.
—How’s the weather there, Brice? Emma Inez asked me.
—Okay, I said.
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