Gilligan's Wake: A Novel

by Carson, Tom

  While I had a fine time at Los Alamos, I often felt under-used—though hardly under-using, so to speak, at least by the measure of a gallery of gaping mouths, thrust-apart thighs, and sleepily blinking, monocular buttocks that stretches, in my memory, as far into the distance as the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. My mental palace drew fewer visitors, however. In our theoretical discussions, to my mute disgust, one or another of the refugees was always hauling out a letter from Niels Bohr or an overexposed in-both-senses prewar snapshot of himself sitting uncertainly with Heisenberg in some drab mittel-Europa chophouse as if that settled everything. Despite the scallop-edged Kodak of the three-seater I kept pinned inside my own trunk, which after all represented something I had done rather than merely vaunting my social connections, my relative lowliness on the scientific roster prevented me from taking either a hand or a stand as often as I might have liked. In fact, my single most memorable contribution to the Manhattan Project came after our strictly scientific work was done. Once Hiroshima had crowned our endeavors with such an extraordinary first success, War Department and White House alike were frantic to drop our only other working bomb somewhere, anywhere—so long as it was in Japan, obviously. (Or perhaps not: there were scattered votes for Winnipeg, for the sheer deliciousness of the surprise of it, and one for San Diego, where the colonel in question had recently picked up a nasty case of the clap.) If it was to be done at all, it had to be done quickly, before the Japanese had time to pick themselves up, dust themselves off, and surrender.

  Along with the other interested parties, we in Los Alamos had been asked for our recommendation on the most promising metropolis that a single B-29 could obliterate in less time than it took “to fill up that Jeep out there with gas,” which was Edward Teller’s favorite way of putting it. The list of guidelines sent from Washington included a reminder that the photographs and films of the great event would probably still be getting reproduced half a century hence, perhaps in media as yet uninvented; in other words, it would be nice if the pictures were good, those from the first explosion having been distinctly subpar.

  At the final meeting in Quonset One, pacing back and forth before a wall map of Japan, Oppenheimer had predictably begun to dither, with maundering the inevitable next step. In his hand, as usual, he held a bit of chalk; at one point, he disconcerted everyone in the room by placing this object in his mouth while querulously asking for a light. All present were dreading the moment when he’d quote the Bhagavad Gita again.

  “Maybe,” he was saying, “we should recommend against dropping it—dropping it anywhere at all! Or find some uninhabited atoll—-some uncharted desert isle, whatever.” Removing the chalk from his lips, he cast his eyes up to the heavens, where only a ceiling fan revolved. “My God, I can’t even think about this without wanting to throw up…”

  A few people, colonels and physicists alike, exchanged alarmed looks. Was that last bit from the Bhagavad Gita? No one knew, but the throb in Oppenheimer’s voice spelled danger. Leaning casually against a wall, still feeling a pleasurable tingle from the moderately unattractive WAC who had rejoiced to find herself up-ended and mined as briskly as Colorado atop a crate of uranium samples a quarter of an hour before—straightening the seams on her thick legs, she had just entered the conference room with another message from Washington pressing us for a decision, thus bringing the memory back to mind—I suddenly recalled the old children’s game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey, which I had never played but often witnessed. Taking half a dozen decisive steps forward, I hurled my shapeless lab coat over the startled Oppenheimer’s head, spun him around three times, and shoved him at the wall map chalk in hand. Having made contact, he removed the improvised blindfold, and bent in close to learn what city he’d marked.

  “ ‘Na-ga-sa-ki,’ “he read slowly, sounding somewhat shaken from the ordeal he’d been put through. “Oh, well—Scheiss, if I may quote my father briefly. At least we can all pronounce that one.” Tossing the chalk over his shoulder, he started toward the door. “Honestly,” he said, pausing and shaking a finger at us, “it was damned embarrassing, how long everyone around here went on saying Hee-roe-SHEE-ma.,’ not ‘Hi-rosh-ima.’ And yes, I know some of us don’t speak English all that well, and wouldn’t need to speak it at all if it weren’t for Adolf Hitler. But we’re all starting from zero when it comes to Japanese, and there’s no excuse for us to mispronounce the names of major cities. Absolutely no excuse—no excuse at all. Good day, gentlemen,” he said, throwing the lab coat back at me.

  The door closed on Oppenheimer, leaving behind a group of conferencing confreres in a state of high satisfaction, or at the very least relief. Every last one of them was grateful to, and quite probably almost unbearably aroused by, a slim young man now leaning casually against a wall again, who had recognized his true vocation at that moment. What the last two minutes had taught me was that I could think outside the confines of physics, or indeed any other scientific discipline to which I might yet apply myself—and I might yet apply myself to them all.

  I had just learned that I was a genius at problem-solving.

  Up to then, the prospect of peace had held few charms for this particular contributor to the war effort, not least because it would cut off the steady supply of thick-ankled or slope-shouldered WACs I had grown used to in Los Alamos—as well as of excitingly sullen, grudgingly compliant male draftees, some of whom had noticeable skin conditions. Indeed, enjoying my New Mexico life as I did, I had hoped the Japanese would be fanatical enough to keep fighting even after we had dropped twenty, thirty, forty bombs, as fast as we could build them. Given their militarism and generally perverted values, it hadn’t seemed beyond the realm of possibility.

  Yet Washington now cried out for a mind like mine, perhaps more loudly than it knew. Unpinning the Kodak of the three-seater from my footlocker, I followed Oppenheimer to the new Atomic Energy Commission, whose head he had been appointed. “Bring that old lab coat of yours, too. We may need it again,” he told me upon inviting me to join him, in the bleakly facetious manner he now adopted for any and all conversations. With a hearty laugh—he was still my boss, after all—I did.

  At a White House reception on Hiroshima’s second anniversary for those of us who’d played a role in the Manhattan Project, Eleanor Roosevelt’s handshake was distinctly tepid. Perhaps the late President’s widow had been unfavorably comparing her own over-dentitioned homeliness to the allure of the brainy young buck before her, reeking with animal magnetism as the thought-storms crackling in his eyes exposed his air of diffidence for the charade it was. Or perhaps, however startlingly, not, for soon afterward, to my perfect horror, I overheard her fluting voice say this to another guest—not one of us, but a female journalist and gadabout who went by the peculiar name of Clare Wilkes Boothe Luce Quilty:

  “Oh, don’t misunderstand, Clare,” said Mrs. Roosevelt; “I’m certain it was necessary. I pray that it was, since it was so horrid. But at least now it’s done, and perhaps we can find our way back to the business of being the good old America that we might have stayed all along, slowly learning how to be better to one another, if it hadn’t been for Mr. Hitler and Pearl Harbor.”

  Remote as they were from my own concerns, and rocking quietly as they did in odd corners of her husband’s splendid dynamo, Mrs. Roosevelt’s well-known array of well-intentioned hobbyhorses had never impressed me unduly. Until that moment, however, I had not known she was mad. Back to business? We were in business. Glancing at the astonishing array of talent around me—the scientists, the generals, the bureaucrats, the contractors—I could feel my lustrous, tousled hair stand on end at the thought of such a team being disbanded. As indeed it might be, if the wrong advice reached the still shaky Harry Truman’s all too susceptible ears.

  Bantam-sized and crisply featured, as Missourian as a Milk Dud, he himself was across the room, listening in more or less the manner of that character in Steinbeck who wants to hear about the rabbits as a top-lofty Averell Harriman desc
ribed some great event in which all had gone well once FDR had taken Averell’s advice. Having been an awestruck, gliding eavesdropper to an earlier onslaught of auto-Harrimania, I knew I could count on this lasting a while.

  Unobtrusively slipping out and padding swiftly down corridors whose layout I seemed to know in my blood—have I mentioned that my grandfather, a born tinke rer like myself, had had a hand in running the Bureau of Indian Affairs during the Grant Administration?—I soon found myself in Truman’s deserted office. On his desk, confirming my worst fears of the new President’s uncertain grip on the helm, lay a well-thumbed copy of Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People.

  Uncapping my pen and sitting down, and taking a moment to collect my thoughts, I dashed off a plan for a vast national-security apparatus, rapidly filling the book’s front and back flyleaves. For the dual purposes of self-concealment and heightened impact on Truman’s mind, I disguised my handwriting as FDR’s—itself easily mimicked from the jotted marginalia in the framed typescript of the Four Freedoms speech hung on the office wall.

  As I completed my task, I heard a click. Saw a Filipino steward standing in the door. Above his uniform’s white collar, his face was a coppery mask of inquisitiveness and confusion, soon complicated beyond its own powers by the dawning of a pathetic conviction that, whatever precisely was going on, he still belonged here inore than I did. Closing Dale Carnegie, I rose from the desk. Chest thrown back and nostrils flaring, my lustrous hair grown thick, I advanced on the steward with the prancing steps of a centaur.

  Five snorting, joyous minutes later—during which the only sounds were my grunts and his gurgling, for Truman’s “The Buck Stops Here” sign, however vapid as a motto, had proved the perfect bit once I seized it from the desk between the Filipino’s scrabbling hands, with which he was frantically but ineptly trying to brace himself at the angle that would give him the most pleasure^my latest admirer had backed out of the office to search for an unbloodied pair of duck trousers, his face flushed with a gratitude to King Priap so intense it left him mute. Patting my hair into place and downing a Laggilin for my heart condition, I suavely returned to the reception; Truman signed the CIA’s founding charter the next month.

  Hard as it is to remember now, that took some courage on our newly resolute leader’s part. Up to then—and with the obvious exception of J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI, from whose staggering success at hoodwinking the populace I drew much inspiration—no large new government bureaucracy had ever been created except in response to some preexisting situation or condition that made the need for it unmistakable to the common citizenry. That was scarcely the case here, making my scheme far from risk-free. Paying off, in the event, more spectacularly still than I’d dared hope, the great gamble buried in my memo on the flyleaves of How to Win Friends and Influence People was that a public long accustomed to the old, common-sensical ways of organizing its affairs would be infinitely more likely to conclude that the government had to know what it was doing than leap to the wild, far-fetched, and perfectly accurate conclusion that the rulebook had been chucked.

  This handily killed two birds with one stone, since anyone who accepted the need for a CIA and an NSA as th e first postulate of an equation would be instantly catapulted into a state of highly useful panic by the belated recognition that they and the lesser agencies they spawned could be necessary only in a world gone mad. Even as I marveled at my own brilliance in convincing premise and conclusion to swap roles, I was aware that, at some future point or points down the road, the public might have second thoughts. But by then, with any luck, the whole, constantly expanding, endlessly recombinant national-security establishment I envisioned would have itself long since become a pre-existing condition—one grown too large to be excisable, or even to be contained except cosmetically.

  And, of course, all this is precisely how it has worked out.

  Naturally, my paternity in the whole affair remained a secret closely held between myself, Dale Carnegie’s beaming dust-jacket photo, and a nameless Filipino White House steward who probably hadn’t even understood any of what was happening except the part that had happened to him. Even so, I couldn’t help but feel a proprietary pride as my institutional spawn began to put out its first baby tentacles, looping around a news-magazine publisher’s neck here, an internationally oriented charity organization there. In fact, on the campus lecture tours I sometimes undertook at the behest of the AEC—still my formal* employer—I would sometimes discreetly steer the most promising students I met toward a career in intelligence instead of talking up my own bailiwick.

  As the AEC then had no speakers’ bureau of its own, these tours were incidentally set up for us via a courtesy arrangement with General Electric’s public relations office, then capably run by a mustachioed young veteran of the Battle of the Bulge whose Dutch or German name—Knut or Kurt Fungott or Vangut, something like that—I no longer recall precisely. On a personal level, I had little use for this fellow, whose omnipresent Pall Malls annoyed me no less than his refusal, despite the responsibility imposed by his current line of work, to speak with respect of anything or anyone save his own older brother Bernard, a scientist like myself. Or rather, as his dry tone somewhat insolently implied, distinctly unlike myself.

  I believe he later quit GE. Still, for all his eccentricity, the middle-class sense of duty that my future masters and I were so often to rely on made Vangut or Fungott almost helplessly competent at his job, thereby incalculably assisting not only my official travels as an AEC speaker but, by extension, my sub-rosa recruitment efforts on the intelligence community’s behalf. As it happens, my very first such nudge of a bright mind in the right direction is the one I remember best, largely because of the memorable way the sandy-haired young man in question introduced himself to me.

  I’d just finished my standard talk on the potential uses of nuclear energy other than bomb-making. Partly because its risks had to be concealed, this was tiresome stuff, as I well knew even if the AEC didn’t. Only the already practiced charm of my disarmingly self-surprised, fingers-raking-forelock delivery kept my audiences from suspecting as much. As I re-rubber-banded a slim stack of index cards at the podium, I was furtively ransacking the emptying hall for the special bulge of pink sweater that would satisfy my eyes, and soon afterward, I expected, their blind twins down below. As a result, I only noticed after several seconds that someone was standing directly in front of me, hand extended.

  “Hello, sir,” he said. “I don’t know if this’ll make sense to you, but I just wanted to say thanks for keeping me alive.”

  “Are you sure that you don’t mean awake?” I said, mildly stupefied, as we shook hands.

  “You mentioned in your lecture that you worked on the Manhattan Project, sir. My outfit was slated to land on Kyushu when we invaded Japan. I was on Iwo Jima, and we"—peculiarly, his attention seemed to wander for a moment; I wondered madly if he had spotted the pink sweater-”we were told that Japan would be worse, sir. Truth is, I probably wouldn’t be here today, if it wasn’t for Hiroshima.”

  “Don’t forget Nagasaki,” I said, perhaps a bit sharply.

  “Yes, sir. I know a lot of people do. I wouldn’t know why that is, sir. Anyhow, that’s all I wanted to say. Appreciate your time.” He nodded and turned to go.

  I glanced around. No pink sweater. She was gone, and something about him—some quality of banked but stokable fire—had impressed me.

  “Wait,” I called. “Have a cup of coffee with me. My train doesn’t leave for an hour yet—and I don’t know a soul in Rochester, Minnesota.”

  ■

  As I recall, his name was some Scotch-Irish monosyllable or near-monosyllable, and it and he were a good match. Alert gray eyes, good jaw, a shrewd calm voice with attractively gruff lifeguard and policeradio undertones, the whole thing pinned together by the perennial cigarette that was his combat-tautened generation’s universal badge of (ironic enough, this, when you recall the Surgeon General’s co
nclusions some years later) survival. In fact, in former days, the sandy-haired fellow sitting across from me in the railroad station’s coffee shop would almost surely have been the beneficiary of a surprise state visit from good King Priap—and the purring motor of my sexual charisma, once turned on, had outraced tighter train schedules than this one when it had to.

  Somewhat to my own surprise, however, neither this kind of appeal nor its distaff equivalent aroused me that much anymore, and I hadn’t even noticed him during my lecture. Instead, and virtually from opening joke to closing thought, my reason to value the podium’s concealment had been the hunchbacked girl in the thick glasses midway back, the hump quite prominent beneath pink wool. The thought of her incredulous delight and abject gratitude when she was unexpectedly invited to pay fealty to my body with her imperfect one had been enfevering enough for the visiting speaker from the Atomic Energy Commission to start plucking at the loose rubber band around his wrist as he spoke—until the pings grew audible to the first row, which was how I found out I’d been doing it.

  The urgings of the lower brain having been denied by her premature exit—with annoyance, I realized that I hadn’t even gotten to see her spine’s curve as she walked—I settled for keeping the upper one interested. Rochester was his hometown, he said, although he’d spent a short and apparently melancholy spell as a child in Florida. After his discharge from the Marines, he’d come back here to work in his father’s garage. But Bruno, the immigrant mechanic his dad had saved from an almost certain doom back East by hiring him twenty-odd years ago, seemed to have things well in hand, so the son had started taking courses on the GI Bill instead.

  What did he want to do next? A rare unfettered grin informed me that this was the most interesting question he’d ever heard, and that he’d heard it often from himself He’d thought sometimes of becoming a journalist, and at other times of teaching; after being on the receiving end of it for a while, he guessed he’d gotten more interested in how history worked. Then again, about three days a week he thought of heading for the Gulf of Mexico, buying a fishing smack, and pointing it out to sea with no destination but the horizon, his dream since boyhood. So what did all of that add up to? Hands thrown apart above his elbows on the table, and joined only by the trailing rope of blue smoke from the cigarette in one of them, he amiably confessed he didn’t know.