In my opinion we remain here for no other purpose than to witness how many bodies are buried. . . . On every side we hear nothing but “So-and-so is dead” or “So-and-so is dying.” And if there were anyone left to weep we should hear nothing but piteous lamentations. . . .
If this is so (and we may plainly see it is) what are we doing here? What are we waiting for? What are we dreaming about? . . . I do not know if you think as I do, but in my opinion if we, through carelessness, do not want to fall into this calamity when we can escape it, I think we should do well to leave this town, just as many others have done and are doing. Let us avoid the wicked examples of others like death itself, and go and live virtuously in our country houses. . . . There let us take what happiness and pleasure we can, without ever breaking the rules of reason in any manner.
There we shall hear the birds sing, we shall see the green hills and valleys, the wheat fields rolling like a sea, and all kinds of trees. We shall see the open Heavens which, although now angered against man, do not withhold from us their eternal beauties that are so much fairer to look upon than the empty walls of our city. . . . On the other hand I believe we are not abandoning anybody here. Indeed we can truthfully say that we are abandoned, since our relatives have either died or fled from death and have left us alone in this calamity as if we were nothing to them.
. . . Let us live in this way (unless death comes upon us) until we see what end Heaven decrees to this plague. And remember that going away virtuously will not harm us so much as staying here in wickedness will harm others.
Eddie shakes his head sadly when the tape runs out. He has seen men go away virtuously. He knows where going away virtuously will lead. And he suspects that in no time at all, there will be no place to go away virtuously to.
Carefully, deliberately, in full knowledge of what he is about, Eddie rethreads the machine and tapes over the old message. As he does so, the astonishing sets of World World—the mountains and rivers and magically foreshortened cities—dissolve back into the empty and level cornfields.
Let’s start again, from scratch. Let us make a small world, a miniature of a miniature, say an even half-dozen, since we screw up everything larger. Let’s model the daily workings of an unremarkable, mid-sized family, and see if we can’t get it right. A family of six, who had one halfway happy summer vacation on the Pacific a decade and a half back.
As Eddie speaks, metallic greens and purples emanate from the machine, and the house fills up with his description. A house in a small, white wood town, like any other. He adds detail to detail, until the family itself takes over—the stunned, bewildered trauma victims of this new landscape. He sets them on their way, marooned in the unforgiving place, finishing what he has started by saying:
It’s one of those unrepeatable days in mid-May, and all those who are still at home sit down to dinner.
20
To Eddie Jr.’s way of seeing, the former American frontier from the Great Lakes westward had become a giant tourist trap, swelling with a thousand and one diversions both amazing and edifying. Every third exit along the interstate bore a brown Park Service sign announcing some natural wonder, scenic vista, historic battlesite, landmark achievement, or birthplace of some president or inventor. If not a subdued Park Service brown, the exit sign sported the gaudy reds and yellows of free enterprise proclaiming a scenic wonder just over the embankment: Crystal Cave, the Moon Gardens, the Town that Time Forgot, or Eddie Jr.’s favorite, Massacre Mesa. “Visit the actual spot where they filmed the classic western The Tribe That Wouldn’t Die.”
Traveling a few hundred miles, Eddie got the distinct impression that the whole country was a giant theme park, a series of scenic vistas where one could drive from Residence World along Driver’s World to Mark Twain’s Boyhood Home World, then split for lunch to Food World, the historic concession stand that invariably waited nearby. By the end of the Great Plains, even the occasional, solitary Bingo sign—$10,000 nightly!—isolated come-ons springing up in the most desolate places, made Eddie Jr. want to stop at one of these shrines and at least case the joint for the Old Historian’s sake.
But after trying a couple of such Must Sees and feeling more than guilty over the delay, Eddie generalized that the interminable hot spots were all of a piece. A centrally located, WPA-vintage tar-shingle shack manned by college kids in badges and soggy khaki scout outfits served as Information Center and Orientation Museum. After a brief lecture with slides delivered every hour starting at twenty minutes after, the guide took the collected band of pilgrims out to see the blessed birthplace. The fee for the whole shooting match was always three dollars and fifty cents for adults, which Eddie now was. That pretty much summed them all up. Or at least the one that concerned him. At least the one he saw.
Eddie Jr. arrived at the Science Hall and Museum of Los Alamos National Laboratory early in the morning of the last visiting day of the year. A small place, very understated, it contained the bones of Indians, their pottery and weapons. It preserved Oppenheimer’s chair and his formal requisition to the government for a nail on which to hang his hat. It included a lump of melted Nagasaki glass and one of “trinitite,” the glassy substance the sand had become under the tower of the first explosion. On its walls hung beautiful mounted pictures of fireballs and mushroom clouds. But it contained no Pop nor any sign of him.
Eddie proceeded to Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, arriving two hours later. He drove the rental to the security checkpoint at the front gate and was duly assured that if the base had received a visit from the person described, he would have been routed through the Visitor Information Center at the National Atomic Museum, the only part of the base open to the public. The crewcut guard gave him a permit, saying, “Drive directly to the museum. No stopping.”
Eddie dutifully checked in to the Center, took the tour, and learned much about the history of atomic weaponry, from Little Boy and Fat Man to Davy Crockett, a bomb two feet long and twelve inches wide. He read a copy of the Albuquerque Tribune of July 16, 1945:
MUNITIONS EXPLODE AT ALAMO DUMP
An ammunition magazine exploded early today in a remote area of the Alamogordo Air Base reservation, producing a brilliant flash and blast, which were reported to have been observed as far away as Gallup, two hundred and thirty-five miles northwest.
But he discovered no sign of his disappeared Dad. Filing out of the diorama-laden exhibit hall, he collared one of the khaki curators, looking to Eddie a little like Joseph Cotten just before his shell-shock relapse in I’ll Be Seeing You. “Is this all there is to see? I’ve been up at the lab, and down here, and I’m wondering if there’s anything else.” The fellow pointed out that another, tiny exhibit, one much closer to Trinity Site, sat two hours south of here, in the White Sands National Monument, on the southern tip of the missile range. Eddie thanked the officer. He silently agreed that ground zero or as close as possible was as likely a place as any to find a missing man of his father’s persuasion.
After a brief stop at Snack World and Rest Room World, Little Eddie got back in the rented car. To his eyes, the northernmost region of the Chihuahuan Desert was, even without the historical overtones, a place unlike any other on this earth. The landscape was perfect, endless, and unmitigated: even emptier than De Kalb. The ground underneath, if it could be called ground, seemed synthetic, newly prepared, comparable only to the seamless, starched linen on a fastidious nurse. The unlikely parfait of colors and outcroppings, the otherworldly scrub and vegetation—occasional creosote, yucca, bizarre cactus varieties—the scope of a horizon with so little on it that was human, made him more susceptible to highway hypnosis than usual. He strayed off the last fifteen miles of road a dozen times.
The missile range was understandably immense. A human could not see from one side to the other, even across the narrowest dimension. The earth’s curve prevented that. The range completely enclosed the National Monument, a mere 150,000 acres, established in 1933 because the land was cheap, uninhabi
ted, and contained some truly staggering dunes and wind sculptures of white gypsum sands. As he made his approach Eddie Jr. wondered: how many people die in the desert annually? How many individuals each year, looking for an illegal passage into the country or, as in the case that concerned him, an equally illegal way out, end up waylaid, drifted over in sand dunes, dehydrated, baked, burned, or, like that by now clichéd cow-skull icon, bleached into works of abstract art? Eddie hadn’t even a guess as to the order of magnitude.
To his surprise, the Tour Center at White Sands Monument was devoted almost exclusively to the geological curiosities of the park, dealing very little with the detonation of the device Pop had inadvertently witnessed. The tourist hacienda had as its focus a detailed papier-mâché model of the lay of the land, pointing out the park highlights in miniature: Lake Lucero, the crystallized marsh, the Alkali Flats. Several photos about the walls documented the most truly dazzling and ghostly gypsum dunes, some more than fifty feet high.
The composite scenic wonders would ordinarily have appealed to Eddie Jr. But now they seemed beside the point. He put in a few minutes buzzing the displays so as not to seem rude. Then he gravitated to the Information Desk, where he could not help but notice that the local variation on the uniformed guide nicely filled out hers. He read the tag sidelong as he spoke. “Hi, uh, Ms. Henderson. Could you tell me if I’ve come to the right place? I was told this was roughly where the atomic bomb . . .” He let the clause dangle, having said enough.
Ms. Henderson looked around the room furtively and rolled her eyes: another Bomb nut. The Center, so soon after Christmas, was having a slow day, with only one or two geriatric couples browsing the paste-ups and exclaiming. In a low but official voice she said, “Yes. Trinity Site is about fifty miles north and west of where you now stand.” Eddie looked quickly at the floor to find the tape marks. “It’s on the missile range. You can’t actually go see the actual location at present. But if you want to travel around the rest of the park for a bit and come back here at twenty minutes after the hour, we’ve got a great presentation about the blast in the auditorium.”
Eddie told her charmingly that he didn’t care a hoot about gypsum drifts and never had. “I’ll just wait, and chat here with you, if you don’t mind.” The prospect did not thrill Ms. Henderson, whom he found terrifically charming in spite or perhaps because of a half-centimeter gap between her front incisors. After engaging her in discussions about every professional sport and several currently popular television shows, Eddie exhausted his conversational repertoire and fell silent. At fifteen minutes past, seeing that he was now the sole visitor in the Center, Ms. Henderson took his three dollars and fifty cents and said she’d go see about getting the show under way.
As she slipped the money into the cash drawer, Eddie caught sight of something remarkable. “What’s that?” he shouted, startling both of them with the force of his words. She reopened the drawer reluctantly and withdrew a pair of mouse ears marked with the name “Ed.”
“Now how did those get in there?” she asked, equal parts irritated and shocked. She took them out gingerly between thumb and forefinger and carried them into a back room as if they were still attached to a plague-dosed rat. When she returned, Eddie barraged her with questions about the ears, several times repeating a description of Dad and refusing to believe that no man answering to it had been seen around the premises in the last two days.
After the tour guide’s repeated denials, he let her go and followed her into the auditorium, a little room with a little white screen for showing a little film about the Bomb. Although Eddie was the only audience in sight, Ms. Henderson nevertheless delivered her canned speech about what had happened just outside this building and down the road less than forty years ago. She had countless intriguing facts at her disposal: how Trinity Site got its name (Oppenheimer had been reading a John Donne sonnet beginning “Batter my heart, three-person’d God”); how a large circle of surrounding sand had been turned to glass; how the physicists formed a betting pool on the size of the blast; how Enrico Fermi calculated it precisely by sprinkling bits of paper at impact; how others ran calculations on the possibility of igniting the atmosphere.
Eddie, isolated in the closed auditorium, had the eerie sense of being alone in an amusement park, listening to the spiel of a carnival barker spouting rehearsed lines for his benefit only. Such an archaic, sideshow delivery, like the perpetuation and nurturing of the delivery systems being described, struck Eddie as a clear-cut case of Dad’s Loser’s Auction, in which a two-dollar door prize is auctioned off for ten bucks because none of the bidders can afford to let the prize go to another. He sat on his hands and listened. Mercifully completing her lecture, Ms. Henderson fired up the projector. But instead of the promised March of Time newsreel, the screen lit up with a cartoon leader, a short subject introducing Our Feature Attraction.
Ms. Henderson reacted faster than he did. She killed the projector; the screen went dim and the sound drooped to a ghastly halt. But in the instant before she could stop the cartoon, Eddie was sure he had seen Donald Duck, of all people, in a Nazi uniform. Ms. Henderson reappeared, apologizing profusely, saying that things had been very strange around here for the last couple of days. She claimed that a co-worker, recently fired, had returned to play pranks of revenge on her. She promised to find the proper reel of documentary film and thread it up for him ASAP.
Eddie knew better. So the old guy had been here. Or still was. Eddie walked slowly out of the darkened theater into the desert daylight. He stood in front of the modest building, looked out on that ungaugeable expanse of sand. Pop had decided to fight noncooperation with noncooperation: he was refusing to go along with refusing to go along. The strategy seemed less polemical than Tit for Tat, but more pragmatic than attacking missile silos with hatchets. Pop had exploded out of the old payoff matrix and was now in some other domain altogether, one that subscribed to another order of numeric and physical law.
Eddie walked out into the plantless sand and lay down in it. The sand was close enough to white, he decided, for sake of nomenclature. In a few minutes, Ms. Henderson came out to tell him that the real film was now ready. But as she poked her head out of the Tour Center, another voice cut her off. A familiar bass came over the PA system, singing “The Prisoner’s Song,” an old Broadway version of that traditional American tune “New Jail”:
I’m going to my new jail tomorrow
A place where I’ve never been before
With those cold prison bars all around me
And my head on a pillow of stone.
Ms. Henderson gave Eddie a long and uncomprehending look. “Do you hear that?” she asked. “It’s not possible.” He shut her up, stilled her with a violent glance.
Meet me tonight in the moonlight
Meet me out in the moonlight alone
For I have a sad secret to tell you
Must be told in the moonlight alone.
The park guide, in all her starched, uniformed glory, ran back inside her exhibit hall to find out the source of the impossible intrusion and try to stop it. Eddie simply flopped down on his back farther into the sand and listened out the last stanza:
I wish I had someone to love me
Someone to call my own
I wish I had someone to trust in
For I’m tired of living alone.
It was finally clear to Eddie, here, at White Sands, just a little to the north of epicenter, what had become of his dad. The man had at last completed his own longed-for cremation, half-begun some forty years before. It only remained for a member of the family to make it a decent sacrament by distributing the ashes. The kid rolled over, his face almost touching the sand grains. He reached out and pinched a handful of the unworldly crystals between his fingers. They vibrated, gave off a pure musical pitch, almost all fundamental, without partials or overtones. He whispered something into them and threw the ashes straight up into the air.
The white sand whipped directly upward a
t an astounding rate, entered the trade winds, and instantly spread around the earth three times in a girdle of imperceptible thinness. As they fell back to earth, the grains, countless now, entered the eyes of the people of the sleeping kingdom, dislodging the spell that had hung there for hundreds of years. Some say it was at that moment that folks finally began to sit up and see things with some measure of sense.
21
The tape ran out. The fairy tale came to its end. Disney, the world of You Are the War, grew seamlessly into the world of NORAD and underground hardened silos. Brother and sisters sat stilled in the stilled room. Outside, shadows lengthened as the day disappeared into December afternoon. Snow thickened, wrapped them in the childhood mystery of winter.
For some reason, Artie felt himself grow strangely exhilarated. Listening to the tape all the way through with his sisters in the room gave him, for the first time ever, the sense of his father actually having lived. The taped story, with his own surprise cameo at the very end, made him feel, for the first time, how he lived at the most crucial and momentous instant in history. He felt how not one of us can be allowed to abdicate, to give up what little we matter. Dad would have to be the last person to go under.
Somehow, the few moments they had just spent in the Never-never Land Dad had felt compelled to destroy had given Artie an idea as clear as the cold clarity of the late day: What we can’t bring about in no way releases us from what we must. The top, the big picture, would never reform. The world was, as Pop so fondly put it, already lost, making it all the more urgent that the five of them remaining perfect their own corner. If they couldn’t get along, what else mattered? But these thoughts came apart when Lily spoke out in bitterness. “Do you mean to tell me that that . . . son of a bitch kills himself, and drags all of us down with him, because of a fluke posting to Alamogordo?”
Prisoner's Dilemma Page 36
