by Lydia Millet
Of course there had been slights, disappointments, the shock of the world. She had been left alone once or twice and felt abandoned, forgotten by others. She knew she was only a narrow slip of existence.
When the family dog was hit by a car she stood with her face to the wall for fourteen hours. —Do other kids kill themselves when their puppies die? she asked her father, wracked with sobs, having seen the dear brown body twisted against the curb. Laying the dog to rest on a bed of tissue paper in a liquor box he had told her—Not very often, honey.
So instead she nobly turned to the wall in mourning.
Her mother and her father had not interfered. They let her be noble and watery with grief in silence. Once, in passing, her mother stooped to kiss the top of her head in a benediction, and then moved around the room tidying and humming.
The house was sweet with cleanness and always the same, fans whirring on the high ceilings with their dark crossbeams. She and her brothers floated in the pool on blowup whales and alligators until their thin, sleek calves and bony shoulders were evenly toasted. Her mother, who often wore a string of pearls around her neck, liked to bake bread and the smell of the baking bread would waft through the open windows and over the lilac bushes.
Ben had never known anything like that.
She pushed her fingertips against his temple, stroking a wing of his hair. Then she flicked the light off again.
Innocent and ignorant, she thought sadly, turning to lie on her back, there’s no real difference, actually we are both. Finally our ignorance consumes us, licking our backs with tongues of fire. And behind us the earth is left black.
What odd monsters will walk here after us, she wondered then, staring up.
She thought of them roaming the plains, the aftermen, their legs as tall as buildings but as thin as wire. She saw them bounding over the barren wastes like giant mosquitoes.
She wondered if they would be the leavings of men, the grandsons of robots, their veins and sinews delicate skeins of wire. Or if men had left nothing they might be the descendants of beetles and dragonflies. She tried to imagine their hearts, metal and polymer or muscle and blood.
And if there is memory then, if there is any recollection, it is our ignorance that will be remembered, she thought. Our innocence will be forgotten, our kittens will not go down in history.
A few minutes later, restless under the sheets, she thought: Secrets have lain waiting in matter, down through the centuries.
The soldier who chose Julius Robert Oppenheimer as lead scientist for the Manhattan Project was General Leslie R. Groves. A West Point graduate and an engineer by training, Groves had built the Pentagon before he set to work building the A-bomb to win the war against the fascists. “I’m not prejudiced,” he once said. “I don’t like certain Jews, and I don’t like certain well-known characteristics of theirs, but I’m not prejudiced.”
Although he admired Oppenheimer he hated Leo Szilard. Convinced Hitler was working toward an A-bomb or would be soon, Szilard had persuaded Albert Einstein to sign a letter he wrote to Roosevelt in 1939. With this letter they alerted the president to the possibility of an atomic bomb and thus, rather lamentably for two pacifist academics, touched off the nuclear arms race.
Later, Groves tried to have Szilard imprisoned as an enemy of the state. “If there were to be any villain of this piece,” he said, “I’d say it was Szilard.”
He also wrote of Szilard, as marginalia in a book: “He was completely unprincipled, amoral, and immoral.”
In 1948 Groves retired from military service to work in the private sector, as a Vice President of the RAND Corporation. He died in 1970 of heart disease.
As for Szilard, he thought Groves was a moron.
It was Szilard who made up the term breeder reactor.
Finally Ann got up again because she was still turning in the sheets.
The floors were red clay tile and cool against her bare feet. As she walked noiselessly through the rooms she touched certain fixtures and furnishings, letting her fingertips drift over their surfaces: the candles on iron stands, which smelled of vanilla and orange, the soft, old wood of sideboards and shelves, the soft, fibrous paper of a lampshade that gave off a faint, warm glow. The walls of the house were hung with paintings lent or given to her and Ben by a friend who owned an art gallery, and their amber and gold oils were carefully lit. She pulled the sliding doors open and stepped outside onto the flagstone patio.
There was a mild night wind and a new moon. Sitting down on the edge of the fountain with gray shrubs and flowers around her ankles—sage, for instance, and lamb’s ear, and a plant that Ben called hens ’n’ chicks—she could smell basil and mint and lavender growing ten feet away. She knew the name of other flowers she could see faintly in the dark: columbine, sego lilies. Water in the fountain trickled, faint and itchy, and she listened. Her arms were bare and the breeze lifted the fine hairs.
She thought of the child. She had decided a few days ago to throw away her pills, the three weeks of estrogen, the single week of placebos. Ben had wanted her to do this for years. Boundless love, like the boundless sky, seemed easier to make than earn.
You made your own, of course. There was no guarantee of theirs.
Even if there were dangers, even if the rivers and seas and the fish that swam them were flowing with mercury, forests were being felled and deserts turned into strip mines, there was nothing to do but trust. If she had been given a choice before she was conceived, say to exist in chaos or not to exist at all: Chaos, she would have said. She would have said, not without sadness of course, still: let me come. Let me watch as all things fall apart.
There was no birdsong. It was the silence before dawn, when the birds do not sing, the stopped time after dreams in which men die with their eyes on the ceiling, throats aching with tears, arms leaden beside them on the cold sheets.
Later she would think that was the first time she ever understood the danger: the more beautiful a house, the more invisible the rest of the world.
Ben, the husband of Ann, who at that moment was sleeping again, was a gardener.
He thought of himself first as the husband of Ann, and only second as a gardener. More than most husbands, possibly, he liked to be a husband. It was a vocation, whereas gardens were merely a hobby that paid.
They lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where they were surrounded by slick restaurants and boutiques, upscale art galleries and also those that catered to the tourist trade selling paintings of purple and pink desert landscapes, trinket stores that sold oxydized copper Kokopelli statues and coyote bookends and five-gallon hats and leather boots with six-inch fringes, celebrity refugees from Hollywood who kept toy ranches in the hills and liked to pretend they were cowboys.
In fact they lived less than an hour’s winding drive from the city of Los Alamos, on the high pink and gray mesa with its juniper trees and piñon bushes, salvia and chamisa, a city that had barely existed before World War Two and where, from 1943 to 1945, hundreds of Manhattan Project scientists, working under Oppenheimer, had built the world’s first atomic bomb and where, still, nuclear weapons were designed and redesigned, nuclear secrets kept and broken. They lived a little more than two hours from White Sands Missile Range in the Alamogordo desert, in the shadow of the Oscura mountains, home to a sea of flowing, shifting white gypsum dunes. Beyond the dunes in the fluvial-alluvial soil of the ancient Rio Grande valley had grown quietly, for thousands of years, giant flowering soaptree yuccas, globe mallow and fourwing saltbush and mint-green ethereal winterfat, jackrabbits and kit foxes and porcupines and herds of delicate galloping pronghorn antelope, until the predawn darkness of July 16, 1945, when a strange cloud blossomed over all of them.
What happened was, the night of the dream three men were born again. One was born in a motel room, one in a gutter. And the third was born again beneath a table that smelled of french fries and disinfectant, in a cafeteria at the University of Chicago.
2
Oppenheimer lay on a bed in a motel in his expensive suit. He felt stunned and lay without knowing where he was, in a tingling and static dark. Finally, still queasy but also restless, he reached a hand out into the treacherous thick air and fumbled with objects on the nightstand. Flicked at what felt like the switch for a table lamp. Light blazed.
He was in a motel room, shoddy and dim. In front of him and above hung a box with an opaque gray screen, a glass screen of some kind on a black platform, protruding from the wall. Kidnapped? Could some enemy power—Germans, Japanese, even the Russians, those so-called allies—be watching him from the other side of that convex glass?
—Remain calm, he told himself.
He had been surrounded by soldiers at the countdown. No abduction would have been possible. He had just been there, crouched, waiting for ignition in the desert, in the dark, a little after five in the morning, his crowd of other geniuses surrounding him, holding their breath as he held his. And then the blast, that great and terrible flower, that sear of lightness lifting up the sky.
And now he was here.
But where was here, and why was he? He must have been injured by the blast. That was it. This was some kind of dark infirmary.
Plucking at his shirt he felt no pain, however, and there were no cuts or bruises: a head injury? Brain damage? Possibly he had simply been knocked unconscious and they had left him to rest in peace in this dim and ugly room, the best Socorro had to offer. But my God: what was that painting? It was outrageous! On the wall opposite, as he pushed himself up on his elbows to look, was a hideous watercolor of a girl child grasping a fistful of tulips.
It unnerved him. There was an offensive, crass quality to the thing. Something was wrong with the flowers in the young girl’s pale orange bouquet, their pink-purple whorls and openings. Dead, dead wrong. It seemed geared to evoke the fantasies of a pervert.
If he was injured where was Kitty? They should have summoned her right away. He had to look outside. He had to know where he was.
He got up unsteadily and went to the door, whose faintly greasy knob featured an oddly printed DO NOT DISTURB sign, and jerked it open. Dark outside, and all he could see was a parking lot, vast, buildings in the background, all crowded close together, which he surveyed from a second-floor walkway. Civilian buildings, dense and well-used: this was not the mesa and he did not think it was Socorro.
He stumbled onto the walkway and made his way to the stairs and down them, where, in front of a door marked OFFICE, which was all too brightly lit but untenanted, he saw a newspaper box.
Ye gods, it claimed the price of the paper was 35 cents! He laughed aloud and leaned down to look through the clear panel and discover what marvel of the Fourth Estate might be worth this king’s ransom. The Santa Fe New Mexican. Santa Fe, by God, he had always felt at home here. But a newspaper like this? It was slick.
Although, straightening up and looking around, he didn’t know this part of this city, if it was Santa Fe: a slum, industrial, concrete and asphalt everywhere. He could pick out almost no trees in the darkness. It had to be a bigger place, possibly Albuquerque.
But good lord, the date on the paper was a joke too. March 1, 2003.
He was exhausted. He had been working long hours and forgetting to eat. This was delirium, thick and heavy on him as though a large man was pushing down on his shoulders from behind. Groves, possibly. He felt burdened. Yes: and the burden was intolerable, finally. Sleep was required. Look at him!—he might be mistaken for a hobo and thrown out of here on his heel. His clothes were wrinkled and needed to be pressed.
He squinted at the cars in the parking lot and though it was too dark to see well he thought their shapes were strange, the cars were small and strange, both sleek and complicated at once, jarring and shiny hulks. Maybe this was an Army outpost after all, one he had never known; possibly like the mesa it was a locus for the development of new technologies. Leave it, though: in the morning things would be clearer. Right now he was overcome by fatigue. He would go back to bed.
Veering away from the newspaper box to go up to his room again he suddenly smelled garbage, a rank, rotten smell, and then saw a kid walking by carrying a large flat box marked PIZZA.
—Excuse me? he asked the boy. —Did you see the date on this paper?
—What?
—The date on the newspaper here.
The kid leaned over and looked, nodded briefly.
—So what?
—Kind of an odd gag, isn’t it? H. G. Wells?
—Sorry. I don’t get it, said the kid, and shrugged before he continued walking, the pizza box on his shoulder.
—I mean what’s the date today? called Oppenheimer the man after him.
—It’s the first, said the kid.
—But what year?
—Get outta here, man, said the kid.
In the office he rang a bell, but no one came to the desk. Another of the gray-screened boxes hung on the wall. The counter featured machinery he had never seen before. Was this a foreign country? No: they were selling the New Mexican right outside. Still, hard to put his finger on it, but few of the objects on the desk looked familiar. He had spent time in many well-equipped offices over the past three years and never had he seen one like this. Flat dark adding machines lying there with buttons barely raised from their surfaces, another box with a screen that blared bright, near-royal blue, and white words stood out from it, holding tight and vibrating, both at once. He could not read them; the glare of the light was too bright.
No one came to his assistance, but turning around to leave he caught sight of a calendar on the wall.
Again: 2003.
Stupid. How dare they allow this to happen to him, after all he had given them.
All he wanted was sleep.
For a while after the dream Ann did not think about Oppenheimer, the so-called Father of the Atom Bomb, physicist and genius.
She had no reason to think about Oppenheimer in her waking life and she seldom remembered her dreams. When she did they tended to be dreams she thought were trivial: dreams in which her hair had been elaborately curled and was weighing down her head, dreams in which she had not been warned there was a test, dreams of wooden spoons, breadfruit, and once an angry monkey.
She did not think about Oppenheimer per se but she remembered the bent man and the death-light. She remembered waking up sweating, and staying up until the sun rose, and the bitter, dry aftertaste.
Szilard, in his first conscious minute in the new world, was kicked in the ribs by a freshman named Tad. Tad’s real name was Thaddeus Baysden Newton III, originally of Columbia, South Carolina, and currently of the Delta Kappa Epsilon fraternity, whose brothers were commonly referred to in the University of Chicago Greek community as Deeks, renowned for courageous beer swilling. Tad was wearing a bulky shoe on his size twelve foot and the fat man grunted loudly when the toe of it caught him sharply in the sternum, causing Tad to bend down and look under the cafeteria’s formica-topped booth with the expostulation—What the fuck!
What Tad saw was a fat man, jowls drooping like a Basset hound’s, lying on his side on the floor, bleary-eyed and disoriented.
—A fucking homeless drunk on the floor, man.
—What is the world coming to, said his fellow DKE, name of Gil short for Gilman, shaking his head in disgust.
They picked up their orange trays and trudged over to the next free table.
When he was a boy Ben had read voraciously with a weak flashlight under a threadbare brown blanket: comic books, works of fantasy, science fiction, horror. On the other side of the flimsy wall his mother had been wracked with coughs as he read. His father, a kind man but short of words, had worked on the lot at a place that sold secondhand camper shells for trucks, as well as used appliances for RVs. He had a second job as a busboy, and a third as a night watchman. He slept only three hours in every twenty-four, from seven until ten in the morning, but he insisted he had never needed more.
Ben had sneaked int
o the movies through the back door where Gary the janitor smoked. Gary slipped him in after his cigarette break, and crouching he would find a place in the front row, his head tipped back beneath the screen’s immensity.
He still daydreamed in boxes and fields of color, rich and perfect, the lines between them bold and black. There were few straight edges in the world of soils, shrubs, and trees, of pests, butterflies, and hummingbirds, in other words his professional milieu, so the satisfaction he derived there came not in exact, clean measures and angles but voluptuous patterns.
He thought often of his wife as he worked, and behind the work there was always a grateful peace, the peace of a man who has more than he expected to have. Sentimental only in this one reach of life, attempting in the rest a businesslike detach, he was prone to seek comfort in memories of his wife, recollection and anticipation. The first time her skin had touched his own the texture of the world had changed, grown warmer but also more expansive. He had felt permeable then; he had seeped into everything and everything into him.
The first trip they made together, after two nervous dinners, had been in a car that belonged to some of his friends. He remembered it clearly: a mid-sized sedan with a gray interior. They sat awkwardly side by side in the back seat. It was early fall and they were being driven south to a wildlife refuge named Bosque del Apache, an artificial oasis in the middle of the desert where they hoped to see birds. In the front seat his friends, an older, academic couple he had worked for who were amateur ornithologists, who kept immaculate life lists of all the birds they had seen, were talking about cormorants, and from cormorants they moved to herons and from herons to egrets. They told of bird-watching weekends in Patagonia, Guadalupe, and the Salton Sea, and of all the birds of North America that flew for thousands of miles each year in migration. Neither Ann nor Ben was educated on the identities and behaviors of birds, so they remained silent.
Over the murmur in the front they both floated away, both gazed out their windows at the rolling tan mountains and the light sky. And as they softened in their seats, carried over the blacktop impervious and aloft, as they rested on the gray imitation leather, Ann looked at Ben and moved her hand over the cool smooth slope of the vinyl seat to touch his wrist.
