“But you’re weak,” Mather said. “Who could predict what you might do?”
Charlie took a stack of papers to the bin labeled Documents to Destroy and dropped them in. “I am finished with this conversation.”
“Now I’ve hurt your feelings,” Mather said, “when I meant to pay you a compliment. Because of course what you were calculating, in all your wrestling with pi, was the fall time of the bomb. All of your hypotheticals proved conclusive.”
Charlie returned to his desk without answering.
Mather went to the window, hands on his hips like a landowner surveying his fields. “You are the one who calculated the forty-three-second fall.”
“So?” Keep, destroy, keep.
Mather glanced out the window. There was no activity, no one hustling across the tech area. The place was deserted. “So after forty-three seconds, a B-29 going three hundred and fifty miles an hour would be six miles away.”
“Mather, you are tiresome. What’s your point?”
He turned from the window. “You proved that they would survive, Fish. The B-29 crew, I mean. Your math demonstrated that they could drop this gigantic bomb, and be far enough away when it blew, and the detonation would not obliterate them. See?”
Charlie shook his head. “Not really.”
“The military didn’t have to recruit men for a suicide mission. Your math made the whole thing possible.”
Charlie rubbed his face with both hands. “I feel like I’ve been used.”
“On the contrary.” Mather shook his head. “You have received advancements, based on legitimate accomplishments. I would not have predicted it, Fish, but you have come a long way since Chicago.”
Charlie took a sheet from the destroy pile and turned it over. He poked around and found a pencil. “How many men do you estimate worked in that math room?”
“I don’t estimate. The exact number was thirty, plus our manager Cohen, that worthless windbag.”
“All right.” Charlie did quick division on the paper. “That’s three thousand, two hundred and twenty-six each.”
“Meaning what?”
“Meaning the number of Japanese people killed in Hiroshima per math person.”
“Don’t be infantile.” Mather began pacing. “Their nation started this. The imbeciles are still fighting us too.” As if insulting someone was balm, he calmed, half-sitting on a desk. “Those bastards invited this destruction on themselves.”
At that, Charlie realized what the conversation was actually about. Giles would have spotted it sooner, but it was apparent to him now: Mather was filled with guilt. He had come here not to deliver news, but to shed culpability. Whether by exaggerating Charlie’s role or by blaming the Japanese, the man was seeking exoneration.
Charlie knew with every cell in his body that this was not something he could give. Especially given the culpability he felt himself.
“Tell me, Mather,” he said. “Whatever became of your sister? The pretty tennis player you said none of us would ever touch. Did she make it through the war all right?”
“My sister.” Mather laughed to himself. “My untouchable sister.”
“Last I heard she was in England.”
“Nursing assistant at a war hospital, that plucky gal.” Mather picked a sheet of paper up from the desk. “One anecdote from her last letter should suffice.”
As he spoke, he folded the paper this way and that. “One day she was delivering some documents, an innocent messenger for some VIP, scurrying through the ward, when a surgeon shouted at her to assist him. It was an emergency. Well, she has the heart of an authentic do-gooder, but no medical training whatsoever. He said it didn’t matter, this boy would die of infection if he did not amputate immediately, and there were no nurses available. He pointed to where she was to secure the delirious fellow’s leg.” Mather put the paper down to hang his hands out in the air, holding an imaginary thigh. “She put her hands on his swollen skin, and it was hot to the touch. The surgeon placed a blade against the skin, and the moment he applied pressure, the wound burst. My sister was not wearing a mask, of course, and it sprayed into her face.”
“That is a horror,” Charlie said.
“Blood, pus, who knows what hideousness.” Mather dropped his hands. “Poor boy probably died within the hour anyway. But my sweet, dutiful sister remained at the bedside, as ordered, until she found herself holding an amputated leg. Then that lovely girl asked the surgeon, ‘Where do I put this?’”
He picked up the paper again, crushed it into a ball, and tossed it toward a wastebasket. It missed and bounced away on the floor. “You don’t need a battle to destroy you. That nice tennis girl? That beautiful tomboy? Wrecked. Utterly wrecked.”
“Is anyone going to get out of this war intact?” Charlie asked. “Anyone?”
“Did you know,” Mather said, rousing himself, sitting up straight, “Fish, did you know that our armed forces set aside certain cities as ineligible for fire bombings? Apparently we wanted them kept pristine for the Gadget.”
“What do you mean?”
“If your atomic bomb blows down charred timbers, where’s the glory? They set a few places aside, intact. A better canvas on which to display the art of annihilation.”
Charlie sat with his head down for a full minute, struggling not to vomit. When he looked up, Mather was staring at him. “I’m having a difficult time with all of this.”
“Consider mankind as a species,” Mather replied. “Is it a collection of angels, who make music and art and automobiles? Or is it a mob of monsters? These are the questions I ask.”
“And what do you think, now that we know how to split an atom?”
“What I have long suspected,” Mather said, a smile coming to his face. “Our species is capable of anything.”
47.
My mother stayed till the stitches came out, then caught a train back to Chicago. Lizzie waited two solid days before coming to the doorway of my room, a look on her face that made me think she was going to say she was seriously ill.
“Here’s what you need to know first,” she said instead.
“About what?” I was flat on my back. I’d managed to make it downstairs twice each day, even shuffling half a block from the house the second time, though the climb back up the stairs was still daunting. I had dressed for the day’s first salvo, but paused before starting the struggle to get my shoes on.
“First you need to know that my husband, my powerful lover Tim, was scheduled to ship out from San Diego in three weeks.”
“For the invasion, yes. You told me.”
“He’s a medic,” she added. “So he’d be running right into the gunfire.”
“Let’s sincerely hope that doesn’t happen.”
“You believe that, don’t you? And we should take any steps we can to prevent it?”
“Lizzie,” I sat up, no easy task. “Of course. What’s this all about?”
She rubbed a finger under her nose. “Our country took steps.”
“Good. Did it work?”
“Not yet. But I need you to be thinking that way.”
“You’re scaring me a little,” I said.
“We’ve been keeping something from you. Mrs. Morris wanted to wait longer, but the hell with her.”
“Is it about Charlie? Is he all right?”
Lizzie hesitated. “He’s fine. Though he’s also probably not entirely okay.”
“Tell me,” I said. “Say it plain.”
Lizzie took a deep breath. Her fingers were in a knot. She shook them loose and sat on the bed. “There is a bomb. Well, two. Bigger than any bomb ever.”
“Does our side have them?”
She nodded. “We dropped the first one on a city called Hiroshima. It killed a hundred thousand people.”
“What?”
“The second hit the city of Nagasaki. They say that one killed seventy thousand.”
“Why kill the whole city? Were they some kind of military fortresses?�
�
“No. Just regular cities. But we killed everyone.”
“That’s not right,” I said, standing up. I had to hold the wall a second, while my blood caught up with my body. “Unless . . . has Japan surrendered?”
Lizzie shook her head. “I can’t imagine why not. The photographs in the papers are horrifying. The cities look flattened. Nothing left.”
“That sounds savage.”
“I’m not heartless, Brenda.” She unclipped her hair so that it fell around her face. “I feel bad for the women and children and old folks who got cooked by that bomb.”
“Naturally.”
“But their country started it,” she continued, reaching back to braid her hair. “They are the ones who refuse to surrender. The hell with them. Now they know we will make them fry.” She quit braiding and pushed her hair to one side. “They’ll quit soon. And my husband will come home in one piece.”
I considered that for a moment. “What does all this have to do with Charlie?”
Lizzie sighed. “The bomb was made here, kid.”
“What do you mean, ‘here’?”
“Los Alamos. In a giant secret lab. Other labs helped, but this was the main one. Charlie works at the place that made this bomb, that killed all those people.”
Oh, an old conversation came back to me: Charlie talking about building a giant gun, with a bullet so huge it could not be aimed.
“How great are we, right?” She was smiling. “Now Tim won’t die on some island ten thousand miles from here, and we are the greatest warrior nation ever. Also cold-blooded murderers, but who cares, if it means your man is coming home.”
“I thought Charlie was doing math.”
She laughed. “He was. Math on how to flatten an entire city with one punch.”
I sat down on the bed. Had I underestimated Charlie all this time? No. I knew him. I knew that his work had been tearing him up. I remembered the day he could not stop shaking. That man would not contribute to a weapon so destructive. “I’m telling you, Lizzie. Charlie doesn’t know anything about bombs. He’s a mathematician.” I set my jaw. “I don’t believe you.”
“I thought that might happen,” Lizzie answered evenly. “So I brought this.”
Reaching behind her back, she pulled a rolled-up newspaper from her belt and tossed it on my lap. “This is from five days ago. See for yourself, kid.”
The Santa Fe New Mexican, August 7, 1945. One glance told me everything, the headlines in a cascade down the page: “atomic bombs drop on japan.” Above it, in smaller letters, “los alamos secret disclosed by truman.” Below, “Deadliest Weapons in World’s History Made in Santa Fe Vicinity.” At the bottom of the page, “Now They Can Be Told Aloud, Those Stories of The Hill.”
I scanned the page, not knowing where to begin. “I don’t understand.”
Lizzie stood and went to the door. “I’ve been your friend for a while now, Brenda Dubie. I’ve bucked you up and bailed you out, and listened for a thousand hours. I just spent nine days at your bedside, without so much as a thank you. And when I tell you the news that is going to bring my husband home, there’s no congratulations. No ‘I’m happy for you.’ No ‘Now you can have those babies you’ve been wanting, instead of being a widow at twenty-seven.’ Just ‘Oh, my innocent Charlie would never do such a thing.’”
She jabbed her finger at the newspaper. “He did it, little miss. He helped in the slaughter. And I’m glad. He could have killed twice as many people and I’d still be glad. Chew on that one for a while.”
Lizzie spun on her heel and vanished down the hall. I heard her door slam.
I was alone with the newspaper. From top to bottom, I began to read.
It was all there: the bomb, the ruined city, the death toll. Suddenly all kinds of odd things made sense: the quiet night at the hospital, the crowd in the Morrises’ living room, Mrs. Morris’s hushed manner when she checked on me. And the credit was going to the people at Los Alamos. “Charlie,” I said to my empty room. “What did you do?”
The answer, as I continued reading, was surprisingly plain: the gang on The Hill did this, they invented this thing, and the president was proud of them.
This was what Charlie had hesitated about. This was what had terrified him. And this was the thing I had pushed and urged him to do, with no idea what I was saying. What a reckless, arrogant beast I was. And he listened to me, he allowed me to compromise his conscience.
This was the most wrong I had ever been. All those times I thought of myself as superior? Now I knew better. Maybe the strongest thing a person can do is follow his conscience. Maybe this is the only kind of strength that matters. Now? One hundred thousand killed, and I hadn’t said I loved him? Seventy thousand killed, and I’d told him to be a man?
I hoisted myself off the bed and struggled down the stairs. Flinging the door open, I staggered into the street. There were stitches across my middle and I was barefoot.
Should I head to the church, to seek spiritual comfort? Or go to East Palace Avenue, and take the next bus to The Hill? Or hike back up the boardinghouse stairs first, and apologize to my friend? Where could I shed the weight of my guilt?
I found myself immobile, standing in the middle of the boulevard. Even if my heart had known which way to go, my body hurt too much to take me there.
A car approached, long and black, swerving around me with a blare of its horn. The man behind the wheel gave me a long, angry stare as he roared away, and I had no argument to make in my defense. The damage my vanity had done.
Another car came along, but slower. The woman driving wore an expression of deep concern. All I wanted to say to her was no, I am unworthy. No, I have ruined him.
48.
The morning after Japan’s surrender, Charlie’s assignment was to police the detonation area. No celebrations, business as usual.
“Absurd,” Giles said, climbing into the truck bed beside him. “The testing terrain alone covers fifteen acres.”
“I don’t mind,” Charlie said, sliding over to make room, as half a dozen other technicians joined them. “Anything to keep me from thinking about this hangover.”
Giles looked upward. “At least it’s not sunny. We would roast.”
The skies were gunmetal gray, horizon to horizon. The day promised steady rain, though none had fallen yet.
“And Nagasaki.” Charlie tried to swallow but his mouth felt like sawdust. “Another two thousand two hundred and fifty-eight each. But who’s counting?”
Giles gave Charlie a quizzical look, until the truck jerked forward, then chugged away from the mess tent.
“Moving at a civilized speed makes me miss Monroe,” Charlie said.
“By now I imagine he has a terrible case of ellipsism.”
“Which means?”
“The sadness that you’ll never know how things turn out.” Giles sighed. “I liked everything about Monroe but his driving.”
On the ride to the detonation area, the other technicians chatted or dozed, but Charlie remained upright, scanning the hillsides on both sides of the road.
“What are you looking for?” Giles asked.
“Nothing,” Charlie answered. “My cat.”
Giles closed his eyes, trying to get comfortable. “If Midnight has any survival instinct at all, she is long gone from this place.”
Soon enough the truck reached the clearing. Giles watched Charlie climb down, wincing with the effort. “I’ve never seen you put it away like that before.”
“Your fault,” Charlie muttered. “Before I met you, I’d never even tasted whiskey.”
“Yet another reason that today is a proud day for our nation.”
The team fanned out, Charlie and Giles lingering near the concrete bowl. They’d fill a wheelbarrow with debris—splintered wood and twisted metal—and haul it up to the road. Later a sanitation crew would come and cart it all away. After dumping the wheelbarrow, Giles pretended to climb in for a ride.
“Any other day, I
would oblige you,” Charlie said. “Today I would shatter.”
“You know,” Giles observed, as they rambled down the hill, “you’ve been hitting the bottle every night since you returned from Santa Fe.”
“So have you,” Charlie replied.
“But I’m an old hand. You’re setting new records each night.”
Charlie stopped, and Giles pulled up too. Beyond the scrub and ponderosa, the land fell away into a canyon. To the right, the road continued to Bandelier and the ancient cliff dwellings. The overcast skies made everything look vast and bland.
“Which would you rather have?” he asked. “Pain or numbness?”
“Pain is instructive,” Giles said. “If your ankle aches, perhaps you sprained it. If your head hurts, possibly you need to drink less.”
“What if the pain isn’t something you can bear?”
Giles wiped sweat from his face. “Brenda did not die. Your grief about other things may not last forever.”
“You know what we did. You know how vast the damage is.”
“The planet does not contain enough whiskey to kill that pain. Only to dull it, and only temporarily. You need to find some other way to manage.”
“I have no idea what that could be,” Charlie said, lifting the wheelbarrow again.
A banging sound came from above, and they both turned. A pickup similar to Bronsky’s came careening down the incline. The tailgate had fallen open, and with each bounce of the truck, it rose and slammed down.
“Here comes the rodeo,” Giles said.
The truck rattled to a halt, its passenger climbing out: John Simmons, wearing a wide-brimmed cowboy hat. He glared in at the driver. “Nearly killed me, you idiot.” But then he saw Charlie, and broke out his trademark smile. “Ah, there’s my fine nephew.”
Charlie muttered to Giles, “No rodeo, just a politician.” But he came forward and introduced his friend.
Simmons took in the test area, the trees and detonation craters. “Gorgeous spot you’ve been working in.”
Charlie made no reply, so Giles filled the pause. “What brings you to The Hill?”
Universe of Two Page 39
