Trinity, p.1
Trinity, page 1
Dedication
For William
Contents
Cover
Title Page
Dedication
Prologue
Testimonial 1: Sam Casal (San Francisco, 1943)
It’s the Jornada
Testimonial 2: Grace Goodman (Los Alamos, 1945)
Oppenheimer Spends the Last
Testimonial 3: Andries van den Berg (Paris, 1949)
At One A.M
Testimonial 4: Sally Connelly (Princeton, 1954)
At Three Thirty
Testimonial 5: Lía Peón (St. John, 1958)
In the Absence
Testimonial 6: Tim Schmidt (Massachusetts, 1963)
An Hour Goes
Testimonial 7: Helen Childs (Princeton, 1966)
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Also by Louisa Hall
Copyright
About the Publisher
Prologue
WHAT I KNOW, FROM EYEWITNESS ACCOUNTS OF THE FINAL twenty-four hours, is this: on the afternoon of July 15, 1945, Robert Oppenheimer drives to the steel shot tower that rises one hundred feet from the desert.
He steps out of the jeep. The wind is blowing harder now, as Oppenheimer walks to the tower. He climbs one rung at a time, the warm metal pressing his palms. When he reaches the top, he pulls himself up to the platform and stands in the shack the technicians built: a roof and three corrugated metal walls, one open side facing west.
There, he inspects the device. In its cradle, it stands as tall as his head: a ten-thousand-pound metal capsule, looped and plugged with detonators. The first nuclear bomb. The work of the last three years of his life.
It’s Oppenheimer who managed to persuade General Groves to run a full-scale test of the weapon. Groves would have delivered the bombs without testing, on the basis of the theoretical group’s calculations. A test, Groves felt, was a waste of millions of dollars of plutonium that had taken the army years to extract.
But Oppenheimer refused. He wouldn’t deliver the bombs until they’d run a full test, on the grounds that though the calculations were in all likelihood correct, without an actual experiment, our knowledge of the weapon wasn’t complete yet.
Groves finally consented. The test site was chosen, the shot tower erected, and the test bomb, which Oppenheimer now inspects, assembled and hoisted up to the platform.
HOW LONG DOES OPPENHEIMER REMAIN THERE, ONE HUNDRED FEET over the desert, standing beside the assembled device? I can’t find any record. I know, however, from photographs, that he’s wearing his porkpie hat.
It’s the same hat he’s worn since he lived in Berkeley, in the small house on Shasta Road, where he later will say he was happy. It’s made of brown felt, broad brimmed and battered by use. And if he stands, and faces out the open side of the shack, he looks away from the Oscura mountains toward the Jornada del Muerto basin.
That’s what he must see: a vast expanse of cracked, reddish earth spreading toward the mountains on the horizon. Dry shrubs, rocky outcrops, the blades of an occasional yucca, and scattered bones bleached by decades of sunlight.
The wind, according to every account, has only continued to quicken. Now the clouds have grown dark. They pour over the mountains like smoke, and as they cross the sky, they drag their shadows over the snakeweed.
Testimonial 1
Sam Casal
San Francisco, 1943
I ONLY FOLLOWED HIM FOR TWO DAYS, IN JUNE OF 1943, SO I CAN’T say that I knew him. Not, at least, in any real sense.
But it’s true that I thought about him a lot. Even after he’d gone back to Los Alamos, when I was just tailing that girl. And even after the war had been won, and I’d left G-2 to start my own practice.
Even now, if I’m honest. Every once in a while, when I’m on my way home from the office, I still sometimes think about Opp and that girl having dinner.
On the train, swinging out over the bay, it can start to seem as if there must have been some clue I didn’t catch, when I was sitting there at the bar, watching them in the smudged mirror. An exchange between him and the girl. An expression I didn’t notice.
It’s possible for me to get so caught up in the details of that night that the real world—Joanne and the boys, their football games and the homework—can sometimes start to recede. It’s as if I’m on the same train, traveling over the same body of water, but it’s almost thirty years ago now, and I’m still with the counterintelligence office, tailing him for Communist contacts.
Then, once again, Opp is sitting a few seats ahead, shaking out the newspaper he bought at the station, and it’s my job to stay a few seats behind him.
I’ve missed my stop a few times. I’ve had to apologize when I got home, and explain to Joanne that I slept through the station. There she is, folding laundry, or cleaning up after dinner, and I’m running late because all these years later, Opp’s still shaking out that old paper.
It’s the definition of a cold case. A case I’m not even assigned to, and haven’t been for nearly three decades.
But even so, sometimes you can’t help reviewing the details. You examine the way she greeted him at the station. You look at the Mexican place where they chose to have dinner. You remember the song they got up to dance to, the run in her stocking, the way she led him into the restaurant.
I know it’s all useless. Once I looked long and hard at a girl’s face. She was my wife and she was sleeping beside me. In the darkness, I looked at her a long time, but another person is a mystery.
We lived together for nearly a year. In the mornings, I watched her pull on her socks. Her shoes were lined up on the floor of our closet. But I never did know her. I also never knew Opp, or Opp’s wife, much less that girl who danced with him at the Mexican restaurant.
It’s useless to go back now and try to understand what I couldn’t back then. For the most part I resist the temptation, and it only occurs to me in a few specific locations. When I’m on the train, for example. Or if I pass Montgomery Street. If I pause there and try to remember what it was like when Opp had gone back to Los Alamos, and I was just tailing the girl.
I stood in that yard across from her building. Every night, I waited there in the darkness, under that tree. Its leaves smelled bitter and dusty. I could never figure out why. I just waited there, looking up at the lights of that girl’s apartment.
By then, I was so tired I started to see things. Like the belly of that plane that passed by so slowly it didn’t even seem to be moving. I was sure it wouldn’t stay up. I thought it would drop straight out of the sky. I imagined running headfirst into the wreckage.
What a strange time that was. I’m glad it’s behind us. Now there’s no reason to think of it much. Only if I drive past Montgomery Street, or if I venture back to that Mexican restaurant, and pull open that heavy door, and step into that particular darkness.
Then, sometimes, I can start to suspect once again that maybe the whole series of unsolvable cases started because Opp and that girl went to eat there. Or because they danced to that song. Or because they drove home to her third-story apartment.
That’s what it seemed like at the time: that because I couldn’t understand Opp, I couldn’t trust myself to understand anyone or anything else. Because for reasons I couldn’t comprehend in that moment, Opp wasn’t content to stay where he was supposed to, at that camp in the desert, sleeping in the house we gave him to share with his wife, waking up early to look after those weapons.
Because he set off on that reckless escape from the mesa, and fled back to the city, where he took that girl to the Mexican restaurant.
I couldn’t understand why he did it. Or why he thought he could do it. He had agents on him at all times. There was a childishness to the whole thing, as though he thought that if he couldn’t see us, we couldn’t see him and catch what he was doing.
I just didn’t get it. It contributed to my sense that we were sliding into a new kind of chaos. As if Opp himself—coming back to the city, spending the night with that girl—had knocked the whole world off its axis.
Now, of course, I can see there were other factors at work. Youth, for example. And stupidity. The fact that we were at war, and the general randomness of existence.
Some planes stay up, some planes go down. Some secrets come out right away, and some of them stay secret forever. I know that as well as I know the back of my own hand, but even now, all these years later, if I step into that restaurant I can start to feel dizzy.
It’s as if things might start falling to pieces again, now that the door’s been reopened. Then it’s as tempting as ever to line up all the facts as they happened.
FOR A MOMENT, FOR INSTANCE, WHEN OPP STEPPED OUT THE BACK door of the Radiation Lab, he stood still and stared out at the bay.
He didn’t move. He had the unfocused stare of a blind man, and for a moment I wondered if he needed glasses.
All day, he’d proceeded crisply through his appointments. I assumed he knew that we were behind him. He seemed to be checking off all his preapproved duties, acting in the exaggeratedly purposeful way a person would act if he knew he’d been followed.
From the airport, he headed straight for the Rad Lab, as he’d promised to do. The whole point of the trip, as he’d explained it to Security at Los Alamos, was to go back to Berkeley to interview potential assistants. He spoke only to the graduate students he’d listed. Everything went according to plan. The whole trip was running perfectly smoothly until that strange moment when he stepped out the back door and peered off
Then, abruptly, he headed off toward the station. I followed behind him. He was walking fast, heading down University Avenue. That hadn’t been preapproved. I wondered if he thought that he’d lost us, simply by stepping out the back door of the Rad Lab.
It was a sunny afternoon. He was wearing that porkpie hat. One of his hands was stuffed in his pocket. The other hand was curled in a fist, and he refused to look over his shoulder.
Not once, the whole time, did he look back to see me.
That’s how I knew he was on his way to do something we would have refused. He wouldn’t look back. He stayed on the shady side of the street and shifted his weight side to side if he ever had to stop at a streetlight.
Even when he got to the station, he didn’t stop moving. He charged through the front doors and through the main hall as if he planned to sail straight on out again through the opposite exit.
He was still sailing when he glanced up at the departures list. Overhead, on the board, the slats clacked away briskly, like dominoes falling. Then, for the first time since he left the Rad Lab, he pulled up short. He must have realized his gate wasn’t open.
FOR A MINUTE, HE STAYED WHERE HE WAS, LOOKING UP AT THE board. Even then, he refused to glance back.
In his position, another man would have been jumping out of his skin. He’d stepped out of the itinerary given to him by General Groves, carrying top secret nuclear information. He knew that we had evidence of espionage on the mesa. He knew that no matter how firmly General Groves was behind him, his former involvement with Communist groups meant he wasn’t above our suspicion.
Another man would’ve checked for tails every two minutes. But Opp didn’t look once. He must have known we were behind him. He just didn’t want to admit it.
With one hand still clenched in his pocket, he stood peering up at the board as if he couldn’t believe it. It took him a minute to accept the fact that his gate was really closed. Then he turned away and kept moving.
He headed for the café. He bought a newspaper and a small coffee. Then he left a tip on the counter and went to the window.
He drank standing up, without any apparent enjoyment. And he was still gazing blankly off into the distance, as if the scene in front of his eyes—the station, I mean, and the people coming and going, the shoe blacks and the women in heels and the GIs with their duffels—didn’t exist. As if that station had been replaced by some other station, or some other, different version of this one.
WHILE HE FINISHED HIS COFFEE, I FOUND A PAY PHONE THAT KEPT him in my sight line.
What is it, Pash said when I’d reached him in the office.
Opp’s flying the coop, I said.
What do you mean he’s flying the coop? Pash said, after a moment.
He left the Rad Lab. We’re at the station. I think he’s heading into the city.
Jesus Christ, Pash said. Jesus Christ, the fucking Red bastard.
I could hear him breathing into the telephone.
Do you want me to stop him? I said.
Stop him? Pash said. What the fuck are you talking about? Why the fuck would you do that?
I didn’t answer. Pash made several odd snorting noises.
No, he said. No, no. Don’t intervene. Don’t fucking intervene. I have to phone Washington first.
He paused, snorted again, then caught his breath.
Just don’t fucking lose him, he said. Remember your fucking directives. I’ll have Frank meet you out front in the De Soto.
AFTER THAT, AT A KIOSK BY THE PAY PHONE, I BOUGHT SOME CASHEWS and a Chronicle. While I waited for change, I opened the paper, then snuck out my camera. Over the rim of the front page, I photographed Opp a few times.
Then I glanced down again at the headlines. FORTRESSES SMASH KIEL, BREMEN, they said. 26 LOST IN BIG DAYLIGHT BATTLE.
I put a cashew in my mouth, but it was too salty to swallow. Then I focused again on Opp’s face: dark eyebrows, high cheekbones, that beak of a nose.
Every so often, he brought his coffee up to his mouth.
The longer I focused, the less human his face seemed. His jaw was like a grasshopper’s jaw. Then after a while it wasn’t a jaw, just an inhuman apparatus.
At 5:07, he brought his watch up to his face. Then he moved out of the frame. I folded up my paper and followed.
ON THE TRAIN INTO THE CITY, HE TOOK A SEAT BY THE WINDOW LIKE any other man on his way in to work. I watched him over the paper, trying not to get caught up in the headlines. I must have, though, because I remember them still. There were a lot of headlines that day. COSTS HELD “NOT TOO HIGH FOR RESULTS,” was one of the ones I remember. And U.S. FLIERS DOWN 25 ZEROS OF 50 IN SOLOMONS BATTLE.
That kind of thing. All the headlines you get during wartime, mathematical calculations of loss.
I tried not to let them distract me. I focused on the side of Opp’s face, that strange apparatus. He was in possession, I thought to myself, of secrets that could potentially wipe out the planet.
That’s as much as I knew. He was working on a weapon that could potentially wipe out the planet.
And there he was, a quiet man in the seat by the window.
ONCE WE’D MOVED OUT OVER THE BAY, THE WATER MADE ITSELF known. It was so bright and vast, stretching off into the haze. Opp looked out the window. Then, when the train pulled into the tunnel through Yerba Buena, he got up and went to stand by the door. Once again, he faced out the window, but now, in the tunnel, there was nothing to see. Only a light passing, every so often, from an occasional dead man’s hole in the darkness.
I tried to imagine what he could be thinking. Maybe he was counting the holes. Maybe he was watching his own reflection, swimming on the glass in the window. From the side, he looked blind and determined, like a man getting ready to make a mistake, the inevitability of which he’s already accepted.
Or maybe that’s just what I saw. It’s possible I was reading him wrong. Like I’ve said, I slept badly that summer. Sometimes I was up all night on the job. Other nights I was at home, and I still had trouble sleeping. Once I’d turned out the lamp, there was always that conversation with Warren to go over again.
Then I’d picture the scene: me and my little brother, out on the back stoop, the moths knocking themselves out on the streetlight.
May had gone into the bedroom to sleep. You could smell the jasmine crawling over the opposite fence. Warren was standing, leaning on the stoop railing, and I’d taken a seat on the steps.
For a while, we stayed out there without having much to say to each other. It was a strange moment between us. Warren was shipping out the next morning. It was the end of our three days together, and now that we were alone we both felt compelled to imitate a brotherly closeness.
We sat there in silence. We were trying, I think, to come up with something to say. Something conclusive to allow us to imagine that in the course of three days, we’d gotten close. That I’d miss him, and that he would miss me. That we’d be in each other’s minds even after he’d shipped out in the morning.
But it wasn’t that easy. How do you miss a brother you never really knew in the first place? The last time I’d seen Warren was when he was a kid, when my mother packed up the car and asked which of us would come with her. He went, and I stayed. And then he showed up ten years later, the week before he shipped out to the Pacific, and it’s true that nothing went wrong.
He stayed with us in the new house. He met May. We played cards. We had a good time. We smoked cigarettes and listened to records.
But there was still something unnatural about it. And that last night, on the back porch, neither one of us knew how to take his leave in a way that would seem normal. We sat there in the darkness, with the jasmine vines in the alley, and the streetlight flickering, and the dog a few yards down occasionally yowling, and I couldn’t think of the right thing to say, so I was grateful when he started talking. But then I realized where he was going: Asking about where May grew up. Asking about where she went to high school.
I got a metal taste in my mouth. Then I stood up, stubbed out my cigarette, and headed back into the kitchen, and Warren left the next day. I drove him to the base.
The whole way there, neither one of us spoke. At the gate, with those enormous ships flying their flags behind us, we both got out of the car. We stood there awkwardly for a moment: me and my brother, who I’d never known all that well in the first place.
