Trinity, p.9
Trinity, page 9
He was standing there in the corner. He didn’t shake his fists over his shoulders. He didn’t smile. He just stood quietly, smoking a cigarette, and by then the rest of us were so drunk I’m not sure anyone else noticed his presence.
But I did. There he was in the corner, wearing his work shirt and his boots, and I remembered his hawk feather, stuck so jauntily in that jar, and suddenly, for a moment, my heart ached to see him.
He looked so young. He looked as if he might cry. For a moment, I felt really bad for him. I thought he’d done something he knew he couldn’t ever forgive, and therefore couldn’t begin to atone for.
But then the moment passed. I’d cared too much already. I’d stayed up too late, wearing out my powers of caring, so then I gave up, and right away I knew I’d be sick.
I only just got outside before I had to kneel and shove my head into a juniper bush, and only when I’d finished and wiped off my mouth did I realize Oppie was kneeling beside me.
Then I felt another wave rising, so I shoved my head back in the bush, and the whole time, Oppie stayed there beside me, the two of us kneeling on the cracked earth as if we’d come there to pray for forgiveness.
“I’m sorry,” I kept saying, “I’m really sorry.”
And he didn’t answer. He just stayed there beside me until I’d stopped throwing up, and then he helped me off my knees. I brushed off my dress. And by then, I think, I’d gotten sort of used to his presence. By then he didn’t seem like the great Oppie, the mayor of our Shangri-la, he just seemed like another lost soul, wandering around a camp we should have abandoned.
HE WALKED WITH ME THE WHOLE WAY BACK TO THE WAC DORM. AT some point I noticed that there weren’t any clothes on the clotheslines.
Then I thought somewhere else in the world, the survivors of those two bomb strikes—if there were any survivors—were even now wandering through a city that no longer existed.
Later, I read more specific accounts. I was sitting in the hair salon, and I read an article in a magazine that mentioned a girl whose leg had been broken when the bomb exploded nearby, and how all night while the black rain poured down around her, she waited under a sheet of tin with another woman whose left breast had been sheared off her body.
I read about a man who, running from the conflagration of the houses on his street, kicked the severed head of a man and shouted, “Excuse me, excuse me!”
And then I read about another woman who wandered for days through the ruins of the neighborhood where she used to live, holding the charred corpse of her baby, looking for the husband she’d lost in the chaos.
But I read that magazine later. That night, when I was walking back to the WAC dorm with Oppie, all I could really imagine were the mountains shifting two feet to the left, so I asked Oppie why he’d called it the Trinity Test.
He told me it was in honor of a good friend.
“Was he Catholic?” I said.
He told me it was from a poem she loved.
Then we walked for a while in silence. Later I asked him what became of his friend.
She died, he said. Her name was Jean.
I said I was sorry. Then I told him my mother died also. Then we walked on for a while in silence, and only later, when we’d gotten close to the WAC dorm, did I ask him how his friend died.
She killed herself, he said. She drowned in the bathtub.
I said I was sorry. Then I asked about the poem she’d loved, and he said it was a poem by Donne. Then he recited the whole thing by heart. And then, very politely, he left me at the front door of the WAC dorm.
THERE I STOOD IN THE NIGHT, WATCHING OPPIE RECEDE. HE WALKED somewhat jerkily, as though he were strung up on a line. He kept one hand in his pocket, the other hand hanging free, and while I watched him moving away, blending in with the dark trees and the dark mountains, I repeated what I remembered back to myself.
Batter my heart, three person’d God, I whispered into the night.
And while I headed up the stairs, I thought, For you as yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend.
And when I opened the door, hoping there wouldn’t be any rats in my chair, I thought, Break, blow, burn, and make me new.
And later, brushing my teeth, looking at my aging face in the mirror, the bruise having faded, leaving me alone with myself once again, I whispered, For I shall never be free. When I lay down to sleep, I waited for the mice to begin running over the ceiling, but by some unknowable grace they were still, so I just lay there in the darkness that seemed to have poured out of a faucet, a darkness rising slowly around me, and repeated, For I shall never be free.
By then I was getting it wrong, but I didn’t care. I only wondered what Oppie’s friend Jean had been like. I wondered whether he loved her, and whether or not Kitty knew.
Then, finally, I wondered if Jean would have wanted a bomb to be named in her honor, whether she might have considered that outcome when she lay down in the bathtub and opened the taps, but before I had time to come to any conclusions, I began to drift off to sleep, and just before the whole world went dark, I thought again: A violence to end all other forms of violence.
And: A weapon to end the use of all weapons.
Oppenheimer Spends the Last
Oppenheimer spends the last hours of daylight in the confines of base camp, where site personnel are completing their preparations. The medical group issues coveralls, caps, gas masks, cotton gloves, and booties to be worn over shoes. The chief of the fallout team issues commands to his monitors by radio transmitter. They’ve chosen code names from The Wizard of Oz; orders are directed to Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, and the Tin Man. Now the meteorologists have launched their weather balloons, and as the sun sets, they drift northeast in bright clusters.
At the control hub at South Shelter, ten thousand yards from the shot tower, technicians check the detonator signals for the last time. Some are out in the desert, scattering debris. At the last minute, someone decided that an effort should be made to test the bomb’s impact on city structures. Pieces of sheet metal and lumber, intended to represent houses, have been placed at varying distances from the tower.
At some point, someone was given a box of white mice and ordered to tie them to the signal wires running between the bomb and base camp. Now a technician runs out to check on the mice and finds they’ve all died of thirst before they had a chance to survive the explosion.
At dusk, circuit testing is called to a halt. The activity at base camp starts to slow, and the only disruption that occurs is a young scientist who suddenly grows hysterical and has to be removed under heavy sedation.
ONCE HE’S GONE, THE CAMP GROWS QUIET AGAIN. AFTER NIGHTFALL, the darkness is massive. The clouds have thickened over the desert, its elements undifferentiated by starlight.
In the mess hall, to pass time, some of the scientists place bets on whether the bomb will ignite the atmosphere. If so, they wonder, will the fire consume only the state, or will it consume the whole planet.
Others, trusting the theoretical group’s calculations, bet on the force of the explosion. Some of the scientists go to sleep. Oppenheimer does not. He remains in the mess hall, rolling cigarettes, drinking black coffee, and reading—according to several witnesses—poems by Baudelaire. At some point, rain starts pelting the tin roof of base camp.
Testimonial 3
Andries van den Berg
Paris, 1949
IT WAS ONLY A FEW YEARS AFTER THE END OF THE WAR—MAYBE 1948, or 1949—when he and Kitty came to our little garret in Paris for dinner, and as soon as he walked in the door, I knew that nothing had changed.
Maybe there were a few superficial differences. His hair was cut shorter, that much is true. And let’s not forget that he’d become famous. In one year, can you believe it, he was on the cover of Time magazine twice. The Father of the Atom Bomb! Or maybe it was the cover of Life. One or the other, he’d been on it twice, and I bought copies of both. I kept them on the coffee table, until Jacqueline put them away in the bookshelf.
Once, I picked up a magazine at a newsstand and on the cover there was only a lab stool and his porkpie hat. That’s how famous he was. He’d entered the metonymic realm!
Of course, between you and me, I can tell you that hat wasn’t exactly an original choice. He only started wearing it after Bernard Peters joined up with our group. Opje might have been his advisor, but we all looked up to Peters. He’d been sent to Dachau for Communist activity. Then he escaped and made his way to Berkeley, wearing a brown felt porkpie hat.
A few months later, Opje was wearing one also. But what does it matter? By the time Opje came to visit in Paris, that was his hat on the cover. You saw it at every magazine stand you passed. It even showed up in the newsreels. You’d go to the cinema and there he was, sitting with Eleanor Roosevelt and a bunch of bigwigs in bow ties, and every time I saw him presented like that—quoting Donne and the Bhagavad Gita, his hair cropped so close his head looked like a skull—it made me laugh.
Could that really be Opje? I had to rub my eyes!
There he was on the screen, looking so somber, the same guy who once kept his hair in that unruly cloud. Once he took me riding over a mountain pass near Santa Fe, and he wouldn’t turn back when it started to hail. He must have had some kind of death wish! Those hailstones were like marbles, but Opje wouldn’t take shelter. We rode over that pass covering our heads with our arms like we were under enemy fire, and when we finally got back to the house it took a whole bottle of whiskey to warm us.
That was 1938, or maybe 1939, the summer Barb and I visited Opje in New Mexico. There was no electricity in his cabin, and no running water. We drank our whiskey out of tin cups. We ate Vienna sausages straight from the can. It was lucky I brought my pocket knife with the inlaid turquoise handle, because as soon as we got there, Opje realized he didn’t have an opener.
What would we have done? We might not have eaten all week! But even so, Opje would have had a fine time. He never ate much. He had a few bites, and then he sat back and while the rest of us were finishing, he recited poetry, or talked to us about permanent free fall, and when he had to piss he did it outside under the stars, and when he came back in he was smiling.
That was the Opje I knew in Berkeley, not the Opje up there on the screen. But time does funny things. Or that’s what I said to myself, when I was waiting for him and Kitty on the balcony outside our little apartment. Inside, Jacqueline arranged the tulips she’d managed to find, and I tried to imagine what Opje would look like.
It was spring when they came, but it was still cold. I sat there on the balcony looking out over the spirally rooftops and the low, miserable clouds, and at one point Jacqueline came out and asked me to sponge off the tables. But I was so caught up in wondering whether Opje had changed that I completely forgot what she’d asked me. Instead, inspecting those rooftops, I thought that, to a certain extent, I would have to “face facts.” He probably wasn’t the same Opje I’d known back in Berkeley, when I was working on my monograph on Native American myth. How could he be? A lot of time had intervened. There had been a war. Some people said that Opje had won it.
Now he was a great American hero. He was in Paris for an international conference on diplomacy in the atomic age. He’d given his country a power that set it above every other country on earth. By then, every week, Radio Moscow made some new announcement about how close their atom bomb was to completion, but no one really believed them, and in Paris, waiting for Opje to show up, I tried to prepare myself for the fact that he might have been changed.
I told myself he probably wouldn’t walk in the door looking just like he had when he was another assistant professor at Berkeley, with that big cloud of curly hair and that belt he wore with the Navajo buckle.
While Jacqueline finished the soup, I stayed out there on the balcony, looking out over the bare trees and the gray city, feeling more and more cross about the things time does to the people we care for, and then, finally, a cab pulled up, and Opje stepped out.
Sure enough, even from above I could see he looked different. He wasn’t wearing his hat. His hair was shorter, and it had gone gray. His overcoat must have cost him a fortune.
Then Kitty stepped out behind him, and I’ll tell you what. She was wearing a mink coat, and her hair was done in an awful new style, cut just under her chin, and sort of rounded and sprayed in the shape of a helmet.
I was so disappointed! I imagined them climbing the stairs, passing the shared bathroom we used on the stairwell, and there was a knot in my stomach when I went to the door. But then I opened it up, and there they were, and I saw that underneath her new helmet, Kitty was still almost as pretty as she was in the old days, back when she and Opje first met and she came with him to a dinner party we threw at Barb’s house.
Now she was wearing a pair of diamond earrings the size of small grapes, but when she went up on her tiptoes to kiss me, and Opje grinned, and held out a salad in a big wooden bowl, and a bottle of Château Cheval Blanc, I knew right away that they were the same people.
I took the wine and Opje held on to the salad, and they moved through that little Paris apartment—the only thing we could afford, between my lecturer’s pay and Jacqueline’s graduate stipend—and acted as impressed as they would have acted walking into that house on the coast that Barb inherited from her parents.
That apartment was no bigger than the laundry room in Barb’s house, but Opje seemed genuinely delighted. He loved the exposed beams and the view over the rooftops. He walked around acting so excited and happy to be there, and it was clear right from the start that though our lives had taken two different forks, he didn’t hold himself above me.
He was still the same guy he was when he lived in that house on Shasta Road, with the hammock slung up on the back porch. And he was just about to put the salad bowl down when Jacqueline swooped past, murmuring apologies, and sponged off the tables. Then she smiled shyly and let him put the salad bowl down, and I saw Opje notice how pretty she was.
I’ll tell you what: that made me feel good. I realized then how lucky I was, to live with Jacqueline in that little apartment. She was so pretty and sweet, and such an excellent cook, and the spread we laid out for Opje and Kitty was simple but it was as good as anything they’d have been served at any pretentious French restaurant.
We started with the onion soup and a loaf of excellent bread, and I’d spent more than I should have on a few bottles of good Languedoc. Then we opened the Château Cheval Blanc. And by the time we’d finished that bottle, I’d remembered Opje’s famous martinis.
Those martinis! He used to keep glasses chilled in the freezer. Even in that little house, where he sometimes slept on the back porch and ate nothing but peanut butter out of the jar, he always kept a box of the best gin in his pantry.
I told that little story while we finished our salad, and we all had a good laugh, and then we decided the only proper thing we could do to celebrate the old days back in Berkeley was to make a few of Opje’s famous martinis. Then Opje and I went to the kitchen, leaving Jacqueline and Kitty to get to know one another, and for a moment, just before we closed the door, I remembered that Barb once said Kitty could be a difficult person.
But then I thought maybe that was just Barb. She was always oversensitive, and Jacqueline was so sweet she could have charmed Stalin, so I wasn’t concerned in the least when Opje and I went to the kitchen, and while I rummaged around for some olive juice and vermouth, we caught up on the old days in California.
We talked about the monograph I was writing back then, my collection of Native American myths. Then Opje asked me about the new project, and I told him this one was an ethnography in photographs, a study of Europe after the war. And we both knew without saying that it was a new direction for me. My specialty was Native American myth, and I found the new subject depressing. But of course I’d been denied a visa to return to the States, and then Opje acted so interested in the new subject, and so impressed by the new direction I’d taken, that by the time we’d found the olives, it didn’t matter one bit.
There was Opje, leaning on the counter, asking me all sorts of excellent questions, and I’ll tell you what, it made me so happy just to be standing there in the kitchen with Opje, talking about our work like we used to.
Then I asked him if he’d had time, since the war, to go back to studying permanent free fall. He couldn’t believe it! But how could I have forgotten permanent free fall? All those conversations, late into the night, sitting on his back porch and looking up at the stars while Opje explained that somewhere out there in the darkness there were spots of matter so massive and dense they simply vanished.
They collapsed into themselves and disappeared, and so did every little thing that passed by them.
Even sound. Even light! Or that’s what he told me, sitting on that back porch in Berkeley. Every little thing that passed too near those spots bent in and around them and started to spiral until they’d disappeared, vanished as though they’d never existed.
Later they called those spots a name. They called them black holes, I think, but it was Opje who predicted them, all the way back at that house on Shasta Road. Standing there in the kitchen while Opje poured the gin into the glasses, we laughed about those nights for a while, and then Opje told me he hadn’t had much time to get back to physics.
He looked a little sad about that, so I changed the subject. I asked him about California. I’d heard he’d moved back there after the war. Of course by the time he came to Paris, they’d moved to Princeton. But for a year or two, after the war, when he’d left the Manhattan Project, he was in California again. So I asked him if he’d seen any of the old gang that used to gather on Shasta Road.
He couldn’t believe it! But how could I have forgotten the name of that street? I remembered everything about that little house, like how he kept the windows open all year, so the smell of eucalyptus swept through the kitchen.
