It was a hard chair in front of a television monitor. Beside him sat an older woman in dark slacks and a red-and-white-striped blouse in some slick silky fabric that was far too small for the heavy slope of her massive, pearlike breasts. He glanced sidelong at her and thought: Madam, your burden is heavy.
It had always been his understanding that, in cases where there was such a rude superabundance of flesh, girdles were de rigueur. Women of a certain age in particular, he thought, did not even like to leave the privacy of their boudoirs without the support and decency of whalebone or a less expensive substitute. But then here there were young girls on the streets with their midriffs showing, their navels actually exposed to the open air. And more disturbing still, he had seen a boy whose massive bluejeans, in which he seemed to wade with difficulty as though treading through quicksand, actually commenced fully beneath the lower edge of his buttocks. It was an engineering marvel that they did not fall down—either that or a sleight-of-hand trick.
At that point a busload of schoolchildren ran loud and distracted behind him, bouncing from wall to wall, glancing only briefly at pictures and shouting taunts and mockeries at each other. —That’s so fake! yelled one of them barely a foot from his ear, as though even the idea of history was a trick.
Taunting a schoolmate, another boy said: —You fuckin’ fag, then who’s the big fat faggot now, huh bitch?
Oppenheimer sat frozen at his station for some time, pondering the obscenity. Out of the mouths of babes. They were a rough tribe, possibly juvenile delinquents. To call them ill-behaved would be an understatement; no doubt they were children from a specialized facility.
On the monitor he saw short videos—he had just learned the word video in his motel and liked it, a Latin verb in common usage, people actually said “I wanna see a video,” he had learned, which literally meant, of course, “I want to see an I-see”—about the Manhattan Project. They showed the Trinity test and the use of the A-bomb on Hiroshima, and even he himself was pictured, right there in black and white, wearing his favorite hat, which he now held carefully on his lap.
He clutched the hat, his hands shaking uncontrollably.
He and the hat had been transported together.
On the monitor he saw the mushroom cloud. It had been captured on film, he realized with detachment, by Berlyn Brixner who had worked on the mesa in the Optics group, brought to Site Y by their mutual friend David Hawkins. Hawkins was a philosopher by trade but in wartime had accepted a position as the official Los Alamos historian. Oppenheimer had known they were making history; he had known this was a process that should be recorded, even then, and hired a scholar for the job. It was not a task that could be entrusted to the military. One thing for which he could take credit: he had never mistaken the endeavor for anything less than it was. He had never thought it was not important, that they would not, after some fashion at least, make history.
He remembered this man Brixner, the photographer, when he saw the mushroom cloud rising and blossoming on the monitor, small and contained. Brixner, Hawkins, Serber, Alvarez, Groves, all these men, different men, fat and thin, arrogant and modest, some with senses of humor, others dry as a bone. He had liked some of them and disliked others, but to all of them he had given his support, all of them had had his shoulder to cry on or his ear to complain into when the pressure was great, and that, at least, was something of which to be proud. All of them together: this was what they had made, all those millions, or in fact, if Groves could be taken at his word, billions of dollars. He remembered Hanford and the Columbia River, the river of sweet pink salmon and the plutonium flowing there.
That and the mystery of the young boy’s trousers, held beneath his buttocks by some invisible force. These questions must be answered.
Watching the video he registered not the strange, anomalous cloud but the rest of what he had lost, the vacuum that was left. That was what it looked like at a glance. It was sucking a vacuum on the ground, blistering a hole in the sky. It was vengeance on them all: it was the unspeakable and the divine.
It had taken everything.
The people he had known, he’d been with yesterday, all gone, gone from him now or he was gone from them, a robbed soul, a victim. He felt it like a tearing loss, felt it weaken his knees as he sat there, how they had all disappeared in the blink of an eye, in the space between seconds. He felt at once the outrage of his absence from that scene he had made, the production he had authored, with its ponderous massive godhead looming over the land.
Kitty. Where was his wife? Was she dead now, or had she only forgotten him? And the children, taken. Where were they? He felt panic rising. Other people had known them, but not him.
All that was what it claimed to be, if this was the future and time had gone on without him.
They had worked together, he and all of these men. They had striven so hard all these weeks, so earnest in the enterprise, laboring in a fever of concentration and letting their families fall by the wayside, knowing they were the priesthood of the atom. They had believed staunchly in Roosevelt before he died and in Niels Bohr, the great man, his own mentor, a scientist for peace. They had known they were fighting the good fight, but then again—it was clear to him now as
