After that he left the museum and walked through the streets looking for his old house, which he failed to locate. Kitty and the children had been living there only the day before yesterday. Only the day before yesterday, this was where he came home to, this but not this, here but not here, and his wife and children were no longer wife and children: all they were was all gone.
If everything he knew had not been swept away they would be living here still. When he came to the place where he guessed his house had once been he sat down on a bench, his hat beside him, and wept again. His eyes were dry but his throat rasped with sobs.
A passing youngster lobbed a quarter onto his hat brim.
After three cups of coffee and nine cigarettes in a nearby dive he walked to the lab complex and inquired after physicists and engineers and even secretaries and file clerks he knew, hoping one of them would still be present, working there. He wracked his brain for the names of the youngest employees of the Project, the ones he’d known when they were in their very early twenties, who might feasibly still be around, postponing their retirement because they were wedded to their work. But not surprisingly none of the names he gave to security were recognized, and finally they turned him away.
Firsthand accounts of the Trinity test make clear it was a sight that could never be captured by photography or by words. It was a moment that had to be felt in the stomach, seen with the eyes. The singularity of the sight of the first atomic bomb is clear in all descriptions by the physicists who were present. It turned scientists into poets.
Enrico Fermi wrote: Although I did not look directly towards the object, I had the impression that suddenly the countryside became brighter than in full daylight. Robert Serber wrote: At a height of perhaps twenty thousand feet, two or three thin horizontal layers of shimmering white cloud were formed. Luis Alvarez wrote: My first sensation was one of intense light covering my whole field of vision. Victor Weisskopf wrote: The path of the shock wave through the clouds was plainly visible as an expanding circle all over the sky. Phillip Morrison wrote: I observed an enormous and brilliant disk of white light. Ed McMillan, the test director, wrote: The whole surface of the ball was covered with a purple luminescence, like that produced by the electrical excitation of air.
Oppenheimer read his own comments about Trinity too. He read the line his other self, the shell of self that had witnessed the explosion and continued living in its own time, had apparently selected from the Bhagavad-Gita to describe the experience. It was a line that had been famous, almost as famous as he himself, the line I am become Death, the Destroyer of Worlds.
He saw himself pronounce these words on film. On the grainy gray film stock he was a white-haired old man, old beyond his years, careful and worn, his eyes misty.
Every night Ann walked alone. She walked home, she walked down the street, she walked to meet Ben at a restaurant or a friend’s house or occasionally a bar. She made sure that she walked alone.
As she walked she became all abstract.
The opposition between the small and the big, the idea of the miniscule and the idea of the vast, she thought, is not far removed from the opposition between the mundane and the sublime.
And if the question were asked: What is more real, the mundane or the sublime? most would hesitate before they gave an answer.
On the one side details: say, the aftermath of a breakfast, dirty chipped plates in the sink, their rims encrusted with egg yolk. Against this, the unnameable: small aching heart with boasts, what can you know? Outside the cage of everything we ever heard or saw, beyond, outside, above, there lies the real, hiding as long as we shall live, there stretch and trail the millions of names of God burning across the eons. When all through this our end will come before we even know the names of us.
For many the egg yolk prevails.
He did not know what was real but for the time being, until he got his bearings, he allowed himself to believe what was being proposed: he had been displaced in time and the man whose story had been told in history books, this other impostor self, therefore could not be and had never been him. How could it? Here he was: this was he.
He also read other people’s descriptions of him. He pored over these, attempting to glean from them a sense of his own wonder secondhand. He was disturbed by one description of him “swaggering” as he left the Trinity site after the test, as he stepped into the car. He felt that this comment was unfair. He was not, and never had been, a man to swagger. He would not have strutted like a cowboy from a sight like that.
He was downcast for some days at the betrayal of intimates. Haakon Chevalier had written a novel featuring Robert himself, thinly veiled, as an cruelly rendered protagonist, an arrogant and self-deluding intellectual. This drew from him a shaken and wounded astonishment. Haakon had been a close friend, or so he had believed: but in fact to judge from the text Haakon had not known him, had not known him at all, clearly. And then there was the report that Teller, during what appeared to be a right-wing political witch hunt in the 1950s, had spoken ill of him and doomed him to a senescence of obscurity.
Reading these accounts of the past, accounts
