—Look, she said to Ben, —Fermi! It’s Fermi!
—What is he doing? Doesn’t he know they’re shooting?
The birds were flying in wide arcs over the stage, back and forth, turning gracefully and returning. Fermi spun around and around among them, smiling. His smile was visible on the screen as a faint line of white teeth, and he was walking so near the screen that his silhouette touched the image of himself behind him.
—Oppenheimer! said Ben, and she saw him beside Fermi, bending over as though he was bowing; for a split second she thought he had tipped his hat at them. Then the flurry of the birds hid them, and the birds were diving and swooping, and the crowd was quiet.
Then were other shots and other birds fell.
—I wish they would stop it! she said urgently, voice shaking, afraid she was going to break down. The birds were beautiful and shocking in their nearness, the wide white wings with end-feathers like long black fingers and thin legs hanging down as they flew past.
She saw the eye of one of them, the deep and lovely eye.
Ben had lost sight of Fermi in the white blizzard but then he caught sight of him again, briefly; and the last split-second he saw him he had to blink and squint, muttering under his breath What?—because he could have sworn Fermi was being lifted off the ground.
The birds swooping low over the stage hid the screen now but still vaguely she thought she could see the dark forms of the physicists against it. On the edges of the stage she could certainly see other men, soldiers or police she could not tell, trying to shoot the birds as the birds dove at them, almost, she thought, fighting, diving at them, being shot and then others diving again.
More and more birds flew low over the stage until she could not see anything else anymore, though she strained to make out the shapes past their blurred and shifting bodies.
All of them watched, she and Ben and the people around them they did not know, watched as the birds, banners of white in the wind, musical and rhythmic, flew thicker and thicker among them and anything that was not the birds—buildings and trees and the further reaches of the crowd itself—could not be seen. After that they lifted up in a series of fluid motions, in waves and lulls, and their calls began to grow faint. Rising into the sky the cover of their bodies slowly lifted, the dense white of the flock grew sparser and revealed the mundane and usual below it, concrete and brown, the city and the people, the derelict stage littered with a dark mass that she guessed had to be Bradley’s soldiers. They lifted to reveal the Washington Monument and the burned husk of the ICBM.
—Is that—can you tell what that is? she asked Ben, and pointed.
In among the white birds, somewhere above the stage and to the west, there were small dark shapes. But he shook his head and told her he could not see what they were.
The flock thinned as it moved away toward the horizon, thinned as the birds spread out and flew. Finally they were few and far between enough for the light of the sun to filter through the gaps in their ranks. For a while as they receded people watched them endlessly, still silent no matter how far away they grew, for a time that felt closer to hours than minutes.
And then abruptly the crowd seemed to feel it had kept silent for too long, and was embarrassed by this. Whispers broke out, and then normal voices, pedestrian, vulgar, returning all of them to the business of being who they had always been, saying trivial things in the usual way. But Ann would think later only of the silence, and how the patience of the crowd had seemed infinite, watching the birds vanish in the distance.
She had the feeling she had been left behind.
When she finally looked away from what were now black flecks, low and fading in the red western sky, and tried desperately to pick out the physicists on the stage—recalled to the danger in which they had been, the men shooting all around them, a lurch of panic in her throat—she saw bags from the stage being piled into trucks parked behind it, being carried on stretchers and loaded away from sight. She could not be sure at the time but to her they looked like soldiers in camouflage.
Not bags, she thought later: bodies.
Not ambulances, she thought later: trucks.
The work was conducted swiftly and with great precision because almost before she knew it the stage was bare. Yellow and brown leaves skittered over the concrete in front of her as dusk fell.
And the scientists were gone.
Oppenheimer finally knew as they rose how he had come to this. He dismissed the precision of sums for the last time, let go of calculation. The birds had him now. Their wide wings were beating as they carried him, and it was good with them.
Only the dead have seen the end of war: and it was such a relief. He did not need to look for Fermi for he knew that Fermi, too, was out in the white somewhere beyond, shedding worry, skin turning to feathers, turning lighter than air.
He could shed everything now because in the end there was nothing more for him, he had done his best and finally it was nothing to what his worst had been. He could almost laugh now at the smallness of his good intentions, how paltry they had been against his mischief and the mischief of the neighborhood boys he had played with. He thought of Groves’s fat, smug face and the beady homespun ignorance of Truman. Governments were gangs of boys, he thought, roaming the best neighborhoods and kicking puppies with their steel-toed boots; but
