At this point in the scene she confused it with the Bible. The man named Oppenheimer saw what he had made, and it was beautiful. But when he looked at it, the light burned out his eyes and turned him blind.
She saw the rolling balls of the eyes when he righted himself to face the tree, and they were white like eggs.
Back then she knew nothing about Oppenheimer’s life: not who he was, not the identities of places, not the fact that the sand in the scrapes in his knees would have been the sand of the valley with the Spanish name Jornada del Muerto, Voyage of the Dead. There were infinite details she could not recognize, infinite details beyond her awareness in her own half-idea, in the deep blind territory of what is not known to be known but is known all the same.
Also there was what she knew without knowing why she knew it, for example the phrase brighter than a thousand suns. She recalled these words without a hint of where they came from or how they had first been imprinted on her memory. She did not know what “brighter than a thousand suns” would mean, how a brightness so bright could be outdone. The eye is not equal to even one sun, she thought. Straight, unwavering, bold, the eye cannot abide it.
A thousand suns? The eye could never adapt.
Or maybe once it is blinded the eye is transformed, she thought, and ceases to be an eye at all.
How much is learned unconsciously? It must be vast, she thought. We sweep through fields of knowledge and later all we can see is the dirt that clings to the hems of our clothes.
Of course the scene itself, the dramatic idea that was not quite as unconscious as a dream, might have simply been a blurry cognitive rerun of any number of World War Two documentaries. It might have been a fragment from television, a black-and-white epic of scarred and pocked newsreels interspersed with propaganda footage from the Nuremberg rallies. She might remember young boys marching in synchronicity and jutting out their arms in salute; further she might recall the chilling but majestic banners hanging long and thin and several stories high above the seemingly endless crowds, their spidery symbols rippling like water in the wind.
And over this she might recall the droning, authoritative voice of a British narrator.
Afterward she remembered the name. She could not forget the name, in fact, in the way a bad jingle overstays its welcome, tinny and insistent, lodged in the neural pathways of the brain. It was a famous name, or a name that had once been famous anyway, before she was born when her parents were young, when the Japs got what was coming to them, and later still when the drunkard McCarthy was hunting down Communists.
It was Oppenheimer, J. R.
Also the words The Father of the Atom Bomb.
A few days before, in waking life, she had seen the name at a small garage sale in a driveway, on the yellowing pages of a dog-eared copy of an old magazine from 1948, titled Physics Today. At the garage sale she had purchased a trivet, and the trivet had been sitting on this magazine when it caught her attention. She did not need a trivet, and in particular she did not need a porcelain trivet decorated with watercolor-style renderings of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. But she felt a need to compensate the woman who was trying to sell it. The woman had a gentle gaze and a distracted manner and admittedly also a flipper for one arm.
Later, when she thought of the magazine cover, she also thought of printed words on the trivet: The Hanging Gardens of Babylon.
On the cover of the magazine was a picture: the porkpie hat perched on some pipes, possibly in a factory. Later she learned the porkpie hat had been a stand-in for Oppenheimer at the height of his fame. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the bombs had been dropped, the war was over and the Father of the Atom Bomb was a hero, the hat actually posed alone for photographs.
As an ambassador, the hat had a simple message. It said: I am worn by a gentleman.
It said: We are all gentlemen here.
In the scene that was not quite a dream she saw the man named Oppenheimer kneeling in the desert when the first atomic bomb went off, and he was wearing his characteristic porkpie hat.
The scene had other elements, such as a squirrel shaped like a long balloon, dragging its belly on the ground. The squirrel came before Oppenheimer and then it retired politely. The squirrel was not present when the mushroom cloud rose over the horizon on its slowly twisting stem.
Neither was her mother, who had also been in the dream when it was still a dream, before it drew itself out of a well of sleep. Twelve years old, her mother rode a blue bicycle along the top of a white wall. She saw not the color blue in the dream but only the word blue, blue bicycle. Her mother did not need to hold the handlebars and she was proud of this; her hands were in the air, flitting birdlike as she rode. From the ends of the bicycle handles sprouted bright-colored strips of plastic, and on her small fingers the little mothergirl wore bulging candy rings. Color was at her hands.
Watching the girl ride along the wall, almost dreaming, her heart broke that she had never known her mother when she was young. As she turned in the sheets, hot, almost waking completely, she thought: She will never be young again. None of us will ever, ever be young again.
She wanted to cry, but was more thirsty.
Nothing was present at the end of the scene. Squirrels, mothers, bicycles vanished. And the faint, dry aftertaste of
