Ben had sneaked into the movies through the back door where Gary the janitor smoked. Gary slipped him in after his cigarette break, and crouching he would find a place in the front row, his head tipped back beneath the screen’s immensity.
He still daydreamed in boxes and fields of color, rich and perfect, the lines between them bold and black. There were few straight edges in the world of soils, shrubs, and trees, of pests, butterflies, and hummingbirds, in other words his professional milieu, so the satisfaction he derived there came not in exact, clean measures and angles but voluptuous patterns.
He thought often of his wife as he worked, and behind the work there was always a grateful peace, the peace of a man who has more than he expected to have. Sentimental only in this one reach of life, attempting in the rest a businesslike detach, he was prone to seek comfort in memories of his wife, recollection and anticipation. The first time her skin had touched his own the texture of the world had changed, grown warmer but also more expansive. He had felt permeable then; he had seeped into everything and everything into him.
The first trip they made together, after two nervous dinners, had been in a car that belonged to some of his friends. He remembered it clearly: a mid-sized sedan with a gray interior. They sat awkwardly side by side in the back seat. It was early fall and they were being driven south to a wildlife refuge named Bosque del Apache, an artificial oasis in the middle of the desert where they hoped to see birds. In the front seat his friends, an older, academic couple he had worked for who were amateur ornithologists, who kept immaculate life lists of all the birds they had seen, were talking about cormorants, and from cormorants they moved to herons and from herons to egrets. They told of bird-watching weekends in Patagonia, Guadalupe, and the Salton Sea, and of all the birds of North America that flew for thousands of miles each year in migration. Neither Ann nor Ben was educated on the identities and behaviors of birds, so they remained silent.
Over the murmur in the front they both floated away, both gazed out their windows at the rolling tan mountains and the light sky. And as they softened in their seats, carried over the blacktop impervious and aloft, as they rested on the gray imitation leather, Ann looked at Ben and moved her hand over the cool smooth slope of the vinyl seat to touch his wrist.
Fullness surged.
Of course he did have preferences beyond the fact of her existence; but that was all they were, a set of requests. Nothing was actually necessary beyond what he already had, any added pleasure or comfort he was willing to forgo if need be. In the center were the two of them, bound together, and what rotated, what clung, what distant satellite might orbit them in a faint attraction, far out from the core held fast, was mostly empty space.
Before the Trinity test, the physicist Edward Teller—later known as the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb, a famously passionate advocate for the nuclear arms buildup—calculated that the heat of the first atomic explosion might be sufficient to ignite and consume the world’s atmosphere. Subsequent calculations showed this was unlikely: there was only a three-in-a-million chance, the physicists in charge of the test decided, that the atmosphere would be ignited.
Enrico Fermi, however, who liked a good wager, made a jesting offer on the morning of the test.
“I invite bets,” he said, “against first the destruction of all human life and second just that of human life in New Mexico.”
Physicists are well-known for their sense of humor.
Oppenheimer’s first full day at the motel was devoted to television. He located the remote on the bedside table, where it sat beside the enigmatic telephone with its sheet of intricate numeric instructions, and eventually by pressing the button marked power discovered its function.
There had been some false starts while he held the remote sideways and attempted to type on its buttons, pointing it randomly at the ceiling, the door, and his face. Finally, when he noticed it shared a brand name with the black box on the wall, he had moved it toward the box.
After that he lay on the bed staring at show after show, a barrage of stimuli his eyes and mind had never known, a primer in pop culture, a primer in history. The motel, though cheap, had free cable and non-stop movies.
He gathered that he was far away from where he had just been. He was no longer in Los Alamos in 1945; or alternatively he was no longer a self-steering mind but one lost, gone floating off its moorings. Carefully he reserved his judgment.
The next morning he emerged from his room into daylight and lost himself in a larger panorama still, people, cars, and buildings flowing past as he strolled out of the motel lot and down the street. He looked at everything, but he spoke to no one. He was aghast.
Noteworthy in Ben, perhaps this is already clear, was his devotion.
In life Oppenheimer was a tall man, tall and gaunt, handsome with luminous blue eyes; he was a Jewish man who loved the Bhagavad-Gita, who held fast to his creed of Ahimsa: At least do no harm while he directed the making of the first weapon of mass destruction. He was an intellectual from the city of New York, the grandson of poor immigrants who became importers of suit linings, who became purveyors of ready-made garments in the city of New York. His delicate mother
