Oh Pure and Radiant Heart - Lydia Millet (ebook reader online TXT) 📗

down at the photograph from different distances, different angles, trying to find points of distinction between the man in the portrait and the man who had been smoking at the bar. Finding none she began to mull it over: an Oppenheimer relative? Oppenheimer’s son? She scoured the indexes of several books to confirm that he had a son, and he did, though she could not find a picture of this son as an adult. There were only baby pictures. The son, she read, lived in the hills of New Mexico, not far away from Santa Fe. He should be in his late fifties or early sixties, she deduced from the mention of his birth, and the man she had seen looked younger than that: but people age at different rates, the bar had been dimly lit, in fact the bar had been a hall of shadows.

It was a coincidence, certainly, she thought: first a bad dream about Oppenheimer, then a sighting of someone who looked just like him. Then it occurred to her that of course not, it was not a coincidence at all, and she felt ashamed of her simple-mindedness. She was exaggerating. Probably the man in the bar had borne a slight resemblance to the man in the photograph, and the rest she had fabricated. She had been affected more than she knew by Eugene and his death. She was looking for a mystery like a child who wished for a secret. She was on the brink of hysteria, even.

Oppenheimer also had a daughter, she discovered, but she had been subject to periods of depression and finally, with a broken heart, had killed herself.

It had been slow at the library since the shooting, so slow that Ann could spread out books on the Reference counter without interruption, smoothing her hands over the pages, the rounds of her elbows settled on thick cushions of paper.

The Manhattan Project had been housed, at first, in the Los Alamos Ranch School for Boys, where for decades spindly, pasty specimens from wealthy families back East had been sent to find hardiness, to grow robust and manly in the sun and pines. The school had been commandeered by the Army almost overnight, condemned, shut down, and unceremoniously cleared of all boys. Two scientists calling themselves “Smith” and “Jones” came to supervise the eviction. The school was also cleared of headmasters, faculty and staff, stunned, sad, and marooned, who left for the Manhattan Engineering District their garbage pails, pie plates, and mustard jars, their bunk beds, horses, and bales of hay.

Oppenheimer had chosen the site because of his fondness for the desert, she learned. She also learned that the scientists and their wives were under a security quarantine on the high, isolated mesa for the years they lived there, and could rarely venture outside. Partly due to the dearth of entertainment, the birth rate in Los Alamos was so high there were diaper shortages.

And though all traffic through the official gates of the supposedly high-security compound was strictly controlled, the children on the mesa regularly escaped to play outside the top-secret Site Y through unnoticed holes in the fences.

The next day she pored over pictures of the Trinity test in its first seconds, a black-and-white, stop-motion sequence of the rising and billowing mushroom cloud in the Alamogordo desert. She cast her eyes slowly over photographs of the Army barracks the scientists and their families had lived in, up on the mesa in World War Two, over Oppenheimer and his brother on horseback and scenic vistas of the Sangre de Cristo and Jemez mountains, snow-covered pines against a clear winter sky. She saw grainy, blurred shots of the bombs made at Los Alamos and then dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

The first bomb, called Little Boy, was rocket-shaped and used rare uranium 235. The second bomb was called Fat Man. It was rotund and used plutonium, which could be produced in bulk.

Finally she looked at portraits of the scientists themselves, rows and rows of men, many of them so-called geniuses. Among them was Fermi, a Nobel Prize winner and refugee from Mussolini. It was Fermi who had produced the first chain reaction in piles of graphite and uranium under the bleachers of Stagg Field at the University of Chicago. He was the one who had found a way to manufacture plutonium, the one who enabled the Allies to beat the Nazis to the bomb, and the one who made the bomb infinitely buildable.

He was also the spitting image of the short, balding man in the trench coat. His first name was Enrico.

When she saw the photograph of Fermi she closed the book she was reading and then deliberately, carefully closed the other books spread out at her elbows. She stacked them neatly in a pile beside her; she sat with her hands folded in her lap and watched the second hand tick on the clock on the wall. At five o’clock she made the usual rounds, flicking off lights and checking for stragglers, of which she already knew there were none.

Then she left.

Though Oppenheimer would say later that implicit in the invention of the bomb was its use, while he directed the Manhattan Project he did not choose to frame it that way. Instead he chose to argue that the bomb, if its design succeeded, would be so terrible, so awesome in its power to destroy, that it would bring an end to all wars. Like no other weapon before it, the atom bomb would be an instrument of peace.

But for a brilliant man, Oppenheimer was relying on a surprisingly impoverished logic, the logic of a man attempting to rationalize. For clearly an undiscovered threat is no threat at all. For the idea of the bomb to emanate such awesome power, of course, the bomb would have to be used.

Ben had promised Yoshi they would join him for cocktails at the mansion. He had promised Yoshi despite the fact that Ann rarely enjoyed a party, despite the