Ariel Gore: Santa Fe Noir

He saw me as merely a lesser chum amid the tittering audience he garnered with such compulsion, a negligible layer in the dull impasto against which he believed his own strokes of wit and genius might glitter by uplifted contrast.

The man had no inkling that my chuckles were ever more sincere, arising as they now did from my increasingly detailed and heartwarming plans for his imminent demise.

The fatal day, Monday, July 16, 1945, began as nearly any other in our part of New Mexico. There was the same chill of predawn as we rose in darkness from our plebeian bunks in various raw Quonset huts, or the old dormitories of the boys’ school that had once graced this plateau.

I will say our usual chatter over the shared sinks was muted, and few if any seemed interested in breaking the night’s fast.

There was good reason for this. I’d scheduled my private fête for Dickie Boy to coincide with the first test of our “gadget”: Trinity, that grand instrument du mort toward the parturition of which we’d all labored during every conscious moment for the last four years.

The powers that be had ferried our plutonium core to the test site in an army sedan on Thursday, July 12, 1945.

One minute into Friday the thirteenth, the nonnuclear components had followed, to be assembled over the course of that day at the old McDonald ranch house.

By five p.m. on the fifteenth, the device was complete, awaiting detonation at the apex of a one-hundred-foot steel tower.

We’d begun moving onto the buses at two a.m. on the sixteenth, shuffling through frigid lashings of rain. The test was slated to commence at four a.m., but soon the gossip began, mutterings from seat to high-backed seat on every bus:

Oppenheimer will ignore the rain...

No, he’ll postpone while the skies clear.

Groves will call a halt to the proceedings to ensure the hoped-for blast can be filmed for the government, and posterity...

Chadwick will insist we go forward on schedule...

I ignored this pointless chatter, wiping away the condensation to peer out my rearmost seat’s window.

I’d made sure of a place for myself aboard the very bus to which Feynman had been assigned. But though I had full view of my fellow passengers, I couldn’t locate his absurdly large head atop that scrawny body anywhere between my seat and that of the vehicle’s army-issue driver.

I well knew I could not inquire of my seatmates whether they had any clue as to the smirking jester’s whereabouts. They must not link the pair of us in any memory of the splendid and awe-filled day sure to come.

The bus’s engine rumbled alive, making droplets of rain skitter faster down the window glass.

And then, pelting toward us, came Feynman at last. He sprinted through the rain like an awkwardly malnourished cricket, waving his skinny arms as he clambered onto our bus, just as the driver grasped the chrome handle to clap its hinged doors shut.

“About time, Dick!” yelled some wag from the front seats.

“Wouldn’t’ve missed it for the world,” replied my nemesis, his nasal Borough-of-Queens honk forcing that final word to rhyme with soiled .

Feynman’s lovely wife Arline had died of tuberculosis only one month earlier, yet he seemed to have a grin or a joke ready for every man he passed while slouching down the aisle.

I’d heard that his MIT professors had begged Princeton to take him on as a graduate student despite the all-too-necessary quotas, writing that their prodigy “isn’t like other Jews.”

In that they were correct: he was worse.

Thankfully, I was a Yale man myself, and so had not had to suffer the displeasure of his company until we’d been marooned together here by the war effort.

Small mercies.

Feynman continued down the aisle, until at last he stood, hunched and dripping wet, directly before me.

“How’s it going, Thurston old pal?” he asked, looking me in the eye with his typical horrid leer.

Too late, I realized that the only unclaimed seat was the one beside my own.

“Dick!” I stuck out my hand, grinning for all I was worth. “All’s well that ends well, eh?”

Our group was dropped off exactly twenty miles out from the blast site.

I’d climbed up behind the wheel of an empty old army truck, hoping for a better view. The radios were on the fritz, so we had little idea when, or even whether , the test might be conducted.

Finally, I heard a crackle from the set a few feet away, nestled against the rib cage of an NCO who was lying facedown on the ground with his arms crossed over his helmet.

A distant voice broke through the static, intoning “...twenty seconds...”

I put on the pair of dark glasses I’d been issued to protect my eyes from the flash.

At that moment, Feynman leaped up onto the bench seat beside me. The man was a veritable leech, shoving me over with a sharp elbow and then sliding in even closer.

“Don’t be an idiot, Thirsty,” he cackled, lips smacking. “The only thing that can hurt your eyes is ultraviolet light. The windshield’ll block that.”

And just as he’d finished uttering those boastful words, the flash came.

Despite his bravado, Feynman flinched and ducked his head below the dashboard, screwing his eyes shut before muttering, “ That’s not it, that’s the afterimage...” He sat up straight once more, jostling me.

Not to be outdone, I removed my own glasses.

The white light changed to yellow, then to orange.

Clouds formed and disappeared again.

Compression and expansion.

The ball of orange grew, rising and billowing. Its edges turned black, and soon we could see that it was a ball of smoke, flashing inside with lightning as it became ever larger.

This went on for sixty seconds... seventy... eighty... and at a minute and a half the shock wave finally reached us: the heart-stopping BOOOOOM , followed by an unearthly, thunderous rumble.

“What’s that ?” asked some journalist fellow, standing just outside the truck.

Feynman snorted, amused. “That was The Bomb.”

I glanced at my watch. Five thirty-one a.m., with the second hand just passing thirty.

What remained of the day was pandemonium, and well-earned.

We’d done it! All of us!

The years of labor, the horrid meals and the never-enough sleep, the thin mattresses on creaking wire! We’d overcome all exhaustion, dismay, and discouragement to produce this glorious feat, this magnificent engine which would now save the lives of tens of thousands of Our Boys in the Pacific.

The detonation of Trinity had rekindled us all, pumped the lifeblood of esprit de corps back into every last resident of Los Alamos.

We couldn’t congratulate one another heartily enough. Army men danced drunken jigs with physicists. Comely secretaries do-si-doed with apple-cheeked calculator girls. Chemists clapped engineers on the back and were nearly knocked down by their brethren’s returned clouts of joyous camaraderie.

Even Oppenheimer, who had lately come to resemble a wraithlike mere shadow of his former mere shadow, was pink in the face and light on his feet, head thrown back with laughter every time I glanced his way.

It was pure carnival as the high-desert night came on, the sizzle and spark of Eros ignited by the Promethean gift of Thanatos we had just bestowed to all the world beyond our gates.

And I was undoubtedly the calmest man for miles around.

Never doubt that I toasted and boasted with the rest of the fellows, the very picture of a hail fellow well met. But I savored the knowledge of how vastly my evening’s denouement would eclipse our communal high spirits, in the afterglow of Trinity’s climax.