Louisa Hall - Trinity

For a minute, once again, I let myself wonder what they were doing. Maybe she was lying with her head on his shoulder. Maybe he’d rolled away. Maybe now they weren’t touching.

Then I remembered them dancing. The way he held her hand to his shoulder, and the way she brushed her cheek with her finger.

Then I thought of May in the bathroom, and that quiet coughing. And the tap running, and how noiseless she was when she came back into the bedroom. The door opened without any sound, and that angle of moonlight widened over the floor, like a fan spreading over the face of a girl who doesn’t want you to see her.

It’s the Jornada del Muerto desert that Oppenheimer sees when he faces out the open side of the shack. There’s some debate about the source of its name: The Journey of the Dead Man, or The Journey of the Dead, or, perhaps more accurately, The Working Day of the Dead . Some historians believe it’s named in honor of the Spanish settlers who fled Santa Fe in 1680, when, after over a century of subjugation, the Pueblos organized a revolt. Five years before, fifty Pueblo medicine men had been accused of sorcery by agents of the Inquisition. Three were hanged without trial; another killed himself in his cell; the others were publicly whipped then imprisoned. Then the Pueblos began to prepare. Five years later, they attacked Santa Fe, where they killed four hundred settlers and drove the rest from the city. Of the two thousand Spanish refugees who gathered in Socorro and headed south into that stretch of desert, only twelve hundred later emerged at Las Cruces.

Others believe the desert was named for a German trader, Bernardo Gruber, known for his prosperity and his elegant clothing: he owned ten mules and eighteen horses, traveled with three Apache servants, and wore a blue doublet lined with otter skin, which matched his blue pantaloons. Gruber passed through Quarai Pueblo in 1668, where he sold some of his wares and a fight broke out one afternoon over a magic trick played with papelitos . Several months later, he was accused of sorcery by local agents of the Inquisition. They kept him in a cell for more than two years. His requests for a trial went nowhere. At some point he was told that his servants had disappeared. His animals had all died, or fallen into the hands of new owners. No word could be given on the length of his sentence.

Finally, driven to that desperation that a lack of real knowledge so often produces, Gruber managed to break out through his cell window and flee into the desert on horseback. Several weeks later, the horse on which he’d fled was found dead, tied to a tree by its harness. His blue doublet was discovered nearby, along with his pantaloons, a skull, three ribs, and four bones, gnawed and scattered in the dry, woody snakeweed.

THAT’S THE DESERT OPPENHEIMER SURVEYS FROM ONE HUNDRED feet, a desert he’s known since he was seventeen. His parents sent him there from Manhattan, to recuperate from an illness.

In New Mexico, after a somewhat solitary childhood, he learned to ride horses. He spent nights sleeping outside. Days he rode over empty plateaus, learning the landscape by heart, so that now, as he stands on the tower and turns to the open side of the shack, he faces a desert he’s often imagined.

Staring out over that strange ocean of land, it’s almost as if he’s looking for someone: a caravan of carriages winding its way down the Fra Cristobal mountains, or a single young man riding horseback, a bobbing black point in the distance.

But nobody comes. The desert appears to be empty.

With his hat pulled low over his forehead, Oppenheimer turns and climbs back down the tower. The steel rungs press his arches until his feet hit solid land once again. He drives the jeep back into base camp, where he chats with the metallurgists packing their gear.

According to one, interviewed later, he talks about family. He discusses life at the Los Alamos camp. Then he looks up at the sky. It’s blackening over the Oscura Range. “Funny,” he says, “how the mountains always inspire our work.” He keeps his face turned toward the range, and the clouds keep rolling over the ridges.

OF COURSE I DID. HOW COULD I HAVE MISSED HIM? HE WAS THEmayor of our little Shangri-la on the mesa. No matter which way you turned, you’d see him getting driven around in his jeep, wearing that porkpie hat and an old pair of blue jeans.

He was everywhere you looked. Or at least that’s how it seemed. He had his spoon in every pot. He even started a women’s committee, and he donated part of his record collection to the mesa radio station. After that, if you were lying awake in your dorm room, listening to Bach to calm down because every time you opened your eyes you saw mice running over the ceiling, it was Oppie you had to thank for the music.

Sometimes, he came to the square dances we organized at Fuller Lodge. Then we’d all go green with envy while he danced with some lucky girl. Or Kitty might take a break from drinking in her living room, and she and Oppie would dance, gazing into each other’s eyes like they’d only ever been in love with each other.

Once, he played the part of a corpse in the theater production of Arsenic and Old Lace . He let them carry him in with flour all over his face, and out in the audience we almost died laughing.

But that was the kind of thing Oppie would do. He didn’t hold himself too high above us. When the wives complained about working jobs on the mesa and still getting left to do all the cleaning at home, he organized a maid service. After that, there were Indian girls who walked up from San Ildefonso, wearing leather slippers and emerging out of the mist that came up with them from the river.

It was Oppie who arranged that, just like he spearheaded the effort to improve the hospital where the women gave birth. He was always trying to help, even with the trivial things. Even though he was the head of the project.

Once, you know, he even invited me to his house. Sometimes I can’t believe I was there, but it’s true: once I went to a party at Oppie’s house on Bathtub Row, and Jack was there, too, standing in the living room, talking with Johnny von Neumann and Oppie.

They saw me when I walked in, with that bruise under my eye and my new boyfriend. All three of them were holding martinis, and standing in front of a bookcase. And usually I would have felt cowed by their importance, what with my own relatively insignificant status, but I walked into that party with a real sense of my strengths.

It was the bruise that made it possible, not the fact that I had a new boyfriend. He’d only come in recently, after all, with the latest round of explosives, and he wasn’t even all that important.

No. It wasn’t him. It was the bruise that gave me such substance when I walked into that party. As soon as Jack saw it, he changed. I smote him with that bruise, I really did, even though I was only a WAC, and I only got to come to that party because Oppie invited the new round of explosives. And even though Jack was standing there with von Neumann and Oppie himself, and they were all tan from their recent trip into the desert, for some secret reason having to do with the secret weapon we all knew they were building.

There they were, assembled in front of a bookcase crowded with Oppie’s big books and his expensive Native American tchotchkes. Jack was standing as he always did, with one hand in his pants’ pocket and the other leg jutting out slightly, like a Boy Scout who’s climbed to the top of a summit. And even so, when I came in, the mere sight of me smote him.