Louisa Hall - Trinity

I saw, finally, how stupid she was. How unknowing of what was to come. How she felt that the worst was finally behind her, with her nice legs and her little white shorts and her foolish laughter when she returned from the lake to this house that was never her own, but where she still bumbled around and felt happy.

Standing there in the bedroom, watching my former self and Jack kissing, I felt so sorry for her in Jack’s arms, and so deeply ashamed of her dumbness, that I couldn’t help it and did start crying a little.

Then Jack lifted his fingertips to the bruise. Then he kissed it so gently.

“Oh, Grace,” he said. “My little Grace.”

Then he picked me up and carried me to the bed. “Sweet Grace,” he said, and I was so cold, lying there with no dress, lying there with no coat to protect me.

Nakedly, I got under the blankets. Then I felt Jack’s body beside me. And then it was the two of us there, lying underneath the same sheets that I’d pulled up to my chin when I slept there as a young girl. In the same bed, I lay naked again, and this time when Jack kissed my throat, I thought about that murderer’s axe.

I thought about the cold, sharp edge of that weapon, and a warmth began to spread through my body.

Now, I thought, here it is.

This, finally: this is what the dead long to come back for. This fear, this spreading warmth, this exquisite new youth that knows it will die, and how, and when, and exactly how much it will hurt when it happens.

THAT NEXT WEEK, THE WIFE BEATER WAS GONE.

So were a bunch of the most important scientists, like Jack, for instance, and von Neumann and Oppie. And of course they weren’t allowed to say where they were going, and the rest of us were supposed to not guess. And I did my best, I really did.

I went through all the motions, putting calls through to intelligence, trying to piece together the scraps of information I overheard, eating at the PX, reminding myself to still put on my lipstick, and toward the end of the week Charlotte came by my room and said that June’s husband told her tonight was the night they were testing the weapon.

Even then, I didn’t say, what goddamned weapon. I didn’t say, why tonight of all nights.

I only tagged along with Charlotte to the base of Sawyer’s Hill, where a bunch of other women were waiting. And none of us knew what to expect, not even June, who was standing there nervously touching her stomach. And meanwhile the whole night smelled like the lake, and then of course I remembered learning to swim, and the feel of the water, and the way it parted so softly to let me slip under.

Inside my body, while we waited there at the base of the hill, I was sinking so softly into the lake, deep down into that darkness where nothing could touch me, where the storm had already passed and the gales had already blown themselves out and all I had left to do was let myself go all the way to the bottom.

I stood there so calm and so patient, letting my eyes adjust to the darkness, and eventually I could differentiate between the dense, matted black of the mountains and the more watery black of the sky. A few times it drizzled, and then we were cold, and whenever it came around, I took the thermos June passed, letting the warmth from the whiskey run through me.

We waited there a long time. Four o’clock passed, then four fifteen, then four forty-five, and at five o’clock I almost gave up and went in, but just as I was reaching to hand back the thermos, the sky went perfectly white.

Then the earth under our feet lurched toward the mountains, and the mountains tilted a foot to the right, and the trees leaped off the sides of the mountains.

I grabbed for somebody’s arm, and I saw that the women around me had turned into X-rays, and that my own arm was an X-ray as well, our bodies having become in an instant nothing more than revelations of the bone cages we’d lived our whole lives in.

Somewhere in the silence, Charlotte was whimpering weirdly. A few moments later, a low rumbling rose up from the floor of the valley, and I thought the great flood was finally coming, and for a moment it seemed as if we should be running.

But then I remembered that vision: all of us bone. And I thought, What nonsense. We’re in no danger, we’ve already died, and what use could there be in running toward safety.

WHEN IT WAS FINISHED AND THE TREES HAD RETURNED TO THEmountains, we stayed there for a while. By then the sky had burned out to orange, then purple, then inky black, and the rumbling had died back to silence, and we stood there in the cold like a statuary of salt figurines, holding each other close, craning our necks over our shoulders, as if there were anything left to see anymore, or as if seeing it clearly made any difference to the destruction of the city we’d already run from.

AT THE PARTY THEY THREW AFTERWARD, PEOPLE’S SPIRITS WERE HIGH.The scientists who hadn’t wanted the test to be done stayed at home, but the others came out for a victory dance.

In that big lot in front of the lodge, Richard Feynman was playing the bongos on the roof of a jeep, and Mike Michnovicz had his accordion out, and he was trying, I think, to make it sound happy while the WACs came streaming out from the WAC dorms.

For a while, caught up in the celebration, I looked for Jack. Then I looked for my new boyfriend. But I didn’t find either one, so I kept drinking and at some point in the evening, Oppie turned up, wearing his hat.

Then a cheer rose in the laboratory where I’d ended up, and Oppie grinned, and by then I must have been asking people where Jack had gone, because finally someone pulled me aside and said he’d been given leave to go back to Princeton.

Why, I asked.

Because his wife’s having a baby.

Then I stood there for a while. Later someone came by and handed me a full beaker.

I THINK IT WAS A SATURDAY, SEVERAL WEEKS LATER, WHEN OPPIEcalled an assembly to let us know the bombs had been dropped. He took the stage, as he’d taken the stage in the chapel, but this time it was the auditorium and the weather was sunny.

He told us our bombs had been a success. They’d gone down on two Japanese targets: Hiroshima, and then Nagasaki. He said in both cases they’d exploded as they were meant to, and we’d finished the job we’d come up to accomplish.

Then he pumped his fists over his shoulders, and for a moment I remembered his getting carried onstage, covered in flour, playing the part of a corpse in the mesa theater production.

But there he was, still pumping his fists, though I wasn’t really sure he looked happy.

THE PARTY THAT NIGHT WAS UNUSUALLY QUIET. IT WAS THROWN INthe GI dorm, and most of the scientists didn’t even show up.

Freddy stayed in, for example, and so did the wife beater and most of his friends. And I almost stayed in my room, but then I got restless and lonely, so I put on a dress and went to the party.

For the most part it was only GIs and a few other WACs. They’d mixed up some punch, and later someone opened champagne, and everybody got pretty loaded, trying to forget what we’d seen that night, when the mountains shifted two feet to the left, and the trees jumped off the mountains. Everyone in that party had really committed themselves to drinking. The lab didn’t smell right, and people were sweating, and a woman wandered by with the sleeve of her dress torn, and while I lined up to refill my beaker I was thinking this was really a gross and disreputable party, so it was a surprise to me when I saw Oppie.

He was standing there in the corner. He didn’t shake his fists over his shoulders. He didn’t smile. He just stood quietly, smoking a cigarette, and by then the rest of us were so drunk I’m not sure anyone else noticed his presence.