Louisa Hall - Trinity

But I did. There he was in the corner, wearing his work shirt and his boots, and I remembered his hawk feather, stuck so jauntily in that jar, and suddenly, for a moment, my heart ached to see him.

He looked so young. He looked as if he might cry. For a moment, I felt really bad for him. I thought he’d done something he knew he couldn’t ever forgive, and therefore couldn’t begin to atone for.

But then the moment passed. I’d cared too much already. I’d stayed up too late, wearing out my powers of caring, so then I gave up, and right away I knew I’d be sick.

I only just got outside before I had to kneel and shove my head into a juniper bush, and only when I’d finished and wiped off my mouth did I realize Oppie was kneeling beside me.

Then I felt another wave rising, so I shoved my head back in the bush, and the whole time, Oppie stayed there beside me, the two of us kneeling on the cracked earth as if we’d come there to pray for forgiveness.

“I’m sorry,” I kept saying, “I’m really sorry.”

And he didn’t answer. He just stayed there beside me until I’d stopped throwing up, and then he helped me off my knees. I brushed off my dress. And by then, I think, I’d gotten sort of used to his presence. By then he didn’t seem like the great Oppie, the mayor of our Shangri-la, he just seemed like another lost soul, wandering around a camp we should have abandoned.

HE WALKED WITH ME THE WHOLE WAY BACK TO THE WAC DORM. ATsome point I noticed that there weren’t any clothes on the clotheslines.

Then I thought somewhere else in the world, the survivors of those two bomb strikes—if there were any survivors—were even now wandering through a city that no longer existed.

Later, I read more specific accounts. I was sitting in the hair salon, and I read an article in a magazine that mentioned a girl whose leg had been broken when the bomb exploded nearby, and how all night while the black rain poured down around her, she waited under a sheet of tin with another woman whose left breast had been sheared off her body.

I read about a man who, running from the conflagration of the houses on his street, kicked the severed head of a man and shouted, “Excuse me, excuse me!”

And then I read about another woman who wandered for days through the ruins of the neighborhood where she used to live, holding the charred corpse of her baby, looking for the husband she’d lost in the chaos.

But I read that magazine later. That night, when I was walking back to the WAC dorm with Oppie, all I could really imagine were the mountains shifting two feet to the left, so I asked Oppie why he’d called it the Trinity Test.

He told me it was in honor of a good friend.

“Was he Catholic?” I said.

He told me it was from a poem she loved.

Then we walked for a while in silence. Later I asked him what became of his friend.

She died, he said. Her name was Jean.

I said I was sorry. Then I told him my mother died also. Then we walked on for a while in silence, and only later, when we’d gotten close to the WAC dorm, did I ask him how his friend died.

She killed herself, he said. She drowned in the bathtub.

I said I was sorry. Then I asked about the poem she’d loved, and he said it was a poem by Donne. Then he recited the whole thing by heart. And then, very politely, he left me at the front door of the WAC dorm.

THERE I STOOD IN THE NIGHT, WATCHING OPPIE RECEDE. HE WALKEDsomewhat jerkily, as though he were strung up on a line. He kept one hand in his pocket, the other hand hanging free, and while I watched him moving away, blending in with the dark trees and the dark mountains, I repeated what I remembered back to myself.

Batter my heart, three person’d God, I whispered into the night.

And while I headed up the stairs, I thought, For you as yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend.

And when I opened the door, hoping there wouldn’t be any rats in my chair, I thought, Break, blow, burn, and make me new.

And later, brushing my teeth, looking at my aging face in the mirror, the bruise having faded, leaving me alone with myself once again, I whispered, For I shall never be free . When I lay down to sleep, I waited for the mice to begin running over the ceiling, but by some unknowable grace they were still, so I just lay there in the darkness that seemed to have poured out of a faucet, a darkness rising slowly around me, and repeated, For I shall never be free .

By then I was getting it wrong, but I didn’t care. I only wondered what Oppie’s friend Jean had been like. I wondered whether he loved her, and whether or not Kitty knew.

Then, finally, I wondered if Jean would have wanted a bomb to be named in her honor, whether she might have considered that outcome when she lay down in the bathtub and opened the taps, but before I had time to come to any conclusions, I began to drift off to sleep, and just before the whole world went dark, I thought again: A violence to end all other forms of violence.

And: A weapon to end the use of all weapons.

Oppenheimer spends the last hours of daylight in the confines of base camp, where site personnel are completing their preparations. The medical group issues coveralls, caps, gas masks, cotton gloves, and booties to be worn over shoes. The chief of the fallout team issues commands to his monitors by radio transmitter. They’ve chosen code names from The Wizard of Oz; orders are directed to Dorothy, the Cowardly Lion, and the Tin Man. Now the meteorologists have launched their weather balloons, and as the sun sets, they drift northeast in bright clusters.

At the control hub at South Shelter, ten thousand yards from the shot tower, technicians check the detonator signals for the last time. Some are out in the desert, scattering debris. At the last minute, someone decided that an effort should be made to test the bomb’s impact on city structures. Pieces of sheet metal and lumber, intended to represent houses, have been placed at varying distances from the tower.

At some point, someone was given a box of white mice and ordered to tie them to the signal wires running between the bomb and base camp. Now a technician runs out to check on the mice and finds they’ve all died of thirst before they had a chance to survive the explosion.

At dusk, circuit testing is called to a halt. The activity at base camp starts to slow, and the only disruption that occurs is a young scientist who suddenly grows hysterical and has to be removed under heavy sedation.

ONCE HE’S GONE, THE CAMP GROWS QUIET AGAIN. AFTER NIGHTFALL, the darkness is massive. The clouds have thickened over the desert, its elements undifferentiated by starlight.

In the mess hall, to pass time, some of the scientists place bets on whether the bomb will ignite the atmosphere. If so, they wonder, will the fire consume only the state, or will it consume the whole planet.

Others, trusting the theoretical group’s calculations, bet on the force of the explosion. Some of the scientists go to sleep. Oppenheimer does not. He remains in the mess hall, rolling cigarettes, drinking black coffee, and reading—according to several witnesses—poems by Baudelaire. At some point, rain starts pelting the tin roof of base camp.

IT WAS ONLY A FEW YEARS AFTER THE END OF THE WAR—MAYBE 1948,or 1949—when he and Kitty came to our little garret in Paris for dinner, and as soon as he walked in the door, I knew that nothing had changed.