Within months, Carol was displaying symptoms that she mistook for mosquito bites. She was new to the city. She came from Michigan. She had grown up on a horse farm. She had always wanted to be a milkmaid princess, and then, in high school, a theater star. She hawked tickets to comedy clubs late nights, to make the money for auditions. She didn’t tell her parents about it. She read plays over breakfast, walked the lonely morning streets with coffee, went to see anything avant-garde, tentatively liked the Living Theatre. She’d never had sex before. She assumed that it would be like a thunderclap. She had the low-grade symptom kind, and she didn’t know until after she was married, to a good man who moved them to Suffolk County, where she taught drama in the junior high school. He had words for her. They thought about getting a divorce. They slept for many months afterward with their backs to each other, until one day the husband turned over. She looked at him over her shoulder with something resembling desire. Fuck it, he said.
SHATTER THE TREES AND BLOW THEM AWAY
It was 1944 and they told us to take the overnight to Jemez Springs, New Mexico, and when I said, Where’s that? the guy at the ticket counter at Grand Central train station said, Middle a bumfuck nowhere, that’s what I know, and the guy in the conductor’s cap next to him said, Why all the one-way tickets to Los Alamos lately, and I said, Some things are classified for a reason. I was gone.
Lise was in the aisle across from me as we passed into the tunnel, and I saw her reading The Science of Mechanics. When she saw that I didn’t get off in Chicago like everyone else, she asked if I was by chance a man of science, and I told her engineering. She did particle physics, and already we were sharing a secret.
The compound was built on the site of what used to be an all- boys school. They had a bit of a library, but now the Army Corps was underneath it, building a particle accelerator. Everything was claptrap—the wooden sidings, the paint above the windows. My room didn’t even have a shower, although hers did, and I begged her to let me use it, an excuse to be close by, her roommate yelling from her bedroom when I tramped back in, Is he here again?
Everyone spent all day at work. You can’t understand it. Somebody had come to each of us, put a pointer finger in the center of our chests, and said, Serve your country. We who were too scared for infantry, and spent all our post-finals beer money worrying if we’d lose our draft-exempt status. But they said, make us the Gadget, and everything will change.
I thought Lise and I would be the youngest, but graduate students were like leaves. All the professors who had been disappearing from class, or the Institute higher-ups who had become conspicuously absent, were showing up here, from Berkeley, Cambridge, Ann Arbor. There were mathematicians, theoretical physicists, chemists who knew all about fission, armaments engineers flown in from Normandy and their college buddies from MIT. There was no one else from Brooklyn College.
It was summer camp surrounded by barbed-wire fences. There was only the one cantina in the neighboring town and it was packed with shirt-tucked-in scientists trying to talk to the locals. It was always a male crowd. The women were something special, in their studies—they tended to be better than the rest of us—and their small number. Men danced with each other in order to keep dances alive. I was lucky to meet her on the train, I told her once. She rolled her eyes and said, Whatever that means.
Meanwhile, I was busier than I’d ever been in my life. I used to imagine making whole flying cities when I was a kid, designing just the tallest pinpoint towers and letting the lessers take care of the rest, according to my dashed-off plans. My father tuh’d, as if he’d seen it before, and didn’t say anything else. In high school I made bottle rockets and Roman candles, and then the college gave me an aerodynamics lab, and they brought me to the compound to work on how the Gadget would fall. The third day there, after I sat in on theory meetings and filled four notebooks, I spent all afternoon doing exploded view drawings—from right to left: the nose casing, the uranium target, the uranium bullet that would set it off, and the explosive on the back end, which mattered most for me. The explosive had to be triggered somewhere before it landed, or half the power would go into the ground. We had to know the drop path and design the casing so the explosive could go off at the right time. Four days later when I had a mock-up, they gave me an assistant from Texas Tech, and together we started dropping models off the top of dormitory buildings. Then the explosives engineers redesigned the bullet, and we had to redesign the casing, and it was back to square one.