One night, coming home from the college, I found my father in the basement of our house, which he’d dug with his own hands, looking at drawings on his amateur drafting bench, in the corner against the rough wall. The Gerritsen gristmill had burned down that afternoon, and I’d gone to see it happen, because it was the most exciting thing around. He was looking at a scaled model, his pencils not in his hand but lying on the other side of the desk: a drawing of the main baseball diamond, with stands on two sides, the ground beveled and the dirt new. We could have had the Dodgers, he was saying, when he looked up. The World Series. We couldn’t even get that. He didn’t address me often. His lips puckered in a pathetic way. I went over to the desk, picked up one of the pencils, shaded a white line of chalk running down the base lines to the outfield. Get out, he said, and looked down, and so I did. Waste of time, he said, while I closed the door. Not long until I was gone. His letters from Brooklyn came back to me at Los Alamos after the censor, everything he said about construction blocked out with long black ink.
• • •
Sometime that summer the Army Corps made a baseball field out of desert and nothing, once they were done with the scientific installations. Oppenheimer thought it was good to have us doing something other than work and drink. It was mostly popular with the military men, who played pepper and hit fungoes. But some of the scientists would go watch, and a few number theorists from California made a pretty good infield. Lise liked to sit behind home plate with a skirt on and her legs crossed.
She told me once when I was sitting in her office that she thought I could try to apply myself in ways outside of work, so the next day I went down to the dugout when they were choosing up teams. All anyone wore was T-shirts and jeans then out west, except for the soldiers, of course, who did everything in semi-uniform. One of the sergeants was from Sheepshead Bay and told the number theorists to take me for their outfield. They gave me a glove, and when I ran by, Lise raised her eyebrows and crossed her arms.
I only got one at-bat that day, because they rang an air-raid drill in the second inning. I walked on four pitches, and Lise clapped, and I was looking so much toward her that the PFC playing first base picked me off. I didn’t even go back to the dugout, just sat next to her on the bleachers, and she said to me, very sincerely, it could have been worse. I had been worried the whole time in right field about getting a fly ball. I’d never been much good back in Brooklyn. It was a high sky, and that sun was along the first-base line, and I imagined the ball and the sun in my field of vision obscuring each other. I felt sick imagining the ball making two-run-double contact with the ground.
Of course Lise was the love of the whole place. During the dances she told me, when we sat together afterward, that she tried to time each turn with a guy so each one got two and a half minutes. Everyone asked her for dinner, and walks, most of which she declined. She liked being with me, she said, because she knew I was here for the right reasons. What are those? I asked.
Do you miss home? she said. I told her.
What do you think will happen when it ends?
I didn’t have an answer.
I’m going to miss the sand of it. She had her shoes off and was drawing circles with her toes.
Look, I said, it’s us. I drew another circle to make a Venn diagram.
She put her hands around me then, and I only felt her smile.
She liked to listen to music while she worked, particularly piano, and I found her a record player in town. Sometimes I brought my drawings into her office too and watched her working, me tracing the air currents things leave when they fall at terminal velocity. There were more and more people running down the halls at that time, and sometimes they came and asked for our pieces of paper. Sometimes you heard people shout in the corridors, and nobody came out and checked if anyone was hurt anymore, because it would just be someone doing something important.
• • •
We had been there for a few months, Lise and I, when they got enough uranium to run a test. On the morning of Trinity, I was the last one on top of the tower. We were dropping it from fifteen stories up. One of the chemists had asked an explosives man standing near me at breakfast that morning, wouldn’t the tower look conspicuous to everyone after we did the drop? The guy just looked at him.