The Utopian

By Mark Chiusano.

“Like everyone else, someone had come up to me, put a pointer finger in the center of my chests, and said, serve your country.  Make us the Gadget, they said, and your name will be forever.”

A short story.

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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 the Princeton train station said, middle a bumfuck nowhere, that’s what I know, and the guy in the conductor 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.

It was on that long train down to New Mexico that I saw her for the first time. She was in the aisle across from me. When she saw that I didn’t get off in Chicago like everyone else, she asked me 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 an old all-boys school. Everything was clap-trap, 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, although the woman next door would yell from her bedroom when I was tramping into the shower, “Lise, 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 to sign up 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 your names will be forever.

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.

It was summer camp surrounded by barbed-wire fences.  There was only the one cantina in the neighboring town and it was always packed with shirt-tucked-in scientists trying to talk to the locals.  It was always a male crowd.  The women were something special. They  tended to be better than the rest of us, and there weren’t many of them either.  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.  In high school, I was into bottle rockets and roman candles, and then the University gave me an aerodynamics lab, and they brought me to the compound to work on the way the Gadget would fall.  The third day there, I spent all afternoon doing exploded view drawings of the thing—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 problem was that the explosive had to be triggered somewhere before it landed, or half of the Gadget’s power would go right into the ground.  We had to know the drop-path and design the casing so the explosive could go off correctly 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 buildings.  Then the explosives engineers redesigned the bullet, and we had to redesign the casing, and it was back to square one.    

Lise had an office all to herself at the far end of the compound.  The guy next to her was also in particles and kept a carton of cookies on his desk.  He was one of the last holdovers who didn’t believe in Special Relativity, but he was such a good ideas-man that they took him from U. Minnesota in case something hit him here in the heat.  Lise argued with him all the time in the beginning, but eventually she just stopped by for a chocolate chip cookie in the morning and waved when he went out.

I had dinner breaks then and I would go visit once he was gone.  Sometimes I kneaded her shoulders while she stared at her graphs.  She had this idea that it might be possible to use entropy to model the explosion. She was spending her time trying to make the sum of the equations a convergent series.  When she wrote integral signs the muscles in her neck twitched.   

One of the times with my hands on her shoulders she stood up, took my hand, led me over to the extra chair and pulled it over to her plush one.  We sat alongside one another, and she put my arm around her shoulder.  She had her head turned away, towards the papers on her desk.  I ran my fingers over her arm and let her hear my breathing get heavy.  After three minutes she stood up and told me to get out, she had work to do.  

I needed her to be with me.  I set my watch by the point when we broke for lunch when she came and met me and hugged hello.  I walked down different corridors to try to pass her when she didn’t know I’d be there.  It was the way you can make yourself sick, and finally I was doodling abstract drawings at my drafting bench, running the .2-inch lead-pen up and down in geometric and sinusoidal patterns, putting in circles for her eyes and obtuse angles for her bottom lip.

***

Sometime that summer, the Army Corps made a baseball field out of desert and nothing, once they were done with the scientific installations.  Oppie thought it was good to have us doing something other than working and drinking.  It was mostly popular with the military guys, 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.

Once when I was sitting in her office, she told me that she thought I could maybe 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 number theorists knew who I was and told a sergeant to take me for right field.  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 towards her that the private F.C. 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, that it could have been worse.  The whole time in right field, I had been terrified of getting a fly-ball.  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, the whole place loved Lise.  When we sat together at the dances, she told me 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.  

She liked to listen to music while she worked, particularly piano, and I found her a record player from a second-hand store 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.  

***

Lise and I had been there for a few months, 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 a guy standing near me at breakfast that morning if the tower wouldn’t look conspicuous to everyone after we did the drop.  The guy just looked at him.

I was at the top fixing the packaging, making sure the angle was right so it wouldn’t hit the scaffolding on the way down.  The Gadget had a three-foot radius, and in the tests I ran it could have a horizontal variance of three inches right before the blow.  I’d told them to make the drop chute at least eight feet wide, and they gave it ten.  It was the middle of a rainstorm, and the lightning was coming down all around me.  You could see it hit the desert and the chain link fences around our compound.  It occurred to me that the top of a metal tower next to the Gadget wasn’t the safest place to be with lightning dropping, but someone had to do it.  Two days ago, I had heard the theorist squad asking if everyone was sure this wasn’t going to blow holes in the atmosphere.  Because then we’d really be cooked.  I got off the tower and they drove us ten miles away to a bunker.

Two guys from DC were there to observe, and they were standing a few people away from me.  Oppie told everyone to squat on their knees.  Then he made us turn away from the tower.  Ten seconds before it happened, he told us to cover our eyes with our palms.  The DC guys looked at each other and one said, “what’ve we come all this way for, then?”  But they did it and then it dropped and we saw our white bones under the skin of our hands. 

That night, Lise and I climbed out of her window onto the roof.  One of the German émigrés was playing Tchaikovsky two buildings over.  She wanted to dance, and we did, and it was good to be doing something, getting the motion out of our veins.  The dust was still coming down at the edge of the horizon, and it was still colored green and purple and pink from the radiation.  The thing just blew.  I wanted to jump, or pound my fist on the roof tops, or cover Lise with my entire heavy life up to now.  Something happened.  Something had changed.  When Lise pulled my pants off, I almost ripped the top of her blouse.  The chipped paint scratched up my back.  Later, she asked me if it was my first time. I lied.  

We heard the news about the Gadget going overseas one morning.  There were loudspeakers set up around the compound on top of telephone poles.  They played the national anthem and then a sober-voiced man said the tests had worked as well as our wildest dreams.  There was champagne at the laboratory benches.  Someone was pouring bourbon into beakers and we toasted.  

Lise was with the observation team that was going over to help the crew’s training for three weeks and then observe.  We put a chair under the doorknob in her bathroom and her roommate just knocked and knocked.  They dressed the observation team in fatigues, and a lot of us, including Oppie, went to wave to the plane goodbye.

During that time, we played a lot of pickup baseball on the compound.  We were waiting for the okay to get started on the new project, working with hydrogen, 400,000 times more powerful.  Everyone was chomping at the chalkboards to get going, but DC said wait.  Oppie was travelling back and forth from the East Coast.

The field was yellow with half straw at this heat in August, though the Army Corps people watered the diamond every other week.  There was a layer of fine sand over the infield base-paths which made it easy to get grounders.  You could just sit back and wait for them to die and swirl in the sand.  I liked taking rounds and rounds of them with the number theorists and some privates, rotating who would hit and then getting in line, seeing who would let the ball through their legs first.  The bat was made of aspen wood from a tree on the compound, and some genius had carved on the power spot, Los Alamos, Home of Explosions.  We spent long afternoons there, lying in the dusty outfield, looking at the sun.  It was a pulsing, living thing that summer, its image burned into our heads while we waited.  

When Lise came back, I went to meet the plane, and I asked her if she wanted to go to the cantina for a drink.  The particle physicist from the office next to hers was holding a banner, and they were pumping music through the loudspeakers.  I tried to press the khaki of her shirt against my chest.  But she pushed me off and said that she wanted to go to her room.  When she came out, she was in civilian clothes and she wanted to get dinner.  When we went into town, we were stopped at a green light waiting for jeeps to go by and she told me she wasn’t going to stay.

We argued.  We sat against somebody else’s fence and never made it to dinner.  I said that, technically, the military police could get involved.  She said that the second bomb had shattered the trees rather than blowing them over.  I told her she had an obligation to her country and her brother, a marine in the Fifth.  She said the bomb left shadows of spiral staircases on walls they were leaning against; that the Enola Gay flew through a late moon in the East;  that there were eight ships in Hiroshima Harbor.  I stopped her and touched her hand and asked if she remembered the night of Trinity, and she said she hadn’t slept since somewhere over the Pacific, and the mushroom cloud was still in her head.      

It took a week for her clearance to be revoked, and for all the papers to come in for her statements to be signed.  She ate dinner with me once, but she wouldn’t come to the dance afterwards.  She stayed inside with a handful of other scientists who were leaving while we toasted, in the middle of the street, next to the pagoda the Army Corps had just finished installing.  We went for walks and sat on the bench in the dugout when the baseball field was empty, and towards the middle she was almost like she’d always been.  But then that Friday she wouldn’t say a word, and she didn’t want me to touch her shoulders.  

Two days later, she was gone and we got the go-ahead to get the H-bomb up and running.  The war was over, but the Russians were working on their own Gadget, and it was only a matter of time before this one mattered.  Everyone was ecstatic.  We worked 12-hour days, did calculations and ran tests.  I dropped metal from the rooftops to measure the lateral drift.  She left and I hated that she had, with all this going on.  

It started again, the nights in the cantina, the days in underground labs. The military men played baseball, but we had a war on here.  Sometimes I caught myself panting in the middle of drafting, and I’d have to take a beaker of the bourbon before picking up the pencil again.  I knew guys who had to be hospitalized because they refused to sleep.  There was talk of changing our sleep schedules to make a 26-hour day.  Day and night became interchangeable.  She wrote a letter, saying she was somewhere in Arizona and trying to live.  I threw it out.  I wanted to see it again, the cloud coming over the desert.  So loud that the deaf heard something outrageous and the blind asking if this was white.  I went into her office, pored over her papers, sat in the plush chair behind her desk.  I began to think that she took the answer with her.  She knew how it could be done.  There was a secret and it was lost to me.  She was gone and we were waiting here for inspiration to strike.  

Mark Chiusano lives in Cambridge, MA.