Marine Park: Stories (9 page)

I
t 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.

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 Minnesota in case something clicked out here in the heat. Lise argued with him all the time in the beginning, but eventually she just stopped by for an oatmeal raisin in the morning and waved when he went out, still busy over numbers.

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 you'd be able to measure the theoretical explosion with entropy calculations. She was spending her time manipulating 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 parallel to each other and she leaned into me over the arm of her chair. She had her head turned away, toward the papers on her desk. The small hairs on her arm were visible from this close. Her lip quivered every few seconds, and I watched the smooth skin on her neck. I ran my fingers over her arm and let her hear my breathing get heavy. I didn't move. I didn't do more than that. After three minutes she stood up and said, get out, she had work to do.

I needed her to be with me. I set my watch to the point at lunchtime when she came and met me and hugged hello. I walked down different corridors trying 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.

 • • • 

There were no Lise's at home. Some nights I walked the empty streets for something to do, the dirt roads. In winter the snow piled so high the cars got stuck for days. Nobody ever locked their doors.

My father owned the hardware store. He said that he knew everyone in town; he knew what everyone ate for lunch. Sometimes he made sandwiches in the back room, and gave them out to the laborers or the drunks who hung around the store during the day. They talked about the Dodgers, always the Dodgers, as if they would get to heaven through them, and always the park. The park hung out there gleaming. Not in real life—not anything concrete—but the idea of it, all the promises. City Hall was eight miles away, but everyone read the newspapers. It was a college man had been picked, who won the design competition; a man from Connecticut, who loved walking in the outdoors up and over hills. That's what the papers said. There had been mornings, years ago, when the drunks followed him around as he surveyed the area. He had a long coat, my father remembered. He put up a sign that said
MARINE PARK.

My father had a little technical skill, and he ended up doing some of the drawings. We still had them, framed, in the hardware store. The architect's name on the bottom. The paths that the speed rail lines would take, all three of them, to service the park and resort. The parking areas for 28,000 cars. Land reclamation for the Circumferential Parkway, bringing Manhattan as close to here as if we were the ones across the river. Two hundred sixty-four acres of walks. Seventeen acres of tennis courts, 9.6 of farm gardens, flower gardens, 38 planned buildings. My father drew them all. A zoo or menagerie. A stadium seating 100,000. A long canal, the big pool, larger even than the lake in Central Park, chlorinated so people could swim. A tunnel connecting the white-sand waterfront to Flatbush Avenue, where the buses would stop and the trains would have their terminus stations. The nine-mile trip from Manhattan would be part of the amusement. A bathing house, open all year for tubercular children, particularly poor ones, and on weekdays and Saturday mornings children could swim free of charge. The Connecticut man, the one morning he gave a speech, said he was bringing the Olympics here. The 1940 Olympics. This was 1933. The land was crawling with surveyors.

It all didn't happen quickly. The money never came. The war started. We shaved our heads on the side and on the top in Marine fashion. Army recruiters came by on the roads, the only things built, meant to bring people to the park. They said, You can't join the Navy if you've got both your parents. There was only three-hour overnight parking in case of invasion by sea. My father wouldn't move the car, said he wasn't helping Roosevelt. Nights, I watched the artillery demonstrations at Fort Tilden, the tracers coming over the Rockaway Peninsula like fireworks. For a moment they lit up the parkland, where nothing had changed. There were strange people who lived on houseboats in the canals running through the grass. They didn't talk to anyone, and we didn't talk to them. I was starting at Brooklyn. The teachers said that science wins war.

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.

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 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. Obviously it occurred to me that on 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. I had heard the theorist squad two days ago 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 Washington were there to observe, and they were standing a few people away from me. Oppenheimer told everyone to squat on their knees. Then he made us turn in the opposite direction of the tower. Ten seconds before it happened he told us to put our palms over our eyes. The Washington guys looked at each other and one said, What'd 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.