The Heat of the Sun (24 page)

‘Stalin?’ said Meyer. ‘Stalin’s our ally.’

‘Shows how much you know.’ The Englishman jabbed a Camel into a long holder. ‘Enemies, that’s what you Yanks need. Do you really think you’ll shut down all this
– this funfair of yours – after the war’s over? You’ll need a good excuse to keep it going.’

There was a blast of cold, and Meyer yelled for somebody to close the fucking door.

‘Major Sharpless? Major Sharpless, sir?’

A young man, a corporal with a prominent Adam’s apple, peered with curiosity through the crowd.

‘The cripple,’ said Miller, pointing in my direction.

‘I’m Sharpless.’ I rose. ‘Who wants him?’

‘Orders from Senator Pinkerton, sir,’ said the corporal, saluting me. ‘I’m to take you to him.’

Meyer goggled at me, outraged. ‘Him? The fucking cripple’s going to get a ringside seat?’

I made a rude gesture at him as I left.

‘So what’s this all about?’ I asked the corporal, following him from the hut. I had tried to see the senator for days. He had ignored me. Why summon me now, out of all these
observers gathered in Alamogordo?

‘This way, sir.’ The corporal held a groundsheet over me as I struggled towards his jeep. The jeep’s cover was up, but rain seeped through, and a flap of canvas, torn half
free, billowed beside me as we churned off through the mud.

I watched the windshield wipers slap back and forth. ‘It’s base camp we’re headed for?’

‘Closer. Senator Pinkerton’s in one of the VIP shelters, sir.’

Rain had ceased by the time we arrived. Our destination was a concrete bunker barely visible in a rise of scrubby hillside. Far off, in the purplish dawn, a steel tower rose like a rocket ship
one hundred feet tall.

The corporal led me down concrete steps.

Inside, the bunker was bleak as a locker room, but for the desert scene, like an artist’s impression of Venus or Mars, that flickered behind an oblong of toughened glass. I half-expected
Oppenheimer to be there – poised over a detonator, grimly exultant – but, of course, he was at base camp. This was only an observation point, where Senator Pinkerton, his wide back
towards me as I entered, conversed heartily with a congressman I recognized from the papers. A famous general and several other top brass pored over a map or chart; the base chaplain from Los
Alamos clutched a prayer book with a harried air; scientists hovered, white-coated, over meters and dials. In one corner, a radio operator with cans over his ears yelled into a bulky microphone.
The walls were grey untreated concrete, stained copiously by intrusive rain. ‘Zero minus five minutes, gentlemen,’ called the radio operator, exchanging a thumbs-up with the famous
general.

‘You sent for me, sir?’ I had to interrupt the senator.

‘Ah, Sharpless. One of you press fellows had to see it up close. Did you bring your black specs?’

I patted my breast pocket and listened respectfully as the fat congressman expatiated on the project as if it had been his own idea and the senator nodded, wryly perhaps, in agreement. He
offered me a cigar, and I let him light it. I despised myself. I had never wanted to be in Los Alamos; I had never wanted to be in Alamogordo. Something was dying inside me and I was powerless to
resist it. Impassively, I gazed into the senator’s bland, broad face. We could have been businessmen at a Rotary meeting, gathered in the bar.

‘Zero minus four minutes,’ said the radio operator.

‘A stiff shot, that’s what we need,’ said the congressman, indicating the drinks tray in the corner.

I moved to assist him, but the senator drew me back. Through the window, the steel tower flamed like a beacon in the rising sun. He draped an arm about me. ‘You thought I never cared for
my son, I suppose.’

‘He isn’t in Washington, is he?’ I said. The arm was heavy across my neck, like a yoke.

I had stayed at Wobblewood West for four days after Trouble left. Aunt Toolie, unhurt, seemed pleased to have been at the centre of a drama that, undoubtedly, was a bigger hit than
Antigone.
With admirable panache, she applied steaks to her black eye and worried about Trouble. Uncle Grover’s red convertible had been found abandoned, some ways down the coast.

When I got back to Los Alamos, Trouble had not returned. Fearing the worst, I said to one of the senator’s staff, ‘He’s AWOL, isn’t he?’

‘AWOL?’ The fellow shook his head. ‘He’s back in DC.’

Even then, I knew this was a lie.

Now, in the bunker, the senator rubbed his eyes as if with fatigue, and I almost laughed; for the first time I saw him as an old man, pathetic and defeated. I drew back on my cigar. I felt
sick.

‘You don’t know where he’s gone,’ I said.

‘Of course I know. He’s been spotted in Mexico. Lying low, the little fool! The only question is how to handle things delicately.’

‘You’re thinking of publicity.’

‘Damn right I am! But I’d gladly have him court-martialled.’

‘He’s cracked up. He needs help, not punishment.’

‘Mr Sharpless! Are you really so naive?’

I flushed and wanted to ask him what he meant, but the radio operator gave the three-minute warning, the congressman returned with the drinks, and we clinked glasses together, toasting the
detonation.

‘Those Russkies won’t know what hit ’em,’ said the congressman.

‘We’re not at war with the Russians,’ I said.

The senator stared out at the desert. He sipped his bourbon and swilled it around his teeth like mouthwash. ‘Strange, isn’t it,’ he said, ‘the way time passes? Fifty
years ago I sailed from San Francisco. It was the first time I’d left the States. The world seemed so wide – stretched before me, all there for the taking! So long ago, but sometimes I
think no time has passed at all; other times, it seems that everything I knew then is gone, crumbled like a collapsing wall.’

The congressman, looking uneasy, shifted his attention to the chaplain, who had opened his little book and was intoning prayers. The general and other top brass bowed their heads; the scientists
continued with their instruments; the radio operator said, ‘Zero minus two minutes,’ and the senator pulled me close. ‘I love my son,’ he said. ‘And all you’ve
ever done is poison him against me.’

Uneasily, I looked around. No one had turned to watch us.

‘You’re hurting me,’ I said. Still the heavy arm bore down on my neck.

‘You’ve got to make him understand, I love him.’

‘What can
I
make him do?’ I dropped my cigar to the concrete floor and ground it out with my lame foot. Desolately, as if knowing it for the first time, I said,
‘I’m nothing to him.’

The senator might not have heard me. He was muttering, talking to himself, and I was mortified, though still nobody saw. ‘Ben, Ben!’ he said. ‘You’ll do anything to
disgrace me. Am I to forgive you? Perhaps I should take the blame. Why did you have to see too much? You saw through me like an X-ray. You knew I was guilty. Always.’

Desert dawn flared before us, blood-red through the glass. Softly, I shifted his arm from my neck as the countdown came again: ‘Zero minus one minute.’ Warning sirens, muffled
through the concrete walls, rang across the firing range. Heavy doors shuddered into place. There was nothing to do except watch the blast. I would not. I turned away, but the senator, with barely
a touch, propelled me back to face it. He drew the dark glasses from my breast pocket and calmly held them before my eyes.

‘Watch,’ he said, in a hollow voice. ‘Watch and tell the world.’

Could I resist him? I donned the glasses, accepting my fate, as the countdown reached ‘Zero minus thirty seconds’ and Voice of America, caught on the same frequency as the base
radio, crackled through the loudspeakers, filling the air with the anthem that began the day’s broadcasts; as a scientist in a lab coat, taking his place beside me, brought long, pondering
fingers to his chin; as the numbers clicked down, ‘Minus fifteen’, then ‘Ten... nine... eight...’ and the chaplain, murmurously, as if presiding over a deathbed, continued
with his prayers, and the top brass stood, hands clasped before them like embarrassed mourners, uncertain what was required of them – and the senator, just before the countdown ended, reached
up in a strangely casual gesture, smudged the black glasses from his face, and gazed, like a man bravely facing death, into sudden, searing fire.

‘
O say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light
...’

What happened next was the work of moments, but to me it unfolded in a timeless realm: as if time split into fragments when the count reached zero and part of me and part of the world would be
there ever afterwards in that bunker at Alamogordo at five-thirty in the morning on July 16, 1945.

A new sun consumed the sky. The flash, silent and immense, was brighter than any lightning that had scourged the night, brighter than the desert in the midday heat. First it was white, then all
colours and none: golden, purple, violet, grey, and blue, lighting the arid plain and the mountains behind with a clarity and power never seen before on earth. Never in my life have I known such
awe.

Only later, hours later or so it seemed, came the sound, at once impossibly deep and high, shrieking through the bunker’s walls and toughened glass like an express train passing and
passing, as if eternally, just inches from our ears.
And I am witness
, I thought,
to a death that has no ending. The death of air. The death of earth. The death of water and fire. I have
witnessed this and I am Death.

Tears blurred my eyes. My heart was hushed, suspended between beats; the world I had known all my life was gone, annihilated in an instant; but when, impossibly, I found myself returned to the
stream of time, I was the first to go to Senator Pinkerton, who stood, trembling, in the centre of the floor, hands covering his eyes. I reached for his wrists and pulled them down.

Voices said, ‘What is it? What’s happened?’

‘He’s blind,’ I said. ‘He’s blind.’

Escape, to my surprise, was easy.

In the chaos, I forced back the blast doors, found the jeep that had brought me, and reversed on to the road before I even considered what I was doing. Checkpoint guards saluted me as I passed:
Major Sharpless, VIP. What had the senator said? He could have Trouble court-martialled – imagine that! Now he could do the same to me: Major Sharpless, AWOL.

As in a dream, I sped past arid mountains. The scholarly Maybee, with patrician drollery, had said that the Conquistadores had dubbed this desert the
Jornada del Muerto
: the Journey of
Death.

The sun was high and the heat burning by the time the rough road crossed Route 66 at Albuquerque. I turned westwards, drove until Route 66 was a blur, then stopped at the first motel I could
find. It was the middle of the afternoon, but I fell on the bed, fully clothed and slept.

When I woke it was morning; raging hunger possessed me, and in the diner next to the motel I amazed the waitress by devouring plate after plate of greasy sausages, potato waffles, buttered
toast, and eggs over easy, washed down with several pots of strong black coffee. I left her a tip worth more than the meal, staggered out to my stolen jeep, and drove on.

That night, in another motel, I wondered if the military police might be on my trail; I thought of them pounding on the door, ripping me from my bed, and was not afraid. But what crime had I
committed worse than the explosion called Trinity? I dreamed of it: sometimes all I did was close my eyes and the memory rushed upon me. Again I felt that shuddering through the ground, that
rolling heat; on and on went the express-train roar, on and on the searing brightness. What thoughts possessed the senator in that last moment I would never know; I imagined that his
self-immolation revealed a longing to be redeemed.

Two days passed before I reached the coast. On a bright afternoon, a Wednesday, I pulled into the drive at Wobblewood West. The house was quiet and the blinds were drawn, but I found the door
unlocked.

‘Aunt Toolie?’ I entered the flagstoned hall; I passed through the broad, open rooms. How empty this house seemed! Low chairs on spindly legs, flowers in brushed-steel vases, and
bright abstract paintings loomed out at me, but none of it had anything to do with me, or the world, or what might happen next. Everyday life was the merest façade, a brittle shell that a
shout could crack. I peeled back slats in a blind and peered out at the sunlit terrace. How long had it been since that evening of
Antigone
? I climbed the stairs.

‘Aunt Toolie?’ I longed to see her; she might have been the last link that tethered me to the world. In the upstairs corridor I heard a radio playing low. Caressingly, a song curled
towards me – the one about taking a sentimental journey, the one about putting your heart at ease – and I crept forward to meet it. At the end of the corridor, a door stood ajar, and I
pushed it open to find a room in shadow. There, marooned on a sea of soft carpet, was a big bed with Aunt Toolie sitting by it. She turned towards me, unsurprised, as I entered.

Again I said her name, fearful now as I saw the inert figure in the bed, the head deep in the pillows, the hand in Aunt Toolie’s hand. Her tongue moved over her lips, moistening them as if
after a long silence. There was sadness in her eyes, but a strange happiness too.

In the bed, skeleton-thin, was Le Vol.

‘Tallulah, I’m back!’

Hours might have passed, though perhaps it was only minutes, before the automobile pulled up in the drive. When I went to greet Uncle Grover, he shook my hand with what might have been relief
and I asked him when Le Vol had arrived at Wobblewood West.

‘Three days ago, four. We tried to call you, but that base of yours said you were off somewhere.’ He clattered about the kitchen, putting groceries in cupboards. ‘Your friend
collapsed on the doorstep. To think, they’d let him out of a military hospital! Well, that’s military hospitals for you.’

‘But what was he doing here?’

‘Why, looking for you, Woodley! That was all he could think to do, to come looking for you.’

Le Vol, after all these years! ‘It’s like a ghost coming back.’