According to a travel form buried in some bureaucrat’s desk, Jonathan Redman was on a research trip. It claimed he was there to meet with leading experts in processor design, give a talk on the current state of lattice gauge theory, and help devise a six-point manifesto on how the two fields can better cooperate. He was also there to scout for postdocs. Dozens of early-career researchers had been told of his arrival, and would soon swarm him like ducks around a boy throwing bread-chunks. He was there, in short, to fill chalkboards with equations and scribble notes on napkins and discuss serious science with serious scientists. And indeed, he would do all this and more. But the truth is that Jonathan Redman was not on a research trip. He was on a pilgrimage.
Redman knew well that only one creation here had ever truly mattered. Not the national laboratory, not the supercomputer slumbering beneath the earth, certainly not the guided tour. It was the moment in July of 1945 when the sky split everywhere into white-hot lightning and dread torrents flew faster than cannonballs over the desert and for just a moment— the initial flash lasting longer than anyone had expected— all the cleverest men in God’s cleverest country thought they had lit the atmosphere ablaze and doomed the earth. At that time Redman would not be born for another twenty years. And yet it sealed his destiny all the same, because it took the physicist from a mere stamp collector to an augur in whose visions lay access to the buried powers of creation. From the moment he learned of the Trinity test he knew what he would become.
For the most part, Los Alamos looked like the rest of the state. On the cab ride into the town Redman passed wall after wall of white stucco and red adobe. Each facade seemed to have drawn from the same pool of decorations: cactus and yucca, tile mosaic and dream-catcher. He pressed his cheek to the window, tired from the nine-hour flight. Houses and storefronts melted into a beige blur.
The laboratory’s main building, in Redman’s eyes, was an atrocity. Cuboids of aquamarine glass cut through great steel drums at odd angles, all seeming to be thrown thoughtlessly together as if by a child stacking toy blocks. Outside the main entrance, a man in a tight button-down shirt waited for him, smiling. Gabriel Dubé. A further distaste turned in Redman. As the cab pulled curbside he saw that the wrinkles crossing Dubé’s cheeks had grown deep as canyons and that his short wiry hair was now receding, carving out a horseshoe-shape in his head.
“John!” called Dubé. “It’s good to see you.” Irritation shot through Redman— only his closest friends called him Jonathan, and no one called him John.
“Likewise,” he said, shaking hands nonetheless.
“I volunteered to show you around. Well— was volun-told, is more like it!” Dubé laughed, exposing the great yellow incisors that had followed Redman from Oxford to Pasadena to Copenhagen and now, somehow, to this long-imagined personal sanctorium. “You’ll spend most of your time in the Bradbury building. Follow me.”
On the tour, Redman bit his lip. He reminded himself why he had come— not to advertise, not to brown-nose, not for any reason a buffoon like Dubé could overturn. He would smile and nod and smile again until it was over. They passed lecture theatres, server rooms, walls made entirely of whiteboard. A plastic sheen reminiscent of shrink wrap seemed to cling to the halls. At one point they passed a small fluids lab where a long-haired graduate student was curled up in a sleeping bag, nestled between a terminal and a centrifuge.
“That’s Sean,” said Dubé. “Odd fellow. Says he likes to sleep in the lab so he can get up and check his simulations. Damn good coder, though.”
Redman had few plans for the first day. He spent the late afternoon in a conference room, motioning now and then to jot something down but really behaving just as he had with Dubé: smile and nod and smile again. He got to his hotel room at around eight in the evening, and ordered tacos. They arrived soggy.
Strange dreams came to Redman that night. A flood of ants spewing from some rusted forest drainpipe, devouring leaves and shrubbery until only a barren waste remained. A young boy trapped at the bottom of a dumbwaiter shaft. Dubé, pale and ragged in some abandoned tunnel, yellow teeth flickering by firelight, grinning like a mad prophet. This final image woke him up in a hazy sweat. He hadn’t dreamed so vividly since before he was an undergraduate. Most nights he didn’t dream at all.
The second day was to be a serious one. Redman found that it took two evenings to overcome the jet lag crossing the Atlantic, and so delayed the truly important business until he’d be clear-headed. He gave his talk in the morning, stumbling over his words and mixing up one slide with the next. When it was finished he was forced to realize it was the worst of his career. Yet what upset him the most was not his poor delivery nor even the spurious content, but that the room still hung on his every word, nodding with wide eyes and mouths agape like seekers before an oracle. This realisation came to him about half an hour in and conjured a dread that would survive the rest of the day.
As expected, the young and hopeful thronged him after the talk. The black-plastic lectern before which he stood caught bleary reflections, and as the queue formed he noticed more and more the image of his face distorted there. The wrinkles and laugh lines smeared and distended. Somehow, he had begun to look rather like an old man. Rather, even, like Dubé.
Conversations ran over him like water. The last person he spoke to was a rake-thin Scottish postdoc who clutched a moleskin notebook against his chest.
“Thanks for the talk,” said the postdoc. “ I was just wondering— your results, what do you think they say about our chances of detecting ultralight bosons via gravitational waves?”
Redman’s talk had concerned neither ultralight bosons nor gravitational waves. “I don’t know,” he said. “That’s rather outside my area of study, to be honest.”
“Oh,” said the postdoc, shuffling on his feet. “Sorry. I guess I sort of thought everything was your area of study.”
Redman sighed. “That’s just what the science press writes.”
Lunch was provided: a collection of miniature vegetarian dishes served in small glass bowls. The locals devoured these, but for Redman the entire affair was bland and depressing. Plastic, again, like the walls and the tables and the lectern. He ate little and twirled his spoon in one of the bowls until the cauliflower turned to purée.
Afterwards, another meeting: impromptu presentations, the six-point manifesto. Dubé sat at the end of the table and delivered an extemporaneous monologue lasting some twenty minutes and having nothing to do with the discussion whatsoever. During this, Redman thought about his reasons for disliking the man. The petty battles fought from opposite ends of a lecture theatre. Snide remarks and political appointments. The publication rejected, in apparent anonymity, but with a clue smuggled into the first letter of each line in the referee’s report: D-U-B-E. A coincidence? Perhaps. But two months later, a very similar paper had appeared with Dubé as third author. Redman ran his eyes on the other faces in the room, each seeming to possess a deadness all its own— glassy eyes or a sallow quality in the cheeks or skin that sagged like a too-large sweater. Where was Fermi’s virile wit, Oppenheimer’s quiet incision, Teller’s wild genius? Gone; driven from this place with that supersonic wind. No matter. When the time came he would pay his due reverence to the ghosts, in silence, in understanding.
In the evening he told the others that he was meeting an old friend for dinner. This was a lie. He sat in his hotel room with the blinds shut tight and the desklamp on, holding a glass of scotch in one hand and a pulp sci-fi novel in the other. And he searched the cream-white walls for imperfections but found none.
The second night, Redman did not dream.
He woke in a solemn mood. On the third day, nothing was booked for him. Here too he had lied, though in a subtler way and well in advance. He'd claimed he wanted a day alone to tour and pay visits. But in truth he had planned only one visit and one destination.
Redman had arranged to rent a sedan. He drove a little over two hundred miles south, leaving the vehicle in an empty parking lot ringed by a shallow arroyo. His goal lay over a fence fringed with barbed wire— the site was open to the public only one day a year and he had not come on that day. But this was no obstruction. He had brought a bolt cutter.
Thirty-five miles from Socorro, in the dead dry heat of the Jornada del Muerto, a black lava-rock obelisk stood planted like an ancient arrowhead mounted upright in its display. A brass plate on its face recalled the time and place of the cleaving there dealt to the world. In the sands all around there still lay twinkling hints of the green crystal like sea glass into which the desert had been by that fatal instant baked, holding within themselves no trace of the cholla and mesquite and jackrabbit and armadillo whose incinerate forms vanished into the inch-deep molten lake. Trinitite, the scientists called it. And in 1953 they had it disposed of almost to the shard, but no removal is ever complete.
Redman walked for another hour. He’d brought two small plastic canteens full of water and drained one along the way. Once only, he stopped for shelter in the shade of a cottonwood. He didn’t know it but about half of his journey overlapped with that of the conquistadors in the transit of their caravans northward to Santa Fe. The same heat had hung over them too: arriving at the Rio Grande, their records claimed two horses drank so much water that their sides burst open.
Redman was not thinking of these, nor of the cholla, nor of the mesquite. He hardly even noticed the jackrabbit that went skittering over the earth before him like a stone skipped on a still pond. He was thinking of the base camp that had once stood here, the observation points like foxholes, the gathering about the flash in the sky where all lay staring through carbon-blackened lenses that their eyesight survive. All removed: only the obelisk remained to tell of what happened. But Redman knew that all things to be built leave an imprint. That no removal is ever complete.
He arrived at the obelisk around noon. A warm wind ran through the creosote-bush; over the horizon a Russian thistle went loping by. Somewhere distant there came a low rumbling. Three hundred and sixty-four days a year this remained a military testing ground and idiot bombs still cratered the sand. Redman was unfazed. They would not fall near the obelisk, nor on his path. He pressed his hand to the metal. It was cool, somehow. The only cool thing in sight. And for a moment he felt it all flow into him: the great conjoining of human potentials, the scalpel-clean cut slicing history into a before and an after. The mark, even, of his own self-creation.
Yet something else followed. This was not enough.
He had planned to return to Los Alamos directly. On the way to the obelisk he’d noted the sparse landmarks, ensuring he would not be delayed. The amount of water was calculated to last only the expected journey. There were many reasons, in short, for Redman to turn back, and a physicist then in the fifteenth year of his professorship ought to have known better than to continue into regions unknown. But continue he did. Past the creosote-bush, past the Russian thistle, on and on until even the far-off rumbling vanished and all that remained was sun and dust and sand. He had to go further, further. Something called him.
At some point those old images of scientific legend faded from Redman’s memory. The ghosts had departed; here the desert was haunted by silence alone. He spent some fifteen minutes standing over a spherical barrel cactus which sprouted between two chunks of limestone, and new thoughts arrived. That life had sprung up even in this crack among deadness. That the cacti had been here long before the first human footfall, and would endure— in Redman’s view— long after our tools of self-destruction sealed in time the last. That this living testudo, surface arrayed with spears in defense of its slight reservoir, still saw fit to flower for a few days every year.
Some time later he’d drained the second canteen. He remained lost.
The heat began to get to him. He passed a section of petrified wood, the bark crystallized amber-orange so that the split face took the appearance of a geode, and he thought he could see hints of some fluid pulsing in the glistening spiderweb cracks like blood through capillaries. A handful of odd-shaped sandstone protrusions became a band of coyotes, until the shock subdued and a closer look broke the illusion. Murky blots seemed to flicker on the horizon like far-off pagan dancers.
Redman knew well that he could die here. That weeks later someone might stumble upon the bones of a once-noted professor of physics, identified only by his teeth, soon to be remembered less for his work than for the strangeness of his passing. And yet— though his rational mind insisted this was an effect of the dehydration— the thought did not disturb him.
His throat was dry and scratchy but the need to urinate came all the same. What to do— recycle the liquid like some roadshow survivalist? No, he knew better; this would only parch him further. Better to let it spill into the sand. To water, at least, a patch of grama grass.
A time came when he felt he could drag himself forward no longer. With no memory of how he arrived he had entered a mudcracked playa, the land underfoot sectioned into even-sized yet irregular shapes like a map of counties. And Redman then carried no thoughts at all. Only sensations: heat and light and sweat.
He struggled onward. Something bright flashed at the very edge of his vision, some white shape blurred and diffracted. Onward, onward. The white thing congealed; he began to make out the shape of a tree, leafless and bone-white and dead. What manner of tree? Neither cottonwood nor mesquite, greater than both and indeed greater than anything that should have sprouted there, vast leg in the desert by some antique traveller recalled. Redman made it to the thing’s foot and collapsed to his knees, emptying the contents of his stomach upon the earth so that yellow-green rivulets ran in the cracks.
A single branch extended from the great trunk’s side, just a little above eye level. Redman looked up at it. He saw then that he was not alone— on the branch there stood a burrowing owl, lean body tucked in the shape of a raindrop, slanted ochre eyes locking him in place. Redman was not a religious man. But the sudden need to confess to this stranger rose up in him all the same. His dry mouth cracked open.
“It’s true, damn it all,” he said. “I whittled my days away like so much nothing. Spent them on trivialities.” Sweat dripped into his eyes; the hot pain sent him wincing earthward. When he’d wiped them clean and looked back up, the owl had vanished. But something else was in its place: a Jornada hawk, stoic on the branch, all coiled muscle and dagger-claw. A thing made for killing. Redman had heard no indication of a flight and began to suspect he was losing his senses, but this was a secondary matter. The confession had to continue.
“And it wasn’t just that either. I didn’t just stop doing what mattered, I forgot what mattered entirely. Like I thought life was a long procession of distractions.”
He rubbed his eyes a second time, and again the branch had a new occupant. This time it was a vulture, red-faced, wings outstretched and fringed with white, swollen and contorted in odd places like a corpse mid-bloating. Gazing into the black bead-eye, Redman knew he had but one more thing to confess.
“Like I thought I would never die.”
This time he saw the vulture fly off, though after it left the branch he could not track its passage across the sky. He was alone once more. Only a small burst of his strength had returned— enough, at least, to escape the vomit-smell. He made the first motions on his hands and knees, then got to his feet limping. Expecting this would lead to nothing but a death somewhere else.
But the playa did not go on forever. Eventually Redman came to a steep formation of basalt, and, rolling himself over the side, obtained a clear view of the horizon. And in the distance, he could just make out a thin grey line. The fence. A goal, then. He lapsed in and out of awareness but never once stopped moving in its direction. Arriving, he knew he wouldn’t have the strength to cut his way out. But fortune was kind. A few sections down, the barbed wire running over the top had snapped from rusting. There was a safe place to climb, and climb— and to fall, on the other side, landing harshly on his left shoulder. Dislocated. Yet he could stand, and move. He had only to return to the parking lot. How to find it?
He still had a physicist’s mind. The position of the sun, the angle of the fence. These were all he needed to orient himself.
And in the end— with a thirst that scratched like sandpaper and the sharp hot ache of a body not quite in its right shape— he made it to the parking lot. There, he noticed something he’d missed before. At the nadir of the encircling arroyo a thin stream ran. He cupped water to his mouth. Perhaps this journey had been planned, somewhere, after all.
It was a little over three hours back to Los Alamos. He steered with one hand.
The sun began to set during Redman’s return. By the time he reached the hotel’s parking lot, it had vanished. The pain in his shoulder hadn’t dulled all the while. He figured he’d have to contact a doctor eventually— claim he fell out of bed, perhaps. But first he wanted to lie down.
In the corridor leading to his room, he encountered one final strangeness. A man, knocking on the door to his room, looking concerned. Short wiry horseshoe-printed hair and a tight button-down shirt. Gabriel Dubé.
“Looking for me?” said Redman.
Dubé whipped around. “John! Folks at the institute were getting worried. No one could get in touch with you. I, ah, offered to come and check.”
Redman nodded. “Sorry. Got a little held up there. I’m quite alright.” It was then that Redman realized something incredible: looking at Dubé, no wave of reflexive disgust had come over him, no trace of anger or contempt. The man had been reduced to a man as any other.
“There was, ah, a second reason, you see— well, we were planning this group picture, to put on the website, you know, and there was a change of plans, so the photographer is coming at eight in the morning tomorrow.”
“Sure. I can be there.”
“Ah, good, good. We just got a little spooked, since you weren’t answering your email. Or your phone.”
“Well. Thanks for coming to check on me.”
“No problem, no problem. You have a good night, yeah John?”
“Sure. You too, Gabriel.”
In his room, alone, Redman of course knew the truth— that Dubé was really there to secure his image for advertising purposes, that honest concern had likely played no role at all. But now the knowledge was merely amusing. Robbed of its venom. In his most charitable moments, he even entertained the notion that some small measure of honest concern had helped bring Dubé to the hotel after all.
He was dog-tired. There’d be one more thing to do before sleep, he decided. After a quick Google search he wrapped the injured arm in an arc over his head, pulling on his elbow with the other. A pop and a jolt and the shoulder returned to its right place. Pain in the joint, at first, but throbbing down toward nothing. No doctor needed after all.
He had three more days in Los Alamos. Three more days of meetings and manifestos, seminars and scribblings. At one time he had dreaded this denouement, but somewhere in the desert he’d left this dread behind. Left many dreads behind, and perhaps something else besides.
Falling asleep, his final thought was a foggy optimism. He hoped that he would dream.
Your depiction of the physics conference is authentic as hell! Hilarious. Redman and Dubé are both great memorable characters — I could see them both and the environments you describe without much effort. Great work. Loved your description of the Trinity site especially.
A very compelling story and theme. Well done!
As some constructive criticism I'd say you should stick to the active tense more instead of using the passive. One problem I had is that you switched between them, seemingly at random, throughout the story. That alone was bothersome, but the passive tense in and of itself was bothersome! And since you switched between the two tenses I could REALLY feel how much more pleasant the active tense sections were to read than the passive. The passive parts felt like I was being dragged through the text against my will, whereas the active tense sentences made me feel like a stone skipping across water.
Hope that helps!