Work Text:
Jornada Del Muerto, New Mexico
July 1945
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When the bomb happened the desert melted and became green glass. When they observed it, clad in radiation suits, they found it to be radioactive. It spread across the malpais in a great brilliant swath but by then the wind had come once more and blown the sand over it in drifts.
Ever like anything. They had by then staked a nation upon the desert erasing itself as though any process after this would ever be certain again.
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They had been working at Los Alamos. Remus did some math thing Sirius could not even begin to comprehend and at first spurned his advances with a series of cold and sensual rebuffs smoother than ice sculpture. But he did not really mean it, which Sirius understood. It seemed his mood had been foul since the day he was born and summarily abandoned at, rumor had it, some destitute and squalid Ohio orphanage, but it had been rather worse of late. It was no doubt the bomb on account of it was always the bomb. They ate and breathed and drunk and shat the bomb, he often feared. Feigning drunker than he was one evening in March after a drunken argument Sirius asked if Remus might like that mood fucked out of him; they were in the parking lot of a bar outside Santa Fe and after the fistfight they did indeed fuck in the bed of Sirius’s pickup parked in the star-strewn midnight darkness off the pueblo and that night, he remembered, there had been no moon, and he was still tasting his own blood at the back of his throat from the bloody nose. They slept there in a tangle of limbs and horseblankets, spent the morning vomiting and the evening fucking once more in Sirius’s cabin on Route Four, and returned to work on Monday.
Sirius was a physicist who studied reactivity. As a child he’d found yellowcake on his parents’ ranch south of La Sal, Utah, on the Colorado border. He had lost the respect of his parents, and thus his title to the ranch, when he had gone to college in Massachusetts and started sleeping with men. When offered the chance to return to the desert he took it far and away over Tennessee or Port Hope though he would have denied he missed it if anyone had asked in all his ill-spent prodigal years. It was in his very blood, the desert, which he ruminated upon with a deep anxiety when he laid awake at night. He liked Remus because he thought it was in Remus’s blood too, but it turned out Remus was from Ohio. Still he acted like there was no life upon him or inside him but sometimes you could tell. He was not made (angles, waves, geologic sharpness) of math really when you investigated and got beneath the layers (clothes, etc.) which took sometimes a great deal of convincing and/or liquor and/or grass.
For a while Remus was working on building Jumbo, which was the great massive belly thing that would contain the plutonium if the test fizzled. He was not a chemist so he came to talk to Sirius. He was really very handsome in a way not fully realized and he carried himself with an atrocious slouch. They took him off Jumbo, and he would not say what he was working on, but still he came to talk to Sirius, and The Rest Was History.
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In early July he got up to piss in the night and when he came back to the bed Remus was awake having pressed his hand over his eyes to keep them from the bathroom light. Though when Sirius shut it off he kept his hand there in the dappled blue moonlight through the wide window cast through the blackened ghosts of the trees left standing dead amidst the short green burn, and the grey sheaves of exposed stone cutting through the long-ago floor of some forgotten ocean. This was a light that quite befit Remus whose skin was very pale and whose freckles very dark and Sirius found he could not quit staring at the tuft of soft hair in his underarm and the two even round birthmarks at the top of his ribcage visible there like some vampiric love bite or the resultant scatters of blood. “Do you think about what we’re doing.”
“Of course I do.”
“Do you really ever really think Black about what we’re doing?”
“Every day.”
“Liar,” said Remus miserably.
“Don’t think no one suffers with it but you.”
“Is it too much to ask you to fuckin suffer with me.”
I suffer with you every day, Sirius thought about saying.
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Their employer had named the beast from a poem by John Donne — “so death doth touch the resurrection” — but in the lab they had nicknamed it the Gadget. Sirius was one of seven men who drove across the desert in an armored tank to perform the final arming seven and one half hours before the detonation.
Then in the darkness they prayed. He thought it was funny to be praying in the desert for the rain to stop. They walked about on the desert outside the bunker milling with the rest of them, smoking cigarettes and waiting. It was very silent because the trains and the trucks after months had finally stopped coming and going bringing oil from Standard and water from Socorro and now there was only the breathlessness like no other before or since like the weight upon each back of the entire creature asleep atop the tower twenty miles away across the malpais but infinite distance in comprehension, compassion, understanding, undertaking, possibility, atavism, eschaton, fullness, blankness, life, death, death, death, death, death, and the desert watching. Together in the bunker during the twenty-minute countdown they took bets upon its potency.
It was let go at a half minute before five thirty in the morning. The light was like nothing that had ever been and it passed with a great tidal violence and subsumed then abruptly to stillness. All sound was swallowed. The great cloud swelled up into itself and expanded and dispersed searing like a camera’s flash against his retinas through the goggles and in it he wondered if he saw God’s face, or a gateway. Next to him he felt Remus shaking like he shook just in the last seconds before he came, or before he threw a punch.
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They laid in bed all day unsleeping in the cabin on Route Four amidst the burn and Remus did not speak and Sirius tried to rouse him but could not manage. And after a while enough of the silence fomenting contemplation he had to rise and run to the toilet to vomit. And Remus came in then still unspeaking and stroked his hair.
They went to bed and for a moment he got Remus to talk again, but they were both crying, and Remus was clutching at his hair, and he pressed his face against Remus’s neck and wept. At dusk they went for a walk about the edge of the caldera in the day’s draining heat and watched at the sheep in the great bowl valley grazing against the blackening sky. They found their way home in the bright wedge of moonlight like a very early frost upon the grassland.
He feared that weekend while they dozed and wandered unspeaking that perhaps he and Remus were the only survivors of some great shipwreck (smashed to pieces against the red stone bluff of progress) but when he ventured to the grocery store he saw somehow against all odds there were others still alive and operating as though the ship had never been wrecked at all.
They had not known as they built it, or even then, what they would do with it, but they had suspected.
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In August they were not taken to North Field at Tinian with others from the laboratory but rather they were both up 24 hours in one of the innermost sanctums of Los Alamos casting the plutonium core for a bomb that did not drop for another year and never upon the Japanese archipelago, psyche, morale, mythology, history, legacy, past, future, citizenry, infantry, industry, prisoners of war, war, war, war, war. The core alone would kill two men at Los Alamos with acute radiation poisoning and it would be detonated at Bikini Atoll as Gilda in July 1946 by which time Remus and Sirius both had left the laboratory and Remus was in the hospital and Sirius teaching first year physics at a community college in Albuquerque. Anyway in August when they had finished casting the demon core they slept nearly all the two days following on the couch in Sirius’s cabin and thus he was only half conscious when Remus asked him, “Isn’t there anyone you would drop it on if you could.”
He was sitting up and smoking a cigarette and there was a hole in his sock through which his big toe protruded with the nail bruising purple from having been slammed against something in the lab. Sirius said, “I don’t think so.”
“Well,” said Remus. He put the cigarette out in the cut-glass bowl upon the table with the rest. “I suppose that’s good.”
That was the beginning.
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When they left they would both be forced to sign away their complete histories as though any of it could ever be forgotten. Progress progressed. In the Los Alamos lab and others they bred more creatures and tested them under code names in the desert, in the sea, underground: Operation Crossroads, Operation Sandstone, Operation Faust (later renamed Operation Ranger), Operation Greenhouse, Operation Buster-Jangle, Operation Tumbler-Snapper, Operation Ivy, Operation Upshot-Knothole, Operation Castle (worldwide fallout, Rongelap, Utirik, the Daigo Fukuryu Maru), Operation Teapot, Operation Wigwam, Project 56, Operation Redwing, Project 57 (the first safety test), Operation Plumbbob, and on and on and on until the end of the world.
He walked upon the desert with Remus who could leave the hospital if supervised and they walked together amongst the pueblos, and they camped at night in the malpais and in the woods. By lanternlight Sirius graded papers and Remus watched over his shoulder. He showed Sirius the plans he had drawn for things like planes and spaceships exactingly engineered upon scratch paper emblazoned with the institution’s logo in a friendly coral pink. “They cannot have us again,” he said. He was thinner. Sirius had been invited to work at Enewetak Atoll and someone from the laboratory had come to look at Remus’s sketches. To the staff at the hospital they looked like the stuff of science fiction or schizophrenia. To Sirius they looked like the truth, which was that he was very tired, too tired even to be afraid, and fearing, in dramatic upset of Roosevelt’s proclamation at the dawn of the war, that he had lost — that they had all lost — even the final shred of humanity they had been clinging to of late, which was the capacity to fear. After all, what was left?
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The desert does not erase itself and in fact it seemed to Sirius it concealed things selectively to enhance its own agenda. He was always dreaming about rigging the Gadget in the early sunset in the Jornada Del Muerto; it was July and the summer heat potent; it was the last time he had ever felt young, or like he was human. He dreamed about going home the next day with Remus and the silence and outside the window the big wide burn having stripped the mountain bare, and amongst the wreckage the greenness growing back minty and young beneath the wild white sky. Down the hill the pueblo, the caldera, the laboratory, everything buried, uranium core, yellowcake, salt, stone.
Will we come back like this, he was thinking. Could we come back this fast; could we come back at all? Can we come back even now?
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