Oppenheimer Is Watching Me: A Memoir (Sightline Books)

OPPENHEIMER I S WAT C H I N G M E

A Memoir JEFF PORTER

. . . . . . .Oppenheimer . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Is. .Watching . . . . . . . . . . Me ..................

. . . . . . . . sightline . . . . . . . . . .books ................................. The Iowa Series in Literary Nonfiction Patricia Hampl & Carl H. Klaus, series editors

Jeff Porter

Oppenheimer

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Is Watching Me A Memoir

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City

University of Iowa Press, Iowa City 52242 Copyright © 2007 by Jeff Porter www.uiowapress.org All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America Text design by Richard Hendel No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form or by any means without permission in writing from the publisher. All reasonable steps have been taken to contact copyright holders of material used in this book. The publisher would be pleased to make suitable arrangements with any whom it has not been possible to reach. The University of Iowa Press is a member of Green Press Initiative and is committed to preserving natural resources. Printed on acid-free paper Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Porter, Jeffrey Lyn, 1951– Oppenheimer is watching me: a memoir / Jeff Porter. p. cm. — (Sightline Books: The Iowa series in literary nonfiction) ISBN-13: 978-1-58729-616-1 (cloth) ISBN-10: 1-58729-616-0 (cloth) 1. United States—Social life and customs—1945–1970. 2. United States—Social conditions—1945–. 3. Cold War—Social aspects—United States. 4. Atomic bomb—Social aspects—United States. 5. Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 1904 –1967—Influence. 6. Porter, Jeffrey Lyn, 1951– —Childhood and youth. 7. Porter, Jeffrey Lyn, 1951– —Family. 8. United States—History—1953– 1961—Biography. 9. United States—History—1961– 1969—Biography. 10. Buffalo (N.Y.)—Biography. I. Title. E169.Z8P5924 2007 2007007356 973.92— dc22 07

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for my mother, father, and sister

. . . . . . . . . Contents .........................................................

Acknowledgments ix Introduction xi Oppenheimer Is Watching Me 1 Castro’s Beard 24 Distress Signals 44 Going Ballistic 64 Trace Elements 82 On the Beach 106 Postscript 127

. . . . . . . . .Acknowledgments .........................................................

If this were a television commercial, I would itemize the cost of researching this project (“one CDV-700 Geiger Counter, forty-nine dollars”) and then include cameos of the many people who have made this book possible, with the simple punch line — “priceless.” There are indeed some things money can’t buy. I would like to say thanks to my earliest readers, Judith Pascoe and Patricia Foster, for their incisive criticism and generous assistance. A note of special gratitude to Carl Klaus and Joe Parsons for unstinting support and guidance. Thanks also to the talented and dedicated staff at the University of Iowa Press, especially to Holly Carver, Charlotte Wright, Allison Thomas, Karen Copp, and Stacy Dreyer — and to my copyeditor, Mary Heaton, who expertly ironed out the wrinkles in this manuscript. Although they probably will be surprised by the shape this project has taken, Pam Clements, Paul Boyer, H. Bruce Franklin, Gerard H. Clarfield, and William M. Wiecek have my appreciation for their early support. My mother and father have faced more cross-examination than anyone, including Francis Gary Powers, should ever endure. I hope they will forgive me for so much prying. (Somebody had to do it.) A warm thank-you to my mother- and father-in-law for their convincing mock-up of a 1950s household, and to my sister and her family for their impersonation of my favorite DeLillo novel. I am particularly fortunate to have had Claire Sponsler edit this book from beginning to end. Nothing but her unceasing rigor (and razor-sharp eye) could have possibly kept my unruly Sicilian instincts in line. Special thanks to the University of Iowa Office of the Vice President for Research for supporting this project. For any lapses in style and content, I take (reluctantly) full responsibility. In writing this book I have drawn upon many sources, far too many to cite in this space, but I wish to acknowledge with a broad

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stroke the important work of cultural historians in laying down the various plotlines of nuclear America, from Richard Rhodes’s The Making of the Atomic Bomb to Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin’s recent biography of Oppenheimer, American Prometheus. Dino A. Brugioni’s Eyeball to Eyeball: The Inside Story of the Cuban Missile Crisis proved extremely helpful, as did Tom Vanderbilt’s Survival City: Adventures among the Ruins of Atomic America, Carole Gallagher’s American Ground Zero: The Secret Nuclear War, Paul Boyer’s By the Bomb’s Early Light, Spencer Weart’s Nuclear Fear, Peter Bacon Hales’s Atomic Spaces, Stephen I. Schwartz’s Atomic Audit, Fred Kaplan’s The Wizards of Armageddon, Michael R. Beschloss’s Mayday, H. Bruce Franklin’s War Stars, and John Polkinghorne’s Quantum Theory. I would like to express my gratitude to these writers, and many unnamed others, for their contributions to our collective understanding of the cold war. Although I have consulted numerous books on modern physics, I do not doubt that there are undetected errors in my account of quantum mechanics. But who knows? Over time these mistakes may very well turn into truths. As Richard Feynman has said, we can safely assume that no one really understands quantum mechanics. It is my hope, at least, that any errors, large or small, will not detract from the resonance of quantum theory as a guiding metaphor.

Introduction ......................................................... To articulate what is past does not mean to recognize “how it really was.” It means to take control of a memory, as it flashes in a moment of danger. — Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History”

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lways on the lookout for metaphors, a writer is drawn to strange ideas and uncanny phenomena, the more so when they promise to explain the way things are. The principal metaphor in this book is J. Robert Oppenheimer, the lead scientist of the Manhattan Project, who was later stripped of his government security clearance for alleged character defects. Oppenheimer’s place in American memory is as symbolic as it is ambiguous. Best known for “fathering” the A-bomb, he was the first scientist to achieve stardom during the postwar years, a triumph he parlayed into national authority on the subject of subatomic physics. Before long, Oppenheimer became a living icon of the nuclear age and when he was later defrocked by the government — for raising doubts about the H-bomb — it seemed like the ritual slaying of a fallen hero, one betrayed not only by friends and government agents but by himself as well. In this book Oppenheimer is emblematic of a paradoxical knowledge that transformed the political and cultural dynamics of the postwar scene but also revealed the disorder at the heart of matter. A man gripped by powerful contradictions, he was as enigmatic as he was captivating: is it any surprise that his favorite literary characters were Hamlet and Raskolnikov? Oppenheimer’s influence over me across time is the point of departure of this book, which begins with my rummaging through a box of family records hidden away in the attic. Among the many surprises awaiting me is the revelation that my father, a ne’er-do-well bass player, worked on atomic missiles at a major defense contractor for almost a

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decade. This discovery brings home the startling realization that my family, which always seemed so marginalized from “History” with a capital H, was in more ways than I would have guessed part of the grand narrative of the cold war. Besides the “father of the A-bomb,” other noteworthy figures from the era make an appearance in this book, including Francis Gary Powers, Fidel Castro, Herman Kahn, Edward Teller, Enrico Fermi, Wernher von Braun, Lewis Strauss, Paul Nitze, Nikita Khrushchev, and Jane Fonda — all of whom act not so much as influential agents but as witnesses caught in a web of ironic coincidences. They share time with members of my family — my Sicilian grandparents and my bootstrapping parents — and with bits of material culture — vintage Pontiacs, Fizzie sodas, Boy Scout badges, Geiger counters, Vitamin-D-enriched milk, latex girdles, fiberglass poles, Sputnik satellites, U-2 spy planes, VFW posts, and of course Fat Man and Little Boy. Like a photograph, these objects point to a kind of meaning that can’t really be captured in words. They evoke the aura of a culture suspended somewhere in time, between an opaque past and an elusive present. Cold war America was a world made by the A-bomb, where men in lab coats toyed with the properties of matter, and where fears of national security haunted our sleep. If the 1950s had a profound impact on many Americans, it was partly because we were so naïve and innocent in the face of global menace — few doubted the goodwill of our leaders. We are only now catching up with the repercussions. In my own small world, I replicated the perversities of the cold war, reenacting the plots, schemes, ploys, and story lines laid down by a culture that came dangerously close to fulfilling absurdly apocalyptic visions. It was only natural that my play would be haunted by fantasies of disaster. The cold war has been under erasure, as theorists used to say, since Ronald Reagan’s second term in office. To bring its lingering traces to light twenty years later calls for a certain kind of remembering, one that can give form to the underlying science of the cold war. You will find in this book a fascination with quantum theory, partly because it explains an aspect of the past that is otherwise not easy to grasp. As anyone who has flirted with quantum theory knows, putting into words what quantum numbers mean — say, the Schrödinger equation, describing how a wavefunction evolves over time — can produce results closer to poetry than science. I find the poetry implicit in the structure of the atom irresistible, and I have tried to tap into its paradoxes as a

Introduction

way of promoting connections between events and characters, small and large, that might otherwise collapse into meaninglessness. Waveforms are the alphabet of the quantum but they cannot be read in conventional ways. In subatomic physics, you never really know where in space a quantum entity is. When, say, an electron jumps from one energy state to another, it can move in either direction, up or down the energy scale, defeating attempts to track it. And even when it reappears, you can’t be sure it’s there, since things like electrons are notoriously hard to find. According to the principle of superposition, quantum particles coexist in several places at once and remain there until observed or measured, when they are said to collapse into a single actuality. Coherence is the term used by physicists to describe the wavefunction of a particle that’s here, there, and everywhere while the term decoherence, curiously enough, refers to the moment a particle ceases to be vague about its whereabouts and becomes local, the moment when the particle falls, so to speak, out of indeterminacy and into “normal” space. While the rule of clarity suggests that a writer should always seek consistency and unity in order to make sense of things, my strategy is to return the cold war to a state of quantum coherence that can put probabilities back into play. As a model, the quantum offers little hope of temporal tidiness and so the representation of time, not surprisingly, has proven to be a challenge in writing this book. A postatomic Jacob, I have wrestled with my imagination over the issue of chronology, giving in to occasional outbursts of temporal disorder. I cannot help but think that there is a Borgesian dimension to the cold war: it is a place of unfinished business whose inconclusiveness has haunted my verb tenses like a poltergeist. The story told here refuses to be anything but nonlinear, even though in certain respects it is an old-fashioned search for answers and origins. When verbs falter, I turn to mimicry, stylistically impersonating one of the many voices, states, or crises of the cold war — the shock of Sputnik, the dismay over Gary Powers’s downed spy plane, the security trial of Oppenheimer, the quest for the perfect rocket, the U.S. campaign against Castro, and the near catastrophe of the Cuban missile crisis. Radioactive fallout was a persistent fact of life thirty years ago, despite government efforts to keep its severity classified, and fallout has both a literal and a metaphoric presence in this book. The entire country was, at one point, blanketed by particles that fell from

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radioactive clouds drifting far from the Nevada Test Site; today, contaminated wastes from nuclear weapon sites continue to ooze up from the ground. Bad though this is, perhaps worse was the psychic fallout suffered by my generation as we witnessed an explosion of popcultural paranoia: movies showing irradiated insects menacing cozy suburbs, children huddling in school basements in duck-and-cover drills, government films teeming with atomic factoids predicting our imminent doom, Conelrad alerts disrupting already jumpy lives. As children of the cold war, my generation spent the better part of its youth outdoors at play under radioactive skies. We were frenetic, constantly in motion. The key to any successful game was to move fast. There was Spud with top speed dispersal and the chance to become “It,” bombardment with multiple red rubber balls that left welts, hide-and-seek, baseball games that were stranger than fiction, track and field with its looping and launching, not to mention homemade war games like Nazi! Nazi! with real-time Field Ops. In the chapters of this book, I juxtapose these recreational games with the more serious play of adults, from game theory to the space race, as a way of documenting the curious parallels between the ahistorical places of childhood and the hysterical events of the cold war, between the bedlam of boyhood and the starker violence of adult history. When you read quantum theory, you come to realize that dematerialized particles have an uncanny advantage over objects with mass and momentum. How many unidentified particles and unnamed thoughts brush up against your forehead each day? What errant messages, lost hopes, alien dreams, unimagined signals, coded plots, waveforms from unheard galaxies appear as if out of nowhere? Looking back at America in the 1950s and 1960s, we witness the peculiar eagerness of men in high places to gamble with uncontrollable might and we see their determination to forestall public understanding of this new reality. If cold war America taught us anything, it was how to squander enormous amounts of psychic energy to repress the strange, dark forces emerging around us. Those powers may have been undetectable but they are traceable. And what can be traced can be imagined. A nerve signal travels at 984 feet per second. Electrical signals travel at 186,000 miles per second. In one nanosecond, light travels one foot. These are the things that speed through and around us. We can’t see them but we know they are there, waiting for someone to notice.

. . . . . . .Oppenheimer . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Is. .Watching . . . . . . . . . . Me ..................

Oppenheimer . . . . . . . . . . . . . .Is . . Watching . . . . . . . . . .Me ...............................

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fter my father died, I found a box of memorabilia in the attic chronicling the first decade of my parents’ marriage. This was my mother’s work, an exhaustive record of household expenses, stubs of various shapes and colors, and payment coupons from every loan agency in town. In it were fuel and electric bills, invoices, report cards, old repair manuals, magazines, letters, tax statements. When I opened it, the smell of fifty-year-old paper rose up like a toxic gas above the images of factory closings and traces of long-gone merchandise. On top was a rolled-up issue of Life magazine, dated October 10, 1949. I popped the rubber band, which went up in smoke, and unfurled it. J. Robert Oppenheimer stared back at me, daring me to turn the page. Working-class people, some say, are not particularly interested in their own history. That was true of my parents, who lacked the means, or perhaps simply the desire, to figure out their past. Their lives were shaped by hard economic facts and they scrambled to make ends meet. Anything that could not be summarized in a pay stub was not worth heeding. What did matter was stored in discrete anecdotes. While my mother had no idea when or why her parents left Italy or where in Sicily they had lived, she did remember the day Frank Battaglia, a local head of the mafia, was invited to her home to baptize her brother. My father gave me conflicting and fragmentary accounts of his early days as a musician and liked to repeat the story of exchanging a pack of Lucky Strikes for a Snickers bar with a Japanese prisoner during World War II. My parents told only little stories. Any larger tale that might throw their lives into relief eluded them. We were a family without a master narrative.

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From the box I took up the various fragments, spreading them on the floor like wreckage recovered from a plane crash. Here, an invoice from Canlake Petroleum Corporation for 172 gallons of fuel oil delivered on February 2, 1955. The bill: $26.14. There, half an invoice from Niagara Mohawk. In May 1952, 498 kilowatt hours of electricity cost $8.84. 1958 federal income tax withheld: $160.89. Dental appointment: Dr. Roy J. Stelzle on Friday, May 12, 1961, at 1:00 p.m. This was history by numbers, writ exceptionally small. These modest figures stand in stark contrast to the prodigious numbers concocted in cold war calculations. At the very moment my mother placed her April phone bill ($4.63) in her cardboard archive, high-level mathematicians in Santa Monica were calculating how many five-hundred-kiloton warheads would be needed to take out the industrial complexes in twenty of the largest Soviet cities. On the same day she stowed away photographs of her honeymoon, government sociologists were computing the likely incidence of genetic defects after a thermonuclear war (numbers of defective children — in the millions — born to postatomic survivors). For postwar America, the A-bomb had inflated numbers to unimaginable dimensions. In the Oppenheimer who looked up at me from the pages of Life, captured in Arnold Newman’s striking portrait, I sensed the presence of a monumental figure. I could see the desert light lingering in his eyes, the afterglow of the first bomb. Discarded for so long amongst gas bills and old birthday cards, the scientist now begged for attention. Oppenheimer is an irresistible figure for someone like me. Bombs, jets, and rockets were the stuff of my childhood. When I reach back into the dark matter of my memory, what I see are round-edged appliances, canned vegetables, Jackie Gleason, and a B-52 growling across the sky. Oppenheimer was the Merlin of my age, the father of the A-bomb who mastered the sorcery of atomic energy. Like a gravitational perturbation coming at me from the past, his presence brushes up against each thought and word. I imagine him fading in and out, a plaintive cello barely audible in the background. Here he is crossing paths with Werner Heisenberg on his way to Zurich while the German lectures on ferromagnetism. That bit about hysteresis, the tendency of electromagnets to remember their magnetic history, he recalls much later while (there he is again) walking down K Street, dressed as usual in a brown wool suit, his trousers too long, dogged by J. Edgar Hoover

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and his agents. These spectral clips take hold of my imagination, the archival footage of a lifetime, edited like bits and pieces of a blackand-white movie that continually decomposes, particles of matter exceeding the speed of film — though not of recollection. For a spell, everyone felt his pull. Oppenheimer rose rapidly to stardom after the destruction of Hiroshima, even as, in his own mind, the darker implications of the bomb (“a legacy of concern” as he put it) were beginning to sink in. A year before he was featured in Life, Oppenheimer appeared on the cover of a November issue of Henry R. Luce’s other publication, Time magazine. That portrait, painted by Ernest Hamlin Baker, featured Oppenheimer’s head in close-up against a chalkboard teeming with exotic equations. In the media, it was usually the head of Oppenheimer that was put on display, as though it were an object of Delphic wonder. Not since Helen of Troy has one face carried such historic weight. Anyone who followed the Oppenheimer story in Time would have learned that the father of the A-bomb had shrunk to 115 pounds while toiling over its invention at Los Alamos. Now separated by three years from Los Alamos, Oppenheimer admitted to having mixed feelings about the Manhattan Project. “The whole wartime spirit was one of frantic and rather ruthless exploitation of the known,” he told Time’s reporter. “ We took this tree with a lot of ripe fruit on it and shook it hard and out came radar and atomic bombs.” Time also reported that a twenty-four-hour armed guard stood outside Oppenheimer’s office at the Institute for Advanced Study, keeping watch over the secret atomic documents in his safe. The guard bore a flaming sword, I am inclined to imagine, turning every way. My mother does not remember why she stashed away that issue of Life magazine but perhaps she sensed something. Could she have known that Oppenheimer’s story was ours, that, so contradictory and tortured, he would come to symbolize a definitive moment in American history? She was just a kid herself in 1949, not even married yet. Perhaps her fabled clairvoyance, which later came down to us in apocryphal stories, was at work. Perhaps she saw in the vigilant face of Oppenheimer the promise and betrayal of the coming decade. Oppenheimer moved to Olden Manor in Princeton after the war, where he lived surrounded by spacious gardens and lush woodlands. My newlywed parents lived on Hardy Court in Buffalo, near

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the industrial waterfront along the Niagara River. From the front yard of the apartment, they could count the smokestacks: General Motors, Dunlop, Niagara Mohawk, the Linde Ceramics Corporation, and General Electric. It was the nearest thing to a forest that could be found in blue-collar Buffalo. Hardy Court was a low-income development, part of the public housing built by the federal government in the 1940s to accommodate temporary employees in factory jobs vital to the war effort. By the early fifties, Hardy Court was filling up with returning GIs who replaced the short-term workforce. My father was a GI and thus qualified for a low-rent, one-bedroom apartment with eat-in kitchen. The place was tiny. The coal furnace was crammed into a living room closet and the kitchen was hardly larger than the bathroom. My parents had been living with my father’s mother in a small bungalow in an old German neighborhood on the east side of Buffalo. My grandmother was a white-haired woman who played piano and disliked Italians. I have a photograph of her but I cannot recall her, as if her image has been wiped clean from my mind. My earliest memory is linked with the acrid smell of the smoke from Dunlop and the slippery feel of vinyl in my father’s Pontiac. It’s a cold, mid-January day. Bundled up from top to bottom, I am a miniature astronaut. The car is about to come to a stop when, suddenly, the driver steps on the gas. The Pontiac leaps forward screeching and then begins to spin. No one is in control. Round and round I go, the Pontiac spinning. I am in orbit like a satellite — and then kaboom. Someone had driven the car into the Hardy Court apartment. Much later, I will ask my parents about this memory. Oh, my mother will say evasively, you know how your father never could hold his liquor. Of course I did not believe her. My parents’ candor about the past has always been suspect. Together they covered up more deeds than Richard Nixon. My father’s first marriage was a well-kept secret that nearly followed him to his grave and my grandfather’s mafioso dealings were guarded from curious eyes like JFK’s flings. No doubt my parents wanted to hide their mistakes, hoping to pass for normal middle-class people. They worked hard on this project, if only because they were intent on entering the mainstream. Now, years later, I was anxious to get my hands on the hard facts. My parents’ box of forgotten records, full of archive-grade documentation, held the promise of truth. I burrowed down into the thing,

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reaching beneath the utility bills and letters. At the bottom I found two envelopes stuffed with old film negatives. They were in bad shape. The stock was Kodak safety film with a base of cellulose diacetate, which prevented the negatives from going up in flames — a good thing since the unventilated attic was impossibly hot in the summer. But diacetate films fade and shrink, and this has happened here. Once a negative begins to deteriorate, the rate of chemical instability speeds up. Even if stored at the correct temperature, a negative — like a memory — gradually eats itself alive. You can postpone disintegration but you can’t stop the decay entirely. These negatives were old, spotted, creased, bleached, and cracked. Several strips were missing corners. There is something eerie about a photographic negative. I held up one strip to the light and peered at two bare-chested men in Adirondack chairs. Dark carbon shadows, as though from a car bomb, crept past the edge of the frame. I recognized my father and Uncle Art, trim and smiling. In the inverted world of the negative — the lit subject placed in a luminous shadow — the two men resembled phantoms. Even at the peak of health, photos have an uncanny way of predicting one’s demise. Death is always lurking. The pictures were taken at Alexandria Bay on the St. Lawrence River, five months before my first memory in the backseat of a careening Pontiac. My parents, along with my mother’s sister and her husband, had rented a riverside bungalow with four bedrooms on the second floor. Price for a week: $65. I counted twelve strips of film, each with three picture frames, filled with stock vacation poses: sunbathing on the beach, the catch of the day, kicking back with a bottle of beer, dockside with the child. Like fossils, the pictures were traces of a lost culture. An archaeological fascination took over, as though I were handling pottery shards from beneath the walls of a postatomic Jericho. I ran the negatives through a scanner, converting the dark plastic into positive images on my laptop. Out of the digital white noise my mother suddenly appeared, at the age of twenty-two, posing at the bow of a boat in plaid shorts, swimsuit top, white kerchief, bright lipstick, sunglasses hiding her eyes. My mother steadies herself, trying for a glamorous look. It almost works. Her Sicilian face is exotic — she could be the girlfriend in a gangster film — but already her legs have filled out.

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Another scan revealed shirtless Uncle Art in white trousers, his pilsner glass resting on the arm of a chair. (Art Stekowicz, a mailman, fit and handsome here, will drink himself to death before he turns forty.) My father, in trunks and loafers, crouches down, holding me piggyback on his shoulders. I have curly dark hair and am wearing light-colored shorts and classic white baby shoes. My hands rest on my father’s head; he holds me by my ankles, traces of a bond between father and child that I had not remembered. The boy looks at me expectantly, as though fast-forwarding to the present. Time, as construed by physics, comes in two forms. Newton’s time is absolute, flowing without relation to anything else, a linear sequence of instants. Einstein’s time is famously reversible. It moves both forward and back. Memory follows Einstein’s, not Newton’s, model, for in the quantum jumble we call recollection, perceptual time changes direction randomly, in unpredictable fits and starts. Although the past is that which has already occurred and the future is that which has not, both, according to Einstein, are here in the present. Maybe this is the secret wish we bring to photographs, the desire to glimpse the curves in space-time that shape our memories. I wonder what Zapruder thought when he first viewed the eight-millimeter footage from his small Bell & Howell Zoomatic: Dallas 1963, the crumpled leader, the weeping wife, the Secret Service at his door? Life magazine purchased the rights to Zapruder’s twenty-six-second film for fifty thousand dollars shortly after the shooting, but the publisher was so unsettled by what he saw he vowed never to release the images. Parked adjacent to the bungalow in the photo of me with my father is the fateful Pontiac. I could see its front end — big curves, Indianhead hood ornament, and a shiny cartoonlike bumper and grill — that part of the car my mother will wreck in five months, her two-year-old unmoored in the backseat. There I am again, in another picture, out on the dock with a stylishly dressed Aunt Mary, who models expertly for the camera as though on a photo shoot. I am crying. She gestures toward some unseen object ahead, hoping to divert me. In another photo, I am alone in front of the cottage. Shirtless, I am a swarthy little creature, leaning on the stark wooden porch like some sharecropper’s kid staring back at Walker Evans. Who are these smiling people, these jolly vacationers? Why the photos were taken I know but what do they tell me about my family?

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A musician and a mailman on holiday far from the smokestacks and railroad tracks. Are they really as innocent as they seem? My uncles on the Italian side of the family were short, burly, explosive men who handled pig iron and steel forgings in lakefront factories during the week and stayed home on Saturday nights to watch The Jackie Gleason Show. My father was less obviously proletariat material, though he too would serve industrial time. A weekend bass player, he was a downtown kind of guy, moving from one nightclub to the next. As Friday neared he became fidgety. You could sense this in the way he picked up his pace around the house, like a cat when the sun goes down. On Saturday evenings a powerful and complex scent would waft out of our tiny bathroom. With a towel wrapped around his neck and his face, my father stood before a mirror primping, plying his Schick Injector and then dabbing his razor-clean cheeks with Old Spice aftershave from a chubby ceramic bottle. This ritual was part of his transformation into a bass-wielding cool cat. My mother called him “Joe Belido” — her code word for a dandy. Rigged out in a flamingred blazer and with his hair slicked back, my father emerged from the bathroom a changed man, his eyes bright with expectation. I pulled myself from the TV, searching his face for recognizable signs of paternity, which I could not see, for he had turned himself into a stranger. My mother and I watched movies teeming with radioactive insects while my father maneuvered his bass fiddle out the door and into the backseat of the Pontiac, ready to croon Frank Sinatra songs in smoky bars and taverns. In 1950 General Motors introduced the Pontiac Catalina, a twodoor hardtop billed to last a hundred thousand miles. My father bought one a few years later from Maxson Pontiac on the corner of Main Street and Jewett Avenue. One of the finest structures in all of Buffalo, the Art Deco dealership had been built in 1929 for Pierce-Arrow, makers of refrigerators, birdcages, and trucks used by Allied forces in Europe during World War I. The Pontiac cost my father about twentyfour hundred dollars. My mother has no memory of the car. In my parents’ archive I found a faded green envelope containing a detailed repair bill from Maxson Pontiac. Here, perhaps, is the solution to the riddle that is my first memory. Twenty-five front-end parts are itemized in fine detail. The handwriting is neat and precise,

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the figures especially so. The front bumper was crumpled, both headlights were busted, the left fender had to be replaced, the driver’s- and passenger’s-side doors required straightening, the radiator had to be recoiled and hoses installed, along with new fan blades. In all, the collision work cost over four hundred dollars. Quite a lot of damage to forget. Confronted with this evidence, my mother finally confessed. With her vacation tan long faded, she drove the Pontiac into the side of our Hardy Court apartment, losing control when she mistook the gas pedal for the brake. The Pontiac sped up, fishtailing across the frozen lawn before slamming into the small apartment and pitching my father into the windshield. It happened so fast, my mother said. My parents went about their business as though nothing unusual had happened. A week later, however, my father left work early with a headache and nausea. In the box of records was a letter from my mother to her sister-in-law. “Dear Dan Sunny and Girls,” writes my mother. She is twenty-two and uneasy about commas. “You probably wondered why I haven’t written sooner but it seems it’s just one thing after another.” She explains that my father has had x-rays, which reveal a fractured skull. “The doctor prescribed complete rest and quiet for two weeks so we had Jeffrey taken to my sister’s house for a week.” Twelve years later, my father will crash his latest red Pontiac convertible into a tree and suffer another concussion. Dollar for dollar you can’t beat a Pontiac. The box of memorabilia continued to radiate clues about the past. Like tiny bursts of energy, narratives came to light from a tangle of words and numbers. My gaze fell once more on the cover of Life, on its arresting photo of Oppenheimer. I could not, for some reason, avert my eyes. It is said that Oppenheimer had a mesmerizing effect on people during his lifetime, especially at the height of his fame, an almost hypnotic allure that induced trancelike states. Certain things were better seen than written about — this was Life’s motto — and the portrait of Oppenheimer speaks, as they say, volumes. Arnold Newman’s photo caught the scientist in a moment of supreme self-possession. The aura of Oppenheimer is intense, shimmering like a charged particle. By 1949 he has become a household name, a provocative figure with growing renown. What began as the bomb’s radiant glare is now the shining light of cultural fame. This is the Promethean Oppenheimer walking through the corridors of

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power — I can hear his footfall — the most powerful scientist in the world, the number one thinker (as the magazine says) on atomic energy. Oppenheimer’s pose is iconic. The atomic physicist is settled at his desk, already a cerebral legend — if not the embodiment of deep thought itself — the man who has plumbed the mystery of matter. His left hand rests on a small pile of disordered papers, his fingers squeezing a half-smoked cigarette. The cigarette is a fuse, for Oppenheimer himself is a bomb soon to implode. He does not know this yet. Not wearing his signature porkpie hat, that humanizing touch, Oppenheimer is clad in a herringbone jacket and narrow necktie. Years later, I will wear a jacket much like this, only I will seem lackluster and irrelevant. After the Life photo shoot, Oppenheimer paced back and forth in his office, nervous and restless, biting his fingernails, chainsmoking Chesterfields, his bony fingers a deep yellow. His secretary could hear uncontrolled spasms of coughing from behind the closed door. History holds no record of these motions yet I am sure this is what happened. When I visited Los Alamos many years later, I half expected to find traces of Blake’s dark satanic mills in those still-intact wartime structures but instead I saw an extensive network of insipid architecture, like some sprawling community college, featureless and down on its luck. Whatever its mystique in Oppenheimer’s age, today Los Alamos is an immense complex of calculated blandness, spread out over forty-three square miles of mesa top. I tried to imagine the ranches and barns and chicken pens torn down to make way for the barracks and guardhouses, for the hastily built Gamma Lab building and the large seven-foot chain-link fence topped by barbed wire that encircles the entire complex and encloses the tech areas. Aerial photographs from the 1930s reveal nothing but jagged mountain peaks, rocky mesas, and sheer desert as far as the eye can see. Last place in the world to build a doomsday bomb, one would think. For the director of the Manhattan Project, the appeal of the Los Alamos site was its isolation from everything else. But trucking supplies and equipment up the unpaved road was a logistical nightmare. And then there was the architectural challenge. The Corps of Engineers, used to erecting orderly buildings in flat spaces, despaired over the crooked landscape. When the rain came, the scientists trudged through a sea of mud like gold-rush miners in a makeshift camp.

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Initially, Oppenheimer had envisioned a staff of 265, but that number quickly swelled to 3,000. Each worker was issued a metal-framed badge with photograph ID and radiation dosimeters. It was a hard life, and not always rewarding. The Army distrusted the scientists and kept them under close guard. Wartime Los Alamos, the crowded shantytown swarming with frenzied engineers and scientists, is hard to find today behind a happy façade constructed for sunbaked tourists. On my way to the Atomic Museum, I stopped at Chili Works on Trinity Drive and devoured a double-bean burrito plate with onions, a block away from Ashley Pond, the center of the wartime Los Alamos Lab. I had come in search of the nuclear sublime but instead found a museum crammed with the tchotchkes of an atomic war that never happened. Don’t Miss our Atomic Bomb General Store! said the banner over the entrance. I walked across Trinity Drive and down 20th Street to Fuller Lodge Visitors’ Center. Where is Los Alamos? I asked the middle-aged man behind the counter, I mean the real one, where they made the A-bomb? He pointed out the window to the building next door. The Los Alamos Historical Society is a small, cramped museum stocked with old photos, pamphlets, posters, models, and recreations. There is a housing exhibit (Life in the Secret City), a reconstructed kitchen illustrating how families carried on at wartime Los Alamos, and a colorful display of postwar propaganda. The simulated dining room, utterly stark, bare, and simple, is reminiscent of the Honeymooners’ kitchen, and I half expected Audrey Meadows to walk in. The tablecloth caught my eye. It was imprinted with a map of New Mexico but the city of Los Alamos for security reasons had been omitted. Los Alamos, it seems, was never on anyone’s map. When scientists, researchers, and technicians set out for the site, they were said to disappear into the desert. The name of the place — like their work — was unmentionable. Newcomers were trucked up by busloads from Santa Fe, bringing enormous bags and parcels, too many kids, and too many questions — where are we going? and for how long? how will we do for groceries? “For crying out loud, ladies,” the driver said amidst the hubbub, “we’ve got a war on.” The bus was so full it sagged in the middle, lumbering up the dirt road to the top of the mesa. What remains of the Manhattan Project today, its artifacts and lore, are marketed to the public as charms or keepsakes, like curios at a flea

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market. Copies of the original blueprints of Fat Man and Little Boy are on sale, staple-bound in a “contractor’s pack.” The early bombs have turned out to be immense crowd pleasers and it’s not hard to see why. Fat Man and Little Boy, history-making weapons that killed more than two hundred thousand people in Hiroshima and Nagasaki, look harmless — if not cartoonish. Fat Man is anything but fearsome — it is short and stocky and in terms of industrial design has more in common with the original Volkswagen Beetle than with the menacing missiles of the 1960s and 1970s. With its Betty Boop curves, Fat Man is so cute that the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos posts warnings to keep children off its cuddly replicas. A-bombs R Us. The real Fat Man and Little Boy, of course, were not toys but the strange children of Oppenheimer. “I am become Death, the shatterer of worlds,” he famously said after the Trinity test. I like a man who thinks big. The year 1949 was an eventful one for Oppenheimer. That summer his brother Frank appeared before the House Un-American Activities Committee and admitted to having been a member of the Communist Party. With the arrest of Klaus Fuchs in London a few months later, suspicion would fall on Oppenheimer as well. More menacing news issued from the Soviet Union. In October 1949, just as Oppenheimer’s Life portrait hit the streets, government officials were reeling from the surprising discovery that Russia had detonated its own A-bomb. Word of the explosion had reached Washington a month earlier. Men in dark suits turned to tall windows — in my imagination it cannot have been otherwise — and words were spoken. Lewis Strauss, mumbling to himself, fidgeted with the keys in his pocket. It was raining heavily. Analysts aboard a B-29, which was tracking along the Soviet border, detected particles in the air matching debris from a fission explosion. They were watching the sky and scanning subfrequencies, tireless men in olive-drab fatigues with closely cropped hair (you did not have to be there to see this — you know this scene from the movies). The men in dark suits maintained an outward calm but soon began to write notes to themselves. Each deadline was now an urgency. Navy scientists confirmed the earlier report when they found traces of cesium-141 and yttrium-91 while running routine analysis on rainwater samples. Someone telephoned Oppenheimer, who was

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vacationing in New Mexico where odors of piñon smoke hung in the air. “I’ve never even heard of yttrium,” the man in Washington said. “Element 39,” Oppenheimer replied, “lustrous and silvery metallic, even when radioactive.” The story of yttrium is largely a function of numbers, as is true of most elements. It has an atomic mass of 88.90585 amu and a density of 4.47 g/cm⫺3. Its van der Waals radius is 0.106 nm (⫹3) and its electron affinity is 29.6 kJ/mole. As inscrutable as these numbers may seem, they are strangely significant. Subtract a single neutron and we wind up with an isotope (Y-88: in the 1980s my father’s thyroid would be irradiated by an yttrium isotope). Throw in a proton and we have something entirely different (zirconium: crucial in modern deodorants). That large changes can be set off by infinitesimal fractions is counterintuitive but this margin of difference defines our improbable relationship with modern physics. I remember my high school chemistry teacher’s lecture on Avogadro’s number (6.022 ⫻ 10 23) and on calculating the mole of an ion. I may have aced my chemistry exam but I really had no idea what he was saying. I could not get to the numbers behind the ripe green vegetable and the blind rodent conjured up by the lecture. In postwar America, numbers were taken seriously. In my parents’ box of records, I counted at least three hundred pay stubs, rolled up in neat wads bound by rubber bands. The statements were issued by the Bell Aircraft Corporation and, given their sheer mass, constituted the archive’s apparent reason for being. Working for Bell was an unexpected turn in my father’s career. Why, I now wonder, was my father, a bass player, building missiles for a defense contractor? The image eludes me — my dad assembling a liquid-fuel rocket. He was a musician, not a weapons designer. According to the official family line, my father worked at Bell for less than a year, just to earn a few extra dollars. But the pay stubs told a different story: my father was on Bell’s payroll from 1953 to 1958, the formative years, economically, for my parents. My father’s gig at Bell Aircraft was a financial breakthrough. For six years he had a steadily growing wage. By 1958 he was earning five thousand dollars a year, an amount that dwarfed his take from music jobs on weekends. As long as he was building rockets, my father was solvent. I have no doubt that this spell of fiscal good fortune was the impetus behind my mother’s homemade archive. It’s all there in the receipts. So unforeseen was this prosperity that my mother, I sus-

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pect, felt like Cinderella and kept records lest the windfall turn into a pumpkin by morning. Two months after my father began working at Bell, my parents bought a house in a new suburb three miles north of Buffalo, leaving Hardy Court behind. Not long afterward, they purchased an RCA Deluxe Console TV and a Whirlpool Refrigerator (with an exclusive air-purifying system), and traded in the wrecked Pontiac for a Chevy Impala with fanciful tail fins. No matter how improved the economic picture may have looked for many, my parents included, the prosperity of the fifties would always be haunted by an arms race that officially commenced in 1949 with the first Russian A-bomb test, dubbed Joe-1. When Truman learned of the Russian bomb, he was annoyed. Only a year earlier, CIA analysts had confidently stated that the Soviet Union lagged years behind American bomb technology. Not unexpectedly, since Russia was full of vodka-guzzling potato farmers. That’s what the men in dark suits liked to maintain on Friday afternoons in Georgetown, puffing on Marlboros and drinking Johnny Walker Gold. Was the intelligence that wrong? How could they have failed to see this coming? With news of the Russian A-bomb, Edward Teller lobbied paranoid bureaucrats and ranking military people to push the H-bomb. He spoke of liquid deuterium, of neutron bombardment, of a blast force of ten million tons of TNT. “Keep your shirt on,” Oppenheimer said over the phone but this only infuriated Teller, who was becoming increasingly choleric, so riled, as a matter of fact, that he returned to Los Alamos to build more weapons. “This is what I know best,” he tells his friends. Oppenheimer’s opposition to the H-bomb only emboldened his enemies. Air Force chief of staff Hoyt S. Vandenberg passed over Oppenheimer when appointing a special committee to assess the status of the Russian A-bomb. Two years later, in 1951, Vandenberg gave a direct order to top civilian scientists not to use Oppenheimer as a consultant in any further studies and to keep classified Air Force information out of his hands. They were about to throw him out of the loop. By the time I am born, Oppenheimer will be in exile — punished by the vindictive Lewis Strauss, head of the Atomic Energy Commission — a victim of second thoughts, and, finally, of throat cancer. The paradox of prosperity driven by a nuclear arms race is all there in that 1949 Life magazine with Oppenheimer pensive on its cover.

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Life’s telephoto lens zooms in on Americans at the racetrack, behind the wheels of Chevrolets, in backyards smoking Chesterfield cigarettes, on the prairie baking sponge cakes — the earnest spectacle of capitalism captured on thirty-five-millimeter film. These black-andwhite photos, so clear and precise, stand out from the flux of halfremembered events chronicled by my parents. Preoccupied with finding their place in postwar America, they never stopped to measure their moment in time, as though the one feat cancelled out the other. That’s the cost of becoming, perhaps, which permits us only a partial knowledge of our situation at any given moment in time. In the physics of memory, we can never know both time and place, any more than a quantum physicist can determine both the position and velocity of a particle at the same time. As I leaf through Life’s pages, the photos seem haunted by a sense of things about to go wrong. There is labor unrest in my hometown (tear gas tossed from a helicopter dispersed strikers at Buffalo’s Bell Aircraft plant ), coal miners picketing in western Pennsylvania (as unrest increased, convoys of coal trucks were ambushed and mine tipples dynamited ), a massive walkout in Gary, Indiana (steel shuts down; million on strike), and a B-25 falling from the sky in Tennessee. But not to worry. As Life’s ads show, Americans knew how to ward off nuclear foreboding and social unrest. There are Libby’s canned vegetables (to help you set a thriftier table, look to Libby’s for perfection), Maxwell House Coffee (now in instant form too! ), Perma-lift Girdles (lightweight and thrillingly youthful ), and Hotpoint automatic washers (with Swirlaway Water Action). Here’s my parents’ RCA Victor television ( you and your family can enjoy the fun of the amazing television world on a big 10-inch screen), and their four-door Chevy Impala Deluxe (with smooth, graceful curves and new interior richness). The commodification of the good life in the face of global menace may seem oxymoronic but it worked better than a prescription drug. It was easy for people like my parents to ignore signs of disaster. The average wage earner experienced a 25 percent increase in buying power during the 1950s. By 1960 disposable income was twice what it had been during the Depression. With that margin, consumers bought homes, refrigerators, televisions, and cars. By 1954, when the average car could be had for about sixteen hundred dollars, Americans spent sixty-five billion dollars on new automobiles, one fifth of

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the GNP. The collision work on our wrecked Pontiac may have cost a fortune but my parents never flinched, buoyed by the prosperity all around them. For my parents, the urge to keep pace was apparently strong. Six months after I was born, they bought a white enameled Tappan stove for $360, which was paid for in monthly installments of $20. The coupon book documents eighteen payments. Another Purchaser’s Coupon Book contains twenty-four stubs; this one bought a Blackstone washer for $406 in February 1953. A year and a half earlier, my parents had applied to the Domestic Finance Corporation for a $445 loan, which required mortgaging all of their belongings. The loan was repaid over twenty months at $27.17 an installment, at an interest rate of 22 percent. According to his tax statement, my father grossed $2,500 at the time. Rising household debt has been a common fact of life in America, even before the age of credit cards. But I suspect that my parents were flirting with trouble, hoping the money would keep rolling in. There is another coupon book from the Buffalo Industrial Bank for $135.20, with a six-month installment plan. This one dates to September 1954 and was used to buy a maple bunk bed and a mattress from Mendleson’s Associates. My mother was six months pregnant; they were building a family. I opened an envelope stuffed with phone bills from 1955, the year my parents bought their own home. Basicservice costs: $4.13. No long-distance calls are itemized. My mother writes letters instead. The fantasies shaping Life’s ads seem modest compared to later trends but that doesn’t hide their creepiness. In one ad I stumbled upon an image my parents may have aspired to. It’s a family of four, identical to my own but with an opposite spin. The William Hustons, devoted equestrians (they have horses, we had Chevys), are posing casually before a stable. Mr. Huston’s jodhpurs look brand-new, as do his wife’s and daughter’s. Their boy is dressed like a cowboy, in Stetson, laced shirt, and western boots. When I turn six, completely outfitted in a Gene Autry suit with a Mattel toy in my right hand, I will look much like this boy but my getup will come from Woolworth’s. The Hustons are from Plainfield, New Jersey, and they protect their teeth and gums with Ipana toothpaste. Safe and cozy in their pictureperfect world, they are a contented lot, a model to others like my parents who dreamt of happier trails.

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The objects once desired by postwar consumers today seem interesting only in an anthropological way. Many of the products advertised by Life in 1949 have been laid to rest. Delsey Toilet Paper, Kellogg’s Dog Food, Blue Jay Corn Plasters, Borden’s Instant Coffee, Stopette Spray Deodorant (no gooey cream — no sticky fingers! ), Veedol Motor Oil, Ammident ammoniated toothpaste, Matrix shoes, Dromedary Date-Nut-Roll (the candy that grows on trees! ), Crosley Fine Cars, Bruce Floor Cleaner — all no more, abolished by time. Their return as images of what once was is strangely haunting, reminders of a world that can never again exist. An inherent sadness resides in Life’s photos, the pathos of what cannot be. A young woman in a Playtex girdle leaps into the air spreading her arms like a gymnast, forcing a smile for the imagined viewer. The model’s action is captured in multiple exposures, like a Muybridge study in motion. This action photo shows how Playtex becomes a living part of you — an eerie notion, if you think about it. Latex girdles were made by Dunlop, whose fumes I inhaled in the backseat of the soon-to-bewrecked Pontiac. The girdles themselves were sold rolled up in tubes, like toy space capsules or miniature rockets. Latex is unlike other rubber. It is naturally translucent and has a good memory, returning to its original shape without distortion. My mother wore latex girdles. The one I liked best, the one I tried on, was white as snow. It was a Playtex high-waist gartered model with a split-entry crotch and satin front. The day before the Russian launch of the Pomeranian sheepdog Laika in Sputnik 2, I jerked the girdle up over my corduroy pants and twisted it around my waist. The girdle bunched up around my middle, the garter snaps dangling like parachute straps. On me, the special hip-slimming panels looked crumpled and the French-style leno elastic lost its charm. The latex remembered my mother’s form, rejecting me as an imposter. My mother’s box of memorabilia is filled with odds and ends. Here is a prescription for homemade baby food written by the doctor who delivered me. It goes like this: milk 30 oz., water 10 oz., Dextro Maltose 6 teaspoons (feed six to seven ounces of this mixture every four hours); cereal at 10 a.m. and 6 p.m.; fruits (applesauce, peaches, pears, apricots, prunes, and bananas) at 2 p.m. These were my numbers, a simple equation to make the child grow, to turn matter into energy. Here is a curious letter from Rita Baldo, my mother’s sister, dated

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November 3, 1953. “Dear Petrina, We are making a novena for Cardinal Mindszenty, just one Our Father and one Hail Mary. It is going around the world for the fourth time. I hope you do not break it. It is not a chain letter but a novena approved by the Sisters of St. Francis. One who had broken it had misfortune in twenty-four hours. Otherwise you will have good luck four days after you receive this letter.” What kind of luck was my mother hoping for? Was she at heart unconvinced by Life’s cheery ads? The picture of the week in that 1949 issue of Life was taken by a Tennessee teacher, Clarence Goodrich Towry, who looked up and saw a B-25 twin-engine bomber falling from the sky. Two crewmen have parachuted from the plane and an engine has shaken loose. The pilot of the B-25, Captain William E. Blair, steered the doomed bomber beyond residential dwellings but did not survive the crash. Seven of the eight crewman parachuted to safety. When I am a teenager, I will have recurrent dreams of airplanes plunging to their doom, their stressed engines droning through the night. Passenger planes, jets, bombers — in my nightmares they loom overhead large and swollen and their zenith is always low. And then they drop from the sky, streaming white smoke and dread. Great pains have been taken to enlarge the image of the fallen B-25 (already there is the incipient fascination with catastrophes that will persist to the century’s end). The tiny black dots representing the parachuting crewmen drift far behind the wounded B-25, as though eager to be separated from a machine gone wrong. Captain Blair, who did not bail out, is somewhere in the bomber. We cannot see the desperation on his face. He is locked in, watching his right engine, a Wright Cyclone R-2600, break free of its housing, flip end over end, and plunge twenty thousand feet, belching smoke and fuel. I imagine William Blair trying to think of his wife and daughter in Spokane but in his last ninety-nine seconds — the final measure of his life — recalling only Jimmy Doolittle’s 1942 raid on Tokyo, the morning sixteen B-25s were launched from an aircraft carrier seven hundred miles off the coast of Japan, each one of them crash-landing in the China Sea. Blair knows the movie well, I would like to think. He sees Spencer Tracy and Van Johnson battling the darkness and fog over the water. Ceiling and visibility unlimited, he says to himself, banking over the well-populated suburbs of Woodland Heights and Pineville, southwest

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down the East River. Children on their tricycles riding along tree-lined streets look up at the plummeting bomber, its remaining engine now on fire, and run indoors to their mothers. The explosion and fire can be seen from Chattanooga. When she stowed away this rolled-up magazine, my mother might have recalled that four years earlier, in 1945, another B-25 had crashed into the Empire State Building. Lost in fog over Manhattan, the bomber slammed into the seventy-ninth floor, killing fourteen people and injuring two dozen, when the pilot flew too low over the city. Hundreds of office workers were trapped a fifth of a mile above street level. Just twelve days before that, a nineteen-kiloton plutonium bomb, the first in history, was exploded at Trinity, 230 miles south of Los Alamos. The staples that bound Life magazine were loosening as I turned the pages. The centerfold dropped out, and with it a one-page ad for Kodak Verichrome film. Remember, the snapshots you’ll want tomorrow, you must take today. With snapshots, you never forget! Life prizes remembrance, even as its pages come undone. If for six years my parents were flush, thanks were due in large part to Paul Nitze of the National Security Council, who in April of 1950 wrote the now infamous document known as NSC 68, making war a permanent fixture of peace by portraying the near future as a vast drama between good and evil. “The risks we now face are of a new order of magnitude,” the document warns. NSC 68 casts Russia as a crafty and menacing nation bent on world conquest. Only a full wartime mobilization will prepare America for “the year of maximum danger.” In Washington, Truman did not want to quadruple defense spending during peacetime but had already been cornered by Nitze and Dean Acheson. Massive rearmament was now unavoidable. North Korea’s sudden invasion of South Korea did much to legitimize the fantasies of NSC 68. As Truman proclaimed in his State of the Union address, American conventional and nuclear forces would have to be vastly expanded in order to resist the spread of communism. “ We are going to produce all the weapons and equipment that such an armed force will need. We will make weapons for our allies and weapons for our own reserve supplies.” Truman gave the Pentagon a blank check, believing that, as his economic advisers had hoped, large-scale defense spending would promote full employment and

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perhaps even pay for itself by stimulating economic growth. By 1953 the Pentagon’s budget had soared to a record fifty billion dollars, surpassing the thirteen billion dollar level of 1950, when defense expenditures accounted for over 5 percent of the GNP. We were well on our way to a lasting state of terror, the best that money could buy. Large chunks of cash were funneled to the Air Force’s rocket and missile program, some of which came the way of Bell Aircraft, where my father would soon find work. Bell had become famous for its experimental X-planes (Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier in the X-1 in 1947). Bell’s Rascal (the X-63) was something new, the firstever atomic rocket manufactured for the USAF. Thirty-one feet long and four feet in diameter, the Rascal had small, cruciform nose fins and larger tail fins. It was a liquid-fueled rocket — like the Nazi V-2 — and was launched by a customized B-47 bomber. With a range of a hundred miles, the Rascal was meant to penetrate Soviet airspace in ways that bombers with piston engines, such as the B-29, couldn’t. Pay stubs don’t lie. My father had entered into the service of the rocket. In fact, his brief career at Bell coincided almost perfectly with the X-63 program. When the Air Force killed the missile in 1958, he was laid off, along with five thousand other workers in Buffalo. My family’s fortunes, small as they were, were inextricably tied to the grand design of the cold war. Fast forward to November 1963. Oppenheimer sits back in his brown leather chair. We are now in the mind of the father of the A-bomb — it’s a quantum stretch, I know, but indulge me. Oppenheimer is looking out his office window in Fuld Hall. He can see the woods behind the Institute. In two weeks he will fly to Washington to receive the Fermi award from Lyndon Johnson. In one week Kennedy will be shot. But right now it has begun to snow. Oppenheimer is not thinking of alpha particles or of Lewis Strauss. He remembers (it has been a long time) how he lost himself in the Harz Mountains when a teenager. He was with his parents, traveling in Germany. He went off alone, frail and bookish, searching for minerals and old rocks in abandoned mines. He wanted to reach the Hexentanzplatz because the word took hold of him, pulling him like a magnet. He knew (because he read prodigiously) that Goethe’s Faust had been here, at Brocken, on the highest peak, searching for Walpurgisnacht. At the summit, the northerly winds are raw and damp, even in summer.

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But right now in Princeton it has begun to snow. From the comfort of his chair, Oppenheimer remembers that just south of Brocken, in a series of pre-existing tunnels under Kohnstein Mountain, the infernal Mittelwerk complex produced nearly five thousand V-2 bombs. Part of a defunct gypsum mine, the tunnels were overhauled in the summer of 1943 for advanced weapons production — overseen by the telegenic Wernher von Braun (who will also pose for Life magazine). While we labored at Los Alamos on top of the mesa, muses Oppenheimer, the Nazis toiled underground on bombs of their own. A strange scene it must have been — such fiendish work surrounded by picturesque mountains, deep forests, and murmuring streams. Oppenheimer has read that more people died making rockets at Mittelwerk than were actually killed by the bombs themselves. Von Braun and his Mittelwerk team, with their trainloads of vital rocket documents, were hustled out of the Harz Mountains by American soldiers in 1945 and brought to White Sands, New Mexico, where they began launching rockets in the desert. Oppenheimer pauses over the symmetry of this, unsure whether to admire its formal design or to be appalled by the irony. He closes his eyes. One more time Oppenheimer travels in his mind to northern New Mexico. He drives beyond the guard station and up Route 4 to the high country, eighty-five hundred feet above sea level. He stops beside the road and gazes out across the Valle Grande, two hundred square miles of giant caldera, a hollowed-out plain where elk and sheep roam through wildflowers and aspen forests. Oppenheimer used to keep his hair long and curly but his head is shaved now, like a monk’s. Below the eastern ridge of the Jemez Mountains, erosion has carved a series of deep vertical canyons into the Pajarito Plateau. Composed of pyroclastic deposits, the soft pumice canyon walls are marked by gashes, hollows, and grooves. Above, the mesas are covered by piñon, juniper, yucca, and the ruins of prehistoric Pueblo Indian culture. Cliff dwellings, pottery shards, petroglyphs, the remains of kivas, burial grounds, ceremonial objects — it is a topography permeated by an old and powerful history. Before the war Oppenheimer was in the habit of riding horseback in the desert, but once the Project began, the desert became peopled by shadowy agents, ex-West Point officers lying in wait like rattlers. Focusing on the work at hand, Oppenheimer gave up his wanderings. On the mesa, he was steadfast and

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vigilant — overseeing bomb mechanisms, on guard against low-level explosions. Oppenheimer has always passed by these ruins. It is only now, in my imagination, that he visits them. Later, Oppenheimer will write that although Einstein thought the universe was finite, because everything was steady and static, he was wrong. Motion is the characteristic feature of the world. Everywhere we search in space, we see the universe flying apart — the farther off we look, the faster things seem to be receding from us. Oppenheimer opens his eyes. He is back in Princeton, where the snow is mounting outside his window. The flakes are wet and heavy. He should call Kitty. He checks his watch. “Time present and time past are present in time future.” Oppenheimer says this out loud, even though he is alone in his office. He has been quoting Eliot often lately. Oppenheimer closes his eyes and returns to New Mexico, driving past the yellow no-trespassing signs along the south mesa, down the winding road, past Technical Area-33. As a boy, Oppenheimer was irrepressibly arrogant. “Ask me a question in Latin,” he told a friend, “and I will answer you in Greek.” Teaching physics in Berkeley, he studied Sanskrit so as to read the ancient Hindu text the Bhagavad Gita. Oppenheimer had a quick and subtle mind that was particularly drawn to the oracular and the abstruse. At Göttingen he spent two hours a day laboring over Dante in Italian while studying Schrödinger psi-functions and continuous spectra. “ Why do you waste your time on such trash,” Paul Dirac complained. “ What makes you think you can you do both poetry and physics?” It’s time to move on, I whisper in Oppenheimer’s ear. Pressing on, he continues down Route 4, stopping at a Tewa site, the ruins of an ancient Pueblo village. The Tsankawi pueblo sits atop an island mesa overlooking the Rio Grande valley to the north, the Sangre de Cristo Mountains to the east, and the Jemez range to the west. The soft volcanic-rock trail up the mesa has been worn down a foot and a half by the treading of human feet. Countless petroglyphs, pecked into soft canyon walls and large basalt boulders, are close by — signs left thousands of years ago by nomads roaming up and down the Rio Grande. Oppenheimer walks up the smoothly furrowed trail, smoking a cigarette, studying his shadow. To a distant observer, the physicist might seem otherworldly. Tall, pale, and stooped, Oppenheimer appears to

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be fading. He scans the faces of rocks for carvings. He has come, at my urging, looking for ancient runes. Oppenheimer is feeling more and more weightless and quicker on his feet in the stark light. Uniform motion, not rest, is the natural state of matter. He has always been restless, even now, and he stops only to inspect the markings on the stone. Beautiful to see, they are faint shapes from nature. He studies them, tracing the outlines of a hand. The carvings include ceremonial figures, some wearing bear claws — all with their hands up, waving at him. How wonderful, he thinks. They are saluting. The petroglyphs include a curious detail. On the left is a birdlike creature, with four legs and a plant form growing from its head. It straddles a large fissure that runs the length of the cliff face. Below the feet of the creature, and beneath the crack, are two large arrows — vectors really or maybe rods — pointing towards the split rock. It looks to Oppenheimer like a diagram of sorts, a sketch of preatomic fission. Oppenheimer gazes out past the mesa, trying to follow the flux of random thoughts running through his mind, his porkpie hat askew and the ever-present cigarette dangling from his mouth. What does he almost understand? To anyone who cares to listen, matter will talk and when fractured it will speak out in waves of neutrons and gamma rays, in blinding flashes of light. The natural tendency of particles is to come apart, to decay into others but when a particle moves very fast, its decay rate slows down proportionately. This is where my search for Oppenheimer has brought me. To the same state of unrest I imagine he felt. Like him, I must keep on the move. I feel the quantum all around me. I feel it when writing, when following the cloudy and fitful tracks of memory, tuning into life’s subliminal vibrations. The quantum shadows me, or I shadow it — I can’t say which. Below Oppenheimer — I see this too — the desert spreads out like an equation, the yucca plants casting precise silhouettes in the gathering twilight. And I think of my parents, their time, their memories. How strange that their box, which contains merely ciphers, should yield so much. I must hold to a certain velocity (V ), even at the risk of weightlessness, if I am to stay my own decay. We are still in November of 1963. For ten years no one in Washington has spoken to Oppenheimer. Since the revocation of his security clearance in 1954, the clock on his own half-life has been ticking

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faster and faster, as though he has been exposed to a lethal dose of radiation. He embraced raw power in its most dangerous forms and this changed him nearly as much as it has changed us. A desolate look settles across his face. His hair is white and thin, his face gaunt and drawn, his eyes strangely haunted. Matter mostly flies apart, naturally in due time or in a hurry when provoked. This is the law of the quantum. Remember me.

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I

t was called the black plane. A New York Times reporter had spied one in West Germany in the summer of 1958, parked on the tarmac, motionless, its flat finish fiercely black. The exceptionally wide wings sagged and the fuselage had no markings, just the civil registration “N805X.” The reporter was eager to write about the black plane, having heard rumors in Washington concerning advances in aerial intelligence, but Allen Dulles of the CIA phoned Arthur Sulzberger, the newspaper’s publisher, who killed the article. The U-2 was a breakthrough in high-altitude reconnaissance. With a narrow fuselage and outstretched wings, it looked like a dragonfly. It could soar to ninety thousand feet — high enough to fly undetected — glide for three hundred miles without power, and cruise for eleven hours before refueling. Lodged in the “Q-bay” behind the pilot was a five-hundred-pound camera loaded with a mile of film. With a thirty-six-inch lens, the camera had six times the resolution of the human eye and could isolate a golf ball from a height of thirteen miles. Dubbed “the dragon lady,” the U-2 was a masterpiece of modern surveillance, nearly as all-seeing as an ancient sky god. Fears about the Soviet Union’s ability to launch a surprise nuclear attack on American soil was behind the push to build the U-2. By the early 1950s the Soviet Union had effectively sealed itself off from the outside world and its strategic capabilities were guarded with unqualified secrecy. Matters came to a head in 1953 when, a few months after the first American H-bomb test, the Soviet Union exploded one of its own, using a more advanced technology. The Russians, it was thought, were reaching new levels of aggression. Just two months earlier, Soviet troops ruthlessly lashed out against popular resistance in East Berlin. That same year, news broke of a new Soviet long-range bomber,

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similar in design and capacity to the Strategic Air Command’s B-52 (which had only recently gone into production) — a development well ahead of schedule, according to baffled defense officials. In the spring of 1953, the Rand Corporation released a study warning that U.S. air bases were vulnerable to a preemptive nuclear attack. Understandably, the intelligence community was a nervous wreck and hoped to deliver itself from fatal ignorance by developing the U-2 (with the salvific code name “Angel”) at Lockheed’s Skunk Works in California. Production on Bell Aircraft’s competing high-flying spy plane (the less ethereal X-16) started in Buffalo that same year. On May 1, 1960, at 6:26 a.m., the CIA sent a U-2 spy plane on a prolonged flight over Russia to photograph missile installations deep in the Soviet heartland. The plan was to fly from one end of the Soviet Union to the other — thirty-eight hundred miles in all, over Sverdlovsk, Kirov, Archangel, and Murmansk, and then on to the Barents Sea. If all went well, the plane would touch down in Bodø, Norway, nine hours later. The pilot was Francis Gary Powers. Another icon of the cold war, Powers would be the subject of bold-faced headlines for weeks to come — for a short spell would be nearly as legendary as Oppenheimer, though for all the wrong reasons. Outside the U-2 it was cold, at least sixty degrees below zero. Powers must have felt the chill in his bones. His wife had joined him at Incirlik in Turkey. She drank heavily and at a recent party she had fallen while dancing, breaking her leg. Powers must have felt cooped up. A single-seat plane, the U-2 was badly cramped, its cockpit hardly big enough for a dog. Thousands of miles lay ahead. He was to fly directly across the Soviet Union. No matter how many times he said this to himself, it always sounded like a dream. If you fly in a straight line long enough, they’re going to get you. Was that too from a dream? Once he crossed the Russian border, Powers could begin to relax. Down below, about thirty miles east of the Aral Sea, he could see through thin cloud cover an Intercontinental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) launching site at the Tyuratam Cosmodrome, where Sputnik had been sent into orbit three years before. Later, as he neared Chelyabinsk-40, the sky cleared. He maneuvered his plane to gain a good angle on the ground structures. In silence the camera recorded on film what lay below, the military airfields and the center of Russia’s nuclear industry. Just to the north, the industrial city of Sverdlovsk and its many rocket

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batteries were lying in wait for the uncanny eye of the U-2. Only a year earlier, Nixon had been a guest here, in Sverdlovsk, where the Bolsheviks murdered Tsar Nicholas and his family. Shortly before the annual May Day parade began in Moscow, the Kremlin’s Air Defense Command tracked Powers’s U-2 as it entered Soviet airspace. The commander, Sergei Biryuzov, moved a tiny model of an American U-2 across a wall map, tracing its northward heading towards an intercept zone. When Khrushchev learned of the U-2, he phoned Biryuzov and insisted that the plane be shot down at all costs. “If I could become a missile,” Biryuzov replied, “I myself would fly and down this damned intruder.” Powers had no idea what was going on below him. He presumed that his U-2 was beyond the reach of jet fighters and rockets. Powers hit the camera switches as he approached Sverdlovsk. Large spools of seventy-millimeter film whirled behind him in the reconnaissance bay. The U-2’s high-flying cameras could capture immense tracks of landscape, could even spot a standing rocket on a pad far below but they could not detect the fourteen SA-2 missiles soaring toward the black plane at 760 mph, launched by the Soviet Air Defense. Powers began recording the relevant data — altitude, speed, time, and temperature. Especially at this altitude, he appreciated the feeling of mastery these routines gave him. Suddenly he heard a strange thud as the cockpit filled with an orange glow. Powers pulled back on the wheel but the U-2 kept nosing down. Thirteen hundred miles into enemy territory and the plane was out of control. One wing flew off and then, my god, another. Powers’s plane went into a spiral, his suit inflating as the cabin lost pressure. He groped for switches, any switches but the pull of gravity was tearing him apart. The U-2 had become a torpedo, plunging twenty thousand feet per minute. As his face mask frosted up, Powers released the canopy and broke free of the tumbling plane and onto the front page of newspapers everywhere, his orange-and-white parachute flapping in the chilly Russian sky. When Gary Powers died seventeen years later in a helicopter accident in Los Angeles, the crash occurred near a baseball diamond on a sweltering August afternoon. The boys looked up from their game in astonishment as the troubled helicopter hovered above. It was a small news copter, a Bell Jet Ranger, running out of fuel and losing alti-

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tude in the middle of a routine traffic report. Inside the cabin a fortyseven-year-old pilot, in a state of utter disbelief, thrashed his throttle but the sturdy cockpit with rollover protection, a feature widely marketed by Bell Aircraft (Fly Smart, Fly Bell ), was about to burst. The helicopter hovered and dipped in the air and then collided with the ground, hard, fragments of the wreck flying in every direction. Except by these boys, Powers’s second crash was barely noticed. Newspapers ran a small obligatory story buried in the midsection: newsman dies in helicopter crash. Powers died in obscurity on a hot afternoon in southern California, but as far as Washington was concerned, his demise came seventeen years too late. Soon after his parachute opened in the Russian skies on that notorious day in May 1960, Powers had become a national embarrassment. Bizarre rumors spread that the Spy-in-the-Sky was a double agent who had landed his plane safely on Russian soil and was last seen in a Sverdlovsk nightclub with blond babes on each elbow. The intelligence community would have been much happier had Powers injected himself with lethal shellfish toxin — or had at least triggered the self-destruct switch before falling free of the plummeting U-2. He was not supposed to survive. It was a deeply held belief within the CIA that, in the event of a mishap, the whole package would be lost — the pilot, his plane, and the film — all dashed to smithereens. There would be no incriminating evidence. The feds were counting on such an ending in the case of Francis Gary Powers, which is what the CIA’s director, Allen Dulles, told Eisenhower. Relax, no one is going to fall from a height of thirteen miles and live to tell the tale — not even Chuck Yeager. We’ll produce a cover story. We’ll tell the Kremlin the U-2 was a weather plane, or something, that flew off course. Eisenhower did not like the sound of that but what else could he do, especially with only a week before the Paris Summit starring himself and Khrushchev, a meeting that was billed as a crucial first step towards détente? But Powers did not die and America would never forgive him for that. Especially not Ike, who was caught with his pants down when the theatrical Khrushchev announced the news of the pilot’s survival the next day. More than twelve thousand feet of Mylar film, some of which had already been shot, fell into Russian hands, along with the enormous spy camera. The remains of the American spy plane were

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carefully gathered, catalogued, and put on display in Gorky Park on May 11, a virtual shrine to the wrecked Americanski U-2. “I am an American and do not speak your language,” said a silk scarf (in Russian and other languages) inside Gary Powers’s survival kit. The Kubrick-like kit also contained several thousand rubles, two dozen gold francs, and a number of trinkets suitable for ladies. Countless Russians filed past the exhibit, fascinated by the legendary plane that had eavesdropped on them. Powers stood trial in Moscow and was convicted of espionage. He apologized to the court — “I am deeply repentant and profoundly sorry,” he said on the advice of his Russian lawyer — and received a ten-year prison sentence for crimes against the Soviet people. Imagine what a U-2 might have seen one August evening two years later in an overflight above western New York. Far below, among houses and trees, factories and rivers, is a field of boys playing baseball. From up high, through the lens of a five-hundred-pound aerial camera, they might look like particles of matter undergoing small, random fluctuations. I remember the bodies in motion — I was there — darting back and forth, the ball thrown wild over first base, the absence of discipline. It is an idyllic though haphazard picture. Who could have imagined that at this very moment Russian ships were bound for Cuba, carrying medium-range nuclear missiles? As I rummaged through the ball bag and the opposing pitcher warmed up, the Omsk was docking in Mariel, unloading MRBMs assigned to San Cristo´bal. Soon Russian rocket sites would proliferate on Cuban soil like Mandelbrot fractals. Gary Powers had been released from a Soviet prison in a daring spy swap just six months earlier but Castro is in the headlines now. I’m the second baseman for Brighton Doughnuts on this August 29, the day another U-2 was ordered on a reconnaissance mission, over Cuba this time, less notorious than Powers’s but no less momentous. A red RCA transistor radio with a gold speaker grill is sandwiched inside my baseball glove. “ With a love like that, you know you can’t be beat,” the radio broadcasts as I put my cleats on. It’s six o’clock in the evening. I’m sitting on a green wooden bench on the west side of diamond number 5, the one closest to the railroad tracks at Conway Field. On the north side of Conway is the Continental Can Company, an innocuous midsize factory that manufactures containers. It is a three-story

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building with an arched roof much like a hangar, something you would be more likely to see near an airport than next to a baseball field. Conway Field was on loan to the Town of Tonawanda from the Continental Can Company, which rescued this nondescript plot of land from developers who had already erected a large and unseemly apartment complex on the other side of the factory, bulldozing the wooded landscape I had played in. Conway Field appeared ripe for subdivision itself but it survived for decades as barren parkland, not good for much other than dog walking and ball playing. In 1959 the Navy, for some reason, had bestowed upon Conway Field a trophy from the 1950s: a decommissioned Grumman F9F-5 Panther jet, which had logged airtime in the Korean War and had been flown in aerial shows by the famous Blue Angels. The Grumman was ritually hoisted onto blocks at the entrance to the park. Instead of some defunct cannon, a shiny, sexy navy blue jet shimmered under the midsummer sun. Hundreds of kids converged on Conway Field to appraise the new plane, scrambling across its wings. One boy, not content to shinny up the fuselage, climbed inside the cockpit where he was trapped for hours when the canopy unexpectedly snapped shut. Inside the hot cockpit, now low on oxygen, the boy hallucinated dropping cluster bombs on remote cities. Firemen cut a large hole in the Grumman, releasing the imaginary pilot. It was rumored that the boy was never the same after that. The Continental Can Company had set up shop in Tonawanda in 1948, joining a web of local industries drawn by the Niagara River, low taxes, and the promise of cheap power. Many of these industries thrived on government contracts during the war years. Dunlop, Du Pont, Allied Chemical, Linde Ceramics (a subsidiary of Union Carbide), Niagara Mohawk, General Motors, Curtis Wright, Consolidated Aircraft, General Electric, Ascension Chemical Company, EAD Metallurgical, Farrell-Birmingham, and Ashland Oil all operated around the clock. Residents nearby complained for years of billowing smoke, coal dust, fly ash, and sulfur fumes, to no avail. Migrating to what they envisioned as leafy suburbia, my parents discovered too late that they had moved to a small-scale Coketown. Beyond its Dickensian industrial zone, Tonawanda was a matrix of small “starter” homes, gas stations, bad restaurants, small churches, and plazas with vast parking lots. Roughly three out of every five employed males were

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blue-collar, working-class types like Ray Thomsett next door, who worked for Harrison Radiator, a subsidiary of General Motors. Bob Van Dusen worked at Pratt and Lambert lumberyard in North Tonawanda. Bill Lahiff worked at Allied Chemical near the Niagara River and on weekends he umpired in the senior baseball leagues in town. Vinnie Saragusa worked the night shift at Ford. Mr. Coone worked at Buffalo Brass. These were the good years, when Buffalo’s factories hummed and whistled throughout the night. Most of the men on my mother’s side of the family worked at Bethlehem Steel, an enormous structure built on the edge of Lake Erie. Bethlehem Steel transformed a lakeshore swamp into a flat expanse of industrial geometry, furnace stacks, coke ovens, gantries, rolling mills, stocking trestles, Bessemer buildings, coal piles, and ore docks, all silhouetted against the dim lake sky like cuneiform at the end of space. The Bethlehem plant was originally located in Scranton, Pennsylvania, where rich veins of anthracite coal fueled nineteenth-century blast furnaces. When the Lackawanna mills were closed in Pennsylvania in 1901, the year of Buffalo’s Pan-American Exposition, more than twenty-five hundred jobs were lost in Scranton. The plant was entirely dismantled, torn down piece by piece while newly unemployed steel workers looked on. The disassembled factory was boxed, loaded, and shipped by train to Buffalo. In the 1950s, when my uncles worked there, Bethlehem Steel was under contract with the Atomic Energy Commission to process uranium rods, though no one at the time knew that, least of all the workers. According to a Gallup Poll taken shortly after Gary Powers’s U-2 incident, many Americans believed that a catastrophic war with Khrushchev’s Russia was inescapable, that it was imminent, and that most people would, in all likelihood, perish in a nasty explosion. The blustery Khrushchev inflamed matters by bragging of a Russian superbomb of unprecedented power, a 100-megaton behemoth that would vaporize the entire state of Maryland and that could blow a hole in the planet the size of the moon. It was to hang over the heads of the capitalists, Khrushchev said, like a sword of Damocles. The war may have been cold but the language was hot. In July 1960, Time reported, Raul Castro told confidants that his greatest dream was “to drop three atomic bombs on New York.” Time did not say what grudge Raul may have held against the city but

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hyperboles of this sort were escalating out of control, much like the weapons systems themselves. Overstatement was the lingua franca of the cold war — just recall Khrushchev’s “we will bury you” speech, issued as a threat to the West. In the frenzied eyes of the media, the cold war had reached new heights of “cataclysmic peril,” and thanks in large part to the “rocketing Soviet military might” we were all on the verge, as Rand analysts put it, of an “impending catastrophe.” As I tighten the straps on my glove, I slyly watch two girls in tank tops and shorts climbing up the bleachers. They smile obligingly and wave at my friend Rich and me. Rich pretends not to see the girls. Instead, he inspects the array of bats at the bottom of an army-surplus canvas bag, making sure his number thirty-two has got enough black tape around the handle to pull the ball to left field. I prefer a thirtyounce bat but I still choke up on the handle to speed up my swing. I have a hard time getting around on fastballs. Every once in a while some fat boy with flabby cheeks, drooping eyes, and slouching shoulders will step on the mound and throw nothing but speed: he’ll look chunky and slow but will burn a hole in new leather. Rumors are that the opposing pitcher tonight is a flame thrower, a big pudgy kid with steely eyes. A good fastball makes me nervous. Castro’s Cuban revolution was not welcomed by the Eisenhower administration. In March 1960, Eisenhower authorized covert action against Cuba, hoping to overthrow the bewhiskered generalissimo. The prospect of a socialist regime only ninety miles away from the tip of Florida was as distasteful to American politicos as Castro’s beard, which in its woolly raggedness infuriated the smooth-shaven men in Langley and Washington — so much so, in fact, that thirteen million dollars were authorized for a CIA-led operation to terminate the bearded leader. The CIA rose to the occasion with extraordinary ingenuity by devising a host of strange gadgets and biochemical poisons in a bizarre string of assassination plots. In one instance, Castro’s coffee was to be spiked with LSD just before he addressed the public. It was hoped the drug would sabotage his charismatic delivery. Castro’s speeches were long and rambling to begin with, so this seemed a not entirely foolproof stratagem. In another scheme, CIA operatives would dust the general’s shoes with thallium salts in order to make his hair and beard fall off. Suddenly bald and clean-shaven, Fidel would lose his charm, it was thought. But Castro’s beard was inseparable

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from the man — clearly the only way to remove it was to chop off his head. The mobsters John Rosselli, Sam Giancana, and Santos Trafficante were recruited to put a “hit” on Castro. This too backfired. The CIA even sent the sinister Boris Pash, head of the assassination unit, to Havana bearing lethal viruses and exotic poisons; this was the same Boris Pash who had once managed security at the Manhattan Project and who hounded Oppenheimer about his alleged Communist connections for the duration of the war. The resilience of the Castro regime vexed Washington and turned a foreign policy concern into an hysterical obsession. The CIA’s screwball assassination plots were followed by embargoes, sanctions, and kooky paramilitary operations, all aimed at squeezing Cuba economically and provoking a counterrevolution. In what was hoped to be the final blow, Kennedy authorized Operation Mongoose in November 1961, a secret interagency plan designed to “provoke, harass, and disrupt” the Castro regime, as the Pentagon put it. From the Encyclopaedia Britannica, I knew that a mongoose is a small carnivore that feeds on rats, mice, snakes, and lizards. The Indian mongoose, for instance, will attack a cobra, avoiding the deadly head by dodging its thrusts. Eluding the snake again and again, the mongoose exhausts its prey in an artful dance of side steps, whereupon it grasps the head of the snake in its jaws and crushes its skull. It is illegal to import mongooses into the United States, the encyclopaedia said. They are thought to be dangerous. The Kennedy administration apparently would have liked nothing better than to seize the bearded head of Castro and crush it like a walnut. Operation Mongoose began favorably enough — it had a good name — but never quite lived up to its high-concept ambitions, such as disseminating doctored photos of an “obese” Castro, inventing a mythical “anti-Castro” with Zorro-like appeal, simulating an attack on the Guantanamo Base (which would be blamed on Cubans), and airdropping one-way airline tickets good for passage to Mexico City. I am entirely oblivious to Operation Mongoose as I stand at second base on that August afternoon. Special ops agents are loose in Havana but I am thinking about my uniform. I have a big white “B” on my navy blue hat, the “B” standing for Brighton Doughnuts, our neighborhood sponsor, a small, one-room bakery near the corner of Eggert and Brighton run by mustachioed women who make greasy

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pastries. The doughnuts may be third-rate but the white-and-gray striped uniforms are very fine. In this getup I feel endowed with a sense of poise I ordinarily lack, as if I have slipped into someone else’s skin. At second base I move into a crouch. Time to warm up. Crack goes the bat as Coach Van Dusen hits a sharp grounder my way. The ball travels fast, skimming the dirt and kicking up gravel. It’s coming directly towards me as though I have been targeted, a quirky ground ball with strange vectors, Ping-Ponging through dirt and gravel, plotting a trajectory that could never be mapped in three dimensions. There is very little time — and yet there is far too much time — for calculation. I charge the bouncing ball and play the short hop but, no, the ball rebounds high to the left and spurts into right field. Unlucky me, I think. It’s a dicey business. How will the ball hop and when? It could careen at any moment or it might not. One never knows. At second base I will glimpse a truth I won’t really understand for many years. The universe is much stranger than anything your parents have prepared you for, a system with hidden variables and a-causal connections. The really important things in life are unpredictable, as if chance or random luck were all that mattered. In my infielder’s crouch, halfway between first and second, I can feel these rich complications in my bones. From across Brighton Road I can also smell barbecued chicken. There’s a rumble in my stomach from having skipped out on mashed potatoes and pork chops. In the gully beyond the railroad tracks the crickets have begun chirping. It’s a high-pitched sound because male crickets are courting females, which is what Mr. Clements, our earth science teacher, told us last month. The umpire, a skinny middle-aged man with dark, thinning hair who arrived in a beat-up Ford Galaxie, watches from behind the backstop, yawning. Kids from the other team, Kenmore Seal and Gasket, are observing our infield warm-up. When Sam Peterson, our third baseman, throws errantly to first, the Seal and Gasket boys point and sneer savagely. It’s standard practice to relish the other team’s incompetence. With third base so close to Kenmore’s bench, Sam reddens and looks down at the dirt, kicking around loose gravel and punching his hand in his glove, willing himself invisible. In the course of the game, Sam will strike out twice and ground out weakly to first base with runners in scoring position. But he will walk in the sixth and score an improbable run.

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Warm-up is over. I smack the inside of my glove with a closed fist several times while Ron Glose, the pitcher for our team, gets ready to throw. For a twelve-year-old, Ron is smooth on the mound. He has complete control of his fastball and can throw a curveball that consistently nicks the inside corner on right-handers. Ron is a gawky kid with buck teeth who moved with his family from Brooklyn. He doesn’t say much, perhaps because he knows that he sounds funny to our ears, but on the field he is transformed into a full-grown adult by the dynamics of pitching — the leg-kicking, shoulder-twisting, armflinging axial motion of his fastball. The discipline of his body here is in stark contrast to his awkwardness off the field. Although I know the girls in the bleachers are watching me, it’s hard for me to take them seriously. I am still a kid, someone who would rather start a real fire than go on a date. Just a week before, I ignited a series of brushfires in the open fields behind the Continental Can Company. These were not acts of corporate terrorism; nor was I an anarchist. My friends and I had built a ship out of plywood — it was a destroyer I think — that we christened the Nikita. We soon lost interest in our boat and began playing with fire. A book of matches, half a dozen kids, and a shrub-filled no-man’s land scorched by midsummer sun. Flinging lit cigarettes into stubby masses of grass from atop the Nikita, we forgot the hard laws of cause and effect. The field ignited instantly, a low-level blaze hovering two inches above the scorched ground. Our destroyer was surrounded by flames that spread over the dry field with the sound of torn newsprint. We thwacked the flames with sheets of plywood ripped from Nikita’s bow, hoping to smother the fire before it got out of hand. That we might lose control, of course, was wildly exciting. Blustery air surged over from Lake Erie, turning our two-bit fire into a three-alarm conflagration. I ran home and hid under my bed. It took three fire trucks to douse the blaze. The Nikita, what was left of her, went up in smoke. As the second inning starts and I trot to the bench, a tense summer is coming to a head. Soviet cargo ships are bound for Cuba. In mid-July, the Maria Ulyanova discreetly set sail from Murmansk for the sunny port of Cabanas, the first of nearly one hundred ships that would depart from Baltic and Black seaports for Castro’s shores. According to U.S. aerial reconnaissance, the Soviet ships were riding high in the water, with oddly shaped containers topside. Adding to U.S. suspicion was the

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arrival of Soviet personnel. Russian technicians were observed southwest of Havana, beardless, burly men in surfer shirts, with slide rulers protruding from back pockets, playing poker around shiny new radio towers. On August 18, 1962, the Cuban-bound merchant ship Sovetskaya Gavan was photographed by a low-flying spy plane, which detected four large crates on its deck. What was in those crates? Perplexed, the intelligence community ordered up more photos and more analysis — lots of it. The photogrammetrists at the National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) would have to examine the photos. It would be necessary to provide detailed dimensions and run configurations. Notes would have to be prepared on three-by-five cards. The U-2s would be called in as well, to fly over Cuba, again and again. If the Soviets were delivering arms, someone would have to go in and take a look. Someone would have to watch very carefully. In the top of the third inning, I am hit by a pitch. The count is two and two when the pitcher for Kenmore Seal and Gasket lets go of a curveball too soon. It clips the outside of my forearm and stings like a wasp bite. I had struck out the first time I was at bat and probably would have done so again — I couldn’t even see his fastball — and so getting beaned is my lucky break. It isn’t much of a feat but at least I can try to steal second and maybe impress the girls in the bleachers. The correct way to perform as a base runner is to climb aboard the white bag with both feet, as though standing on a scale, nonchalantly remove your batting glove, scratch your crotch twice, chat with the first-base coach while smacking your gum, blow a fat bubble, and then slowly turn to the pitcher with studied indifference, as though he were barely worth a thought, and finally step off the bag ever so deliberately, as if all the stored energy in the known universe were now at your beck and call. This is how it was done on television, even if not always in Little League games, which discouraged acts of pure symbolism. For one thing, we were required to wear an oversized batting helmet made of industrial-grade plastic while running the bases. It felt like a Chinese frying pan and rarely stayed square on one’s head. For another, we weren’t allowed to lead off but were tethered like dogs to the bag. Only after the pitcher released the ball could we dash to second. As intricate as a quantum mechanics textbook, Little League was full of rules crafted to keep the game from collapsing into chaos.

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There were wavefunctions and Feynman equations. Second base was my eigenspace. To get there, I would have to stretch my vector across its axis. I am followed at the plate by Donald Cox, an amiable kid with waxy blond hair and a natural stroke. Cox swings hard at the first pitch, fouling the ball deep down the third-base line. This puts some fear into the pitcher, who throws the next ball in the dirt. And off I go. The intelligence community was jumpy. Reports from Mariel, Caban˜as, and Pinar del Rio were that there had been a frenzy of offloading with tight security. On August 29, 1962, as I was running towards second, the CIA ordered a U-2 reconnaissance mission over Cuba. Photograph the whole damn island, U-2 pilot Bob Ericson was told, leave no stone unturned. Ericson climbed into his oxygen suit at five-o’clock in the morning. He put on the standard black flight boots and the bulky pressure-sealed space stockings. Ericson might have had misgivings but he didn’t give them much time. He had reason to think he was invincible. In 1956 Ericson had experienced an oxygen failure at thirty-five thousand feet in a test flight at Groom Lake. He passed out but somehow managed to spring the canopy open just as the U-2 went into an uncontrolled free fall, parachuting onto the Navajo Indian Reservation. He bounced right back. Like Powers, they all came back. They were hooked on high-altitude flying. At seventy thousand feet, you can see the line between day and night — you can see the entire curvature of the Earth. With a huge camera between your legs, you feel like a giant eyeball up there. Much was riding on Ericson’s overflight that morning. Pressure was building in Washington for the Kennedy administration to act. The public was getting ornery. “I have reason to believe,” said Senator Thomas J. Dodd, “that the situation in Cuba is even more grave than has yet been indicated to the American public.” Time was running out, warned Life magazine. What was now at stake was not only American prestige but American survival. Unless Cuba sent the Russians packing, advised Senator Homer E. Capehart, we should land troops in Havana and occupy the whole godforsaken country. “ Why don’t we go in there and knock the blazes out of Cuba?” wondered Senator Alexander Wiley. I like to run. When I’m running I don’t have to think. I let my feet think. Off with a whoosh, I clench my fists and pump my arms. My

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metal cleats crunch through pebbles; I dig in harder for traction. I’m headed north to second base, which looks as far away as Toronto. I’m running like mad and I’m just a kid playing a game and one of the girls is standing up on the fourth row of the bleachers — on a wooden plank all beat up by pocket knives and cleats — waving at someone on the railroad tracks. The catcher chucks his mask and scrambles after the ball that is rebounding off the cyclone fence. I am an object in space moving faster and faster, accelerating 2xn, and there’s Sam Peterson, a null vector, standing on second base half-asleep. “Go, Sam, go,” I scream but he doesn’t get it and just stands there perplexed. It’s obvious that the double-steal is going to backfire so I come to an awkward stop and go into reverse. Just then the catcher, blind to our ineptitude, lets heave a desperate throw that sails wide of second base and deep into center. It is a mighty throw, the ball airborne the length of a football field, and it gives our side a lucky break. I see Coach Van Dusen jumping up and down. He’s waving me on, all the way in. I skid to a stop, turn around, and dart towards third. I clench my fists and pump my arms one more time. By now Sam Peterson has figured everything out and is pumping his arms, too, steaming towards the invertible matrix of home. Over Cuba the sky was overcast but Ericson came back with plenty of photos. The developed film was rushed to the National Photographic Interpretation Center, where aides scrambled to get the pictures on a light table. Analysts hunched over the photos, staring at their atomic makeup, at dots no bigger than electrons arrayed across a seam, at fractal-like patterns and obscure geometries. All at once, a member of scan team two cried out, “I’ve got SAMs here.” The number of sites grew with analysis of each of Ericson’s photos. By the end of the day, eight surface-to-air missile (SAM) sites had been identified. Incredible things were happening in the world — a doomsday bomb had been built, great men would soon be shot, an awful war had begun far away, the Cuban missile crisis was unfolding — and there I was, lost in the vast banality of a baseball game that was about, however, to take a curious twist. My parents almost never came to watch my games but as I cross home plate I look up to see my father seated on the bleachers watching the run. Since losing his job at Bell Aircraft, my father spent his days traveling the streets of suburbia where he was the minister of

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cleanliness, greeting groggy-eye housewives on their front steps as he stopped to deliver their husbands’ neatly pressed pants. On weekend evenings he drove down to the city, with his big bass fiddle in the back of his dry-cleaning truck. Downtown to the Chez Ami, the Polish Village, the Marigold Manor, where he mounted a stage, his bass high on his shoulder. But on this hot August night, he has come to watch Little League baseball. Two months later, on Saturday evening, October 13, 1962, Major Richard D. Heyser, helped by assistants, stepped into a pressure suit, strapped on an inflated vest, vent hose, comm cord, and space helmet, and climbed into a black U-2 at Edwards Air Force Base in the California desert. He had followed the preflight ritual carefully on the previous day, had avoided bulk foods, and had fallen into a dreamless sleep. When he awoke, he had thirty minutes to clean up, move his bowels, and slip into his clothes, after which he was examined by a flight doctor, who checked his vital signs. This was a sober business. There were no jests, no gibes. There was a forty-cent breakfast of steak and eggs and coffee, and then the prebreathing drill, over an hour of inhaling pure oxygen. It was a five-hour flight to Cuba. Heyser was tense but who could blame him? The cockpit was more cramped than a coffin. His orders were to fly a U-2 reconnaissance over Cuba, where the Russian SAM sites recently detected in Ericson’s photos stood poised and ready, each one capable of taking him out. The flight plan made him fidgety. Heyser watched his gauges closely, only glancing at the stars, and he kept a wary eye on his life-support system. He approached the island from the south at an altitude of seventy-two thousand feet, switched on the camera, and steered his black plane over places he could barely imagine — the sugar cane, the thatched roofs of farm huts, the baseball fields, the towns with exotic names — Davaniguas, Los Palacios, San Cristo´bal, San Diego de los Banos, Los Pozos. The camera hummed as it swiveled back and forth from horizon to horizon, snapping 928 pictures in less than ten minutes. It was a splendid day, the hot morning sun sparkling over Russian missile trailers. Minutes later, Heyser was headed back to the California desert. “A piece of cake,” he told the ground crew after debriefing. The eight cans of film from Heyser’s flight were hurried, as Ericson’s footage had been, by armed guards to the National Photographic

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Interpretation Center on K Street in Washington, where scan teams, surrounded by target dossiers and fact sheets, switched on the light tables and the zoom stereoscopes. All day long they gazed at Cuba, scanning tropical vegetation for anomalies, signs of Russian hardware, searching in real time for traces of the cold war before it could be lost to history. By evening, the San Cristo´bal team noticed six suspiciouslooking objects more than sixty feet long, covered by canvas, and surrounded by tents and unidentified tractor trailers. These things sure didn’t look like sugar cane or like SA-2 short-range missiles. They were as large as our own medium-range ballistic missiles (MRBMs) stationed in Turkey. After thumbing through Soviet missile catalogs and Moscow parade photos, the scan team found a match. “ We’ve got MRBMs in Cuba,” someone called out. “ We’ve got big missiles in Cuba,” said another. “How big?” someone asked. “Really big.” The Center was filled with excitement. “You know, boys,” said Arthur C. Lundahl, the director of NPIC, “we could be sitting on the biggest story of our time.” Shortly afterwards, the scan team reached the alarming conclusion that the Russians were installing SS-4 missiles in Cuba, each one capable of carrying a three-thousand-pound warhead twelve hundred miles into U.S. airspace. Castro was in the final stages of deploying intermediate-range nuclear missiles, missiles that could be launched at any moment into my backyard. It’s bottom of the seventh and we have a one-run lead. There are two outs with runners on second and third. My mind begins wandering again. It’s a long game, and after my base stealing, not very much has come my way. I turn to take in the weekly air-raid siren three miles away at Alexander Hamilton Elementary, a slow, deliberate shrieking that fills the twilight sky. Suddenly the shortstop for Kenmore Seal and Gasket hits a line drive back to the mound. The batter crunches the ball, and our team’s pitcher, Ron, instinctively ducks, throwing his hands over his head. If I were playing my position correctly, now would be the time to dash toward second base, the path of the ball. Instead I head in the opposite direction. It’s a pure act of wrongway-charlieness and it puts a look of horror on Coach Van Dusen’s face. The hit is a low smoker that will either smash Ron’s chin into a fine powder or shoot into center. In the midst of my lunge towards first, for no good reason I stop abruptly, dig my right cleats into the dirt, go

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down on my right knee, and pivot towards the pitcher. At that precise point the ball ricochets off the frayed pitching rubber and bounces towards me on two hops. I glove the ball cleanly and wind up to throw for the third out. A regulation pitcher’s rubber is a white six-by-twenty-four-inch rectangle that sits in the middle of the pitcher’s mound. It protrudes a couple of inches above the ground, providing a platform on which a pitcher must place one foot when throwing. The wayward ball had grazed the corner of the rubber and deflected straight towards me. Inexplicably, I had positioned myself perfectly for its unexpected detour. None of this made any sense at the time nor does it now. It’s hard to know why I went off in the wrong direction — perhaps I was simply error-prone — but I like to think that I was responding to an odd twist of the space-time continuum. I was surrounded by strange attractors, the girls in the stands, the graveyard just over the tracks, the overdetermined rules of the game, the peculiar feeling of August. Now and then we are interrupted by surprises, visited by mysterious occasions, objects, people — unedited time itself — that, for a brief moment, postpone the ordinary rules governing our lives. Such moments come and go without any warning and leave without a trace. There I am, standing near second base, recording various sensations on a long, drawn-out two-and-two count, noting the graininess of the dirt, the smell of barbecue two blocks away, the distant rumble of tractor-trailers across the Interstate while within my hippocampus neurons are rearranging themselves, bathed in a cascade of biochemical reactions. At the very moment the ball ricochets off the pitcher’s rubber, the event is already the object of memory formation — proteins are entering the nuclei of my neurons, toggling on genes like switches, moving around phosphate groups, binding amino acids, strengthening and weakening synapses, activating junction points. A second baseman who studied ground balls would have lunged towards center. Had I done so, I would have muffed the play when the ball changed course. Its trajectory was inscrutable. Just a kid, I know nothing. Not about girls, not about missiles in Cuba, not about the unpredictable physics governing the routes of fast-moving objects. The CIA was watching and knew what to do. When Heyser’s U-2 photographs reached the government, Kennedy convened a meeting of his closest advisors, who after urgent and intense discussion told

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him to invade Cuba. Congress demanded such an action; so did public opinion. The Air Force and Navy were mobilized. SAC went to DEFCON 4. They were going to take Castro out. That was the plan. The stakes were high—Khrushchev held his breath. But Kennedy dithered. He was puzzled by Khrushchev’s motivation. Why was the Russian leader doing this? Why would he risk nuclear war for the sake of Cuba’s bearded general? Kennedy was also worried. Even if none of his hawkish advisors had thought about the consequences of triggering a nuclear conflict in the Caribbean, he had. As Kennedy stalled, pressure for him to act grew. Comparisons were made to Neville Chamberlain and the appeasement of Hitler. Anything short of an all-out invasion, said the press, would be grounds for impeachment. Surprisingly, Kennedy did not act on the advice of his hawkish advisors and bomb Cuba. Instead, he authorized a naval blockade of the island while also secretly reassuring Khrushchev that he would remove our Jupiter missiles from Turkey on the Russian border. Americans did not learn of this concession until thirty years later. Surveillance is a form of ignorance, which knows both more and less than it thinks it does. Quantum physics tells us that when the observer looks at something, he disturbs it. Before it is observed, matter remains in a state of flux and ambiguity. A photon, for instance, is not only a particle but a wave and its location and mass are absolutely indeterminate. Once observed, the photon gives up information about itself but only partially. Knowing the location of the photon entails a kind of cluelessness about its mass and so every form of knowing is also a form of unknowing. In 1962, at the height of the cold war, the CIA forgot that principle. The quantum — or a slight degree of indeterminacy, at any rate — prevailed and Kennedy gave up the missiles in Turkey in return for Khrushchev’s promise to pull his MRBMs from Cuba. The unexpected observer of that August baseball game is my father. Watching through his sunglasses, he sees me make an improbable play as I field the erratic grounder. At that moment, as I scoop up the ball, I know he is studying my every move. I would like to imagine that his presence there, watching me play, altered the trajectory of that grounder in some bizarre way. What was my father thinking at that very moment, as the bat

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struck the ball? He was calculating the speed of the ground ball. Both mass and weight are properties of matter, he says to himself. I could read his lips as I dashed towards the unexpected ricochet. He was locked onto the momentum of the bouncing ball. Weight is the force by which an object is attracted by gravity, he says to himself, while mass reflects the extent to which it resists acceleration. He knows something about force, gravity, and drag from his Bell Aircraft days. He leans forward on the green bench, monitoring the velocity of the grounder with rising interest. The ball is now free to go wherever it will — damned be Newton. The witnesses to Gary Powers’s fatal helicopter crash are now middle-aged men prone to memory loss and nostalgia. Do they remember that day in August when the legendary U-2 pilot fell from the sky one last time? Does the shortstop, rolling over his past in latenight reveries, remember backpedaling into left field, deftly fielding a blooper but then wondering what that strange sound was overhead (more a whooshing than the familiar thumping)? It is a long way to the past, to the brown diamond where one August evening a cloud of dust kicked up by a short hop drifted like smoke across the railroad tracks between Conway Field and Elmlawn Cemetery, past the Queen Anne’s lace and over the now dry water beds filled not long ago with pollywogs and cattails. I remember the factory whistle signaling the next shift. I remember the passing of summer. And I remember that strange moment when I improbably caught an errant ball, in a succession of small acts transpiring in a blur of space-time subtleties. Somewhere between first and second base I stumbled on the indeterminacy that lurks behind all things. Behind Oppenheimer and his tragic irony, behind Powers and his spectacular trespass, behind Castro and his nine lives, behind any attempt to claim history. As the boundaries of the present move backwards in time, the odd connections among things — among people and events — vibrate like tense wires. The black plane, the smell of barbecue, the factory whistle, two girls in yellow tank tops, the distant siren — bits of memory interlock as I write, falling into place like a forgotten poem. Before the wavefunction of a particle collapses, physicists say, the particle lacks a fixed position, spreading itself out across a network of probable locations; it may even form remote connections with other

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particles vastly separated from it. Behind these monstrous violations of common sense lies the irreducible instability of subatomic matter. Things come apart. The average male contains about 140 grams of radioactive potassium in his body, which produces 4,400 disintegrations per second, most of which are capable of altering a cell’s DNA. Instability is in our nature. We do our best to cover this up. Human history is like that.

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Distress . . . . . . . . . Signals ..............................................

I

n the middle of the night, hidden from the cameras, my sister experiences a mysterious nervous twitch in her right eye. I myself am already monitoring my pulse, listening to forewarnings deep in the body. I am waiting for something terrible to happen. The cardiovascular system, I imagine, will speak to me in Morse code. It’s not the Russians I’m worried about so much as my own nation. It’s the 1960s and the culture of disaster — at this point, here right now, we’re halfway through the decade — is blooming like a fungus. But let me rewind this story for one brief moment by flashing back to an event in Eisenhower’s second term in office, a vast freak-out of formative scope. soviet fires earth satellite into space, the bold but nervous front-page headline of the New York Times announced. Launched from the Cosmodrome in bleak Tyuratam, the two-hundred pound Sputnik sailed through space like a meteorite, circling the earth once every ninety-six minutes, beep, beep, beeping for three full weeks. The October 1957 event surprised everyone, not least of all those who had invested heavily in Russia’s presumed ineptitude, and embarrassed the fledgling U.S. missile program, which would suffer the humiliating failure — on TV no less — of Project Vanguard two months later with the launch of a puny satellite not much larger than, as Khrushchev gleefully noted, a “grapefruit.” Project Vanguard relied on the Navy’s Viking missile, a rocket with a lamentable past. Shortly before noon on December 6, a star-crossed Viking rocket — with satellite in tow — was launched at Cape Canaveral surrounded by a full bank of television cameras and an audience of anxious dignitaries. Expectations ran high. This was to be America’s answer to Sputnik, proving to the world that we were not technological oafs. The rocket rose four feet into the air when it suddenly lost thrust,

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toppled over, and burst into flames. The tiny satellite, its spindly antennae dangling awkwardly, tumbled to the ground and rolled across the concrete pad while transmitting distress signals to headquarters, chronicling in fine detail the arc of its untimely doom. What had happened? By this time, the Soviet Union already had sent two large satellites into outer space, the second of which — Sputnik 2 — carried the ill-fated dog Laika who, lacking thermal protection but surrounded by sensors, would bake to death only hours after her launch in an overheated hatch, her plaintive barking and fading heart rate clearly audible to agitated engineers below. American intelligence had underestimated Soviet technology once again. It wasn’t the satellites per se that startled the American defense community but the technology that launched them. Both Sputniks were sent into orbit by R-7 rockets, the world’s first deployable Intercontinental Ballistic Missile. Unimaginably huge at 280 tons, the R-7 was a two-stage rocket fueled by liquid oxygen and kerosene and designed to deliver a single nuclear warhead of three megatons to a target some five thousand miles away. While the Pentagon dillydallied with plans to step up ballistic missile production, the Russians had managed to put their satellites into precise orbit. That the Soviet Union could now target any American city at any moment with an H-bomb large enough to annihilate 80 percent of an urban population went over most of our heads, happily. Had we understood the larger picture, we might have gone crazy with fear. The symbolism of Sputnik, though, was immediately clear. The Sputnik missions, test flights really, demonstrated that the R-7 was not a Soviet fantasy but a new reality that, in a spectacular reversal of fortune, raised serious questions about U.S. technological dominance. The U.S. rocket community was spooked, and rightly so it seems in retrospect. Sputnik is truly frightening, said Wernher von Braun; a devastating blow, said Senator Henry M. Jackson; an immense achievement, said the Manchester Guardian; as of October 4, said Arthur C. Clarke, the United States has become a second-rate power. Khrushchev had originally shrugged off the successful launch of Sputnik as a meaningless technical event but when he woke to the stunned reaction of world opinion the next day, he realized it was a very big deal. Not everyone in the United States knew what a satellite was. Some imagined that Sputnik was an insidious weapon that, by harnessing the

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awful power of, say, radium-X, could mutate its victims (remember Boris Karloff’s The Invisible Ray?) into glowing gobs of twisted flesh. More sophisticated parties imagined that Sputnik was a newfangled guidance system capable of directing a Russian bomb — was anywhere safe? — right through the kitchen window. What was America to do? Start work at once on a rocket with a million-pound thrust, said the senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson. People were getting jumpy. One month after the launch of Sputnik 1, the Gaither Report was released, calling for a massive increase in the size of the U.S. missile force. What was noticeably odd about the hawkish report was the poker-faced style evident in its calculation of casualties and survivors in a “postattack world.” The Gaither Report got its name from H. Rowan Gaither, Jr., a major player at the Rand Corporation, a strategic think tank run by the U.S. Air Force, who was chosen by Eisenhower to lead a panel that would determine whether or not the government should fund a comprehensive falloutshelter program. The report was written by Paul Nitze, a career alarmist who also penned the now famously paranoid NSC 68 document in 1950, and warned that Americans were in grave danger from nuclear annihilation by the Russians, who were achieving superiority in long-range ballistic missiles. The Gaither Report capitalized on fears raised by the two Sputnik launches, and urged that the United States undertake a crash ballistic missile program — “this should be given the highest national priority” — dedicated to bigger and better ICBMs. The report also recommended financing the construction of a nationwide network of civilian fallout shelters. The estimated cost of implementing this proposal was close to fifty billion dollars. No money should be spared, the report suggested, when our very survival was at stake. By the time Kennedy was dead and Khrushchev’s SA-4s had been removed from Cuba, everyone was talking about ICBMs, which went down with other expressions that year — like “massive retaliation,” “overkill,” and “megadeath” — in the dictionary of dread, words that invoked darker powers and a new kind of madness. My parents, however, had other things to worry about. Faced with my father’s dwindling income from his dry-cleaning business and weekend music gigs, my mother began working retail at Hens & Kelly, a Buffalo department store that popularized the use of S&H Green Stamps. No wonder there was a lot of stress between them.

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Maybe that was to be expected. Tension was inherent in the moment and the moment seemed to be inching closer towards the absurd conclusion captured by Kubrick’s Major Kong riding bareback atop an H-bomb. About the same time that Dr. Strangelove was released, I developed an irrepressible curiosity about atoms and neutrons. In the margins of my homework, I drew pictures of electrons spinning in orbit around the nucleus of an atom. I must have been the only kid in the neighborhood who read the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists, which I found on the shelves of the public library on Brighton Avenue, where I went after school to escape the dreariness of lake-effect clouds. I searched through magazines for articles on atomic explosions. Though most of this material was over my head, I was rapt. The language of nuclear science had the feel of witchcraft waiting to work its spell. I dreamt of catastrophic explosions and felt pulsating gamma rays pass through my body. My adaptation to the culture of disaster was inspired by my middle school science teacher — let’s call him Mr. Moody. Mr. Moody’s pedagogy profited from the rising fortunes of physics, which had hitched its wagon to Big Government. Shortly after the Cuban missile crisis, Mr. Moody acquired a heightened interest in national security. He was concerned that the Office of Civil Defense was not doing all it could to prepare America for nuclear war. To make up the difference, Mr. Moody was determined to deliver the hard facts about an atomic attack. He chose our class, made up of goofballs and troublemakers who would have preferred to be in the metal shop among bars of black iron, to bear witness to the truth. It was a frigid morning in the middle of winter when Mr. Moody gave his first recitation on civil defense. He approached the blackboard and in large, bold letters wrote “ What to Know about a Nuclear Attack.” He turned around to face us. “ When the enemy strikes, the primary targets will be large cities and industrial centers, like the city of Buffalo. We have a good idea that a ten-megaton explosion will wreak total havoc within a radius of ten miles of ground zero.” Mr. Moody used a special doomsday voice for his civil defense talk, instinctively lowering his pitch by an octave. “There are four ways to die from an atomic explosion,” he continued, looking firmly at us. “First, the blast. There is an awful lot of thermal heat. Tremendous temperatures are produced by an atom bomb, radiating outward from the explosion at the speed of light. Heat rays can kill people up to

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ten miles away.” I turned towards Cindy Laughton, on whom I had a secret crush; her face was white. So was John Ballante’s, John the tough guy. Mr. Moody glanced at a pamphlet on the corner of his desk. “ When an atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, the temperature climbed to well over ten thousand degrees Fahrenheit. A rising column of hot gas drew in the surrounding air, producing powerful ground winds five times stronger than those generated by a hurricane. Six blocks from ground zero, the blast wind was traveling 800 miles per hour.” Mr. Moody paused for dramatic effect, relishing the macabre details. “Most people exposed to thermal rays within a one-mile radius of ground zero died. Thousands of Japanese were roasted by a wave of searing heat. Nothing remained, not even their bones. Tile and glass melted; anything flammable went up in smoke.” Mr. Moody drew concentric circles on the board, plotting thermal heat vectors and radiation intensities. “ Within seconds, countless others lay screaming in agony, burning alive. In Hiroshima the blast was devastating. Over seventy-five thousand people were killed and forty-eight thousand buildings were destroyed. Trains and automobiles were heaved into the air. Many of the wounded would die in the coming days, months, and even years from radiation exposure.” “All of this destruction,” Mr. Moody said just as the buzzer rang, “from a mere fifteen-kiloton atom bomb. Today’s hydrogen bombs . . .” He didn’t get to finish his sentence. We bolted for the door and raced down the hallway, relieved to be alive, though doubtful it would be for long. I wasn’t the only one who had bad dreams that night. It was Mr. Moody’s idea to have parents put names on our clothing with indelible ink. In the event of a nuclear attack, he explained, children may be separated from their families. My mother anxiously scrawled our surname over all my shirt collars as though by some medieval necromancy it might shield me from a twenty-megaton blast. Instead, the ink rubbed off on the back of my neck, tattooing me with the patronym of anxiety. A month later Mr. Moody made arrangements to screen a series of government films about atomic tests. Our class took to the idea if only because it meant we would be spared what had now become Mr. Moody’s weekly doomsday talk. Sadly, the movies were black-

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and-white and they were old, like dusty stock from army surplus. The first film described the atom bomb tests at Bikini Atoll in the Pacific Ocean. “The B-29 takes off to deliver the bomb, while an electrical metronome counts the final seconds,” said the narrator in his best animated, newsreel voice. “Cover your eyes. Now . . . bombs away!” Boom! There it was, our first A-bomb. The awful mushroom rose above the rumbling explosion, a swirling column of burnt matter, folding time and space into itself like a black hole. No one in the class had seen a bomb in action. Now here it was, that magnificent mushroom. Far more spectacular than any of us imagined, the mushroom cloud was our initiation into the world of the cold war. Welcome to the atomic age. The narrator remained silent for thirty seconds as if aware of the significance of the occasion. Mr. Moody instructed everyone to pay particular attention to the next clip. The camera zoomed in on the mushroom cloud. “A deadly radioactive cloud rises over seven miles,” the narrator said bleakly. “Naval ships are tangled wrecks. Plutonium — half the weight of a dime caused this — a force that can destroy the world.” Bikini Atoll was part of the Marshall Island group north of the equator in the Pacific Ocean, Mr. Moody later explained, best known for its coconuts. It was a tropical paradise largely undisturbed by modern civilization, inhabited by quaint canoe-paddling islanders living in thatched huts. The Spaniards stumbled onto the islands in the seventeenth century, and then, later, the Germans. By the time the American testing program was wrapped up in 1958, over sixty nuclear bombs had been detonated — bada-bada-boom — and hundreds of islanders, along with their king, were banished, methodically replaced by five thousand experimental rats, goats, and pigs. Where did the islanders go? we wondered. To Rongerik, Mr. Moody said, another atoll thought to be inhabited by ghosts. Lucky for them, Mr. Moody added, there were more atolls than bombs. In March 1954, the nuclear testing program fired its first H-bomb in the Marshall Islands, the largest ever detonated by the United States. A thousand times more powerful than Fat Man or Little Boy, the Bravo explosion produced a cloud of radioactivity large enough to shroud the entire state of New Jersey. The consequences of radiation exposure on this scale are not pretty, Mr. Moody explained. There’s usually bone cancer, leukemia, and incidences of gross genetic defects.

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After Bravo, there was panic in Tokyo. People stopped eating fish, the market collapsed, and 457 tons of seafood were destroyed. What happened to the fishermen? I asked. Bad things, mostly. There was nausea, vomiting, fatigue; their skin became itchy and then inflamed. There was loss of hair, nasty sores, swollen livers. The last of the government documentaries was Survival Under Atomic Attack, a film about living through a nuclear war. “Let us face without panic the reality of our time, the fact that atom bombs may someday be dropped on our cities,” the film’s narrator said. The music, all hyped up in that blood-and-thunder way, sounded like an RKO Pictures horror track. After walking us through the rubble of Hiroshima, the narrator admonished us to follow his advice if we wished to avoid the fate of the Japanese. The first job, he said, was to check out your own home for shelter possibilities. “Always have a good flashlight and a supply of canned goods in the house, and keep all windows and doors closed for at least several hours after an atomic bombing,” said the narrator as though a nuclear detonation was hardly any worse than bad weather. What Mr. Moody never mentioned was that it was Herman Kahn who introduced the idea of surviving a nuclear war. Known for his macabre sense of humor, Kahn was the Truman Capote of the Rand Corporation, an irrepressible jokester and provocateur who thrived on plotting deadly war scenarios and threat assessments. Kahn had been recruited to Rand in 1948 and threw himself into the job of making nuclear war as viable as any other business conducted by the United States. Kahn wasn’t alone in thinking that Americans could outlast a nuclear war. The nation’s civil-defense program (which paid for Mr. Moody’s atomic movies) likewise subscribed to the curious belief that people could endure an all-out atomic attack simply by rolling up into a ball like a pill bug. Absurd exercises were advertised on TV and on the radio, in newspapers and in magazines, and were carried out in public schools. These drills seem daffy today (“It’s a bomb — duck and cover!”) and didn’t make much sense to me then either. “Now you and I don’t have shells to crawl into like Bert the Turtle,” said one popular civil-defense ad, “so we have to cover up in our own way. That flash means act fast.”

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The duck-and-cover drill was a strange ritual. The descent into the private parts of the local school building, where only mice and janitors prowled, gave me a for-whom-the-bell-tolls feeling, something I could never entirely shake off after surfacing. Like prisoners of war, my classmates and I squeezed through narrow passageways, rubbing up against copper tubing, hanging wires, and steel reinforcement rods, bowing down, in the end, on cold cement with arms locked behind our heads. Standing guard over us, Mr. Moody gave the standard warning about flying glass and “various wayward projectiles,” as he liked to put it, usually concluding matters with an anecdote about either the V-2 rocket attacks on London or the firebombing of Dresden in World War II. The most unnerving part of these alerts were the air-raid sirens, those screaming banshees portending doom. Two sirens were mounted atop tall poles at an elementary school a mile from where I lived. When they went off late at night, I awoke immediately, turning on the radio to make sure it was only a rehearsal. I had jury-rigged my transistor radio, fixing bubble gum under the dial, locking the radio’s dial to WKBW, Buffalo’s rock-and-roll station. As soon as the sirens began shrieking, usually around 1:30 a.m., I stumbled out of bed and flipped the radio switch, waiting for loud riffs and thrashing percussion, which would mean that our ICBMs were in their silos and all was right with the world, more or less. Although the culture seemed bent on producing an endless stream of alerts, we weren’t supposed to panic but to embrace disaster. And Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War was there to show us how. An ungainly collection of lectures and notes assembled in a massive 651-page tome, the book challenged assumptions about how to conduct and survive nuclear warfare. Kahn was said to have carried the hefty manuscript around for a year while traveling across the country, shuffling through pages on airplanes and railroads. When the book was published in 1960, it sold thirty thousand copies in hardback and made Kahn as notorious as a rock star. The bomb had found its perfect spokesman. Kahn’s argument was that nuclear wars were not only likely to happen but were also winnable and survivable. “Nuclear war may be unthinkable,” Kahn wrote, “but it is not impossible.” The book defied

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the conventional belief that an all-out nuclear war would mean the annihilation of civilization, that the survivors would envy the dead. “There is obviously a difference between damage and annihilation,” Kahn wrote, and “it is high time that the distinction was drummed into many key minds in our society.” Kahn insisted that the dangers of radioactivity had long been inflated and that there were various gradations of genetic defects and radioactive contamination, some of which, though tragic, were tolerable. Kahn’s irrepressible enthusiasm for his subject seemed to suggest that a nuclear war might actually be fun. There was certainly no reason why a normal person who has survived one, and who has taken ordinary precautions, shouldn’t continue to live a happy life afterwards, regardless of the radioactive contamination, extensive destruction, and general collapse of society. “ We can even imagine a renewed vigor among the population,” Kahn wrote, “with a zealous dedication to reconstruction.” Survivors shouldn’t be demoralized by a nuclear war. The important thing was to stay upbeat. Kahn’s ability to transform a nuclear catastrophe, with millions dead or poisoned, into giddy opportunity seemed chilling, if not inhuman, to many but there was clearly a method to the madness of the book that spoke to the decade. Kahn said that nuclear wars were unavoidable and although nobody wanted to believe him they suspected he was right. We were all waiting for something to happen, for the imminent shock of disaster. It could be tomorrow, it could be now. Watch the skies! I knew what nuclear survival looked like. My sister and I liked to watch the Late Show, which regularly ran third-rate disaster movies featuring postatomic families holed up in rural homes, having endured a nuclear war only to find themselves up against homicidal neighbors, enormous insects, or a twenty-five-foot human Cyclops. I remember one movie, Run for the Hills, in which an insurance clerk bought a cave just as you would purchase a home. He moved his wife and kids inside their new lodging where the family prepared itself for nuclear war. Crazy as this guy might seem, I couldn’t blame him. The desire to hole up in some remote place was for me as inescapable as it was for the funny little homunculi in Superman and the MoleMen, where subterranean creatures remain underground to avoid hostile humans. I myself had already begun burrowing in the crawl space

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in the basement, hoping to isolate myself from beta emitters and gamma rays. “Lingering radioactivity” was on everyone’s mind. Not too many of us were taken in by Life’s advice to drink hot tea for relief from radiation sickness. Nor did we find believable Edward Teller’s glib reassurance that a little extra radioactivity might be good for you. Edward R. Murrow’s broadcast about a young boy who had died of leukemia as a result of playing in a radioactive sandbox seemed more accurate. The poor kid lived not far from an atomic test site in Nevada. What was worse, the danger of radiation wasn’t confined to Nevada. Snow falling on New York City carried radioactive dust from the Nevada Test Site twenty-five hundred miles away. Some scientists warned that thousands of babies in the Albany area could have received up to thirty rads, possibly enough to provoke anywhere from ten to a hundred cases of cancer over the next few decades. Nobody’s sandbox was safe any longer. McCall’s magazine featured on its cover a picture of a blue-eyed baby howling in fright, with the loud warning “radioactivity is poisoning your children” displayed across the infant’s chest. A few months later, Life ran a special feature explaining how radioactive particles entered the food cycle. The article ended with a pitch for radiation masks (six basic sizes will fit everyone), which looked to me like goggles from outer space. Soon people were measuring “hot spots,” areas of intense fallout, in every corner of the country, from California to Maine. Not only experts but the average consumer began running milk samples, collecting baby teeth, probing ponds, and testing cucumbers. There was somber talk of roentgens, bone cancer, millicuries, and sunshine units. In a short while strontium-90 became a household word. It was about this time I started drinking imitation beverages. To this day I eat my cereal dry. The phrase “known levels of childhood radiation exposure” stuck with me. What was the word for “radiation” in Marshallese? I wondered. One day I was rummaging around the cellar for a soldering gun hoping to build a Geiger counter, Boy Scouts of America Requirement 6, Option B, on the way towards earning the newly introduced Atomic Energy merit badge. I understood only too well that the merit badge program was one of Scouting’s basic character-building tools

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but I was not in it for that so much as the badge itself, a splendid cloth emblem of the atom, which featured three blue balls in red elliptical orbit around a pea-size nucleus on a corn-yellow background — the canary yellow of carnotite, I realize now. The badge was mesmerizing; I absolutely had to have one. But the requirements for earning it, as I recall, were daunting. I had to work up biographies of Enrico Fermi, Wilhelm Roentgen, Ernest Rutherford, and Niels Bohr; draw a detailed picture of nuclear fission; define alpha particle, beta particle, gamma ray, ionization, isotope, radioactivity, and x-rays; and construct a model of a nuclear reactor, complete with control rods, shielding, and cooling material. The final requirement was to make your own Geiger counter and then search for background radiation — in the attic, beneath your bed, under the stove — all the while keeping a record of counts per minute. The essential element in a radiation detector is a Geiger-Mueller tube, which I had ordered several weeks earlier. Mine was a Raytheon CK-1026, less expensive than others and therefore only able to detect beta particles. The Geiger-Mueller tube is a gas-filled chamber with electrodes on either end and a thin wire stretched between them. Radiation can be detected by the ionization it causes when it interacts with the gas in the tube. Ions penetrating the tube through a detector window remove electrons from atoms, creating charged particles, and these produce a detectable pulse of current. Attach a small amplifier and an external speaker to a G-M tube, and with any luck the racket will be as loud as that of the Geiger counter in The Brain from Planet Arous. If my parents had given me a bigger allowance, I could have bought the Detectron Nucliometer Model DR-229. With twenty-four Geiger tubes in its belly, the Detectron surpassed all other devices in sensitivity. “Truly a tremendous step forward in uranium detection,” said the magazine ad. It had six operating zones and a forty-two-square-inch detection range. It was rugged and compact and exceptionally versatile. No uranium prospector should be without one. But at a cost of $545, its price was equivalent to two months of an average wageearner’s salary. You had to be knee-deep in yellowcake to afford that. Although I couldn’t come up with the money for a DR-229, many adults managed to, especially those cashing in on the new demand for uranium. Desperate for weapons-grade fuel, the Atomic Energy Commission had sent out a call for prospectors, announcing a ten-

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thousand dollar bonus for new lodes of high-grade uranium and a guaranteed price per pound that raised the value of uranium ore more than twentyfold. When Charlie Steen hit the jackpot in Moab, Utah, in 1952, there was a stampede of prospectors as large as the gold rush a century earlier. Soon, thousands of dry-mouthed desperadoes were knocking about the red rocks of the Colorado Plateau, slinging Geiger counters and praying for the tick-tick of uranium ore. The uranium frenzy turned a lucky few into millionaires. Steen, dubbed “the Uranium King,” was one of them. Steen had dragged his family up from Texas in 1950 to the rocky badlands of Utah, where he built a tarpaper shack. The Steens — all five of them — ate wild rabbit, beans, and Kelloggs’ Corn Flakes for two years before Charlie, roaming the back country without a Geiger counter (he couldn’t afford even a cheap one like I had), staked a claim to twenty-four million pounds of uranium behind the Old Buck Mine. News of Charlie Steen’s fortune spread wide and fast, triggering a mad scramble that shook the region. Suddenly the Four Corners — ancient home to the Anasazi — was teeming with schoolteachers, used car salesmen, electricians, plumbers, and auto mechanics, all armed with Geiger counters, Cracker Jacks, and beef jerky, advancing headlong into the blazing outback, hoofing around canyon rims — my god, the sun was hot! — and sandstone walls, dauntless and bewitched. Well over four thousand mines were producing uranium ore by 1970 and over three hundred thousand claims were filed in Utah alone. Most of these claims ran shaft-mining ventures requiring countless underground networks of caverns and tunnels, many without ventilation. Uranium is one of the most toxic substances on the planet. In Europe, 75 percent of the men mining uranium in the Erz Mountains died of lung cancer. Once they descended underground, their life expectancy shrank by twenty years. German scientists suspected that radon gas, a radioactive byproduct of uranium, was to blame for the excess lung cancer. Radon levels in the mine shaft routinely tested at ninety to a hundred times maximum “safe” levels. By the mid-1970s, uranium miners in the United States, many of them Native American, were dying of lung cancer by the hundreds. Mining uranium was like stewing in a broth of radioactive contaminants. Herman Kahn’s On Thermonuclear War provoked two kinds of response. There were those readers, like Bertrand Russell, who praised

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the book for its ability to direct unwilling attention to grim realities. And then there were readers like James R. Newman, who wrote in Scientific American that he thought Kahn was out of his mind and had perpetrated an awful crime by advocating mass murder. For many, Kahn’s willingness to subtract human suffering from his treatment of megadeaths seemed grotesque and obscene. Not every reader appreciated, or understood, Kahn’s morbid sense of irony. Take the Doomsday Machine, a huge tongue-in-cheek computer envisioned by Kahn, which was wired to a large stockpile of H-bombs that would automatically be triggered during an enemy attack. The detonation would cover the planet with an endless shroud of radiation. “Assume that for, say, $10 billion we could build a device whose only function is to destroy all human life,” Kahn wrote. “The device is then connected to a computer which is in turn connected to hundreds of sensory devices all over the United States. The computer would then be programmed so that if, say, five nuclear bombs exploded over the United States, the device would be triggered and the earth destroyed. If Khrushchev should order an attack, both Khrushchev and the Soviet population would be automatically and efficiently annihilated.” This was Kahn at his best, devilishly straddling the line between punditry and science fiction. As it turned out, however, his Doomsday Machine was only a partially fictional knockoff of standing U.S. policy. The idea of massive retaliation, a legacy of Eisenhower’s 1950s, amounted to essentially the same thing: if you attack us, we’ll launch our entire stockpile of bombs at you, which could very well destroy every living thing on the planet. The Kennedy administration, which had inherited Eisenhower’s nuclear policies, was frustrated by the idea of massive retaliation because it weakened what the administration considered to be America’s defense posture, transforming nuclear war into an unthinkable proposition. Robert McNamara, Kennedy’s secretary of defense, wanted practical choices. He wanted a viable first-strike strategy with real attack options. Shortly after the publication of On Thermonuclear War, Kennedy had his top aides devise a credible first-strike plan against Russia. The new policy was called Assured Destruction. The idea was to knock out the Soviet Union’s long-range nuclear capacity in one fell swoop without triggering an all-out nuclear exchange. It was a grisly

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scheme — an unprovoked nuclear attack — and had all the markings of Herman Kahn’s theories. Once the defense community realized, however, that nothing prevented a limited strike from escalating into something much bigger and that neither the United States nor the Soviet Union would survive an all-out atomic attack, the policy was more accurately renamed Mutually Assured Destruction, producing the Strangelovian acronym MAD. In retrospect, Kennedy’s first-strike scheme does indeed seem like an outtake from Dr. Strangelove, which itself was partly inspired by Kahn’s work. Kubrick was so taken with On Thermonuclear War that he read the big book twice and even met with Kahn over dinner to discuss the logistics of nuclear war. As Strangelove showed, the nuclear absurd was seeping into the groundwater of American popular culture. This did not make it any easier for Americans to grasp something they could not see. I watched late-night reruns of the movie Them!, which was among the first to introduce nuclear fallout as a rationale for the abrupt appearance of bizarre life forms. The giant ants, which terrorize rural inhabitants of New Mexico, were the result of contamination by lingering radiation from the first A-bomb test nine years earlier at the nearby White Sands Missile Range. Nine years (a parody of human gestation) is sufficient time, explain the film’s eggheads, for genetic alterations to have created a mutant species that is now on the verge of becoming the dominant life-form on the planet. “ When man entered the atomic age,” the film’s resident entomologist, Dr. Medford, observes, “he opened a door to a new world. What we’ll eventually find in that new world nobody can predict.” Today, the mutant ants of Them! are likely to evoke titters. Hairy, stiff, and awkward, these moon-eyed giant bugs are no match for the aliens of contemporary special-effects shops. At the time, however, the ants were as scary as anything I had seen on film. They were grotesque and savage, imposing shape and form on that which was invisible — atomic radiation — those huge mandibles, as big as elephant tusks, closing around the waist of Ben Peterson at the end of the film, lifting him clear off the ground. These creatures weren’t invaders from some remote planet like Mars — they swarmed freely right here in my own backyard. It took only a bit of random radiation to create a nightmare and everyone knew there was plenty of that to go around.

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A quiet man, my father kept his worries mostly to himself. He was in the habit, however, of stashing away newspapers of historic weight, front-page stories with fateful headlines, in the bottom drawer of his utility cabinet. u-2 plane shot down over russia, bay of pigs landing is fiasco, kennedy orders blockade of cuba, kennedy assassinated in dallas, sniper kills negro leader medgar evers, china explodes first a-bomb, malcolm x assassinated in harlem. They were souvenirs of disaster, my father’s way of keeping in touch with history. One day, looking for a soldering gun to build my Geiger counter, I pulled open the drawer and discovered something that disturbed me more than gigantic ants ever could. Lying on top of the stack of newspapers was an issue of the Buffalo Evening News dated Friday, July 20, 1956. The headline read: 125,000 known dead, downtown in ruins. The lead photo was of a fiery City Hall whose towers were bursting and crumbling. The legend below the photo explained how a “news photographer, airlifted by Bell helicopter over Buffalo’s devastated downtown section, risked fallout dangers of nuclear blast to get this graphic photo of fire-weakened City Hall crumbling into ruins.” I zoomed in on the flames engulfing City Hall. “State of Emergency Declared as Civil Defense Teams Swing into Action on Wide Front” said the paper. I read on, unable to believe my eyes. “The heart of Buffalo is gone. The twin cities of the Tonawandas are heavily damaged” — holy cannoli, that’s where I live! — “Buffalo’s entire downtown area is completely leveled — a smoldering, blazing ruin. Unknown thousands of Buffalonians are presumed dead and many more thousands injured.” I would have dashed upstairs to phone my grandmother (though in all likelihood she — along with Aunts Joe, Lena, Rita, and Mary — was toast) but I could not take my eyes off the terrifying front page. “The Buffalo skyline has disappeared. Scoring a bull’s-eye, the enemy plane dropped its bomb with a direct hit on the McKinley Monument. Then the plane went on to drop even a more powerful bomb on the City of North Tonawanda.” Was I living in a parallel universe? Before my eyes was documentary proof that Buffalo had been nuked. The Scajaquada Highway was refugee-clogged, over Grand Island rose a massive plume of smoke laden with radioactive material, fires raged out of control. I had stumbled upon a nightmare. How could I have survived?

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Stunned by the headlines, I was slow to register the date of the newspaper — July 20, 1956. This catastrophe had happened years ago. How odd that no one, not even Mr. Moody with his appetite for nuclear trauma, had mentioned this. Then I noticed the disclaimer above the masthead — Warning: This Didn’t Happen . . . But It Could! The publisher was kidding. Whose idea was this? Was he out of his mind? I suppose it was a relief to find that I was holding a hoax edition and that the surrealistic headlines were pointing not to a real but a mock nuclear attack — we were all safe, at least for now — but at some deeper level I felt let down, secretly craving disaster. Later, I discovered that other newspapers had carried similar stories and that they weren’t exactly jokes. These so-called emergency editions, it turned out, were produced under the bizarre auspices of Operation Alert, a Federal Civil Defense Administration (FCDA) program. Operation Alert worked like this: first there was a simulated nuclear attack, then a danger signal, and finally everyone was ordered to take cover. It was really very simple. Even Eisenhower was swept up by this exercise in collective paranoia meant to put civil defense plans to the test. On one occasion Eisenhower and his NSC staff were evacuated from the city by helicopter but never told of their destination, then forced to climb down into a bomb shelter outside of Washington. The FCDA was the agency behind duck-and-cover drills and sirens waking me at 1:30 a.m. And now it was jamming the airwaves with faux stories of massive death and destruction. The agency must have nodded approval when a shopping center in Maryland piped in the recorded sound of a mock nuclear attack, complete with sirens, explosions, and anguished cries. Major Edwin G. Zeigler, director of the Erie County Civil Defense program, thought so highly of the Buffalo hoax that he commended the Buffalo Evening News personally for its unstinting public service. Operation Alert might officially have been touted as a civil-defense training program but it was in effect a form of state-run terrorism, as even the government sometimes acknowledged when wondering out loud whether this kind of chicanery might scare the daylights out of people without purpose. No matter how often the FCDA demanded “Keep Calm!” there were always those ominous radioactive clouds to worry about.

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Kennedy told us that nuclear war was a fact of life that could not be ignored. Herman Kahn said that a nuclear war would be “invigorating.” My father waxed his bass strings and watered the lawn; my mother grated more parmesan. In 1958 Linus Pauling had issued the first of many warnings about the biological dangers of radioactive fallout. By the 1960s nuclear contamination was a national obsession. An invisible killer, radioactive fallout would destroy us all, like the doomed coastal dwellers in Nevil Shute’s On the Beach, where fallout crept upon its victims like the bubonic plague. At first they didn’t feel a thing, just a disorder at the cellular level, resulting from the chemical changes caused by ionization. Then tissue damage, hemorrhaging, infection, and dehydration, followed by nausea, diarrhea, skin burns, hair loss, ulceration, and bloody stool. This was what we could look forward to. Mr. Moody said that it was no good to burrow into the earth. We needed courage to face disaster and that could only come, he said, from looking the enemy squarely in the eye. But his was an unpopular opinion. “Is your home ready for an emergency?” asked the FCDA. The Chicago Wonder Building Corporation was selling two hundred fallout shelters a week by 1961, at a thousand dollars a crack, and had become famous for their “trussless” form (erect it yourself! ). Constructed from corrugated steel, the Wonder Buildings looked like giant, hollowed-out caterpillars — yet another nuked bug with out-ofcontrol growth hormones. I found refuge in our cellar, where I created temporary fallout shelters from discarded plywood, old rugs, and snow tires. I used my merit-badge Geiger counter to impose mandatory radiation checks on anyone who happened to come downstairs while I was in my Conelrad mode. My father never reproached me for these efforts, despite the enormous mess I made. Down deep, I believe, he understood what I was going through. One Saturday morning I found him lugging gallon jars of water into the basement. Everyone in the family had by now grown used to my paranoia — to my waking in the middle of the night, to my stockpiling cans of Chef Boyardee ravioli and jars of Marshmallow Fluff in my closet, and to my turning the cellar into a relocation center — but the sight of my dad silently hauling water down the cellar stairs was unnerving. He cleared the far end of the basement

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of his golf clubs, a seldom-used croquet set, rusted lawn furniture, and a box of broken Christmas tree bulbs. Then he set up a couple of Woolworth’s utility shelves and a folding card table with chairs. He piled blankets and pillows on the floor. This was the poor man’s fallout shelter. Meanwhile, the government was mining tunnels and caves from Pennsylvania to Colorado in preparation for doomsday. In West Virginia the Superior Supply Company poured fifty thousand tons of concrete into a massive hole that had been dug near the Greenbrier Resort in the Allegheny Mountains. Washington’s politicos were building their very own bomb shelter twenty feet below the surface. When completed, the reinforced concrete facility, which is still operative today, was equipped with bunk beds, showers, offices, TVs, a crematorium, huge steel blast doors, and innumerable crates of C rations. Under the government’s Doomsday Plan, federal bomb shelters were equipped with a prerecorded message from the president, instructions for the nation should he not, god forbid, make his descent in time. As far as I was concerned, the feds had one big advantage over the public. Their holes were bigger and deeper than anything we could dig, better equipped, and full of fancy monitoring devices. Not only that, if you were in the government, you got to carry around a Crisis ID card, which declared that the cardholder had essential emergency privileges, including unrestricted movement in a disaster area. I would have given anything to have owned a Crisis ID card. I even wrote to the Office of Civil Defense for one but all I got back was some promotional stuff on survival kits (Be Prepared! Seven Days of Food for One Person). Watch the skies, we were told. Missiles on the loose, Russian bombers, plummeting satellites. Sales of binoculars and telescopes were up and the number of UFO sightings increased dramatically. I kept a keen eye on the sky, scanning the clouds over Lake Erie. When I looked, though, all I saw were our own bombers, like the hulking B-52 Stratofortresses whose crews lived alone in self-contained shelters without family contact and were known to write messages on their bombs before taking off. I noticed that my mother began overcooking canned vegetables about this time. Canned vegetables were soft and mushy to begin with but when my mother finally put them on my plate they tasted like the paste we used to make papier-mâché Halloween masks.

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I saw my first B-52 in the midsixties while camping with my parents and sister at Paradox Lake in the Adirondack Mountains about twenty miles west of Fort Ticonderoga. Traveling to the Adirondacks was a welcome break from duck-and-cover drills. Here, there would be no ground zeroes, no screaming sirens, no Code Three Alerts, no Nikita Khrushchev, no cesium-137. To my mind, the Adirondack region was a neutral country, like Switzerland. It was a place where refugees like myself could find asylum. I woke up early on the first morning at our campsite and crawled out of my pup tent to make myself a solitary breakfast of peanut butter and jelly sandwiches while my parents and sister still slept. It was mid-June but the air was damp and chilly. My fingers were numb and I was having trouble holding the knife. That’s when I heard an awful roar above the mountains across the lake. By instinct, I ducked under the table. “Act Now Or Perish!” Mr. Moody’s voice urged in my head. All I could do, though, was crouch beneath the table, doomed to be burnt to a crisp in the coming holocaust. Something horrible was crossing the sky, a toothless pterodactyl with great iron wings. I didn’t expect this, not here among the firs and birches, beside the glaciated lakes where the Iroquois and Mohicans once traveled by moonlight. So large was the plane that it moved in slow motion. I could make out the white antinuclear flash painted on its underbelly. The bomber banked to the left, its eight Pratt and Whitney engines thundering over Lake Paradox. A B-52 on a low-level penetration exercise, my father said later, probably heading back to Plattsburgh Air Force Base. Unlike the deadly pall of radiation or Titan missiles buried deep in their silos or the stealthy high-flying U-2, the B-52 was something I could see and hear. It was perceptible, tangible. I didn’t need a Geiger counter to find it or a leukocyte count to test it. I didn’t need Mr. Moody to parse its history. I didn’t need Herman Kahn to assess its kill ratios. I knew that its twenty-seven-foot-long bomb doors would open with a steely clanking noise, revealing four powerful fusion bombs. If a B-52 dropped one of those on my head, I would blow up. There was no uncertainty about it, no lingering side effects. That would be that. The B-52 was an appreciable sign, an absolute point of reference — solid, real, and knowable. It was a hedge against the inscrutability of hidden variables of subatomic matter, against the deadly

Distress Signals

fallout we would never notice until it was too late. I understood now why the ants were so big, why all the insects were so ridiculously large, why Hollywood overstated its case. Those outsized creatures were the cinematic equal of a B-52, an argument from scale against the hidden threats surrounding us. The giant insects were distress signals, a kind of visual “Mayday” emerging from a grave and imminent danger. The Russians were not to blame. The source of fear was more subtle. The nation’s destiny was being shaped by powerful new technologies designed to control that which was too small to see and which defied human comprehension. Under the extended wings of that B-52, the gargantuan bugs suddenly made sense: they were a throwback to a classical Newtonian universe, where mass, position, and momentum were predictable events — where if something was about to kill you, you could at least see it coming. In that world, a clear and present danger would not hide out in the nth dimension, like a Higgs boson, but would be as observable as a rhinoceros. If a colossal roach charged headlong at you, twisting its jumbo antennae to and fro, then you could run like the wind the other way. The giant bugs, weird though they seemed, were a last-ditch appeal to normality. They were the ingenious creations of a culture trying to fathom, if not resist, the quantumization of everyday life — an imaginative solution to a strange, new problem but no more successful than King Kong battling the tiny biplanes whirling around his enormous head.

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Going . . . . . . Ballistic .................................................

O

ne sunny day in July I found myself standing on a concrete runway gripping a thirteen-foot fiberglass pole. I was counting down silently to myself, searching for my center of gravity. In a few seconds I would launch my body into space. It was 1968, a milestone year for America, one that began menacingly with the Tet offensive and would end even more ominously with the election of Richard Nixon. In March, there was a massacre of Vietnamese civilians by American troops in the village of My Lai. In April, Martin Luther King was shot. Violence erupted in over a hundred American cities. The Chicago PD were told “shoot to kill.” In May, students in Berkeley, New York, Paris, and Warsaw occupied university buildings. In June, Bobby Kennedy was gunned down in Los Angeles. In July, Nigerian troops began massacring Biafrans. By late summer, everything came to a head as Soviet tanks moved across the Czechoslovakian border, while in Chicago demonstrators, reporters, and campaign workers were hammered by Richard Daley’s police. Sad and lonely, I played Jerry Jeff Walker’s “Mr. Bojangles” on my guitar. By the time Tommie Smith and John Carlos each raised a black-gloved hand at the Summer Olympics in Mexico City, I had moved on to the songs of Leonard Cohen. But right now, at this very moment — 4:45 p.m. on Saturday, July 20, 1968 — I am standing on a concrete runway gripping a thirteen-foot fiberglass pole. In six weeks Bob Seagren will break the Olympic record in the pole vault with a jump of 17 ft. 11½ in. Claus Schiprowski of West Germany will take the silver medal and Wolfgang Nordwig of East Germany will take the bronze. By the late sixties, the air was full of arcs and trajectories, eminent people rising and falling. In Princeton, New Jersey, Oppenheimer was

Going Ballistic

dying from throat cancer while in Huntsville, Alabama, Wernher von Braun was making final adjustments to the Saturn 5 booster, the rocket that would carry the first men to the moon. The infamous V-2 — it will forever arrive shrieking in Pynchonesque form across the sky — was the foundation of the U.S. missile program. The product of cutting-edge German technology, the V-2 was the rocket launched by Hitler to terrorize Londoners, the one that gave people little warning other than a strange hissing sound when it struck. V-2 technology was in such great demand by the end of World War II that both Russian and American operatives raced towards Peenemünde and Nordhausen, where the V-2 was assembled, to round up Nazi rocket scientists and any technical data, schemas, diagrams, blueprints, formulae, charts, layouts, sketches — or better yet, any rocket parts — that might shed light on the V-2 rocket and any other Wunderwassen under development by General Dornberger, commander of the German rocket program. As Russians and Americans approached from either side, von Braun, chief designer of the V-2, gathered his colleagues to discuss their postwar options. The German scientists could not surrender to the Russians because the Russians were too menacing. Nor could they surrender to the British because the British could not afford a rocket program. The best choice, thought von Braun, was to evacuate Peenemünde and side with the Americans. With the Red Army advancing on Peenemünde, Dornberger ordered the transfer of a large contingent of the German rocket corps, including von Braun, to the underground Mittelwerk site in the Harz Mountains. Von Braun took with him vital technical information. When the Russians seized Peenemünde, they found only the leftovers of the German rocket program. The Americans, meanwhile, hit the jackpot in the underground factory at Nordhausen, where three hundred leading rocket engineers were in hiding and where von Braun had cleverly stashed fourteen tons of technical documents in railway cars in an iron mine. By the time the Americans left Nordhausen, they had in hand over one hundred elite rocket scientists, including Dornberger and von Braun, a hundred complete and viable V-2 rockets, and forty tons of technical data. It was a stunning bonanza, well beyond the wildest dreams of the Pentagon, which hadn’t the foggiest idea how to launch, let alone build, a rocket.

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Von Braun and his Peenemünder colleagues were hustled off to Fort Bliss, Texas, where they worked under contract for the U.S. Army and where they formed the nucleus of the American postwar rocket program. The Peenemünders not only restored and reassembled the appropriated V-2s, they also trained American engineers in the arcane arts of rocket design, brought military and industrial personnel up to speed on rocket propulsion, and collaborated in the launching of V-2s at nearby White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. Later transferred to Huntsville, the German scientists built the Saturn rocket program — the driving engine of space travel in the sixties and seventies. When I flash back to Project Apollo, I see Buzz Aldrin stepping on the lunar surface and Neil Armstrong hailing Mission Control. What’s missing from my memory is the masked narrative of V-2 rocket development in America, which was responsible for not only putting the first men on the moon but also for jump-starting the ICBM program. Nor did I understand that the pole in my hand, like other advanced composites, was a spin-off of experiments to develop sturdier and lighter materials for missiles, aircraft, and space vehicles. I was too preoccupied with converting the kinetic energy of my moving body into the potential energy of the jump to consider the subtle connections forming all around me. The crossbar rested precariously eleven and a half feet above the ground. It was a standard black-and-yellow shaft scuffed with dents and creases. Midway between the stands, exactly above the planting pit, the crossbar sagged in homage to the intractable law of gravity, which had defeated many a vaulter launching his juvenile body toefirst into the infinite blue sky. Resting on the pegs of the upright stands, the zebra-striped shaft seemed to issue a warning, like the mechanical arm at a railroad crossing. A gusty wind blew at my back. I had a thirteen-foot brown fiberglass pole in my hands. I rocked back and forth on the asphalt runway. It was a ritual movement, a kind of speechless prayer as I stood gazing at the hypnotic crossbar, the geometry of which had entered my dream life. There was no hurry, I thought. I delayed my approach, watching a crowd of two-milers completing their seventh quarter-mile — one more to go — their stoic faces strained by fatigue and determination.

Going Ballistic

These were the quiet ones, the distance runners, stubborn introverted boys who sat near the rear of the bus peeling oranges. I felt a kinship with the long-distance runners but I lacked their staying power. They ran in circles, giant arcs, their sinewy legs stretched out, striding through each repetition, passing the same signpost, wearing the same mask of despair. The pole vault was more explosive, requiring but a brief sprint and a perilous leap. It was like theater, essentially Aristotelian, with its quick start, fast approach, and phallic takeoff, the hurtling momentum upward, the upside-down peripeteia, and the tragic fall. These were the plotlines of the leap. On that sunny afternoon in July, chatty teenagers sat on concrete benches in the half-empty grandstand drinking Pepsi and eating Mars bars. Three tough guys in leather jackets, half-smoked cigarettes dangling from their mouths, stood at the gate perusing the scene, drawn by the crack of the starter’s pistol. The field was an old-fashioned cinder track, part of an athletic complex behind Kenmore West Junior High, a few blocks north of the city’s limits. It was the only sports park in town. A steady line of traffic drifted northbound on Colvin Avenue. Sooner or later, I have to jump, I thought to myself. I had cleared the bar at 11 ft. twenty minutes ago. That height might place me third in the event, behind Andy Zirna and the other team’s best vaulter, who would probably jump 12 ft. If I made it safely over 11 ft. 6 in., I could nail down third place. Andy Zirna had recently broken the school record with a jump of 13 ft. Even on a bad day Andy could make it over 12 ft. 6 in. Once, in practice, I climbed far enough to cross the bar at 11 ft. 6 in., flying off my pole and thrusting my chest backwards as if the crossbar were electrified. On my descent I grazed the bar with my elbow but it didn’t fall. My teammates, who were so sympathetic it was embarrassing, let out a collective shout. But practice jumps don’t count. I had to clear 11 ft. 6 in. in a meet or it meant nothing. I raised the tip of my thin pole off the runway, my right hand squeezing the grip near the top. I could smell the freshly wound white stickytape. I began my sprint. The planting box was sunk eight inches below ground level a hundred yards away. It was a metal box that looked like an industrial drain. I would guide my pole into this box. It was ten seconds to launch time. A NASAesque voice began the monotone countdown in my head. “Ten, nine, eight . . .”

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The year after my leap, von Braun would put two men on the moon, a feat that began in the American Southwest in the late 1940s, when von Braun and the German rocket scientists were brought to El Paso without visas, de facto illegals working and living under the auspices of the army. Their letters were censored, their phone calls were monitored, and they could not leave Fort Bliss without an army escort. Practicing science under the watchful eye of the military, they were like a second Manhattan Project, only on a smaller scale and dedicated less to bomb design than to liquid oxygen and thrust. This time, however, the scientists were not émigré physicists fleeing Nazi persecution but Nazis themselves. Their work was classified and carefully monitored, not only to maintain tight security but also to keep the American public in the dark about the leanings of the Peenemünders. How would it look to George and Ida Alexander of Galesburg, Illinois, after all, were it widely known that the Nazis were building V-2 rockets on American soil? There was reasonable concern that public opinion might not be favorable to this enterprise. That von Braun was not only a former Nazi but also once a member of the SS was carefully guarded information. Truman had authorized the Pentagon’s plan in 1946 to naturalize a thousand German scientists and technicians, providing they were only nominal, not thorough-going, Nazis. That distinction was made by a review panel and in many cases army intelligence officers had the dossiers of German scientists discreetly purified to avoid the panel’s suspicion. A State Department representative had already denied von Braun’s application on the grounds that the scientist was an “ardent Nazi and a security risk.” But that wasn’t a deterrent in the face of America’s voracious appetite for rockets. A vaulter should run as far as is necessary to attain maximum speed two strides before the plant. My spiked feet pounded the asphalt, the point of my pole holding at eye level and slightly to the left of the centerline of the runway. I sucked in air, a horseless jouster. The striped crossbar seemed to rise higher with every stride. Out of the corner of my eye I saw Andy Zirna peeling a blurred banana. The dull footfall of my spikes kept beat with my thumping heart. Once full acceleration has been reached, the mind shifts from speed to the smooth transfer of momentum. Mass times velocity. The final checkpoint flashed below me. T minus two seconds. The planting box now entered my field

Going Ballistic

of vision. I steadied my pole, fixing a line on the rusty sunken trapezoid but it seemed to be moving, shifting left and right like a mirage. I couldn’t hold it in place. My plant would have to be conjecture. My brain sped through the calculations, averaging a midpoint from the floating forms, and there, with an overhand shift, I stuck my pole and became a human missile. As a kid, I longed for two things above all else: a pet rabbit and my very own rocket. I was allergic to furry animals so the rabbit was out of the question. My first rocket was the Bell GAM-63 Rascal, a model of the missile on which my father worked at Bell Aircraft in the fifties. The thirty-two-foot Rascal was dangerous-looking, constructed with cantilevered wings, full-span trailing-edge ailerons, and many sharp points. It had an orange fuel tank, while the warhead and guidance units were painted a matte black. With its dark dorsal fins and white underbelly, the rocket’s forward compartment bore a striking resemblance to a killer whale. The real beauty of the rocket was inside. The Rascal was powered by Bell’s own liquid-fuel rocket engine based on three in-line combustion chambers, each capable of three thousand pounds of thrust. The rocket weighed about thirteen thousand pounds and was thirty feet long with a body diameter of four feet; it was designed to carry a three-thousand-pound nuclear warhead and could travel at the supersonic speed of Mach 3. In test flights in New Mexico, the Rascal was unerringly on target, in one series scoring four direct hits. “Right in the old pickle barrel,” said one Strategic Air Command bombardier after letting fly with a Rascal that dashed seventy-five correct miles to its target. SAC headquarters, however, had some issues with my dad’s rocket. They complained that the guidance system was enigmatic and susceptible to failure. By the time the Air Force killed the Rascal in 1958, it had spent $448 million on its development, leaving behind some 143 existing Rascals for dry dock. Today, an old Rascal rocket engine hangs in the Niagara Falls Air and Space Museum. When I travel home, I pay it a visit. Years ago Einstein complained about the weirdness of quantum mechanics, the theory that describes the behavior of matter on the smallest possible scale but that flies in the face of common sense. Quantum mechanics does not actually explain anything, Einstein objected, and, worse, assigns too much randomness to the nature of the

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universe. Modern physicists are generally less troubled by the bizarre implications of quantum mechanics than Einstein was and have gotten used to the idea that in the world of atoms particles exist not as objects but as probability fields, dwelling in different states at the same time. It helps, too, that quantum mechanics applies mostly to the world of subatomic matter, to the infinitesimal vibrations that somehow shape our realities, and not to the jumbo world of large things. That is why people lunching at the Chophouse in downtown Milwaukee one moment do not reappear at Happy Joe’s Pizza in Oskaloosa the next. Einstein may have found it hard to believe, but quantum theory is the only thing — it now seems to me — that explains the peculiar way I went about pole-vaulting. That the vaulting box should move just before my takeoff, shifting through a field of probable positions like a subatomic wavefunction, vexed me. I knew this couldn’t actually be happening — reality doesn’t shift (or does it?) — and that it must all be in my head. Einstein would probably have been skeptical but for me vaulting was a quantum leap. I have seen snapshots of my vaults; no other metaphor captures the strangeness of my body in flight. In a fraction of a moment I was upside down, riding the upswing. A vaulter’s eyes at takeoff should focus at a very low upward angle, never looking at the crossbar. I drove my right leg up with a hard thrust. The pole flexed, bending as I rose upwards, converting the raw force of motion to potential energy. I was lifting off while rocking backwards, rising above the eight skinny boys reaching their final lap. My body swung like a pendulum, completely inverting itself on a vertical axis. My feet were above my chin. Where the sky should have been, there was cinder track, pulverized charcoal. I struggled to find the blue sky, the normal sky. In the grandstands people vanished, the whole world altering its coordinates. In 1942 Cornelius Warmerdam, a twenty-six-year-old high school teacher from California, set the world indoor mark in the pole vault with a jump of 15 ft. 7 in. at the fifty-third annual Boston American Association of Track and Field meet, before a crowd of fifteen thousand people. Warmerdam was the first person ever to clear 15 ft. with a bamboo pole. Not until 1962 did anyone clear 16 ft. It took twenty years and the introduction of a new technology to go the extra five inches, which was accomplished when John Uelses cleared 16 ft. at Madison Square Garden using a fiberglass pole.

Going Ballistic

Bamboo was the material of choice for most vaulters until World War II. The trouble with bamboo poles was that they often broke, making vaulting dangerous and leaving the vaulter, if unmaimed, looking spastic. After the war, bamboo poles from the Orient were hard to come by and so metal poles, which were lighter and more durable, became increasingly popular. Bob Richards, whom I watched in TV ads promoting Wheaties (the Breakfast of Champions), was the first great steel-pole vaulter. An ordained minister, Richards (called “the Vaulting Vicar”) won gold medals in the pole vault in both 1952 (Helsinki) and 1956 (Melbourne), clearing just over 14 ft. 11 in. each time. In 1960 Don Bragg, a big, burly fellow weighing almost two hundred pounds, set the world record at 15 ft. 9¼ in. before sixty-five thousand people using an aluminum pole. Bragg was over six feet tall but could run 100 yards in 10.2 seconds, achieving enough mass and velocity to bend an aluminum pole as though it were flexible. Two years later Bragg complained bitterly when Uelses cleared 16 ft., objecting that the new record was achieved exploiting an unfair advantage — the flexibility of fiberglass. Siding with Bragg, many vaulters thought that records set with the new “sky poles,” as fiberglass poles were first called, should not be recognized. Like their bamboo predecessors, the first fiberglass poles were flimsy. They broke easily and vaulters were slow to warm to them. With various modifications, however, fiberglass poles became sturdier and the new ultraflexible poles finally displaced the old aluminum ones. Records were quickly broken. By 1971 the fiberglass pole had raised jumps by two feet. Vaulters soon realized that they had to switch to fiberglass and learn a new technology if they wanted to compete. In 1963, one year after Uelses set a new mark at 16 ft., John Pennel jumped 17 ft. on his first attempt at the University of Miami. Fiberglass did for pole-vaulting what the corked bat does for baseball. It made the event sexy, adding drama and improbable heights. Suddenly there were vaulters like Bob Seagren, Christos Papanikolaou, and Wolfgang Norwig who, by 1970, would throw themselves 18 ft. into the air. The purest moment for me, what drew me to vaulting, was the point at which the fiberglass pole began to coil, bending as though it might break. Every vaulter dreams of a big bend, a giant arc full of soaring tension. At takeoff, the arms remain fixed and spread wide apart, providing the fulcrum for the body that transfers the force of

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the approach to the pole. In a “big bend,” the upper half of the pole will curve parallel to the ground, forming a right angle in relation to the lower half. The bigger the bend, the greater the energy stored in the pole. When the pole springs back, it transfers the energy to the vaulter, who is crouching in an imaginary chair, waiting for vertical lift. On my rock-back I heard the pole flex, a sound that unnerved me, the hiss of fine strands of twisted glass. As my body moved forward, my pole stretched its fibers with a silent screaming. A vaulter tenses during the bend-time, awaiting the upsurge. All action is suspended, the vaulter reaching a point of near stillness. A fiberglass pole straightens with great quickness. My pole recoiled like a crossbow, hurling my dangling body upward. No matter how often I vaulted, the push always surprised me. Upwards I catapulted into space, riding the simple mechanics of kinetic energy, a human rocket in nylon shorts struggling for escape velocity. It was true, as Warmerdam said: “In vaulting, the human body becomes a projectile.” Fiberglass is produced from silica, aluminum oxide, calcia, magnesia, and boron oxide. Glass fibers are made by melting marble-sized balls in a tank. Ninety-three miles of glass fiber .00023 inches in diameter can be drawn from one marble. The melted glass is extruded through small holes in a platinum bushing at the bottom of an electric furnace. Very fine filaments of hot, pliable glass are stretched into thin fibers, then gathered together and sized with a glazed coating on a high-speed winder revolving at 120 miles per hour, pulling and stretching the fibers on a spinning drum. The construction of a fiberglass pole involves weaving the glass fibers into a kind of cloth, which is dipped into hot resin and wrapped around a steel form. Pressure and heat activate the glass, causing a chemical change that laminates it into an integral whole. The highpressure processes mean no trapped gases or surplus resin remains. This adds to the power and strength of the resulting pole. In many respects the development of advanced composites like fiberglass was the answer to an engineer’s dream: strong and stiff, light and resilient, and easily shaped into complex geometries. By the time I made my first jump, defense contractors in California were wrapping the rocket motor of the third stage of the Minuteman ICBM in glass filaments to produce a stronger, lighter-weight missile. My pole whooshed and gave me lift. I held my breath and began the pull-up, straightening my legs, hoisting my inverted torso over

Going Ballistic

my handgrip. Patience and poise are necessary at this point. Properly executed, the pull-up should begin only when the pole is perpendicular to the ground where it can receive the full impact of the moving body, the base of the pole being secure in the planting box. I never mastered the pull-up. I invariably hoisted myself up the pole a fraction of a second too soon. My effort was tortured and I could feel the energy of the pole dissipate — it was all going wrong. Science tells us that energy can rarely be converted with absolute efficiency. Along the way, some will always be squandered. In my case, too much effort was spent in my pull-up. A proper turn should begin only when the hips have lifted to the level of the hands, which establishes the vaulter’s center of gravity above the pole. The vaulter then looks down his pole and pushes off, raising his upside-down body a crucial six to twelve inches. In my impatience to clear the bar, I botched the push-off. I turned over on my belly. This was my reentry. In the whitewashed stands, I could hear the laughing voices, feet shuffling over crumpled paper and scattered bottles, the high-pitched sounds of Eric Clapton’s guitar on someone’s radio. And there was Andy Zirna standing by to catch my pole. A vaulter should hold his center of gravity at the crossbar and not collapse his legs prematurely, making sure that his hips reach their maximum height. I began my descent with no margin of error. I let go of the pole, my arms flying up and away, and I pulled my legs back in an inverted pike position. I was kneeling in midair, like a pilgrim at the wall of prayer in Jerusalem. Andy Zirna screamed, “Push, push, push.” From his angle he could see that, even though I had sufficient height to clear the bar, my forward progress was waning. Less than one quarter of an inch was between the steel bar and my chest. I struggled to arch back farther but the crossbar was coming at my chin. Coach Tock, clipboard in hand, looked up and grimaced. The crossbar boinged and rattled and jumped twice on its metal pegs before following my body into the pit. I went down like Icarus — a humiliated young man, convinced of the frailty of the human condition. Andy’s parents were immigrants from Estonia. Mr. Zirna worked for General Motors on River Road. Andy was tall, strong, smart, and good-natured. With his giant strides, Andy’s approach to the box seemed to unfold in slow motion. The advantage of bulk and strength

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allowed him to use a larger pole. Andy’s higher handgrip, along with his weight advantage, also gave him significantly greater leverage. His pole recoiled with a vengeance, regularly launching him above 12 ft. I never tired of watching him, a Soviet cosmonaut in training. Track and field was a refuge for a loner like myself. I could find a fleeting sense of solace behind a uniform. Otherwise, high school seemed an appalling prank designed to torment teenagers. I didn’t know how I got there or how I might get away. Returning home did not offer much of a reprieve. There were other problems to face, such as my parents, who were noisy people. If my mother was not screeching at my father for his shortcomings, then my father was blasting Henry Mancini LPs on his brand-new RCA Victor record player — “Peter Gunn,” “The Pink Panther,” “The Days of Wine and Roses.” A giant mahogany cabinet, the new stereo ran the entire length of a basement wall, packing enough tubes and watts to blow a hole in the roof. It was too much for our house, a small, two-bedroom Cape, but my father liked to crank up the volume. My parents’ clamor drove me into the attic, where I holed up with my books in a dimly lit crawl space. It was while I was reading Herman Hesse’s Steppenwolf that I noticed my parents had begun a new form of noisemaking. My uncle Jim, an audiophile with an enthusiasm for electronics, had just purchased a reel-to-reel tape recorder. If I remember right, it was the Germanmade Uher 4200. Uncle Jim belonged to the cult of high fidelity. He was enamored of giant speakers and signal-to-noise ratios. Though small, the Uher 4200 was an expensive tape recorder, generally used in broadcast applications; it was manufactured in Munich and distributed by Martel Electronics in New York City, the first company to bring the foreign-made recorder to America. The product of European technology, the Uher had an obvious mystique. German audio engineers at AEG had invented magnetic recording in 1932 just as Hitler was rising to power and showed off their “Magnetophone” at the Berlin Radio Fair in 1935. The Nazis were the first to see the value of the new technology and a more portable version (called the Tonschreiber, or “sound writer”) was quickly put in the hands of the German Army by I. G. Farben. A student of the history of audio reproduction might be forgiven for thinking that Hitler seemed more captivated by magnetic recording than by A-bomb building.

Going Ballistic

My parents’ taste in music was indiscriminate. They liked to mix the high with the low, singing along with Ray Charles one moment and Giacomo Puccini the next. On Friday nights, Uncle Jim would set up his reel-to-reel tape recorder on top of my father’s pickle-barrel bar, which was festooned with Christmas lights at all times of the year, while Aunt Rita positioned a microphone and boom stand beside a stool. Surrounded by a garish red shag carpet and empty bottles of Molson Canadian lager beer, my mother took her place on the stool, leafing through a Mozart song sheet. My father would place an LP on his RCA; Uncle Jim sounded the countdown and then pressed the record button on his Uher. After a brief introduction — the two men liked to simulate a live radio broadcast — the volume was raised on the RCA as my operatic mother began belting out an aria from Don Giovanni. The sound was deafening, even from the attic, and the racket only worsened when my father cued up “Moon River,” triggering a chorus of voices (“Oh, dream maker, you heartbreaker”). After two sets, there was a station identification (“This is WKTI coming at you from scenic Tonawanda”) — my father always complied with Federal Communications Commission (FCC) regulations — followed by social commentary and other forms of prattle. By the time the talking-head segments rolled around, both my father and Uncle Jim were well-pickled, their efforts to appear broadcast-worthy growing more and more labored. Anyone loitering in the basement was likely to be corralled for an interview. “Apropos of the present-day climate, do you think that Sirhan Sirhan deserves the death penalty?” my father, mike in hand, asked his five-year-old nephew. I did not read a lot of books but what I read I read intensely. In the case of Steppenwolf, I should have suspected that identifying with Harry Haller, the middle-aged protagonist, was a bad omen. I should have been out and about. I could still hear Uncle Jim in the basement bragging about his new Uher as he rewound the night’s recording. Cursed with excellent hearing, I could make out the whir of the machine speeding backwards in time. At that very moment Nikita Khrushchev had begun dictating a two-hundred-hour memoir on his new Uher four-track recorder in Moscow, all thirty-nine reels of which would be transcribed and printed in English before appearing in Russian. Not to be outdone, Richard Nixon had begun recording memos and

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conversations inside the White House, hiding tiny lavalier microphones throughout the Oval Office. In all, Nixon would record twenty-eight hundred hours of tape. Soon, Nixon’s secretary Rose Mary Woods would push the record button on a Uher 5000, hoping to expunge 18½ minutes of a conversation between Nixon and Haldeman three days after the Watergate break-in. An erasure — the Urcut — that still haunts American memory. While Bell Aircraft was developing the Rascal cruise missile, North American Aviation and its Rocketdyne division were under contract to build a long-range surface-to-surface missile with a capacity to carry a nuclear warhead several thousand miles — the Navaho. With a propulsion system derived from the German rocket, the Navaho was a V-2 reincarnation, with wings and a much larger engine. Like Bell’s Rascal, North American Aviation’s Navaho was in development for ten years. The Navaho had a dismal test record, however. The first launch in 1956 floundered after a mere thirty seconds. This was followed by several subsequent flops. Another launch in 1957 ended in a blowout seconds after liftoff. What looked good on paper seemed fated to fail. The USAF cancelled the Navaho just a few weeks before the successful launch of a Russian ICBM, the R-7, carrying Sputnik into orbit. In all, the Navaho program cost seven hundred million dollars — seven billion in today’s dollars — but produced very little. In ten years’ time, the rocket was in the air for less than one hour, a record that considerably enhanced my mediocre pole-vaulting stats. Although the Navaho program did not pan out, the problems North American Aviation solved while developing a liquid-propellant booster engine large enough to send a nuclear warhead across the ocean cleared the way for the success not only of America’s first ICBM missile, the Atlas rocket, but also of the Jupiter and Thor Medium Range Missile programs. By 1955 the Eisenhower administration had committed big dollars to the Atlas Intercontinental Ballistic Missile program. Several high-level studies, including a Rand Corporation paper and the Killian Report, had just been released, putting pressure on Eisenhower to assign the highest priority to what only a few years before had been deemed a pipe dream: designing a rocket that could soar across the ocean with a three-thousand-pound nuclear warhead on top.

Going Ballistic

Urged on by a culture of mistrust, the United States had no choice but to take the production of large ballistic missiles seriously. The result, designed by von Braun and his German rocketeers, who by this time had been transferred from El Paso to Huntsville, was the Redstone missile. The Redstone was essentially a super V-2 rocket. It was the first viable ballistic missile in the Pentagon’s arsenal, with a mediumrange capacity of three hundred to five hundred miles and it would later come to play an important role in the space program. The Redstone’s engine was borrowed from the Navaho design. Later, the Redstone rocket would be converted to a Jupiter Medium Range Ballistic Missile, forty-five of which were deployed in Turkey and Italy. While the Jupiter’s inaccuracy was well documented, Khrushchev did not take kindly to forty-five nuclear-tipped rockets pointed at Moscow. A sleepy southern town that was transformed into “Rocket City” nearly overnight by the arrival of von Braun and his rocket team, Huntsville by 1960 was the fastest-growing urban area in America, thanks to the arms race and to Kennedy’s promise to put a man on the moon. Federal dollars were pouring in and large rockets were rolling out. Alabama was good to the rocketeers and there they acquired American citizenship. By 1955 von Braun was a U.S. citizen; two years later he made it onto the cover of Life. General Walter Dornberger was conspicuously absent from von Braun’s Alabama team. Dornberger, who had been the commander of the V-2 rocket program at Peenemünde and who had originally recruited von Braun, was arrested after the war and interned in England for two years. The British would have hung Dornberger as a war criminal but the commandant testified that he never intended to deploy the V-2 against civilians. That was the work of the SS, he said. With the help of von Braun, Dornberger emigrated to America in 1947, where he set up shop as a consultant on guided missiles for the Air Force. In 1950 he was recruited to work at Bell Aircraft in Buffalo, which had employed several other ex-Nazi rocket men. Was their past a secret, or did the local men whisper as the Germans walked down the hallways? I wonder. Did my father pass Dornberger in the parking lot when the rocketeer drove up in his Buick, pulling into the place marked Reserved for Management? The fact was that the U.S. war machine’s dependence on the knowhow of German rocket scientists prevented too close a look into their

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pasts. It was not until 1979, when a memoir by a survivor of the Dora prison camp at Nordhausen was released in America, that the story of the Mittelwerk V-2 complex provoked public outcry. It was estimated that thirty thousand prisoners, who had been forced to work seventy-two hours a week on the production of V-2 rockets, had died at Mittelwerk. Arthur Rudolph, who was the director of the subterranean complex, was a key member of von Braun’s Alabama rocket team and, as program manager of the Saturn 5 rocket used by the Apollo missions, was instrumental in helping to put a man on the moon. In 1984 Rudolph, now a national hero, was advised by the Justice Department that he could be tried for war crimes; soon after, he renounced his American citizenship and returned to Germany. While von Braun’s reputation was soaring in Huntsville, Oppenheimer was facing a Washington tribunal bent on revoking his topsecret Q clearance. Oppenheimer’s reservations about the wisdom of building H-bombs had antagonized high-ranking members of the Strategic Air Command. It didn’t help that Oppenheimer had a knack for offending influential people and had made several enemies in high places since becoming a postatomic celebrity. Lewis Strauss of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) was convinced that Oppenheimer was not only an arrogant smart-ass but a communist subversive to boot and he managed to convince important people that the scientist was a security risk. Oppenheimer’s timing was poor. The Pentagon was hell-bent on establishing a second Los Alamos, whether in Chicago with Teller’s fusion bomb, or at Groom Lake (“Area 51”), where Kelly Johnson tested the U-2 and other stealth aircraft, or at Livermore, where Ernest Lawrence obsessed over ever bigger cyclotrons, or in Huntsville. Los Alamos was an irresistible paradigm not only because of its history of success but also because it laid down the perfect formula for turning state-of-the-art science into cutting-edge technology that was useful on the battlefield. Implicitly, the Manhattan Project was the chosen model for waging the cold war. The rocket state was counting down and Oppenheimer was naïve to think he could delay the launch. Accused of disloyalty and of posing a security risk, the former director of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and former chair of the General Advisory Committee of the Atomic Energy Commission was charged with treason. Meanwhile, the FBI, which had kept its eye

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on Oppenheimer for several years, had begun illegally wiretapping his phone calls. Oppenheimer’s conversations with his lawyer were intercepted and passed along to the AEC prosecutor. The board knew Oppenheimer’s defense strategy before Oppenheimer himself did and so stayed a step ahead of him at every turn. In 1953 Oppenheimer had reflected on the increasing hazards of the cold war, which he feared would only get worse with the escalation of H-bombs. He warned that the famous atomic clock was ticking faster, drawing us closer to nuclear war with the Soviets. “ We may be likened to two scorpions in a bottle,” Oppenheimer said, “each capable of killing the other but only at the risk of his own life.” The Air Force brass wanted Oppenheimer out of Washington and they wanted him out fast. His metaphors were killing them. They were worse than bombs. William Borden, a Washington lawyer who had become obsessed with Oppenheimer, sent a letter to J. Edgar Hoover in November 1953. “Dear Mr. Hoover,” he wrote. “The purpose of this letter is to state my own exhaustively considered opinion, based upon years of study of the available classified evidence, that more probably than not J. Robert Oppenheimer is an agent of the Soviet Union.” Borden had collected a mountain of evidence against Oppenheimer, none of which was new, however, to Hoover’s eyes. That Oppenheimer had befriended Communists while at Berkeley in the 1930s was a wellknown fact. What made that knowledge suddenly look different was that by 1953 the McCarthy frenzy was inciting new levels of paranoia. Longtime opponents of Oppenheimer, like Strauss and Borden, suddenly found willing ears for their scurrilous rumors. President Eisenhower himself ordered that “a blank wall” be placed between Oppenheimer and the nation’s atomic secrets. The AEC held security hearings ostensibly to determine Oppenheimer’s fitness to keep his clearance but its real purpose seemed much darker. “I have rarely seen a case in which there was so much devastating derogatory information about the individual,” wrote Harold P. Green, a lawyer working for the AEC. After three weeks of bitter charges that Oppenheimer was a Russian spy, the Security Board revoked his clearance. During that time, the chain-smoking Oppenheimer sat nervously beside his lawyer, listening intently as the prosecution systematically defamed his once brilliant career.

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Oppenheimer had given everything to the Manhattan Project and now the government repudiated him. According to his friends, the hearings nearly killed him. The once charismatic director of the Manhattan Project seemed shrunken, saddened, and withdrawn. By the time von Braun had become head of NASA’s Marshall Space Flight Center, Oppenheimer was dying of cancer. The giant three-stage Saturn 5 rocket already had a record of success and the forty-billion-dollar Project Apollo was well on schedule — but the father of the A-bomb was in exile. The German-born rocketeers enjoyed a mystique that protected them from suspicion and kept them gainfully employed. V-2 rocketeer Dornberger stayed on as technical assistant to the president of Bell Aircraft in Buffalo long after my father had been sent packing and von Braun’s career was a spectacular success. “I never believed it could happen,” said von Braun just prior to the launch of Apollo 13 in 1969. The V-2 rocketeer had come a long way, from the Baltic Sea to the Marshall Space Flight center in Huntsville. His questionable past — was he really ignorant of slave labor at Nordhausen? — rarely proved incriminating. Even when fellow Peenemünder Arthur Rudolph was forced to return to Germany under suspicion of war crimes, von Braun was vigorously defended by Americans across the land. The media giant Henry Luce loved von Braun, who “best personified man’s accelerating drive to rise above the planet,” as Time magazine said of the missile man. Meanwhile Oppenheimer’s superficial ties to Communist friends in California haunted him throughout his career, and he was summarily defrocked by a kangaroo court. What was von Braun’s secret? What was Oppenheimer’s fatal flaw? In 1954 the atmosphere around Oppenheimer had been poisoned by his Washington enemies, mostly hawkish types within the Air Force and AEC in thrall with thermonuclear weaponry. Probably at no other time in American history would the paranoid charges brought against the physicist have been taken seriously. Nothing could save him now, however — not his charm, his eloquence, his celebrity; not his dreamy blue eyes. A decade and a half after Oppenheimer’s trial, I swung over the crossbar, dangling in midair. The cold war had reached its apogee. The nuclear forces that Los Alamos had hatched were now loose across the land. We hadn’t blown ourselves up yet but the Clock of

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Doom was still ticking. By 1968 America and Russia were well on their way to amassing more than seventy thousand nuclear warheads. Is it any wonder the nation was hypnotized by the Apollo Mission and the upcoming moon shot? Here at last was a way out, an exit to another world with no burning fuse. Ten, nine, eight . . . a different clock, a different trajectory. I was a persistent vaulter but I never could make that height, never could clear 11 ft. 6 in. My failure was unsettling. When we drove beneath overpasses, I took note of the truck warning — Clearance 13 ft. 6 in., the sign said — and tried to imagine jumping that high with my pole. But even in my imagination I crashed into concrete. It was the late sixties. We lived in a rocket culture. The urge to transcend was hardwired into our heads. In a few months, Neil Armstrong would walk on the moon. This offered me little consolation. I felt left out, as though I would be the last one to leave, stuck on the ground, waving good-bye to Andy Zirna.

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I

hated milk. Its whiteness was as appalling as its taste, immensely insipid. I drank it but only to neutralize my mother’s highalkaline red sauce. My aversion was not easy to maintain since I was up against a relentless marketing campaign sponsored by the dairy industry, government, schools, and doctors, who all promoted milk as an essential part of growing up. Without sufficient milk in your diet, they said, you were doomed to horrible growth disturbances like juvenile osteomalacia or, worse, to secondary skeletal deformities like cerebral palsy, bowlegs, or knock-knees. Four glasses a day or else. What saved me were Fizzies, those multicolored tablets that transformed an ordinary glass of water into an effervescent novelty. Whenever I felt the world closing in on me, I popped a little soda-flavored Fizzie into a tall glass and watched it carbonate like Bromo Seltzer. There were eight flavors to choose from, including Groov’N Grape and Rock’N Rootbeer. Ooz’N Orange (vitamin C-enriched) was especially ebullient and zestful, sunshine units that burst like tiny rockets. Milk was for babies — Fizzies were for real men. I was wrong about milk, it turns out. Milk was anything but dull. Milk, in fact, was hot. For nearly two decades, cows had been ingesting radioactive iodine deposited by nuclear debris on dairy farms across the country. A grim legacy of the Nevada testing program, large swaths of radioactive fallout traveled far beyond ground zero, moving across the land like an epidemic, touching nearly every state in the country. As cows and goats grazed in dirty pastures, iodine-131 contaminated their milk and concentrated in the thyroids of children. Who were these children? I am talking about my generation, baby boomers all, unsuspecting kids with hula hoops and brightly colored

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yo-yos, these days paranoid consumers of oat bran and organic apples but back then innocent guzzlers of America’s favorite drink. The milk crisis was but one incident in a much larger story, my favorite episode of which concerns a very bad movie and its sad outcome. Snow Canyon is hidden in the hills north of St. George, Utah, in an area of immense beauty bordered on the west by Red Mountain, a great mass of Navajo sandstone, and on the east by extinct volcanoes. Small settlements built by Mormon pioneers in the 1850s rim it. The land was hard and the winters were harsh but Mormons were famous for their ability to cope with severe challenges. In 1954 the director Dick Powell chose Snow Canyon as the location for his ill-fated film The Conqueror. Produced by Howard Hughes, the film tells the story of the great Mongol warrior Genghis Khan, played — improbably enough — by John Wayne. Susan Hayward — just as oddly — was cast as the Tartar woman of his dreams. Powell selected Snow Canyon for the Gobi Desert shots, and brought along large portable fans to stir up the desert sand, hoping to simulate wind-swept Mongolia for horseback-fighting scenes. Dust and dirt were continually whipped up during thirteen weeks of shooting. The food was covered with fine grit and so were the people. Management was so enamored of the effect that it shipped sixty tons of canyon sand back to Hollywood for retakes, which turned out to be a very bad idea. One year before the RKO film crew arrived in Utah, the UpshotKnothole nuclear detonations had rocked Yucca Flats in Nevada, a three-hour drive upwind of Snow Canyon. There were eleven blasts from March to June 1953, the largest of which was Shot Harry, nicknamed “Dirty Harry” for the enormous amount of radioactive debris it dispersed over southern Utah. Unsuspecting ranchers, shepherds, and their animals were blanketed by radioactive fallout. Dense pinkish clouds drifted over their grazing land, dropping radiant dust over mesas and valleys. Goats turned blue on the spot, sheep lost their wool, and weeks later ewes gave birth to bicephalic lambs. White-clad Atomic Energy Commission officials, Geiger counters in hand, monitored the St. George area with growing alarm. “This place is hotter than a twodollar pistol,” said one. According to readings, Utah’s downwind livestock had been exposed to thirty thousand rads (six hundred rads are

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considered fatal). Cedar City ranchers alone lost over four thousand sheep and lambs to Dirty Harry. Back in Washington, Atomic Energy Commission officials were frightened by the ghastly implications, but despite off-the-scale Geiger-counter readings, the AEC told Utah’s ranchers that their sheep had died of malnutrition. From 1951 to 1958, the government conducted 119 tests in all, worth several thousand kilotons — an enormous amount of nuclear debris to set in motion. That the government never issued warnings to nearby citizens moves the story of atom-bomb testing much closer to the theater of cruelty than to strategic policy. Radiation levels were constantly recorded, but even when they spiked, few countermeasures were taken. Instead, reassuring booklets were issued advising people to hose down their automobiles. Nuclear fallout consists of particles funneled upward like a cyclone, which are then pulverized and irradiated by the jumble of radioactive materials set loose in the blast. Bits of this hot debris may fall back to earth within minutes while large portions might stay airborne for days. Some fallout particles remain radioactive no longer than an hour or two but many have much longer half-lives. The highly radioactive uranium-235 has an appalling half-life of seven hundred million years. The most toxic isotope in this deadly mix, plutonium-239, has a halflife of twenty-four thousand years. It is estimated that over five metric tons of Pu-239, which does not exist in nature, have been released in the atmosphere after nearly fifty years of global testing. The Conqueror has been dismissed as one of the worst movies ever made but its notoriety lingers on. By 1980 nearly half of the 220person crew was either diagnosed with or had died from cancer, including Powell, Hayward, and Wayne. This is not counting the 300 Native Americans hired as extras for the horseback battle scenes. Something had gone very wrong. The government aggressively denied that radiation was to blame for the high incidence of cancer along the Nevada-Utah border. As far as the Department of Energy was concerned, the discovery of birth defects in Arizona, leukemia in Nevada, thyroid cancer in Utah did not prove a thing. People die, some more quickly than others. The government was prepared to wait out the downwinders, whom it cynically viewed as “a low-use segment of the population.” Despite the shocking evidence, it would be impossible in a legal sense to link any specific

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human death to radiation. “They bombed Utah and we’re paying the price,” said Elmer Pickett of St. George. “They done to us what the Russians couldn’t do.” A few years ago, the National Cancer Institute estimated that fallout from the Nevada testing program could very well trigger seventyfive thousand cases of thyroid cancer in the long run, a 20 percent increase above the national average. These numbers are startling and grossly exceed earlier government estimations. Those dutiful children who, with white mustaches on their upper lips, drank four glasses of milk per day may have received ten to twenty times the allowable exposure to radioactive iodine. Building and testing nuclear bombs during the cold war was a dirty and sometimes fatal business. What made an awful operation even worse was the government’s decades-long secrecy about atomic consequences, a policy that bordered on madness. As that secrecy unraveled in the 1990s, declassified documents revealed that matters were worse than anyone imagined. Not only were America’s nuclear bombmaking facilities (there are over fifty sites) declared contaminated “in perpetuity” but Americans everywhere (not just in southwestern Utah) were at risk from years of bomb-making and testing. We were all downwinders. That point would be demonstrated by my own parents, innocently settling into married life back in Buffalo. While Powell was framing shots in a contaminated canyon, my father was about to rent a house next to a top-secret uranium refining complex, with results that, while not quite as dire as the deaths by cancer of Powell’s actors, nonetheless would raise doubts about his choice of real estate. Two Mile Creek runs across the northern border of Buffalo and through the moist lowlands of Tonawanda, past the former Western Electric plant and Linde Ceramics. It winds through Sheridan Park Golf Course and then empties itself into the fast-moving waters of the Niagara River. On the northern side of the creek, Queen Anne’s Lace, cattails, pin oak, sweet gale, and low-growing shrubs flourish. If you are lucky, you can see a northern shrike overhead monitoring the banks for small mammals. The area to the south tells a different story. This once heavily industrialized area today is a bleak wasteland of abandoned buildings, concrete slabs, and rusted barrels, disturbed only by intermittent excavation. A fatal air hangs over the site.

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Eerie warning signs are posted with anxious regularity on the fenced-in perimeter. Sheds and warehouses in full decay tilt towards the river. The only straight lines are the Conrail tracks behind Linde Ceramics. Sheridan Parkside, the low-income housing project where I spent the first three years of my life, was a quarter of a mile from Linde Ceramics. Inspired by the green space of the golf course beside it, the Parkside developers borrowed from nineteenth-century novelists and poets to cast a pastoral glow over an area that was otherwise drab and dreary. We lived on Hardy Court, halfway between Thoreau and Shelley. Two blocks over were streets named after Thackeray, Twain, and Longfellow, all just around the corner from Browning. The project came to an abrupt halt at Dickens Avenue, a stone’s throw from Linde Ceramics. I have no memory of scooping pollywogs out of the polychromatic waters of Two Mile Creek and that is probably a good thing. The creek was unsafe, though no one knew that until much later, when the story of Love Canal broke in 1978. Ten miles north of us, Love Canal had been built in 1892 as a way for ships plying Lake Erie to bypass the falls a few miles downstream. The canal fell into disuse, however, and was purchased by the Hooker Chemical Company in 1920. After fifty years of unregulated dumping, Love Canal became a festering trench oozing a thick oily leachate into streets and storm sewers. This transformation was disastrous for a neighborhood comprised of more than eight hundred homes and three elementary schools. There were dogs with burned noses, rocks that exploded, children who scorched their feet at play in yards. It was southern Utah all over again, a few miles short of the Canadian border. By the time Jane Fonda and Tom Hayden arrived in town, eyewitness allegations had traced the dumping of toxic waste at Love Canal all the way back to the beginning of the Manhattan Project. From 1942 to 1953 forty-two million pounds of hazardous waste found its way into the canal. For this, the Hooker Chemical Company — which manufactured various pesticides and chlorinated by-products, including DDT, Mirex, PVC, and PCBs — was largely but not solely to blame. Hooker’s chemical proficiency made it a key player in developing the atom bomb. The company was under contract to produce hexafluoroxylene, which was sent by train to Oak Ridge, and to process uranium slag. Liquid waste from the refining process flowed

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into Love Canal along with a multitude of other chemicals, including lindane, benzene, toluene, chloroform, trichloroethylene, tetrachlorethylene, hexane, xylenes, and cesium-137. In the final count, nearly four hundred different chemicals were identified in Love Canal and over half of the chemicals inventoried were so exotic they didn’t show up in existing toxicology data. Some residents testified that, at night, the canal would blow up. Following the explosion, it was said, balls of fire and steam would rise from the water, hovering in midair like poltergeists. Though at first spooked by these strange eruptions, neighbors eventually got used to the fireballs and minor detonations. In the years following the Love Canal catastrophe, radiological surveys uncovered an enormous and lethal network of hazardous waste sites in the region. One of the most dangerous turned out to be Linde Ceramics, just down the street from us. An amalgam of two- and three-story buildings situated on a hundred acres of land, Linde Ceramics was bordered by small businesses, a park, Two Mile Creek, and railroad tracks. There was something eerie about the place. Like Egdon Heath, it was a wild and forsaken place. For its size, Linde played an unusually large role in the Manhattan Project, handling “source materials” during the production of the first A-bomb, by converting domestic and highly concentrated Belgian ores into uranium tetrafluoride. This work was exceptionally toxic. Belgian pitchblende was so radioactive that in the places where it was mined in Africa legends emerged about its rare properties. It was said that “ghost warriors” spread the radium-rich dirt on their faces to glow in the dark, intimidating rival tribes. The volume of chemical and organic waste generated by the milling of uranium from crude ore at Linde was vast. Because uranium is naturally present in pitchblende at an average of only two parts per million, huge quantities must be crushed and chemically processed with acids in order to dissolve out the uranium. The refining process required a continuous cycle of solvent extractions and chemical conversions before the uranium reached weapons-grade strength. The crushed ore was first leached with sulfuric acid to release the uranium oxide, which was in turn washed several more times by various acids before conversion into a powdery green salt, uranium tetrafluoride. This was

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sent to the Electrometallurgical Company in Niagara Falls for further processing into uranium metal, which was then shipped to Oak Ridge for the final stage of purification in this unholy alchemy. Waiting at the end of the line in Los Alamos were Oppenheimer and his crew of scientists. The final destination was Hiroshima. Manhattan Project officials exerted relentless pressure on Linde to produce large amounts of uranium tetrafluoride, knowing full well that plans to dispose of hazardous waste in underground wells and local drainage systems would permanently contaminate the area. It wasn’t long before local officials noticed that the absurdly concentrated alkaline waste from the Ceramics Plant was destroying the bacteria essential to the sewage treatment plant’s function. But with so much effluent waste and nowhere to take it, Linde simply continued dumping into wells and storm sewers. The extent of groundwater contamination remains unknown to this day and many fear that the aquifer is now toxic. A few years ago my mother received a letter from the New York State Department of Health. “Dear Concerned Town of Tonawanda Resident,” it began. “As you may have read recently, a preliminary study conducted by the New York DOH was released in response to community concerns about radioactive contamination from the former Linde site in the Town of Tonawanda.” Radiation in Tonawanda? This was news to my mother, who thought she was living in leafy suburbia. “The preliminary study found that the total number of residents with cancer, both men and women, is higher than expected. This includes cancers linked with radiation exposure, colorectal cancer in men and colorectal, breast, and thyroid cancers in women.” One thing missing from this list was the malaise that had snuck up on my father at about the same time as the Love Canal disaster was happening, just months after he had passed the Civil Service exam that would let him trade in his failing dry-cleaning business for the steady paycheck of a postal worker. As he started to walk his routes, the mail sack suddenly seemed heavy, too heavy. He fumbled to open mailbox doors and faltered while climbing porch steps. Surely this wasn’t normal, wasn’t part of the learning curve of all mailmen. My father was tired and scared, very scared. On a visit home to Tonawanda years later, I dreamt one night of my father. He was lurking like a thief at the top of a staircase, all in

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black from head to toe, looking down as he squeezed his hands into tight-fitting leather gloves. His body was lean and spry, unaffected by the degenerative disease that had for so long bedeviled him. He was black as pitchblende, a shadow in the night, secretly infiltrating his own home. Long after I said my good-byes the next morning, the dark image stayed with me, haunting my memory as I drove away from Buffalo. I was following the lake-effect clouds eastward, along the old barge canal, towards Washington, D.C. It was a dull Sunday afternoon. The traffic was heavy on the Interstate, a steady drizzle falling on the spindly, leafless trees. I drove past Rochester and Henrietta. In the distance I could make out the defunct locks of the Erie Canal. Large crows perched on sagging phone lines. The canal once passed through farmlands and small towns like a picturesque stream. Passengers sat atop crowded packet boats destined for Buffalo, reading newspapers and romances, pulled along at four miles per hour by tow horses and mules. For eight dollars, they traveled 250 miles from the Hudson River to Lake Erie. Theirs was a tedious journey but it was a fast ride in my Honda Prelude to Syracuse and then down I-81 to Binghamton, through small towns with big names — Tyre, Egypt, Macedon, Palmyra, Montezuma, Memphis, Marathon, Ithaca, Homer, Virgil, and Nineveh — shadows of storybook wars and legendary conquests. The dream about my father stayed with me as I drove into Pennsylvania. Over dinner the night before, my father had talked of his war years, what he did while holed up in the Philippines. He spoke in broken sentences, emphasizing nouns, omitting verbs. “Manila . . . the Japs in caves . . . a Browning Automatic . . . Luzon . . . Okinawa . . . boat drop. I didn’t want to shoot anyone.” The effort to communicate agitated him. He flopped around in his chair. The Browning Automatic issued to him was too heavy. He was young and skinny, no match for a big gun. They landed on the beachhead under heavy artillery fire. He raised the Browning Automatic over his head like a barbell, pushing through five feet of seawater. “I got on the beach and found a hole. Bullets flying overhead. It’s a wonder I’m alive.” His illness squeezed the words out of him, past a throat and tongue no longer able to do his bidding. The neuron is the functional unit of the brain. Information comes to it, in the shape of electrical impulses, through its dendrites. The im-

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pulse passes through the neuron’s cell body and out its axon to other neurons. Nerve cells need certain chemicals to make this intricate circuitry function properly. These chemicals, called neurotransmitters, provide the connection between the axon of one neuron and the dendrite of another. Neurotransmitters, the Roeblings of the brain, allow electrical impulses to pass from one cell to another. When they fail, traffic comes to a halt. In March 1979, the Government Accounting Office released a report warning of radiation disasters waiting to happen around military and commercial nuclear facilities. The report recommended that evacuation plans be undertaken to protect the public from the consequences of a serious accident. The GAO warning coincided with the release of the political thriller The China Syndrome, a film about a fictional nuclear power plant whose core reactor overheats and nearly melts down. Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas starred in the movie as broadcast news reporters who stumble on the meltdown while covering a routine story. Less than two weeks after the debut of The China Syndrome, the reactor core at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant on the Susquehanna River began to overheat — more than a hundred alarms were set off simultaneously — and quickly reached 4,300 degrees Fahrenheit, a partial meltdown. During the five-day-long crisis, which took place a few miles from where my sister was awaiting the birth of her first child, an unknown quantity of radioactive steam escaped into the air and river. Oddly enough, the film appeared to predict a nuclear accident that, according to a growing number of critics, was waiting to happen. The partial meltdown at Three Mile Island, the most serious nuclear accident in U.S. history, set off a wave of public doubt about the future of atomic energy. The stock of Columbia Pictures — the studio that produced The China Syndrome — went up and Jane Fonda hit the road crusading against the nuclear industry. Alarmed by these developments, Edward Teller began campaigning against environmentalists and antinuclear critics. The perennial champion of all things nuclear was slowed only by a heart attack in May of that year. But the indefatigable Teller bounced back in late July with a two-page spread in the Wall Street Journal whose headline read: I WAS THE ONLY VICTIM OF THREE MILE ISLAND. In the article, paid for by Dresser Industries (the hapless firm that had manufactured one of the defective valves

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at TMI), Teller once more proclaimed that nuclear power was a safe and clean way to produce energy. He also blamed his heart attack on Jane Fonda. “I was the only one whose health was affected by the accident at Three Mile Island,” Teller told reporters. “But it wasn’t the fault of the reactor. It was Jane Fonda,” he said. “Reactors are not dangerous.” When he was first diagnosed with Parkinson’s, my father had a blood test and an EEG. Portions of his head were shaved and small electrodes were attached to his scalp with a creamy glue. An electroencephalograph typically measures the minute oscillating currents produced by the brain. A high-gain amplifier boosts the current, allowing the recording of brain waves as a continuous drawing on a paper strip. The neurologist was looking for traces of epilepsy or a past history of injury or trauma. Next came the CAT scan. My father’s head was placed inside a narrow tube as a detector whirled on a gantry above his eyes, making several hundred readings of his brain’s internal structure, and then rotated beside his ear, taking multiple samples. The readings were fed into a computer, which calculated the intensity of the radiation at hundreds of points inside his head. The computer hummed as an image of my father’s brain appeared on a television screen. I was as far away as possible when my father was diagnosed with Parkinson’s disease, having gone off to school in Oregon, unconsciously moved perhaps by a desire to flee an environmental disaster in the making. As his disease progressed, I developed a clinical interest in the structure of the brain. In the university library in Eugene, I interrupted my study of Blake’s burning tiger to read books about neurotransmitters and cell deficiencies. I gazed at glossy photos of ganglions. I even purchased a plastic model of the brain. I learned about Broca’s area — a particular region of the brain regulating the muscles of the face, tongue, jaw, and throat — and about the hypothalamus, which controls the entire endocrine system, delivering information about temperature, salt concentration, thyroid secretion, activity in the gonads. The language of the brain was exotic — precentral gyrus, occipital lobe, the pons, venous sinus, choroid plexus, myelin sheath, astrocytes, basal ganglia — and I was hypnotized. The countless lobes, chords, boneless cavities, the sinuous system of folds. Much of this complexity relates to motion, defining how the body

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maneuvers in space. In a healthy brain the substantia nigra makes possible the self-regulation of the body. But in a person afflicted with Parkinson’s, the body no longer knows what it’s doing since a vital portion of the brain has lost contact with the motor and sensory cerebral cortices. The body loses its self-awareness. It can’t visualize itself, so to speak, and the Parkinsonian patient can no longer command his actions. I have seen my father tremble wildly and then rise from his chair but remain absolutely fixed in space. James Parkinson, who first diagnosed this disorder in 1817, called it the “shaking palsy.” My mother called me one night with news of my father. Sitting down on a homemade sofa in the house on the northwest coast that I shared with a back-to-earth couple who insisted that we compost our own wastes, I listened to my mother recount from three thousand miles away the latest fiasco. My father was carrying his upright bass from one room to another down in the basement without thinking. When he stumbled over the doorjamb, he fell hard, on top of his bass. He was okay, my mother said, no broken bones but he smashed his bass to smithereens. My father had stopped playing years before, when the spirit went out of him and the tremors settled in. Now his right arm swung up and down like a conductor’s baton. His left hand pointed at unseen presences. He was prone to launching himself out of his chair and into a stiff walk. Physicians call this bradykinesia, “slow motion.” As Parkinson’s freezes the muscles, slows the diaphragm, puts nerves to sleep, shuts the body inexorably down, with malicious inconsistency it propels its victims into feverish action. I keep the bass’s bridge as a memento on my shelf, where it stands next to a dictionary of medical terms. With Parkinson’s, the real troublemaker is dopamine. Dopamine is produced in the darkly pigmented cells of the substantia nigra, then transmitted to the striatum, where it allows the complex computations of body movement to take place. My mother monitored my father to see if his dentures were in place. In agitated phone calls she told me about the funny grimaces he made while talking, as if his mouth were caving in. It’s nearly impossible for someone with Parkinson’s disease to carry on a coherent conversation. No one ever talked about fallout when I was growing up. That and adolescent sexuality were off-limits. Radioactivity works in unseen ways — no one has ever observed the disintegrations of a beta

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ray — but its invisibility does not lessen its damage. Before uranium238 reaches stability as nonradioactive lead-206, it will transform itself into fifteen different elements, including radioactive thorium, protactinium, and polonium. At each turn, it releases ionizing radiation capable of destabilizing anything within reach. Since ionizing radiation knocks electrons out of the orbits of neighboring atoms, it can shatter chemical bonds and disturb an organism’s metabolism and hormonal action. Cancer is not the only disaster set off by radiation. An agent of cellular disruption, radiation can trigger any number of problems, including neurological woes, especially in people with an inherent propensity towards this or that disorder. Throughout the cold war, the AEC upheld the fiction that only excessive doses of high-level radiation were hazardous for life. If you happened to be at or near ground zero during a nuclear blast, then (and only then) were you in trouble. Otherwise there was very little to worry about. In 1972, however, a Canadian biophysicist named Abram Petkau found that extremely low doses of radiation were far more damaging to living tissues than were high doses. Dubbed the “Petkau Effect,” the new theory explained how prolonged exposure to small amounts of radioactive substances can collapse cell membranes almost immediately by leaving cells vulnerable to damage by free radicals, which go about their nasty business far more efficiently in fewer numbers. Petkau discovered that the more chronic the exposure to radiation, in any form, the smaller the dose required to wreak havoc on cell life. The Petkau Effect flew in the face of the AEC’s radiation dose estimates and so the agency suppressed the new information. But the rise in childhood leukemia and thyroid cancer following years of nuclear testing, along with the high incidence of cancer deaths in young adults, proved just how fatally misleading government information about radiation standards was during the cold war. By the end of the twentieth century, the AEC had long been defunct but the numbers of victims of fallout and low-level radiation exposure continued to rise. Worse, the list of hazardous radioactive sites scattered across America kept growing as Hazel O’Leary’s efforts to disclose the government’s atomic secrets moved forward. Stage eight or nine of Parkinson’s is when you start falling, my father would say, tracking his own deterioration. When you fall, you

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don’t try to get up right away. When you get up, you start falling again. It becomes a terrible situation. In a healthy brain, the substantia nigra produces enough dopamine to allow the striatum to perform its complicated activities. But in the brain of a Parkinsonian, the striatum does not receive enough dopamine to fuel the millions of synaptic transmissions needed to create smooth, continuous movement or to maintain proper posture or muscle tone. My father had a history of falls. Dislocated shoulder, deep gash above the elbow on his right arm, multiple bumps and bruises to the head from encounters with the corners of cupboards. My father spent many an afternoon listening to a Christian dietitian on TV and organizing his cloth travel bag — sunglasses, pills, loose change for poker, a plastic urinal. It was important to him to arrange the items in his cloth bag; his obsessive activity was a temporary stay against the confusion of unstructured time all around him. Is it Wednesday or Sunday? he asked. Dopamine-producing cells project up past the striatum into the frontal lobes of the cerebral cortex where most of the memory, sensory, and thinking areas of the brain are found. Some scientists believe that schizophrenia and other mental illnesses may be caused by an excess of dopamine in this region. Often the drugs designed to replace the lost dopamine cause hallucinations and other mental disturbances, and can result in symptoms that resemble schizophrenia. When he walked, my father leaned forward and dropped his right shoulder. The classic Parkinson’s shuffle, as though he were marching to his own execution, a slave of nature, of the body that no longer behaved predictably. He was frightened by what lay ahead for him. “If I could sum up aging in one word, it would be absorption,” said a voice on the television. “ We’re getting 2.2 billion pounds of pesticide poured into our food sources.” There is something oddly robotic about those who suffer from Parkinson’s disease. My father possessed as many moving parts as a linotype machine, his right hand fidgeting on the table, adjusting the tablecloth, his left hand behind his neck, waving to someone who wasn’t there. “You’re a lucky man,” his doctor told him. “Most people don’t respond that well to medication.” My father shaved in the kitchen, tapping his left leg to the beat of big band jazz on the radio.

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There was a hole in the screen of his electric razor, covered by a small piece of duct tape. Few problems in his universe could not be remedied by duct tape. The moment I arrived for a visit, after driving my Mercury Marauder through an endless succession of rest stops, across Montana, Iowa, and Ohio, my father began polishing his golf clubs, the chrome shafts of the irons glistening in the sunlight. Hungry and road-weary, I would lace my sneakers and grab an apple while he filled his pillbox. There were any number of public courses to choose from but we usually drove to Sheridan Park Golf Course next to Linde Ceramics, teeing off within a nine-iron shot of nuclear sludge. What golf requires of the body is astonishing, a paradox of force at rest, shoulders square, left heel firmly planted, knees flexed, grip loose, and then the artful twisting of hips, the torque of the upper torso, the unwinding of arms, the stillness of feet. It isn’t a sport made for a Parkinsonian. I remember one hole in particular. The distance to the green was some 160 yards but the lie was downhill. Steeply downhill. My father didn’t like that. He grabbed a four iron out of his bag, then changed his mind, replacing it with a three wood. Downhill lies are treacherous. The trick is to stroke the ball cleanly and leave the turf behind. It’s much easier said than done. I’ve never managed a downhill shot without pitching clumps of dirt. Woods are longer than irons and with the ground coming up at you fast it requires remarkable finesse to make a level shot. I tried to talk my father out of the three wood — the odds were against him — but he was determined to reach the green in two. The laws of physics are unforgiving. My father approached the ball with evident misgiving. He leaned heavily on his right heel, adjusting to the radical slope of his lie, took two practice swings, and then tried to crash the ball as if he were twenty-five and had a surplus of highquality dopamine. It was not meant to be. His knees locked, his right shoulder dipped, his elbow buckled. As the wood dug into the turf, a fat lump of sod flew off to the right. Reaching down into distant memory, my father put everything into his swing — it was all or nothing — but the ball trickled forward only twenty feet. He had botched the shot. The shock went straight up his spine, throwing him so badly off balance that he tumbled to the grass. Much to my horror, he be-

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gan rolling down the hill. “Dad!” I yelled, “wait!” My father had the stunned look of a boater who had ventured too close to Niagara Falls. I ran after him. My father’s symptoms had a disruptive effect on everyone around him. My mother had the worst of it, leaving the house each morning for her job wondering what mischief my father would get into while she was dealing with impatient customers at the bank. Would this be the day he would forget to turn off the tap and flood the kitchen again or would she return to find him flat on his back, lying where he’d fallen four hours ago, unable to get up? My sister and I were by then both living on our own, buffered by distance from my father’s daily struggles and spared the pain of watching his decline. On visits, it took me a full day to adjust to his strange motions. I sometimes found myself unconsciously mimicking his tremors as though I were tuning my instrument in his key. His head was a metronome, turning left and then right, saying no repeatedly, a sign unrelated to anything present, as though his body were quarreling on its own against an unknown foe. He said no over and over again, without uttering a word. He was the word and the word was in him and the word said no over and over again. His head snapped left and right in constant denial. I often thought back to when my father was healthy. Even then he was impulsive and restless. He didn’t understand the basic laws of causality, that life was rife with consequences. It’s strange how the old complaints come back, the tedious objections of the son. The truth was, as I moved further into my own adulthood, I had begun to feel identical to my father, as though I might turn into him. I can impersonate my father perfectly. I do this alone before the mirror, stretching the muscles in my face wide and hard, biting down on my molars, treating my jaw like a piece of clay, until I match the tortured smile on his face. I have become my father. It’s frightening. I recall once asking for the keys to our Pontiac Catalina. It was a warm day late in June and my adolescent libido was acting up. My father, with the shadow of Parkinson’s not yet upon him, wore a white T-shirt and beige cotton trousers as he watered the grass in the backyard with a garden hose. It was a nightly ritual. We had just finished dinner, pork chops and mashed potatoes. I wanted to drive across the

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river to Canada. It was where everyone went on weekends; there were lots of girls there. I asked my father for the car. The answer was no. Fathers often said no back then and it was no secret that they took pleasure in denial. I didn’t know anyone who liked his dad. There was Jim B. on Highland Avenue joking about his father who ran an auto repair shop on Military Road in a burned-out industrial neighborhood just north of the city, a short and stocky man with rough and greasy hands who cursed from nine to five. Behind the cavernous garage stood a tall stack of rusty mufflers and exhaust pipes, and off to the right lay a row of wrecked autos, their insides stripped away. Just about everywhere you looked there was a deep pothole and the whole yard was enclosed in barbed wire. Jim majored in business at college, determined to move beyond the world of his father, beyond body repair and auto mechanics. Then there was Dave C. on Glenalby, whose father was a dentist. Dave’s older brothers were both career military types, sober fellows with crew cuts who never cracked a smile. When his mother, a woman with a strong arm, urged him to follow in his father’s footsteps, Dave resisted and got into trouble with the cops as if to show us that he was no toady. At college he majored in anthropology, dreaming of travel and adventure. Rarely are young men faithful to their intentions. Before Jim even finished his final semester, he had bought a used tow truck, a real clunker, and joined forces with his dad. Dave, meanwhile, gave up on Borneo and applied for dental school even though that meant enrolling in organic chemistry. The last I heard he was working for the Air Force. As for myself, I went through college without a plan, having no sense of the future. After graduation, I somehow wound up in the state of Oregon. It was an act of utmost improbability. On the far side of the continent, Oregon was as far as you could get from the flatlands of New York, separated from my hometown by vast mountain ranges and three time zones, by immense plains and forests and redrock deserts. In the distant Northwest, I hoped, I would escape biological destiny. Acts of will, though, have a way of turning against you. The more distance I put between my father and myself, the closer I got to him in some inscrutable way. The whole thing seemed rigged, as if I had been ambushed genetically. My father was no better, no worse than anyone else’s. He was a

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man with a high school education who served time in World War II, played an upright bass and sang in a band, and, aside from his eight years of cold war work at Bell Aircraft, got by running a dry-cleaning business. The youngest of five brothers, he grew up on the east side of Buffalo in a wood frame house in a German neighborhood. The old house still stands though the street is run-down. My grandfather was a stern man who brewed his own beer and painted houses; my grandmother played the piano. His brothers are all dead now, Bucky, Jim, Ed, and Dan. His sister, Dorothy, died in a car wreck in 1966. My grandparents were gone before I was born. Old black-and-white photos of my father in his teens and early twenties made me uneasy as a kid. He didn’t look like a father. He was too slick, as though he had something else going on. In a high school picture — School 23, Class of 1936 — he is standing among the older boys in the rear row. Like the others, he sports a necktie and his hair is carefully combed. He is also wearing suspenders and his tie has been fashioned in a tight knot. Most of the boys seem young and innocent but on his face there is a hip, tough-guy look. His head tilted at a cocky angle, he resembles a gangster. A few years later, in another photo, he is posing with his sister Dorothy, his mother, and his brother Ed, who is in uniform. My father is dressed in a swanky double-breasted suit and shiny shoes. He holds a cigarette in his right hand. He is handsome and unmistakably cool. In another picture, he sits on the rear bumper of a 1934 Chevrolet. It’s a mild, early spring day. He is wearing an army shirt. His hands rest on his knees, a halfsmoked cigarette dangling between his fingers. There is a dark circle under his left eye, a trace of some sort. My father dressed fastidiously, often wearing expensive Kleinhans suits and shoes. He cultivated the big band look popular in the forties, auspicious, on the move. He listened to Dizzy Gillespie and Charles Mingus on the radio and from time to time traveled with a jazz band to New York City for weekend engagements. He often performed at a big club on Delaware Avenue where Broadway-style dancing girls processed down the aisles and where the musicians all wore tuxedos. My father bought his first bass for $158 in 1936 at Denton, Kadear, and Daniel’s on Chippewa Street near City Hall. It was an American standard bass built in Cleveland in 1935. He bought it on a whim, without knowing how to play. After dropping out of high school, he

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worked at Doc Johnson’s drugstore at the soda counter and took bass lessons from the third bassist in the Buffalo Philharmonic. He said I was a natural, my father told me. Years later, my father claimed his greatest thrill was buying that bass. His brother asked, what are you going to do with that thing? I’m going to play it, he said. I am home on a visit again, this time from a job at a university in D.C., where Edward Teller is campaigning for a new weapons system. Outside, it is in the low thirties and snowing lightly. March 22. One day into spring. The mayor of Buffalo, Tony Masiello, is kicking off the second annual Buffalo in Bloom gardening contest. “Buffalo is a lot more than bricks and mortar,” the mayor says optimistically, hoping to bolster civic pride and promote the use of flowers, trees, and shrubs. “The best part of Buffalo is its heart and soul,” the mayor says. When I was a freshman at Canisius College, Tony Masiello was a senior. I had arrived in D.C. around the time that Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), popularly known as “Star Wars,” was at the height of its controversy. It seemed like a bleak time to live in the nation’s capital but what could I do? At least I was now lecturing where Edward Teller once worked. Teller had come to George Washington University in 1935, when he was recruited by the Russian émigré scientist George Gamow. Their collaboration on quantum mechanics would result in new rules for classifying subatomic particle behavior in radioactive decay. Teller left for Los Alamos in 1945 and several years later moved to Livermore at Berkeley where he resumed his ten-year obsession with building the hydrogen bomb. Forty years later, Teller was back in Washington advocating Star Wars, a program aimed at defending the nation against the weapons he had earlier helped to design. Teller sold SDI to Reagan by arguing that the Russians had more thermonuclear weapons than America did and intended to use them. “Nuclear war is for me a real possibility and has been for the last forty years,” he said in an interview with Forbes magazine in 1980. “If we went into a nuclear war today, there is practically no question that the Russians would win that war and the United States would not exist.” Teller’s vision of a nuclear-powered laser gun orbiting the planet — a bit like the Death Star of George Lucas — had so tickled the president’s fancy that the Hungarian-born physicist soon became the most influential science adviser in the Reagan administration. By the time

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I came to Washington, the administration had raised its funding for Livermore research on SDI to over half a billion dollars. Teller, like Oppenheimer and Ernest Lawrence before him, hopscotched back and forth between California and Washington, lecturing on x-ray lasers and lobbying hard for the SDI program, which he considered to be his brainchild. The H-bomb all over again. It was the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi who in 1941 first introduced Teller to the idea of a hydrogen bomb. Triggering an A-bomb, Fermi had speculated, might possibly heat up a large enough mass of deuterium to set off a thermonuclear reaction. Teller became so gripped by the notion of a “superbomb” he could think of nothing else while working for the Manhattan Project. At Los Alamos, Oppenheimer tried to humor Teller — tried to convince him that of all the émigrés in New Mexico he, Teller, had the biggest brain — but was forced instead to recruit additional physicists to do the work that the beetle-browed Teller ignored. After the war Teller pushed for the H-bomb and for a new weapons lab. Luck was on his side. By 1954 thermonuclear bombs had become a sinister reality and were multiplying like mushrooms while Teller’s own Livermore Lab was competing against Los Alamos for nuclear dollars. As Kennedy took office in 1961, blessed with a stockpile of eighteen thousand nuclear bombs (compared to the Russians’ two thousand), Teller nevertheless continued to grumble about U.S. vulnerability. He would never be content. Teller’s real fear, the biographers say, was not the Russians but a test-ban treaty. He was afraid that the new administration, moved by a spirit of détente, would halt weapons development, which for him would be an absolute nightmare. It is a chilly, partly sunny Sunday morning in Tonawanda, a week shy of Easter. There are patches of ice in the shaded corners of the yard. The juniper trees are a dull rusty green, taking on the qualities of corroded metal. The churches on my parents’ street have full parking lots. My father is listening to Buddy Rich big band recordings on the radio. “If it ain’t got that swing, it don’t mean a thing,” one of the crooners says. My father is modeling his hats for me. He tries on his favorite, a blue cotton flat cap. He circles the living room and then stands before a mirror, pleased with his image. He lunges into his bedroom, returning with a brown-and-black checked golf cap. “It’s a Newport,” my father says, “genuine merino felt.” Joe Williams is sing-

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ing “Memories of You.” My father says, “I used to like Joe Williams but he doesn’t sing worth shit anymore.” That’s probably not true but I don’t argue the point. Since his latest episode with pneumonia, my father keeps spare oxygen tanks in his bedroom. In the war my father shipped out from Fort Ord, California, with five thousand troops headed for Guam. Manila was occupied by the Japanese. My father landed on the beach with a Browning Automatic rifle. You could knock a house down with that sonofabitch, my father liked to say. Hit a guy and split him right in half. The water was four feet deep when the troops came off the landing barges. With their helmets, ammo belts, and heavy guns, if they slipped in the water they were done for. Fighting went on for five days. My father wanted to get rid of that goddamn rifle with its fifty-caliber shells: that’s the first thing the enemy zeroes in on, the big flash of the Browning. After about a month, they relieved my father of his duty, giving the gun to a bigger man and sending him to Luzon, an uninhabited tropical island. That’s where he caught malaria and was sick, sick as a dog. Forty years later, the government was to feed my father again, underwriting shipments of protein-in-a-can through the local Veterans Administration Hospital. The VA sent three cases of Ensure a month, free of charge. My father made an Ensure shake for his breakfast each day. I watched him take out a tray of ice cubes, run the water, and place two boxes of Instant Carnation Breakfast on the table. He peeled the label off a can of Ensure to show me its nutritional content. When you have Parkinson’s, it’s hard to eat because you can’t swallow right. The esophagus stops working. It’s like an elevator, my father tells me, it takes things up and down. You gotta learn how to swallow all over again. If you’re taking pills, you’ve gotta watch what you’re doing. Watch for choking. Any food will do this. It lodges in your throat and you can’t get air. One Friday evening on my way home from teaching I stopped by Kramer Books in Dupont Circle. At the Dupont subway stop I climbed the steep escalator, which had stalled once again. I reached the surface exhausted and light-headed. It was a relief to be above ground. Just then, a black limousine came to a halt in the traffic circle. It was late September and damp. A young man in a floppy raincoat, probably a staffer, ran from the car to a street-side vending machine to fetch a newspaper. The limousine door was left open and inside I

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could see an old man with bushy eyebrows. Surely that wasn’t Edward Teller — or was it? I fought off an impulse to step inside the limo and turned away dizzy with imaginings. Darth Vader himself, maybe, just a few feet away, hustling on behalf of yet another weapons system. My father gave up playing his bass when he got the diagnosis. The doctor advised him to continue with his music but my father quit. He was self-conscious. These days, he listens to the music he once played. Frank Sinatra’s voice carries through the window. An old Sinatra, forcing his songs. Whatever caused its destruction, my father’s dopamine was gone and now chemical substitutes filled in for the missing neurotransmitter: Docusate sodium, 100 mg per day; Levothyroxine, 1 mg; Carbidopa Levodopa, take two at eight a.m., one and a half at noon, one at four, and one at eight p.m.; Amitriptyline, 50 mg at bedtime; Fosinopril, 10 mg; Elavil, 50 mg. My father takes his own blood pressure. On his arms, innumerable scars and pits, a map of accidents and mishaps charting the course of his disease. There are traces everywhere, as if the cold war can no longer keep its secrets. The Nevada Test Site is a vast open-air complex located on nearly fourteen hundred square miles of federally owned land in southern Nevada. It is one of the largest secured areas in the country, bigger than Rhode Island and nearly as large as Yosemite National Park. This is no place for hikers, however, given the more than one thousand nuclear bombs detonated here in above- and underground testing. Since its establishment in 1950, testers exploded on average three nuclear bombs every month for thirty-one years. Bordered to the west by Mercury Highway (aptly named after the god who led the deceased to the underworld) and to the east by Plutonium Valley, the thirty-two square miles of the Yucca Flat test basin today are so severely pitted by craters they look extraterrestrial. Apollo astronauts practiced for the moon walk here. More than three decades of an undeclared atomic war waged against the desert are traceable in sand and dirt, in craters, pockmarks, cracks, and fissures. When an underground device was detonated, the blast vaporized the surrounding rock and formed various subterranean cavities where molten pools gathered. Once the rock cooled and gases dissipated, the

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spherical cavities collapsed, creating what geologists call “subsidence” craters, as though, like receding floodwaters, the harm had passed. The wider the cavity, the bigger the explosion. One of the largest tests at the Nevada site, the 1963 Bilby shot, rocked multistory buildings in Las Vegas sixty-five miles away. Buried twenty-four hundred feet underground, the bomb blew open a crater eighteen hundred feet wide and eighty feet deep. Most people have forgotten about the Las Vegas tremors but the Bilby crater is still there, out in the open for anyone who cares to look. For some time, Area 3 subsidence craters have done double duty as low-level waste-storage facilities under the auspices of the Radioactive Waste Management Site. Contaminated soil, twisted metal, fuel rod clottings, transuranic waste, and other forms of exotic debris from nearly half a century of nuclear testing have been, and continue to be, discarded into Area 3’s large craters by the Department of Energy. In those pits and holes, the DOE hoped to submerge the legacy of nuclear America a hundred feet below the ground. A foolish bet by a desperate player. Scientists have recently discovered that significant amounts of residual radioactive materials have penetrated the aquifers of southern Nevada. A cause of particular concern is radioactive tritium, which is believed to have migrated in groundwater beyond the fractured landscape of the test site. Large quantities of tritium were used in the triggering mechanism of thermonuclear bombs. Tritium is not especially nasty as radioactive waste goes (strontium-90 is far worse) but it is considered one of the more harmful radionucleotides produced by underground nuclear blasts. Because tritium, which is an isotope of hydrogen, reacts readily with oxygen to form water, it dissolves easily in groundwater and moves about swiftly and stealthily, thus posing a considerable health hazard. Tritium is defined as a carcinogen by the EPA and is believed to produce birth defects. The Nevada Test Site is a landmark to America’s obsession with a form of violence so extravagant that it could only be called sublime. The site contains traces of a war that was never waged in fact but only hypothetically in deep shafts beneath a sizzling desert. These days, sightseers arrive from New Jersey, Nebraska, and Florida for monthly tours, come hither to glimpse a landscape marred by nuclear scars, by

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shifting fault lines, immense sink holes, and contaminated caverns. The bus departs from 755 East Flamingo Road, Las Vegas. Casual clothing is suggested but pregnant women are discouraged from boarding. Tourists from western New York could save themselves a trip. In 1942 the army acquired seventy-five hundred acres from landowners, mostly dairy farmers and fruit growers, within the towns of Lewiston and Porter just eight miles north of Love Canal. Named the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works (LOOW), the site was cleared of farmhouses, barns, and cherry orchards to make way for the construction of a trinitrotoluene plant for munitions during World War II. The plant manufactured TNT for only nine months before it was decommissioned, but in that short time the army managed to contaminate much of the surface area of the building, as well as the underground waste system, with the hazardous by-products of TNT production. A precedent had been set. A few years later, in 1944, the Manhattan Project purchased fifteen hundred acres on the LOOW site from the army to use for the disposal of radioactive waste generated by the development of the Abomb. This went on through the 1950s and well into the 1980s. During this period LOOW became one of the AEC’s favorite waste sites. It was cheap, isolated, and just up the pike from Linde Ceramics and its radioactive sludge. The tons of toxic effluents that did not wind up in Two Mile Creek or in Tonawanda’s storm sewers were trucked up to LOOW. In the buoyant years of the 1950s, my unsuspecting father set up house three blocks downwind from one of the most hazardous uranium production sites in the country. He played eighteen holes of golf on a daily basis at Sheridan Park Golf Course, the hottest park this side of the Mississippi River, thanks to Linde. (How many golf balls did I fetch from Two Mile Creek as a kid?) He worked for eight years at Bell Aircraft, inside the perimeter of the Lake Ontario Ordnance Works site. My father was triangulated by toxic disaster. All locations informed against him. No one knows what causes Parkinson’s disease but medical research suggests that it may result from a combination of exposure to harmful environmental agents and inherited susceptibility. Toxins like pesticides and heavy metals appear to interact with the proteins that package dopamine within nerves and the cellular machinery that degrades

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abnormal proteins. Recent studies linking oxidation to cell death in the substantia nigra have also suggested that an excess of free radicals (of the sort produced by low-dose radiation) may trigger the disease. I will never know if my father was a victim of the cold war by proximity, no more than I will ever know if my own chronic nervousness and nosebleeds are just over-the-counter neuroses or traces of a bomb inside of me. These are the things we have been asked to live with, elemental riddles of life and chance, ghostly lines in the desert lit by the sudden glare of artificial dawns.

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On . . . the . . . . Beach ................................................

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ikhail Gorbachev stood high above a curved bay, watching the brightly colored tuna boats go out to sea. Although it was late in the afternoon, the sunlight was blinding. Behind him, stony hills rose up sharply. He would never get used to this light. Jutting over the harbor stood an Aragonese castle that had been crumbling for centuries. Built by Arabs, it had been renovated by Normans and then by Swabians. Later, the House of Aragon rebuilt the structure, which perched on a promontory above the bay. The Gorbachevs were vacationing in a seaside villa in Castellammare del Golfo, a small fishing village on the western side of the island of Sicily. It was the spring of 1972. They had been invited to Italy by the Italian Communist Party but here along the glittering Mediterranean the Gorbachevs were the fussed-over guests of Castellammare’s most influential families, some of whom had intriguing pasts. It was here, a long way from home, that Gorbachev is said to have had a vision of ending the cold war, gazing out to sea beside a medieval castle in one of Sicily’s most crime-infested villages. Perestroika would come too late for me. By then, the damage was done — I had absorbed too many images of disaster. If I die before I wake, I recited each night, I pray Conelrad my soul to take. As a child, I was blessed with a premature tendency towards melancholy, as if I lived under a vague sentence. Try as I might, I could never throw off the sense of impending peril. By the time I was eight years old, I had internalized the era’s general feeling of doom and had become a hypochondriac with an unshakable belief in my imminent demise. I began monitoring my vital functions like a patient in an intensive care unit.

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One night, lying awake in my bunk bed, I scanned my heartbeat, as was my habit. On guard against omens of ruin, I wanted to be certain I was still alive. What if my heart were to stop in the middle of the night? Some kids wet their beds; I gave myself cardiograms. My uncle Art had given me an old stethoscope, which I slung around my neck. The earpieces were so gummed up with the detritus of long use, however, that I couldn’t hear a thing, certainly not the reassuring thump, thump of my heart. I panicked. My mother heard my scream and interrupted her TV viewing to come to my bedroom door. How, she reasonably asked, could I be talking to her if my heart had actually ceased beating? She had a point. What had come over me? I still wonder. I would like to blame my neuroses on the A-bomb but that is only half the story. Less cosmic factors, like the quirks of ethnicity, also came into play. The Italian side of my family was combative, as fierce as any cold war politician plotting U.S. defense policy. Our tribe lived under a thundercloud of violence, brewed by my Sicilian grandfather, an orphan who had arrived in America under mysterious circumstances. Joe Baldo worked the blast furnace at Bethlehem Steel on the shores of Lake Erie for most of his adult life. He terrified his children, who in turn frightened theirs. My grandfather was secretive about his past and only later did I learn that he spent his childhood in Castellammare, not far from where Gorbachev looked out to sea. Castellammare was a poor fishing village; it was also the hometown of Stefano Magaddino, who ran the Buffalo crime family, and of many of the mafiosi who eventually landed in New York — Joe Bonanno, Carmine Galante, Sal Maranzano, Charlie DiBenedetto. In my grandfather’s day, Castellammare’s crime rate was legendary. Eighty percent of the male population of the town was said to have served time and nearly one out of every three men had killed someone. The carabinieri knew to keep away. Rumor had it that the local mafiosi inspired Mario Puzo’s Godfather books. For someone like my grandfather — an ambitious boy without a family, who wanted to be a tough guy — the mafia offered an irresistible opportunity. At thirteen my grandfather found himself in Brooklyn, after a week’s voyage across the Atlantic. There, he ran small errands for the Castellammare clan and after moving to Buffalo he continued to angle for a way in. As my aunt Lena remembered it, at family rituals Joe Baldo

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always invited an important figure to join the celebration. When my uncle Paul was baptized, everyone began whispering that the “goombadda dona,” as Sicilians pronounced compare donare, the “gift-bearing godfather,” was coming to dinner. That put the whole family on edge. My grandfather, a shrewd actor, did a perfect imitation of the scrupulous patriarch, embracing his children, serving wine, eating heartily from a mountain of pasta, and portraying himself unfailingly as a benevolent, though strong-willed, family man. That last role required some effort, since Joe Baldo, the rumor goes, was a gambler and a womanizer. Despite the theatrics, my grandfather never quite graduated into gangsterhood but remained forever on the fringe, an adjunct mobster with strong aspirations. I grew up blind to my ethnicity, imagining I was just an ordinary white male, until I moved to Oregon. My epiphany came in Roseburg, Oregon, an undersized logging town just off of the Interstate bordering the Umpqua National Forest, a small dot on the timber industry’s grid. I was drinking beer one October night at VFW Post 68. Across from me, a circle of white-haired men played poker on a round Formica table. One of the cardplayers, a man in a white short-sleeved shirt, glanced up from his hand. He regarded me keenly, as though looking for an old friend. I ordered another beer and watched a crowd of elders dance the polka in the dimly lit room next door. They struggled with the tempo. I had driven down from Eugene for the music, played by a retired brass-and-woodwind band known for testing the boundaries of rhythm. Other times I came for the biker shows and tattoo contests. Tonight, I was minding my own business when the wizened poker player dropped his cards on the table and walked towards me as though on a mission. Everyone stiffened to alertness, eager to observe the encounter. The poker player hunched close to me, looked me right in the eye, and said for all to hear, “I know you — you’re a Moroccan!” I was startled. Me Moroccan? My mother was from rust-belt Buffalo and my father’s family was from Pennsylvania Dutch country, far away from the desert tribes of North Africa. The guy was out of his mind. My father always bought Dutch Boy Paints for our walls and I had grown up identifying with the blue-eyed, blond-haired chap on the logo, even though he looked a little like a girl. The poker player’s proclamation was an easy thing to laugh off on the drive back to Eugene but a vague picture of Hassan Arazi — my doppelgänger — stayed

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with me. Hassan Arazi was the Moroccan ferry operator the poker player had befriended in WWII — for whom, he told me, I was a dead ringer. When my grandfather died three months later, Hassan suddenly became more than a ghost. That was when the idea of Sicily took shape in my mind. Some years later I flew to Rome and took a train straight to Naples. I was bound for my grandfather’s country, that historically complicated land marked ages ago by invasion and by a mythmaking as extreme as its steep and jagged mountains. I was on a quest for origins, foolish though it may have been, eager for a glimpse of ancestral knowledge that might throw light on that moment of mistaken identity in the Roseburg VFW hall. Boarding a ferry at the port of Mergellina — out of the corner of my eye I looked for Hassan Arazi the ferryman — I saw the hillside cluster of bunched-up apartments and palaces above the Bay of Naples. As we pulled away from the dock, they grew smaller and smaller. There too was Capri, shrouded by haze, a steady line of ferries traveling back and forth between the island and Sorrento. Before long the sea was empty. The boat’s giant turbine roared as we climbed the rolling waves, the submerged winglike foils lifting the hull out of the water. Heavy seas made travel difficult and the hydrofoil lurched on rising swells. One after another, Italian passengers stumbled towards the open air deck in the rear for a smoke. I peered out the salt-stained window at the undulating sea, the same waters that had been scoured by Etruscan and Barbary pirates, traveled by epic heroes, and patrolled by man-eating monsters. Plowing the wine-dark sea for foreign ports of call. The hydrofoil droned on. Those passengers not smoking in the rear were either asleep or buried in a book. We passed the Aeolian Islands, the place of fire and wind, where Hephestos, son of Zeus, forged the shield of Achilles and where a stranded Odysseus sought the help of Aeolus, keeper of the winds. Lipari, the chief island, took its name from Liparus, whose daughter Cyane married Aeolus. Every nautical mile seemed legendary, magnified by a ring of fable. These tales had penetrated my imagination when I was a boy and now they acquired mass and form. Just before I left the States, several stories appeared in the news about recent breakthroughs in neutrino detection and I had brought along a primer on particle physics, motivated partly by an impulse

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to be contrary. Who walks around Sicily with his nose in a book, let alone one about tau leptons? The primer went well over my head but the chapters on neutrinos — I had only a vague idea of what a neutrino was — appealed to my sense of the fantastic. The history of neutrinos lies at the center of the search for the origins of matter, a search that has been in equal parts perplexing and illuminating, the primer said. Protons and neutrons, once thought to be indivisible, are composed of quarks, called “up” and “down.” There are four other kinds of quark with equally curious names — “top,” “bottom,” “charm,” and “strange” — that sound more like Elizabethan stage characters than the proverbial building blocks of matter. Indeed, the quark seems decidedly fictitious, an impression encouraged by the fact that Murray Gell-Mann borrowed the term from Joyce’s Finnegans Wake. Gell-Mann was afraid, he later said, that a “pompous” Greek name — this said by a scientist who once called a newly discovered particle “omega-minus” — would impose a heavy burden on the idea of the quark. A meaningless word from a book few would ever read, however, might not. Quarks are wondrously odd. They can’t be seen in nature and they are restricted to the manufacturing of protons and neutrons. Smaller than 10 ⫺19 meters, quarks are practically immeasurable and therefore hard to identify. To find them, matter must be scattered by large, expensive colliders. By 1973 only three quarks had been detected: “up,” “down,” and “strange.” The “top” quark was discovered at the Fermilab’s Tevatron Collider in 1995. Like quarks, neutrinos are among the most elusive particles known to science. Because neutrinos have almost no mass, they exhibit unusually penetrating radiation. Neutrinos can pierce a lead barrier millions of miles thick without ever slowing down. It is said that a neutrino can pass through the earth with only an infinitesimal chance of striking another particle. Neutrinos were first theorized as a solution to a nagging problem: during decay, beta rays violated one of the most fundamental laws of physics, the law of conservation of energy. When a nucleus undergoes beta decay, a neutron changes into a proton and forces out an electron. Beta decay is in theory supposed to release a fixed amount of energy but measurements showed that the energy that ought to be there was missing. This absence was distressing.

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In 1930 the Austrian physicist Wolfgang Pauli came to the rescue by positing the existence of a new particle. “Dear Radioactive Ladies and Gentlemen,” he famously wrote in a letter to a conference in Tübingen. “I have hit upon a desperate remedy for rescuing the energy law by suggesting the possibility that there exists in the nuclei electrically neutral particles, which I shall call neutrons.” The missing energy, Pauli surmised, was carried away by an extremely light, undetected particle. Pauli’s zero-mass neutron was a mathematical invention, formulated more or less as a last-ditch effort to justify the conservation of energy. It embarrassed him, he later said, to resort to such a fabrication and he shied away from publishing his hypothesis. Shortly afterwards, in Rome, the Italian physicist Enrico Fermi coined the term neutrino (little neutral one) for Pauli’s made-up particle, appending a diminutive suffix to the word neutrone (a large neutral object), as though by a linguistic sleight of hand he could conjure up the mysterious particle. Three years later, in 1934, Fermi formulated a broad theory of radioactive decay that accounted for the interactions of the newly named neutrino, postulating a new force — the “weak force” — that mediated particle transformations within the nucleus. Twenty-two years later, real neutrinos were finally detected by physicists working at the Savannah River Nuclear Power Plant in South Carolina — a place I sometimes drove past after I landed a teaching job in Charleston — and ceased to be a fiction. Created in vast quantities a second after the big bang, large numbers of primordial neutrinos remain in the universe today, moving about freely. Having hardly any mass, neutrinos rarely collide with other particles and can therefore travel across vast distances virtually unimpeded. Every cubic centimeter of space is said to contain about three hundred “relic” neutrinos believed to carry information, like messengers, from an imagined beginning. Just think, the big bang as the inception of time and space — genesis really — traces of which are now passing through your body. As you read this, billions of neutrinos are streaming through your head at nearly the speed of light, particles forged long, long ago. It’s a consoling notion, in a way, to think that we are still so in touch with the early universe. The sun had set by the time we docked in the Palermo harbor. It was a balmy evening. On the right a vague seaside bulk reared up

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above me in the twilight, Monte Pellegrino. But for a couple of taxis idling by the gate, the dock was deserted. I was hungry and exhausted, and a bit overwhelmed. I was in Sicily, the outermost reach of Europe, and I had the sensation of having left the known universe behind. I hailed one of the remaining taxis and asked to be taken to the old-town section of Palermo, where I had booked a room in an inexpensive hotel. The cab driver had a crafty face and a big nose, reminding me of my grandfather. I hadn’t yet discovered that many older Palermitani males would look like him. I asked the driver’s name but the answer was too quick for my ears and it was too dark inside the car to read the tag under the meter. I could feel an idiotic urge well up inside me, the urge of a genetic affiliation, to embrace him as my kin. Palermo was founded by the Phoenicians in the eighth century b.c. and unlike other regions of Sicily has little that’s Greek about it. The city was captured by the Romans in the First Punic War, conquered by the Arabs in the eighth century a.d., and seized by the Normans in the twelfth. Muslim settlers, arriving in great numbers from North Africa, Spain, and the Levant, transformed the old town into a city of great beauty and wealth, with mosques and busy markets, pleasure palaces, gardens, and orchards. At its peak, there were over three hundred mosques in Arabic Palermo. Although many were converted by the Normans into Christian churches, Palermo remained an ethnically dynamic and religiously tolerant city, with Christian, Muslim, and Jewish merchants thronging to its bazaars. For the outsider, Sicily is a rocky archive of other civilizations — Elymian, Phoenician, Mycaenean, Greek, Roman, Arabian, Norman, Spanish — that, like natural disasters, arrived violently and left abruptly, leaving their telltale marks behind. The tragedian Aeschylus is said to have died in Sicily when an eagle flying overhead dropped a turtle on his bald head, which the bird mistook for a rock. The air is as full of historical traces as it is of lemon scents. Zone archeologiche signs are ubiquitous: on medieval castles, Greek temples, Roman sarcophagi, Phoenician burial mounds, crumbling palazzi, besides the names of the tyrants Agathocles and Dionysius inscribed on marble. So many antiquities they seem to crowd out the living. In Sicily we are always in touch with the past.

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The next day I packed my camera and a lunch, and took the train to Castellammare. We passed small farms with olive groves and stone granaries. The houses were rectangular concrete boxes with flat roofs. The train made several stops, picking up ancient peasant farmers, their bags filled with vegetables, fresh sardines, and tuna. They spoke in dialect, a continuous rush of rapidly fired guttural speech where d’s were substituted for t’s and u’s for a’s. At times their language sounded more like Arabic than Italian. The crowded fishing village of Castellammare huddles at the base of the surly hills surrounding the town. The winding streets eventually pour down into the harbor and along its eastern side rises a clifflike promontory built up by houses and twisting steps. At the base of this rocky formation lies the medieval castle from which the town gets its name, a squat, two-towered fortress that stands all by itself against the blue sea. Festive wooden dinghies painted red, white, and blue are docked along the quay and their quick-handed owners sit under umbrellas repairing fine mesh nets and tackle, sinewy men in thigh-high boots, their faces the color of earth. On weekends Sicilians from Palermo drive the fifty miles to Castellammare to bathe on the picturesque beaches on either side of town, bringing with them money and noise. The tourist liri help ease the poverty that Castellammare, like other towns in Sicily, has suffered for years. Fishing is not a thriving industry. For centuries these waters were overfished by each wave of invaders. More recently, illegal trawling, practiced by the mafia in the 1950s and 1960s, depleted the gulf of what was left — the tuna, swordfish, and sardines that are the staple catch of local fishermen. The dozen or so boats that now go out compete for a dwindling supply of “small fries,” as one fisherman explained to me, just enough for the restaurants’ catch of the day. Tyrants seem to have been as native to Sicily as figs. Sicilian despots, as boundless in ambition as they were devoid of scruples, acquired power by amassing mercenary troops and then by identifying themselves, in bursts of populist bombast, with the underclasses against the oligarchs. More often than not this was pure demagogy, although in the case of Agathocles, the son of a potter, hatred of aristocrats seems to have been genuine. Dionysius fortified himself against potential enemies by surrounding himself with a personal bodyguard and by placing

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kinsmen and family members in his command structure. The modern mafia of western Sicily didn’t have to look far for their model of power brokering. When not subjugating weaker peoples, Sicily’s ancient autocrats expressed themselves in fits of paranoia and massive public works projects, building fortifications and large naval fleets, widening harbors and erecting monumental temples and theaters. It’s a bit unsettling when walking down a gravel path in Segesta or Selinunte or Agrigento to realize that many of the architectural remains of Sicily’s Archaic period are a testament to some strongman’s megalomania. As I headed back down towards the Castellammare harbor, I saw little evidence of such a past. Crossing paths with a very old man, I stopped to take his picture. He tolerated my silliness. Before I turned to go I asked, “Dove sono i mafiosi?” “Sono morti,” he said. Shortly after coining the term neutrino, Fermi began bombarding elements with neutrons. Because the neutron, like the neutrino, was an uncharged particle, he hoped that it too might penetrate a nucleus with little repulsion. The idea was to irradiate anything he could get his hands on, in hopes of infiltrating the nuclei of various elements up and down the periodic table so as to produce artificial radioactivity. Fermi went around Rome with a shopping list, collecting all the materials he needed for his experiment: gold from a jeweler, radon from a chemist. He began with the light elements, like hydrogen, and worked his way up to uranium. In all, Fermi identified forty radioactive isotopes. More importantly, without quite realizing what he had done, Fermi split an atom. By the time Mussolini was invading Ethiopia and instituting antiSemitic laws in Rome, Fermi and his wife, who was Jewish, had decamped to America, joining a wave of European émigrés fleeing fascism. It would be hard to overestimate the value of this intellectual capital to the insular United States. Between 1933 and 1941 European refugees — including Einstein, John von Neumann, Eugene Wigner, Leo Szilard, Hans Bethe, Stanislaw Ulam, and Edward Teller — set in motion one of the greatest transfusions of brainpower to America. From Germany alone, more than three hundred scientists and scholars left for America. German universities were hemorrhaging faculty as though Hitler were determined, in some strangely self-destructive way, to supply American universities with A-list physicists at his own country’s expense.

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Word spread quickly among physicists about experiments that confirmed nuclear fission. Not only could uranium nuclei be split by neutrons but the energy set loose was enormous. Splitting a single uranium nucleus might release two hundred million electron volts, a staggering number. The implications were instantly clear. A modest amount of pure uranium, perhaps no larger than a tennis ball, could lay waste to all of downtown New York. In California, Oppenheimer wondered to a friend if a tiny cube of uranium “might very well blow itself to hell.” Fermi had settled happily in America. He bought a house in New Jersey while teaching at Columbia, where he immediately began work on the first nuclear reactor, dubbed “the pile.” Fermi hired members of the Columbia football squad to haul the hundred-pound packs of black uranium oxide into the makeshift reactor. Soon after, Fermi moved to the University of Chicago where he was recruited by Oppenheimer for the Manhattan Project. As head of the Metallurgical Lab, Fermi resumed his work on fission, now focused on assembling a new pile in a thirty-by-sixty-foot squash court under Stagg Field’s bleachers. Fermi’s challenge was to trigger and manage a self-sustained chain reaction, the first ever. Without a chain reaction, there could be no A-bomb. The reactor, or pile, he designed in Chicago was a crude mound of black bricks, graphite blocks, uranium slugs, cadmium rods, and wood timber. Fermi is said to have read Winnie the Pooh to polish his English while building his pile and even got in the habit of naming his gadgets after characters in the story: Kanga, Tigger, Piglet, and Roo. A question of growing significance for Fermi and the Manhattan Project concerned the quantity of neutrons escaping the split uranium nucleus. If the uranium pile was to go critical, its builders would have to find ways to control the fluctuation of neutrons. The key to Fermi’s reactor was the massive supply of graphite machined and configured to slow down the neutrons. In Rome, Fermi had stumbled upon paraffin as a neutron modifier. In Chicago, graphite worked even better. When neutrons leave the nucleus, they are moving very fast, too fast to interact with other uranium nuclei. The carbon atoms in graphite collide with neutrons and absorb a small amount of energy, enough to slow the neutron flux. In all, Fermi’s group machined over four hundred tons of graphite, along with eighty thousand pounds of uranium oxide.

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Graphite was first discovered in a Borrowdale mine in the Lake District near Keswick in England around 1500. The story goes that shepherds stumbled upon a large mass of a mysterious black material on a mountainside recently exposed in a violent storm. The substance, locally called “wad,” resembled coal but would not burn. It was, however, very good for marking sheep. Elsewhere wad was called “plumbago,” or black lead. In Shakespeare’s day it was used in molds for the production of cannonballs. A German geologist gave it the name of graphite (from the Greek graphein, “to write”) in 1789. A pencil will conduct electricity. If you apply one hundred thousand times the atmospheric pressure at a very high temperature (say, 4,000 degrees Fahrenheit), a pencil lead will turn into a diamond. As Albert Wattenberg recalls, machining graphite and pressing uranium oxide for Fermi’s pile was dirty and grueling. “ Week after week our shop turned out graphite bricks,” he said, “around the clock. We found out how coal miners feel. After eight hours of machining, we were entirely black. One shower was not enough. Shortly afterwards the dust in our pores would ooze out.” By the time the pile was completed, it was twenty-five feet wide, twenty feet high, and wrapped in timber, the most perilous pencil ever conceived. On December 2, 1942, before an assembled crowd of scientists, Fermi’s reactor went critical. Thanks to the Italian physicist, the Manhattan Project had its first chain reaction and now there would be nothing, theoretically, to prevent the making of an A-bomb. The occasion was commemorated with a bottle of Chianti, the Chicago-based scientists holding up their cups in silent toast to the cracked atom. Fermi’s atomic efforts earned him naturalization and he became a U.S. citizen in 1944. He died of cancer ten years later in Chicago, at the age of 53. He visited Italy for the last time the year before his death. According to the little my family knows about my grandfather’s origins, he was born in Castellammare, either in the port itself or on one of the dusty farms between Scopello and Castellammare, where groves of almond, orange, and lemon trees fill the air with a fruity scent, a scent that made me dizzy as I walked along the rocky, gnarled slopes that rush to the sea. It was hard for me to understand how a Sicilian from a sunlit Mediterranean town like this could wind up in a bleak industrial city like Buffalo.

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I did not have much to go on — only a name and a place. And what is a name but a bundle of sounds, a string of letters, a sign of something else perhaps, a link, a form of contact? Every day, countless names pass through our minds unimpeded, traveling at or near the speed of light. Along the quay, camera in hand, I asked the fishermen at work on their boats if they had ever heard of the name Baldo. They looked at each other, shaking their heads. “Giuseppe Baldo,” I said. Again they looked at each other and shrugged their shoulders. There is no such name as Baldo. Baldini, Baldacci, Baldamente — but not Baldo. Baldamente, of course, is Castellammare’s crime boss. That evening I asked the concierge behind the desk at my hotel if she had ever heard of the name Baldo. “No,” she said, flopping a telephone book on the counter. She leafed through the names beginning with B, noting that Baldo had never been used as a surname in her memory — only as a first name. She talked rapidly in Sicilian to other guests in the lobby. A tanned man in his midthirties, dressed in a beige polo shirt, shrugged apologetically. “Baldo? No.” The Castellammarese are kind. It would be pleasant to help this foreigner, the American in search of his grandfather. It is a small service, an easily provided amenity. I had already begun to suspect there was something amiss with my grandfather’s identity. But I carried on, if only to hear his name pronounced over and over again by Castellammarese. I was intrigued by the way the initial vowel sound is lengthened. When spoken in Sicilian, the word takes on new life. The first syllable receives enough stress to hang in the air just long enough to lend the second syllable a degree of suspense, as if the word all by itself contained a kind of story. The next day I went to the town hall, an ochre-stuccoed four-story building whose plain offices had no carpeting, no floor plants, no fax machines, no copiers, no computers. The absence of technology surprised me. Here, information was managed by hand, kept on crumbling sheets of paper. The first bureaucrat I met, a pleasant middleaged man, listened patiently as I repeated my question. He himself could not help me but he would be happy to take me upstairs to another who might be more able to. His colleague was a woman in a casual white blouse and dark cotton pants. She listened while, once

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again, I inquired about Baldo. She was tired and uninterested. She passed me along to another official. Something was missing here. Unlike Caius Julius Caesar or Marcus Junius Brutus, Italians with a nominal surplus, my grandfather had a name that contained no indication of pedigree or lineage. Baldo, I was beginning to realize, named nothing. It withheld all markings of identity. It was a name that suffered from amnesia. My grandfather’s relationship to his last name is actually more complicated than I have let on. The only hard evidence I have that Baldo was in fact his birth name — and not simply invented by him at a later time — comes from an Italian document dated April 10, 1912. The document is a fishing license made out for Giuseppe Baldo and approved in Palermo by the capitano di porto. The document records Castellammare del Golfo as my grandfather’s place of birth and in the space reserved for the name of his parents there is a single, stark word. Ignoti — “unknown.” The simple document confers a degree of authenticity on my grandfather. But there are questions it cannot answer. Less than a year after filing for that fishing license in Palermo, Joe Baldo was in New York City, living under a different name. Why did my grandfather abandon “Baldo” for “Galande” the moment he arrived in America? Why was he so eager to shed the identity that sent him on his way across the Atlantic? Pauli had never expected to see a neutrino and he frankly doubted anyone else would either. That neutrinos were in fact detected and have routinely become the target of high-level experiments has only added to their mystique. Neutrinos do not reflect light and seldom interact with other particles. These properties enable neutrinos, essentially, to ignore matter, as if it did not exist. By 1970 the results of new research on neutrino behavior baffled observers. Since science could now detect the notoriously subtle neutrino, physicists began counting them and came up significantly short of expected findings. More than half of the predicted neutrinos were missing from the flux, which was doubly strange given that in any cubic meter of space there are said to be over three hundred million neutrinos. An elementary form of matter, which had only recently been detected, now seemed to have disappeared. This puzzling

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finding, called the Solar Neutrino Problem, was reproduced in several experiments, mystifying physicists across the globe. The missing neutrinos were not found until thirty years later, by giant detectors in Canada and Japan, captured underground in massive vats of water. As it turned out, the neutrinos had been there all along. The solution to the puzzle implied something interesting. The previously absent electron neutrinos had transformed themselves into muon and tau neutrinos (which are harder to detect). They had changed their identities. It is a strange fact of quantum mechanics that particles also behave as waves, allowing them to exist in different states over time — a schizoid condition in the case of neutrinos (and quarks), which may suffer from double identity more often than other subatomic particles. The muon neutrino, for instance, appears to have two different “massive” states, that of a muon and a tau neutrino. The two “matter waves,” having different frequencies, will oscillate in and out of phase with each other as they travel along, sometimes interfering with one another. If a neutrino collides with a quark while in such an indeterminate state, it is entirely uncertain what it will become when push comes to shove, tau or muon. In 1943, now living in Buffalo, my grandfather hired an attorney to file a request for a name change. My grandfather had served briefly in the army, for all of three months, and had been discharged in 1918 under the name of Joseph Galande. Five years later, he claimed, his stepsister broke the news to him while visiting New York that he was not a Galande but an adopted child. His real name was Baldo, she said. According to the attorney’s letter, my grandfather had no idea he was an orphan. “In the year 1913, I left Italy with an older sister, coming to the United States, and, unknown to me, I was listed on my passport as Joseph Baldo (which, of course, was my correct name as I now know),” his letter states. The letter concludes with a request to file new discharge papers under the name of Baldo and to erase the name of Galande from his records. My grandfather claimed to have been disadvantaged and embarrassed by “this duplicity of names.” Given known attitudes towards southern Italians in America at the time, I suspect the explanation behind his request was viewed as a plausible story. After all, in the eyes of officialdom my grandfather was just another ignorant peasant, no different from the countless

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other southern Italians migrating to America. By 1914 eleven million people — one fourth of the population of Italy — had sought passage overseas, nearly five million Italian immigrants coming to America. Nearly half of them were illiterate or, at best, semiliterate, many unable to read a train ticket in their native language. Would it have been any surprise if Joe Baldo could not read his own passport? But my grandfather was in fact literate. He had attended school in his native land and had finished the eighth grade before coming to America. Once in Buffalo, he frequently wrote letters in Italian to relations in New York. If my grandfather had filed for a fishing license in 1912 with the intention of leaving Sicily, likelier than not he was the one who supplied the name that appears on that document. For a while, it seems, my grandfather was happy to be Giuseppe Baldo and then he wasn’t. Whatever the reason, by 1943 my grandfather needed to swap names and did so by pretending to be an illiterate immigrant who could not read his own documents during his voyage to America. I found this interesting, that my grandfather was now reclaiming a name he had once abandoned — a name that appeared to signify nothing. If Joe needed to hide something, then Baldo — the nameless name, as I was discovering — was a perfect cover. Perhaps an unnamable event defined the moment of Joe’s beginning, I said to myself, relishing the mystery. Perhaps his naming is tied to an unapproachable secret, which lies at the heart of my family’s lapse of knowing. The beginning, some say, already contains the end. What did this mean in my own case and how did this apply to Joe Baldo’s descendents? Walking the blazing hills of Sicily, I wanted to spread myself out along the various planes of distance, to lose myself in the space of an unrecoverable past. If the origin of Joe Baldo could only be imagined, the outlines of his story might begin to form a vague but distinct picture in the bronze distance. Neutrinos are forged by violent events. At the Fermilab, they are created by accelerating protons around a four-mile underground course. They then collide against a graphite barrier. The collision is forceful, emitting a beam of muon neutrinos that travel 450 miles north towards the Soudan mine in Minnesota where the Main Injector Neutrino Oscillation Search (MINOS) detector lies in wait. It takes the neutrinos just under three milliseconds to reach the six-

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thousand-ton detector in the underground cavern. In that fraction of a second, the MINOS gathers data on the disappearance of muon neutrinos, trying to observe the occurrence of a muon- to electronneutrino oscillation. What’s in a name — a dream, an idea, a vision, a bond, a sideways glance across the sea? The MINOS experiment, like another recent international neutrino study, the Icarus project at the Gran Sasso Underground Laboratory outside of Rome, invokes names that hark back to a remote age, to the Minoan island of Crete where the inventor Daedalus built the legendary labyrinth to contain the man-eating monster the Minotaur. Crete was ruled by King Minos, a man who, according to Philostratus, exceeded all others in cruelty. The ruins of the palace built by Minos — a vast and complex architectural wonder sprawling over five acres of land — still exist in Knossos, as do fragments of frescoes depicting vividly colored young men and women, naked to their narrow waists, processing with ritual jugs and vases. What remains of Minoan culture today is only incompletely understood, as its language has never been decoded. Images of Minoan life come down to us from vase paintings, frescoes, tools, and artifacts. A sporting people, the Minoans seem to have been especially fond of bull jumping, which is depicted in the famous fresco in the Palace of King Minos at Knossos. Bull jumping was a dangerous sport. As the bull charged, a vaulter (male or female) ran towards the animal, grabbed its horns and, with a spectacular somersault, leapt onto the creature’s back before dismounting with a flourish. Judging by the surviving frescoes, the death-defying sport required as much skill as it did daring. Its purpose is a mystery and we no longer know whether it was part of a religious ceremony or simply a spectator sport. The Minoans were among the first Aegean people to practice religious ceremonies in caves and on mountain peaks. Dozens of caverns on the island have been singled out by archaeologists as sites of cult worship from Neolithic and Minoan periods. The legendary birthplace of Zeus is the Dikteon cave and vestiges of an Artemis cult have been discovered in Arkoudia (“Cave of the She Bear”). Bulls were no doubt also an object of cult worship, appearing on walls, vases, and statues. They were at the center of public life, as they had been for the nearby Sumerians (the fusion of bull and man is a recurrent image that harks back to Gilgamesh), and were vital to the plotlines of

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countless myths. The famous labyrinth originally may have been a site of bull worship. According to classical sources, Pasiphaë, the wife of King Minos, fell furiously in love with a royal bull and Daedalus, the great inventor, built a hollow wooden cow into which Pasiphaë crawled in order to satisfy her unnatural passion. Thus disguised, she consummated her desire and bore a hybrid creature — half man, half bull. Furious, Minos had Daedalus construct an elaborate maze from which his wife’s monstrous son might not escape. In secrecy and solitude the Minotaur lived in his strange house, feeding on stray animals and Athenian youths. Long before the arrival of Arabs and Normans in Sicily, Daedalus — the great Athenian artificer, scientist, and builder — took refuge in the ancient city of Camicus. He came there in flight from King Minos, who had discovered that Daedalus had helped Theseus destroy the Minotaur by revealing the secret of the maze built to contain the dreadful beast. The legendary labyrinth was a clever structure, with neither beginning nor end, the fitting creation of a man whose name means “ingenious worker.” With the exception of Theseus, no one who entered ever escaped. Under house arrest on Crete, Daedalus constructed two sets of wings so that he and his son might escape the maniacal Minos. While everyone knows the fate of Icarus, Daedalus’s end is less familiar. Saddened by his son’s death, the great labyrinth-builder gathered up the wingless body of Icarus and buried his son on the island of Icaria northeast of the Cyclades, whose name honors the fallen boy. The mourning father then continued on his airborne way, flying towards the west, over Delos, Athens, Corinth, and Ithaca, all the way across the Mediterranean Sea. Daedalus did not walk on solid ground again until he landed in Camicus near the western Sicilian town of Agrigento, where he hung up his wings and built a temple dedicated to Apollo. Though in ruins, the temple still stands. Oppenheimer might have felt a kinship with that archetypal inventor, might have traced the links to that first crafter of impossible things, tyrant’s science advisor and master builder. Did Oppenheimer, belatedly and with rue, muse on how little thought Daedalus had given to the consequences of his inventions until fate made him atone for them? Did the grand craftsman of the cold war think about that life

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ended in exile and about the loss of the son who paid for his father’s ingenuity? Did he? How could he not? Oppenheimer’s security trial — it was called a hearing but was conducted with surprising hostility and flawed by many procedural injustices — took place in 1954 in Room 2022 of Building T3, a drab auxiliary unit stationed on the Mall in the District of Columbia, not far from the Washington Monument. The room was dark and spartan, dominated by black binders — two decades’ worth of FBI files containing derogatory information on Oppenheimer. The files were noteworthy not only for their contents but for the fact that Oppenheimer’s lawyer, Lloyd Garrison, didn’t know they existed. His first inkling of their presence was when he saw them stacked up on the large mahogany desk as the hearing commenced. The hearing was humiliating and degrading for Oppenheimer but what puzzled many observers was his submissiveness during the ordeal. As the published transcript of the hearing shows, Oppenheimer didn’t fight back. Ordinarily poised, eloquent, charming, and subtle, Oppenheimer was strangely tongue-tied and self-contradictory during his testimony, as though inwardly collaborating with his tormentors. Where was the arrogance and wit? He resembled a Socrates on trial, only without the irony, all too willing to drink the hemlock. He later confessed that he “had very little sense of self” while the nightmare played out, as though it were happening to “someone else.” Hardly a fair trial, the hearing was designed to disgrace Oppenheimer and put to an end his moral and political authority. It was a brutal ceremony, aimed at demystifying the “father of the A-bomb.” Oppenheimer’s priestly role in atomic politics, a part he clearly embraced, may have provoked as much envy as it did admiration among onlookers but for right-wing players like Lewis Strauss and Edward Teller it was clearly problematic. As high minister of all things atomic, Oppenheimer wielded a power they found unseemly. That one man — haughty and given to obscure literary allusions — should carry such clout was a dangerous precedent. They itched, as Teller — who had never forgiven Oppenheimer for lobbying against the H-bomb and who eagerly delivered damaging testimony against his Los Alamos colleague during the hearing — put it, to “unfrock Oppenheimer in his own church.”

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In the end Oppenheimer was condemned not for disloyalty but for “defects in character.” The iconoclastic desires of his enemies reached their absurd conclusion in the publication of the full transcript of the 1954 hearing, over one thousand pages in small print that exposed every intimate secret of Oppenheimer’s life: the fabricated stories concerning his prewar associations; an affair with his erstwhile fiancé, Jean Tatlock, three years into his marriage; testimony incriminating past students and friends. Not so long before that, Oppenheimer had been an international star admired throughout the world. He was the living symbol of the atomic age, the magazines liked to say, a new kind of celebrity, the scientist as hero. All of that changed, however, after his security hearing. Suddenly Oppenheimer’s glory vanished. He was no longer seen in public, no longer consulted, no longer photographed. Not long afterwards, he was simply forgotten, “a rapidly receding figure in the public mind,” as Philip Stern has written, fading into obscurity. After the hearings, Oppenheimer bought property on the north shore of St. John, in the Virgin Islands, where he spent his summers and holidays with his wife and daughter, until his death in 1967. He would visit Los Alamos in 1964 to deliver a memorial lecture on Niels Bohr to a packed house and a thunderous ovation. But he would never return to New Mexico. The high desert was behind him now — he had traded the mesa for an island and a beach, a last meeting place (did he remember his Eliot?) at the still point of the turning world. Visitors noted that he was losing mass alarmingly. He had become thin and white (neither flesh nor fleshless), insubstantial and ghostlike. He weighed barely one hundred pounds. The more fragile he became, however, the livelier his gestures, as though he reveled in his own disappearance. Oppenheimer’s biographers suggest that he had reconciled himself to his fate, to his banishment from Washington. No longer at the center of things, he struck an introspective note in public talks, revealing a more humble side of himself. “ When we are blind to the evil in ourselves, we dehumanize ourselves,” he said in 1963, “and we deprive ourselves not only of our destiny but of any possibility of dealing with the evil in others.” In detecting this change, we catch Oppenheimer in a characteristic oscillation, from the arrogant scientist to the dreamyeyed poet.

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And this is where we shall leave him, this wispy and fragile legend, in his self-imposed exile on St. John, where he hosted memorable parties and sailed endlessly around the Caribbean, where he memorized lengthy passages from his favorite tale, the Odyssey. We shall leave him in this pose, on a starry night, martini in hand, repeating from memory the story of the wine-dark sea, of that man skilled in all ways of contending—Oppenheimer on the beach — reciting Homer beside the aromatic ylang-ylang tree. In Castellammare the waves lapped against the base of the Aragonese castle. The sun had set and the village fishermen had returned from sea. I sat on the stone harbor beside the castle, my legs dangling over the edge, eating warmed pistachios and watching the flickering lights on the slope above the village. Joe Baldo was nowhere to be found. The ancestral ground I came in search of was covered by the bones of others and my grandfather’s past remained unknown to me. I wanted to put things in perspective, to discover a totality that might give shape to his life, but all I could find were missing links, breathless gaps between the vaguely plotted points of his story. What then was I? Perhaps I should be content to imagine myself, as the old-timer in Roseburg, Oregon, did, as Hassan Arazi, the ferryman from a busy Moroccan port town. Like Daedalus, Hassan’s people migrated to western Sicily centuries ago. Perhaps both of us are descendants of Phoenicians from Tyre, a seafaring people. What had stunned me years ago in that small bar in Oregon — was it the shock of recognition? — now made sense. Ethnic drift of this kind, archaeologists have suggested, is normal, especially in Sicily. The Scottish writer and naturalist Gavin Maxwell lived in the Aragonese castle in the early 1950s while researching a biography on the legendary Sicilian bandit Salvatore Giuliano. A few years later Maxwell finished a book about poverty in western Sicily, motivated, he wrote, by the “swarming suffering mass of humanity that fills the island today.” That was fifty years ago. Tourist euros and dollars have since changed the picture. This once small seafaring village, home to the mafia as well as to the Madonna del Soccorso, is now a popular stopover for photographers with digital SLRs, hikers outfitted in Lycra, and vacationers toting camcorders. Adding to this spectacle are the weekenders from Palermo, arriving in noisy Fiats with motorscooters in tow. Traces of a quieter past, however, remain. There is a long and

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winding stairway leading from the town to the sea, a relic of Sicily’s Arabian past when Castellammare was called Al-Madarig (“the steps”). Old men with creased faces go up and down the stone steps dressed for church, pausing midway to watch the boats return to the harbor. They have been gazing at the deep sea swells for centuries, the same old men. In the company town of Los Alamos, I have read, people are dying of brain tumors. The Energy Department’s Office of Nuclear Safety has disputed the charges. On an island suspended between myth and history, inhabited by real and imaginary people, I marveled at the waves, at how the sea grinds large stones into small ones, how it rubs one shell against another until the two make a cup of sand — fragment-to-fragment clinging. Nothing abides, said a Roman poet long ago. Like so many before me, I stood on the shore mesmerized by the imponderable sea. The train to Palermo would arrive in an hour. My flight home would depart early in the evening. A delicate haze drifted over the waves as I ambled along the beach, gathering moon shells and massaging my toes in the warm, atomic sand.

Postscript .........................................................

A

lpha — Charlie — Stand by — Message follows. My father passed away the same day the final Minuteman II silo blew up in North Dakota. He died in a run-down hospital in Batavia, New York. The attending physician had mistaken a blocked bladder for kidney failure. Until then, my father had been bedridden in a recently built nursing home that reeked of cheap chocolates, body fluids, and phenolic disinfectants. Thanks to his wartime malaria, my father qualified for a bed in a corner of the facility but he lasted only six months before suffering a series of setbacks. By the time I arrived at his bedside, my father couldn’t speak, eat, walk, swallow, or pee. One by one, his organs defaulted. Eventually he just gave up — I could see it in his eyes — and who could blame him? This was the final scene, sans teeth, sans everything. He died on a fine Saturday morning in midsummer. After twenty-five years of twitching and trembling, my father’s body lay still at last. On that same day, far away in the rolling grasslands of North Dakota, a demolition crew from the Midwest completed the final phase of the Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START ), dismantling 150 underground missile silos spread across eleven thousand square miles. They had been built in the 1960s deep inside the nuclear heartland, a thousand silos hollowed out of prairie farmland and armed with Atlas and Titan ICBMs. They were a legacy of the Kennedy administration, which sought combat-ready squadrons the way an Iowa farmer longed for high soybean yields. Encased in steel and concrete, each silo was buried 120 feet below the ground. Kennedy called the Minuteman missile his “ace in the hole.” I had seen a bronze Minuteman statue in New England when I was a kid, which made a lasting impression on me. The farmer who became a

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Revolutionary soldier, clutching a rifle as he purposefully marched off to war. Growing up in Buffalo, I was sensitive to the resolve of working men and women. My imagination grafted arms and legs onto Kennedy’s ICBMs. I imagined them crouching in their deep holes, long-suffering heroes whispering in their solitude, waiting in the secret darkness. The silos eventually blended into the prairie landscape, with farmers raising crops alongside the fences that enclosed the weapon sites. “You’d be plowing,” said one North Dakotan, “and look over to see an airman with a gun watching you all the time. It gave you the heebie-jeebies.” According to the Brookings Institute, the United States spent upwards of $5.5 trillion on national security during the cold war — an unthinkable sum for a war that was, technically speaking, never waged. That figure included $31.1 billion (in 1996 dollars) set aside for dismantling nuclear weapons, one billion of which was earmarked for the destruction of Minuteman II silos. In the year I moved to eastern Iowa, silos were exploding all over the Midwest — hundreds of them — tiny mushroom clouds rising up above the muffled boom. Each silo had cost $3.8 million to create but destroying them was a bargain at $189,000 a pop. After the implosion the contractor salvaged whatever could be recycled. Eventually the demolition team returned to backfill the ruined silo. “ We throw the dirt back into the hole, compact it, level it off, and spread grass seed,” said one of the crewmen. If only it were that easy to bury the past. I left Washington not long after the first Gulf War. The warlike excitement in the nation’s capital was a bit trying for someone as paranoid as myself. I got used to seeing tanks stationed on the shoulder of the George Washington Parkway when I drove by the Pentagon but the Desert Storm victory celebration downtown took me by surprise. The cold war had ended only five minutes ago, or so it seemed, and here we were, thousands of celebrants, waving little flags in the air for having bombed Baghdad back to the Bronze Age. Floats, military bands, tanks, missiles, “Boom Boom” Zambelli and his firecrackers — the whole works was on hand. The real spectacle, I discovered, was over at the Mall where the Pentagon was displaying the wonder weapons of Desert Storm. From the Hellfire and Humdinger to the Apache and the Abrams, more than

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a hundred examples of leading-edge war technology bedazzled the crowds massed around the Smithsonian buildings. So good was the military show that well-established attractions were out-museumed by the Pentagon, leaving the famous domed galleries deserted and forsaken. Across from the missiles and howitzers, the statues in the sculpture garden of the Hirshhorn were wrapped in heavy quilts for protection against debris kicked up by the fans of war. Bound and gagged, the Rodins and Moores looked like refugees waiting to be airlifted away. When I returned to my basement apartment on Potomac Avenue, my first instinct was to crawl into the cellar — but I was already there. Was there no place to hide? I packed my bags and moved to Iowa — to the land of corn and soy — as far away from the war machine as I could get. Had I known about the Minutemen tucked into their silos just four hours away from my new home in a sleepy college town, I’d have been less likely to overlook the reach of the atomic age. One year later Hazel O’Leary declassified the Department of Energy’s vast case files on secret radiation tests run by the government. The subsequent flurry of gruesome stories about unsuspecting men and women victimized in radiation labs all over the country shocked everyone. The sheer volume of information that came pouring out of the DOE was staggering: 460 documents on nuclear testing in the Marshall Islands between 1946 and 1962; vast data on atmospheric releases of tritium from the Savannah River Site between 1955 and 1993 (16 million curies); the total amount of plutonium expended in nuclear weapons tests (3.4 metric tons); number of U.S. nuclear weapons tests (1,030) and actual devices detonated (1,126). The cold war was supposed to have been an imaginary war: bombs weren’t dropped, missiles weren’t fired. Deterrence was a triumph of policy and national will. But don’t let this fool you. As I write, Minuteman III ICBMs are receiving new motors, guidance systems, and control electronics, and are expected to remain in service until 2020, at which time the Air Force will move to the next stage, the Minuteman IV. When the national media named the World Trade Center’s fallen towers “ground zero,” it was, as Yogi Berra said, déjà vu all over again. Was that New York City on television — or Nagasaki — bathed in light and ash? Had Raul Castro made good on his threat? I recently read an article in Slate about the increasing likelihood of nuclear terrorism in the foreseeable future. Let’s imagine, the writer

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says, what would happen should a ten-kiloton nuclear bomb (small by classic cold war standards) detonate in downtown Manhattan. In the first few moments, an invisible electromagnetic pulse will disable all electronic systems, including those in computers, cars, and intensive care units in hospitals throughout New York City and its vicinities. This will be followed by a blinding flash of light. A fierce shock wave will then erupt outwards, flattening buildings within a half mile of the blast. Fires will rage uncontrollably, destroying those structures left standing, and a lethal column of radioactive dust will rise up overhead. These words have an eerily familiar ring to them, so recognizable as to be reassuring in a strange way. The writer concludes by outlining several practical steps one might take to survive a blast of low magnitude. My favorite tip requires slipping into a Demron TwoPly Radiation Torso Vest, sold online at safeamerica.com. Impressively black, sophisticated, and form-fitting, the vest captures the keen spirit of a counterterrorist agent on a high-stakes vigil. If I’m near ground zero, I want to look like Jack Bauer. Though pricey at seven hundred dollars, the vest is sure to make a fashion statement in a neoatomic future — which is not to downplay its capacity to shield the user from various forms of ionizing radiation. In case you are without potassium-iodide pills, the vest comes with a removable thyroid protector. The old rivalry between the United States and the Soviet Union may be over but the spectacular absurdity of the cold war lives on. Consider the couple who purchased an abandoned missile silo in the Nebraska panhandle. Don and Charlene, two charming and, in many respects, sensible people, renovated an underground launch complex that previously housed an 82-foot Atlas missile. The Nebraska couple bought the silo in 1996 for forty thousand dollars and, after two years of redecorating, now live twenty feet underground — and they are thrilled. “This is really our dream home,” says Charlene. “I’ve fallen in love with the place.” The couple has redefined the meaning of homeland security, nesting beneath 139,000 cubic yards of reinforced concrete and 27,000 tons of structural steel. Their house is termite-resistant and tornado-proof and in the event of a disaster the couple calculate that they can remain underground for a year without leaving the repurposed silo. With a 16,000-gallon water reserve, Don figures they could last even longer. Don and Charlene recently installed a surveillance

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camera outside their home; controlled by a voice-activated computer (called HAL), it is wired to a huge projection TV in the living room. They hope to establish a computer-disaster recovery facility where sensitive data from around the nation can be backed up, in the event of a nuclear terrorist attack. Don and Charlene are not alone. Since 9/11, interest in deactivated missile sites has, as they say, taken off. I’m not above cold war kitsch myself and have long coveted a civil defense certified Leni Omega Pro Geiger Counter on eBay ( fully calibrated to military standards). More often, I screen video clips of my mother and father. In my documentary zeal I had filmed my father obsessively during the last years of his life, recording for apparently no clear reason his irregular body language. One sequence stands out. It is midsummer and my parents are seated at a porch table, my father in his New York Yankees cap, my mother in her Buffalo Bills sweatshirt. The business of caring for my father, a full-time job, exhausted my mother but there were no other options. I can see the strain on her face. My father, though, is in good spirits and begins to make fun of himself. He is laughing in a way only a Parkinsonian can, stretching his mouth ridiculously wide, rolling his head around. He is grinning and looks improbably happy. My mother, in spite of herself, begins to laugh, uncontrollably. She doesn’t want to but can’t help herself. It was the absurdity of the situation — this tortured episode of their life — that rose up before them with surprising clarity. No one said anything but they laughed together as they hadn’t done in many years. This is how I shall remember my father. Before he died, Einstein wrote that although the atom had changed everything our thinking had stubbornly remained the same and he suspected that we were drifting towards an inescapable catastrophe. Einstein’s thoughts, great monuments of the last century, continue to haunt our own. What did he know that we don’t? One dreams of deciphering history, its past as well as its future. I recently dreamt of a mysterious explosion. It is New York City at 11:00 a.m. and all is well. It is a mild July day. The Dow is spiking, shoppers are afoot, inbound traffic is heavy. But something is about to go awfully wrong, with hardly any warning. There will be no screaming across the sky nor will there be a blinding flash of light in the morning haze. This is my dream, the dream at the end of the book, beyond the last word. A nuclear bomb is about to detonate,

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accidentally — if you were to probe this dream more deliberately, you would not find any source for this explosion. I have fifteen minutes to leave town but I can’t find my car keys, and by the time I do, it’s too late of course. The nuke goes off but without the telltale bada boom. Nothing has happened yet everything has changed. All the buildings, cars, trucks, overpasses — still standing — are in ruins, as if a century has passed in a second. Was it a nuke or was it a time machine? Are they the same thing? Official checkpoints are formed, towards which dazed survivors, myself included, are moving, an exodus of stricken people. Only then do I realize that my book — this book (still a file on my computer) — is missing. I want to return to my apartment for my laptop but reality sets in. The ambiguities of time and motion converge in an instant of spectacular loss. These words — machine code really, ones and zeroes — are now irretrievable, erased by an electromagnetic pulse, the silent bomb. The bomb inside of us that is part of us, the nuclear uncanny. The nuclear as referent has always contained the possible obliteration of meaning, of all writing, for what is the nuclear if not the end of memory? And so the dreamer must begin all over again, within the circle that is ground zero. Concealed beneath the color of winter, hidden from the rest of the planet like the dark side of the moon, Buffalo exists in time but not in space. I have faxed messages to Buffalo that have never arrived, made phone calls that did not get through. I have circled the airport in a plane that could not land in the fog . . . A meditation on remembrance but much more than that, think of this book as a passage. It is a way that doubles back (rotatory motion), a reversing of the irreversible. We are always on-the-way — it is the law of spin.

. . . . . . . . . sightline . . . . . . . books .................................................. The Iowa Series in Literary Nonfiction

The Men in My Country marilyn abildskov Shadow Girl: A Memoir of Attachment deb abramson Embalming Mom: Essays in Life janet burroway Dream Not of Other Worlds: Teaching in a Segregated

The Body of Brooklyn david lazar No Such Country: Essays toward Home elmar lueth Grammar Lessons: Translating a Life in Spain michele morano Currency of the Heart: A Year of

Elementary School, 1970

Investing, Death, Work, and Coins

huston diehl

donald r. nichols

Fauna and Flora, Earth and Sky: Brushes with Nature’s Wisdom trudy dittmar In Defense of Nature john hay Letters to Kate: Life after Life carl h. klaus Essays of Elia charles lamb

Oppenheimer Is Watching Me: A Memoir jeff porter Memoirs of a Revolutionary victor serge The Harvard Black Rock Forest george w. s. trow