And So Oppenheimer Made the Bomb

And So Oppenheimer Made the Bomb

By Douglas, the Small-minded

No. Science is the most susceptible to training of all the world’s disciplines. It seems objective and independent of history while in fact it not only is determined by history but makes sure that futures follow the same values as the cultures that came before.

       Like writers. Well-known writers do not encourage new writers of worth, much as they seem to. Encouraging what competes with one makes no normal sense. A writer, especially a famous one, writes in order to be famous and great. If he is, as writers are, mediocre of thought and prodigal of talent and, so, witless and tightfisted with assistance, keeping with vigilance to what has been taught him, and only making great efforts to appear independent, then it stands to reason that he will encourage those who are struggling in his own area of expertise. The publishing industry, staffed by failing writers, in cahoots with successful writers, wears frippery. The strong need the help of the weak.

       One day Oppenheimer, long after the bomb’s construction, tested in Nevada and then released on the multitudes of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, walked in his friend’s garden and helped himself to a tomato. His friend was not there and so he took it without asking. He looked over his shoulder, took the fruit and ate, and it was good. He then took an cucumber of fine proportions, green, slender and succulent and it, too, went after its companion down the good man’s gullet. Similarly, after a few minutes to digest the sensations of good vitals going into the stomach, O (we shall refer to him as O from here on in) masticated another cucumber, a celery, two asparagus, a rutabaga, a cabbage and, finally, both a sweet and a hot pepper, one round as a bell, the other elongated and slim as ever might be. Full to the brim (browsing of ivy, one could say) he decided to sleep. He slept for one hundred years and when he awoke his stomach felt empty and ready for another gargantuan sit-down at table. His friend not being around, dead by this time and long just dust, O made another tour of the garden and this time he focused on less likely edibles, for what reason he himself had no answer, though he did wonder at his odd principles of selection. He ate: dandelion pods; vanilla leaves; wisteria blossoms (the purple, sweet ones that leave the aftertaste of aluminum to the rear of the esophagus); sensa roots, which are revered in eastern Asia for their odiferous qualities; papaya peels, the insides not recommended at that time of year, about the third week in June when fish flies lay their eggs untimely in exactly that species of botany; and, string bean stems that secrete an fierce and fiery liquid that first burns and then numbs the palate.

       Satisfied, O slept again, this time for a short week or two, and getting up he found himself not so much hungry as constipated. For constipation he knew no cure, having been always a reluctant student of natural medicine, paying little attention to his mother’s lectures on the ameliorative virtues of this or that shrub. He did what a child would do for such an ailment. He stuck his finger in his anus and pulled it out again without success. No plum. No substance black and congealing denoting an unblockage of anything there. What next? He tried, among the things he found in his deceased acquaintance’s garden, everything that looked promising. He worked techniques with these items that suggested themselves to him. And, they suggested themselves thick and fast. He made good use of bramble, for instance. He wedged in a stick and worked it in and out as quickly as he could. He then tried stones. Onto those with sharp and pointed tops he sat down with some abruptness in order to force a dislodgement of matter in his intestines. He lept bumfirst onto stones from a distance, at a run, zeroing in on these granite projections, but with little effect.

       Next he thought of frogs. He found the biggest and most sonorous of these, a Striated Gobi bullfrog, and stuffed him nose first up his dallywog. O felt the expansion of the amphibian’s bellows, he experienced the sensation of the first release of  air, and then heard, as from a distance--like listening to the music in a seashell--a croak of great magnitude, resembling more a Holstein’s bawl than anything. There came to him a distant woooommmpppphhhribbbettttt. But, no deliverance. A fart, perhaps. A modest explosion of gases from both the anus and the lips. But, no lucky release of tightness in groin and abdomen. Next he tickled his nethers with moosegrass, that long and stringy grain natural to the northern deciduous. His friend had cultivated some of it in a shady corner of his herbarium. He plucked a stem of it, the thickness of his thumb, with tufts of feathery grass on its head, and pried and rubbed this in and over his buttocks to attempt to make that region laugh and, laughing, release its load. No dice. No luck. Luckless O.

       When he finally shat it had little to do with flora and fauna so much as a weariness with the game of figuring out how to make himself do so. He simply shat, wiped himself on whatever available plantage he could lay hands on (it happened to be a bunch of tiger lily growing next  to the juniper under which his steaming pile lay), got up and went back to sleep, wondering what new problem his wakeage would bring.