A Tragic American Manhattan Project

A Tragic American Manhattan Project

       by Cornelius the Bombast

at first he thought

i don't think

the thing will work

it won't do what we intend

it's just too weird a thought

how can a thing explode

and take with it

in that one conflagration

all the world

or all the world

in some square miles

so he went on and thought

that he would think

it through some more

and so he did

till hiroshima

When Oppy (his wife called him that) made the bomb work well enough to ignite (or whatever it is that bombs do) she kissed him next morning and asked how they could find out for sure because she had been thinking about the mechanics of the thing when she woke.

       "We're going to drop one from the air on an uninhabited part of Death Valley and cross our fingers that it actually goes off," Oppenheimer said and kissed her back with equal energy. He ate cheerios, brushed his teeth, got into the striped gray suit Skyreens had laid out for him, entered their 1944 Dodge sedan and drove off. The clouds overhead wiffled and sighed. Gerkus trees on the other side of their ditch waved goodbye with their delicate branches and their elongated leaves in clusters and the tall hay grass beside the road ducked to get out of the dust and wind the car made.

       "This is the day, this is the day, that the Big O made, that the Big O made," Oppie sang as he drove along. He felt unhappy about it all, sick really, but he had not been able to find a balance for his emotions and so he sang songs such as this and made odd remarks full of absurd optimism as a sign to himself of his own volatility and wicked goodness.

       "O rejoice, o rejoice, for today is the day that my Lord will come," he intoned. He would be on the plane that would drop the first bomb and because he himself had never flown in an aeroplane he wondered what he would have to do, wear, say, think, feel and communicate about in the process. I hope I get to sit by a window so that I get to see the bomb drop, he thought. After all, I was an important person on the team! He snickered at his joke.

       Snickers, he thought. Hmmm. Snickers. When they got into the plane he had a window seat at the back but in front of the bomb cargo where the bombing person sat. Oppy turned toward him and asked him a question or two about procedure but the guy did not respond and O thought that he must be deaf or shy or concentrating, or maybe repeating to himself the tables by which he accurately dropped bombs onto targets. The wind rushed past O's window; he could hear it. The plane lifted off and they were in the air. O enjoyed it a lot, this lifting off and suddenly being suspended in a wobbly carousel of immobility. Flying is great, he said to himself. Flying is great, yes it is, yes it is, he intoned to the melody of an old Sunday school hymn. No one was paying him any attention, the pilot, co-pilot and bomber all busy with their eight hour shift, so he pressed his face at will against the window and enjoyed the sight of the ground slipping by in all its variety of color and thing.

       City gave way to country where his house nestled somewhere below. Country lay next to forest where he had once gone with his father and mother on a picnic among bears and trees and rocks and all things wild. Southern Pine region gave out onto scraggly swamps and endless hills covered in furz, and finally there ahead swelled the telltale signs of desert, tan-coloured expanses visible on the horizon and growing ever closer as the plane charged onward.

       The target approached slowly. Death Valley was a huge area that should have been called Death Zone, or Death Region, or some other such name that  countries give to unimaginably endless tracts, since after an hour of flight they still had not reached their destination. When they did after an hour and forty minutes, O wondered at how little life he had seen below him. He could see well enough the little details on the ground. Now a gigantic boulder shouldered up out of the sand. Here an ancient and abandoned mine headframe. There a dry gulch through which dry water meandered. Now and then an outcropping of rock that might have been called a little mountain. Mainly sand, though, and where it was sand he could not differentiate one place from another. When they reached the target area. not having seen signs of humanity for hundreds of miles, the pilot turned to O and said,

       "This is it." O was startled. No one had spoken for three hours.

       "Oh," he said. "Where does the bomb drop?" The pilot turned from him and pointed downwards.

       "There," he said, nodding, too. "That old farmstead there." Below O the buildings of the farm came into view. Sand dunes between house and barn, in a wasteland as broad as the face of moon itself, without tree or lake or road or grass field around, there it stood.

       "What!?" O shouted. "We're going to bomb a farm?"

       "Yep," the pilot said, "we are." He flew, he banked, he approached, he lifted his thumb to the watchful bomber at the back, he pulled his thumb down in a sudden motion, and O heard the sound of the bomb hatch opening and emptying, and looking down he could see the bomb dropping, straight toward the target.

       "Kablam!" O said to himself even before the bomb hit. Then all he saw was light and nothing else.

       In the old barn, Bubba Wassermann, a high school dropout, sat smoking a hand-rolled cigarette. He was fortyish, single, had never had a date, hated himself, wished for a better world, thought highly of himself at times, ate whatever creatures he could find, and drank whatever liquids he could lay his hands on. He had discovered an ingenious way of collecting dew overnight and so he had a gallon of water each day that did him quite well.  He collected also cactus plant juice and brewed both wine and tequila from it. Tequila was wine distilled and a bit of snake oil put in for flavor. At least, that is what Wass had heard and what he had tried and had grown to like. Just now he was drunk and happy. His mule had died and that was good.  He hated that mule. His dog was gone to rattlers and he didn't mind. Dogs needed too much food and love. So, Wass had only himself to look after and he did that, day by day.

       When the bomb hit it wiped out the farm and did the dishes for Wass. He had not done them for a week, partly because of a chronic shortage of water, partly because he had no woman to impress or drive him. The bomb painted his buildings for him (they'd needed painting for ever so long), it dug both his outhouse and his dugout (accomplishments Wass had only dreamt of, though he had fantasized about hiring someone to do that for him). All the small jobs on the farm were finally done now and he would not have to think about projects anymore.