Y: Oppenheimer, Horseman of Los Alamos

By Aaron Tucker

J. Robert Oppenheimer: reluctant father of the atomic bomb, enthusiastic lover of books, devoted husband and philanderer. Engaging with the books he voraciously read, and especially the Bhagavad Gita, his moral compass, this lyrical novel takes us through his story, from his tumultuous youth to his marriage with a radical communist and the two secret, consuming affairs he carried on, all the while bringing us deep inside the mind of the man behind the Manhattan Project. With the stunning backdrop of Los Alamos, New Mexico, Oppenheimer's spiritual home, and using progressively shorter chapters that shape into an inward spiral, Y brings us deep inside the passions and moral qualms of this man with pacifist, communist leanings as he created and tested the world's first weapon of mass destruction? and, in the process, changed the world we live in immeasurably.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Coach House Books
• Release date: Apr 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781770565517

Aaron Tucker

Aaron Tucker is a poet and a scholar. He is the author of two collections of poetry, irresponsible mediums: the chesspoems of Marcel Duchamp and punchlines. Y is his first novel. He currently lives in Toronto. 

Book preview

He rides, and the wilderness drops away, and the barbed wire of Project Y grows larger, and he stops because he cannot return to Los Alamos yet, cannot face his family and friends and co-workers with all the parts of him as they are now, in constant motion around his conflicted centre. As he rests his hands on the pommel, he lets the reins fall from his fists and the bridle shifts slightly and he tells himself that his work is nearly done, and the bit slips in the horse’s mouth, he can hear the animal’s gums and teeth working to regrip, the puff of its large breaths loud and sighing as it waits to move forward through the purpling mountainscape, toward the rocky peaks. He still feels weak from the fever that torched him two months ago, a sickness that forced him into bedrest, and despite the slack inhabiting his body, he is preparing to make himself rigid again, because he knows they are mere months from finishing and unleashing the Gadget’s evaporating light, and he forced himself away from the labs this afternoon so that he could settle his thoughts.

Opje has been riding along the scrub of stiff branches, sharp and constant and mixed with asters and red skyrockets, the branches scraping the hooves and agile legs of his horse as they cut through the pointed dust, the dust turning from clay-red to mauve, darker as the night encroaches; they have ridden for hours away from the deserts to the south, first through the San Ildefonso Pueblo and across the Rio Grande, now into the scrabbled terrain of Caballo Mountain, and all the while, he has ridden between the flitting of poetry scraps, George Herbert’s ‘Church Monuments,’ flesh is but the glass, which holds the dust, with the weight of the horse under his legs. He reminds himself that the Gadget is the result of an unstoppable and unavoidable momentum that started long before him, that his, their, achievement of it is monumental. Now he moves his hands to the horse’s neck, his voice in its ears, and he thinks how minute he is against the ever-present Sangre de Cristo Range and the horizon clouds, trimmed on their underside by the shadows of the mountains as the sun lowers in tiers of cobalt, sky, orange, then maize. He pictures himself, tall and lean and handsome, as he trots forward, his body co-commanded by the dark horse’s eyes, creosote brown-to-black, those eyes so in opposition to its rider’s, his own eyes so near to clear they are ice-white, tinged blue despite the dark hair beneath his hat. His eyes, which before saw dust – everyone he meets comments in sweeping tones on them, eyes as impossibly coloured as the edges of far-off ocean waves about to crest; even in photos, his gaze addresses the camera with a focused intensity like that imbued by the finest portrait brush strokes of a Dutch master, the camera an instrument repurposed by his stare into a horsehair brush, canvas-dragged and rippled by textured acrylic. His eyes with just the trim of animal darkness, a locomotive instinct he shares with the horse underneath him, covalent in each’s perfect addition to the other’s complete shell.

All of the people in his life are tethered to these mountains in some way: there is his wife, Kitty, and children, Peter and Toni, his family living in the compound, at their home on Bathtub Row; there is Katy, the first woman who possessed the full expanse of his feelings, their rides together through the Pecos; there is Dorothy, indispensible in helping to organize Los Alamos, a confidante; there is Jean, the shadow of Jean, his lover, his ex-lover, an ever-presence. His mind is composed of these bodies, their dates and years, catalogues, states in correspondence that he rotates through, each an unpredictable system of minute components, scattered across chronologies, and he keeps track of every event and sifts through them in the quiet before he returns to the labs, the overhead swirl of a sharp-shinned hawk above him.

As he searches through his memory, the imagery that is most vivid is always his place on the mesas, on Santa Fe Baldy, on Round Mountain, on Grady’s Mountain, here, the over-coloured blankets of dense wool that the Puebloan people sell on the roadside, their symmetrical patterns, triangles within triangles within triangles, a spiralling geometry that reminds him of the wise saints in the Bhavagad Gita who

dive deep into themselves

fearless, one-pointed

each turn inward one curve tighter to the centre.

He begins riding as he thinks this, one hand gripping the soft leather straps, the other on the horn of the saddle, the slight jostle of his horse’s regal trot, his view, panoramic from the skinny mountain path, sweeping down the slopes, and he sees Los Alamos, Project Y, and he remembers November 1942 and the Department of War’s search for the perfect site, occupies himself with the memory of the trip to Jemez Springs, its walls sheered into ranging cliffs by the eruptions of past volcanoes; the four men looked up from its bottom and he told his fellow scientist Ed McMillan and Colonel Dudley that his vision of a potential and, one day, sprawling laboratory would never work there, that the stone borders would only lean more closely together the longer anyone stayed, which General Groves vindicated: ‘This will never do.’ Leslie Groves, his face wide and rocky and augmented by a swept-back hairline, his stomach rounded slightly over his belt but his shoulders broad as the wings of an osprey in hunt, his shirt collar crisped to the sheen of his medals, formal and glinting with the sliver of canyon-closed sunlight. He relives this now, riding, remembering that Groves spoke those words and the four men and their convoy pivoted up the canyon, drove the dirt roads along the Valle Grande, turning a corner to be greeted by a flatland, a caldera, made from Bandelier tuff, rock with ash, and low grass, wound another corner, drove and climbed the tilted grade up to the top of the mesa, and in doing so they drove along the same serpentine paths recarved decades ago by the early-twentieth-century students of the Los Alamos Ranch School for boys, brilliant roads created with a craftsmanship beyond youth, pushed on by the ideals of dusty boots and grip-sore hands, and he thinks of those sons of rich men sent into the desert to be trained by the land, the students heaving heavy stones cut, then fit as buttress, into the steep valley sides, magnificent roads double the width of those initially engraved by three generations of migratory farmers, families chased by the spring bursts of wild hollyhocks along the Rio Grande to the cooling altitude provided by scaling the mountains. From his saddle he watches Project Y growing larger as he moves toward it, he thinks of those families who relied on the sinew of horses and the bulk of cattle, the cows lulling in fields then rounded for milk, for slaughter. Those families grew arugula and chicories, bitter and brittle, and summer squash and cilantro, grew giant blackberries in May, grew blueberries in June and raspberries in July, grew basil all year that scented every gulp of air as it spread and wound its way into all the free spaces of the earth. Those families engraved those initial roads to take their beef and vegetables and fruits to market, to come down to gentler slopes surrounding the turquoise and silver mines near Los Cerrillos on the other side of Santa Fe, and the routes veined along the near-vertical grades of the canyons and arroyos bisected by meagre washes that fuelled the semi-arid atmosphere, those arroyos that would flood each spring then dry to sectored dirt in summer.

He stops and pats his horse softly on the neck, pulls his fingers lightly through its coarse mane, and thinks of the slices of the local tomato he salted and ate for lunch just before their trip to the Jemez in that early winter of 1942, the fine seeds nearly invisible and the burst of liquid enough to overwhelm the mouth, the taste still lingering as they drove, and his mind regressed further into history, millennia backward, scattered obsidian heads of spears and husks of villages still half-buried throughout the region, and he envisioned the hunters chasing hulking masses through their sacred mountains, their prey one generation evolved past the extinct megafauna, the increased predatory skills of those hunters: he thinks of the process of lithic reduction, how the sharp points of those arrowheads were carved from the smack of a hammer-stone, and then he imagined the motion of a weapon thrown overhand and the snap of its point into the side of a buck. Later in the sixteenth century, when the Spanish world-openers first landed and met the Puebloan people, along the Puyé and the Pajarito and the Rito de los Frijoles, and spoke to the seasonal cacique, a different priest for summer and winter, and they pressed Catholic crosses into their palms, Este dios es el único dios, and the pueblos responded first with acceptance, then, under encomienda, with revolt. As the unrest rose, the Tewa leader, Popé, tasked his fastest warriors to run to each pueblo with a knotted rope, and those blazing messengers told the leaders of those pueblos to untie one knot every day until there were no more and only then were they to attack, and when there were no more knots they drove the Spaniards up to the north and held their space for a dozen years. Still, the twelve years passed and the land was retaken and the region bore the language, pajarito, meaning ‘small bird,’ sparrow.

He had been telling his companions this history as they walked from the cars, a light November snow dusting their boots; when he, General Groves, Colonel Dudley, and Ed McMillan had hiked up to a height, then halted, a late-afternoon sun threatening toward the earth and the ground sharpened by the flaking white, and the four men looked at the Ranch School’s lodge, the central building proud with the long grain of large logs and sharply slanted roof, and they watched the boys running and shouting, their short pants startling him as his breath clouded in his face, and Groves said, ‘This is the place.’ That place an expanse on the lid of an extinct volcano, los alamos, ‘the cottonwoods,’ a place horizontal and vertical simultaneously, its planes running perpendicular, the north and south blockaded by steep rock, and between them flat extended to the limits of human sight. Opje lit a cigarette, coughed his usual cough between long inhales, thought of the tuberculosis that still lingered in each of his breaths, permanent, and brushed the ash off with the tip of his nicotine-charred little finger.

‘What do you think, Doctor?’ Dudley asked, and that question echoes through him now, he and his horse as sentinel against the dropping evening, and he remembers being asked and then, as the boys continued to play in front of them, Opje pulled smoke into his mouth, throat, lungs, exhaled, and thought of his childhood self. Looking at the boys’ school, he recalled that he had always known he was extraordinarily intelligent. Until he had found the word polymath, he drifted through school bored, skipping grades and flipping past the redundant and simple pages of his textbooks, his fellow classmates distracted by radio shows and toys and sports while he, always too skinny, read and talked with the adults around him. His first break from this boredom was the spring of 1922. His father sent him to New Mexico to recuperate from the dysentery, later colitis, acquired in Germany while on a family vacation, that drove his body temperature to searing, then sweating through the ruthless clenching of his stomach, his muscles exhausted by the tension of contractions. His namesake father thought the Southwest would expose him to the physicality of his own bony body, harden it by long horseback rides and the purest air, untouched and incomparable at such high elevation. He stayed in the Pecos River Forest Reserve, at Los Pinos, two dozen miles from Santa Fe, a dude ranch run by Katy Page, a woman who could control a horse with just her fingers and wrist. When he first arrived, he was one of many boys sent to her to toughen themselves, but they quickly grew close, he was her favourite, and she was his first attempt at loving someone. Her absent husband, married in crisis as she lay choked by illness, was twice her age; in contrast, Opje was handsome and young, would bring her handfuls of fragrant mountain pinks and lupine, and she would take his flowers with his multilingual poetry. He might explain it away later as a schoolboy crush, but it was more; it was the way Katy rode a horse with a straight back, her face beautiful and open to the snowy breezes, and she dared him and nudged him and hardened his body by teaching him how to breathe in and out with a horse, in combination, to ride with light saddlebags, with sparse packings of food and bedding and later tobacco, how to move between the towering trees while still devouring everything in sight. He remembers her, the muscles and endurance she demanded of him on their five- and six-day horseback rides, through wildflowers, coral gilia, past Pecos Falls, then Trampas Peak, to southern Colorado and back, perched around dwindling fires at night and speaking, those dark eyes, not just speaking but explaining, and he felt that first bit of openness with a woman, unrequited but there. After that summer, he visited her and Los Pinos nearly every summer of his young adult life, the two of them growing closer: in the summer of 1925, they stumbled on a previously undiscovered lake, following the Winsor Canyon, and saw the oxygen-starved slender spruces that lined its edges, and he named it after her, Lake Katherine, a lake as montane as she was.

But the vistas and elevations: each time he returned to Los Pinos, he would dip his hands into boiling water, safe in his knowledge of the atmosphere’s pressure, and remove them unscarred, in a flourish that sent droplets all over the stove. The altitude disrupted Nature’s laws, where water boiled instead at 198 degrees Fahrenheit, making meals an incredibly slow process; he remembers waiting hours for potatoes to boil, the water still and slowly changing, at its own indiscriminate pace, as it pleased, and when the meals finally came out, they were always a bit chewy; he remembers his molars working in condensed bites, his cheek muscles strained. This was why he preferred the immediate bite of fresh produce, a meal of greens and the bright colours of chilies, honeyed figs for dessert.

He is resting as he remembers all this, his horse pawing at the trail, and he recedes back into his memories, first to looking down on the boys’ school, trying deciding whether to build the labs there, ‘What do you think, Doctor?’ then further, again, to his initial trip to New Mexico as an eighteen-year-old when he first learned how to breathe, fully engaging both his lungs and swallowing, holding the coolness inside himself, then exhaling