It is the first anniversary of her death and he has finally steeled himself, in his closed-door office, to read the coroner’s clinical reconstructing of her – Body is that of a well-developed, well-nourished twenty-nine-year-old female – and he thinks of her letters after their last visit, ‘I have never stopped,’ and in the face of her proclamations and her continued letters, he had forced himself to stay away despite that final time together and the way her frame sat full in the lamplight, her breath still wild with tequila. He remembers the exact date, January 7, that he found out, three days after she had actually died. He had received a phone call from a man, someone who didn’t give his name but claimed to work for the FBI, and that unnamed voice explained that Jean had been found dead, her father climbing in through her top-floor window after she didn’t answer the phone or door, and then the voice disappeared into the dial tone and he looked into his darkened room, and he knew they must have been watching her, too, listening to her phone, tailing her when she left to work at the hospital or slipped out for dinner at one of the cheap bars in her neighbourhood, and those shadows had waited three days, had waited until her body had bloated through the skin of her bathwater and her dark hair spread out in chunky skeins, and had let her father walk in on his dead daughter.
He sat at the same desk that he sits at now, in nearly the same position, so much having moved in one year, except him hunched over his desk, the same as when the knock at the door stopped him from staring at the flame resting on his desk, the wick engulfed and half-hidden by the spattering heat, and its contorting reminded him of a tree in mid-wind sway – there was a logic to its movement, despite that movement being imposed upon it, by gusts or by his breath. He had been staring uninterrupted as the daybreak trickled into his office, he could smell the wax as it burned, and he could feel the slight pinch of his belt buckle into his stomach as he sat. The room was lit only by a few candles around its edges, on the window sill, on the edge of his desk, on the cabinet off to the right of the door, and the light was unsteady and small and the cold of the office was obvious. He recalls all this and reads the letter that had mysteriously arrived that day, on this anniversary, in an unmarked envelope, the letter beginning: To those who loved and helped me.
He stops and goes back in his mind to that morning he found out. After the knock Robert Serber cautiously entered, and without looking directly at him, spoke: ‘I’m so sorry. Charlotte just got a telegram from Mary-Ellen in California and I’m not sure if you’ve heard yet but … ’ and his friend, the man who first brought Kitty to him at Perro Caliente when the embers of his relationship with Jean were near their hottest, the man overfamiliar with Crisis’s nickering along trails up and down the valles, stopped in mid-sentence because their eyes collided.
This memory is interrupted as he starts again – To those who loved and helped me, all love and courage – but cannot go further and instead remembers the realization in Serber’s face that he had heard already. He did not finish his sentence, instead stepped back toward the door, reluctant. He let Serber leave and he cried into his crossed forearms as he laid his head on his desk – To those who loved and helped me, all love and courage. I think I would have been a liability all my life – he cried in long hitches that wet his uniform’s sleeves, cried until his body was a drought and his eyes were red-ringed beads of ice blue, and only then did he stand and walk from his office, escaping past his guards and the commissary, the fire station, through the centre of the compound, the roads starring outward toward the technical and engineering labs, the nursery, the post office, and beauty shop and barber. He walked past the redwood water tower, past the last residences and outward until he was crunching through the stiff snow, and every knot in every pine he passed was vivid, the colours of the pastel sky hazed dull by winter clouds, doing little to stop the exaggeration of sunlight off the immaculate snow, the light a blinding scrim that annihilated the landscape and left him alone, walking, with his thoughts and her body, her corpse; Los Alamos was behind him, its mechanical noise and voice, its rows of half-formed houses that clouded the winter with stove smoke, burnt coal and wood seeping out and into the bright air, and it was late morning and the electricity had been out since dawn, and every building, room, was burnished with encroaching cold. He had passed the Sundt Apartments at the edges of the compound nearly an hour earlier, shadowed by his security’s rigid footfalls, and the Jemez’s exposed pines provided a skeletal archway up into the umber mountains as he struggled forward. His feet made fresh holes in the sedimentary crust of snow as he walked over unseen and hibernating ignimbrite rocks, thin grasses blended with zinnias, the hurried tracks of jackrabbits and rock squirrels, he wandered away and up into the low edges of the mountains as he pictured her corpse: she was on her back submerged in her tub, her left leg hanging over its edge, her unworried mouth and resting eyes, as calm, as smooth and soft, as lily petals, she was serene and floating and clean. He merged his image with a young poem he had written more than a decade earlier
But for us who are not angels, for us
You, whom the angels inhabit, are so precious
That we learn to cherish equally
The red angel of joy, and the pale angel of misery
and trekked forward, without endpoint, outward.
He lifts his eyes to the letter and, restarting, reads, determined to finish – To those who loved and helped me, all love and courage. I think I would have been a liability all my life. I wanted to live and to give and I got paralyzed somehow – but he can’t finish, breaks, contracts abruptly, remembering back to when they were first dating, their voices in exchange, the dim evening framing her pleas to break through his own cocooning ignorance, through his own wealth and privilege, to examine the world in front of him, the breadlines, the tattered clothing of a passing child and her mother. ‘You cannot simply live in science and ideas,’ she insisted, but her didacticism was balanced by their common escapes into verse, Donne’s three-person’d god Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new, or her tranquil features as he read her the Gita’s Sanskrit followed by his own spontaneous translation, the poem’s words with him as he walked with his hands in his jacket pockets one year ago, his feet walking without him lowering his gaze in caution. He trusted the ground, looked straight and forward into the full magnitude of his vision’s ability, further than the steepening slopes and snow-covered talus, further than the peaks, Chicoma, beyond the sacred Redondo and the Pueblo hiking to its summit shrine, further – To those who loved and helped me, all love and courage. I think I would have been a liability all my life. I wanted to live and to give and I got paralyzed somehow. I tried like hell to understand and couldn’t – further, until he settles on the memory of his three days in the desert with his scouting partners, hunting for a test site, and after they had settled on that stark patch of earth along the Jornada del Muerto, to when he thought of Jean reading Donne’s sonnet to him, Yet dearly I love you, and would be lov’d fain, and that was one more turn in the wheel that named the site Trinity.
They had been building the site near Alamogordo for months now, and he thinks of the men living there during its construction; they had been camping among the desert rocks and lava under the purple shadows of the surrounding ranges, living as Opje himself used to live, with Katy, with Kitty, with his horses Crisis or Chico, near naked under the cooling nights, muscular and limber instead of hewn all the way to his bones by the large chunky swipes of the security fences and the constant light and noise of Los Alamos.
From this image he switches to reading the coroner’s report, remembering when Jean had stood up – Height: 5 foot 6 inches. Weight: 117 – and moved toward the frame of the bedroom’s open door, and she stopped as she did and her face was directly exposed – Eyes: Hazel. Hair: Brown – replicating his, and neither of them moved until she confessed, ‘I can’t stop,’ and she unburdened herself – Heart: 240 grams and measure 13x7x6 centimetres – and he reciprocated in the manner he could, and later he took in but brushed past the pill bottles that adorned the edges of her sink, the small cabinet behind the bathroom mirror, had completely forgot about them until he reads of all the drugs in her apartment, thoroughly catalogued – Abbott’s Nembutal C, Codeine ½ gr, Upjohn Racephedrine Hydrochloride 3/8 gr – and then the contents of her stomach – recently ingested, semi-solid food – cheap beans and rice, he wonders, continues – 4 barbituric acid derivatives, derivative of salicylic acid, faint trace of chloral hydrate (uncorroborated) – the repetition of acid driving his mind to images of her organs eroded in bubbling hunks, her beautiful, floating body being devoured from the inside out and through her skin, exposing her to the bathwater, air, so that then it wasn’t so much that her lungs filled – Cause of death: Acute edema of the lungs with pulmonary congestion – but rather her whole body, even her veins, was hollowed out and replaced with water, and perhaps then she was of one substance.
As he continues, he imagines her father discovering her, his increasing panic in the prior days as his numerous reachings out to her came back silent, sixty-seven years old and desperately scaling the fire escape of her building and forcing one of her windows open, barely fitting underneath the propped-up pane, and breathing heavily as he entered her apartment, only a single lamp on, and he relives that moment from the perspective of her father: there are no smells, no sounds, just stillness, the sense that there hasn’t been motion in the space in days, and he walks forward and finds her in the tub, with her unsigned suicide note
To those who loved and helped me, all love and courage. I think I would have been a liability all my life. I wanted to live and to give and I got paralyzed somehow. I tried like hell to understand and couldn’t … At least I could take away the burden of a paralyzed soul from a fighting world …
and as he visualizes the trailing last letters, off the page and into the dead narrator of ‘Renascence’ at the point of her awakening
For rain it hath a friendly sound
To one who’s six feet underground;
And scarce the friendly voice or face:
A grave is such a quiet place.
The tiny sprinkling of water so beautiful and simple that the narrator immediately regrets her passing, even after the drops multiply into a storm; after the clouds of the poem dissolve, she is met by wind, Into my face a miracle/Of orchard-breath, and wishes to be reborn in order to experience the full breath and beauty of God and His earth. But, he reminds himself, Jean remains paralyzed in her rain-pocked grave.
He reads that after her father found her, her note, he carried her to her couch and then he searched the drawers and corners of the apartment, gathered up whatever personal letters and photos he found, filled the fireplace with them and then he sat awhile longer, lit only by those flames, until the papers’ edges curled off completely into ash, and only then did he call the funeral parlour. From his Los Alamos office, Opje thinks that it’s likely some of those letters were his, his weavings between her and Kitty, his rewriting of their favourite verses, his descriptions of the New Mexico mountains barring him from all sides, and he thinks of the map in Donne’s ‘Hymn to God, My God, in my Sickness’ and recalls the final warning of Millay’s narrator:
But East and West will pinch the heart
That can not keep them pushed apart;
And he whose soul is flat – the sky
Will cave in on him by and by.
He reads on, and is left with the image of Jean’s body as it was actually found, not as he imagined on his hours in the Jemez woods the day he heard she was dead, not familiarly floating on her back, her face upward. No, her father came upon her hunched over the edge of the bathtub, pillows underneath her knees, her head the only portion of her body in the cold water.