Dr. Manhattan Considers Oppenheimer
by Nay Saysourinho
Saskia Jordá, Soft Borders, industrial felt, thread, wood, and enamel, 14.3 x 7.3 x 1 feet, 2016. Photograph by Airi Katsuta.
Dr. Manhattan Considers
Oppenheimer
Nay Saysourinho / MAY 2021 / ISSUE 8
What is heartbreak, Oppenheimer? A nuclear cloud over history, drones blooming like dandelion seeds, cluster bombs under the smooth feet of children.
A stranger you hurt.
Sometimes I think of you as much as you dream of me. I am a quantum being, drawn from the pages of a comic book in which old gods pantomime superheroes. Yet I exist, bending reality because I can. Bifurcating time and space because I will.
The echo of your choices resonates in every timeline I have observed, and I have observed a thousand timelines waiting for the echo to fade. I want to know, Oppenheimer, if we ever escape the consequences of our actions.
Compania Hill, United States - 1945
You stand there, Oppenheimer, amused by the Italian physicist who wonders out loud if the Gadget will destroy the state or the planet. The project director yells at him for scaring the soldiers who are already terrified, but the mood in the shelter is festive despite the enormity of what you are about to do. Here you are with your colleagues, a safe distance away from the test site, away from the nuclear fallout.
“We could all die,” laughs the Italian physicist.
“A dud,” replies the Harvard physicist.
“Eighteen kilotons,” predicts another.
Two. The Gadget explodes successfully. In a moment of silence amidst the cheers and applause for the scientific breakthrough, you quote a Sanskrit poem under your breath. In other timelines, the poem changes to Latin, to Greek, even Aramaic. But the Gadget never changes. In every timeline, it annihilates life. In every timeline, oleander blooms again, first flower of all flowers.
One. In this timeline, the protective goggles that were handed out before the test have disappeared. When the Gadget explodes, you are reminded of a thousand suns. You lose your eyesight. Your damaged retinas never recover. In August, you hear Hiroshima, then Nagasaki, but cannot see the carnage.
Tsɨtqawɨ, New World - 1587
The masts on the galleon have cracked. Lumber must be gathered for repairs, but the crew is restless with anger. There are not enough provisions to feed everyone, but the captain and his officers care little for the Luzonians who man his ship. He demands that they scout the area, that they dispose of any threat they encounter. Once the land is cleared, the captain will claim the bay for Spain.
Datu is the oldest sailor onboard, his skin red and brown from fifty years in the parching sun. Salt runs deep in his wounds. His sons are sailors too, and his grandsons are pages. He pleads with them to disobey the captain’s order. Through the fog, he has seen shadows moving on a hill. Through the trees, he senses that the birds are too quiet, that the rustling leaves are too loud.
“We are not welcomed here,” he tells them.
Five. In this timeline, the sailors mutiny. Maynilà, they clamor. Let us return to Maynilà.
Paris, France - 1919
The French do not notice me. They only pay attention to the garçon, who is flitting about, serving coffee and pastries at the café where he works. The garçon is Vietnamese.
One. In this timeline he never leaves Paris alive, but for now he dares to dream of self-determination. A gentleman compliments his assiduity, the garçon thanks him. Merci monsieur, vous êtes bien aimable. He thinks of the document he carries every day in a leather satchel on behalf of his people. In other timelines, he succeeds in delivering the letter to the American Secretary of State, who will end up doing nothing about it. But in this timeline, the garçon works himself to the point of exhaustion. The café has been bustling with diplomats and attachés—opportunities, all of them, to further his cause.
“Excellence,” he mumbles on the streets of Paris, “Excellence. Nous prenons la liberté…Nous, le peuple Annamite—”
He can’t stop coughing as Parisians walk by, unconcerned by his pallor. He continues to mumble and when he looks up at the sky, he catches a glimpse of my levitating form, a mirage in June. He assumes I am delirium, or death, or destiny. In this particular moment, I am all of them. The garçon collapses on the ground, his lifeforce spent. As he expires at the hospital, he turns to the nurse—rien ne se perd, vous savez. Nothing is lost.
Four. On the street where the garçon has collapsed, a journalist finds the leather satchel and the document it contains. Though it is addressed to the American Secretary of State, the journalist decides to take it to his editor-in-chief. When it is published the next day, a frisson runs through the French colonies.
Dong Hen, Laos - 1965
Three. Once the branches and the palm fronds are pulled over their heads, the trench they share becomes dark and quiet. There are trenches like this all around the village. American planes are bombing their houses and North Vietnamese soldiers are looking for traitors. The ground is the only place the Lao villagers have left to hide. In other timelines, they die. In other timelines, they flee their homes.
In every timeline, none of them return to this place.
She is only seven years old, but she understands there’s an important supply road nearby. She rubs one foot against the other, wondering where she has left her sandals. Villagers turn to her father for comfort. He is a medicine man. He reads scriptures in Pali and Sanskrit. War is the destroyer of worlds, he tells her with a sigh. She nods, but all she can think about is how badly she needs to pee. How hungry she is. Her mother is not here. She wants her mother.
“I thought the Japanese were cruel,” says a villager. “But I heard the VietCong are killing babies just like they did.”
“Americans are killing all of us,” adds another villager. “I think they’re the worst ones.”
“I miss the French,” says a man.
“No one misses the French,” retorts his wife.
The little girl stares upwards. She is a small, feisty little thing who runs around at night, catching fireflies in a jar. Her father often chides her for causing their death. Let them live, he reminds her constantly. There are karmic repercussions to every action. He doesn’t eat meat, not even fish.
Four. She finds the darkest corner. She waits for the adults to look away. I wish some of the other kids were here with me, she thinks as she squats down.
Two. She climbs out quickly, unnoticed, and pees behind Auntie Deng’s house. When she slips back into the trench, her father grabs her by the arm, scared to death. She is his favorite child, the one most like himself, full of mischief and curiosity. She bears the name of a bright, pink flower his wife likes to wear. Tonight, he understands their little girl will one day disappear. He looks around him, almost as if he can feel my presence. I don’t know how he knows, but he has seen some part of the future. One day, his daughter will vanish during another bombing. He will not see her again for thirty years.
New York City, United States - 2021
She walks by my side and asks me if she should apologize to him. In this timeline, I pretend I am an astrologer. I stare at her, the hair piled up, the dark eyes. The nose, it wrinkles often. She tells me about the letter she angrily demanded he destroy, the written evidence of their unequal friendship. She loves him deeply while he favors her the way one favors a brand of cereal over another. In the grand scheme of things, it is all inconsequential and meaningless, side effects of cells gaining sentience, looking for a unified theory.
“I should apologize,” she says.
In this timeline, I tell her the truth. Her heart will never stop breaking. Her sadness is a broken mirror in a hall of mirrors, a shattered reflection reflected to infinity. I am indifferent to her pain. I am a timeless being, a deity who plays with dice, waiting to see which number will appear. One, she apologizes. Three, she sends another letter. Six—she believes me. We cross the street at the intersection, her eyes an incandescent spring in the night.
A young man catcalls her, but she keeps walking ahead. He becomes enraged. The young man is having a bad day, but hers is worse. Two—when he yells love you long time and pulls out a gun, she shoots him first. All is fair in love and war.
Four, she stays.
Five, she runs.
I want to know if the heartache I tore open for her will travel like a cosmic wave. Or will it become a ley line that beckons tragedy. I travel to another timeline. And to another. And another. She doesn’t know this, but she is stronger than she thinks.
Highland Park, Michigan – 1982
Things do not happen for a reason. There is no meaning to be found in the worst of humanity. There is no secret valley to cross, no mysterious plan to follow. There is only this.
Two men stalk Vincent. They want to kill him because they think he is Japanese, an enemy that American history has handed them before. There is no meaning or depth to their hatred. It is merely a straight line, from a nuclear test site to this parking lot, from the district of Manhattan to the state of Michigan. It is the oldest story in the world. Fear, selfishness, arrogance.
In this timeline, the two men head out with a baseball bat. In this timeline, a car suddenly loses control and drives right through them. The bat flies into the windshield, the two men lie unconscious on the ground. Someone has run inside to call 911.
Vincent thinks the accident victims look familiar. But he is going home now. He is getting married. He hopes the two men will be okay.
He lives a long life, and becomes a grandfather who sometimes tells the story of that time he witnessed an accident, and how thankful he was that it had not been him. He will tell the children, I think it was fate. In this timeline, no one knows who Vincent is. He does not make history. Happiness seldom does.
One. They never wake up.
Six. They wake up, but they are never the same.
I linger in the hospital. I throw the dice.
I cannot create new futures. I can only change what already exists by toying with human decisions. Nothing is lost, nothing is created, everything is transformed. But for all the free will you possess, Oppenheimer, I never see you waver. Scientists suffer from the same fallacy as the rest of humanity, the conviction that they can limit the consequences of their actions.
Know this: in the thousands of timelines that I have inhabited, in all my omnipotence, there were always strands that escaped me. My own name has been outside of my control. I used to be called a god, then a captain, then a doctor. Tomorrow, I will be called something else again. An alchemist, perhaps.
It is because, like all gods and heroes, I am made in your image, Oppenheimer. Copies are subjects to their originals, and my omnipotence is subject to your desire. Though I will always be limited by man’s understanding of power, you will never stop dreaming of me. In different variations, different timelines, different numbers. I am Manhattan, I am Lexington, I am Brooklyn. I am the quantum tunnel between myth and history, a screaming across the sky. I give you strange love.
Nay Saysourinho is a writer, literary critic and visual artist. She is the 2020 Rona Jaffe Fellow at MacDowell and a Berkeley Fellow at Yale. In addition to having received the Adina Talve-Goodman Fellowship from One Story Magazine in its inaugural year, she was awarded fellowships and scholarships from Kundiman, The Writers Grotto, The Mendocino Coast Writers Conference and Tin House. She has been published in The Funambulist Magazine, The Asian American Writers Workshop, Kenyon Review, Ploughshares Blog, and more. She is currently working on a novel and a series of visual fables based on Lao weaving symbology.
Saskia Jordá was born in Caracas, Venezuela and works with site-specific installations, drawings, and performances that map the tension between retaining one's identity and assimilating a foreign persona. “Having relocated from my native Venezuela to the United States as a teenager, I became aware of the layers of 'skin' that define and separate cultures—one's own skin, the second skin of clothing, the shell of one's dwelling place—all these protecting the vital space of one's hidden identity.”