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Now, the odd case study that was Oak Ridge all but consumed me. In the handful of days since I had cut a physicist’s body from the ice of a murky frozen swimming pool, Oak Ridge had come to occupy most of my waking thoughts and more than a few of my dreams, and one of the things I found amazing was that it had taken so many years — and such a dramatic turn of personal events — to trigger my fascination. It was impossible to live in East Tennessee without knowing that Oak Ridge had played a pivotal role in the Manhattan Project and the creation of the atomic bomb. It was almost as widely understood that in the decades that followed Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Oak Ridge had helped harness atoms for peace, in the form of nuclear power and radioisotopes for medical research and treatment. Beyond those superficial bullet points, though, I had never bothered to read much or think much about the opening chapter in the history of Oak Ridge. As I considered it now, I marveled, again and again, how profoundly this tiny city had changed not just the nation but the entire world. Talk about a lever and a place to stand: nuclear energy was about as long and strong as a lever could get — I suppose a poet might argue that love or hatred could be stronger, but as a scientist, I would find that argument somewhat abstract and unconvincing — and Oak Ridge had been the fulcrum, the fixed point around which the lever of the atom had swiveled to move the earth.
Oak Ridge wasn’t the only Manhattan Project installation, of course. There was also Los Alamos, New Mexico, where hundreds of physicists and other scientists devoted themselves to turning theoretical physics into deliverable bombs. And there was Hanford, Washington, where mammoth reactors — scaled-up versions of Novak’s reactor in Oak Ridge — cranked out the bomb-sized quantities of plutonium. But Oak Ridge was the biggest of the sites, and everything Los Alamos and Hanford did was built on the foundation of Oak Ridge. That alone made the city a fascinating specimen.
But there was more. There was the whole heroic and heartbreaking backdrop to Oak Ridge’s creation behind the veil of secrecy: there was World War II. I wasn’t born until a decade after Germany and Japan surrendered, so I knew only what I’d read and heard and seen, and that was only a small smattering of the historical record and archival images and firsthand stories. But from what I knew, it truly embodied the best of times and the worst of times; the best of mankind, and the cruelest and most depraved.
The scale of the cruelty and suffering and loss was beyond my comprehension. The most famous number, of course, was six million: the number of Jews killed by the Nazis as they implemented the madness of Hitler’s “Final Solution.” But tens of millions more had died, too — another forty million civilians, by some reckonings, and twenty-five million soldiers. Although some four hundred thousand U.S. soldiers were killed in three and a half years of fighting — a dreadful toll, to be sure — American losses represented only a tiny fraction of the war’s total. In China, the war dead totaled nearly four million soldiers and sixteen million civilians as Japan’s armies cut a deadly swath through China. The Soviet Union lost twenty million people as well, almost equally divided between soldiers and civilians, as the German army ground itself down in a prolonged and bloody eastern campaign. Seventy-two million deaths, by bombings, firestorms, massacres, diseases, starvation. How was it possible, I wondered, for so many people to die in such a short time without the very fabric of civilization collapsing? And how did the hundreds of millions of grieving survivors carry on in the face of such sorrow?
As my truck topped the rise and dropped once more into the valley where Oak Ridge sprawled, I looked at the place with new eyes. Against a global backdrop of unrelenting, apocalyptic death, this small place, which to modern eyes might look haphazard and provisional and ordinary, had been the focal point of the biggest, most complex, and most urgent endeavor the world had ever known. That endeavor was all the more amazing considering that it was accomplished without the world’s knowledge. Until that knowledge had burst, brighter than a hundred suns, above two cities in Japan.
* * *
Leonard Novak’s final resting place was barely a stone’s throw from his death scene. The funeral was held in the United Church — called the Chapel on the Hill by every Oak Ridger I heard refer to it — the small, historic church perched on the hillside just above the Alexander Inn. It seemed a fitting place to memorialize one of the pivotal scientists of the Manhattan Project. Although Novak had long since retired, and although Emert had said the scientist wasn’t a churchgoer, the parking lot beside the church was packed, and even the faded asphalt down beside the derelict hotel was filling fast, with more than a few spots occupied by television news vehicles. Novak’s retirement had been a quiet, almost obscure one, according to Emert, but his bizarre death had thrust him squarely into the posthumous spotlight.
I parked in front of the old hotel and made my way up a sidewalk and a long flight of steps to the front door of the chapel.
One of the first public buildings erected during the city’s wartime construction boom, the Chapel on the Hill had done its part for the war effort by hosting services of multiple faiths and denominations. Methodists, Baptists, Catholics, Jews — they’d all held weekly services here during the war, each group distributing their prayer books or hymnals just before their appointed hour in the building, then gathering them up again at the end of the service. Church buildings often sit empty and idle most of the time, but not this one. During the war, it would have been hard to find an hour of the day when someone wasn’t preaching or praying or practicing on the church’s pump organ. I would like to have seen a time-lapse video — one compressing a week’s worth of comings and goings into, say, sixty seconds — just to watch the church’s doors open and close, the building rhythmically inhaling and exhaling streams of worshipers.
The chapel’s interior was packed; three television cameras rested on tripods at the back, and every seat seemed taken. I scanned the pews, seeking any open space, but I didn’t see one. In a moment, though, an usher came up the center aisle from near the front of the church and motioned me forward. There were no rows reserved for family — Novak had been married, briefly, as a young man, the newspaper obituary had said, but he had no children — and I found myself shoehorned into the front row, in a slot better suited to someone half my size. The elderly man on my left — I guessed his age at seventy — pretended not to notice me, even as he drew himself in tightly and scooted, fussily but with no noticeable increase in room for me, away from me. To my right, an even older woman — she must have been eighty or more — nodded slightly as I sat down, then surprised me by turning to speak to me. In a stage whisper that could probably have been heard three rows back, she said, “Well, thank God somebody here is under sixty. We’ll be lucky if three or four of us don’t kick the bucket during the service.” I wanted to laugh — she might be old, but she seemed sharp and funny — but I managed to limit myself to a smile, since laughter didn’t seem to suit the setting or the occasion.
There was no coffin; instead an unadorned brass urn rested on a simple wooden altar. Within hours after the FBI had whisked the iridium source out of Knoxville, Garcia had phoned the state medical examiner’s office and they had sent a pathologist from Nashville to complete the autopsy so that Novak’s body — which was not getting any fresher — could be removed from the morgue and cremated. It had taken three people — Garcia, Duane Johnson, and Dr. Sorensen — to convince the Nashville pathologist that Novak’s radiation-ravaged body was no more hazardous than any other corpse. I had heard Johnson explaining the physics of it over the phone. “Think of the gamma source like a really strong magnet sitting on your desk,” he had said. “There’s a powerful energy field emanating from it — a magnetic field surrounding the magnet, gamma radiation around the iridium-192. If the magnet’s too close to your computer, your hard drive is gonna be toast. If the gamma source is too close to your body, well…” He’d trailed off then, probably regretting his use of the word “toast,” given our concerns about Garcia’s hands. “Anyhow,” he went on, “on
ce you get rid of the source, it’s gone. There’s no smear of magnetism lingering on your desk, waiting to trash your new hard drive; there’s no radioactivity in the sink or the cadaver.”
In the end, though, it was probably not the magnet analogy that reassured the nervous Nashville pathologist, but Sorensen’s offer to assist in the morgue. It was one thing to say, “It’s perfectly safe”; it was another to say, “I’ll stand with you while you do this.” And for Sorensen, I realized, participating in the remainder of the autopsy was probably an interesting opportunity to learn more about the specific effects of a lethal dose of gamma radiation.
The body had been cremated by my friend Helen Taylor, in one of the gleaming furnaces at East Tennessee Cremation Services. Helen, too, had seemed nervous about handling the body. Taking a cue from Sorensen, I offered to bring the remains out personally; she thanked me for the offer, but said it wasn’t necessary. In my head, I knew the remains — and now the cremated remains, or cremains — were perfectly safe. Still, something spooked me about that brass urn on the altar. It was not what was in the urn that spooked me, I gradually realized, but what was in me — some kernel of superstition in my heart, some fear germinating in a dark corner of my psyche. Fear for Garcia and Miranda, perhaps. A sense of bad karma in the air, or spiritual fallout drifting down from the past.
I shook off my thoughts and focused on the lectern, where an ancient man was telling a story about Novak’s absentmindedness, which apparently was legendary. “And so we put this lead brick in his briefcase, to see how long it would take him to notice it. He never did. Carried the damn thing around for months.” He laughed, and the congregation laughed with him — enjoying his enjoyment, including the naughtiness of saying “damn” in a church. One of the few consolations of old age, I thought: you can say pretty much anything you want, even outrageous things, and people let them slide, or even find them charming. Beside me I felt a slight shift, then noticed my seatmate jotting a note on her program. She finished writing, then nudged me and held the note toward me with a twinkle in her eye. “Not true,” the spidery script read. “It was Richard Feynman who lugged that lead brick around, and it was in Los Alamos.”
I smiled. I liked her. She seemed both witty and slightly subversive. Her face said eighty, and so did her handwriting, but the note-passing spoke of a mischievous schoolgirl.
After the ancient colleague told a few more anecdotes — some lighthearted, some more serious — a minister took the podium to put Novak’s life and work in a philosophical and theological context. He talked about science and discovery — about Galileo and Leonardo da Vinci — whose given name Novak had shared — and Copernicus and Darwin. He reminded us that curiosity was what had called our primordial ancestors out of the sea and onto dry land. I suspected the aforementioned Darwin might have debated him on that; I didn’t remember reading much about curiosity in The Origin of Species. But this was a sermon, not a lecture, so I took it with a grain of scientific salt. The minister went on awhile about the quest for knowledge being a hallmark of humans. “The divine spark,” he called knowledge. “There is no brighter spark than atomic energy,” he went on — the transition to Oak Ridge, and to Novak, at last. He told how Novak had guided the construction and operation of the Graphite Reactor; how he’d created plutonium within the crucible of the reactor; how he’d mastered the steps needed to separate and purify this new element. “Un-locking the power of the atom,” he said dramatically. “The fire at the core of the universe. Like a twentieth-century Prometheus, Leonard Novak stole fire from the gods.” I heard a small, sharp exhalation from the woman beside me; it sounded surprisingly like exasperation. “Stealing fire from the gods,” the minister repeated, his voice rising as he got swept up in the mythology. “A bold theft. A world-changing theft. A perilous theft. The gift of fire; the curse of fire.” He surveyed the congregation, and stretched forth his arms as if to encompass us. “May we — those of us who dwell in the light and warmth of that Promethean fire”—he now raised his hands toward the ceiling, and the chandeliers glowing there, presumably powered by nuclear energy—“may we acquire the wisdom to harness that fire for good. Always, only for good.” He stood silent, his arms still aloft.
“Oh please.” It was the stage whisper again, surprisingly loud in the silence that had followed the minister’s big finish. I saw a few heads turn in the direction of my elderly seatmate; one of them was the minister’s. A look of confusion and anger flashed across his face, then he regained his composure and directed us to a closing hymn. The words were printed in the program, which everyone but me seemed to have received. We stood to sing, feet scraping and throats clearing, as the organist played a stanza to acquaint us with the melody.
The music sounded quaint and prim, like something from another century. I’d never considered myself much of a singer, so I didn’t much mind that I couldn’t sing along. I did feel slightly self-conscious, though, to be standing amid the singing throng with my mouth closed and my hands empty. I felt a gentle nudge at my right elbow. My neighbor extended her program slightly toward me. She gripped the lower right corner of the page between a bony thumb and knuckle, her skin papery and blue-veined. She gave the program a slight twitch to indicate that I should take hold of the lower left corner. The paper certainly didn’t require both of us to hold it up; rather, the paper was a sort of bridge, a bond, between two strangers jammed together on a wooden pew. It was an oddly intimate gesture. Two strangers bound, by a link and a story, to a brass urn and the ashes within, which had once been Leonard Novak. Together we sang.
Let there be light, Lord God of hosts,
Let there be wisdom on the earth;
Let broad humanity have birth,
Let there be deeds, instead of boasts.
Within our passioned hearts instill
The calm that endeth strain and strife;
Make us thy ministers of life;
Purge us from lusts that curse and kill.
Give us the peace of vision clear
To see our brothers’ good our own,
To joy and suffer not alone,
The love that casteth out all fear.
Let woe and waste of warfare cease,
That useful labor yet may build
Its homes with love and laughter filled;
God give thy wayward children peace.
As the words of the hymn sank in, I decided to cut the minister some slack for his overheated delivery. The beginning of the song fit with his “divine spark” image, and the ending — well, I decided it took some guts to close an A-bomb scientist’s funeral with an antiwar plea.
I halfway expected to hear a snort or feel a cynical elbow in my ribs at the song’s earnest goodheartedness, but I never did. And as the final notes died away, I glanced to my right and saw that the woman beside me — the same woman who had said “Oh, please” just moments before — had tears on her cheeks.
As the service ended, I turned to her. “Thank you for sharing your pew and your program with me.”
“You’re welcome,” she said. “You’re Brockton, aren’t you?” I nodded, surprised. “You’re the guy that watches the bodies rot?”
I laughed. “You do have a way with words. How’d you know? Do I smell that bad?”
“I saw your picture in the Oak Ridger a couple of days ago. Here, let’s go out the back door. I don’t want to have to shake the preacher’s hand — it would just embarrass us both.” She steered me through a door that led through a cluttered vestry and out into the thin sunshine. Suddenly I stopped in my tracks. Fifty yards ahead of us, walking down the steps and away from the chapel, I saw Jess Carter, my dead lover. I thought I saw her, at any rate: I saw a striking woman wearing Jess’s black hair and Jess’s lithe body, walking Jess’s walk. Then she turned her head enough for me to see that it was not Jess. Of course not: it had been nearly a year since Jess was murdered; I had attended her memorial service in Chattanooga, had seen her ashes buried in a churchyard, had ne
stled a granite plaque to honor Jess in the ground at the Body Farm, where her corpse had been taken by her killer. How could it possibly be Jess walking ahead of me down a hillside in Oak Ridge?
I felt a tug at my sleeve. My elderly companion was studying my face shrewdly. “You look like you just saw a ghost,” she said.
“I thought I did,” I said. “Or hoped I did. Sorry. You were saying something about the newspaper.”
“Oh, nothing important. Just that I saw your picture in the story about Novak. By the way, I gather that when you came to fetch the body, you left a souvenir behind, in about eight feet of water.” Her eyes were dancing as she pointed a crooked finger at the swimming pool, a hundred yards downslope from where we stood.
“They wrote about my chainsaw?” I meant to sigh but it came out as a laugh. “I wish they’d hurry up and drain that pool.”
“Don’t hold your breath,” she said.
“Oh, it’s starting to warm up,” I said, although I noticed that the rectangular opening I had cut in the surface had refrozen. “It’ll probably thaw out enough to drain in another couple of days.”
“It’s not just the ice,” she said. “It’ll be a miracle if the drain still works. That whole place is falling apart.”
Even from this distance, the inn’s peeling paint and sagging roof were easy to see. So was the murky ice. “It has seen better days.”
“Haven’t we all,” she said, “haven’t we all. That crumbling hotel pretty much sums up Oak Ridge, and all of us who’ve been here since the creation. We used to be young and smart and important — crossroads of the world, at least the world of atomic physics. Look at us now. The glory days are long gone. In a few more years, that hotel will be dust. And so will all the famous people who sat on the porch and figured out how to build the bomb fifty years ago. No, sixty years ago. No, sixty-five, dammit. Oppenheimer, Fermi, Lawrence — they’ve been gone a long time. Novak was one of the last. They don’t seem to make them like that anymore.”
