We had three rooms in the apartment: a studio sitting room, a bedroom, and a small study. There were, in addition, a kitchen, a bathroom, several large closets, and a terrace garden with plants and trees in pots and boxes, chairs, swings, and a striped awning which could be lowered or pulled up by means of ropes. The apartment was, in fact, an ordinary small New York penthouse in the theatrical district, chosen for a combination of privacy, economy and delight in the situation—this being in what was known as Times Square and corresponding in this city to the grand boulevards of my native Paris. Around us each time we took the air to buy a pack of cigarettes or a bottle of beer, were the cream of the world’s artists, actors, playwriters, musicians, dancers, singers, prize fighters, cowboys. There were also pimps, gamblers and prostitutes— and their prey: the curious and the rich who sought on the West Side those diversions which the West Side sought on the East.
I was shaving. I had been ill, and to interest myself had grown a beard which each day I marked out like a tennis court, shaving up to the soap mark. The immense white beard which now sweeps my belt buckle was thus simply born. My wife was in the kitchen washing up the things which would be needed for breakfast, and which in a more meticulous household would have been washed the previous night (when we had made tea on coming in from the theater). It was fortunate that she had left the dishes until morning; if she had not, she would have been in the bedroom and exposed to the direct rays of the blinding flash of the explosion. It is hard to recall with exactness what I felt or heard, or to differentiate between what I have reconstructed and my actual memory. My first conscious act was to run from the bathroom to meet Mildred running toward me from the kitchen. She was followed by the dog, which jumped into my arms. With one arm around my wife, and carrying the dog, I went toward the bedroom. I do not think we spoke. I do not think we even said: “What was that?” It was obvious that something had taken place that was beyond both question or explanation. I cannot even remember if the sound—an incredible, dull, slow explosion, if such a thing is possible to imagine, like the bursting of a shell which takes minutes instead of seconds to explode—or the unearthly light came first, or if they came together as lightning and thunder come when they strike near by.
It seems almost certain to me now that we both knew what it was. That it was it—the atomic bomb, the “new god” that we had talked about for so long and whose name, like that of older gods, we feared to mention, calling it it. It can’t happen here; it can’t happen to us.
I do not know what I felt when it happened. Fear certainly, then perhaps an odd kind of relief. It had happened, and we were still alive. This was the worst that could happen—that was what we thought, then. In a way, it was like walking through a barrage. A thing that seemed impossible had taken place; we had passed through a wall of death and fire. We had survived. In us then, consciously or not, was the terrible selfish joy of the survivor. Only the dog had more sense. She trembled so much that when I put her down she could not stand but fell on her side. And the kinkajou in the kitchen was uttering loud screams.
The glass from the bedroom windows was on the floor and window sill. Since some of it still stuck to the frames, it was obvious that it had not been smashed the way glass is usually broken by an explosion, but that it had been bent, like a plastic, by inward pressure and then had fallen, instead of being blown into the room. Thus all laws of physics were shattered; everything that I had learned of what, at school, we had called “heat, light, and sound” was now reversed. We and all mankind were dwelling in a vacuum universe where even Einstein must find himself a child spending his first day in a cosmic kindergarten. But this thought did not come then, as I stood with my wife in my arms, as she clung like a small bird to the only safety that she knew. We stared, not out—for we dared not —but at the familiarity of our bedroom which was bathed in an unearthly light. Only a true artist would know what I mean when I say it was a cold rose. Only he would know that this is not an impossibility—for by the rules all reds and pinks are warm, and it is the blues that are cold. Only he would know—and it makes me laugh as I write, for there is not an artist left alive today, not a damned soul who can understand this message from the damned.
My wife’s dressing table was intact, its mirror unshattered, her comb, brushes and other accessories as they had always been in that woman’s disorder, that asymmetry which always appalls a man. There was a lipstick lying open. There was a scattering of powder. A cut-glass perfume bottle was unstoppered. It occurred to me to ask her how she expected the perfume to retain its strength if she did not put the stopper back—a thing I had done a hundred times, to no effect. And I smiled inside my mind at the thought and turned my eyes to the bed. There we had lain. There were the marks of our lying. The sheets crumpled, the bed no doubt still warm; and this had happened. This had taken place.
Still looking, my eyes moved to the bird cage. At night we brought Sam into the bedroom so that his chuckling and calling would wake us slowly in the morning. (That was one advantage of my profession; I was no servant to time or to the shattering effect of an alarm clock. As it is to every man, my belly was my master, but I could choose my time to make the wherewithal to fill it, and use, if I so desired, a bird to wake me.) At the bottom of the cage my bird lay dead, a crumpled ball of black and yellow.
Apart from the curious cold pink glow in the room, there was a smell of hot iron. Mixed with this smell was a faint odor of ozone, a sort of seashore smell. There was also a feeling of warmth—not heat, just warmth, like that felt from the shortwave diathermy treatment that doctors used to give sometimes for a strained back. I had the feeling of being enveloped in a blanket of powerful, almost palpitating warmth. I remember thinking: Are these the fatal radioactive waves that we read about? A writer whose name I cannot recall had written a magnificent description of the bombing of Hiroshima in a magazine called The New Yorker, which, though it was a magazine of sophisticated humor, devoted a whole issue to his report. His description gave us a standard of comparison.
We now dared to look out of the window. The McGraw-Hill Building was still standing, and so was the Holland Hotel, but beyond them there was only an incandescent orange redness against which they were blackly silhouetted. This redness was the center of what can only be described as a frightful, cream-colored, cauliflower-shaped cloud. Branches of white and butter-yellow broccoli seemed to grow writhing out from this center in mushroom layers. The whole thing was vegetablelike, a vivid, livid, mushroom-cauliflower-broccoli that formed great branches which grew, changing into white trees growing out of the scarlet central heart, against a background of thick brown smoke. Everything writhed and churned, the branches becoming intricate tendrils of marblelike delicacy—orange-pink, scarlet, amber-yellow, citron; and then the veins thickened into arms so that the vegetable simile failed and one thought of the writhing arms of an octopus.
Having watched this tree of death grow, having seen it mount into the firmament, break into two parts and drift in majesty toward the west, we turned our attention to our home, which we knew already to be shattered, cracked like a mended cup which seems, as it is dropped for the last time, to retain its shape for an instant so that a memory of it can be fixed before it breaks into tiny shards.
Meanwhile, other things had happened, as we found out when we looked around more carefully. The kinkajou had stopped screaming and had gone to sleep. This was her answer to all problems and corresponded to our method of anesthesia by means of drink, drugs, or women. But some of the tropical fish were dead, floating with their white bellies in the air; and the plants which filled the big studio window had their leaves browned on the edges. Why only the edges? Why had only some of the fish died? I forget which now, but all of two or three varieties were dead while the others swam at ease, seeking food in the corners of the tank. We picked out the dead fish to feed to Edward when she woke, as was our habit. We scattered some food in the feed ring and watched the multicolored fish cluster near the surface to eat. I said, “Put on the kettle and we’ll have some tea”; a cup of tea being my answer to any crisis—tea and aspirin.