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, “once 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.