She shook her head. “I went early this morning,” she said. “Dr. Davies met me there, and he talked to Dr. Sorensen on the phone. If the pain gets bad and the tissue gets necrotic, they’ll give me painkillers and ointments and antibiotics. But for now, there’s nothing to be done except ‘watchful waiting.’ Watching and waiting to see if my fingertips die or heal. Watching and waiting to see if Eddie heals or dies.” She studied her fingertips. “The necrosis has started in his hands.” She said it calmly, but then the shaking got worse. The tremor traveled up her arms to her shoulders, which began to quake. She said “dammit” again, very softly, and I knew she was not cursing the complexities of origami now. “Why,” she said, “God in heaven, why?”
“I don’t know, Miranda. I can’t think of anybody who deserves this less than you and Eddie.”
“Oh, Dr. B.,” she cried, “I’m not asking ‘why’ about Eddie and me. I’m asking ‘why’ about everything else. Everybody else. All the horror we’ve inflicted on one another.”
I’d known Miranda for years now; she could be as tough as cheap steak about her own hurts, but her heart bled freely for others. By “everybody else,” I figured she meant the dead of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and maybe even more than those: maybe also Dresden and Auschwitz, Gettysburg and Shiloh, Rwanda and Darfur and Baghdad. I laid one hand on her shoulder; with the other, I reached behind me and retrieved a Kleenex box from the desk. The paper bird fell from her hand, fluttered to the floor, and lay still. “Fucking war,” she whispered through clenched teeth. “God damn it to hell.”
“Yes,” I said. “God damn it to hell.”
I set the Kleenex box on the table, gave her shoulder a squeeze, and eased out of the bone lab. I hung the DO NOT DISTURB sign on the knob, locked the door behind me, and retreated to my office at the far end of the stadium. There, I locked my own door and unplugged the phone. I did a quick search of the Internet and clicked on a link that filled my computer screen with purple squares and triangles, crisscrossed with dotted lines. “Best Origami Crane Folding Instructions,” the caption read. I took a sheet of paper from the printer tray and folded it diagonally. I creased it between my fingertips until the edges were sharp as a blade.
That night i had a dream. In my dream, Garcia and Miranda reached out to me for help, but their outstretched hands crumbled before my eyes, leaving bloody stumps at the ends of their wrists. Then the dream shifted, and I was speaking to a large crowd in an auditorium in Oak Ridge. I realized I was talking to them about the atomic genie their city had helped loose from the bottle, and I realized I was distraught. I heard myself say to them, “Was anyone ever helped by it?” There was a stunned silence when I said it; even I, who dreamed the words, was shocked by them. Then, near the back of the room, I glimpsed movement. A woman rose slowly to her feet and stood. Her head was wrapped tightly in a scarf, in the manner favored by women who have lost their hair to radiation or chemotherapy. The woman didn’t speak; she didn’t move; she simply stood, holding that space, a calm answer to the bitter question I had posed.
Heads had swiveled in her direction when she stood, and the atmosphere in the dream-room suddenly felt alive and electric, the way the Tennessee air prickles just before a summer thunderstorm. Then a second person stood, and soon a dozen other people were on their feet, all bearing silent witness to cures effected, diseases diagnosed, homes heated, pipelines and airliners made safe.
The last person to stand was directly in front of me. He rose slowly, as if it cost him some pain to stand, and his head was bowed. He raised his head slowly, and I found myself staring into eyes that were both haunted and hopeful. I found myself staring into the eyes of Robert Oppenheimer.
When I awoke — or dreamed I awoke — I seemed to see the world through such eyes myself.
CHAPTER 25
Thornton had sent a peace offering to Miranda — a dozen stems of iris, not yet unfurled, looking like green artists’ brushes dipped in indigo paint. Seven small sunflowers were tucked amid the blue tips, blazing like a week of summer days. Miranda wasn’t in the lab when I saw them; I knew they were from Thornton by the business card lying beside the vase, bearing his name, the FBI logo, and the word “Peace?” The man had flair, and he seemed smart and spunky, so maybe he was still in the game.
But he wasn’t ready to risk a personal appearance just yet, so I agreed to pick him up at the Federal Building, in downtown Knoxville, for our trip to Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I’d come up with an idea about how we might search for the dead man shown on Novak’s film, and Thornton wanted to talk with someone in the Lab’s radioisotopes program, so we decided to ride-share.
Once we crossed the Solway Bridge, we headed west on Bethel Valley Road, a long, straight, prairie-flat ribbon of two-lane leading to the research complex. Five miles out Bethel Valley we stopped at a security checkpoint, where an armed guard consulted a clipboard and my driver’s license, then nodded slightly at me. He practically genuflected at Thornton’s FBI shield. Not that I was jealous or anything.
The road beelined along another two miles of valley floor, lined on either side by pines and hardwood. It grazed the end of a frozen cove on Melton Hill Lake, then entered the sprawling laboratory. Oak Ridge National Laboratory — known as “the Lab” to most of the scientists who worked there, as “ORNL” to the acronym-inclined, and as “X-10” to the blue-collared hourly workers — was the only research facility created in Oak Ridge during the Manhattan Project. The Y-12 and K-25 plants had been huge production facilities staffed by hourly workers like Beatrice. The wartime Lab, though, had a higher ratio of physicists, chemists, and engineers. The Lab had been built around the Graphite Reactor — a much bigger version of Fermi’s makeshift Chicago reactor — so that Leonard Novak and his colleagues could devise the means to create and purify weapons-grade plutonium.
As Thornton and I turned off Bethel Valley Road and entered the research complex, we found ourselves surrounded by gleaming new buildings of glass and steel. Although the Lab was owned by the federal government — the Department of Energy — it was jointly operated these days by UT and Battelle, a research institute with billions of dollars in government contracts. Clearly the partnership had been a fruitful one, at least architecturally speaking.
After parking, Thornton and I threaded our way past the new buildings, and I began to recognize the massive Cold War buildings I remembered from a prior visit, years before. The old buildings hadn’t been replaced by the new buildings; they’d simply been supplemented and screened from initial view. We walked down a one-lane alley between two looming buildings, labeled 4500 NORTH and 4500 SOUTH, and then entered a metal doorway set in the vast brick wall of 4500 South. Just inside, a staircase led down into a basement and upward to two additional floors of offices and labs. We climbed one flight, then entered a hallway labeled H CORRIDOR. I knocked on the open doorway of the first office — the office was dark, which made me worry that I’d somehow gone astray — but a voice called, “Come in.”
Arpad Vass emerged from the dimness to shake my hand and turn on the light; the fluorescents were bright enough to hurt my eyes at first, and I could understand why Arpad might prefer the dark, at least for computer work.
Arpad was one of the most innovative graduate students I’d ever had. Rather than focusing on physical anthropology — bones, essentially — Arpad’s Ph.D. research had focused on chemicals. Specifically, he developed a way to interpret the chemicals of decomposition like a clock, one that told the time since death.