Oppenheimer is lying on his stomach next to his brother Frank in the bunker and the pre-dawn storm, its pingings against the metal roof, has since washed past down the San Andres range on the strength of the slanting winds that drove the dark clouds south, and they are at the central point between the sun’s rise and setting, and he thinks of Krishna explaining

From formlessness all forms proceed
At dawning of the day;
And at its dusk, they sink once more
In formlessness away

he is between dark and dawn and the rocket signaling five minutes until the test has already coiled into the clearing night, setting a parabolic path for the next rocket, marking one minute prior, that followed nearly identically, its trail briefly blotting out the stars that
had emerged, but in this exact moment he hears a disembodied voice counting down over the speaker, the radio signal crosses surreally with another and Tchaikovsky intrudes, the Nutcracker Suite, and the musical strains merge with the numbers until “One” then “Zero” and he knows that the control room has switched the current on, that pulse following the miles of electrical lines strung, that pulse reaches the tower, the Gadget, and he knows that the plutonium at its core is condensing with an incredible inward force, and in those seconds he thinks of the frogs that woke him up hours before as he had been reading Baudelaire, Et je te donnerai, ma brune, Des baisers froid comme la lune, when their fevered mating croaks shook him from the first moments of sleep he had taken in a day, he is remembering the pecking frequency of the frogs’ calls from the pond next to Trinity when the bomb goes off and he raises his eyes from his facedown position, looks through the bunker’s welder’s glass and his darkened glasses and is transported to the battlefield where Arjuna is begging Krishna to reveal his ultimate form and, in order to see, Krishna grants him divine sight, beyond the capabilities of any prior mortal Look! Look! Krishna implores as he transforms

with innumerable mouths and eyes,
faces too marvelous to stare at,
dazzling ornaments, innumerable
weapons uplifted, flaming

as the whole New Mexico landscape is obliterated by a wall of impenetrable white light, as a thousand simultaneous suns arising and standing in the noon sky, blazing, the early morning darkness is brought immediately into daylight that quickly shades to ice blue, then violet to purple in milliseconds, the colours imprinted upon his eyes and momentarily blinding him, measureless, massive sun-flame, and in his blindness he imagines the whole universe of bodies contained within Krishna, as Arjuna describes it, and Your eyes are moon and sun; you burn this helpless world entire and pictures the bulb of the bomb’s detonation, a half sphere rising and expanding from the ground, filling itself until it lifts entirely from the earth, as Krishna’s astounding, terrifying form, and his sight fades back, and the landscape begins to re-materialize, the light saturating the dry ground, the swelling foothills, the craggy sides and sharp peaks and ridges of all the mountains, As you touch the sky, many hued, and at the center of the light, golden, then yellow burning to orange, a flaming stalk of sand erupting with enormous heat, and he flashes back to a hike he took as a child, with his father, just outside New York City, to look for minerals, for the rare rocks that he would shine and display, and he was so small and his father so tall and they pulled a specimen ornamented by quartz from the dirt just off the trail and he cradled it all the way home, occasionally looking up at Julius, and, now, he looks again at the column exploding miles upward and he thinks of Eliot, I will show you fear in a handful of dust, thinks of the temperatures at the base of the detonation, so incredibly hot that the sand i
instantly reconstructed into glass, and the earth that is cast up into the air would then be immediately solidified, those hunks raining to the ground, flashes to a vision of what those minerals might look like, clear with emerald-shading from the radiation and carved with small dark pockets, those rocks blended with the support materials of the tower, combinations of metal and earth and nuclear reaction, What would I have done if I found that in a forest and when he follows the explosion’s pillar he sees it topped by a reddening cloud, thinks of the warriors that line each side of Arjuna’s battlefield and how Krishna’s divine form swallows them, as Arjuna tells his god when he looks upon Him, that he sees those warriors

Entering with hurried step
Your jaws are fierce-fanged and dread,
I see them with skulls crushed
their raw flesh stuck to your teeth

and seconds go by, as he watches the slow blooming in mid-desert, and he has not exhaled yet, and he does not look at his brother next to him, and then he feels warmth spreading across his exposed arms, face, increasing and flushing his whole body, it is a shell over all of him, and then the heat increases so rapidly he is sweating, feels a rivet begin to work down from his hairline, but still heoes not move, not even when the pressure slams into the bunker, a solid and impenetrable current that barrages and shakes the walls of the lowslung bunker, and the sound of it simultaneously hammers him, and he tastes the grit of the desert with that air as it lines his nostrils and coats his mouth, thinks All food forward will carry this residue, these particles between my teeth, then Eliot again, among the drought-defined landscape of rock There is not even silence in the mountains/ But dry sterile thunder without rain, the last piece of language that fills his mind before his body is completely overwhelmed, the pillar and cloud, the heat, the smashing force of the air, that sound beyond human or animal construction, that which could never be made by natural throat, his body lays amazed and docile and still, until one clear message surfaces, singular and completely formed The epicenter is rippling outward and he pictures droplets in a bathtub and the concentric circles they form on the surface, weakening with distance, and he lays and watches the mushroom as it expands in silent slow motion, he watches its full unfurling, knowing that it is essential to watch what he has made all the way to its completion and, as he stares, its shape does not change but only exaggerates, its scale now mountain-high, We are going to use this he thinks, parallel versions of The Gadget already in motion towards the Pacific, and he knows that soon this will be repeated upon cities, civilians, remembers the image of his mistress Jean among the wreckage of the innocent, recalls Krishna as Shiva Now I am become Death, destroyer of worlds annihilating all things, and his paralysis deepens until, on the cliff of desperation, he remembers the Gita’s lines only one stanza further, wherein Krishna comforts Arjuna’s struggles with having to kill his kinsmen:

Arise, on fame, on victory,
On kingly joys intent!
They are already slain by me;
Be you my instrument

and swathes himself in the notion that Brahma, Creator, and Vishnu, Preserver, are contained within the same entity as Shiva, and that all transcend him as he lies on his belly in the desert, he clings to this before moving to the Gita within Eliot’s “The Dry Salvages,” as it
begins, with the river as forgotten god, Keeping his seasons and rages, destroyer, reminder/ Of what men choose to forget and yet The river is within us and in this conflation of god and nature and mortal, he explains himself as an instrument of motion, that the science of The
Gadget was inevitable forward momentum,There is no end, but addition, and he is simply progressing forward as Eliot’s narrator instructs, and he is an instrument of Duty, to his country, to the labs and the men and women populating Los Alamos, and that his responsibility does not include how and where to use the Gadget, and, as he continues through this progression of his mind, he reminds himself that these thoughts have not sprung anew from this moment but rather are what he has been thinking to himself for weeks, months, what he and his wife Kitty have rationalized over the dinner table, Kitty, who is in their home at Site Y waiting for their coded message, he must call and tell her she can now “Change the sheets,”
and with this phrase she will know that the flash and thunder from the south was successful, that they have not wasted their years on the plateau and they will emerge large and immortal, the couple that birthed the atomic bomb, and they must, he must, live with their creation, and to do so requires the Gita, Eliot, and the understanding that he must live extended beyond this singular body, this state, and accept his chaotic system of selves, as particles in incessant flux, in memory or future, that Time the destroyer is time the preserver and that he will find solace in that seeming contradiction, that he will exist in and beyond this moment, the unattended Moment, the moment in and out of time, the desert cratered at its center by the
peak of his work, by the flash, the sound, the heat that has crestedand is resettling on the earth in showers of dust and rock and metal, and he knows that right action is freedom/ From past and future also, that The good deeds a man has done before defend him, that he is a part of Eliot’s collective,

We, content at the last
If our temporal reversion nourish
(Not too far from the yew-tree)
The life of significant soil

and the bunker awakens sluggishly into tentative applause as he lays, and he and his brother finally find each other’s eyes, and Frank smiles as he raises himself into standing and offers his hand to help pull him up, and the clapping inflates and he can hear the men around him in simple exhalations “It worked,” “We did it,” their stunned and delirious voices devolving into a primal mash of sounds, cacophonous in delight, in congratulations as he accepts his brother’s help and gets to his feet, brushing his hands down his chest, flecking dirt back to the floor, and now he is tall and straightbacked as he strides across the room, the group of men parting and gathering on either side as he swaggers down the center of them, all warriors and he the general, the Director, and he is touched by all that he passes, their straining fingers sliding from his frame, all in the room desperate to simply come in contact with him as he moves towards the door and the jeep that is going to carry him to General Groves at his post a few miles away, and he enters into the now dawn light, complete.

Originally published in White Wall Review 41 (2017)