First Light by Charles Baxter

Author:Charles Baxter [Baxter, Charles]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-94852-6
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2012-01-17T05:00:00+00:00

It happens now that at certain times of day she cannot remember where she is. Working to finish her dissertation, she must stop and think about where she is located: I’m in the science library, I’m in Kearsley Hall, I’m at home. When she is at home, in the apartment, she works. She calls friends. She receives phone calls. She is encouraged: her work is going well, and she is almost finished. But what is this, happening to time? Some days, completing the thesis, she works for so long that when she looks up at the window, it is not noon, as she thought, but night, and she has passed through the day without knowing, exactly, that it had been there. Sometimes it’s supposed to be night, but it’s early morning instead. She forgets to eat. It’s a rare pleasure to forget to eat, to go without food and not to miss it. This is the pleasure of monks and contemplatives. She sees with delight that she is losing weight, and, after being invited again, she shows up at Carlo Pavorese’s house, in her new, more slender self.

As unobservant as he is, he notices that she is thinner and feeds her T-bone steak. “Oppenheimer, you know, lost so much weight at Los Alamos that by the time we tested the bomb he was down to 115 pounds. He had what I think you would call an hysterical personality, and his wife didn’t help matters much. And of course he smoked constantly. He treated his body as if it were an appendage to his mind, a stalk. I heard people there say that he looked like a faun: you know, the delicate features, the long ears, the liquid lantern blue eyes. Some said bird, but no, it was not that either. I heard someone else say that he was cultivating the look of what the Jews call a tzaddik, a holy man. He had a great yearning for God, Oppenheimer did. And after all, he called the first bomb test Trinity, didn’t he? So here’s a man who yearns for God and manages to get the first A-bomb built. This is a joke, of course, a cosmic joke, but no one is laughing, at least not yet.”

“Carlo, can we talk about something else?”

“Sure,” he says. “What do you want to talk about?”

“What about the trees in your backyard?”

“What trees?” he asks. “I never noticed any.”

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