You dont blame your father.

No.

You said if we had a child.

If I had a child.

Who’s we?

None of your business.

You dont think that your father lost any sleep over the bomb.

My father didnt sleep before the bomb and he didnt sleep after. I think most of the scientists didnt give that much thought to what was going to happen. They were just having a good time. They all said the same thing about the Manhattan Project. That they’d never had so much fun in their lives. But anyone who doesnt understand that the Manhattan Project is one of the most significant events in human history hasnt been paying attention. It’s up there with fire and language. It’s at least number three and it may be number one. We just dont know yet. But we will.

You think that your father didnt really dwell on the outcome of the project.

I think that he did dwell. And that he was unusual in that. He didnt have a lot of sympathy with all the handwringing that went on after Hiroshima. He was older than most of the scientists. I think the average age was around twenty-six or twenty-seven. I think a few were even in their teens. When they suddenly became peacemongers he just thought they were a bunch of hypocrites. After the war he worked with Teller. They detonated bombs capable of reducing fairly large parcels of the known world to uninhabitable rubble. Everybody hated Teller and they hated my father. Too bad. I dont know what to tell you about his sleep. I never slept either. And I didnt bomb anybody.

You were born at Los Alamos.

Yes. Boxing Day. Nineteen fifty-one.

Boxing Day? What is that?

It’s the day after Christmas.

Why is it called Boxing Day?

It’s called Boxing Day because that’s the day you box up all the crap you got that you dont want and take it back to the store.

That’s not true.

No. Traditionally it was the day you exchanged gifts. Boxes of cookies or whatever. An army sergeant drove my mother to the hospital in one of those olivedrab sedans left over from the war. There was nobody else around. She was supposed to go to Tennessee but in the end they wouldnt let her travel.

Where was your father?

He was in Providence. The one in Rhode Island.

Why was he in Providence? He was visiting with his family?

He went to hear Kurt Gödel give the Gibbs Lecture at the American Mathematical Society at Brown University.

He didnt spend Christmas with your mother.

He did not.

Were they estranged?

You’d have to define estranged. I dont think entirely. But then I wasnt there. Anyway, I dont fault him for going to hear Gödel. I would have. Even though Gödel just read the paper in a monotone. The paper was on the foundations of mathematics. Mostly it was a defense of platonism. I dont know that my father was all that interested in the subject but he was interested in Gödel.