New Mexico.

Was your father there?

Yes. Of course.

Did he talk about that?

Not much. I’ve read the standard accounts. My father’s group was about six miles from ground zero. They’d been given glasses that were very dark. I think something like welding goggles. But my father had brought his own because he didnt think you’d be able to see much with the government issue glasses. I guess you can read that as a metaphor. But all the glasses had to do was block the ultraviolet light. They listened to the countdown over a loudspeaker. They were a pretty nervous lot. Some that it would go off and some that it wouldnt. The thing I remember my father saying was that he put his hands over his goggles against the initial flare of light and that when it came he could see the bones in his fingers with his eyes closed. There was no sound. Just this searing white light. And then the reddish purple cloud rising in billows and flowering into the iconic white mushroom. Symbol of the age. The whole thing standing slowly to ten thousand feet. The wind from the shockwave was supersonic and it hurt your ears for just a moment. And lastly of course the sound of it. The ungodly detonation followed by the slow rumble, the afterclap that rolled away over the burning countryside into a world that had never existed before this side of the sun. The desert creatures evaporating without a cry and the scientists watching with this thing standing twinned in the black lenses of their goggles. And my father watching it through his fingers like See-No-Evil. But if they knew nothing else they all knew it was too late for that.

What did they say? The scientists.

They all stood up and said Holy Shit.

No they didnt.

I dont think they said anything. They were simply stunned. A friend of my father’s, a physicist named Bainbridge who was head of the program, said we’re all sons of bitches now. And supposedly Oppenheimer quoted from the Bhagavad Gita but I think the Sanskrit word for Time came out Death or maybe the other way around. Or maybe they’re the same.

I’d have thought that the signature image of our age might better be the NASA photograph of the earth taken from space. That beautiful blue sphere turning in the void.

Interesting juxtaposition, isnt it?

You dont find that photograph moving?

I find it frightening. The void has no stake in the world’s continuing existence. It’s home as well to countless millions of meteorites. Some of them enormous. Trundling across the blackness at forty miles a second. I think if there were anything to care it would have cared by now. A friend of mine once said: When all trace of our existence is gone, for whom then will this be a tragedy? Do you play those things back or do you just save them?

The tapes.

The tapes. Yes.