1. Introduction
From the back, that’s how I first see the new recruit. He’s standing rigid where the adjutant has cut him adrift, at the foot of his bed in the empty dorm, small and angular, wearing cowboy boots, powder-blue shirt and pants, red kerchief, gun belt with fake Colt pistols, and a white stetson under whose back brim I can see the knotted ties of a black mask — a perfectly scaled-down version of the Lone Ranger. My tastes run more towards the spy serials, Fu Manchu, Dick Tracy, and lately to anything where the G-men match wits with the nazis and the yellow peril, but still I’m thinking, another aficionado of the Saturday afternoon matinee, a kindred spirit. Heck, who knows, maybe even a friend. But when I brush back the folds of my Mandrake cape, raising my hand to say, Hi-de-ho in my chummiest voice, he turns, and I snap my mouth shut, scissoring off the first syllable, gobsmacked by a face flawlessly symmetrical, skin smooth as polished marble. Behind the mask his eyes are deep, dark brown and fathomless. A face too perfect to be real, except for one thing: it’s Japanese.
What the heck? I think, pushing my top hat back up so I can scratch my forehead. Aren’t we at war with the Japs?
We are, of course, have been since the dirty so-and-so’s sneak-attacked Pearl Harbour. What’s a Nip doing here, of all places, in a program bent on annihilating him and his kind?
A code-name badge has been pinned to the lapel of his jacket. Little Boy, it says, then below, in smaller letters, Dallas, Texas. I’m Fat Man from Poughkeepsie, New York. Weird that our real names are verboten, but they stick on our home town. Maybe for the name-tag maker it’s an involuntary tick, that blank space an itch that has to be scratched.
The Jap eyes me warily, like a cornered deer, and I can’t blame him cause as miserable as it might have been for a butterball like me back in Poughkeepsie, New York, I can’t even imagine how bad it must have been for a Jap dressed like the Lone Ranger in Dallas, Texas.
“Killer-diller outfit,” I say, pretending to smooth my pencil line mustache with thumb and forefinger.
He nods stiffly, still suspicious, but maybe the teeny-tiniest bit less. Sure, he’s a Jap and all, but it is a neat outfit. And he wouldn’t be here if he wasn’t on our team, right? Plus, it’s not like I have superabundance of friends. Or, say, even one.
I twirl, my scarlet cape billowing in a dramatic fashion, a move I’ve practised in front of the small mirror in the privy of the dorm, one appropriate to a legendary magician. “Come on,” I say over my shoulder, “I’ll show you the camp,” thinking, What the heck, it’s not like I can be even more of a leper.
It’s 1945 and, for the first time since I arrived, the scent of magic is in the air.
2. Technical Requirements
2.1. Acquiring Sufficient Quantities of Fissile Material
Anyhow, the second thing that brought us all here, is that our parents (or guardians, I suppose, though I can’t claim to know everyone’s situation) signed papers the g-men brought around, volunteering us cause we’re too young to volunteer ourselves, and I guess the military or the government or some secret organization now owns us. My dad, a letterman and vice-president of his fraternity at college and, once, a fourth-quarter hero, was relieved, though he pretended not to be. Which was only fair, because I wasn’t sad to be leaving, like I pretended to be.
Near as I can tell, every recruit is here because of two things. The first is that we’re all pariahs. Odd things happen around us: street lamps stutter and go out as we pass beneath, then flicker back to life in our wake; cars cough and sputter and die when we sit in the front seat; radios crackle when we pass by and sometimes their tubes flare and pop. Weird, I know. Not those things. We’re all used to those things, because we’ve lived with them since we slammed into puberty, learning which side of the street the lamps are on, to always sit in the backseat, and how wide a circle to skirt around the radio. No, what’s weird is that the white-coated scientists obsessed over these things, like they weren’t an embarrassment, again and again coaxing us to describe everything we remember about stuff like that, even though we’ve already told it to them a thousand times, all while they scribbled notes and nodded like bobbleheads.
“It’s for the war effort,” my dad said, trying to convince himself, and his arm twitched just a little like he was thinking of putting his hand on my fleshy shoulder, but still couldn’t bring himself to touch me. “A way you can serve and make us proud.”
The implication, of course, was clear, that it was the only way I could ever serve. I was fifteen then, going on sixteen, and a bunch of my classmates had lied about their ages, one already rumoured to be missing in action. But me, no point, even if I wanted to: flat feet, weak eyes, heart palpitations and assorted other chronic maladies that plague the corpulent — 4F all the way.
Yet here I am, at Los Alamos, New Mexico, a million miles from the front, doing my duty, learning to become a magician.
(More…)