The Heat of the Sun

a moment she held back, then sank into his arms as if she were returning home at last,
after a lifetime away. She moaned as soft words tumbled from his lips. ‘Kate,’ I heard him say, ‘it’s dark. Why is it so dark? You said you’d protect me from the
dark.’ On he babbled, a frightened child, until she calmed him with a kiss. I wished I were a thousand miles away. Still the siren sounded. Still the twilight faded: grey, almost black.
    The blue telephone rang and I picked it up. ‘Senator Pinkerton’s office.’
    A reporter. A leak, he said. Source reliable. No, he couldn’t say from where (I hadn’t asked), but could the senator comment? The senator, I said, had no comment. – None? None,
when halfway around the world, where it’s morning and tomorrow, a B-29 called Bock’s Car is on its way home from its mission over Japan? None, when Truman’s curse has come
to pass and the rain of ruin is descending as we speak? They’ve done it, haven’t they? Plutonium bomb! Crack in the clouds! Down, down, through the crack in the clouds...
    ‘They’ve bombed Nagasaki.’ I tried to replace the receiver but fumbled. It swung from the edge of the desk. ‘Nagasaki.’
    Blankly, I heard the siren; I heard the radio; I heard the Pinkertons sob when I repeated my announcement, louder this time; but as the senator pushed his wife away, then struck her, I could do
nothing to intervene. The world lurched and I fell to the floor.
    ‘Trouble,’ I said like a prayer.
    I felt the softness of the carpet beneath me; I fondled at the fibres and inhaled their rich aroma – so many cigars dropping ash, so many boots pressing down the gathered dust of years
– before rolling on to my back and gazing up at the chandelier, ponderous as fate but still unlit, while the senator and Kate Pinkerton, in lurid shadow-play, ended their odyssey at last.
    ‘You’ve killed my son.’ Horror hung heavy in the senator’s words.
    ‘Ben, no! He was my son too.’
    ‘You wanted this. You said so.’
    Imploringly, she spread her hands. ‘What does it matter what I wanted, what you wanted? The machine had been set in motion. Had the Japanese beaten us to the atomic bomb, they would have
levelled Los Angeles. They aren’t innocent. They aren’t good. None of this could be helped. Not Hiroshima. Not Nagasaki. And not the world that lies ahead.’
    ‘You’ve always hated him, and hated me.’
    ‘Ben, I love you.’ Her hands dropped. ‘ Ben, what are you doing ?’
    I wonder still if I could have saved Kate Pinkerton. Time seemed to smash, like a plate on tiles. I might have been back in that bunker at Alamogordo; I would always be in that bunker in
Alamogordo, dazzled by the beauty and terror of the three-person’d God, for all the years that I lived.
    Half sobbing, I scrambled to my knees, but agony seared my injured right leg, and all I could do was watch as Kate Pinkerton backed away from her blind, blundering husband; as he ripped the
sheath from the dagger and lunged at her; as she hurled one heavy statute book at him, then another, then crashed into the radio and brushed the bulky controls. The room filled with a deafening
crescendo. It was Tartarin’s great lament, ‘ Il mio sogno dei leoni è finito ’ – my dream of the lions is over. For Kate Pinkerton, it marked the moment when all
she had been, even the remnants of what she had been, fell from her at last.
    The dream was over. Everything was over. She tore her hair. Like a crazed insect, she battered this way and that: against the windows, against a wall, against a map of the world, with pins and
paper arrows marking the progress of the Pacific campaign. She rushed back to the telephones, grabbed one, then another, then swept them all from the desk; she doubled over, then gazed up in
despairing rapture at the blind man with the dagger and stepped, ecstatic, into his embrace.
    ‘I love you, Ben,’ she cried, then slumped down.
    The senator stepped away, raising the blood-dripping dagger like an offering to the night. He flung back his throat, as if to cry out to the gods, but the music was rising, bursting and
cascading like the bomb that had blinded him. It filled the air, relentless as fire: that great despairing plea of Tartarin’s that the world should be something other than what it had
become.
    There was nothing but the music: if telephones jangled, we would not hear them; if sirens wailed or snapped into silence, we would know nothing of