Matthew Slocum

Thirty-Four Hundred

Cauliflower.  That’s the word that came to me when the mushroom cloud bloomed over me on the silver screen.  Another word.  Fractals.  In the vegetable, buds are nested within florets, which are nested within ramifications, and these fork from inflorescences, and then branch, until finally you reach the stem.  But, while the explosion had the same recursive nature, with its vapors and fumes and billowing clouds, it had, of course, none of the charm of that vegetable that grew in the far corner of your garden.  No, it was like a cauliflower grown to feed a titan, a cauliflower grown on x-rays.  It was the embodiment of the spirit that pummeled the boxer’s ear.

I avoided pictures, news stories, and films about the bomb.  When making conversation, I dodged anything that might lead to discussing it; I did not mention commies, the military, the situation in Eastern Europe or China, or the arms race.  In Japan, a crazy movie had just come out featuring a gigantic lizard somehow brought to life by the damn thing, but I did not talk about it.

But Patty was a Hitchcock fan and told me she wanted to see Dial M for Murder, and I could not resist any request made by those graceful, curved lips. So, I took her to the Roxy, arriving by taxi over rain-sheened streets.  I opened the door and she stepped out—like the unfolding of an origami swan—and as we strolled through the crowd, I felt all that a man feels with a beautiful woman on his arm.  During the newsreel, I learned I had successfully avoided knowing anything about the H-bomb tests on Bikini Atoll.

Of course, on the screen, the cloud was black and white.  But my mind readily supplied the colors, having seen a real one just short of a decade ago.  The light, flashing chiaroscuro on Patty’s lovely face, was painted in by the physicist in me.  In oranges and crimsons.  In blood.  My lungs felt compressed, their air forcefully expelled, as if by a blast wave.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, I had just graduated from Princeton, and was the perfect age to go to the front.  I could run an eight minute mile, and I wanted to go.  But I had that rare combination of being both good at math and good with my hands, and so I was sent seven hundred miles south to Tennessee.  There I worked in a different kind of Manhattan.  I directed a team of mostly young women, fresh out of high school.  Together we transposed matrices, and calculated Eigenvalues and partial derivatives.  We figured the strength of the Lorentz force, so we could focus our beams and optimize our voltages.  In this way we worked my calutron.

One percent.  That’s how much of the total required material I had made, by the time it was all done.  And I did the rest of the math.  I could not help but do the rest of the math.  One percent of three hundred and forty thousand is thirty-four hundred. 

Thirty-four hundred shadows burnt into the concrete.  Thirty-four hundred people vomiting and bleeding from their orifices, before dying of organ failure.  Thirty-four hundred…

I looked at Patty.  She looked happy.  She would not understand why, tomorrow, I did not return her call.

Matthew Slocum earned a PhD in ecology at the University of Miami and currently works as a data scientist in Houston.  “Thirty-Four Hundred” is his first fiction publication.

Matthew Slocum

Thirty-Four Hundred

Cauliflower.  That’s the word that came to me when the mushroom cloud bloomed over me on the silver screen.  Another word.  Fractals.  In the vegetable, buds are nested within florets, which are nested within ramifications, and these fork from inflorescences, and then branch, until finally you reach the stem.  But, while the explosion had the same recursive nature, with its vapors and fumes and billowing clouds, it had, of course, none of the charm of that vegetable that grew in the far corner of your garden.  No, it was like a cauliflower grown to feed a titan, a cauliflower grown on x-rays.  It was the embodiment of the spirit that pummeled the boxer’s ear.

I avoided pictures, news stories, and films about the bomb.  When making conversation, I dodged anything that might lead to discussing it; I did not mention commies, the military, the situation in Eastern Europe or China, or the arms race.  In Japan, a crazy movie had just come out featuring a gigantic lizard somehow brought to life by the damn thing, but I did not talk about it.

But Patty was a Hitchcock fan and told me she wanted to see Dial M for Murder, and I could not resist any request made by those graceful, curved lips. So, I took her to the Roxy, arriving by taxi over rain-sheened streets.  I opened the door and she stepped out—like the unfolding of an origami swan—and as we strolled through the crowd, I felt all that a man feels with a beautiful woman on his arm.  During the newsreel, I learned I had successfully avoided knowing anything about the H-bomb tests on Bikini Atoll.

Of course, on the screen, the cloud was black and white.  But my mind readily supplied the colors, having seen a real one just short of a decade ago.  The light, flashing chiaroscuro on Patty’s lovely face, was painted in by the physicist in me.  In oranges and crimsons.  In blood.  My lungs felt compressed, their air forcefully expelled, as if by a blast wave.

When Japan attacked Pearl Harbor, I had just graduated from Princeton, and was the perfect age to go to the front.  I could run an eight minute mile, and I wanted to go.  But I had that rare combination of being both good at math and good with my hands, and so I was sent seven hundred miles south to Tennessee.  There I worked in a different kind of Manhattan.  I directed a team of mostly young women, fresh out of high school.  Together we transposed matrices, and calculated Eigenvalues and partial derivatives.  We figured the strength of the Lorentz force, so we could focus our beams and optimize our voltages.  In this way we worked my calutron.

One percent.  That’s how much of the total required material I had made, by the time it was all done.  And I did the rest of the math.  I could not help but do the rest of the math.  One percent of three hundred and forty thousand is thirty-four hundred. 

Thirty-four hundred shadows burnt into the concrete.  Thirty-four hundred people vomiting and bleeding from their orifices, before dying of organ failure.  Thirty-four hundred…

I looked at Patty.  She looked happy.  She would not understand why, tomorrow, I did not return her call.

Matthew Slocum earned a PhD in ecology at the University of Miami and currently works as a data scientist in Houston.  “Thirty-Four Hundred” is his first fiction publication.

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