The Heat of the Sun

Perhaps I should take the blame. Why did you have to see too much? You saw through me like an X-ray. You knew I was guilty. Always.’
    Desert dawn flared before us, blood-red through the glass. Softly, I shifted his arm from my neck as the countdown came again: ‘Zero minus one minute.’ Warning sirens, muffled
through the concrete walls, rang across the firing range. Heavy doors shuddered into place. There was nothing to do except watch the blast. I would not. I turned away, but the senator, with barely
a touch, propelled me back to face it. He drew the dark glasses from my breast pocket and calmly held them before my eyes.
    ‘Watch,’ he said, in a hollow voice. ‘Watch and tell the world.’
    Could I resist him? I donned the glasses, accepting my fate, as the countdown reached ‘Zero minus thirty seconds’ and Voice of America, caught on the same frequency as the base
radio, crackled through the loudspeakers, filling the air with the anthem that began the day’s broadcasts; as a scientist in a lab coat, taking his place beside me, brought long, pondering
fingers to his chin; as the numbers clicked down, ‘Minus fifteen’, then ‘Ten... nine... eight...’ and the chaplain, murmurously, as if presiding over a deathbed, continued
with his prayers, and the top brass stood, hands clasped before them like embarrassed mourners, uncertain what was required of them – and the senator, just before the countdown ended, reached
up in a strangely casual gesture, smudged the black glasses from his face, and gazed, like a man bravely facing death, into sudden, searing fire.
    ‘ O say, can you see, by the dawn’s early light ...’
    What happened next was the work of moments, but to me it unfolded in a timeless realm: as if time split into fragments when the count reached zero and part of me and part of the world would be
there ever afterwards in that bunker at Alamogordo at five-thirty in the morning on July 16, 1945.
    A new sun consumed the sky. The flash, silent and immense, was brighter than any lightning that had scourged the night, brighter than the desert in the midday heat. First it was white, then all
colours and none: golden, purple, violet, grey, and blue, lighting the arid plain and the mountains behind with a clarity and power never seen before on earth. Never in my life have I known such
awe.
    Only later, hours later or so it seemed, came the sound, at once impossibly deep and high, shrieking through the bunker’s walls and toughened glass like an express train passing and
passing, as if eternally, just inches from our ears. And I am witness , I thought, to a death that has no ending. The death of air. The death of earth. The death of water and fire. I have
witnessed this and I am Death.
    Tears blurred my eyes. My heart was hushed, suspended between beats; the world I had known all my life was gone, annihilated in an instant; but when, impossibly, I found myself returned to the
stream of time, I was the first to go to Senator Pinkerton, who stood, trembling, in the centre of the floor, hands covering his eyes. I reached for his wrists and pulled them down.
    Voices said, ‘What is it? What’s happened?’
    ‘He’s blind,’ I said. ‘He’s blind.’
    Escape, to my surprise, was easy.
    In the chaos, I forced back the blast doors, found the jeep that had brought me, and reversed on to the road before I even considered what I was doing. Checkpoint guards saluted me as I passed:
Major Sharpless, VIP. What had the senator said? He could have Trouble court-martialled – imagine that! Now he could do the same to me: Major Sharpless, AWOL.
    As in a dream, I sped past arid mountains. The scholarly Maybee, with patrician drollery, had said that the Conquistadores had dubbed this desert the Jornada del Muerto : the Journey of
Death.
    The sun was high and the heat burning by the time the rough road crossed Route 66 at Albuquerque. I turned westwards, drove until Route 66 was a blur, then stopped at the first motel I could
find. It was the middle of the afternoon, but I fell on the bed, fully clothed and slept.
    When I woke it was morning; raging hunger possessed me, and in the diner next to the motel I amazed the waitress by devouring plate after plate of greasy sausages, potato waffles, buttered
toast, and eggs over easy, washed down with several pots of strong black coffee. I left her a tip worth more than the meal, staggered out to my stolen jeep, and drove on.
    That night, in another