I. “The Burial of the Dead”

It’s July of 2023 and I’m pulled to the screen like gravity, watching a gaunt face with piercing eyes study a dance of ripples in water, the tea leaves of consequence to come. Next, a concert of flame and flashes of swirling red-orange geometry, bulbs of detonating subatomic particles and pillars of cumulonimbus fire, blazing in his mind’s eye. I am watching “Fission,” the 8,000-foot-wide detonation of energy from the splitting of the atom, only now imagined in retrospect, a roiling thought deep behind the eyes of that same gaunt face 30 years later, about to justify his whole life.

As he sits in a claustrophobic office for a kangaroo court with a predetermined outcome, I soon enter the mazed oceans of his mind, the organizing principles of what I see and how I see it, as one thought surfs into the next through associative semiotic and literal metaphors. Mention of a difficult time abroad sharply transitions to him as an anguished schoolboy, igniting a new round of frenzied abstractions, and I now gaze at churning cyclones of energy and light. Thoughts, images, moments: provoked and unprovoked by direct lines of inquiry, interrogated by crisply-suited and belligerent attorneys who sit as judges accountable to no one, flaying bare the fevered contradictions of the “sphinx-like guru of the atom,” a mind as inscrutable to me, to us, as to his friends—and ultimately, possibly, himself.