Secrets of Los Alamos: How Family Stories Can Help Inform Historical Fiction

“No right turns and no photographs for the next three miles.” The guardsman at the Omega Bridge instructed us briskly. He fixed me with a steady stare before nodding us and our enormous rental Chevrolet Equinox through the checkpoint gate. I felt myself shrinking under his gaze as I maneuvered the large, clunky vehicle, my composure cracking.

“We’re just making our way back to Santa Fe,” I said, blaming a wrong turn and holding my pregnant belly demonstrably for pity. “We must have missed the turnoff in this weather.” It was snowing sideways. I remember thinking the fleet of snowflakes dancing in the headlights felt like something from a dream.

Back in Chicago, it had been unseasonably warm for October. I hadn’t even packed a coat or gloves. There had been no other cars on the road, no other souls in sight, except for the elks with glowing eyes who wandered in and out of the blurry distance. Under that low white sky, it felt like we had mistakenly driven back in time.

Constructed in 1951, the two-lane steel bridge is the only road into the top-secret laboratory complex of the famed Los Alamos National Laboratory, which relocated across a canyon to the mesa south of town after the war. Drifting over the fresh powder of the overpass struck me as a stark contrast to the unpaved, treacherous winding roads the Manhattan Project scientists used to maneuver with explosives bouncing in their open truck beds. Today, the bridge serves as an apt metaphor for the divide between the known world and the top-secret city of Los Alamos.

We hadn’t really been lost. We had tried our luck at driving down Highway 4, desperate for a peek at the restricted laboratories that contained not only national secrets but also our family history. My grandfather was one of the physicists who helped design the trigger device for the Fat Man bomb, working under Oppenheimer on the famed Manhattan Project. In our family, it felt like every conversation since had either directly referenced the bomb or intentionally avoided it.

Every few miles, one of the enormous elks bucked and darted through the sphere of my brights, and I skidded to the side of the road. Each time we pulled over, we were confronted by yet another warning sign affixed to the barbed wire enclosure: “This Area is Under Video Surveillance,” “Danger. Explosives. Keep Out,” and “Fragment Hazard Area. Do Not Enter Without Clearance.” All the while, my mother sat beside me wringing her hands.

She was seventy-two years old and rail thin, but she had insisted on joining me on this wild adventure. I had flown to New Mexico, ostensibly, to fact-check for my historical fiction novel, The Sound of a Thousand Stars, which was inspired by my grandparents’ experiences. But I was really there searching for my grandfather. Something of him was still encapsulated in that isolated town: in the red rock formations and the windy “S” curves of the mesa. I longed to see the vistas and lookouts he had witnessed from the places he had observed them when he was young and bound by secrecy and fear. He would have been terrified he and his team of scientists could lose the race to build the world’s first atomic bomb to the Nazis, or worse, ignite the atmosphere trying.

My mother was there for different reasons. It was her childhood she was searching for out there in the storm. The mysteries my grandparents had guarded and the guilt they had carried into their postwar lives had instigated my grandmother’s depression and my grandfather’s stoicism—it was the preface to her childhood. The horror of the war had calcified into the man who kicked the tires of my mother’s dates’ cars before letting her out of the house, who swung his arm at the backseat carelessly when his children bickered on long drives, not caring which of the four he hit so long as the net result was silence.

It was the same man who softened in old age, who quizzed his grandchildren with math problems around the dinner table, who told stories in riddles, who understood the world through numbers. Finally, at the end of his life, this was the old man who, when he thought no one was listening, whispered alone in his living room: “I wonder if my children can forgive me for what I’ve done.”

Perhaps that is why my mother had tears in her eyes when we sat around a table at Archives & Collections in the Los Alamos Historical Society, and I said so freely that I planned to donate my grandmother’s original letters. I spoke plainly about siphoning-off the ownership of my grandmother’s original handwriting to the collection. These were artifacts that deserved an audience: the letters she had written home during the war, the words censored and trimmed away by government censors, and her snippets of daily life as a wife and mother on the Project. I believed firmly in the value of the archive as a place for preserving the truth or truths of the past for future generations. “It’s their legacy,” I had said to my mother, pleading for us to track down the remaining originals that had been lost to a box in a cold family garage. I believe that if we don’t preserve history in words, it will disappear.

My mother, on the other hand, blanched when we found my grandmother’s book, Los Alamos Experience, a collection of those same letters home, edited and revised to be acceptable to a general audience, stashed away in the cupboard in the famed Bethe house on Bathtub Row. It had been waiting there all those years for us to find it. She told every tour guide scrupulous details about her connections to that town—her brother’s birth certificate which still read P.O. Box 1663, the story of how my grandmother had discovered the truth of my grandfather’s work while pregnant and discussing baby names, and by some turn of fate, suggested the name “Atomic,” and the faraway look on my grandmother’s face in her old age. It was deeply personal to her.

The author’s grandmother, Phyllis Fisher in area around Los Alamos, 1944-45.

Here is where the ways part between fiction and nonfiction. Craft is a curious pursuit, and it affects everyone, not just authors. There are the stories we tell ourselves about who we are and about who our family is—the ones we recite endlessly and know by heart. They’re like a good movie where you know the ending before you begin. But what happens when you tug at a loose thread and realize your own story is only a façade? Whole family networks can come apart at the seams.

Everyone is certain of the truth of their own memories, but memories hinge around words, which are inherently flawed, reinforced by desire and imperfection. This became clear to me as I chipped away at my book, which began as a nonfiction account of my family history, by interviewing family and friends who had known and lived alongside my grandparents during those mysterious years that had been mostly wiped clean from our family record, 1944-1946.

One after another, my grandparents’ offspring and still-living colleagues proclaimed the veracity of their own accounts and the falsehoods of all those who had preceded them. “They’ve got it wrong,” each insisted, countering whoever came before. “Here’s how it really happened.” So, the truth had been buried with my grandparents, like those magnificent cliffs in the desert, beneath layers of red silt.

Fiction, I came to realize, was the only way in. Sometimes, by lying, you can get at the truth in a way honesty can’t. There’s that clunky saying that nonfiction is about facts and fiction is about truth. Fiction allows you to skew things, to get at it from another vantage point, to see what was overlooked in the subtext—the pause at the end of the sentence, the blank page, the unanswered riddle around the dinner table.

Before we bid farewell to Los Alamos, my mother and I stood quietly at the embankment, marveling at how small Ashley Pond was. With all the stories of Niels Bohr rowing and ice skating there, we would have thought it rivaled Lake Superior. We tried to measure the distance between the narratives and the territory. That’s the trouble with places. Some landscapes hold too much history to fit within their perimeters. “All these years and I never thought to come here,” my mother said. “It was such a huge part of my father’s life.” She put on her tinted glasses, hiding what was brewing in her eyes. It was funny to travel all that way on a quest to find out who my grandfather had been as a young person, and to instead wind up finding my mother.

“On the way out of town,” one of the guides advised us, “stop at the lookout.” There’s a turnout, just before the Main Gate. Onlookers and tourists pull off there to admire the picturesque view of the desert monoliths—the enormous tiered mountains like layer cakes of rock strata. But, the point isn’t the imposing view. “Turn around 180 degrees, and look up at the cliff behind you,” the guide had said, winking at what must have been a startled look on my face.

He explained that it was only by turning around, looking away from the scenery you might see on a postcard, the one cataloged in all the guidebooks, that you could spot the weatherbeaten remains of the original road into Los Alamos, that famed winding labyrinth of zig zag hairpin turns that put out so many tires and left so many vehicles abandoned in the muck, with only their splattered license plates shining through reading the state motto: New Mexico, Land of Enchantment.

That’s the thing I admire most about stories, the mysteries guarded in the archives and enmeshed in fiction itself. The goal is never the goal. The answer is waiting for you right back where you began. You just have to turn around and look where you least expect it.

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The Sound of a Thousand Stars by Rachel Robbins is available from Alcove Press.