JL: One of the interesting things about Trinity Fields is that, even though part of it is set in Los Alamos, you never talk about the actual making of the bomb. The fact of the bomb is brought up as an issue, but the story of how it was made and the people who were involved in it is almost assumed.

BM: Well, I figured Richard Rhodes had already done that so brilliantly in The Making of the Atomic Bomb that I didn't need to do it. At a certain point when I was working on the book I had read so much on the making of the atomic bomb that I felt I could build one in my basement; and I certainly could have put that into the book . But I wanted to write about growing up in America in the post-atomic era by focusing on two boys who not only grew up in the shadow of it, but right at the epicenter where the whole project had taken place. They didn't build a bomb, Brice and Kip: their parents did. And that's as close as I wanted to get. The narrator has a naivete, a kind of innocence that carries on to his adulthood. So there are lots of scenes from their childhood that are in the book. It's interesting: the sequestration in which Los Alamos was founded has provided for a kind of brilliant naivete, which is evident when you meet the scientists who are still working there. Their minds are extraordinarily active, but there's a kind of unworldliness to them that sometimes seems childlike.

JL: The Institute for Advanced Studies is kind of like that also.

BM: Although you can feel Princeton nearby when you're at the Institute. It's a suburb in a way. At Los Alamos, you really are away from everybody.You have to cross the Rio Grande, and you drive up the same road that Enrico Ferme and Segre and Neddermeyer and Bohr and Oppenheimer and all of them drove up. Going up that road was really one of the most astounding emotional events that I experienced when I was starting this book. This community was brought into being for a specific purpose; it didn't exist before. I mean, there was a little boy's ranch nearby. William Burroughs and Gore Vidal both went there.. There are photos of them there.

JL: That's perfect. They were there at the same time?

BM: No, different years. There's a photo of the summer class when Burroughs was there. He's sitting in the lower left hand corner. And he looks so unhappy. He's looking at his feet. He just wishes he were anywhere but there.

JL: Why is it called Trinity?

BM: There are conflicting theories about that but the most accepted one is that Oppenheimer named it Trinity Site because he was a big fan of the Bhagavad-Gita, and there is a moment in that book when the three part god is manifest, and the third god says "I am the destroyer of worlds."

JL: That line that Oppenheimer spoke right after the bomb went off, about becoming death, the destroyer of worlds, always struck me as kind of bullshitty. It seemed so...

BM: Prepared?

JL: Prepared 限 designed for what was very self-consciously an historical moment. Who was it who said, "Now we're all sons of bitches"?

BM: That's the great line, and it strikes me as totally unrehearsed. It was Kenneth Bainbridge, the director of the Trinity tests: he turned to Oppenheimer and said, "Now we're all sons of bitches." That's more like it. And he wasn't wrong.

JL: So what's it like when you get up there?

BM: Up to Trinity site? The best way to get there is to go to El Paso and then drive north across this scratchland of mesquite and thorns.

JL: Yeah, I've been through there. Around Las Cruces.

BM: Las Cruces is where Billy the Kid was sentenced to hang. This is Billy the Kid's old stomping ground, really desolate land. Desolate, beautiful, almost indescribable. And Alamagordo, which is a young town as towns go--it was founded in 1898 by a railroad entrepreneur named Charles Eddy--is snuggled up against the Sacramento mountains You set out in the morning from the Alamagordo Fairgrounds, and there's a pleasant group of people with turquoise Alamagordo Chamber of Commerce t-shirts on, and 150, 200 cars caravan out under military police escort, with their lights on, like a big funeral procession. It's 85 miles in and you go through White Sands Missile Range, which is very eerie, with telemetry bunkers and radar installations dotted around the landscape.

JL: I love the vocabulary of this. I mean, 'telemetry'. What a great word. I was jealous of Trinity Fields, because I've always wanted to be have an excuse to use the word 'ordnance' in a sentence. It's such a great sounding word.

BM: Write a war book. Then you can have all the ordnances you want, and nobody will get on your case. Well, you can have emotional ordnance of course.

JL: We'll use it metaphorically.

BM: "How dare you!" she exploded. Anyway, you can't take cameras in there, and you aren't supposed to take sketches. But they didn't say anything about notebooks, so I took 60 pages of notes.

JL: Is there still research going on there?

BM: Oh, all the time. Since the Trinity blast there have been 40,000 missiles fired on this range. The cruise missile was developed there, the stealth fighter and the stealth bomber programs were developed there. So you arrive about 11:30 in the morning, and suddenly you see this dark black lava stone obelisk in this crater. It still stands. Nobody could tell me who designed this thing. To me, it's one of the most emotionally startling and moving national monuments we've got.

JL: Especially because nobody can see it.

BM: Twice a year on the first Saturday in April and the first Saturday in October.

JL: It's like the plaque on the moon.

BM: It really is. After the plaque on the moon, this is the most hidden monument we've got. I can't think of anything that is more dumbfounding than standing there in this place where the world really changed. Because when that bomb worked we were at a new historical era. We could take it and we could burn the the world down.

JL: Now, I want to talk about your near death experience. One of the things that Eli Gottlieb told me was that while you were waiting for the ambulance you were reflecting on what you had done and what you wanted to do still, if you made it out of this. You thought you had two or three books left in you.

BM: I hope more than that. There are two or three books that I have planned. But I've got to tell you, I was in such extraordinary pain that my memories are really specific, and mostly interior. I remember one thing: an orderly in the emergency room at this little hospital upstate came up and touched my belly, and I did a double jack knife and screamed. And he said, "If I can't touch you, I can't help you, champ." And I said, "Don't call me champ". (Laughter) I remember that.

JL: I'm curious about the whole thing. I've never felt extreme physical pain. Is it like regular pain, only more so?

BM: That's an interesting question. No. Regular pain, which hurts and is annoying and disturbs your normal mental processes, and which you hope to get out of your life as soon as possible, is different, for me, from the pain I experienced in extremis. That pain was fully occupying. It was me, that pain. My consciousness became active in a brighter, different way. I wasn't against the pain so much as I was inside it.

JL: Does it reach the point where it almost gets sort of abstract?

BM: No it's very concrete. (Laughter)

JL: Damn. I was hoping it would get abstract.

BM: What gets abstracted is the sense that there something outside of that pain, because it becomes so completely a part of your existence the moment you're in it that there's no consideration of what might lie outside the envelope. You simply begin to think inside of it, the same way you take the exterior of your epidermis for granted. You view other people from inside that bubble, and they're not in it, and you are.

JL: So it becomes a sort of proprioceptive fact.

BM: Yeah. It's not that you have a pain, you have become an organism that is pain. You really feel yourself as this complex of the organs, and something has gone wrong. It's a moment at which I abandoned hope, and so therefore fear wasn't part of the experience either. Which is, in retrospect, one of the most astounding aspects of the whole thing. When I was coming down on this hundred mile ambulance ride to the city, I remember coming across the George Washington Bridge, and looking out at those big silver spans, and thinking, Jesus, this is how you die. I was more fascinated by it than afraid of it. It just seemed very normal and natural and things were falling into place. I couldn't get up and help myself and no one could help me. It was peculiar in that I was so intellectually and imaginatively conscious and alive, but the body was kind of falling away.

JL: One of the things that's said about women who have particularly painful childbirths is that there's this peculiar sort of amnesia that kicks in afterwards, which I suppose may be something naturally selected for 限 you'll have another kid if you don't remember how awful it was the first time. Did that happen to you also?

BM: In the same way you forget pleasure, which is probably part of the procreative process too 限 as if you go back to find out what that lovemaking felt like, because you forget. I have a pretty strong memory of most of what happened, but it's hard to go back and touch the pain again, I have to admit. At the time I remember thinking, How am I going to describe this, if can describe it?

JL: Is it differentiable? Is there this kind of pain and that kind of pain, or is it a sort of indivisible term?

BM: Oh no, it broke down into abdominal pain and...

JL: But I don't mean location, I mean sensation. In other words, is pain one thing, or are there different kinds, as there are, say, different kinds of tastes? I mean, you can tell, even if you're not looking, the difference between a pinprick and a burn. But I'm wondering if, at that level, all of those distinctions become moot.

BM: What was happening to me toward the end of these seventy hours was that I was going into septic shock. My liver was going down, different organs were beginning to go down, and the body was so taxed by the infection that the pain had become the whole of my tiny universe. The differentiation was still there, but it was so complex and crowded that it felt complete. It was a staircase going down that just turned into a dark shaft. And I was in this amazing free fall. Time became very bendy and warped and peculiar. It was a great experience. I mean, I've come out of it sharpened, really honed. Your purpose can't help but become focused, refocused.

JL: Who said, "Nothing focuses your senses like knowing you're going to die"?

BM: Samuel Johnson. Yeah. It's something like...it has to do with hanging. Nothing focuses a man's...

JL: Right.

BM: A man's life...

JL: Like knowing he's going to be hanged in the morning.

BM: Yeah. I got ripped to the roots. Everything has to be re-evaluated. Everything. It's really been like a small, personal atomic explosion; there's a green glassy trinotite on the bottom of my being. It's like a green monocle through which I can look up into the universe and review everything. Things re苯used and things were unconfused. Friendships were strengthened. My work seems to have a meaning to me now that it didn't have before. Somebody told me that I should really write a hospital book...

JL: A Michael Crichton kind of thriller. Or you could do Reader's Digest pieces 限 you know, "I am Brad's colon".

BM: I have to say, though, that I'm not as convinced as I was before all this occurred of the eradication of the imagination or the consciousness of the soul on physical death.

JL: Oh, you're not going to start getting all spiritual on me, are you?

BM: No, I didn't go gooey. (Laughter) I'm just as crinkly and cranky as I was before. It was just one of the noticings that occurred when I was that sick, I was still able to perceive what was going on with me, and I remember thinking, how could the mind be this active when the body is this distressed?

JL: Do you remember the story about A.J.Ayer? He was a philosopher, logical-positivist, really as hardcore rationalist as the twentieth century has produced; and he was an atheist, a staunch atheist; but just before he died he had this conversion experience that he wrote about for one of the British papers. He'd had some hallucinatory contact with the gods, and upon recovering from it 限 temporarily, because he died soon afterwards 限 he sat down and recanted all of his anti-spirituality.

BM: Well, a lot of lifetime atheists undergo conversion on their deathbed. Wyndham Lewis, the writer, converted to Roman Catholicism on his deathbed after having lived a life of devout atheism and skepticism.

JL: All right, let's talk about Vietnam. One of the first things that struck me about your treatment of Vietnam was that the idea that yellow rain was in fact chemical warfare was a very right wing theory. It was supposed to be Russian doings, and the supposing debunking of it, that it was bee droppings, was something that had come from the left. But you seem to endorse quite strongly in the book the idea that there was in fact a great deal of chemical warfare. Not that, you shouldn't believe anything that isn't left wing, but I was curious about how you came to that conclusion.

BM: Well I have a left hand and a right hand. And he fact is, the Mung people are being eradicated by military extremists in the Laotian regime, and the Mung are neither left nor right. They're mountain people, farmers, who've been itinerant for four thousand years, and basically have been pushed around by whoever was in power at the time, the Chinese, the Vietnamese.
    It's true that they were funded by the CIA; we gave them weapons, and helped them to sell heroin so that they could have funds to fight the North Vietnamese Communists. But the Mung got taken by the Americans the same way they're being systematically eradicated by the Lao. So you'll find that the right wing is just as anxious to embrace the bee droppings theory of yellow rain as the left wing is, because we don't want to deal with the war anymore. It always comes down to money, finally, and there's not enough money in Laos for us to bother with it, yet. I think Vietnam has opened because there's sufficient commerce promised that enough money would be lost by both countries if ties were't reopened. So the Mung meant more to me than left wing or right wing; they just seemed, again, innocents, in the same way the physicists in Los Alamos were. I mean, they're not really innocent, either one of these communities, insofar as they became part of a machinery larger than themselves. The Mung become a part of pro-democracy extremists in the fringe of the CIA. And you can't expect them not to fall prey to things they don't really understand or can't control.

JL: There's this kind of vice that afflicts people, for example, who write about the police a lot: they become sort of cop-groupies, and they very quickly lose all their objectivity, and become so infatuated with the romance of police work that it becomes very clear whose side they're on. Given all the time you spent with the Ravens, how did you keep yourself from doing that?

BM: Don't forget, the narrator of Trinity Fields is an anti-war activist who studied law so that he could get other anti-war activists out of jail and he's, the person who tells the story is essentially a straightforward liberal. So I was no more tempted into a romance with the Ravens than I was into a romance with the anti-war activists that I talked to as I was writing the Columbia riot sections. I think the journey for me as a novelist was just that, as a novelist, and I got into it as much as I safely could, without going native...

JL: Is there a name for... ?

BM: Yeah, going bamboo. But I mean, the kind of novels I like reading and the kind of novels I seem to write, seem to be anthropological by nature; they explore how the culture works at a macrolevel as well as an individual level. So I try the best I can to ensure that it doesn't really matter what I personally think so long as the novel expresses itself, and the form fills itself out properly.

JL: And yet the narrator has your initials.

BM: Yeah, I noticed that. (Laughter) But I don't relate any more personally to Brice than I do to Kip or Jessica or Ariel or anyone in the book. What's dicey about writing a novel that has politics as one of it's facets is that you've got to remain true to your characters and to the fiction itself, but at the same time, you can't sell your own political views down the river, and I think it's apparent by the end of Trinity Fields that I don't consider this government, or any other government, to be much more than made up of generally, ambitious, often selfish, sometimes cruel people. What interests me as a novelist in all three books was how individuals live a life in the shadow of these larger monstrous grotesque dancing figures, how you live a life in the presence of people who really aren't good. And there are people in the world who are really not good. And I think that's part of what the book's about.

JL: Do you have a theodicy? Why do you think people become evil? Because they're weak, because they're evil, because they're ignorant?

BM: Because they're incapable of empathy. And because they're full of fear and therefore overprotect themselves,and become selfish and greedy. If you can't empathize and embrace, you can't understand, and if you can't understand, you're on your way to becoming evil.

--Jim Lewis is the author of Sister, a novel.