Qu’elles rouillent en paix

Oppenheimer was not surprised by the crowds. If there was anything he was used to by now it was multitudes. Whether in their vastness they were only a dream of crowds or actual crowds he was not sure, but he would give them the benefit of the doubt. Pretend the world is real. This had been his creed at the very beginning and lately he had returned to it.

But lately it had been a stretch because the dreams stayed with him when he was awake. Their tone throughout the morning, haunting him as he drank his coffee and smoked his cigarettes and even talked to the people around him, the dreams covering their faces. All the dreams were of multitudes. There were multitudes of people or multitudes of things, but they were all multitudes.

One of them was of a woman weeping, the kind of abject woman he had begun to see everywhere and feel beholden to, women to whom he could give nothing. In the dream he owed a debt to all women and children. He was guilty before them, guilty even before animals of which he did not know the names: he was guilty before the world of the living.

Now all of them, these living animals and men and women and children who would soon enough cease to live, converged on him. They drew themselves along the ground, moving in crowds across the land, slow and sightless and wishing for something he could no longer offer. One day he had done a thing that could not be undone and now he basked in the sickening afterglow. It was a glow like a needle, the edge of a flashing knife.

Another dream pressed down on him with the hard white burning of the sun, and under the sun the water: there were cars under the ocean, all the cars he had seen in the world since he got here, the thousands or hundreds of thousands of them. They lay side by side at the bottom of the sea, covered in water, overgrown with seaweed. Rusting in peace. The ocean was dark around their bodies.

This last dream was a good dream. Ever since he had come to the new life he had hated the cars.