The Stain That May or May Not Have Been Guacamole

Arthur Wisener, while still in his 20s, had been on the team of physicists that developed the first atomic bomb; but in the year immediately following the war, he discovered that even though this was true--and it was--there was something about it that sounded unconvincing.

"I'm always trying to shoehorn it in," Arthur thought to himself. "That's probably the trouble."

He attended the next dinner party determined to make no mention of his role in history, at least until dessert, and not even then if the conversation had drifted to some subject that was incompatible, such as sex.

"So that's where I was during (continued on page 116)The Stain(continued from page 103) the war," Arthur said to the guests, after modestly summing up his activities. "Down there at Oak Ridge."

There was a general silence. Then a man whom Arthur knew for a fact to be a manufacturer of patio furniture said, "So was I."

"Me, too," another man said.

A snicker came from the far end of the table.

"I'm really going to insist on your wife's giving me the recipe for these," a lady said to the host.

"Well, it's getting late," Arthur said.

At the door, Arthur said to the host, "You knew I was telling the truth--why didn't you say something?"

"Look, why cause trouble?" the host said. "I thought it was going very well up to then."

• • •

Since the atomic bomb had been considered such a success by high Government officials, it followed, in keeping with basic bureaucratic principles, that the work at Oak Ridge was to become more or less ongoing in nature. Consequently, Arthur was on the premises late in 1946 when a technician stopped by his office one morning. "The March of Time people are here," he said. "They're doing a thing on the bomb."

Arthur changed into a fresh smock and went to the main laboratory. Lights and cameras were set up. The Old Man was there. Arthur found out later they'd flown him down from Baltimore just for the film.

The director was a young man in a corduroy suit. He was talking to the Old Man and Dr. Barnes, another physicist. "The point we're trying to get across in this particular scene is that many of the scientists in the early stages of the project were not cognizant of the value of the elements they were dealing with," he said.

"I see," said the Old Man.

"So in this particular scene, Dr. Barnes will walk up to you with a test tube and say"--the director checked his script--"he will say, 'Well, sir, here it is: plutonium!' And when he says this, you, sir, will stick a pan under the test tube and say, 'Very good. However, I will take the precaution of holding this receptacle under it, as the contents of that test tube are worth well over a million dollars!' " The director looked up from his script. "Any questions?"

"I was cognizant of the value of plutonium," Dr. Barnes said.

"Of course you were," the director said.

"I'm sure you were very cognizant of it. But in this scene, you'll be playing a scientist who wasn't."

"Tupper was never cognizant of it," the Old Man said. "But he's in England now. You couldn't get him."

"No," the director said. "So if Dr. Barnes would--"

Dr. Barnes agreed to cooperate.

They made ready to shoot the scene. Arthur was placed in the background and given a beaker of darkish fluid to study.

The lights were switched on and the cameras began to roll.

"Well, sir, here it is: plutonium!"

"Very good. However, I will take the precaution of--"

"Excuse me--cut." The director called to Arthur. "You, in the background."

"Yes?"

"Just be motionless when you study your beaker. It's too distracting if you raise it up to the light."

Arthur nodded.

"How was I?" the Old Man asked.

"Fine," the director said.

Dr. Barnes said, "I'm going to look surprised when he tells me what it's worth."

"That would be a nice touch," the director said. "OK, let's try it once more."

"Well, sir, here it--"

"No, not till I give you the signal. OK--now."

They did not finish until four in the afternoon.

• • •

Before another year had passed, Arthur was informed that he was no longer needed at Oak Ridge. He settled in New York, took a job as consultant with the American Cyanamid Company and married a lady who seemed to like him. They had a son. Arthur watched him closely, trying to determine whether or not he was a genius. By the age of 16 months, several factors indicated such a possibility, but as the child grew to maturity, the only really outstanding accomplishment Arthur could point to occurred in the boy's 15th year, when he entered a contest sponsored by a menthol-cigarette company and won a sailboat.

In the meantime, the Old Man published his memoirs. Arthur read them eagerly but found his name mentioned only once toward the end, where the Old Man had written: "And, of course, so many other colleagues, such as Arthur Wisener, who is now in England."

By the late Fifties, whenever Arthur mentioned his connection with Oak Ridge, the response was usually something like, "I hear that first one is nothing compared with the babies they've got these days." As a result, Arthur found himself as upset as anyone to see a radical carrying a placard reading Ban the Bomb, but if the placard read Ban the H-Bomb, he tended to sympathize.

Early in 1960, Arthur became obsessed with the feeling that his wife had begun throwing large parties in his absence. Sometimes, according to his calculations, the parties had broken up only moments before his return home. "I know what you're up to," he told her. "Don't think I don't."

His psychiatrist had an explanation. According to his theory, the partygoers, so to speak, represented those citizens who had opted for the more-or-less carefree means of conventional warfare, whereas Arthur, due to his nuclear research, represented a latecomer who wanted to enjoy himself but couldn't manage because he had tasted a far stronger punch.

"I don't want to get critical," Arthur said, "but that sounds like a load of horseshit."

"Perhaps we should look into why you feel that way," the psychiatrist said.

"Perhaps you should go fuck yourself," Arthur said.

Both the analysis and the marriage were terminated. Ironically enough, his ex-wife and his ex-psychiatrist met two years later at a fund raiser, and both of them thought how ironic it would be if they wound up in bed together, but, ironically enough, they never did.

Arthur moved to the West Coast, accepting a position with a Santa Ana firm engaged in cryogenics research. He began seeing a lady in her 40s named Lily Fineberg and they were married within a year. She, too, had gone through a divorce. They tried to be open about their respective pasts.

"What can I say?" she said.

"My story's much the same," he said.

• • •

But things were not going so smoothly elsewhere in Arthur's life. Napalm had begun to eclipse nuclear warfare as a controversial issue, making him feel old before his time. In the winter of 1968, he came across a news story headlined: " 'I'd Do It Again,' Says Inventor of Napalm."

The inventor was a Harvard professor, now retired, and, according to the article, a group of students had staged a protest in front of his home. Reporters learned after the demonstration that in spite of the students' reaction, he was proud of his accomplishment, describing it as a difficult technical problem in which he and his associates had been required to come up with a means of producing substantial conflagrations from modest beginnings. Arthur gathered from the man's words that he was under the impression that napalm was dropped exclusively on buildings, possibly due to a protective wife who had pretended to misplace his newspaper every morning for the past several years.

In any case, Arthur found himself envying the retired professor. Of course, the encounter with the protesting students may well have brought on shortness of breath, loss of appetite, even, perhaps, a nagging headache with accompanying nausea, but along with all this, Arthur felt the man most certainly had been (concluded on page 198)The Stain(continued from page 116) somehow cleansed by the incident.

And the more Arthur thought about it, the more he began to crave some such encounter. He would make a trip to Hiroshima. Word would spread of his arrival. There would be marching in the streets and a large banner: Arthur Wisener Go Home Just Now.

His car window would be shattered. Someone would spit on him. Then, later, in the small hours of the morning, he would slink off to a brothel in some dingy quarter of the city and make love to a Japanese prostitute with a hideously scarred face.

• • •

But none of this happened. Instead, there was only the problem of the stain tickets. Last October, Arthur's wife had sent a sports coat of his to the cleaners and it had come back with the following notice stapled to the polyethylene bag that covered it:

We regret to say that the stain on this garment cannot be removed by our normal cleaning methods. Any further efforts on our part may do irreparable damage to the fabric.

Arthur examined the sports coat. He could find no stain. The next time it came back from the cleaners, it bore the same notice, and still he could find no stain.

He visited the cleaners in person the following afternoon, taking the jacket along with him. There was a lady behind the counter who wore her glasses on a chain around her neck.

"Is all work done on the premises?" Arthur asked.

"We like to give that impression, but as a matter of fact, no," the lady said. "It seems to make people nervous if they think their clothes are going to be carted off to some other place."

"I don't want to go into that aspect of it," Arthur said. "I just want to know where you send them."

She gave him an address across town. It was a large authentic-looking building with several ground-level pipes emitting steam. Arthur asked to speak with the manager. A man appeared who definitely had food in his mouth but was trying to look otherwise. Perhaps he'd been caught unawares in the middle of a snack.

"It's about this," Arthur said. He held up his sports coat, which, for no accountable reason, he'd rolled up tightly and tied with twine. He explained about the stain tickets. "It's very important that I talk with him," Arthur said. "I want to find out exactly what the person who put the ticket on here does and does not know."

The manager explained that those tickets and all matters related to those tickets were the responsibility of the spot-removal man. "But I could make an exception and take a look, if you want," he said.

"No, I've got to talk with him myself," Arthur said. "In private."

The manager explained that the spot-removal man no longer worked there. "His name's Earl," he said. "He quit two days ago and took a job selling quality infantwear."

Arthur got Earl's home address, which turned out to be a trailer park. Earl, a man in his 30s who was wearing a shirt Arthur didn't particularly like, answered the door. Arthur introduced himself and said, "It's going to sound like I've got some complaint about my sports coat, but that's not it. I want to talk with you."

Earl asked him to step inside, gesturing toward the television set as Arthur entered. "Hollywood Squares," he said. "I hardly ever watch it."

Arthur explained again about the stain tickets. Then he unknotted the twine around his sports coat and shook it out. "I guess it's naïve to bring this along, since, according to my theory, you're simply using it symbolically. Anyway, I figure I might as well start at the beginning. I earned a doctorate in physics at the University of Chicago in the spring of 1943. At the suggestion of the department chairman, I submitted an application to--"

Earl was staring at the jacket. "Wait--I remember this coat. It's the one with the spot."

"What?"

He pointed to the left-hand pocket. "Right there. It's kind of hard to see unless the light's just right."

"Oh. That." Arthur examined the stain. "That's strange," he said. "I can't understand why I never saw it before."

"My personal guess would be guacamole," Earl said.

Arthur stood up. "Well, I've got to be going," he said.

"I thought you wanted to talk."

"No, not exactly. I mean, it's nothing that couldn't wait."

• • •

When he got home, he put the coat away in his closet without taking another look at it. He was afraid that if he did, he would discover that the stain had somehow disappeared.

However, at some point in the middle of the night, Arthur decided he was being ridiculous. He got a flashlight, went to the closet and examined the jacket again. The stain was still there on the pocket.

The next morning, he awoke in good spirits, and it was not until lunchtime that the possibility occurred to him that getting up in the middle of the night to look at his jacket might have been only a dream. In the end, he decided such a possibility was too remote to warrant another look. Still, it was difficult to account for the fact that what he now recalled seeing by the light of his flashlight was not an actual stain but only the word stain itself, written on the pocket in small neat letters with a red felt-tipped pen.