Archive of Our Own

In many ways, he is a fairy-tale man. Only a fairy-tale man would leave a poisoned apple on his tutor’s desk, showing that he took Snow White to heart.

That was back at Cambridge when he wasn’t managing his depression very well.

He’d always chased fairy-tale logic, not for its whimsy, but for its irrepressible fecundity. In fairy-tales, you could cut off a monster’s head and glue it to a bird’s back and make that bird carry a ruby in its beak and inside the ruby would be a princess, who would grow back to real size when you released her.

What is an atomic bomb if not a monster’s head glued to a bird’s back, carrying a ruby with a girl inside it, waiting to be released?

But why a girl?

Why a thing so jejune?

Oh, just because.

Just because he’d seen a strange girl while out horse riding.

His English teacher took him to New Mexico the summer after his first year at Harvard so he could recover from a bad ulcer. He rode horses from morning to evening, which did not improve his ulcer, but made him forget about the dreadful things inside him. When you’re on horseback you have to focus on the muscles of your thighs, on the thing in front of you, the shimmering dust that never settles into air, the docile animal carrying you over the uneven ground. You’re going somewhere, but you’re not in any hurry to arrive.

He was in the valley of the mountains called Sangre de Cristo. In the distance, he thought he saw a wisp of gold. The glint of the sun against a rock.

But it wasn’t gold. It was a strange yellow. Not egg yolk. Not the center of a daisy. Something else, something that looked made in a lab.

A yellow that broke his idea of yellow, his idea of color. 

Robert didn’t want to chase it. He had a feeling the yellow would disappear if he tried.

His patience was rewarded one day when he got closer. And he saw hair.

She was riding a white horse. She was wearing a funny cowboy hat with a wide brim, something you'd buy at the state fair. She had on a bright pink jacket with tassels. Her clothes looked lab-made too. There was no dust on them.

He couldn’t see her face, but something about her body in the saddle hummed with happiness.

Robert was terrified. Here was a princess. But she was completely alien.

And he couldn't see her face.

I need physics more than friends, I love chemistry more than you, he’d told his brother in a letter after he’d tried to strangle one of his friends for being happy.

His friend had told him he was getting married. How was Robert supposed to react?

He'd put his hands around his throat. He'd pushed the words back in. 

Physics + Chemistry > Friends 

But what if you could have both? What if there was a being that was also a field of study?

An idea as lush as a body?

Robert saw her in the streets of Manhattan in a studded dress that looked like a rainbow, but was only silver in the shade.

She looked like a mineral, like pure ore. Her hair was that same inorganic yellow, puffed up and undulating, like a wave in a Japanese print.

And she was inconceivably exposed. Her long legs made her look like a showgirl. She was not wearing any stockings. Her legs were bare and athletic. Perfect, really. Not a woman’s legs, but a kind of prototype’s.

She didn’t seem to feel the cold.

She walked fast, skipping steps, touching car doors with her palms, as if to count them.

He could see her face now, though he couldn’t catch her eye. It would have been hard to describe the face. Dolled up, magazine-glamorous, exaggerate in its cosmetic perfection, but completely natural somehow, as if those thick lashes had come out of her, as if the shade of lipstick was genetic.

No one else seemed to notice the girl from nowhere.

Robert had to catch his breath. He lowered his hat and breathed into it slowly.

God, he thought, I don’t believe in you.

He dreamed about her legs that night, he saw them from the knees down. She was tiptoeing the side of a tall building, but he could tell she had no intention of jumping. It was only a game. An impossible woman’s legs, scaling a skyscraper.

“What if it’s Alice who’s the wonder?”

Pauli looks at him funny. He thought they were talking about beta decay. But Robert does things like this sometimes.

He smiles blandly. “Pardon?”

“You know, Alice in Wonderland. She’s supposed to be…” Robert waves his hand, making smoke signals with his cigarette, “the normal creature in an absurd world. But from their point of view… what would she be? What is she exactly?”

Pauli gives it some thought. He is, after all, the one interested in parapsychology of the two. “She is part of linear time. That must seem very strange for people living in a loop.”

Robert taps ashes into his palm. “Oh. I hadn’t considered that.”

“Considered what?”

“That she is from the future.”

How terrifying to be in the presence of a woman whose beauty has no source on this green earth.

As if all those statues and paintings that men had obsessed over in their ateliers across the ages had coalesced into a soulless Galatea.

You can tell she has nothing in common with the dogs she’s holding on a leash. She’s walking three poodles in the park. She’s wearing a bell-shaped pink coat and bright white boots.

Is her flesh made of flesh? Or is it another kind of material? Are her clothes and her flesh one texture?

Robert sits on the bench, unable to do anything but watch, sweat building on his scalp.

Do not chase the yellow, or it will not come you.

The poodles are sniffing at his feet. He didn’t even notice.

He looks up into her bright face. All he sees is a perfect white smile, each tooth a flawless white pearl, each row inserted automatically.

“Do you like puppies?”

He staggers. His throat is too dry. “I...I don’t know.”

“They seem to like you,” she says, blinking slowly, batting her eyelashes.

“I guess – I haven’t had much experience with them.”

The girl bends down to scratch behind a dog’s ear. “You don’t need experience. Look how sweet they are.”

Robert nods, terrified. Thirsty.

They don’t look like puppies. They look large and fully grown.

“Go on, pet them,” she invites with a nudge of her head.

He stares at her lacquered nails stroking the fur.

He extends a slightly shaking hand. The poodle’s head is real enough. And soft. Should he also touch her hand? Does he dare?

“I’m only worried about them getting old,” she says to him conversationally. “I’ve been thinking a lot about death lately. Have you?”

Robert keeps his hand on the dog’s head. “Do I...do I think about death?”

“Uh-huh.”

“Well, doesn’t everyone?”

She casts a few glances left and right. “You mean the people in this park all think about it?"

"Yes. Very - very likely."

"Even that little baby in the stroller?”

Robert feels as if the air compresses when she speaks. 

“Maybe,” he mumbles, looking down at the dog's skull. 

She hums in a contented sort of way. Every form of life thinks of its end.

“Well, at least I’m not alone.”

But you are, he wants to say. You are singular.

“I guess I’ll see you around,” she says breezily, pulling her dogs away.

Robert keeps shaking long after.

He’s in bed with Kitty, who is small and mean and fits under him very neatly and her opening is easy to penetrate. It’s lovely to sleep with her and assert some dormant part of masculinity, but he can’t stop thinking about the tall blonde. Most men, perhaps, can't stop thinking about tall blondes. But this one is not made for men. The giantess' joints seem crafted from steel. She could crush him and Kitty. She could break them at the waist, right in the middle of this domestic children-making. 

But if they were alone, he would be under her. She would not be female, not really. She would be the lush idea, the field of study. Parabolas would come alive across her skin. There would be a faint luminosity along her cornea, her melting point tattooed under eyelids.

She would be a baroque timepiece, a jeweled clock, dismantled for his hands, but still working, still very much accurate.

Robert would press his lips to the fine nuts and bolts.

Here he is, telling a classroom full of students about the first example of a quantum effect due to a barrier penetration.

“Any external electric field, no matter how weak, will in time dissociate an atom.”

You can, and if you can, you must attempt to break the atomic bonds. It is violent. It is necessary.

Even someone like her must be made of the same bonds.

Can the barrier be penetrated?

Who knew he would be back in New Mexico?

He feels like an oil prospector, setting up rigs to dig up black gold.

They’re out here to create the end, not the beginning.

Kitty serves vichyssoise for dinner and drinks a lot due to neglect and the heat of the desert, and he tends to walk about at night to cool himself and look over the ghost town they have built in Los Alamos. So many scientists are laboring on top of their wives in those little boxes. He can hear the sounds of their rutting. It’s good for morale.

Robert climbs up an observation tower and sits in the vacant chair, looking over his little kingdom.

One day soon, he will see a mushroom on the horizon and he will have put it there. Wasn’t it a mushroom that Alice ate to grow bigger?

In the distance, he spots tiny headlights, driving around the compound's perimeter.

He can hear a strand of music, something garish and giggly, something electric, electronic, electrodes of sound. Out of this world.

The motor’s still running, humming in time to the song coming from the radio of her car.

He has never seen this shade of pink before, like salmon on ice, slathered in milk. It makes his stomach churn. It’s not the disgust, it’s the curiosity, gnawing at him like a woman’s nails.

He has never encountered such a make before. The car might as well be a spaceship. 

“Hiya,” she says by way of greeting. She’s wearing a pink beret. The darkness of the night doesn’t seem to touch her features, which appear bright, as if a private sun were hanging above her brow. “Do you wanna come for a ride?”

Robert swallows. “That depends. Are you a good driver?”

She chuckles, reaching out and slapping his hand with her fingers, tapping his wrist watch lightly. He will notice later that she broke the glass.

“You’re a hoot. I did get here in one piece, didn’t I?”

Is she one piece? Is anything?

He coughs. “You shouldn’t have come. Everything here is strictly classified. We’re – it’s very sensitive work.”

“I tried going somewhere else, but the car brought me here either way. I think I’m supposed to get some answers.”

“Answers?”

“Yeah. Are you getting in, or what?” she asks, frowning a little, like this was his idea.

Roberts considers the chances of death in the middle of the desert. He walks around and gets into the passenger seat.

She adjusts the rearview mirror.

“Seatbelt, please.”

Robert looks at her blankly.

She rolls her eyes with a smile. “Oh, I always forget you guys don’t do that yet. Here…”

She leans forward. She comes up inappropriately close. Practically climbs into his lap. Robert sits very still as she drags a pink strap over his chest and clips it inside a metal opening next to his left hip.

A part of him wishes for lust. He would prefer to want to sleep with her, instead of wanting to know how she works, how this works.

“Will you tell me your name, at least?” he asks.

The girl scoffs cheerfully. “It's Barbie, silly.”

Like he’s supposed to know.

Barbara. Barbarian. The Greek for “foreign”. Maybe she’s not just from the future, maybe she’s from the past too, a resplendent cave woman, an artifact of unknown beauty.

Like a deadly life form inside a fossil. The girl escaped the ruby. 

He shudders with the possibility.

The car moves smooth and noiseless across the sands.

“Can you tell me why I’m here, J?”

No one calls him J.

Robert looks up at the star-speckled sky. “I was hoping you’d tell me.”

“Nope. No can do. I’m the one who needs answers.”

“Well… I can only hazard a guess. Maybe there was a glitch in the Minkowski space.”

“What’s that?”

“A four-dimensional continuum.”

“Oh.” Her profile is like living marble. “I want to go back home.”

He glances at the perfect upward motion of her nose. “Where’s home for you?”

“It’s a place with warm beaches. It’s the best place to be. My heels never have to touch the ground.”

He read a story once by one of those Russian masters. Dostoevsky, he thinks. A duplicate Earth appears in the protagonist’s dreams. His chance to visit Paradise. But the man’s presence there corrupts it. Science and progress begin to take precedence. The man begs the people to crucify him. Maybe his sacrifice would return them to a pure state.

“Do you remember how you got here?”

“I think I made a choice, but I can’t remember the choice,” she says, lips pouting, pursing, pink lipstick still fresh. No trace of saliva.

“Could you describe your last memory?”

She hums. “Shoes.”

He doesn’t pursue this line of inquiry.

They drive in silence for a while, until he can’t quite take it anymore.

“Try driving in circles.”

“Huh?”

“We’ve been driving in a straight line. That – I don’t like that.”

Barbie clutches the pink steering wheel. “Oh, sure. That sounds fun.”

She turns the car sideways with a screech, letting the wheels slide behind them.

The stars blur and skid with each swerve.

She’s making wheelies in the sand, driving backwards, like chasing her own tail.

Robert glances sideways. She’s laughing with her mouth open, hanging onto the steering wheel. Hair flying from her ponytail.

When they finally stop, they’re both panting. Barbie kills the engine. She unclasps her seatbelt and his.

“Wow, that was great. It really takes your mind off things.”

Robert tugs on his tie. “It tricks you into losing direction.”

“Then I like losing direction.” Her knuckles are white on the steering wheel.

“Maybe that’s what got you here,” he says, both friendly and callous. He can’t deny the cold dread in his stomach. She could kill me out here, he thinks, and a part of him almost looks forward to it.

He’s curious to see how this other being would do it. Sex is not real intimacy, not in his frustrated experience. Maybe this would be.

The only way he knows how to express the fear and longing is to say, “I haven’t stopped thinking of you since I first saw you. And that was years ago.”

Barbie looks at him with wistful eyes, eyes painted on, eyes made of other eyes. Then she covers his hand with hers. “I didn’t mean to scare you. I just kept running into you. Frankly, I thought you were the one following me. Because you’re the only one who can actually see me.”

Robert issues a strangled chuckle. He absorbs her touch. He laces his fingers with hers. “I suppose I’ve been going insane for a while now.”

“I don’t think you’re insane,” she says softly.

Robert lifts her hand to his lips. He needs to know what her skin feels like, what his mind will create for him. He presses dry lips to her knuckles and is surprised by the strange plasticity.

Barbie gives him a sweet smile. Then she takes his hand to kiss too, but instead of kissing it, she puts it on her throat.

“Can you feel a pulse?”

Robert concentrates. He pushes away other thoughts. “Faintly.”

“I don’t feel weak, though. I don’t know…I’m not like the rest, but I’ve got most of your parts.”

“What’s missing?” he asks, relishing the coolness of her skin.

“Some internal organs, I think.” She lowers his hand to her chest, over her dress. Her breasts underneath feel hard and round. She drags his hand down to her flat belly and her geometrical lap. “Do you see how narrow I am?”

Robert swallows. “I’m not an anatomist…but you look fine to me.”

“I look pretty, not fine.”

What’s the difference? Prettiness is symmetry, all things in the right place. 

Barbie squeezes his hand. “I can show you.”

Barbie stands in front of the glaring headlights. Behind her, the flat mesas drip with darkness.

She unbuttons her dress. There’s nothing sultry about her stripping. She is not undressing for his pleasure.

Robert puts a hand to his mouth.

He’s never had friends who slapped his back and told him to get up and go talk to that girl over there. But he pictures men with low appetites urging him on.

Her naked body is the mold of a living doll, a container of smoothed female features. She has no nipples. She has no hairs or wrinkles. Between her legs there is nothing except the same perfect, unbreachable surface.

Perfectly sealed.

There is nothing inappropriate about her nakedness. Nothing to make it nakedness. This is what it looks like when you never had to grow into something.

Robert steps out of the car.

He’s walking on smoke trails. In the blare of the lights, the air looks populated by many worlds. Maybe he’s slipped between them.

He stops in front of her body.

Barbie’s eyes shimmer with undefined emotion. “I don’t think anyone’s seen me like this. But I guess it wouldn’t matter if they did.”

“Why wouldn’t it matter?”

Barbie shrugs, letting her arms dangle like dead swans’ throats. “There’s nothing to see.”

Robert doesn’t touch her shoulders, but he lets his hands ghost over their immaculate, lightning-rod frame.

“You are perfect and this bothers you,” he rasps.

“Nothing bothers me, and that bothers me,” she says, looking into his eyes.

“You just contradicted yourself.”

“I can’t feel the difference,” she says, staring at his face as if she wishes she could borrow it.

Robert looks down at her body. Her toes stand up from the ground in an incongruous way.

He kneels before her.

She was right. Her heels don’t touch the ground. She’s not a ballerina, holding herself up by force of discipline. She is seemingly built this way.

Barbie places a hand on his cheek, making him look up. “I can be flat, if you want.”

She forces her soles to touch the ground.

His head is level with her pelvis. He can’t help but look straight at the plastic sleekness. Airtight and hermetical.

“Can you make an entrance inside me?” she asks, running her fingers through his short hair.

Robert closes his eyes. He has always been a fairy-tale man. In fairy-tales, such mechanical wonders are possible. He can make her swallow a ball of light that will give her wings of smoke and penetrate the atomic barrier between her legs.

"Yes."

He presses his forehead to the beautiful nothing of her missing cunt.

There’s a snake of fire coiling above the skies, vaporizing mountains. Cool lava spills from its fangs. Fire made black and gray.

He sees her beautifully tanned legs, whizzing past, untouched by ash. She’s weaving through debris, zigzagging like a comet’s tail.

She has roller skates on her feet and she’s wearing a rainbow-colored one-piece.

He watches Barbie skate through nuclear fallout. There are cries coming from inside the earth. She times each glide to the rhythm of their ecstasy.

She moves her hips in time with the agony.

Robert is still kneeling.

Inside the sealed-off chamber, there is only a mirror.

Robert walks up to the mirror. He has never liked the gauntness of his face, but he is grateful for its meagerness now.

He stares at his reflection until it stops being his.

Her face is the apogee of fabrication, the labyrinth inside which the Minotaur lies starving.

There are no circuits or devices inside her, no systems that need to rely on each other. A labyrinth is actually no choices, no directions.

She is the egg that once birthed god – technology that does not have an inside or out, a beginning or end.

Robert lifts his hand and she lifts hers.

They hold their hands close to the mirror’s surface. What is the world like on her side?

Their fingers lace and Robert gently tugs her forward.

Alice is coming through the looking glass.

She is inside the chamber with him now. The music is already playing. The ticking melody tickles the inner ear.

Robert puts his hand on the small of her back and leads her into the dance. He’s quite good at dancing. He was always happy at parties in the first hour, at least.

They turn about the small confines of the chamber with small, precise steps which become faster and looser as he swings her away from his body, then back into him, chest to chest, mouth to mouth, bright pink and bone gray.

Mothers and sisters and wives have never lived a single day. There is only Her, the gynocentric wonder.

Not Mother Earth. Mother Ether, perhaps.

The faster they dance, the quicker the elements converge.

A dark, pink shadow fills up the sky, a prelude to her brightness.

She is the future, and he ushers her in. 

Beryllium and Plutonium kick off the reactions in picoseconds.

Barbie and Oppenheimer set the atomic bomb loose on the world.