Yes, Lysenko declared Siberia transformed into a land of orchards and gardens, but we physicists were left to continue our fissile calculus. Remember that time we raised our glasses at the confluence of two imagined rivers, their throats pouring into one another? Pretended we were standing among ruined temples and gates? Los Alamos is a hanging garden, we said, whispering behind our hands. Having survived, I now keep my face half-turned. Not because Eden first belonged to creatures with wings and swords—maybe that’s a part of it—but someone told us a lie, when everything looked fine, and fallout felt like snow. How we believed we loved the atom so much we could learn to live with the bomb. In the hospital ward’s locked room, there was a faded print of a woman on horseback traveling through emptied streets. The cheap brass frame rattled on the wall each time our doctors unlocked the door. By then, our skin, too, was melting—the sheets blotted red and the pale-faced nurse consoling, You did it to save others from worse.