Ira was as normal as they come.
Ordinary as a pencil, even one that needs sharpening.
I knew little about him because, no doubt, there was nothing much to know. No high drama, no low motives, nothing in the middle either. He married cousin Syd because she got pregnant. His pants always seemed to be about two inches too short. He had a puffy face. He worked at an insurance company doing whatever it was that insurance workers there did.
Yet that was exactly where his story went oddball because Ira just so happened to work for a company that just so happened to have its offices at 270 Broadway in New York. No doubt that address has little meaning today and indeed the building itself, still standing, has no sign on it to remind anyone of what it was or what happened there. It is as anonymous as Ira himself and just as vague in the memory.
Dutifully and without any hint of the desperation of the company man, Ira went to work every day there on the 17th floor, filed his papers, typed his memos, borrowed the key to the men’s room down the hall, ate his lunch at his desk. Blah, blah, blah. Then on the evening of August 13 in 1942, at 5:30 pm precisely, he got the first of the migraine headaches.
These were massive ones. Not just throbbing but a clockwork wrenching accompanied by a profound sense of doom. He tried to drone his way through them but to no avail. A series of doctors gave him aspirin and muscle relaxants and other meds but none of them worked because the pounding, in actuality, had nothing to do with blood or muscle. The headaches were pressure fronts – like those from a coming storm – that preceded the onset of the future. It was a unique kind of sensitivity to subsequence…like a psychic allergy to what happens next.
Not that Ira himself would have known this as he sharpened his pencil and tried to get back to the comfort of his ledger.
Yet the headaches continued. Not all the time and not everywhere, but only at work and only at certain times of the day, though those times varied. A wrench at the water cooler, a twist at the file cabinet, a boom at the phone. Ira kept trying to find solutions but all those doctors and shrinks and chiropractors were all looking in the wrong place. They were searching for answers inside the body or within the psyche. What they should have been investigating was the 18th floor just above his office at the insurance company.
There the clever investigator would have uncovered the offices for the North Atlantic division of the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers. And now the reason that mundane address matters becomes clear because it was there, on the very first day of the headaches, that Colonel Leslie Groves created the so-called Manhattan Engineer District, or MED. Maybe you have heard of this by its more common name…the Manhattan Project. The strategic plans for building the very first atom bomb – what they referred to in code as the “gadget” – were hatched right there in that office.
It was this warp in the continuum that was causing the headaches.
The connection is not as far-fetched as it seems. Perhaps Ira could hear their dire discussions as a faint echo through one of the old gas grates. Or maybe he picked up the stern glances of the men in the elevator on the way up. Or felt the vibrations of their feet as they moved around overhead as a kind of prelude to mayhem. Or maybe the pressure of working on a project so terrible and so urgent became a kind of shock wave that hit him in the worry center of the brain even Ira did not know that he had.
Maybe there was no connection at all, just a coincidence of time and place.
Still, it is odd that the headaches stopped completely – in a flash so to speak – at 05:30 on July 16, 1945. That was the moment that the so-called gadget exploded at Alamogordo Army Airfield in New Mexico. It was the moment that all the planning and calculating came to fruition and the work was done. It was the moment we reached into the core of nature and began futzing around with essences. From that point on, no more Manhattan Project and the headaches were gone, just like that.
Small price to pay when you think of it.
After all, what is a mere headache in light of the birth of the atomic age and the death of life without annihilation?
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