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champ-wiggle · 4 months ago

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'She is so old': One-eyed wolf in Yellowstone defies odds by having 10th litter of pups in 11 years

By Patrick Pester, published June 3, 2024

Wolf 907F recently gave birth to her 10th litter of pups, which researchers say is likely a Yellowstone National Park record.

Wolf 907F walking past a trail camera in Yellowstone National Park. (Image credit: Yellowstone Wolf and Cougar Project)

The alpha female of a Yellowstone gray-wolf pack has defied the odds by having a 10th litter of pups at the age of 11.

The one-eyed wolf elder, named Wolf 907F, gave birth to her latest litter last month, the Cowboy State Daily reported. Gray wolves (Canis lupus) have an average life span of three to four years, so it's rare for them to reach 11, let alone have pups at that age.

Wolf 907F has given birth to pups every year for a decade straight since she became sexually mature, which Kira Cassidy, a research associate at the Yellowstone Wolf Project, said is likely a record for the wolves of Yellowstone National Park.

At age 11, Yellowstone’s Wolf 907F has lived more than twice a wild wolf’s average life expectancy. In this photo from April, she was pregnant with a litter of pups that she’s since given birth to. (Courtesy Yellowstone Wildlife Project)

"Every day, I expect that she might die just because she is so elderly, but I've been thinking that for the last few years, and she keeps going," Cassidy told Live Science.

Cassidy has calculated that only about 1 in 250 wolves in Yellowstone make it to their 11th birthday, with just six recorded examples since wolves were reintroduced to the park in 1995. The oldest of all of these great elders lived to 12.5 years, according to the National Park Service.

Wolf 907F lies in the snow in Yellowstone in 2015. (Image credit: Kira Cassidy/NPS)

Wolf 907F is the oldest wolf to have lived her whole life in the park's Northern Range, where there is more prey but also more competition from other wolves. Wolves rarely die of old age in the wild, and in Yellowstone National Park, the biggest threat is other wolves.

"In a protected place like Yellowstone, their number-one cause of death is when two packs fight with each other," Cassidy said. "That accounts for about half of the mortality."

One of Yellowstone's oldest wolves, Wolf 907F is pictured here with her pack last year. She's the gray collared wolf on the lower left. (Courtesy Yellowstone Wildlife Project)

Wolf 907F is the alpha female of the Junction Butte pack, which has between 10 and 35 members at any given time. Cassidy noted that this is a large pack — the average wolf pack size is about 12 individuals — and that reduces the risk of being killed in territorial fights. Wolf 907F's experience also gives her pack an edge.

"Packs that have elderly wolves are much more successful in those pack-versus-pack conflicts because of the accumulated knowledge and the experience that they bring to that really stressful situation," Cassidy said.

Wolf 907F has likely boosted her pack's survival chances outside of battle, too. Cassidy noted that the Junction Butte pack rarely leaves Yellowstone's border and that Wolf 907F is "savvy" when it comes to things like crossing roads and avoiding humans.

Wolf 907F, Yellowstone's aging matriarch at 11 years old, only has one eye. She's the fourth wolf to pass by this trail cam. (Courtesy Yellowstone Wildlife Project)

What makes Wolf 907F even more impressive is that she does all of this with only one functioning eye. Researchers aren't sure what happened, but her left eye has been small and sunken since before she turned 4. "You would never know [when] watching her," Cassidy said.

Like other elders, Wolf 907F takes a back seat in hunts now that she's older, and she spends most of her day hanging around with the pack's pups. Cassidy and her colleagues have counted three pups in her current litter, which is smaller than the average litter size of four to five but not surprising. A 2012 study of Yellowstone wolves published in the Journal of Animal Ecology found that litter size declines with age.

"The fact that 907 is still having pups is amazing, and her litter being small is expected given that she is so old," Cassidy said.

A few of Wolf 907F's offspring now lead packs of their own, but most of her pups never reach adulthood due to the perilous nature of being a wolf. However, Wolf 907F and the others in the park don't seem to live like death is on their mind.

"They are happy to be with their family going from day to day," Cassidy said. "Even if they have injuries or are missing an eye or something really stressful is going on in their life, they move through that stress and go back to seemingly really enjoying their life."

At age 11, Yellowstone's Wolf 907F - the gray wolf in the center of this photo from 2020- has lived more than double the typical lifespan of wolves in the wild. (Courtesy Yellowstone Wildlife Project)

#wolf #yellowstone #nature #animals

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xtruss · 2 months ago

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At the U.S. Army’s Camp Century on the Greenland ice sheet, an Army truck equipped with a railroad wheel conversion rides on 1,300 feet of track under the snow. Visual: Robert W. Gerdel Papers, Ohio State University

The Golden Age of Offbeat Arctic Research! The Odd Arctic Military Projects Spawned By The Cold War

The Cold War Spawned Some Odd Military Projects That Were Doomed To Fail, From Atomic Subways To A City Under The Ice.

— September 19, 2024 | Paul Bierman, Undark Magazine | Smithsonian Magazine

In Recent Years, the Arctic has become a magnet for climate change anxiety, with scientists nervously monitoring the Greenland ice sheet for signs of melting and fretting over rampant environmental degradation. It wasn’t always that way.

At the height of the Cold War in the 1950s, as the fear of nuclear Armageddon hung over American and Soviet citizens, idealistic scientists and engineers saw the vast Arctic region as a place of unlimited potential for creating a bold new future. Greenland emerged as the most tantalizing proving ground for their research.

Scientists and engineers working for and with the U.S. military cooked up a rash of audacious cold-region projects — some innovative, many spit-balled, and most quickly abandoned. They were the stuff of science fiction: disposing of nuclear waste by letting it melt through the ice; moving people, supplies, and missiles below the ice using subways, some perhaps atomic powered; testing hovercraft to zip over impassable crevasses; making furniture from a frozen mix of ice and soil; and even building a nuclear-powered city under the ice sheet.

Today, many of their ideas, and the fever dreams that spawned them, survive only in the yellowed pages and covers of magazines like “Real: the exciting magazine For Men” and dozens of obscure Army technical reports.

Karl And Bernhard Philberth, both physicists and ordained priests, thought Greenland’s ice sheet the perfect repository for nuclear waste. Not all the waste — first they’d reprocess spent reactor fuel so that the long-lived nuclides would be recycled. The remaining, mostly short-lived radionuclides would be fused into glass or ceramic and surrounded by a few inches of lead for transport. They imagined several million radioactive medicine balls about 16 inches in diameter scattered over a small area of the ice sheet (about 300 square miles) far from the coast.

Because the balls were so radioactive, and thus warm, they would melt their way into the ice, each with the energy of a bit less than two dozen 100-watt incandescent light bulbs — a reasonable leap from Karl Philberth’s expertise designing heated ice drills that worked by melting their way through glaciers. The hope was that by the time the ice carrying the balls emerged at the coast thousands or tens of thousands of years later, the radioactivity would have decayed away. One of the physicists later reported that the idea was shown to him by God, in a vision.

What I Left Out is a recurring feature in which book authors are invited to share anecdotes and narratives that, for whatever reason, did not make it into their final manuscripts. In this installment, author and geoscientist Paul Bierman shares a story that didn’t make it into his recent book, “When the Ice Is Gone: What a Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth’s Tumultuous History and Perilous Future” (W.W. Norton & Company).

Top Left: U.S. Army test of the Snowblast in Greenland in the 1950s, a machine designed to smooth snow runways. Visual: U.S. Army. Top Right: A U.S. Air Force C-119, Flying Boxcar, delivering a bulldozer to northern Greenland. Visual: U.S. Air Force. Bottom: Lead canister carrying the fuel rods from the U.S. Army’s Camp Century nuclear reactor in Greenland, during decommissioning in 1960s. Visual: Jon Fresch/U.S. Army

Of Course, the plan had plenty of unknowns and led to heated discussion at scientific meetings when it was presented — what, for example, would happen if the balls got crushed or caught up in flows of meltwater near the base of the ice sheet. And would the radioactive balls warm the ice so much that the ice flowed faster at the base, speeding the balls’ trip to the coast?

Logistical challenges, scientific doubt, and politics sunk the project. Producing millions of radioactive glass balls wasn’t yet practical, and the Danes, who at the time controlled Greenland, were never keen on allowing nuclear waste disposal on what they saw as their island. Some skeptics even worried about climate change melting the ice. Nonetheless, the Philberths made visits to the ice sheet and published peer-reviewed scientific papers about their waste dream.

Arctic Military imagination predates the Cold War. In 1943, that imagination spawned the Kee Bird — a mystical creature. An early description appears in a poem by A/C Warren M. Kniskern published in the Army’s weekly magazine for enlisted men, YANK. The bird taunts men across the Arctic with its call “Kee Kee Keerist, but it’s cold!” Its name was widely applied. Most well-known, a B-29 bomber named Kee Bird that took off from Alaska with a heading toward the North Pole, but then got badly lost and put down on a frozen Greenland lake in 1947 as it ran out of fuel. An ambitious plan to fly the nearly pristine plane off the ice in the mid-1990s was thwarted by fire. But the Kee bird lineage was by no means extinct.

In February 1955, Real magazine published the story of the U.S. military’s first base inside Greenland’s ice sheet. Visual: Real Magazine

In 1959, The Detroit Free Press, under the headline “The Crazy, Mixed-Up Keebird Can’t Fly,” reported that the Army was testing a new over-snow vehicle. This Keebird was not a flying machine but rather a snowmobile/tractor/airplane chimera that would cut travel time across the ice sheet by a factor of 10 or more. Unlike similar but utilitarian contraptions of the 1930s, developed in the central plains of North America and Russia and equipped with short skis, boxy bodies, and propellors that pushed them along, this new single-propped version was built for sheer speed.

The prototype hit 40 miles per hour at the Army’s testing facility in Houghton, Michigan, thanks to the “almost friction-proof” Teflon coating on its 25-foot-long skis and a 300-horsepower airplane engine that spun the propellor. The goal was for the machine to hit a hundred miles per hour but after several failed tests, and a few technical publications, it warranted only the one syndicated newspaper article written by Jean Hanmer Pearson, who was a military pilot in World War II before she became a journalist and one of the first women to set foot on the South Pole. The Soviet version, known as an “airsleigh”, was short, stout, and armed with weapons for Arctic combat. There’s no record the Army’s Keebird carrying weapons.

In 1964, the Army tested a distant relative of the Keebird in Greenland. The Carabao, which floated over the ground and over water or snow on a cushion of air, was developed by Bell Aerosystems Company and had been previously tested in tropical locales, including southern Florida. It carried two men and 1,000 pounds of cargo, and had a top speed of 60 miles per hour. The air cushion vehicle skimmed over crevasses but was grounded by even moderate winds, an all-too-common occurrence on the ice sheet.

Top: Kee Bird, a B-29 bomber that got badly lost and put down on a frozen Greenland lake in 1947. Visual: U.S. Air Force. Bottom: U.S. Army test of the Carabao air cushion vehicle over snow in Greenland, in the 1960s. Visual: U.S. Army

Another Problem: The craft went uphill fine, but going downhill was another matter because it had no brakes. Unsurprisingly, the Carabao — its namesake a Philippine water buffalo — proved to be unsuited for ice travel despite the claim that: “All this is no mere pipe-dream following an overdose of science-fiction. The acknowledged experts are thinking hard about the future use of hovercraft in Polar travel.” Despite all the hard thinking, hovercraft have yet to catch on and are still rarely used for Arctic travel and research.

IN 1956, Colliers, a weekly magazine once read by millions of Americans, published an article titled “Subways Under the Icecap.” It was a sensationalized report of Army activities in Greenland and opened with a photograph of an enlisted soldier holding a pick. Behind him, a 250-foot tunnel, mostly excavated by hand and lit only by lanterns, probed the Greenland ice sheet. Colliers included a simple map and a stylistic cut-away showing an imaginary rail line slicing across northwestern Greenland. But the Army’s ice tunnels ended only about a thousand feet from where they started — doomed by the fragility of their icy walls, which crept inward up to several feet each year, closing the tunnels like a healing wound. The subway never happened.

That didn’t stop the Army from proposing Project Iceworm — a top-secret plan that might represent peak weirdness. A network of tunnels would crisscross northern Greenland over an area about the size of Alabama. Hundreds of missiles, topped with nuclear warheads, would roll through the tunnels on trains, pop up at firing points, and if needed, respond to Soviet aggression by many annihilating many Eastern Block targets. Greenland was much closer to Europe than North America, allowing a prompt strategic response, and the snow provided cover and blast protection. Iceworm would be a giant under-snow shell game of sorts, which the Army would power using portable nuclear reactors.

A tunnel cut into the Greenland ice sheet by the Army in the 1950s, mostly using hand tools. The tunnel was a prototype for a subway system — in part to move nuclear missiles under the ice — that never came to fruition. Visual: U.S. Army via United Press Associations

Except it wasn’t a game. The Army hired the Spur and Siding Constructors Company of Detroit, Michigan, to scope out and price the rail project. A 1965 report, complete with maps of stations and sidings where trains would sit when not in use, concluded that contractors could build a railroad stretching 22 miles over land and 138 miles inside the ice sheet for a mere $47 million (or roughly $470 million today). The company suggested studying nuclear-powered locomotives because they reduced the risk of heat from diesel engines melting the frozen tunnels. Never mind that no one had ever built a nuclear locomotive or run rails through tunnels crossing constantly shifting crevasses.

But in the end, Iceworm amounted only to a single railcar, 1,300 feet of track, and an abandoned military truck on railroad wheels.

The Split personality of Arctic permafrost frustrated Army engineers. When frozen in the winter, it was stable but difficult to excavate. But in the summer, under the warmth of 24-hour sunshine, the top foot or two of soil melted, creating an impassable quagmire for people and vehicles. When the permafrost under airstrips melted, the pavement buckled, and the resulting potholes could damage landing gear. The military responded by painting Arctic runways white to reflect the constant summer sunshine and keep the underlying permafrost cool — a potentially good idea grounded in physics that was stymied by the fact that the paint reduced the braking ability of planes.

The military engineers, ever optimistic, put a more positive spin on permafrost. Trying to use native materials in the Arctic, where transportation costs were exceptionally high, they made a synthetic version of permafrost that they nicknamed permacrete – a mashup of the words permafrost and concrete. First, they mixed the optimal amount of water and dry soil. Then, after allowing the mix to freeze solid in molds, they made beams, bricks, tunnel linings, and even a chair. But permacrete never caught on as a building material, likely because one warm day was all it would take to turn even the most robust construction project into a puddle of mud.

U.S. Army engineers test permacrete strength in a tunnel cut into the frozen soil beneath the Greenland ice sheet in the 1960s. A permacrete chair is in the front right. Visual: Jon Fresch/U.S. Army

The Army’s most ambitious Arctic dream actually came true. In 1959, engineers began building Camp Century, known by many as the City Under the Ice. A 138-mile ice road led to the camp that was about 100 miles inland from the edge of the ice sheet. Almost a vertical mile of ice separated the camp from the rock and soil below.

Camp Century contained several dozen massive trenches, one more than a thousand feet long, all carved into the ice sheet by giant snowplows and then covered with metal arches and more snow. Inside were heated bunkrooms for several hundred men, a mess hall, and a portable nuclear power plant. The first of its kind, the reactor provided unlimited hot showers and plenty of electrical power.

The camp was ephemeral. In less than a decade, flowing ice crushed Century — but not before scientists and engineers drilled the first deep ice core that eventually penetrated the full thickness of Greenland’s ice sheet. In 1966, the last season the Army occupied Camp Century, drillers recovered more than 11 feet of frozen soil from beneath the ice — another first.

A two page diagram of Camp Century published in the 1960s by Pilote, a French comics magazine. Visual: Pilote

Top: In the 1960s, a plow excavates the trenches that will hold Camp Century. Visual: Robert W. Gerdel Papers, Ohio State University. Bottom: Men install metal roofing forms over a completed trench at Camp Century, which are later covered with snow. Visual: Robert W. Gerdel Papers, Ohio State University

One module of a portable nuclear reactor being moved into Camp Century. The first of its kind, the reactor provided unlimited hot showers and plenty of electrical power to the camp. Visual: Jon Fresch/U.S. Army

Little studied, the Camp Century soil vanished in 1993, but was rediscovered by Danish scientists in 2018, safely frozen in Copenhagen. Samples revealed that the soil contained abundant plant and insect fossils, unambiguous evidence that large parts of Greenland were free of ice some 400,000 years ago, when the Earth was about the same temperature as today but had almost 30 percent less carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

In half century or so since the demise of Camp Century, global warming has begun melting large amounts of Greenland’s ice. The past 10 years are the warmest on record, and the ice sheet is shrinking a bit more every year. That’s science, not fiction, and a world away from the heady optimism of the Cold War dreamers who once envisioned a future embedded in ice.

— Paul Bierman is a Geoscientist and a Professor of Environmental Science and Natural Resources at the University of Vermont. He is the author, most recently, of “When the Ice Is Gone: What a Greenland Ice Core Reveals About Earth’s Tumultuous History and Perilous Future,” a study of Greenland, the Cold War, and the collection and analysis of the world’s first deep ice core. Bierman’s research in Greenland is supported by the U.S. National Science Foundation.

#Undark.Org #Science #Golden Age #Offbeat Arctic Reseach #Odd Arctic | Military Projects #The Cold War #Smithsonian Magazine #Atomic Subways #City Under The Ice

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albonium · 4 months ago

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why do i have to go to work tomorrow i just want to pack my bag and go on hikes let me roam around nature away from people aaaargh

#the dolomites last year and the alps this year just really hammered in the fact that i hate living in an urban area #don't get me wrong i love working in a lab i love science etc but these days ?????? we have a shit ton of work. i'm given stuff i hate #the lead engineer on one of the projects is a fucking dumbass and im struggling so bad on her stuff bc she makes terrible choices #so the exploitation of the samples is really REALLY taking me to the limit of my patience #rn me and another colleague are the only two remaining from our part of the department we have to do the work of 5 people #and all of this for what ????????????????#working in r&d/reasearch means that you work on stuff long term and the motivation has to be strong bc it's not easy and it takes AGES #i have older colleagues who haven't seen their main projects through yet and they're about to retire #im kind of losing faith lol #i wish i could just take days off again but 1. hr is fucking me over on when they started couting my allowed days off #and 2. we have too much work it wouldn't be fair on my colleague to leave now #sunday scarries yay!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

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sophieswundergarten · 1 year ago

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#Technically Milligan Pedalian and Curtain have the apartment and the girls (Garrison and Kate’s mom and SQ’s mom) live across the street#But they all basically live in the same place so yeah why not#And it basically sums up the entire friendship dynamic between the six of them

(@nobody33333333 I'm ignoring that last bit)

#OH #I want a fluffy sitcom AU so bad now #Because. As much as I love stuff about the “missing years” or whatever skimmed in Nicholas' life #The dynamic is very different when it's a bunch of scientist college students more or less the same age #Instead of a singular scientist an amnesiac and two young girls #Curtain and Garrison would constantly be on the verge of getting kicked out from sneaking into the labs to do after-hours projects #Asksjfjfjdjd #The sleepover energy from the girls working to get Garrison to relax #Versus the boys all just sitting quietly in the same room hanging out in each other's space #The early birds versus the night owls #Whichever one can cook in both apartments (I refuse to believe most of them can produce edible food on the regular)#Taking care of each other after someone decides to stay up all night #I feel like at least once somebody drags everyone to try karaoke #The kind of stupid bets they'd place with each other #Garrison and Curtain hanging out and doing Unhinged science while the others are on double dates #(They're always invited but preferred to take the opportunity to try Some Things while unsupervised)#Big all-group movie nights that are scheduled once a month and they switch off who's hosting #And they all usually end up falling asleep on the couch/floor/beanbags #So the next morning they all get up and have breakfast together #And Then Nothing Bad Happens Ever And They Stay Friends Until The End Of Time The End #the mysterious benedict society #mbs #ld curtain #dr. garrison

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denimbex1986 · 1 year ago

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'WHO WAS J. Robert Oppenheimer? This is easy enough to answer: an American theoretical physicist, the “father of the atomic bomb,” an important architect of early US nuclear policy, and, ultimately, a victim of anti-communist fervor after he lost his security clearance in a well-publicized decision by the Atomic Energy Commission in 1954 and was excommunicated from the nuclear priesthood. Oppenheimer’s very public rise and fall, and his embodiment of various parables about dangerous knowledge (Faust, Prometheus, Icarus, etc.), have made his life one of the most scrutinized and publicized in the history of modern science. And yet, he is still universally described as inscrutable despite an extraordinary wealth of documentation: a voluminous FBI file; a security hearing that picked over his life with a microscope; and an archive of letters, memos, and recollections of both friends and enemies.

Some of Oppenheimer’s affect was clearly deliberate—he consciously played the role of a worldly, “brilliant” intellectual with broad-ranging interests and a rapid-firing mind. His close friend, the physicist I. I. Rabi, later told physicist and historian Jeremy Bernstein that “[Oppenheimer] lived a charade, and you went along with it.” The interest in Hindu philosophy and scripture, the Sanskrit, the cowboy-rancher, the poet, the flirtations with communism, the reading of Das Kapital in the original German—this was “Oppie,” a character invented by an insecure young man in the 1920s who struggled to be taken seriously by the luminaries he admired, and who felt a deep need to leave behind his cushy German Jewish upbringing on the Upper West Side.

That Oppenheimer himself played a role makes it especially fitting that his life has been adapted not only into a dozen or so full-length biographies but also in far more general histories of the atomic bomb and many prominent fictional portrayals in film, television, graphic novels, and one opera. (The best study of Oppenheimer’s use as a narrative figure is David K. Hecht’s 2015 book Storytelling and Science: Rewriting Oppenheimer in the Nuclear Age.) And while he has been subjected to the Hollywood treatment several times before, he has perhaps never been granted as much artistic treatment, nor quite such an enormous filming budget, as he has this summer with the debut of Oppenheimer, the latest film by Christopher Nolan.

Nolan wrote, directed, and produced Oppenheimer, explicitly basing it largely on the Pulitzer Prize–winning biography American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer (2005), written by Kai Bird and the late historian Martin J. Sherwin. Nolan clearly fell into the Oppenheimer rabbit hole and, one can surmise, became captivated by the challenge of how to represent his paradoxical mind. What has resulted from that fascination is plainly a labor of love, both for Nolan and his leading actor, Cillian Murphy. According to Nolan’s promotional interviews, the script was written exclusively in the first person—from Oppenheimer’s perspective—a remarkable and telling revelation about the questions Nolan was pursuing. The film is fast-paced, with short, quick-cut scenes that proceed out of chronological order over a very long running time; a sense of anxious dread hangs over the entire affair. Oppenheimer is not easy to watch, and the large number of A- and B-list actors playing small roles (as historical figures both famous and obscure) is distracting and, at times, confusing, even for someone who knows the historical source material.

And yet, improbably, the film has become a summer blockbuster: within a few weeks, it reportedly earned several multiples of its purported $100 million price tag. As Variety put it, “considering ‘Oppenheimer’ is a three-hour, R-rated biographical drama, these numbers are staggering.” Much of this can be credited to Nolan, almost universally acknowledged as the premier director working at the intersection between think piece and spectacle.

When I learned that Nolan was making an Oppenheimer film, the first question that came to mind was: why? None of Nolan’s other films suggested an interest in historical biography, and if anything, the most frequent critique of Nolan is his indifference to deep characterization. Since I have been thinking about J. Robert Oppenheimer for some 20 years, I can certainly understand his allure, but to Nolan? I worried that Oppenheimer’s inner complexity and subtlety, the very thing that historians find interesting about him, would be turned into a simplistic parody (the brilliant scientist, the weeping martyr, the weapons maker, etc.).

And so, upon watching the film, I was impressed by how much Nolan as writer, and Murphy as actor, tried to avoid this particular snare. Murphy’s Oppenheimer exudes tension, intelligence, and, crucially, insecurity. He is not portrayed as a hero, or someone you would want to emulate, or potentially even someone you would like to have dinner with. He is smart, yes, but he’s also a show-off, a know-it-all whose need to be considered “brilliant” by others drives him at times to be impressive, cruel, and thoughtless. It is remarkable that Nolan and Murphy went in this direction. One gets the sense that Nolan thinks Oppenheimer is important, and interesting, but not that he likes Oppenheimer. This may have helped him avoid the most seductive trap of all: trying to make Oppenheimer a relatable everyman.

The film zigs and zags temporally, using Oppenheimer’s 1954 security clearance hearing as an organizer of sorts, jumping between 1954 and various moments from Oppenheimer’s earlier life. There is also some footage, always in black-and-white to distinguish it from Oppenheimer’s point of view, that follows the perspective of Lewis Strauss (played with verve by Robert Downey Jr.), Oppenheimer’s political enemy and the architect of his security clearance revocation. A few periods in Oppenheimer’s life receive particular focus: his early years as a student in Cambridge (ca. 1925), his years as a young professor at the University of California, Berkeley (1930s), the years he worked on the Manhattan Project (1942–45), the detection of the Soviet atomic bomb and the debate over the hydrogen bomb (1949–50), and the turn in political fortunes that led to his security clearance hearing and revocation (1953–54). Though this leaves out some key periods in his biography (more on that in a moment), it still feels like a lot to cover in a single film—too much, perhaps.

As a historian of nuclear weapons, I have been asked innumerable times since the film came out whether it was accurate. It is a harder question to answer than one might think. At some level, the answer is “of course not”—but that is true of not only all historical films but also, to a certain degree, all historical books. “Truth” is a tricky thing in general, and “historical truth” even trickier; scholars are always finding fault with each other’s works, and there is never any real consensus on the true character of a historical figure even for people with less apparent depth than Oppenheimer. And then there’s the fact that the standard for works of art is surely different. In Oppenheimer, many of the characters’ lines are in fact taken from historical documents, sometimes verbatim. When David Krumholtz delivers Rabi’s famous line about being appreciative of Oppenheimer’s contributions (“and what more do you want, mermaids?”), he uses an unusually verbatim quote, including a section (“and a whole series of Super bombs”) that was redacted until 2015, and is not present in any Oppenheimer biography that I know of.

The film also contains tricky mixtures of real and wholly imagined dialogue. In his testimony at Oppenheimer’s hearing, General Leslie Groves (Matt Damon), the military head of the Manhattan Project, concedes that, had he been acting according to the standards of the postwar Atomic Energy Act during World War II, he would not have given Oppenheimer a security clearance. This is indeed in the transcript of the security hearing. But in the film, Groves shoots off one more line, to the effect that he wouldn’t have cleared any of the scientists by that standard. It’s a good line—but the real Groves never said it, nor did he imply it in his actual testimony. Though supportive of Oppenheimer, he was also shielding himself from his own political and legal vulnerabilities. But the sentiment is right for the film, serving as an indication that Groves bore Oppenheimer no ill feeling, and that the priorities and requirements of World War II were different from those of the Cold War.

More troublesome are the aspects of the film that are based on untrustworthy historical accounts. A terrific scene, which takes place just after Hiroshima, shows Oppenheimer giving a rousing and patriotic speech to a bloodthirsty crowd while internally haunted by thoughts of the burned and dead. It is the one place where Oppenheimer’s conflicting feelings toward Hiroshima are portrayed, and where what had happened at Hiroshima is imagined.

The scene is powerful and appropriately disturbing. You could hear a pin drop during this scene in the sold-out theater I attended. But did this particular speech actually happen? It was not invented whole cloth by Nolan; the setup and dialogue were taken from a scientist’s recollections. But the scientist in question, Samuel Cohen, is the only person who has ever indicated that this event happened, and he only wrote it down many decades after the fact. (In his self-published memoir, Cohen insinuates that “[t]here’s an explanation” for the fact that nobody has ever written about this other than himself, but that he couldn’t be bothered to write about it.) Cohen was a bit of a fabulist; he created an identity for himself as the “father of the neutron bomb” based on work he did on the possibilities of enhanced-radiation warheads at the RAND Corporation in the late 1950s, which actual weapons designers from the period regarded as fairly insignificant. He was also no fan of Oppenheimer’s, considering him “a real sadist.” I do not put much stock in Cohen’s story.

But one can see the appeal of such a scene for Nolan: no other accounts have Oppenheimer giving any such speech after Hiroshima, or doing anything other than perhaps going to one party and then leaving. The literal or hewing-to-the-facts approach would be anticlimactic—whereas incorporating Cohen’s account allows for a complex exploration of the American reaction to Hiroshima, the Los Alamos reaction to Hiroshima, and Oppenheimer’s reaction to Hiroshima. It gives Nolan and Murphy a broader canvas to work with. Is there a greater truth being expressed, whatever the quality of the source? I am not sure. It depends on what one believes about Oppenheimer’s mental state immediately after Hiroshima, before the accounts of casualties and suffering came in, before Nagasaki, and before he was enlisted to (erroneously, it turns out) deny Japanese reports of radiation sickness. (Michael D. Gordin’s 2007 book Five Days in August: How World War II Became a Nuclear War is a close account emphasizing just how rapidly attitudes on the atomic bomb changed in the days between its first use and the eventual surrender of Japan.)

Another example of Hollywood invention occurs when Nolan has Oppenheimer meet President Harry Truman, and the president calls Oppenheimer a “crybaby” for complaining about having blood on his hands. What is the source of these insults? The “crybaby” and “blood” bits come from later stories told by Truman, when he was trying to impress upon others how impractical and irritating scientists can be, and how it was he, Harry Truman, who truly had blood on his hands (Truman had his own complex relationship to the bombings, despite his tough talk). There is also an account from biographer Nuel Pharr Davis of Oppenheimer’s side of that story, but Davis provides no citation whatsoever, nor even a date when this conversation may have taken place.

Nolan also interpolates into this meeting a line in which Oppenheimer suggests that the future of Los Alamos should be to “give it back to the Indians.” Not only is this unlikely to be a true line—a sentiment to the contrary is more likely—but also the only person who might have suggested that Oppenheimer said this was Edward Teller (another Oppenheimer enemy), and only in 1950 as part of an explicit attempt to recruit opposition to Oppenheimer and lobby for Teller’s own weapons laboratory (which would eventually become Livermore). As the late Oppenheimer biographer Priscilla McMillan pointed out, “Give It Back to the Indians” was a popular show tune from 1939, and if Oppenheimer ever did say the phrase, it was probably in jest, and certainly not to the president. (My wife has suggested that this would be like hearing someone describe themselves as a “Gangster of Love” and interpreting it as a literal assertion, rather than a tongue-in-cheek reference to the Steve Miller Band.) In Teller’s actual testimony at Oppenheimer’s security hearing, Teller distanced himself from the line, claiming that he heard it “attributed to Oppenheimer” but could not recall ever hearing him say it.

The film is full of such questionably accurate scenes. Did Oppenheimer actually try to poison his tutor at Cambridge with a poisoned apple? We don’t really know. Young Oppenheimer, as reflected through his letters of the period, was prone to making exaggerated, “shocking” statements of this sort. (Many of Oppenheimer’s letters from the 1920s contain what Jeremy Bernstein refers to as “Oppenheimer exuberance.”) It makes for a more perplexing character portrait to imagine these moments as literal, as Nolan does in the film, which raises this question: is representing them as literal truth getting at a deeper truth, or introducing a deeper confusion? Does the ambivalence of historians about an event give the artist full latitude to present it either way?

The most shocking (and creative) reappropriation is the famous line from the Bhagavad Gītā that Oppenheimer later claimed flashed into his mind during the world’s first nuclear test, Trinity: “Now I am become death, the destroyer of worlds.” The actual line is an idiosyncratic translation, deployed as a near incomprehensible (and perhaps pretentiously “Oppie”) analogy about duty and awe. Disregarding whatever the real Oppenheimer might have meant by it, Nolan’s film turns the quote into an orgasm, or a memory of an orgasm. There is something about this kind of transformation that I respect more than the subtler ones.

Nolan is most editorial when he invents lines about Oppenheimer’s motivations and mental state and puts them into the mouths of observers: Haakon Chevalier (Jefferson Hall) suggests that Oppenheimer’s difficulties as a parent (and perhaps as a person) might be the result of staring into the infinite void of the universe for too long; Kitty Oppenheimer suggests that her husband’s need for the security hearing is a form of penance for his guilt about Hiroshima (an interesting thesis, one he surely would not have agreed with, but who knows?); Strauss suggests that Oppenheimer would like the world to remember him for Trinity, not Hiroshima (also interesting, although putting interesting sentiments into the mouth of a sworn enemy and unreliable narrator tends to dilute their credibility). I might not agree with these interpolations, but I respect that they are not superficial “theses” about Oppenheimer. That Murphy’s character does not endorse or deny any of them is, I think, a plus: the film suggests them as possible interpretations but does not collapse the uncertainty into one definitive reality.

Nolan’s film is most directly misleading about actual history when Oppenheimer is portrayed as getting sidelined, starting at the end of the Los Alamos sequence when it is suggested that, despite his usefulness to the military and the government, they are only interested in Oppenheimer’s technical abilities and not in his advice on other matters. It is further implied that in the film’s postwar period, Oppenheimer becomes marginalized, in part because Strauss is the sort of person who actually controls policy. This is wrong on several levels. Oppenheimer was much closer to the policy process during World War II than the film depicts, including in the targeting of the atomic bombs (and not just from a technical perspective). The film’s implication of distance between Oppenheimer and the government officials involved in dropping the atomic bomb is inaccurate; they all saw eye to eye, and Oppenheimer personally endorsed the idea that the bombs ought be dropped on “urban areas” without warning. He even suggested, after the Trinity test, ways in which the bomb designs could be modified to use more of their scarce nuclear fuel, so that there would be many more bombs ready to drop on Japan (Groves rejected this suggestion for the first bombs). Many years later, well after Oppenheimer had died, Strauss told an interviewer that these scientists during World War II felt a “compulsion to use the bomb—an obsession,” and while one should be wary of the source, in this case I think he was right.

In truth, Oppenheimer enjoyed tremendous influence in the atomic energy establishment after World War II. The chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission for its first, formative years was not Strauss but David Lilienthal, a liberal New Dealer who considered himself a close friend of Oppenheimer’s and a political ally. Oppenheimer’s views did not always carry the day, but one cannot really describe him as sidelined until Eisenhower became president in 1953, and then only because Strauss was made AEC chairman (Strauss’s anti-Oppenheimer campaign, whatever its deep motivations, began in earnest when he feared that Eisenhower would be charmed by Oppenheimer’s way of thinking). One can see how this makes a less clean narrative about Oppenheimer and early nuclear policy, and one can see as well why Nolan probably felt that jumping from 1945 to 1949 worked better for an already long film.

There are other areas where the film’s limited bandwidth creates distortion. The reactions to both the first Soviet atomic test and the hydrogen bomb debate feel rushed and devoid of stakes. One does not get a sense of what the H-bomb debate was about, or why people who supported building the atomic bombs would find the H-bombs morally objectionable. The brief section that addresses the plans for using the atomic bombs in Japan reinforces narratives that historians have for decades known to be false (like the idea that it was seen as a question of “bomb or invade”—in reality, these were not considered alternative options, and it was not at all clear that one, two, or even more atomic bombs would end the war). (Groves told Oppenheimer after Trinity, for example, “It is necessary to drop the first Little Boy and the first Fat Man and probably a second one in accordance with our original plans. It may be that as many as three [Fat Man bombs] may have to be dropped to conform to planned strategical operations,” along with the Little Boy bomb.) One gets the sense that these are not the kinds of historical questions that Nolan cares about.

So what does the director care about? Why make a film about Oppenheimer at all? Cold War narratives about Oppenheimer tend to be moralizing parables about the dangers of McCarthyism and the security state. This is not Nolan’s interest; to his credit, he makes it very clear that though the Oppenheimer hearings were a farce as far as justice was concerned, once the scientist’s behavior was under the microscope, it became hard for anyone, including Oppenheimer, to justify it. Oppenheimer might have gotten to his precarious position because he offended a few powerful people, and because he opposed them on the question of thermonuclear weapons, but his fate was sealed by his admission that he had lied repeatedly to security officers and had maintained connections—even sexual ones—with known or suspected communists after becoming the head of Los Alamos. One doesn’t leave Nolan’s film concerned that Oppenheimer didn’t get justice.

Nolan’s interest in Oppenheimer centers on two themes. One of them is the complexity of Oppenheimer’s character. The other is global destruction, threaded through the entire film from its first images until its last scene. The fact that these two themes are intertwined in the same person is, I think, the point. In Oppenheimer, the intensely personal is suffused with the apocalyptic imagination. The visions that kept Oppenheimer up at night were not about Hiroshima and Nagasaki, for better or worse. They were about the next war, the one he hoped Hiroshima and Nagasaki would make impossible.

When Secretary of Commerce Henry Wallace met Oppenheimer a few months after the end of World War II, he described a man in great distress. “I never saw a man in such an extremely nervous state as Oppenheimer,” Wallace wrote in his diary. “He seemed to feel that the destruction of the entire human race was imminent. […] The guilt consciousness of the atomic bomb scientists is one of the most astounding things I have ever seen.” (The result of this meeting was Wallace’s arranging of Oppenheimer’s disastrous encounter with Truman in the Oval Office.) Oppenheimer was, at this point, desperately trying to advocate for a world in which no nation would have nuclear weapons, using the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, and the nascent plans for even worse weapons, as an impetus for remaking the entire nature of war and international relations. He did not succeed; we live in his worst nightmare, where multiple states have civilization-killing quantities of nuclear arms ready for deployment at a moment’s notice.

This harried, eschatological prophet, desperately trying to invoke what influence he has in order to convince the people with real power not to use that power poorly, is the Oppenheimer that Murphy channels, and that Nolan is interested in. I have always thought that Prometheus was the wrong reference point, one that Oppenheimer himself would have strongly rejected. Oppenheimer was no champion of humanity, and his punishment was not for having “stolen fire,” but for more mundane transgressions, including those of the flesh, a fact that Nolan’s film emphasizes. In his Bhagavad Gītā reference, Oppenheimer renders himself as Prince Arjuna, who was cajoled by something great and terrible into taking on a burden he did not want. Even that feels incomplete, for while Oppenheimer was initially willing to go to war, he was afterwards gripped with an intense desire to push things in a different direction. Perhaps we need to invent a new, modern mythology for such a figure; perhaps that is what Nolan is really trying to do. Let’s hope the film will be remembered for this, and not just for its curious juxtaposition with the other summer blockbuster, Greta Gerwig’s (excellent) Barbie.'

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nereidprinc3ss · 4 months ago

Text

just like heaven

in which flirty!reader finally confesses her feelings to a pining spencer reid after a night out. she's slightly buzzed. it's complicated.

fluff (some angst) warnings/tags: fem!reader, reader drinks alcohol, dirty jokes, so much flirting and banter, some arguing kinda, but spencer is such a gentleman, everyone gets flustered at least once, they really wanna kiss, happy ending a/n: gif :D I hope u like this! not bandages reader but like same vibes. like an AU for my AU

“Emily!”

You drawl the ee sound long, the same way you reach across the table and wiggle your fingers at her half-empty glass. Thin dark brows dart up beneath that glossy sweep of reddish-black hair.

“Oh, wow. That’s unsettling. What?”

It’s been at least an hour since you had a drink of your own, but enough alcohol is still flowing through your veins so as to render her offensive comment inoffensive. You love Emily. You love the Tequila Sunrise sweating onto the sticky table in front of her which she’s not going to finish.

“I think she wants your drink,” JJ assists, cheek balanced tipsily on a propped up fist.

“Uh…”

Emily’s doe-sweet eyes flash uncertainly behind you.

“I’m basically sober,” you insist, laying your head on your outstretched arm and letting your hair cascade as you bat your lashes, offering her your sweetest smile. “Please, Em?”

It does not go according to plan. She scoffs.

“Are you flirting with me right now?”

“... Would that work?”

“Oh my god, just… cool it with the fuck-me eyes,” she laughs. “You can have the drink.”

You sit up, turning just barely over your shoulder to address Spencer.

“See? Emily buys me drinks. Basically.”

She slides the drink toward you, with a subtle roll of her eyes that you choose to interpret as affectionate under the dim canned lighting. As you sit back, content and free drink in hand, her eyes slide to Reid in the seat next to you, brows arching.

“Are you sure you can handle her all on your own?”

“Handle me?” You frown deeply as Emily gathers her purse and slides out of the booth, followed shortly thereafter by JJ. “I don’t need handling.”

“Then why do you have a handler?” JJ teases.

You slump against the worn vinyl, stirring what is mostly orange juice.

“He most definitely is not my handler. He’s my science project.”

“I got it,” Spencer assures your friends, with his trademark flattened smile. You can’t help but watch him with a grin of your own, flipping the straw in the drink and nibbling on the end until it’s stained sparkly pink. Goodbyes are issued, and soon it’s just the two of you. Perhaps it’s a tipsy delusion, but you think he seems to relax slightly when you’re alone. His eyes are easy on you. “You know, you’re not actually decreasing the amount of germ transmission by using the other end of the straw.”

“Mm… pretty sure alcohol kills germs, Doctor.”

At that, you giggle.

Doctor.

Soon you’re covering your face and having a full-fledged laugh attack.

“What?” Spencer asks. From between your fingers you can see that he’s smiling guardedly, brows furrowed in a way that reminds you he’s often worried about being the butt of a joke and not knowing it. “What’s funny?”

“Nothing,” you assure him quickly, gathering yourself. “I just… can’t believe you’re a doctor.”

“Why not? What’s so unbelievable about that?”

“You’re so young.”

And handsome.

“I’m not that young. I’m older than you,” he defends. Only by a handful of years, but you know he’s defensive about his age after a lifetime of being told he looks young for—well, everything.

“You’re… 32?”

That’s not right—you know as soon as you say it.

“Thirty three.” He very politely captures a hand—your hand—that had at some point ended up a little too close to his eye. You’re not sure what you planned to do once it got there—you don’t recall moving it at all.

“Sorry.” You take your hand back, choosing to instead fiddle with a button on his coat ponderously. “33 is a good age.”

“Yeah?” Spencer laughs, angling his head as if to regard you from a new angle. It warms you all over. Burns in some places, like a shot of liquor down your throat. Makes you just as dizzy, too. “You have a lot of experience being thirty three?”

“No, I just…” your cheeks heat and you wrestle with a timid smile, averting your gaze and dropping your hand for fear his grin this close up might actually kill you. “I like 33 year old you.”

“So… you didn’t like me when I was thirty two?”

“Stop,” you beg, a self-effacing laugh into the cup of your palm. “I can’t banter. I’m not at peak performance.”

The truth of it hits you, and you sigh, folding your arms on the table and resting your cloudy head. Only then, from this new perspective, do you allow yourself to fully admire Spencer Reid. He is smiling at you, and your heart does skip a beat like you’ve got some school girl crush. These days he wears his hair falling over his face, messy on purpose, and always smells so nice. You wonder when he started caring about that stuff. You want to see what products are in his shower, and learn why he chose that cologne, or how he decides to pair his socks. He probably has some sort of algorithm.

“Spencer,” you begin, the serious quality of your voice diminished by the smush of your cheek against your arm. Still, he tries to respect your tone, zipping the smile and answering with a playfully twitching brow.

“Hm?”

You want to push the hair out of his face. Why is he looking down at you like that? Like he likes you?

“You’re a very good handler.”

His eyes narrow as he considers this, but the glimmer in them could still spark a forest fire. You’re probably grinning like an idiot.

“Oh, I couldn’t handle you. You know this.”

You hum thoughtfully.

“I bet you could. Wanna try?”

Spencer shakes his head, huffing a laugh through his nose. To his credit, your bold-face innuendos don’t always send him into a tailspin these days.

Just sometimes.

“You need a ride home, don’t you?”

You sit back up, stretching your arms out.

“You don’t have to. I could get a cab.”

“I know,” he assures you, still a hint of amusement playing at the corners of his lips. Why. Is. He. Looking. At. You. Like. That?

“Will you let me drive?”

“I would. But, you know, my affairs aren’t in order.”

You roll your eyes as he gets out of the booth and offers you a hand.

“I’m not that drunk.”

Spencer just wiggles his fingers.

“If you can recite the alphabet in reverse you can drive my car.”

You roll your eyes again. Obviously he’s fucking with you, because 1. He’d never let you drive even the slightest bit inebriated, and 2. He knows you can’t say your ABC’s backward when you’re dead sober.

The truth is you’re more buzzed than anything. You could get up and walk fine without any assistance, but he’s offering you his hand, so you take it. After you’re standing, you wonder how many excuses could you possibly dream up to get it back in yours. Should you pretend to fall?

No. Not quite worth your self respect.

“You know…” you muse, reveling in the brief brush of him against your back as he holds open the door for you, “it’s a good thing you didn’t become, like… a medical doctor.”

Now walking side by side on the street, he glances over at you, a poorly veiled smile on his perfect face. Like a trap door brushed over with a few leaves. He wants you to see it.

“Why’s that?”

A breeze ruffles your hair. The brisk cold and the walk seem to be making things crisper already. You shrug, bunching your sleeves in your hands against the increasingly frigid night. The skirt and tights you’d chosen were perfect for a stuffy dive bar. Not so much for an early DC spring.

“Nobody wants a hot doctor.”

He looks down at the sidewalk, hands pocketed, but the curve of his lips doesn’t lessen.

“Hm. You’re drunker than I thought.”

“What? No! I’m—barely!” Again he laughs at you, and again you flush, looking down and counting the cracks in the pavement as you journey slowly under the bath of yellow street lights. “Why do you say that?”

“Because you called me hot.” He sounds almost delighted as he grins sheepishly around the final word.

You snort. You’ve said worse things, more graphic things within the past few hours alone—but you suppose they’ve all been more like dirty jokes than compliments.

“Yeah. You think you aren’t?”

Sandy locks fall side to side as he carefully measures a response. His cologne is warm—sort of smoky. It’s very nice. He doesn’t seem like he’d wear cologne. Have you already thought about his cologne tonight? Once was probably enough.

“I just think sober you wouldn’t have said that.”

“But don’t you prefer it when I’m aggressively flirting with you? I mean, I know I do it sober too, but it's not as good, right?”

A silent stretch begins and shortly ends, and you don’t mind it. Right now, everything is a winding path through the woods. You’re willing to follow any fork off the trail if it means spending more time with him.

“I guess I wasn’t aware that was what you were doing.”

“Oh, bullshit,” you laugh, and it echoes through the canyon of a nearby alley, “I’m not subtle, Reid.”

“I don’t know! You—for all I know that’s just how you are! I mean, what did Emily call them earlier, your—your fuck-me eyes?”

Like he does when he’s flustered, he gets shrill and stuttery. It’s nice to be reminded that he’s still a complete dork on the inside—and the outside, too, as pink stains his cheeks like watercolor. You smirk at him in your periphery, watching him against the darkened city backdrop.

“You noticed those, huh?”

“No,” he denies forcefully, but his brow is pinched like he doesn’t quite believe himself, “I mean, yes, I notice when you look at other people like that, but that’s not what I would call them—I wouldn’t call them anything, I’d just call them your eyes, you know? Not that you always look like you’re soliciting… the implication isn’t there, it’s just—I notice when you flirt with other people! With Emily, and Derek, like, not even half an hour ago. You’re lucky Hotch wasn’t there. You’d probably have given him a heart attack.”

“I’m more concerned with yours, to be honest.”

“My heart is fine,” he laughs. “Worry about my dignity.”

“Hm. I was going for both. Guess I’d better try harder.”

You don’t notice you’ve come to a stop until you’re face to face in front of his vintage Volvo. Spencer is standing closer than usual, hands perpetually stuck in that nice wool coat. He’s all windswept and pretty, smiling crookedly and eyes sparkly with humor. A strand of hair sticks to your lip gloss, and you brush it away, tucking it behind your ear and squinting up at him against the chilly breeze. The flush is either from the nip in the air or your brazen flirting.

“Or, you could go easy on me. I’m frail. Like a… sickly Victorian child.”

Again his brow knits and he smiles like he knows what he’s said is ridiculous. But his tone is gentler now. Softer. Invites you to fall in deeper and see what you might find.

“And ruin all my fun? Toughen up, Reid.”

For a long moment, you don’t get a response—only his eyes, soft and thoughtful on you, before you’re distracted by the sweet bow of his lips. If he notices you’re staring, it doesn’t seem to bother him.

But something evidently does, as when he next speaks, it’s troubled. Curiosity straining against a rope that says maybe it’s better if I don’t ask.

“Do… do you actually flirt with me? When you’re sober, I mean.”

He expects to be ridiculed. In his most vulnerable moments, he’s still bracing for rejection—turning his cheek slightly so he’s ready for the stinging blow. It opens a fissure in your chest. You frown, and speak gently.

“Yeah, Spence. More than anyone else. You really don’t notice?”

Sometimes his face is so expressive, in the pull of his brow and tightening of his eyes and the way he wets his lips. But he probably doesn’t know that. And he can’t seem to meet your eyes, instead choosing to study the leather of your heeled boots. Sounds of late-night traffic, of tires on wet asphalt buffer the pauses between sentences.

“I notice… when you talk to Derek and Emily and JJ and Penelope the exact same way you talk to me. I didn’t think…”

Another gap in conversation, filled with the chatter of some group pouring out of a bar somewhere. You realize he’ll need some gentle prompting to bridge it.

“You didn’t think what?”

When his eyes flash back up to meet yours, you have a feeling like he’s shutting the pipes off.

“It’s—uh—” he clears his throat— “it’s not important, we can—we’ll talk about it a different time. We should—”

“Wait.”

He’d been turning away but snaps right back to look at you as if on command, wearing a brand new face that tells you he’d like to wipe the past minute or so completely away.

“Yeah?”

“Spencer. I wanna know what you were going to say.”

“I told you. It’s nothing.”

“You didn’t tell me. You mumbled evasively and walked away. We were in the middle of something and I want to know what you were going to say. Please?”

“Well, you’re drunk,” he finally sighs, and it’s a bit sharp. Stinging.

“I am not drunk,” you defend, and it feels true, with a bitter cold lashing at your cheek and blood heightened from the walk. “You know I’m not too drunk to have a coherent conversation. Why are you being weird?”

“Because I asked you to drop it! We can’t have this conversation right now, all right? I shouldn’t have brought it up.”

Your stomach flips, and your breath comes a little heavier. Spencer is clearly frustrated with you. Maybe being on the wrong end of this mild vexation, and so suddenly, should make you feel guilty, or some kind of bad—but all you feel is a sort of buzz in the tips of your fingers and the thrum of your heart, something deeper than excitement pooling in your veins at having inspired this sort of passion. It means he feels something. Something for you.

“I’m sorry,” he tries halfheartedly, unable or more likely unwilling to stay angry at you for very long, “you didn’t—”

“What conversation?”

It’s jarring how quickly this has spun on its head. The very air you’re breathing seems to have changed. The metropolitan soundscape is a rife undercurrent of tension and louder from all the words unsaid.

Finally he swallows.

“There’s no conversation. I’m—it was a poor choice of wording. I just meant we should get you home.”

Before he can make it to the driver’s side door, you’re calling out.

“You think I don’t like you. And I just flirt with you ‘cause I flirt with everyone.”

Spencer stops, and turns to face you once more, sighing and head dropped to one side like you’re doing something incredibly inconsiderate. He’s never looked at you like that before, but you don’t let it shake you.

“That’s what this is about, right?”

He says your name, but you don’t let him get further than that.

“No, I think there is a conversation here, and saying I’m not sober enough to have it isn’t fair and you should have said something before and I think you should just say it now.”

You’re pushing his buttons with a heavy hand, though your own voice shakes. He’s feeling it too—you’ve never been so short with each other. His voice is raised.

“What am I supposed to say?”

It boils over.

“That you like me!”

It rings.

Then it’s silent.

His face is mostly blank. A little sorrowful around his eyes.

It’s cold, jumping into the deep end like this.

“We can’t talk about this right now,” he finally says, glancing to the side as if to suggest a situation the size of the whole city.

“Spencer, I—”

“It’s impossible to have a meaningful discussion until your judgement isn’t impaired, otherwise it’s—”

“I am telling you that I flirt with you because I really like you.”

“I—”

It appears you’ve truly thrown him for a loop. For a moment his jaw works at nothing, a soliloquy of words go unspoken, and then he’s stuttering and fumbling for the right thing to say, looking everywhere but at you.

“I can’t—that’s—regardless of whether or not it’s even true—”

“It is true.”

“Could you—stop?” He pleads. “You can’t tell me that. I mean, the power imbalance when you’ve been drinking and I haven’t—it’s—I mean, it's coercive. Because I brought it up, I asked an inappropriate question—or at least started to ask it, and you—not that it was your fault, I’m the responsible party in this instance, but if tomorrow you realize you never wanted to tell me—so I have to take that with a grain of salt. I’m just—I have to pretend I didn’t hear that, alright? And you can’t say it again.”

He’s ridiculous. You shift your weight onto one foot casually.

“That’s not very nice. I just confessed to having a huge crush on you and you’re gonna leave me hanging?”

There is an undeniable sort of pleasure in the bright of his eyes, and you phrased it that way on purpose, just to see him preen and glow—also to see if you could make him trip all over himself some more. Right now, despite the liminal space your relationship may or may not be occupying, you’re teasing him like you always do. Like he’s a friend, because he is. Before anything else.

He tries to glower, barely.

“Were you listening to me at all?”

“It was hard with all the stammering. I thought you might pass out.”

“I might,” he grumbles, and the admission pleases you greatly. Your lips tug as you admire him for a moment—watch his defenses go down and his features ease into something more inviting.

God, maybe you really had been too hard on him. Maybe he really didn’t expect that you would like him back.

You’re struck with the need to reassure.

A dampened clack emits from your shoe where the heel hits the ground as you step down off the curb.

“You know… I do like you. A lot. I mean it. And I’m glad I told you, because... you like me too, right?”

He raises his brows, like don’t do anything stupid, as you approach unhurriedly. It’s good to see that you haven’t broken his spirit completely.

Less than a foot away, you stop. Close enough to be in his space. Too far for him to have the grounds to step back.

His eyes are careful on you, analytical as always, constantly predicting an infinite number of outcomes to any given scenario. That’s how he keeps his footing in the world. But he’s never very good at predicting you. And it helps that his razor sharp intellect is dulled, some, with affection. Attraction.

It shows in his eyes. He’ll let you push boundaries he knows he shouldn’t. More so if you keep speaking to him this softly. Almost whispering.

“Tell me you like me, Spencer.”

Because he hasn’t yet. All the heavy lifting has been done for him, and that just won’t do.

First, he opens his mouth, and you watch the internal debate, a million things he could say, spinning round in his eyes like pinwheels. Rules, and buts, and caveats.

In the end, he just clears his throat. Speaks in the same secretive tone. Low enough to be intimate.

“I like you.”

Such a simple thing has never made you feel so airy before in your life. You steal another glance at his lips.

“So it’s really not that complicated. We could probably just kiss.”

He tinges pink.

“We definitely can’t.”

“You also said we couldn’t talk about it, and yet…”

“Talking is different. As far as I’m concerned, nothing you say to me tonight is binding. Whatever just transpired happened completely off the record. We can… talk about it tomorrow, but right now, you and I are friends.”

You shrug.

“Friends can kiss.”

“No, they can’t,” he says definitively, though not without a healthy dose of sardonic self-awareness and a dark smile. His hand finds your waist, and it’s glancing, if anything a light push, but you’re delighted nonetheless. Almost as pleased as if he really had kissed you. “It’s cold. I’m ready to leave.”

You’ve pushed him enough for one night. And it is cold. So you shuffle around the car with quick steps to the passenger side door, hooking your fingers under the biting metal handle and waiting for him to unlock the vehicle.

You’re shivering as your thighs press against leather upholstery, only the thinnest layer of synthetic material protecting your legs. Spencer is already starting the car, but the engine is too cold to bother turning the heat on yet.

“I think it’s colder in here than outside. Look at my hand.” You hold it up for him, and it is discolored, waxy, as he mindlessly takes it between his own much warmer ones. “I thought alcohol was supposed to keep you warm. Didn’t that chef on the Titanic survive hours in the ocean because he was hammered?”

“That’s a myth. Not the chef—he did survive, but it was a complete anomaly. Alcohol causes vasodilation in the dermis layer of the skin, so you feel warmer, but it draws blood flow away from your internal organs and significantly raises your likelihood of developing hypothermia.”

Does he notice how he’s holding your hand? Carefully pressing his thumbs to the center of your palm and pushing up through your love and life lines, cupping the fingers, before sandwiching them between his own and generating friction the way a child furiously rolls a play-doh worm?

“I guess I’m really not that drunk, then.”

He’s not expecting it, and maybe he doesn’t know what to make of your exceptionally gentle tone at first. It was a mistake, you think, as he relinquishes his hold on your hand, and you curl it to retain the memory of his warmth. But then he tucks hair behind your ear, like he’s done once or twice before, and smiles in a way you don’t quite understand.

“I know.”

You won’t push him. You won’t ask for anything else, and you won’t demand an explanation. Spencer is special. It can all wait, because you have something good with him already. Something important. Something like holding hands.

It comes as a surprise when he leans across the console, and you lean in a trance to meet him, and another surprise when he gently redirects, pressing his lips to your cheek, close enough to match the corners of your mouths and nothing more.

You’d let him do it a hundred times over, but he draws back after a fraction of a lingering second, and finds your hand to stroke the back of it, forgotten in your lap.

“You said no kissing,” you murmur, as if in a dream. If you had the wherewithal to be embarrassed maybe you wouldn’t be ogling so much.

“Compromise.”

If anything, you should be the cheek-kisser. But there will be time to feel slighted about that later. Time to amend. For now, you look ahead robotically.

“Is there a rule against friendly hand-holding?”

“Probably,” he says.

But he lets you hold his hand in your lap the whole drive to your apartment, anyway.

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