Follow the Bouncing Ball

Follow the Bouncing Ball is a phrase that carries two distinct but interwoven meanings in the novel. On one level it refers to the old sing-along tradition in which audiences followed a bouncing ball across the lyrics on a screen, a nostalgic image of communal song. On another, it names the catastrophic 1946 criticality accident at Los Alamos in which the young biophysicist Louis Slotin died. The novel uses the phrase to connect the act of singing with the act of measuring the point of no return, and to explore the longing to go back to the moment before history went wrong.

The Bouncing Ball and the Longing to Return

The phrase first appears in the narrative as part of a meditation on the desire to return to the origin. The narrator reflects on going back to where it started, to where it went wrong, to that point before the history. This longing is described as dangerous, capable of killing. The Bouncing Ball becomes the emblem of that return: the point of critical measurement, the precise moment before closure, the synapse of decision. The novel presents this as both a physical and a spiritual problem, the desire to undo or to re-enter the moment of transformation.

Louis Slotin and the Criticality Accident

The historical event behind the phrase is the death of Louis Slotin, a brilliant biophysicist who had flown for the RAF in the Second World War. He was testing the Bouncing Ball by halves, using simple screwdrivers to nudge its two cored hemispheres toward each other on a steel rod. At a certain point he must not go beyond, the spherical closure of the hemispheres would give indication of being about to happen. This was the moment of synapse, the precise critical measurement he was looking for. He was hunched over the apparatus, peering at the minute incremental lines of measurement on the steel rod, when one of the screwdrivers seemed to jump with a will of its own. For that one bobbled instant it sprang up and knocked the hemispheres together.

The Accident and Its Aftermath

In his hospital bed, Louis Slotin would remember through his searing agony the intense blue light that had flooded his eyes. He thought in that moment a clamping of the hemispheres should make a hard sound. Instead, there was a terrible hiss of transfiguration. With his bare hands, he grabbed the bouncing ball and rent it in half. And all at once the quiet room filled with normal daylight. Out in the desert, near the village of Oscuro, or Darkness, the scaffold was built to hold the Bouncing Ball. Louis Slotin's colleagues, wearing black armbands, drove out to the desert near the village of Oscuro where the two halves of the Bouncing Ball, primed now in their casing, were attached to a pulley and slowly hoisted to position on the scaffold. At a discreet distance, Louis Slotin's colleagues hunkered down in their trenches awaiting the dawn.

The Phrase in the Hospital Ward

In a later scene, the phrase returns in a hospital ward. The narrator looks around the ward and sees from the heads on the pillows an uncharacteristic alertness, something other than the generic blank stares of the pre-deads. Here a gaze back at him, there something like a smile, and in one bed, a living cadaver, completely still and staring upward without expression, but his hand, raised barely above the bedclothes, waving in time to the music. McIlvaine motions for the narrator to sing, saying "Follow the bouncing ball." Because this is the man the narrator has chosen to hear his confession, he does, adding his baritone to the soprano and the growl, one golden oldie after another, and feeling the same love for God, tears welling hot in his throat, as when in the pulpit, with his congregation, he belted out "A mighty fortress is our God."

The Bouncing Ball as Prayer and Confession

The phrase thus becomes a bridge between the secular and the sacred. The act of following the bouncing ball, of singing old standards in a hospital ward, is presented as equivalent to the act of singing hymns in the pulpit. The same love, the same tears, the same communal voice. The Bouncing Ball, which in the desert was an instrument of death and transfiguration, becomes in the ward an instrument of confession and connection. The novel uses the phrase to suggest that the moment of critical measurement, the point of no return, is also the moment of prayer, the point at which one speaks to and of and from God. The hiss of transfiguration and the belted-out hymn are two versions of the same event: the approach to the limit, the crossing of the threshold, the act of singing that holds a community together at the edge of darkness.