Oh Pure and Radiant Heart by Lydia Millet (shoe dog free ebook .txt) 📕

—Listen, it’s good to see you but we should really go, said Ben. —We have to buy some manure.

They played blackjack at five-dollar tables, calling back and forth to each other as they got drunk on cocktails, caught up in the momentum. Finally she quit when she was two hundred dollars ahead on Larry’s dime.

Clint scoffed. —You got no ambition!

—I’m what they call risk-averse.

To her it was a modest but satisfying triumph. It would pay for her room for all three nights if Larry forgot to offer.

Oppenheimer stopped playing and was drinking and smoking at the bar, engrossed in a conversation about waves with Boogie the surfer. It involved the word quantum. Boogie had pushed his face up close, listening and nodding rapidly, and Oppenheimer was nursing a martini. She tried to catch his eye as she walked past but did not want to interrupt his disquisition, and anyway she was tired.

She felt more alone than usual in her room, having slunk away and left the crowd with the night still ahead of them. The floor vibrated and hummed beneath her and she found herself wishing they weren’t going to the test site in the morning, that they were never going to the test site and that, in fact, Szilard would abandon his desperate quest for fame, or whatever it was. She wished the noise of his fruitless ambition would cease and they could all go somewhere else in the morning, somewhere silent, cleaner and more serene.

Or she could stay here. They all could. There was food, there were swimming pools, and in the theater were stage magicians with frosted hair wearing pancake makeup and smiling permanently.

It was the amateur quality of Szilard’s activities that she resented. Or maybe it was Szilard himself, never asking what she thought even though it was her world he was living in, hers he needed to know, and she was the one who had given him a home here. She had always wanted the scientists to go forward; she did not wish obscurity for them. She wanted them to be prominent and moving, to shimmer over the crowds and be seen for what they were: at least a startling event, at most a revolution. But this was nothing real. Szilard was making himself foolish, and by extension the other two. He passed out fliers to men with body odor who were lying on the cement pretending to be dead and to blowsy, vague-eyed women patrolling above them carrying poorly worded signs. It was pathetic in its futility. Szilard mistook himself for an adult, but being born fully formed into a world where he was already dead had made him a boy again.

Only the gullible flocked to listen. They were on the fringes now and there they would remain, with their small crowd of hangers-on who had nothing better to do than follow them around, cheerlead and gobble the free food. Szilard and Oppenheimer believed they were pursuing a vision, they had said earnestly. This was it?

She had no idea what else she had expected. She had no vision herself, only aversions.

Darkness yawned at her and she felt herself on the far reaches of a crowd with no one seeing her or knowing she was there. The main rush of the world was streaming past her just as it would if she did not exist; she had led herself blindly away from the middle of life down a tunnel where there was no air or light. She had done it all by herself: it was her fault.

She rolled over in the bed, reaching for the phone in the dark, for the light, reaching past it to fumble with her bag and slip a phonecard out of the wallet. The numbers blurred as she dialed.

—Ben?

When he picked up she started to cry.

Ben listened closely and warmly as she made almost no sense, attentive as she cried and said she felt guilty, how sorry she was for being missing, how she was also lost. She did not know if he could also feel the thin line of longing that extended past him, stretched outward, a line he could not answer.

Hanging up she turned out the light and laid down her head again, on her side between the sheets of Egyptian cotton, but she still could not close her eyes into sleep. She still could not close out the bright, slowly shifting letters of MANDALAY BAY from the window. Where was the real Mandalay Bay, with the sun rising over lapping waves? Or was this concrete monolith the real one, and the other only a pale reflection?

Silence rose around her and the still room turned into foreboding, deathlike and cold. It was a box that would be here after she was gone, after her flesh had melted on her bones, here with its sterile walls.

Here she was, briefly alive, and into the long gray fall of time hopes were folding.

He was not as desperate anymore: he had come to a tranquil stand, or felt as though he had. It might be temporary, but still it lightened his step.

We may be born with a predisposition to personality, he thought, but as for the rest, it is ours only because we touch it.

The world gives us our soul, he went thinking lately, and it opened him.

3

Ann and Oppenheimer lingered at the door to the adjoining suite waiting for the others, both clutching styrofoam coffee cups. Beside them Szilard ate a cherry Danish that left crumbs on his jacket.

Ann had dressed hastily in jeans and a T-shirt, clothes that conformed to the Bechtel regulations for the test site tour: Sturdy shoes. No shorts, no skirts, no sandals.

—I don’t know, said Leslie, coming out of her room two doors down. She took her own herbal teabags with her everywhere and was now drinking a cup of Chai Spice. —I mean I’m already a survivor. I’ve had radiation treatments. A little blown-up sand is going to hurt