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

webcast on our site. Right now all they’re getting is the party out there. Waste of bandwidth.

—But you need medical attention, Leo!

—The splint will do for now, said Szilard. —It’s a flesh wound, that’s all.

—I really don’t advise it, Leo, said Oppenheimer. —You have a serious injury. I think we should cut our losses.

—But we weren’t even done with our speeches!

—You are injured, said Oppenheimer calmly. —And the salient points had already been made.

—Stay right where you are! Government agents! barked a man behind them, and the door of the bus crashed against the wall again and splintered beside him.

Larry shrieked and Ann shrank away, holding the back of the couch.

Behind him were other men with long guns. They wore vests and dark jackets marked DEA. The guns were real, no doubt, but Ann found herself drifting. Whenever she saw a gun these days the world became less real. She told herself to stay there, to remain. It was not right that she felt lightheaded right now, not right that she had begun to feel like a dream.

—Man, said Clint, and whistled through his teeth. —That a Saco M60? Nice!

—We have nothing to do with the meth lab, said Szilard stoutly.

—Put your hands in the air! All of you!

—Jesus Christ, said Larry.

—I’m just press, said the cameraman to the SWAT guys, and bobbed his camera up toward them as proof. —KLAS-TV Eyewitness News?

—We don’t have weapons, said Ann, trying for calm and gentle, as though soothing a maniac. —None of us. These people are all peace activists. We’re harmless!

—Hands in the air or we will shoot. All of you! Get up against that wall, put your hands up against it above you and turn your backs.

—What is this, some kind of fascist firing squad? asked Larry, as the rest of them started to shuffle toward the wall. —We have civil rights here, man. We’re American citizens.

—Omigod, you’re all so cool-looking! Just like on TV! said Tamika brightly to the SWAT team, and held out her potted cactus in both hands, smiling. —Where do you get those outfits?

He had certain tasks and took pride in performing them dutifully—public speaking, for instance, because Szilard had insisted on this pitiful effort. He had the full-time job of impersonating himself, a service he had never dreamed he would be called upon to provide.

But quietly, all the same, the turmoil of it had driven him far away. He had come to see himself as an observer in the late world, less a part of anything than a shade on the edge of the sun. If he was nothing more than perspective, nothing more than a fixed point outside the realm in which the action swirled, noisy and rude beyond his reach, he would not have to feel the pull of it, the tension and hope of being a participant. He would not have to contend with anger or disappointment.

He was not a fighter anyway, and he never had been. He described and he synthesized: he saw through the dirt to the skeletal roots of ideas. But he was not a politician. A diplomat, possibly. He could manage finesse, and a polite and civil distance. But he would not join in battle. He would speak and listen, he would do his best, but as far as he was concerned all that was before him now was a tapestry, the world after it had been mortally hurt, only moving slowly, feebly, the way an animal suffers in the undergrowth, left by a careless hunter.

To be released from desire was in fact a privilege, and when for moments or for hours he forgot how he had come to be alone here in this late, new world, forgot the absence of his wife and his children, of his own life, then he could sometimes breathe freely. Although he had made a promise to go through the motions, and he would be faithful to that on the off, off-chance there was still hope to abide by, still purpose, in fact, in the end, in the base of himself he knew everything was already over.

It was only a faint afterimage, printed on the eye.

4

—Why do they give you so much food?

—Because people demand it, said Ben.

Fermi was defeated by the imposing presence of his omelet, inert in a puddle of melted cheese. They were sitting in a diner across from their motel.

—If a man can put that in his stomach then he must be very fat, said Fermi, staring down at his plate.

The cell phone rang and Ben excused himself to answer it, going outside to shelter under the awning as he pressed the TALK button. In the distance a row of pines stood against the white horizon, and the parking lot was vast.

—It’s me, said Ann on the other end, faint and windy.

—Where are you?

—The DEA came in and did a mass arrest, she said.

—Pardon?

—But they didn’t take the scientists. They took some bikers with a portable meth lab. And that Belgian food activist.

—Are you bullshitting me?

—We’re still here, outside the Test Site, she said. —Szilard has a broken arm. He’s got some interviews lined up with TV. He thinks someone tried to assassinate him.

The connection was uneven.

— … Szilard … challenge to the Army, she said. — … them to show …

—I can’t hear you, Ann. You’re breaking up. Were these DEA people connected with the military?

— … he’s going to get them to exhume Fermi’s body and do a DNA test. It’s for PR.

—What?

—Yeah.

—Fermi’s body? Why not his?

—He and Oppie were cremated. Remember?

—Did Fermi authorize this?

—Szilard claims that he did.

Ben turned and looked in the diner window at Fermi, who was delicately smearing grape jelly onto a piece of toast. On the other end he heard static, and what sounded like a long wail in the distance.

—You’re breaking up. I have to go, sweetie.

— … don’t know what to …, said Ann. — … waiting for you to save me.

—It would be my pleasure.

Maybe it