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

Fermi turned and picked up his water cup carefully, not spilling a drop as he lifted it to sip.

—I am not a T-shirt.

The witch got up from the table and took off running as soon as he saw Ann and Oppenheimer heading over. He passed them at a jog and Ann could hear the fft-fft-fft of his baggy jeans rubbing together. She turned to watch as he knocked a plate off an old man’s table with the tail of his heavy plaid shirt and then was out of view among the slot machines.

At the table sat Ted the lawyer, between Larry and Szilard, penning into a palm pilot.

—Think he thought we were going to try to have him arrested, said Larry when she and Oppenheimer sat down, and clapped Oppenheimer on the back heartily. —How you doing, brother?

—I am fine. Thank you for paying the ransom.

—Please! said Larry, and raised his hands. —Of course!

—If you hadn’t obliged I’d have been forced to watch them play Grand Theft Auto until I slipped into a coma.

—That one kid was a dick, said Larry.

Oppenheimer raised his eyebrows slightly, signaling his assent. —I did not warm to him.

Szilard was reading a legal brief, his arm in its cast on the table beside him, and spooning an ice cream sundae out of a parfait glass with the other hand.

—Grand Theft Auto?

—I thought you were the expert on teen culture, Leo, said Ann.

—Lar, said Szilard, —are the Wackenhut guys starting today? Because from now on they’re on both of us twenty-four seven. Oh, and there’s Enrico too. Put two of them on him. I think he’s in the room with Ben.

—Nice to see you too, Leo, said Oppenheimer, with a raised eyebrow. —So tomorrow’s when the trial begins?

Larry got up to make the call on his cell phone, wandering away from the table.

—We need to make it to Albuquerque by ten in the morning. We have a press conference.

—If you’d like to hear about our legal strategy, said Ted to Oppenheimer, —I can brief you.

—If I must, said Oppenheimer.

Ted flipped through documents across the booth from them.

—Here’s the deal, he said. —What we’re doing is we’re arguing the No Records response the Army gave us is false. They haven’t been too smart about this. What they should have done is just denied us the documents, which is fully legal. Instead they just flat-out lied and said No Records. Plus the letter was signed by someone way high up, not the FOIA coordinator, which means the peons are covering their asses. They know there’s bullshit going on and they don’t want to put their careers on the line.

—Uh huh.

Ann studied the way Oppenheimer’s cigarette smoke curled toward the vent above them, and how Ted’s ears shone pink and scrubby under tendrils of hair. She could smell onion rings.

—So we’re going to ask the judge for something called Discovery and Document Production. We’ve already submitted the request in writing, and then the Army challenged it. The judge asked for a hearing.

—I see, said Oppenheimer, but his eyes were beyond Ted, on an electronic billboard advertising Kino, with angry red digital letters that moved too fast.

Fermi slept in his clothes, tie loosened and suit jacket hung in the open closet behind him, stretched out on top of the sheet on his bed. A sharp rap on the room door woke Ben from a dream of suffocation, and he watched Fermi sleep until the knock came again and then dragged himself off his bed.

Answering the door blearily he came face to face with two large men. They were beefy and small-eyed and wore uniforms that made them look as though they wished to be important.

—What can I do for you?

—We’re Dr. Fermi’s security detail.

—He’s taking a nap.

—We will need to make sure that the room is secure. Then he can continue sleeping.

The Wackenhut force had its own vans. One drove ahead of the bus and the other followed, flanked by motorcycles, and a lone Wackenhut man was posted inside the bus with them, wearing a brown uniform. He did most of the driving, taking breaks every two hours during which he drank diet soda in the corner with his radio squawking intermittently. Ann noticed that sometimes he seemed to be caressing his handgun in its holster. There was a longer gun propped beside him.

—It’s a pump-action shotgun, Clint said when he saw her staring at it. —A Remington 870.

On television they watched a videotape of the demonstration, McDonalds food spread out in front of them. Szilard was fond of it. A contingent of vegans had attempted to boycott the lunch stop but had been overruled. Behind them knelt Dory, with her camcorder resting on her shoulder, filming both the television and the three of them watching it. Her left hand, on the back of the couch, brushed against Oppenheimer’s shoulder. Ann watched his face to see if he noticed, but could detect nothing.

She moved closer to Ben, who was reading.

—I’m sorry for before, she told him. —I don’t mean to be selfish. This is like an addiction.

—Thank you for saying that. I’m sorry for the way I spoke to you.

But he said it evenly with a dutiful tone, and without looking up from his book.

—I can’t stop until it’s over, she said.

—And when will you know when it’s over? Is there going to be a sign that pops up on the road and says THE END?

She glanced past him and out the window just as they passed a billboard for a brothel, well-lit in the dark. Over its yellow background was a woman’s disinterested face, with a stiffly shaped helmet of hair and glistening lips.

The convoy was even longer now, Ann realized, the lights of all their vehicles stretching far ahead into the dark of the desert and trailing off into the distance behind them.

She was struck by the endless shimmer of the procession. It had happened overnight: they were legion.

—Leo, she said to Szilard, who had gotten up to