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

and leaned down close, smoothing her hair. —You’re a little delirious, he said. —Or it might be the pain meds. You asked for them. Remember?

—But I mean it! Drugs are the city of God on earth.

—OK, sweetie.

He was still smiling when she felt herself drifting again. Buoyancy was with her, and the absence of care. Choice could be taken away, she saw, and then you became an object: but far from being dangerous that moment when choice disappeared was when danger also vanished, and there was nothing you could do but submit. She felt the slow draw of contentment over her, and the relief of a great submission.

For after all it was not ego or a conviction of your own importance that made life worth living but whether you could see how perfect the world had always been without you. It was not to despair at this thought, not to run, not to fear, not to fight; it was if, instead of running or fighting, out of the overwhelming nearness of the world, you could finally make something that could be glimpsed from afar.

IV

A VAST INFANT

1

As the caravan pulled out of Albuquerque she only wanted to go home. She wanted to be alone in her house, on its calm earthen floors; she wanted to feel once again the deliberate coolness of walking across the clay tiles on bare feet.

She thought of the windows wide open and in her longing leaned through them to the slope of the hill beside the garden, leaned to the already-gone feeling of the last slow minutes of a day of wind and rain and the smells of juniper and piñon.

She considered ways she could leave, by a sudden hailed taxi or spontaneous flight, but sat without moving.

During the Cold War, when nuclear weapons were proliferating most rapidly, Americans were treated to many educational film strips on Civil Defense. One of these, released in the early 1960s, was called You and the Atom. It offered very straightforward advice, namely: “The Atomic Energy Commission says the best defense against an atom bomb is to BE SOMEWHERE ELSE when it bursts.”

When she told the scientists why she had run they had looked at her as though they were sorry for her, nodding and smiling but condescending. She could tell that behind their kind words they were sure she had acted irrationally. Szilard’s mouth said Don’t worry, don’t worry, but his face said hysterical woman. Even Oppenheimer remarked gently that he doubted the young businessman had intended to hurt her physically.

She herself did not regret running. She regretted falling—her agitation and the blur of her vision as she rushed against the wind—but she did not regret running. There had been something in the young businessman, something in his perfect tan and perfect calm and the soft leather and the quiet purr of the BMW’s engine, that made her cold. In the company of the young businessman, she realized, sitting on the buttery seat, she had felt an insidious lull, a laxness spreading through all her limbs, as though all her will and desire was draining out through her skin.

Oppenheimer’s pity for her was rare evidence to him that he could still bend from his detachment. Something in the haste and odd triviality of the episode made her seem more fearful and attention-seeking than she would have seemed as the victim of a grosser infraction. Yet he knew these were unworthy associations and he was sorry. He had rarely felt protective since he came to the new life from the old one, and he was not exactly protective now—more sorry than anything, pulled toward her by a sense of paternal longing that he could not distinguish from remorse.

She would be laid up for at least forty-eight hours, and even after that she would walk for a while with crutches.

At the end of the evening the others were talking softly around her, plumping their pillows and settling onto their blankets and sleeping pads. Safe, harbored by solid walls and warm lights and people she knew, she lay on her back on top of her own sleeping bag, raised her leg slowly and squinted at her awkward bound ankle in the low brown light. The blood rushed to her head and she had to lower the leg again, wavering as it fell. Cautiously she tried to bend her ankle, which resisted bending, and sucked in her breath at the sharp pain.

This could be where she stayed for a while, she thought, after all. Ben was with her and she had no job at home anymore. It was not time to go home yet, she realized. A few days earlier the bus had been sterile and ugly but now she felt a sad compassion for it: it had not been protected. Even the mustard-colored vinyl floor tiles in the kitchenette, stamped with horns of plenty, looked like orphans.

It was more hers because she had failed to keep it from the harm of itself. What you hurt is more yours, she thought, when you have hurt yourself. What is hurt becomes you.

In the bathroom Ben considered taking a sleeping pill, but had none. Brushing his teeth with Szilard’s toothpaste, which featured suspended glitter for the delight of children, he asked himself if sleeping pills prevented dreaming and did not know the answer. Lately his dreams had turned sour and vivid and he woke up from them in a shaken and inexplicable fear. In the worst dreams family members long dead died again. His sick mother stared at him frowning and melting before he could haul his eyes open, struggling to rise away from her by forcing himself awake. His uncle lay in a ditch beside a grove of tall trees, many-clawed bulldozers moving stiffly behind him. He himself stood on narrow ledges looking at telephone wires stretched below and then he sat with both his parents on metal chairs, piles of wet leaves in