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

Lately she wanted to hit Clint. She felt weak, but she wanted to hit him. He was pent-up and small, a scrawny nut of a man. There was nothing grandiose in him: if he could hunker down and shoot at his opponents out of a small hole in a concrete wall, he would. He did not know how to be fond, it seemed to her, and this dried him up and stretched him into meanness.

That was the risk of an ungenerous nature, she thought, whereas adoring made people spill with life. It was a talent to love, to adore and worship, and it was how they adored that made them tender, made them live as though life was a gift instead of a right.

Life glowed in many houses but one of them was faith. At first she hated this recognition: it seemed a concession to weakness. Her parents had raised her to believe in science—or not science, but rather information. There were categories of information and these categories had a hierarchy. Very low in the hierarchy was religion, a fanciful tale, a bright piece of costume jewelry, a fake bauble to dazzle the eyes. Religion always struck her as sad, a sad answer to need, a handout for those impoverished minds who were not more discerning.

But information was worse than sad. Information was tragic.

During the decades of the Cold War there could never be enough nuclear weapons, yet there were always too many. For any practical purpose up to and including global annihilation, there were simply far too many.

At the height of this frenzy of production in 1960, before it refined its arsenal for accuracy instead of brute force, the U.S. alone possessed twenty thousand megatons worth of bombs. This was the equivalent of 1.4 million Hiroshimas.

The next day they pulled into a rest stop so that Szilard could amass volunteers to collate fliers, on tables set up in a long row on the pavement. They were in the mountains of western North Carolina. As they traveled east it had become greener and greener until Tennessee, and after Tennessee it was still green, but with more buildings.

At the rest stop there were tall trees planted in a straight row, each equidistant from the next. Ann bought watery, sugary lemonade from a vending machine and stood staring at the row of trees as she drank it, regretting the straightness.

—Ann? Is it you? I mean are you kidding me?

She turned and saw her friend Sheila from Santa Fe standing a few feet away, in a bright pink sundress.

—I can’t believe it!

Sheila screeched and ran over, throwing her arms around Ann’s shoulders before Ann could say anything. When she backed off again she was smiling broadly and Ann caught a glimpse of food between her teeth. Her face shone and Ann saw she had her hair braided all over her head with small colorful beads.

—Are you with us? asked Sheila.

—I mean, are you? asked Ann. —With the caravan?

—We call it the parade, actually, said Sheila expertly. —Yeah, I’m an oldtimer. Picked ’em up after Albuquerque. I read about the parade in the paper and I just followed my instincts! Are you new?

—No, said Ann. —The parade?

—You haven’t heard that? Where have you been?

—I’m in the RV with the scientists.

Sheila stared at her, brow furrowed.

—You’re shittin’ me.

—They were living with us in Santa Fe before this. In our house.

—When?

—It started after the shooting. In the library.

—Get out. Are you for real?

—I promise, said Ann. —Sorry I was out of touch. It was—I don’t know. A hard time.

—I mean—how did you meet them?

—It’s a long story.

—I got nothing but time!

Sheila grabbed her arm and steered her over toward the women’s rest room, in a concrete bunker lined with dirty beige tiles. The line for the toilet stalls was long, snaking out past the water fountain and into the parking lot.

—I’ll just go in the bushes, then, said Sheila. —I guess you guys have a bathroom on board? But for those of us who just have cars, oh my God. It is like this all the time. I haven’t seen the inside of a toilet bowl since Tucumcari.

—What does Rick think of all this?

—We kind of broke up. I wanted to talk to you about it but you were still traumatized. It’s part of the reason I came out. You know, to get a feeling of liberation. Just to do my own thing. The thing with Rick was, I mean I was really into him but what I found out was, he didn’t want me to be a whole person. He had no interest in my personal wholeness. He wanted me for what I could do for him. Basically all he wanted was my body. Then when he found a better body, he decided to go for that one.

—Really? said Ann.

—It turned out he was having this affair with a twenty-year-old blond girl named Finki. She went to Choate or something and she had a trust fund. I gotta empty my bladder. I mean really. Wait right here! You promise?

She went to pee behind the rest room building, in a dark place in the trees that smelled of soil. Ann could smell the soil from the parking lot where she stood, as though it had been freshly turned. Other women were emerging from the dark place in the trees, adjusting their skirts or buttoning the waists of their pants, and still others were going in.

Ann stood back, sipping her drink and looking around for a smoker who would let her have a cigarette. But everyone was wholesome.

In fact she did not mean religion, she thought, looking into the branches of the nearest tree and then turning and leaning back against it. The brown of the bark was a soft brown to the touch, and the green was deep on the eyes. It was like home, which was also brown and green but drier brown and drier green. Here the colors were lush but too