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

reminded him of the Tyrolean gear he had worn for his Alpine hikes in the 1930s.

They had walked for hours and were sitting beneath a canopy of oak and hickory trees a few paces off the trail, eating sandwiches and apples, when Fermi looked up, vigilant, his head cocked.

—We are not alone, he said. —Be quiet.

Ben followed his gaze and saw a deer in the shade of thin, close-growing trees, and then a fawn beside it. As he stared they moved a little closer: then there was a faint shout and they bolted. He turned and squinted and could barely make out a figure a few hundred yards down the trail. Soon he saw more of them, a dark mass of figures behind the first one. The noise was growing.

They were legion.

—Oh no, said Oppenheimer. —It’s them.

Dory lifted her camcorder and pointed it at the far-off crowd.

—Let’s get out of here, said Fermi, stuffing the lunch remnants into his backpack. —I have a compass and I think I can get us to the cabin bushwhacking.

They took off after him through the trees and down the hill of a steep ravine, leaving the trail and the crowd behind them. Ben looked at his feet as they descended, sidestepping. He watched his stiff industrial running shoes crushing leaves, stomping through mountain laurel. They were out of place there.

Ann sat outside the bus by the fire, her lame foot up on a folding chair. She stared up at the stars, obscured by artificial light.

Clint and others from Tokyo were playing cards at a small table outside the second bus, parked inside the perimeter fence. They hunched over, shutting out the world with their backs. Out of necessity they maintained a respectful attitude toward Larry and the scientists, but the others in the first bus had become objects of their scorn. A bunker mentality had settled among them.

The wind shifted and she had to lean out of the column of smoke, move her weak foot off the chair and then rise. She hobbled away from the ring of fire coughing and squinting and saw Sheila waving from across the highway, so she lifted an arm and waved back briefly. She wished she was up in the mountains of Virginia with the others, far from the trailers and the fences and the Huts patrolling.

She limped slowly outside the fence into a fringe of trees. She wanted to be clear of the lights of the road and the camp, of the fluorescent seep of the Walmart parking lot. It was impossible to walk far on the weak ankle but she wanted to see the sky straight above her, to make out the stars and guess how many eons away they were, how deep and far in time.

The give of soil and pine needles beneath her feet was a relief from the parking lot.

—I brought this for you, said a man behind her, and she shrieked, jumping as she turned. But it was Webster, smiling and apologetic, holding up a frayed lawn chair. —Sorry!

—No, I’m just—

—Of course you’re nervous, I’m really sorry. After what happened to you I shouldn’t have surprised you like that. Anyways. I thought you might want to rest.

He bent over and set down the chair carefully in the humus and dead leaves, grinding the aluminum legs into the ground for stability.

—I heard your divorce came through.

She sat down in the chair as he shuffled around to stand in front of her.

—Oh, yeah, he said softly. —She was a nice lady. I mean, she is.

—Are you sorry?

—You know, she found another guy she liked better, said Webster, and shrugged. —People choose.

She looked up at him but could not see his face well in the dark. The trees barely swayed above them.

—Anyways, I’ll be getting back, he said. —You can just leave the chair here when you’re done, I’ll pick it up in the morning.

—Thank you, she said again, and did not watch as he walked past her and out of the trees again.

She could see the stars now, faintly, through the gaps in the branches above. It was astounding, when she thought about it that not everyone among the two thousand wanted to sit here, away from each other, in the quiet dark with the air that whispered through conifers, seeing the light all those impossible light years away. It was astounding that they stayed close to the vehicles, close to the asphalt and the fumes. She remembered reading about couples who took their children power-boating on Lake Powell, the massive reservoir in the desert above Glen Canyon Dam. They let their small children swim in the water and the gasoline fumes until one of the children actually asphyxiated and died right there, in the middle of having fun in the artificial lake with gasoline fumes floating along the surface.

The mothers and fathers of the children did not think that bathing their children in the exhaust from the boats was the wrong thing to do. The exhaust stank and grayed the air and slicked the water with a rainbow of oils, but until the child suddenly died that had not bothered them. They were vacationing.

Fermi had not found the trail or the cabin again and they had not brought their tents, so they unrolled their sleeping bags onto the dewy grass in a small meadow.

—We will find it tomorrow, promised Fermi.

Dory wandered off into the trees with a flashlight, leaving the men to arrange themselves around the pile of backpacks and boots.

—So, said Ben to Oppenheimer when they lay down, —where is this all going?

—After the march on Washington, said Oppenheimer, —I don’t know. I just follow orders from Leo.

—What’s it for?

—What’s anything for? We’re here. We have to do something with our time. We don’t have our families anymore.

—That must be the hardest.

—It is. That and the world gotten old and ugly.

—I’m sorry you have to go through this.

—I’m just waiting, said Oppenheimer softly.

—What are you waiting for?

—I don’t know yet.

Sitting in the