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

but that’s not the same as camping out along the interstate. The guy’s clueless.

—We may want to split up, said Szilard.

—What else? said Larry. —We can’t have this. I’m the one that has to deal with the cops, me and Glen.

—I’ll talk to him.

—You do that! The guy’s an asshole. Four thousand converts?

—There may be accretion, of course, said Oppenheimer. —They may have been brought into the spirit by the preachers, but that doesn’t necessarily mean they’re with us for the long haul.

—I need you with me, said Szilard to Oppenheimer. —But no one else.

Ann watched them go with a hand shading her eyes, their dark suit tails flapping. Beside them walked the Huts in lock step. When they first came to work for Larry they had lounged around without guns in the shade; they had spent their breaks smoking and drinking beer from cans they crunched afterward and left in piles. But since the arrival of Bradley’s army they had sharpened their attitude, standing straight, practicing target-shooting, jogging in formation in the early mornings. Now they kept their weapons polished, their hair buzzed and their cheeks shaven.

Bradley’s soldiers did not smoke or drink and these were the sole habits that the Huts retained, as though to showcase their toughness against the goody two-shoes.

—Did you see this? Larry asked her when the scientists were gone, and steered her inside the bus again, to a stack of magazines on Szilard’s desk. —Look, and he opened a magazine and slid it across the table.

A-BOMB SCIENTISTS GARNER HIGH RATINGS, read the headline.

She sat down in Szilard’s small wooden desk chair and bent over the glossy pages. The story told of a cult following for the scientists, which collected news clips about them from television stations and posted these on a slew of web sites. A one-hour news show had showed video footage and advertised it in advance. It showed the vastness of the crowds at a speaking engagement, with stadium lights in the distance.

Ann did not recognize the scene. She had never been there.

But more than a million viewers had tuned in.

Fan clubs had sprung up across the country, holding meetings to discuss the scientists’ progress, writing to their representatives in Congress, conducting educational campaigns and collecting funds to “promote the public image, and foster greater understanding, of the scientists and the anomaly.” There were slick digital pictures of Oppenheimer from the present day beside grainy photos of him from the 1940s. The center photo was of his porkpie hat, sitting alone on a stage behind a microphone, casting a shadow.

Driving away Ben felt light. He popped a CD into the player and cranked up the volume. At a gas station he spoke to the cashier about her son, whose mullet-headed high school photo was taped to the side of the cash register.

The rain had stopped but grass and bushes were still wet and the sky was still gray. Something new! he thought.

Something new.

Szilard came back angry, Oppenheimer indifferent.

—I’m not dealing with them anymore, said Szilard.

—What happened?

But Szilard was already in the bathroom, shutting the door behind him.

—Leo and Steve couldn’t come to an agreement, said Oppenheimer. —In fact Steve accused Leo of exploiting me for his own selfish purposes. He said Leo was putting words in my mouth, making me talk politics when I should be speaking Scripture. He said his flock believes that Leo is a profane influence interested only in expansion and monetary gain. He sullies my purity. They feel Leo is one of—how did he put it, Leo?

—The bad Jews, said Szilard, banging out of the bathroom again with a wet face. —The Christ-killers.

—I spoke strongly against this sentiment, said Oppenheimer, —and all that it represents, but they did not listen to me. They seem to have developed a real hostility toward Leo. Almost a vendetta.

—But not against him, because he’s one of the good Jews, said Szilard.

—Assimilated, they mean, said Oppenheimer.

—We’re leaving for New York tonight, said Szilard. He lifted a dishtowel off the counter and wiped the beads of water off his forehead and cheeks. —While the rest of them are sleeping.

Ben was relieved, and the relief felt like a victory.

After Ann called he went swimming in the motel pool in the dark, floating on his back in the future, full of a pent-up joy. The caravan would be gone and the world would shrink in scale and become his again: he would be free.

First Fermi had fallen off and away, a lost soldier. Now the parade was ending at long last, and they would all be able to stop waving their flags and go home.

Eventually Oppenheimer and even Szilard would follow in disillusion, and he would be alone with his wife again. They would go for long walks in the forest, beneath the soft redness of ponderosa pine. A breeze would sweep through the high branches and they would shed their memories of all this and be filled with a new momentum, the sense of a hopeful enterprise, the air around them but moving.

He sculled with his arms slowly, speed gradually fading, letting his feet sink and pull his legs down until the rest of him went under too, and then he pulled himself up again and flipped in the water, sputtering.

Inside the motel, through a glass door, he could see a vending machine that sold drinks, with a lighted panel depicting a refreshing splash of blue liquid. He splashed at the water beside him in an echo of this, like a child with flat palms slapping, and then looked away from the vending machine up into the dark, where, when the shock of former brightness faded from his eyes, he could make out the small lights of an airplane blinking silently in the sky.

After she had talked to Ben she tried to go to sleep, but she was too nervous. Anything by stealth set her on edge, made her alert and wary.

The last lights around the camp went out at two but it was not