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

—They’re everywhere, anyway, said Ann, feeling helpful.

—The places in the world that I loved were like my children. The mesa, the pine forests. Now those places are an ancient withered child. The skull is showing through the gray hair and the face is a wrinkled bag of skin. Do you see? The world was my baby once. This was my smooth and beautiful infant that I held in my arms.

She tipped up her second beer—she was drinking them right from the bottle on an almost empty stomach, quickly to keep him company—and looked at him closely, the crows’ feet at the corners of his eyes, the nose that was austere. Roman, she thought, almost. But then what was Roman? She had never been to Rome.

Rome, Babylon, the Planet of the Apes.

He was a Roman emperor in a plaid workshirt. Ben had lent him the shirt, a faded flannel like all his others. She knew the shirt well. She had handled it both warm from the skin beneath it and warm from the dryer. The lines were dim on the cloth, the cloth was soft to the touch. The shirt was ancient with wear.

And yet the cloth held fast.

She was suddenly overwhelmed by affection for the shirt and the bones and flesh that filled it, beneath the breast pockets the breathing lungs. She wanted to reach over and stroke the fabric but did not move. He would have been an old man, older than her grandfather would be now if her grandfather were not dead. Had she met the first Oppenheimer, the one who went down in history, she would have been a little girl and he would have been an old, old man.

Her grandfather had worn plaid shirts too. She felt a fondness for all men who wore plaid shirts, plaid shirts of faded cotton or rayon whose labels bore a name in flowing stitched script. Her grandfather’s pants were pleated and he had called them “trousers.” Like Oppenheimer he had said “trousers” and “fellow,” but unlike Oppenheimer he had also said “I’ll be golldurned” and, for a curse, “Dang nab it!” He had owned a shoehorn and collected silver quarters. What had happened to shoehorns since then? Who ever had a shoehorn now? He had a tortoiseshell shoehorn and brown shoe polish.

These things disappeared, you could barely recall them except when you thought about childhood. Or as time went on you remembered remembering childhood, one step removed if not more. You went back not to the first memory but the ones that followed it, the many references to the memory you’d made over the years and subsequently added to the bank of even older memories. Like what Oppenheimer was describing, though less tragic and sweeping in scope: small objects rendered obsolete by custom, and the constant manufacturing of new things, the constant discarding. In her grandfather’s youth—at least this was the impression she had—things had been made to be kept, and repaired many times by men with highly specialized skills, men who took care.

For example: the men who had the shoeshine chairs in airports now, weren’t they a vestige of a bygone age, anachronistic and out of place? Those men, if truth be told, were not for shining shoes but for sitting above. A businessman liked to have another man kneeling in front of him and scrubbing at his feet. That was why they still existed. Their sales technique and their product was subservience.

Oppenheimer was not her grandfather. He should be a century old now but here he was, only a couple of years older than Ben but far, far more tired. Tired: yes.

For her Oppenheimer had risen over the horizon, startling in suddenness, but for him this was just an extension of the routine exhaustion he had known before, the exhaustion of work in an institution. For him there was no wonder in being here, only confusion and the degradation of an accelerated, busy future choked with chemicals, cars and ugly buildings. It was void of loved ones and packed with indifferent strangers, a future of anonymity and isolation, a half-life.

He was injured.

Oppenheimer leaned back in his chair, arms crossed on his chest above the table edge, and closed his eyes.

—More than any of it, he murmured, —what astounds me is the blindness of you people now. A civilization that is blind to itself. I mean blind. In my day there was ignorance too: ignorance is timeless. But at least we were ashamed of it.

—You see this? How the door’s hard to open? That’s going to cost me hundreds of dollars to fix, Leo. And I don’t really have the money.

Ben had almost no investment in the appearance of his truck; the door would function well enough and the damage didn’t reach the wheel well. But he was angry at Szilard anyway. The guy had deceived him on purpose, in premeditated fashion, and then on top of it, after he wrecked the truck and made an incursion on a stronghold of the U.S. military, had the cojones to call them to bail him out. They should have left him in jail. One night might have done him some good.

Also, after all that, not a word of thanks had passed Szilard’s lips. Szilard stuck in his craw.

Ben watched him standing beside the dent, gazing down at it without evidence of interest. That was what needled him with Szilard: the man was impenetrable. The truck might be dented but Szilard was untouched. Szilard was so convinced he was right that no competing opinions could even be entertained.

—I mean for all intents and purposes you’re a freeloader, said Ben, in a gambit to get his attention. Admittedly he didn’t know what he’d do with it once he had it.

Szilard nodded slowly, meditative.

—And if that’s not bad enough you’re a freeloader who steals and then wrecks my truck.

—Why now? asked Szilard. —Have you asked yourself that?

—Why you wrecked my truck now? Why