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

there was nothing: but then she shifted on her feet and craned her neck she saw blood on its neck, a small bloody hole. And then a larger hole at the shoulder.

There was black on her eyelids as she squatted beside it, swaying, a hot prickle in her cheeks. Blood seeped from the hole in its throat to disappear in the grass and the cat closed its eyes with her beside it, touching it in panicky small pats and pleading —No! No no no! in a whisper.

Finally she rose on quaking legs and ran out of the yard, onto the street. No one was around. She saw nothing.

But the cat had clearly been shot. And the shot had been silent.

—Help! she said weakly. Her voice was almost gone.

There was no one visible.

Dazed she walked back into her yard and sat down beside the cat. She put a hand on its still, warm flank, looked at its quiet face and felt a searing pity. Soon she turned her face up and her eyes stung with the light of the sky through the tree branches, which she was staring at without blinking.

Even on a gray day, it occurred to her, you could not stare at the sky. I should go in, she thought: what if I get shot too?

But she sat with the dead cat. She thought quickly that she was having a nervous breakdown, but then she forgot this thought and lost herself staring up at the sky, tears dripping down her cheeks because she refused to blink.

She picked up the cat, which was limp and heavy, and held it in her lap, her cheeks wet, her throat aching. She felt the terrible loneliness of its dying. I am all it has, she thought, now, in its last moments: and I too am small and don’t go far. How narrowly contained is all the knowledge of a life.

We want to feel infused, she thought, her arms around the cat, holding tight. We want to be dear to the leaves and the sky. I know what it is to long, we say across the air of time, I know what feeling is. We want to think we will be there, always with the others that were and will be. We want to glow in the dark.

2

After the bomb was dropped ostensibly to ensure that the emperor was removed from his throne, the emperor was not in fact removed from his throne. Far from ousting Hirohito, whose stubborn refusal to surrender unconditionally had allegedly provoked them so far that only the atom bomb could spell peace, American authorities kept him on the throne for decades.

For some, this appears to reinforce the notion that the bomb was dropped not out of wartime desperation but as a combination political maneuver-field test. It insinuates that the hundreds of thousands of Japanese men, women and children who died, either through instant vaporization or through long months or years of suffering, were the first American sacrifice to the care and feeding of the infant Cold War.

After the war the Allies did, however, force Hirohito to reject his claim to divinity. Japanese emperors could no longer be descendants of the sun goddess.

Ann told Oppenheimer about the cat and together they carried the body to the neighbors’ house, wrapped tenderly in one of Ann’s mother’s old scarves. Later they told Szilard, who dismissed it as the work of a child with a BB gun.

When he came home from work she also told Ben, but only that the neighbors’ cat had died and she had found it. She did not tell him how.

She felt a pang of guilt at this but reassured herself that it was for his own good: he would only worry.

She also told herself that if the shooter had wanted to aim for her he would have: it was a campaign of intimidation. And it was working; often she was afraid, now, when she was by herself. But it did not deter her when it came to the scientists: they were still her charges. And because she was fearful when she was alone, she tried to stay with one of them at all times, with one of them or with Ben. When she was not with the scientists in the course of a day she dwelled on them, admitting her need for them, to feel chosen by them. The desire to feel chosen was sad to her, in part for being a child’s longing that stretched out over a lifetime. But even though it was sad she could not dismiss it. It was never to be outgrown, sad in its futility, sad in its solitude.

Still it is there, she thought, no matter how clearly you see it. And it persists past anything.

Fermi had acquired the habit of following Ben around the vegetable garden when he got home from work, asking questions about native chili and squash and new varieties of tomato. He became familiar with the drip irrigation system and began to study xeriscape gardening, something he had not learned in New Jersey in the 1930s.

He still did not want to go to Japan. He was sick of movement in general and did not wish to be moved. He felt he had already been forced to travel more than he had ever wished to, already had to adjust where adjustment was next to impossible. He had been shunted from Rome to Pisa to Leiden and Göttingen to Florence and back to Rome and through Stockholm to New Jersey to Chicago to Los Alamos, and then, final insult, from 1945 all the way to 2004.

It was the last leg of the journey that left him embittered.

Little Boy, the uranium bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima, killed between seventy thousand and one-hundred and forty thousand people instantly. It is often estimated that over the next five years the death toll reached two hundred thousand, though U.S. government estimates tend to be lower.

Fat Man, the plutonium bomb that