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

was dropped on Nagasaki three days later, killed fewer though it was a more powerful device. The mountains served as barriers.

In Nagasaki estimates of the dead range up to one hundred thousand.

There were instances in which Ann and Ben felt euphoric with each other, hysterical and giddy as children. It was a wave that rose and swept them up, catapulting them forward and beaching them on the sand.

The euphoria came when they escaped their houseguests. They would steal out of the house together to a bar or a restaurant or to walk down the street in the dark, quietly, as they had always walked in the days when there were no scientists. Ben remembered this ebullience from the months when they first met, in the excitement of novelty. He had not felt it since then. And it went far: on the basis of a few occasions of abandon, he could survive for weeks.

Because they had this privacy in snatches and the strange elation that covered them when they escaped, he could almost believe at times that he was learning to overlook his wife’s new faith, though he continued to anticipate a lifting of the scales from her eyes. After all it was only one ripple on the surface where there could be far more.

And in the long days between their privacies he reassured himself: She is still who she was.

Szilard spent hours every day lobbying Oppenheimer and Fermi to join him in a campaign. It was not clear to Ann what Szilard was proposing: she knew only that Fermi ignored him and Oppenheimer was opposed, that despite the evidence Szilard apparently marshaled and brought to him he only waved his hand and shook his head.

Yoshi told Ben that there was still a Japanese emperor, in name only, but virtually no politics since one party had ruled for decades and there was no significant opposition. In Japan, he said, little remained but industry: the whole country had been given over to corporations and was now skyscrapers and concrete, interspersed with rice paddies.

It was what America was planning to be in the future, he said.

He told Ben that the spaces were small in Japan. He had never noticed when he lived there, he said, but now, when he went back, even outside he felt claustrophobic.

His own brother’s apartment in Tokyo was so narrow that you could not open an umbrella.

—I think there is no air, he said.

They would be staying with his wealthy art-school friend in Tokyo: he had set it up for them. He told Ben how to bow and say “Thank you very politely.” He also said Ben should tell the others not to eat or drink while walking. It was considered rude. There was much, he said apologetically, that was considered rude.

But Ben did not need to worry, he said: Ben would be fine. Ben was American.

The scientists had never seen mass commercial air travel. From the moment they got to the airport in Albuquerque they had to be herded like sheep. Fermi walked at a measured pace, looking around cautiously; Oppenheimer plowed along with businesslike focus but was privately elsewhere; and Szilard rubbernecked. He was drawn to the other passengers and speculated on their mode of dress, marveling at the sheer number of gates and airlines, at what he thought were obscure destinations on the digital boards and at the swollen newsstands with their critical last-minute dental flosses and tampons and hundreds of magazines. He strayed over to the rack and picked up a copy of Cat Fancy, holding it up to Ann with a quizzical look.

Ben had barely slept the night before and in a daze he bought an expensive pack of nicotine gum. The flight would exceed ten hours and none of them told Oppenheimer he would not be allowed to smoke. Ann had a prescription for sleeping pills from her doctor chiefly so that Oppenheimer, if he succumbed to the symptoms of nicotine withdrawal, could be decommissioned. Or she could tranquilize him with blue tablets her friend Sheila bought by the hundreds in Mexico and had given her when her parents died. She was retaining her options.

As they approached security Szilard proclaimed in stentorian tones X-ray scanning machines! Do those show hidden explosives?

—Shut up, hissed Ann. —Just don’t say anything! OK?

—They can’t arrest me for talking, can they?

—In a second, said Ben. —So shut up.

—And with the fake ID, forget it, said Ann. —They’ll send you to Guantánamo and you’ll never be seen again.

—I think we should gag him until we get to Tokyo, said Oppenheimer. —What can it harm?

—Great idea, said Ben.

—They gang up on me, said Szilard. —They impugn me. Enrico! Don’t listen.

She was nervous about the passports but they passed through the X-ray machines with only the usual pat-downs. Fermi was brusquely instructed to remove his shoes and he slipped them off with no evidence of affect and set them neatly beside his feet. Then he sat with his back ramrod straight on a hard chair beside a long brown table. As he waited for the security woman to pass the shoes through the X-ray machine he blinked every now and then, but otherwise he was immobile.

Standing beside him, a quick reassuring touch to his shoulder to show him this was normal, that he did not need to be nervous, Ann knew he was still depressed. Beneath her hand his body felt inert.

Their first flight was delayed and in the lounge she could not concentrate for long enough to read. She was restless and followed the gate personnel with her eyes. One of the attendants was a tired woman with her dyed yellow hair in a twist, wearing orange pancake makeup and blue eye shadow. She tapped endlessly on her keyboard, held mesmerized by its gaze. Beside her an effeminate man of extreme friendliness addressed all passengers brightly. She hoped they would not notice the passports were fake; she hoped they were thinking instead about their personal lives.

No one else was worried