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

so she was alone in her tension. Even law-abiding Fermi was indifferent, since he did not wish to get on the plane; and Oppenheimer had confessed a new disregard for the rule of law. In being no one, he said, there was immense freedom. He had uncovered in himself a calm and perfect neutrality.

She looked at the gate attendants, willing the tension to drain from her and failing. Szilard leaned over a spread-out newspaper as he unwrapped a cheese Danish, Fermi took out a book about organic farming in arid landscapes, and Oppenheimer strode off manfully in search of a place he could smoke.

Ben held her hand and said nothing as they waited, as the fingers of her other hand drummed on the arm of her plastic chair. But when they boarded the tired woman at the gate barely glanced at the scientists’ fake passports, and then they were in the airplane and settled in their seats. Beside him Ann walked more lightly, actually smiled and flicked her hair back carelessly as they sat down.

All the scientists paid close attention to the speech on safety precautions, listening with solemn faces as though great wisdom was being imparted. Szilard was so intent on the flight attendant’s instructions about what to do in the unlikely event of a water landing that he spun in his seat and hissed out an angry Shh! to two Japanese girls chattering excitedly behind him.

Ann heard them begin to giggle hysterically as Szilard turned smugly to face forward again, pleased with himself for a job well done.

—You can barely feel it move! he crowed as the plane rose off the runway.

—We are inside a building that flies, said Fermi quietly.

—What? asked Oppenheimer a minute later. —Did they just say you can’t smoke in here?

—We could go into one of the bathrooms, whispered Ben as the aircraft began to level off. —While everyone is sleeping.

—I don’t think those bathrooms would put me in the mood, she whispered back. —They smell bad.

Reflecting on her reluctance she wrote in the margin of her book: In the end, saying that happiness is superior to pleasure is an insult to the body. It was a book about the war in the Pacific and she was finding it difficult to concentrate on. Also, it assumes the mind and body are separate.

They are not, she thought. They are not.

And she realized she was relieved to be airborne, leaving the country. She was relieved to be flying away from whoever was watching them.

One moment everything was as usual in the city. It was a sunny morning and people rode their bicycles to work, hung laundry, pruned bushes, ate breakfast. Schoolchildren, called to work duty instead of class to do their part for the war effort, assembled by the hundreds in open fields where they waited to be assigned to their tasks for the day.

Only a few seconds later the city was leveled and black. Over the scorched earth where streets had been just seconds before, where buildings and tall trees had been and now only their twisted skeletons remained, husbands, wives, small children walked in a daze. Some of them appeared to be intact, though confused. Others moved forward with their arms held up in front of them, zombie-like, and the skin hanging off their arms and faces in strips. Some dropped to all fours and groped blindly along because their eyes had been liquefied and were dripping down the cheeks.

Around Ground Zero, everything and everyone was vaporized except a European-style building that later came to be called the Atomic Bomb Dome. Further out the occasional structure remained and a few people lay in the dirt maimed but still breathing; here and there a dead horse or dog was visible, splay-legged on its side on the ground.

In the hours and days that followed the blinding flash many thousands of people wandered around the devastated city, which was almost nothing but rubble, as animated corpses. Some of their body parts were already dead while others, such as the brain, were stubbornly functioning. A few people who had been instantly incinerated left their images like shadows on the concrete, shadows cut into stone by the blinding flash of the blast.

All who were left alive but wounded to the brink of death, flesh melting, disfigured, shirts forever fused to their chests, shoes fused with their toes, were overcome by a terrible thirst. Many wanted nothing but a drink of water before they collapsed, and wandered or crawled through the ruins begging for it. Some threw themselves gratefully into rivers, and drowned in such numbers that the logjams of bloated bodies had to be skimmed from the water and burned in piles.

But such is the power of culture that the residents of Hiroshima, walking melted or burned through a scene of black and red and orange that many would describe later as hell on earth, watching a mother or father burn to death pinned underneath a house or stumbling over the charred skull of a three-year-old child that on further examination proved to be their own, would often greet each other as politely and formally as ever. They offered humble apologies to those they encountered along the way. In some cases they apologized for the offensiveness of their mutilated appearance, in other cases for their inability to offer help.

In some cases, when those they were addressing had suffered an obvious great loss—say, were carrying a dead baby or pulling themselves along the ground dragging two stumps of legs—they even apologized for being spared.

Szilard exclaimed at the monitors built into the backs of the seats in front of them. —You can choose from ten channels including four different movies! he crowed. —Just by touching the screen!

He ripped the clear plastic bag off his headphones with greedy haste.

—My God, said Oppenheimer under his breath. —Look at this. A chicken in every pot, and in every airplane seat a television.

—It’s the American dream, said Ben.

Szilard shook his head.

—Modern man can’t bear to