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

—What thoughts, answered Oppenheimer, and pulled out a book.

He read about Hiroshima as they flew. Most of what he read was a list: timelines, decisions, destroyed buildings, the dead. They were litanies, chants with the solemnity of a judgment.

The bad acts of which people were capable seemed to him to have grown and swelled in magnitude through history. Of course, he did not have the figures in front of him. It might be an illusion, this conviction of a trail of dead widening as time passed. It might be an illusion that everything was collapsing as the culture dreamt itself forward in time, on over the long fields to the burning gate.

As soon as we saw history as a line we also saw its end, he thought: because then it was not merely our deaths that we had to contend with but our extinction.

But it also seems to be the case, he thought, that what goes on and on has to be going somewhere, finally. And litanies were well-suited to the expression of an outrageous grievance. In litanies there was a repetitiousness that bordered on maniacal, and with it the growing weight of the deaths that came not instantly but in the unfolding time of the aftermath. In litanies there was both the longevity of the bomb’s effects and the tedium of hopelessness.

He had seen a movie with Ann that was set in Washington D.C. It featured a scene near the Vietnam War Memorial, a dark, sleek and impersonal thing at first glance, with a very long list of the names of the dead. Modern memorials no longer featured the faces of men, he thought. Instead they were often abstract. Statues of human forms had all but disappeared as public art, he thought.

Now they looked old-fashioned, absurd. Even he could see that.

A survivor of Hiroshima said, “I just could not understand why our surroundings had changed so greatly in one instant.”

Minor turbulence over the ocean caused Fermi to clutch the arms of his seat nervously, and even when it subsided he remained wary for some time, staring out the window.

Two seats away from Ann Szilard watched a movie and lectured loudly about its shortcomings. The movie promised to be about Albert Einstein yet featured almost exclusively the perky grin and yellow tresses of Meg Ryan. He declaimed loudly at the movie’s flaws in the realm of factual accuracy, poking first Fermi, then Ben on the shoulder to call their attention to this. Apparently Meg Ryan, whose character in the movie purported to be of great intelligence, did not appear to Szilard to give a credible imitation of being intelligent. This irked him. Not only were the movie-makers and their audience apparently stupid, he complained in a droning voice, they were incapable of even pretending to be smart. Furthermore Walter Matthau, playing a particularly spry and fun-loving Einstein egged on by mischievous friends who, like the famous relativity theorist himself, sported ludicrously thick crypto-European accents and zany mad-scientist hairdos, was an insult to the great man. It might as well be a minstrel show, said Szilard.

Meanwhile Oppenheimer, growing increasingly agitated as nicotine withdrawal set in, lost his customary polished calm and became desperate to use all means at his disposal to sleep through the ordeal: first a tranquilizer, which put him out for two hours, then three sleeping pills, and finally a fourth and fifth sleeping pill. After that he consumed Ben’s entire pack of nicotine chewing gum voraciously, pacing up and down the aisles as he chewed.

—You know what, he confessed to Ben, —I’ve actually never been deprived of these things.

It left him disgruntled, drawn, mint-smelling and tense with exhaustion. There were not enough newspapers and in-flight magazines to keep him occupied, and he had packed and checked all his scientific literature, so he finished the flight standing at the back amid flight attendants busy shelving food items and passengers waiting in line for the bathroom, chewing the final piece of gum—long ago drained of chemical merit—and jiggling one leg as he leaned against the wall, distractedly flipping through a well-thumbed paperback called Are You There, God? It’s Me, Margaret.

This last had been donated to him selflessly by a twelve-year-old girl who noticed his hands shaking and took pity on him.

On their arrival in Tokyo he shifted from one foot to the other while he was waiting to file off the plane and then bolted up the walkway. But inside the terminal he slowed between Ann and Ben, shoulders crumpling: he was getting no glimpse of the outside and continued to be denied any such glimpse as, among tired, slow-moving crowds, all of them gave in to the current and slogged their way to customs.

Finally he excused himself and stepped away out of the crowd to light up in the men’s rest room where, even if someone objected, he was unlikely to be arrested for the offense. The others waited for him on the shining white linoleum outside the rest room in silence, except for Szilard who, seated on his duffel bag, energy seemingly unflagging, continued his indignant exegesis of the documentary failures of the Meg Ryan Einstein movie. It reflected, he said, a rampant disregard for intellectualism itself and in fact entirely repudiated the life of the mind as a cultural value.

Fermi yawned.

Without nicotine Oppenheimer had been a different man. Ann liked him much better when he was smoking, though she did not like the staleness of cigarettes on his breath and his hands.

When he came out of the bathroom he regained his customary elegance and walked beside her in serenity, his faith in the immediate future restored.

Oppenheimer struggled to remember the last time he had been deprived of cigarettes or a pipe, and could not. It must have been years.

He thought of the non-smoking rule on the airplane and what punishment a minor regulation could bring. The law, he thought, and everyone. Ridiculous. Damn it, he thought, America