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

did not sacrifice the few to the many very often—far too seldom, in fact, as the communists had rightly argued before they were driven out of the culture squealing—but here was an instance.

—Crowds aren’t bodies, are they, said Ann as they waited at baggage claim, watching suitcases pass. —I mean individual bodies.

—It depends on the crowd, he said.

—What?

—Whether the crowd is familiar or not. Crowds of Americans, you know—those are considered human, I think. At least by their own government.

The bodies of those in other states actually had no rights at all, he guessed. The bodies of absent masses cannot be known and so their minds cannot be imagined; a mindless body can be hurt with impunity, hardly more complex than a side of beef.

This is the irony of the dualist, he thought, watching one of Leo’s legs stick out and get caught on a passing field-hockey stick. As Szilard tripped, falling higgledy-piggledy onto the small child beside him and loudly blaming the child, he thought: The mind can be fondly imagined, but only the body can be known. The mind is revered but unproven. So the dualist pretends to elevate the mind, but in a sense he is an unbeliever.

Some of the citizens of Hiroshima felt fine immediately after the bombing and were relieved at the lack of physical harm, but in the weeks that followed developed strange symptoms.

These were not pleasant, of course. Weakening, they lost their teeth and their hair, were infested by maggots as their flesh turned necrotic, and finally threw up the dark, fluid remains of their internal organs. Some bled out through the skin, their blood, unable to coagulate, leaking out through the pores. Many died of this new disease they called “radiation sickness” with no medical care and no painkillers or shelter or comfort, their children or parents sitting near them, watching.

As soon as they got out of the airport and into the train for Shibuya station they were overwhelmed.

Standing surrounded by the close-packed throng of fellow passengers she watched Fermi begin to sweat, Oppenheimer press his lips together, and Szilard start to complain. She found herself hoping no one else in the train spoke English but knowing she hoped in vain.

—My God! squeaked Szilard as a short businessman reading a comic book jostled him against a door. The strap of the duffel bag he was lugging, which was full of books and papers, had worn a red rut into his plump, white shoulder and he was irritable. Over the businessman’s shoulder Ann could see a cartoon picture of a large-breasted, naked woman with flowing hair. —Look how many there are! How can they live like this?

—Please, Leo, said Fermi. —Shut your mouth just for once.

Distant bodies are excluded from the world of the mind, Oppenheimer was thinking as a small woman in a gray suit beside him ground her elbow into his lower ribcage, because they are both abstractions and matter, a sheerly living whole and an insensate mass but also a pure idea of flesh, hopeless in their plurality. Each man or woman alone we can love, but a carpet of them teems like ants.

As they bustled out the doors, all of them tall between short, slim strangers, he looked back and saw Fermi staring slack-jawed at a poster for a movie about a transvestite.

—Enrico! Hey! Move! We’re getting out! called Ben.

It was even worse when they changed from the train to the subway system, not knowing where they were supposed to be. Ben was laden with suitcases and bags, Ann grasped an open phrasebook as she walked, and people surged rapidly around them as they gathered with their clutter of luggage at a ticket vending machine. Ann and Szilard stared together at the hundreds of colored buttons bearing characters they were powerless to interpret.

And when they emerged from the subway station at their final destination in Tokyo Fermi gasped audibly. The throng was infinite, infinite and intimidating, and the navigational proficiency of all of its parts was far superior to their own. Around them blocky gray and white skyscrapers loomed close, the streets were almost treeless and neon glared and flashed in oppressive profusion. Ben felt grateful he was not epileptic. The pavement of the street, a vast intersection, could not even be seen beneath the crowd, so dense and wide, a drifting continent of heads and limbs.

—I don’t like it here, said Fermi, and stopped walking, dropping his bags heavily on the pavement.

Commuters surged around him.

—I want to go home, he said. —Now.

—Yeah right, said Ben, in his first-ever expression of impatience with Fermi.

—Come on, Enrico, said Oppenheimer paternally. —You’ll be all right. —It won’t be like this everywhere.

—I don’t like it, said Fermi stubbornly. —I don’t want to be here. It’s already too full!

—Listen, said Ann. —Let’s get out of the crowds. We’re going to get a taxi. We’re going to Yoshi’s friend’s apartment. You can rest there, you’ll have peace and quiet, OK? You can’t stay here, anyway, can you? Here, on the sidewalk? Where it’s the worst?

Fermi stood stock-still until finally, reluctantly, he stooped to pick up his bag again and followed them to the curb, looking down at the ground as he shuffled.

And so a crowd does not receive our love, but only individuals, alone. Staring out the taxi window Oppenheimer saw a man walking by himself along the sidewalk and thought he was magnetic: and behind him the crowds were dull.

Some of the survivors of Hiroshima, known in Japanese as hibakusha, carried deforming keloid scars from radiation burns on their faces and bodies for the rest of their lives. A few would later say to psychologists that they felt that they had in fact actually died on the day of the bombing, that subsequently, for the rest of their days, they felt they were living what they called a “death in life.”

Many spoke of the quality of their lives after the bomb as muga-muchu: without self, in a trance.

Yoshi’s friend Larry’s apartment was palatial