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

The little girl on the sculpture, they read, had survived the bomb only to fall sick ten years later with radiation-caused leukemia. In the hospital she had folded hundreds of cranes out of colored paper, following a Japanese legend that said that folding a thousand cranes could make her well again. She never made it to a thousand, but now children all over the world made cranes and sent them here in memory of the girl.

—What a sentimental story, said Fermi.

—The crane is a lovely, mythical bird, said Oppenheimer.

—Look at those dirty pigeons, said Szilard.

On the ground pigeons clucked and hustled, fat and greasy as back home. They were pecking at the papery remains of what appeared to be a McDonalds cheeseburger.

Ann recalled that pigeons could be highly intelligent, and then looked at Szilard.

—We all died of cancer too, said Fermi. —All of us.

—Except me, said Szilard.

—You died of being fat.

Walking over the lawns of the Peace Park toward the Peace Museum they passed monuments and fountains, large, stylized stone hands open wide to release water that flowed along a white trough toward a cenotaph whose plaque was covered in cut flowers. Its stone chest contained all the names of the dead.

—More than three hundred thousand, announced a Japanese tour guide to a group of tanned and camera-clicking Germans. —Every year on the anniversary they open it, add more names to the list, of those people who just died that year from long-term effects of the atom bomb. And then they lock it away again. But there is a controversy. Some people say not all of them have died of radiation sickness or cancers from the bomb. Some of them just died from regular cancers, some people say. Some people say they just want their dead parents’ name in the cenotaph.

In the lobby of the Peace Museum they introduced themselves awkwardly to Keiko, a neatly dressed housewife who worked as a volunteer while her children were in school. She met tourists at the museum and took them on tours of the exhibits and the monuments. She bowed repeatedly, shaking each of their hands in turn.

—I will be your interpreter today, she said, nodding and smiling, in case they had not yet fully understood the arrangement.

She pointed out a tall digital clock looming beside the door. It said PEACE WATCH. It was counting the days and hours and seconds since the bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, and beneath that, said Keiko, since the most recent nuclear test, which had taken place at the Nevada Test Site a few weeks before.

It had been a subterranean, subcritical test that had not made the papers in the United States. None of the new tests ever did, said Keiko.

—I thought testing was banned, said Oppenheimer.

—Not subcritical tests, said Szilard.

—This peace clock is a hopeful clock, said Keiko, continuing to smile pleasantly.

—Hopeful? asked Oppenheimer.

—When all nuclear weapons are abolished from the earth, then it will stop ticking forever. But until then, it will just keep on ticking.

Fermi shifted impatiently from one foot to another. He had no patience for melodrama.

—Hope the thing is built to last, said Ben.

—Well then, said Oppenheimer, —why don’t we buy our tickets and go in?

—They are very cheap, said Keiko, and smiled again. —A bargain!

Reason, like bombs, can be deployed from far away. Closer up there is nothing but feeling.

When Ann and Ben emerged from the museum at the end of the day the skies had lowered. It looked as though it might rain and Ann welcomed this.

They sat on a bench beside a tree that had been scorched by the bomb, burned black up one side of its narrow trunk, and was still leafing out more than half a century later. It had been moved from its original site, further out from the hypocenter, to a carefully maintained plot on the lawn beside the museum. Visitors could inspect the damage and marvel at the tree’s longevity.

Ann had not eaten since breakfast and was feeling pangs of hunger. Inside the museum in the sight of atrocities she had not thought of hunger but now that she was safely away from it she remembered herself and then felt guilty. She was callous to even think about her minor aches; she was humiliated. Ben confessed he was hungry too but he had learned to savor hunger a long time before, had learned to coast on it, so a day without food was nothing.

The scientists, who had been behind them in the museum, finally exited the lobby and came walking slowly across the concrete, Oppenheimer limping. He and Fermi wore tight leather shoes with leather soles and no rubber components. Szilard, by contrast, had made Ann buy him new shoes, and as a result now had a spring in his step. She had driven him to a mall in Albuquerque, where he had purchased some bulky cross-trainers. Only the women’s model had been on sale and Szilard, impatiently waving off a protesting salesman, had selected a pair with garish purple and turquoise trim.

Oppenheimer, wearier than ever, sat down heavily on the bench beside them. As he was fumbling in his jacket pocket for his cigarettes Fermi, still a few feet away, stopped walking abruptly, turned, and began to run away from them, pell-mell toward the parking lot, his arms windmilling.

—Stop him, said Oppenheimer, and then more urgently, to Ben, — Stop him! I can’t run!

Ben dropped his camera on her lap and dashed off, and Szilard, moving at a slow jog that resembled race-walking, reluctantly took up the rear.

—Sorry, said Oppenheimer to Ann. —But I have blisters. I never had one before. In my real life I would ride for days in leather boots and never have a problem. Now both heels are torn. I could barely walk by the end of the tour.

—What’s going on with him? asked Ann.

Oppenheimer shook his head, as if too tired to speak, and slipped off a shoe to reveal a gray sock-heel caked in brown blood.

—There