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

are Band-Aids in my suitcase, offered Ann softly as she gazed at it, thinking nothing.

A few minutes later Ann had nowhere to go and Oppenheimer slumped beside her, silent and smoking. All he said before he fell silent was that he had not expected the weight of the evidence.

In the years after the war, survivors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were often shunned for their disfigurements and illnesses. Many became pariahs, their scars a great source of shame.

Szilard and Ben came back exhausted and dragging, without Fermi.

—I couldn’t catch him, said Ben. —He was surprisingly fast. He just kept on going. He pulled ahead and ran around that Starbucks on the corner and when I got there and looked down the street he was gone.

—Quite fast, nodded Szilard, whose empurpled cheeks shone with sweat. —Must be all those Alpine hikes.

—We’ll probably see him back at the hotel, said Ann, and turned to Oppenheimer. —Do you think he was—did he run because he was upset by what he saw?

—Upset? asked Oppenheimer. —Upset?

He pulled on his cigarette and did not elaborate.

—By what he saw, said Ann finally.

—Upset, mused Oppenheimer, exhaling two plumes from the nostrils, dragonlike. —Yes. You could probably call him upset.

—He hadn’t read anything before, said Ann. —About the bomb effects. Had he.

—Are you upset, Robert? asked Szilard.

—Upset, repeated Oppenheimer flatly, and nodded.

He sat with his bare feet touching the ground, bloody socks balled neatly on the bench beside him. The blisters on his heels had burst, his shoes had rubbed off the skin, and the bony, naked heels were raw meat, glistening wet near the cement beneath them. Ann looked at him, waiting for him to say more. His profile was that of an aristocrat but his feet were torn like a beggar’s.

After he inhaled he tapped his cigarette carelessly and Ann watched the flakes of ash fall down. One settled on an exposed heel and stuck to it.

She winced.

—You have an ash— she began, but he was ignoring her, staring off at the museum’s elevated walkway.

—Upset, he said again.

Eventually they got up and walked toward their hotel, only four of them now, Oppenheimer carrying his shoes on two crooked fingers, smoking with the other hand, none of them saying anything.

As the sun set they passed beneath overhanging branches and saw a large red billboard for Coca Cola looming over the museum, dominating the parking lot, the peace monuments, and the trees that grew over Ground Zero.

3

Ben woke up damp from the weight of a heavy floral coverlet in the weakly cooled room, tossing off the bedspread, the furry blanket beneath it and the sheets. He got up to find Ann already in the bathroom, brushing her teeth, face drawn with worry. They had stayed in their room the night before, drinking beers Ben bought at a convenience store on the corner while Szilard ate on the bed in the next room, Oppenheimer drank overpriced mini-bar whiskey in an armchair, and all of them separately were silent. Ben and Ann had blearily watched Japanese television until they fell asleep, staring half-comprehending at a dreary sequence of greasy cooking shows shot on video in fluorescent kitchens, pastel-colored dating shows, and the best of the lot, shows that featured dogs and cats, sometimes dragged by their owners, struggling bravely through obstacle courses.

—Fermi hasn’t come back, she said, and already as he reached out to stroke her shoulder in consolation his strength was sinking at the prospect of a dull and thankless day.

When he went next door to talk to Oppenheimer he found only Szilard in the room, reading an English-language newspaper and drinking off-white coffee.

—Where’s Oppenheimer? he asked.

—He went out, said Szilard, not turning.

—I can see that, said Ben, and through gritted teeth: —Where? When?

—Said he’d be back for breakfast, said Szilard. —Actually, I’ll join you. Should be ready to eat again by about ten. I just had a little chocolate croissant from Starbucks.

—Uh huh, said Ben, and retreated.

But Oppenheimer did not come back for breakfast.

Ann and Ben walked idly through the city, along the riverbanks and over the sandy walkways of the Peace Park, between the poorly sculpted death monuments, muddy perimeters trodden and flattened by tourist shoeprints in intricate geometric patterns. Beneath this grassy mound lie the ashes of a hundred thousand soldiers.

—If this is the form public memory has to take, said Ben once in the Peace Park, —I would rather be publicly forgotten.

They left the sculpture gardens finally, worn out by the cold shapes, and went to a shopping district where they wandered into stores distracted, barely looking at the English-language T-shirts, sweatshirts and glossy jackets that bore such enigmatic slogans such as BABY COOL FLIES and HIGHWAY 66 RED SHERIFF NOW. They ended up at a noodle shop for lunch, where they ate miso soup laden with tan-brown fish flakes.

Ann became agitated as the day got old, insisting one of them should go back to the hotel just in case, but Ben would not agree to this and stuck to her side, and presently she gave up.

By night Oppenheimer had still not returned. Fermi did not come back either.

The next morning there was a note for Ann at the lobby desk. It was from Oppenheimer. It said he was on his way to a retreat at a Buddhist monastery.

—Jesus Christ, said Ben.

Through her annoyance she wondered: At what point did the pain of others become too much? It was overwhelming to Oppenheimer because of his nearness to the cause: and the farther you were from the cause, the freer you were to forget.

Oppenheimer’s close friend Robert Serber had written of his tour of Hiroshima in his autobiography, which Oppenheimer read just before they left New Mexico. Shortly after the bombing Serber had been sent to the city to make scientific observations of the bomb’s aftermath, to measure and describe its destructive capabilities. He wrote his account completely without color or detail, as clinically and remotely as possible, barely mentioning the dead or the suffering