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

To read his description of the devastated city without knowing Serber, thought Oppenheimer, was to be inspired to dislike him; yet Oppenheimer had been fond of Serber and could not shake the old fondness, even after he was told about Serber and Kitty. And watching a videotape of Serber made in his dotage in the 1990s, Oppenheimer had thought his old friend a kindly, humorous man, almost a caricature, with a creaky voice and a grating, infectious laugh. Apparently, sometime in the postwar years, he had developed a penchant for wearing comical glasses and blindingly bright-colored jackets and ties.

—They’re sensitive, said Szilard, perched on the side of the bed in Ann and Ben’s room the third night in Hiroshima.

He had come in bearing a tattered copy of the New York Times, New York metro edition, cajoled off a businessman in the lobby. He was eager to discuss global diplomacy as it pertained to the American government, against whom he always inveighed in moments of conversational lull. But Ann was quiet and deflated, bereft, feeling the loss of the other two scientists as her own failure, a lack of vigilance, lack of charisma, a flaw in herself she could not quite pick out. She could barely nod at Szilard’s opening sally, which consisted of the assertion that The birth of the limited liability corporation was the death of freedom.

Szilard, recognizing in a rare flash of insight that now was not the time for his usual lecture, adopted the air of a country doctor. He sat heavy and near on the bed, patting Ann’s hand and cocking his head in a listening posture. But Ben had spent the day trying to offer solace, frustrated by the stasis of the predicament, Oppenheimer’s self-indulgence, Fermi’s flight, Ann’s attachment to them in the first place, the useless digression from real life that this represented, from the life that had been happening before. Szilard-GP was just as irritating as Szilard-PhD.

—Sensitive, repeated Ben, with an edge to his voice.

—They’re in shock. Sure. And I’m not. You understand: my position is different. It’s not as painful for me.

—How’s that, Leo, said Ben.

—His opposition, said Ann. —He wasn’t behind it like them. He isn’t directly responsible.

—I am responsible, said Szilard. —Of course I am. All of us were implicated. But I was not, you know, I was just not in power. I was not institutional. Not part of the team like them. Groves tried to have me thrown in jail, for Chrissake! Just for disagreeing with him!

—So you’re telling me, Leo, said Ben, —that these guys are having nervous breakdowns or something?

—I mean what do you think happened? asked Szilard. —You saw how Enrico took off.

—But you don’t suffer breakdowns.

—No I don’t.

—Just grandiose delusions.

—Whatever, said Szilard.

Distracted, Ben was thinking this might be the break that would end it. Severe shock could sever the delusional from their delusions—hadn’t that been the idea behind electroshock therapy, something like that?—and if it could, then maybe the trauma of this upsetting experience would liberate the so-called “Oppenheimer” and “Fermi” from their assumed identities. Realizing with nauseous certainty that their heroes of genius had been chiefly civil service cogs in a vast war machine, tools like any other, less martyrs to science than weak-chinned gunsmiths with hungry women and thin-armed children in their crosshairs, Oppenheimer and Fermi would admit their real names were, say, Runsen and Hodges, Al and Fred, and sheepishly return to their jobs teaching physics and chemistry at an underfunded high school for gifted students in Omaha, a drab Canadian university full of future electrical engineers, someplace mundane and familiar from which they had fled.

There would still be the problem of Szilard, of course.

—It’s not their fault, said Ann, —they’re upset.

—Enrico hasn’t gone far, said Szilard. —Ten-block radius maximum. I guarantee it.

She lay on the bed and half-wished she was sick in a hospital, waited on by neat, placid women in white. Of course sickness was bad, but on the other hand it brought gifts. The relief after pain is a flood, a swelling freedom: it gives a great lift of hope before complacency sets in.

But there’s no recovery from chronic irritation, she thought.

She wished Ben would put down his magazine and turn the light off but since he wasn’t complying, was failing annoyingly to read her mind, she pulled up the sheet and the coverlet, turned away from the light, closed her eyes and tried to stop the light from coming through her eyelids.

In giving a glimpse of death, in showing what is possible, pain brings a storm to the body. But minor complaints never bring storms: they give to the experience of moving through time only a fretful monotony.

After she set the digital alarm clock and Ben turned off the bedside light they lay with their heads close together, not touching but facing. This was a waiting position, one they assumed at times when they were not sure they were ready for sleep but were tired, no more to offer than a warm silence.

He smelled the cheap cotton of the hotel pillow, a cotton like old age in a hospital, antiseptic and musty, and heard the sounds of the street out the window. It was not chaotic noise, like Tokyo, only a faint rush and now and then the whine of a moped. From her slightly open mouth he could smell toothpaste, and her face was eclipsed by the dark round of the pillow between them, no features, only steady breath.

In the second before he said it he was anxious but hopeful. This was his chance to return to the old routine, the worn, gentle routine, the routine that he craved. Here it was, the escape hatch, within reach, inches off.

—Listen, honey. They’re gone. Two of them just took off, and here we are with no one but Szilard, who by the way is eating us out of house and home. Food is expensive here. He’s impatient now