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

because he’s seen what he came to see and he wants to get home, back to where the action is, or as he puts it he can “be effective.” Why don’t we just do what he wants and cut our losses? We can change the dates on the plane tickets, we can leave tomorrow morning if you want. And go back. The other scientists can find their way home later.

Ann hesitated, a span of restraint that stretched out painfully. Briefly he thought maybe she was asleep. Then he felt the curt, tidy shake of her head on the pillow, the back and forth of her forehead against his own.

—I can’t, she said. —You know I can’t. I could lose them.

He waited for her to say more, trying to send the message unsaid toward her that her clinging to the dead scientists, this devotion, this adherence above and beyond what they asked of her, past common sense and reason and way past entertainment, was not self-explanatory. He knew what her instinct would be but he wanted to know if she would still realize that she should explain herself, whether she would still have the benefit of perspective or whether she was too far gone.

—This is just—this is a problem, she said. —It’s an obstacle. But leaving is out of the question. I can’t leave without them. They could disappear. I might never see them again. Then all this would be for nothing. Wouldn’t that be the worst?

—But what do you want from it? What do you expect anyway? I mean what’s the happy ending?

—I can’t abandon them here.

—We would still have Szilard, said Ben, feeling desperate. There could be no weaker boast.

—But I can’t leave Robert here. I can’t leave Fermi. You know that. I mean you knew that before you even asked me.

There was an early knock on the door at 7 a.m. and she opened it to Keiko the interpreter, who entered in a flurry of bowing and smiling, as usual, just in time to catch Ben towel-waisted, coming out of the bathroom, and turn away blushing, covering her mouth with a raised hand as she giggled.

—Excuse me, said Ben, and Keiko smiled and bowed again as she retreated to stand as far away from his half-naked body as she could, backed up against the heavy floral drapes of the window, so embarrassed it was almost painful to look at her.

—She’s been kind enough to offer to help me make some phone calls, said Ann.

—Dial-a-Buddhist? asked Ben. Then he felt stupid, a teenager with an attitude. He picked up clothes from his suitcase, retiring, holding the towel tight at the hip just in case, offering a slight bow himself in the general direction of the drapes before he shut the bathroom door behind him again, Keiko meekly averting her eyes.

He had been given the job of babysitting Szilard—as though anyone could effectively guard Szilard, who in his purple-and-green cross-trainers, powered by processed sugar and adrenaline, could make off anywhere, trundling, turbo-charged, at the drop of a hat.

Together they would scour the city for Fermi. Ben did not relish the prospect of picking his way through the humid, narrow streets with Szilard, bickering as they always did. Elsewhere Ann would be moving forward without him, free of the burden of Szilard, her interpreter mincing along beside her, helpful, self-effacing, and unlike Szilard more than willing to just shut up.

He was barely dressed when there was an explosion of hammering on the bathroom door and he opened it into Szilard’s bug-eyed face, all too close.

—What are you waiting for? Primping in front of the mirror?

—You give me a headache, Leo.

—Bye sweetie, said Ann as they went past, —I’ll leave you a message if I go out.

Before they reached the elevator Szilard was already delivering a sermon on Oppenheimer and Fermi’s participation on the Scientific Panel of the Interim Committee on Atomic Energy.

—Stimson, you know, at the War Department, convened it in ’45, purportedly to find out whether there were technical alternatives to dropping the bomb on Hiroshima.

The elevators slid open and they stepped in, Ben leaning forward to push the button marked 1, Szilard curiously scrutinizing his blurred and elongated face in the stainless doors as they closed but not suspending his relentless patter.

—Of course there were alternatives—I was advocating several myself, including a demonstration of the bomb without human victims—but Oppie and Fermi ended up saying “No, there’s no alternative.” Keep in mind that these guys weren’t soldiers, they weren’t military planners, they were just basically academics with an analytical job to do, an essentially qualitative job, a subjective assignment they’d been given by civilian government, and they could have said anything they wanted to. But the scientific panel—and of course this was after Trinity, this was something this Oppie and this Fermi didn’t formally have time to do before they showed up here with me, it was their other selves that did it—Oppie and Fermi and some other scientists you never met, officially they put their names to a document that said “All we can do is bomb women and children.” They said: Go ahead. Use the bomb.

Ann sat across from Keiko on the bed as she made calls from the room phone, a reel of niceties, Domo arigato gozaimashita, one of the few Japanese phrases she had learned, repeated over and over. Yoshi had taught it to Ben and Ben taught it to her. Thank you very politely.

It was soon clear that almost none of the monasteries were willing to disclose the identities of their guests. Finally Keiko gave up, shaking her head, and all they could do was make up a list of the institutions, with Keiko’s careful directions written beside them, from the nearest to the furthest away. They would not disclose names over the phone, Keiko said, this was not something they would do, but certainly, she thought, if Ann went in person and showed a picture, and if Oppenheimer was actually in residence, they