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

test of the self falling short, constrained, distorted, disturbed or rebuffed, the vacuum left by longing, call without an answer.

In a face-off with happiness suffering often wins, he reflected, not by being a necessary hardship but by being chosen. Suffering is chosen over happiness by almost everyone. It is designed, coddled, caressed and persuaded; it is worked over by the brain so that it informs the limits of our freedoms and the shape of our fulfillment. It ties us to other people where happiness does not.

Suffering is embraced.

The men approached Fermi when he was sitting on a park bench, staring ahead of him dazedly. On his lap he had an American newspaper, freshly purchased but had not opened.

One was older, the other was younger, but neither was of an age to be noticed. They wore suits and had faces and voices that were difficult to remember. Later, thinking back, he would ask himself whether one of them had a Dutch accent: had it been Dutch or had it been German?

They sat down on either side of him, too close.

—We are given to understand, said the first one quietly, —that you are a reasonable person with no ax to grind.

—I’m sorry? asked Fermi politely. His fingers curled on the front page of the New York Times so that the edges of his fingernails scratched into the fiber.

—He must confide in you, said the second one.

—Who? asked Fermi.

—The man who calls himself Leo Szilard.

—Who are you? asked Fermi.

The men shot each other glances of amusement over his head.

—We have been watching him ever since his arrest at Kirtland, said the second man.

—What is Kirtland? asked Fermi.

—You don’t know?

Fermi looked at him blankly.

—Kirtland Air Force Base, said the first man.

—Albuquerque, said the second. —He tried to break in. It was laughable but it drew our attention. And then we stopped laughing.

—I was not told about this before it happened, said Fermi quietly. — Are you the police?

The first man only smiled again.

—We had secret police in Italy, said Fermi. —You cannot intimidate me.

—We do not intend to, said the first man.

—Do you know what Szilard wants to do? asked the second man.

—No, said Fermi.

—Would you tell us if you did?

—Not necessarily.

—You have heard nothing? He hasn’t told you what he’s planning?

—He talks to Robert, said Fermi. —The two of them have conversations. I have not paid attention.

—I find that very difficult to believe, said the second man.

—Well, said the first one briskly, and got up, —thank you for your time, Dr. Fermi.

The second man rose too, a little reluctantly.

Fermi did not like him.

The first man leaned forward, clapped Fermi firmly on the shoulder and smiled without opening his mouth. Then they both turned and Fermi watched their backs recede as they walked away. Finally they turned a corner and were lost to sight.

Several minutes later he got up himself.

—We’re not going to find him like this, said Szilard as they left the pachinko place. —He was a betting man but not exactly a gambler, you know what I mean? And he hated smoking. He and Laura would have parties and people couldn’t even smoke in the house. And this was in the ’30s. Everybody smoked then. He would never be in a place like this.

—You could have said so before, couldn’t you, snapped Ben.

—I think we should look for Italian restaurants, said Szilard. —Let’s look there. They have Italian restaurants in Hiroshima, don’t they?

—I really don’t know, Leo, said Ben. —Have you seen any?

—Plus then we can get lunch, said Szilard. —It’s already past three. We can order pasta. Those spiral ones.

Oppenheimer had been thrown by the shock of the effects of the bomb, laid out there in the museum in panoramic display, in black-and-white photographs and videos on wall monitors that showed the torments of the dying. He had been struck by all the names and faces of these victims, girls and boys, the five-year-olds and the six-year-olds, the seven-year-olds, the eight-year-olds, the nine-year-olds and the ten. A child should not die. There was death, and death in the natural order was a simple grace; it gave life over to those who were newly made. He had no quarrel with it then. But surely, in violence and in sickness too, the infants should be spared.

He had been silenced by the frail old men talking humbly to rooms of schoolchildren, telling them in soft voices all about the bomb and what it had done, how it had made a world vanish in plain sight and whisked away their mothers, mothers barely remembered.

Fermi had simply wanted to be alone until the weight that oppressed him lifted to give some slight relief. Not only was there the evidence of the bomb, what it had done to innocent children, but there was the cloying thickness of the world around him, from which nature had been removed. Cities were built and built and over time converted into prisons. Apparently the Japanese did not demand trees on their streets: beyond the park the city was all gray blocks, unrelieved by green.

But now there were the questions, and the attitude of the men who asked them.

The second time she knocked on a monastery door she was ushered in by a monk wearing a robe of pale orange, his bearing serene. He could not understand her question, Sumimasen, tomodachi o sagashiteiru n desu ga, so she sat waiting in a high-ceilinged anteroom while he went to find someone who spoke English. She was shy, embarrassed at the ungainliness of what she had probably said to him. She told herself she should have had Keiko write down the characters for her so that she could show her paper to the men at the monasteries when her tongue failed, like the deaf-mute she was, wandering door to door. She turned her face up to a skylight, through which the sky was a bland and senseless white. What was Oppenheimer doing? Was he near or far, alone or in company, still or speaking?