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

that suffering was what gave onto love. Suffering itself is beloved: love and suffering are far closer to each other than love and pleasure.

Ben went back to the hotel room to sleep hoping she would be there, having extracted a promise from Fermi not to run again. Far from rebuking Fermi he found himself promising that when they got home Fermi could help him with summer plantings in the garden. With Szilard rebuke was second nature and he often felt like a high school principal, an absurd father figure doling out warnings and slaps on the wrist—without, admittedly, wielding any threat of real punishment.

But with Fermi he felt more like a nursemaid. Fermi was a rigid man with something vital broken.

Instead of Ann in the room there were two messages waiting for him. One was from her, telling him she hadn’t found Oppenheimer, of course. She was staying in a small bed-and-breakfast about two hours distant by train, and here was the number if he needed it. The second was from Oppenheimer, calling not from an isolated monastery high up on a hill, where Ben had imagined him, but from a slick apartment in Shibuya, Tokyo.

Ann ended the evening on a bench outside the train station, under a broad, low tree. Rain threatened but did not fall and passersby looked at her sometimes from the sidewalk, their faces inscrutable in the darkness. She was embarrassed so she turned her face away from the street and hoped the police did not come.

She thought of the pain of Oppenheimer and the pain of the dying. She thought of her parents being hit by the truck and then she thought of people dying more slowly, or sick people not dying at all but acting as though they had battled death and beat it in a contest. She thought of people who claim for example that a famous terminal illness has not conquered them no matter how hard it tried, who brag that they are greater now than they ever were in good health, larger for having fought the fight.

It’s rarely the boast of those who have lived through war, she was thinking as she turned on the bench, hip joints aching from the hardness. Those people don’t boast because they know the real heroes rarely survive.

Trying to go to sleep and failing, she thought: the real heroes are dead. This distinguishes them.

In his new bed Oppenheimer was also trying to fall asleep and failing, annoyingly conscious of his dry cheek against the pillow. Suffering ignites the spark of contact with the sublime and offers proof of humanity, he was thinking. He wondered why it had been given to him to see history unfold, when it would have been so much more usual to die.

Powerful people have the luxury of designing the way they suffer, he thought, while the weak have the manner of their suffering forced upon them. But neither category has much daily business with happiness.

It is suffering, he thought, that is the engine of transfiguration, a hub around which the captive self turns.

4

—It was a total, like, revelation, said Larry. —I’m not even kidding. She stared at him and then at Oppenheimer, who sat smoking in an armchair holding a tumbler of whiskey. He was wearing a well-tailored new suit and new leather shoes. Cross-legged on the floor at the low black enamel table in his living room, a few feet away, Larry cradled a large bong.

Fermi had retired to a bedroom as soon as they arrived and Szilard, who stood across the room talking on Larry’s cell phone, was not bothering to listen.

—He calls me to ask about places to go meditate, right? Like retreats and all that. Meanwhile since you guys were here I’ve been reading up on shit, like the alien autopsy, abductions, Roswell, and then all this stuff about cattle mutilations and the military and Alamogordo and the A-bomb and all that. And then I’m looking at this old Time-Life book my father’s got back there. He’s got a whole set of them, right? So I find Oppie’s picture. I can’t believe you guys didn’t tell me!

—It’s hard to explain, said Ann with a note of apology.

—Some people tend to be skeptical, said Ben drily.

—I was blown away. I mean blown away. Totally. So when he calls I’m like, just come here, man. You’re welcome. I go, If you want a like spiritual retreat or whatever I’ll just clear out for a few days, I’ll leave you in peace, know what I mean? I mean he’s the Father of the A-Bomb! And he’s supposed to be dead.

—That’s when Larry called me and told me about it, said Larry’s girlfriend, sitting next to him on the floor. Her bellbottoms were so wide and long she had to hold them up when she walked. Ann had visibly marveled at this sacrifice to fashion—Ben had watched her watching—but also at her hair, so long she could sit on it, dyed blond interspersed with red and green, and artfully dreadlocked.

Larry took a bong hit and nodded, his face pink from held breath, as his girlfriend leaned across the table and took Ann’s hand in both of her own, charm bracelets dangling onto the table’s surface, squeezing the fingers warmly.

—Tamika really admires you, said Larry, on the sighing end of a long exhalation.

—Me? asked Ann.

—I think it is so great that you believed in him and supported him, said Tamika. —That is so great. And oh yeah, the other guys too.

—Oak Woods Cemetery, said Szilard to the cell phone. —Chicago.

—I mean it’s amazing, said Larry. —Robert’s basically been reincarnated as himself. That’s like completely unheard of. It, like, never happens.

—Never, agreed Tamika solemnly.

—You don’t say, said Ben.

—He came back to tell us something. He has a mission here. This guy is like a messenger. I’m serious. I mean it. You know what he is? He’s basically a prophet.

In the hush that followed Larry and Tamika turned their gaze up