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

and legal campaign as soon as we get back. You’ll be a highly valuable member of the team, Clint. Believe me.

Ben considered how quickly Szilard had picked up the business language to add to his canon of slang. Whatever you can say about Szilard, he thought, he’s sharp as a tack. He assimilates information at a rapid rate. He never stops learning.

—Where are they going to stay? whispered Ann to Oppenheimer, turning in her seat once Clint had been distracted.

Ben shot him a look of warning, or tried to. Don’t impose.

—Don’t worry, said Oppenheimer.

He had understood.

—They’re not staying with us, Ann, said Ben. —Robert wouldn’t ask that of you.

—Of course not, said Oppenheimer smoothly. —I’m sure Larry will take care of it. From what I understand his father is one of the richest men in the world. Larry is his only son so his funds are virtually unlimited. The trust fund alone is worth hundreds of millions. And he told me he’s never known what to do with all that money, other than buy marijuana and go surfing. Now he feels as though he has a mission, for the first time in his life. How did he put it? He wants to be a warrior for peace.

—That’s nice, said Ben. —Catchy, yet stupid.

—So when it comes to money, don’t worry, Annie.

—Larry can help them much more than we ever could, said Ben to Ann, trying to be comforting.

Ann smiled at Ben as the plane began to taxi, thinking it was the first time Oppenheimer had called her Annie. It was the first time anyone had called her that since she was very young.

As they leveled after the steady climb she watched Oppenheimer undo his seatbelt, struggle to cross his long legs in his seat and then give up and reach for his packaged headphones. He tore them out of their plastic, put them on his head and adjusted them to sit right. He played with the channel buttons on the arm of his seat and listened intently to each channel before he changed to the next. It was astounding how quickly he had adjusted, she thought, to modern commercial flight, to technology, to all the routines that were new to him. It was the same with Szilard. Only Fermi was slow, and the slowness was due to disinterest, she thought.

We can adapt to anything, she thought looking out the window, homo sapiens.

At first the trait seemed praiseworthy, evidence of a lively and supple intelligence.

But then a long shadow was cast across the wing and she remembered the crowds in Tokyo, the infinite crowds spread across the concrete and the streets bare of trees.

One of the walls of the Peace Museum at Hiroshima is covered in letters, carefully typed on official stationery. The letters are arranged neatly in chronological sequence. Each letter was written by a mayor of Hiroshima, each successive mayor in his time, on a long series of dates after World War Two.

They are not form letters. Each is carefully written from scratch, in English. Some are addressed to a president, others to a prime minister or a premier, and all are written on the day of a nuclear test.

Each letter, one after another down through the years, makes its request politely. “Dear Sir: Please be kind enough to cease building nuclear weapons, for the good of all nations of peace.”

To feel sympathy for people outside ourselves we need to know each soul can be alone, thought Oppenheimer. We need to be sure that each body can feel the separation of itself from other bodies, to know desire lives there, in every one separately. We have to feel how longing surges from the hearts of others.

More than that, without longing the other is not a self, and beyond longing, even, it is the pain of others that is the source of our sympathy. A being that does not know pain cannot be the object of pity, and so a being that does not suffer also does not receive our love.

There is nothing to fasten to there, in who does not feel pain.

III

THE DEAD MAINTAIN THEIR GOOD LOOKS

1

We were not made to fly, thought Ann like many fearful passengers before and after her, but here we are aloft.

It was precarious. When she flew she was on the edge of air, between air and nothing.

They were moving steadily at thirty-seven thousand feet above a thin layer of cloud that gaped open over the Sierra Nevada and then dispersed into clarity. Colors showed beneath.

She stared down at the colors with her forehead against the cool windowpane, looking out over the clean white wing. She saw the Grand Canyon yawning purple and gray and brown and then the dust-red nation of the Navajo. The lines of its orange cliffs spread like floods of sand beneath them and towering stone monuments cast dark, blunt shadows. The government had given the Navajo a very large piece of barren land, thinking this a clever swindle; and the dry soil would never make them rich, that much was true. But the land was so beautiful the joke was on the government.

When the plane began its descent into her own high desert, gentle brown mountains in the distance with their dark green skirts of pine, Ann felt homesick. Only from here could she know her own country best, far above with no way to touch it.

Larry had booked the scientists a lavish suite at La Posada, the establishment Oppenheimer preferred.

—Let me take the burden off you, OK? Money is no object, like the man said. I couldn’t spend it all if I had six lifetimes. I’m serious. I mean you have already been so great to these guys.

They were in a flight lounge in Albuquerque, she and Ben walking fast with Larry beside them as the others trailed behind. She was moving out of relevance, she thought, away from the center. There was nothing to object to, because of