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

one-hundred and twenty miles away from Ground Zero, on an atoll called Rongelap, radiation was so intense that the people there doubled over to vomit.

Later, when burns were rising on their skin, the Atomic Energy Commission announced breezily to the press that “All were reported well.”

—I thought we were trying, said Ben a couple of nights later. —We are, said Ann.

She was turned away from him on her side, reading an article about the Marshall Islands testing program. Several of the bomb tests had sunk old warships, incinerating pigs and rabbits that had been placed on the decks in cages.

Reading was a distraction from worry. It had been nagging at her that she was missing what was essential, that her exhaustion was an excuse, a capitulation to life as usual, flat and dry with all the new suspense relinquished.

She had to be there herself, she thought, she had to be among them, near what was happening. But it was too late now: she had missed it. She had actually said no. And there was no way of reaching them when they got there: they had not left an itinerary or the name of a hotel. Szilard’s new cell phone, bought for him by Larry, would not receive thousands of miles into the Pacific Ocean, would not ring in Micronesia, among the palm fronds and coral reefs in the middle of seemingly infinite water, when she dialed the number.

They were the ones standing on piles of sand in the middle of the world’s vastest ocean but it was she who felt the panic of isolation.

—I mean trying the usual way, said Ben, and rested his hand on her hip where it jutted up, covered in sheet. —Not by praying for an immaculate conception.

—I’m not even close to ovulating, she said, and read perforating the reef with gigantic blast craters.

Are you even there anymore? Ben was thinking, but refused to turn away from her and give up. This was the sole job of the male of many species, he told himself wryly: disseminate his semen often and broadly. The biological imperative broadly he had forsworn for the social imperative narrowly.

But he knew he was cheating. Jocular humor would save the day but not the marriage.

She resists, but single-mindedly I go forward. It is not that she has forgotten me.

Of course, she thought in resignation, give in. It was kinder, it was easier and it would be fine by the end.

She let the pages slide to the floor and turned. Strokes of the limbs, the usual bent head, the ministering, and she felt tended and passive as a plant, and then guilty for the passivity. Trying to infuse herself with momentum and will she moved, smiled, bent down herself in an awkward spiral of repositioning arms and legs. She would not neglect him, she would not be disappointing, since what if this was all there was, and after this there was no more of either of them?

She knew it with her stomach suddenly, a weight of guilt and certainty caving her in. In the past months, with herself in other things, she had left him behind and forlorn in a corner. She had betrayed him gradually, not all at once like infidelity but here and then, more and more. Now, left out and discarded herself, she was getting a taste of her own medicine.

She felt it with a twinge, how mean it was. Nothing was as lonely as abandoning.

—I’m sorry, she whispered, and he looked down at her face and he knew what she meant, she could tell. But it was too sad to dwell on; it was not conducive. So she applied herself as though for a job. Usually it was not like this between them but now she felt it was necessary because she had too much to atone for to seem half-hearted. For once in recent memory she wanted to have given, furnished, even satisfied, as though she was being paid. Adequate was inadequate; she wanted him to go to sleep without doubt, if that was still possible. He should feel safe again.

Even if, she realized as she set herself to the task, expression everywhere welling out of her, body stirring and full of gesture, he was not safe, even if he was not he should be unaware, for who was safe now, ever? Who was perfectly safe forever?

Scientists at the Atomic Energy Commission took advantage of the testing in the Marshall Islands to study the effects of radiation on people.

In 1956, at an AEC meeting, one official admitted that Rongelap was the most contaminated place on earth. He said of the Marshall Islanders, reportedly without irony, “While it is true that these people do not live, I would say, the way Westerners do—civilized people—it is nevertheless true that they are more like us than mice.”

Sad, he thought, sad, collapsing himself into concave places and rounding himself over convex ones, fawning on the surfaces. Sad, without knowing why he was thinking it.

It was her desperation to be in the fray that had led her to leave her husband behind, forgetting him while he was in plain sight. She was ashamed but could not help herself even now. She was pulled by a desire to be central to them, to Oppenheimer and Szilard and even Fermi, that solid, self-effacing Republican. The strength of her desire made her worry even when she was covered by her husband’s body. It made her strain toward the tropics far to the west, float dreamily in the white-and-blue elsewhere, the sand and the islands, because that was where they were, the others. And she was not. She only here, and it was not enough.

What was crucial for her to see could be happening right now, all because she was here, lamely here.

She was not proud of her desperation but that did not change it. It was the child in her, not the innocent child but the one that screamed for attention, face a fat red fury.

She