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

soldiers who witnessed Shot Hood, a seventy-four kiloton test in Nevada in 1957, told a story at the hospital where he was taken for radiation sickness. After the test, he told his doctor, he had seen the burnt corpses not only of animals in cages but of men shackled to a chain link fence.

“I was happy, full of life before I saw that bomb,” he told a photographer years afterward, “but then I understood evil and was never the same.”

He had been a thin young boy from Utah. Later he grew fat and paranoid and claimed he had been held at a psychiatric facility where they were doing something with the top of my head. There they had told him to forget what he had seen.

He was clinically paranoid, but other troops had told the same story.

Above the Pacific in a 747 Oppenheimer laid his head back on the headrest and waxed nostalgic. He daydreamed of the remote islands of the tropics.

He did not think fondly of the Marshalls, for they were sad ghettos created by the military and it had made his throat close to see what the people had endured and how, even still, his countrymen treated them like slaves. Also, the seas were rising as the planet’s atmosphere warmed, according to his colleagues in the earth sciences; and the poor Marshall Islands, seven feet above sea level, were sure to be among the first submerged.

He thought of the Virgin Islands of his first life and then also Hawaii, where they had recently stopped. Islands with mountains: there a man could retreat, to look out on the sea. He remembered sailing in his twenty-eight-foot sloop the Trimethy, the first boat he ever owned, out around Fire Island in the roaring twenties. Lately he had begun to miss islands with a thirst he did not recall feeling before. He would find himself lost in thought and realize he wanted nothing more than to be back in his old beach house in St. John with Kitty and the children, the house that was now, he had read, empty and slowly collapsing, scoured with salt and nearer the waterline every year. He recalled the large, waxy-leafed bushes that shaded the porch, the steep incline of the hillside path down to the cottage where it was nestled in its bower of palms on the sand.

But if he left all this now, looking for that subtle peace in the scent of red-blooming flamboyant trees and trade winds, he would only get there and find himself alone. He had no one to share it with since all the people he had ever held dear had suddenly become dead.

Without them there was no refuge anywhere.

He was a man with no future, a man who might as well sit forever facing forward in this same airplane seat, hands on his sharp-boned knees as they were now, eyes glazed over, and outside his white metal capsule the neverending clear cold blue that was too thin to breathe.

By the time she had played a few hands of video poker and decided to go to bed, the scientists and their followers had still not arrived. Their tour of the test site was supposed to leave from an industrial park in North Las Vegas at seven in the morning.

The bed in her room was comfortable, hieroglyphs crawling all over it, the covers printed with them, the headboard engraved with them. But even in comfort willing herself to fall asleep failed, as all acts of will seemed to fail recently, despite the soothing influence of the cobras, storks, vultures, and dogs marching across polyester. She tried to suppress her irritation. It was how she spent her time these days: she suppressed herself. She waited on the lip of time, always anticipating a moment that never came, a change that never occurred, a surprise unveiling.

They might be injured, stranded somewhere without telephones. What felt like neglect could be hardship, and she should be worrying about their welfare instead of her own inconvenience.

But then this was always the way she rationalized their disinterest. She could see it now. She forgot about herself by worrying about them.

In reference to the possibility of radiation from bomb tests hurting those who lived near the Nevada Test Site, one of the commissioners of the Atomic Energy Commission said to another in 1955: “People have got to learn to live with the facts of life. And part of the facts of life are fallout.”

The same year, the public was invited into slot trenches to watch the Shot Apple-2 at a distance of two miles from Ground Zero. Shot Apple-2 was a twenty-nine-kiloton shot, larger than Little Boy.

A New York Times article called “Watching the Bombs Go Off” supplied a list of upcoming test dates to its readers, encouraging tourists to visit Nevada on the test dates to watch the splendid mushroom clouds rise from vantage points along the highways and in the nearby mountains.

Along with the series of test dates, the article provided the reassurance that “there is virtually no danger from radioactive fallout.”

In the morning she woke up at six and called down to the desk. Still they hadn’t showed up. She slammed the phone into the cradle and felt enraged, a welling up of fury. Larry hadn’t given her their flight information and they hadn’t called her either. In fact, in fact, she barely existed for them since Larry had begun to foot the bills, in fact they-didn’t-bother-to-tell-her-anything-anymore-they-did-not-care-that-she-put-herself-out-for-them-or-that-she-was-here-just-waiting-depending-on-them-and-receiving-nothing-nothing-nothing!

She got up and walked lightly across the soft sage-green carpet to stand at the slanted window that comprised the outer wall of her room, the outer skin of the pyramid, and saw the massive mirrored structure of the nearby casino-hotel reflecting the sunrise: Mandalay Bay. Its broad surface was copper and violet. Nearby she could see a vacant lot, blank and flat, all light-brown sand with a massive orange crane leaning up into the sky.

She would miss the tour, they all would: not that she cared. What she