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

cared about was the chance to see them again. Now she had to decide whether to keep waiting for them senselessly or fly home again without contact, admitting to herself that she was at the very furthest margins, left out, overlooked. She could fly home to wait as she was always waiting these days.

She called Szilard’s cell and got no answer, Larry’s cell, no answer, and finally Ben to make sure they hadn’t called him. Fermi picked up the phone and right away she felt calmer. Ben was not alone.

She washed her face and went down to eat an omelet in the Pyramid Café, where the waiter looked all around the room while she ordered but never at her. The omelet was professionally fluffy and symmetrical and she ate it slowly, sipping coffee and reading her free copy of USA Today.

The headlines were all boring and the stories even more so. She found it difficult to concentrate on what was happening. The newspaper was the diary of a whole culture, she thought, but it worked so diligently to say nothing. It was actually more like the greeting card of a culture, meant to catch the eye and be discarded rapidly.

If a country were more like a crowd, with feeling rippling among the ranks, instead of a network of institutions all distant from each other, she thought, then it would not control itself with such coldness and such economy. If a country were more like a body, then it might have a chance to know itself.

If a culture could be like a single person, she thought, then it could scream.

—I like first class, said Szilard. —The food is better.

—Hey, Oppie. That longhair over there’s been staring at you, said Larry, and pointed.

Oppenheimer turned and followed his finger. A hollow-cheeked man with a beard gazed at them from his seat in coach, eyes glassy.

—He looks like he really needs a shower, said Tamika.

—Oh, him. I met him when I was in line for the bathroom, said Szilard. —He’s crazy. All he does is talk about God.

She had paid for her meal and was headed outside to take the Free Tram! To Excalibur! when a disturbance in front of the long reception desk to her left caught her and spun her around.

—Call security! someone yelled.

In relief she recognized the voice: it was Larry.

At the very long desk, the clerk raised the phone to his ear and she saw all of them there, Szilard and Larry leaning over the counter, demanding, a pile of suitcases on carts behind them, some of the others standing watching Oppenheimer in the background, Oppenheimer who was backing up, cringing slightly with his hands raised in front of him as a weeping man knelt on the slick, shining floor at his feet.

He had heard the phone ring and known it had to be her but resisted getting up. Their bedroom window was open and he could hear Fermi walking past, out into the garden, the soft soles of his shoes on the stones. The wind chimes moved in the morning breeze and early light dappled the wall, a pattern of shadow leaves dipping and fluttering.

Nothing was like the light dance of leaves.

He would just give her time, he thought, and wait for relief. Time returned things to themselves.

It was good to lie watching the silhouettes of thin branches shivering, good to breathe the moist air the breeze carried in through the window, filling the curtains.

He moved a hand under the blanket.

—Leo! What’s going on? she asked as she came up behind them.

Szilard was wearing a tropical shirt with palm trees on it. It made her uncomfortable.

—A religious fanatic, he said.

Larry was bent down in front of Oppenheimer trying to pull off the kneeling man. With one hand he patted the weeping man’s back as though to console him, and with the other he tugged stubbornly at the man’s stringy arm, which was grasping at Oppenheimer’s Italian-leather-shod foot.

A Japanese family stood staring.

—Let me kiss it! cried the weeping man, but then hotel security converged, tanned well-dressed men with thick faces.

—He’s crazy! said Szilard.

—Wait. He’s not violent, cried Oppenheimer, as the security men hauled the weeping man off him by the back of his shirt. —Don’t hurt him! Be careful!

—What is this? asked Ann, but none of them noticed her. Oppenheimer’s nose was sunburnt, his cheeks tanned.

—Why don’t you come with us, sir, said one of the security guards to Oppenheimer as the others hustled away the weeping man. —We’ll sit you down and get you a glass of water.

—He’s been following us, said Szilard to Ann, and then turned. —We’ll meet you in the room, OK Larry? Yours? I can take care of this.

And they followed as the guards walked Oppenheimer through a staff door.

Ann turned and looked behind them, at the weeping man twisting and kicking as they marched him outside.

Children playing, thought Ben, lying in the bed with his right hand motionless, the wet fingers were irritating, but he did not want to get up to wash them. He was considering going back to slee, but in the meantime he was thinking of the child they were failing to conceive; in particular he imagined the childhood this nonexistent infant would never have.

See Spot Run and a world of picket fences, a suburban dream world: that had been the world Oppenheimer and his colleagues had left to people in the fifties, to their fellow Americans. When Ben’s parents were teenagers it was the world they grew up in, See Spot Run, civil defense, fallout shelters, Atomic Fire Ball candies you could buy at the corner store and pop in your mouth. School drills where they taught children how to get under the desks when the nuclear bombs began to fall. Duck and cover.

What is there so idyllic in that fifties vision, he thought, that pastel-colored propaganda of a simple life. It was a wishful return to Eden after the Fall.

He held in his mind the quaint picture of a