Oh Pure and Radiant Heart - Lydia Millet (ebook reader online TXT) 📗

it a “hydration kit,” a plastic bag made for hiking and shaped to fit the contours of the back. From this he could sip as he shoveled, hoed, or knelt on his kneepads to plant. He kept it inside the shirt so that its faint and insulated coldness lay touching the skin.

When he was bored with his work he lived in scenes. Sipping the plastic-tasting water he might be a pioneer on a far planet, sowing the seeds of future life in angry fields, sustained only by the vein of liquid. Or he might be a plant himself among the plants, drawing rainwater into his barely mobile body.

Sometimes he imagined the son he would have, because he wished for a child as though it was too much to ask, as though it was a unreal dream, as some men wish for wealth or fame.

At lunch in a Mexican restaurant Oppenheimer looked up from his plate of beans and saw Fermi walking toward him as though in his sleep. He rose from his seat so fast that he hit the table and spilled his beer, and they looked at each other across the bright room as the beer cascaded off the table edge.

As she learned after the police came jogging in wearing their riot gear, a ricochet off a pipe had hit the gunman near the base of his skull. He had died quickly beside a display of Navajo baskets.

It had happened too fast for them to save him or, as one of the policemen said jauntily, the carpet.

Mr. Hofstadt had not had a heart attack but a panic attack. He got up as soon as the policemen came in, then waited for the Crime Scene Unit and hovered behind them, bulgy-eyed and avid, as they taped off the corner of the room. After that day he would seldom return to the library, and when he did it was not to ask her questions but merely to check out a few books, mostly whodunits, quickly and wordlessly.

So she never found out how many blond babies were born in 1983.

They closed the library that afternoon so that the police could come and go without obstruction. She stayed at the phone, away from the bustle and the eyewitness interviews, until late in the afternoon, when she walked over to the children’s books section, hesitant and stepping lightly. A policeman and a forensic pathologist tried to tell her how to “sanitize the area,” but she could not discern the meaning of the words from their sound. She looked down at the man with the gun and felt dizzy.

He was not the man with the gun anymore, in fact, because he had dropped the gun before he died. The police had picked it up and bagged it as evidence. He looked casual to her, a man who had tripped and fallen some time ago and was now lying on the carpet by choice, idly recalling an untended detail: a dog unwalked, a sink of dishes uncleaned.

She thought: When I die there will be an envelope without a stamp, or worse an envelope with no address, with no name on it, even. They will have to open it to determine its object, and who knows what they will find? She shuddered at the idea that some wrong detail might slip unintended beneath the wrong eyes.

She thought: Maybe this fear is what keeps some people from writing letters at all.

One of the parrots on his shirt, red and yellow and beady-eyed, was upside-down. By means of its precarious perch on the shirt and its long tail feathers it led her eyes to the wound on the side of his head, where the hair was not dry and light. Instead there was heaviness there, the inside like worms, and it was wet.

She glanced away again, and a few minutes later they lifted him onto a gurney, covered him and rolled him outside and into the coroner’s van. She had the feeling of watching television, then of being inside television, inside bad television, in fact. She watched the van pull down the drive and stop at the lights down the street. Then she turned to her fellow librarian, asking: —Was there something I could have done?

The other librarian, a portly vegan named Jeff with a brown ponytail, shook his head and reassured her. She was unconvinced. He stepped away to talk to a reporter, though he himself had been occupied eating a tofurkey sandwich on rye, lettuce, mustard, extra lite organic soy mayo, when the tragedy occurred. Ann had not spoken to the media and she did not plan to, but Mr. Hofstadt had talked at great length to a reporter from Channel 2, in sweaty agitation.

It was a loose, spare day. After the police and the reporters and Jeff had all left she felt the library to be empty, emptier than it should be. At the same time it was cloying: it was empty and suffocating at once. The metal shelves, the windowsills, the curtains, the tables and chairs and counters were washed with an unfamiliar veneer, somehow altered and not how they used to be. Their surfaces could not be trusted; who knew what they hid?

They were the last fixtures to be seen of the world, the last sight seen.

Above him as his heart slowed there had been long fluorescent tubes and beside him, open on a table, had been a children’s book called Make Way for Ducklings.

The last sight seen could not be designed, she knew, and this stung her, it grieved her, it made her beg secretly. It should be an entitlement, she thought, at least this should be guaranteed, shouldn’t it? Even if everything else was chaos. That you could be outside, under the sky at night, seeing the white blur of stars that was the Milky Way. Because why should it be that this was what you got, your last touch of anything, the instant then, the instant of disappearing forever, why should