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

Anyway, she thought further, no one dies too well.

This was not a comfort.

She went to the bathroom, and standing at the sink washing her hands she thought: Heaven is an idea, but it does not follow that an idea is heaven. Still, it seems likely that in ideas, she thought, and only in ideas is there heaven. It can’t be found in plain sight, where most of us live, she thought, because we have teemed over the surface of the world and stained it. Rich people look for heaven in Bali or Key West but poor people have to find it between the fingertips and the frontal lobe: cigarettes, booze, crack and heroin.

The library bathroom was fairly pleasant and none of these were in evidence.

Ben was brought out of his trance rudely when Lynn came to talk to him.

—It’s Yoshi. He just does not want to understand my needs. I really can’t talk to him.

—I’m sorry to hear it.

—So I was wondering: Could you talk to him for me? Like always? I can’t deal. I mean really.

He did not think it was a good idea. Yoshi was in the next room, so he said softly, —I’m sure you can find a way of understanding each other.

—You know why it is? He doesn’t respect me. I think it’s that, you know, Asian woman thing. They’re totally subjugated. They bind their feet.

Whining for a good death was weak when even a good life was a tall order. At the same time she felt imploring, and asked universe to hand out good deaths for everyone. What harm could there be?

Though her parents had died in an accident not too long since, she had not seen the accident or the death. They had only been reported to her. It was a secondhand death and had stayed that way, the abstract removal of parents who themselves, in recent years, had abstracted themselves. It had still wrenched her but she saw it differently at different times: it was fluid so the shape of it did not loom. Sometimes it was a sad blur, other times it was violent and the soles of her feet tingled up from the ground at the thought.

But this had been near, near and real like a slap.

She closed the plastic blinds on four windows in a row and said to herself self-consciously: And then he was lucky. She was thinking of her grandmother, now dead, who had by her own admission lived decades too long. For her grandmother, in the years before she died, the ground itself had ceased to be stable and balance could not be regained: the world shook and trembled and her hands followed suit, her unsteady hands, quavering voice, even the laws of gravity had let her down. Her skin was white and powdery as moth wings. Once lucid briefly, she had pulled Ann down close to her on the pillow and whispered, with wet eyes: —It isn’t me anymore. I’m all gone.

Even disregarded and packed away, she thought, in a home with the other old ones, in a home with the other defunct, we cling with our bodies in shreds to the smells, the branches dipping in the wind, the old worn pads of our fingers: the same fingers we have had all our lives.

And the light in the air.

The bodies, she thought, those sad oxen, tired, they beg us to go free. The bodies beg us to go free.

She sat down near a magazine rack and paged through a People, blankly and without engagement. She could think of nothing to do, nothing that would occupy her. Her hands hung useless and she was surprised by a rush of adrenaline followed by restlessness.

At certain moments of shock or stupefaction it is clear, she thought, that doing anything is a waste of time, that effort itself is a waste. Doing something appears more wasteful than doing nothing, while only doing nothing seems safe. This may be because something is always, at base, a distraction from nothing. Paradoxically nothing is full, whereas something is often surprisingly empty; yet in nothing all things are possible, whereas in something there are limits on all sides.

And it is possible to relax into nothing, let nothing envelop you like a love.

Fermi was even more lost than Oppenheimer himself, but this mattered less than the obvious fact that it was him. It was Fermi, his old friend.

He had never been so relieved in his life.

Ann left the building thinking of herself as a woman who had witnessed a shooting. Then she amended this: she was a woman who had heard a series of loud noises, ie. shots, one of which produced a death. A subsequent amendment: Violent death.

It did not occur to her to interrupt Ben at work. She was distracted and instead of going home she got into her car and drove up into the mountains, pulling off the shoulder where a trailhead led into the forest. It was still raining, with an occasional low shiver of thunder; she got out of the car anyway and began to walk, between tall ponderosa pines on a brown bed of needles and cones.

She walked fast, wanting to drain herself of what felt like a morbid, even lurid excitement. Whether she was pressed onward by fear or exhilaration was not obvious to her and this made her furtive and shameful even as her legs moved. The texture of the day, of time itself on this day, it seemed to her, had been altered, roughened and sharpened, and it occurred to her that she would be far safer as a tree among trees. Upright and unbending, her feet frozen and locked in soil, she would be solid and surely without confusion.

She looked up into the ponderosas and saw how long and bare their trunks were, how their riddled columns of rust-red bark soared up around her without branches for what she thought must be seven stories, eight or nine or