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

the rotating heel to a mailbox beside them, on the side of the alley. It was a freestanding mailbox painted in camouflage, balanced solitary on a wooden stake in a clump of dried grass beside the hard, rutted dirt of the road. It had been caved in on one side, probably by a euphoric youth with a baseball bat. She was only half-listening to Oppenheimer, at the same time bored and captivated. The mailbox had tried to camouflage itself, but had been blindsided anyway.

—he was suggesting there was some form of surplus energy that remained after the moment of death, which had the capacity to, as it were, ideate—

His fingers were long and thin, forefinger and middle finger stained yellow. It occurred to her that Szilard was right: they should be fingerprinted. Their fingerprints might still be on record; they had worked for the Army.

—use the term loosely to mean “simulate the experience of consciousness”—produce a pseudo-sensory perception. I’m thinking of Einstein’s discussion of Leucippus, for example. Early atomism. Death, for the purposes of this discussion, would be construed not as a change in the essence of an individual but as a rearrangement of particles in space—

—Listen, interrupted Ann in a tentative voice, thinking his head was too large for his body, his body like a stringy puppet with a pumpkin on top—this is—

—united by some cohesive force under a specific set of conditions. Since our final memories immediately coincide with the Trinity test, it’s been surmised that there was something in the event, something anomalous and unprecedented, that managed to duplicate us over time, essentially move a copy of us, as it were, while the originals remained, forward through—

—Time travel? This is like science fiction?

—I make no claims as to genre. My point is, there have been a number of suggestions, but none of them make much sense. And believe me, none of them have anything to do with you.

He paused

—Incidentally, you would be—?

—I work at the library downtown. A man who said he was Dr. Szilard came in a few days ago—

—Leo! I see.

—He asked my—another librarian a number of—

—Leo is the opposite of discreet. Always was. He’s a one-man assault on good taste.

—But I have to ask you, I mean—if you are who you claim to be—how did you—?

—One minute we were down in the desert near Socorro counting down to the test. I was very tense, there had been forecasts of inclement weather and I was worried about what you now call “fallout,” and worse, what if after everything we’d been through we had a complete bust on our hands anyway—I wasn’t sure it would work, I really wasn’t—and we were under T-30 seconds, under T-10, and I was holding on to a post, so nervous I could barely stand. Then it went off. And it was …

—What?

— … It was something no one should ever see. But seeing it, we were transformed instantly. Like the matter itself. I don’t expect you to understand that. My colleague has suggested that possibly we too became energy. But then again, here we are. We seem to be animals as always. We still have the same old bodies, and we sleep. And we breathe.

—When I passed out you carried me, she said vaguely, thinking of their real legs as she fell, their real feet.

—And then I was here. In a motel.

—A motel?

—Sadly yes. I recollect waking up in a bed with a lumpy mattress. There was a print on the wall of a naked child holding a nosegay. Crass.

—You’re saying you went from—

—First it was ’45—the early hours of July 16th, around 5:30 to be precise, and then here I was in the next millennium. Purportedly.

—So you just materialized in a motel, you’re telling me.

—Actually I was lucky it was a motel. Fermi fetched up in the pouring rain on a street just off the Plaza, lying in a gutter. He was almost run over.

—You understand it’s not—I mean it’s obviously not believable, you being who you say you are.

She tripped: a blunt, burnished tongue of metal sticking out of the packed dirt of the road. Recovered but felt itchy on her skin, the swell and tingle of awkward humiliation. It was not good to trip during a first meeting. She had already been nervous.

—I hope you won’t take offense, but as far as what you may or may not believe, I’m indifferent, frankly, said Oppenheimer, amused.

—You claim the world is unreal, you’re real but the whole world is unreal.

—There is a real world, of course. This just isn’t it.

—Right.

—Clearly the vision, presentation, landscape—whatever it is—is dystopic. I mean you don’t expect me to believe …

He gestured at a house they were passing, whose backyard, grass still brown from beneath winter ice, was full of rusted motorcycles and bright red and yellow-painted totem poles bearing the caricatured faces of movie stars. An old man with a gray beard sat on a stained toilet in the middle of them, watching a talk show on a small television on a stump.

— … You don’t propose that this is the world, I hope.

Then they emerged from the alley onto a bright, wide street, and Oppenheimer waved at a short man on the other side. She recognized him: Fermi.

—Anyway, a pleasure, said Oppenheimer lightly, and shook her hand in dismissal. —Excuse me.

She pulled up short and watched him walk away.

—She says Szilard is here too, Oppenheimer told Fermi, whom he was trying, as usual, to extract from a trance.

—Insult to injury, murmured Fermi.

It was early afternoon when they emerged. She had gone into the coffeehouse once for a glass of ice water and watched them with mugs at their elbows, bent toward each other in conversation. Above them hung a spider plant, brown at the points of its leaves. They were sitting at a window. She had gone outside again and perched on the curb for a while, her feet in the gutter. She could see Fermi’s shoulder and arm if she looked