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

he was not without powers of reason and not without rigor at times, he believed that the world outside them, with its judgments and categories, could do its worst. Let it exclude them both, let it bother and nag and harass them with its definitions and prohibitions. He would keep her close to him all the time, enclosing, a human shield.

But that didn’t mean he had to let himself get creamed by an oncoming tour bus. Szilard was idling the truck in the middle of an intersection, craning his neck to look past Ben to the right, and there, bearing down on them from the left, was a purple leviathan with tinted windows.

—Gas! screamed Ben like a six-year-old girl, and the truck lurched forward at the eleventh hour, the grinding whine of the tour bus’s horn Dopplering behind them.

He turned his head to watch it pass and saw a flash of yellow and purple and the ghostly faces of a legion of seniors peering vaguely through the darkness.

—OK, that’s it, he told Szilard when he had his breath back. —No way are you driving this thing without me. You’re completely incompetent.

—A learning curve! protested Szilard weakly.

He was sweating at the temples.

—Whatever. I’ll get out and walk around. You scoot over.

—There are too many vehicles, OK? said Szilard as Ben slid into the driver’s seat. —It’s crowded everywhere!

—Welcome to the twenty-first century.

—You may not know this, said Szilard, —but I was always a strong advocate of birth control.

The Navajo basket display in its solemn glass case had become a small Bermuda Triangle that Ann steered past warily. Sometimes it occurred to her that there was something there that pressed outward, a force field of warning. When she had to walk past the display case she allowed it a wide berth.

Finally she decided to take action. First of all, the baskets themselves had to go. Their hour had come round at last.

She had always found them incongruous anyway. She had nothing against a basket, certainly nothing against a Navajo basket-weaver, but the idea that here, in this neat box on the sterilized carpet, tribute could be politely paid via six cute decorative handmade reed containers to a people ruthlessly exterminated, robbed, enslaved, driven into the hot dust of their homeland and then roped off on a dry piece of ground slowly to agonize through generation after dirt-poor generation at the decay and death of all their parents and grandparents and ancestors had ever held dear did not please her.

The baskets had been put in the case by a docent at the Historical Society, a coral-lipsticked, bumbling Bettina whose gentle hands shook with palsy as she painstakingly placed the baskets on the glass shelves. It was impossible to refuse Bettina anything. Therein lay her power.

Resolute, turning back to the dangerous space, Ann opened the case and began to remove the baskets. Turning away with basket-heaped arms, she came face to face with Oppenheimer.

—I’m in an embarrassing spot, he said.

Yet she was the one laden chin-high.

—Follow me to the back, she said, and cocked her head. A basket threatened to topple, but she caught it with a well-timed shrug.

—There should be a licensing process, said Szilard eagerly as Ben drove. —To own and operate a vehicle you have to take a test. There are fees you pay, rules you have to observe. But to create and harbor life? Exploit it, subvert it, neglect it? No! To own and operate a human vehicle for at least sixteen years, do you need a permit for that? Reproduction: a sacred so-called human right. Why?

—You just can’t stop people from having children, said Ben.

—There are ways, said Szilard. —The Chinese!

—I don’t know that they’ve been a hundred percent successful, said Ben. —Plus there’s the personal freedom thing.

—In this country freedom’s just a euphemism for selfishness, said Szilard, bending forward and twisting around in his seat, struggling vainly with the seatbelt. —But listen: I really need to get where I’m going today.

—What can I say, said Ben. —You’re not qualified to operate this vehicle. You failed the test. You’re a danger to yourself and to others. My wife wouldn’t forgive me if her favorite dead scientist got himself killed his first day out.

—Don’t be ridiculous, said Szilard. —I’m not dead.

—I know that, said Ben. —Believe me. If you were you’d shut up.

—What if you went with me?

—I have to go to work, said Ben. —I have a job. Those of us who are not dead scientists have to have livelihoods.

—But after that.

—I’ll consider it, OK? Here, this is me. You got something to do until five?

—Can I use the bathroom before I go?

Oppenheimer had underestimated the cost of living. His hotel bill was far more substantial than he had anticipated and as a result he had exhausted his savings at the bank.

He had never, he explained to Ann, found himself in this position before. It was not, he assured her, habitual for him.

Not only were there financial problems of an urgent nature, but he was concerned about his colleague Fermi, who in his withdrawal and passivity appeared to Oppenheimer—merely a layman, of course, when it came to psychiatric diagnoses—to be exhibiting telltale signs of clinical depression. He slept almost all day, he spoke little, he did not have an appetite, and his responses to questions about his well-being were almost inaudible. Although Oppenheimer was no psychiatrist, needless to say, he admitted to Ann that he himself had suffered from depression for a brief time in his youth. Call it depression or call it existential anxiety: fortunately, a vacation in Italy had helped to alleviate the discomfort.

He and Fermi needed time to gather themselves; they were at loose ends. They wanted the leisure to consider their new lives without the pressure of hotel bills.

In short they were both, he confessed, seeking lodging.

Ben was planting lamb’s ear, touching a furred and silver leaf, when he remembered his mother. When she came back to him he felt a piercing sadness, and then