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

he had given an alleged fat dead physicist the benefit of the doubt. The grace period was not indefinite, but he would wait to see what cataclysms were wrought by the joyride. Szilard was the worst driver he had ever personally observed.

And his father was the same as he had been for decades now. Yes, he picked up the phone; he went that far, but no further. The telephone was an instrument, he seemed to believe, seldom employed in the service of good.

Only monosyllables had emerged.

Finally there had been the announcement that the doors of his home were being flung wide open. To be precise it had come in the form of a question, but her wish was his command. He was stubbornly maintaining his laissez-faire policy. Possibly the situation would grow worse, exacerbated by the crowds, and she would give up the project sooner. But he wasn’t sure. She could be tenacious.

Still, there was a silver lining. Lynn, now sporting a turquoise visor above the glittering beetle hues of the caftan, stood in front of her tomahawk-wielding warrior for the first time and frowned.

—Do you think he gives off, like, a hostile vibe?

Fermi shuffled wherever he went like a sleepwalker but Oppenheimer was the one whose body was skeletal, whose eyes shone in a drawn, bony-cheeked face. He subsisted on cigarettes and cocktails. To Ann he seemed ethereal, on the brink of nothingness, which was also how he had been described by some who worked with him on the Manhattan Project: a skeleton animated by nicotine, a frail and fatless martyr to work and the war.

—Someone can sleep in here, she said. —It’s my study, but this chair here is actually a single futon—see? It folds out like this.

—Fu-tong, enunciated Fermi slowly.

—Why don’t you take this one, Enrico, said Oppenheimer. —I’ll bring in your bag.

—Fine, said Fermi, nodding.

He spoke from a point so far away that despite the solidity of his barrel chest and his arms and his legs the character that inhabited them seemed absent. He had assigned a clerical worker to walk around in his body for him; he had delegated authority.

—I’ll just leave the keys under the mat, and remember to put them back there when you go out, said Ann, smiling. —Do you have any plans?

—We’re still learning, said Oppenheimer. —I read all the time. There’s catching up. You don’t know. I have more books in my bag than clothing. And then there are the newspapers. I use them as cues: I take notes when I don’t understand an assumption. Then I look it up. The volume of information gives me headaches. And the concentration. There are passages I have to read ten times to separate what I understand from what I don’t. You have no idea how difficult it is to assimilate a world.

—It’s just lucky you’re geniuses, said Ann.

This fell flat. Oppenheimer nodded curtly.

—Do you have an aspirin or two?

—In the medicine cabinet. I’ll get you the bottle.

—And Enrico, said Oppenheimer, —you wanted to sleep?

—I want to sleep, mumbled Fermi, and turned away from them.

When she brought the pills and a glass of water Oppenheimer was sitting alone on the sofa staring into midair. She tipped the pills into his hand.

—Do you want to come to the library with me?

—It’s walking distance, correct?

—About ten minutes.

—Thanks, but I’ll come in later.

She left them in the house and walked out down the path, the sun warm on her shoulders. Parry’s penstemon were starting to bloom, pink. They stretched out skyward. And behind her she felt the scientists in the house, bees in a hive. They were living among her possessions, the objects of her own life. She liked having them there; she was invigorated by her new devotion. Latent beneath her satisfaction, her tendency always to shrink away, had evidently been a longing to have something to offer up. It might be seen as desperate from the outside, viewed coldly, she suspected. But from the inside it was ripe with the promise of transport.

People have a habit of seeking answers, she thought. They want to believe there are always answers: all problems have solutions, all wrongs a right. Everything works in twos. Some instincts of thought can never be suppressed, and so people refuse to give up on the reversibility of what has gone wrong.

There must be something they can do, a person may say.

She was no different, she saw this.

Because she was convinced there was a clue here, the key to a solution. So what if it was naïve of her. There had to be hope, and hope needed an object. And if she was wrong about the scientists nothing would have been lost or disrupted but routine.

Leaving the house she felt more than ever that she had something hidden there, a secret that glowed.

Three men, one tall, tubby and sagging, the other two short and muscle-bound, removed the bronze horse and Indian rider on an industrial dolly. Small mercies.

The afternoon wore on, Ben told himself as it did, hacking away at rocks, dislodging them from the soil.

Szilard did not return.

Ann came home again to find the house empty and quiet and the setting sun casting long doors of light across the clay tiles. She sat down on the sofa and smelled lavender. Through the window she watched the inching movement of cars along the street beyond the trees as they rounded a curve that led up the hill, and the sky above them was violet. The cars were the only intrusions and without them the repose was complete. She felt more rested than she had felt in weeks.

Wandering into her study she found Fermi’s jackets hung neatly on an old coat stand she never used. Papers were stacked on the desk in neat, symmetrical piles, and several library books on quantum physics and cosmology had been added to her book case. A small travel alarm clock sat on the edge of the desk, along with a copy of the Wall Street Journal. She