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

woman driver. They are less competent.

—Uh huh, she said.

—Present company excluded of course. You are a credit to your sex.

Suppressing annoyance was hard work, and draining.

—Unlike you.

—What?

—Forget it.

They drove on in silence, Szilard oblivious, she was sure. He was opaque as well as irritating. He never told her anything.

After a while he turned to her and spoke again.

—Did you get the donuts?

Fermi had gone to sleep by the time they got home but Oppenheimer was still awake.

—Put yourself in our shoes, he said, when she and Szilard came into the kitchen. She flicked the light on as Szilard, donut box in hand, trudged to the refrigerator and extracted a Coke.

Oppenheimer had been sitting in the dark. There was a tumbler of whiskey on the table in front of him and the kitchen was full of cigarette smoke.

—OK, said Ann. —Just let me get myself a beer.

She moved around him to open the window.

—It’s a world you recognize in pieces. It’s worse than a different world, it’s the same world turned alien.

—I can imagine, said Ann gently.

He was far from sober.

—I doubt it, said Oppenheimer, shaking his head. —You can’t imagine something you’ve never known. It’s beyond you.

—I believe you, said Ann. —I do.

The phone rang, but she ignored it.

—Like finding limbs from your own body strewn across the landscape. Do you know what this desert used to look like? Of course you don’t. You never saw what I saw. It’s not there anymore. It’s all gone.

—What are you talking about? asked Szilard.

—A man who’s blind from birth can’t know color. He doesn’t know there is color. He hears “the sky is blue” and it’s a foreign language to him. It means nothing. Not only blue but the sky.

—Actually, that’s not strictly—

—It’s a metaphor, Leo.

—Windbag, said Szilard mildly.

—Please, said Ann.

Szilard shrugged, turned away, fished around in the donut box and extracted a double chocolate, which he gobbled with zeal.

—Well, I can’t speak for him, said Oppenheimer doggedly, —but for Fermi and me. The two of us have spoken and for us I can speak. I can speak—

—Then speak already, said Szilard as he chewed.

—In the dream, here’s the thing, went on Oppenheimer, slurring his words. —You’re walking along, you see something—under a bush, under a hedge—you can’t tell what it is until the last second. Leaning down close. And then: it’s your leg. Your own leg. Long-lost leg! Lying under a bush!

He raised his glass as though for a toast.

Ann was glad she was seeing him drunk. Usually he spoke with a formality that sounded scripted, though this habit had been disintegrating since his arrival under a constant barrage of new slang. When a teen spoke obscenities in his earshot he would often say: What a surprising expostulation!

Then Ben was at the kitchen door. There was trajectory to him, like a thrown ball. —I need to talk to you now, he said to Szilard through gritted teeth.

—It was not my fault, I assure you, said Szilard, his mouth smeared with sticky brown. —It was an accident caused by another driver!

—Right. And did you get his insurance information?

—She left the scene in a hurry, said Szilard. —She was upset.

—She was upset? Come to the garage, Szilard. Come let me show you what you did to my truck. You could have killed somebody! Do you realize that?

—That’s ridiculous, protested Szilard. —I’m a very good driver.

—What I mean is, just a disembodied leg lying under the bush, mumbled Oppenheimer, staring at the ceiling light fixture. —And it’s not that you’re even missing a leg. The leg is a reminder.

—So what does it remind you of? asked Ann.

—Oh, said Oppenheimer, and paused for a long moment, apparently lost. —… I guess … legs?

—Father of the A-bomb, said Szilard. —Witness the genius.

—Come on, Szilard, said Ben. —Garage, now. I mean it.

—I regret the accident, certainly, said Szilard, shuffling off toward Ben, who shunted him out the door ahead of him. His voice was plaintive, trailing off. —But the damage is minor, and it had nothing to do with me.

—I remember having dreams like that in the other life, went on Oppenheimer softly. —The first life, I mean.

Ann twisted the cap off her beer and sat down across from him.

—You’re walking in a dark forest where you’ve never been before, said Oppenheimer, —I mean you’ve never seen these trees, a type of tree you’ve never seen before with leaves like moths, fans or moths … how they hardly move at all, just with their wings trembling. …

He seemed to be drifting off.

—Are you with me, Dr. Oppenheimer?

—And the monarch butterflies on the coast, clusters of them on the branches, by the thousands. Have you ever seen that? I saw them in California, when I was living there. We would drive up the coast. It was in Santa Cruz, I think. They look brown then, not orange, brown like paper bags. All hanging there waiting for, I don’t know. The end of winter.

—You were saying you were walking? In the forest?

—The world I knew was beautiful, Ann.

—I’m sure it was.

—I’ve heard people say there was no golden age. But that’s just an excuse. It relieves them of responsibility. The fact is: things fall apart. Yeats! Newton! Entropy increases. The world was more golden when it was young. Poor sad world.

She got up for another beer.

—We drive past parking lots and fast-food joints and then I see an old house, say an old adobe that’s always been there. Back when I knew it there was a grove of trees there. I remember cottonwoods and willows. There were other adobes on the lot back then, in the shade of the trees with stone pathways between them. All the casitas were built by the same family, the Reynosos. They had beautiful girls. Girls with deep brown eyes were the children of that family. They used to ride horses.

He nodded, staring into the distance.

She took a bottle from the refrigerator and as she turned back to him he leaned forward eagerly.

—Cars have