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

—Why we’re here, said Szilard impatiently, and came around the hood to stand uncomfortably close. Ben could see donut sugar lining his upper lip. —The three of us.

—Because my wife had a dream, said Ben. —And you are a freeloader.

—What I’m telling you, said Szilard, —is that it’s coming to a head. History does have an end: ask the dinosaurs and the Carolina parakeet and the giant sloths. The drums of the very last wars are beating.

Oppenheimer sat beside Ann on the side of the fountain, where she always sat at night. He crossed his legs and she noticed his bony knees, and the knees brought her own dream back to her again. He had been bent then, with grains of sand on his skin. The skin was scraped. When the mushroom cloud rose he had skinned his knees.

She had always known there was something disturbing in a skinned knee, something wrong, like chalk screeching on a blackboard. Where that enormous thing had been, that blossoming and roiling pillar and cloud in the sky, also nearby there was something as minor as a skinned knee. Too near each other were the pinprick and the vast desecration. They were not separate enough.

She recalled that Oppenheimer, in life, had been concerned that the scientists working on the Manhattan Project should not be compartmentalized. He had been opposed to compartmentalization. Groves tried to insist upon it, to some degree at least. Groves did not want the right hand to know what the left hand was doing, unless the hands in question were both his own. Groves got his way in many things, but in this he had not been completely successful. Compartmentalization meant that some of the scientists, technicians, and engineers knew what the project was doing overall, and some knew very little.

She herself wanted things to be separate, she wanted categories, she wanted some spaces reserved for particular things and other spaces prohibited to them. She did not like how the scraped knee, the texture of the torn pants that had opened up to show her the knee in her dream, and the mushroom cloud could be so close. They were of different orders.

But this was a weakness of hers. She should be comforted instead of displaced: because if small things were vast, then vast were also small, and ceased to be fearsome.

—Of course, said Oppenheimer, —we may have been the beginning of that. It doesn’t escape me. The beginning of the end. When I accuse you, I’m accusing myself too. It doesn’t escape me, what we left to all of you.

—What are you—?

—Forget it.

They were quiet. She took one of his cigarettes.

—It’s a nice garden, said Oppenheimer, lighting the cigarette for her.

—Thank you.

Dreams, she thought, both of us. Why we talk about dreams, think of them as anchors: because everything in a dream must be true. That it cannot be explained only makes it more true. More not less. How it vibrates near the edge of the mind, or forever buried.

—I saw a picture of my son today.

—Peter?

—Peter. Yes. He’s alive. He’s older than I am now. I tell you what …

He leaned back, holding the cigarette up to his lips and closing his eyes, face upturned. The light of the moon made his face metallic: if skin could be made of metal, his was. It was silver, and his eyes hollows there.

—What.

—My children were never happy.

—Oh, now …

—They grew old and one of them has already died. My daughter killed herself. She was unhappy and she took her own life.

—I read that. I’m sorry.

She could not see his face anymore. Behind him in the dark of the garden crickets chirped and made the darkness larger.

—When I last saw my son he was an infant, did you know that? He was born during the war. In 1941, in Berkeley.

—It must be—

—But we discussed it, Fermi and I. We can’t be in touch with our families, the ones who are here now but who we left behind when we died. We wanted to. Believe me. It was the first thing we thought of when we understood where we were. But clearly, it would be a disaster.

—That’s probably very—

—How does a man have happy children? Is there a way to be sure?

—I don’t know. I don’t think so.

He nodded slowly. She noticed his Adam’s apple.

—Because I did love them, even if I was preoccupied. So that’s not it. It wasn’t the absence of love.

—I’m sure it wasn’t.

—And I hardly saw Kitty at all those last weeks. We didn’t have time. I’m supposed to believe she’s dead now? Overnight?

—But she had a happy life with you. It went on for decades. After the war it went on for twenty-two years, until the day you died.

—She might not have been robbed, but I was.

—I know.

—That wasn’t me. I am Oppenheimer.

—But it might have been.

—It was not! I am here.

—I know that. But maybe you were there then, and you’re here now. Maybe you were both.

—Sometimes I think the books are just books, the films and the microfiche are nothing but objects. It might as well be a stage. It’s just props, all of it, everything around us. Around me. Even you. It’s elaborate, certainly, well-articulated, but in the end the facts are just documents. They’re not the people of my life. How am I supposed to believe them? It’s a production. It’s not real. All the history you put in front of me—it could be a joke!

—I know.

—But then I feel it. I smell things, the sage, the creosote in the rain, and I remember. And I can no longer deny that this is the world I knew. The world I knew grown old.

The light from the open garage made the driveway visible, the cactus along its adobe wall and the weeds growing through cracks in the stubbly gray pavement. From the garage itself she could hear the faint drone of Ben’s voice.

—It happened so quickly, whispered Oppenheimer.

She let