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

that, right? You only need a thousand hundred-kiloton warheads. That’s the threshold for nuclear winter. I’ve been trying to convince Oppie, tell him we have to act. He won’t listen. He never listened, and where did it get him? It got him blacklisted, basically. In life I mean. He wouldn’t take my advice because he was too busy being a bureaucrat, cozying up to the powers that be. And what good did it do him? They threw him out with the bathwater as soon as it suited them. At the end of the day all his kissing up to the establishment brought him nothing but tears. And now he has a second chance and he still doesn’t listen to me.

—Leo. You’re starting to sound hysterical, said Ben. —Tone it down. Take it slow.

He cleared cigarette butts and an empty bottle off the table as Szilard hovered over his shoulder.

—I’m not kidding. We’re on the brink. I’ve come up against this before. Remember? They have tools they’ve spent money on and they have to use them. Inertia. They have to and they want to. Do you get it? It’s not reason. It’s not strategy. It’s a fantasy of power. It’s what they want.

That a man, a group, or an institution should want to employ a nuclear weapon, should desire its employment is difficult for a thoughtful person to credit, thought Oppenheimer.

And yet weapons are full of desire, shaking with it. They are instruments for the expression of longing.

He said goodnight to Ann and left her drinking a glass of water at the bathroom sink, staggering into his bedroom.

At the window he thought of missiles streaking across the sky streamlined and ardent with purpose. He lit the evening’s last cigarette and studied its ember. In an instrument of mass destruction is distilled great artistry, a gorgeous swiftness and a fierce will.

What was it Leo had said, lecturing him on current events? The four largest defense contractors in America have spent forty million dollars lobbying over the past three years, he had said. In one year alone, he claimed, these businesses received $35 billion in Pentagon contracts.

Therefore weapons of mass destruction are big business, yes, thought Oppenheimer, and turned to look out his door to where Ann was padding along the corridor in sock feet, carrying her toothbrush and stumbling into her bedroom.

In fact, in monetary terms, the biggest business there is, Leo had said. Was that possible?

Leo made it seem like it was all about profit, greed and expansion. But it could not be.

The cynics are wrong, always wrong, thought Oppenheimer as he ground the cigarette into the outside wall beneath the window.

Because finally all the most obsessive work in the world is done not for profit but for pure devotion.

After extracting various promises from Szilard—no more illicit driving, no more auto theft, no more felony B&E—Ben went down the hall to the bedroom to find her standing on their bed, a chaos of clothes erupted over the bedroom floor.

—You’re drunk! he said with great insight.

It was rare. To drink enough to get drunk she had to be goaded like a teenager. Left to her own devices she had little interest in alcohol.

She was indifferent to the observation. Naked, wearing a mint-green facial mask, hair sticking out, she was making piles. Briefly he saw her as a child, forlorn and reckless. He thought: a child will look like her, a child will stamp like this on the mattress, teeter there overlooking the room as though the room, and only the room, is her kingdom.

—Szilard seem to think he’s here to stop the apocalypse, he told her, sitting on the edge of the mattress and picking up a black feather boa. He recognized it: it was left over from some old Halloween, but it had never been worn. He threaded it through his fingers and ran it over his bare forearms, felt the soft and tickling strands.

—Getting rid of the extra, she said. —Look at it! Give it to the Goodwill. Or the Big Brothers. I mean the Boys Club. You know.

—Yes, he said. —Good. Did you hear me?

—I wish I had some water! she said, jumping off the bed and stumbling over a tangle of shoes.

—Let me get you some water. You’ll feel better as soon as you drink it.

Head already throbbing despite the fact that she had dutifully drunk the water and swallowed three aspirin, her eyes aching and dry, she tiptoed into Oppenheimer’s room later, unable to sleep, to find him reading in a pair of Ben’s pajamas and smoking a cigarette, far soberer than before.

—Sorry, he said smoothly as she came in, and held the cigarette out the window.

—Dr. Szilard says you’re here to stop the apocalypse, she told him.

—Goodness gracious.

—He says World War Three is looming.

—Leo has always been a pain in the ass, said Oppenheimer. —He’s a professional panic artist. It’s a gift. Don’t let him upset you.

After she left the room Oppenheimer turned to the window to flick his cigarette butt outside. He followed the arc of its spark as it hit the ground in the darkness, and kept watching until the spark died.

Past the black pool of the garden he saw the stubbled gleam of the road, a single streetlight bathing its asphalt surface in texture. He was about to turn away from the window again when his eye caught a slight movement across the street. A man stood near a telephone pole, shapeless away from the light. Oppenheimer had the distinct sensation the man was watching the house. Possibly the man could even see him.

Quickly he reached over and flicked off the floor lamp. He stood motionless at the window in his dim room, waiting.

Finally the man turned and walked behind a screen of trees. Looking into the mass of branches with his hands braced on the window sill, where the fingers lightly trembled, Oppenheimer heard the faint slam of a car door and an engine firing.

Slowly disrobing after the car drove away he