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

could not shake the conviction that the man intended to come back.

The man was looking for him.

What did our parents want for us? thought Ann, tossing and turning, still with alcohol in her blood, dizzy. The room did spin, she had to admit it. She sat up.

That was better so she stayed still for a moment, the back of her head against the hard headboard, eyes open to the dark to steady her. She tried to make herself solid.

Beside her Ben snored lightly.

Our parents and their institutions learned that one day the sun would die, she thought, becoming first a red giant, then a nebula, then a white dwarf and finally a black dwarf, cold and dark. They sent out feelers to the moon, to distant sun systems, these oddly dreaming governments. They sent their robot spaceships into the black between the stars. Our parents yearned to roam the universe.

Recently she had seen old footage of the moon landing. When the first men got to the moon they planted an American flag there, doing their duty, leaving it stiff and unmoving in the cratered earth of the moon with the black sky behind it. Then they danced in the different gravity, carefree, bobbing up and down in their giant suits, bouncing and singing songs without words, da-da-da, dum-dum-dum.

Beyond words was the quiet that could never be known.

II

WHY TALL PEOPLE FEAR DWARVES

1

What do we seek to feel?

Happy, they say, frequently.

Hiroshima was selected as a target for the atom bomb in the late spring of 1945, when trees were budding in Washington.

Outside several of the buildings where the decision was made grew Yoshino and weeping cherry trees. They had been planted by the thousands some thirty years before, a gift from the empire of Japan. They bore thick clusters of white flowers that were reflected in the glass of the windows as men talked to each other inside. The blossoms grew so close together that their stems were invisible.

At first Oppenheimer was consumed by the need to read about his own life. Ann brought him biographies and he would skim them with an amused expression, shaking his head now and then at an incorrect detail. —It’s not what they say that’s wrong, he told her, —it’s how they say it.

He would never forget how hard he had worked on the Project, how it had began to turn his hair gray and stretched the skin so taut on his bones that even he noticed that he was shedding his body. He remembered how for three years he had taken no vacation.

And still there was the cold fact that he had personally recommended, along with Fermi and other scientific luminaries, that the bomb be used on the Japanese. When he read that he was filled with a dread of himself. He let the dread lie dormant inside him and moved around it fluidly: but it was always there.

When Jeff the vegan heard that Ann was taking a leave of absence from work his jaw dropped, quick as a cartoon. Ann relished the moment: it was almost a gift.

—He’s just letting you do that? For how long?

—I don’t know yet, she said. —At this point it’s indefinite.

—And when you come back then bingo, there’s your job waiting for you?

—No.

At this Jeff patted his ruffled hair down, turned away and sorted paperclips. Clearly he wished to conceal his delight.

—Listen, he said after a minute, —this isn’t about the Coworker Feedback Form, is it?

—No Jeff. It isn’t.

—Good, OK good.

Later he revealed his own big news: he was giving up veganism due to protein deficiency and creeping anemia. He would now take up the far lesser task of lacto-ovo-vegetarianism.

—The world is just too hard a place to be perfect in, know what I mean? I mean it’s the world that’s wrong, not me.

Leaving work at the end of the afternoon Ann strolled across the plaza to a restaurant with a wide balcony on the second floor. It was Friday and groups were laughing raucously at tables. She felt pleasantly untethered, drifting up the stairs and onto the balcony, nodding at the hostess, sitting in the shade beside a cool deep adobe wall and sipping lemon water from a frosted glass. A mariachi band was playing in the depths of the restaurant. It was the music of nostalgia, she thought, pure sentiment with words only for placeholders—as though that was the only function of music, to convey either nostalgia or longing, the same emotion in different tenses.

Inside, over the bar, a television blared. On CNN a newscaster told of news from space: a planet had been discovered, the oldest ever known. Far beyond the solar system, it was three times the age of earth.

Looking out across the street, over treetops, she studied the sky and felt she was studying what was possible: wide, empty and spectacular.

The ground is where history has happened, she thought, and when the future is mentioned many eyes are cast upward. Far above in space there are numerous phantom worlds, millions of light-years away. Their high meadows lie untouched, the white peaks of their green mountains blinding in the sun. Blowing grasses weave the shapes of wind across the wide plains and rivers run clear as glass.

The planets there are home again, she thought: the land before we came. What we have done wrong can be forgiven, for there is the earth reborn, again and again forever.

When he was in a good mood Ben convinced himself the scientists were growing on him. Even if they were patients escaped from a psych ward, the fact that they had extensive training in physics was clear. Either that or they had extensive training as actors, because their language was convincing.

Szilard was annoying but offered comic relief to compensate for his homeliness, like a flat-faced dog. To himself he constituted the final authority on all matters. But despite this there was a unflagging courage in his persistence. He neither wished