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

of man, his bloodlust and his will to power, most often trump his capacity for logic and empathy.

In fact Szilard was oblivious in the physical world, in matters of the body. It has been documented that on one occasion, as a guest in someone’s house, he slept poorly for three nights, complaining every morning about his uncomfortable mattress. It was finally discovered, in an investigation that followed his third complaint, that before his arrival, after the mattress had been lifted off the bed to be turned and aired out, it had never been replaced.

He had been sleeping on the bare springs.

Ben was exhausted now and then with an exhaustion he had barely known since his childhood. He stopped driving Szilard anywhere except when taxis were the only alternative and Szilard threatened to get the cash for the taxis from Ann.

For his part Szilard restrained himself. He made the threat only when he was serious about getting somewhere, and it became shorthand for “You will drive me.”

For Oppenheimer reading had turned into a fierce and ugly act. He was afraid of it, but he had to persist.

At the time it was bombed Hiroshima also had a prisoner-of-war camp full of Allied soldiers. One of them, from a gentle town surrounded by cornfields in the American midwest, was a thin man grown far thinner on his prisoner-of-war diet. He was given to picking at his cuticles and had worked unsuccessfully to conquer a stutter.

Only a few short years before he had been a strapping baby. When he was seven months old and twenty-six inches long by the measuring tape his mother had hurt her back lifting him, and in the ensuing years her back had never fully recovered; but she loved him so much, his small beaming face, that she quickly forgot how her back had been injured and never thought of it again.

Still, after her back was injured she had switched to a carriage instead of carrying him everywhere. When she pushed him down the street in his carriage he had lain in the carriage and beamed, watching the treetops pass overhead like weather.

Ann had a savings account and a small package of funds from her parents’ life insurance company. In the last days, after they fell from middle-class comfort into the tight and watchful penury of a small pension plan, she and Ben had helped to support them. Her father had been mildly disgraced: an employee under his supervision had embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years, siphoning it slowly, and because he did not notice the accounting discrepancies he was held responsible in the end and forced into early retirement.

He tended not to stand straight after that, even though it was commonly known that lack of vigilance, not criminality, had been responsible for his downfall. There were sad testimonials from his coworkers and even cards from a corporate vice president or two, signaling the appropriate level of patronizing regret. Her mother had actually been sent a funeral wreath by her father’s secretary, no doubt a mistake at the florist’s.

Ann had the modest life insurance payment that had come to her after the accident and a few thousand dollars in her old savings account from before her marriage. There was a lawsuit pending against the trucking company, but she seldom thought about it and had no hopes of a return.

She brought the subject up with him when they were in bed, when he was happy and drowsy and curled around her, his warm breath on the back of her neck. She had not planned it, but the word came and she saw no reason to hold it back. —Hiroshima, she said quietly as people will, evoking in one word, one place name, the unspeakable, a vague but jarring memory of guilt, something like an original sin.

Why is this happening to me, was what ran through Ben’s mind after she told him where she wanted to spend her long-earned vacation. But he suppressed the complaint.

Oppenheimer confided in Ben that he had considered taking Fermi to a psychologist. But as long as he was destitute and unsure of himself he did not wish to approach any authority or institution. Authorities would do nothing but judge them, exactly as the police, he said, had briefly—though apparently with supreme indifference—judged Szilard.

They were watching television because Szilard had developed an interest in reality shows, which he claimed reminded him of the circus freak shows of yesteryear. They took the place, said Szilard, of the Siamese twins and deformed fetuses in pickle jars that had long been outlawed.

Oppenheimer watched distractedly, smoking out the window, drinking bourbon and making conversation with Ben. He and Ben had agreed to disagree on the subject of identity. Oppenheimer did not blame him at all for his skepticism. It was exactly, he said, how he would have felt if their positions were reversed.

—The one thing a shrink could do, said Ben, —would be to convince you you’re not who you claim to be. Your delusions of grandeur are pretty common. I mean in hospitals where they treat psychiatric problems there are literally hundreds of Napoleons, Kennedys, Pope John Pauls, and Mahatma Gandhis.

—Believe me, said Oppenheimer, —I’d rather be one of them.

Ann slipped into the car and slung her plastic bag of groceries into the passenger seat. In an overpriced gourmet food store she had run into a woman named Melanie who had once been a friend and was now an awkward acquaintance. The friendship had always been uncertain and finally Melanie stopped calling and Ann did not call her either. They had little to say each other.

Beside the deli counter Melanie had smiled palely at her, clearly bored even as she asked with forced interest: —Hey Ann, so how have you been?

Ann had wanted to answer: —You don’t have to fake it for me. Just grab your pasta salad and run.

But instead she had answered with equal politeness. It occurred to her that Melanie’s life was sealed off from