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

—They would have wanted you to give your money away? To hand over your meager savings to men you just met?

—No, you know what I—

—Men who seem to be in the throes of a grandiose schizoid delusion? That’s what your parents would have wanted for you?

—They would have wanted me to do something …

She stopped, throat constricting, and swallowed so she could go on.

—… something I wanted to do.

The scientists were hers, the only cause she had ever held dear. Causes had always kept her at a distance: they cried out for attention but left her numb. There were just too many of them, mostly hopeless.

But now there was only one.

As for Nagasaki, bombed three days after Hiroshima, leaflets were certainly dropped warning of an atomic bomb and exhorting those below to flee the city.

The timing of this is occasionally debated, however. Some Japanese survivors of the bomb maintain that the leaflets were dropped by American planes only after the attack, for the sake of posterity.

But there is no debate as to whether the leaflets were helpful to the citizens of Nagasaki. Japan was a poor country then; the war had seen strict rationing, and toilet paper was scarce.

He felt guilty, pulled toward her and pushed away at once, worry nagging. But it was true: her parents would have approved. She had always been too retiring for them. They had raised her with high hopes of social status and she had turned out to be a librarian.

To them it was almost, she had said to him once, as though she had become a nun. A librarian was a nun without God. A librarian could have God, of course, she might or might not have God, but God was not mandatory.

—I’m sorry, said Ben, putting his arms around her. —I didn’t mean to upset you.

—I know, she said.

—It’s just, I thought you were putting that money away for the kid, he said softly. —Remember? College tuition.

—But there’s still time for that, she said, —right? We don’t have to live like we’re already middle-aged. We’re still young. And for some reason I know, for some reason I’m sure about this. I have to stay with them.

Japan was the first destination on Szilard’s list but only the second on Oppenheimer’s. Oppenheimer had an even more pressing appointment. With Szilard’s collusion he prepared quietly, buying fake driver’s licenses and University of New Mexico faculty IDs and arranging to join a chartered bus tour. The bus would be full of civil servants from a federal agency that regulated the nuclear power industry. They had scheduled a private tour of a national historical site.

Because of their status as civil servants in the industry these bureaucrats had special privileges. They would be attending a conference in Albuquerque, and on the side, in their spare time, wished to be educated in history.

He wanted to go back to the place from which he and Fermi had first disappeared. It was not easy because the Trinity Site, on the White Sands Missile Range near the strip-mall, fast-food town of Socorro, was open to the general public for only two days a year.

After all the primary function of a missile range is not, it has to be admitted, the entertainment of tourists.

—No, I don’t need to go, Ben told her when she asked if he wanted to go with them. —From what I hear there’s not a lot to see, just some bare earth and busloads of fat people snapping their cameras. I have to work.

It was Oppenheimer who chose the code name Trinity for the first-ever atomic blast. When he was asked about this baptism, according to the history books, he said: “This code name didn’t mean anything. It was just something suggested to me by John Donne’s sonnets, which I happened to be reading at the time.”

Apparently there were two poems he had in mind by Donne, one of which went As West and East are one, So death doth touch the Resurrection.

The other, a devotional poem, went Batter my heart, three person’d God.

At the White Sands Missile Range they parked the car near a guarded entrance called Stallion Gate. It was here that they would meet the Army personnel who would lead them on their tour.

—It had a different name back then, said Oppenheimer as he got out of the passenger seat and ground his cigarette out on the roadbed with the toe of his shoe. —Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range. Back then we called things by their names. Remember, Enrico? Stimson was the secretary of war; now they have a secretary of defense.

—Apparently these days the government likes to pretend that all war is defense, said Szilard.

Fermi nodded vaguely.

—It’s what I said would happen, said Oppenheimer. —I read it just yesterday in one of my lectures. The government has to lie because it’s afraid of the people.

—Doublespeak, said Szilard. —You can’t believe a word they say.

—Democracy has become very crude, said Fermi prissily. —Have you seen the magazines for women?

—And the popular music, said Oppenheimer.

—Eminem, said Szilard. —He’s good. But I got an old album by Ice Cube that I like better.

—Ice Cube? asked Oppenheimer.

—“Your daughter was a nice girl, now she’s a slut,” said Szilard.

—Excuse me? said Fermi.

—Ice Cube. The rapper. It’s a song. “A queen treatin’ niggaz just like King Tut. Gobblin’ up nuts, sorta like a hummingbird.”

Fermi was confused. —A hummingbird is not a seedeater.

—People are very crude when they want to sell things, said Oppenheimer. —But the government is as evasive as the Japs.

—Japanese! said Szilard. —You racist.

—I’m sorry. The Japanese. I bear them no ill will. Old habits die hard, you know that. Not everyone picks up the jargon as quickly as you do, Leo. My point is, the government talks in words that make horror trivial. But the people talk in words that make the trivial horrible.

—Well, said Ann. —Here comes the government now.

Government turned out to be a friendly woman with a nametag that