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

Ben had left his battered truck there the night before. So she walked down the long hill with him until they came to the mansion; she walked him over the bulldozed soil, feeling the texture of mounds of fresh dirt beneath her feet, past a polished Mercedes and a dusky violet Jaguar to where his truck was parked, its doors and windows splattered with mud.

He kissed her on the lips and the eyebrow, and she turned and went up the hill and away.

When he left the motel on his second morning, wearing his rumpled suit, porkpie hat and polished shoes, all of which he had found in a suitcase in the motel room closet, Oppenheimer stopped in the lobby first to ask for directions. A pimply clerk handed him a complimentary Santa Fe map on what appeared to be a paper placemat.

He folded the map carefully and placed it in his inside jacket pocket; then he asked the clerk how one traveled to Los Alamos on a limited budget.

As far as he knew all the money he had was the few bills in his wallet; he was in a city that had some of the attributes of Santa Fe and purported to be Santa Fe but barely resembled the mountain settlement of rounded adobe buildings and narrow, winding streets that he knew from half a century before. He was unsure of his situation and did not want to spend money on taxis.

The clerk apparently knew nothing about public buses. He said jokingly that if he stood beside the road with a sign that said LOS ALAMOS someone would eventually stop and drive him up the hill for free.

Oppenheimer nodded curtly. The clerk seemed surprised, but nonetheless, when asked, provided a piece of cardboard and a thick black marker.

Following his directions Oppenheimer made his way at a leisurely pace to the intersection of two freeways. Along the way he stopped in a drugstore, one far more extensive than any he had seen before. It offered, besides drugs and cosmetics, a vast selection of liquor, children’s toys, kitchenware, an entire wall of refrigerated sodas, and miscellaneous containers of all kinds. Many of these containers were made of a hardy and translucent plastic, and he picked them up, palpated and sniffed them curiously. Finally he bought a pair of sunglasses for $3.99. He had rarely worn sunglasses before but the vivid brilliance of the sky was hurting his eyes.

After only five minutes standing at the side of the road he was picked up by a man in a torn shirt driving what looked like a race car. He was relieved at the brevity of the wait and slid jauntily, albeit on unsteady legs into the low-slung, deep seat. He was immediately faced with a worn sticker on the dash that read TWISTED SISTER. This left him feeling nonplussed.

The car moved fast when it jolted forward, far faster than any he had driven himself. The momentum was dizzying.

The driver had tied his long hair back in a ponytail and slicked down the front with pomade. He was apparently of a deeply religious bent since his upper right arm bore an intricate tattoo of St. George slaying the dragon, not with a sword but with what looked like an oversize Tommy gun. It jetted a spray of crimson bullets into the dragon’s face. Oppenheimer gaped openly, first at the extensive ornamentation of his benefactor and then at the roads around them as they sped along, so slick, wide, and fast. The driver talked about Jesus for most of the drive, in highly laudatory terms, to which Oppenheimer, though distracted by the speed and the road, listened politely. Occasionally he interjected a comment on the Scriptures, which he had always read with great interest.

Just as they passed a sign that read LOS ALAMOS CITY LIMITS, however, the driver became agitated and began to talk also about righteousness, purity, homosexual Sodomites and finally those dirty Christ-killers the Jews.

At this point Oppenheimer asked in civil, if anxious tones to be let out, thanked the driver and began to wander through what was apparently the city of Los Alamos, though he did not recognize it.

The city was clearly no longer a closed community run by the Army, though the nuclear lab had still not thrown its doors open wide to the public. But more affecting than this administrative shift was the physical transformation. He had not admired the aesthetics of the cheap Army buildings thrown up in haste to house Project personnel—far from it—but what was this? He reviled what had taken their place.

The rutted mud streets had been replaced by wide, slick blacktop roads, clean and blank as an embalmer’s slab. Rows of squat, bland buildings were set far back from these all-powerful, all-seeing avenues on flat, square lots scraped free of vegetation, the land itself robbed of shape along the sweeping roads, flattened by what must have been legions of heavy earth-moving machines.

The mesa had been a place of elegant and windswept isolation, a place where it was possible to be alone and feel the presence of God. He had wanted it to revert to wilderness one day. When the soldiers, the engineers and the scientists had all left he had wanted it turned back to open space, abandoned ranches and yellow grass and sage scrub or a small, bucolic town. He had wanted it to be a place that history had moved through once fleetingly, with no trace of the past blowing through the high silver branches of its solitary trees.

But the wide streets were treeless now. In place of trees there were telephone poles.

He wandered through the town looking at the cheap modern buildings, shivering in his shirtsleeves. He always forgot it was colder up here than down in Santa Fe. Finally he found himself at a small building labeled BRADBURY SCIENCE MUSEUM, and shuffled past the reception desk and across the carpet in a daze. He forgot to pay the price of admission but