by Lydia Millet
Finally she called Ben and left a message on his cell phone, asking him to meet her when he got off work. Then she got into the car again and drove to an expensive restaurant, frequented by tourists but owned by a friend.
It was late afternoon and the cocktail-hour crowds were beginning to wander in. She warmed herself by the fire and then sat on a stool at the slick, varnished bar and ordered a glass of wine. John, the owner’s son, was behind the bar; she told him what had happened. He took her hand in both of his, which she did not mind although she was not overly fond of him. But then he made a suggestion about her chakras and she was required to be tolerant. Her hand itched and felt like a prisoner.
When he moved away to pour drinks she sipped her wine slowly, red this time. She could feel the spreading heat from the hearth, and the rain steady overhead.
She was about to ask for a second glass when she noticed a man sitting a few stools down. He wore a plaid shirt and jeans, and a belt with an ungainly silver buckle. The clothes hung on him; his body was gaunt. He was in his early forties, she guessed, with a prominent, aquiline nose, close-cropped dark hair and large, light eyes under his thick eyebrows.
He had a martini at his elbow, and was smoking a cigarette from a pack of Lucky Strikes beside him on the counter as he paged through a large-format, square paperback book. The book seemed to her to be compelling him almost unnaturally, so rapt was he as he read it, so hunched over and beadily focused. When he glanced up he reminded her of a gangly baby bird—an ostrich maybe, though he was elegant, not absurd.
—May I trouble you, John, he said, and fingered the stem of his martini glass.
—Sure.
He had a nervous, angular charm. His clothes were shabby and the colors on the shirt struck her as slightly garish but despite this he seemed genteel, with an air of easy privilege. She noticed the title of the book he was reading: Oppenheimer.
But in fact it was not until later that she thought consciously of the name in her dream and connected the book with the dream. At the moment of seeing the title, Oppenheimer, she felt only a faint flick of recognition.
As he turned back to his book his eyes moved past her face and she looked away quickly. But he paid no attention to her; he had caught sight of someone coming in the door and was beckoning him over. It was a compact, balding man who brushed past her in his wet trench coat, sat down on the bar stool next to the martini drinker and began to speak rapidly in Italian.
The first man listened closely, nodding, until the Italian calmed down and paused in his speech, looking around for the bartender. Then he said to him, in English —I’m glad to see you’re feeling better, anyway.
They were quiet, and then the first man went on —For the rest, I don’t know, Enrico. I have no idea. If I were a strictly religious man …
He paused again, and the two of them sat staring at the mirror behind the bar. She saw their faces between the shelved bottles, somehow both animated and stunned. The Italian was elfin with a long nose, and his hairline receded almost to the crown of his head.
— … I would think it was punishment.
—Ridiculous, said the Italian. He had a heavy accent.
—But that’s when your recollection ends too, isn’t it. After the flash.
—Yes.
—And this, he lifted the book. —Have you read your own biographies?
—I just read a book by my wife.
—Laura wrote a book?
—Several. One of them was about me.
—And what did it say?
—The bomb ended the war, et cetera. It was published in the year that I died. You know, if I believe these books, I only had nine more years to live?
—It’s like a bad joke, isn’t it.
—You lived until ’67. But the government turned against you.
—The ungrateful bastards.
—Let us get out of here, yes? I need a good walk. And I always hated that smell.
He gestured toward the ashtray.
—Well, I will concede, said the first man slowly, —these cigarettes taste terrible.
There was a pause. The Italian relaxed briefly and smiled.
—You shouldn’t smoke anyway, he said. —I read it in a book: you’re going to come down with cancer.
They laughed.
The first man stubbed out his cigarette, put some money down on the bar, tucked his book under his arm and clapped the Italian on the shoulder.
—Whatever it is, is it just us, or are there others here too? he asked, and they moved past her and out the door, into the rain.
When they were gone she turned to John, who picked up the first man’s ashtray and began to wipe it.
—Did you hear what they were saying? she asked him, incredulous.
—Nah, game’s on.
—Do you—did you know those men?
—Nah, not really, he said. His eyes were small. His puffy lips and cheeks gleamed and from under his pink Oxford cloth collar wafted a detergent smell, Tide, thought Ann, or Era, stiff, strong and white. —The tall one started coming in here last Friday and he’s been here every single day since. Pain in the ass. Guy smokes like a chimney. I told him it was against the law to light up in the restaurant and he laughed his head off! Thought I was joking. Then he offered to pay the fine himself if we got one. He asked me how much it would be and said he was good for it. Finally I had to pull out this thing for him. Afraid he was going to ash on the mahogany. The guy’s Eurotrash or something.
—I don’t think so, said Ann. —I mean he speaks English with an American—
John’s girlfriend, sitting two stools down with a beer in hand, leaned over and confided in her.
—That guy had a completely dark aura. I swear. It was practically a smog.
—Oh.
—Browns, grays, blacks. The only positive color I saw was yellow, light yellow. The color of intellect.
—Wasn’t he reading—
—But the browns are very murky: selfishness. And the gray symbolizes, like, narrow focus. He’s cold and he’s got this kind of like, real anal retentive thing going on, but like he tries to hide it? And like the black in the aura’s just the absence of color. Probably depression. He’s totally depressed and under this big like weight of something. He’s got work to do. Healing work.
—The poor man.
—There’s a lot of negativity there.
—Oh. You know I should probably—
—Whereas your aura is very positive. I see a lot of pale blue, and even some gold. That’s so special! Gold is rare.
—Oh, she said again.
But her voice trailed off. She was looking out the window past John and his girlfriend, wishing the men had not disappeared so soon. She was gazing at where they were not.
Already then, she was wishing she had followed them.
Ben cherished arrangement over lighting. A simple rectangle containing small, neat squares, distinct from each other by texture or color, could actually evoke in him a sense of sudden and overwhelming fullness.
Enclosed and separated fields that lay beside each other perfectly, shapes that fit together, these were something at once unbearably contained and triumphantly uncontainable. He often thought he might have found another outlet for the expression of this had he been born wealthy, or even middle-class, to a family with bourgeois aspirations. But he had always had to work, even before it was legal. When he was ten he had apprenticed to a carpenter and by the time he was twelve he was already working on custom furniture, sculpting and sanding the details on desks and tables. The work was hard for his thin, small hands, and at night the fingers, the wrists and even the elbows would ache. Several cuts with saws had reshaped the ends of his fingers, giving the pads a rippled texture, deep lengthwise rifts even thirty years later.
So he was still young when he discovered shapes and the satisfaction to be gained from them. Arrangement in a confined space, say a garden bordered by road, brought with it a sad thrill, because as so
on as he saw the beginning of the perfect he could always also see the end. The perfect was never even perfect at all, but invaded by its opposite.
Szilard embarked on the long journey west and south by bus. He had wished to take the train, but was shocked to discover it too expensive. Though far from sentimental and even further from emotional, he had always trusted his instincts. In the midwest he was alone, and though alone did not bother him it had strategic limitations.
He knew beyond a shadow of a doubt that he would find others where he was going.
Leaving the bar, wondering as she walked whether she would see the two men again, it occurred to Ann that an idea could not always be packaged in words, but that did not make it less true. What puzzled her was how ideas that vibrate with life, with beauty and with truth, could change into weapons when they became knowledge. Ideas may be sun on the water, but then as knowledge they turn fierce, as bright or brighter than a thousand suns.
A young man in the 1920s, Enrico Fermi went through a phase of wearing knickerbockers and a Tyrolean jacket. He would later exchange these for what his wife Laura called a “too-tight suit.” He was short-legged, stocky and athletic, and on hikes in the Italian mountains he always insisted on being first: faster, stronger, more capable than others. He was far more arrogant about his physical prowess than his aptitude for physics. Laura, who would write his biography shortly before his death, was Jewish. They left Rome four months after Mussolini published the Manifesto della Razza, which stated “Jews do not belong to the Italian race.”
Fermi died of cancer in 1954.
The man with the gun had not been homeless, from some far elsewhere or without friends or relatives, as Ann had first assumed. He was the scion of a well-known Albuquerque family with political connections. His uncle had once run for mayor, the newspaper said, and lost by only a few hundred votes.
His mother, Mrs. Lopez, came to see Ann at work. She was a white-haired apple doll with rosy cheeks and bright, darting eyes. She asked if they could talk privately, so Ann asked a volunteer to take her place at the counter and led Mrs. Lopez back past the children’s books section and the square of new carpet. They drank a cup of lemon tea in the small staff kitchen, standing beside the sink. Mrs. Lopez did not wish to sit down.
Mrs. Lopez apologized for her son, whose name was Eugene, and for his gun. She wanted Ann to know that Eugene had been mentally ill, in fact he had suffered from schizophrenia.
—But he was also a warm person, a warm and wonderful person, his real self.
—I’m sure he was, said Ann softly.
Ann bore Eugene no ill will. Now and then she imagined the details he might have left behind, a dripping tap, refrigerator door standing open, plant drying out on a windowsill and dropping its leaves. She felt herself pulled toward these details, as though she herself was expected to correct them, needed in the spaces he had vacated by accident. It was always only later, apart from the details, that she remembered the Heckler & Koch.
But Mrs. Lopez was not content with the assurance. She told Ann that when Eugene was eight he had built a cardboard rocket covered in tinfoil to fly his gerbil to the moon. The gerbil’s name was Burpy.
Eugene had wanted Burpy to see Mars, Jupiter, and even Neptune, she reported sadly. She was lost in memory.
—Even Neptune, she repeated.
Burpy would conquer the skies, Mrs. Lopez told her. But reason had prevailed, she went on, and the gerbil had not been launched.
She told Ann that when Eugene had first become delusional and violent and one time lifted a knife to her throat, she often recalled the tender affection he had shown to animals as a small child. She remembered the gentleness of his hands as he picked up Burpy the gerbil and petted him softly, and how protective he had been of Burpy when other children handled the gerbil roughly.
She asked for more hot water for her tea, and Ann poured it into the mug from a spigot on the coffeemaker.
—When he was seven, said Mrs. Lopez, —he liked to design zoos. He would draw these zoos on newsprint, with drawings of all the animals that he wanted to put in them. He papered the walls of his bedroom with them! His zoo had something he called the Giant Animals Section.
The Giant Animals Section had featured dinosaurs, mammoths and, somewhat inexplicably, a toucan. Ann remembered the parrot on his shirt, and where the tail feathers pointed. Birds, brightly colored birds.
Then Mrs. Lopez asked what he had said, that is, what his last words had been.
—All he said was that the old ones were coming, said Ann.
Mrs. Lopez nodded, resigned, as though the old ones had been coming for a long, long time, as though she was so tired that she welcomed them.
If some good ideas are loved too much, Ann was thinking as she got up to show Mrs. Lopez out, if they are loved too much and therefore known too well, if they are followed to their end, they can cease to be good. They can be too much of a good thing.
You can’t treat an idea like a fact, she decided. You have to treat it like music.
As she was leaving Mrs. Lopez told Ann that she wanted her to attend the memorial service and hear the eulogies.
—Because, said Mrs. Lopez to Ann, and took her hand, —you were the last one to spend time with him. I don’t want you to remember him that way.
Ann said yes, she would go, and Mrs. Lopez smiled at her and bustled out, blowing her nose. Watching her negotiate the doors, the doors of this building of books where her son had died, Ann thought: We have sought the wrong knowledge all these years. We have believed that knowledge should be accumulated, taking the form of many separate pieces. But this is not the knowledge that we need most. To be able to separate things was a skill that allowed us to survive when we were being hunted but not later, now, when all the animals that hunted us are dead.
The Sunday after the shooting Ben went with her to the funeral in Albuquerque. They entered quietly as the service was beginning and sat immediately inside the church doors. Ann did not think she should pretend to have known the deceased. She wanted to be mouselike, polite and present but not intrusive.
There was no coffin, only a photograph of Eugene as a young man, framed and propped upright between heavy, large wreaths and tall sprays of daffodils and irises. His hair had been short and curly when the picture was taken, and his smile easy. He wore a suit and tie that clearly dated from the 1970s. Ann wondered if his mother had asked him to pose for the photograph, and if she had thought back then: One day I may need this when there is no more of him.
In the front pews the mourners seemed somber but not shocked, mourning but not grieving, except for a red-haired woman with freckles in the third pew, who sobbed.
The priest read, —Even so must the son of man be lifted up, that whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life.
Increasingly Ann could not hear the priest because of the sound of the red-haired woman sobbing. The sobbing grew in volume till it was half-choked, raw and full of phlegm. It was so loud that other people were also prevented from hearing the words of the priest, and turned around and stared.
The woman finally stood up, quickly then, and scrambled out of the pew, banging along the row of seated mourners. She was bowing to their disapproval by leaving, Ann could feel it, but even in leaving they could not let her be: the awkwardness of her progress along the jutting row of knees drew scorn. There was a very soft murmur of irritation as she bumped along the knees, almost imperceptible. She ran past Ann and Ben, alone at the back, and let the heavy doors slam behind her.
Later Ben was talking to Eugene’s mother on the receiving line—he had one of her hands in both of his and was leaning in close over her small white head, listening—when Ann’s eyes strayed over the floral arrangements to a stained-glass window, purple and pink with white lilies on an emerald-green bank. She did not like it, she was thinking, she did not like the colors of Easter on the window because they were the colors of pre-filled Easter baskets at the drugstore, burstin
g with chemical additives beneath their plastic wraps. She did not like the stylized, curving lilies: they projected a clinical, professional indifference, and the light they let through was a feeble, trapped light.
Then she noticed something behind the lilies: the moving silhouette of a man’s hat over hunched shoulders.
She excused herself and slipped outside, walking in a hurry around the corner of the church to the window. There was no one there, only a gate that prevented her from going further and a ragged, weathered wooden fence topped with barbed wire, up close to the building’s back wall. It ran beneath the window just a few inches from the crumbling adobe brick. Behind it were some rusted oil barrels, lying on their sides on the ground, a hub cap, and a waterlogged pile of colorful beach towels. There, on a rising wrinkle sticking out of the earth, was the face of Minnie Mouse streaked with dirt. There too was a smiling turtle.
But not enough room for a man to pass.
She thought she must have made a mistake: there must be several windows with lilies on them, behind which a man in a hat could have walked. She gazed past the oil barrels into a stand of pines, and saw nothing moving, not even the trees. It was still. Maybe the shape of the man had been a fluke of angles and sunlight, a shadow cast from far away.
Back inside she walked along the windows, but there was no other window with lilies. She did not know why it mattered to her that a man in a hat might have walked past the window.
Ben was still talking to Eugene’s mother when she slipped back inside, or rather she was talking to him. After a while he clasped her hand and walked toward Ann. He had never met Mrs. Lopez before, Ann was thinking, and in all probability he would never see her again, but watching his face as he came nearer she recalled him telling her once that all grief was the same.
He had been weeding her yard while she read on a lawn chair. She had found him in the phonebook. Surrounded by what she knew, the gentle slope of the hill behind her house, the pale-green bluster of chuparosa bushes, snakeweed and grass, he was swallowed by home, he was natural there.