by Lydia Millet
But then he shook his head in apology when she tried to make small talk. He knew quite a few English words, Ben said, but it was difficult for him to string them into a sentence.
So Ben took him by the arm and led him to an alcove where there was a table and chairs. They sat down, Yoshi pulled a small lined notepad and a pencil from the pocket of his jacket, and Ben and Yoshi began drawing for each other. They had worked out a code of stick figures, which performed actions such as arriving at the door to the house or talking to each other in symbols: !? * $ #. Ben understood them quickly, and pointed out their meanings.
Now, Yoshi wrote, Roger and Lynn wanted a fountain in the front yard of the mansion, and they had commissioned one from a prominent Western artist, to be cast in bronze. This was a word Yoshi knew. —Bronze, he said. He had seen the sketches for it, and he could replicate them. He drew swiftly and efficiently: a horse with front legs flailing the air and an Indian warrior on its back, in full ceremonial headdress.
The horse would be rearing in the center of the fountain, and water would come spurting from his mouth. His mane would be flying wildly. The Indian would wield a tomahawk.
Behind her chair Ann heard a woman gasp and turned, panic rising. But the woman was only looking at another woman’s raised left hand, which bore a diamond ring.
The woman with the ring, whose lips shone a peachy orange, said, —Yeah. Just Saturday. We were at Ten Thousand Waves actually.
—Really? A group tub?
—Yeah right. But seriously, he wants to go to lousy Maui!
She listened to them as the jarring sensation faded, replaced by safety, insulation. Privately she told herself: See? They are just the way they’ve always been. Nothing has happened.
These people, the ones I’ve never been able to stand, she thought, these people are the normal background noise of the world. They are a guarantee.
She thought: It is wrong but even not liking them, even not being able to stand them, all of a sudden I feel grateful.
On the way home, three glasses of wine later, she held Ben’s arm again, this time to steady herself. She had talked at length to an obstetrician who had his own country western band. They specialized in covers of Conway Twitty songs and played at weddings, baptisms and keg parties, he told her. But seldom bar mitzvahs.
She was proud of herself for talking to him.
—See? she said to Ben, one of her slippers falling off her foot, swiveling to scoop it up again with her toes. —I can do it!
Later, when he got into the shower to wash the cigar smoke from his hair, she left the house again and ran weaving down the street, arms wide and foolish, to lie on her back on the front lawn of a neighbor, hidden in a pocket of trees. The grass was already moist from the dew.
She gazed with blurred vision at a constellation of stars in the sky and thought: a drunk woman in a neighbor’s front yard. Inside they lie in bed or do whatever else they’re doing, and we don’t know each other at all.
One of the books she had read about Oppenheimer claimed that it was at the moment of the first atom splitting that material things gained final ascendancy and took the place of God.
—But maybe God was just revealed, she whispered to the constellations, as though she possessed special wisdom, spinning and wet in the grass.
Before the mushroom cloud there had always been a dream of setting the human spirit free, a dream that the spirit could be loosed from its gates of skin, become airborne, ecstatic and undone.
And here it was at last: the mind of man.
3
For several days after she saw the photographs of Oppenheimer and Fermi it was impossible for Ann to read about them. She woke up confused, woke up and was awake for less than a second one morning before she remembered her confusion. She had the nauseated, hollow feeling of someone struck by a loss.
She considered keeping everything simple, actually adopting the pose that everything was simple, adopting the pose and denying all evidence against it. It could work. Denial was a time-tried method, well-proven. She saw herself wearing blinders, willfully looking straight ahead. She wondered how long it took for horses who walked straight ahead without flinching under the whip to feel their front legs buckle beneath them.
Although he had a relaxed manner and gentle posture Ben was inwardly in a state of constant vigilance. He had noticed the change and was watchful, always on guard against the sky falling.
He knew, like most of those on whom the sky has already fallen, that if the sky was, in fact, to fall there would be nothing he could do to stop it.
The sky was large.
She was pushing her cart down the produce aisle, looking for mustard greens, when to her right she heard someone say indignantly—What in God’s name is this?
She turned in the direction of the voice and there he stood, dressed this time in a gray suit and his porkpie hat and holding up a bunch of arugula.
She had let her cart roll to a stop and stared at them openly but they did not notice, intent on the arugula. She was wracking her brain for what to say when Oppenheimer finally put down the arugula and picked up a Daikon radish.
With this she stepped awkwardly toward him. Her shyness rose around her in walls but she felt pressed forward anyway, audacious, an impostor in her own skin.
—Excuse me.
—Yes?
—I’m sorry for intruding, but can you please—I think I know you from somewhere, but I can’t remember where. Can you tell me your name?
—I don’t think we’ve met, but certainly. This is Fermi, Enrico Fermi, he said pleasantly. —I am Oppenheimer. Robert.
Ann looked at him slack-jawed, and then at the bulbous Daikon radish. It resembled a club, and she thought blunt instrument.
In the first instant of the faint, as her legs wavered, still conscious but not in control, she realized she was falling and fumbled vaguely for Fermi’s arm. He reached to help her, but not fast enough. Fortunately it was a straight shot to the floor and she crumpled conveniently against his side, sliding down and into a heap with her head at rest on the toe of Oppenheimer’s leather shoe.
The two men exchanged quizzical glances, and then, unhurriedly and somewhat gracefully, stooped to pick her up. Fermi saw her purse sitting in the basket of the cart, and picked that up too.
—We need to lay her down, said Oppenheimer.
An observer would have seen two men, one tall and thin, the other stocky and balding and elfin, both somewhat antiquely dressed, the taller in hat and suit too large for his gaunt frame, the shorter in shirt sleeves. They walked at a leisurely pace toward the back of the store with a young woman propped up between them. Her head lolled onto the shoulder of the taller man, then flopped back, exposing an arched white throat, and rolled onto the shoulder of the shorter man. Her mouth hung open.
Ben felt that every day he lost her, not for always but from sight. He was apart from the small measure of her life as it was spending itself, which seemed wasteful until he remembered it was fine, it was right. It was right not only for practical reasons but because the separation attenuated the hours and sharpened them to a point. Like abstinence or deprivation it spun out time into timelessness, actually made the day longer, and by extension the months and the years.
Still, sometimes he almost could not believe that he permitted these flagrant absences, these brutal removals of her person from his sphere of influence and sensation. These removals of her were virtual robberies, covert offenses, assaults on him, almost. That was how it looked when, finding himself alone after she left one morning, it occurred to him that with her gone he was solitary in everything, in the bare, cold roads that stretched from coast to coast intersecting only with each other, the monolithic industry that squatted by the roadsides, hunkered down, of infinite strip-mall suburbs where no sympathy could be found for what had evolved instead of being manufactured, what was abstract instead of concrete, where everything was made for the convenience of the barely sensate, the men who fol
lowed football and Nascar and Bud Ice, the women who emptied ashtrays out their car windows as they drove through the redwoods.
In such a gray glittering world it would be impossible to find tired relief, much less home. When she was beyond his reach there was always the danger of her permanent disappearance, and what evidence was there anyway, at those times, that she existed at all? He wondered idly if, like some animals—wolves? Birds of prey?—he might one day develop long-distance hearing or sight, be able miraculously to pick her out in a crowd miles away.
But he was used to a routine of separation five days a week, and the hours when he was with her and without complemented each other neatly. He was not naïve, he knew that even the closest of attachments could exhaust themselves and that absence, when it did not extinguish, tended to renew. And every day when the sun was setting, he saw her again: call him a greeting card but there it was, the light cast on the leaves was red and the branches might be warmed and rounded with gold and on the eastern rim of the sky there might be, from time to time, the earth’s purple shadow, a dusky haze over the hills.
These were the shades of the end of day, when he saw her again. After the final colors of twilight in the trees as he walked or drove back up the hill of his street, after the descent of the sun, he had the deliberate routine of dinner, the softness of food in his mouth, the slowness and measured wellbeing of time in the house.
Then there was the prospect of sleep and a whole night of hours side by side. That was good.
The trouble with Oppenheimer,” said Albert Einstein once, “is that he loves a woman who doesn’t love him: the U.S. government.”
When Ann came out of her faint she was lying on a striped orange-and-brown couch, apparently alone. She sat up dizzily, looked around and saw she had company after all: in the corner was a dumpy, pale teenager playing a videogame.
She was in a dingy lounge paneled in fake wood, graced with a hulking television whose screen was a jagged green and pink zigzag of snowy images, playing mute and unwatched, and a bulletin board with homemade signs advertising For Sale Cheap: ATV and Free Pit Bull Puppies. There was also an ancient, faded poster in primary colors advertising the Heimlich maneuver.
Her head ached and she was so parched that she could feel her throat crack. There was a sink against the wall, a row of mugs in bright colors with logos and birthday wishes. She got up shakily and went toward it, but a water cooler loomed before she got there and she bent to fill a paper cone, and then drained it again and again.
—Aspirin over the sink if you wannit, lady, said the dumpy teenager.
—Thank you, said Ann.
She opened the cupboard and moved boxes of tea out of the way to find the bottle, popped a pill into her mouth, washed it down and sat back heavily on the couch.
—Excuse me, she said to the teenager, —Can you tell me something?
—What.
—Who brought me in here?
He shrugged. —These two guys.
—What did they look like to you?
—Whaddaya mean?
—Just describe them. Please.
—Uh, OK. There was a tall skinny guy in a hat that looked, like, old-fashioned or something. Then there was this shorter guy that had a foreign accent.
—Did they say anything to you?
—Nah, they just dumped you there and looked at their watches. Then they took off. Said they hadda go meet someone.
—Thank you.
So she still saw what was widely seen, at least. It might be filtered through a psychosis, but at least the men hadn’t been built from the ground up on nothing but neural pathways. Probably the Oppenheimer lookalike had said a name like Augsburger, Alzheimer’s. The power of suggestion.
Alternatively, he knew he was a dead ringer for Oppenheimer, the most iconic of the atom bomb men, and he cherished the resemblance. Living in a barely visible subculture, trading anecdotes by email and in chat rooms, was no doubt a legion of wannabe Oppenheimers, a host of Oppenheimer pretenders, like Elvises or James Deans or Marilyn Monroes.
Bastard. Preying on her weakness.
Or maybe, like that woman who underwent cosmetic surgery tens—or was it hundreds?—of times to force her face and body into the shape of Barbie’s, he sought to actually be Oppenheimer and was remaking himself in the image of his private hero.
Fermi was just a sidekick.
—Did they say anything? she persevered.
—Just like to give you an aspirin when you woke up and it was nice to meet you. That was, like, a joke though.
It occurred to Oppenheimer, looking at a piece of angular, metallic public art with no redeeming features, that bad art was infinitely sad.
If both science and art are forms of unrequited love, he thought, bad science and bad art are pining away.
Szilard stepped off the bus from Chicago on a Saturday after a long trip that would have exhausted a lesser man. He made a beeline for the public library, where he spoke in his thick accent—Hungarian-German, in fact—to Jeff the vegan. Jeff the vegan, in turn, told Ann about him when she went back to work after the weekend, describing him as “a fat foreign guy.”
He had spent hours hunched over the microfiche readers voraciously scanning old newspapers, Jeff reported, and nibbling on chocolate bars as he peered at the screen. Intermittently he left and came back with pastries from a store down the street, which he gobbled surreptitiously as he scrolled. Jeff disclosed this with a shake of the head, himself masticating, with superior air, a peanut-buttered celery stick.
Finally Jeff caught him smearing jelly filling on the machine’s knobs, eyes fixed on the fine print, oblivious to his transgression. Jeff asked him firmly, even punitively to be so kind as to take his “food” outside, please.
When he finished his donuts the “fat foreign guy” came up to Reference and fired off a battery of questions. (Jeff compared him to Mr. Hofstadt.) He wanted to know everything, Jeff said. He asked about Presidents: Ford, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, the two Bushes; he asked about Gorbachev, the Berlin Wall, Vietnam, the Gulf War, the World Trade Center. He asked about credit cards, cell phones, satellites, GIS mapping, global warming, the disappearing ozone, the moonwalk, the exploration of Mars, Star Wars, Chernobyl, Madonna, Microsoft, electric cars, commercial aviation, the burning rain forests, the rising tides, the mass extinction of frogs and birds.
He spent the evening at one of the computer terminals, fascinated by the Internet. Jeff had to kick him out at the end of the day by turning out the lights, but he was back the next morning waiting for the library to open, sitting on the front steps, eating a cruller, and when he saw Jeff, smiling broadly.
By the time Ann got to work, however, he had left, after requesting a library card for which Jeff turned him down, since he had no proof of residency, in fact no fixed address, and no ID save a worn and sixty-years-out-dated University of Chicago faculty card. On his way out he asked Jeff for the location of the nearest television station.
Recently she had the urge to be immersed in water as soon as she could when she got up in the morning. She wanted to stroke her arms through the soft chemical blue and float when she was exhausted, float and think of white minarets, tropical forests, places lush and quiet where, undisturbed by hunters, vast and gentle animals moved.
Swimming regulated her mind, kept the cogs turning, she felt, surely and predictably, making her into a mill whose paddles churned the water to good use, steady, determined, workmanlike.
One Tuesday morning after swimming, her face bleached dry and pleasantly sterile from the chlorine, she bought an orange juice and a bagel at a café on the way to work and sat down to read the newspaper at an outside table, white metal and flimsy. Doves fluttered down to the pavement near her feet, dim-witted and dun-colored, barely noticeable in the shade.
On one of the back pages there was a human interest story: a corpulent man claiming to be a European scientist named Leo Szilard had burst onto the set of a local live news show, dema
nding air time.
He wanted to announce his return from the dead, and claimed to have proof of it in the form of fingerprints. He also claimed, under questioning by the police psychologist, to have once given a razor to Nikita Khrushchev.
Despite a Harvard education the psychologist had never heard of Nikita Khrushchev. For this reason the boast was wasted on him.
The police declined to fingerprint the fat man.
Leo Szilard is believed by many to have been the man who first conceived of nuclear fission. He is also believed to have been the first to conceive of the cyclotron—parent machine of the “particle accelerator”—and the electron microscope. He was a pioneer in information theory, shared a patent for nuclear reactors with Fermi, and designed a liquid-metal refrigerator pump with Einstein. (The pump was impractical and failed to make them millionaires because, though it worked quite effectively, it also regularly emitted an ear-splitting screech.) When, after the war, he switched from physics to molecular biology, he invented the chemostat, which is still used today in microbiology, and was the first to theorize what is now known as “negative feedback regulation of enzyme activity,” for which someone else later received the Nobel Prize. He studied sperm preservation and promoted research that would eventually lead to the discovery of the birth-control pill.
And it was Szilard who first suggested—to Nikita Khrushchev, in fact—a nuclear telephone hotline between the president of the United States and the premier of the Soviet Union.
He took out numerous patents including one for low-fat cheese, an early “lite” food product.
Szilard was perennially broke and perennially alone until quite late in life. After two decades of friendship, in 1951 he finally married his longtime penpal and confidante Trude Weiss. He was secretive about this and when belatedly told of the marriage, a colleague at Columbia inquired with genuine curiosity, —Who would marry Szilard? It must have something to do with taxes.