by Lydia Millet
—Certainly not!
—Right, I forgot. Being from the 1940s and all.
Szilard shook his head at the dashboard, perplexed, and leaned in close to squint at the digital readout on the odometer.
—OK, said Ben. No point in quibbling. —It’ll take some getting used to. Think of it this way: a hair trigger.
—But it’s dangerous! protested Szilard. —It’s a death trap!
—Just ease up on the clutch and touch the gas gently. Barely any pressure there. Easy does it.
—How people aren’t careening all over the road, grumbled Szilard, as they jerked backward out the driveway, seizing and shivering.
—I gotta tell you, said Ben. —So far your skills do not impress.
Einstein believed that Szilard overestimated the role of reason in human affairs. Admittedly Szilard felt, with Plato, that the world should be ruled by scientists, philosophers and other men of intellect—men, in fact, who closely resembled himself. If only human beings could marshal their rationality, policy changes could be made; structures and systems could be adjusted; a new social compact could be agreed upon and signed by all interested parties.
In life, Fermi was irritated and annoyed by Szilard. Chiefly an experimental physicist, he came to dislike working with Szilard because of the latter’s exceptional laziness when it came to the nitty-gritty of the experiments. But he had to concede Szilard’s genius, and made at least one speech in which he referred to Szilard as “extremely brilliant.”
Szilard liked Fermi but did not like Oppenheimer, finding his politics acceptable but his character unpleasant. Even those who worshipped Oppenheimer—and they were many—admitted he was impatient and sometimes sharp-tongued; Szilard’s bad manners took a more languorous form. He routinely slept through colleagues’ lectures sitting in the front row, snoring loudly and waking up only to confront them with painful and often unanswerable questions.
Oppenheimer and Fermi liked each other, Oppenheimer remembering Fermi after his death with fondness.
About Szilard, it is difficult to say exactly what Oppenheimer thought. During the war, Szilard’s insistent petitioning against the use of the bomb was certainly an irritation.
Jeff took her aside when she got in and cleared his throat several times. Then he confessed that on his Coworker Feedback Form he had mentioned her recent lateness problem.
—I wouldn’t have except you didn’t seem to like want to have a meaningful dialogue on the issue, he said.
—OK, she said. —Don’t worry about it.
—I just don’t want it to be awkward or whatever, so I hadda let you know.
—OK. Thanks Jeff.
—But it’s totally not personal.
—I understand.
—But so are you—
—Yes? What?
—Are you like gonna be keeping the more, like regular hours again? See it’s that I just get tied up and then there’s like people waiting, and the phones. So then I get totally stressed, which besides the whole, you know, like spiritual drain is harmful to my GI tract, because you know I had all that stuff with my colon, the bad high colonic and the whole thing with the litigation? Plus it gives me these headaches that are almost like migraines. Borderline migraines actually.
—I’m so sorry to hear that.
—Stress can also cause thinning hair. My brother, you know, who’s the commodities broker? He’s got like not a single hair on his head. And here’s a guy that practically had a Jewfro when he got out of college.
—OK Jeff.
Not long ago she would have been horrified at the evidence of her laxity, the self-indulgence it laid bare. For the first time she was not toeing the line, was not upholding her end of a bargain. She had always been a good soldier.
And there was a nice flight in it, it turned out, a light swoop of clenching, smug and giddy joy. Things were moving upward, over and over.
He knew there was a place for reassurance: but what was that place? On the one hand there is loyalty and faith, on the other skepticism, rigor, even common sense. In choosing to stand beside his wife in what looked like a grand delusion he was opting for the former.
Finally, though he was not without powers of reason and not without rigor at times, he believed that the world outside them, with its judgments and categories, could do its worst. Let it exclude them both, let it bother and nag and harass them with its definitions and prohibitions. He would keep her close to him all the time, enclosing, a human shield.
But that didn’t mean he had to let himself get creamed by an oncoming tour bus. Szilard was idling the truck in the middle of an intersection, craning his neck to look past Ben to the right, and there, bearing down on them from the left, was a purple leviathan with tinted windows.
—Gas! screamed Ben like a six-year-old girl, and the truck lurched forward at the eleventh hour, the grinding whine of the tour bus’s horn Dopplering behind them.
He turned his head to watch it pass and saw a flash of yellow and purple and the ghostly faces of a legion of seniors peering vaguely through the darkness.
—OK, that’s it, he told Szilard when he had his breath back. —No way are you driving this thing without me. You’re completely incompetent.
—A learning curve! protested Szilard weakly.
He was sweating at the temples.
—Whatever. I’ll get out and walk around. You scoot over.
—There are too many vehicles, OK? said Szilard as Ben slid into the driver’s seat. —It’s crowded everywhere!
—Welcome to the twenty-first century.
—You may not know this, said Szilard, —but I was always a strong advocate of birth control.
The Navajo basket display in its solemn glass case had become a small Bermuda Triangle that Ann steered past warily. Sometimes it occurred to her that there was something there that pressed outward, a force field of warning. When she had to walk past the display case she allowed it a wide berth.
Finally she decided to take action. First of all, the baskets themselves had to go. Their hour had come round at last.
She had always found them incongruous anyway. She had nothing against a basket, certainly nothing against a Navajo basket-weaver, but the idea that here, in this neat box on the sterilized carpet, tribute could be politely paid via six cute decorative handmade reed containers to a people ruthlessly exterminated, robbed, enslaved, driven into the hot dust of their homeland and then roped off on a dry piece of ground slowly to agonize through generation after dirt-poor generation at the decay and death of all their parents and grandparents and ancestors had ever held dear did not please her.
The baskets had been put in the case by a docent at the Historical Society, a coral-lipsticked, bumbling Bettina whose gentle hands shook with palsy as she painstakingly placed the baskets on the glass shelves. It was impossible to refuse Bettina anything. Therein lay her power.
Resolute, turning back to the dangerous space, Ann opened the case and began to remove the baskets. Turning away with basket-heaped arms, she came face to face with Oppenheimer.
—I’m in an embarrassing spot, he said.
Yet she was the one laden chin-high.
—Follow me to the back, she said, and cocked her head. A basket threatened to topple, but she caught it with a well-timed shrug.
—There should be a licensing process, said Szilard eagerly as Ben drove. —To own and operate a vehicle you have to take a test. There are fees you pay, rules you have to observe. But to create and harbor life? Exploit it, subvert it, neglect it? No! To own and operate a human vehicle for at least sixteen years, do you need a permit for that? Reproduction: a sacred so-called human right. Why?
—You just can’t stop people from having children, said Ben.
—There are ways, said Szilard. —The Chinese!
—I don’t know that they’ve been a hundred percent successful, said Ben. —Plus there’s the personal freedom thing.
—In this country freedom’s just a eup
hemism for selfishness, said Szilard, bending forward and twisting around in his seat, struggling vainly with the seatbelt. —But listen: I really need to get where I’m going today.
—What can I say, said Ben. —You’re not qualified to operate this vehicle. You failed the test. You’re a danger to yourself and to others. My wife wouldn’t forgive me if her favorite dead scientist got himself killed his first day out.
—Don’t be ridiculous, said Szilard. —I’m not dead.
—I know that, said Ben. —Believe me. If you were you’d shut up.
—What if you went with me?
—I have to go to work, said Ben. —I have a job. Those of us who are not dead scientists have to have livelihoods.
—But after that.
—I’ll consider it, OK? Here, this is me. You got something to do until five?
—Can I use the bathroom before I go?
Oppenheimer had underestimated the cost of living. His hotel bill was far more substantial than he had anticipated and as a result he had exhausted his savings at the bank.
He had never, he explained to Ann, found himself in this position before. It was not, he assured her, habitual for him.
Not only were there financial problems of an urgent nature, but he was concerned about his colleague Fermi, who in his withdrawal and passivity appeared to Oppenheimer—merely a layman, of course, when it came to psychiatric diagnoses—to be exhibiting telltale signs of clinical depression. He slept almost all day, he spoke little, he did not have an appetite, and his responses to questions about his well-being were almost inaudible. Although Oppenheimer was no psychiatrist, needless to say, he admitted to Ann that he himself had suffered from depression for a brief time in his youth. Call it depression or call it existential anxiety: fortunately, a vacation in Italy had helped to alleviate the discomfort.
He and Fermi needed time to gather themselves; they were at loose ends. They wanted the leisure to consider their new lives without the pressure of hotel bills.
In short they were both, he confessed, seeking lodging.
Ben was planting lamb’s ear, touching a furred and silver leaf, when he remembered his mother. When she came back to him he felt a piercing sadness, and then he felt his limbs soften, under the flesh and the forgiving organ of the skin he felt the frame that held him up dissolving. She had been a first-generation Irish immigrant who had grown up in a farmhouse with a thatched roof in County Cork. He remembered her expressions, Cat got your tongue? and Jeeee-sus-Mary-and-Joseph, her busy movements in the kitchenette, a yellow-and-white checked dishtowel with a red embroidered apple and green leaf. The dishtowel had hung from the door of their small refrigerator and sometimes over her shoulder while she was cooking.
Then there were the shades later, stale smell of the sickness at the end that always made him think of her even though it shouldn’t, it had been something that was done to her, not what she was. But that was sickness, it turned the person into itself, memories of a mother into memories of a disease.
He had sat beside the bed and from the bedside table her colorful pictures of weeping saints held out their arms to him. Gone bald, face pasty as a doll’s, puttylike, she stopped moving once and for all, alive but motionless. To ease her pain they were told to put sleeping pills under her tongue. Later that night his father had been sitting and rocking in the chair, listening to the radio. Usually he listened to Golden Oldies but that time he had put in a cassette. No talking, she had said weeks before; at the end just play me the music to help me on my way. She liked the old folksongs sung by tenors of the first half of the century, “Believe Me, If All Those Endearing Young Charms” and “Down by the Sally Gardens.” Now whenever he heard the strains of these songs he remembered her death. He remembered home had vanished one afternoon, turned alien suddenly because she was gone.
She had been all that was warm, all the comfort known in the world, and then dead. Never die, he murmured to Ann sometimes, as though it was a decision to be made. Even in his sleep he would say it.
Then his father, fading: good man of few words, as the fathers often were, bound up and speechless. Their bodies were taut with instinctive defenses that kept them from opening their mouths.
And other than his father he had no one. Looking for evidence of an extended family, before he met Ann, he once attended a reunion in Aspen where second and third cousins milled around in a conference room. The formica-topped tables were decorated with dried flowers and the distant cousins wore nametags on their lapels, ate vanilla cake and drank watery nonalcoholic punch. Strangely the family had hardly reproduced at all in his generation so there were no children running through legs. Instead the family was simply aging, cousins and aunts and uncles dying off and the ones left alive growing more and more decrepit and sedentary until finally they could be gathered in this hotel room and displayed in all their infirmity, a sprawling and crippled gray horde.
But his father, trapped in himself, was even now alive, a good and kind man though always so silent as to vanish in plain sight. He should call him: it had been over a month. In fact now, he thought: this was the time. What if something had happened to him?
Heading in the back door to get his cell phone out of his bag he met Lynn. She was in a caftan, gold and green, and tottering on the usual four-inch heels. Her fingernails, which picked up the gold in the robe, were drying and she agitated her hands in the air as she walked.
—I showed your uncle where you leave your car keys, she said.
—Excuse me?
—Your uncle Leo? He said you were letting him use your little truck?
—Are you kidding?
—What I would advise is, he should go in the Zone. I had a fat decorator and it really helped her.
—He already drove off?
—Now she’s a skinny mini. Men, you know, can find it hard to commit to weight loss. But once they do the results are often very rewarding.
Ben’s cell phone answered after one ring, which meant he was probably talking on it. She couldn’t leave a message, so she waited to redial. In the meantime she set some ground rules for Oppenheimer.
—You can’t smoke in the house.
—I will be happy to step outside.
—And someone’s going to have to sleep on the sofa, in an area that doesn’t really have a door that closes, this room that’s between the study and the kitchen. We just call it the extra room, we haven’t done anything with it. Because there’s a futon in the study but other than that—you know, Dr. Szilard’s already set up in the guest room.
—I’m sure we can make do. I hope it won’t be too long.
—And we only have the one bathroom. So we’re going to have to set, I don’t know, schedules with that. I don’t want to irritate my husband.
—No. I do understand.
—It’s me, honey, she said to Ben, when he picked up. —How are you?
So reassurance is aimed at protection, thought Oppenheimer, but often it protects only the speaker, hiding behind itself.
In life Szilard was once approached by someone he had not seen for a very long time. This person exclaimed over the fact that Szilard had become a great man.
“I was always a great man,” said Szilard.
Ann waited outside La Fonda in her car while Oppenheimer went in to roust Fermi. She had detected some reluctance in Ben but all in all he was as patient as always, patient and open to a certain looseness of events, a shifting ground.
It occurred to her as she tapped her fingers on the wheel that she was missing a brown-bag lunch discussion of New Tools for a World Wide Web Research Etiquette.
Ben was holding himself in check. He had not revealed Szilard as the car thief he was to his credulous fan when she called; he had given an alleged fat dead physicist the benefit of the doubt. The grace period was not indefinite, but he would wait to see what cataclysms were wrought by the joyride. Szilard was the worst driver he had ever personally observed.
And his father was the same as
he had been for decades now. Yes, he picked up the phone; he went that far, but no further. The telephone was an instrument, he seemed to believe, seldom employed in the service of good.
Only monosyllables had emerged.
Finally there had been the announcement that the doors of his home were being flung wide open. To be precise it had come in the form of a question, but her wish was his command. He was stubbornly maintaining his laissez-faire policy. Possibly the situation would grow worse, exacerbated by the crowds, and she would give up the project sooner. But he wasn’t sure. She could be tenacious.
Still, there was a silver lining. Lynn, now sporting a turquoise visor above the glittering beetle hues of the caftan, stood in front of her tomahawk-wielding warrior for the first time and frowned.
—Do you think he gives off, like, a hostile vibe?
Fermi shuffled wherever he went like a sleepwalker but Oppenheimer was the one whose body was skeletal, whose eyes shone in a drawn, bony-cheeked face. He subsisted on cigarettes and cocktails. To Ann he seemed ethereal, on the brink of nothingness, which was also how he had been described by some who worked with him on the Manhattan Project: a skeleton animated by nicotine, a frail and fatless martyr to work and the war.
—Someone can sleep in here, she said. —It’s my study, but this chair here is actually a single futon—see? It folds out like this.
—Fu-tong, enunciated Fermi slowly.
—Why don’t you take this one, Enrico, said Oppenheimer. —I’ll bring in your bag.
—Fine, said Fermi, nodding.
He spoke from a point so far away that despite the solidity of his barrel chest and his arms and his legs the character that inhabited them seemed absent. He had assigned a clerical worker to walk around in his body for him; he had delegated authority.
—I’ll just leave the keys under the mat, and remember to put them back there when you go out, said Ann, smiling. —Do you have any plans?
—We’re still learning, said Oppenheimer. —I read all the time. There’s catching up. You don’t know. I have more books in my bag than clothing. And then there are the newspapers. I use them as cues: I take notes when I don’t understand an assumption. Then I look it up. The volume of information gives me headaches. And the concentration. There are passages I have to read ten times to separate what I understand from what I don’t. You have no idea how difficult it is to assimilate a world.