by Lydia Millet
—It’s just lucky you’re geniuses, said Ann.
This fell flat. Oppenheimer nodded curtly.
—Do you have an aspirin or two?
—In the medicine cabinet. I’ll get you the bottle.
—And Enrico, said Oppenheimer, —you wanted to sleep?
—I want to sleep, mumbled Fermi, and turned away from them.
When she brought the pills and a glass of water Oppenheimer was sitting alone on the sofa staring into midair. She tipped the pills into his hand.
—Do you want to come to the library with me?
—It’s walking distance, correct?
—About ten minutes.
—Thanks, but I’ll come in later.
She left them in the house and walked out down the path, the sun warm on her shoulders. Parry’s penstemon were starting to bloom, pink. They stretched out skyward. And behind her she felt the scientists in the house, bees in a hive. They were living among her possessions, the objects of her own life. She liked having them there; she was invigorated by her new devotion. Latent beneath her satisfaction, her tendency always to shrink away, had evidently been a longing to have something to offer up. It might be seen as desperate from the outside, viewed coldly, she suspected. But from the inside it was ripe with the promise of transport.
People have a habit of seeking answers, she thought. They want to believe there are always answers: all problems have solutions, all wrongs a right. Everything works in twos. Some instincts of thought can never be suppressed, and so people refuse to give up on the reversibility of what has gone wrong.
There must be something they can do, a person may say.
She was no different, she saw this.
Because she was convinced there was a clue here, the key to a solution. So what if it was naïve of her. There had to be hope, and hope needed an object. And if she was wrong about the scientists nothing would have been lost or disrupted but routine.
Leaving the house she felt more than ever that she had something hidden there, a secret that glowed.
Three men, one tall, tubby and sagging, the other two short and muscle-bound, removed the bronze horse and Indian rider on an industrial dolly. Small mercies.
The afternoon wore on, Ben told himself as it did, hacking away at rocks, dislodging them from the soil.
Szilard did not return.
Ann came home again to find the house empty and quiet and the setting sun casting long doors of light across the clay tiles. She sat down on the sofa and smelled lavender. Through the window she watched the inching movement of cars along the street beyond the trees as they rounded a curve that led up the hill, and the sky above them was violet. The cars were the only intrusions and without them the repose was complete. She felt more rested than she had felt in weeks.
Wandering into her study she found Fermi’s jackets hung neatly on an old coat stand she never used. Papers were stacked on the desk in neat, symmetrical piles, and several library books on quantum physics and cosmology had been added to her book case. A small travel alarm clock sat on the edge of the desk, along with a copy of the Wall Street Journal. She picked up the clock and turned it over: it was old, with no battery compartment.
Oppenheimer’s suitcase was opened at the end of the sofa in the extra room and his suits were laid over an arm. Without contemplating the act she picked one up, lifted it to her face and inhaled: cigarettes and something she could not identify, musty and sweet.
—If you can drop me off on your way out, said Ben to Roger.
At 6:30 p.m. he had still not seen his truck again.
—Sure. I’m heading to the club to play some squash, said Roger. —You play?
—Racquetball, used to, said Ben.
—Racquetball’s a fag’s game, said Roger. —Just kidding. Wanna join me?
—Thanks for the invitation, said Ben, —I appreciate that. But I have to be getting home to my wife.
—What I’m offering you, said Roger, —is a superior product. C’mon, wife versus squash and single malt after? No contest. I mean who’s shittin’ who here.
The call came while they were outside after dinner, leaning against each other. Ben had been talking about the child they would have while Ann listened and smiled faintly, her fingers brushing along his arm also light, skimming over the skin, not holding it. The night was warm and Ben had the sense of a boundary between them, renewed. She was with him only the way someone else would be, casual, not herself but a distant acquaintance. Her distraction was distracting him; he did not follow it. It nagged at him like a mistake that was only half-forgotten. Was she there or not?
If he were coloring it in, the crayon would stray outside the lines, leaving ragged loops of green and blue and hazy brown to confuse the blank space. The boxes were not aligned, the fields were not in place. Things were disorderly.
They let it ring three times and then Ann relented, thinking it might be Oppenheimer. —Would you? and Ben stepped inside to pick up. It was Szilard, who reported that he was in police custody.
Ben hung up and went outside again.
—Excuse me? said Ann when he told her.
—They’ll release him if we post bail and pick him up.
—But what’s the charge?
—Breaking and entering.
There are men and women who have neat and benign visions about how to improve the world and others who have dramatic and urgent visions about how to save it from catastrophe. Many of these men and women are passionate and gather followers behind them.
Szilard should be counted among both groups, though he had few followers during his lifetime.
Frequently these men and women with grandiose visions do not believe the laws that apply to common people should apply to them. Because they have a mission, unlike the scurrying nine-to-fivers, the billions of performers of mundane tasks, they believe themselves to be exempted from obligations and niceties. Besides being so-called great men, for example, they may be shoplifters or kleptomaniacs, reckless or absent-minded drivers, habitually late or chronically unwashed.
The truth is, they know they can get away with it.
Also they know that many of the customs and rituals with which we fill our time are just that. So many routine acts seem invented to use up the day.
For those who are not invested with a sacred sense of purpose, organization may become important. A small landscape, say a kitchen, a closet, or a drawer, takes the place of a kingdom.
It is transparent, but that does not mean it is obvious.
To be fair Szilard, though he saw himself as exceptional, did not see himself as superhuman. In fact he identified with the masses. “I am a worker, not a drone,” he once said while attempting to shrug off the affections of a young woman named Alice.
It was not Szilard’s job, he was saying, to service the Queen.
When they got to the jail the clerk told Ann they were releasing Szilard only because a police shrink had deemed him mentally unstable.
—So they’re not pressing charges, they said, said the clerk. —The Army, you never know. Sometimes they’re hardcore, like with radicals or whatever, other times, if it’s just a crazy, they shrug it off.
—The Army?
—Yeah, didn’t they tell you? When they picked him up he was trying to break into some Air Force facility. He got stuck on a fence or something. Razor wire.
—And my truck? He must have had it with him then?
—Impound lot.
Ann waited for Szilard while Ben went to reclaim the truck. When he emerged from a door at the back, unattended by cops, she almost ran to get to him. There were scratches on his white arms, and his hair was tousled, but otherwise he looked the same as always.
—Are you OK?
—Hungry, he said cheerfully.
He did not seem remorseful.
—What happened?
—There was a young man in the holding cell who’d never heard of World War Two, he said. —Fact he’d never heard of Europe.
—I meant, before.
—A very interesting case.
—Why did they arrest you?
—I was in the wrong place.
—You tried to break in, they told me.
—I did break in. They caught me on the way out.
—You did? What did you—
—Forget it. It was a waste of time. The new systems are computerized but the archives barely go back. No use to me.
—What is going on? asked Ann. —Would you clue me in, please?
—Records, said Szilard. —Fingerprints.
—You were looking for them?
—But no luck.
In the car driving home he stared out the window, tapping his fingers on the door panel.
—Wait! he said, jerking forward. —What if I gave up my body to science?
—I don’t see how that would help, said Ann. —Frankly.
—No, I mean then! In ’64! Maybe it’s still around somewhere, or part of it. DNA! Right? They can do that. Compare!
—I doubt it, said Ann. —I don’t think they keep the corpses for that long. Unless cryogenics existed then.
He was quiet for a moment.
—Also, a small matter. There was a—I had a traffic incident.
—Incident?
—There’s a dent now. In the side door where a lady hit it. Just a little caved in. It still drives though.
—You had an accident in his truck?
—It was a woman driver. They are less competent.
—Uh huh, she said.
—Present company excluded of course. You are a credit to your sex.
Suppressing annoyance was hard work, and draining.
—Unlike you.
—What?
—Forget it.
They drove on in silence, Szilard oblivious, she was sure. He was opaque as well as irritating. He never told her anything.
After a while he turned to her and spoke again.
—Did you get the donuts?
Fermi had gone to sleep by the time they got home but Oppenheimer was still awake.
—Put yourself in our shoes, he said, when she and Szilard came into the kitchen. She flicked the light on as Szilard, donut box in hand, trudged to the refrigerator and extracted a Coke.
Oppenheimer had been sitting in the dark. There was a tumbler of whiskey on the table in front of him and the kitchen was full of cigarette smoke.
—OK, said Ann. —Just let me get myself a beer.
She moved around him to open the window.
—It’s a world you recognize in pieces. It’s worse than a different world, it’s the same world turned alien.
—I can imagine, said Ann gently.
He was far from sober.
—I doubt it, said Oppenheimer, shaking his head. —You can’t imagine something you’ve never known. It’s beyond you.
—I believe you, said Ann. —I do.
The phone rang, but she ignored it.
—Like finding limbs from your own body strewn across the landscape. Do you know what this desert used to look like? Of course you don’t. You never saw what I saw. It’s not there anymore. It’s all gone.
—What are you talking about? asked Szilard.
—A man who’s blind from birth can’t know color. He doesn’t know there is color. He hears “the sky is blue” and it’s a foreign language to him. It means nothing. Not only blue but the sky.
—Actually, that’s not strictly—
—It’s a metaphor, Leo.
—Windbag, said Szilard mildly.
—Please, said Ann.
Szilard shrugged, turned away, fished around in the donut box and extracted a double chocolate, which he gobbled with zeal.
—Well, I can’t speak for him, said Oppenheimer doggedly, —but for Fermi and me. The two of us have spoken and for us I can speak. I can speak—
—Then speak already, said Szilard as he chewed.
—In the dream, here’s the thing, went on Oppenheimer, slurring his words. —You’re walking along, you see something—under a bush, under a hedge—you can’t tell what it is until the last second. Leaning down close. And then: it’s your leg. Your own leg. Long-lost leg! Lying under a bush!
He raised his glass as though for a toast.
Ann was glad she was seeing him drunk. Usually he spoke with a formality that sounded scripted, though this habit had been disintegrating since his arrival under a constant barrage of new slang. When a teen spoke obscenities in his earshot he would often say: What a surprising expostulation!
Then Ben was at the kitchen door. There was trajectory to him, like a thrown ball. —I need to talk to you now, he said to Szilard through gritted teeth.
—It was not my fault, I assure you, said Szilard, his mouth smeared with sticky brown. —It was an accident caused by another driver!
—Right. And did you get his insurance information?
—She left the scene in a hurry, said Szilard. —She was upset.
—She was upset? Come to the garage, Szilard. Come let me show you what you did to my truck. You could have killed somebody! Do you realize that?
—That’s ridiculous, protested Szilard. —I’m a very good driver.
—What I mean is, just a disembodied leg lying under the bush, mumbled Oppenheimer, staring at the ceiling light fixture. —And it’s not that you’re even missing a leg. The leg is a reminder.
—So what does it remind you of? asked Ann.
—Oh, said Oppenheimer, and paused for a long moment, apparently lost. —… I guess … legs?
—Father of the A-bomb, said Szilard. —Witness the genius.
—Come on, Szilard, said Ben. —Garage, now. I mean it.
—I regret the accident, certainly, said Szilard, shuffling off toward Ben, who shunted him out the door ahead of him. His voice was plaintive, trailing off. —But the damage is minor, and it had nothing to do with me.
—I remember having dreams like that in the other life, went on Oppenheimer softly. —The first life, I mean.
Ann twisted the cap off her beer and sat down across from him.
—You’re walking in a dark forest where you’ve never been before, said Oppenheimer, —I mean you’ve never seen these trees, a type of tree you’ve never seen before with leaves like moths, fans or moths … how they hardly move at all, just with their wings trembling. …
He seemed to be drifting off.
—Are you with me, Dr. Oppenheimer?
—And the monarch butterflies on the coast, clusters of them on the branches, by the thousands. Have you ever seen that? I saw them in California, when I was living there. We would drive up the coast. It was in Santa Cruz, I think. They look brown then, not orange, brown like paper bags. All hanging there waiting for, I don’t know. The end of winter.
—You were saying you were walking? In the forest?
—The world I knew was beautiful, Ann.
—I’m sure it was.
—I’ve heard people say there was no golden age. But that’s just an excuse. It relieves them of responsibility. The fact is: things fall apart. Yeats! Newton! Entropy increases. The world was more golden when it was young. Poor sad world.
She got up for another beer.
—We drive past parking lots and fast-food joints and then I see an old house, say an old adobe that’s always been there. Back when I knew it there was a grove of trees there. I remember cottonwoods and willows. There were other adobes on the lot back then, in the shade of the trees with stone pathways between them. All the casitas were built by the same family, the Reynosos. They had beautiful girls. Girls with deep brown eyes were the children of that family. They used to ride horses.
He nodded, staring into the distance.
She took a bottle from the refrigerator and as she turned back to him he leaned forward eagerly.
—Cars have conquered this country, he went on. —I did not foresee that.
—They’re everywhere, anyway, said Ann, feeling helpful.
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—The places in the world that I loved were like my children. The mesa, the pine forests. Now those places are an ancient withered child. The skull is showing through the gray hair and the face is a wrinkled bag of skin. Do you see? The world was my baby once. This was my smooth and beautiful infant that I held in my arms.
She tipped up her second beer—she was drinking them right from the bottle on an almost empty stomach, quickly to keep him company—and looked at him closely, the crows’ feet at the corners of his eyes, the nose that was austere. Roman, she thought, almost. But then what was Roman? She had never been to Rome.
Rome, Babylon, the Planet of the Apes.
He was a Roman emperor in a plaid workshirt. Ben had lent him the shirt, a faded flannel like all his others. She knew the shirt well. She had handled it both warm from the skin beneath it and warm from the dryer. The lines were dim on the cloth, the cloth was soft to the touch. The shirt was ancient with wear.
And yet the cloth held fast.
She was suddenly overwhelmed by affection for the shirt and the bones and flesh that filled it, beneath the breast pockets the breathing lungs. She wanted to reach over and stroke the fabric but did not move. He would have been an old man, older than her grandfather would be now if her grandfather were not dead. Had she met the first Oppenheimer, the one who went down in history, she would have been a little girl and he would have been an old, old man.
Her grandfather had worn plaid shirts too. She felt a fondness for all men who wore plaid shirts, plaid shirts of faded cotton or rayon whose labels bore a name in flowing stitched script. Her grandfather’s pants were pleated and he had called them “trousers.” Like Oppenheimer he had said “trousers” and “fellow,” but unlike Oppenheimer he had also said “I’ll be golldurned” and, for a curse, “Dang nab it!” He had owned a shoehorn and collected silver quarters. What had happened to shoehorns since then? Who ever had a shoehorn now? He had a tortoiseshell shoehorn and brown shoe polish.