Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

by Lydia Millet

  She was indifferent to the observation. Naked, wearing a mint-green facial mask, hair sticking out, she was making piles. Briefly he saw her as a child, forlorn and reckless. He thought: a child will look like her, a child will stamp like this on the mattress, teeter there overlooking the room as though the room, and only the room, is her kingdom.

  —Szilard seem to think he’s here to stop the apocalypse, he told her, sitting on the edge of the mattress and picking up a black feather boa. He recognized it: it was left over from some old Halloween, but it had never been worn. He threaded it through his fingers and ran it over his bare forearms, felt the soft and tickling strands.

  —Getting rid of the extra, she said. —Look at it! Give it to the Goodwill. Or the Big Brothers. I mean the Boys Club. You know.

  —Yes, he said. —Good. Did you hear me?

  —I wish I had some water! she said, jumping off the bed and stumbling over a tangle of shoes.

  —Let me get you some water. You’ll feel better as soon as you drink it.

  Head already throbbing despite the fact that she had dutifully drunk the water and swallowed three aspirin, her eyes aching and dry, she tiptoed into Oppenheimer’s room later, unable to sleep, to find him reading in a pair of Ben’s pajamas and smoking a cigarette, far soberer than before.

  —Sorry, he said smoothly as she came in, and held the cigarette out the window.

  —Dr. Szilard says you’re here to stop the apocalypse, she told him.

  —Goodness gracious.

  —He says World War Three is looming.

  —Leo has always been a pain in the ass, said Oppenheimer. —He’s a professional panic artist. It’s a gift. Don’t let him upset you.

  After she left the room Oppenheimer turned to the window to flick his cigarette butt outside. He followed the arc of its spark as it hit the ground in the darkness, and kept watching until the spark died.

  Past the black pool of the garden he saw the stubbled gleam of the road, a single streetlight bathing its asphalt surface in texture. He was about to turn away from the window again when his eye caught a slight movement across the street. A man stood near a telephone pole, shapeless away from the light. Oppenheimer had the distinct sensation the man was watching the house. Possibly the man could even see him.

  Quickly he reached over and flicked off the floor lamp. He stood motionless at the window in his dim room, waiting.

  Finally the man turned and walked behind a screen of trees. Looking into the mass of branches with his hands braced on the window sill, where the fingers lightly trembled, Oppenheimer heard the faint slam of a car door and an engine firing.

  Slowly disrobing after the car drove away he could not shake the conviction that the man intended to come back.

  The man was looking for him.

  What did our parents want for us? thought Ann, tossing and turning, still with alcohol in her blood, dizzy. The room did spin, she had to admit it. She sat up.

  That was better so she stayed still for a moment, the back of her head against the hard headboard, eyes open to the dark to steady her. She tried to make herself solid.

  Beside her Ben snored lightly.

  Our parents and their institutions learned that one day the sun would die, she thought, becoming first a red giant, then a nebula, then a white dwarf and finally a black dwarf, cold and dark. They sent out feelers to the moon, to distant sun systems, these oddly dreaming governments. They sent their robot spaceships into the black between the stars. Our parents yearned to roam the universe.

  Recently she had seen old footage of the moon landing. When the first men got to the moon they planted an American flag there, doing their duty, leaving it stiff and unmoving in the cratered earth of the moon with the black sky behind it. Then they danced in the different gravity, carefree, bobbing up and down in their giant suits, bouncing and singing songs without words, da-da-da, dum-dum-dum.

  Beyond words was the quiet that could never be known.

  II

  WHY TALL PEOPLE FEAR DWARVES

  1

  What do we seek to feel?

  Happy, they say, frequently.

  Hiroshima was selected as a target for the atom bomb in the late spring of 1945, when trees were budding in Washington.

  Outside several of the buildings where the decision was made grew Yoshino and weeping cherry trees. They had been planted by the thousands some thirty years before, a gift from the empire of Japan. They bore thick clusters of white flowers that were reflected in the glass of the windows as men talked to each other inside. The blossoms grew so close together that their stems were invisible.

  At first Oppenheimer was consumed by the need to read about his own life. Ann brought him biographies and he would skim them with an amused expression, shaking his head now and then at an incorrect detail. —It’s not what they say that’s wrong, he told her, —it’s how they say it.

  He would never forget how hard he had worked on the Project, how it had began to turn his hair gray and stretched the skin so taut on his bones that even he noticed that he was shedding his body. He remembered how for three years he had taken no vacation.

  And still there was the cold fact that he had personally recommended, along with Fermi and other scientific luminaries, that the bomb be used on the Japanese. When he read that he was filled with a dread of himself. He let the dread lie dormant inside him and moved around it fluidly: but it was always there.

  When Jeff the vegan heard that Ann was taking a leave of absence from work his jaw dropped, quick as a cartoon. Ann relished the moment: it was almost a gift.

  —He’s just letting you do that? For how long?

  —I don’t know yet, she said. —At this point it’s indefinite.

  —And when you come back then bingo, there’s your job waiting for you?

  —No.

  At this Jeff patted his ruffled hair down, turned away and sorted paperclips. Clearly he wished to conceal his delight.

  —Listen, he said after a minute, —this isn’t about the Coworker Feedback Form, is it?

  —No Jeff. It isn’t.

  —Good, OK good.

  Later he revealed his own big news: he was giving up veganism due to protein deficiency and creeping anemia. He would now take up the far lesser task of lacto-ovo-vegetarianism.

  —The world is just too hard a place to be perfect in, know what I mean? I mean it’s the world that’s wrong, not me.

  Leaving work at the end of the afternoon Ann strolled across the plaza to a restaurant with a wide balcony on the second floor. It was Friday and groups were laughing raucously at tables. She felt pleasantly untethered, drifting up the stairs and onto the balcony, nodding at the hostess, sitting in the shade beside a cool deep adobe wall and sipping lemon water from a frosted glass. A mariachi band was playing in the depths of the restaurant. It was the music of nostalgia, she thought, pure sentiment with words only for placeholders—as though that was the only function of music, to convey either nostalgia or longing, the same emotion in different tenses.

  Inside, over the bar, a television blared. On CNN a newscaster told of news from space: a planet had been discovered, the oldest ever known. Far beyond the solar system, it was three times the age of earth.

  Looking out across the street, over treetops, she studied the sky and felt she was studying what was possible: wide, empty and spectacular.

  The ground is where history has happened, she thought, and when the future is mentioned many eyes are cast upward. Far above in space there are numerous phantom worlds, millions of light-years away. Their high meadows lie untouched, the white peaks of their green mountains blinding in the sun. Blowing grasses weave the shapes of wind across the wide plains and rivers run clear as glass.

  The planets there are home again, she thought: the land before we came. What we have done wrong can be forgiven, for there is the earth reborn, again and again forever.

  When he was in a good mood Ben convinced himself the scientists were growing on
him. Even if they were patients escaped from a psych ward, the fact that they had extensive training in physics was clear. Either that or they had extensive training as actors, because their language was convincing.

  Szilard was annoying but offered comic relief to compensate for his homeliness, like a flat-faced dog. To himself he constituted the final authority on all matters. But despite this there was a unflagging courage in his persistence. He neither wished for nor had a private life: the human race was his family.

  Oppenheimer was a distant and austere presence except when caught up in oratory, and then he was borderline pretentious. Ann did not seem to notice.

  And poor Fermi was vestigial, barely there, generously polite, neat, soft-spoken, retiring quickly to the room where he slept after mealtimes and lying there unmoving. At intervals he would take a book to bed with him but for the most part he lay silent. He asked for little.

  Oppenheimer also asked for little: he followed a precise and orderly routine and with his cigarettes, coffee, and drinks at cocktail hour seemed to have all that he required. He borrowed clothes from Ben and cigarette money from Ann, keeping careful accounts in the form of a running IOU in a small notebook.

  It was Szilard who did all the asking.

  The sky has always been home to paradise, always the light and vacant kingdom, holding out a promise. This is why no one is surprised when promise finally descends, silver and purple, a fiery dragon of the air, rising, swelling and falling again, and the ground and the sky are together at last.

  This was what Oppenheimer thought when he looked into the emptiness above Santa Fe.

  No one is surprised as dirt disperses in the sky and what descended from the sky spreads all across the ground below, the past turning into the future, the future vanishing in the past.

  Szilard knew exactly what he was called upon to do. His clear duty was to change the world. This was not the Pollyanna sentiment of a do-gooder or an idealist: rather it stood to reason. The world was a problem that needed to be solved. He would tackle the problem stoutly.

  On the sidewalk outside the restaurant they were waylaid by one of Ben’s former clients, a woman wearing tight riding pants on her lean thighs. She insisted on grilling him about a gardening problem as Ann waited beside them, shivering and hugging herself against the chill. A young girl crossed the street clutching a child’s hand and further along the block two soldiers were getting out of a jeep.

  —It sounds like root rot, Ben was saying to the woman in jodhpurs.

  The soldiers strode together down the sidewalk toward her. There was nothing exceptional about this save for the fact that they were both looking at her, looking directly at her as they grew near and saying nothing to each other. She began to feel nervous and interrupted: —I’m sorry, I’m cold. Can we go?

  —Of course, said Ben, —sorry, and the woman in jodhpurs stared briefly at Ann and then turned back to him.

  —You provide such an awesome service, she said, and flashed a smile that showed bright lipstick against white teeth.

  The soldiers were almost on them as they got into the car. Ben, in the driver’s seat, was noticing nothing, but she kept her eyes on their faces and never looked away. Both of them stopped short as the car pulled off the curb and turned their heads calmly, in unison, to watch it leave.

  Ben came into the living room with his morning coffee and found Ann with the war books, which she read when Oppenheimer was not reading them to keep up with him. She did not want to be caught out in ignorance of the world they had lived in, she had told him, and was constantly studying.

  —A short walk, maybe?

  —Sorry honey I can’t, she said, and smiled briefly before going back to the books.

  Hiroshima was chosen partly because it had remained unharmed throughout the war till 1945 and partly because it contained a small number of military installations. Its innocence made it an ideal target, unlike Tokyo or Kobe where firestorms caused by air raids had already destroyed thousands of buildings. The new injuries to the land, buildings and people of the city could not be confused with the ravages of previous assaults.

  In Alamogordo there had been only cattle and scrub, but in Hiroshima, for the first time, there would be human subjects.

  The ancient capital city of Kyoto had also made it onto the shortlist, but was not selected for bombing because Secretary of War Henry Stimson, a lover of antiquity, decided it was too attractive to be destroyed. This was lucky for Kyoto’s people, as well as its thousands of Shinto shrines and Buddhist temples, gardens of moss, and blood-red maples.

  The leaflets that were dropped on Hiroshima before the bombing were few in number and similar in content to leaflets that had been dropped before, in other parts of Japan, warning of so-called “conventional” air strikes. The government of Japan should surrender, they said, lest the force of American arms be further loosed upon her citizens.

  They did not mention a powerful new weapon, different from any that had come before. They did not mention an atomic bomb; it would have ruined the surprise.

  This trying to feel something is a strange ambition, she thought as she put aside her book and picked up the newspaper.

  She was preoccupied with feelings since Eugene had died, when she saw how easily she could be their victim.

  Oppenheimer had put in a request to see something new, out of Hollywood. He said it as though Hollywood was a quaint boutique. As she flipped through the pages looking for movie reviews she thought: I like feeling because it seems like the opposite of reason. Reason is boring even if it does make us human, where feeling is the breath of life and stands apart from reason, all transmogrified.

  Then she remembered the soldiers turning their faces in perfect synchronicity to watch Ben drive her away, and what she felt was fear.

  The last few times he’d left the house she had barely noticed him leaving, barely felt, as far as he could tell, his arms going around her before he left, his mouth on her cheek, barely heard what he said. As far as he could tell she must hardly be noticing his absence in the house when he was gone; he was a shifting element in her eyes but no longer a central one.

  His wife had new enthusiasms.

  Szilard and Oppenheimer began to take what Oppenheimer called “constitutionals” after breakfast, walking down upper Canyon Road toward the galleries and cafes. Breakfast for Oppenheimer was a piece of dry toast; for Szilard it was eggs and bacon and buttered scones or English muffins or chocolate chip cookies with pecans or walnuts, of which he had become very fond. (He also liked a banana, and could be seen with his cheeks full, munching, at intervals throughout the day.)

  During their walks Szilard kept up a constant patter as Oppenheimer smoked. She would see Oppenheimer nodding slowly at what Szilard said as they made their way back into the house, or occasionally shaking his head.

  Oppenheimer adopted a clay pot on an exterior windowsill as a repository for his cigarette butts. They built up daily, a grave full of bones rising. Whenever she passed the pot on the windowsill she worried that there were too many dead cigarettes in the soil. They were vandals, dirty and derelict.

  She shrugged off a suspicion that he was going to die for the second time soon.

  Ben decided to wait it out, open his arms and persist. He would not pass judgment, or at least not be raucous in his disbelief; he would let her believe what she wanted and meanwhile prosecute his life as he had before, seemingly impartial, waiting for a revelation that was not even his.

  In Make Way for Ducklings the mother duck walked through the city followed by the winding line of her young. She was aided in this enterprise by kindly policemen, who stopped the cars to let the ducklings cross the street. Ann herself, though, had seen few policemen come to the assistance of ducks, and often observed drivers swerve on purpose not to avoid a snake or rabbit but to run over it.

  She worried about Oppenheimer and Szilard when they were out of her sight.

  Thinking of Make Way for Ducklings, on the table
near Eugene’s body, she also reminded herself that she did not believe in signs or portents, inherent purpose behind coincidences. Her friend Sheila, who owned a store that sold hand-made soap in fruity scents, always ascribed coincidence to divine intervention in her daily routine. Sheila believed the world was in direct, conscious contact, and had, for reasons of its own, special business with her. If a lampshade in a tulip motif arrived at the store on the same day she happened to dab her neck with perfume bearing a tulip logo, Sheila viewed the simultaneity as a miraculous gesture of goodwill, pregnant with significance, from the hovering divine. The simultaneous presence of the tulip-related items, despite the fact that both had been directly and purposefully acquired, reinforced in Sheila the conviction that she herself was blessed, and moreover that tulips were part of the meaning of Sheila, grateful participants in the drama of Sheila’s personal growth.

  At these moments of uncanny significance, moments such as two tulip-related items appearing in her sphere on the very same day, Sheila became righteous with the certainty of her own transcendent grace and sure of the complicity in this grace of the great goddess Gaia, the cycles of the moon and tides, and her menstrual blood. This blood contained, she had told Ann, molecules from the bodies of ancient cavewoman ancestors, ancestors Ann pictured as breast-beating, hair-tearing, and possibly employing hardy reeds as dental floss.

  It also contained, Sheila had said solemnly after perusing the New York Times Science page on a Tuesday, “actual molecules left over from the Big Bang.”

  —We are all one! she had said, hands raised dramatically, after reading about the molecules.

  —But so what? Ann had asked.

  Sheila had taken this question as hard evidence of a resistance to spiritual matters. She thought Ann was being facetious. But Ann did not trust Sheila’s instincts vis-à-vis her own blessedness, if only because this blessedness had single-handedly allowed Sheila to build up her collection of dangly earrings, with which she professed herself admittedly “obsessed,” to three hundred and eighty-four pairs by the most recent count. The earrings were a bi-weekly reward for loving herself, as Sheila put it, with a generous and totally unconditional love.