Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

by Lydia Millet

  On the other hand, Sheila was kind to animals and would never run over either a rabbit or a snake. She collected crippled cats and dogs and gave them food and shelter, wrapping the wounded in vibrantly colorful afghans knitted by her mother.

  Ann did not wish to see meaning latent everywhere. If she let herself feel that the world was laying omens in her path she might soon believe she was receiving marital advice from stray pigeons, strutting on the pavement like bug-eyed morons. She might soon see a secret intelligence in the eyes of a passing Standard Poodle, and pin it down spread-eagled to force it to confess.

  Now that she had an actual contestable belief, a preposterous, irrational belief—namely the conviction that something that seemed impossible was real—she would have to discipline herself. She would have to keep herself temperate and measured so she did not spin off wheeling into the night, an object of derision.

  Szilard had argued with Oppie, as he called him now, near the end of the war in the Pacific. The argument concerned the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Oppenheimer knew the bomb would be used; he knew three years of his life had now been consecrated to the machine of its eventual use. But Szilard did not think the bombing was defensible under any circumstances. He did not fully understand that he was beating his head against the sturdy wall of an edifice that later would come to be called the “military-industrial complex.”

  But then Szilard could be oblivious on many levels to the exigencies of politics. He believed reason could conquer all, could talk a man down from the perilous heights of compulsion. He steadfastly refused to admit that the feral urges of man, his bloodlust and his will to power, most often trump his capacity for logic and empathy.

  In fact Szilard was oblivious in the physical world, in matters of the body. It has been documented that on one occasion, as a guest in someone’s house, he slept poorly for three nights, complaining every morning about his uncomfortable mattress. It was finally discovered, in an investigation that followed his third complaint, that before his arrival, after the mattress had been lifted off the bed to be turned and aired out, it had never been replaced.

  He had been sleeping on the bare springs.

  Ben was exhausted now and then with an exhaustion he had barely known since his childhood. He stopped driving Szilard anywhere except when taxis were the only alternative and Szilard threatened to get the cash for the taxis from Ann.

  For his part Szilard restrained himself. He made the threat only when he was serious about getting somewhere, and it became shorthand for “You will drive me.”

  For Oppenheimer reading had turned into a fierce and ugly act. He was afraid of it, but he had to persist.

  At the time it was bombed Hiroshima also had a prisoner-of-war camp full of Allied soldiers. One of them, from a gentle town surrounded by cornfields in the American midwest, was a thin man grown far thinner on his prisoner-of-war diet. He was given to picking at his cuticles and had worked unsuccessfully to conquer a stutter.

  Only a few short years before he had been a strapping baby. When he was seven months old and twenty-six inches long by the measuring tape his mother had hurt her back lifting him, and in the ensuing years her back had never fully recovered; but she loved him so much, his small beaming face, that she quickly forgot how her back had been injured and never thought of it again.

  Still, after her back was injured she had switched to a carriage instead of carrying him everywhere. When she pushed him down the street in his carriage he had lain in the carriage and beamed, watching the treetops pass overhead like weather.

  Ann had a savings account and a small package of funds from her parents’ life insurance company. In the last days, after they fell from middle-class comfort into the tight and watchful penury of a small pension plan, she and Ben had helped to support them. Her father had been mildly disgraced: an employee under his supervision had embezzled hundreds of thousands of dollars over the years, siphoning it slowly, and because he did not notice the accounting discrepancies he was held responsible in the end and forced into early retirement.

  He tended not to stand straight after that, even though it was commonly known that lack of vigilance, not criminality, had been responsible for his downfall. There were sad testimonials from his coworkers and even cards from a corporate vice president or two, signaling the appropriate level of patronizing regret. Her mother had actually been sent a funeral wreath by her father’s secretary, no doubt a mistake at the florist’s.

  Ann had the modest life insurance payment that had come to her after the accident and a few thousand dollars in her old savings account from before her marriage. There was a lawsuit pending against the trucking company, but she seldom thought about it and had no hopes of a return.

  She brought the subject up with him when they were in bed, when he was happy and drowsy and curled around her, his warm breath on the back of her neck. She had not planned it, but the word came and she saw no reason to hold it back. —Hiroshima, she said quietly as people will, evoking in one word, one place name, the unspeakable, a vague but jarring memory of guilt, something like an original sin.

  Why is this happening to me, was what ran through Ben’s mind after she told him where she wanted to spend her long-earned vacation. But he suppressed the complaint.

  Oppenheimer confided in Ben that he had considered taking Fermi to a psychologist. But as long as he was destitute and unsure of himself he did not wish to approach any authority or institution. Authorities would do nothing but judge them, exactly as the police, he said, had briefly—though apparently with supreme indifference—judged Szilard.

  They were watching television because Szilard had developed an interest in reality shows, which he claimed reminded him of the circus freak shows of yesteryear. They took the place, said Szilard, of the Siamese twins and deformed fetuses in pickle jars that had long been outlawed.

  Oppenheimer watched distractedly, smoking out the window, drinking bourbon and making conversation with Ben. He and Ben had agreed to disagree on the subject of identity. Oppenheimer did not blame him at all for his skepticism. It was exactly, he said, how he would have felt if their positions were reversed.

  —The one thing a shrink could do, said Ben, —would be to convince you you’re not who you claim to be. Your delusions of grandeur are pretty common. I mean in hospitals where they treat psychiatric problems there are literally hundreds of Napoleons, Kennedys, Pope John Pauls, and Mahatma Gandhis.

  —Believe me, said Oppenheimer, —I’d rather be one of them.

  Ann slipped into the car and slung her plastic bag of groceries into the passenger seat. In an overpriced gourmet food store she had run into a woman named Melanie who had once been a friend and was now an awkward acquaintance. The friendship had always been uncertain and finally Melanie stopped calling and Ann did not call her either. They had little to say each other.

  Beside the deli counter Melanie had smiled palely at her, clearly bored even as she asked with forced interest: —Hey Ann, so how have you been?

  Ann had wanted to answer: —You don’t have to fake it for me. Just grab your pasta salad and run.

  But instead she had answered with equal politeness. It occurred to her that Melanie’s life was sealed off from her now, but she did not care. She felt she should regret this, but did not.

  —Is she happy? she wondered, flicking her signal for the turn into her driveway, and then conjugated. —Am I happy? Are they happy?

  She thought: when people ask these questions they mean the reverse. Is it a happy marriage? means: Is it unhappy? Is he a happy man means: is he unhappy?

  People do not mean happy. Happy is never meant. On the subject of happy the mind actually draws a blank.

  When she got home, grocery bags in her arms, and pushed the front door open with her hip, her foot slid as she stepped over the threshold and looking down she saw a scuffed envelope. It was unmarked so she put down her bags, picked it up and ripped it open. Inside was a photograph: a shadowy figure seen
through a white window curtain. It had been taken at night, from outside the window looking in.

  She put the picture down on an end table and was in the kitchen pouring herself a glass of water when she realized it was her bedroom window, and the figure was her.

  Glass in one hand, picture in the other, heart beating quickly, she went to find Oppenheimer, who was reading in the garden. Her hand shook as she held it out to him.

  —I think, he said slowly, —someone is watching us.

  A few minutes later she picked up the ringing telephone to hear, at the other end, a man’s voice she did not recognize. It said only: Get them out of your house. They are not good for you.

  She told Oppenheimer about this but she did not tell Ben.

  When it came to money Ben could dig in his heels. He was cautious about spending it, always in the certainty that men of any age could easily become poor, cast out onto the street to shake cups for pennies and fall to drinking malt liquor. When he heard the words old man this was the first image that entered his mind; when he heard the word poor he thought of father.

  The first time he’d heard The Lord’s Prayer he had thought the words went Poor father, who art in heaven, hallowed be thy name. Thy kingdom come, thy will be done, on earth as it is in heaven.

  And if he had to be frail-boned and brittle, if he lived that long, at least he would be sure not to be yellow-haired, brown-toothed, at the mercy of young passersby in slick garments, with clean faces, shining eyes and confident shoulders. He would not be abject.

  He had opened a retirement account when he was nineteen.

  But Ann had always associated those who planned too carefully for their advancing age with a denial of life, an eagerness to be done with it. She had an uncle and aunt who had lived in a small house with a dry brown lawn in Anaheim, California, for forty years. She had visited them as a freshman in college and again in her late twenties. The aunt and uncle rarely went outside; their groceries were delivered once a week. When she saw them in her twenties they sat her down and brought her a glass of iced tea, the same flavor of iced tea they had offered her when she was eighteen. She sat in the same beige armchair and placed her tea on a round, straw coaster that, though she could not be perfectly sure, also looked familiar after more than a decade.

  Her aunt liked to do large sailboat and nature-scene jigsaw puzzles, which she later laminated and hung on the wall. Her uncle watched sports and collected small bottles of tequila from all over Mexico, though, being in AA, he did not drink them. But chiefly, she had seen from their reticence and rigid bodies and their obvious reluctance to hear new information, they wished that all the rush was over. They wished the job of living was already resolved and perfect in completion. If they could be statues they would, but failing that they would float forever on the surface of their lives.

  Ben feared cataclysmic events but more and more she feared the lack of them. So his resistance to Hiroshima did not surprise her. It was like rope, long, quiet and strong. How were they going to get passports for the scientists, for instance? Szilard was handling the details, she told him. Szilard had investigated. Szilard was determined not to be obstructed by what he called “the logistics of being dead.” Ben said the bills would add up. He said it made no sense to spend thousands of dollars on a whim. Weren’t they giving the scientists enough already? The scientists were living off them. They, Ann and Ben, had become a charity, but far from being rich they were an unemployed librarian and a gardener.

  —A charity, finished Ben, —without the tax benefits.

  Ann stood behind him, arms folded, on the opposite side of the kitchen, the edge of the sink lodged sharply against the small of her back as she watched him chop vegetables with a sure hand. It was difficult to persuade from this position, looking at his shoulder blades. She felt weak.

  —I can afford it, she said. —I want to use my parents’ insurance policy for the trip. They would have wanted it.

  Her parents had wanted her to see the world and she had always resisted. During their lives she had never gone far afield. She had always thought travel was beside the point, an escape from what was real instead of a search for it as most travelers claimed. Even now she did not want to travel. She had no interest in Japan before other countries; she did not speak the language and she did not know the country’s history except for the single blot, the event. Because of this she would only coast along outside of the culture looking in as she suspected tourists always did, feet leaden, eyes dazzled, spending.

  But she could not let the scientists go alone.

  —They would have wanted you to give your money away? To hand over your meager savings to men you just met?

  —No, you know what I—

  —Men who seem to be in the throes of a grandiose schizoid delusion? That’s what your parents would have wanted for you?

  —They would have wanted me to do something …

  She stopped, throat constricting, and swallowed so she could go on.

  —… something I wanted to do.

  The scientists were hers, the only cause she had ever held dear. Causes had always kept her at a distance: they cried out for attention but left her numb. There were just too many of them, mostly hopeless.

  But now there was only one.

  As for Nagasaki, bombed three days after Hiroshima, leaflets were certainly dropped warning of an atomic bomb and exhorting those below to flee the city.

  The timing of this is occasionally debated, however. Some Japanese survivors of the bomb maintain that the leaflets were dropped by American planes only after the attack, for the sake of posterity.

  But there is no debate as to whether the leaflets were helpful to the citizens of Nagasaki. Japan was a poor country then; the war had seen strict rationing, and toilet paper was scarce.

  He felt guilty, pulled toward her and pushed away at once, worry nagging. But it was true: her parents would have approved. She had always been too retiring for them. They had raised her with high hopes of social status and she had turned out to be a librarian.

  To them it was almost, she had said to him once, as though she had become a nun. A librarian was a nun without God. A librarian could have God, of course, she might or might not have God, but God was not mandatory.

  —I’m sorry, said Ben, putting his arms around her. —I didn’t mean to upset you.

  —I know, she said.

  —It’s just, I thought you were putting that money away for the kid, he said softly. —Remember? College tuition.

  —But there’s still time for that, she said, —right? We don’t have to live like we’re already middle-aged. We’re still young. And for some reason I know, for some reason I’m sure about this. I have to stay with them.

  Japan was the first destination on Szilard’s list but only the second on Oppenheimer’s. Oppenheimer had an even more pressing appointment. With Szilard’s collusion he prepared quietly, buying fake driver’s licenses and University of New Mexico faculty IDs and arranging to join a chartered bus tour. The bus would be full of civil servants from a federal agency that regulated the nuclear power industry. They had scheduled a private tour of a national historical site.

  Because of their status as civil servants in the industry these bureaucrats had special privileges. They would be attending a conference in Albuquerque, and on the side, in their spare time, wished to be educated in history.

  He wanted to go back to the place from which he and Fermi had first disappeared. It was not easy because the Trinity Site, on the White Sands Missile Range near the strip-mall, fast-food town of Socorro, was open to the general public for only two days a year.

  After all the primary function of a missile range is not, it has to be admitted, the entertainment of tourists.

  —No, I don’t need to go, Ben told her when she asked if he wanted to go with them. —From what I hear there’s not a lot to see, just some bare earth and busloads of fat people snapping their cameras. I have to work.

  It was Op
penheimer who chose the code name Trinity for the first-ever atomic blast. When he was asked about this baptism, according to the history books, he said: “This code name didn’t mean anything. It was just something suggested to me by John Donne’s sonnets, which I happened to be reading at the time.”

  Apparently there were two poems he had in mind by Donne, one of which went As West and East are one, So death doth touch the Resurrection.

  The other, a devotional poem, went Batter my heart, three person’d God.

  At the White Sands Missile Range they parked the car near a guarded entrance called Stallion Gate. It was here that they would meet the Army personnel who would lead them on their tour.

  —It had a different name back then, said Oppenheimer as he got out of the passenger seat and ground his cigarette out on the roadbed with the toe of his shoe. —Alamogordo Bombing and Gunnery Range. Back then we called things by their names. Remember, Enrico? Stimson was the secretary of war; now they have a secretary of defense.

  —Apparently these days the government likes to pretend that all war is defense, said Szilard.

  Fermi nodded vaguely.

  —It’s what I said would happen, said Oppenheimer. —I read it just yesterday in one of my lectures. The government has to lie because it’s afraid of the people.

  —Doublespeak, said Szilard. —You can’t believe a word they say.

  —Democracy has become very crude, said Fermi prissily. —Have you seen the magazines for women?

  —And the popular music, said Oppenheimer.

  —Eminem, said Szilard. —He’s good. But I got an old album by Ice Cube that I like better.

  —Ice Cube? asked Oppenheimer.

  —“Your daughter was a nice girl, now she’s a slut,” said Szilard.

  —Excuse me? said Fermi.

  —Ice Cube. The rapper. It’s a song. “A queen treatin’ niggaz just like King Tut. Gobblin’ up nuts, sorta like a hummingbird.”