by Lydia Millet
These numbers, as far as Oppenheimer could tell, had no basis in fact.
They were sitting reading after dinner when Fermi appeared in the living room doorway and cleared his throat.
Surprised at this uncharacteristic boldness all four of them turned to look at him.
—This incident was the last straw, he said. —I do not want to go to Japan. I do not think my presence will be a benefit.
—You’re coming with us anyway, said Oppenheimer, who brooked no dissent. Szilard pretended to be immersed in an issue of Scientific American.
Fermi stood there for a while and then turned and shuffled back to his room.
In life Fermi had been an avid hiker, climbing quickly and energetically through the Jemez and the Sangre de Cristo and before that the Italian Alps, always at the head of the column, liking to be first and liking to be fast, wielding a walking stick.
The afternoon after the accident Ben came home for lunch and Fermi was perched on a stool at the kitchen’s wooden bar nibbling quiet and rabbitlike at an egg-salad sandwich. Then, following his daily custom, he retired to his room to lie on his side and close his eyes without sleeping.
Ben followed him and knocked on his door. Fermi sat up on the sofabed and waited politely.
—I was thinking, maybe you’d feel like taking a walk in the mountains when I get off work. There should be color in the high meadows now, Indian paintbrush blooming. Back in your time a big fire went through there, and now the hills are covered in aspen.
It took Fermi some time to answer.
—I’m tired, he said finally.
—You don’t have to go far, said Ben. —You don’t have to go fast. Do you good to get out.
Later they drove upward, winding, almost in silence except for once when Fermi asked if he could open the window. He rolled it down carefully, as though the handle might break in his fingers. Then he leaned. He reminded Ben of a dog, listing toward the opening to catch the force of the wind in his face. His hands rested neatly, almost formally on his knees, but his torso leaned away toward the breeze, which rifled what remained of his hair.
When they got out Ben handed him a full water bottle, which he accepted wordlessly. Along the wide disused Forest Service road, hard-packed dirt, dried grass, tire treads and small-headed yellow flowers bending along the edges, Fermi followed him uphill, trudging the gradual but wearing slope. When Ben said something and turned to look at him he would nod or shake his head, but he was distant.
Where the trail narrowed a hawk swooped suddenly over them, the white of its underwings so close Ben thought he could touch the feathers. He wondered what had drawn it so low, what prey it had dipped to catch. Fermi stopped in his tracks and stared up at it, arms hanging at his sides, head tipped back, as it lifted on a swell and rose away from them again.
After that he began to walk faster. He passed Ben and strode ahead more and more quickly until finally Ben didn’t feel like keeping up.
—Turn back, he called, —at four thirty! OK?
He thought he saw the back of Fermi’s head move vertically in a nod, but he wasn’t sure.
At five he got tired and turned back, hoping that Fermi, ahead of him, further up and in colder air, was doing the same. One knee was hurting where he’d had surgery. He waited for him at the car, until the sun set and the dark dropped. There was silence around him except for the wind in the trees now and then, and every few minutes a car passed behind, headlights swinging as it rounded the near curve.
After a while he was too irritated to do nothing. He hummed and swung his arms, walked in circles and stretched his legs, counted branches, trees, stars and constellations. He cleaned the car’s interior, wiping the dash with wet wipes from the glove compartment, collecting bubble gum wrappers and paper cups and the wrinkled stiff white balls of wax paper that Szilard invariably tucked under the passenger seat after eating his daily donut. He thought of Szilard’s fleshy face, his sloped shoulders. Normally Szilard was the butt of his private jokes but the longer Ben waited for Fermi the better Szilard looked by contrast: the reliable homebody, the good dog on the hearth.
It was almost ten when Fermi came trotting briskly down the path again, water bottle in one hand. He was smiling, and when he got into the car his apologies were so profuse and heavily accented that Ben smiled and forgot to be angry anymore, and they drove back down the mountain in a warm exhaustion that was almost contented.
—Goodnight, said Oppenheimer, stepping into the living room where she sat and waving to her after his last cigarette of the evening. Szilard was in bed and Ben and Fermi were still in the mountains.
She turned a page in the book of photographs she was looking at, beautiful photographs of foreign landscapes. She felt a surge of joy looking down at them and decided it would be wise never to go there. This was best, sitting here, looking at them like this, flat, fully captured, perfect.
Joy rises unexpectedly, she thought, now in peace, now in crisis. The feeling of it escapes design, surging only at the far end of endurance, on the lip of despair. It trills a faint pulse beyond the normal in the tiredness of limbs, a lifted grief, the flash and glitter of the sea.
When they came in the door they smelled of the cold. Ben could tell, smelling the cold that was on his own face.
He and Fermi smiled at each other quickly when they saw Ann curled on the couch. She had fallen asleep with a coffee table book on her lap, in the dim glow of a lamp.
Fermi slipped off his shoes and went quietly down the hall to his room while Ben lifted the book off her lap and picked her up gently to carry her to bed.
In actual fact so-called conventional warfare had already devolved into total war, that is to say, war waged against civilians on a sweeping scale. Both the Allies and the Axis military had been guilty of this. The American firebombings of Tokyo, for instance, killed one hundred thousand citizens in two days, who died mostly by burning alive. The Japanese rape of Nanking left more than two hundred thousand civilians dead and involved the rape and mutilation of tens of thousands of women and girls. The English bombing of Dresden killed one-hundred and thirty thousand. All in all, the Soviet Union saw seventeen million civilians killed in the war, China nine million, Poland six million, Germany four million. England suffered only sixty-two thousand, and the United States almost none.
The sheets needed to be washed. Even the coverlet, the down comforter, all of them smelled faintly of skin and sweat instead of detergent because she had forgotten routine in the past weeks, forgotten the care she always took and how it had both framed the day and hung itself on the day’s frame. Herself she liked these smells of sleeping but her mother had lectured her often on the hygiene of linens, how they should bear the fragrance of soap instead of humans.
—So listen, said Ben.
This was where most of their negotiations were conducted now, where most new information was disclosed since the advent of the scientists, which had made public space of the rest of the house.
—Yes? she murmured, though she had actually departed already, even as she decided the sheets were dirty and she didn’t mind. She had emerged into an airport, onto a long automatic sidewalk, where blocking the sidewalk ahead of her was a kangaroo in an overstuffed chair, reminding her of Szilard.
Then she remembered: he and Fermi had been out late. She had waited for them. She was jarred awake.
—What took you so long? she asked plaintively.
—Listen, whispered Ben. —I’m going with you to Japan.
She lifted herself up, alert, noticing now his crow’s feet, the bags under his eyes. He seemed older to her in the half-light, lying down, the back of his hand against his forehead, palm up and fingers curled, a gesture he made only when he was very tired.
—Really? she asked. —You can leave work for two weeks?
She settled against his cool naked side, adjusting herself so that her cheek did not lie against the sharp lines of the ribs. Once a lung had collapsed, and there was a scar b
eneath his arm, across the side of the ribcage. When a lung collapsed, he had told her, air continued to be inhaled into the body but could not be exhaled again, and so the body swelled and rounded, ballooning till finally the heart stopped. He had warned her the lung could easily collapse again. If they were alone in a place with no telephones or ambulances she would have to make the incision herself. She would have to remove the ink cartridge from a ballpoint pen, he said, and stick the hollow pen into the hole to let out the air.
—Lynn wasn’t happy about it, he said. —But I convinced her. I told her the sub was taking a break from doing Joni Mitchell.
Oppenheimer and Szilard had begun to discuss their colleagues of an evening, their former colleagues from life. Szilard had tracked down various biographies and for light reading after dinner he and Oppenheimer would read from these. They read about themselves privately, with advance psychological preparation, but they were always jarred when they found references to themselves in books they were reading about others.
Ann liked to listen to them and Ben liked to sit with his arm around her shoulders. Two nights after his walk on the mountain, Fermi even joined them.
—Uh, Bob Serber—, said Szilard, putting down the book from which he was reading aloud. It was one of several autobiographical tomes by the physicist Richard Feynman, rich in frolicsome anecdotes and reports of clever practical jokes Feynman had played on his fellow academics.
—What about him? asked Oppenheimer from the open window where he was standing, arm and cigarette outside. His mind had been wandering, Ann could tell.
Szilard appeared to reconsider speaking further. He fumbled with the Feynman a bit nervously, flipping through it as though searching.
But now Oppenheimer was interested.
—Biographers seem to believe he had an, um, special relationship with Kitty, is what Dr. Szilard was probably going to say, said Ann. —He’s going to learn it sooner or later, she went on, turning to Szilard. —He might as well hear it now.
—They may have been just friends, said Szilard quickly. —Like me and Trude.
—You married Trude, said Ann.
—The other guy did that, not me, said Szilard. —She probably begged him to. I wouldn’t have done it personally. But it wasn’t his fault anyway. He put up a good fight. It took her twenty years to convince him.
—Bob Serber, said Oppenheimer slowly. —With my wife?
—You were already dead, said Szilard. —Don’t worry.
—I hadn’t read that, said Oppenheimer. —I wonder how I missed it.
—They were mourning you, put in Ann, anxious to mitigate. —They spent a lot of time together after your death. Kitty was lonely.
—Kitty never liked to be on her own, said Oppenheimer. —I wouldn’t expect her to.
—Anyway, Oppie, said Szilard, —you were dead.
—No one acted out of turn, said Ann.
—But how about Bob’s wife? Charlotte?
—She died too, said Szilard. —She died young.
—Dear Charlotte. That poor girl. She was our librarian! Just like you, said Oppenheimer with sudden tenderness, turning to Ann.
Ann felt flustered and went on talking to cover her confusion. Oppenheimer was rarely affectionate.
—Serber remarried after Kitty died, said Ann.
She had researched the subject because she felt an obligation to know about the scientists’ personal lives. It seldom occurred to them to explain themselves, so to follow their conversations she needed a complete background. Oppenheimer in life had been close to Serber and so she had read about him: born and raised in West Philadelphia, the grandson of immigrants from Russia and Poland, he had been thirteen when his mother died of a nervous system disease, having spent her last years in dim rooms, shielded from noise and light. Scarlet fever had left Serber himself near-sighted and all his life he wore bottle-thick glasses. Yet women had tended to find him attractive. He had lived longer than any of the atom bomb scientists save Teller, finally dying of cancer in 1997. —A younger woman.
—Bob was a good physicist. A great help. I was quite fond of him, said Oppenheimer with a studied mildness.
Both he and Szilard liked to pore over pictures of the young scientists they had known in 1945, images of these men that had been made long after they had known them. Even Fermi could be roused by this, occasionally moved to laughter by the sight of his boyhood friends transformed—somewhat gruesomely, it had to be admitted, in one fell swoop—into doddering old men.
—There’s Segré! he said, crowing and pointing. —My God! Emilio! We used to call him the Basilisk when we were at school in Rome. He turned a fiery eye when displeased. So much taller than me. And then look at him! He liked to fish for trout. Now he looks like one.
—Not now, said Oppenheimer. —Now he’s deceased.
—You know what I mean, said Fermi.
—His son wrote a book about him, said Ann. —He said he was emotionally unreachable.
—Is that bad? asked Fermi.
—I think you, on the other hand, said Oppenheimer to Szilard, —aged quite well.
—Oh, Leo was always the same, said Fermi. —Fat. Fat people retain a youthful appearance.
—What? said Szilard.
—The fat puffs out the wrinkles.
—What? repeated Szilard, indignant but willing to ham it up if his performance would help draw out Fermi. He turned the book toward him to scrutinize himself posing for a group photo. —That’s the other guy. Maybe he got fat, sure. But not me. You’re saying I was big like he got to be, even when I was young? That’s bullshit! I’m young now! Look at me!
—You’re going native, said Oppenheimer, smiling. —Since when did you use such offensive language?
—When in Rome, said Szilard. —I don’t know about you, but I don’t want to be a fossil. Not when I already have being dead to deal with. I go by the school, talk to the kids between classes. It’s quite an education. Haven’t you talked to the kids?
—I can’t understand a damn thing they say, murmured Oppenheimer.
—I’m learning the language. Bullshit dopeass gay-ass motherfucker, said Szilard carefully. —Girlfriend, you a stanky ho.
One morning after Ben had left for work she was heading down the hall in her nightgown and gnawing on a piece of toast when she heard Szilard singing tunelessly in the shower. He sang a song he had apparently learned from the radio or in the CD store, where he sometimes spent an afternoon conducting research on our nation’s vibrant youth culture. —You and me baby ain’t nothing but mammals, so let’s do it like they do on the Discovery Channel.
It made her laugh abruptly, alone in the hallway. She stopped and stood there and ate the last crust; then she opened a door at random and stared inside at the dusty photo albums standing on a shelf beside a stack of linens. They were not hers but her parents’, part of her inheritance when they died. She had taken them out of their apartment when she was going through their belongings but since then she avoided looking at them. It had hung over her since.
She picked up the album on top of the pile and opened it to a black-and-white picture of her mother as a child, standing with a blond boy in swimsuits on a beach, holding sandcastle shovels. Their faces were young and perfect, large soft dark eyes and unlined skin.
Joy, she thought: maybe when you don’t have it yourself, when you don’t have the grace, you look for it to shine out of someone nearby.
She felt her smile fading and thought: Watch yourself. It wasn’t the answer to look elsewhere just because she couldn’t make her own light.
—Can you give me a towel? interjected Szilard loudly, sticking his wet head out the bathroom door.
She reached into the closet again and pulled one out, crossed the hall and handed it to him. He shut the door without further comment.
We’re so many, we’re so hard to distinguish from each other, but we long to be distinguished, she thought, putting the album away without looking at it any more, shutt
ing the closet door and walking away from Szilard and his ingratitude.
Because of that we feel compelled, beyond being happy, also to feel chosen. We want to feel anointed and brought in, to know we have been spoken to, she thought, and went alone into the yard, shutting the door behind her softly to watch the neighbors’ solid, square-faced tabby cat stare up into a tree without moving. She walked over to pet it and then retreated to her front steps to sit down again. The cat resumed its observation of the tree and she followed its gaze: in the high branches was movement, a small animal.
But then when she looked back at the cat it had fallen onto its paws. Its chin was resting there, and slowly it rolled sideways onto the ground. There was something wrong with the movement and she got up suddenly and ran over to it. It was breathing shallowly, and its eyes rolled toward her slowly though it did not turn its head. She felt its side, the warm roundness of the stomach, the sleek back, and there was nothing: but then she shifted on her feet and craned her neck she saw blood on its neck, a small bloody hole. And then a larger hole at the shoulder.
There was black on her eyelids as she squatted beside it, swaying, a hot prickle in her cheeks. Blood seeped from the hole in its throat to disappear in the grass and the cat closed its eyes with her beside it, touching it in panicky small pats and pleading —No! No no no! in a whisper.
Finally she rose on quaking legs and ran out of the yard, onto the street. No one was around. She saw nothing.
But the cat had clearly been shot. And the shot had been silent.
—Help! she said weakly. Her voice was almost gone.
There was no one visible.
Dazed she walked back into her yard and sat down beside the cat. She put a hand on its still, warm flank, looked at its quiet face and felt a searing pity. Soon she turned her face up and her eyes stung with the light of the sky through the tree branches, which she was staring at without blinking.