by Lydia Millet
In the corner of the walled lot Bradley’s wife stood staring back at him, clutching a handkerchief he recognized because she had asked him to bless it. Beside her Dory was filming, crouched with her camcorder on her shoulder. Above them a sign on crumbling brick read $7.99 Early Bird Special.
Seeing the two of them together he could not help but consider them in the same light, two faithful camp followers, humble and submissive, deferring. Dory had begged for service, and thinking of it made his bones feel cold as steel. He flinched without moving.
He could perpetrate any insult or injury against them without provoking anger or outrage. And yet of course there was no injury he wished to give them. He was without urges of any kind, mean or lustful or disparaging. He had first seen his pity as a relief from neutrality, but since then it had become a burden. It was the only thing he knew how to feel anymore. And the fact that he was left with pity, one sad small shade from the broad spectrum of emotions, seemed pitiable itself. Wherever he looked over these past few days he saw something worthy of condescension—a repulsive inclination. In theory he rejected everything about it but in practice there was nothing he could do. Pity was simply how you felt when everything around you was mortal.
But when he first came here, he remembered, he had cried. He had had feelings then. How quaint he had been. He recalled himself sitting at a bus stop in Los Alamos, the crisp air of the high plateau around him, weeping for his lost house and neighborhood and wife and children as though he was human.
Ben first became aware of the noise while he was walking around the block with Fermi, bodyguards behind and in front of them. They had both gotten cold and needed to walk to generate heat, despite Fermi’s alarm at the squalor of the street, which he said he could hardly believe was actually a street “in the downtown of America’s capital city.”
—What is that? Sounds like someone humming, asked Ben. Fermi only shook his head.
—It’s the crowd, said one of the bodyguards. —They’re meeting up about a half-mile away.
As they walked around the block the faint hum grew louder and Ben could see that streets were cordoned off, crowds massing at the ends of them, banners held and megaphones blaring.
—I’m afraid of it, said Fermi suddenly, coming to a dead stop. His lips were blue. —I prefer to go back.
—You’ll be fine today, said Ben. —And you can go back tomorrow. OK? Right now we need to get you warmed up.
After a few moments Fermi seemed to forget his alarm.
—We used to wear long underwear, he mused, and picked up his stride. —Woolen. I had a red pair. In those days we kept warm.
In 2001, the George W. Bush administration withdrew from the longstanding anti-ballistic missile treaty of 1972 and began to agitate for the placement of a “Star Wars” type anti-ballistic missile system in California and Alaska, though such a system, since it did not yet exist, was still only science fiction.
The following year, when it made its argument for small, usable nukes, it published a “Nuclear Posture Review” that recommended expanding the U.S. nuclear program. The paper outlined a plan to deploy a new type of intercontinental ballistic missile by 2018, a new submarine-launched missile by 2030, and a new heavy bomber by 2040.
Knowing how much the public likes to see reductions in nuclear weapons, however, the American and Russian presidents made a great public show three months later of agreeing to reduce their stockpiles of strategic weapons by several thousand by 2012.
This so-called historic agreement was actually non-binding and in fact set the same levels of reduction already outlined in old treaties. In the meantime, the men in charge of the American government were dreaming of a future where nuclear weapons loomed large once again.
Szilard and Oppenheimer would make their opening speech from a balcony that overlooked a square, with Fermi standing behind them. The rest of them would not go upstairs with the scientists but would watch from the ground with the crowds.
The van pulled into an underground lot and let them out, and bodyguards led Oppenheimer and Szilard and Fermi and Bradley to an elevator. When the doors closed behind them other soldiers in the Righteous Army led the rest of them up a car ramp to the street.
—Is Bradley going to talk too? Ann asked Larry.
—Say some of that Christian shit? I don’t think so, he said.
She looked sidelong at the soldiers but their faces betrayed nothing.
—So why is he going up with them?
—He has to be where the action is, said Tamika.
They were on the street then and walking toward a police barrier, behind which crowds were teeming. Ann saw a wavering, dipping handmade sign that read HAIL THE SAVIOR. In small print beneath this was written INTO YOUR HEART WELCOME HIM.
The square was packed and further out, down the streets that fed into it, there was no end of people. It struck Ann as they moved along the margin of the crowd with their bodyguard escort that the marchers were very well-behaved, even orderly.
—Can you hear me? boomed a voice over their heads. It was Szilard, but his voice was deeper than usual, a rich baritone. They had come to a concrete barrier and Ann looked up at the balcony, almost immediately overhead. All she could see was brick, and all she could hear was the drone of conversation, now dropping off around her as the crowd began to clap. Behind her someone was singing in a high, off-key voice. Glory, glory hallelujah, glory, glory hallelujah.
—Thank you all for the effort you’ve made to be here today! We couldn’t have an impact without you!
—We can’t even see them here! complained Tamika to one of the guards. —Can’t we move? We’re like right under their feet!
—Instructions. This is the most secure location, said the guard, and turned away to speak into his headset.
—This sucks, said Tamika.
—Secure location my ass, said Larry.
—But Dory’s taping it, hon, said Tamika. —She wangled a deal where she can be up there with the network news people, where she has a good view of the mall. At least we can watch it on tape later. Right?
—This is a day that will herald the dawn of a new age, came Szilard’s distorted and magnified voice.
Around them people cheered and screamed, and more voices took up the hymn the single voice had been singing. Ann turned around to see who it was but could not pick out the singers from the crowd.
—How many people did they say were showing up? Ben asked Larry.
—Somewhere around three hundred thousand, I think they were telling me, said Larry, and turned to Tamika. —Is that right, honey? I know it’s more than they had at that million-man march way back when.
—Today we march for an end to warlike things, said Szilard, and the crowd screamed again.
—Where are the floats? said Ann into Larry’s ear.
—They’re coming. Should be here any minute.
Szilard spoke of “the imperative of ridding the world of the nuclear menace” and below the balcony where he an Oppenheimer were standing Ben could see nothing, only hear. Around him he read the signs of the marchers, which did not refer to peace but rather to the Rapture, not of the need to bring together the community of nations but of the final annihilation in which God’s justice will be done.
Bodyguards flanked them. When he looked past a burly shoulder he could see down a wide boulevard: over the crowds loomed a missile, easily the size of three eighteen-wheelers. It pointed straight up like a rocket.
—Oh my God, said Ann beside him, and Larry grinned.
—That’s the lead float, he said. —It’s a reproduction of an ICBM!
—Very lifelike, said Ben.
It was white and written on the side in somber black were the words U.S. Air Force.
—And I give you my colleague, said Szilard, —Dr. Julius Robert Oppenheimer.
The crowd surged hard against Ann’s back, all of them pressing forward, the pitch of their cries rising into a scream. She raised her hands to her
ears and leaned against Ben.
—The king! The king! chanted a group nearby, and she turned to look at them. They were teenagers, holding signs that bore pictures of the porkpie hat.
Oppenheimer was not surprised by the crowds. If there was anything he was used to by now it was multitudes. Whether in their vastness they were only a dream of crowds or actual crowds he was not sure, but he would give them the benefit of the doubt. Pretend the world is real. This had been his creed at the very beginning and lately he had returned to it.
But lately it had been a stretch because the dreams stayed with him when he was awake. Their tone lasted throughout the morning, haunting him as he drank his coffee and smoked his cigarettes and even talked to the people around him, the dreams covering their faces. All the dreams were of multitudes. There were multitudes of people or multitudes of things, but they were all multitudes.
One of them was of women weeping, the kind of abject women he had begun to see everywhere and feel beholden to, women to whom he could give nothing. In the dream he owed a debt to all women and all children. He was guilty before them, guilty even before animals of which he did not know the names: he was guilty before the world of the living.
Now all of them, these living animals and men and women and children who would soon enough cease to live, converged on him. They drew themselves along the ground, moving in crowds across the land, slow and sightless and wishing for something he could no longer offer. One day he had done a thing that could not be undone and now he basked in the sickening afterglow. It was a glow like a needle, the edge of a flashing knife.
Another dream pressed down on him with the hard white burning of the sun, and under the sun the water: there were cars under the ocean, all the cars he had seen in the world since he got here, the thousands or hundreds of thousands of them. They lay side by side at the bottom of the sea, covered in water, overgrown with seaweed, rusting in peace. The ocean was dark around their bodies.
This last dream was a good dream. Ever since he had come to the new life he had hated the cars.
But his one wish was for simplicity. He would be satisfied to live without what he had prized most all his life, namely intelligence. He considered the small mammals burrowing under wet leaves, the long-legged graceful ones running across wide fields. Most likely they did not know the prospect of their own death or the end of history but only moved about their business when the sun rose or set. He wanted to be one of them, or even a man still but without faculties, one of the slack-jawed and smiling, one of the bumbling and grinning and always childlike. Ignorance was what he wanted, and he saw now what a beautiful thing it could be and always had been.
He saw how the crowds looked up to him worshipfully, as though one man could mean anything. He envied them even as he pitied their simplicity, hating himself for his own condescension, an anthropologist among the pygmies.
I see it now, he thought. All my life I held up the ideal of learning, but I was wrong. We all were wrong, he thought. It is not learning we need at all. Individuals need learning but the culture needs something else, the pulse of light on the sea, the warm urge of huddling together to keep out the cold. We need empathy, we need the eyes that still can weep.
After a point learning is useless, he thought, useless because it has been swallowed by technology and instead of compassion has brought the end of it.
He felt grief in him but it was not a flowing grief; rather it was the grief of a stone, always solid and gray and unmoving. That’s what happened to me, he thought. I became an abstraction. At first, he thought, we tried to learn about the universe, and for a while we were still safe. But then we tried to learn about ourselves before the universe, not because we were curious but because we had something to prove. We wished to prove we were made in the image of God. And then the universe and ourselves became one in our eyes.
All of this he thought in a flash as he stepped up to the microphone beside Szilard; all this was gone as the people massed beneath them roared and Szilard, for once completely silent, instantly crumpled at his feet.
For a second he barely registered it, and then, when he did, he could not believe what he saw bending over his fallen colleague. Of all the unreal matters to fly before his eyes since he had come from the old life this was the most obscene: and Szilard, who despite his formidable genius had always been, at base, a figure of fun to him, would never be funny again.
The crowd beyond them pressed forward with a shriek of hysteria and Ann was screaming too, into Ben’s ear this time: —What happened?
She had not been looking upward because she had no vantage point, had not seen whatever caused this last vast movement, in fact because their part of the crowd had no view of the balcony all around them was confusion as people strained to see and hear.
—He was shot! screamed someone else to someone else, across her. —Szilard was shot in the face.
She and Ben turned and stared at each other, strained and unwilling. She felt her face and arms tingle and the hair raise, but she would not believe.
—We have to get out of here, he said, grim, and she said —We have to get to them! But the throng was packed far too closely.
—You! called Ben to one of the bodyguards, but he was moving away, pressing through the crowd himself with a raised gun, which allowed him easier passage. He did not even turn. The other bodyguards were also leaving, talking into their headsets, weapons held up and plainly visible, plowing through bobbing heads.
They had been abandoned.
Bradley’s soldiers pressed in around him, lifting up Leo’s body—for there could be no doubt that it was now a body—and bearing it inside, and at the same time Bradley himself was at his elbow, pulling him along, curiously calm and certain. Others of the Christians were close by also, flanking them.
—It can’t be, murmured Oppenheimer, —what is it? but Bradley only steered him with a firm hold on his arm, saying words he could not pick out above the din. Beneath the balcony the crowd was still screaming.
—You are pure now, he thought he heard Bradley whisper. —You are free.
Death was the realest thing, he was thinking as they pulled him, and part of him resisted; but was this death or was this violence? It was a curious sensation: as they towed him through the rooms, as they towed him past Leo, or where, at least, Leo had used to be, in that skin—oh! being laid on a table, splash of flesh on a bright blue tarpaulin, which someone had already laid out—he turned and looked at him, looked at his poor friend. And he realized this at the same time: Leo had not been merely a colleague but a friend, moreover no mere friend but a hero, for heroes are not movie stars but worker bees. The farmer in the field, he thought: man, not the image of man.
He saw what had once been Leo’s face and understood that the hole in the back of the head was neat and the ragged exit wound, the terrible injury of the bullet leaving, was what had torn out poor dear Leo’s eyes.
And so, because Leo had stood right beside him, he knew with certainty that the shot had not come from the crowd but the inside, not from the masses out there to whom such an act of madness could easily be ascribed but from the ones right here. They had done it, these men misled to worship him. They had killed his friend.
Later Ben would remember the day as though he had not lived it but only been handed the memory. He would not recall a chronology, only a series of impressions and how, after a while, his body had become too tired to react to events, and his senses were dulled by the tiredness of his limbs. He would recall Ann hanging on his arm, the people around them, one woman with her child on her shoulders, the child crying snottily in the chaos, and her husband beside her wearing a tattered brown robe and a dirty pair of running shoes.
He remembered the pace of the walk—too slow—and how formless the crowd was, and how impossible it was to know anything with certainty. He remembered confusion and Ann asking him if they could please get somewhere, please sit down, anything but what they were doing. He carried her for a whil
e, carried her piggyback because there was no way out of the crowd to find a place to sit down. They were packed in too tightly and the crowd stretched too far. The restlessness of the crowd was alarming from the moment Szilard fell, a moment they had missed, being too close beneath him.
He remembered what happened later, the men in riot gear teeming, the visors through which faces were not visible, the burn of tear gas on his eyeballs and in his throat and the wail of sirens.
All of this was overshadowed in his memory by what came before and after, but neither of those, in retrospect, seemed real.
In the lobby downstairs Bradley’s men held Fermi waiting for him, Fermi who knew nothing of what had happened, a lost man. Still, as they stepped closer he could see on Fermi’s white face a growing fear, and he turned to Bradley, gripping his one good arm with sharp fingers.
—You will tell me who did this now, he said. —Tell me!
—Dr. Leo was executed because he was using you, said Bradley, and gazed unblinking past Oppenheimer’s shoulder. Oppenheimer felt swiftly infuriated and almost as swiftly resigned. —He would have betrayed you for a handful of silver. He was a shackle holding you to the earth and keeping the faithful from their due. He refused to admit to your divinity.
Behind Bradley’s head Oppenheimer noticed there were soldiers staring at him, staring and waiting for what he would say to this. Against such ignorance nothing could be said. He thought of Leo eating a lettuce leaf coated with sugar, nibbling at it with bulging eyes. When desserts were not available he had often rummaged in Ann’s refrigerator until he found a head of lettuce; he had peeled off the outer leaves and into a tender, pale inner leaf he had poured white sugar.
He thought of Leo looking at him over his sweetened lettuce leaf and refusing to admit to his divinity. It made him smile.
—But you knew that, went on Bradley gently.
Oppenheimer was called back to him.