Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

by Lydia Millet

  And yet he was perfectly calm: and he knew.

  To look down around her at the sea of heads made her queasy and dizzy and she was willing herself to stay strong, stay upright and not fall off of Ben’s shoulders. She kept her eyes on the horizon, the stage and the burning ICBM.

  Onstage Bradley was shouting past the microphone inaudibly, shouting with soldiers arrayed behind him, their faces projected on the screen, strained, confused, panicking. Over the crowd she could no longer hear them and she could not see Oppenheimer either. If she knew how to read lips she would know what they were saying, she thought, and wished she knew how to read lips, but she did not. She had never known a deaf person and had never interested herself in deafness.

  She regretted this with a sudden anger.

  —I should have had an interest in the deaf, she repeated as they moved. But of course no one heard her. She could be panicked but instead she was dumb; there was nothing she could do. It frustrated her that she could not see Oppenheimer or Fermi on the stage anymore and her eyes stung. She turned toward the missile and saw white smoke billowing there again.

  —Oh no! she said, and looked down at Ben. —Smoke! Did something else explode?

  —Tear gas! he yelled.

  —What?

  —Tear gas! It moves fast! Get your water out of your bag!

  The bag was hanging off his shoulder. She leaned down and fumbled with it one-handed, slipping out the near-empty bottle and spilling candy bars and her watch onto the ground. She let them go. —Are you thirsty?

  —Soak the bottom of your shirt in it and then hand it to me! The gas is going to drift over here! Any second!

  She poured the water on her shirt and handed it down to him.

  —Hold up our shirt to your nose and mouth, OK? Breathe through the wet cloth. It’s going to catch up with us. We can’t move any faster than the rest of them.

  She held it over her nose and mouth but could still feel burning start there, and her eyes and nose were running. Around her people stumbled and fell against Ben and she felt a clutch of fear rising through her body. Even her feet trembled. They would fall and people would step on them, boots would crush their windpipes, their necks would snap like dry twigs. Her legs trembled all the way up to her crotch and her stomach was like water.

  —Can you see the physicists up there?

  —Only Bradley, she said, muffled through the T-shirt, —on the screen.

  Then the burning grew and was stifling and they had to stop talking at all. It was all they could do to keep going forward. He had his wet shirt over his nose and mouth and she had hers, holding onto each other with their free left hands, people whimpering around them, now and then a shriek or a hoarse yell. When she finally felt herself falling, felt both of them toppling over pressed from the side, she closed her eyes because there was nothing else she could do. The fall seemed slow once it was in motion and because they landed on a cushion of bodies there was a softness to it, but at the same time it was almost impossible to breathe because she had to let her hand fall, her shirt was wrenched away from her nose and mouth and instantly the burning was far, far worse. A man was on top of her and she kicked out her legs, trying to unscissor them from Ben’s head, afraid of crushing him. It was black and hot and she wanted to scream but could not, the burning and her closed throat, the thickness and the suffocation, and her eyes and nose streaming.

  Oppenheimer saw the riot police pushing their way through the crowd, absurd with their shields and masks like boys playing at war with pots and pans. He saw them before he noticed the SWAT teams, though the SWAT teams were far nearer, barely a hundred yards away, past the cordons and the crowds with nothing in their way, converging on the stage around him.

  When Bradley’s soldiers fired warning shots into the air—in doing so finally, he thought, seeming somehow almost innocent—the SWAT team opened fire on them. He stood among their falling bodies confused more than frightened as the SWAT team moved up the sides of the broad stage; he stood watching without bending, without taking cover, as though bullets could not penetrate him.

  A few feet away Fermi sat in similar passivity, on a folding chair that had once been placed behind the podium, as usual gazing up at the sky.

  Oppenheimer thought at first that the SWAT team was firing on Bradley’s soldiers only but had to admit, as a trail of fire seared his forearm, that they were also firing on him. It was a grazing wound and did not bother him, but he was caught up in curiosity, gazing down at the bloom on his shirtsleeve like a man drugged or detached, as the SWAT team cut down Bradley’s soldiers. They fell jerkily, one by one, with a surprising lack of protest.

  Then like a man moving underwater he stepped up to the microphone. It would be the last time, he knew. He could not tell if the microphone was working. His arms moved slowly and stiffly as he reached and held onto the thin metal stand; he spoke without hearing his voice in the gunfire around him, persisting deafly.

  —These men shooting at me now, he said, —Ann! Can you hear me? They are the ones who were hunting us! The other ones want heaven on earth. They shot Szilard! But it’s the institutions that want to kill me. They have no use for the Rapture. They want their empire to last forever.

  His vision was blurred, and he could not tell if he was speaking out loud. Grayer and grayer until the world is all gone, he was thinking: money and a vast machine.

  —But the question is not, who is the enemy, he said, or thought he said. —The question is not even, why is the enemy winning? Those are the questions people ask but they are the wrong questions. The right question is: What is it in me that delivers the world into the hands of my enemy?

  Amid the chaos everything had ceased to be separate, and inclining his head slightly he gazed at the simplicity of his red and white sleeve, alarm softly frozen. Just then the last rifles were lowered and sighted on his chest and head, and before they could fire the great white birds were coming down around him.

  He had not seen their shapes against the sun, their shapes move out of silhouette and turn from black to white as they drew near. Then now, descending, they were a density of lightness, and they enfolded him.

  Bones prodded her, sharp things poking, before the pressure abruptly let up and she was lying on the ground with no one above her and none beneath. She was astounded at this and the quick silence, a silence that fell as though a wind had dropped, and there was serenity.

  Afraid and relieved at once she opened her eyes in a quick painful blink and saw white above her, white with small flashes of black but almost all white. In the silence she heard calls but did not know what they were, and then the white mass above her was rising and falling everywhere. Beside her on the ground was Ben, and near them was the crowd, not on top of them anymore but standing.

  She pulled herself up, feeling scraped knees faintly against the fabric of her pants and blinked at the whiteness, which was moving. The wings were longer than she had ever seen, seven feet or eight feet together, vast. Feet dangled on long black legs.

  —What are they? she whispered to him finally, incredulous, tears wet on her cheeks, and wiped her nose with the back of her hand, wiped her whole face with her wet shirt to clean it. The eyes and nostrils were still stinging hard and Ben was doubled over coughing from the tear gas still. Her throat burned and the other people were coughing too, there was coughing above the silence and the strange calls.

  —It can’t be, he said, standing up. —This is impossible.

  She looked at him and saw him squint blinking into the sky above them.

  —There aren’t that many of them in the world, I mean look, there must be thousands, tens of thousands! he said, and his tear-wet, dirty face was turned up to the white in the sky. He bent quickly and choked and coughed into his hand.

  —But what? she said.

  —But they are, he said to himself more than her, staring. —They have the black wing tips, see that? The dark legs … I can’t see their heads from below but it’s them. The
y’re huge. There’s nothing else it could be.

  —Than what?

  The screen was obscured by the birds, flying so low they had darkened it. Her vision blurred with new tears from the gas and she could not see whose face was on the screen anymore, whether Bradley was looking up at the whiteness above him like everyone else, the coughing and weeping crowd, standing motionless now beneath the thousands of wings and gently sloping undersides. The air was so thick that the sky was not visible and underneath the white feathered slopes of the undersides of their bodies was a darkness not like night but shadow. The wings moved slowly, so slowly she was amazed they could stay airborne, and the black legs dangled beneath their bellies like afterthoughts.

  —Whooping cranes.

  She turned and saw them flying past the Washington Monument so that the peak could not be seen, and over long parallel rows of trees. She kept turning in place and saw them flying over the Smithsonian castle, the Capitol, the reflecting pool, over the Grant Memorial and the Museum of Natural History, all of this in snatches, all of these behind the birds and subsumed.

  —It’s a mass hallucination, whispered Ben, stunned. —The gas maybe? Some obscure neurotoxin that makes you see things? Because these birds don’t even exist anymore. Not in these numbers. They’re practically extinct.

  —They must just be something else, said Ann. —Like storks or swans or something? I mean—neither of us knows anything about birds.

  Deaf language and birds, she thought, of both she was sadly ignorant.

  —No they’re not, said Ben. —Fermi wrote about them and I did the research. There’s nothing else they could be.

  —They have black heads, sometimes you can see them, she said, as the film on her eyes cleared for a second. —See? You can catch a glimpse …

  She was noticing the missile, which had a pointed black tip on its white body.

  —They look like the bomb, she whispered, and pointed. —See? All white on the body, and black at the top.

  —Ann? Why are you whispering?

  —Everyone is, she whispered back after a few seconds, and it was true, no one was talking, only coughing and wiping the tears off their faces and blowing their noses, only recovering and staring up above and occasionally leaning in close to each other to whisper or rasp from their burning throats. —They’re so graceful, she said. —What are they doing in the city?

  They came to get us, thought Ben, but he knew it was not his own thought: it was Fermi’s. Finally.

  —I think they came for the scientists, he said slowly. —I think that must be why they’re here. I think they came to save them.

  The birds swooped lower and lower over the stage, and at last she could make out figures there. There were the dark figures of men on the stage, but the birds swooped and flew over and covered them. When she saw a dark man uncovered, fleetingly, he was running and waving his arms, and then she heard the shots again.

  —They’re shooting at them! said Ben. —The cranes!

  He was straining to see past other people’s heads, people still standing in place and watching the great flock of birds above them, their faces turned upward.

  —They can’t be, she said, but then another shot rang out and she saw a flash of white as a bird fell near the stage. —Who?

  —The military, said Ben. —Or whoever’s up there now. It doesn’t look like Bradley’s men.

  There was something on the screen again, flickering: a slight man in a suit, his hairline receding, reaching out at the birds as they swooped around him.

  —Look, she said to Ben, —Fermi! It’s Fermi!

  —What is he doing? Doesn’t he know they’re shooting?

  The birds were flying in wide arcs over the stage, back and forth, turning gracefully and returning. Fermi spun around and around among them, smiling. His smile was visible on the screen as a faint line of white teeth, and he was walking so near the screen that his silhouette touched the image of himself behind him.

  —Oppenheimer! said Ben, and she saw him beside Fermi, bending over as though he was bowing; for a split second she thought he had tipped his hat at them. Then the flurry of the birds hid them, and the birds were diving and swooping, and the crowd was quiet.

  Then were other shots and other birds fell.

  —I wish they would stop it! she said urgently, voice shaking, afraid she was going to break down. The birds were beautiful and shocking in their nearness, the wide white wings with end-feathers like long black fingers and thin legs hanging down as they flew past.

  She saw the eye of one of them, the deep and lovely eye.

  Ben had lost sight of Fermi in the white blizzard but then he caught sight of him again, briefly; and the last split-second he saw him he had to blink and squint, muttering under his breath What?—because he could have sworn Fermi was being lifted off the ground.

  The birds swooping low over the stage hid the screen now but still vaguely she thought she could see the dark forms of the physicists against it. On the edges of the stage she could certainly see other men, soldiers or police she could not tell, trying to shoot the birds as the birds dove at them, almost, she thought, fighting, diving at them, being shot and then others diving again.

  More and more birds flew low over the stage until she could not see anything else anymore, though she strained to make out the shapes past their blurred and shifting bodies.

  All of them watched, she and Ben and the people around them they did not know, watched as the birds, banners of white in the wind, musical and rhythmic, flew thicker and thicker among them and anything that was not the birds—buildings and trees and the further reaches of the crowd itself—could not be seen. After that they lifted up in a series of fluid motions, in waves and lulls, and their calls began to grow faint. Rising into the sky the cover of their bodies slowly lifted, the dense white of the flock grew sparser and revealed the mundane and usual below it, concrete and brown, the city and the people, the derelict stage littered with a dark mass that she guessed had to be Bradley’s soldiers. They lifted to reveal the Washington Monument and the burned husk of the ICBM.

  —Is that—can you tell what that is? she asked Ben, and pointed.

  In among the white birds, somewhere above the stage and to the west, there were small dark shapes. But he shook his head and told her he could not see what they were.

  The flock thinned as it moved away toward the horizon, thinned as the birds spread out and flew. Finally they were few and far between enough for the light of the sun to filter through the gaps in their ranks. For a while as they receded people watched them endlessly, still silent no matter how far away they grew, for a time that felt closer to hours than minutes.

  And then abruptly the crowd seemed to feel it had kept silent for too long, and was embarrassed by this. Whispers broke out, and then normal voices, pedestrian, vulgar, returning all of them to the business of being who they had always been, saying trivial things in the usual way. But Ann would think later only of the silence, and how the patience of the crowd had seemed infinite, watching the birds vanish in the distance.

  She had the feeling she had been left behind.

  When she finally looked away from what were now black flecks, low and fading in the red western sky, and tried desperately to pick out the physicists on the stage—recalled to the danger in which they had been, the men shooting all around them, a lurch of panic in her throat—she saw bags from the stage being piled into trucks parked behind it, being carried on stretchers and loaded away from sight. She could not be sure at the time but to her they looked like soldiers in camouflage.

  Not bags, she thought later: bodies.

  Not ambulances, she thought later: trucks.

  The work was conducted swiftly and with great precision because almost before she knew it the stage was bare. Yellow and brown leaves skittered over the concrete in front of her as dusk fell.

  And the scientists were gone.

  Oppenheimer finally knew as they rose how he had come to thi
s. He dismissed the precision of sums for the last time, let go of calculation. The birds had him now. Their wide wings were beating as they carried him, and it was good with them.

  Only the dead have seen the end of war: and it was such a relief. He did not need to look for Fermi for he knew that Fermi, too, was out in the white somewhere beyond, shedding worry, skin turning to feathers, turning lighter than air.

  He could shed everything now because in the end there was nothing more for him, he had done his best and finally it was nothing to what his worst had been. He could almost laugh now at the smallness of his good intentions, how paltry they had been against his mischief and the mischief of the neighborhood boys he had played with. He thought of Groves’s fat, smug face and the beady homespun ignorance of Truman. Governments were gangs of boys, he thought, roaming the best neighborhoods and kicking puppies with their steel-toed boots; but their henchmen in the private sector were far, far worse. What a fool he had been: but all men were fools. His problem was to know it.

  And he saw what it was that had brought him here in the first place, moved all of them from the first life and into this one. He understood finally. It had looked like desire, how it shaped them and sent them away from the blast, sent them wishing with such a piercing will from the moment of ignition that they left themselves behind.

  But it was not desire, not exactly, though it flared like desire, flared and burned out. It was both more and less. It was regret.

  And he could offer no more of it. He was tapped out. He had come to the end: he had done his best to undo himself. But his efforts were those of a child, frantically trying to bring back to life a small unknowing animal that it had killed in play. He was tired and ready for sleep, and alone on the road time was waiting for him.

  But for a moment now they were together again, the birds and him and Fermi and even poor Szilard: they were adrift in infinity, where all became nothing.

  How they made it back to Larry’s limousine Ben could not recollect shortly afterward. It was a slow blur. Those sad and limping moments would come back to him unexpectedly, without context, in the remaining days and years of his life as those days and years spun out and away from him.