Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

by Lydia Millet

  They sleepwalked through the crowds, dispersing in a weary haze. People were saying little even after the birds vanished; an exhaustion settled over them and it was unmistakable; it was the tiredness of defeat.

  The crowds left a trail of signs and litter in their wake, trampled cardboard and broken bottles. He could walk without touching the shoulders of his neighbors now, and swing his arms again. There was air around him. He thought, for no purpose he could know, I am free but I am also useless.

  Near the edge of the mall they passed a dead crane, lying shot on the concrete. There was not much blood but its neck was bent at a wrong angle. He looked away because he could not stand to see, and then a few paces further he turned and ran back and squatted down beside it, full of a grief that almost choked him. Even Ann standing beside him almost vanished in the sight of the bird.

  He moved his eyes over the red spot on the crown of its head, along the dark thin beak, and stroked its soft white feathers with a hand. Finally, with Ann swaying in fatigue beside him, about to collapse into sleep, he picked it up in his arms, its long, graceful neck flopping, and carried it away with them, cradling it like an infant.

  —I’m going to bury it, he said when Ann pressed him.

  The birds, he knew, had somehow won, had been not the vanquished but the triumphant: but there were those among their number who had been sacrificed to the men with the guns.

  People stared at him as he walked, the man holding his crane; they stared as though they had no idea where the crane had come from, as though they had already forgotten.

  Once they had reached the limousine, parked a block down from the ruined ICBM—cordoned off and teeming with police—Ben laid the dead bird out in the trunk on a blanket, and Tamika, suddenly dressed in a sari with a diamond on her forehead, dropped dry leaves around it.

  Before he let the chauffeur slam down the lid he smoked a cigarette. He stood at the corner of the trunk and glanced down at the bird now and then, almost furtive, leaning against the fender and drinking a cup of stale, tepid coffee someone had handed him. Ann slipped inside the car and lay down on one of the long plush seats.

  Neither Oppenheimer nor Fermi had returned and neither of them had been seen since the birds rose into the sky and flew away. Almost all of the Huts were assigned to the search by Larry but Bradley’s men did not show an interest in searching: they were massed nearby, praying and weeping for those of their number who had been shot and killed, swaying with their arms around each other and huddling for prayer. Now and then one of them would break away from the circle to drink water or wipe the grime off his face, but mostly they were impregnable, a fortress of backs in camouflage, heads shaking as voices intoned.

  Bradley sat off under an oak tree on what looked like a wooden crate, talking on his cell phone as the other leaders conversed in low tones nearby. When Ben approached and asked him what had happened, who had attacked them, who the dark men had been who ascended the stage right before the birds covered them, he would say nothing; he merely shook his head and turned away from him. In fact he would say nothing about Szilard’s death either, nothing about any of it.

  —You were there, weren’t you? asked Ben belligerently, gesturing freely with the hand that held his lit cigarette. —Oppenheimer blamed it on you.

  —We have nothing to say, said Bradley stiffly. Others rose with stern faces to warn Ben away and Bradley watched as he was forced to back up, the ranks of the believers closing against him.

  When Oppenheimer had fingered Bradley he and the other men had been carried away, there on the stage behind him, swaying. They had not denied the charge and they had not rushed him. Possibly, Ben decided, they had thought at that moment that the Rapture was upon them; possibly they had thought they were already home free.

  Now they were back in the world and their mouths were sealed shut.

  Soon after this Bradley and his friends in the leadership called together the soldiers who were praying and crying, climbed into their black jeeps and drove noisily off down the street.

  The rest of the travelers from the buses perched in and around the limousine with the doors standing open, wiping their faces with paper towels and napkins and thirstily gulping water from the bottles in Szilard’s cooler. Their eyes were red and puffy and still streaming from the tear gas, and they held ice from the cooler against their faces. They were quiet.

  —Who did all that shooting? asked Tamika, but no one knew the answer.

  Without Szilard no one knew what to think. He had been the source of all information, and now he was gone and there was no more. They turned on the radio and sat there waiting, and Ann laid her head down and fell asleep on Ben’s knees.

  But the radio reported nothing.

  The scientists could not be found, and Larry’s men came back alone. It was dark when the limousine pulled away from the curb and Ann felt closed off, extinguished. She had nothing to say and she wanted no one to talk to her. She wanted only to sleep in the dark hearing nothing; she wanted the past to be changed.

  —There’s gotta be news reports on TV, said Larry, aggrieved. The car moved through the dim streets, stragglers crossing in front of them and slowing their progress, and Ann gazed up into the glow of yellow and orange fall trees as the streetlights winked on. —We can watch the news in the hotel, he went on. —Whoever did this, they can’t get away with it. There had to have been arrests. There’s probably reporters all over the story now.

  Maybe the scientists had been arrested, maybe they would call in later, maybe they would have to be bailed out, said Larry. Maybe they had been jailed as insurgents. The men who had murdered Szilard, the men who had shot and killed Bradley’s soldiers and brought down cranes, where were they now and why were they free?

  —Where is Dr. Leo’s body? asked Webster, teary-eyed. —He deserves to be buried.

  —How could this be allowed to happen? said Tamika, and shook her head in wonder.

  None of them had any comment after that. Finally someone changed the radio station and country music played. They sat stunned, barely speaking. Now and then someone fumbled with a water bottle or a shoelace.

  As Ann was dozing off again, her head still aching from the effects of the gas, Father Raymond turned and whispered into her ear. Before she heard him she had not even realized he was beside her: she was barely noticing anything.

  —They still don’t know what happened, he murmured. —Any of them.

  She opened her eyes with an effort, looked at him and saw his face was solemn. As she looked she felt a jarring in the world, in her position, as though she had not moved but magnetic fields were shifting and her coordinates were uncertain.

  It did not matter. It had no consequence.

  What a baby she had been, she thought sadly, about meaning.

  —The birds were beautiful, though, she said dreamily.

  —You thought they were birds? asked Father Raymond.

  She sat there without moving as he stroked the Bible on his lap with trembling fingers, gently, comforting. He was kind: she had always liked him.

  When other things were gone, that was all there was left.

  —What do you mean?

  —Such a hopeful book, in its own angry way, he said, and smiled fondly.

  —The Bible?

  —Always hopeful that at least some of us would be saved. But when all was said and done none of us were, were we?

  —What are you—

  —None of us.

  She sat looking at him, his bowed head, thinning hair and double chin.

  —Saved, saved, saved, he murmured. —We never knew what it meant but we wanted it anyway. For our children and our parents if not for ourselves.

  —It had to mean something good, she said vaguely, too tired to converse.

  They sat there for a minute.

  —Those were not birds, he said, and looked up at her with watery eyes. —Or put it this way: they were not only birds.

  —What do you mean? she wh
ispered.

  —They brought us a message, he said sadly. —Didn’t you know? The end has already come and gone. And here we are.

  Ben looked around the tired circle, their collapsed and inward faces suffused with failure, and thought how less they seemed than they had been. Without the scientists they were only strays, gathered together for warmth.

  When they reached the hotel Father Raymond sat without moving while the others filed out of the car. She reached out and his touched his hand but if she was waiting for something it never came. He did not look up at her so she slowly roused herself to step out the open door of the limousine after Ben.

  —Was it a moral failure? he asked as she stood up. —Did the spirit fail us? Or was it never in us at all?

  She could tell he was talking only to himself.

  —Ann? called Ben from the motel door, holding it open as he looked back at her. —Coming?

  She said goodbye to Father Raymond, who sat shaking his head as though he had not heard. Then she turned and slogged across the parking lot in a tired daze, noticing nothing but her own exhaustion.

  Later she woke up thinking: But they were birds. They were gone birds, gone birds who had taken the gone men.

  The birds had forgiven them.

  He buried the dead crane in the woods the next morning, beside a trail in a state park a few minutes off the highway. He had nothing to dig with but a crowbar he found in the trunk of their car, so he used it to hack away at the dirt at the foot of a dead tree. When the hole was deep enough he laid the crane inside, filled in the hole again and covered the freshly turned earth with rocks and dry leaves.

  Ann was watching him from a boulder a few feet away, where she sat drinking beer and smoking a Dunhill from a trampled half-empty pack she had found on the floor of the limousine.

  He showed her photographs of whooping cranes to prove the bird’s identity, even showed her printouts of its population numbers to illustrate the impossibility of the mass descent they had seen, but she only nodded, smiling sadly and tolerantly but showing little interest.

  Now she said, across the air between them, —The Christians had it right all along.

  He laid the bird down in the dirt.

  —History is over.

  When they got back to the hotel it was snowing lightly, at a slant. It was early for snow and the large flakes melted as soon as they touched the ground. In the hotel parking lot were Larry and his friends. The Christian leaders and all their thousands were already dispersing far and wide, but failure had not yet quelched Larry. Despite the fact that the massacre had not been reported on television or newspapers, that a sudden and complete radio silence had descended on everything they were doing, that television and newspaper reporters did not return the calls he made to them, Larry and his friends were still waiting for the scientists to return. They had not given up. They huddled in groups, drinking hot chocolate and coffee from plastic travel mugs covered in stickers, rubbing their hands in thick woolen mittens and discussing the situation in urgent voices as snowflakes alit on their shoulders and hair. They had sent out electronic alerts and volunteers all over the city were tacking up MISSING posters.

  Ann and Ben did not join them. They only walked past with their faces set in pleasant neutrality and raised their hands half-heartedly to wave.

  The day after that they were listless and did not know what to do. While they waited in line to see a movie, standing outside a multiplex at a mall in the suburbs, she said it.

  —We’ll never see them again.

  He could not contradict her so he lifted his cardboard cup of tea to his lips and sipped. He liked the narrow pressure of the rounded white rim.

  —They came and went, she said. —They did what they had to do but it was no use. And now they’re gone from us.

  —The birds took them, he said.

  She nodded vaguely and looked away from him into the mall’s food court, where a man dressed as a hot dog hopped first on one leg and then on the other.

  He wondered if there would be an end to the effort to understand. What would happen in the future felt more known to him than what had happened already, though both were elusive. The scientists had flown into the sunset on the wings of birds he was sure could not exist anymore. Had Fermi known? Either he had known or he had summoned them.

  First he had come, and Oppenheimer and Szilard, and they had stayed a while. This was impossible. Then the impossible birds had come, the birds long gone extinct.

  And finally they had disappeared together.

  Larry knocked on the door of their hotel room that night while Ann was in the shower. Ben let him in and watched with moderate interest as he sat down at the small round table to roll a joint.

  —So Clint disappeared after the event, said Larry. —Never saw him again. You notice?

  —Good riddance, said Ben.

  —That chick Sheila? said Larry. —She just came to see me. She was looking for Ann but she couldn’t find her and she was in a hurry so she settled for me. She says she saw him afterward.

  —Who? After what?

  —Clint. She says she was able to get close because they didn’t know her. She says she saw him loading bodies into the trucks.

  —I don’t get it.

  He looked at Larry’s face then, which was haggard in the yellow cast of the table lamp. For once Larry seemed as old as he was, not a rugged boy surfer with sun-weathered skin but a sad man in his middle forties trying to cling to youth.

  —He was with the Covert Ops guys, the Green Berets or whoever they were. The ones that did the shooting. She said he was one of them. She said he was doing what they did. She said he was talking to them like he knew them, all familiar, you know? She said he had a weapon in a holster and he was dragging one of Bradley’s guys across the ground by his feet. She says he slung him in the back of a truck like garbage.

  Ben gazed at him for a time, his crisp blue irises beneath the lined forehead, until Larry lifted a joint to his lips, inhaled, held his breath, and then handed the joint to him.

  —What does that mean?

  —I think, said Larry slowly after he let out his breath, —he was working for them the whole time.

  —Clint was undercover?

  Larry nodded and Ben closed his eyes as he held the smoke in his mouth. When he opened them again he asked, —Undercover for who?

  —Glen warned me, man. I shouldn’t have trusted him. He always wanted money. He was all about that. They probably paid him a lot to spy on us.

  —Undercover for who? repeated Ben, impatient with his own confusion.

  —You know, said Larry, and looked away from him to the bathroom, where Ann was standing wrapped in a towel. He lowered his voice. —The ones who were going to kill Oppenheimer. Before the birds took him.

  Between the invention of nuclear weapons and the turn of the twenty-first century the U.S. spent over five trillion dollars building and maintaining its nuclear arsenal—about one-tenth of the country’s total spending since 1940. In America, annual spending on past and present military activities exceeds spending on all other categories of human need; approximately eighty percent of the national debt is estimated to have been created by military expenditures.

  The so-called “military-industrial complex” about which Eisenhower warned is thus, in a sense, the single largest consumer of the country’s resources. It might fairly be seen as the prime mover of the U.S. government.

  4

  On the high plains of San Augustine west of Socorro, New Mexico, is a small town named Magdalena. About a half an hour’s drive farther west is a row of telescopes called the Very Large Array.

  To the untrained eye the Very Large Array looks like a row of satellite dishes, extending for many miles in a long line across the desert. They can be seen from the highway. The dishes can be moved, so that sometimes they stretch for great distances and sometimes the formation is neatly compressed. Astronomers call them antennas.

  The array comprises
twenty-seven dish antennas, turned up toward the sky. It is a complex of radio telescopes, devoted to observing the cosmos. Its mission is to collect radio waves from natural celestial bodies vast distances away from earth—waves that are then fashioned by computers into images of these far-off bodies, which include planets, stars, even whole galaxies. There are spiral galaxies like the one in which our solar system dwells, dwarf galaxies, even strangely shaped, distorted galaxies astronomers call peculiar.

  Ann and Ben moved onto an abandoned ranch outside Magdalena in the winter of 2003. By that time, in the known universe, the number of stars within telescope range was estimated at seventy sextillion, or seventy thousand million million million.

  Ann had learned of this estimate in the late fall, soon after they got home, and begun to comb newspapers and web sites for land for sale near the Very Large Array. She thought if she lived there she would feel the presence of the sextillion.

  She found them an isolated place, an old mud-brick ranch house with a stone chimney and tile floors. It sat on a sagebrush ridge overlooking rolling valleys and hills of grass, piñon, cedar, and juniper, and at sunset purple and red clouds spread across the whole sky and nothing could touch them.

  Often they looked like they were burning.

  It was painful to sell the house and the garden in Santa Fe but she could not stay there. In the city there were too many smug Rogers and too many Sheilas who wanted to relive the old days, too many intimations of quiet power on the sides of trucks that passed the city hurtling down the interstate. In the country house they found a new routine, drinking wine every night as the sun set and they sat on their front porch watching the dark shapes of their low, scrubby trees bending in the wind. They ordered the wine several cases at a time, but they were not immoderate; and in the pantry, waiting to be drunk, the bottles gathered dust.

  Ben found work on a nearby national forest, planting trees, thinning brush, and occasionally watching planned burns. He liked the sight of the fires in the dark, all low along the ground.