Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

by Lydia Millet

  Fullness surged.

  Of course he did have preferences beyond the fact of her existence; but that was all they were, a set of requests. Nothing was actually necessary beyond what he already had, any added pleasure or comfort he was willing to forgo if need be. In the center were the two of them, bound together, and what rotated, what clung, what distant satellite might orbit them in a faint attraction, far out from the core held fast, was mostly empty space.

  Before the Trinity test, the physicist Edward Teller—later known as the Father of the Hydrogen Bomb, a famously passionate advocate for the nuclear arms buildup—calculated that the heat of the first atomic explosion might be sufficient to ignite and consume the world’s atmosphere. Subsequent calculations showed this was unlikely: there was only a three-in-a-million chance, the physicists in charge of the test decided, that the atmosphere would be ignited.

  Enrico Fermi, however, who liked a good wager, made a jesting offer on the morning of the test.

  “I invite bets,” he said, “against first the destruction of all human life and second just that of human life in New Mexico.”

  Physicists are well-known for their sense of humor.

  Oppenheimer’s first full day at the motel was devoted to television. He located the remote on the bedside table, where it sat beside the enigmatic telephone with its sheet of intricate numeric instructions, and eventually by pressing the button marked power discovered its function.

  There had been some false starts while he held the remote sideways and attempted to type on its buttons, pointing it randomly at the ceiling, the door, and his face. Finally, when he noticed it shared a brand name with the black box on the wall, he had moved it toward the box.

  After that he lay on the bed staring at show after show, a barrage of stimuli his eyes and mind had never known, a primer in pop culture, a primer in history. The motel, though cheap, had free cable and non-stop movies.

  He gathered that he was far away from where he had just been. He was no longer in Los Alamos in 1945; or alternatively he was no longer a self-steering mind but one lost, gone floating off its moorings. Carefully he reserved his judgment.

  The next morning he emerged from his room into daylight and lost himself in a larger panorama still, people, cars, and buildings flowing past as he strolled out of the motel lot and down the street. He looked at everything, but he spoke to no one. He was aghast.

  Noteworthy in Ben, perhaps this is already clear, was his devotion.

  In life Oppenheimer was a tall man, tall and gaunt, handsome with luminous blue eyes; he was a Jewish man who loved the Bhagavad-Gita, who held fast to his creed of Ahimsa: At least do no harm while he directed the making of the first weapon of mass destruction. He was an intellectual from the city of New York, the grandson of poor immigrants who became importers of suit linings, who became purveyors of ready-made garments in the city of New York. His delicate mother had a deformed hand, which she kept concealed in a long glove. He was the husband of a woman named Kitty who drank too much.

  Oppenheimer died of cancer in 1967.

  Then there was Ann: in good health, she was confident in her marriage, satisfied, and secure. She worked at the public library and gave to local and national charities, typically modest amounts in response to direct mail. She preferred gentle, reasonable solicitations to those that shrilled “This bunny was blinded by hairspray!” Of course, in recent times bad things were happening: planes flew into buildings and democracy was waning. War was everywhere erupting and as people multiplied obscenely and advanced on open space they were driving all the plants and animals extinct.

  But much of this was far away. The world kept its distance.

  Although she was sometimes withdrawn and thoughtful she had never been prone to depression, had never in fact suffered from any major affliction, disorder or syndrome described by the American Psychiatric Association. In other words there was little in her makeup to presage disruption, little on which, subsequently, to look back and nod knowingly.

  It was a day in March with low skies and rain threatening, and she had walked Ben to work on her way to the library. He was helping to design and plant a garden for a middle-aged couple who had just bought one of the largest adobe houses in east Santa Fe. It had been said that this man and his wife had been in business together in high finance on Wall Street, and together had perfected what she once heard described as “the art of the leveraged buyout.” In fact they were practically the inventors, it was said, of the leveraged buyout.

  She did not understand this. It did not sound like “inventors of the player piano.” It did not sound like “inventors of the donut.”

  They had hundreds of millions of dollars at their disposal, Ben had told her, and so they had casually bought one of the largest adobe houses in east Santa Fe. Strictly speaking it was a mansion, not a house. She had seen the mansion long before, when others had owned it, and she liked the high adobe walls around it, the walls that were so thick that they themselves had roofs. She liked the old acequias that flowed beneath the house, some of which dated from 1700. She liked the hand-carved wooden gates and the apple trees; she liked the lilacs and sand plums that grew against the walls, scraping on the curved tiles when the wind blew.

  But the inventors of the leveraged buyout found little to like in the house, despite the quickness of their purchase. One thing they did not like was the mansion’s garden, so they bulldozed it. And then they hired Ben, along with a well-reputed Japanese landscape architect named Yoshi, to make them some new gardens.

  Ben was often invited to the homes of clients after he had worked for them. He rarely accepted these invitations, and when he did it was always in consultation with Ann. And then, when Ann and Ben arrived at the dinner or cocktail party, the woman of the house would introduce him fondly to her guests—often, Ann had observed, with a proprietary air. —This is my gardener, the hostess would say, or “landscaper,” or even “garden consultant” or “horticulturist,” and once, with relish, “yard man.”

  And typically the man of the house would give Ben a brief sidelong glance, grudging and skeptical. If Ben and Ann were the only guests the host might clap him on the back and steer him through the house showing him the expensive items, stereos or plasma televisions or kitchen appliances in brushed stainless. He might do this casually, as though, despite the fact that he wished to give the tour, it was his wife who insisted on owning everything.

  Once, while Ann lingered in the background, a husband had shown Ben the head of a Dall sheep he had shot in Alaska, now mounted on a peach-colored wall. He told Ben a story about the kill—a trek that had lasted for days, the report of which involved the timeless phrase slithering on our bellies—and then led him away to show him something else, leaving her in front of the sheep head. She stood there, without knowing it, for half an hour, gazing into the dark, dewy glass eyes where she wandered and lost herself. She felt the city receding behind her, its twinkling lights forgotten, felt herself leaving the city as she walked through the gates of the eyes. In the eyes there was welcome, an envelope of pity.

  Oh sweetheart, they said, you see, there’s no more they can do to me.

  Finally the wife had come in from the living room to retrieve her. Ann had followed her in a daze past an altar to the goddess and a beadwork tapestry to where the guests sat drinking frozen margaritas and eating mixed nuts in the living room, beneath a vaulted ceiling with a tinted skylight. The women were clustered together on a black-and-white cowhide sofa, talking about how it felt to be Rolfed. The men stood outside the sliding doors on the patio, one of them flipping steaks on the barbecue with long tongs.

  Ann was not afraid she would be stuffed and mounted.

  Ben’s employers often treated Ann as though she was a bookend to him, the two of them a matched set, both slight and shy, except with each other, and tending to smile gently when nervous. Moreover she was a librarian, which was felt to be quaint and properly humble, not unlike gardening.

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nbsp; It was a day with low, dark banks of thunderclouds that might produce dramatic storms, storms that would make the high desert turbulent, an epic country. She was looking forward to the smell of the rain, its cool fragrant breezes, and warm blankets tucked around her and Ben at night. The large adobe mansion was not far away from her small adobe house, and Ben had left his battered truck there the night before. So she walked down the long hill with him until they came to the mansion; she walked him over the bulldozed soil, feeling the texture of mounds of fresh dirt beneath her feet, past a polished Mercedes and a dusky violet Jaguar to where his truck was parked, its doors and windows splattered with mud.

  He kissed her on the lips and the eyebrow, and she turned and went up the hill and away.

  When he left the motel on his second morning, wearing his rumpled suit, porkpie hat and polished shoes, all of which he had found in a suitcase in the motel room closet, Oppenheimer stopped in the lobby first to ask for directions. A pimply clerk handed him a complimentary Santa Fe map on what appeared to be a paper placemat.

  He folded the map carefully and placed it in his inside jacket pocket; then he asked the clerk how one traveled to Los Alamos on a limited budget.

  As far as he knew all the money he had was the few bills in his wallet; he was in a city that had some of the attributes of Santa Fe and purported to be Santa Fe but barely resembled the mountain settlement of rounded adobe buildings and narrow, winding streets that he knew from half a century before. He was unsure of his situation and did not want to spend money on taxis.

  The clerk apparently knew nothing about public buses. He said jokingly that if he stood beside the road with a sign that said LOS ALAMOS someone would eventually stop and drive him up the hill for free.

  Oppenheimer nodded curtly. The clerk seemed surprised, but nonetheless, when asked, provided a piece of cardboard and a thick black marker.

  Following his directions Oppenheimer made his way at a leisurely pace to the intersection of two freeways. Along the way he stopped in a drugstore, one far more extensive than any he had seen before. It offered, besides drugs and cosmetics, a vast selection of liquor, children’s toys, kitchenware, an entire wall of refrigerated sodas, and miscellaneous containers of all kinds. Many of these containers were made of a hardy and translucent plastic, and he picked them up, palpated and sniffed them curiously. Finally he bought a pair of sunglasses for $3.99. He had rarely worn sunglasses before but the vivid brilliance of the sky was hurting his eyes.

  After only five minutes standing at the side of the road he was picked up by a man in a torn shirt driving what looked like a race car. He was relieved at the brevity of the wait and slid jauntily, albeit on unsteady legs into the low-slung, deep seat. He was immediately faced with a worn sticker on the dash that read TWISTED SISTER. This left him feeling nonplussed.

  The car moved fast when it jolted forward, far faster than any he had driven himself. The momentum was dizzying.

  The driver had tied his long hair back in a ponytail and slicked down the front with pomade. He was apparently of a deeply religious bent since his upper right arm bore an intricate tattoo of St. George slaying the dragon, not with a sword but with what looked like an oversize Tommy gun. It jetted a spray of crimson bullets into the dragon’s face. Oppenheimer gaped openly, first at the extensive ornamentation of his benefactor and then at the roads around them as they sped along, so slick, wide, and fast. The driver talked about Jesus for most of the drive, in highly laudatory terms, to which Oppenheimer, though distracted by the speed and the road, listened politely. Occasionally he interjected a comment on the Scriptures, which he had always read with great interest.

  Just as they passed a sign that read LOS ALAMOS CITY LIMITS, however, the driver became agitated and began to talk also about righteousness, purity, homosexual Sodomites and finally those dirty Christ-killers the Jews.

  At this point Oppenheimer asked in civil, if anxious tones to be let out, thanked the driver and began to wander through what was apparently the city of Los Alamos, though he did not recognize it.

  The city was clearly no longer a closed community run by the Army, though the nuclear lab had still not thrown its doors open wide to the public. But more affecting than this administrative shift was the physical transformation. He had not admired the aesthetics of the cheap Army buildings thrown up in haste to house Project personnel—far from it—but what was this? He reviled what had taken their place.

  The rutted mud streets had been replaced by wide, slick blacktop roads, clean and blank as an embalmer’s slab. Rows of squat, bland buildings were set far back from these all-powerful, all-seeing avenues on flat, square lots scraped free of vegetation, the land itself robbed of shape along the sweeping roads, flattened by what must have been legions of heavy earth-moving machines.

  The mesa had been a place of elegant and windswept isolation, a place where it was possible to be alone and feel the presence of God. He had wanted it to revert to wilderness one day. When the soldiers, the engineers and the scientists had all left he had wanted it turned back to open space, abandoned ranches and yellow grass and sage scrub or a small, bucolic town. He had wanted it to be a place that history had moved through once fleetingly, with no trace of the past blowing through the high silver branches of its solitary trees.

  But the wide streets were treeless now. In place of trees there were telephone poles.

  He wandered through the town looking at the cheap modern buildings, shivering in his shirtsleeves. He always forgot it was colder up here than down in Santa Fe. Finally he found himself at a small building labeled BRADBURY SCIENCE MUSEUM, and shuffled past the reception desk and across the carpet in a daze. He forgot to pay the price of admission but the presiding volunteer, overcome by surging schoolchildren, failed to notice or stop him. Inside he sat down in the first chair he saw.

  It was a hard chair in front of a television monitor. Beside him sat an older woman in dark slacks and a red-and-white-striped blouse in some slick silky fabric that was far too small for the heavy slope of her massive, pearlike breasts. He glanced sidelong at her and thought: Madam, your burden is heavy.

  It had always been his understanding that, in cases where there was such a rude superabundance of flesh, girdles were de rigueur. Women of a certain age in particular, he thought, did not even like to leave the privacy of their boudoirs without the support and decency of whalebone or a less expensive substitute. But then here there were young girls on the streets with their midriffs showing, their navels actually exposed to the open air. And more disturbing still, he had seen a boy whose massive bluejeans, in which he seemed to wade with difficulty as though treading through quicksand, actually commenced fully beneath the lower edge of his buttocks. It was an engineering marvel that they did not fall down—either that or a sleight-of-hand trick.

  At that point a busload of schoolchildren ran loud and distracted behind him, bouncing from wall to wall, glancing only briefly at pictures and shouting taunts and mockeries at each other. —That’s so fake! yelled one of them barely a foot from his ear, as though even the idea of history was a trick.

  Taunting a schoolmate, another boy said: —You fuckin’ fag, then who’s the big fat faggot now, huh bitch?

  Oppenheimer sat frozen at his station for some time, pondering the obscenity. Out of the mouths of babes. They were a rough tribe, possibly juvenile delinquents. To call them ill-behaved would be an understatement; no doubt they were children from a specialized facility.

  On the monitor he saw short videos—he had just learned the word video in his motel and liked it, a Latin verb in common usage, people actually said “I wanna see a video,” he had learned, which literally meant, of course, “I want to see an I-see”—about the Manhattan Project. They showed the Trinity test and the use of the A-bomb on Hiroshima, and even he himself was pictured, right there in black and white, wearing his favorite hat, which he now held carefully on his lap.

  He clutched the hat, his hands shaking uncontrolla
bly.

  He and the hat had been transported together.

  On the monitor he saw the mushroom cloud. It had been captured on film, he realized with detachment, by Berlyn Brixner who had worked on the mesa in the Optics group, brought to Site Y by their mutual friend David Hawkins. Hawkins was a philosopher by trade but in wartime had accepted a position as the official Los Alamos historian. Oppenheimer had known they were making history; he had known this was a process that should be recorded, even then, and hired a scholar for the job. It was not a task that could be entrusted to the military. One thing for which he could take credit: he had never mistaken the endeavor for anything less than it was. He had never thought it was not important, that they would not, after some fashion at least, make history.

  He remembered this man Brixner, the photographer, when he saw the mushroom cloud rising and blossoming on the monitor, small and contained. Brixner, Hawkins, Serber, Alvarez, Groves, all these men, different men, fat and thin, arrogant and modest, some with senses of humor, others dry as a bone. He had liked some of them and disliked others, but to all of them he had given his support, all of them had had his shoulder to cry on or his ear to complain into when the pressure was great, and that, at least, was something of which to be proud. All of them together: this was what they had made, all those millions, or in fact, if Groves could be taken at his word, billions of dollars. He remembered Hanford and the Columbia River, the river of sweet pink salmon and the plutonium flowing there.

  That and the mystery of the young boy’s trousers, held beneath his buttocks by some invisible force. These questions must be answered.

  Watching the video he registered not the strange, anomalous cloud but the rest of what he had lost, the vacuum that was left. That was what it looked like at a glance. It was sucking a vacuum on the ground, blistering a hole in the sky. It was vengeance on them all: it was the unspeakable and the divine.