by Lydia Millet
Excited, grasping the newspaper tightly, she left the doves clucking and walking in circles. When she got to her desk at work she clipped the story and called the police department to find out whether the fat man claiming to be Leo Szilard was still in custody. They told her no charges had been pressed and the man had been released, only to turn his attention to the FBI field office in Albuquerque, where he had also demanded to be fingerprinted.
The FBI had refused to accede to his request and had released him on his own recognizance.
For the first time, hanging up the phone, she felt practical, hard-nosed, not adrift but detail-bound and equal to difficult tasks. Recalling that she had found Ben in the phonebook she looked up Detectives, see Investigations, which yielded a listing billing itself as Complete Investigative Services, Professional Expedient Confidential, Criminal Defense Personal Injury Child Custody Missing Persons Pre-Marital & Background Checks.
She called to set up an appointment and then made several photocopies from a book.
The office of the so-called Investigative Services was not dark and strewn with ashtrays but brightly, blankly lit. There were posters of Hawaii on the walls and yellow and orange paper flowers in ceramic vases on the coffee table in the waiting room.
The receptionist noticed her looking at these.
—Vic one of the owners? He just like has a thing for Hawaii, it’s like a Magnum PI fixation or something.
On her way back to the library she drove to the mansion, where she parked her car beside Ben’s truck and walked down into the garden. He was planting passion flower vines at the base of the bronze horse statue, not without reluctance. He told her the pale tendrils of the vines, thin as threads with curling ends, would grow around the hooves and fetlocks and up the muscular legs. Quickly they would produce complex, delicate flowers of purple and white and hairy green fruits the size of pecans.
When he stood and pulled off his gloves by the fingertips, slapping off the dirt across the thigh of his workpants, she told him she felt lighter, loftier having suspended her disbelief. She told him she had been afraid of collapsing inward, but now she felt she was expanding outward, growing lighter, shedding weight.
—Your first thought will be that I’m psychotic, she said.
—I can’t wait.
They sat down on a rock ledge and she went on, with effort, —There are these scientists that are supposed to be dead.
—What? said Ben.
Before she answered she glanced up at the street, where a Volvo passed and a young blond girl with a smooth and perfect face looked out the window at her, bored.
—I saw them once in a bar, and now I’m looking for them.
In a greeting card store Ann browsed for a card for her older brother. It was his birthday. All over the cards was written I love you.
Ann did not select any of those cards. Her brother did not want a card that said I love you. People forget, thought Ann looking at the furry animals, the flowery flowers, that even love is only an idea. And the people that believe they hate ideas, the ones that claim no interest in the abstract, buy greeting cards and songs that say I love you by the billions. At once brimming with and devoid of meaning, I love you is a sacred cliché.
It cannot be assailed.
He liked being alone in the garden. He had long, warm stretches of solitude, broken only by the times when Lynn came and talked to him for too long, when he had to tell his assistants what to do or meet with Yoshi to go over designs. The assistants were mostly self-sufficient and Yoshi rarely needed him, so it was chiefly Lynn who was responsible for interrupting. Luckily she usually kept busy. When she was at loose ends his days could be burdensome.
And even though he resented the removal of Ann he also savored the fact that his daytime separation from her was complete and seamless. There was a neatness in the division between work and play, one he had to admit he did not mind. So it jarred him when her coworker Jeff from the library called him on the cell phone, intruding.
He barely knew Jeff. Jeff tended to wear a pinky ring, he recalled, of a small coiled snake with forked tongue protruding. It was this snake he remembered when he pushed the TALK button and heard the man’s voice. Vaguely he also saw carrot sticks in a freezer bag that Jeff had been carrying the first time they met, in the library’s parking lot. And he recalled Jeff’s checked shirt, which featured fake mother-of-pearl snaps, and the flaky dryness of Jeff’s lips.
—The thing is, said Jeff, —I was wondering if there was anything going on that I should know about. At, you know, home. I don’t mean it’s my business, obviously it’s not, I just mean in case that would help explain things, or help me in terms of dealing with any changes in, you know, work habits that I might be observing? At all?
Ben was rendered speechless. He walked across the yard and leaned against a crab apple tree with the phone to his ear.
—Just in terms, Jeff went on, —of any irregularities that might, you know, eventually cause problems in terms of work performance? I mean I’m not her supervisor, you know, I mean actually she’s mine, technically. This is more from a, you know, wanting to help her out kind of situation. That I’m asking.
—I’m sorry, said Ben. He was surprised, even shocked at the suggestion that Ann had begun to be remiss in the work that she had always done impeccably. She had always been a good librarian, neat, organized, accessible, kind, at least the way he saw it.
And then there was the claim she had just made to him, that resurrected A-bomb scientists from World War Two were lurking in the bushes.
Possibly she was suffering from post-traumatic stress. It would not be surprising, given the violence of the schizophrenic man’s death.
But he put that aside, as he had trained himself to do when protocol demanded an impersonal response.
—What are you asking me? Whether my wife and I are having marital difficulties?
—No! said Jeff, —no, I didn’t mean that, totally. Just if there’s anything going on, like maybe illness in the family.
—I don’t quite understand, sorry. Are you calling because you have something to ask me? Or tell me?
—Oh, said Jeff. —Well I guess both. Just that she hasn’t been keeping her normal, the work hours she’s normally committed to, is the thing. Which as you know, she’s always been real prompt, I barely even saw her take a sick day before now. So I was wondering if there was a, say, mitigating circumstance.
—May I ask why you’re speaking to me about this instead of to her?
There was a brief silence, during which Ben thought he could hear a carrot being bitten into and ruminated. Or possibly celery.
—I kind of did but it didn’t seem to be getting results.
—I see, said Ben. The guy was an asshole. And now Lynn was approaching across the back patio, a deliveryman pushing a handcart behind her with what appeared to be—yes.
A stone cherub. It held aloft a large cluster of grapes.
—So I just thought I would make sure, you know, before I bring it up with anyone or whatever, I mean if that comes up. I mean the absenteeism issue.
—I’m sorry, said Ben, —I appreciate your concern but I can’t help you. I don’t discuss my wife’s personal life with her coworkers without her knowledge. I will say no, there have been no deaths or illnesses in the family since her parents died. Beyond that you’ll have to take up this question with her. And let me just say for the record that calling me was completely inappropriate.
—Huh, said Jeff.
—OK? So I’ll have to go now, I’m at work, said Ben.
Lynn, standing on the edge of the patio in high heels, was waving at him frantically, as though she was marooned on a desert island and he was flying overhead, her sole chance of rescue.
—If you, could you at least do me a favor, though, too?
Ben suppressed a sigh. —Doubt it, he said.
—If maybe you could give me a couple days’ lead before you let her know that I called? Just because then I
could bring it up with her again, like, myself. It’s that I’ve, like, been having—
—No, said Ben. —Weren’t you listening to me? I don’t keep things from her. Again, I think it was wrong for you to call me about this.
—That’s hardcore, said Jeff. —But whatever I guess.
—Good luck, said Ben. —I hope you work it out.
He pressed END as Lynn, impatient, actually stepped off the patio and into the deep earth of the south rock garden, freshly turned and aerated. Her stiletto heel sank deep instantly and she stumbled, shrieking.
Behind her the deliveryman stepped up and grabbed a windmilling arm.
—Are you all right? asked Ben, drawing near, pocketing the cell phone.
—That’s my bad ankle! I’ve had physical therapy on this ankle six times! raged Lynn, and flapped angrily at the deliveryman with her free hand as she sat down hard on the flagstones.
—Are you going to need an ambulance? asked Ben.
She looked up at him sharply, but seeing only polite concern had no recourse.
—No, no, no, she grumbled. —I just need to not fucking step in fucking mud.
She pulled a shoe off to reveal gold toenails and a heel broken, dangling.
—Uh, so where do you want this? asked the deliveryman.
—Damn it! That was a Badgley Mischka!
She hurled the shoe into the soil again.
—That, uh, the statue is for the back—? inquired Ben.
—In with the—somewhere back there! Near the hummingbird garden! she said angrily, massaging the ankle, and he nodded at the deliveryman.
—Past that acacia, go along the path there to the right, he said. —You can leave it beside the birdbath. Can I get you some ice?
—Help me inside, said Lynn. —I’ll put it up first.
She hopped beside him, steadied on his arm, lurching into his side with every hop. At the back doors he hesitated to slip off his work boots and Lynn leaned insistently on his shoulder, as though he was furniture.
—Just take me to the chaise over there, she said.
He deposited her on a pink chaise lounge and headed to the kitchen. Crescent-shaped ice rained out of the refrigerator into a glass, and he wrapped the crescents in a dishcloth.
Back in the cavernous living room she had draped herself artfully on the chaise, tasseled cushions behind her head, one leg over the back, her skirt hiked up to mid-thigh.
—I don’t know that you’ll be able to balance these on the ankle like that, said Ben. —Maybe we should move you to the chair and pile the cushions on the footstool?
Grudgingly she dropped her leg from the back of the chaise and handed him a cushion from behind her head.
—I’m fine here, she said.
He leaned down and lifted the ankle onto the cushion, then put the ice on it, adjusting for stability.
—Just get me the phone, would you?
He brought her the portable from its silver cradle.
—And could I have some water?
Water, like the crescents, rained.
—Oh, you know what I need? We have some like soothing lotion, like menthol rub? It’s in the vanity in the master bath.
—I should probably make sure he’s all right back there, said Ben, gesturing out the back door, thinking of the deliveryman stomping through cosmos. —Would you like me to ask Marcia to help you?
—It’s Marcia’s day off. She’s in Gallup. And Roger’s in La Jolla, he won’t be back until Tuesday.
—OK. I’ll get you the lotion, and then I should get back to work.
In the master bath he was deluged by scents. The floor was strewn with Lynn’s lacy underwear, tangled nylons, bikini segments, padded bras, the counter with cleansers, moisturizers, atomizers, even an almost-whole cucumber with slices cut off one end, paper-thin slices now wet and clinging to the bowl of the sink. There was a curling iron, a blow dryer, sunscreen, self-tanning gel, under-eye cream, cuticle cream, cellulite cream.
Roger’s modest shaving kit huddled in the corner, apparently frightened.
Ben opened the vanity determined to notice nothing private, but the lotion, unfortunately, was nowhere to be seen, necessitating increasingly close scrutiny. Past a package of condoms, batteries, dental floss, past antidepressants, tranquilizers, razorblades, organic alcohol-free deodorant, lip gloss, eye shadow, he finally found a small brown-glass container.
When he got back to Lynn she was lying with her head back and her eyes closed.
—Could you just smooth some on for me? she murmured, without opening them.
He noticed that somehow, from her prone position, she had brushed her hair to fan out over her shoulders and applied fresh lipstick.
—Sorry, I’ll just put it down here for now, said Ben gently. —I have to go see about the delivery guy. I think he may be trampling your nasturtiums.
“I love you” is everywhere, reflected Ann when she saw two teenagers making out against a wall as she walked down Alameda. The popularity of love in general and “I love you” in particular might be ascribed to their deceptive humility. “I love you” seems to privilege “you” over “I” and by this small deception, she thought, becomes sacrosanct. Because what could be wrong with offering to be subsumed?
Saturday morning art buyers and gawkers milled around on the sidewalks looking for more to buy, coffees and shopping bags in hand. Oppenheimer stood in a gallery, looking at a piece of ancient pottery held out from the wall on delicate plexiglass brackets. He was alone.
Ann hovered outside staring in, struck and held. She had caught sight of him from the street when she turned suddenly, hearing her name called behind her. But it was someone else with her name, a woman in a red cowboy hat and a black leather jacket, running in heels to greet someone, smiling a shiny smile and opening her arms.
When she looked away she saw Oppenheimer through the window of the gallery.
After a minute he moved toward the back and disappeared in the white glare on the windowpane. She waited until he came out and donned his hat, her heart beating a panicked beat, and watched him turn to trudge down the driveway beside the gallery building toward the yard behind. As he turned the corner of the building she followed him, slowly gaining. He walked out between two houses, dipped down into a small arroyo, crossed the sandy bed and walked up the slight rise to the street behind, which he turned off into a dirt road behind. Striding up the alley he lit a cigarette, waved out the match and threw it away. She thought how slight he was, despite his height, how slight and delicate a figure he cut.
He stopped and swiveled on his heels to look at a house off the alley, a dusty backyard through which children’s toys were strewn, a yellow plastic car, a battered, zebra-striped kite, an orange frisbee gnawed by a dog and a plywood doghouse, water-stained and leaning.
She stopped too, chicken, and then started up again, forcing herself, drawing close, looking at the brown leather of her shoes, lightened by dust, and then up at his hunched shoulders.
—Dr. Oppenheimer? she called, feeling it come out of her mouth awkward, almost pathetically eager.
He turned.
—The—young lady from the grocery store?
—Yes. But did you—is that really your name?
—Oppenheimer. Yes.
—The one—Robert. The physicist.
—The only one I know, said Oppenheimer, inhaling swiftly on his cigarette and beginning to walk again.
She found herself walking fast to keep up, in fact scurrying to keep up. Rats scurry, she thought. Rats and other rodents, small furtive animals.
—Who invented the atom bomb.
—Hardly, said Oppenheimer, chuckling. —I was one among many. And I would say developed, not invented.
—But you’re dead.
—So they say.
—So—what? How do you—how can you be what you say? Are you a liar, or am I having a breakdown?
—Please! said Oppenheimer, surprised, turning to raise an eyebrow in h
er general direction and stopping. —I have no idea who you are, or what the current state of your psychological health may be!
—I, no, said Ann. —But I mean, how can you—He started walking again, moving quickly.
—We’ve considered various scenarios. One proposition, which we’ve discussed in the vaguest terms only of course, is that this—and he gestured around him at the garages off the alley with their blistering paint, a tire swing hanging from a dead tree, a filthy silver car with a suction-foot Garfield in the rear window—is our delusion. Including you. Some kind of postmortem experience of cognition, sounds like an oxymoron I know, maybe based on an energy transfer—
He tossed his cigarette onto the dirt beside a garbage can and ground it in with a heel.
—that occurred at the time of the test, or a massive release of stored chemicals, say neurotransmitters…?
Ann looked from the rotating heel to a mailbox beside them, on the side of the alley. It was a freestanding mailbox painted in camouflage, balanced solitary on a wooden stake in a clump of dried grass beside the hard, rutted dirt of the road. It had been caved in on one side, probably by a euphoric youth with a baseball bat. She was only half-listening to Oppenheimer, at the same time bored and captivated. The mailbox had tried to camouflage itself, but had been blindsided anyway.
—he was suggesting there was some form of surplus energy that remained after the moment of death, which had the capacity to, as it were, ideate—
His fingers were long and thin, forefinger and middle finger stained yellow. It occurred to her that Szilard was right: they should be fingerprinted. Their fingerprints might still be on record; they had worked for the Army.
—use the term loosely to mean “simulate the experience of consciousness”—produce a pseudo-sensory perception. I’m thinking of Einstein’s discussion of Leucippus, for example. Early atomism. Death, for the purposes of this discussion, would be construed not as a change in the essence of an individual but as a rearrangement of particles in space—
—Listen, interrupted Ann in a tentative voice, thinking his head was too large for his body, his body like a stringy puppet with a pumpkin on top—this is—
