Oh Pure and Radiant Heart, Lydia Millet [top romance novels .txt] 📗

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