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

poor friend. And he realized this at the same time: Leo had not been merely a colleague but a friend, moreover no mere friend but a hero, for heroes are not movie stars but worker bees. The farmer in the field, he thought: man, not the image of man.

He saw what had once been Leo’s face and understood that the hole in the back of the head was neat and the ragged exit wound, the terrible injury of the bullet leaving, was what had torn out poor dear Leo’s eyes.

And so, because Leo had stood right beside him, he knew with certainty that the shot had not come from the crowd but the inside, not from the masses out there to whom such an act of madness could easily be ascribed but from the ones right here. They had done it, these men misled to worship him. They had killed his friend.

Later Ben would remember the day as though he had not lived it but only been handed the memory. He would not recall a chronology, only a series of impressions and how, after a while, his body had become too tired to react to events, and his senses were dulled by the tiredness of his limbs. He would recall Ann hanging on his arm, the people around them, one woman with her child on her shoulders, the child crying snottily in the chaos, and her husband beside her wearing a tattered brown robe and a dirty pair of running shoes.

He remembered the pace of the walk—too slow—and how formless the crowd was, and how impossible it was to know anything with certainty. He remembered confusion and Ann asking him if they could please get somewhere, please sit down, anything but what they were doing. He carried her for a while, carried her piggyback because there was no way out of the crowd to find a place to sit down. They were packed in too tightly and the crowd stretched too far. The restlessness of the crowd was alarming from the moment Szilard fell, a moment they had missed, being too close beneath him.

He remembered what happened later, the men in riot gear teeming, the visors through which faces were not visible, the burn of tear gas on his eyeballs and in his throat and the wail of sirens.

All of this was overshadowed in his memory by what came before and after, but neither of those, in retrospect, seemed real.

In the lobby downstairs Bradley’s men held Fermi waiting for him, Fermi who knew nothing of what had happened, a lost man. Still, as they stepped closer he could see on Fermi’s white face a growing fear, and he turned to Bradley, gripping his one good arm with sharp fingers.

—You will tell me who did this now, he said. —Tell me!

—Dr. Leo was executed because he was using you, said Bradley, and gazed unblinking past Oppenheimer’s shoulder. Oppenheimer felt swiftly infuriated and almost as swiftly resigned. —He would have betrayed you for a handful of silver. He was a shackle holding you to the earth and keeping the faithful from their due. He refused to admit to your divinity.

Behind Bradley’s head Oppenheimer noticed there were soldiers staring at him, staring and waiting for what he would say to this. Against such ignorance nothing could be said. He thought of Leo eating a lettuce leaf coated with sugar, nibbling at it with bulging eyes. When desserts were not available he had often rummaged in Ann’s refrigerator until he found a head of lettuce; he had peeled off the outer leaves and into a tender, pale inner leaf he had poured white sugar.

He thought of Leo looking at him over his sweetened lettuce leaf and refusing to admit to his divinity. It made him smile.

—But you knew that, went on Bradley gently.

Oppenheimer was called back to him.

—So were you the ones who were threatening us? Were you behind the warning in the Marshall Islands?

—The Marshall what?

One of the soldiers leaned forward and whispered in Bradley’s ear, distracting him.

—Was that your people too? persevered Oppenheimer.

—I don’t know what you’re talking about. Move along, OK? We gotta be going now.

—We were under surveillance. An officer threatened me in Micronesia. Men threatened Fermi in Tokyo. Someone shot a cat.

—Why would we threaten you? You are the final sign. No, that had to be them. They are afraid of the End Times, for they know they will never be saved. We do have some believers in the armed forces who have joined us in the cause, in fact we have many thousands, but they are enlisted men. Many of the civilian and military leaders belong to them.

—Them?

—The ones who do not want the Rapture, said Bradley solemnly.

—The high priests of Mammon.

Oppenheimer stared.

—And now, said Bradley, lowering his voice to a vicious whisper, —you will do your duty.

For the first time, strangely, looking down at Bradley’s prosthetic arm, Oppenheimer thought of the sameness with his mother: she too had only had a single good hand. She had been lovely, and Bradley was grotesque, but still he saw now that both his mother and this man had made him what he was. In that moment he was conscious of repulsion: he was repelled by Bradley, he reviled him. At the same time a shadow passed over his head and he knew that Bradley was right. He was the worst kind of man, but he was also correct.

For Oppenheimer himself was nothing but history. He had loved the world and wanted to build something to honor it, and all he had ever known said this was a noble quest. But instead it was human. It was human but it was not noble, for men are only noble in humility.

So he had built the wrong thing, and his was both the last and the original sin, the tower of Babel.

And all he could do now was to give himself up.

In the distance the missile was still vertical, looming over the trees