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

hysteria mounting in others around them, discerned the edginess he had felt the afternoon at the bright waterfall. He would not let himself cave in to fear though he sensed it all around him, warm and sweaty.

His lower back was hurting so he enlisted the aid of a guy next to him and they hoisted Ann all the way up onto his shoulders, still moving the whole time, pushed along. As they pushed her up she winced from the pain in her ankle. It was precarious but she could not walk and there was nothing he could do about it.

—Can you see where the crowd thins out? he yelled up to her, and repeated it when she did not hear him. She looked around and then pointed past the stage to his right.

—Up there! she said. —Go that way!

It was with the crowd, just a slight veer, and he leaned into it, packed in by other shoulders as they half-walked and were half-carried by the momentum. His neck felt strained, the cords standing out and pulling at his chin and throat, and his mouth was parched. In front of him was denim, a sign bobbing that threatened to take out an eye with its sharp corners, Can You Hear the Voice of the Dolphins?

—Just stay calm, he called up to her, because her hands on the tops of his arms were squeezing too hard.

He stepped on a shoelace and stumbled when it was pulled out from under his foot, but was held up when he fell against a big man beside him.

—Keep pointing me in the right direction, he yelled up to Ann, —you’re the lookout!

That was when the tear gas billowed near the base of the missile, at the far edge of the crowd.

Oppenheimer had felt the explosion, though he had not been looking in the right direction to see it. But from his high place he could see the aftermath: the missile was burning. Smoke rose in columns at the edges of the crowd: tear gas, he thought, most likely, or perhaps some more lethal chemical agent. Was it sabotage, or was it a direct attack?

Then he was pushed backward on the stage and Bradley’s soldiers were surrounding him. Others among the Christian leadership were close—all of them, he thought, so recently euphoric, so recently beyond themselves and ecstatic, now babbling and squawking so loudly among themselves that he could barely make out the words of those nearest to him. Nearby he could see Fermi, but not near enough to address.

Bradley’s soldiers were more frightened, he thought, than they should have been by fireworks and tear gas; certainly they were far more frightened than he.

—It’s gotta be them! yelled one of them to another—Denny, if he recalled correctly, with the Confederate flag on his arm, a thick-necked Baptist from the deep South. Past him stood the soldiers with their rifles raised.

How, Oppenheimer wondered belatedly, had they been permitted to bring their rifles to this public place, in this time of supposed peace? These rifles, one of which had surely killed his friend?

—How do you know it’s them? said Rob, who resembled a well-heeled golfer but whose working-class congregation, he had once told Oppenheimer, enjoyed the handling of snakes. —It could just be the D.C. cops. They’re nothing!

—It’s not the D.C. cops, said Denny, and Oppenheimer noticed the color had washed out of his florid face.

—It’s a private security force, said one of the soldiers, a middle-aged man with furrowed brow who spoke near Oppenheimer’s ear. —Either that or Special Ops.

—It’s theirs, urged Denny, —I’m telling you.

Oppenheimer looked off the stage beyond him. In the crowd people had to be fleeing from the tear gas, and yet the crowd was so dense and wide their movement was barely perceptible.

Then there was Bradley again, jogging over from a huddle with his lieutenants, the small mouthpiece of his headphone blocking his mouth.

—This is your fault! he said to Oppenheimer. —We didn’t care what you said about us. We have nothing to hide. But they do. They don’t like to be named. And now they’re coming. We have spotters in helicopters and they’ve seen them. They’re on their way in from all sides and they want to kill you.

Then he was swamped by the others, as overhead a small helicopter hovered and dropped a ladder. Rob from the Pentecostal church was the first to climb up it, shimmying up with a face red from the effort and his thick beige-clad legs clutching awkwardly; but then there were other helicopters above them too, dark, flat-bellied and sinister, ponderous and massive. They were edging the small one out and forcing it away. The noise of them was deafening.

Oppenheimer looked away from them, down and around him at the crowds beyond the stage, beneath the smoke and the screen of gas, which seemed to him a turmoil. He looked up again just in time to see Rob clamber into the blue helicopter as it began to retract its ladder. It occurred to him that Bradley could not hope to get clear in this way, one-armed as he was, with only the rope ladder to assist. But anyway it was not going to be the way out for any of them, for the small blue craft swooped jerkily away flanked by the military choppers.

Surely even Bradley and his soldiers would be overcome by the tear gas; surely they did not have long to formulate their plan. Surely the so-called high priests of Mammon were closing in.

And yet he was perfectly calm: and he knew.

To look down around her at the sea of heads made her queasy and dizzy and she was willing herself to stay strong, stay upright and not fall off of Ben’s shoulders. She kept her eyes on the horizon, the stage and the burning ICBM.

Onstage Bradley was shouting past the microphone inaudibly, shouting with soldiers arrayed behind him, their faces projected on the screen, strained, confused, panicking. Over the crowd she could no