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

longer hear them and she could not see Oppenheimer either. If she knew how to read lips she would know what they were saying, she thought, and wished she knew how to read lips, but she did not. She had never known a deaf person and had never interested herself in deafness.

She regretted this with a sudden anger.

—I should have had an interest in the deaf, she repeated as they moved. But of course no one heard her. She could be panicked but instead she was dumb; there was nothing she could do. It frustrated her that she could not see Oppenheimer or Fermi on the stage anymore and her eyes stung. She turned toward the missile and saw white smoke billowing there again.

—Oh no! she said, and looked down at Ben. —Smoke! Did something else explode?

—Tear gas! he yelled.

—What?

—Tear gas! It moves fast! Get your water out of your bag!

The bag was hanging off his shoulder. She leaned down and fumbled with it one-handed, slipping out the near-empty bottle and spilling candy bars and her watch onto the ground. She let them go. —Are you thirsty?

—Soak the bottom of your shirt in it and then hand it to me! The gas is going to drift over here! Any second!

She poured the water on her shirt and handed it down to him.

—Hold up our shirt to your nose and mouth, OK? Breathe through the wet cloth. It’s going to catch up with us. We can’t move any faster than the rest of them.

She held it over her nose and mouth but could still feel burning start there, and her eyes and nose were running. Around her people stumbled and fell against Ben and she felt a clutch of fear rising through her body. Even her feet trembled. They would fall and people would step on them, boots would crush their windpipes, their necks would snap like dry twigs. Her legs trembled all the way up to her crotch and her stomach was like water.

—Can you see the physicists up there?

—Only Bradley, she said, muffled through the T-shirt, —on the screen.

Then the burning grew and was stifling and they had to stop talking at all. It was all they could do to keep going forward. He had his wet shirt over his nose and mouth and she had hers, holding onto each other with their free left hands, people whimpering around them, now and then a shriek or a hoarse yell. When she finally felt herself falling, felt both of them toppling over pressed from the side, she closed her eyes because there was nothing else she could do. The fall seemed slow once it was in motion and because they landed on a cushion of bodies there was a softness to it, but at the same time it was almost impossible to breathe because she had to let her hand fall, her shirt was wrenched away from her nose and mouth and instantly the burning was far, far worse. A man was on top of her and she kicked out her legs, trying to unscissor them from Ben’s head, afraid of crushing him. It was black and hot and she wanted to scream but could not, the burning and her closed throat, the thickness and the suffocation, and her eyes and nose streaming.

Oppenheimer saw the riot police pushing their way through the crowd, absurd with their shields and masks like boys playing at war with pots and pans. He saw them before he noticed the SWAT teams, though the SWAT teams were far nearer, barely a hundred yards away, past the cordons and the crowds with nothing in their way, converging on the stage around him.

When Bradley’s soldiers fired warning shots into the air—in doing so finally, he thought, seeming somehow almost innocent—the SWAT team opened fire on them. He stood among their falling bodies confused more than frightened as the SWAT team moved up the sides of the broad stage; he stood watching without bending, without taking cover, as though bullets could not penetrate him.

A few feet away Fermi sat in similar passivity, on a folding chair that had once been placed behind the podium, as usual gazing up at the sky.

Oppenheimer thought at first that the SWAT team was firing on Bradley’s soldiers only but had to admit, as a trail of fire seared his forearm, that they were also firing on him. It was a grazing wound and did not bother him, but he was caught up in curiosity, gazing down at the bloom on his shirtsleeve like a man drugged or detached, as the SWAT team cut down Bradley’s soldiers. They fell jerkily, one by one, with a surprising lack of protest.

Then like a man moving underwater he stepped up to the microphone. It would be the last time, he knew. He could not tell if the microphone was working. His arms moved slowly and stiffly as he reached and held onto the thin metal stand; he spoke without hearing his voice in the gunfire around him, persisting deafly.

—These men shooting at me now, he said, —Ann! Can you hear me? They are the ones who were hunting us! The other ones want heaven on earth. They shot Szilard! But it’s the institutions that want to kill me. They have no use for the Rapture. They want their empire to last forever.

His vision was blurred, and he could not tell if he was speaking out loud. Grayer and grayer until the world is all gone, he was thinking: money and a vast machine.

—But the question is not, who is the enemy, he said, or thought he said. —The question is not even, why is the enemy winning? Those are the questions people ask but they are the wrong questions. The right question is: What is it in me that delivers the world into the hands of my enemy?

Amid the chaos everything had ceased to be separate, and inclining his head slightly he gazed at the simplicity