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

’n’ chicks—she could smell basil and mint and lavender growing ten feet away. She knew the name of other flowers she could see faintly in the dark: columbine, sego lilies. Water in the fountain trickled, faint and itchy, and she listened. Her arms were bare and the breeze lifted the fine hairs.

She thought of the child. She had decided a few days ago to throw away her pills, the three weeks of estrogen, the single week of placebos. Ben had wanted her to do this for years. Boundless love, like the boundless sky, seemed easier to make than earn.

You made your own, of course. There was no guarantee of theirs.

Even if there were dangers, even if the rivers and seas and the fish that swam them were flowing with mercury, forests were being felled and deserts turned into strip mines, there was nothing to do but trust. If she had been given a choice before she was conceived, say to exist in chaos or not to exist at all: Chaos, she would have said. She would have said, not without sadness of course, still: let me come. Let me watch as all things fall apart.

There was no birdsong. It was the silence before dawn, when the birds do not sing, the stopped time after dreams in which men die with their eyes on the ceiling, throats aching with tears, arms leaden beside them on the cold sheets.

Later she would think that was the first time she ever understood the danger: the more beautiful a house, the more invisible the rest of the world.

Ben, the husband of Ann, who at that moment was sleeping again, was a gardener.

He thought of himself first as the husband of Ann, and only second as a gardener. More than most husbands, possibly, he liked to be a husband. It was a vocation, whereas gardens were merely a hobby that paid.

They lived in Santa Fe, New Mexico, where they were surrounded by slick restaurants and boutiques, upscale art galleries and also those that catered to the tourist trade selling paintings of purple and pink desert landscapes, trinket stores that sold oxydized copper Kokopelli statues and coyote bookends and five-gallon hats and leather boots with six-inch fringes, celebrity refugees from Hollywood who kept toy ranches in the hills and liked to pretend they were cowboys.

In fact they lived less than an hour’s winding drive from the city of Los Alamos, on the high pink and gray mesa with its juniper trees and piñon bushes, salvia and chamisa, a city that had barely existed before World War Two and where, from 1943 to 1945, hundreds of Manhattan Project scientists, working under Oppenheimer, had built the world’s first atomic bomb and where, still, nuclear weapons were designed and redesigned, nuclear secrets kept and broken. They lived a little more than two hours from White Sands Missile Range in the Alamogordo desert, in the shadow of the Oscura mountains, home to a sea of flowing, shifting white gypsum dunes. Beyond the dunes in the fluvial-alluvial soil of the ancient Rio Grande valley had grown quietly, for thousands of years, giant flowering soaptree yuccas, globe mallow and fourwing saltbush and mint-green ethereal winterfat, jackrabbits and kit foxes and porcupines and herds of delicate galloping pronghorn antelope, until the predawn darkness of July 16, 1945, when a strange cloud blossomed over all of them.

What happened was, the night of the dream three men were born again. One was born in a motel room, one in a gutter. And the third was born again beneath a table that smelled of french fries and disinfectant, in a cafeteria at the University of Chicago.

2

Oppenheimer lay on a bed in a motel in his expensive suit. He felt stunned and lay without knowing where he was, in a tingling and static dark. Finally, still queasy but also restless, he reached a hand out into the treacherous thick air and fumbled with objects on the nightstand. Flicked at what felt like the switch for a table lamp. Light blazed.

He was in a motel room, shoddy and dim. In front of him and above hung a box with an opaque gray screen, a glass screen of some kind on a black platform, protruding from the wall. Kidnapped? Could some enemy power—Germans, Japanese, even the Russians, those so-called allies—be watching him from the other side of that convex glass?

—Remain calm, he told himself.

He had been surrounded by soldiers at the countdown. No abduction would have been possible. He had just been there, crouched, waiting for ignition in the desert, in the dark, a little after five in the morning, his crowd of other geniuses surrounding him, holding their breath as he held his. And then the blast, that great and terrible flower, that sear of lightness lifting up the sky.

And now he was here.

But where was here, and why was he? He must have been injured by the blast. That was it. This was some kind of dark infirmary.

Plucking at his shirt he felt no pain, however, and there were no cuts or bruises: a head injury? Brain damage? Possibly he had simply been knocked unconscious and they had left him to rest in peace in this dim and ugly room, the best Socorro had to offer. But my God: what was that painting? It was outrageous! On the wall opposite, as he pushed himself up on his elbows to look, was a hideous watercolor of a girl child grasping a fistful of tulips.

It unnerved him. There was an offensive, crass quality to the thing. Something was wrong with the flowers in the young girl’s pale orange bouquet, their pink-purple whorls and openings. Dead, dead wrong. It seemed geared to evoke the fantasies of a pervert.

If he was injured where was Kitty? They should have summoned her right away. He had to look outside. He had to know where he was.

He got up unsteadily and went to the door, whose faintly greasy knob featured an oddly