Oh Pure and Radiant Heart Read online

  OH PURE AND RADIANT HEART

  OH PURE AND RADIANT HEART

  Lydia Millet

  Soft Skull Press

  Brooklyn, NY | 2005

  Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

  © 2005 Lydia Millet

  Book Design: David Janik

  Cover Art: “Trinity 2 (21kt, NM, 16.Jul.1945)” Copyright ©1995–2003

  Gregory Walker ([email protected]), Creator of Trinity Atomic Web Site.

  Author Photo: Adam Frank

  Published by Soft Skull Press

  71 Bond Street

  Brooklyn, NY 11217

  Distributed by Publishers Group West

  1.800.788.3123

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Millet, Lydia, 1968–

  Oh pure and radiant heart / Lydia Millet.

  p. cm.

  ISBN 978-1-593763-13-8

  1.Oppenheimer, J. Robert, 1904-1967—Fiction. 2.Fermi, Enrico, 1901-1954—Fiction. 3.Nuclear physicists—Fiction. 4.Women librarians—Fiction. 5.Santa Fe (N.M.)—Fiction. 6.Szilard, Leo—Fiction. 7.Celebrities—Fiction. 8.Atomic bomb—Fiction. 9. Time travel—Fiction.I. Title.

  PS3563.I42175O37 2005

  813’.54—dc22

  2005001028

  Behold, I have set before you an open door, and no man can shut it.

  —Revelation 3:8

  CONTENTS

  I. THE MEANING OF THE PORKPIE HAT

  II. WHY TALL PEOPLE FEAR DWARVES

  III. THE DEAD MAINTAIN THEIR GOOD LOOKS

  IV. A VAST INFANT

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  For their insight and critical help I wish to thank Jenny Offill, Kieran Suckling, and Kate Bernheimer. For their forbearance as readers, my thanks to Saralaine Millet and Maria Massie. And I am deeply grateful to Richard Eoin Nash for his perseverance and conviction.

  For her help with the Japanese language and her hospitality in Tokyo, thanks to Nerissa Moray; for help and guidance in Hiroshima, thanks to Andrew Hill; and for her many social connections, thanks to Alycia Rossiter. For their kindness and interpretive skills, thanks to Kazue Moshi Ichi in Hiroshima and Keiko Shirahama in Nagasaki. Thanks to Hibakusha Tomei Ozaki for his eyewitness account of the bombing of Nagasaki.

  Thanks also to Tonya Turner-Carroll and Michael Carroll for their gracious hospitality in Santa Fe, to Debbie Bingham for her help at the White Sands Missile Range, and Peter Galvin and Melanie Duchin for their knowledge of the Grateful Dead. I am also grateful to Brian Segee for his advice on Freedom of Information Act matters, Evelin and Mike Sullivan for their assistance with particle physics, and Ernest B. Williams, tour guide at the Nevada Test Site, for his inspiration.

  I

  THE MEANING OF THE PORKPIE HAT

  1

  In the middle of the twentieth century three men were charged with the task of removing the tension between minute and vast things. It was their job to rend asunder the smallest unit of being known to be separable from itself; out of a particle so modest there are billions in a single tear, in a moment so brief it could not be perceived, they would make the finite infinite.

  Two of the scientists were self-selected to split the atom. Leo Szilard and Enrico Fermi had chosen long before to work on the matter, to follow in the footsteps of Marie Curie and her husband, who had discovered radioactivity.

  The third man was a theoretical physicist who had considered the subject of the divisible atom among many others. He was a generalist, not a specialist. He did not select himself per se, but was chosen for the job by a soldier.

  Thousands worked at the whims of these men. From Szilard they took the first idea, from Fermi the fuel, from Oppenheimer both the orders and the inspiration. They built the first atomic bomb with primitive tools, performing their calculations on the same slide rules schoolchildren were given. For complex sums they punched keys on adding machines. Their equipment was clumsy and dull, or so it would seem by the standards of their children. Only their minds were sharp. In three years they achieved a technological miracle.

  Essentially they learned how to split the atom by chiseling secret runes onto rocks.

  And it should be admitted, the concession must be gracefully made: in the moment when a speck of dust acquires the power to engulf the world in fire, suddenly, then, all bets are off.

  Suddenly then there is no idea that cannot be entertained.

  On a clear, cool spring night more than half a century after the invention of the atom bomb, a woman lying in her bed in the rich and leisured citadel of Santa Fe, New Mexico, had a dream.

  This itself was not surprising.

  To be precise it was less a dream than an idea in the struggle of waking up. She thought the dream as she began to rouse herself and she was left, after waking, with an urgency that had no answer. She was left salty and dry, trussed up in a sheet, the length of her a shudder of vague regret.

  In the dream a man was kneeling in the desert.

  The man was J. Robert Oppenheimer, the Father of the Atom Bomb. The desert was an American desert: it was the New Mexico desert, and the site was named Trinity. Oppenheimer named it that. He gave lofty names to all his works, all except Fat Man and Little Boy.

  These details would be revealed to her later. At the time nothing had a name but the man.

  The man’s porkpie hat was tipped forward on his head and his pants were torn. His knobby knees were scratched and the abrasions were full of sand. She almost thought she could feel the sand against her own raw flesh, where the grains agitated. It may have been dust on the sheet beneath her, or, further removed, dust between the sheet and the mattress, a pea dreamed by a princess.

  He was bent over abjectly, his face turned to the ground.

  Then there was the flash, as bright as a thousand suns, which turned night into day. And on the horizon the fireball rose, spreading silently. In the spreading she felt peace, peace and what came before, as though the country beneath her, with its wide prairies, had been returned to the wild. She saw the cloud churning and growing, majestic and broad, and thought: No, not a mushroom, but a tree. A great and ancient tree, growing and sheltering us all.

  The sight of it was poetry, the kind that turns men’s bones to dust before their hearts.

  At this point in the scene she confused it with the Bible. The man named Oppenheimer saw what he had made, and it was beautiful. But when he looked at it, the light burned out his eyes and turned him blind.

  She saw the rolling balls of the eyes when he righted himself to face the tree, and they were white like eggs.

  Back then she knew nothing about Oppenheimer’s life: not who he was, not the identities of places, not the fact that the sand in the scrapes in his knees would have been the sand of the valley with the Spanish name Jornada del Muerto, Voyage of the Dead. There were infinite details she could not recognize, infinite details beyond her awareness in her own half-idea, in the deep blind territory of what is not known to be known but is known all the same.

  Also there was what she knew without knowing why she knew it, for example the phrase brighter than a thousand suns. She recalled these words without a hint of where they came from or how they had first been imprinted on her memory. She did not know what “brighter than a thousand suns” would mean, how a brightness so bright could be outdone. The eye is not equal to even one sun, she thought. Straight, unwavering, bold, the eye cannot abide it.

  A thousand suns? The eye could never adapt.

  Or maybe once it is blinded the eye is transformed, she thought, and ceases to be an eye at all.

  How much is learned unconsciously? It must be vast, she thought. We sweep through fields of knowledge and later all we can see is the dirt that cling
s to the hems of our clothes.

  Of course the scene itself, the dramatic idea that was not quite as unconscious as a dream, might have simply been a blurry cognitive rerun of any number of World War Two documentaries. It might have been a fragment from television, a black-and-white epic of scarred and pocked newsreels interspersed with propaganda footage from the Nuremberg rallies. She might remember young boys marching in synchronicity and jutting out their arms in salute; further she might recall the chilling but majestic banners hanging long and thin and several stories high above the seemingly endless crowds, their spidery symbols rippling like water in the wind.

  And over this she might recall the droning, authoritative voice of a British narrator.

  Afterward she remembered the name. She could not forget the name, in fact, in the way a bad jingle overstays its welcome, tinny and insistent, lodged in the neural pathways of the brain. It was a famous name, or a name that had once been famous anyway, before she was born when her parents were young, when the Japs got what was coming to them, and later still when the drunkard McCarthy was hunting down Communists.

  It was Oppenheimer, J. R.

  Also the words The Father of the Atom Bomb.

  A few days before, in waking life, she had seen the name at a small garage sale in a driveway, on the yellowing pages of a dog-eared copy of an old magazine from 1948, titled Physics Today. At the garage sale she had purchased a trivet, and the trivet had been sitting on this magazine when it caught her attention. She did not need a trivet, and in particular she did not need a porcelain trivet decorated with watercolor-style renderings of the Seven Wonders of the Ancient World. But she felt a need to compensate the woman who was trying to sell it. The woman had a gentle gaze and a distracted manner and admittedly also a flipper for one arm.

  Later, when she thought of the magazine cover, she also thought of printed words on the trivet: The Hanging Gardens of Babylon.

  On the cover of the magazine was a picture: the porkpie hat perched on some pipes, possibly in a factory. Later she learned the porkpie hat had been a stand-in for Oppenheimer at the height of his fame. After Hiroshima and Nagasaki, when the bombs had been dropped, the war was over and the Father of the Atom Bomb was a hero, the hat actually posed alone for photographs.

  As an ambassador, the hat had a simple message. It said: I am worn by a gentleman.

  It said: We are all gentlemen here.

  In the scene that was not quite a dream she saw the man named Oppenheimer kneeling in the desert when the first atomic bomb went off, and he was wearing his characteristic porkpie hat.

  The scene had other elements, such as a squirrel shaped like a long balloon, dragging its belly on the ground. The squirrel came before Oppenheimer and then it retired politely. The squirrel was not present when the mushroom cloud rose over the horizon on its slowly twisting stem.

  Neither was her mother, who had also been in the dream when it was still a dream, before it drew itself out of a well of sleep. Twelve years old, her mother rode a blue bicycle along the top of a white wall. She saw not the color blue in the dream but only the word blue, blue bicycle. Her mother did not need to hold the handlebars and she was proud of this; her hands were in the air, flitting birdlike as she rode. From the ends of the bicycle handles sprouted bright-colored strips of plastic, and on her small fingers the little mothergirl wore bulging candy rings. Color was at her hands.

  Watching the girl ride along the wall, almost dreaming, her heart broke that she had never known her mother when she was young. As she turned in the sheets, hot, almost waking completely, she thought: She will never be young again. None of us will ever, ever be young again.

  She wanted to cry, but was more thirsty.

  Nothing was present at the end of the scene. Squirrels, mothers, bicycles vanished. And the faint, dry aftertaste of it all was only a porkpie hat.

  As soon as we know it, it is gone.

  When she realized she was awake she also realized she was sweating, and her shirt was sticking to her skin. She flicked on the nightstand lamp.

  How this particular woman, Ann, would have looked to an observer then, a so-called peeping tom for example, staring in the window, was this: she was a white woman, young, small, with a thin, muscled torso and a delicate, fine-boned face. She was sweating and the rings of sweat under her arms, soaking her cotton tank top, made her look like a fresh army recruit in boot camp, someone new to obstacle courses and discipline. In the past, people had caught sight of her and called her “wholesome.” They had said, many people on many different occasions—She’s so wholesome looking.

  Her husband Ben was next to her in bed, and she looked down at him in the dim light cast by the bedside lamp. It occurred to her that he was not the Father of the Atom Bomb. He lay sleeping; his face was collapsed. He had nothing to hide, or if he did he had no will to hide it, she thought. If something lay hidden, he slept beside it unknowing.

  It also occurred to her that Ben was not only not the Father of the Atom Bomb but less a father than a child, at least compared to the man in the desert. Feeling poised on the brink of a discovery she knew, at the same time, she would never make, she thought the words a baby. The man in the desert had been as old as the hills but also ageless.

  She studied her husband’s dark hair with its few gray strands at the temples, the wings of his eyelids casting shadows across his pale cheeks, and was guilty: she had condescended to him. Even though he was sleeping and could not read her mind, he would never know it, true, but still it stood. There was an insult in that involuntary gesture of pity. She felt a pang of sorrow for both of them. But it was not childlike to be defenseless, she told herself: defenseless and weak are not the same, they are nothing alike.

  No, she reassured herself as she got up and changed shirts, in fact it is the strong who feels no need to defend himself, any idiot knows that.

  She padded to the bathroom and brushed her teeth absently, thinking that not having brushed them might be what was keeping her awake. Grainy teeth.

  It is the weak who act ferocious, she thought, those small, yappy dogs, those tiny inbred dogs with high-pitched, shrieking barks, leash-straining, frantic, leaping savagely at huge placid Dobermans trotting past.

  It takes courage, she thought, to be one in a multitude.

  —The wine, she said aloud in recognition.

  White wine made her maudlin.

  Looking into her face in the mirror she flicked out the bathroom light and her face disappeared in the blankness of dark. Then, climbing into bed again, gently to keep the mattress from jiggling, she thought: We both lie here every night with secrets all around us.

  The truth of it grazed her like a feather, brushing as faintly as a breeze but leaving a burn of feeling in its wake. We have no knives, no guns, no weapons, we have no armor at all, we lie here without barriers, near a paper-thin window, she thought, and shivered under the blankets. We are naked as the bulbs of flowers. We may not be children, we may not be innocent at all, but we will always be easy to hurt.

  That was something of which she felt sure, as she looked down at Ben sleeping, propping herself up on an elbow on the sloping, fat pillow. Easy to hurt, nothing could be easier.

  Ben had been woken by her restless movement and was only feigning sleep. He was doing so in order to allow Ann to fall asleep again, in order not to prevent her from taking her rest. As he lay beside her knowing she was awake he wished to gather her up in his arms and put himself in her body.

  But Ann did not always sleep easily and he knew this. He was worried about her sleeplessness, how it might age her before it was her turn to be old. Sleep, he had read, is even more important for health and longevity than a nutritious diet.

  That there could be a time after her, a time when he was alone, actually made him cringe if he dwelled on it too long: how empty all the buildings would be, and the streets of cities. Cavernous and gray they would echo the sound of his voice.

  Shuddering he pressed his face into h
er shoulder, and felt the sympathy of her leaning toward him, her cheek against the crown of his head. She still believed he was sleeping.

  He breathed her skin and told himself a story to drift away. Once in the future, on the surface of the moon, there were thousands who raised their arms. They sang in a tone he could not hear, beyond the threshold of the human ear. But to look at them was enough: white like ghosts, their faces beaming, they were arrayed in great number, as far as the eye could see. Behind them the mountains of the moon rose up like pillars in the airless sky.

  She had grown up on a street where, at dusk on a calm day, a woman could stand on her front porch with a cocktail in her slim hand and hear the faint laughing splashes from seven swimming pools at once. Long, dark cars pulled into driveways with their silent engines purring, black men pushed lawnmowers, there were houses for finches like small wooden cathedrals.

  There were even old trees with spreading limbs that shaded her as she played.

  This street of green lawns on hills, velvet bands in the sky at dusk, and the smell of barbecue as the heat of the day rose away was not where Ben spent his formative years. Ben lived lifetimes of exhaustion before he was ten.

  But when she was a child the ground had been steady beneath her feet, and in the spring and the summer she had grass stains on her tennis shoes. The tennis shoes had always been new, and as soon as they were gray her mother bought her fresh white ones. She picked crab apples from the trees in the schoolyard and played with the smiling girls across the street, whose parents came from Holland. They liked to perch pipe-cleaner tiaras on their heads and pretend they were queens and princesses. They dressed in old clothes that smelled of mothballs, which they fished from a wicker trunk in the play room, and pranced up and down the street on silver platform shoes with their flowing robes trailing behind them. They had sung loudly as they paraded down the street, sung at the top of their lungs.

  The platform shoes, her mother had told her later, were all she had kept from the sixties.