Oh Pure and Radiant Heart

the cloud rolled outward—by the same token they had believed everything, they had been like children. They had been willing to accept every word he said to them, he realized suddenly, and there had been no deception: he had believed the words himself. And yet while he was reassuring them, plying his logic and his wit and gracious speech—he would admit it, he rose to the occasion, occasionally even he with his mere gifts was capable of eloquence—he had actually known nothing.

That was what he saw now. All he had known was how to make science into faith, or at least that had been his pretension. He had known nothing, despite his erudition or maybe because of it, possibly the layers of information had smothered what lay beneath. He had known nothing at all, finally, and now his own ignorance stunned him.

He ran the footage from the Trinity shot repeatedly, pressing the button that started the video again and again. As he watched the shot, the cloud that transformed itself as it rose, he finally forgot about individuals, forgot about the others who had been there with him. At first he had remembered their gestures and habits, the texture of them had come home with startling force as he watched the cloud rise and burgeon, its pregnant violence spread rolling and tumbling over the sky, spectacular and obscene birth.

But now he was losing them as he began to see the cloud for what it was, grandeur and mass. It took so many forms: at first it was a dome, then a bell, then a jellyfish. People called it a mushroom cloud: he heard it all around him.

At first he had not fathomed its enormity. When he was there, although it had been awesome, it had also been too near to see clearly. He had seen close instead of clear. But still he knew it for what it was and it had struck to his heart and to the hearts of all of them.

And now the longer he watched the more clearly he saw it, as though from far away, through space and time that had left him. He forgot the families of the men, their wives and kids, all of whom he had met, most of whom he had known by name, handed drinks at parties or patted on the head—wives drinks, that was, and children heads. Their faces faded and his mind wandered to other matters, to vast sights and abstractions, darkness and light.

Finally what he recalled as he sat there, as he pushed the button and watched the cloud rise over and over, mesmerized, was a distraction, a tangent. He digressed, with the cloud rising before him on the small screen, and it struck him how hopeful he had been when he was young. As a child he had dreamed of heaven: even as a child, before he even knew the rigors of adversity, he had clung to the idea of another place, a flawless and gentle place beyond and after this one.

Despite what had been taught to him at the Adler school, the politely benevolent atheism, despite the secular learning of those he most respected he had still, as a child, dreamed of heaven almost rapturously. It had been a quasi-Christian heaven, possibly, he reflected as he sat watching the cloud. It smacked of the pearliness and sentimentality of Christian visions, not his own family’s faith, such as it was, now that he thought about it. He had been assimilated even then: it had begun when he was very young.

But whether heaven was on earth or elsewhere, futurist utopia or a return to the garden of Eden, a worker’s paradise or a rich man’s material indulgence, he had held fast to this vision. Men could make an empire of peace, an empire of perfect comprehension. Somewhere, future or dream, this city of God must exist.

He wondered how old he had been, whether it was ten or twelve, when he had first begun to cling to this. He wondered whether his last sandcastle on the beach had been built and washed away before then.

It occurred to him fleetingly that this might be a test, that his presence here, in what appeared at first glance to be a sterile and terrible future, was not real but only a test, a test of faith, moral fiber, a test of integrity.

At last the old woman beside him, disgruntled, complained loudly that he was “monopolizing the button.” She heaved herself up from her chair and crept away swaying. Stray children wandered over and sat down but they quickly became bored with his trigger finger and he was left alone at the monitor, motionless and staring.

After an hour or two—it might have been longer, he did not know—he began to cry.

This was contrary to his usual practice. He wept, like most adult men, so rarely that there were often years between outbreaks.

Finally another visitor to the museum, a young woman wearing open-toed suede sandals, put a sympathetic hand on his shoulder as he sobbed. She stood behind him and watched with him patiently as the mushroom cloud rose and blossomed first tens, then hundreds of times; she shook her head sadly at the blossoming, touching and rubbing his shoulder gently but firmly.

At first he was taken aback by this intrusion, by the sudden intimacy and forwardness of the gesture, but presently he became grateful for it. The hand was warm and soft and linked him to a person who, unlike all the others he knew, had not yet disappeared. When she squatted down behind him to watch the screen at his level he could see the shape of her head reflected in the monitor, the braids on either side of her face and the long earrings whose complicated beadwork swayed with the slow movements of her shaking head.

She left with a final pat to his shoulder and the whispered word Peace.

He was greatly comforted by this.

Later, telling of his encounter with the woman