And he saw what it was that had brought him here in the first place, moved all of them from the first life and into this one. He understood finally. It had looked like desire, how it shaped them and sent them away from the blast, sent them wishing with such a piercing will from the moment of ignition that they left themselves behind.
But it was not desire, not exactly, though it flared like desire, flared and burned out. It was both more and less. It was regret.
And he could offer no more of it. He was tapped out. He had come to the end: he had done his best to undo himself. But his efforts were those of a child, frantically trying to bring back to life a small unknowing animal that it had killed in play. He was tired and ready for sleep, and alone on the road time was waiting for him.
But for a moment now they were together again, the birds and him and Fermi and even poor Szilard: they were adrift in infinity, where all became nothing.
How they made it back to Larry’s limousine Ben could not recollect shortly afterward. It was a slow blur. Those sad and limping moments would come back to him unexpectedly, without context, in the remaining days and years of his life as those days and years spun out and away from him.
They sleepwalked through the crowds, dispersing in a weary haze. People were saying little even after the birds vanished; an exhaustion settled over them and it was unmistakable; it was the tiredness of defeat.
The crowds left a trail of signs and litter in their wake, trampled cardboard and broken bottles. He could walk without touching the shoulders of his neighbors now, and swing his arms again. There was air around him. He thought, for no purpose he could know, I am free but I am also useless.
Near the edge of the mall they passed a dead crane, lying shot on the concrete. There was not much blood but its neck was bent at a wrong angle. He looked away because he could not stand to see, and then a few paces further he turned and ran back and squatted down beside it, full of a grief that almost choked him. Even Ann standing beside him almost vanished in the sight of the bird.
He moved his eyes over the red spot on the crown of its head, along the dark thin beak, and stroked its soft white feathers with a hand. Finally, with Ann swaying in fatigue beside him, about to collapse into sleep, he picked it up in his arms, its long, graceful neck flopping, and carried it away with them, cradling it like an infant.
—I’m going to bury it, he said when Ann pressed him.
The birds, he knew, had somehow won, had been not the vanquished but the triumphant: but there were those among their number who had been sacrificed to the men with the guns.
People stared at him as he walked, the man holding his crane; they stared as though they had no idea where the crane had come from, as though they had already forgotten.
Once they had reached the limousine, parked a block down from the ruined ICBM—cordoned off and teeming with police—Ben laid the dead bird out in the trunk on a blanket, and Tamika, suddenly dressed in a sari with a diamond on her forehead, dropped dry leaves around it.
Before he let the chauffeur slam down the lid he smoked a cigarette. He stood at the corner of the trunk and glanced down at the bird now and then, almost furtive, leaning against the fender and drinking a cup of stale, tepid coffee someone had handed him. Ann slipped inside the car and lay down on one of the long plush seats.
Neither Oppenheimer nor Fermi had returned and neither of them had been seen since the birds rose into the sky and flew away. Almost all of the Huts were assigned to the search by Larry but Bradley’s men did not show an interest in searching: they were massed nearby, praying and weeping for those of their number who had been shot and killed, swaying with their arms around each other and huddling for prayer. Now and then one of them would break away from the circle to drink water or wipe the grime off his face, but mostly they were impregnable, a fortress of backs in camouflage, heads shaking as voices intoned.
Bradley sat off under an oak tree on what looked like a wooden crate, talking on his cell phone as the other leaders conversed in low tones nearby. When Ben approached and asked him what had happened, who had attacked them, who the dark men had been who ascended the stage right before the birds covered them, he would say nothing; he merely shook his head and turned away from him. In fact he would say nothing about Szilard’s death either, nothing about any of it.
—You were there, weren’t you? asked Ben belligerently, gesturing freely with the hand that held his lit cigarette. —Oppenheimer blamed it on you.
—We have nothing to say, said Bradley stiffly. Others rose with stern faces to warn Ben away and Bradley watched as he was forced to back up, the ranks of the believers closing against him.
When Oppenheimer had fingered Bradley he and the other men had been carried away, there on the stage behind him, swaying. They had not denied the charge and they had not rushed him. Possibly, Ben decided, they had thought at that moment that the Rapture was upon them; possibly they had thought they were already home free.
Now they were back in the world and their mouths were sealed shut.
Soon after this Bradley and his friends in the leadership called together the soldiers who were
