Some of their fan groups remained active, selling souvenir mugs and T-shirts on their web sites and reporting on the sluggish progress of various old Szilard-authored petitions through minor committees of the United Nations. Several list-serves notified interested parties on the release of videotapes of the scientists’ public appearances. Obscure sources documented clearly spurious “sightings” of men meeting Oppenheimer’s and Fermi’s and even Szilard’s descriptions, in isolated locations as far-flung as Luxembourg and Beijing.
When he told all this to Ann she did not seem interested. She neither spoke of the scientists nor asked about them, even when she caught a glimpse of what he had on his computer screen. In fact she rarely discussed any of the events of the past year and he was mildly surprised to find out she corresponded occasionally with the well-mannered, unassuming minister from Peace Camp. Father Raymond had given away all his worldly possessions after the day of the birds, renounced his U.S. citizenship and left the country. He was ministering to war victims with the Red Cross in Africa.
The worldly possessions, Ann told Ben as she read aloud from a letter, had amounted to a 1985 Volkswagen Jetta, some cooking pots inherited from a great-aunt, and a rotary telephone.
Larry called the house once after they had moved but it was not to discuss Oppenheimer, Fermi, Szilard or their erstwhile world-peace mission. Rather he had become convinced of the veracity of certain UFO sightings in Pennsylvania. The sightings involved Amish widows struck dumb by what they called ghost lights descending from the sky. He was impressed by the eyewitness accounts and hired a highly qualified team of parapsychologists and UFOlogists to help him investigate them. Some of the Amish widows, he said, had not spoken since they saw the lights. They refused to speak though there was nothing physically wrong with them. But others, he said, had actually lost the use of their tongues.
—If you guys want to come along it’ll be free room and board and transportation, he told Ben on the phone. —Just like before, and we’d like to have you, man. Plus some of the old crowd would be there.
Ben said no and told him it sounded frivolous to him, but Larry did not take the slight personally and changed the subject without a sign of discomfort. Had Ben heard that Leslie was getting married to a woman? They were having a commitment ceremony in Oregon. Adalbert the food activist had gone back to Belgium.
He was good-humored as they hung up the phone, saying Take it easy, brother. And a few weeks after Christmas they got a card that featured a photograph of him and Tamika, arms around each other, smiling. There was a Christmas tree in the background and both of them wore brown-felt antlers sprouting from their heads.
It was hard to remember sometimes that history had ended. The trees and the sky felt no different unless she stopped herself from moving and listened to them. Even then they were the same: only she was different.
When the ground was so real and the evidence of solid life was all around her, it mostly seemed out of the question that anything had changed.
Only in strange moments would she be stopped as she walked or closed a car door or moved between rooms. She would be stricken then, shot through with a panic, convinced for a fleeting fraction of a second that what she was seeing would be the last sight seen.
And then she went on, back to the everyday world she could touch, which could all disappear in a flash.
Letters from Father Raymond reminded her that she was not alone in this. They were parchment-thin and exotic, the stamps ornate, the envelopes lined in red-and-blue airmail stripes long since outmoded in the U.S. They seemed to her to come not only from another place but from another era and because of this she handled them gently, stacking them carefully alongside each other in a small cubbyhole in her desk. She allowed herself these letters in which to examine the past and hear its echoes reverberating, but aside from the letters, which only came every few months, she turned away from it and tried not to remember the details. She was wary of the danger there, the danger of dwelling on what she would never know, and anyway all there was for her was what was at her fingertips. Once she had loved the past and the future best, but now they both were off limits.
Now and then she would ask him a question when she wrote back, such as: Do you think Oppenheimer was right? And he would respond, in his deliberate, neatly slanted handwriting: He once told me he did not think the end would come from bombs because there was not time. He thought it would come earlier than that, from all the changing of the world and the destruction of it. He said to me once: it is the mind that made the bombs that is killing the world. For that purpose the bombs are not needed.
They were not unhappy but there was the sense between them that what was beyond their presence was shimmering and unreal. The super-world, the world of trade and great cities and daily news, was only an image of itself anymore. On television, in the magazines, nothing was said about what was real: only the surface was touched. And even on the grainy plastic dashboards of their cars and in the spidery cracks in their dusty windshields as they drove forward through the desert there were textures of loss and forgetfulness. Both of them believed that human time spun on only for the sake of a machine, and the machine was far greater and more monolithic than anything weak and living.
Inhabiting this afterlife, which was less life itself than the memory of a life passed
