A young man in the 1920s, Enrico Fermi went through a phase of wearing knickerbockers and a Tyrolean jacket. He would later exchange these for what his wife Laura called a “too-tight suit.” He was short-legged, stocky and athletic, and on hikes in the Italian mountains he always insisted on being first: faster, stronger, more capable than others. He was far more arrogant about his physical prowess than his aptitude for physics. Laura, who would write his biography shortly before his death, was Jewish. They left Rome four months after Mussolini published the Manifesto della Razza, which stated “Jews do not belong to the Italian race.”
Fermi died of cancer in 1954.
The man with the gun had not been homeless, from some far elsewhere or without friends or relatives, as Ann had first assumed. He was the scion of a well-known Albuquerque family with political connections. His uncle had once run for mayor, the newspaper said, and lost by only a few hundred votes.
His mother, Mrs. Lopez, came to see Ann at work. She was a white-haired apple doll with rosy cheeks and bright, darting eyes. She asked if they could talk privately, so Ann asked a volunteer to take her place at the counter and led Mrs. Lopez back past the children’s books section and the square of new carpet. They drank a cup of lemon tea in the small staff kitchen, standing beside the sink. Mrs. Lopez did not wish to sit down.
Mrs. Lopez apologized for her son, whose name was Eugene, and for his gun. She wanted Ann to know that Eugene had been mentally ill, in fact he had suffered from schizophrenia.
—But he was also a warm person, a warm and wonderful person, his real self.
—I’m sure he was, said Ann softly.
Ann bore Eugene no ill will. Now and then she imagined the details he might have left behind, a dripping tap, refrigerator door standing open, plant drying out on a windowsill and dropping its leaves. She felt herself pulled toward these details, as though she herself was expected to correct them, needed in the spaces he had vacated by accident. It was always only later, apart from the details, that she remembered the Heckler & Koch.
But Mrs. Lopez was not content with the assurance. She told Ann that when Eugene was eight he had built a cardboard rocket covered in tinfoil to fly his gerbil to the moon. The gerbil’s name was Burpy.
Eugene had wanted Burpy to see Mars, Jupiter, and even Neptune, she reported sadly. She was lost in memory.
—Even Neptune, she repeated.
Burpy would conquer the skies, Mrs. Lopez told her. But reason had prevailed, she went on, and the gerbil had not been launched.
She told Ann that when Eugene had first become delusional and violent and one time lifted a knife to her throat, she often recalled the tender affection he had shown to animals as a small child. She remembered the gentleness of his hands as he picked up Burpy the gerbil and petted him softly, and how protective he had been of Burpy when other children handled the gerbil roughly.
She asked for more hot water for her tea, and Ann poured it into the mug from a spigot on the coffeemaker.
—When he was seven, said Mrs. Lopez, —he liked to design zoos. He would draw these zoos on newsprint, with drawings of all the animals that he wanted to put in them. He papered the walls of his bedroom with them! His zoo had something he called the Giant Animals Section.
The Giant Animals Section had featured dinosaurs, mammoths and, somewhat inexplicably, a toucan. Ann remembered the parrot on his shirt, and where the tail feathers pointed. Birds, brightly colored birds.
Then Mrs. Lopez asked what he had said, that is, what his last words had been.
—All he said was that the old ones were coming, said Ann.
Mrs. Lopez nodded, resigned, as though the old ones had been coming for a long, long time, as though she was so tired that she welcomed them.
If some good ideas are loved too much, Ann was thinking as she got up to show Mrs. Lopez out, if they are loved too much and therefore known too well, if they are followed to their end, they can cease to be good. They can be too much of a good thing.
You can’t treat an idea like a fact, she decided. You have to treat it like music.
As she was leaving Mrs. Lopez told Ann that she wanted her to attend the memorial service and hear the eulogies.
—Because, said Mrs. Lopez to Ann, and took her hand, —you were the last one to spend time with him. I don’t want you to remember him that way.
Ann said yes, she would go, and Mrs. Lopez smiled at her and bustled out, blowing her nose. Watching her negotiate the doors, the doors of this building of books where her son had died, Ann thought: We have sought the wrong knowledge all these years. We have believed that knowledge should be accumulated, taking the form of many separate pieces. But this is not the knowledge that we need most. To be able to separate things was a skill that allowed us to survive when we were being hunted but not later, now, when all the animals that hunted us are dead.
The Sunday after the shooting Ben went with her to the funeral in Albuquerque. They entered quietly as the service was beginning and sat immediately inside the church doors. Ann did not think she should pretend to have known the deceased. She wanted to be mouselike, polite and present but not intrusive.
There was no coffin, only a photograph of Eugene as a young man, framed and propped upright between heavy, large wreaths and tall sprays of daffodils and irises. His hair had been
