—I don’t think we’ve met, but certainly. This is Fermi, Enrico Fermi, he said pleasantly. —I am Oppenheimer. Robert.
Ann looked at him slack-jawed, and then at the bulbous Daikon radish. It resembled a club, and she thought blunt instrument.
In the first instant of the faint, as her legs wavered, still conscious but not in control, she realized she was falling and fumbled vaguely for Fermi’s arm. He reached to help her, but not fast enough. Fortunately it was a straight shot to the floor and she crumpled conveniently against his side, sliding down and into a heap with her head at rest on the toe of Oppenheimer’s leather shoe.
The two men exchanged quizzical glances, and then, unhurriedly and somewhat gracefully, stooped to pick her up. Fermi saw her purse sitting in the basket of the cart, and picked that up too.
—We need to lay her down, said Oppenheimer.
An observer would have seen two men, one tall and thin, the other stocky and balding and elfin, both somewhat antiquely dressed, the taller in hat and suit too large for his gaunt frame, the shorter in shirt sleeves. They walked at a leisurely pace toward the back of the store with a young woman propped up between them. Her head lolled onto the shoulder of the taller man, then flopped back, exposing an arched white throat, and rolled onto the shoulder of the shorter man. Her mouth hung open.
Ben felt that every day he lost her, not for always but from sight. He was apart from the small measure of her life as it was spending itself, which seemed wasteful until he remembered it was fine, it was right. It was right not only for practical reasons but because the separation attenuated the hours and sharpened them to a point. Like abstinence or deprivation it spun out time into timelessness, actually made the day longer, and by extension the months and the years.
Still, sometimes he almost could not believe that he permitted these flagrant absences, these brutal removals of her person from his sphere of influence and sensation. These removals of her were virtual robberies, covert offenses, assaults on him, almost. That was how it looked when, finding himself alone after she left one morning, it occurred to him that with her gone he was solitary in everything, in the bare, cold roads that stretched from coast to coast intersecting only with each other, the monolithic industry that squatted by the roadsides, hunkered down, of infinite strip-mall suburbs where no sympathy could be found for what had evolved instead of being manufactured, what was abstract instead of concrete, where everything was made for the convenience of the barely sensate, the men who followed football and Nascar and Bud Ice, the women who emptied ashtrays out their car windows as they drove through the redwoods.
In such a gray glittering world it would be impossible to find tired relief, much less home. When she was beyond his reach there was always the danger of her permanent disappearance, and what evidence was there anyway, at those times, that she existed at all? He wondered idly if, like some animals—wolves? Birds of prey?—he might one day develop long-distance hearing or sight, be able miraculously to pick her out in a crowd miles away.
But he was used to a routine of separation five days a week, and the hours when he was with her and without complemented each other neatly. He was not naïve, he knew that even the closest of attachments could exhaust themselves and that absence, when it did not extinguish, tended to renew. And every day when the sun was setting, he saw her again: call him a greeting card but there it was, the light cast on the leaves was red and the branches might be warmed and rounded with gold and on the eastern rim of the sky there might be, from time to time, the earth’s purple shadow, a dusky haze over the hills.
These were the shades of the end of day, when he saw her again. After the final colors of twilight in the trees as he walked or drove back up the hill of his street, after the descent of the sun, he had the deliberate routine of dinner, the softness of food in his mouth, the slowness and measured wellbeing of time in the house.
Then there was the prospect of sleep and a whole night of hours side by side. That was good.
The trouble with Oppenheimer,” said Albert Einstein once, “is that he loves a woman who doesn’t love him: the U.S. government.”
When Ann came out of her faint she was lying on a striped orange-and-brown couch, apparently alone. She sat up dizzily, looked around and saw she had company after all: in the corner was a dumpy, pale teenager playing a videogame.
She was in a dingy lounge paneled in fake wood, graced with a hulking television whose screen was a jagged green and pink zigzag of snowy images, playing mute and unwatched, and a bulletin board with homemade signs advertising For Sale Cheap: ATV and Free Pit Bull Puppies. There was also an ancient, faded poster in primary colors advertising the Heimlich maneuver.
Her head ached and she was so parched that she could feel her throat crack. There was a sink against the wall, a row of mugs in bright colors with logos and birthday wishes. She got up shakily and went toward it, but a water cooler loomed before she got there and she bent to fill a paper cone, and then drained it again and again.
—Aspirin over the sink if you wannit, lady, said the dumpy teenager.
—Thank you, said Ann.
She opened the cupboard and moved boxes of tea out of the way to find the bottle, popped a pill into her mouth, washed it down and sat back heavily on the couch.
—Excuse me, she said to the teenager, —Can you tell me something?
—What.
—Who brought me in here?
He shrugged. —These two guys.
—What did they look like
