—Whaddaya mean?
—Just describe them. Please.
—Uh, OK. There was a tall skinny guy in a hat that looked, like, old-fashioned or something. Then there was this shorter guy that had a foreign accent.
—Did they say anything to you?
—Nah, they just dumped you there and looked at their watches. Then they took off. Said they hadda go meet someone.
—Thank you.
So she still saw what was widely seen, at least. It might be filtered through a psychosis, but at least the men hadn’t been built from the ground up on nothing but neural pathways. Probably the Oppenheimer lookalike had said a name like Augsburger, Alzheimer’s. The power of suggestion.
Alternatively, he knew he was a dead ringer for Oppenheimer, the most iconic of the atom bomb men, and he cherished the resemblance. Living in a barely visible subculture, trading anecdotes by email and in chat rooms, was no doubt a legion of wannabe Oppenheimers, a host of Oppenheimer pretenders, like Elvises or James Deans or Marilyn Monroes.
Bastard. Preying on her weakness.
Or maybe, like that woman who underwent cosmetic surgery tens—or was it hundreds?—of times to force her face and body into the shape of Barbie’s, he sought to actually be Oppenheimer and was remaking himself in the image of his private hero.
Fermi was just a sidekick.
—Did they say anything? she persevered.
—Just like to give you an aspirin when you woke up and it was nice to meet you. That was, like, a joke though.
It occurred to Oppenheimer, looking at a piece of angular, metallic public art with no redeeming features, that bad art was infinitely sad.
If both science and art are forms of unrequited love, he thought, bad science and bad art are pining away.
Szilard stepped off the bus from Chicago on a Saturday after a long trip that would have exhausted a lesser man. He made a beeline for the public library, where he spoke in his thick accent—Hungarian-German, in fact—to Jeff the vegan. Jeff the vegan, in turn, told Ann about him when she went back to work after the weekend, describing him as “a fat foreign guy.”
He had spent hours hunched over the microfiche readers voraciously scanning old newspapers, Jeff reported, and nibbling on chocolate bars as he peered at the screen. Intermittently he left and came back with pastries from a store down the street, which he gobbled surreptitiously as he scrolled. Jeff disclosed this with a shake of the head, himself masticating, with superior air, a peanut-buttered celery stick.
Finally Jeff caught him smearing jelly filling on the machine’s knobs, eyes fixed on the fine print, oblivious to his transgression. Jeff asked him firmly, even punitively to be so kind as to take his “food” outside, please.
When he finished his donuts the “fat foreign guy” came up to Reference and fired off a battery of questions. (Jeff compared him to Mr. Hofstadt.) He wanted to know everything, Jeff said. He asked about Presidents: Ford, Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Clinton, the two Bushes; he asked about Gorbachev, the Berlin Wall, Vietnam, the Gulf War, the World Trade Center. He asked about credit cards, cell phones, satellites, GIS mapping, global warming, the disappearing ozone, the moonwalk, the exploration of Mars, Star Wars, Chernobyl, Madonna, Microsoft, electric cars, commercial aviation, the burning rain forests, the rising tides, the mass extinction of frogs and birds.
He spent the evening at one of the computer terminals, fascinated by the Internet. Jeff had to kick him out at the end of the day by turning out the lights, but he was back the next morning waiting for the library to open, sitting on the front steps, eating a cruller, and when he saw Jeff, smiling broadly.
By the time Ann got to work, however, he had left, after requesting a library card for which Jeff turned him down, since he had no proof of residency, in fact no fixed address, and no ID save a worn and sixty-years-out-dated University of Chicago faculty card. On his way out he asked Jeff for the location of the nearest television station.
Recently she had the urge to be immersed in water as soon as she could when she got up in the morning. She wanted to stroke her arms through the soft chemical blue and float when she was exhausted, float and think of white minarets, tropical forests, places lush and quiet where, undisturbed by hunters, vast and gentle animals moved.
Swimming regulated her mind, kept the cogs turning, she felt, surely and predictably, making her into a mill whose paddles churned the water to good use, steady, determined, workmanlike.
One Tuesday morning after swimming, her face bleached dry and pleasantly sterile from the chlorine, she bought an orange juice and a bagel at a café on the way to work and sat down to read the newspaper at an outside table, white metal and flimsy. Doves fluttered down to the pavement near her feet, dim-witted and dun-colored, barely noticeable in the shade.
On one of the back pages there was a human interest story: a corpulent man claiming to be a European scientist named Leo Szilard had burst onto the set of a local live news show, demanding air time.
He wanted to announce his return from the dead, and claimed to have proof of it in the form of fingerprints. He also claimed, under questioning by the police psychologist, to have once given a razor to Nikita Khrushchev.
Despite a Harvard education the psychologist had never heard of Nikita Khrushchev. For this reason the boast was wasted on him.
The police declined to fingerprint the fat man.
Leo Szilard is believed by many to have been the man who first conceived of nuclear fission. He is also believed to have been the first to conceive of the cyclotron—parent machine of the “particle accelerator”—and the electron microscope. He was a pioneer in information theory, shared a patent for nuclear reactors with Fermi, and designed a liquid-metal refrigerator pump with Einstein. (The pump was impractical and failed to make them millionaires because, though it worked quite effectively, it also
