The Cassandra Read online

  The rattlesnake appeared from his den in the earth, slithering toward us across the frozen sponge of ground. He wound up the woman’s ankle and onto her thigh. He put his fangs onto her free breast and began to suckle there, too. The woman nursed and wept.

  Now only the feet of the rabbit protruded from the heron’s beak. Her yellow eye found me.

  Here come the other hibakusha.

  Scores of people lurched from the icy waves, some of them eerily calm, stunned dumb, others screaming or begging for help. Open wounds leaked blood and pus. The coursing lines of bodies created a gruesome canvas, entire torsos and spines flayed open. The heron’s voice, deep and ugly and female, continued,

  There will be little help for them.

  “But why?” I was angry. “Surely there are doctors, hospitals.”

  Supplies will run out. Most of the doctors and nurses will be killed or maimed. The hospitals will be obliterated.

  A man with emptied eye sockets approached us, his eyeballs having melted down his cheekbones, drizzling now from his chin. He wore a uniform that was oddly pristine given the ruin of his face.

  “I can’t see,” he told me.

  These are the lucky ones, the heron said. The ones who will live.

  “But look at them. Look at their faces.”

  There are others who seem unscathed but will drop dead within hours.

  The man with no eyes pawed at me for a moment. I tried to give him an apology, to tell him, I have no way to help you, but he continued to scrabble at me until I stood and shoved him forcefully away. He made a sobbing noise in his throat and then turned his back to me. He returned to the river, waded into its cold belly, and then sank until I could only see the top slope of his head. Maybe the water soothed him like the Lethe, inspiring relief and forgetfulness, however temporary.

  “This is a cursed place,” I told the heron.

  I was used to frank visions of death, gaping mouths and blank eyes and regret like a sharp rock in the throat. But this was different. This was monstrous, incalculable. For the first time in my life I hated my clairvoyance. I remembered the book of Greek tales my father had given to me, the one about Cassandra, the gifted prophet no one believed, the cursed woman who called the house of Atreidae “the shambles for men’s butchery, the dripping floor.” She was grateful for death; there was no blessing in seeing the damned. I wanted the bejeweled hand of the sky to lower and wipe all of us away. This—the butchery, the dripping floor—was what kingdoms of men did to one another. We were no more than instruments of hatred.

  “Make it stop,” I said. “I’ve seen enough.”

  We showed you the dead, and now we show you the living, the heron replied crossly.

  “Please let me go home,” I said.

  The heron barked at me and then ascended. I was struck by the fetid wind of her. What a gorgeous creature she was, enormous with her serpentine neck, her voluminous gray feathers, the jackknife beak like a primitive stabbing tool.

  Follow, she said, looping toward the river.

  The wounded and despairing had returned there, too, melting into the water. They lifted their faces and the sky grew heavy with the weight of a thousand pairs of eyes.

  The great blue heron wanted me to cross the river. I held up my hands to her. How? Her long neck seemed to stretch in annoyance, and she turned back for me. I waited. In the heron, harpy, chariot, was the power of my vision refusing to be pinned down. As those wingbeats approached, the sound hurt me; the pressure nearly split my head open. My ears rang and rang.

  I closed my eyes. The darkness dropped; the landscape flattened. I was lifted, again. When I opened my eyes the water of the river flowed beneath me, dark and glittering like squid ink, and in it the victims thrashed. From this height it was like they were children, playing in the water. They had all been children once. Some were children now. I hung from the talons of the heron like a broken doll.

  The talons let go. I fell onto the gravel of the far bank. While I dusted myself off, making sure I had no broken limbs, the great blue heron waded in the water to hunt. She bayoneted a mountain whitefish. She tossed her head back and choked it down with repulsive jerks. When she was finished, she regarded me sidelong with her cold yellow eye and then flew up the hillside.

  I followed her, hiking up a steep trail. I slipped on the ice and banged my knees, cursing my bedroom slippers. My ankle was already scabbing over from where the heron had pierced the skin.

  Near the summit of the trail, she waited for me. As I neared she began to tremble and writhe, feathers becoming fur, wings and talons becoming limbs and tail, bird becoming dog. Aufhocker, I heard my grandmother say. They will attack you by the larynx. Then she was a he, the coyote, glaring at me. He coughed up a bird bone and pricked up his ears, noticing me.

  He pressed forward to snuffle one of my slippers.

  “Just show me what you need to so I can leave.”

  The coyote licked softly at my bloodied ankle and then turned, leading me up the hill.

  We summited a bluff and I was surprised to find it covered in soft, white sand, as though we’d traveled to an ocean beach. I panted, gripping my hips and bending at the waist to catch my breath. Below was the canyon where the hibakusha swam.

  Look down, the heron’s voice said.

  “I am,” I said. “I see them all. They’re looking at us, aren’t they?”

  Straight down.

  My gaze pulled back from the river. Below me was the sharp pediment, darkly shadowed beneath the white cliffs, bare but for rock and a basalt cornice.

  This is where you must go when it all becomes too much.

  I went down on my palms and bruised knees, peering over the brutal edge. On the rocks below lay my own body, an exploded treasure chest of rubies and garnets, gems and bones, liquid, solid. Mildred, spilled and shattered.

  I shouted into the basin, at the ruin of myself: MILDRED, HELLO.

  The ruin began to shimmer and shake and draw itself back together, building a New Me. I watched excitedly. The New Me was beautiful, tall, stately, even, but with a sloped back, like that of an old woman.

  When I raised my eyes to the Columbia, the miserable throng of the hibakusha was gone. They all rushed with the water toward the future, preparing for their gloomy exhibition.

  Beside me, the heron again. She lifted her beak into the air and shrieked mournfully. The sound spooked me. In it, I heard my younger self, my seven-year-old self, shrieking. Grandmother wakes up, pets me, tells me to go back to sleep.

  The next minute I was caught up in the claws of the heron again, hurtling over the river. I felt a keen sense of fear that I would be dropped into the water. How fragile, really, were my dreams? In the brush of the bank I saw a four-legged animal slipping away over the lip of the ridge, his tail between his legs. The coyote, I recognized, but it seemed too timid to be the animal I’d known. I felt myself split in two at the sight of it, a woman of confidence, a woman of uncertainty. To be both, I worried, meant I was nothing. Too much balance erased identity.

  The wind kept me company, whistling in my ears as the vision hurtled me west, over the river and bluff and then down and through the manned gate, the barbed-wire fence. The men stared at nothing with their mulberry eyes.

  We moved away from them. We rounded the corner of the line of barracks, quiet and still like the chambers of the dead.

  Whatever birdlike creature held me—heron, harpy, demon—now dropped me, roughly, to the earth.

  * * *

  I entered the barracks limping. Something was clearly wrong with my foot. The middle toe was numb, beyond aching, protruding from my body like a dead thing. I hurried clumsily inside, threw out my damaged slippers, and took off my icy clothes. From the small suitcase that served as a makeshift closet beneath my bed, I chose a fresh flannel nightie. I struggled into it, my limbs like lead pipes. I burrowed into my sheets but I couldn’t warm up properly, so I rose again to put on my coat. Then I climbed back into bed and thought
about fireplaces, warm bricks, hot soup, anything that could warm me from the inside out.

  “Milly,” came Beth’s stern voice from the cot beside me. “I’m so mad at you I could scream.”

  “I was only—”

  “How dare you take off that bell? I’ve been lying here worried sick for the last two hours. I tried to find you, following your footprints in the frost, but then they just vanished—”

  “I went to the bathroom,” I whispered. The lie was pathetic, my voice thin and childish. I was exhausted from all I had seen, and I only wanted to sleep, so grateful to be back in the bunk, so cold.

  “I could scream,” she said again, and I felt burned by the steam of her anger. “You could freeze to death out there.”

  “I’m not in my right mind when I sleepwalk. I didn’t mean for the bell to fall off.”

  “What am I going to do with you, Milly?”

  I didn’t like her fed-up tone.

  “Quiet down over there,” Kathy demanded from a few cots down. “I was dreaming about Van Johnson—before his car accident. We were eating a chocolate cake. You’ve ruined it.”

  “Go back to sleep,” Beth said.

  Other girls stirred, too. Beth pressed a palm to her forehead, then stepped out of her cot. The next moment she ordered me to scoot over. I obeyed and she slid in beside me, cursing when my chilly feet grazed her bare shin. My toe, warming, ached horribly. It had been chewed apart by the cold, broken somehow, but Beth’s arms went around me and the pain became less important.

  “You know they’ll send you away, right? You have to stop.”

  I drew away from her in the bed. A war exploded in me.

  How dare you tell me what to do. How dare you try to limit me.

  But there was also, I love you please don’t leave me alone you’re all I have I love you I’ll stop I promise I’ll stop—

  “I mean it, girls,” Kathy said in her cruel, offended tone. “Not another peep.”

  Beth’s eyes glowed black in the dark. Their expression was open and affectionate and not at all hateful. She was supplicating. I could tell from the sentimental downturn of her mouth that she saw her little Annie in my face: She wanted to save me from drowning. I tried to fold my features into the features of her sister, to fit inside them perfectly like a protective shell. I worried one day that she would see me only as Milly, and this would make me no more than another of her ailing flock, a patient to care for at the hospital but to forget the moment work was done.

  She reached for my hand and squeezed it and the kindness of this gesture moved me. Oh, Beth. How normal she was, and how predictable. I was not. I kept secrets from her. I pitied her. I was filled with power, a power made all the more glorious by my presence here in this place of secrets. It was a terrible power, and I saw only terrible things, but it was power, nonetheless. I gave her a brief nod, indicating that I understood, that I would do anything she asked of me, and she closed her eyes for a long moment, and when she reopened them, she was almost smiling. In this way, we were cleansed.

  Then I whispered into Beth’s ear that I didn’t much like Kathy.

  She laughed and whispered back to me, “No one does.”

  Kathy heard us laughing and said, “Pipe down, you chickens!”

  Beth and I sniggered and I felt my body warm and relax, the pain in my ankle a snug irritant, the pain in my toe a deep, relaxing throb.

  We fell asleep in each other’s arms, Beth and I. Even with the strange sensation in my foot, even with all of the horrors of my vision, it was the best night of sleep of my life.

  MERRY AND BRIGHT

  The holidays were thrilling at Hanford. I was relieved to not be in Omak. I phoned Mother to inform her that I wouldn’t be returning home. I couldn’t afford to take even one day off. My presence was essential for the war effort, I told her, and even a few hours away slowed down productivity too much. She feigned indifference.

  “So I don’t have to listen to your little ferret squeaks across the dinner table,” she said. “You’ve saved me some peace. I should be thanking you, but I won’t, since you don’t appreciate it, anyway.”

  But I sensed from a fullness in her tone that she was feeling sentimental; she missed me, too. She told me that Martha was a wretched cook; she dreaded eating a turkey that tasted like it had been soaked in bathwater. She also hated the way Martha folded the napkins, “Like the goddamned Chinamen she folds them, so intricate I can’t pry them apart,” and that the children never washed their hands properly and left grease marks on the davenport. Still, she paused quite a lot as she complained, as though trying to control her stronger emotions, and I took this as a sign of her love for me.

  “Do you wish I was with you, Mother?” I asked her, half-smiling.

  “Nope,” she said. “Have I told you about my cankers?”

  We spoke of her cankers for several minutes, and by the end of our conversation we were both in decent spirits.

  “I’ll send a very large check this month, Mother,” I told her. “Almost my entire Christmas bonus. We all get one. For our excellent service, the government says.”

  “A bonus won’t buy my love, though, you poor ferret face,” Mother said.

  I told her to quit teasing me. I was a responsible adult now, and I deserved better.

  “I don’t tease, dear, I tell it like it is. I’m the most honest sort of person. The Lord broke the honesty mold when he made me.”

  She said it as though to hurt me, but I knew she was in a good mood if she was flattering herself.

  “Now, if you were honest like I am, young lady, you would tell your old sick mother what it is you’re doing at Hanford. Or haven’t you a clue?”

  I laughed nervously. I hated when she pried like this. I wanted to prove to her that the work I was doing was real and powerful, but I knew better than to disclose anything important.

  “Mother, you know I can’t. Mum’s the word.”

  “You haven’t a loyal bone in your body, Mildred. If you had, you never would have left me the way you did. I think they don’t tell you anything there because they don’t respect you. I think—”

  “No one knows anything, Mother,” I said, and the shrillness in my voice hurt my own ears. “No one knows what we’re doing.”

  “I could phone them and tell them, you know,” she said then. “There are numbers a person can call. I could tell them what you told me the last time.”

  “I didn’t tell you anything,” I said, but my stomach roiled. I struggled to remember our conversation. She would do it. I know she would.

  “About the weapon. The product. That’s more than I’ve heard anywhere else.” A sucking sound, the sound she made when worrying a licorice wheel with her tongue. “That would send you back home, wouldn’t it?”

  I closed my eyes and put my right palm against the cold windowpane, steeling myself with the sensation of cold. I pictured releasing Mother into the river, the immediate sense of joy and horror I’d felt at the letting go of her, of witnessing her topple away from me into the rock-stippled waters. When I opened my eyes, there was the glass phone booth, the cheerful, decorated storefronts of downtown Richland, the hazy streetlamps glowing kindly behind the smoke of my blue breath.

  “Mother, don’t do it, please. If you have any love for me at all.”

  “If I had any love for you, I’d bring you home,” she said. I heard her speak to someone else, holding the mouthpiece away from her, “Now stop it. Wait your turn.”

  It was my sister, scrabbling to speak with me. Mother muttered that she was a meddlesome magpie, but she handed the phone over.

  “I’m not surprised you’re staying in Hanford,” Martha said, “deserter that you are. Now what’s this about a bonus?”

  I told her, and she listened reasonably.

  “Well, I do hope you mean it that you’ll send the whole thing. The three girls are in need of good winter boots. They’ve been losing toenails all season because their boots are all a year old. A
nd Timothy, surely you remember Timothy—”

  “Martha, please, don’t be dramatic. I’ve only been gone a few months.”

  “He’s the boy, my oldest, the one with freckles and brown hair and jaundiced eyes. Not that you care which one he is, seeing how you quit being his aunt. Anyway, he wants to play baseball come spring and the price of the gear is nothing to sneeze at—”

  “Of course, Martha, I’ll send the check soon.”

  “And we’d like a gift for each of them this year, maybe two, even, and while I can’t promise we won’t be angry with you still, I can certainly say that we will stop telling your nieces and poor Tim that their aunt is as good as dead.”

  “You surely haven’t—”

  “And one more thing: Please don’t go and make Walter feel so unmanned. We hate it when you rub your money in his face.”

  I waited a moment, expecting Walter to rush to my defense, but there was only a long silence.

  I’ll send whatever you want. Just so long as no one makes a phone call, just so long as I can stay put.

  “So, dear,” my sister said, and I was warmed by the sudden generosity of her tone, “what do you want for Christmas?”

  How wonderful it would be to receive a package in the mail! I rushed forward, stupidly, to say, “I’ve been eyeing this pair of shoes in the Roebuck catalog that are a ringer for Susan Peters’s shoes, do you remember, the ones we saw her wear in Spokane? Remember when I said, ‘Why, those shoes would make any gal look pretty!’ I thought I’d take a little money from the bonus and—”

  Martha clucked her tongue. “As selfish as ever,” she said. “I’m not surprised. And all for a silly starstruck pair of shoes.”

  I stuttered for a response, chiding myself for my boldness. She was right, I knew. I was selfish. I’d up and left them—just like that, without warning—and they’d had no choice but to accept the fate I’d forced on them. I cheered myself by thinking they missed me, that their annoyance with me was no more than misplaced grief. For a moment the sight of Martha loping down the embankment flashed in my mind: her panicked eyes and widened nostrils, her loose hair, her thick arms and strong thighs pumping in her good Sunday dress. She had blown right by me as though I’d been invisible. In that moment, my presence hung in a peaceful limbo between the act and the reckoning. I was not yet seen, or judged. I was still, for one bare ephemeral moment, a good person.