The Cassandra Read online

  “So proud of what you’ve all done over there,” she told me. “We really creamed those Japs, didn’t we?”

  “I suppose we did,” I said, but there was no joy in my voice. There was no emotion at all.

  I was so tired.

  A rattlesnake hissed.

  Murderer. Murderess.

  I left my suitcase closed and packed on the unwashed floor and collapsed on the bare, stained mattress. I slept like that in my clothes and shoes for almost a full day and night, waking occasionally in a confused sweat. The next morning I washed myself in the shared bathroom down the hall, dressed slowly, and ate breakfast in a nearby diner.

  Full of pancakes and syrup and black coffee, I took the next cattle car to Hanford to see Dr. Hall about my job.

  ENDLESSNESS

  Dr. Hall had never visited me in the hospital, but the moment I arrived in his office he rose to shake my hand and then turned to his new secretary and, without apology, dismissed her. She left fighting tears, wrangling her coat in her hands, and he called after her to see Human Resources, to say that he’d sent her. I felt sorry for her, but not enough to help her. This was my place. Murderers Inc. Dr. Hall pulled out the chair for me in front of his desk and when I was properly settled he returned to his own seat, facing me.

  I wasn’t dead. I was returned to the space I was meant to inhabit. There was no place safer and more secure than this office. From here we attacked the world. Nothing could get in, only out.

  Even as I thought it, I understood how mistaken such thinking was. I was keenly acquainted now with vulnerability.

  “Miss Groves, you’ve returned right when we need you. We’re upping plutonium production.”

  I stifled a laugh. Of course we were! More plutonium. More bombs. I thought of Tom Cat, his trip to the ocean. Washing west in Washington State. How long of a journey would it be?

  “Yes,” Dr. Hall said, watching me carefully. “Yes, I’m worried about it all, too. Many of the physicists are leaving the program, Miss Groves. It turns out your hypotheses were true regarding this weapon. It’s difficult to feel proud of something that’s waged such destruction, though I’m certainly in awe of it. Do you have any new thoughts regarding our continuation of the program?”

  I shook my head, No. For a short time, I was free of visions, although in a few days I would begin to dream of babies born with ruined, deflated heads. I would dream of pink tumbleweeds and radioactive crocodiles loosed into the Columbia and chemicals with names like iodine and xedone released en masse on populated areas. I would see men in suits exploring farmlands in the dead of night, plucking at radioactive materials in the earth while the farmers and their families slept unaware in their modest homes. I would envision the premature deaths of my colleagues, including Dr. Hall, who would die of a rare stomach cancer, and of Gordon, too, who would perish, miserably, of a cancer of the blood.

  It was coming. It pushed at us like the great Hanford wind, like the Columbia River herself.

  “No,” I said, and for that day, that week, I wasn’t lying. “I’ve seen nothing.”

  Dr. Hall was silent for a long moment, his head turned thoughtfully to one side. “I remember you said something about the pilots. That’s what strikes me. You were right about it, what you said. Did you know that the pilots who dropped the bomb had no idea what they carried? They felt the aftershock in the air from miles away, after flying to safety, and when they returned later to the city they saw a thousand little fires merge before their eyes and create one enormous fire. It was worse than the Tokyo firebombing. One of the pilots cried out and put his hands up against the glass.”

  “He must have been terrified.”

  Dr. Hall nodded sadly. “He knew what it meant for the people below. A powerful moment, to be sure.” He pushed his glasses up onto his forehead, revealing his tired, swollen eyes. “I feel horrible for wishing that I’d been there to see it. But I wish it, nonetheless.”

  Dr. Hall’s glance returned to my face, tracing from chin to crown the unfamiliar crookedness of my nose, the half-closed eye with its new glass eyeball, the craggy dent in my forehead. He gazed at me with a look that was almost tender.

  “I’m sorry for what’s happened to you, Mildred.”

  I let out a little sob of surprise. “The power of men,” I said.

  I thought of the power I had over them, too. Poor Tom Cat. If you played by their rules then you could win, I told myself, as if, by killing a man, I’d taken up their mantle.

  “Farmer’s not pleased, of course,” Dr. Hall said, and I realized that we’d sped beyond the subject of my battery. “He thinks it’s an abomination. He wants to shut the entire program down. Even Einstein’s with him. The very men who started all of this! Some people shirk all responsibility once they achieve any sizable goal. They don’t realize what this could mean for the safety of the world. They don’t realize that if we can do this, just imagine what we could do next.”

  “Maybe they worry one will be dropped on us,” I said.

  “Yes! That’s exactly why we need to up production. To prevent that very thing. The Soviets are already hard at work on their own weapons. Someone has leaked plans from our facilities here. There will always be new enemies, Miss Groves.”

  I thought about how stupid humans were, how uncreative. “New secrets,” I said.

  “Necessary secrets.”

  I took up a tablet of paper. On it was the scrawl of the other secretary, the one who had just been fired, and I noted her shorthand’s lack of sophistication.

  Dr. Hall handed me one of his fancy pens.

  “A gift,” he said.

  It was a beautiful pen, squat and firm in my fingers. I told him thank you.

  With practice, I hoped, I could shut off my mind, the sluicing waters of thought. I would trust in the work ahead of us. I heard some workers passing by in the hallway behind us. Tom Cat, I thought, and then shuddered.

  Gordon.

  I straightened in my chair, keeping my back to them, showing them the rigid rod of my spine. I controlled this body, at least up to a certain point; it was mine alone to keep strong despite what others might do to it.

  the indifferent passageway of the river

  the bodies it carries

  the river the river the river

  Dr. Hall said, “Start here.”

  TRUE LOVE

  I ran into Bethesda on a Saturday, just as I was completing my morning exercise. I was breaking in a new pair of shoes, and I was pleased with them. They were brown cow-skin wedges, nothing special, “everyday shoes” as the clerk had called them in the department store. They were similar to Luella Woods’s pair, and I remembered all that cleaved us apart and together. The shoes were boxy and plain but comfortable. I’d thrown Susan Peters’s shoes out only the week before, and I hadn’t felt a hint of regret hurling the curse of them into the large green Dumpster behind my apartment building. Unlike my mother’s shoes, the new shoes allowed me freedom, and unlike Susan Peters’s shoes, they allowed me to disappear. I could feel the weight of them with every step, but it was a gratifying ponderousness, as though they gave my journey import.

  Normally I started my walk on Washington Avenue, where my apartment was, and then I curled south toward the river, where I sometimes encountered a deer or a pheasant staring back at me in terror from the tall grass, and then I ambled back north to the business district and capped off the event with some mindless window shopping. This day, however, I turned the corner onto Flager Avenue and froze.

  There was Beth, statuesque, graceful, standing on the corner as though waiting for someone special. She concentrated on the sleeve of her coat, fussing with a loose string, and her auburn hair fell around her face in pretty ringlets. A red purselet hung from her wrist and she was dressed attractively in a blue kick pleat skirt, simple black pumps, a long brown coat. She’d clearly come into town for some shopping, and for a moment I wondered if I could turn and slip away before she spotted me, but she sensed my pr
esence in that very moment and looked up, her face splitting into a happy smile.

  At first I was relieved that she seemed okay. She was as radiant and beautiful as ever. But when she grabbed my shoulders and pulled me into her, hugging me too hard, I whiffed a noxious odor on her breath. It mingled grotesquely with the sharp scent of the witch hazel she used to clean her face. I drew away from her, feeling as though I might gag. She likely had a dead tooth.

  “Milly, why haven’t you come to see me? Haven’t you received my letters?”

  I’d received them, five or six of them, and, sitting on my bed in my small apartment, I’d run my fingers along the edges of those clean white envelopes. I’d thrown all of them away unopened. I was afraid of the phony sentiment inside. She hadn’t bothered to find me in any real way, she’d only written things down. If she had mentioned Gordon or Tom Cat’s disappearance, I would have screamed so loudly and unstoppably that I’d be kicked out of my new building. This paranoia wasn’t even born of guilt, but of boredom with the whole subject. I felt I would shatter at the very tediousness of those emotions.

  “No,” I said. “I haven’t received anything.”

  “I got your address from the payroll women,” Beth said. “I was so surprised to hear that you were living alone. I don’t blame you for wanting to live off-campus, after what happened to you, Milly, and after Tom Cat’s disappearing and all. But we could have gone in on an apartment together.”

  “I like being alone.”

  Part of me wanted to apologize to her. Something else in me growled, The fact is I’ve grown sick of you.

  But truthfully I was as in love with her as ever. Her voice was warm and tender and sincere. It occurred to me that the cold things she had said about me were likely no more insidious than simple venting, as we all did about our loved ones when life became dull or difficult. She hadn’t meant to hurt me any more than I had meant to hurt her.

  “I figured you would move in with Gordon soon,” I said, and I nearly slapped myself for saying his name, baffled at my own needling curiosity. “When is the wedding?”

  “Yes, well, we have plans to move back to Seattle. I’ll head over there first, I’ve already found a job. We’ll marry in a year or so.”

  I waited a moment, silently studying her face, those damp, kind eyes, the long lashes, the shining hair that looked its very best when swept up from her jawline, pinned neatly into a nursing cap. I adored her familiar composure, her shoulders round and strong, her chin lifted, controlled.

  And yet her breath tinted the very air around us with the stench of offal. Something was amiss.

  “He’s been so moody lately,” she confided. “Nothing I can’t handle, of course, but goodness, it’s draining.”

  I was silent. I wanted to tell her. I did. But what if she didn’t believe me? Maybe it would turn out okay for her in the end. Maybe he loved her enough to treat her well. I knew this was ridiculous. How heavy was the burden of my own bitterness, sick of being disbelieved, sick of giving warning.

  “I don’t know why I’m telling you all of this, Milly,” she said. “I know you don’t like him. It’s just so easy to speak to you.”

  “I hate him,” I said then, and the finality in my tone made her lift her eyes to mine and the dark openness in them showed me the truth I hadn’t let myself consider.

  I withdrew from her. “You know.”

  Her face fell. “Know what, Milly?”

  She was a phony. I recognized that tone of hers, the voice that commanded sweetness even as she judged you.

  “You know what he did to me and you’re still marrying him.”

  “Milly, have you gone mad?”

  Mad Mildred.

  “What an ugly, shallow grave you’ve dug for yourself,” I told her, wickedly, coldly, with the voice of Mother.

  “He said you were crazy. He said you’d try to pin it on him. He warned me about this.”

  Her eyes were two bright fireballs in her face but the death smell from her tooth wafted out at us. One small, tough nugget of her body guessed all that had happened and suffered for it. She brought a hand to her mouth as though to seal in the stench.

  “He did this to me,” I said, motioning at my face, then at my lower half, “and you know what I did because of it?”

  She shook her head. She didn’t want to know. She wanted the conversation to stop. She moaned and put her hand against her jaw: the rotting tooth was hurting her.

  I was angry, mostly at myself. Someone hurts us and we turn and hurt someone else. You couldn’t take anything back that you did in this world, not really, not at all. All of our wrongs were connected.

  “I killed Tom Cat. I shoved him off White Bluffs. I imagined he was Gordon as I did it.”

  She brightened with the excitement of such a tale, but then she shook her head. “He said you were crazy, Milly. God. To think I defended you.”

  She relaxed. She didn’t believe me. It didn’t matter what I said now—future, past, present—none of it was believable. By uttering it, I stripped it of its reality. I hated my tongue then, my mouth, my lungs with their thoughtless automatic breathing.

  She reached forward and touched my arm and I felt all of her pity there.

  “I love you, Beth,” I told her, and I said it firmly, for the last time.

  “I know you do, Milly,” she said affectionately. “Not that it does us any good.”

  She invited me to lunch but I demurred, as I’m sure she suspected I would. “I have a terrible headache,” I said, and it was the truth.

  “You know, I worry about you mostly at night,” Beth said. “Are you sleepwalking?”

  “I’m not,” I told her.

  This was also true. As far as I could tell, I’d never so much as risen from my bed and walked to the bathroom. I slept like a sunken stone the whole night and rose in the morning as though crawling from a thick viscous pool, gasping for breath, relieved to be freed from the soundless nothingness of slumber. But it was true that my waking visions—though rare now—were more excruciating than ever. The ensuing headaches crippled me. I reeled with a pain so intense that usually I vomited. With great power comes great pain.

  “Don’t be a stranger,” she told me.

  But I was.

  * * *

  When I next heard from Beth it was by post. This time I read the letter. She was in Seattle. She’d started a job on Cherry Hill at Providence Hospital. She asked me to write to her. She asked me to visit. If I wished to start anew, I could share an apartment with her and a couple of other girls. She wouldn’t marry and move in with Gordon for another year or so. She assured me that I could find a swell secretarial position in the city. The change would be good for me, she wrote, but I knew that being with her, as much as I wanted it, would very well kill me. I would stay in Richland and continue to work at Hanford, which seemed like the only place I was meant to be, demons and all.

  I never wrote her back. Rather, I did, but I never posted it. Now and again I sat down and filled an entire sheet of paper with my regret and grief. I asked her questions like, What if he’d done this to your sister Annie? and Would you forgive Annie if she killed a man? They were letters that would have upset her tremendously; I decided that sending them would be too deliberately cruel. I’d said enough to Beth. She would now decide alone her own limits of allowance and forgiveness.

  I wondered about her future: marriage, children, the drudgery of being a dutiful housewife. There was a time when I wanted those things, too, not because I was born that way, but because they were beaten into me by the man-made world. I didn’t deserve or desire them now. I hated the thought of what happened behind those closed doors. My marriage to Tom Cat had been bloody, violent, and mercifully short. My children were the things I consumed every day: a loaf of bread, a pitcher of milk, a cup of coffee enjoyed at my small, round kitchen table. When I used up those briefly cherished things, I purchased new ones. My house was a cheerful one, filled with these small relationships. The on
ly person I could fail was myself.

  I thought of my dead father, how I’d once overheard him say that he wished to be entirely alone: no children, no wife, no job, no responsibility. I asked him, But what would you do then? He replied with a simple answer, “I would garden.” He said he would feel a joy so serene that it wouldn’t even matter to him if he was happy or not. When he died, I hoped in a faintly religious way that he was given his own garden plot in heaven.

  By now Tom Cat might have reached the ocean. In the gardens of the deep sea his soul swam and twirled. Other souls gyred there, too. Bubbles issuing from their dead mouths, they spoke of those who had wronged them and of those they had wronged. They confused the details, the perpetrators, the victims.

  In this nebulous underworld they found peace.

  THE WALL

  Guilt does not disappear with age, but it does mellow. There are moments, of course, that shoot up from the earth like fireworks and send you to your knees, but with time these detonations weaken and fade more quickly. You’re used to them now. You endure them. You plod forward and time, like the river, washes away the intensity and dulls the sharp edges. Your identity merges with the identities of those harmed. The bodies you imagine floating downstream become your own.

  If Gordon felt guilt, I never learned of it. I did my best to avoid him. He’d been transferred from Unit B and worked instead at one of the new reactors being built. Beth was already in Seattle and I heard from Kathy that he planned to join her soon. I was relieved. I hated that I might run into him in Richland or be trapped on a cattle car with him. Somehow, I went several weeks without ever seeing him. Nonetheless, there were times when I was forced to complete a task at one of the other reactors, and I journeyed to these places filled with a suffocating dread.