The Cassandra Read online

  On a warm Tuesday, carrying papers to a DuPont manager at the new F Reactor, I paused in the foyer, my movements slowed as though I were caught in an enemy’s lasso.

  I sensed him there before I saw him. Despite a dizzying sensation of needing to run, I turned, scouting. There he was, leaning against the concrete wall.

  He spoke to another man, but he watched me with his one good eye, unblinking. For a moment I worried that he might beckon me over or jog up to me. How would I respond? My hands spasmed. I spilled my papers everywhere. There are so few secrets now. “Our bombs clinched it.” I swallowed a scream; I worried I’d be mocked and chided and called a liar even as he attacked me, fucked me. A few men loitering nearby hurried to help me with the scattered papers, but Gordon gazed at me placidly, as though he’d never done anything wrong. I was confused. He’d done it, hadn’t he? I put a hand against my forehead.

  My heart beat wildly. I remembered the meadowlark that had been trapped in Tom Cat’s rib cage.

  It happened.

  “Are you okay?” a man asked, gently taking my elbow and helping me to my feet. I leaned for a moment against the man’s arm. The muscles thrummed with his masculinity. I hated him for it. I pulled sharply away.

  He handed me the file and messy papers. I stammered at him to leave me alone.

  “I’m just trying to help,” he said.

  I glanced again at Gordon, whose good eye regarded me emptily from over the shoulder of the man he spoke with, and I wondered where my glass eye pointed, if it listed to the left like his own. Dark Twin. How like him I was now; he’d broken me to be like him. He and I, damaged, damaging, would only ever see half of the truth.

  I hastily arranged the papers into the folder and rushed away.

  I wish I’d killed Gordon, and not Tom Cat.

  It was the only time I allowed myself to think it.

  * * *

  Instead of returning to Unit B, I took an early cattle car to Richland. I phoned Mother from a pay phone there, still clutching the file, now dirty and crimped, to my chest. I was upset, weeping. She couldn’t understand a word I said.

  “I only have one daughter now,” she told me. “I’m not interested in your tears.”

  “I saw him, Mother,” I said. “I saw him.”

  She was silent for a long moment. Then, “I suppose I don’t have to ask who.”

  I cried into the mouthpiece and she allowed it.

  Eventually she cleared her throat. “Mildred, that’s enough. Shoulders back. You have a life to live. Choose to be strong. That’s all strength is, a choice.”

  “Yes, Mother,” I said. I shook myself, straightened my spine. I was grateful to be told what to do.

  “And don’t wait a full year to phone me again, Mildred. I’m not long for this world. Your silence is killing me.”

  I wanted to explain to her, I didn’t want to be a murderess. It’s not who I am. But I am one, we all are here, we—

  She hung up.

  It was a type of forgiveness, more than I deserved.

  THE BASIC POWER OF THE UNIVERSE

  After seeing Gordon, my visions intensified.

  When they dropped over me, I crumpled in pain. The heron perched right on top of my head, squeezing my skull with her claws. Her full power throbbed through me, filling me with the sense of this place and all I had done wrong here. I grew intimate with the soil, the sickness already taking place inside it, the roots drinking their poison. I breathed in the venom with the plants, I absorbed the particles, drew in the iodine through my stomata and then out, exhaling. I was relieved when humans plucked me from the earth, cooked me dead, ate me, drained me finally of the pain only to absorb it themselves. When cows pushed at me with their big lips, churning me up in their many stomachs, I filled their fat udders with creamy poisoned milk. In the end I became the diseased children and diminished adults, pain-stricken, querulous, thinned out by cancer until I was no more than the bony leg of the heron, weak and fading. Only then did my visions release me, lifting away, and I stumbled back into myself, grimacing, groaning.

  You had a chance to stop it and you failed.

  There is more than one type of murderer.

  I had become them all.

  * * *

  One evening, as a cruel joke, the vision transformed me into Tom Cat, all of the disparate parts of him, an organ licked up by a coyote, a pelvic bone caught in a tangle of weeds, the head and neck and torso, still whole, rolling bloated and silty beneath the river’s surface. I could see now beyond death herself, could peer into the afterlife, the infinite, and it troubled me, the lack of peace there. No peace for Tom Cat, none for me. And yet as I inhabited his mangled ephemera I saw nothing of anger or terror, only a persistent disinterested pull toward something ahead of myself, a lazy wish.

  When I came to again, having blacked out on a dock overlooking the Columbia, this remaining gentleness of Tom Cat’s almost ruined me.

  I hated myself and my gift. I was a demon.

  The muscles in my neck and jaw throbbed. My skull seethed. I was familiar with these headaches now, but there was no getting used to them. It was bone-deep agony, pain so intense I was afraid to blink.

  My stomach revolted. I vomited into the water.

  * * *

  One of my last visions was the coldest, the loneliest. I was a girl, young, eleven or twelve, recently orphaned, torpid with grief. I stood on a soap box surrounded by doctors. I didn’t speak their language. None of my own people were there. I was trembling, afraid. The room was chilly; I was dressed in underpants and a thin cotton tank top. They examined the burn scars on my face and right arm, shined flashlights in my eyes, put their rough hands on my jaw to open my mouth, prodded my tongue with a blunt wooden stick. I gagged but they didn’t apologize or draw back, only murmured and peered. They bent me over and pulled down my underpants and stuck something in my asshole. A translator told me they knew about my diarrhea, they were curious if it was still happening. I nodded. My insides had been boiled by Fat Man, and I hadn’t been able to eat or shit normally since.

  The translator told me to rise. My breasts had recently started growing, and I was embarrassed that my nipples eyeballed through the white fabric. Exposed and vulnerable, I tried to sink my shoulders, but they tapped me on the back of my arms, on my spine, to make me tall again.

  A doctor said something to me, motioning, and I turned my head to one side so they could look into my ear. Straight black hair fell into my eyes and I whimpered. Somewhere in the city were my parents, dead, and I wanted to cry out, to call for them, to leave this bare, mean room.

  The doctors pushed and prodded. They loved my scars, they cared for them, they spoke to them more than they spoke to me. They wrote down loving words about the scars, about my asshole, my pain, in their tidy clipboards. They didn’t see me, but they saw and admired what they’d done to me.

  As the young girl, I could almost see Mildred, the seer back in Hanford, who convulsed in the prairie grass, whites of her eyes blaring, hair clasped by sage.

  I am in a vision, but I might not return from it.

  The keenest of my memories not my memories her memories reared. My father, her father, struck down by the fireball, begging for someone to kill him, begging for me her to kill him. My her mother lying a short distance away, already dead. I hovered over my her father, unsure of how to help him, Dadē, パパ, Papa, my arms and face are on fire, too, Dadē, I need help, too, he’d taken on most of the burns, shielding me her at the last moment. He writhed, Kill me, Kill me, it was like he was trying to crawl out of his own skin. And then he did. I watched him crawl clean out of it, like a snake sloughing old cells, unaware of my future solitude his daughter not me not me please not me, unaware that I would be stared at and studied and objectified by American doctors curious about what our bombs had done to them all, aware only of the blistering agony and of its sudden release. He glistened at my feet, dead.

  Her feet. Not yours. Mildred, don’t disappear.
Mildred, come back.

  * * *

  I bucked. I could feel the girl trying to keep me inside her, Don’t leave me, I need you, Whoever you are, I’m alone, but I crawled, crawled like I’d seen her father crawl, right out of her. I came apart, away from the young girl, shrieking, to find myself collapsed on a deer path in the Hanford steppe, only a few yards away from the Columbia.

  What hour? What day was it?

  My mind reeled. I was still the young girl, I was not yet myself. I pushed my palms into my eyes, coaxing myself to return, and I did, hesitantly, petulantly.

  I worried that I wouldn’t be able to return from the next one.

  I tried to breathe. It’s Sunday, I remembered. It’s almost lunchtime. You took a walk. You were in a good mood. You skipped a stone in the water. You heard the heron’s wings—

  The bird emerged then from the water, so tall on her piston legs, her feathered body like a torpedo aimed at me. How powerful you are now, she said, to lose all sense of self.

  I didn’t respond. I breathed. The pain was already edging in, my stomach was already roiling. I retched and retched, sobbing. My throat was ulcerated from the vomiting. Too many visions now, too big, too out of my control.

  I wanted everything to end.

  There, there, the heron said with her yellow death eyes. In one way or another it will all be over soon.

  ATOMIC SHADOWS

  After weeks of silence, of secrets, of going about my diurnal tasks with a numbness that almost felt like contentment, it became clear to me that Tom Cat’s spirit was lodged in the glass of my left eye. When I reached into a cupboard for a fresh washcloth, the glass eyeball went hot, and there was a view of salmon, pummeling upstream. Or when I drew a circle around a mistake in a letter Dr. Hall had written, the heat sparked, and there was a hawk, its talons digging into a bone once a piece of me, its mouth tearing at the marrow. Another day I pulled down my underpants to find that I’d started my period, and, annoyed, mopping myself up with toilet paper, my vision in my right eye went black, and instead of the cramped stall, my own blood, I saw thunderclouds overhead, lightning, felt rain on my face. Tom Cat was showing me his worldview, in real time, maybe, or what had already passed or was coming for him. My tongue and throat swelled. He wanted to talk through me, he wanted to live through me, too.

  I thought of Gordon’s own glass eye, and I wondered who lived in his, an abusive father, a tense mother, a parent’s friend who had touched him when he didn’t want to be touched? Or just an emptiness he was born with, a disregard for human life? I reached up to feel the glass, and the eyelashes brushed my fingertips but the eye didn’t wince or shut anymore, and I could tap against it even if the sensation made my head hurt. For that last season at Hanford I was discomfited by the ghost that lived in this cavey socket, nestled there like a sleeping bat, carried along with the rest of me from task to task as though he were my constant unwanted pet.

  Good night, Tom Cat, I said, and through the glass I heard a voice answer, Good night, Milly. It was the closest I would come to a marriage.

  One morning I took the cattle car to work and midway to the reactors it sighed and sputtered and rolled to a stop. There was a flat tire. The bus driver told us not to fret, he’d have us going again in half an hour, tops, and he allowed us to rise and stretch our limbs, telling us, “Don’t wander too far.”

  The men let me disembark first. Then they noisily followed me, laughing, heaving down the cattle car’s steps so that the vehicle groaned and shifted. They alighted on the soft, soundless prairie. They lit their cigarettes and filled the peace with their big voices and laughter, teasing one another, kicking at sagebrush, testing one another, but I ambled away from them, pulled as I always was to the Columbia River. Their voices faded behind me and I was grateful to be alone.

  But as I hiked down into the gully I was overcome by a sense of unease. Someone had followed me. I glimpsed a movement to my right: a shadow, no more. Almost simultaneously, to my left, another shadow. I heard—and looked for—the heron’s great wings. Then a shadow behind me. In front. I went very still, the way you’re told to if a bear attacks: Play dead, maybe it will go away.

  Shadows splayed all around me, the shadows of children, the shadows of grown men, the shadows of hunched old women, canes and all. They swarmed thickly across the clumps of wheatgrass and fescue, limbs churning, as alive as they were featureless. They glided across the ground like figures across a movie screen. They were not the hibakusha: These were the dead. They gestured to me gracefully, Come with us, and frightened, I obeyed, worried that if I turned and ran, their dim hands would fall on me and steal the color from my flesh, from my uterus and liver, from my heart and lungs, flattening me until I was no more than a black slip of paper.

  I followed a deer trail to the water, the shadows buttressing me on all sides, falling across my sensible shoes, my stockinged ankles. The path was steep and scabbed with rock; I slipped, dirtying my skirt, and slipped again, cutting my palm. I pressed on, beckoned by the graceful, diaphanous hands.

  I finally reached the bank, my shoes caked with silt. The shadow of what must have been a small boy pointed into the water. I leaned over, hardly breathing. I expected to see Tom Cat floating there, outing me, finally. Or maybe it would be Gordon, springing from the water to grip my arms and pull me under. I tensed my body to recoil, to run.

  But there was nothing. Just the water, pewter, thin and cold. A few minnows darted frantically below the surface.

  I relaxed for a moment, chiding myself for my nervousness. I was safe. It was daytime. The worst had been done to me. No harm could befall me now.

  I heard the heron’s voice. Her beak like a dagger against my shoulder.

  There’s a way to stop these visions. There’s a way to never tell anyone anything again, to never be disbelieved. Look closer.

  I reached down and touched the water. Beneath the surface was a rusty old knife. I gripped it with purpose, wonderingly.

  I wanted, more than anything, to be free of myself. I took up the knife.

  A thin line of light flared on the horizon.

  The water tore apart. A bolt of lightning hurtled me backward onto my haunches. There was a sound like ten thousand buildings being ripped in half, so loud in my ears that I screamed. My head collapsed with pain. Disoriented, I recalled Dr. Hall’s description of the thermal flash, how it temporarily blinded anyone who saw it. I reached up and touched my head and shook with pain. The shadow people gathered around me, flitting together and apart like so many crows. For a moment I saw the figures as they had looked when alive, and they were beautiful, vivid, filled with blood and life and longevity, and then death recaptured them and they collapsed into shade.

  A voice then, calling to me from the cliff. The shadows panicked and dispersed. The sun shone brighter, the river blued. The crushing pain in my head faded into a large, general numbness. My face was sticky and wet and I leaned over the river and washed it with my right hand. When I turned, I saw a man waving his arms at me from atop the bluff: The tire was fixed, or very nearly. It was time to depart.

  I limped up the bank. It was easier going up than down, more steady if harder on my lungs. My mouth felt heavy and full and tender. I lost my footing at one point and pivoted forward, catching myself with one hand. In the other hand, my left, I gripped something wet and warm.

  Panting, sweating, I stopped on the hillside and stared at my left hand, uncomprehending. What did I hold there? I remembered the rusty knife, and then nothing but light and sound and pain. But this wasn’t a knife. It felt like one of the frogs heron liked to catch, slimy, alive. It must have been placed there by someone during the thermal flash—another of my visions, maybe—perhaps by the shadow of the boy, or by the heron, herself? A dumb joke. Where was the knife now?

  I tried to open my fist to look at the object but my fingers held fast.

  Not yet.

  My knuckles were stained with what looked like rust. From the knife, maybe
. Whatever I held appeared to be leaking.

  Another shout from above, more urgent this time.

  I couldn’t miss my ride. I swallowed mucus and river water—silty, muddy—and noticed how senseless my mouth was, how I couldn’t taste a thing. I hurried up the path, urging myself to remain calm, and when I reached the cattle car I shoved my leaking left fist into the pocket of my cardigan and took my seat without meeting anyone’s eye.

  “What were you doing down there?”

  “Your dress is filthy, honey.”

  “Ha! And those shoes! Filled with mud!”

  “She’s part mermaid.”

  “Doesn’t look like she’d swim well.”

  “Bet she can float! Plump little lady like that.”

  “I like them plump.”

  “Leave her alone, you Marys. She looks like a good Christian girl.”

  “She looks like pudding and pie is what she looks like.”

  I glared into my lap. Dots of the liquid began to leak through the knitted cables of my mustard-colored sweater.

  A knife. A heart. An organ. A dead mouse. A mutilated bird.

  A five-point buck edged out over the embankment and stared warily at the bus for a few moments, twitching its ears, its eyes as black as sleep. The bus coughed to life and the buck pivoted, plunging down the gulley toward the river and out of my line of sight. One of the men started talking about hunting and then all of them started gibbering about it, who shot what and where and how, and they forgot about me for the rest of the ride.

  I was grateful for the fuzzy numbness in my face and skull. For once there was no sensation at all.

  * * *

  I entered Dr. Hall’s office only slightly late. He was irritated that I wasn’t on time, and I didn’t bother to explain the flat tire. He loathed explanations, anyway.