The Cassandra

by Sharma Shields

  “Lay off it, lovebirds,” Gordon had said, laughing cruelly—he saw us as two poorly told jokes.

  Now it was March, and I waited for Tom Cat and the cattle car, standing awkwardly in my spring jacket and my mother’s pinching shoes. I’d decided to order the new shoes in May, just in time for summer. How pretty they’d be on my feet! Tom Cat would approve, I was sure of it.

  Gordon arrived. I wasn’t very happy to see him. He always stood too close to me, and sometimes he guided me around by the arm in a commanding way that embarrassed me. He grinned when he saw me and complimented me on my lipstick. It was the same tube I’d purchased in Omak, the whore’s color, as Mrs. Brown had described it. I always dotted it on sparingly, with my pinky finger, and even Beth had told me how pretty and adult it made me look.

  “I’m waiting for Tom Cat,” I told Gordon, half-hoping this would encourage him to leave me alone.

  “Good ol’ Tom. Poor kid. He’s smitten with you, isn’t he?”

  “He’s a friendly person.”

  “Modesty becomes you, Milly,” Gordon said sarcastically, and then pointed. “Here he comes now. But who’s the sad sack with him?”

  I turned, smiling, and saw Tom Cat’s stubby, strong figure moving toward us. He was slightly backlit by the morning sun. Beside him walked another man, ambling jumpily with a frightening grin, a show of broken teeth. My alarm grew as the two men approached.

  Tom Cat put an arm around me, trying to steer me away, clearly believing this man to be dangerous, but I withdrew, overcome with curiosity. Crooked, bungling, the man moved like a broken pull toy.

  It took me a moment to recognize him. It was Stanley Johnson. I hadn’t seen him since he’d cleaned up the coyote’s blood in Unit B. Almost immediately following, he’d accepted a transfer to an outdoor position at a new reactor being built a mile or so away. To get away from me, I’d presumed.

  Now he stood before us barefoot, dressed only in his pajamas. His pants and person were bemired, as if he’d spent a week sleeping outdoors. His grin faded, seeing me.

  “Well, if it isn’t Miss Groves,” he said.

  I tried to say hello, but my voice caught in my throat.

  “What’s your beef, Stan?” Gordon asked.

  “Never felt better,” Stanley said. “I’ve been troubled by the wind, you see, but this morning, I just decided if you can’t beat her, join her!”

  He unbuttoned his pajama top and withdrew it from his shoulders. The sun magnified the scars, the brokenness of his face, his severed ear. I pitied him. The wind birched at his skin and he laughed like a little boy. I put my hand up to my eyes to shield them from the whipping sand. He sang and outstretched his arms and floated with the wind like it was a dancing partner. Gordon lumbered forward, cursing, and tried to stuff Stanley’s arms back into his shirt.

  “You’re making a damn fool of yourself, Stan,” he said. “You’re in front of a lady. Cover up, for crissakes.”

  But Stanley shook Gordon away and began to strip off his pants. Tom Cat left my side and went to help Gordon.

  “Leave me alone, you goddamn bullies,” Stanley cried, and his shrill voice frightened me more than the shed pajamas.

  I threaded through the jostling men and put my hand on Stanley’s forearm. “Stan,” I said. “I know about the wind, how cruel she can be. But don’t let her take you over, she’s only as powerful as you—”

  “You’re the worst of all of them,” he said to me, yanking his arm away. “Stay away from me, witch.”

  Tom Cat hollered at him now, defending me, but I held Stanley’s gaze. He knew what I was, even if the others didn’t. It was strange to be so understood. I rightly terrified him.

  “I only want to help you,” I said, but he bucked and thrashed and yelled as if I’d branded him.

  My heart sank. We’d broken him. Maybe I’d broken him most of all. The visions, the horrors that followed. He’d transferred from Unit B to shake free of me, of us, but he only slid further into the ruin I’d projected for him. He would be forced to leave Hanford.

  Off to one side, Gordon spoke to one of Hanford’s officers, who had emerged from a black and white Dodge. Tom Cat stood tensed between Stanley and me, asking Stanley to calm down. He wanted to defend me, but I wished he would go away so that I could talk to Stanley alone, so that I could convince him I meant no harm.

  “This place will save you or kill you,” I told Stanley.

  “I don’t have a choice,” Stanley said, “unlike you.”

  I glanced at Tom Cat, and he shrugged at me, What more can we do?

  I hoped they’d let Stanley go home to wherever he’d been before he came here, but most likely they’d send him somewhere else, jail, probably, a place where he’d undergo his final unraveling.

  I considered his sister, the assistant nurse. Was she aware of Stanley’s current state? Had she tried to help him? Or was she one of the hundreds who’d already left Hanford, sick of being tormented by the wind and worse?

  The officer approached, Gordon at his side.

  “Hey there, mister,” the officer said. “Why don’t you come with me?”

  Stanley shook his head. “I could use a stiff drink.” He was calmer now. He sensed it was almost over.

  The officer laughed in a way that sounded forced. “We all could, huh?”

  “He’s had enough of this place,” Gordon said spitefully. “Bye bye, birdie.”

  Stanley nodded as though Gordon had been kind.

  “Yes,” he said, straightening. “I’m all done.”

  He put his pajama shirt back on and walked away, limping, ill-dressed, head down into the wind. She fought him with every step. We watched him, shading our eyes. The officer walked beside him with one hand casually resting on his belt’s revolver.

  “Chicken liver,” Gordon said.

  He spat between our feet.

  “Termination winds,” Tom Cat said. “We’re losing a lot of men this way. Working outside stirs up too many thoughts.”

  Tom Cat still worked outside, of course. He seemed steeled against it, and I both hoped and feared that his determination had to do with me.

  “Losing a lot of chicken livers is what,” Gordon said. “Why, even Mildred is tougher than that cotton picker. Good riddance, I say. He doesn’t have the spine to work for this country. And after I helped him out. Those people don’t appreciate a goddamn thing we do for them.”

  I glowered at him. “You helped him only to hurt him later.”

  “Like most women, Milly, you don’t know a damn thing,” Gordon said. “He got what was coming to him. I had nothing to do with it.”

  Tom Cat was silent. I tried to read his face but it was clouded, perturbed. I was tired of both men in that moment, Gordon and his hatefulness, Tom Cat and his reticence.

  Gordon glared after the departing police car as if he wanted Stanley dead.

  Repulsed, I turned away from him, now facing Tom Cat directly. Our eyes met and the cloud of doubt on his face parted. What I saw there, pure adoration, disquieted me. I glanced away, at the prairie grass, at the dull brown horizon, at the miserable humps of the mountains. There was nowhere to hide.

  On the cattle car Tom Cat sat next to me, the silence between us filled with his gibbous affection. I didn’t speak. I was worried about puncturing our muteness, about what would spring from his lips if I said the wrong thing.

  We joggled along like that, not speaking, for a good few minutes, and then, gently, Tom Cat put his hand on mine, wrapping his fingers all the way around my palm so that his knuckles briefly grazed my inner thigh. A sensual, aching fire shot through me from groin to throat. The feeling was too intense.

  “You’re a good soul, Mildred,” he whispered to me, and then he let go of my hand, with a passion that I nearly mistook for anger, and turned to gaze out the window.

  DARK TWIN

  On March 9, the day we fire-bombed Tokyo, I ran into my twin in the immense hallway of Unit B. The Other Me was dressed in a w
hite lab coat; she carried herself with import. Her eyes were sharper and darker, her nose less round, and she was thinner, but she was otherwise my duplicate, same height, same searching brown gaze, same smooth brunette hair combed with care behind her ears. When she passed me she glanced at me hastily and then did a double take: She, too, noted the resemblance. I lifted my hand to her, smiling, and she lifted her hand, too, frowning, and our disparateness intensified our sameness, a scientist scowling at a fortune-teller, seekers, both. She walked quickly away from me as though to separate our twinning self-hoods and I held back from crying out, But I’m you and you’re me! Without one, there is no other!

  Only an hour later, I came upon her speaking with another scientist, a man I later learned was her husband, muttering how she was nothing more than a babysitter for Unit B’s operators, accomplishing nothing more glorious than supervision as they dipped slugs into and out of molten flux, and that she was “murderously” bored. “Tell me when we can leave this godforsaken place,” she hissed, and then looked up and saw me watching and tugged on the man’s arm and hurried away. I liked that I made her uncomfortable.

  I asked Dr. Hall about her and he confirmed that she was the physicist I’d heard about, Luella Woods. She was rumored to be one of Mr. Farmer’s favorite pets, plucked from her work on his Unit B prototype in Chicago. From what I’d heard, she was brought here almost against her will, and she wasn’t fond of the living conditions, especially the weather. She’d had a baby recently, a little girl watched dutifully by Luella’s mother. Her husband was also a physicist. She lived in Richland and developed friendships with other WACs, but I wondered how distant she felt from all of us women, educated as she was, superior in intelligence and status.

  I was proud of myself when I saw her, as though our shared looks had anything to do with her success. I was certain she was who I would have been if I’d been born into a wealthier family, which instantly gave you access to things like college degrees and dumb luck. I was almost disappointed when I heard she came here with her husband, because I felt this threw us into two vastly different social circles, and I’d never be able to properly meet her. She worked mostly at a different building under construction, a new unit across the Hanford campus, but she was with us the day Unit B went critical—and how strange I hadn’t met her until a few months later, as if the men of Unit B disliked the idea of more than one woman in a room at any given time—and she was here again now to oversee, or “babysit,” as she put it, the manufacturing of our mystery product.

  The secrets. She knows them all, I thought with wonder.

  A skulking avian presence in my gut chittered, Don’t be jealous, Milly. They know what this unit makes, but you’ve seen what it destroys.

  I asked Dr. Hall about Mrs. Woods’s opinion on all of this. I assumed, being my more intelligent twin, that she would feel similarly ambivalent. But Dr. Hall told me that she had stated quite plainly her concern over how grave a situation we were in; she rooted wholeheartedly for us to win the arms race against Hitler, at any cost.

  Maybe she was the stronger woman of the two of us. I was impressed with her confidence in the matter: destruction at any cost.

  Dr. Hall told me what she’d said in a recent meeting: No regrets. Anybody against our efforts here is a crybaby.

  He also confided that he wasn’t entirely sure he agreed with her, but he admired her for her strength, especially as she was the only woman at Hanford.

  I stared at him. “She’s not the only woman.”

  Dr. Hall glanced up at me, sputtering. “Oh, you know what I mean, Miss Groves. The only professional woman.”

  I muttered that education and compassion did not necessarily go hand in hand.

  “You should thank her,” Dr. Hall scolded me. “Without her, there wouldn’t be a woman’s restroom in Unit B.”

  “So that’s what education has brought us. A private toilet.”

  Dr. Hall laughed. “You know,” he said, removing his glasses and peering at me, squinting, “you look an awful lot like her, in the right light.”

  Before, this might have delighted me, but now I fell silent, irritated. I didn’t like what made us different, what made us the same.

  SPEED UP

  One morning in late April, I scooted my hard wooden chair closer to Dr. Hall, struggling to hear both his side of the phone conversation and the low, masculine voice issuing from the receiver. My pen moved swiftly over the paper. I liked to impress Dr. Hall with the speed and precision of my shorthand. I was, admittedly, showing off. He had once called my shorthand “a small miracle,” and I longed for another compliment. Still, despite my every effort, I missed quite a lot of what the other party said.

  “But if the war is almost over,” Dr. Hall said tersely, and I felt a thrill run through me at this news, “then all of our work here will be for nothing.”

  The voice muttered in response. I wrote down a word, speed, and another, when I heard it, dismiss.

  “We’ve already forgone certain safety measures,” Dr. Hall said. “It could cause problems to relax even more.”

  I underlined the word safety. I couldn’t help myself. I always underlined safety and secrecy and loyalty and security and any words related to those. It seemed to entertain Dr. Hall.

  I heard the voice on the other end say, “Japs.” I wrote it down. Common shorthand for Japanese was JPN but since he said JAPS, I just wrote JAP. Dr. Hall would recognize that abbreviation even quicker.

  “And do you have targets already decided?”

  The general replied with two words I couldn’t quite make out.

  “Yes, a difficult decision, surely,” Dr. Hall said, but I heard the impatience in his tone.

  He caught my eye and grimaced. He liked to tell me that the government officials meant well but were constantly interrupting scientific process with their red tape and bureaucratic bickering and paradoxical demand for immediate results.

  “Is there a chance they’ll surrender before we’re ready?”

  The general responded with a staticky, “Perhaps.”

  I’d heard the opposite: That the Japanese were ruthless, that they would never surrender, and I made a little noise in my throat from surprise.

  “We’re so close,” Dr. Hall said.

  The general spoke loudly then, so that I heard him word for word. “It’s not up to us. The Germans will surrender any day now. Japs could follow in a few months. We’ve blockaded the entire island. They’ll go broke and starve to death if they keep going.” He waited and then said, less noisily, “I want this as much as anyone.”

  “Progress here has been commendable,” Dr. Hall repeated. “Have you spoken to Farmer?”

  The general spoke more softly now. I strained, practically falling into Dr. Hall’s narrow lap in order to hear better, but it was no use.

  “Yes, he would say that,” Dr. Hall said. “But he’s as curious as any of us.”

  They exchanged a few more words, nothing more than pleasantries, really, and then Dr. Hall hung up.

  “Germany’s about to surrender,” he summarized, “and the Japanese are likely to follow. The military is pounding them with B-29s and naval blockades. Their economy is tanking. If I were the general, I would pause and let them regroup for a moment. We’re so close here. It will be a great tragedy if we’re not allowed to test all that we’ve accomplished here.”

  “But perhaps,” I said helpfully, “you can still test it, just not in the war.”

  Dr. Hall scoffed. “Of course, we’ll do that, too. But we’ll never know the scale of its power until it’s dropped on a militarized setting.”

  “But aren’t you at all glad that the war is almost over?”

  Dr. Hall took off his heavy glasses and rubbed at the bridge of his nose. He leaned away from me in his chair and swam his myopic eyes at me. I must have appeared grainy and blurry before him. I uncrossed and recrossed my legs. The heat was cranked in the little room. My inner thighs were slick with sweat.
r />   “What will happen to you, Miss Groves, when the war is over?”

  I hadn’t thought about it. “I’d like to keep working here if I can,” I said.

  “You can’t. When the war is over, you better believe we’ll be over, too.”

  I closed my eyes. I saw myself hugging Beth good-bye, boarding the crowded bus back to Omak, reestablishing myself in the tense boredom of Mother’s house. There would be no crowded mess halls, no dancing with friends, no smiling at strangers, no foreign languages, no feeling small in a big crowd. I would be exiled from the Columbia, from the clean sands of White Bluffs. My conversation with the wind and the wild creatures would be silenced. There would be no more magic, no more distinction.

  I would be lonely.

  I opened my eyes. Dr. Hall’s thin lips curled upward. He knew me too well. He pushed his glasses back onto the edge of his nose. On the wall above him, a round clock ticked off the seconds of the day. Beneath the clock was the picture window, framing the control room of the beautiful invention of physics, the whole of it working marvelously, clattering and purring in its rhythmic, carefree manner.

  “You see, Miss Groves, we belong here, you and I. Neither of us can leave. Our whole life is here. No one else loves us but this place. Don’t you feel the same?”

  For a knifelike moment, his gaze fell on me with absolute focus. I was an algorithm he had solved. This pleased me; it meant I was worthy of an intelligent man’s attention and understanding. It was, of course, the first time he’d ever looked at me so directly, and for many, many months, it would be the last direct glance I would enjoy from him. There were far bigger concerns in his life than Mildred Groves from Omak, but for that one trim, flattering moment, I was an important subject.

  “But what can we do?” I asked him.

  “Ah, Miss Groves, an excellent question,” he said. “We can work even harder.”