The Cassandra

by Sharma Shields

  Tom Cat found me. “Ah, there you are! Finally!”

  I wasn’t unhappy to see him. The earth moved in me; whatever I did ultimately didn’t matter. I relaxed into his grip and gave way to the music, dancing, crumbling. He held me the way a brother holds a sister, at arm’s length, adoringly, respectfully. I tried to find Gordon and Beth in the crowd but they were gone.

  PROTECTION FOR ALL

  The heat wilted away all of Hanford’s spring hues. The vibrant petals, the verdant plains and hills, all of the lushness dried up and rusted by mid-July. The heat was heavy, filled with longing, but it wasn’t foreign; it was the same heat I’d felt in Omak. I breathed it deep into my lungs when I stepped outside. Others hurried for shade or cover, but I lingered, allowing the waves of warmth to slow me down, to calm me.

  * * *

  There was a tension now like a brewing lightning storm all around us. It was July 16. Dr. Hall, unable to concentrate on work, paced the office, eyeballing his telephone all the while.

  “I should have heard from them by now,” he said. “What’s taking them so long?”

  I didn’t pry. I was patient, I was dutiful. I’d learn the details soon enough.

  “That woman,” I said instead. “Hazel Dee. Will you marry her?”

  He looked up at me sharply, surprised. But then his face relaxed, and I saw he was grateful for a distraction.

  “I’m helping her,” he said. “Nothing more than that.” He sat against his desk and laced his small pale hands around one knee, relaxing there for a moment. “She’s a remarkable woman. She’s as fascinating to me as my work. I feel I could pour myself into her for a lifetime and never grow tired of her.”

  Even when waxing romantic he was professorial, didactic.

  “And her illness progresses,” I said.

  Dr. Hall smirked. “I’m always surprised by how observant you are, Miss Groves.”

  “But how will you help her?”

  “I’m a doctor,” he said simply.

  “But you’re not that kind of doctor.”

  He nodded sadly. “Unfortunately, no regular doctor would be able to help her in any significant way. Not with the disease she has. She’s—”

  The telephone on his desk pealed. He grabbed for the receiver.

  “Yes?” he said into it. “Yes, of course, yes.”

  He snapped at me and I pulled my chair away from my tiny desk over to his larger one, scooping up my notepad and pen as I went. I nestled in right beside him and he tilted the phone slightly away from his own ear so that I could listen, too.

  “Trinity,” he said. “From a John Donne poem, I know. I take it from your tone that you’re pleased?”

  I wrote down the words Trinity, John Donne, pleased.

  “And the gadget?” he said.

  He leaned forward and I leaned toward him, our foreheads touching lightly so that we could both listen to the voice on the other end of the line.

  “At 05:10, the twenty-minute countdown began. Two B-29s observed the test to make the airborne measurements. At 05:29:21, the gadget exploded. You should have seen it, Phil. The sand melted into this gorgeous green glass. The mountains lit up like they were on fire. It took about forty seconds for the shock wave to hit us. The ball of fire that came up was like a giant mushroom, then it was a cylinder of white smoke wearing a long, flat cloud for a hat. It was miraculous, unlike anything I’ve ever seen. The power of this thing, Phil. Amazing, beyond our wildest dreams. I tell you, Phil, we’ve done it!”

  Dr. Hall wasn’t breathing. He handed the phone to me and I held it delicately away from my ear, afraid it, too, would explode. The man continued to speak but I heard him only as a distant, mouse-like chirping. I watched Dr. Hall, marveling at his triumph. He pumped his fist in the air and then finally exhaled in one long, relieved whoosh. He hardly made a sound, but there was more excitement contained in him than I’d ever witnessed.

  “The product is ready,” he said.

  He was triumphant, but a rattling sound shook in my ears, and dread dropped into the pit of my stomach like a stone.

  Later I would go to the Richland library and ask the librarian to find the John Donne poem for me. She would do so in a tidy manner. I could never be sure, of course, if this was the exact poem they meant or not, but it struck me as likely.

  Batter my heart, three-personed God; for you

  As yet but knock, breathe, shine, and seek to mend;

  That I may rise and stand, o’erthrow me, and bend

  Your force to break, blow, burn, and make me new.

  I, like an usurped town, to another due,

  Labor to admit you, but O, to no end;

  Reason, your viceroy in me, me should defend,

  but is captived, and proves weak or untrue.

  yet dearly I love you, and would be loved fain,

  But am betrothed unto your enemy.

  Divorce me, untie or break that knot again;

  Take me to you, imprison me, for I,

  Except you enthrall me, never shall be free,

  Nor even chaste, except you ravish me.

  Break, blow, burn, I would murmur then; I would consider the speaker begging to be demolished by brutal holy love. The men who found inspiration here equated themselves with the merciless God of my mother’s youth, the destroyer of worlds. When we brought ruin to others, did we wrongly assume we brought them love?

  But finding the poem would occur later.

  In Dr. Hall’s office now, my eyes darted over the floor. I was anxious that the rattlesnake would appear at my feet or drape himself across Dr. Hall’s narrow shoulders. If the coyote or the meadowlark could materialize at a moment’s notice, of course the snake could, too. But the sound of the shaking tail faded, and not even a speck of dust floated by, and I told myself it was in my head alone, and that the dread, too, was my own silly conjuring.

  Luella entered the room then, walking swiftly over to the desk. Resting her sharp fingernails on the wood slab, she leaned close to hear what was being said. Her face was all urgency and demand, how I might have looked had I wanted something very badly.

  Dr. Hall gave her a brief nod and took the phone back from me and congratulated his colleague. I scooted my chair slowly away from their conversation, worried that the hazard of whatever gadget they spoke of would leak through the holes of the transmitter and ooze onto the floor. It would slide lavalike toward me, melting my new shoes, chewing up my bones, setting fire to my eye sockets and hair. I bit into my knuckle until I tasted blood. It tasted like the ashen screams I’d heard from the hibakusha.

  Dr. Hall hung up the phone and sat back in his chair, exhaling. “Wow.”

  “Tell me,” she said.

  He laced his fingers behind his head and lifted his eyes toward the ceiling in joy or wonderment or expectation, I couldn’t tell. I stayed in my chair.

  One corner of Luella’s mouth lifted. “It’s a success then?”

  Dr. Hall nodded, beaming, his head still leaning back into his hands.

  I gargoyled out at them both, glaring, glaring, and soon enough their heads rolled toward me. Luella narrowed her familiar eyes.

  “What’s the matter with her?” she said to Dr. Hall.

  The ringing in my ears, my sweating brow: I knew what would happen. What always happened when I foretold the future, the annoyance, the rejection, the loneliness I would feel in the aftermath. I would be left alone, to withdraw into the monster of myself.

  They watched me, waiting.

  I wished I could shutter the windows of the office. I no longer wanted to see the control room, its dials and clocks all staring at me like a thousand cold, empty faces. I hated the shoulders of the control room’s men, hunkered over their tasks, waiting diligently for the right moment to press whatever button or rotate whatever lever they needed in order to punish and dominate. Machines, all of them, I thought. Thoughtless. What did they care about what they made? I saw what was emerging from the concrete womb of this place. It wa
s peril itself, a sorcerer that mutated sand into green glass.

  The words unspooled from my mouth and there was no stopping them. As long as I had a tongue, the visions would sooner or later surface.

  “We’re making a weapon that will kill thousands. Tens of thousands. It will maim even more. Children—babies—will suffer and perish. People will drop dead from the sickness it brings. Eyeballs will melt from their sockets. It will affect the land here, too. The very soil around us will give birth to demons.”

  I glanced at Luella. Our faces mirrored each other in their intensity.

  Dr. Hall lowered his gangly arms, resting them now on the desk before him. He leaned forward. “Go on,” he said.

  Encouragement ignited the power in me. My blood warmed and coursed through its avenues, pushing open gates of awareness that stunned me with their exactitude.

  “The weapons will only get bigger and more powerful. What we make will be terrible, but it will be laughable compared to what will come next.”

  Dr. Hall licked his lips, not in a predatory way but in the manner of a man deeply engrossed.

  “We’ll all be in jeopardy. Other countries will make the product. They’ll use it here against us, right here in the Inland Northwest. Then more. This invention will destroy everything, the planet as we know it. It might not be for another eighty years, but the damage will be irreversible.”

  For a moment, I thought Dr. Hall was going to stand up and applaud. He hung on my every word, nodding along with it all, harrumphing, the lean ropes of his body tensed, and I could see even the tiny gray hairs of his pointy ears standing at attention. If not for the grave subject matter, I might have smiled, I might have thanked him. My whole life I’d only ever wanted to help, to be believed enough that I made a difference.

  Luella perched on the edge of the desk, folding her arms together. She, too, was listening keenly.

  My vision sharpened. A cloud receded from my mind’s eye, and I peered through a window there into the open sky, the black-and-blue expanse below, the bulbous cloud lifting from the latter to the former.

  “After they drop the bomb, the men will look out of the windows of a plane named Mother. They’ll see the fires, the smoke. They’ll guess then what they’ve done. Some will celebrate but one of them will mourn. He will realize how those below them suffer.”

  I was crying. Tears fell freely but I barely registered them, the firmness of my voice belied any emotion.

  We convened in the tidy office of Unit B, so distant from everything I was predicting, and yet there we were, at the horror’s epicenter.

  I closed my eyes. The tears ceased. When I opened my eyes again, Dr. Hall regarded me with an expression of awe. Even Luella’s cold eyes snapped and brightened with appreciation.

  I’ve done it.

  Finally.

  They believe me.

  What if my childhood friends had believed me? What if the belief had altered the course of events? What if the girl had warned her mother about the car wreck, and the mother—laughing, reassuring—had in turn convinced the girl that she would drive more carefully, and then, without even meaning to, she did, because the thought was now locked into her subconscious? How much would we improve as a human race if we listened to the warnings given to us? Why was it always easier to diminish and ignore?

  I thought of Martha’s warnings, of my mother’s, of Beth’s tying the bell to my ankle every evening. Everyone thinks she’s a clairvoyant, I thought. We cancel each other out.

  Dr. Hall cleared his throat, and I straightened my spine and pushed back my shoulders. I waited as though I was about to be anointed. This would be my vindication.

  “Goodness,” Luella said. “More poetic than I expected. But charming, really.”

  “Wasn’t I telling you?” Dr. Hall said to her. “It’s such a loss.”

  I was confused. “I don’t quite follow.”

  His tone was adoring, but there was none of the profound understanding that I thought I’d sown in him. “I just mean how sad it is that you’re just a secretary from Omak. Think what you might have done with a decent education. You would have made one hell of a scientist. You do have an extraordinary mind.”

  “A dark mind, certainly,” Luella said, but not without approbation.

  “But these are all things I’ve seen—”

  “These are all very fine hypotheses,” Dr. Hall said, “and all worthy of further investigation.”

  “There is immediate danger,” I said. My throat tightened. I felt on the verge of tears again, sobbing uncontrollable, embarrassing tears. “There are human lives at stake.”

  “Of course, you’re right. We’re all losing sleep over the possibilities, believe me. And this is why it’s so important for us to complete the project, you see, to keep it from falling into the wrong hands.”

  Luella made a noise of agreement. “You must remember,” she added, “we’re doing this to prevent such disaster, not to cause it.”

  My voice rose. “But by creating it, it’s fallen into the wrong hands already, don’t you see? Now that we’ve done it, others will do it, too.”

  I didn’t say it aloud—I would sound like a Benedict Arnold—but what I thought then was, What if we are the wrong hands?

  “That is one way of looking at it, isn’t it, Miss Groves? I do see the merit in such thinking.” He reached across the desk and patted my hand, which lay curled on the desk like a sickly animal. “I’m very impressed with your depth of consideration.”

  I saw the truth then: They found me adorable, like a pet puppy, an animal capable of learning neat tricks, so sweet and entertaining. If only I’d been born a human!

  “The truth is, we still, even after this test, don’t fully know what to expect. And you’re right: The power is incredibly destructive, and we must be aware of all that it can do. All of us are working hard to make sure we understand all outcomes.”

  “We are in a war to the death,” Luella said. I saw myself too much in her face, but her voice was the opposite of my own, calm, clipped, certain. “It doesn’t help to stand around crying on one another’s shoulders. We can’t waste time asking one another, ‘Gee, is this okay?’”

  “It will create hell on earth,” I said. The droves of walking dead, the ears and noses and mouths bleeding, the children incinerated where they played, organs boiled to sludge.

  “It might reassure you, Miss Groves,” Dr. Hall said, “to know that warning pamphlets are always dropped on the towns before an air raid. People will be warned in plenty of time.”

  “It’s not always so simple,” I said, “to leave.”

  I left, I thought, and barely.

  I was holding a pen in my other hand, the hand he wasn’t patting in a condescending manner, and when I looked down I saw that the ink had bled all over my dress. I had somehow, during our conversation, snapped the pen in two.

  “Why don’t you go home early,” Dr. Hall said, waving loosely at the stained fabric. He gave a small laugh. “Clean yourself up. But thank you as always for sharing your interesting thoughts, Miss Groves.”

  “A little more education and you could stop up that bleeding heart,” Luella said.

  I retrieved my purse from my desk.

  “Take care, Miss Groves,” Dr. Hall said. “I’ll see you early tomorrow.”

  What bothered me most was that maybe they did believe me, but even then, it didn’t matter.

  * * *

  I arrived at the barracks bleary-eyed, sand-stained, my hair disheveled, and I wanted nothing more than to creep into my cot and fall asleep. But when I stepped through the doorway I heard voices speaking near my bunk. Something about their tone froze me. I hardly breathed.

  “Mildred’s sleepwalking again,” Kathy hissed.

  This surprised me. Was I sleepwalking? I’d had the impression of it, but no waking memory.

  “I saw it, Beth,” Kathy said. “A couple of nights ago she came in after midnight and she looked right at me but her eyes wer
e as blank as a fart.”

  Beth said, “I saw her that night, too. I haven’t even told her yet. She’s seemed so cheerful during the day. I don’t think she’s even aware she’s doing it.” Her voice was muffled, as though she held a hand over her face. I couldn’t see them properly, the partial wall blocked my view, but I recognized their voices clearly. “She lost my bell, did I tell you? Glen gave that to me. I don’t know what to do about her.”

  I frowned.

  Do about me?

  As though I were a porcelain doll, cracked. As though I belonged to anyone at all. I remembered when she spoke to our house mother this way, whisperingly, secretly, as if I was a shameful blight on their lives.

  “The truth is, Kathy, I’ve been asked to keep an eye on her. She’s been to the doctor for her nerves. She’s as fragile as a kitten. They don’t want nervous types here, and I worry she’s not mentally fit.”

  “Don’t protect her,” Kathy said. “It will hurt you both in the end.”

  “Her options are pathetic. Where will she go after this? Back to Omak? Her mother and sister are awful.”

  “She shouldn’t be here. It makes a mockery of us all. It’s hard enough being a woman here, but someone like Mildred gives us all a bad name.”

  “I wanted to help her,” Beth said. “She’s very sweet. But I’ve grown tired, I’ll admit it. Sometimes she just sits and watches us all with these wide, unblinking eyes. I’m afraid of what this place is doing to her mind.”

  I lifted my hands straight out in front of me and spread my fingers wide apart. They trembled violently. I pictured gnawing each digit off and throwing them at Beth and Kathy, and the thought of their horrified screams calmed me.

  My own Beth. How could you?

  “The next thing,” Beth said, determinedly, “and I’ll report her. I will. For her own safety.”

  “Good girl,” Kathy said. “You don’t owe her anything. You have to take care of yourself.”