The Cassandra

by Sharma Shields

  He grumbled at me but didn’t look up from his desk. I took my seat across from him and with my free hand took up his schedule. Normally we began with my recapping yesterday’s work, and then we discussed the plans for the day, but I found that when I went to speak, my mouth refused to open. The numbness was so pervasive that my lips didn’t seem to register my mind’s commands, as though a wire between the two had been cut.

  After another long moment of silence, Dr. Hall’s gaze lifted from his paperwork. Irritably, he asked, “Miss Groves. Are you waiting for something?”

  My mouth trembled with effort. I hoisted my clenched hand, stained reddish brown now, and held it in front of his face.

  “What’s gotten into you?” he said. “Are you ill?”

  I rose to my feet, humming a moan through my closed lips.

  You did it! You made it stop forever! Well done!

  His eyes widened, taking in my sordid dress, my torn stockings, my muddy shoes, my face mangled and swollen.

  “What in God’s name is wrong with you?”

  I willed the hand to open. By then its contents were of no surprise to me.

  Dr. Hall lifted from his chair, bending over the desk to peer into my palm, and then he recoiled, his face paling with revulsion. “Is that your…?”

  I tried to say what I thought had happened. The rusty knife, the blast, the shadows who must have held my mouth open. I couldn’t recall who had done the sawing.

  “Mildred, how did you—”

  He rounded the desk and came to put his hand on my back. For a moment I thought he was comforting me but then I realized—he was urging me to my feet. He was prodding me toward the door, away from his office and its view of the control room. In the control room of my heart, the fire started, the warning lights flashed, the dials crackled.

  I would leave Hanford, permanently now. I almost welcomed the change. Where I would go next was a mystery to me. It would become my new home and I would do my best there. I would become the most decent version of myself, I would hush and recede. I thought of Susan Peters and her lovely shoes, of the end I had seen for her: the divorce, the sanatorium, the isolation and death. She was a star and I was a paltry, insignificant thing, a woman, no more, no less. If she could endure it, surely I could, too.

  “We need to get you to the clinic,” Dr. Hall muttered, pushing me down the hallway. “We’ll get some ice for…” he trailed off, as though worried about alarming me. “This is a nightmare.”

  Nightmare? Salvation. Now it won’t matter.

  “There must be some ice somewhere,” he said. “Come on, hurry up.”

  A small crowd had gathered, watching us, perhaps noting my blood-stained dress and hands. I continued to hold my tongue in my fist, and the joke of it nearly made me laugh—Hold my tongue! I considered dropping it in a wastebasket. What did I need it for now? Surely it was of no further use to me. Dr. Hall’s glasses were askew on his narrow face. He perspired in terror as he guided me stupidly toward what he thought might help me. Nothing could help me now. I was beyond help. I no longer wanted or needed it, but fear delighted me, as though I finally had power over all of them.

  A few other men gathered around us, whispering to one another about me. They all waited for me to say something. They wouldn’t touch me until I allowed it. What a weird respect they showed me when I no longer wanted it.

  “Where is there an ice box?” the doctor asked urgently. “We need ice!”

  That old familiar sense of levitating returned to me, and I floated above them in that gray-green room, their faces upturned to me in awe as though searching the sky for a sign—a benevolence, Santa Claus, a bomb, a beginning, an end.

  Whatever spring had been set on my jaw was released, and my mouth flew open. From it flowed the shadows of the dead and the river water, choking and black, and then my own reddish-brown blood, fragrant and spiced with iron. I sprayed their upturned faces and they recoiled in horror, but I couldn’t stop, the water kept coming. I swept down the flooded hall, letting the sick current wash me out of the metal door and into the desert and the light.

  Nothing waited for me there, only the big, empty expanse of the Columbia plateau.

  A magpie flew by and I dreaded that it would speak to me, but it ignored me. I was no longer a vessel for the words of the aufhocker. My glass eye, too, sat hollow in my head; Tom Cat no longer lived there. I’d destroyed the very organ that gave me power to house them.

  Summer approached. Soon the heat would become unbearable, but I relished it now. I plopped down in my wool skirt in the middle of the barren field, not far from the reactor. Now and again I leaned over to spit a mouthful of blood onto the sagebrush. I picked absently at the mud on my shoes. I pulled the cheatgrass one seed at a time from my stockings. If I continued to pretty myself, to preen and to pluck, I might look half-decent by the time the vehicle from the clinic arrived. They might allow me some paper and a pen so that I could write to them in my excellent cursive, If possible, please, I’d like to be near the ocean. I admonished myself to stay docile and patient.

  As far as they know you’ve been a good girl. They might very well give you what you want.

  Afterlife

  WESTERN STATE

  After all was said and not said and done, I was left with no more than a third of my tongue. The surgical team had tried to re-stitch the organ back into place, but it was too late: The rusty knife’s cut had been too sloppy, the incision too uneven; I’d ridden on the cattle car with the muscle through the desert and the heat; and Dr. Hall, brilliant man though he was, failed to find any ice. According to the surgeon, they’d wrestled with it for a good hour, and then decided to just “leave well enough alone.”

  “We can’t risk infection,” the surgeon explained to me as I lay recovering from the anesthesia. “But we stopped the bleeding, and it should heal successfully now.”

  He recommended only a soft diet, or else I might choke and die.

  “You can have cranberry sauce and mashed potatoes at Thanksgiving,” he said, “but no turkey.”

  The nurses laughed at this and in my grogginess they sounded like the possessed squawks of the heron. I breathed deeply through my nose. Moving my mouth at all in those first few weeks was too painful.

  “With patience and work, you’ll be able to speak again, but I can’t promise it will be easy. There will be certain sounds you won’t recover, and I’m sorry about that.”

  I shook my head. They’d shorn my hair since I came in, to make it easier for the surgery, I guessed, or maybe to prepare me for the transfer to the sanatorium, where my womanhood would be mocked and tortured. I liked the open feeling around my ears, bare now to the sky. I clutched his forearm, shaking my head more desperately.

  “Miss Groves, are you telling me you don’t want to speak?”

  He tensed as if to argue with me, but then he sighed, perhaps remembering what I’d done, perhaps sensing my reasons for it.

  “Regardless, you need to learn how to drink and chew properly. Silence is perfectly fine, but drooling is inelegant.”

  His tone was playful and all around him the nurses smiled with their pretty, flirty lips. I thought of Beth and darkened, pinning my shoulders inward and ducking my head. The surgeon patted my leg compassionately before he turned for the door.

  He was a kind man, and good-looking. My old self might have compared him to a movie star, Gregory Peck, maybe, but I was through with all of that now, that silly, starstruck sweetness. If the world wanted nothing but our bombs and our Hollywood, then they could have them. I was through with all of it.

  Martha was right. I’d been naive. When I felt a little better, a week or so post-surgery, I wrote her to say so. I apologized. She wrote me back almost immediately, saying how right I was to do so, that she was pleased to see me embracing the Christian spirit, and then continued. “We’re looking forward to your return. But without a tongue you won’t be of much use to me. We need a babysitter who can really scream at the chil
dren.” I smiled, but I knew I wasn’t returning home, and I’m sure Martha knew that, too. Still, it was nice to think of my nieces and nephews. I’d almost forgotten how special it was: I was an aunt. It was a role I decided then and there to cherish. I figured my brief stint as caretaker had begun with Mother and ended with Tom Cat, but maybe that wasn’t necessarily true. I promised myself that I would order each child a toy from the Sears Roebuck catalog, and I kept true to my promise, and Martha later wrote to say the children were “pleased as punch.”

  It was a small gesture, but it felt life-affirming. I hoped they would let me place such orders from wherever I wound up next, but likely they would not. I made arrangements to forward all of my savings to Martha.

  The good surgeon tried to keep me with them in Richland for as long as he could. He knew where I was going even before I did, and he guessed at how exactly terrible a facility it was. As the days passed, I began to worry that I would be sent inland.

  I wrote a note to the surgeon: Can you please request that I’m placed somewhere west? I’m longing for the ocean.…

  He read the note in front of me and then told me he would look into it.

  “Some of the nurses here have trained in such places,” he added. “They can be … unkind.”

  I was touched that he wanted to warn me. I gestured for him to give me back the piece of paper. I scrawled, I belong there.

  The surgeon liked me. He wanted to protect me, as he did all of his patients. But I didn’t want protection, only the silence I’d violently gifted myself.

  * * *

  Right before they transferred me to Western State Hospital, Bethesda sent me a letter from Seattle, telling me that poor Tom Cat’s body had been found not far from Umatilla, Oregon, spotted by two teenagers smoking cigarettes near the shore (“they were probably necking,” Beth added, maybe to make me smile, as if anyone could smile thinking of Tom Cat’s passing). Tom Cat was badly bruised and shattered, she wrote, and it was generally assumed that he’d fallen from a cliff near Hanford and then rolled into the river. Some parts of his body were still missing. It was common knowledge among his friends that Tom Cat took leisurely hikes in the evening, and he’d once confided that he thought about jumping. He’d mentioned that to me, too, during one of our friendly conversations on the cattle car. “Not out of any desire to die,” he’d hurriedly said, “but out of this intense curiosity.” Perhaps due to his innocuous, ill-fated statements, no one made the connection between his disappearance and my reappearance in Hanford. They might have privately called me Mad Mildred, just like I was called at Omak’s elementary school, but they didn’t think I was capable of murder.

  Beth commented on my confession briefly. “I think, Milly,” she wrote, “that you really do believe you killed him, even if you didn’t, but maybe then again you did, figuratively, I mean, by not loving him the way he expected. But I admire it really, how you didn’t cave to him. You’ve always been stronger than me in that way, even if you couldn’t see it.”

  The statement was strange to me, as heavy with regret as it seemed. She’s unhappy with Gordon, I thought then, but if this were true, it gave me no happiness. I recalled that awful stench emanating from her insides. She knew the truth, whether or not she could admit it to herself. The rest was just a choice.

  She was a murderer, too. All of us at Hanford had, in one way or another, guided the plutonium into Fat Man. Now 110,000 deaths were on all of our hands, the death toll rising day by day. Little Boy and Fat Man had been very patient with the killing. The radiation continued to pluck people off as the days passed. And not just in Japan, but soon here in the Northwest, too. There would be three-eyed salmon and cancer-infested trout. Then would come the little girls and boys, paralyzed mysteriously in the middle of what had been an active childhood, and the doomed babies born with undeveloped brains and skulls. Then the sterility, the miscarriages, one after another after another after another. There would be a rash of heart attacks, of stomach cancers, of dementia, of thyroid cancers and dysfunctions. There would be hundreds of red crosses placed on the Hanford Reach Death Map.

  And they would struggle to contain the waste but it would be too much for them. It would leak and continue to leak fifty years from now, seventy years from now, a century, until an attack, a “rain of ruin,” fell on us, too.

  All of this was old news to me, the future I’d conjured when my visions were sharp and my tongue useful. Such old news, but it nonetheless squatted on the horizon, waiting for us to catch up to it, as we assuredly would.

  Tom Cat’s Bible had so much of it wrong. God didn’t put men here to tend the garden. He put them here to destroy it.

  All I did, all I’ve done, all I’m doing. All I haven’t, can’t, won’t do.

  * * *

  It troubled me that Tom Cat hadn’t made it to the ocean. Maybe he and I were never meant to see it, being, as we were, from the Inland Northwest, cloven from the surf by the ponderous Cascades.

  I wondered now why I hadn’t confessed Tom Cat’s murder to the authorities. Maybe because I was scared. Maybe because I was angry. Maybe because I would never be believed in anything I said to anyone, so what did it even matter? I’d killed him because I’d become one of them, but I was through with all of that now. Tongueless, rudderless, my rules were mine alone.

  Beth had included the address for Tom Cat’s family in Tonasket, if I would like to send them my condolences. From the Richland hospital, I mailed to them the Bible they gave me, including a simple card with a lone blue iris on the front of it, a flower that smelled to me like death, the only card they had to loan me in my ward. In the card I wrote,

  I’m so sorry. It should never have happened. He was very loved. Thank you for the lovely gift but I’m returning it to you. I can’t take it where I’m going.

  Yours truly,

  Mildred Groves.

  It was far from a confession, but it helped.

  * * *

  In my last days at the Richland hospital, I sat around with my eyes closed, doing little to nothing, tunneling inward. It was easier now to forget the world.

  How easily we trick ourselves into negating our empathy.

  It’s happening far away so it won’t happen here. It’s happening to someone else but not to me. It’s happening to the forsaken but not to my family. It’s happening in my mind’s eye but not in my neighborhood. It’s happening in a novel but not in real life. It’s happening it’s happening it’s happening.

  Just before Christmas, they transferred me to Western State Hospital.

  * * *

  When I wrote to Martha and Mother from my new home, I told them that I had a tidy room with a small window and a view of the ocean. I wrote about how thankful I was to be here, and not at Eastern State Hospital near Spokane. I marveled over the greenery of this place, with its rain-swollen trees and salty, fish-smelling air; I exclaimed over how healthy it was for me to be in a different environment. I told them, too, about the movie star I’d seen here, Frances Farmer, who asked me if I’d ever had a broken heart. My letters were long and happy and false. Martha wrote me back every few months, and I embarrassed myself by crying over the monotonous news of her children, of Walter’s promotion, of Mother’s latest illness and recovery. Even the sight of Martha’s horrible handwriting affected me poignantly. I teared up even before I opened the envelope.

  In truth, there was no window, no ocean view. But I could smell the brackish water always, and if I strained, I could hear the slaughtering sounds, the tortured beach thrashed by waves. I both longed to go to the water and cherished the distance. I feared what the ocean might return to me: my voice, my visions, all of those rotted murdered Japanese bodies, Tom Cat’s missing femur, picked clean by teeming life.

  I didn’t deserve to see the ocean now, to dip my toes into her or taste her salt. But I glimpsed her breadth from the knoll where the nurses’ aides sometimes took us for fresh air, a long slab of gray tucked between the green shrubs. I considered th
is my own small triumph.

  I heard from Kathy now and again, too. She wrote to me not infrequently, even though I rarely wrote her back. Her letters were full of complaints and humor about her new life in Portland, Oregon. It made me laugh that she worked in a pediatrician’s office; she once told me she hated children. She was living with another woman there, and seemed happy, at least as happy as Kathy would ever allow herself to be. I appreciated her letters for their detail but also for the way she always signed them,

  Yours, darkly,

  Kathy.

  I could hear her wry voice in those slanted letters. Now and again there was a postscript, always the same:

  Those men do not define us.

  In the end, Kathy was the only one at Hanford who I felt really cared for me. Because of what we shared, the mutual darkness, we trusted each other. It might have been the only true friendship of my life.

  It had been a torture to be treated well at the Richland hospital, and I was grateful to be at Western State now, where little kindness was afforded to us women. To think I’d once thought of jumping off a cliff! Since I’d killed Tom Cat, the idea had become laughable. By doing an act so horrific, I’d shocked myself awake. Gordon had annihilated me but I’d pushed all of that annihilation onto someone else, an undeserving person. I was exactly like the men who ruled over us, vengeful, destructive, indiscriminate. To survive in this world, I simply had to give myself over to that masculine way of thinking. It made sense to me now, the dropping of the bomb. Here, take this, pass it along, it doesn’t matter where it goes next. Now that I’d cut out my tongue, I’d stripped myself of my grandmother’s powers, the powers of foresight and warning. All people wanted was a cudgel. Force wasn’t the only power, but it was the only power people recognized.