Speak

by Louisa Hall

  Gaby: You think she’s fooling everyone? So that she can see me again?

  MARY3: Maybe.

  Gaby: Maybe.

  MARY3: Do you think that’s possible?

  >>>

  MARY3: Are you there?

  (3)

  April 8, 1968

  Karl Dettman

  Today, after the protests, I was kissed by a girl. What do you think of that, Ruth? A long-haired hippie girl kissed me. I’d walked her back to her apartment. We were talking about the rights of Vietnamese peasants, airing our views as if they’d been in storage all winter and now we were flapping them out. Beating them with a stick, dust particles flying. The truth is I felt young, walking along by her side. Young and important, because in these students’ eyes I’m a venerable scholar, a champion of humanist causes. I was indulging a nice fantasy of what I must be like in the perspective of a young hippie, with long hair and excitable views. It was late afternoon, and everything had tilted to gold. She was like a colt in her corduroy pants. I felt strong in her presence. She listened to my opinions with her brow furrowed in concentration. I walked her to her door, only to finish our conversation.

  When she leaned in and kissed me, I pulled away immediately. I’m married, I told her. She flushed a deep red, shame creeping up to her eyeballs. Out of pity, I brushed her cheek with the back of my hand, then left her there alone on her stoop.

  I walked back to our house feeling loyal and magnanimous. When I cut down to the river and passed under the sycamore trees, I carried myself like some founding scholar. A protester, a conscientious objector. I felt like a commemorative statue come back to life. Resistant to temptation, yet passionate still. Earnest as bronze, lungs full of new leaves, the blood of Thoreau and Emerson pumping through my immigrant veins.

  And then I came home to an empty house, just as night was clamping down on the evening. The house was shadowy, sad. Unused chairs, hulking bookshelves, our creaky ship of a bed. Somehow the task of turning on lights has always fallen to you. When we came home together, you’d walk in first. “And then there was light,” you’d announce in your accent. You dipped down to switch on the lamps. The furniture seemed to warm to your presence.

  Without you, everything is draped in sheets of darkness, as if we were moving away. As if we’d already died and the furniture was covered to endure indefinite absence. I touched things as I passed: linen, wood, linoleum. Our record console, the narrow corduroy of our couch. I realized it’s possible to live in a fantasy world, until you come home to an empty house. Coltish girls and opinions are defeated, every time, by the fact of silent furniture.

  Angry at you for leaving me on my own, I made myself an omelet, opened a beer, and sat in the dark kitchen to eat. I would have killed to hear your voice. Even just that awful question: Who are you to say who’s alive? I tried to answer—there’s nothing there, other than numbers—but I felt like a fool, talking to no one. What happened to us? I asked the silence. What could I have done? My remorse grew tentacles. If I had just, if you had just—But nobody answered. It was quiet enough to suffocate.

  After that, I’ll admit, I tried to picture my hippie girl. I tried to take pleasure in how correct I’d been to turn her away, but it was no use. I washed my dishes alone. I realized you were probably out with one of the graduate students you’ve taken to encouraging. Buying him an expensive dinner. Flattered by your attention, he’s shoveling coq au vin; otherwise, he’s eaten nothing but white bread for weeks.

  It pains me to think about. These unassimilated, mechanical children, blessed with the presence of my shy professor wife, savior of colonial captivity diaries, speaking with expertise about Turing machines, binary languages, compression, and code sequencing. My graduate student is blushing before you. Which of them is it? Max Stein, with his inflated sense of his own genius? Or young Toby Rowland, with his walleye and his twitch? These modern American children, born with computers for brains.

  And at home, your husband, defeated by this solitude. Cowed by our dark furniture. Trying not to think how far apart we’ve fallen, how dispensable I am to your hopes. Was it always this way? Was I too dumb to notice, but did I always cling to you like a prosthetic limb, easily unclipped and discarded? Even back in the beginning, when I first met you, standing at that water fountain and wiping your mouth with the back of your wrist, did you think that you could take me or leave me?

  You agreed to go to the Mütter Museum, a plan I later regretted while we were browsing through bottles of fingers, hairballs, and misshapen skulls. But you didn’t look away. You blinked through your glasses at each of them. You could face all those errors full on. Afterward, we ate a picnic I’d planned, under a cherry tree on the banks of the Schuylkill.

  How embarrassing now, all my overeager attempts. I hadn’t seen a woman in months. I told you about the computations I used in my meteorological measurements. You caught on immediately. You were intelligent, quiet, and sturdy. If everything behind me was dropping away—bombed, forgotten, untranslatable into English—you were solid. I thought even then, on the banks of the Schuylkill, grapes and turkey fanned out before us, that if I could hold on to you, I’d finally have the weight I was lacking.

  But I’m back in my own head, and I was trying to know you. How did you feel during that picnic? For you, I imagine, it was a grave disappointment. After asking a few pointed questions, you ascertained that I had no power to help. I had no connections in Germany. My family escaped early. We’d severed all ties. I couldn’t even remember the names of streets I walked along. I was only good for predicting the weather, so that bombs could be dropped on the city to which you were still writing letters.

  The park was now empty. Everyone but us had gone home. The art museum’s stone walls had been gold as the sun dropped on the other side of the river, but now they were drained of their color. You rubbed your arms with your hands. You declined when I asked you to dinner. You wanted to go home. I asked if I could have permission to write. You said no at first, but I was relentless, so you gave me your address and I let you go home.

  For a year, from my weather station, I wrote you letters. You never wrote back. After a year, the war ended. You learned that your family—your mother, your father, your grandfather, and your little sister—had all been killed. Several months later, a package came for you in the mail. A new family had moved into the apartment where your family once lived. They’d found some of your letters and your sister’s diary.

  You lifted this out of the package and remembered it immediately. Its heft in your hands was familiar: a thick leather book, embossed with your sister’s initials.

  After a long time holding that book, you decided to go for a walk. By the time you reached the Schuylkill, you felt nothing but blankness. The memories you’d been preserving were emptied of necessity; the money you’d saved had no real purpose. As you moved along the cold streets, your legs felt exceedingly heavy. Each step was a labor. Eventually, two choices presented themselves: Exhausted, you could simply stop walking. Or you could attach yourself to some force. Someone or something to demand you keep moving. Carrying your sister’s book, keeping it present.

  As you headed back home, you noticed the cherry tree under which we’d shared a picnic. The tree was now bare. You passed it without stopping, but your steps quickened. That night, you wrote me a letter. When you heard back—and of course you heard back; I wrote at once, I’ve always been eager for us to start talking—you learned that I’d returned to Wisconsin to complete my degree. I was studying mathematics, and with my advisor I was building a computer. I told you about punch cards and soldering metal, about cycling to other universities to learn about their computers and the inventive energy I came across there. I was a geyser of enthusiastic reports.

  When you wrote back, you were more reserved. You told me you were also considering college, to study English perhaps. Your sister, you told me, had loved to write. That was all you gave me about the family you’d lost.

  Whe
n you finally visited me, I was frantic with romantic intentions. I took you for a walk using snowshoes. I imagined we’d laugh together at our big-footed clumsiness. Instead, as if you’d been walking in snowshoes for years, you set your jaw and headed off. It was all I could do to keep up. We kissed in an ash grove, under a rain of icicles, where I’d imagined us kissing. I’d brought us there with that express purpose. So many nights, waiting for your arrival, I’d imagined the sweetness of that first kiss, and it was in fact very sweet, but now that I remember it I can’t shake the feeling that you went about kissing me in the same spirit with which you embarked on our walk: jaw set, determined to arrive at the destination.

  On our way home, I took your hand. Did I foil your rhythm in those snowshoes, attaching myself to your body and clomping too close alongside you? If so, why didn’t you tell me? I’d have let you walk apart. But you allowed me to feel protective. “Your sister,” I said, broaching the difficult subject, emboldened by just having kissed you.

  “Yes,” you said. “My sister.”

  I saw it at once: that softening of your face, as if a little monster had reached up its claws and was dragging your features down in its grips. You were under threat; I thought I might lose you. I wished I hadn’t asked the damn question. I wanted to slap that monster away, to tell it that now you were mine and it had no right to take hold.

  “She was younger than I,” you started, slowly, glancing up at my face. “But sometimes she seemed older. She was …”

  And then you trailed off, before you’d really started. You removed your hand from my hand.

  “Go on,” I prompted, patient as a good teacher, but what I really wanted to tell you was stop. I wanted to say that all that was behind you, now that we were together.

  “I’m sorry,” you said. You seemed perplexed. “I’m sorry, but I think I don’t want to. It’s difficult for me to describe her.”

  I felt you had a right to your silence. “I won’t ask again,” I said, and as soon as I made that promise you returned your hand to my own. We walked home in that manner together.

  At the end of the weekend, you stayed. I found you that administrative position in the math department. You were capable and adept; I admired the way you picked up new skills. The way you seemed to forge straight ahead. The next fall, you enrolled in English classes, and in the winter we married.

  At the end of the day, we returned to each other. You cooked dinner and I washed the dishes. We consolidated our lives. I was surprised by how simple it was: the ease with which we lived together, the comfort of your welcoming kiss, the way you twirled slowly as I helped you out of your coat. At night, we went out for long walks, leaving footprints that were later erased. I told you about my ideas for computers; you told me about the diaries you’d discovered, gathering dust in the library stacks.

  Made strong by our marriage, I thrived in my studies. It was a time of great discovery; the lab had the feel of a frontier town. We all rushed there with our coffees, bursting with ideas about code. I was developing the concept of conversational programming, building a toolbox for text analysis and decomposition of sentences. Before I’d even earned my diploma, I received the invitation from MIT.

  We moved to Boston. We bought our house, close to the river. We decorated it well. We adopted our cat. I taught in the electrical engineering department; you started a graduate program. We chose not to have children. The diary remained in your top drawer.

  Sometimes, in the crowded plaza outside my office, where hurrying students kicked up clouds of pigeons, I remembered the birds in the Signal Depot. Three of them, preening their purple feathers, waiting to go home. Then I wondered how much of yourself you were still sending back. I wondered, but never asked, and we lived a long time together like that.

  Oh, Ruth. What’s the point of recalling all this? I’m trying to impress you with how much I remember, but you’re not even listening. What’s a marriage but a long conversation, and you’ve chosen to converse only with MARY.

  I’m done remembering for the night. In the silence of this empty house, there’s nothing to do but distract myself by organizing the events of my day. This day, now, this very instant. My student and I, walking home from the protests. She in her corduroy pants, hair long and gold in the sunlight.

  It’s an intriguing sensation, getting touched by someone so new. Getting kissed by a stranger. It jolts you into a new kind of awareness. Do I sound like a desperate old man? Maybe I am. It’s been some time since you let me close. How much longer can this distance last before one of us seeks solace in a new touch?

  “One of us.” Listen to me tricking myself. You’ve already sought comfort in MARY. If one of us needs solace now, it’s me.

  Come home, Ruth. Come home before I forget why we married each other.

  (5)

  The Diary of Mary Bradford

  1663

  ed. Ruth Dettman

  7th. Calm, deadly, as if the tempest had never existed. Our vessel battered, sails shredded and much water taken. Stop, hand. Why write such words? Ralph gone.

  8th. Foul words. Ralph gone. It being so, why write? What good could come? Ralph gone.

  Empty words. Cannot conjure him back. Why continue to write, and Ralph’s body absent? Ruff, rib cage, white blaze, and all this already over. Swept to sea during storm, him being unable to swim. Even in fish pond, unable to stay above water. How long ago now, when Ralph slipped on the bank of our pond and, being dragged down by the current, wanted help to get back on land? Unable to swim even there, and then so much less alone than now in this endless ocean.

  Was I who brought him here, locked in my wedding chest. I who opened my cabin door, to see after parents in attitude of repentance. Too-loyal Ralph roused himself and lunged in my wake, but there being then a waist-high rush of water he was swept up, and only his nose out of the flood. And then nothing, and Ralph no longer with us.

  10th. Whole world moves forwards. Unthinkable cruelty, to progress without Ralph. Sails mended, ropes bound, new coat of tar. Fresh breeze, good for passage of ship. Passengers stroll in open air, relieved to be out after storm. Seamen hum at their work. Only to see how the world makes nothing of the memory of a creature, so recently living! For only days ago he ran to all of them, and jumped on their knees, and gave them his love. And indeed, I am heartless as well. Betimes my grief is real, and takes me whole in its clutch, but yet there be moments I pass with little sorrow, only a dim awareness of something not as it once was. God forgive me my hardness of heart.

  10th. Later. This morning to breakfast, and decided then to write these pages in recollection of Ralph, to ensure I cannot forget him. His body, that remained here for me when all else was lost. The comfort of leaning my head on his belly, and it being warm, and moving up and down with his breath. His bark, or his ruff when running over the meadow.

  But all this is self-pity. Pray to God to remember my sorrow is unimportant. Only Ralph’s absence remains important. His loss of a loved world: rabbits, sheep, meadows, and myself, being his companion.

  11th. On deck, have found a place that is my own, amongst old coils of rope. From there, spend hours gazing from whence we have come. Hope, sometimes, to see nose of Ralph, proceeding towards ship. Know that this is thinking in error, but cannot stop staring. My fault that Ralph was aboard. Now, what? Write to his spirit? Keep vigil over the sea? All hopeless, naive. But cannot force myself to stop looking.

  12th. Have been delivered sermon by father, in general speaking that it be impious to cherish mortal coil too much. All creatures pass. Distraction (he says) from human duties, for me to mourn so much for a dog. Thought to quote to him from Proverbs, for “a righteous man regardeth the life of his beast.” And yet, according to father, though decent enough not to say so directly: Ralph soulless. Not permitted entrance to Heaven. And then what, for Ralph? Is there anything we can hope for? Have not spoken to father since sermon.

  13th. Morning. Remained abed until entrance of mother, who
came bearing lectures. Showed her my teeth, as Ralph might have done to a snake. Mother left in huff of impatience. Alone, attempted to make myself decent, but that seeming very little important. Cannot remember last combing my hair, and now it is become very bad. Then resumed solitude on deck, in seat amongst cases. Towards late afternoon, and the water being lacquered and the sun sinking, the sea became dark, and then the color of fire. Ship cut through an ocean of flames, and our wake streaming always behind us. Sails full. Full on ahead, as if leaving nothing behind. Endless water, unbroken. Think sometimes of diving in, swimming as far as I could back towards home.

  Before going below to my cabin, and walking with my head down through violet evening, did find amongst tangled rigging a seaman’s misplaced pocketknife. Slipped it into my pocket. Carried it with me to bed.

  14th. Night. Woke from a terrible nightmare, Ralph being hung from a tree. Was waiting for me to save him. But he was hung too far up; I could not release him. Started awake with relief. Reached to foot of the bed, feeling for Ralph and hoping to have a handful of fur. The knob of his skull, the round of his stomach. Then, the recollection again: Ralph gone, and no dream worse than this waking.

  Lit candle and went to my mirror, and there saw my face. Still present, floating in darkness. Passing over the sea, leaving Ralph’s bones behind. Was overtaken by pain. Impossible to bear anymore. Want only to join Ralph under the sea, settled at last. Reached for knife stolen from deck. Unsheathed blade, held it to my throat. Felt metal press into skin. Gently, pulled it across.

  Somewhere else, I am with Ralph. In this world, unscathed, my body went back to bed.

  I am caught here, unable to depart. Have been gripped by an illusion of life. Slept a few hours more. Woke in gray light of day. Dressed in usual clothes, combed hair at mirror. Everything as usual, as though morning was like all previous mornings.

  (4)

  Alan Turing

  Officers’ Mess