The Cassandra

by Sharma Shields

  I would send them all of the money. I would listen to their complaints. They could have done anything to me, sent me away to a state hospital, put me in a woman’s prison, but they hadn’t, they’d simply trapped me in my childhood home. My mother threatened to report me but she wouldn’t. Right? She couldn’t. They were trying their best to forgive me.

  Still, the conversation disquieted me.

  “It was just a silly wish,” I told her. “I’ll send you all of the money. I will.”

  She took the receiver away from her mouth and said, just loudly enough so that I could hear, “Mother, you’re right, she’ll never grow up.”

  There was a long silence. I stayed upbeat.

  “Merry Christmas,” I said, but no one replied.

  The line was dead.

  NIGHT OF DEMONS

  Christmas arrived with its spidery web of frost draped across the flatland, the colorless mountains garlanded with bands of fresh snow. As I waited for the cattle car at the encampment, my toes and heels froze into hard wooden knobs. They thawed later at my little desk in Dr. Hall’s office, wet and throbbing in Mother’s pinching shoes. My frostbitten toe alternately tingled and burned. I didn’t mind the sensations. It was how my mind felt when I was in the middle of a profound vision.

  Unit B was warm and loud and comforting. The roar of the Columbia’s waters through the motor-driven pumps soothed me. I relaxed into it the way I imagined a baby relaxes into the commotion of her mother’s womb. We worked tremendous hours then, twelve per day, hurriedly increasing output of the product. From what I learned in the meetings Dr. Hall hosted with Colonel Matthias, Mr. Farmer, and the various DuPont managers, production was proceeding smoothly. Dr. Hall marveled over the flawlessness of it.

  “Sure, there was that little hiccup in the beginning. But after that, we’ve sailed along beautifully. Hardly a hitch! It almost makes me nervous. This unit is the first of its kind, Miss Groves. It’s miraculous how flawless it all is.”

  I beamed with pride when I heard this, as if I, myself, had helped design the unit, with its awe-inspiring symmetry, its tubes and gears and pumps and blocks, its tense precision and monstrosity. I’ve contributed to its greatness. But when I blinked, an image flashed on the black leather of my eyelids: the dark harpy feathers, the baleful eyes of the heron, the nursing mother with her baby of shattered glass.

  What are we making here? What dark force encourages its perfection?

  I guarded my thoughts. I nursed them quietly. I was too grateful for the work, for my status, to put my job at risk. I hated myself for my selfishness, but there it was.

  On Christmas morning, Dr. Hall asked me if I’d like a tour of the facility. My typewriter was tipped over onto its backside, my hands stained with ink. I was applying Nutype cleaner onto the ribbon and gummed-up keys.

  “This very moment?” I said.

  I showed him my inky fingers.

  “I have an hour before the colonel stops in. Would you like to know more about the unit?”

  I was surprised to even be asked. I mentioned that I thought it wasn’t allowed.

  “I can’t show you all of it, of course, but I’m itching to share some of its workings with you. After all, it’s Christmas Day! Consider it a gift. You’ve done well here, you deserve it. Wash up and then I’ll share some of the unit’s secrets.”

  I smiled and agreed, humbled by the request. It delighted me that he thought I was instrumental to Unit B’s success.

  I hurried to the restroom. I had to pee, and, unsurprisingly, the stall was empty. I locked the door behind me, pulled up my skirt, unfastened my girdle. I’d been holding it in all morning, my bladder as taut as a rubber ball. I released the pressure, taking a long moment, listening to my own pointed stream and to the faint rushing of the water through the core room. I’d peeked into that room before and was awed with the symmetry and height of the graphite pile. It stood taller and wider than a movie screen, towering four stories high, a manufactured marvel made more astonishing by the two thousand aluminum process tubes that punctuated its face. They held slugs of the substance Dr. Hall referred to as “metal.” They were key, he’d noted, in creating the product. I thought maybe the water from the river was there to cleanse the product, but at this suggestion, Dr. Hall had shaken his head.

  “No, Miss Groves,” he’d said. “It’s there to cool it.”

  “Cool what?” I’d asked him.

  “The reaction.”

  “What reaction?”

  “Our entire location was chosen because of that big river out there. Our very success depends on the water of the Columbia.”

  In this way I received informational puzzle pieces about Hanford’s product, but I never figured out how to fit them properly together to answer my questions. I wasn’t upset by this. I worried that if I learned too much, I wouldn’t be able to keep my mouth shut, especially with Mother. I didn’t trust myself where Mother was concerned; I never would. Now that she’d threatened to report me, I barely spoke during our phone calls, despite being hammered by her questions.

  But I knew more than most. The visions kept no secrets from me.

  An awesome weapon. A weapon that kills indiscriminately. A weapon that generates so much heat, it melts eyeballs from their sockets.

  I shook myself. Stop it. Stop flattering yourself. You’re not some sort of prophet.

  I pulled off a square of toilet paper from the roll. Just as I went to flush, I heard the door open and then close. There was a small rap on the side of the stall where I sat, not quite a knock but close enough for me to assume someone’s impatience.

  “Hello?” I said. “This stall’s occupied. I’m almost finished.”

  There was a shuffling noise, as though someone had a dog on a leash, and then, after a moment, a heavy object slammed into the stall door.

  The sound upset me. “Wait just one minute,” I said. “I’ll be out soon.”

  It wasn’t rare for other women to come to Unit B, even if I was one of the only permanent female staff. There was a laundress who came a few times a week, and there was a maid who dusted the offices and dials in the evenings. There were a handful of other women who delivered or retrieved packages and messages. There was even a female physicist, a recent hire that filled me with a tremendous curiosity. I had yet to meet her, but the rumor was that Unit B’s restroom was there only because of Mr. Farmer’s respect for her. Simply put, women came and went at Hanford. I heard from someone at Human Resources that we were less likely to leave than the men, and this didn’t surprise me: We were built for endurance. We tolerated poor treatment, haphazard accommodations, and tedious weather with little complaint. Tolerance of abuse was threaded into our bones. Men believed they were too good for certain treatment, but we’d been told for generations that we were not.

  All this is to say: I would have welcomed a woman’s presence in the restroom, even if she had seemed impatient and violent and impolite, pounding on the stall and refusing to speak to me. But I didn’t hear the click of a woman’s pumps on the floor, and I didn’t smell a woman’s perfume, and what I heard and smelled instead—the tip-tap of claws, the wet pine scent of animal fur—alerted me to a different creature entirely.

  It snuffled against the baseboards.

  I flushed the toilet and refastened myself, smoothing down my skirt, careful not to get ink on the fabric. I had yet to wash my hands.

  “Who are you?” I said again.

  A long brown snout pushed under the narrow slat of the stall door.

  It was the coyote. I found it strange that I was caught up in a vision so suddenly, without warning. There was no ringing in my ears, no ponderous beating of wings, no dizzy spells or headaches. But I saw the coyote’s eyes then, yellow, as round and strong as planets. The heron’s eyes.

  The canine drew back his lips in a snarl and then retreated.

  A loud knock rattled the big door to the restroom. “Anyone in there?” a voice called.

  “Occupied
,” I said.

  “Janitor here, ma’am. Take your time. I’ll wait.”

  I opened the stall door and washed my hands. The animal brushed by my legs and slipped into the stall behind me.

  “You,” I whispered harshly. “Come out of there.”

  His big fluffy tail beat the floor.

  “Ma’am?” the voice in the hallway said. “You say something in there?”

  “Just a second,” I called.

  I opened the door. Stanley stood there. I hadn’t seen him up close since my vision of his beating. We both winced, taking stock of each other. I could guess what he thought of me now, after all that I’d predicted for him. I’d never been thanked for sharing a vision, only reviled. Stanley’s pained expression, his physical recoiling, was familiar to me. He hated me, maybe even more than he hated his attackers. He blamed the messenger. I thought of the meadowlark, the feeling that I’d somehow made it happen. I was more at fault than I realized.

  The assault had been severe. Stanley was greatly changed. They had caved in one of his cheekbones. Part of his left ear was gone. I remembered what his sister had said about him being a talented welder. I had a ridiculous thought that maybe he could weld the ear back onto his head.

  “Hello, Stanley,” I said.

  “Hello, Miss Groves.” His voice was strained. “You all finished in there?”

  “Yes,” I said. “But I—” I wanted to say, I need to warn you, but I feared what he would say to me if I repeated such a thing to him. Instead, I blurted out, “There’s a coyote.”

  “A coyote?” Stanley looked at me puzzled for a moment and then grinned, meanly, showing his broken teeth. “You think I’m a fool, Miss Groves.”

  “He’s there,” I said. “In the stall. Just—be careful.”

  His smile thinned. He stepped around me and put his palm on the heavy wooden door, pressing it open. He peered into the room for a moment and then I heard him gasp.

  I told you, I wanted to say, but didn’t.

  “Good grief.” Stanley turned around and looked at me with visible irritation. “What’s the matter with you women? Can’t you clean up after yourselves?”

  He muttered something under his breath and turned back toward the supply closet, leaving his mop and bucket in the hallway.

  Nonplussed, I pushed open the door. The stall was unrecognizable, the floor and toilet covered in blood.

  “Where are you?”

  I found the coyote skulking beside the toilet, nosing a small object on the floor. I crouched down to get a better look. It was a creature, curling into itself like a large mealworm. The thing had eyes on its stomach and a featureless face. The limbs were half-formed, the brain visible from a cleft skull. It was small like a newborn goat but had no fur. A small purple heart beat furtively, unevenly, beneath a thin layer of translucent pink skin. Whatever it was, it would soon be dead.

  “What is it?”

  The coyote rested his yellow eyes on me. The voice of the heron, then,

  A thing born on the night of demons. A lamb, but not a lamb.

  “Put it out of its misery.”

  From a litter of monsters.

  “You shouldn’t be here,” I said. “Why did you bring this here?”

  The coyote scooped up the creature in his mouth, the ball of demented goo that it was, and then slipped slyly from the stall.

  I followed him into the hallway, crying, “Shoo, shoo!”

  The canine dove like a falcon into the hallway, skidding around the corner just as Stanley returned from the supply closet. He shook his head as he walked, disapproving of me. He held a bottle of bleach in one gloved hand, ammonia in the other.

  “It wasn’t my fault,” I told him. “It’s not my blood.”

  “Whatever you say, Miss Groves.” He had a resolved look on his face. Neither of our opinions would be taken seriously if he spoke to a supervisor. I could sense he didn’t want to cause trouble for himself.

  “I have to get back to Dr. Hall,” I said.

  “We both have work to do.”

  Stanley grimaced, entering the restroom. The door swung closed and I was alone. A few scant droplets of blood led from the restroom down the hallway where Coyote had run with his demon. I didn’t follow them. I returned to Dr. Hall.

  I told Dr. Hall I was ready for the tour, remaining on my feet as I said so. I assumed he would guide me to the door and then to the core room, but instead he urged me, eagerly, to sit.

  I waited patiently in the chair while he finished his work.

  “Almost done with this, Miss Groves. Just had to tweak a few things from the original.”

  I peeked at the sheet of paper in front of him. It was filled with neat, straight rectangles and squares. He wrote tiny, inscrutable words inside all of them. In the top corner I read, Unit B, based on Chicago Pile-1 by E. Fermi, ne. Mr. Farmer.

  With a grunt of satisfaction, Dr. Hall twirled the sheet of paper so that it faced me. Leaning over so that I could smell the coffee and mint on his breath, he said, “Let’s begin in the entry hall, shall we? From there we’ll see the charging area, the discharge elevators, and the inner room. Beyond that is the labyrinth.”

  “Labyrinth?”

  “Yes, it’s a corridor that buckles to and fro and blocks the dangerous effects of radiation.” He stopped himself here, perhaps noting my quizzical expression. “You must not, of course, mention any of this to anyone.”

  “Of course not. I never would.” I said this firmly, but I badly wanted to know what caused the radiation. Heat, I thought. From the product? Testing it or creating it or…?

  He continued, “We’ll finish with the control room, which you can see right through the windows here. I can’t go in depth about what it all is, but it will be nice for you to know a little bit more about our castle here.”

  Labyrinth. Castle. I was the princess, searching for her knight. It was a romantic dream. And somewhere, I thought, somewhere deep within, a monster. A newborn demon.

  And then as Dr. Hall droned on, I realized he didn’t mean to show me any of it, not in person. He only meant to tell me about it.

  He was describing the purpose of the discharge elevators when I interrupted him. “Is this the whole tour? Looking at this piece of paper?”

  He smiled at me condescendingly. “Miss Groves, it would not be prudent for us to interrupt the progress being made today. It would also be unsafe.”

  “Just to look at it?”

  “In some instances, you would be dead within moments.”

  I thought about the cases Beth had seen at the clinic, chemical burns, injured lungs, a man’s eyesight damaged by mysterious vapors. In each of these occurrences, Beth said, the men had not been following protocol. Most of the workers here visited a changing house before they came to work, donning equipment meant to protect them from whatever it was they were assigned to handle. Even the men in the control room had started wearing white all-body suits and shiny hard hats. I was beginning to feel naked in my work dress and stockings and tight shoes.

  But the safest place is always the center of the storm.

  “There is one place I can show you,” Dr. Hall said. “Follow me, Miss Groves.”

  He led me down the entry hallway where the men had stomped the meadowlark to death. The walls were clean, emptied of anything but the drab olive paint that was used for all army facilities at the time, but when I blinked the blood flashed there, the guts and innards and feathers smashed into a gelatinous pudding. I followed Dr. Hall around the corner to the large doorway where a beacon whirled, flashing red. Beneath it was the incomprehensible lit-up sign,

  MONITORING—REQUIRED

  SPLINE REMOVAL

  START UP

  CRANE OPERATING

  “Have you seen the pile yet, Miss Groves?”

  “Oh, yes, before it went critical, as you put it. I was awestruck.”

  “It’s massive, isn’t it? Larger and taller than most homes.”

  “My house in O
mak could fit in its foyer, sir.”

  “This morning we heard excellent news. This product you’ve heard so much about? We’ve executed our first successful slugs of it today. And you know what this means, of course. The war will soon be over, Miss Groves.”

  I gasped. “What wonderful news!”

  Despite my fears of the product, or maybe even because of them, I swelled with pride. I had gone from caretaker of Mother to caretaker of the world. I was a happy little cog in the machinery of Unit B, small but necessary. Without my singular effort, the product wouldn’t exist. We all had a vital part to play here, and shame on those who felt otherwise.

  The product! I pictured it as a brown poisonous sludge, then as a disastrous ray of light, and then as a dark, cloaked hero with knives for hands. The Germans would cower in terror. My mind swarmed and in it waved the limbs of the ruined people I’d seen in the river.

  “The product is born,” Dr. Hall said, smiling. “The merriest Christmas gift of all, Miss Groves.”

  “It must be very powerful,” I said.

  “Over here, to the right,” he said, and opened a door into a small room. There were a few white suits hanging there, and a suitcase marked with red stencils, TOURNIQUET AND SAFETY KIT.

  He opened a door on the other side of the room and went through it.

  “Wow,” I shouted when we passed into the cavernous valve pit room. It was noisy. My shout hardly registered. We stood on a bridge of metal overlooking a waterfall of stairs and gangplanks. The valves were like humongous steering wheels designed for an armada of giants.

  “This is where we process water lines and water analyses,” Dr. Hall called back to me over the noise.

  I admired the view, putting my hands on the railing. It wasn’t a full tour, but it was still new to me, austere and beautiful. At my side, Dr. Hall reached over to pat my arm in a contented manner, and I accepted it the way a lover might, with a tingling at the base of my spine.