The War on Space and Time

by Octavia Cade

  July 1, 2017 Volume 7 No 9

  The War of Space and Time

  by Octavia Cade

  Bletchley Park

  Helen woke to a room grown smaller than before. It was no illusion, no result of short sleep and poor light, a head grown soft and malleable under code. Her knees knew before her brain. They barked up against the bed that lay beside her own, the iron of its railings, the thin mattress and the covers all smoothed over.

  It had not been a large room to begin with. There were too many men, too many women, and all the billets were taken, all the houses filled. Helen never minded sharing – she’d shared with her sisters all her life, six of them, and sharing a room now with only one of them – and that her twin, the closest of all – was a marvel of quiet and space in comparison. Even if it were only a small room, even if it were only two feet between cots and one of those feet gone now: the walls coming inwards, the beds inching closer together and that was something they had tried before, her and V., cuddling together for warmth and comfort when news of bombs came in, and battles.

  But the two beds pushed together made it harder to get through the door, so Helen and V. had pushed them back into place, the little narrow beds, and gone to sleep with their arms stretched across the gap, their hands clasped together in darkness. It wasn’t the same, but it was hard to balance themselves together on a narrow bed and sleep when concentration was required of them in the waking hours, in the shifts before Colossus, in the codes and ciphers and breaking of Bletchley. Now, the beds were somehow shifting towards each other again.

  The door opened then and V. was there, her face fresh-scrubbed and more open-eyed than Helen had ever seen her – Helen who had learned talking with her, and walking and running down hills with kites streaming behind. “Do you see it?” said V. “It’s the same all along. The rooms are getting smaller. Everything’s getting jumbled up together.”

  “But why?” said Helen, still stupid with sleep and rubbing at her leg. “Is it a new regulation?” There were so many: rules thick as branches and woven all about, rules to keep them quiet and safe. To keep them all locked in together when the geography of their isolation did nothing to keep others out.

  “Strange if it is,” said V, fond and patient at once. She slid between the cots and sat beside Helen, their sides pressed close that Helen could feel, through her nightdress, the warmth of her sister’s body. “I’m sure we’ll hear about it if we’re supposed to.” It was the constant refrain, the determined avoidance of question. Bletchley was a place of packages, of little separations, and it was not the place of WRENs to open up every one.

  “I wonder if it will happen again,” said Helen, eyeing the bed across, the tiny distance between. The way it reminded her of home.

  Los Alamos

  The Lodge inched closer to the horizon than it should have done. When Frank, atop his horse, held his hand out at length he blotted out its stories with a single knuckle, and the growing distance between them made his stomach clench in a way that was more than war, that was more than absence. The only thing that approached that hot, tight gut-sink was the news of his twin, dead on far fields and never coming home now, the sense of unlocking, of dislocation – the uncoupling of Frank from his former life, from the world in which he was embedded. He was an island now, a brother that was, that had been, and no more. In that he was not alone – Los Alamos was a place of isolation, an island in a dry land, weighted down with distance. He was not the only one so cut off – it was the undercurrent, the ties that bound together and underpinned as ignimbrite the mesas of this new life. All there had left someone behind, had gone on ahead in secrecy and in silence, leaving universities and family homes, leaving that family behind, sometimes, on a continent blackened with war and with no help to come. No help, unless, unless…

  Frank had gotten used to it, the sense of insulation, of, isolation: the dream state of Alamos. He had tied himself to work and rock, found the island as a place to stand and then the island shifted and he was outstripped. The Lodge moved further from the laboratories, and further still, until the land between unravelled as if its elastic had been lost, as if the isolation weren’t enough. As if the country around was determined to see him truly alone, a man without a brother left to stand in an empty stretch, with all the landmarks gone and all the world in silence.

  It was as if he existed at the midpoint of a landscape defined by war: by the gouge and stretch and pillage of it, and Frank at a place of beginnings, an epicentre. All around him waves spread outwards as if a pebble dropped into a pond, and those waves pushed the world away and left him grasping: a single man upon a mount, riding past a pond that he had thrown stones in so many times before. Ashley Pond, that he might have thrown a stone across in summer, had his aim been good and his arm strong. Ashley Pond, that now belied its name and had the appearance of a lake, perhaps, or a small inland sea though it did not have the salt for it, though its growth was untainted as yet by tears.

  There were plenty of those, more now than ever. Frank had seen, in the stables, a WAAC being comforted, her face blotched and being blotted, a handkerchief clutched in one hand. He had squeezed her shoulder himself, a silent gesture to reach across the gulf between them. Contact, on the mesa, had become a precious thing.

  Bletchley Park

  Helen had never been so prim. With all her sisters, there had never been any room for primness – or privacy, or personal space. She was used to encroachment. It was natural, something to be expected – it was why she and V. had adapted so easily to the crush at Bletchley, to the close quarters of people who lived in each other’s pockets, to the quick tempers and easy forgiveness. Not everyone had been so lucky, not everyone found it so natural.

  It was always so simple to tell the only children. To pick up on the small things, the little cues that spoke of space and silence and the expectation of room around. Helen had never had that, had never missed it – until now.

  Now she sat apart, or as apart as she could when the walls were pressing closer and the rooms shrinking, when even the manor house was assuming the aspect of dolls. She wasn’t the only one. They were all the same now, and everyone sat with shoulders drawn up, hunched in, trying to make themselves smaller in turn. Trying not to touch one another. Touch, now that it was so difficult to avoid, had become a thing of rudeness, of flushed cheeks and muttered apologies.

  Helen and V. no longer wanted to share a bed at night. No matter the news, the long lists of friends killed, of acquaintances missing, there was no comfort in clinging. Where once V. would have laid her head on Helen’s shoulder, cried a little perhaps, they turned from each other, balanced on bed ends and slept poorly, kept awake by nightmares of crushing and darkness. Of entanglement, of being trapped by tree roots and buried alive.

  “It was different before,” said V., her voice flat and exhausted. Helen couldn’t see her face. They were on night shifts now, but with the windows blocked as if for black-out there was no hint of expression. “We chose to be together then.” To sign up together, to go through training together and request a posting where they wouldn’t have to be parted.

  “You’re so lucky to stay with each other,” their Dad had told them. “Most of you young ones are shipped off with strangers. You look after each other now. Your Mum and I will be depending on it.”

  It had been such an easy promise. “Of course we will,” they’d said in concert, for who else could do it better? And now their relationship was one of shrinking, of trying to make a distance between them because closeness had become a thing of horror. How could they explain? How could Helen write home and hint at schisms – confess that when she reached behind her at night, reached for her sister’s hand, their flesh pa
ssed through each other because closeness was gobbling them up? Because the walls were moving in and the space between was so thick it could hold both of them – all of them – at once.

  “You make me feel like a ghost,” said V.

  Los Alamos

  “I’ll never see my family again,” said Doris. Frank’s handkerchief was clutched in one hand, damp and crumpled.

  “You don’t know that,” said Frank. Even to him the sound of his voice was shot through with uncertainty, and fragmented. He wished he were a better liar. He didn’t have much experience with crying girls, and all he knew to do had been to offer her his handkerchief, to take the reins from white-knuckled hands and settle down next to her in awkwardness. It might have been easier, but he was dizzy in his isolation, in the way that he was being dragged from a close-knit and often cramped community to one where the gaps were breaching friendships and forcing insularity. He shifted on the bale, uncomfortable. The straw made him want to sneeze.

  “I’m sorry,” said Doris. “It’s difficult for you too, I know. It’s difficult for everyone. And I’ve been trying so hard to be cheerful. And the horses make it easier, somehow.”

  “You’re not the only one to think so,” said Frank. There weren’t enough of them, not really, and with the distances in Alamos increasing the horses were ever more important. They were a comfort, too, as well as a help. More than once he’d come into the stables and found someone with their face buried in mane, with soft wet little sounds and stifled breaths. He’d laid his own cheek against one of those long smooth necks more than once, let his tears fall silent into hair. “I’ve done it myself.”

  “That does makes me feel a bit better,” Doris confessed. “Terrible, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” said Frank. “It all seems terrible lately. Sometimes I feel…” Too much. He felt too much, and he didn’t know how to stuff it down or make it come out and share it.

  “Who was it?” said Doris, and her hand on his was warm as horse’s hide.

  “My brother,” said Frank. “In France. And sometimes I think that if there are more miles in Alamos than there should be then well. So what? There’s more distance out there than that, isn’t there, and it’s not so easy to cross.” There was a long silence.

  “My husband’s in France,” said Doris. “I lie awake at night and wonder if it’s the same for them as it is for us. If he goes to sleep at night with his men and wakes up to find himself alone in the trenches. If he has to go calling for them. If they’re too far away when he needs them.”

  “It’s only here, as far as I’ve heard,” said Frank, turning his hand palm up to squeeze her own. “So far it’s only Alamos.”

  “Do you think we’re causing it?” she said, the two of them joined by hands and absence and clinging. By loneliness, by the experience and expectation of grief. “What we’re doing here. Is there something we’re doing that’s making the world all move apart?”

  “I don’t know,” said Frank again. He hoped not. If it were true, the only thing to do would be to stop, and he didn’t know if they would stop. If they could, even, or if they should. It was too late for his brother but there was still a war on, still hundreds, thousands of brothers out there even if they weren’t his.

  And wouldn’t it be a funny thing, if what they were building at Alamos could save the lot of them and push them away from each other, all at once.

  Bletchley Park

  In Bletchley Park, Helen dreamed of the man who would have been her brother-in-law. She had never dreamed of him before, even in her fascination at the person who would marry the girl who looked and thought and loved like her, but was not.

  The courtship had been a hasty one, born out of leave and the desire for life amidst the bombs, the desire to connect with more than carnage. V. had begun spending her evenings apart, coming back with her face flushed and her blouse slightly askew and Helen would tease and giggle and make sure she was all straight before inspection, would cover for her sneaking. It was easy to cover when they had the same face, the same body – although their paths were diverging, it was still a small divergence as yet.

  Then the leave had ended and the telegram had come, addressed to Miss Veronica Halliwell, and that divergence was cut off at the roots, cut off when it had barely begun to bloom and V. was alone with nothing but Helen and memory.

  “You can talk about it if you want to,” said Helen, and that was something she had never needed to say before but V. hadn’t cried, had kept her lips shut and pressed together and Helen had wanted to make the invitation explicit. To give V. a chance to grieve in a way that wasn’t alone.

  “I don’t want to,” said V. and her ring was put away, the pretty blue-stoned ring that she and Helen had gasped over and admired together. “Alright?”

  “Alright,” said Helen and that was the end of it until she found herself dreaming in a room smaller than before. She was in a private room at a dance, or near one, with music and laughter coming through the door and a blue stone on her finger, and she was kissing the man who was to marry her sister, kissing him until she was breathless and feeling his hands come up under her blouse and he was kissing her neck and saying “V., I love you so.” And that had been enough to shock Helen into almost waking, into pushing him away and seeing on top of that same body a different face, the face of a boy Helen had danced the whole night with, the night that V. had disappeared with her boyfriend and come back to the dance with a ring on her finger.

  Then she was awake, sat up sudden and straight and gasping, with V. pressed too close on a shrinking bed, their flesh merging where they brushed together and shocked awake herself, staring at Helen with a strange sullen dislike. “Those are my memories,” she said. “Mine.”

  Los Alamos

  Frank dreamed of a world he never saw. Dreamed of seeing his own face in a mirror, muddied about the edges and him scraping away the hair with a blunt razor with the trenches rising about him and water in his boots. He knew at once the face was not his own. There was no sense of dislocation, of entrapment. Their ways had parted a long time since, and there was normalcy in separation.

  “Sure you should go to college,” his brother had said. “If I had your brains I might go too. Course, I got all the looks so I can’t really complain.”

  It was an old joke, and Frank had never understood how the same face could have such different personalities, such different minds behind it. They had diverged early, with Frank more and more at school and his brother working at the shop, making up bundles and delivering packages, flirting with the girls that came in and taking them out every weekend while Frank was in his dorm, marking time with equations and homework instead of bra straps and soda pop. Then the war had come, or they had come to it, the sea between no longer enough to keep their country out, and Frank had been sent to science on the southern mesas and his twin had been sent overseas, tall in his uniform and neither of them knowing he’d never come back.

  When the telegram came, the one that told Frank that he had been cut off forever, that he would never come together again, he had been patted on the back and comforted. There had been friends around, other scientists who had their own families and too much imagination and they had bought him drinks and the girls had come and hugged him as they’d always hugged his brother, because he was a twin alone now and that made it extra-sad, apparently. Frank had carried on, had borne up wonderfully, they said, but all the pats and drinks and hugs couldn’t make up for what the telegram didn’t say.

  It never told him how his brother died. A bullet, a grenade… did he suffer, was it quick? Was anyone with him, and did that even make a difference when the only one who should have been with him was home safe and learning to ski in his off hours, exploring the old pueblo, horse riding? Horse riding, for God’s sake, while somewhere his brother’s heart was stopping, while his guts were spilling out, while he was drowning in his own blood.

  Frank dreamed all these deaths, one after the other, and in each
new end his brother was further away, the space of trench between them lengthening out until Frank couldn’t reach him, until he could barely see his face, the face that shaved in that beaten little mirror and even running couldn’t keep up.

  In the last dream, the dream that woke him, his brother had been ripped apart by an explosion, his legs torn free from his body and when Frank tried to go to him he realised that it was his own legs, dressed in a uniform like his brother’s. His legs were blown off, blown far – tens of metres away and receding fast and there was nothing below his hips but separation.

  He woke screaming.

  Bletchley Park

  When Helen finished her shift and returned to her room to change, V. was waiting for her at the door. Not inside, for inside was too much for them now, too close, and that closeness had become so stifling that they’d changed shifts, worked opposite hours so not to see each other, so not to be forced into touch.

  “You need to see this,” said V. She waited while Helen slipped out of her uniform, looked away as she donned another dress – and that was another measure of the distance between them, for they had never bothered to look away before. What good would it do, when all they would ever see was themselves? There was no need for privacy when you shared a body, shared a face, but V. looked away and her hands were behind her back, an image of parade rest in a world where long lines and organisation still held meaning.

  “I’m ready,” said Helen, and if she didn’t comment on V.’s stance or gaze it was because she fell into a distance of her own, a half-step behind until the corridor was passed and they were disgorged into open air, into the lawns around Bletchley, the manor gardens less smooth now than they had ever been with the house full of people, the temporary tacked-up buildings around. Less smooth, and smaller – but smaller was no longer something to comment on. Smaller was all around, the slow contraction of life under war, of rationing and lack and loss. It was boundaries of claustrophobia and silence a lawn all covered-over in footprints, because the space between treads was lacking.