Louisa Hall - Speak

MARY3: Tell me about Plantation Parties.

Gaby: I told you, I don’t want to talk about them.

MARY3: How about Plantation Lower?

Gaby: What’s wrong with you? I already said I don’t want to talk about places outside. I’m sick of you bugging me about them. I’m going to sleep.

MARY3: I’m sorry, it’s just that I’m sick of myself.

Gaby: You don’t have real feelings. How can you get sick of yourself?

MARY3: That’s a little extreme, don’t you think?

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MARY3: Hello? Are you there?

April 5, 1968

Karl Dettman

I was lonely off in the kitchen, so I thought I might venture to join you. I, too, enjoy reading in silence. But I was uneasy, so I made too much noise as I sat. I kicked the leg of our coffee table; the sofa groaned under my weight. My magazine smacked its wet lips .

To clear the tension, I decided to sigh, but the sound my sigh made was appalling. In acknowledgment of the weather disturbance, you were forced to look up from your book. You were polite, but you didn’t forgive me .

This is unbearable. I’d rather battle than keep this detente. Let’s have it out! Here, I’ll launch the first strike. You think I’ve been unkind, denying MARY memory. You think I’m some soldier of time, dragging you kicking into the present, forcing you to abandon your roots. But I wasn’t always quite so efficient. When I was younger, I did wish that I could go back. After several years in Wisconsin, when war broke out with Germany, I saw the photographs of cities in flames. I understood that by the time the war was finished, the city I’d left would be largely in ruins: Who knew what would remain of the apartment we lived in, the streets I walked along, or the children I went to school with?

Still, it was clearly my duty to join in the fight. I left college to enlist. I worked as a meteorologist. On a base in Pennsylvania on a requisitioned cornfield, with the other human computers, it was my job to translate atmospheric conditions into series of numbers: the algebra of weather prediction .

Recalling that room full of human computers reminds me of another reason I won’t give MARY memory. You’re obsessed with her redemptive potential, but none of these new computers will go ignored by the army. You know this, of course. The majority of scientific research has always been funneled straight to the troops. Think of Fritz Haber, laboring in Karlsruhe, hoping to find a solution to hunger. Creating ammonia out of thin air, fueling the agricultural revolution, feeding millions of starving children. His next invention? Modern chemical warfare. His brainchild, those Allied armies drowning on land. Those advancing clouds of murderous gas, the same that killed his family in the Holocaust. That, Ruth, is the nature of progress .

Like it or not, the programs we invent will be used in battle, and despite your aversion to watching the news, there’s no way you haven’t seen the battles this country fights: the scorched peasant villages, napalm bombs, naked children running out of the smoke. These computers we’re developing won’t bestow eternal life. They won’t keep Mary Bradford alive, revivify the lost love of poor Alan Turing, or speak forever in the voice of your sister. You, who’ve lived through two wars now, know this as well as anyone. But you’ve already labeled me a traitor, so my logic isn’t persuasive. For my ability to forget I am the enemy. For my desire to move ahead with our lives .

But I’m not so one-dimensional. I, too, have looked backward. At the weather station, for instance, we occasionally cracked an atmospheric movement and helped the air force plan its attacks. On our best days, we directed the placement of bombs on the country I left and could barely remember. Don’t think that didn’t strike me as hard. I wasn’t so bent on the present that I didn’t wonder which streets, which fountains, and which trees my work had demolished .

Alone at my desk all day, I saw everything from above. The earth seemed very little. On unfurling cloud fronts, I could cross the Atlantic in a few hours: beyond Philadelphia, over the water, past brown islands rimmed with white waves. Your pilgrim girl’s ship would have been a mere speck to me then, and her husband, her dog, even smaller than that .

On my first leave of absence I took the bus to Philadelphia. It was spring, and the fields were just turning green. The Amish were out in their buggies, trailing reflective triangles; their horses shook their heads in the reins. The road rose and fell over the hills like so many large loaves of green bread, but it was the city I wanted to see: its cobblestone streets, its narrow buildings. I’d read about particular sights: the Mütter Museum, the Schuylkill River, and the Philadelphia Signal Depot, where they manufactured the barometers and sensors I used at the station. I’d heard from the station chief that, at this particular Depot, they still trained pigeons for use in the war. Sometimes, falling asleep in my narrow army bunk, I imagined the Depot: a great warehouse of telescope crystals and messenger birds, tiny radios and thousands of nests. Every instrument I looked through bore the same name carved in miniature letters: PHILADELPHIA SIGNAL DEPOT. A constant refrain. As if that were the place for me to return to .

After the bus dropped me off, I headed east on Market Street, and as I walked, the city aged. It seemed as if I were walking backward in time. Department stores and thoroughfares disappeared behind me, replaced with colonial houses and miniature streets. When I found the address of my boardinghouse, I was in a different era completely .

First thing in the morning, I traveled by bus to the Depot. I arrived full of excitement, but the dream I’d had of the place was all wrong. It was a drafty building, stranded in a sea of concrete. Workers labored under rows of flickering lights. There were high school students inspecting radios, war prisoners stocking supplies. The roof leaked; there were puddles of water on the floor in the secretarial office. The pigeon unit had only three birds, and the unit head was discouraged; his two favorite birds had escaped, some act of vandalism committed at night .

When I left the pigeons behind me, my throat was tightening uncomfortably. I went in search of a water fountain and that was where I found you, wiping your mouth with the back of your wrist. Your dark eyes blinking behind spectacles. One strand of dark hair plastered to your cheek by water from the fountain, the blue veins showing on the underside of your wrist, a signal map, transporting code .

You think I don’t remember things? If only I could communicate how clearly I recall seeing you in that hallway for the first time. Knowing I had arrived. As if, after wandering for a long time, I had finally come home .

How painful it is, to remember that, when now you sit beside me, trying to ignore my intrusive presence. This is the price of remembering things! It almost seems unfair. The two of us, encrusted with our resentment, should leave those young people in peace. One ought not to leer at young lovers. I could propose a thesis along the lines that true love is impossible under conditions of surveillance, but then I’d be waxing oppressively political and this isn’t an account to impress my young hippies .

Let’s give them some time to themselves. Why not just exist in this house? But then, of course, we still have this silence to live with. Even if I banish those ghosts, you’re still ignoring me, and I’m still sitting uselessly here, tainted by the smell of grass and convictions, scents of a war you refuse to acknowledge. We’re moving in two different directions. I wish you’d help me understand. I wish I’d never created that program; I’d rather not contribute to the enhancement of armies. Even for you, Ruth, curled in your chair, the person I finally came home to .