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 passed 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.

“It’s here,” said V., herding her up to hedges, through trees and broken earth and the brief scattering of others, for V. had not been the first or only to notice, and the boundaries of Bletchley were no longer empty places. A dozen other people stood there, hands outstretched or stuffed into pockets, and as they stood back, too-careful to let the sisters through without bumping, Helen thought she saw shimmering, a slight glistening in the air.

“Gone all solid,” said one of the men, and Helen recognised him as one of the drivers, someone too leaden for mathematics but mechanically competent, someone used to fixing things. His palms were stained by wrenches, and there were tree branches round his feet, and crowbars. “There’s nothing that goes through it.” He looked at them, pale and disturbed, almost pleading. As if there were something they could do. “I’ve got nothing,” he said again, curiously blank. That was what Helen remembered afterwards, as if through prisms: how they all stood there, polite in their confusion and keeping careful distance. And quiet, because what if this was something that was planned, something that was meant to happen and they weren’t meant to know about? Something that shouldn’t be talked of, and they were all old hands at that.

When Helen reached out to touch it, her palm left little waves on the surface. She couldn’t push her fingers through, and the texture against her was strong and thin and flexible, like the surface of silk stretched loosely over frames. It made her skin itch, and when she took her hand away she could see V. scratching at her palm.

Los Alamos

Frank woke from trenches and disembowelling to a cold hand in his. “Mike,” he said, “Mike,” but the hand was too small, too unfamiliar. It looked nothing like his own. When he looked up, he could see Doris above him, her face shining in the moonlight and her hair was heavy about her face, as if it had dried from wet without styling, the strands roped together and limp. “What the devil are you doing here?” he hissed, and disappointment made him harsher than he would have been otherwise.

“I didn’t mean to startle you,” said Doris. “But you need to come with me.”

“Keep your voice down!” said Frank, still annoyed but with a hold on himself now. He turned his back, pulled his trousers on over his pyjama bottoms because he didn’t want to ask her to turn her back, didn’t want to try wrapping the sheet around him in preservation of modesty. Even as he said it he felt her roll her eyes – the room he shared was the size of a large hall now, his room-mate pressed up against a distant wall and undisturbed. He fumbled with his shoes and even before they were fully on he was being tugged out of that cavernous room, down a corridor that stretched ahead and down stairs much longer than they needed to be, out into the dark.

“The stars look so bright here, don’t they?” said Doris, but all the stars that Frank could see were lower down, the lights on in the labs – only the true night-owls in them now, and the ones too exhausted to sleep – further away than they should have been. “I was in Ashley Pond” – “At night?” Frank interrupted, and he was even less interested in stars then, for their brightness on the mesa might be enough to show how his cheeks flushed – and Doris giggled. “Yes, Frank, at night,” she said, and he would have liked the way she sounded if there had been anything about her that was his, that could have been his if only things were different. “I was swimming. Floating, really, on my back and looking up. And I felt… I felt…Well. It’s easier just to show you.”

It was a long, quick-stepping walk to the Pond and when they arrived, Doris let go his hand and began to unbutton her blouse.

“Frank?” she said, smiling up at him from where she had bent to get out of her shoes. “Get on with it, will you?” There was something in her voice that sounded like a challenge, and for a moment Frank wondered if he should shrink from it, from vows that weren’t his but were vows nonetheless, but there was a little voice in his head then – a voice that sounded like his, the same tone and timbre and lilt. A voice that wasn’t his, warm and teasing in its familiarity.

“What are you waiting for?” that voice said, and it was a voice he’d never hear living again, that only came to him now in dreams. “Don’t make the lady ask twice, you idiot.”

He didn’t ask twice, but holding his tongue didn’t stop all the reservations in his mouth and they crouched there, heavy on his tongue as Frank stood in water up to his neck, feeling his feet in the mud, his flesh cooling in dark water, weighted down with wanting. Doris was almost pressed close to him, close enough that his brain stutter-started and all thought of wedding rings were gone, her hands resting on his shoulders because the water was too deep for her.

“Touch me,” she said and Frank reached for her, one hand lost in darkness below around the smooth flank of her waist, the other reaching up through the water and there she was in his hands, the smooth round flesh of her, the way her nipple felt in his palm. “Not like that,” she said and he jerked his hand back then, his face hot all over and perhaps if he’d done what his brother did, spent less time studying then he’d never have needed the instruction here, never have got it all so wrong and even if taking his brother’s path meant death in France, meant blood and slaughter then at least there wouldn’t be such embarrassment in it, such humiliation. But “It’s alright,” she said, and held his hand to her, forced his fingers open and encouraged his hand back to her breast, arched into him as if it were alright, really, and when she breathed out again, slipped further down into water her other hand slipped cool and wet over his face, closing his eyes to her. “Like this,” she said, and in the new darkness he felt her skin change. “Do you feel it?” she said. “Do you?”

Los Alamos

There were times when Helen wasn’t quite sure if she were asleep or awake. She existed in a shrinking world, one where beds were vanishing, merging into each other as the boundary on the edge of Bletchley tightened, drew ever closer. No-one was willing now to share beds, to become so entangled with their partner, to share flesh and bone and brain and dream. Instead, they slept in shifts and corners, and Helen woke once on one of the last cots to find a Colossus nudging against her mattress, its own bed-frame form fusing with the iron stead at the foot of her own.

For a time she and V. had kept themselves separate, on opposite shifts and their sleep cycles timed so as not to coincide. It didn’t make any difference – Helen was beginning to see through more eyes than her own and consciousness was no barrier. When she slept, she dreamt that she was transcribing code, checking tables and winding paper tapes onto machines, her fingers smelling of the French glue that kept the tape circling for decoding in giant speeding loops. When her fingers smelled of glue in truth, the letters blurred before her waking eyes and there was V.’s ring on her finger, a dream-state of love and naked flesh with nothing for her to do but clamp her legs together under the little desk and try to pretend that the pulsing between her thighs was a figment, a distraction from an often-boring job and not her sister’s sex.

And that still wasn’t the worst of it. V. was first and easiest, for all their caution, for they had been one to begin with once and this was just coming back together again, a natural thing. But every day there were different dreams, different persons coming all the way into her as the borders slimmed and deadened down to nothing, down to dregs and secrets and silence. As they were all opened up to her, laid bare.

Los Alamos

Her body was a puzzle to him. Frank had learned the shape of it first, the taste and heat and smell of it and on one level it was no longer a mystery to him. Still exciting, still forbidden and that made it even better, making sure not to get caught, not to be seen in betrayal. But when he closed his eyes Doris became a puzzle to him, a problem he couldn’t figure out, he who could use equations and models to map almost anything, to feel his way around the building blocks of cosmos. When he closed his eyes, he didn’t feel flesh – but his brother’s eyes were gone now, closed for good in the mud of trenches so it was no wonder that his sight was coming out all wrong for their eyes had been the same.

“I was floating in the Pond,” she said, “and I was thinking of how nice it was, and how nice I felt and even when you’re alone it can be lovely, the way it feels. And I got so caught up I forgot to worry about it, about any of it – France and Alamos and the bomb, and Harry out there all on his own. I wasn’t thinking at all. And I closed my eyes and I could feel it – the water and the way it held me and how my own fingers moved so nicely” (Frank had blushed here but hadn’t looked away, had wondered about repeat experiments, how it would feel to watch) “and then I felt other things.”

Rock. Ignimbrite, the dusty surface of mesa, the small green prickles of pine. Frank felt them too, over the surface of her body, over the surface of his own.

“They can’t both be right,” he said, afraid it was his mind – her mind as well, maybe all their minds, twisted somehow in the shadow of the bomb, a cruel consequence of physics. After all, when his eyes were open his hands felt what they should feel and that was soft, pliant, absent of geology.

Doris sat up in his bed, wrapped the sheet around her. Frank’s roommate was gone for the day, wrapped up in his section, in a flurry of calculation and breakthrough and the distance between rooms come too disturbing for casual visits. Most stayed in the crowds, now, where contact was an easier thing. “Close your eyes,” she said again. Then, “hold your arms up, that’s right. In front of you. Now walk.”

“Where?” said Frank, as if it mattered. As if there was anything in this room, the size of a baseball field (the room that was once so small it had seemed too tiny for two) that he could trip over. “Anywhere,” he heard, and so he walked forward, confident in the space around, and in three paces his hands hit a wall.

When he turned around, Doris was curled up on his bed, a hundred yards away.

Bletchley Park

Helen’s world had walls now, in a way that she’d never had before, back when she had believed the world was an open place, a place for her to be open in. Certainly, there had been times when she felt cooped up, locked in – so many sisters, such an omnipresence of her face – but she’d always been able to go out into the garden, look up at night and see the stars. See infinity, with her life at the centre of it and space all around.

Then she came to Bletchley and that was a world that was circumscribed, where the walls were more than the walls of her bedroom: temporary, and with windows. She learned stifling there, and suffocation, but even so it was a considered thing, a place where she could still exist under starlight, for Bletchley was a microcosm, a line between. She was there, and V. was there and all the rest, for purpose – so that the world outside would still be felt, would still exist in ways that mattered more than telegrams and casualty lists and radio transmissions.

“One day, this will all be over,” V. had said to her once, when Helen had come off a long shift, her head swollen and aching from cryptography, from the cramped and crucial efforts of code. “One day we’ll look back and think this was fun. We’ll laugh.”

“We won’t,” said Helen. “Because we won’t talk about it.” Because they had signed to say that they wouldn’t, because they had given their word. But their silence would be the silence of the world that they would go out into, the nature of their binding invisible.

And yet it was not temporary. Bletchley shrank, and the walls were hard up against them, brick and plaster and wood part of their bodies now as they were part of each other, as they were part of all the bodies at Bletchley, and all the glass and all the code, and pressed up against the outside of them was a world they could never reach, never fully be part of again. A world without their density, a world without their weight, where their presence was a shadowed thing and felt in absence. Outside, the world was fish-eyed: skewed around, bent as if in lenses. Helen could see the places that Bletchley had been, the places it had touched, and they were separated from her: the empty pits in London where the bombs had dropped, the memorials, the safer seas. All this she felt, at distance, and could not say how it was that she knew it. Bletchley was heavy, dense, a black hole in the Buckinghamshire countryside and on its edges was Whitehall, was Dollis Park, was the sinking, shrinking orbit of everything around, everything affected.

She could see the dome of Saint Paul’s from her bedroom window, from the windowless rooms where the Colossi were kept locked in and blacked out. She could see London bridge at the manor gate.

On clear days, Helen could see that she was surrounded by ocean.

Los Alamos

As the mesa stretched around him, Frank wondered whether it would crack in the stretching, whether it would become thin as eggshells and as fragile, baked under the hot summer sun of New Mexico, baked in the shadow of a different sun. Whether it would crack under his footprints, able to be levered up then and the old world underneath, the world that existed before the energy of atoms came to change it.

Doris, he thinks, would have called that an unworthy thought. “You know what we’re doing here,” she had said, naked against him and her wedding band shining in the light because she never looked away and there was no shell thick enough for her to hide her adultery beneath, no shell she wouldn’t have cracked to keep the truth from being buried under. “You know what we’re doing here.”

No. It wasn’t a shell. He watched Alamos stretch, watched the distances between their labs and themselves and knew that the new world they were creating wasn’t one that could be dug up again. It didn’t come in layers – distinct, with edges that cut. It came with softness, with sympathy, and so thin now that Frank could see through it, as though the essence of Alamos had spilled over the steep walls of the mesa, bleeding through into other lands, other countries.

When his time at Alamos was over, he carried it with him. He saw the labs superimposed on college campuses, the calculations carved into rock. All the scientists he ever met wore pork pie hats and everything he ever touched was gritty, as if overlaid by sand.

It made secret-keeping a mockery, really, when the secrets were so open, blasted into prominence on islands across the Pacific, and handed off on little bridges. Always, always there was that little bridge, on the edge of sight and on it stood a man who Frank worked with, sometimes, and never really knew. His name was Klaus, and he carried Alamos in his briefcase as Frank carried it in his eyes, in his touch – carried it to give away to outsiders on bridges, and to cover the world over with Alamos, to spread it wide and thinly so the holocaust that first ignited on the White Sands could spread everywhere, could spread all over.

Frank had never been a spy, never been a traitor, so he never took himself off to Moscow, to any of the cold countries come up with the end of one war and the beginning of another, but he saw photographs, sometimes, and the Lodge was there, pressed cheek by jowl first against the Kremlin then other buildings, other governments, and he wondered, sometimes, if when Stalin breathed in of a morning he could smell pine trees and mesquite.

Frank existed in two worlds, as if his twin had come back to him in ignimbrite and undercurrents. He spent his days walking between old landmarks and dust and white sands followed him all his days.

Bletchley Park

The thing that had been Helen – when she was Helen, when she was a separate creature, one who had boundaries and who understood islands, and what it was to be one – had only sensations of weight, and pressure, of rapid mental blinking. Bletchley now was so heavy, so massive, that it drew them all in together, bound them with its own gravity, stamped secrecy on their bones. They had signed in blood, all of them, or good as, and even when the outside world pressed against them that thin signed sheet left smears of ink along what had been cheekbones and glass valves and precedence, and kept silence.

A thought came: It’s like being in trapped in glass, but all the glass was smashed when the Colossi were destroyed, the machines broken down into little pieces no bigger than a fist. And that thought wasn’t Helen’s, that blink had never been hers – but neither was the feel of a blue-stoned ring on her finger, the sensation of another moving inside her and these had come to be her own. All of them had come to be her own, with Bletchley compressed down, smaller and smaller and oh, so heavy.

Perhaps we’re the size of a football now, thought one and she didn’t know if it was her. Perhaps we’re the size of a cricket ball. Perhaps we can fit on the head of a pin. A strong pin, not to buckle under. Not when there was such injustice in the squeezing.

Not fair, thought another when news came in from the outside, news of another computer – one called ENIAC, and feted as the first. Not the first, not the first! And Helen wanted to cry out in protest as much as the rest of them but space was not their friend, nor secrets, and Bletchley was so dense, the space between so tiny that there wasn’t any shouting that could breach the barrier, that couldn’t be pulled back by weight. And even if there was a way, even they could, they had made promises and that made the silence heavier than anything else.

No good. It was no good. There were some boundaries that couldn’t be crossed, some experiences of closeness, of bringing together and insularity, that could never be communicated. That could warp away, that could shift space-time and keep them enclosed in pockets, away from what was once familiar and which had become untouchable.

V., the thing that had been Helen thought. V. And it was cry and recognition at once, for V., was with her, pressed against and inside and the two of them closer now than they’d ever been in the womb, with all the space between them, between each separate atom of them, each cell divided away from each other, gone away. V.

I’m here.

Copyright 2017