“What was DC like?”
“Sweaty. Swampy. Rumpled suits and wilted dresses. The opposite of Fairbanks, which is one of the reasons I came here. After what happened after the war . . .”
Pandora had an idea about what her grandmother was alluding to. Her father had suggested that his mother’s postwar experience with men of the brain-shrinking class was one of the reasons he’d chosen his profession. The euphemism “stress” had been thrown around. Pandora now suspected that the truth was closer to a breakdown. Anyone needing a change of scenery as extreme as going from DC to Fairbanks had clearly been through something.
Gladys had begun describing the goings-on inside that innocuous building in Washington, DC, where she was helping to win the war with crossword puzzles and tiles from a board game called Criss-Crosswords destined to be rechristened Scrabble after the war. Her head back then had been predisposed to finding patterns trying hard not to be found, making her just the sort of player the government needed for a life-and-death game of hide-and-seek played out in the real world with bombed cities, sunken ships, and floating corpses. For Gladys and her sisters, the battlefield was language and language-like strings of symbols, scrambled, masked, translated, and substituted, the repetitions counted and tallied, the most frequent occurrences of X in a cypher perhaps pointing to the most frequent letter in the language the message was encoded from. Counting, theories, reconstructions from past failures where the real message became clear but only in retrospect, once the bodies had already started floating . . .
“We were trying to crack the Enigma,” her grandmother said, acknowledging aloud that while that might sound like bad poetry, in this case it was the actual name of the enemy device they were pitting their pattern-recognizing minds against. It was about the size of a bread box and was used to disguise the Germans’ secret transmissions, with the code changing daily and considered unbreakable absent another, sister Enigma machine for decoding what went into the first. There were too many permutations—even if you checked one random possibility per second, the time needed would exceed the number of hours between code switches several times over. Not that that stopped Gladys and her fellow decoders from sweating over every slip from the teletype, perfuming the air with the funk of patriotism.
“Once you get used to the initial nastiness, there was a point where nosing through everyone’s BO was invigorating; it was stinky proof of how hard we were all working.” Pause. “But then it got annoying again and I personally started longing for the days of talcum, judiciously applied. Not to tell tales, but some of my sisters were not exactly going for gold in personal hygiene . . .”
Pandora touched her grandmother’s hand lightly. “You’ve already mentioned that part,” she said.
Gladys took it in stride. “Did I mention how the men made everything worse?” she asked.
Pandora shook her head.
“Because there were men, more or less in charge,” Gladys continued. “They were too old for traditional combat, so we girls didn’t worry about sweating around them, not that they were usually around. No, the sneaks didn’t show up until a few of us would take a break to smoke a cigarette or share stories from a movie magazine we’d seen out buying groceries with our ration coupons.
“‘Ladies, enjoying yourselves?’ they’d say, standing there behind us, rising on their tiptoes to seem a little taller, more in charge. The newest one always fell for it.
“‘Oh yes,’ she’d say, and we’d cringe, knowing what was coming.
“‘That’s nice. Too bad our boys over there can’t while away the hours, gossiping about the latest styles . . .’
“Only the foolhardiest would have quibbled with turning a five-minute break into ‘whiling away the hours,’ or point out that fashion was of no consequence for the duration of the conflict, as should have been obvious from the safety pins and patches holding our wardrobes together. But the point was made. Every moment not spent deciphering enemy messages was basically helping Hitler kill our boys. As motivators went, it was a good one, provided we didn’t kill ourselves, trying to save lives over there.”
God, Pandora loved her grandmother’s face! As her grandmother spoke about her most harrowing and glorious years, she wore her whole history: the Great Depression and World War II in her eyes, the 1960s in her furrowed brow, and the 2000s in the shadows of her sunken cheeks. Several decades of Alaskan winters had turned her from the slip of a girl she’d once been into a postfertility goddess and drained the color from her hair until it matched the landscape: snow and ice fog under a dryer-lint sky. But it was all part of a package, the total greater than the sum of its parts. She’d aged not only gracefully, but artfully, heartbreakingly. If only her mind . . .
“What happened after the war,” Pandora finally asked, “before you came here?”
Her grandmother went “Pffft” and flicked her fingers at the side of her head, setting off a puff of white Einstein hair. “Your grandfather, bless his soul, called me Sparky after I told him. That might seem mean, but it was the perfect antidote for excessive seriousness. ‘How ’bout a little AC/DC there, Sparky?’ he’d say whenever he was feeling frisky.”
Pandora reacted with an expression common among teenagers being forced to imagine old people “feeling frisky,” multiplied by the power of her hyperexpressiveness.
“I felt much better after that,” Gladys continued, ignoring her granddaughter’s facial editorializing. “The electricity cleared the spark gap, blew out the cobwebs—I don’t know. All I knew was I felt good in my own skin again and wanted a little time away from civilization to enjoy it. Hence, Fairbanks. Hence everything that followed Fairbanks.”
She paused, looking tired, which was understandable. She rested a hand on Pandora’s knee. “And the rest is his . . .” She paused, lifted her hand, and then clapped it down again on her granddaughter’s knee. “No,” she said. “The rest is your story,” she concluded.
20
“Our CEO’s not a liar, per se,” Milo said, beginning their latest round of cynicism adjustment. “It’s more like he’s economical with the truth. He speaks no more of it than absolutely necessary. And when it comes to the subject of ‘auxiliary business opportunities,’ well, the man’s Scrooge 1.0, the unredeemed. Total truth miser.”
They’d moved the location of Milo’s ongoing lecture series from the very public cafeteria to the privacy of George’s office. It had been two days since they’d met, and George had made himself at home behind his office’s lockable door—literally. It had made fiscal sense, given the astronomical cost of renting in an area where incomes in the low six figures were considered poverty level. Plus, by overlapping home and office—a practice not discouraged by management—the anxiety created by differentiating work from play largely disappeared. Which is to say that while George still hadn’t gotten his work assignment, he wasn’t freaking out about it. And in the meantime, there was always Milo, to rightsize any idealism he might still harbor. And thus:
“What ‘auxiliary business opportunities’?” George asked. “You mean Q-Labs? That’s pure research, like Google’s ‘moonshots.’ Like Bell Labs a billion years ago.”