Megan started, after swallowing a mouthful of breakfast. “I’ve been Q’ing Hadntz, but she doesn’t respond. She never has; it’s all one-way.”
Brian said, “I’ve come across several photos of the original incarnations of the Device.” He shared them on Q. “The first one is just kind of a metallic-looking blob, but Dad writes:
Power sent through solution made via Hadntz’s plan. After several hours, hear faint music. Radio? Can’t be. Some jellylike substance forming in solution. A spark, pure oxygen present, explosion, during which mind ranged through intense musical revelations, seemingly embedded but now forgotten. Brilliance, a sense of altered time, a sense of other paths, other avenues of probabilities. Wink reports same in that instant.
Following small fire provoked search of premises, resulting material passed through several hands and made to disappear by Company Magician Kocab. Returned later for bottle of Scotch from Mountbatten’s private stock, though says a few beers would have been sufficient to work his magic of remanifestation. Hidden in good place, along with precious cavity magnetron magnanimously provided via unknown source.
Surprise trip to Bletchley Park, via limo (Wink disappointed, no booze on board), for low-key questioning about radar event observed during time of fire. Shown plans of a Device, but different from one we built with Hadntz’s additional microfilm from London. Disavow any knowledge. Saw little of place but looks like great place to work. Wink and I mum.
“Skip to six months later,” Brian continued.
Caravan of three hundred command cars en route through frigid France. Avoid St. Lo, not worth rooting out Germans holed up there. Stop for the night, actually find abandoned house! Even lumber for fire! Heaven! Out of blue a woman arrives: Major Elegante. I remember her, quiet in corner, on December 8, 1941, while questioned about the disappearance of Hadntz after Pearl Harbor. She has provender: wine, cheese, bread! Trade stories about Fifty-second Street. Next
A.M.
, abrupt change of demeanor: Pulls rank, orders Wink to drive her Deisenberg, she interrogates me about visit with Hadntz, to underground missile factory where Hadntz found daughter, and V-2 assembly plant at Nordhausen. Wants details of interiors, etcetera. Has order allowing Wink to hear. Records with steno. Finds plans and Device in duffle, drives off, leaving us with command car in snowy field. Nearby ghastly swollen bodies of men, and cows, back of head or arm poking out from snow, remaining carnage of Battle of the Bulge.
Brian flipped pages.
“Next mention of the Device is about a month later. He and Wink are setting up a lab in an abandoned warehouse in Gladbach. A German engineer, Perler, shows them a Device, German-made, and says that he has surmised they are trying to make one from what they have been saving as they salvage equipment from Dusseldorf to fix the German telephone system in Gladbach:
Perler says plans came from blond woman with Berlin accent who said there needs to be a network of Devices for it to work. Wants to trade for sarin gas to kill Hitler; claims Hitler is in Berlin bunker. We cannot procure sarin nor anthrax, but keep his Device. After seeing Bergen-Belsen, begin work on new incarnation. Calls for organic material this time, something to do with H’s DNA speculations. We add blood from ceremonially nicked fingers: Wink’s idea. Add power to solution. Light, heat, no explosion: visions, like a new brain, feel rearranged, changed, after several hours, which pass like seconds. Left with clear, oblong object. Perler breaks in, steals back his Device. Major Elegante shows up in
Biergarten,
has orders for me to drive her to Berlin. Weird scene, Russians everywhere, at big jazz show Elegante buys HD plans from some Russian, has me photograph them. Afterward, I take her to Ravensbrück to look for her cousin. No luck. Eventually end up at some manor house, some high command guy she knows, she has to leave suddenly, leaves me book of Chinese poetry. And, not coincidentally, I think, the Russian plans. Miss her.
* * *
“So there,” said Megan.
“Yeah,” said Brian. “They collaborated on that Device for years. There’s more important stuff, though”:
We leave Mönchengladbach having repaired Olympic pool from 1936, damaged by bombs. En route, Wink and I taken from caravan, put on a plane, eventually shipped to Tinian, on observation plane behind
Enola Gay
. Both of us sickened: just a stunt, killing innocent Japanese. However, Device changes during atomic explosion: I see time as a foam, infinite worlds of consciousness, as I hold Device to window (we surmise we are there via Hadntz’s manipulations; she added a note in own handwriting to “bring it with you.” On return over Asia, Wink and I surmise that proximity to subatomic particles released during bomb detonation changed Device—but how?
On return to States, we exchange addresses, phone numbers, promise to meet on Easter next, I keep Device, store in parents’ attic. Men in black visit my Cleveland apartment, question me, leave. They know I have something. What, or where, though, they do not know.
Brian said, “Then later, while we lived in Hawaii, he apparently met Wink on Midway. Wink gave him a new incarnation of the Device from another time line. He decides to distribute the Device across the Pacific. It is apparently malleable, and grows.”
“So then,” said Jill, “we moved to Germany, and then here, and they hid the ‘malleable Device.’”
“The HD-10,” Brian interrupted.
“In the attic. Where we found it, it bonded with our kiddy minds, and turned into this super-attractive Game Board, which changed our brains. Maybe it made me into more of an activist than I would have been.”
“Perhaps,” said Megan. “But I doubt it.”
“She talks about altruism a lot in her papers,” Brian said.
“Right,” said Megan. “And when we talked in Cuba, that was exactly her slant. Maybe her increasingly refined versions of the Device enhance whatever helps humans enlarge their vision of who, exactly, is in their ‘in-group,’ people they would help without question, would sacrifice for. And enhances whatever causes us to be empathic. I’m also thinking about the latest studies about the power of screen violence. There is no pain. Depending on how the movie or whatever is engineered, we cheer when the enemy dies, no matter how gruesomely—they usually did something very clearly evil, and need to be punished; revenge is satisfying. Proven: Seeing violence on-screen or participating in it in a game actually does make children more prone to commit real violence. Contrast that with how soldiers who have actually gone through battle feel. They are, essentially, proxies of some government, conditioned by patriotism to defend their country ‘right or wrong,’ fighting proxies in the same situation. But no matter how they feel about the enemy going into it, and no matter how good they feel about their victories, about having survived, about having eliminated those who are a threat to them, about forming a bond with their ‘brothers,’ traumatic stress, and inability or unwillingness to talk about their experiences, which sometimes become completely submerged, often results. In fact,” she said, looking at Jill, “I think that’s what happened to you.”
Jill sat back in her chair, as waves of revelation washed through her. The therapist’s mouthed words had meant nothing until now. Suppression, yes. Unwillingness to talk. Almost as if she had committed some vast genocide, destroyed a world. And now, with Daniel’s revelation, and the other things that were happening, yes, relief felt like a weight had been lifted from her chest, she could breathe, she could—
The air she breathed in so deeply came out in a sob, and she lost control, continuing to cry, but she tried to smile as tears welled, as her brother and sister once again leaned over her chair and embraced her, held her as she shook with great, racking breaths that emerged not as words, but just as sounds, as she gradually calmed, washed by vast, deep healing.
By now, the tissue box was almost depleted. She blew her nose, said, “Coffee, anyone?”
She was surprised when she saw it was only ten thirty. It seemed to her that great ages had passed.
When Jill left the library, Cindy looked up from a book she was reading in the living room, across the foyer, and smiled. Bitsy lay next to her on the couch, asleep. Zoe was upstairs, playing something gorgeous.
In the kitchen, Jill washed her face and saw that Cindy had brewed a new pot of coffee. Jim was outside, playing with Abbie and Whens in the new sandbox that Brian’s crew had knocked together in an hour. Jim turned to look at her, smiled, and waved.
At least,
thought Jill, piling bagels, cream cheese, the pot of coffee, and cream and sugar onto a tray,
some things in this world are going well
.
She’d only been gone five minutes, but Brian and Megan had moved on to Topic B: What to Do Now.
“I’m not sure what Hadntz expects us to do with the HD-50,” Megan was saying. “I’ve talked to a lot of prominent people, people I even know, who went through trials with it, and hear nothing but good things. I’ve started taking it. I feel … I don’t know, energized, I guess. Able to look at things differently. And in terms of retrieving memory—I think it’s helped us realize what happened.”
Jill took her seat, with a fresh cup of coffee. “Insofar as the HD-10 was supposed to grow and spread its influence wherever it went, I’d say that just being in this house has a definite influence. But one problem with Hadntz’s ideas are that she seems to just want to … inflict these things on people in general, rather than giving them a choice.”
“Dad said something about that somewhere. Ah, notebook number seven.” He flipped through the pages he’d flagged with stickies. “They’re on the drive from Nordhausen when he asks her about this.”
One of the first times I’ve seen her angry, almost out of control, fierce. She compares war to disease: smallpox, polio, the bubonic plague. So I too begin to wonder: Why not treat war like a disease? If it can be cured through some inoculation, through some agent with no ancillary harm, it does seem a good thing. While various agencies and organizations decry war, they are an impotent minority when the war drums begin to beat. I do not want revenge for Keenan’s death, and I don’t believe he would either. He was there as a soldier, and as I and a few others know, our own nation failed to protect him. The radar report from Opana Point of approaching planes was dismissed. No, I just want him alive again, alive to live out his promise, to raise his children. Killing others will not bring him back, nor will it prevent future wars. We should know by now that horrific weapons, like gas, machine guns, and explosives, do not deter nations from going to war. They are just new ways to inflict damage on the enemy. After seeing these slave labor camps, I am indeed willing to help Hadntz in her mission in any way that I can.
Perhaps that was her reason for taking me.
“The question,” said Jill, “is whether increased intelligence, awareness, whatever you want to call it, actually does decrease violence.”
“I think it’s a moving target,” said Megan. “But coupled with enhancement of empathy—I mean, I remember crying and crying when I was little and watching Shirley Temple play Heidi, when she was taken away from the Alms-Uncle and made to live in Frankfurt. The plight of others, even imaginary others, really moved me. I wanted to keep every child in the world from that pain.”
Brian said, “That has to be coupled with a real ability to do something. Which we may have. But I don’t know how we actually go about presenting this choice to people. Haven’t a clue.”
“We have our own strengths,” said Jill. “I think that the Montessori pods are a great start.”
“Well, if music helps, I’m getting better by the hour,” said Brian.
“Thank God,” murmured Megan. “That frac stuff gave me a headache.”
“Oh, this is pure jazz. Dad jazz. The kind that seems to have synergistically helped his insights into how to make the Device and what it could do. We have another problem to consider, though. A more immediate one. That group of people that Megan overheard during the party think that Q is hidden in the house. And they’re right. But what are their goals?”
“The Clarissa person seemed to hate all of Jill’s plans for Africa, the schools,” Megan said. “I got the distinct impression that they want to use it for their own ends.”
“That may simply be impossible,” said Jill. “Unlike the atomic bomb, this changes human brains. Human behavior. Maybe if we just give it to them—contrive to make them think it has fallen into their hands, or something,
they
will be changed by it.” She grinned. “Clarissa could definitely use some Q-work. She’s been trying to throw up roadblocks against the school project since I started it, years ago.”
“Our way right, your way wrong,” said Brian.
Jill replied, “I just believe that access to education is a human right, for everyone, men and women. You know, Grandma Elegante’s dad took her out of school when she was in eighth grade. Her mother died, and she had to take over the housework. She was bitter about that till she died.”
Brian nodded. “Great-grandpa Dance’s father told him at that age to quit school or move out. He moved to town and shoveled coal for the city’s steam plant so he could get his high school diploma.”
“Grandma was a girl,” said Megan. “She didn’t have that option. It’s much worse than that in a lot of the countries today. Girls just aren’t allowed to go to school, period.”
“So—to get back to the break-in,” said Brian. “I surmise that Dad left important notations in those books about the Device. But how did the thief know which ones to take?”
“Some of them were nosing through the books during the party,” Megan reminded them.
“Right,” said Brian. “Brings us back to the same question. Whodunit, what are they doing with it, what can we do about it?”