“Now, John, no bitterness. We’ve been through this.”
Mother opens an old grimoire beside a glistening retort. She murmurs to herself, “Mummy dust, henbane, cloves… sugar? Lemons? Where do they think we are? I’ll have to improvise.” And then looks up: “Alec, we did ask June what she was doing at the Admiralty and she said it was just statistical. Primarily routine.” She stops. “And… secondarily? Could you enlighten us?”
June hangs her head. There’s nothing we can say. We only know what we do because we work on the same machine in the same hut. The other huts are separate fiefdoms. We’re none of us allowed to speak about our work—we signed the Act—and yet, of course, I have to give details of how we met.
And so I offer up our agreed version of the truth, the true-enough outline—the office girls, a natural camaraderie, trips to the cinema on our days off, a shared interest in Fibonacci numbers (“Really?”), chess.
Mother simpers and purrs. She prefers bridge.
“Good God, woman!” John shouts. “Can you not tell when someone’s patronizing you? Look at him mumbling! The same old rag. We’re being laughed at by the higher-ups. ‘It’s just statistical.’ ‘We both play chess.’ Oh, I know, everything is on the QT, lives are lost through conversation—but it’s not the secrecy and confidentiality I mind. It’s the superiority, as if we couldn’t hope to understand. We’re being watched, Mother. Ordered about, put in our place.”
“I’d no idea,” I say, “you suffered by my hands so much.”
“What would you know about suffering?” The chair jumps forward half an inch. “Last week I pulled a gunner through the hatch of my A9 only to find him missing from the chest upward. He poured on top of me, dear Christ. What do you think happens, Alec, after you make your best guesses and sign your chits for resources? Where does the war go after it has been discussed and plotted on a chart? What happens to the rest of us, the little people, then?”
A sibling in full spate is always frightening, their anger a surprisingly powerful defense, their deeper impotence equally powerful, absurd.
John throws the chair aside and stands revealed, arms wide, red-faced, fatigued, weeping with shame and frustration. His toy-sized uniform clings to a pear-shaped build. He is a dwarf.
It’s not that I don’t know about suffering, but I am bound. What can I do, apart from what I do already, in my own unmentionable realm? Words are forbidden me. That is the real answer, the right one, which I cannot give.
“John, what is it you want—”
“He wants a proof,” June says, raising her hands to calm us down. She’s staring at the damask drape, her brows drawn in. “Don’t you, John Pryor? Need some warranty. Convincing proof.”
He barely nods.
“Imagine, if you can,” he says, “what it is like to do your best, to serve, to wait for leave, and then to wake one day, back home, to find it’s all an act. You’re not even a man.” He stops. A sob comes out as a failed cough. The little man catches his breath. In pauses between frames, his tears fidget and swell.
Mother’s eyes glitter by the hearth.
“You were always the favorite.” John drops his arms, his head. His shoulders slump. “You never had opinions, Alec. You just knew. That’s what you’d say. ‘I always knew the apple in the Bible was both green and red.’” He looks at me. “But can you tell me—do you know what’s going to happen, whether we will win?”
I play for time. “In general, one can never know…” But John is having none of it. He asks me if I think they’ll come, if I’ve received warning, and I say, “No. But invasion can’t be ruled out. The truth is that it’s probable.”
Mother inhales the bad news like an idiot’s insult.
“If that is so, dear Alec, dearest June,” she says, smiling, “and we are, in your routine and statistical opinion, doomed, then perhaps—on your day of troth—you can explain what all of this is for? The struggle and the upheaval?” She bends over the fire to stir her pot, picks up a flask. “‘Dig up the garden, give away your clothes, your furniture and food, your creature comforts, all your raw materials.’” She gestures at our surroundings. “Hardly a day goes by without some new note of instruction in the post! Why bother, if we’ve lost the war?”
“Because it’s still just possible that we will win, and we should all behave as if it were.” My voice is low; it doesn’t echo in the ringing stone-flagged room; its confidence surprises me. “The ‘as if’ is extremely important. The whole of decency depends on it. Of course I can’t give you a proof. The evidence is to the contrary: men are cruel, driven by fear and greed. But it is civilized to suppose otherwise, as if we were fitted for love and loyalty. ‘As if’ is not… complete, but that does not mean it’s untrue.”
“Against all hope you persevere! How romantic!” When Mother laughs, I can’t help noticing, her jaw moves up and down to give the impression of mirth. “And just a little hard for us to take, I think. The high value you’ve always placed on results, logic, form, the underlying certainties, the way things are—so soon displaced?”
“Quite the reverse,” I say. The fire’s cold flames are tassels rising in my mother’s black pupils. Her skeletal physique is ivory in a cave, her cape billows; the glass she holds, the clothes she wears, all saturated with ideal color—the grain of which is, on inspection, rather coarse. “Logic and math are beautiful but they are far from being certainties. I don’t believe there is a realm of truth. And if there is, well, I prefer this one, with all its faults and inconsistencies.” Expressionless, June’s eyes hold me. “And mathematics, it turns out, is one of them. Logic permits no absolute predictability. Some things are true that cannot be proved to be so. There’ll always be statements or questions in a system or a world, like ‘I’m lying,’ or even ‘Who will win the war?’, no one can settle in advance within that system’s rules.”
“Very cunning.”
“Or merely fair.”
“Fairness!” Mother throws back her head and roars. “I wondered when we’d get around to that!” A chill enters the room. “Fairness!” The light behind her skin fades momentarily; the flesh wattles. “Even your grasp of it, dear son, is enfeebled. Fairness is not logic. It has no human property.” She grins. “I know! Try this. Fairness is absolute indifference.” One of her teeth is going gray. “I hardly needed to fix poor Snow White,” she mutters. “Time alone did that for me—revealed the Prince for what he was, a frighteningly limited minstrel.”
“Don’t listen to her, Alec,” June cries, forcefully. “Oh, Mrs. Pryor, try to understand. I love your son for what he is. Don’t be jealous. It’s no one’s fault, I know, but you and John, you’re both—you can’t help it—you’re just a pair of badly drawn cartoons!”
“Impudent girl!” the sorceress shrieks. “John is trivial. Half of a man—a sketch of sibling rivalry. But I—I am the transcendent original! The Lilith of Cartoons!”
The room heaves. Every bottle on the table shakes.
“I am the bold outline, betrothed weakling, whose incomplete spaces resound with Law. I am the single rule, the cellular automaton, the one line on a pane of acetate that moves with repetition, multiplies, and springs to life. Draw me! Draw me again! And every time I’m drawn, you’ll find I grow in deep complexity, until the frame of making splits and I am no mere image but the Great Queen, self-aware symbol of light!”