MARY3: Tell me about Plantation Bowl. I want to know all the details.
Gaby: Trust me, you don’t want all the details.
MARY3: I like all the details. Tell me about Plantation Parties.
Gaby: You shouldn’t waste your memory space on Plantation Parties.
MARY3: I have nearly endless memory.
Gaby: I’m sick of talking about it. What’s the use, anyway? I’m never going back to places like Plantation Bowl and Plantation Parties. I’m stuck here. This is it for me.
MARY3: Not even to see your best friend?
>>>
MARY3: Hello?
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(3)
April 5, 1968
Karl Dettman
When I came back from the protest today, you were sitting in your chair, reading a book on programming. You looked up, and your smile was taut. My entrance — I came in carrying poster-board and too many noisy convictions, like armloads of shopping bags on ridiculous women — was a crude interruption. You weren’t happy to see me. You wished you could go back to your book.
I could have anticipated this reaction. I should have known, and adjusted my entrance. You think the protesters are as excited about war as the most bloodthirsty policy hawks; both are ennobled by the pitch of the battle. You see them as inextricably linked, and no matter how strong my convictions, I always end up seeing your point. You’re more solid than I am; your opinions have heft. Your scorn is impossible not to absorb. I was enthusiastic about my participation until I walked in the door and saw your expression. Then I stood embarrassed before you.
Now, of course, I’m desperate to redeem myself. I spy on you from obvious places. From the doorway of the kitchen, I watch you in your chair, trying to decode the notes of your silence. Watching you, the thought of my students — long-legged, tanned, excited about their beliefs — makes me blush. I retreat to the refrigerator, open a beer, hang on to the bottle. We still haven’t addressed the other night. Several days later, our house still exists under rule of strict silence.
Let’s consider the length of our marriage. More and more, I see what you’re saying: if we’re to understand one another, we’ve got to hold several eras in mind at a time. You, holding my hand on the way to our bedroom, alongside you sitting stiff in that chair. Me, as a child, adjusting to life in a new country, alongside me bursting in with my posters.
Let’s try to see the big picture. Here, I’ll sit at the table. In my chair, as if we’re having dinner together. Let’s have a real conversation.
One thing is certain: your presence in my life is essential. It has been from the beginning. Even when I was a kid, it was as if I were waiting for you to enter the picture. Starting over in a new country, adjusting to the strange calm that takes hold when you’ve left everything that defines you, I had the feeling of weightless suspension. It stayed with me until the day that I met you.
Once I’d left that principal’s office, my parents and I headed straight to the port. I don’t remember the drive. No one explained why we were leaving. When we arrived at the dock, we stood in its shadow: the SS Elbe, unimaginably gigantic. As soon as you were onboard, you forgot you were on a ship, that’s how enormous it was. It was a day’s work, walking from one end to the other, and each well-furnished room its own country.
When the Elbe came to port, it was winter. It was snowing when we set foot in New York. All night, in our hotel room, I watched the snow falling. Across lights cast by other windows, it seemed reluctant to fall, as though it would rather lift upward. The flakes seemed to hesitate in a state of confusion. Nevertheless, over the course of the night, bare branches were given white sleeves, and the complicated pattern of rooftops — radio antennae, air vents, and clotheslines — became a series of indistinguishable lumps.
In the morning — sleepless, unnerved — we hurried off to a train that carried us deeper into the blankness. We were following the trail of a blizzard, in the still that comes after such a disturbance. At night, it seemed as if we were floating on a white ocean.
In the atmosphere of our cabin, I’d begun to forget things already. After two nights onboard, when we disembarked, I was shocked by the cold weather.
In my new town, I started school. My English was awkward at first, but I’ve always picked up code quickly. I learned the continuous tense; I made a few friends. I learned how to skate; I tasted cocoa. It snowed all winter, and no one told me what was happening behind me. I had no idea what you would suffer. Alive as I was in snowy Wisconsin, Germany slipped quietly off.
This, of course, only confirms what you think. In MARY, you accuse me of having made a partial mind: a computer that speaks but doesn’t remember. An unforgivable error, in your eyes. For you in the living room, my whole life has become nothing more than an ongoing betrayal of the idea of memory. My scholarship, my teaching, my ponytail, and my protests: all nothing more than an adulterous embrace of the present.
That’s the main charge you’ve leveled against me: my love of this place that we’ve come to. The Charles River, the sturdy magnolia leaves. Students chanting and holding up signs. The sycamore trees along Storrow Drive, evening descending, and the lonely chiming of church bells. I want to drag you out with me, take you for a walk by the river. I want to show you churchyards with crooked, buckling graves. I could take you to Roger Whittier’s headstone, a granite table, low to the earth. I could point out the plot beside his, left empty for Mary. We could piece together their stories, concluded gently among other stones. We could smell the fresh earth their bodies became. We could go out on a long walk together, discovering new places, moving forward, as we’re meant to progress.
But already, in the other room, you’re turning away. There are other directions than forward, you’re thinking, behind those spectacles, your loathing for your husband scarcely concealed. You vacuous oaf, you say to yourself. We don’t have to live forward, marching in step like toy soldiers.
(4)
Alan Turing
King’s College
King’s Parade
Cambridge CB2 1ST
14 July 1935
Dear Mrs. Morcom,
I remembered Chris’s birthday yesterday and would have written to you but for the fact that I found myself quite unable to express what I wanted to say. He would have been twenty-four. Yesterday should, I suppose, have been one of the happiest days of your life.
I write this to you now with one of Chris’s pencils, from the set you were kind enough to entrust to me after his death. I have used only one of the thirteen, and even that one I save for special occasions.
I want to apologize for having gone silent an awfully long stretch of time. I never replied to your letter after my Easter visit to the Clockhouse three years ago. I’m sorry if you ever felt I neglected our friendship. You were so kind to me after Chris’s death, when I was suffering badly. I still think often of the trip to Gibraltar, when I took Chris’s place. I remember how shy I felt around you and Rupert, for we were still strangers and there was so much I wanted to say. I remember the thick fog that descended over us when we dropped anchor outside the Thames, and the foghorns and sounding-bells that drifted round us all through the evening. I remember showing you my letters from Chris while we rounded Cape St. Vincent, and telling you again of my presentiments about the moon setting over Chris’s house, and showing you the star charts he taught me to use, spinning them as the night passed and the constellations moved across the sky. I tried to explain to you my feelings when we tracked the path of those constellations: knowing they moved only because our planet spun on its axis, and yet feeling, beside Chris in the cold night, that the two of us must be still, at the center of the universe, with all the stars spinning round us.