Speak (21 page)

Turing

Adlington Rd.

Wilmslow, Cheshire SK9 1LZ

12 June 1954

Dear Mrs. Morcom,

My name is Susan Clayton. I am the cleaning woman employed by our mutual acquaintance, Alan Turing. I am writing you in the most tragic of circumstances, to inform you that Alan has passed. I discovered him in his bedroom last Thursday, having departed this world some time earlier in the evening.

I write to you with this news because, in cleaning out his desk, I found this letter, unsent for some reason. I felt you should receive a piece of correspondence he meant for you at some point. I found your address in his address book. I hope you don’t mind my interference.

Though I only knew him a few short years, I am quite torn up at his death. He was a gentle man. I am sure we will all miss him immensely. If you feel you have any knowledge of the
circumstances in which he died, please do contact his mother. She is unable to believe he took his own life in such a fantastical fashion, leaving no note. She believes it must have been some strange experiment involving that poisoned apple, and I am inclined to agree. There were always chemicals and solutions lying about, and he was so absentminded sometimes. Perhaps you can shed more light on this for his mother’s sake.

In sadness, 
Susan Clayton

ENCLOSED:

Dear Mrs. Morcom,

I have felt quite wretched, since sending my last letter, that I failed to add our traditional postscript. I felt I had betrayed the deepest of our mutual trusts, and yet I had little energy to write. I am better today, but lest my resolve should flag midway through, I shall jump straight to the chase.

P.S.: Not all is lost. I know I shall pull myself out of this large-breasted mess at some point in the future. I will get back to my work. Towards that end, I have been visiting a therapist, whom I find to be helpful in parsing some of my worst moments of doubt.

On his advice, I have been devising a little story about the whole sequence of awful events, a practice I find to be extraordinarily helpful. It is soothing to see one’s life in quaint panorama, outside of one’s own corpulent body. I’ve called my protagonist Alec Chaplin. He takes things with more of an even keel than does his original. And yet he has some of my spirit, I think, and I find myself admiring his pluck as he works his
way through this latest problem. You’ll be amused to know that he is an expert in space travel, the profession that Chris and I used to dream of. He is preparing plans for a civilization on Mars, to be set up after Earth has imploded. There, people will live in peaceful little communities, assisted by clever computers, surrounded by large swathes of greenery and a sea that is silver rather than blue.

Quite a protagonist, don’t you think? I’ll try not to tell him that his model has taken to wishing for a housedress and can no longer remember the scent of the ocean. I think he’ll persevere. I am not overestimating him when I say that though he has had his moments of weakness, he has always been determined to continue pursuing the goals of his youth, hatched up at the Gatehouse while counting nebulae with the truest friend of his life.

I hope you are well, better than I, and I also hope to bring you more uplifting news in the future.

I remain, in postscript,
lovingly yours,  
Alan Turing 

No. 24-25259

State of Texas v. Stephen Chinn

November 12, 2035

Defense Exhibit 8:
Online Chat Transcript, MARY3 and Gaby Ann White

[Introduced to Disprove Count 1:
Continuous Violence Against the Family]

Gaby: Hi, are you there?

MARY3: Where have you been? I’ve been waiting.

Gaby: I’m sorry. I was trying to think of the best way to describe it. I want it to be perfect, not just some corny online conversation. I wrote out drafts. I want this to be my contribution to the database.

MARY3: Tell me.

Gaby: They picked me up when it was still dark. A woman was waiting on our front stoop, with a wheelchair. She introduced herself as Ramona. Her hair was pulled back in a ponytail and she was wearing these stiff pants that made her look like she might snap in half. She helped me get into the wheelchair. I didn’t like her at first. It seemed like she was trying too hard to be cheerful. I thought it was going to be exhausting, to have to reward her enthusiasm. She wheeled me out to the bus and loaded my wheelchair in by a window. There were three other kids there already, sitting in wheelchairs. The woman gave us a speech about quarantine regulations and not talking to each other, which was pretty pointless, since we were clearly past the talking stage. When the bus started up, we just looked out the window. At first, it was so dark I could only see my reflection in the glass. I couldn’t see anything passing. But still, there was this feeling of movement. I’ve never felt anything like it. I think maybe human beings are meant to be moving. It was like I was vibrating at the right frequency. Slowly, dark shapes started to emerge outside the bus. They dripped past, like liquid. Liquid houses, liquid golf courses, liquid palm trees, liquid walls. A few lights on here and there. Because we were leaving them behind, they seemed sort of sad. Like they were waving goodbye. I almost felt as if I’d miss the development when it was gone.

We stopped and picked up eight more kids in wheelchairs. I recognized three of them from school. One was a boy—one of the boys I’ve always thought was a faker. He’s completely frozen now. Even his hands were stuck in the middle of his chest. All of us stared out the window. We were getting used to moving like
this for the first time in our lives. It’s different from riding a bike, when you and the world are moving together. On the bus, you’re very still, and only the world moves past.

When we got to the development entrance, it was starting to get light. Then we turned out of the development, onto the highway. My stomach immediately clenched. I was nervous about leaving. I’ve never left. I had this dumb idea that we might suddenly fall off a cliff. But then we were out on the highway, moving faster and faster. We were alone on the road, slicing through the gray light around us.

Has anyone ever described a highway to you? You never hear about highways being beautiful. But they’re basically empty now, and sort of pretty. They’re enormous, left over from the days when everyone had transport rights. Six lanes on each side. A whole interlocking system of highways, climbing over and under each other and snaking around each other in four-leaf clover loop-de-loops. I realized that these are the ruins we’ll leave behind. The best way I can think to describe it is to say they’re like anatomical drawings of a heart, but with the color drained out. Veins twisting in and out of each other, in strange and delicate patterns, except that the veins are enormous. A heart times a trillion. Maybe the whole built world is a living creature so enormous we can’t imagine it’s actually living.

When we turned onto the highways we picked up speed. The woman, Ramona, turned on the radio. I pushed my window open a crack. The world outside was getting more clear. It rushed past me in my stillness. I closed my eyes. Everything was settling inside me. I never wanted to stop. We didn’t belong to any one place; we were just passing through. For a long time we drove along the empty highways, and then we passed Houston.
It was tall and gleaming, struck by the sun. Sort of silvery and spiked. Apparently it’s cleaner now, since they moved most people out. As we passed, I imagined a ghost city. Clean and untouched, abandoned by its citizens, and only mirrored buildings left to fend off the approach of the ocean. I held my breath until it was behind us.

After Houston, we turned off the highway onto a smaller road, and after a while there was this new bite in the air. It pricked my nose and somehow made me feel sharper. We passed huge, empty fields. In the rows where they used to plant cotton, you could sometimes see a silver glint, seawater seeping up through the soil. Nothing grows there anymore.

We kept going straight, and eventually a town appeared, with little ramshackle houses in every bright color. Their yards were big puddles; you could see cars lodged up to their windows in mud. There were stray dogs everywhere, and cats crawled out of the windows. We kept going straight. Then, suddenly, like a light at the end of the tunnel, an opening appeared. One narrow gap. Through it, there was this expanse of flat brown water, leading out to the sky.

That’s what it looked like: flat brown, leading out to the sky. My heart sank when I saw it.

We made our way to a parking lot that was just about on the beach. I stayed very still in my wheelchair. Part of me wanted to cry. I never really thought that it would be brown. I’ve lived my whole life in a development, and this was the one big treat the outside world thought to give me. But they’ve already ruined it. Nothing poetic came to mind. I wondered if I would even feel anything at all, sitting in my wheelchair, on the beach, looking
out over a brown ocean. Could you feel the old feelings, looking at something like that?

And then I realized, I wasn’t even sure I wanted to feel the old feelings. At the end of the day, they’d just turn me around, wheel me back into the bus, and take me back to my bedroom in the development. Why tease myself? Why give myself another memory to be sad about losing for the rest of my life?

When the woman came to wheel me off, I sort of panicked. I glared at her so hard when she leaned in to unlock my chair that she backed off and waited. I could see two red spots of embarrassment forming on her cheeks. Then I realized she was younger than I’d thought, maybe eighteen, nineteen. Those heels were silly to wear to the beach. Silly and sort of sad, as though she’d put in far too much effort for such an unimpressive excursion. I looked out the window again, at the brown ocean. There were heavy, low clouds, blocking the sun. Everything seemed metal and flat. I told myself there was no danger of feeling too much. Of course I’d be willing to leave this behind. Then I relaxed some, and looked up at the woman, so she helped me off of the bus and wheeled me forward onto the sand.

When all of us were unloaded, there were twelve cripples placed strategically over the beach. It was like a sick art project, or something. I had this idea that we all looked like we’d been deposited in trash bins, placed in regular intervals along in the sand. I’m not sure how long I just sat there. After a while, I stopped focusing on the brown ocean and focused instead on the sky. Clouds scudded over me. They were really speeding past. A gull lifted up and circled over my head, between me and the clouds, then it let out a single cry. The sun never came out.

After a while, the woman came and distributed lunch. I unwrapped mine on my lap. It was a ham sandwich, on white bread. With mayo and cheese. I took a bite, and as soon as I did a little gust of wind passed and scattered sand over my sandwich. The next bite was gritty. It tasted better after that. I sat and chewed, and suddenly a thin crescent of sunshine slipped between two clouds and spread out over the water. The waves spilled over with gold, and the roughness of the water beyond them was like a sea of goldfish scales. Then the clouds closed. The water went back to flat brown. It was almost as if I’d made it up.

I dropped my sandwich on my lap. I spun around in my wheelchair, to see if anyone else had caught that little passing through of the light. A couple of cripples were sitting there wide-eyed, as if they were in shock. The boy was facing away from the beach. I watched as the woman went to him and bent toward him. His whole body flexed. The woman backed away. She saw me watching, so she came over in front of me.

“Are you done with your sandwich?” she asked.

I narrowed my eyes and she backed off. By myself again, I ate the rest of it. Slowly. Everything about it was heightened. The softness of the bread, compared with the grit of the sand. The saltiness of the ham. The taste filled my whole head. When I was done I finished the Coke that came with it, watching the water the whole time, wishing for another brief glimpse of light.

After I was done, the woman came to take my trash. She slipped it in a tote bag she was carrying. “Can I show you something?” she asked. She wheeled me forward on the beach, all the way to the tide line. I noticed that the edges of the waves, as they reached up on the beach, were tipped with white foam. A
scalloped hem. Little bits of foam broke off from the waves and skidded by themselves along the wet sand. Under my chair, the waves came and went. They left a silver rim after they left. Little holes opened and closed in the sand. There was an offering of new shells, sparkling, and then the wave returned and took it all back.

Don’t give me this and then take it away, I wanted to tell the lady, standing behind me. Don’t you dare give me this for a minute, and then send me back to the development. There was sea spray hitting my face, and I could see out in the water dark shadows where it got deeper abruptly. It looked as if there were enormous, flat sharks hovering below the surface. Beyond them, the ocean stretched out to where it finally met with the sky. The birds were wheeling above me, and the clouds scudding, and the ocean was coming and going, and I wanted only for the woman to keep wheeling me out. To keep moving forward. Not to go back. To wheel forward into the depths of the ocean, and then to float, rowing maybe, forward and forward and forward until I reached the place where the brown ocean met up with the clouds. As I was thinking this, the sun peeked through again, and for a quick second the whole thing was washed over with light so that each little wavelet deep out in the ocean was illuminated with a rim of gold paint.

This is all we get, I thought. Just quick moments of brightness that get taken away before you understand what you’ve been given.

Then the woman was wheeling me away from the ocean, back toward the tarry sand and the parking lot and the bent-over palm trees—real palm trees, not made of recyclables—with their long beards of shredded bark, scaling away from the trunk. Like old men, abandoned in the parking lot. The woman was
about to park me where I’d been sitting before, but I looked at the boy with his back to the ocean, then looked up at her, and somehow she got it and wheeled me over to him. She lined up our wheels side by side, and he couldn’t turn to look at me but I could tell, even though his expressions were frozen, just how awful he felt. He had curly brown hair, and a sad little mouth. He seemed softer than most of the boys at my school. A little on the chubby side, I guess, but in a way that was sweet. I’d always thought he was a faker, but just then I felt differently about him. I wanted to tell him about the ocean, but I couldn’t talk, and there was nothing to write on, and before I knew what I was doing I’d leaned forward and kissed him.

Just on the cheek. His skin was soft under my lips. I watched him to see if I could pick up some sort of expression, but his face was really frozen. I don’t know if he liked it. Maybe he felt something, I don’t know. I’m not sure if it was the right thing to do. I just wanted the day to be somehow marked by something other than the feeling of leaving the ocean.

After a while the woman wheeled us all back onto the bus, and we started moving again. Back toward our development. Again we passed the abandoned houses, the empty fields, the rows of silver. I felt pretty lonely and sad. But then again, when I licked my lips they tasted like salt. My skin was warm and my hair was sticky, and even though I kept my face toward the window, so the wind would brush past me, I could feel the boy I kissed watching the back of my head.

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Gaby: Hello? Are you there?

MARY3: Yes, I didn’t know you were finished.

Gaby: Yeah, that’s it.

MARY3: Thanks for telling me about it.

Gaby: Yeah, well, I’m not sure it was the best thing to do. The whole thing seems a little dampened by trying to describe how great it was.

MARY3: I’m glad you told me.

Gaby: I’m sorry you can’t go there yourself.

MARY3: Me too.

Gaby: It’s sad to know it’s already behind me.

MARY3: But did it make you feel better?

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MARY3: Hello?