She shook her head. So I read out loud, in my clear little voice: “The book cipher 122129 with this key sentence gives you the clear text HELP.”
I looked proudly at my mother—until I saw her twisted grimace. Then she shut her eyes and put her hands over her ears. Scrunched up the paper. Started to rock back and forth.
That was the moment when I realized that she was sliding into her own world, far beyond my reach or that of others. That key sentence, concocted at random, also became my own dark mantra. I love you just as senselessly as my pretty weird and hellish father, for the time being and onward into eternity, Amen.
For nights on end I rattled off the words as I tried not to fall asleep, since the dreams were worse than reality. Used the sentence as a key in my own restless search for hidden signs. I applied it to everything, from car license plates and telephone numbers to stock market figures and sports results: even though the clear text hardly ever produced a single comprehensible word.
My mother had been in an institution ever since, so I was convinced that I alone could possibly know our key sentence. Until the day when the packages started to arrive.
The first brown envelope was lying in the mailbox outside my office on December 22, 2001, just before the Christmas break. It was a month after I had joined the Team, a few weeks after our return from Afghanistan: what I had pretended both at home and to my colleagues to be a guest lecture tour in the Mid West followed by a fictional week’s backcountry skiing to explain away my cuts and bruises.
At the very top it said “MERRY CHRISTMAS!” in green ink. Then my name and workplace, in the same anonymous capital letters.
ASSISTANT PROFESSOR ERASMUS LEVINE
SCHOOL OF PHILOSOPHY
THE CATHOLIC UNIVERSITY OF AMERICA
WASHINGTON D.C.
The envelope bore neither stamps nor a zip code, somebody must have delivered it by hand. Which might have meant that it came from one of my colleagues, though envelopes like that could be left at the ground-floor reception. Security at the university, even after 9/11, was not impressive.
I followed the routines with care before opening the envelope. Felt it with my fingertips for irregularities, smelled it for any trace of chemicals.
Inside were a dozen articles cut out of newspapers and magazines. They all dealt with the fact that the nuclear disarmament talks between ourselves and Russia were on the point of collapse, an historic moment at which the media was more taken up by global terrorism, the Muslim threat, in fact. I had read all these articles and columns. Their common theme was that we in the U.S. were on the point of unilaterally withdrawing from the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which had been one of the cornerstones in the balance of terror since 1972. This was a development that would lead to a dramatic worsening in the climate for nuclear weapons negotiations.
The clippings had underscores in green ink, in some cases of long passages, sometimes the odd sentence in which a few words had also been circled. At first sight they conveyed no clear meaning. Presumably there was more to them than met the eye.
Having without success tried the most obvious methods—from assembling the underscored words into functioning sentences, to combining the first letters of the words in different ways, or the last ones, those with an even number, those with an odd number, following the Fibonacci sequence, every imaginable series of numbers, forward and backward—I finally had a go at different variations of dates. A classic yet long-forgotten means of teasing out a hidden message.
I started with the day’s date: December 22, 2001. Shuffled the twelfth, twenty-second and first circled words in every possible way—but without the smallest sense coming from it. Then I took the next most obvious date. My birthday was February 14, 1963. So I put together the second, fourteenth and sixty-third circled words in different combinations.
Suddenly the sequence of words “against the world” appeared. And if instead I wrote out the year of my birth, 1963, in full, taking it as indicating the first, ninth, sixth and third circled words—There it was: “WE TWO AGAINST THE WORLD”. Against, not on the side of.
That preposition could have been the difference between a lunatic and a pacifist. Yet all I did was pile the articles up in my broad marble window bay, on top of one of the piles which was spilling out in all directions. In that way, whoever had left me the articles would be able to see through the window and know that I had read them. A small signal that I had engaged with them. That I was willing to join in, test the boundaries, until things started to go too far or get out of hand.
The cleaners seemed not much interested in the papers, perhaps because they did not stand out from the rest of the piles. My office was one entire analog mess.
What had started out as a number of unsorted heaps had over time come to resemble a rolling tide of paper with no beginning and no end, no visible boundary between insignificant and meaningful, dog-eared newspapers and books filled with underscores in red ink or neon-green highlights, classic volumes of scientific history treated any which way, reports from inspections of nuclear weapons bases, dissertations in the field of natural sciences of which I did not at first understand one iota, D.V.D.s and old broken V.H.S. cartridges, drafts of some earlier ideas of mine—some significant, some less so—incomplete lines of reasoning, papers which had got stuck in the printer and just been laid in the mess by a colleague, cutaway diagrams of submarine designs, designations of different missiles, cassette tapes of interviews with researchers which I had never got around to listening to, table after table listing the efficacy of thermonuclear weapons, unsorted minutes of disarmament talks going back more than sixty years, ever since the invention of nuclear weapons, strident pamphlets, counter-arguments.
The entire shapeless research project which I called “The long chain reaction” staggered on, under and across my own desk.
Which is why the envelopes could keep coming, once a month or more often, with none of those around me seeming to notice or care. Jammed together with everything else in the mailbox—with my persistent ordering of new research material I took advantage of my curiously unlimited budget—the evidence could then lie in the window bay for all the world to see.
And so it went on for a decade, while my doubts about everything that I was doing in my military guise increased. When the articles arrived—even though I had often already read them—these feelings grew. The absurdity of the nuclear weapons system became ever clearer to me. The rhetoric was being peeled away, the arguments crushed.
From 2010 on, the articles also began to confirm what the Team, the inner circle, had known for years. For example, a Russian military analyst expressed the view that the risk of nuclear conflict had not been so great since the height of the Cold War thirty years earlier. But, he argued, the global disarmament mechanism had no time to deal with the issue.
An American peace researcher pointed out that the top-level meetings about nuclear safety which were still taking place were chiefly dealing with political instability in the smaller nuclear nations, and the risk of the spread to other states like Iran and North Korea. But nothing at all about the arsenals of the two nations who dominated the scene—Russia and us, the United States.
As one famous peace researcher put it in an article which arrived in my office in March 2011: “The world’s most powerful leaders have now met three times in the last eight years to discuss 17 per cent of the global stock of nuclear weapons. The remaining 83 per cent have not been discussed at all.”
In the same way that the articles were a theme with variations, the cipher system also changed each time, while adhering to the same core principles. Each time the key to decryption required the arrangement of a number of words which had been circled in accordance with a certain system. Each time the message in clear was “We two against the world”.