It was well past midnight. Justine was still tipsy, and she was groggy with sleep. In a few hours, she would need to put on a clean pair of coveralls and smooth her carefully curled hair into a utilitarian ponytail. It would be hard to weld safely when her mind and body were so shaken, but she would find a way. She would also find a way to keep the promise she’d made to herself to transcribe the pattern embedded in the grid of the strange screen before she went to bed. Once she’d put it on paper, she could carry it with her, using scraps of time on the bus and during her breaks to work on it.
The scene at The TickTock had left her so jittery that she startled at each nighttime noise filtering through her bedroom window as she prepared to transcribe the screen’s pattern. She moved around as quietly as she could to avoid waking the women asleep in The Julia’s warren of rooms. She only needed three things—a pencil, the finest-gridded graph paper she owned, and the screen itself. No, she needed a fourth thing. Her pencil was dull, so she needed a knife to sharpen it.
Holding the pencil over her wastebasket, Justine methodically opened her pocketknife and scraped its edge over the pencil’s tip, fashioning wood and graphite into a point sharp enough to fit within the finely spaced squares of her graph paper. Then she put the knife in the usual pocket of the next day’s coveralls and she took the piece of screen from its hiding place behind the books on her top shelf. She laid the screen on her bedspread, where the acid-green cloth would show clearly which squares had been stretched out of shape. Setting her dining table next to the bed and smoothing her graph paper across its surface, she began the task of copying the pattern that someone had poked into the screen.
It wasn’t hard work, but it required focus, and her night at The TickTock hadn’t left her much. Using her left index finger to count squares, she laboriously transferred the pattern to the graph paper.
When her work was done, Justine surveyed the array of dots that she’d copied. She felt in her bones that this was an encrypted message. It had to be.
Why would someone use this method to communicate with someone else at the Michaud plant? Why not just talk to each other? The answer could only be that the two parties couldn’t find a way to be face-to-face or that they didn’t want to be seen together.
And why wouldn’t they simply communicate by a note written in English? The only reasonable answer to that question was that it was imperative that nobody else be able to read the message if it were found.
Well, then, why couldn’t they write on paper like normal people, using a code to keep their message secret? The use of the screen instead of an ordinary piece of paper signaled how critical it was that no one ever knew the message even existed at all.
It had taken her several pieces of graph paper to transcribe every square of the screen. She suspected that the real message was punched into a small area at the center of the screen, and it was surrounded by a frame of nonsense holes, but she’d copied it all, just to be sure.
She forced herself to stay awake a little longer, using scarce cellophane tape to join the pages. By butting the pages edge-to-edge and covering each seam with tape, she was able to fold the finished sheet on those seams, forming a stack the size of a single page. Sighing, because she really didn’t want to crease the sheets, she folded the stack two more times to make a packet that could be buttoned into the front left pocket of her coveralls.
It was comforting to secure her work firmly within the canvas of a pocket sealed shut with a wooden button. Her work was done, and she finally could go to bed.
Justine slipped off her dress, its silk discolored by perspiration and drops of spilled alcohol. She hung it on a hook until she could get it to the dry cleaners, then she opened her jewelry box and tucked the green rosette and sash inside. Her loose cotton nightgown felt wonderful after so many hours strapped into a longline bra and a girdle, all of it overlaid with beautiful but bulky slips and a dress with a snug-fitting bodice. Her cool, smooth sheets felt just as good. If only cool, smooth sheets could quiet her mind enough to let her sleep.
Moonlight streamed through her open window, illuminating her neatly folded coveralls, and the sight bothered her. For some reason she couldn’t have expressed, she wanted the packet of papers in her coverall pocket to be safer, more secure. She got up, grabbed the coveralls, and stood wavering in the middle of the room. After a moment, she folded the coveralls into a firm, tight rectangle of cotton twill that she slid between her mattress and the wall, completely out of sight.
A sudden wind ruffled her curtains. Footsteps pattered down the sidewalk below her. Justine shut the window and, at last, she fully gave in to her fears. The act of hiding both versions of the screen’s code—the transcription behind her mattress and the screen itself behind her books—released something inside her. She finally felt her utter fatigue, and she finally felt enough comfort to sleep.
It wasn’t restful sleep. Her dreams were full of men with angry faces who knew where she lived. They wanted something from her, and she didn’t want to give it to them. Their voices were loud in her head, echoing and distorted. Threading through each disorienting dream-scene was another voice. It was calm and soothing as it repeated a single sentence.
The sound of Charles’s voice pervaded her sleep as he told her over and over how glad he was that she spoke German.