Skirting Lake Michigan beneath Chicago, Interstate 90 makes a Gilbrethian kink, veering eastwards to pass laterally through Gary, from whose junctionery Interstate 65 resumes the southbound line to Lafayette. Floating on an elevated section past the miles of ruined factories and boarded houses, Dean starts murmuring, in tune with the rental engine’s hum-key, half-remembered snatches of a song from an old film she watched one rainy Sunday afternoon back in an era, more remote than childhood itself, of fixed-schedule programming: chirpy, folksy lines rhyming Indiana with Louisiana, Rome with home, syncopation with hesitation – or was it explanation? … By Remington she’s pieced together the pre-chorus and refrain:
There is just one place that can light my face:
Gary, Indiana, Gary Indiana …
– but no more. The lyrics stick with her right down to West Lafayette; and, as she rides the lift up to the fourth floor of the Hilton, takes a bath, falls straight asleep and then, inevitably, wakes at 4 a.m. to watch predawn grey seeping through cheap lacquered drapes, they’re still there, echoing within the rhythms of the hotel’s heating system, void spaces and interstices of her jet-lag: syncopation, hesitation, ana, ana, home …
Dorley has sent her out here, to consult the Gilbreth archive, with a view to ascertaining … what, exactly? Her remit’s vague: to dig around the holdings, see whether the idiosyncratic modelling technique devised by an industrial time-and-motion pioneer a century ago might be construed to constitute, its iterations to lay out, a set of ‘first citations’ – might be construed to do this to the extent that these could form a legal basis for … for something. On whose behalf is she conducting this enquiry? Client A … via Peacock … although her first, and indeed only, point of contact, the post she reports to, mothership, control, is D&G, on to whose server she’s to upload daily all her research files, the paragraphs and pages of her interim report …
Her remit is so vague, in fact, as to preclude, in terms of methodology, the rigour into which a Dip Eng Law, a clerkship and a junior associateship have trained her. In this rigour’s absence, she’s jumped randomly, as off a pier into a lake, into a wide expanse of Gilbrethness. This Gilbrethness washes and laps across her desk, sequence determined by the order in which folders happen to arrive. Here are four things she’s learnt about Lillian Gilbreth in her first three days:
1. That her family spent their summer holidays in Nantucket. Her husband Frank taught their children to sail by marking out a boat-shape on the ground, etching gunwale, bow and stern into dry earth, laying pieces of rope for main- and jib-sheets, moveable poles for boom and tiller, and drilled them in the art of jibing, tacking, heeling and running before the wind until they’d attained an advanced level of seamanship without ever having set foot in an actual boat. The local drugstore, where they’d go for ice cream, was called Coffins.
2. That she had the idea for the cyclegraph technique while hired by Remington (firm not city) to devise methods of increasing typing speed and accuracy: looking at the way the typists’ fingers flexed, extended and contracted, jumping up a row or two before recoiling back to rest above their home-keys – never along a simple up-down vector but (she suspected, and the cyclegraphs confirmed to her) in circuits, buckled loops in which no single position other than the resting one was passed through twice; how entire hands shot up to platen knobs and carriage-release levers then fell back again, in similarly asymmetric and yet fluent, self-enclosing paths … Later, on the back of this, she would be hired to work on more efficient firing of machine guns, which Remington made too. The mechanism, it turns out, is pretty much the same.
3. That she was a lifelong Republican, who even flirted with eugenics – but that, despite these rightward leanings, Lenin so admired her methods that he rolled them out across the Soviet Union, hoping they’d help smooth the way towards state socialism. She met Russian delegations, and American trade unionists. If everyone just worked together, she opined with a flourish lost on almost all her readers, class conflict would melt into air, into thin air.
4. That, as a child, she went to school with Isadora Duncan, Jack London and Gertrude Stein –
– this last fact being divulged, to Dean’s amazement, by a school yearbook: Oakland High, 1891. One of its pages bears a photograph of a prize-giving ceremony: there’s a rickety-looking stage, and a gowned lady handing medals out to children, three girls and a boy. From Left: Gertrude Stein (rhetoric), Lillian Moller (grammar), Isadora Duncan (gymnastics), Jack London (math). The girls are bunched together, in a kind of huddle; the boy, smaller, stands facing them, holding his medal outwards, as though deciding which of them to dedicate it to – less London than Paris, dumbstruck by three goddesses. He looks ill at ease, as though the lines of a short life-script had been pre-stamped on his face: the restless yearning, the stumbling around backwoods, the search for a moment never quite possessed, for some lost eighteenth century … The girls, meanwhile, look confident, as though they know already that, departing this photo, they’ll call into bloom the twentieth.
Here, in File 27, is a letter to her sister Vera, written a few days after Lillian’s wedding:
I’ve exchanged,
she muses,
not only my name but, it seems, a whole mise-en-scène – high-ceilinged rooms with gilt-framed mirrors, stiff black sofas stuffed with horsehair, music boxes and wax flowers under glass domes, our hoch-Deutsch Moller habitus – for this new upstart world. Frank is America.
What does she mean? Frank is an upstart, to be sure: a short and self-made man who had no business courting her; bricklayer who so infuriated his successive bosses with his disquisitions into the efficiency or lack thereof of each hod-carrying style, of every path of trowel to wall and hand to brick and brick to wall, etc., that they kept promoting him just to get rid of him until he found himself devising streamlined operation protocols for entire sites, then companies, and now already, at just twenty-seven, industries. They’re honeymooning in the St Francis, just off Union Square. She recounts to Vera, in some detail, how the bellboy, carrying in the breakfast tray, tripped on the door sill and spilled the tray’s contents:
I retain a picture of it in my head: the tray flying through space, the cups and coffee jug, glasses of orange juice, plates of egg and bacon all gliding away from it, bodies no longer glued into a unit, each following its own trajectory.
Frank’s in the middle of a contract with the New England Butt Company; he decides on the spot to remove sills from all shop floors within his purvey. Lillian continues:
The strange thing is that, every time I call the episode to mind, I see it not in motion but quite still, as though each part were frozen, hanging in the air, above the threshold …
The marriage produces thirteen children, of whom twelve survive. Frank runs the household like a training camp, like a laboratory – a showroom, too – for his cult of time management. He films the children eating, table-laying and -clearing and, on analysing the developed footage, devises more efficient methods for these tasks; methods which, once instituted, he films too. He films their tonsil and appendix operations, extracting new surgical protocol: nurses should act as ‘caddies’, placing requisite woods and putters in the doctors’ hands, ensuring that play runs uninterrupted, tee-box to fairway to green, incision to resection to suture … Various-sized Gilbreth offspring, blinking in magnesium glare, slide out on to Dean’s desk now and again; but mostly it’s pictures from the ‘betterment rooms’ set up by Frank and Lillian in their employers’ factories, or their own Purdue lab, shop floors’ and workstations’ meticulous duplicates. Here, in File 14, are some blown-up film frames showing workers – seamstresses, meat packers, telephone-exchange operators, each wearing a light-ring – performing their tasks against a grid: in some cases an actual gridded backdrop, in others a penetrating screen imprinted on the film through multiple exposure. They’re heavily annotated, snags circled, arrows injecting comments – work rhythm broken here – into the spots, the ‘knots’, that need untangling. A handwritten draft passage is attached by paper clip to one of these:
Each unit divided into subdivisions/cycles of performance. Each cycle then divided into subcycle = micromotion.
The full, typewritten draft, contained in File 31, continues:
Once all micromotions are identified and modelled, methods of least waste can then be synthesised.
The sentence will end up in The Quest for the One Best Way, Lillian’s magnum opus. Frank likes to film his subjects at full speed, a clock-hand racing in the background, measuring off hundredths of a second. But Lillian has understood the paradox that’s central to their entire project: that motion can be mined – interrogated, made to spill its secrets – only when its territory, its dark interior, has been colonised by its inverse, by stasis.
Here’s another scene of arrested motion, in File 7: a photograph showing a roadside picnic. The Gilbreths’ open-top Pierce-Arrow has pulled up in a small clearing by a wood; hampers and rugs and children, like so many micromotions, have been unpacked, laid out across the grass. Lillian describes this picnic, or one like it, in another letter, also to Vera, from File 9: Frank, map-reading, getting them lost, she murmuring behind the steering wheel beneath her breath:
Nel mezzo del cammin di nostra vita
mi ritrovai per una selva oscura
ché la diritta via era smarrita …
Beside the blankets, they find an enormous anthill. Frank presents it to them as a paragon of streamlined labour. Lillian counterbalances his sermon with her own, more nuanced portrait of a highly complex social structure held together, ultimately, not so much by efficiency as by belief – in service to the queen, in colony’s totality; belief that’s wired in, pulsing at an irreducible, base level, neural electricity itself …
Frank, on his own base level, hates waste. He abhors it, an abomination in the eyes of his one god, efficiency. Wasted food, wasted water, wasted energy, money or motions: all these offend him, sting him to the core. Waste is pollution; waste is dirt. A large portion of his time-management rituals turn around cleaning, cleanliness. At home, the bathroom walls are hung with instructions for washing:
Soap in right hand, on left shoulder; run down top of left arm back up bottom of left arm to armpit; down side, down outside of left leg, then up inside of same leg; then ditto in mirror-version for the other side …
If, afterwards, one of the children leaves a tap dripping and the tub fills up again, they’re made to take a second bath, teach them about wasting water … One summer, in Nantucket, they’re all set to work on a research project into the best way to pack tins of detergent. Deliberations about whether or not to buy a family dog turn around calculations of the reduction in garbage-man-motions to be brought about by lowered household food-waste levels. For bodily evacuations they’re allotted a fixed time to purge themselves. Here at this picnic, they’ll be banished, when they need to unload their own waste, in twos, into the woods that loom silver-gelatinous behind them: clearings must be kept clear, unwholesome motions buried down in earth and darkness. Lillian, summarising Frank’s thought, writes that the elimination of waste will result in ‘Happy Minutes’, in time ‘saved’. Saved for what? From what? Might Frank’s real drive, Dean finds herself jotting down in her notes,
not be towards some kind of time so sanitised it’s empty – time devoid of motion, of all content other than itself? – And would this empty, voided time be pure time, or just … void?
The archivist who’s taking care of Dean is one Ms Bernadette Richards, MA, MLIS, CA, Processing and Public Services Officer (Archives and Special Collections). Portly and black, cast in the timeless mould of middle age, she treats Dean like an aunt who hasn’t seen her for a decade: calls her Honey, expresses amazement that she’s high-tailed it all the way over from England!; ushers her each day into the dedicated reading space she’s reserved for her. She serves up to her additional material not held in the Gilbreth files, more general-circulation items. There’s a book, long out of print but a bestseller in its time, written by two of the grown-up children, Frank Jr. and Ernestine; also (as Dean informed the Peacocks) a film. Both are as folksy as the ‘Gary, Indiana’ ditty, full of quirky anecdotes and screwball vignettes – run-ins with exasperated servants; toll-booth attendants, wide-eyed at the sight of twelve kids packed into a car, waving them through gratis … And both play up Frank, presenting him and him alone as source of the whole Gilbreth Weltanschauung, artesian well whence its initiative and dynamism gush. But Dean can see after her first hour in the holdings that it’s Lillian, all Lillian, who upscaled Frank’s narrow ergonomic vision, teased it out across fields and dimensions that he didn’t even know existed. After her first day she can see, too, that it was Lillian, not Frank, who penned the essays and the books for which, sometimes with her, sometimes alone, he’s credited as author. Could Frank have come up with this passage:
Growing to realise the importance of the slightest change from a straight line or smooth curve, the worker comes to think in elementary motions. Tracing and retracing, with our models’ help, these motions – motions refined through changes to chair and work-bench placement, table height and inclination angles, through study of the most efficient workers’ models (other workers running their own hands along the model’s wireframe track, over and over), and through further refinement even of these – all this will bring about a transformation from awkwardness to grace, from hesitation to decision …?
Of course not. A psychology degree’s made Lillian understand that operators have to own the movements they perform. Frank never got this; he’s a Taylorist, thinks that the employee has to be shown – told – what to do. But she can see the value in a machinist knowing, both kinetically and intimately, through repetition, like a lover, every curve and bend and twist of their own action, in aspiring to the perfect line, desiring it. Again, could Frank have written:
The importance of rhythm was recognised in the Assyrian and Babylonian pictorial records, which perpetuate the methods of their best managers. By the same logic of perpetuation must the machinist be trained until his eye can follow paths of motions, judge their length, speed and duration, and thus cultivate an innate timing sense, aided by silent rhythmic counting, that can estimate the times and routes of movement with instinctive accuracy …?
Überhaupt nicht. She’s learnt this through studying poetry: ranges of metre, cadence, rest. Before psychology, her BA was (like Dean’s) Eng Lit; MA dissertation on Bartholomew Fair. Literature’s threaded through the fabric of all her deliberations. When she writes, in The Quest’s first waste-attacking chapter, that true conservation contains thought of neither waste nor niggardliness, she’s got Shakespeare’s mak’st waste in niggarding, from Sonnet One, pulsing, surround-sound, in the background. When designing for workers the relaxation areas she’s identified as vital to output’s beat, she fills them with books – a different selection for each space, but always one that includes a dual-text Divine Comedy (she slots this into all her waiting rooms too, picturing impatient or distracted eyes falling and lingering on Purgatorio IV’s attendi tu iscorta, o pur lo modo usato t’ ha’ ripriso?). She writes her own poems. Here, in File 27, is an elegy to Gantt:
He preached the Gospel of real leadership,
In quiet words, with stress on facts and laws
Showing the goal and pointing out the way,
Nor dreamed his words would found a Fellowship
Of those who held him Leader in a Cause, —
The winning of a new Industrial Day.
It’s rubbish, sure – too corseted, too measured – but that’s not the point. It’s the mechanics of the process she appreciates. Writing’s an operation, just like sewing, cutting steel plates or assembling boxes. Lillian has studied Marey, knows that le père de la chronophotographie’s work began with sphygmographs, pulse-writers, etching blood’s own cadences and meters on smoke-blackened glass; that some of his earliest motion photographs, alongside ones of bayonet points swirling as they traced the outlines of the perfect thrust, recorded cursive hand-styles, carved in air. Killing and writing. Her annotations in the margins of her battered copy (File 20) of le Prof’s Du Mouvement dans les Fonctions de la Vie try out various translations for his neologism chronostylographie: the writing of time … time-writing … time-as-writing … During their first Remington contract, when Frank guinea-pigs the children into testing out his touch-type learning system, covering the keys with a blank sheet to force them to internalise the letters’ layout, he gets them to copy out a passage of Moby-Dick. He’s never read the book – just seized on a Harper & Brothers edition he’s found in their rented holiday lean-to, vaguely aware that it has something to do with Nantucket and the sea. But Lillian has, and spends two days dissecting in her mind the episode on which the tome, by chance, has fallen open in Frank’s hands: the Polynesian harpoonist Queequeg, also transcribing – in his case the tattoo-pattern from his skin over on to his (for now) redundant coffin:
Many spare hours he spent, in carving the lid with all manner of grotesque figures and drawings; and it seemed that hereby he was striving, in his rude way, to copy parts of the twisted tattooing on his body. And this tattooing had been the work of a departed prophet and seer of his island, who, by those hieroglyphic marks, had written out on his body a complete theory of the heavens and the earth, and a mystical treatise on the art of attaining truth; so that Queequeg in his own proper person was a riddle to unfold; a wondrous work in one volume; but whose mysteries not even himself could read, though his own live heart beat against them; and these mysteries were therefore destined in the end to moulder away with the living parchment whereon they were inscribed, and so be unsolved to the last …
Needle, harpoon, pen; white whale, white paper … That summer, concurrently, they’re also working for the Automatic Pencil Company. Frank stages a publicity stunt, filming the children building a casket, filling it with old-school, fixed-lead pencils and, with decorous and solemn faces, burying it in the sand. They all get double scoops as a reward for this one, lining the bar at Coffins, shooting thumb-propelled graphite at each other between licks. The druggist’s name, Lillian learns in conversation with him, has been passed down from carpenter-undertaker forebears. Nantucket wood has a distinctive colouration, its own shade of black. Back in the house, too busy to keep notebooks as she darts from bedroom to pantry, porch to bathroom, she has a Dictaphone installed on every floor; the tape-rolls, emptied daily, are sent down to two stenographers installed in a small room beside the lounge. This prompts a small epiphany about a book that’s long been part of Lillian’s mental landscape: Dracula. ‘There is,’ File 34, a letter to her mother,
so much secretarial work in that novel – all that typing out and duplicating of the other characters’ notes and confessions that Mina busies herself with, even as her vampire-tainted blood turns on her. I always wondered, when you read it to me as a child: How does she find the time?
Now, though (June 1924), she gets it; gets that this is what the story is really about; that all the earth-boxes inside which the Count walls up and ships his territory and domain from Transylvania to London via Whitby, death-lair crates with which he sends himself from half-life to revived un-deadness, serve as doubles, satellites orbiting the real box within whose walls life becomes deadened and revived:
This, Mother, I now see: the true vampire’s casket is Dr John Seward’s Dictaphone.
Three days after this letter’s postmark, Frank, standing in the phone box from which he’s just spoken to her, suffers a massive heart attack. After the funeral, Lillian pens another too-stiff elegy:
Go on, My Dear, I shall not faint or fall,
I cannot know, but I can sense your way.
God speed! You must not swerve or wait for me.
She thinks back to that summer, all its typewriters and secretarial pools, three decades later when she’s hired by Macy’s. Beneath floors stacked full of toasters, stoves, refrigerators (the demand for automated kitchens has exploded, due in no small part to her own work), she installs felt padding round the long pneumatic tubes through which notes shuttle from the ground-floor tills up to the safe room and change clatters in the opposite direction – eight hundred of them, powered by air drums whose vibration was sending a constant roar around the shop floor. Pneuma, breath of God; now muffled. Filming the cashiers at work day after day, week after week, extracting first one then another of them from the line-up to isolate and metal-cast their motion in the on-site betterment room, then tweaking the positions of the tubes, the chairs, the tills, then gazing down, from the store’s mezzanine, over her new configuration, she perceives, once more, a kind of secretariat, expanded twenty-fold: these women rhythmically striking their keys, transcribing some great work, a book taking on shape, right here, before her very eyes. If Borel’s monkeys are destined, eventually, to write Hamlet, what would the character and content of the cashiers’ opus be? Perhaps this one will never have a name, is bound to hover just beyond the edge of legibility, eternally suspended in the act of being composed …
And then there are the boxes. On her fourth day of research, Dean’s led by the kindly Ms Richards down to the stacks from which the files have been brought up to her; and then beyond these, out into a courtyard – a sizeable one, more like a loading bay or depot – inside which sit rows of corrugated-iron containers of the type used on giant cargo ships.
‘This is where we keep oversize holdings,’ the archivist confides with a wink, as though letting her in on a secret. ‘You’ll want Number 7.’
Ms Richards fumbles in the pocket of her skirt, pulls out a plastic fob and holds this to a corresponding plastic-coated patch on Number 7’s door. The patch, or possibly the fob, emits a small beep; the soft, rubberised sound of smart cylinders and latches disengaging follows, and the door pushes back automatically to allow them ingress. There they are, in rows and layers and columns, as in the storeroom of a shoe shop: a supply of little boxes sitting in a big one. They look at once the same as in the pictures Dean saw back in London and completely different. Same because they’re plain back boxes with two sides and the roof cut away and, rising from the floor of each, a thin metal track that crotchets and streaks about the air to loop back round to where it starts, its bows and swerves thrown into relief by grid squares marked across the box’s whole interior. Different because here, amidst dust flakes idling through weak shafts of sunlight, the twisting bars’ implied speed, their kinetic vibrancy, has been both retained and (as it were) stood down, switched into standby mode. They’re flaking too, grown bulbous with oxidising, like old skin. In the physical objects, she can see not just the hooks that anchor the wireframes to the boxes’ floors but also, in the more elaborate or ‘off-balanced’ of these wireframes, thin vertical support armatures tucked away behind them. The painted background squares, so luminescent in the photos’ black and white, seem fainter in the real air’s chromatism; besides which, they’re genuinely faded with time. But as soon as Dean steps forward and scrutinises one and then another from close up, the tubular iterations, as though reactivated by proximity alone, seem to zing back into life; she can not only see but almost viscerally sense light-rings’ trajectories: so many lathemen’s or seamstresses’ action-signatures retained, fragments of time and motion held against oblivion … Lillian’s preferred term was embodied data … Instinctively, Dean finds herself, like the models’ first users, looping her thumb and fingers round the tracks, gliding her hand along their winding path, repeating some hundred-year-old moment – reinhabiting, perhaps even re-living it, skin stroking metal …
‘How many of these are there here?’ she asks.
‘Says in the record three hundred and eighty-five,’ Ms Richards answers, flipping through a print-off. ‘That’s here. The Gilbreths’ own inventory lists more, in other archives …’
It does indeed. Lillian has been meticulous in indexing each one. The Smithsonian has eighty or so; MIT a score; Stanford a handful, in the Muybridge archive. Hundreds more have been lost or destroyed – but they’re still inventorised. They all are: every box the Gilbreths ever made. Lillian was quite unflinching in her determination to capture each movement, not to let a single one slip her recording net. Once an action was wire-modelled, the model was photographed – in stereoscope once more, reverse-engineered into a little pair of thumbnail snapshots, photographs of models made from photographs, that in turn were assigned a number and, along with a short title or description of each action (‘shelf-assembling’, ‘switchboard operating’, etc.), entered in the record whose print-off Ms Richards has in her hands now. That’s what was represented by the squiggle-strings scrawled at the base of the photos that Dean showed the Peacocks: one riddle, at least, solved. Dean spends the next two days working out which of the eight hundred and fourteen inventorised movements have their corresponding models extant here, in Oversize Holdings 7, matching them up, thumbnail double-photograph to box – task helped by the inclusion of each number on the boxes themselves, written in white paint, also now faded but still legible, on their floors, near the front edge …
There’s a Five Guys on the strip-mall just off campus, and, next door but one to it, a Tender Greens. Breaking off, alternately in one or the other of these, each day for lunch, Dean finds she’s watching people eat – or carry food across the restaurant, settle themselves at tables, remove coats, hang bags on backs of chairs, head to the bathroom, open doors – through penetrating screens and chronocyclegraphs now grafted to her visual faculties, invisible prostheses. The passage of fork to mouth, of hand to napkin, arm to sleeve or hip to door-jamb – all becomes ergonomics, choreography. In spinning hems and shawls, amidst the smell of burgers and seared tuna, she sees, once more, Julius’s grainy and post-coloured Loie Fuller gif re-looping. Isadora Duncan: Lillian stays intermittently in touch with her until she (Isadora) dies. File 24 contains a 1913 letter in which the diva thanks her old friend for the condolence note after her children’s drowning. You would like their father: he’s the scion of machinists … So does File 25, from 1927: Down in le Midi, cheri, frolicking with Desti and Chatov … Lillian, in her own journal from that year (also File 25), comments that it’s Chatov’s scarf that, catching in an Amilcar’s rear axle two weeks after the postmark on this one, snaps Isadora’s neck and sends her à la gloire … Gertrude Stein stays on her radar too – hard for her not to: by the thirties she’s packing out concert halls around America, intoning publicly to rapt audiences
what was the use of my having come from Oakland it was not natural to have come from there yes write about if I like or anything if I like but not there, there is no there there
and privately to Lillian
You’d love what they’ve turned our old neighbourhood into: an industrial park …
There’s reams of other correspondence. Dean returns to it when her matching of inventory to boxes gets held up. Here, in Files 42–5, are Soviet-stamped envelopes bearing tributes from the Russian Taylorist Alexsei Gastev, telling her she’s
set the worker on the path to the one best way; helped unleash him from the shackles of his body; through your light-rings consecrated his new matrimony with the liberating dynamism of the great machine …
Or here, File 46, from Vassar’s President, inviting her to the opening of a hall of residence named after her
the better to inspire our students to find the one best way through the great challenges that face them …
This phrase, the one best way, crops up time and again throughout the articles, the books, the letters. As the projects scale up, and as Lillian grows older, the words appear to change their meaning, or at least their range, until it seems that she’s no longer looking for the one best way to pack five hundred toys into a crate or move a thousand chocolate lumps from a conveyor belt into the variegated moulds of an assortment tray: she’s after bigger fish. Might there not be, she writes (File 61) to Powel Crosley, autumn ’54 from Sarajevo, a one – a truly one – best way? For everything, I mean …? The more she delves through these Purdue files, the more Dean starts discerning – in the writings or, perhaps, between them – the outline of an idea taking shape in Lillian’s mind, as though the archive were itself, in its totality, a wireframe model down whose kinking path Dean’s thought-hand, little palmer-pilgrim, is now gliding:
From the mid-forties,
she writes in her report to Dorley,
terms such as ‘perfect movement’ and ‘pure original motion’ start cropping up in Ms Gilbreth’s notebooks – often free-standing, out of context, but nonetheless (to my mind) indicating a turn in her thinking towards the possibility of some form of ‘higher’ or ‘absolute’ movement not yet modelled, perhaps even (if such a thing may be imagined) derived from no source other than itself. This turn coincides with Ms Gilbreth’s newfound fascination with the sightless workers she was helping train. Having started from the premise that such physically disadvantaged people could, with help, be brought up to the capability levels of the able-bodied and thus granted assembly-line and even artisanal roles, Ms Gilbreth ended up believing that, despite appearances, blind people stood at an advantage, not a disadvantage, to their fellows.
(Dean likes ‘fellows’: it’s a Gilbreth kind of word.)
For the blind, she reasoned, all movement is de facto already abstracted from extraneous context and surroundings; and, at the same time, embodied as action that has no exterior correlative it’s imitating. From the late fifties, when she found herself consulting for first NACA, then that agency’s successor NASA, Ms Gilbreth’s utterances, growing rarer, started drifting in more fanciful directions, as though the prospect of entering outer space had expanded the frontiers of the possible, or thinkable. Towards the end …
Dorley calls her from London two hours after she dispatches this email, audibly excited. ‘NASA?’ he barks. ‘You mean this lady, Gilbreth, is instructing astronauts on how to space-walk?’
‘Not exactly space-walk,’ Dean replies, voice full of sleep (it’s 3 a.m. West Lafayette time). ‘More like just move about the module, whose designers had drawn heavily from her work on domestic ergonomics. From the early days, she’d get her children to follow her around the kitchen with balls of string and pin-tacks, marking her passage from sink to bin to cutting board, or cupboard to bin to door to bin again, until the room became its own cat’s-cradle model box.’
‘That’s insane,’ chuffs Dorley. ‘Neighbours should have called in Child Protection …’
‘Not really,’ replies Dean defensively. ‘It worked: it led to her designing better kitchens. Later, after her blind work, she made modified ones for people with reduced mobility: simplified, refined, more closed-in and all-surrounding. So the progression on to NASA-consultancy makes sense: if you think about it, a space module is just a kitchen or a living room for people whose motility has been conditionally altered.’
There’s a long pause while Dorley takes this in. The line, too, seems to stop its crackling and hold, like a breath, the scratch and buzz that has been riding with their voices like a dirty aura. Then, smudging the quiet’s cleanness with new static-bearing speech, he says:
‘You told me there’s an inventory of all the motions that she and her husband modelled?’
‘Yes,’ she confirms.
‘Send it to me,’ he orders her. ‘By the way, stop sending unencrypted files. Use CounterMail or Proton from now on.’
‘Okay,’ she tells him. ‘I’ll do that tomorrow. I’m matching the numbered inventory entries to the physical models in this collection. There’s a little glitch, but it should be cleared up by then.’
In fact, there are two glitches: Dean’s path through the archive has acquired its own pair of snags, its ‘knots’. The first seems trivial: the inventory’s entry-numbers skip from 807 to 809 – there’s no 808. Clerical error perhaps – uncharacteristic, though, from the diligent Lillian. Dean wouldn’t get too hung up on this, if it didn’t come in tandem with the second snag-knot. This one’s vaguer, harder to pinpoint: it consists of a change in the demeanour of the holdings’ staff. Ms Richards, so benevolent and helpful for the first few days, has grown more distant – or, to be precise, evasive. She’s still there, tending to Dean, supervising files’ delivery to her; but a reticence has crept into her manner. Twice, in the last two days, request forms have come back with ‘in use’ stamped across them. When Dean asked ‘by whom?’ the archivist seemed to recoil, snatching the chit away as though even allowing her to see it were too much. Bizarrely, as they left the building after the second of these episodes, Dean heading off through the dark car park back towards the Hilton to file her daily report to London, Ms Richards called after her:
‘Take care!’
The words weren’t spoken in an offhand tone of voice, nor colloquially proffered; it sounded as though the archivist were actually warning her to be careful, as though she’d perceived some imminent threat lurking among Purdue’s lawns and footpaths – ejaculation strange enough to make Dean turn around to ask what she meant. Too late: Ms Richards’ hairbun, coat-wrapped frame and stuffed leather bag had slipped away into the darkness, and the question died in Dean’s throat. The next day, when she raised the issue of the missing 808-entry, Ms Richards answered, almost curtly:
‘I can’t help you.’
No Honey; no beamed smiles; Dean was left to stare morosely at the gap on the page (there is one, a double return – she pictures a hand at the typewriter’s lever, Lillian’s or one of her secretaries’, undulating in a double fishtail side-swipe, left to right and back again) between the photographs and short movement-descriptions of Box 807 and those of Box 809. It could well have been a simple error, after all: these entries are among the last ones, made at a point when Lillian’s eyesight, like her memory, is fading, letters and notebook entries starting to wander off on their own divagating courses, handwriting kinking and wavering as the end, in all its shapelessness, heaves into view …
Lillian spends her final three years in a retirement home in Phoenix, Arizona. It’s called The Beatitudes. The name suggests to Dean some kind of girded region, like the Temperate or Torrid Zones, the Tropics or Antipodes, Indies or Maritimes; it’s not until she looks it up that she realises it comes from the Gospels. Matt. 5:3–11: Blessed are those who … etc…. etc. Lillian, nominally, is agnostic – but she nonetheless believes in upward passages, apotheoses, transformations: hesitation to decision, awkwardness to grace. By this time she’s phenomenally famous. Invitations (all declined) to speak, or at least to come and pick up honorary degrees, are pouring in from all around the world; there’s talk of statues being erected, of becoming the first woman (Liberty aside) stamped on a US banknote … In the Soviet Union, Lenin’s veneration of her has taken deep root, outlived Lenin and moved on two or three generations, beyond Gastev, on to Rozmirovich, rationalisation associations, ob’edineniia … Her children visit her, tell her about the moon landing for which her work has been so instrumental, but she doesn’t really understand. She makes final, sporadic entries in the notebooks, though, and keeps up intermittent correspondence. It’s among the tail end of this latter category, spread over the final two files, that Dean comes across the Vanins letters.
There are two of them, folded up in envelopes that, like Gastev’s, bear Soviet postmarks – in Vanins’ case, from 1969 and 1970. The paper inside is letterheaded with Cyrillic writing and an image that seems to depict some kind of university or research centre. The writing itself’s in Latin script, though: handwritten English. It’s quite hard to follow, partly by dint of not being very neat, partly due to a propensity to give over to diagrams or algebraic shorthand. The letters’ author is one Raivis Vanins – name already familiar to Dean: Lillian has mentioned meeting him a few years earlier, in … a quick flip back to File 32 retrieves this datum: Zürich, the Fourth International Symposium on Applied Kinetics. Lillian’s diary entry of 26/2/65 records her being impressed by the young physicist, whom she saw as taking my work somewhere interesting, quite unexpected … The letters seem to be part of a series; they refer to previous correspondence (not contained here); on top of which, they’re incomplete, missing whole pages.
In the first letter, deploying a familiar tone (he uses her first name), Vanins thanks Lillian for her enthusiastic response to the work he’s ‘been conducting in light of the T.T. episode’. He outlines, through sketches and calculations so incomprehensible to Dean that they might, with equal plausibility, represent a formulaic disquisition on the nature of dark matter or the flightpath of some kind of insect (there’s a kind of cone, two directional arrows corkscrewing around a straight vertical line and, beside them, the same letters, T.T.), his thoughts about said ‘episode’, and informs her that, with her permission, he’ll attempt to model it. Of the second letter, only page two is preserved inside the envelope: beginning and ending mid-sentence, it communicates what Vanins calls ‘my shock – amazement, and perhaps delay …’ delay? No, there’s a dot and then a cross: the word’s delight … ‘my shock – amazement, and perhaps delight – at the implications of this labour, which would seem to transform all the tenets and’ (illegible: assumptions?) ‘of our …’
Here the page ends. Paper-clipped to it, though, is a photo of a wireframe model – a little snapshot, like the others Dean has seen, the thumbnails in the Gilbreth inventory; but in contrast to these just a single, not a stereoscope, image; slightly skewed too, since it’s been taken (presumably by Vanins) in a different setting, from a different angle, and printed with different chemicals on different paper. In the model, in its open-sided box, the metal track rises and turns first anticlockwise and then clockwise before plunging once more to the floor. At the top, on to the photograph itself, are written, once more, the doubled initials T.T.; at its base, Box 808.
It’s not the air conditioning that sends a chill down Dean’s back as she looks at this photo – more the sudden recognition, morphed into a physical awareness, of a missing part’s insertion. She finds herself flipping back and forth between the files now with real vigour, driven by the sense that something’s taking shape here: something solid, perhaps almost sayable – but, if so, only silently, in this scrawled idiom of pictorial and alphabetic cipher, doodle-hieroglyphics … nonetheless, by virtue of these same, somehow recoverable …
In the last file, there’s a journal that she hasn’t thumbed through yet, Lillian’s final one. It, too, is full of doodles, letters, symbols that might, together, amount to some form of mathematical notation, or might simply represent the dying unravelling of a mind whose frame has lost all traction, warp- and cloth beams tumbled from their axes, fallen prey to woodworm and decay. Even amidst this fuzz and visual shipwreck, though, there are still words: fragments, snatches of recalled or uncompleted thoughts … name for force that holds all things in motion? … praxis (energeia), work (ergon), potential (dynamis) – but contemplation …? A jumble of these snatch-fragments appears in the notebook’s final entry, peppered about (as though to annotate) a drawing that Dean recognises as a shaky copying of one of the cone-and-corkscrew sketches from Vanins’ first letter. Some of the words that Lillian has added, perched amidst the springs and arrows, look like names: de Honnecourt, Maricourt, Bessler … Others, lower down, seem to be written in an archaic form of Italian: fattore … farsi … fattura … legato con amove in un volume … geomètra misurar lo cerchio … l’amov che move … Three crayon-drawn circles cut across these lower fragments, each circle gradiently coloured so as to partially reflect the others. Below these, in English, runs, in bold, penned letters, like a kind of tag, the line: Box 808 – is that charges? No, it’s changes – Box 808 changes everything.
In the time it takes Dean to flip forward through nine unused, virgin pages to the notebook’s cover and then back again to this page, one thing at least has become clear to her: the inventory’s omission of the eight hundred and eighth box is no accident or oversight, no numeric typo. There’s a thing – a something, or an everything – behind it. That something has a name, or rather number – 808 – and an embodiment, a box, a low-grade photograph of which she, Dean, is holding in her hand. It’s in her right hand; her left, meanwhile, is hungrily (and blindly) padding the desk around it, feeling for a copy-permission sheet – vainly too, it turns out: she’s used up all the ones Ms Richards gave her. She considers going over to the archivist’s station to ask her for a new one, but holds back, as though afraid of leaving these open files alone, of letting the alignment into which she’s nudged and coaxed them – alignment that, like that of stars, seems to portend some great event, some revelation, but just fleetingly, when viewed at the right moment from a certain point and angle – slip away again. She stays there until closing time, first noting all the words down, then just staring at the pages, eyes darting from diary to photograph to letter, letter to diary to photograph, as though to string-and-tack them, to cat’s cradle the whole set of scenes and movements, or at least their traces, on to which they open – and, in the same movement, close again …
After being kicked out, she races straight back to the Hilton, and stays up most of the night drafting a new report for Dorley:
Somewhere,
she writes, excitement and the lateness of the hour extending her a license for rhetorical indulgence that she wouldn’t normally permit herself,
in the relay between Ms Gilbreth and her young adherent on the far side of the world, the far side of the Iron Curtain; in the transfers and translations, in the unexpected redirections of the type that only geographic distance and generational difference and, above all, chance’s vagaries can occasion, something cropped up that seems to have beguiled, fixated and surprised them both – certainly, to have consumed Ms Gilbreth to the point that, in a final and quite counterintuitive move, she redacted it from the index of her life’s endeavour. The significance attached by her to Box 808 is, despite the host of unknowns hemming it in on every side, beyond all contestation. For her, and in her own words, it ‘changed everything’. For my part, I’m convinced that, despite the enfeebled
too strong – and prejudicial
that, despite her weakening general state around this time, the recognition on her part of some kind of breakthrough achieved by her cohort Vanins (himself at the peak of his professional and intellectual powers) was effected from a robust inner mental enclave, a castle keep of absolute lucidity …
Does Dean really believe this? She does. Despite the shakiness, the incoherence, there’s a conviction emanating from the penstrokes, from the words, a certainty that no doubt, not even the confusion of senility, can undermine. The question follows, though –
The question follows: what new ground did this box breach, that hundreds of other boxes hadn’t? A course-shifting event, insight or understanding must have emerged from what first Vanins and then Ms Gilbreth called ‘the T.T. episode’. As to the nature of this episode, I remain entirely in the dark. Perhaps more research, this time into Vanins’ own archive, should such exist, is called for. How this last might be tracked down, given the disintegration of the state under whose auspices he worked, is …
She sends this, as instructed, in encrypted form, over the firm’s safe line. She then steals a few hours’ sleep beneath whose surface dreams – of boxes sent by ocean liner to the wrong location, Five-Guy and Tender-Button shake-straws twisted into wireframes modelling some momentous action taking place offstage (behind the counter, in the kitchen or some other non-specific backroom), tardily submitted copy-request slips that, doubling as hotel-guest towels, blot, sog and disintegrate – are never far submerged. Morning finds her in the strip mall’s Au Bon Pain, then, ten minutes prior to opening, staking out the Holding Center’s entrance, willing its staff – custodians and doormen, even janitors, but principally Ms Richards – to appear round the corner, jangling keys.
Her willing doesn’t work: Ms Richards doesn’t come today. In her place, when the Holding Center does eventually open, there’s a man: a little younger, possibly late thirties, white, neat moustache sitting on a grey, clean-shaven face. She senses, as soon as she nears his workstation (he’s reordered it; it’s his today), a new charge in the air. He rises to meet her, but it’s not a friendly rising; more like – almost like – a blocking of her route.
‘Can I help you?’ He utters the words coldly, in a tone that makes it clear that helping her’s the last thing he intends to do.
‘Oh,’ says Dean. ‘I’m working here. I mean …’
‘You’re staff?’ he asks.
‘No, no,’ she starts to tell him. ‘I’m a reader. A researcher. I’ve been here – just here …’
As she tentatively points over his shoulder to her little desk, she sees that her nest of files and papers, which Ms Richards usually leaves out for her, has been cleared up.
‘Oh …’ she says again.
‘You have a pass?’ he asks.
‘What? Yes, of course,’ she answers, feeling for it in the pocket of her handbag. As she does this, the man’s face, despite its attempts to remain expressionless, is briefly lit up by a micro-smile, a flicker of pleasure furnished by a foreknowledge of what’s about to happen.
‘Please touch in,’ he instructs her.
Ms Richards issued her the pass and showed her how to do this on her first day here, but subsequently always buzzed her through herself, so Dean has never used it. Pressed to the electronic reader now, the card’s met with a sour beep that, if she’d been sinaesthetic, would have presented to her vision the same colour and tone as this man’s skin.
‘Oh …’ Dean mutters for a third time. ‘Shall I …?’
The man doesn’t answer, doesn’t help her out in any way. After what seems like an interminable pause, he says to her:
‘Your card’s not good for entry to this centre.’
‘What can I …?’ she begins; then, again, ‘Maybe I can …’ But these efforts don’t get any uptake. Eventually she tries: ‘I mean, I’m a registered visitor.’
This last clause he latches on to. ‘Any visiting privileges you had,’ he informs her, ‘have been rescinded.’
‘How do you mean?’ she asks.
‘You are no longer welcome here. You’ll have to leave the building.’
The next few minutes, when she’ll look back on them, will remain stubbornly blank, as unretained in memory as long-past movements never modelled. She must have turned and walked back down the corridor, past the concierge’s booth, opened the door and exited – but these actions seem to have evaporated along with her access to the world of Lillian and Frank and Vanins and the curves of sculpted light and moulded time and all the other magic toys that have been placed beyond her reach. All she’ll remember is standing alone in the Holding Center’s outsize car park in the bright indifferent sunshine, listening to the middle-distance trundle and whirr of vehicles passing by on Interstate 52.