Dear Clarice

© Quinn Dombrowski, CC BY-SA 2.0 via Flickr

YOU ARE THE LAST PERSON I EXPECT to be interested in my explanations and confessions, and yet you’re the only person I can think of to address them to. As I write, I imagine the ballet of reactions on your face; that familiar mix of—forgive me—envy and disgust. Exhaustion. I imagine each upcurled lip and puckered brow, and feel them play out across my own features. You know we made identical faces at one another, always. It was our only real common ground as sisters: being so different that we responded to one another in exactly the same baffled way.

So I’m sending you these pages, because I know you’ll be compelled to read them all the way through, by your parallel senses of duty and dread. Not a compliment, but not an insult either, whatever you may think. I’m grateful for the chance to offer someone what I feel to be the whole truth.

THE INTERNET WAS, OF COURSE, INSUFFERABLE in the days that followed the event. All the social media outlets and special-interest blogs were flooded with some version of this sentiment: “I’m so happy I got to visit France before all this happened. It was a lifelong dream, and le château de Versailles will live forever in my heart. #blessed”

Or alternatively: “Those socialist elitist fucks had it coming. You want to eat snails? Well, you’re asking for something bad to happen. Just my opinion.”

Or even: “You all know the government is behind this, right? It’s a systematic depopulation program, and we’re next. You’ll see.”

Not one of these people had any idea what they were talking about. But that was to be expected, really. We’re the ones who should’ve known.

OUR PROJECT, AS I’M SURE YOU’RE AWARE BY NOW, was called the Cooperative International Thermonuclear Reactor Assessment, CITRA for short. “Cooperative” because it was built and funded by a number of different international agencies. “Assessment” because, in the early stages, it was unclear when, if ever, it would work.¹ The other pieces, I think even you can figure out.

Fusion energy was still a pie-in-the-sky proposition back then, but we were cocky—no surprise to you, I’m sure—and convinced ourselves that we could transform our theories into reality by sheer will. The world needed a safe alternative to gas, coal, and oil—and we would give it to them. No more exhaust fumes, no more fission plants blowing good country people to kingdom come. It wasn’t easy, though. There was no room for error. We couldn’t afford even a millimeter of discrepancy between the plans and the product.

Like anything so precise, CITRA at work was worthy of awe. The force of the reaction could only be contained within a subzero vacuum, supported by powerful electromagnets. It was hotter than any natural phenomenon on Earth. It was a small terrestrial star.

BUT I’M FORGETTING—or, as you’d more likely say, ignoring—you. The things that fill each of us with awe are not the same, are they? Always, you loved the Pentecost, the long hand of God. The descent of the Holy Spirit onto the body of the Earth. We both preferred to love things that the other could not understand. So when I speak of CITRA, I know I risk boring you. Me and my scientific mumbo-jumbo, the kind of talk that was over your head and beneath your concern. After seven years, and a promise of confession, I don’t mean to be so disappointing.

I want to hold your attention, Clarice, I really do—after all, these may be my last words. And I think there’s a way. The personal, you always said. The personal, and the providential. Dancing in our bedroom slippers, singing at the top of our lungs—to you, the point wasn’t to annoy our parents into sending us to summer camp...