THEY HAD NAMES like Herringbone and Honeycomb, or Tyrolean Fern. My mother turned yarn into thick forests and spiraling galaxies with luscious titles. I watched her fingers busy themselves for hours to produce squares of cloth. Sometimes, her hands faded away and the string had a life of its own. Like a snake or an eel, it raised its head then dipped it back down. It looped around itself, only to slip away and tie up its own tail. Eventually, a familiar pattern emerged.
In those days, our house smelled fat with lanolin and fish oils. Her customers stumbled in off the wharf, washed in grappa and mumbling at a frequency that made my head buzz. They put money in an urn on the shelf and my mother would dig some soft, thick sweater out of a basket. Sometimes, they would come back pointing out holes in the elbows or fraying at the edges. These woolen patterns were their defense against the dangers of the ocean.
I wasn’t afraid of the storms or earthquakes that visited the bay. I wasn’t afraid of the depths of the sea or the dark things that swam there. The shadows in our house made me anxious. They came out of the corners when my mother sang and knit, and flew across her face and hands. She sang about shepherds and Hastur and the sweet smell of lemon trees at night.
These were the days before quite so many lights had sprung up. There was a hole in the roof. When I lay on the floor, I saw moonlight shining through it. When it fell on my mother’s hands, I could see every bone roving under the skin. A steady clicking went on forever, reminding me that patterns were filling the room.
… knit two, purl two, knit two, purl two ….
… 11001100 ….
My mother doesn’t believe me when I tell her what I do. When I come home from the factory, she rocks in her eternally creaking chair. She asks me how my day was. She asks me about my coworkers, if anyone is getting married soon, if anyone is pregnant. If anyone has a nice brother to introduce to me. She says she can’t remember if I weave blankets or rugs.
No, I don’t weave blankets. I weave instructions for computers. They have names like Mercury, Gemini and, most importantly, Apollo. I’m like a fable character, threading shining metal on my loom. On each side of me are a dozen other women doing the same thing. Eventually, someone will take all of our work, bind it together, and put it inside the shuttle, where it will help a group of men navigate to the Moon. We’re changing the world.
No, I don’t weave rugs. I demonstrate my job at home with table runners and napkin rings. “See, when the cloth goes through here, it means one, but when it goes around the ring, it means zero. Enough ones and zeroes can stand in for complicated math.” She squints at me while I stand with the contents of our dining room dangling from my hands. They feel warm and uncomfortably organic. I feel hot and embarrassed, and set down her nice things. I brainstorm other ways to get through to her. I light and blow out rows of candles. I get books from the library about Charles Babbage and George Boole, newspaper articles about Grace Hopper. It doesn’t work.
At work the next day, I’m greeted by the daily stack. Pages are piled up as high as three of my fingers, covered in digits. By the 5:00 bell, I’ll transform them all into sparkling strands. I try to be friendly, but it’s hard not to absorb the numbers while I work. Sometimes, I even go out for drinks in the evening, but I’m always distracted by the numbers inside me. I’m starting to recognize patterns. These 16 figures keep recurring, or these 128. So, today, I take it even further. I breathe deeply and let the data into me. It’s not so different from reading a highway map. I wish I were the one traveling along it.
My head is overflowing when I get home. I worry about the numbers turning into fat worms and eating holes in the side of my head, with all the zeroes falling out. I need to hurry if I’m going to bring them into the tactile world. I grab a pair of my mother’s birch needles. They are slowly rotting.
My mother watches my hands while I work and I look at hers. They are swollen past the point of holding needles. She hasn’t made anything in years. Those hands that made forests have become knotted branches. I see a painful future in them after a life of enabling a few to walk on strange lunar landscapes.
My finished product looks random at first glance. It’s a screaming wreck of different types of stitches. Some patches are flat and others are rough. Here and there, a scallop rears its head and is abruptly cut off. I think I’m the only person who can read the calculations in it, and see the angles and velocity. I’m wrong, though. Recognition spreads over my mother’s face for the first time. We finally have a common language to speak to each other.
She tells me about a night when she was younger than I am now. She tells me about a pattern she only made once. She gave it to a fisherman and told him her usual marketing ploy: It would keep him safe from all the dangers above and below the water. She lied. She sent him out wearing a beacon that shouted at the heart of the Moon. It made him see things. He still babbles about the underwater city and the sunken dead that drifted up from the seabed. Even that wasn’t loud enough to bring something down from the sky.
She can’t make it herself anymore, but she whispers all the stitches in my ear. I write them in machine language on the inside of my eyelids. I can visualize it in copper and cores. It will camouflage itself against the endless commands my coworkers weave day after day. When the time is right, the shining sign will call out to something that lives beyond here.
… knit one, purl two, knit one ….
… 1001 ….
The astronauts will return but not alone. They will bring the shadow from the Moon down, finally. It will be enormous. Its landing will send out ripples as large as the Pacific. Its hooves will trample the street lights and skyscrapers until there is nothing left but starlight. I will stand on the rocks by the bay and wrap my sweater tightly around my shoulders, knowing that I will be the last left standing. My work will change the world.