{"id":5005,"date":"2013-02-04T00:00:19","date_gmt":"2013-02-04T05:00:19","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.gadflyonline.com\/home\/?p=5005"},"modified":"2013-02-04T09:27:13","modified_gmt":"2013-02-04T14:27:13","slug":"cryptanalysis-of-the-enigma","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/cryptanalysis-of-the-enigma\/","title":{"rendered":"Cryptanalysis of the Enigma"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Cryptanalysis_585x585\"<\/a><\/p>\n

for Alan Turing<\/em><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

1.<\/p>\n

there are things about myself I cannot decode<\/p>\n

here I am in the tube, Croxley, Watford, at the end<\/p>\n

of the line<\/p>\n

here I am at the cinema, the reels rotating too fast<\/p>\n

the audience sees him enter the bedroom, wipe a tear off her cheek<\/p>\n

a deep kiss<\/p>\n

I can hear the wheels turning<\/p>\n

I want to see each frame, to analyze each movement that brought them here \u2013 somewhere<\/p>\n

on a dusty shelf in a cinema in a dream is the reel of my life<\/p>\n

here I am under the lamp, clamping down the film, cutting and splicing<\/p>\n

the piece I want to show you is a very small piece of the whole<\/p>\n

I will tell you when it\u2019s done<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

2.<\/p>\n

inside each of my cells is a double helical polyalphabetic cipher<\/p>\n

which is to say the enigma is inside me<\/p>\n

which is to say the enigma is inside me like god<\/p>\n

which is to say like god the enigma is inside me<\/p>\n

like inside me is a tesseract, intractable<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

this is hard to explain<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

3.<\/p>\n

the world is full of adversaries<\/p>\n

like rolodexes of shifting characters<\/p>\n

wired to rotate when you touch them<\/p>\n

to output a different signal every time<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

when I saw him outside the cinema<\/p>\n

it was like perfect logic, like winning a war<\/p>\n

taking him home<\/p>\n

circuitry synched, looking under the doormat of god<\/p>\n

and finding a master key<\/p>\n

all our pins tumbling over together<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

it was a pleasure, my complete undoing<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

4.<\/p>\n

there are things about myself I cannot decode<\/p>\n

here I am, poison on my tongue, the deep sleep<\/p>\n

dreams of the tesseract, the enigma, the god<\/p>\n

still alive inside me, all rotor rings and notches<\/p>\n

all spinning, slowing down<\/p>\n

here I am at the controls playing back snatches of signal<\/p>\n

from a wire sound asleep on the ocean floor<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

there were small pieces<\/p>\n

I wanted you<\/p>\n

to see<\/p>\n

—<\/p>\n

Jack McGavick is a graduate of the University of Virginia, where he studied English and secondary education. He has taught both fiction and poetry at the Young Writers Workshop at Sweet Briar College (formerly at UVa). He currently lives in Austin, TX, where he teaches English and social studies at American YouthWorks, a dropout recovery charter school.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

there are things about myself I cannot decode<\/p>\n

here I am in the tube, Croxley, Watford, at the end<\/p>\n

of the line<\/p>\n

here I am at the cinema, the reels rotating too fast<\/p>\n

the audience sees him enter the bedroom, wipe a tear off her cheek<\/p>\n

a deep kiss<\/p>\n

I can hear the wheels turning…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":132,"featured_media":5185,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[218,219,199],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/132"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5005"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5208,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5005\/revisions\/5208"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/5185"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5005"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5005"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/gadflyonline.com\/home\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5005"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}