Due Preparations for the Plague

by Janette Turner Hospital

  I spy.

  With my manifold eye.

  This is Salamander’s morning canticle.

  He leans in close to the bathroom mirror and his words come back lush, fully orchestrated, thick with toothpaste and shower fog. He squints and sees galaxies: bright floating points, moons, multiple planetary rings. He has the eyes of a fly or a god. The things that he knows, weighty matters of life and death—not natural death, or swift death—orbit his consciousness, but he must not speak of them.

  This is the way Samantha imagines him. She has constructed him, like a trick question, from undeleted half lines in documents. Morning exhausts him, she imagines. His eyes, in the bathroom mirror, would be bloodshot. Dreams, dispersing though still opaque, would cloud the room. He would not recall the dreams, though they would leave a layer of unease that he would scrub at under the shower and slough off.

  In the trade, and to those who do research in previously classified files, he is known as Salamander, or S, and that—for the time being, and to Samantha’s chagrin—will have to suffice.

  Salamander: a mythical creature having the power to endure fire without harm; an elemental being inhabiting flames in the theory of Paracelsus; any of numerous amphibians superficially resembling lizards but scaleless and covered with a soft moist skin and breathing by gills in the larval stage.

  He is all of the above, Samantha believes, closing the dictionary. She imagines him in front of his bathroom mirror. He would watch himself without blinking as reptiles do.

  Unobtrusive, soft as a snake, he slithers under and around many lives. Around Samantha’s life. Around Lowell’s. Around yours. Around mine. We deposit data ceaselessly. He gathers it: phone conversations, e-mails, airline tickets, credit card purchases, income and taxation information, websites visited, buying habits, tastes and eccentricities. He has photographs: from banks, retail stores, elevators, public bathrooms, pedestrian crossings, parking lots, airports.

  Those whom he chooses to observe are known to him intimately.

  Their nerve systems are digitally mapped.

  As flies to wanton boys are the chosen to Salamander.

  When it pleases him, he nudges them in this direction or that, according to his game plan. He makes up the rules as he goes.

  Samantha is one of his subjects. In the beginning, this was inadvertent, but then he became obsessed with her and she with him.

  She deposits data. He gorges on it.

  She studies the patterns of his gorging, and posits him.

  She posits him because her own existence requires it. Her own existence? From day to day, it feels to her an uncertain thing, without stable landmarks or fixed signs. Some days, when she watches children playing in the park, she can feel the ground giving way. You have no idea, she wants to tell the children. The swings, the sandbox: they are all illusions. You have no idea how unreliable things are, or how suddenly the sky can turn to fire. The playground dips and sways in front of her. In fog everything shifts with the light, everything floats.

  On other days, in her classes at Georgetown University, she looks around the seminar table at fellow students and thinks: We live on different planets.

  She is nineteen years old, majoring in American history and government, but how could she even begin to translate her life, her inner life, so that it would be intelligible to her peers? They take safety for granted, she knows, and they are certain that two and two always make four, but this could change. She thinks of it this way: that we are composed of a frail string of learned sequences (we recognize our own face in a mirror, we know our own name, we can put on our shoes without thinking, we know how to make love, and we know what to do—more or less—when we feel acute physical pain), and these pieces which make up the puzzle of the self are held together by the glue of memory. Certain solvents can dissolve this glue: a stroke, catastrophic events. Then we are forced to become scavengers of our own past, searching, finding, relearning, reassembling the self.

  Samantha tracks different threads of light, painstakingly, one by one, and she follows their beams into the haze. Here and there, little by little, events can be catalogued and flagged, and eventually she hopes she will be able to recalculate the unknown quantities of herself and of Salamander who made and unmade her. She constructs him from the traces he leaves in other lives. She puts him together like a jigsaw puzzle in order to explain what happened in September 1987 and how it happened and why.

  She is mapping her way out of fog.

  Look at Samantha: here she is, the day the world changed, on the border between Before and After, in fading color on Kodak paper. She is six years old. She is wearing a blue woolen coat with a darker blue velvet collar and a cotton dress (it is white, prinked with forget-me-nots, and has a smocked bodice and puffed sleeves; it is visible through her unbuttoned coat). She is also wearing white lace-edged socks and black patent-leather shoes. The sign above her head says PORTE 12 because this photograph was taken at Charles de Gaulle Airport in September 1987. Framed by the doorway to the boarding tunnel, she is turning back to wave. Her left hand clutches the hand of a young man, not a good-looking man, not particularly, but a man whose skin barely seems to contain him. Even in the photograph, an aura of intensity comes off him. The man is her father, Jonathan Raleigh. A one-armed teddy bear, once Samantha’s but given to her baby brother weeks earlier, dangles from her right hand, and when she waves, the teddy bear swoops about like a flag. She is laughing, and there is a dimple just to one side of her mouth. She can feel the fire passing from her father’s hand to her own. There are high mad notes in the pressure of his fingers, messages she is picking up but cannot translate. Her father is also laughing and waving. Beside him, a woman, perhaps weary, her smile slightly tense, holds baby Matthew up to the view of those who have come to see the family off.

  “Your mother made your coat,” Samantha’s aunt tells her.

  “She did?”

  “She made all your clothes. She was that kind of mother.”

  That kind of mother. Samantha saves this phrase. She saves every fragment, every splinter of information.

  “The bodice of your dress was hand-smocked,” her aunt says. “These days, you have to go to a museum to see that sort of thing.”

  “I still have the dress,” Samantha says.

  “Your mother was not afraid of being old-fashioned.”

  Sometimes at night, when Samantha cannot sleep, she takes the dress out of its tissue paper and holds it against her cheek, but it keeps its secrets. “It’s torn,” she tells her aunt. “There’s a rip in the skirt.”

  “Yes. I remember.”

  “From the hem right up to the smocking on the bodice. But it’s not torn in the photograph.”

  “No.”

  “It must have caught on something when they put us on the escape hatch.”

  “Or later, perhaps,” her aunt says.

  “I can’t remember tearing it.”

  “We couldn’t get that coat off you, you even wanted to sleep in it.”

  “I must have taken it off, though,” Samantha says. “Eventually. My mother must have talked me into it.” She studies the woman in the photograph—her mother, Rosalie Hamilton Raleigh—with a magnifying glass. Her mother is not much more than a girl, really, twenty-six years old, at the time of the photograph. “It must have been in the overhead locker.” Samantha thinks she can remember her father putting the coat there. Sometimes she can remember. It all depends on which way she tells the story to herself. “Perhaps during the first landing,” she says.

  “Morocco,” her aunt says.

  “We didn’t know where we were.”

  “Morocco. Every landing is imprinted on my brain, up to the final one in Iraq. They kept showing us maps and flight paths on TV.”

  For some reason, this makes Samantha feel giddy. The room tilts. She closes her eyes and grips the arm of the sofa because a curving hall of mirrors seems to be sloping away from her and at the far end, very tiny, she can almost
see her mother with a baby in her arms.

  “It was horrible,” her aunt says. “Just watching and watching, completely helpless. It was horrible.”

  “Was it?” Samantha cannot keep an edge of anger from her voice, and something else too, a low buzz of excitement which her aunt detects and which Samantha will not let go. Like a terrier, she works at her aunt’s growing agitation. “Was it, Lou?” she needles. She never says Aunt Lou, only Lou. She watches her aunt the way a cat watches: tense, ready to pounce.

  “Sam,” her aunt says. She sounds very tired. “I am not trying to compete. It goes without saying that it was far, far more horrible on the plane.”

  But it is the different angle of vision that excites and disturbs Samantha. If she could see the little girl in the blue coat in someone else’s frame, if she could study her, would the puzzle solve itself? “Tell me about watching us on TV.”

  Lou clenches her interlocked fingers and the knuckles give off soft cracking sounds that make Samantha wince. Lou’s hands turn the color of sunburn. Then she lifts her elbows like wings and her fingers stretch and pull at each other, her hands involved in a tug-of-war. Neither hand lets go. Her elbows droop at her sides. “Sometimes, especially during the Morocco landing, the camera would zoom in close,” Lou says in a low voice, “and you could see someone’s face through a window.”

  “It was very hot,” Samantha says. She undoes several buttons at the neck of her cotton dress. “People were fainting from the heat, I remember that.” She remembers, across the aisle, a tiny woman with gray hair. I have a granddaughter who’s just your size, the little gray-haired woman told Samantha. That was before anything unusual had happened. The woman was wearing a black dress. Later, when the plane was on the ground again, when it grew hotter and hotter, Samantha remembers that the gray-haired woman reached over and tugged at her sleeve. Water, the woman said, water, water, although she did not make any sound. It was the shape of the words that Samantha heard. “My teddy’s thirsty too,” Samantha told her, and the tiny woman opened her mouth and then she went soft and slithered down to the floor like a towel falling into a pool and Samantha’s mother said, Heat prostration, and Sam, if you don’t take off your coat, and she took it off then, she thinks, and maybe her father put it up in the overhead locker or maybe Sam kicked it under the seat. Wherever it was, the coat remained on the plane. It did not slide down the escape hatch with Sam.

  More than thirteen years later, the lost coat still gnaws at her days and her nights. It has eaten her. In dreams, she looks under the seat and she opens the overhead locker, but her coat has gone, and a salamander with sluglike skin and a smell of blocked drainpipe slithers out. Its eyes are bloodshot. How much do you know? its eyes ask.

  I know more than you think, Samantha tells the bloodshot eyes, and what I don’t know yet, I’ll find out.

  “For days, I never turned the TV off,” her aunt says.

  “You’ve never told me this before.”

  “You’ve never wanted to talk about it.”

  “Now I do,” Samantha says. “Tell me about watching us on TV.”

  “I didn’t sleep. I ate in front of the set. But I never saw you. I never saw any of you; at least, not while you were on the plane. When the children were being off-loaded, I watched for you like a hawk. You were almost last. I was afraid you weren’t going to get off.”

  “I didn’t want to. They had to push me.”

  “The camera got you in close-up at the top of the chute. I’ll never forget your eyes.” Lou touches her niece’s cheek and then throws her arms around Sam and hugs her tightly. “I’d been so afraid,” she says. “I burst into tears when I saw you. I couldn’t stop.”

  Samantha disengages herself and moves away. “It was so hot on the plane. It was so hot. We couldn’t breathe.” She feels feverish. “Do you have something cold? Iced tea or something?” She fans herself with one of her aunt’s magazines. The paper feels damp. “Don’t you have air-conditioning?”

  Her aunt is startled. In October? she does not say. “I’ve got the heat set low, Sam, because we’re supposed to be conserving energy, but I can turn it right off, if you like. The mayor will thank me. In Manhattan, there’s always risk of outages.”

  Samantha feels faint from the heat, but when Lou lowers the thermostat, she starts to shiver. “Can you turn it up again?” she asks. She can hear a baby crying fretfully. “Doesn’t that get on your nerves?” she asks. “Is it from next door?”

  “I can’t hear anything,” Lou says.

  “It sounds like Matthew.” On the plane, her baby brother’s crying went on and on and on. Her mother crooned to him and put her lips against his burning cheeks, but he wouldn’t stop. “He had a heat rash,” Samantha says. “He’d drunk all his formula and they wouldn’t give us any—”

  “Don’t,” her aunt says. “Samantha, please don’t.”

  Don’t worry, there’s a blind curve just ahead, Samantha could have told her. She cannot finish any of her stories, they are full of holes. As for the connecting tissue: she cannot tell if she remembers the thing itself, or the newsreel clips, or the events as she has pored over them in previously classified documents, obtained through much diligence and cunning on her part. A lot of the past comes back at her in print, with lines and half lines and whole paragraphs blocked out.

  Approximate time frame known XXXX XXXX XXXX anticipated strike at major airport XXXX XXXXXXX Paris or London XXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXX flight bound for New York City, passengers Americans and Jews XXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXXXX XXX XXXXXX XXXX codes broken, connections engineered XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX sting operation, code name Black Death, controlled damage XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX Salamander in charge of operations XXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXX XXXX XXX XXXX

  That is where she met Salamander. In a document. It was a case of obsession at first sight.

  But Salamander’s number is unlisted.

  Your call cannot go through as dialed, the recordings say. Please check your information and try again. This is the answering service, a voice advises. Please leave a message and we will get back to you. That is not our department, people say. That person is no longer with us. That happened before our time. All matters falling within the purview of national security are beyond the scope of our … We have no records, we are unable to confirm, we cannot release that information, we cannot be answerable for acts of God, acts of terrorism, acts of double agents, acts of rogue elements of foreign powers, acts of war.

  Rogue agent, she reads in other documents, following Salamander’s trail. Salamander to negotiate with Sirocco XXXXXXXXXXXX arrangements for payment to be made in XXXXXXXXXXXX Sirocco dangerous and unreliable but usable XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX loose cannon, Salamander warns, but as rogue agents go, we can use for Black Death XXXX XXXXXX backstairs contacts in the palaces and has usable information on the princes that not even XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

  Sometimes people Samantha is talking to thin out into block capitals and blacked-out spaces before her eyes. At other times, images with torn edges, scraps of them, flicker without warning across the screen of her mind: butt of machine gun, severed arm, child on inflatable slide, gas masks (bug-eyed), breathing snouts. She slaps at them feverishly, she brushes them away, but they dart and sting. Her dream-films are always jump-cut. They do not add up. When she and Jacob—with whom she first collided at the bottom of an airplane chute, with whom she huddled on a camp cot in Germany—when she and Jacob find someone, when they track down some new link, they treat the pieces like chips from a precious mosaic—from Byzantium say, or Pompeii or Ravenna—from some lost world, fabulous and perhaps impossible to reconstruct. Samantha searches for fragments of cobalt, hunting for the child in the forget-me-not outfit, but the blue notes always disappear. She and Jacob piece together faces but their edges are never sharp and they drift into fog. The task gives them vertigo.

  They are inside us, Jacob tells her. We could find them if we concentrated long enough. The brain is a massive retrieval system, he insists, a
mainframe of electronic impulses. Everything is there, he assures her, if we could nudge the right nerve ends. He rakes his fingers through his hair and across his skull. He clasps hanks of his curls and pulls as though pulling will give relief. I have a crowd in my head, he says.

  “I can’t put my baby brother’s face back together,” Sam tells her aunt. “I’ve tried. I can feel him in my arms. I have certain kinds of physical memory that are quite intense, but not a visual one. I can remember the weight of him, and the sound of his crying, and the fever coming off him, and the way his skin felt bumpy like a plastic bubble-sheet used for packing, but when I look, he doesn’t have a face.”

  Her aunt straightens a photograph in the album. “Please don’t do this, Sam.”

  “Believe me,” Sam tells her, “I’m working on improving the ending. We’re all working on it. Jacob’s migraines are getting so bad, the medication can’t help him anymore.”

  “Who is Jacob?”

  “Jacob Levinstein. He’s one of us.”

  “One of …?” Lou’s eyes widen. She closes the photo album. She seems distressed. She seems angry. She moves away from Sam as though Sam might be infectious. “I would have thought,” Lou says in a strained voice, “that contact … that it would exacerbate …” She hugs the album to her chest. “I read somewhere,” she says reproachfully, “that survivors of the Titanic avoided each other. Reporters tried to arrange reunions, but survivors resisted. I found that easy to understand.”

  It is easy to understand, Samantha thinks, especially for the survivors, especially for the children of Air France 64, but the kind of intense connection that her lot shares—physical proximity is irrelevant—is not something Sam is likely to discuss. “We don’t care to be circus acts for the media,” she tells her aunt. “But we tend to link up. There’s a website now, and we find each other. We need to do it, the same way that war vets do.”

  “A website.” Lou paces from one window to another, the photo album pressed against her chest like a shield. “This is amazing to me, Samantha. Of course I can see … when I think about it, I can see how necessary, how inevitable …”