“Your friend?” Mohammad prompts. “Whom you haven’t seen for years?” But he speaks in French. Ton ami? Que tu n’as pas vu depuis des lustres?
Ton ami … And then it hits her.
It hits her like the comet that punched St. Paul on the road to Damascus. She is winded and blinded by it. It is not just the rudeness of a total stranger addressing her as tu. Ton ami … the random conjunction of the words themselves and the impertinence strikes white light on the splinters of recall, she sees the holograph whole, the floating past, the half-light, the turn in the stair …
Tristan, Mohammad, a dark stairwell.
On Avenue des Gobelins, in the thirteenth district, Tristan is visiting for the night. It is early in their relationship, the first wintry months of l980, before she has moved into Tristan’s apartment in the fourth; sometimes they sleep at her place, sometimes at his. The timed light in her stairwell, as always, blinks out before they reach the second landing. There is a shadowy buffeting as residents from higher floors descend. Bonjour, Genevieve. Bonjour, Françoise, and she notes that Françoise is with the intermittent boyfriend who comes and goes. The boyfriend is never introduced, he rarely speaks, she has never seen him clearly in the dark, but as usual, he contrives to brush against Genevieve en passant. He turns back to look at her. He always does this. He is the kind of man who undresses every woman with his eyes and she has the impression that Françoise, whom she scarcely knows, is made unhappy by him and is frightened of him too. He makes a lewd gesture with left arm and fist, though the lewdness is mitigated by a wink that implies: This is all just a joke. He has an S tattooed on his left wrist. “Tristan!” Françoise says in the dark stairwell. Tristan turns and someone pushes the button for the light and he says, astonished, “Françoise!”
“You know each other?” Genevieve asks, surprised.
“It’s been a while,” Françoise says. “Tu vas bien, Tristan?”
“Ça va,” he says. “Et toi?”
“Ça va.”
The boyfriend is looking back up the stairwell, winking. “Ton ami?” he says to Genevieve with a smirk.
Tristan stiffens, offended at the liberty taken, a thuggish stranger using the intimate form of address.
“Let it go,” Genevieve whispers. “It’s done to provoke.”
Your friend? the boyfriend mouths again, in French, behind Tristan’s back. He makes a throat-slitting gesture with index finger across his own neck. Genevieve stares at him.
“How do you know Françoise?” she asks Tristan later.
“An old girlfriend.” Tristan is shaking his head in disbelief. “In the same building as you, c’est incroyable! How long has she been here?”
“A few months.”
“What a strange coincidence.”
“Her boyfriend’s strange.”
“There’s something a bit strange about Françoise. She’s … she doesn’t like to let go. She always made me feel watched. How well do you know her?”
“Only slightly. We say hello in the stairwell every day. She waters my plants when I’m away and I feed her cat when she is. I’m glad the boyfriend’s not around much. He gives me the creeps.”
“A real thug, but I’m relieved she’s found someone else.” When he first left her, Tristan says, she used to call in the middle of the night, threatening suicide.
“What did you do?”
“What could I do? A few times I went to her, and made love again, until she calmed down. Then I got a new phone number, unlisted.”
“Your friend,” Mohammad, in Seat 11B, is saying in English.
“What?”
“You wanted to ask me something because of your friend.” Mohammad unfastens his seat belt and leans forward. He is relaxing, pulling off his shoes, watching her, never blinking or wavering in his gaze. She senses menace and the feeling is intense. He is smiling again, waiting for her answer. He remembers her, she realizes. He knows who she is, and that fact is at the core of the menace. He does not yet realize that she too has a context now, that she has identified him, but perhaps he would not care. Perhaps that would be part of the sinister joke, whatever it is. He mock-punches her shoulder with his fist and the tattooed S pauses at the tip of her nose. She knows he is ridiculing her.
She asks stupidly, “What does the S stand for?”
“It stands for Sirocco,” he says, smiling. “The wind off the Sahara. Sandstorms. The hot wind that burns where it blows,” and there is an announcement then that due to turbulence passengers must not leave their seats, and a roaring begins in Genevieve’s ears that lasts throughout the serving of the meal and then at last the seat belt sign goes off and she stands and says “Excuse me,” and everything revs up to dizzying speed for whole seconds and then slows down because Mohammad, code name Sirocco, reaches into his shoe and something flashes, something silver and thin as a blade of grass, and it pricks at her throat. He lifts her as a rough lover might and pulls her into the aisle. She feels a paper cut on her neck, feels wetness there. She has the sense of being choreographed. She is part of a slow-motion pas-de-deux that is moving forward down the plane as strange figures float out of the first-class section, men in masks with snouts, men with the heads of pigs, men with machine guns in their hands, and there is screaming and madness and clawing hands and then blackness as Genevieve falls.
4. Code Name: Black Death
Tristan can hear, in the pitch-dark, the violent fumble of hands.
Don’t, he begs silently, but the woman is frantic, as well as clumsy, and goes on tearing at her gas mask. He assumes a woman; they seem to have lower thresholds of panic. He will have to act quickly. He can hear the muffled rip of the Velcro fastener, her collar beginning to give way. She fights to escape the way a drowning person claws at water. Then she will emerge from her grotesque headpiece and rise up, transfigured, into death.
Seat 27D, he calculates. Two rows in front of him. Isn’t that the East Indian family, that whole row? So, the mother, then. Or possibly the tiny elderly one, the grandmother, who was wearing a white sari, not that anyone can see a thing in the dark. It is night and the air-conditioning and all electrical systems have failed, though the fog of heat and body sweat is not the worst of it.
Don’t, he begs, willing the message down the aisle.
Think of your children, for God’s sake.
Think of all of us.
There is a lull then, a brief lull, as though the Indian woman hears his thought and is checked in her frenzy. Is that such a crazy idea? It seems to Tristan that everyone’s edges have dissolved, that they have begun to think and act as one multicelled being. They seem to hear one another’s thoughts, or rather to sense them, to receive them whole in some direct intuitive way, the way a swarm of bees or a herd of cattle thinks. And certainly everyone subscribes to this cardinal rule: that it is unacceptable to give way to hysteria because they are all part of one fragile organism now, at unbearable risk. Nevertheless, their swarm-brain knows only too well the seduction of giving way: a few brief minutes of agony and it will be done. Giving way is as totally understandable and forgivable as it is inadmissible.
Tristan shapes these thoughts into a projectile and aims them at Seat 27D. Think of the contagion, he calls silently. He imagines his words, as hard and speedy as a small rock, striking the woman on the edge of her gas mask. He imagines the impact: the way her neck will snap and go limp. For the greater good, he wants to let her know.
He reasons with her. Think of your children, he pleads. Somewhere, he begs her to remember, somewhere, almost certainly, your children are watching us on a TV screen. See, the world’s journalists are telling them, there is the plane, that dull silver gleam in the dark, at the outer edge of the airstrip, just beyond the halo of light. We cannot get closer, the journalists are explaining, without risking the precipitation of some rash act. The hijackers cannot be counted on to behave rationally or logically or with any recognizable human compassion, the newscaster is saying. They are extremists. They
are psychopaths. They are ideologically mad.
And there, on some stranger’s sofa, Tristan reminds her, or on a camp stretcher in some church hall, your children are huddled, watching. A counselor has been assigned to them. A second cousin on your uncle’s side is being flown from Bombay. Your children suck the woolen corners of blankets donated by a local church, and they watch the screen, shivering and wide-eyed. They are too ashamed to mention their underwear, which is hotly wet and ammoniac from their fear. Mommy and Daddy are still inside, their wide eyes say, with those Pigmen who made us fly down the slide. Your youngest begins to sob noisily. “The Pigman touched me,” she screams, and a counselor holds her.
Think of your children, Tristan pleads. They have been through horrors. They are watching more unfold on TV. Do not inflict this on them: the sight of your body tossed from the plane.
Tristan sends his argument, passionate, intense, synapse to synapse, and he has a direct connection, he is sure of it, but to his dismay, the sounds of fumbling and tearing recommence. They escalate. He can feel then, in his agitated need, the transformation of his own body into rock. He can feel his hard edges. He pivots on the mass of himself. The Indian woman is only two rows in front of him. He readies himself as projectile. He will smash her head against the seat.
But it is too late. Already the panic is rising and twisting up above 27D like a water spout, like a king tide, like a tsunami, and it is swelling and thrumming and curling along its upper edge and sloshing over the middle block of seats and up the aisle toward the rear of the plane. In the dark, Tristan closes his eyes. He has just enough time, before the rogue wave swamps him, to ask himself with real curiosity: Why is that necessary, closing the eyes, when nothing is all that any of us can see?
He hangs tightly to the spar of this question.
He hears people going under on all sides. He feels the pull of the rip tide and is himself tempted to rip off his mask.
At such times, the choice is stark: survival or peace.
At such times, no one has any illusions that survival will be other than trial by horror; and yet most choose it.
Tristan clings to the spar of his question.
It is instinctive, he realizes, to close the eyes. Dark or not, behind the eyelids, we focus better and we hear more acutely. It is instinctive, Tristan sees—think of somewhere else, quickly, quickly—yes, it is instinctive to close the eyes, the way it was on the beach that time, the first time, his ocean debut, and he hunches up again, bracing his small body, being barely thirteen and on the wrong side of his growth spurt, with the wave hanging over him like a vast implacable wall. Terror. He sees the fluted green frown beetling above, utterly indifferent. You are nothing, boy, nothing, it says, bored. He prostrates himself before Wave, the annihilator, the God of Smash. He sees the foaming white of its eyes. I will pound you to shell grit, it hisses, a frothy creaming shussing sweep of sound that enters his lungs. He pukes ribbons of sea salt.
His brother Pierre keeps shouting: Like this, like this, keep your eyes open. You have to watch over your shoulder, watch for it, see? Like this. And curl yourself up in its armpit, give yourself to it, like this, so that you are the wave.
And he does, because he knows he has crossed over, he is beyond help and recovery, he is sea, he is salt water, he is force. He is oceanic ferocity itself. And then he is on the hard wet sand and Pierre is thumping him on the back. You see? You see? Pierre laughs, and Tristan laughs too, a moment of pure and thrilling joy, and he tugs at his older brother’s hand and drags him back into the waves.
Again, again! Tristan is breathless on the wild Moroccan coast …
Morocco.
Might they not be in Morocco at this moment? he asks himself, shaken, pressing his hands hard against the arms of the airline seat because the panic has passed over him and he has not succumbed. Might they not be on the tarmac at Rabat? or perhaps Tangier? Yes, it is more than probable, or perhaps Morocco was only the first landing and perhaps they are somewhere else, well, it could be anywhere, there have been too many night landings and night takeoffs to keep track, too many even before the gas masks were issued, but isn’t it likely that they are flying in small circles because who is going to let the hijackers land? So this means perhaps that they are farther afield, in space more sympathetic to the hijackers: Libya? Syria? Iraq? He knows he has all the necessary clues.
He believes he could plot the course of Air France 64, which departed from Paris on time but has never reached its scheduled destination of New York. (Or has it? No. It is impossible, he thinks, that they could be on the ground in New York. And yet …? He cannot be sure of anything. He knows he is in a severe state of sensory disorientation.) There are myriad details crammed into the grab bag of his mind. What he needs is time and calm to sift them through. He needs to unpack them one by one, he needs to classify and sort: the fragments of language heard at two airstrips; the stifling heat of the first two landings, presumably in North Africa somewhere; the smell of an occasional current of fresh air: for example, when the children were off-loaded, which must have been Europe since the dreadful heat had gone. The off-loading could have been at Marseilles, he believes; he is sure he could smell salt air, though it might have been the north Italian coast. Or even, he supposes, somewhere with industrial smells, salt works, phosphate works close by. Frankfurt, perhaps? The security at Frankfurt is known to be poor. It is a city known to harbor terrorist cells. Yes, he thinks, it might have been Frankfurt where the children were disembarked.
The Pigmen (they look like pigs in their space suits and gas masks; they look like ape pigs, alien pigs; sci-fi pigface-people) speak both French and some other language which he supposes is Arabic. When they bark orders in English over the PA system, for the most part their speech is broken and difficult to understand, though one of them, clearly the leader, has issued announcements twice and speaks like a newscaster on the BBC. Tristan recognizes the accent. In his eagerness to improve his English, he has been listening regularly to the European broadcasts of the BBC. The other hijackers—the ones who speak English so poorly—are probably pieds noirs, he surmises; Algerian Frenchmen, or Muslims with French citizenship, the same old story, in other words; the same old fugue, variations on an overworked theme. He imagines the banner headline: ALGERIAN JIHAD STRIKES AGAIN.
At another landing, there was the smell of rain and something fragrant: Jasmine? Gardenia? Daphne? So, Martinique? Mauritius? Is that possible? Surely too far afield? The Cape Verde Islands, perhaps?
He needs time to fit the pieces together.
Time and calm. These he will have to arrange. He will need, in the lulls between panic waves, between onsets of claustrophobia, to pace himself. He has to shut out altogether the gas, the knowledge of the constant possibility of fire, the impending inferno.
The frenzy of clawing hands all around him is like padded thunder. In another five minutes, he estimates, the Indian woman will have freed herself into a scream, and then the high beam will come out of the dark and touch her like the finger of God. Oh yes, they will all be made to watch, he knows that. They will be forced to witness the whole horror show again: the blistering, the vomiting, the contortions, the last agony. Sarin, he suspects, though the Pigmen have not bothered to designate which toxic gas they have released. The Indian woman will be the third death, only the third, but her dying will be contagious, Tristan fears. There will be a rash of deaths, an epidemic, maybe a dozen, maybe more within the next hour, and then things will settle down for a while.
This can be survived, Tristan tells himself. It is not in the Pigmen’s interests to let too many die (though there, he admits to himself, he could be making a crucial error: the error of assuming a correlation between cunning intelligence on the one hand and logical behavior on the other) but the East Indian woman has succeeded now in ripping off her gas mask, and the spotlight swings and focuses on her, and it turns out that she is not after all from the Indian subcontinent, she is not even a woman but a man, tall
, solid, white, American probably, of substance probably, someone used to authority, Tristan thinks, a banker, perhaps, or maybe (this is economy class, after all) a construction foreman, someone used to giving orders, because it is outrage, not fear, that suffuses his face in the moments before agony claims him, before he writhes and jackknifes and crumples, and Tristan concentrates, as mass panic and struggle swirl about him, on whether this is or is not Morocco, he devotes himself afresh to the puzzle that he knows he must solve. He has much of the data. Perhaps he has all of it. It is possible, indeed, that with sufficient care and diligence, in a sufficient state of meditative attentiveness, he can recover details that he is not currently aware he knows. Things float up in dreams, and in terror. He understands this. The unconscious casts a wider net than the conscious mind can grasp. What he needs, simultaneously, is purity of focus and slack. He needs to be loose in his mind.
He thinks of Génie, his body turns instinctively to the thought of Génie, but this agitates him violently, because where is she? How will he get to her? How many hours, how many days, since they parted at Row 11? Is she still alive, even—? He feels panic like marsh fire at his nerve ends and forces his thoughts to jump tracks.
He has been trying to devise a system for telling time, a complex logistical problem for which he is grateful. He is grateful for anything that demands obsessive concentration. It passes the time—a thought which gives him sardonic amusement; even language cannot manage without time—and anything which helps to pass the time is no small matter when he is floating loose in a nightmare, when he is trapped in a dream in which masked men with machine guns appear but he cannot run, in which the world collapses in on him in slow motion and he knows he will be crushed, he will be pulverized, unless he can run like the wind, but he finds he is running through molasses. His legs are made of something heavier than lead. This terror, he knows, will last until he wakes, but he cannot wake out of this dream. He has to find a way to measure back to when the nightmare began.
Due Preparations for the Plague Page 15
