Due Preparations for the Plague

by Janette Turner Hospital

“Emergency conditions,” she says, “so I’m sorry, but I couldn’t—”

  “Major emergency,” Lowell says.

  Sam is conscious of a small space that outlines her body, a vacuum barrier that sound has to pass through. Lowell speaks, and the words seem to skywrite themselves against the space and Sam reads them slowly and waits for a meaning to drift by. Sirocco, he is saying. Salamander. Sam knows this means something important, but the meaning is still floating and groping for the words. The things my father left, he says.

  “Almost no one left now,” she says. “Besides me.”

  “Samantha, I’ve got one minute left. Can you take down this number and call me back? Got a pencil?”

  “No,” she says, trying to concentrate.

  “Damn it, Samantha, listen to me. You started this, you wouldn’t leave me alone.” His voice is rising, exasperated. “I’m being followed, and you started this, God knows what you’ve started with that goddamn website, your declassified documents, with all your goddamned calls—I’m in a pay phone. Get a pen or a pencil!” he shouts.

  “I’m sorry, I’m in such a—I’m in bad shape, I’m sure I’m not making any sense.” Sam tries to think where a pen or a pencil might be. “I think I’m in shock,” she says. “I’ve lost Jacob. I’ve lost half of myself. I’ve been amputated,” she says, because that’s what it feels like.

  “Please deposit two dollars,” a voice says. “Or recharge your calling card and try again.”

  The line goes dead.

  Shock? Is that the problem? Sam tries to assess her hypothesis. She does seem to be able to go through basic motions. When she hears ringing, she knows to move toward the telephone and she knows to pick up the receiver and speak.

  She must find a pencil and paper for when Lowell calls back. Pencil, she thinks. Where? She finds one on her desk and writes on a piece of paper: Jacob’s body. Must identify. Desire for Jacob’s body overwhelms her. She can identify exactly what she wants. She hugs a pillow between her legs and curls herself tightly around it. She keeps the pencil and notepad in her hand.

  The phone rings.

  Samantha catapults awake and searches for it.

  “Yes?” she says. “Have I identified the body?”

  “Sam? This is Lowell.”

  “I’ve got a pencil.”

  “Take this number.” He dictates ten digits. “Got it?”

  “Got it. Where are you?”

  “I’m getting closer. Heading south on 95. How fast can you get to a pay phone?”

  “Pay phone?” Sam’s mind goes blank again. “I don’t know.”

  “Your phone is probably being tapped. Find a pay phone fast and call back this number.”

  Lowell hangs up. Sam, flustered, thinks: Pay phone, pay phone. Mini market, she thinks, round the corner. But that phone isn’t private, not at all. She runs downstairs and knocks on the door below. “Doug? Hi. Bit of an emergency. My phone seems to be on the blink and I’ve got to be—Could I use your phone?”

  “No problem. Take the cordless,” he says. “Here. Lock yourself in the bathroom and have some privacy.”

  “Angel,” she says.

  In the bathroom, she fumbles with the scrap of paper and dials the number Lowell gave her. Lowell answers on the first ring. “Okay,” he says. “I’m scared shitless. I figure we’ve got about five minutes before they put a trace on this phone too.”

  Sam can hear the terror in his voice, and now she can feel her own terror too, the electric panic of two people who have reason to know that bad will never stop at worse.

  “We have to talk,” he says, “but we can’t do it over the phone. We have to meet. Somewhere safe, though I don’t know if anywhere is safe. My apartment was ransacked and the stuff that my father—”

  “Stuff that your—”

  “I never told you … You remember I had a bag with me in New York?”

  “You wouldn’t let it out of your sight.”

  “My father sent me classified stuff and it’s been stolen. We have to meet somewhere safe.”

  “I know somewhere safe,” Sam tells him—the only safe place left in the world, she thinks—and the boathouse, the abandoned boathouse, is so vivid to her that she can smell the dried salt, smell Cass, smell Jacob, smell a king tide of sorrow that swamps her, and sucks her down. “I do know somewhere quite safe.”

  “Don’t tell me,” he says quickly. “Don’t say it into anything electronic. I’m being followed, so I’m traveling on Greyhound buses and hitching rides. I have to keep changing routes.”

  “Is it really that—?”

  “I don’t know for sure, but I think so. I mean, I might be cracking up, I know that. I also know my house was ransacked, and I do think I’m being followed, and when I can tell you why, you’ll understand.”

  “So how will we—?”

  “When I get to D.C., I’ll call you from a pay phone and give you the number. Get to another pay phone fast and call me back. I’ll tell you where to pick me up. Probably late tonight. Okay?”

  “Okay,” Sam says. “I have to go and identify—”

  “See you later.” Lowell hangs up.

  In the dark, Sam pulls up to a diner in the dangerous northeastern section of Washington, D.C. A man in a bomber jacket and woolen cap, with a blue backpack slung in front like an Indian papoose, gets into her car. They drive east and then south around the curve of the bay without speaking. Eventually, on the unpaved road that leads to the boathouse, Sam says, “The police found Jacob’s body in his car. We used to come here. I don’t believe it was suicide, by the way.” She turns off the lights and nudges the car as close as she dares. “I mean, I know it could have been. It’s possible. But I don’t believe he would. Not without making arrangements for the violin.”

  “Elizabeth’s disappeared too,” Lowell says. “My father’s widow. Not that she knew anything. But someone was afraid she did. Or she was so afraid that someone was afraid that she knew something, she’s moved. She’s gone away.” He holds his backpack as though it were an infant. He cradles it. He strokes it constantly with his hands.

  In the boathouse, Sam wraps herself in the fishnets that heap themselves where Jacob used to sit.

  “… Greyhound buses,” Lowell is saying, making a nest for himself in the nets. “If you want a crash course on race and class in America, Greyhound bus is the way to go. The last time I traveled Greyhound, I was a student coming home on spring break. And that’s the thing. Who uses Greyhound? Students do. American students, and foreign students seeing America on the cheap. Apart from that, it’s blacks, Mexicans, the poor, and the desperate.” He laughs bitterly. “The plus is, the FBI or the CIA or whoever the hell it is who’s after us, they don’t go Greyhound. I don’t believe those guys have ever set foot in a Greyhound terminal, which is another country, believe me. Got to be one of the most depressing zones on earth, but at least it’s a safe one.”

  “I wouldn’t count on that.”

  “I do count on it, though, relatively speaking, I mean, because you can feel being followed on the back of your neck, and I felt unfollowed on those buses. Of course, I didn’t dare go to sleep.”

  “The boathouse is safe. We’ve never seen another human being anywhere near.”

  “I’m exhausted,” Lowell says. “I’ve been on the run two days. Can hardly keep my eyes open.”

  Sam can smell Jacob on the fishnets and she balls a wad of her jacket sleeve into her mouth. She sleeps. They both sleep. She dreams that Jacob is asking her to get the violin from his apartment and keep it safe and she is trying to untangle it from his clothes. Someone else is in the room giving orders and when she swims up to the surface of Lowell’s words, she is tangled up in him and they are both tangled up in the nets and a brackish wind is coming in off the marsh, and gulls, perched in the open gable, swoop off as Sam moves.

  Lowell is talking in his sleep.

  He sleeps awkwardly, his backpack pushing him out of shape, but when Sam tries to ease
it from his shoulders, he cries out and jackknifes up and backhands her across the face.

  “Lowell! It’s me, it’s just me.”

  He stares wild-eyed, still ready to strike. He is trembling violently.

  “We’re in the boathouse,” Sam says. “We’re safe here.”

  “Oh God, Sam.” He takes great gulping breaths, and hugs his knees. “Listen: this blue bag is practically radioactive. My father sent something back from the other side. Some of it’s been stolen, and some of it’s still in here.”

  Sam’s heartbeat is erratic. “Tell me slowly,” she says. “I can’t hear properly if you tell me too much at a time. I can’t take it in. I get interference or reverberation or something.”

  “How I got this stuff—” His hands flutter, and the flutter implies: The explanation won’t make any sense. “Too long a story, but I haven’t let it out of my sight or out of my reach since it came.”

  “What’s in there?”

  “What was in the bag was a bunch of videos and two thick ring binders. One of the binders was in some sort of code and I never made any sense of it. My father wanted it hidden, I don’t know for how long. Decades, maybe. He wanted me to hide it until it could safely be read. The second one was classified stuff, reports on Salamander and Sirocco, kind of a logbook, I guess, and I read a lot of it.”

  “Salamander. You’ve got classified reports on Salamander.”

  “Did have. Both binders were stolen.”

  “But Salamander!”

  “I think my father knew him well. I think my father was killed because he knew who Salamander was. Knew Sirocco too.”

  “Shit,” Sam breathes. “No wonder someone’s after this stuff.”

  “I’ve still got the videotapes he sent me.” He pats the bag that rests in the curve of his body. “I haven’t watched them. I haven’t had a chance to play them yet.”

  “What’s on them?”

  “I have no idea. I’ve been afraid to find out. I’ve been afraid for anyone else to see them, and I’ve been afraid to watch them alone. But I think we have to.”

  “Yes.”

  He opens the backpack and pulls out a drawstring bag made from a child’s pillowcase. He shows Sam the tag at its neck.

  AF 64

  Operation Black Death

  Bunker Tapes & Decameron Tape

  “Oh no,” Sam says faintly. “I can’t watch that.”

  “We have to. People have been murdered for what’s in here.”

  “I’m not sure I can do it.”

  “We have to watch before they’re stolen or destroyed. But the question is, where? Where can we watch them? You don’t have a VCR in the boathouse, I assume.”

  “The Saltmarsh Motel,” Sam says quietly. “It’s nowhere. Nobody goes there off-season.”

  “How far?”

  “Not far by water. There’s an old rowboat below us. We can’t do it in the dark, but if we wait until dawn.”

  “No,” Lowell says. “You can’t show up at a motel in the morning, especially not out of season. We’ll have to wait till tomorrow afternoon.”

  “All right. Late afternoon. We’ll wait until dusk.”

  Book V

  JOURNAL OF S: ENCRYPTED

  And I only am escaped alone to tell thee …

  Book of Job, 1:14

  It’s to the other man, to Borges, that things happen … I live, I let myself live, so that Borges can weave his tales and poems, and those tales and poems are my justification … Little by little, I have been surrendering everything to him, even though I have evidence of his stubborn habit of falsification and exaggeration … Which of us is writing this page I don’t know.

  Jorge Luis Borges, “Borges and I”

  1.

  S for substructure, subterranean, subterfuge.

  S for split selves, Siamesed.

  It is by the other man, Salamander, that events have been nudged in dreadful directions. I operate from beneath his line of sight, because someone has to do this. Someone has to set the record straight. Someone has to sort through the rubble of words and ideas, and I note, for example, that when Salamander writes “ideas” in his reports, or rather in his handwritten notes for his reports, he writes “ids” for short, a plurality of ids, which is a singular idea when you think about it, and he uses the abbreviation “id” when he is indicating “idea” in the nonplural form, as a solitary fertilized seed. It bears looking into, this habit of his, this exhibitionism, this allusive shorthand that might mean id, ideogram, identity, identical, ideologue, or idiot.

  I want you to stop this, Dr. Reuben. I want you to stop words from doing this to me, iddying this way and that, uncontrollably. They are driving me mad. I want you to stop them.

  I want you to stop Salamander from taking up more and more space while I am becoming—have you noticed?—smaller and smaller, like Alice in Wonderland with the shrinking potion. I want you to stop me from disappearing.

  I want you to stop the dreams.

  In this dream, the passengers are all walking around in the fire unharmed, and I am the one who is disfigured. My face and my entire body are as folded and pleated and convoluted as a roasted prune. Children point and stare and make forays into the blackened topography of my body. They climb my welts and slide down my scars. I recognize the children and this is what saddens me beyond what I am able to endure, because I was the one who saved them.

  These are the children I saved.

  I tried to save everyone, but the children, at least, I did save.

  At least I did that. It was something.

  I spoke to Sirocco directly, I spoke directly into his ear, because we always kept radio contact, he from the plane, and I from a location which of course I cannot disclose, Dr. Reuben, not even to you, though it was not far from here. We kept radio and video contact until almost the end, and when contact was lost … well, I do not believe that was Sirocco’s doing or his choice.

  The most dangerous enemy is the agent you wrongly believe to be on your own side.

  While Sirocco and I still had contact, I argued, I negotiated, I made rash and unauthorized offers. I brandished threats and I dangled bribes. This was risky. It is not acceptable, in our line of work, to let personal emotion intrude, and Salamander and I wrestled within ourselves on the matter and I prevailed. I had more substance then. Salamander and I had equal weight. He worked in his sphere, I kept to mine. Operation Black Death was a politically necessary exercise that got out of hand. It was always a gamble, but an intelligent one, and a necessary one, and collateral damage is part of the game. Always. We know that.

  Nevertheless.

  The official line—Salamander’s line—was this: events set in motion for the best of reasons must play themselves out. They must be allowed to take their course. If you intervene, if you try to throw a wrench in the wheels once the whole idea is in motion, well … To put it bluntly: if you get the children out, those children may grow up to destroy you.

  That was the way Salamander thought.

  But those children are children, I protested, and I gave instructions for which no clearance had been received.

  Let my children go, I ordered Sirocco, because I did think of them as mine, as my mission; I thought of them as under my care. And from the point where I realized that the children’s lives were the only negotiable item, I used the only weapon I had to make Sirocco comply. We have located your own children, I told him.

  He had moved them, you see, from Riyadh to Algeria, so that his daughter could attend a French school along with his sons. There will be an accident in this school, I promised him, and many students will be killed. He knew this was something I could arrange. This will come to pass, I promised, if you do not let the children go.

  And though Sirocco has a long history of hardening his heart to threat, he did let the children go.

  This was a moment of triumph for me, though a short-lived one. In our business, personal hatred of an adversary is a cardinal sin, and we
both hated Sirocco, Salamander and I. Our antagonism was passionate, and passion is a major mistake. It clouds judgment.

  You will regret this, Salamander predicted.

  Possibly, I acknowledged. Probably.

  But I went further. I passed up the chain of command a memo detailing all my evidence against Sirocco: the documents, the meeting times, the tapes. Salamander was ordered to hand them over for destruction. It would not be in the interests of national security, he was informed, to pursue …

  Salamander, of course, complied.

  I, on the other hand, made copies first, so that someday, some year, the truth will be known.

  I wear Salamander like a hair shirt. Like an iron lung. But now I want to plead these moments of escape when I defied him. I want to offer them to the children of Flight 64, I want to offer them to my second wife, and to our son L, and to my daughter F, to history, to whatever judges are waiting on the other side of the last abyss. But when I try to explain this to the children in the dream, my words fall from my mouth like hot tar.

  Here, where no birds sing, I do not ask for anything unreasonable. My demands are modest, I think, Dr. Reuben, given the price that I have paid. These are my requests:

  It is the nights that I wish to avoid. I want you to stop the nights.

  On those nights when the torment comes, when nothing else helps, I want continuing access to the basement apartment which is not in my part of the city. Not at all. It is nowhere near the well-groomed tree-shaded streets of Georgetown where I live with E. The building through which one gains access to that dark and desirable basement is quite dissimilar, even violently so, from the graceful town house where I live with my young wife. As you, the ultimate voyeur, inquisitor, lascivious decoder of my journal, as you are very well aware (for remember, I know who you work for, Dr. Reuben. I am always watching you watching, and your reactions are useful and revelatory to me, and are being recorded) … as you are aware, I refer to the cramped below-street-level space of the young courtesan, the lovely Anna in leather and chains.

  Anna lives in that distant, refreshing, bracingly unsafe northeastern sector of our city. Our lovely city. She lives outside the rings of the satin bus routes and beyond the immaculate white aura of the Capitol, which is not visible from the shabby front porches of her street. She lives on the dark side of the moon. Let me be specific, since I know perfectly well that I am followed and watched (I watch you following me): we are speaking of the derelict rowhouses far out along New York Avenue, sardined between the railway lines and those cavernous potholes where even the purring limousines flowing from and toward the Baltimore-Washington Beltway must, for a harsh moment, touch reality. The lovely Anna, my Nefertiti, is black and croons the blue news of underground, which it is my professional duty to keep beneath sewer caps. We have a contract which both of us understand.