Due Preparations for the Plague

by Janette Turner Hospital

  “Lowell?” Sam touches him on the shoulder. “The other cassettes …?”

  “I don’t know if I can,” he says.

  “It’s what he asked of you.”

  “I’m afraid.”

  “So am I. We have reason to be.”

  “I’m afraid of disappointing him yet again. I’m afraid of not measuring up. I’ve already lost the ring binders.”

  “You saved the tapes.”

  “If you’d seen my apartment after they ransacked … How am I going to keep these safe?”

  “You’ve kept them safe. They’re here.”

  “Sam. Samantha. How are we going to stay alive?”

  Sam considers peering between the drapes again, but is afraid to. “We’ll figure that one out later,” she says. “Don’t think about it. First we have to watch the tapes.”

  “I’m afraid of what he wants us to see.”

  “So am I.”

  Lowell checks the chain on the door. “What if I was followed?”

  “We’ll sit in the dark.”

  “The psychiatrist,” Lowell says. “He knows I’ve got them. Someone’s bound to have been tailing him. They could be at the boathouse by now. They could be at the motel office.” He peers between the drapes. The parking lot is still quiet as death. “You’re right,” he says urgently. “We have to watch these before—” He takes the remote. “We have to watch while we can. Where’s the—?”

  “I’ve already put it in the VCR,” Sam whispers. “Keep the sound low.”

  Lowell presses PLAY. Sam turns out the lamp and they sit in the dark, side by side on the double bed, propped against pillows and headboard, their faces ghostly in the flickering light from the screen.

  CBS Anchorman:

  We bring you the latest breaking news on the hijacking of Air France 64, which took off from Paris on September eighth, six days ago. After all children on the flight were safely disembarked in Germany, the plane was permitted to refuel.

  The hijackers then flew to Libya, where gas canisters were brought on board and protective masks and clothing were distributed to passengers. Permission to land in Paris was demanded by the hijackers.

  The hijackers’ claim to have released sarin in the plane, and the limited protection-time offered by the gas masks, were used as blackmail to secure landing rights. The hijackers also declared that flammable gases had been released, and that any attempt at rescue by sharpshooters would cause the plane to explode. The hijackers demanded that ten named terrorists, currently in prison, be released and allowed to board the plane at Charles de Gaulle Airport.

  Intelligence sources could not confirm the release of gases and experts believed this unlikely. Permission to land in Paris was refused.

  Yesterday, September thirteenth, on the Tikrit airstrip in northern Iraq, the plane was blown up, and it was believed that all remaining lives were lost.

  Visual of explosion of plane:

  Screen shows an airstrip with plane in distance.

  There is a blinding flash.

  A sun appears to be rising at the edge of the airstrip.

  CBS Anchorman:

  Today, CBS received a copy of a tape from an Iraqi television station. It appears that ten passengers from Flight 64 are still alive and are being held as hostages until certain demands of the hijackers are met. At this point, CBS has been unable to verify the authenticity of the tape. You are about to see the tape as we received it.

  Visuals:

  A figure in black clothing and a gas mask appears against a stark white ground. He holds a machine gun. He is backlit by harsh bright light so that a shimmer appears at his edges. On the white wall behind him, three words are written in blood (or perhaps they are crudely brush-stroked in red paint): OPERATION BLACK DEATH

  Voice of Man in Black:

  You have seen what has happened to Flight Black Death, formerly Air France 64. Before the plane was blown up, we removed ten hostages. They are safe.

  By refusing us landing rights in Paris, by ignoring our ultimatum on the imminent fate of the passengers, you treated our demands lightly. Now you know that we are not to be trifled with. We therefore give you this one final chance.

  The hostages are in an underground bunker which has been sealed. Sarin and mustard gas have been piped in, but the hostages are unharmed. They have been issued with gas masks and protective suits which will shield them for up to twenty-four hours (though some may succumb earlier than this).

  We have named ten freedom fighters who languish unjustly in French prisons. Many others are in Israeli and American jails. Release any ten Islamic freedom fighters by midnight, and the hostages will be freed. Release one of ours, we release one of yours. You have twenty-four hours at most. If our terms are not met, the hostages will go the way of the plane, though not before they have suffered agonies.

  Visuals:

  A man against the backdrop of the Capitol.

  Subtitled lettering on-screen:

  SPOKESPERSON FOR STATE DEPARTMENT

  Spokesperson for State Department:

  We will make no deals with barbarians. We have been given no proof that there are any hostages. We believe this to be the desperate and pathetic ruse of terrorists who have already played their last trump card and done their worst.

  ABC Anchorman:

  Intelligence sources have revealed that the so-called hostage demand was a hoax. The tape received yesterday from an Iraqi television station, and distributed to global news organizations, has been analyzed by forensic experts. “This footage has been very cleverly put together,” one expert claimed on condition of anonymity, “but it is, without a shadow of doubt, fraudulent.”

  The ultimatum that convicted terrorists be released in exchange for the hostages’ lives is believed to be a desperate plan by a peripheral cell of the terrorist network. Our sources indicate that this group was not even involved in the hijacking, and their film footage has been obtained secondhand and spliced into the so-called Operation Black Death ultimatum. Reliable evidence indicates the hijackers were suicide zealots, all of whom perished when they blew up the plane two days ago.

  “We would not, in any case, have cut a deal with barbarians,” an official of the State Department said. “But in this instance, we were deeply suspicious from the moment the demands were received. Apart from the children, whom our negotiations succeeded in liberating from the plane, we can say categorically that there were no survivors from Flight 64, and no hostages. UN observers have been permitted on Iraqi soil, and the charred remains of the plane have been examined. All the hijackers are accounted for. Our evidence is that they were part of a highly trained terrorist cell of Islamic fundamentalists based in Paris, but made up of a diverse group of Algerians with French citizenship, Palestinians, and Pakistanis. All due steps will be taken to demand reparations from the governments of those involved.

  “Although the toll in American lives has been horrific,” the State Department said, “we do at least know that the dangerous Parisian cell has been eliminated.”

  Visual of explosion of airplane

  Voiceover:

  This is Salamander. The tape you are about to see was sent to CNN and to the major television news networks by an Iraqi television station, but at the request of the State Department was never broadcast. As requested, the networks surrendered their copies to the State Department.

  Visuals:

  Head of a man in black wearing gas mask and carrying machine gun.

  He rips at the Velcro collar and pulls the gas mask from his head. Underneath, he wears a black ski mask.

  Voice of Man in Black Mask:

  (He speaks impeccable English and has the accent of an Oxford don)

  People of America, we have given your journalists the names of ten Muslim heroes who are prisoners in Western jails. Your government, by bringing pressure to bear on its allies and puppet states, can ensure their release. Now we give you the names of ten hostages. If our demands are not met, they will di
e.

  (Sound of a muffled gong.)

  Number one. Isabella Hawthorne, American. Wife of American spy.

  Visuals:

  A woman’s face. She is beautiful. Her hair is shoulder-length and brunette and it wisps at her cheeks. She is smiling.

  (The gong reverberates again like a death bell tolling.)

  Voice of Man in Mask:

  Number two. Avi Levinstein, American Jew.

  Visuals:

  A brooding face. The man has a violin under his chin, the bow half drawn across the strings. A dark curl falls over his forehead.

  (Gong.)

  Voice of Man in Mask:

  Number three. Jonathan Raleigh, American.

  Sam grabs for the remote and hits PAUSE.

  She is stunned by the sight of her father, by the way he gives off energy even in a still photograph. The energy hits her like a hard rubber ball and bounces back. On PAUSE, the image wavers and blurs, so she rewinds a little and sees him clear for a second and then hits the PAUSE button again. Her hands shake because she knows the photograph, and it is part of a whole. It is a detail from a framed family portrait that she keeps on her desk. Her father stands to the right of a swing on which she herself sits. Sam is three years old in the photograph. Her mother stands behind her, her mother’s hands are on the ropes. Her mother has paused in the act of pushing the swing and is turning slightly to smile at her father. Her father is wearing jeans and an Atlanta Braves sweatshirt, and his right arm is raised because his hand closes over his wife’s hand on the rope.

  In the still image on the screen, Sam’s father wears jeans and an Atlanta Braves shirt. His right arm is raised, but the edge of the screen slices his arm at the elbow. One cannot see the rope, nor the swing, nor her father’s hand, nor any hint of the presence of Sam herself.

  She rewinds again and her father smiles for three seconds, and she smells his warm father smell and takes his hand. There is a fleshy imperfection that grows like a bud on this thumb. Her fingertips play with it.

  As far as Sam knows, there is only one other copy of the photograph on her desk. It is in Lou’s photograph album. Sam’s mother must have sent it to her sister. Lou must have taken it to France.

  “I don’t understand,” Sam says. “I don’t understand how they got that.”

  Lowell reaches for the remote and presses PLAY.

  The gong tolls and tolls, and the voice intones, and faces hover on the screen for five seconds.

  Voice of Man in Mask:

  Number four. Tristan Charron, French publisher of books critical of Islam.

  Number five. Genevieve Teague, Australian smuggler of subversive material to Islamic countries.

  Number six. Yasmina Shankara, Hindu film actress from Bombay, involved in immoral films that corrupt Muslim women in India.

  Number seven. Victoria Goldberg, American. Married to American Jew.

  Number eight. Daniel Schulz. Polish Israeli. Yiddish writer.

  Number nine. William Jenkins, American college student.

  Number ten. Homer Longchamp, American.

  Visual:

  Man in black ski mask.

  Voice:

  America, you have twenty-four hours.

  Release our prisoners if you want the hostages to live.

  (Lute music; Middle Eastern music.)

  Visual:

  A mosaic composed of the ten faces of the hostages.

  Book VII

  THE DECAMERON TAPE

  Wherefore … I think it would be excellently well done that we depart this place … and betake ourselves quietly to other places in our thought … and there take such diversion as we may …

  Giovanni Boccaccio, The Decameron

  From now on it can be said that plague was the concern of all of us … Once the town gates were shut, every one of us realized that all, the narrator included, were, so to speak, in the same boat, and each would have to adapt himself to the new conditions of life.

  Albert Camus, The Plague

  Captivity is above all a smell, an incommunicable odor of humiliation … For imprisonment is a form of erosion. The captive devours himself trying to understand his abandonment.

  Jean-Paul Kauffmann, The Black Room of Longwood

  1.

  The screen is shadowy. Some young director of film noir, it would seem, has dispensed with the notion of lighting, and the watcher is tricked into enclosed space and then trapped. In order to get out alive, the watcher must find the sealed opening in the wall.

  You are the watcher.

  You must navigate between dread shapes in the red-flushed dark. (Or you must turn on all the lights and smash the television set, and even so …) Even so, from high in the cube of your dream, where two walls and the ceiling meet, a red light watches. The effect is surreal and dire. This live ember, you know instantly, is the ringmaster’s eye: Let the circus begin.

  The watcher performs as required.

  You clutch at bedding, a handful of sheet in your fist. Vertigo strikes. Your breathing turns ragged. You sweat. You have the certainty that you are being watched. You are monitored not only by the all-seeing light—red devil’s eye, or eye of God—that catalogues your every reaction from deep inside the television set; but you sense some further invisible and overarching presence that hovers and has you under surveillance. And then there are the bug-eyed creatures, monstrously shaped, who peer at you as they grope at the walls and at each other. They snuffle through their filters. They sniff at you with their sensitive snouts. Hog people, you think. Truffle hunters. They huddle and point. They gesture desperately. Step into our box, they plead. We know you can see us. Do not leave us here. Let us out, let us out, let us out.

  Some beat against the membrane that separates them from you. They pummel the screen with padded fists. (You can feel this. You can feel it in the thudding of your heart.) Others sit, propped against the walls. They hunch into themselves like question marks. One is standing beneath the red light, arms lifted in worship, or possibly in supplication or in prayer. One figure is prostrate on the floor.

  Enough, you say. This—the waiting—is intolerable. Let the circus begin.

  Sam studies the brown wraiths with awful fascination. Which one is her father? She believes she can tell, though the shadow-beings are without distinguishing shape. What she recognizes is her father’s intensity. The others drift, becalmed, but her father moves rapidly, thinking escape. He pounds on the wall with gloved fists. He swims through the murk in circles, as though tracking sharks. Seaweedy arms reach for him, then drift aside. He is generating currents, generating energy as he moves, generating a whirlpool of which he is the pulsating core.

  Sam remembers that. She remembers the way of that transfer of energy: her hand in his as they wait to cross a busy city street. Her father is pins-and-needles on her skin and a surge of omnipotence passes through her. People give way to her father. Things give way. He steps into the street and raises one hand. It is my intention to cross, the hand announces, and a path opens up through the swirl of buses and cars and taxis and trucks. The Red Sea parts. Harm cannot touch her father. His life is charmed.

  Before the red eye of God, he raises both arms. This is no act of meekness. If there was a way in, there is a way out, his body says. You will let us go.

  Now his nine companions have fallen back, and some mysterious consensus is at work. Dreamlike fatigue overcomes them. One by one, they sink to the floor until only Sam’s father stands. Sam’s father, Odysseus, stares down the red eye of Circe, and thunder answers.

  Voice of Red Eye:

  (It is enraged, though it speaks with a polished aristocratic accent.)

  Dogs! I am Sirocco, the desert wind that scorches where it blows. For me, circus dogs, you will perform. For me, you will beg and grovel before you die. For me, dogs, you will dance. Faster, I will say, and you will dance faster. Die, I will say. And you will die.

  You have been sacrificed by your own countries and your death will be as
bird bones in the mouth of a bear. Your governments have been trifling with us, stalling for time, using up the minutes of your lives.

  You have six hours before the filters in your masks become useless. Long before that, you will lose the power of speech. Your bunker is sealed. Your deaths by asphyxiation will be slow and painful.

  Or your deaths could be fast. You know this. You have seen fast deaths on the plane. You may choose.

  If you choose the fast exit, while you yet have the power of speech, you may send a last message to your loved ones. The eye of the camera is recording. The world is watching. When you take off your mask to speak, you will have five minutes, perhaps ten. Use your time well.

  An intimation passes from goggled head to goggled head and the viewer can mark the jet stream of its passage. We are down among the dead men, the message says. There is a wilting and buckling of padded forms. They fold themselves up like used clothing. They sink to the floor. In the twilight, they stack themselves loosely, messily, in despair.

  Sam’s father alone is standing. His hands grapple with the Velcro fastening at his neck. Samantha is not surprised to see her father defy his fate, she is thrilled by his raw determination, and somehow, somehow (though she knows how this story ends), somehow she believes the red eye will blink and look away. She believes the sarin and mustard gas will part, she believes a nontoxic channel will open itself up for him and he will cross over and emerge from the lost years of her life and take her hand.