Last Last Chance

by Fiona Maazel

  The boy goes out to dive for pearls. His body is lean and fit. In this still of night and bounty, he is the first man on earth. But back at the hut, things are bad. The keeper of the Virgin curse shows up to take the girl away. She does not protest. She boards his ship.

  Aggie has gone through a box of tissues. She has resorted to her kimono. My sleeve is wet, I’m using Stanley’s. As for Hannah, she is stifling the best she can.

  The boy returns. The ship has already left port. He does not think, he does not hesitate. He plunges into the sea and swims. He almost catches up; he nearly gets her back. But the keeper cuts him off. And that’s that. Under a summer moon, a boy drowns for love.

  I am spent. The nap, the tears, the fomented anti-Semites, it’s too much. I say I’m going to bed. Stanley protests. He wants to watch boxing. He wants me to stay up and watch boxing. He says, “I watched your stupid show.” I wonder if he thinks we’re a couple.

  Hannah heads off to her room. Her face looks ready to blow. I bet she cries a monsoon in there.

  I start to tell Aggie what they are saying at camp about superplague. I point out that just because fundamentalism has taken over the country is no reason to cede our every citizen to it. I ask if it wouldn’t be good to get Hannah the hell out of there. Like maybe I should take her back with me to the chicken plant. Stanley says it’s only October and what about school?

  “Have you noticed she’s not really going? We can school her. We can buy textbooks and stuff. Nate and Carmel homeschool and look at their kids. Model citizens.”

  “Levi’s got those curls in his hair. He looks like a girl,” Stanley says.

  “Levi is seven. All seven-year-old boys look like girls.”

  “No they don’t.”

  “Well, what do you know? Like you went to school.”

  “That’s cold,” Stanley says. “What’s with you?”

  Ugh. Poor Stanley. I pull him close and kiss his forehead. He says he’ll come to bed with me, that it’s okay about the boxing. He takes my hand. As we’re leaving the room, I notice Aggie has not said a word in ages. She’s been staring at the TV screen, which is frozen on a shot of the boy facedown in the water. I say, “Agneth, you in there?”

  She is startled. Then she sighs, “I guess not,” and fusses with the yarn on her lap.

  Twelve

  Such is the paradox: I have come back in Agneth, but I am still in the Gulf. I have endured her life and mine. I have even endured my comrades at dinner, the child with shriveled head and marble eyes. And throughout, I endure the body death. We reexperience the body death ad infinitum. I live in tautologies, though I call them rondos. I call them song. I was singing when I died. We all were. The Gulf of Finland was riddled with mines. The Virona went down with ease. We sang the “Internationale” and jumped overboard.

  It is 1941. The sun has risen and set. From here, I can see Tallinn smoldering. An Estonian flag has gone up. Silly for the Russians to have thought the people of Tallinn would support them against the Nazis. Stupid of the high command to have ignored the German threat. Hundreds are dead. The volunteer brigades at Tallinn, most have never handled a weapon let alone fired one. Boys not sixteen years old were shot in the face. Our convoy was fifteen miles long. We met with torpedoes, artillery fire, air attack. Six thousand are dead. Fifty-three ships are lost. And yet this mine has kept me afloat while others drown.

  What have I learned? Time will tell. They say it takes years to get over love. What drivel. It takes a lifetime. Or several. Possibly, it can’t be done. Healing is unavoidable, but it is also without end.

  My last few months in Norway were electric. What a time to be alive. We were a small country festered with ideas. Anarchosyndicalists. Socialists, fascists, Marxists, Trotskyites. We often shared the same house. Even the same bed. We fought, though it might have seemed otherwise: the Labor Party had been dominant since 1905. Strict neutrality was the platform. And about this there was no debate. Our concerns were national, and our biggest threat came from within. The Roma. The Roma people had everywhere put down foundations; the Roma intended to stay.

  We used to hunt them down. We used to jail them in chastisement houses. We abducted Roma children and put them in orphanages. Assimilation was the plan. And then, thanks to Dr. Scharffenberger, sterilization. Persons who could not care for themselves were neutered. Persons who might pass on insanity or physical defect to their children were neutered. Some were lobotomized. It gave me no small satisfaction to see these methods carried out. The Roma threatened all that was pure and advanced in our culture. Science confirmed it. Their presence in Norway could only degrade our race.

  Has anything changed? I hardly think so. Here at table, the trammels of capitalism are manifest in how the shepherd’s pie is apportioned, and in whose hunger the knife and fork are wielded best. We do not ask: Who wants seconds? We say: Whosoever gets there first.

  Leaders of men arise from homogeneity to express the collective will of the people. This is a staple of fascism, and I agree. But I was living with butchers. I knew not what to think. I still don’t. Ethos is a funny thing. Live long enough and you’ve seen it all.

  It was a time of intermingling. Wilhelm Reich was there. Sigund Heel and Wittgenstein. We stayed up late and made plans. Tracts were written. Fealties were sworn. In every heart a flower. At least until Held. My sweet Held. He was magnificent back then. I understood half of what he said, but it did not matter. He was haloed by the promise of rebirth. He might part the sea like Moses. When Walter spoke, you believed him. You’d follow him anywhere. And I did. I followed him here. I have read he suffered terribly.

  At first I posed as a resistance nurse. I wore an H7 armband. I feigned loyalty to Haakon, who claimed to govern from England. The son of a union boss smuggled me into Finland. From there it was easy. Russian soldiers were returning home in droves. The Luga front was nearly collapsed. Leningrad was vulnerable. Passage to Tallinn was granted to most anyone able to fight. My plan was to fall back with the Russian Army all the way to Moscow. Barbarossa seemed unstoppable. In a few weeks’ time, Hitler would march on Red Square while I tracked down Held. It was a crazy plan. He hardly cared for me.

  In May 1940, what makes a German Trotskyite exile seek passage through Russia? Desperation. Britain and Sweden would soon negotiate peace with the Nazis. Held knew what would become of him. A journalist ideologue never fares well with a fascist. Or a Stalinist. We were certain he’d be killed, and so he was.

  The circumstances of this war have everyone confused. Norway does not even know who she is at war with. That idiot Quisling continues to presume authority. Terboven is not much better. It seemed the Brits were to attack Norway under pretense of helping the Finns against Russia. It seemed the Germans were planning to occupy Norway under pretense of scooping the Brits. The armistice between Finland and the Soviet Union ruined both plans. And yet the fascists came anyway, followed by the Allies. The Allies left us to die. The fascists were no different.

  I was three days in Tallinn before the Germans pushed through. The Russian defense was feeble, though they held out a month. Still, the collapse, when it came, was swift, and the evacuation was organized in haste. We were headed for Kronstadt. There was no way except by sea. The naval command knew the Gulf was heavily mined. To attempt passage was suicide.

  I am a fascist socialist Freudian Trotskyite. I am a völkisch Bolshevik. A Strasserite. A third-positionist. I am Asatru. A eugenicist. I am dead. I am in love. My passions are rent and I know not my own mind.

  Here in the Gulf is the wreckage of hope. Here is a life jacket. I have pursued a love and failed. They will drop the bomb in four. In the twentieth century, the experience of consciousness is bedlam, calamity, and woe.

  Thirteen

  Just what does it take to weaponize plague? I guess the hard part is having to create a strain that can linger in air. So long as it keeps in air, the rest is cake. How to spread it? Fill a lightbulb with the bacteria and drop it on a subway pla
tform.

  The Feds have tracked down everyone with access to Dad’s lab. The result: nothing. The Feds have also detained nearly every radical in the country. Among casualties of the Patriot Act is due process, which has the ACLU looking more impotent than ever. And this is how it always starts, right? Some nut burns down the Reichstag, which gives Hitler grounds to purge house of those who would destroy us. Same went for Stalin. And Franco. Hard to decide what the plague will kill off first, us or our democracy. By contrast, extremists on the Right are doing just fine, and religion—the scary hate-your-neighbor kind—is experiencing a windfall. In my own home, no less. Tonight is Mother’s Guido von List function, where there is talk about the Aryan ego and similitude with God and a drubbing of the Swarthy or else. What’s frightening, besides the obvious, is the currency or else has these days. Or else what? Or else superplague. Every lobby has conscripted the disease as avenger and deterrent, both.

  Our phones have been ringing nonstop. Mostly it’s reporters. If all international flights to the United States are suspended, will we feel responsible? That or it’s people responding to Stanley’s ad. It’s amazing how many women will sublet their wombs for a buck. He’s setting up interviews. No clue what his criteria are or how, exactly, he plans to finance the thing. At least I’m not involved.

  Wanda has called twice. In each message, she says the sentinel chickens are infected, but that she can’t get anyone from the CDC on the line. Stupid plague, she mutters, and call me back. I decide to stop checking my voice mail from now on.

  Because of the calls and letters and threats and egging of our building, Mother has requested police protection. She has not gotten it, which is too bad. The Guido von List people are scary as shit. They start off okay but once the ritual part of the night begins, scary as shit.

  I remember the craziest thing about Waco and the fifty-day siege was the noise torture. I think the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms people made Koresh and his lot listen to dying animals at full blast. Dental drills, bagpipes, and Nancy Sinatra. Nancy Sinatra! Apparently after a few days of this, a bunch of cows went nuts. I wonder how Nancy Sinatra took it. If things get too Jim Jones tonight, I’m gonna try Perry Como.

  Mother has been having these parties for years. Cocktails, crudités, Brie. She has hired two bartenders and a waitress. Hannah is responsible for the coats. She is to pile them on Izzy’s bed. When I was younger and this was my chore, I used to go through everyone’s pockets. Once I stuck a note in some guy’s camel coat that said Let me out!

  On the topic of Mother’s parties, Hannah and I are agreed: we hate them. Especially since our attendance is mandatory. We know all her friends and are expected to charm. Hannah is wearing a yellow dress with a bow at the back, white stockings, and patent leather shoes. No way was this her idea. In fact, only a geriatric would find this outfit suitable for a twelve-year-old. “Aggie?” I say. She nods.

  The first guests to arrive are Suzanna and Oliver Lentz. He’s tall, she’s fat, they’re German. The rest of the guests do not offer up much variety. Everyone is talking about superplague. Mother, who is a world-class hostess, knows how to sense a mood and work it. She taps a glass for silence. There are about two hundred people in the apartment.

  “Friends,” she says. “Welcome. For those who wish to stay for the organized part of the evening, it begins at nine. I know that’s why most of you have come. In fact, I can’t imagine anyone thinking of anything else.”

  Titters.

  “My husband used to say that any press is good press. If he were here tonight, he might reconsider.”

  Titters.

  “But really, I don’t know anything more about it than you do. I married a man, not his life. So let us pray that Odin visits either a miracle on the sick or the bomb on Minnesota. Drink up!”

  Cheers, laughter, exeunt.

  Suzanna corners me by the cheese platter. She wants to know what I’m doing these days. I grew up with her son. We used to do horrible things to each other’s genitalia.

  “Soul searching,” I say. “Taking a little time off before grad school.”

  “Grad school? How wonderful. Marcus just got his law degree. I am sure he’d love to hear from you.”

  Ever since I was young, parents have been trying to make me date their sons.

  “You look wonderful,” she says. “Grad school for what?”

  “To work with children with learning disabilities.”

  “Oh, how wonderful.”

  And it sort of is. I just made it up, but it sounds good.

  “Oliver,” she yells, because the room is loud. “Lucy has just been telling me the most wonderful things.”

  I spot him and Hannah across the room. She is holding forth about Dad’s simulation project, which is like applying a styptic to whatever dribbles of optimism were left these people before they got here. The project set a smallpox epidemic in motion: A thousand citizens were infected by aerosol clouds in three states. Roleplay and real-time response were gauged. Given the government’s limited supply of smallpox vaccine, three million people were infected, one million died, and interstate commerce was stopped. I remember Dad poring over the numbers. Was this scenario even possible? Yes. Yes it was. He was emphatic. Said the North Koreans definitely had the variola. That nine years before WHO announced the eradication of smallpox, the Russians were experimenting with an especially nasty strain they managed to aerosolize and send downwind, where a woman on a boat took in the fresh night air. The Aralsk outbreak, he said, proved how wily a hostile government can be. How brazen. And what can we do? Basically nothing. The smallpox vaccine is itself dangerous. And the virus, if twinned with human DNA, could easily outwit the vaccine, cf. the Jackson-Ramshaw paper on invincible mousepox. And anyway, what are the odds the government will inoculate with parity? They’ll save themselves and the army while the rest of us drown in our own blood.

  Oliver rushes over, happy for the chance to escape Hannah.

  I excuse myself. This night requires many stimulants consumed at many intervals. Mother, apparently, has the same idea. Why doesn’t anyone seem to notice that she’s addicted to crack? Perhaps it’s because none of the people in attendance tonight look that good, either. Lifts, tucks, nips, it’s a chop shop in there. And the alcoholism is throughout. Even so, looking at her now, I wish she’d come to a meeting with me. Just to hear her talk. I still have no idea what could bring a woman so low, at least not a woman like her. She’d been beautiful, she’d been loved. She had money, a career, two children, friends.

  I see she’s putting on the whiteface. It’s a talc-cream pate she makes herself. Smoothes out the skin. And makes you look dead. Except this evening, she’s flushed and excited, and she can slather all the pate she wants, I still know something’s up.

  Aggie is in the next bathroom over. She’s already put on her blue eye shadow and needs help with her cape. It cinches at the neck. Her blouse is black velour and the pants are black something. The belt is silver, so is the necklace. I wonder where’s the mother ship. “Where’s the mother ship?” I ask.

  Izzy comes out in the same uniform, only her belt is bigger. “Shut up,” she says. “Mingle.”

  Back in the living room are the diehards and initiates. Everyone else has left. A waitress is handing out capes. Some guests have brought their own. The newbies are given rhombus pins to wear at the heart. Really, I don’t want to see this, but Mother insists. I say I’ve been to her Winter Nights blot eight bazillion times. She says, “No, no, tonight will be different from all other nights. Tonight we have purpose.”

  Isifrid corrals the folk into the black room. She actually calls it the black chamber after those buildings where twentieth-century cryptanalysts did their work. Here the horrible effects of globalization, imperialist Christianity, and the Zionist Occupation Government are stripped away, leaving bare the glorious shining of our heathen ancestry. For me, the best thing in all this is ZOG. I never tire of hearing people descry the ZOG Menace. But forge
t me. For everyone else, the big thing is Theosophy, which says the world has seven hierarchies and seven ur-races bound up in a cosmic spiral that pursues enlightenment in cycles of birth, death, and rebirth. Add a little pagan culture to the mix and you get Ariosophy, which pairs the seven circles with Aryan preeminence. Then things get tricky: According to Guido von List (whose von is assumed, mind you), the seven ur-races correspond to the Viking Allfather Odin and his sons, and to the offspring of four giants in the Norse sagas. Somehow the Aryan or fifth race comes from Austria and does pretty well until Christianity. Faced with extermination, the pagans go underground. They encode their message in runes, lore, poetry, law, so that nowadays only a priest-king-scientist can restore meaning to the faith. Somehow, no one at this party doubts Isifrid’s qualifications for the job.

  The waitress appears with red wine. Aggie has a pewter goblet. Hannah’s got a mug and straw. I decide to stick with Scotch. Isifrid takes her place at the lectern. The guests half-moon around her. She waits for silence, then raises her arms.

  Fourteen

  She says, “Our forefathers laid claim to this land a thousand years ago. Bjarni Herjulfsson, Lief and Thórvald Erikson, Thórfinn Karlsefni, these were the first to see the shores of Vinland. Not Christopher Columbus and his ridiculous entourage, but Vikings. Vikings! Be not confused about what this means: the Aryan Norseman shall inherit the earth.”

  Then she toasts my dad, because he’s dead. The rest of us toast my dad, same reason. There are paeans to lost relatives and famous people. A few toast themselves. This takes us through three rounds and nine bottles. Most of us are half in the bag. Hannah is shitfaced.

  From beneath the lectern, Mother produces a rune set of twenty-four. I love the runes. Whereas the Roman alphabet is big on the curve—B, C, D, G, J, O, P, Q, R, S, U—the runes prefer a straight line. You see a fair amount. Also ↑. Sometimes . The alphabet or futhark, I guess (named for the first six characters: fehu, uruz, thurisaz, ansuz, raidho, kenaz), is pretty austere-looking, which makes you marvel at the extravagant arts that have grown around it. Each character has a phonetic value, fff, and a meaning, cattle. But each is also a metaphor, as in cattle means wealth. So if you roll them like dice and pick a few at random, they’re gonna tell you a story. Hence magic, witchery, song.