Due Preparations for the Plague (17 page)

It vanished quite slowly, beginning with the end of the tail, and ending with the grin, which remained some time after the rest of it had gone.

Lewis Carroll,
Alice in Wonderland

Lowell is reading
Alice in Wonderland
to his children. Behind them, the tiny lights on the Christmas tree wink randomly. Sometimes they blink in unison, on, off, on, off, sometimes the power flickers along a string like bright dominoes falling. Rowena’s father snores gently in an armchair. In the kitchen, Rowena and her mother load the dishwasher and scrape plates and rinse out glasses. A fire crackles in the hearth. A fragrant smell of cider hangs in the room.

“
Alice began to feel very uneasy
,” Lowell reads. “
To be sure, she had not as yet had any dispute with the Queen, but she knew that it might happen any minute, ‘and then,’ thought she, ‘what would become of me? They’re dreadfully fond of beheading people here; the great wonder is, that there’s anyone left alive!’

“She was looking about for some way of escape, and wondering whether she could get away without being seen, when she noticed a curious appearance in the air: it puzzled her very much at first, but, after watching it a minute or two, she made it out to be a grin, and she said to herself, ‘It’s the Cheshire Cat: now I shall have somebody to talk to.’

“‘
How are you getting on?’ said the Cat—
”

“Daddy,” Amy says, “why can’t we see dead people?”

Lowell’s eyes flick nervously toward the kitchen door. “The Cheshire Cat’s alive,” he says. “Did you think she wasn’t because she disappears?”

“No,” Amy says. She points to the illustrated grin that sits on the branch of a tree. “The Cheshire Cat’s
here
, silly. I know she’s alive.”

“Right,” Lowell says, relieved. “
And Alice waited till the eyes appeared, and then nodded. ‘It’s no use speaking to it,’ she thought, ‘till its ears have come, or at least one of them.’ In another minute the whole head appeared—
”

“But where do
people
go when we can’t see them?” Amy asks.

Lowell waits tensely for the woman in the kitchen to scream,
Off with his head!
He waits to be banished to the outer darkness of his studio apartment, far from the warmth of the season and his children. He is on a strict good behavior bond, and he is not about to cause his children to think of death, so he says cleverly, “You’ll have to ask Mommy. Why don’t you go and ask Mommy?”

“I want to ask
you
,” Amy whispers. “Where did Grandpa
go
?”

Lowell marvels at this. The more we shield them, he thinks, the more curious children become. But nothing will make him say the D word and forfeit his bond. “Grandpa’s in heaven,” he says.

“Can people in heaven see us? Can Grandpa see us?”

“I’m sure he can,” Lowell says. “Yes, I know he can.”

He has not, in fact, been able to free himself of the sense of being watched. He has come to feel like Bunyan’s pilgrim with his own load of sin strapped to his back, because he cannot go anywhere, he dares not go anywhere, without the fearful contents of Locker B–64 at his side. He has invested in six different bags, by way of disguise, because he has a vague fear that the blue Nike sports tote might be recognizable outside the house. Today, in the spirit of the season, he put everything into a red nylon drawstring bag, and arrived with it slung across his back. He added a collar of fake snow and an iron-on Santa. After he put his presents under the tree, Rowena said, curious, “You’ve still got boxes in there.”

“Presents for the guys,” Lowell said, inventing quickly. “That is, for the children of the guys who work for me. Meant to deliver them yesterday and didn’t have time, so I’ll do it tomorrow.”

“I’ll stick the bag in the closet, then,” Rowena said, and it caused him anxiety just to see her pick it up. It made him dizzy to watch her swing it by the cord. Even now, when everyone is in a state of post-dinner somnolence, he feels an agitated need to go to the closet and part the coats and lean down and reassure himself that the bag is still there. He does not give in to this urge.

“Does Grandpa know you gave us
Alice
for Christmas?” Amy asks.

“Yes,” Lowell says. “I think he does. Do you want me to read the chapter about the March Hare now?”

“No. Jason wants the Cheshire Cat,” Amy says. “Don’t you, Jason?”

Jason, with a mouth full of cupcake, nods eagerly. “Chesha Cat,” he says.

Rowena comes into the room and Amy tells her, “The Queen is going to cut off the Cheshire Cat’s head.”

“But the problem is,” Lowell explains, “that the cat’s body is invisible, and you can’t cut off a head that hasn’t got a body attached.”

Amy shrieks with laughter, and Jason joins her, and Rowena says, “Maybe they should work off some of that energy outside. You want to take them tobogganing, Lowell?”

Coats
, he thinks, gratefully.
Closet
. He will be able to check. Amongst the jumble of the children’s boots and parkas, he feels the outlines within the red bag: ring binders, tapes, everything there. He breathes easy.

“You’re not going to take your Santa bag tobogganing, are you?” Rowena asks.

“Why not?” he says. “I’m the Santa man, and we’re going for a ride in my sleigh.”

“Hadn’t you better take the presents out, then?”

“Presents? Oh, for the—Yeah, you’re right. On second thought, I’d better leave the bag here.”

Rowena shakes her head and lifts her eyebrows, but smiles. “Oh, Lowell,” she says. She kisses him on the cheek. She finds his eccentricities almost endearing, now that they are getting a divorce. “I think you’re calmer these days,” she says.

“I am,” he agrees. “I am.” Even as he tucks the red bag back behind snowboots, he feels he could bask like a cat in the smells of Rowena’s kitchen, in the cradle of family, in the sounds that his children make. He feels safer here. He feels that Rowena, and especially Rowena’s parents, would not permit anything out of the ordinary to occur. This has always been the secret of Rowena’s appeal. She is so
normal
. Menace does not peer through the windows of her house—it would not dare—the way it floats at the third-floor casements of the building where Lowell’s apartment is.

Amy and Jason and Lowell slide down the hill on a bright red plastic toboggan, then Lowell and Amy pull Jason back up the slope. They slide down again and again, they roll in the soft white powder, they make snow angels and a snowman with pebble eyes and a stick for a nose. They play till the children begin to feel the cold at fingertips and toes, and Rowena calls them in for hot turkey sandwiches with cranberry sauce.

“I’m so grateful for this, Rowena,” Lowell tells her, slightly weepy from too much mulled toddy and an excess of frosty outdoor air. “For a day like this. It’s the best Christmas present you could give me.”

“It’s for the kids, Lowell,” she says, embarrassed.

His former mother-in-law says, “It’s good to see you two working things out,” and Lowell can feel strings of lights popping on at all his nerve ends, he feels sparklers fizzing in his veins and spreading to the tips of his fingers, but then Rowena says, “Now, Mother. Let’s not go through all that again,” and his hands feel suddenly chilled and he holds them out to the fire.

“Good to have you back in the fold, Lowell,” his father-in-law says.

“Good to be back.” Lowell glances at Rowena from the corner of his eye, but Rowena is passing out the sandwiches on little plates and they all lounge around the fireplace, informal, and Lowell’s father-in-law, his former father-in-law, tells the children about the sleigh rides he used to take as a boy, and then Rowena’s mother plays the piano and they all sing “White Christmas” and “Jingle Bells” and “Let it Snow, Let it Snow, Let it Snow.”

When Rowena finally sends Lowell home in the early evening with a large chunk of Saran-wrapped Christmas cake and the Santa sack beside him on the seat, he feels at peace. He feels that all is almost well with the world. He thinks of Christmases far in the past: the presents under the tree, his father watching as Lowell, trembling with excitement, tears at wrapping paper and cellophane bows, his mother with the camera, the bright glare and pop of the flash. An intense sensory memory of the smell of his mother’s body, the smell of his father’s, of pillowy Christmas hugging, overwhelms him. Instinctively, he reaches for the red bag on the passenger seat and hugs it. He rubs it against one cheek. He decides he will give himself up to his father’s last gift. He will sit in the single armchair in his apartment, pour himself a beer, put up his feet, and mark the evening of Christmas Day 2000 by reading his father’s journals and watching the tapes.

In his driveway, a sliver of chill pricks the warmth that he has so carefully carried back in the cab of the truck. No one has shoveled the snow, of course, but he notices in the glow from the streetlights that someone has walked down the drive. Probably a child. What kid can resist a deep drift of untrodden snow? There are no lights because the timer on the porch lamp has broken. The other five tenants are away, visiting families both in and out of state, and the small building—there are six apartments, two on each floor—is completely empty and dark.

Lowell notices that the storm door on the porch is swinging loose and blames the paperboy. He notices that the front door is slightly ajar. His senses go on alert. Christmas is break-in time, he knows that: stockpiles of presents, empty houses, deserted streets, the constant cover of festive noise, it’s temptation time, the hour of prime crime. He reaches in through the open door and switches on the hall light. “Anyone here?” he calls.

There is no sound.

He puts on the stairwell light.

He slips off his boots and climbs noiselessly, in his socks, to the third floor where he lives. At each landing, in passing, he checks the other apartment doors. All are locked. His own is deadbolted and secure. He unlocks it and switches on the light and locks the door behind him again. He pushes the bolts across at bottom and at top. Inside, everything appears to be as it should. His unwashed cereal bowl is still in the sink. His muscles relax. Perhaps one of the other tenants came back for a gift bought too early and then forgotten. Perhaps, in his haste, he did not properly relock the front door.

Lowell inserts the CD that his in-laws gave him—
An Olde Tyme Christmas Carol Sampler
—into the player, pours a beer, and sinks into his old leather chair. He opens the drawstring bag.

The ring binder labeled
Journal of S: Encrypted
remains impenetrable to Lowell, though it is all handwritten and he recognizes his father’s own hand. He studies the pages of numbers and random letters densely arranged. His father loved secrets and codes. He remembers his father telling him about the Rosetta Stone that Napoleon’s soldiers had found in the mud of the Nile. The stone was dated from around 200 BC and was clearly a burial marker, and so its three inscriptions were deduced to be identical: one in hieroglyphs, one in demotic Egyptian, and one in Greek. Since two of the inscriptions could be read, here at last was the magic key to the mysteries of the Pharaohs and the secret lore of the Cities of the Dead. Even so, his father told him, it took Champollion, brilliant French linguist and code-breaker, fourteen years to decipher the message of the stones.

“A code-breaker looks for
patterns
, Lowell,” his father said.

Is he setting homework for me, Lowell wonders, the way he used to make me learn Homer? What does he want me to do with this, when he knows it’s all Greek to me?

Greek
to me! He closes his eyes and feels the weight of his father at the end of his bed. The mattress rocks like a small boat when his father moves, and Lowell sways drowsily, happily, on the rise and fall of his father’s voice. Lowell is seven, perhaps eight. Lost languages, his father is saying, can weather storms in the ocean of time like Ulysses, in reckless faith. They go astray, they get shipwrecked, they come ashore in strange places, and everyone believes they are lost, but one day they show up again with a cargo so precious that it takes a king’s ransom to buy it.

Take the Dead Sea Scrolls, his father says, and Lowell imagines the scrolls unraveling themselves in his room like brocaded toilet paper that is printed with glittering messages from the holds of Ulysses’s ships. Nine hundred scrolls, his father says. Think of it; and the coils of parchment rustle and billow out like jeweled sails in Lowell’s dreams. The Essenes buried them two thousand years back, his father says, and not until the middle of this century were they found again. Imagine it, Lowell: a whole library from a lost world, much of it in fragments, of course. They were written in ancient Hebrew and Aramaic and Greek by the Essenes in the last century before the Christian Era, and the first century after. Consider the Essenes, Lowell, his father says, consider the means by which they have survived, and Lowell tries to glue together the half-remembered bits and pieces of his father’s accounts, the lost fragments of the Essenes: a monastic sect … Jewish … John the Baptist was one, maybe Jesus was too … Essenes the lost link between Judaism and Christianity … strict puritan rules … called themselves Children of Light.

Probably at the time of the sacking of Jerusalem in the year 70, he remembers his father saying … and something about persecution … and something about protecting the writings from destruction. He remembers the burying of the scrolls. He remembers the date of rediscovery in the caves at Qumran: 1947.

Think of it, Lowell, he remembers his father saying: a message sent through twenty centuries of time. What does that tell us, Lowell, about the desperation and the faith of the Essenes?

That they did their Greek homework? the seven-year-old Lowell suggests.

His father does not laugh. His father perhaps does not hear. His father answers the catechism himself.

It tells us that the truth will endure, Lowell. Even if you kill the messenger, it tells us, a dangerous message can hide and bide its time until the message can safely be read.

He wants me to hide it, Lowell thinks, until the message can safely be read.