Due Preparations for the Plague (18 page)

He places
Journal of S: Encrypted
on the floor beside his chair and picks up the
Report Dossier: Classified
. He flips through the pages. These are typed and easy to read. Sometimes there is only one paragraph to a page—sightings of Sirocco, meetings with Sirocco, Salamander and Sirocco to meet in Pakistan, to meet in Egypt, to meet in Paris, to meet in Afghanistan. Sometimes Nimrod’s reports are given. Sometimes Nimrod cautions. Sometimes Salamander is to convey to Sirocco in cash … Salamander to arrange shipment of … Salamander to relay Sirocco’s report …

He stops at May 1987, the month when his mother left for Paris.

Lowell closes the binder uneasily. He has lost both his mellowness and his willingness to read. His Christmas carol CD has circled back to track one and is beginning again and he gets up to change it. He reaches for his Bing Crosby’s Christmas Classics and then notices that the small tower of CDs—his favorites—is not where he usually keeps it. He looks around the room, puzzled. Ah. There they are, all his CDs, neatly stacked on top of the TV. Odd. He does not recall putting them there.

In the street, a car backfires, and Lowell jumps.

He decides to hide both his father’s coded journal and the classified dossier somewhere that will be safe for a century or so, and to put everything else—that is, the collection of tapes—back into the blue Nike bag. Tomorrow morning, he will return the bag to Logan Airport and he will rent a locker and that is where the bag will stay. After all, his father had considered an airport locker safe space.

He goes to his bedroom closet and gropes in the murky undergrowth of shoes. He feels the back wall and leans down toward the corner where he keeps the blue Nike tote. Since September, since he removed all the risky contents into assorted drawstring bags and backpacks of disguise, he has stuffed the original blue Nike with T-shirts, old sneakers, and a towel.

The bag is not there.

Lowell pulls everything out of his closet, dumping item by item on his bed. There is no blue Nike bag. He puts everything back in the closet, puts on all the lights in all the rooms, and checks in every cupboard and behind every door. There is no sign of an intruder and no sign of the bag. He goes to a kitchen drawer and takes out a flashlight, and then he turns all the lights out and draws the blinds. By the shielded glow from the flashlight, he opens the door of the large cupboard that serves as his pantry. At the back of the bottom shelf is a jumbo pack of toilet rolls. He lifts out the toilet rolls, and a small door, once a milk safe, becomes visible. He opens the door to reveal a shallow uninsulated cavity up against the solid exterior brick. Here, in prerefrigeration days, milk bottles were once kept cool. He puts the
Journal of S: Encrypted
into the cavity. It fits snugly. He closes the milk-safe door and nails it shut. Over the door, he nails a piece of ply that extends several inches beyond all hinges and joins. Then he replaces the jumbo pack of toilet-paper rolls. Don’t squeeze the Charmin, squawks a little voice in his head, and in front of the toilet paper he places a heavy one-gallon tub of laundry detergent and a bottle of viscous fluid used for unclogging drains.

In his small back storage room, the paint cans stand in stacked columns. He has to move a few to reach the wall. He unhooks the pegboard where a dozen brushes hang from S hooks, row by row. Behind the pegboard, in the recessed space between two studs, he places the
Report Dossier: Classified.
He hangs the pegboard in front of it and nails it to the studs. He hooks a row of metal S’s in the pegboard holes. He hangs his brushes from the S hooks: the nylon brushes for latex paint on top, the horsehair bristles for oil paint and primer below.

The tapes he transfers from the red drawstring bag to a blue nylon backpack. He slips his arms through the straps, wearing the bag in front the way women carry babies against their hearts.

He decides to call Elizabeth, his father’s third wife, who believes her phone might be tapped. He will wish her Merry Christmas, very casually, and then he will suggest, also casually, that he is thinking of coming down to D.C., and perhaps she could call him later in the week to arrange dinner or drinks.

He dials her number. After four rings, he gets an operator’s voice.
The number you have called is no longer in service. Please check your directory and try again.

He sits in his armchair in the dark with the backpack over his chest. He falls asleep and dreams of the Cheshire Cat, but the cat is a stuffed one, made of blue calico with a Nike logo on its side. The cat is stuffed in a strangely lumpy way. Something rectangular juts out at its haunches, and its cheeks bulge over square blocky frames. Little by little, the tail and the bulges and the body disappear, until nothing is left but the grin. He wakes with a cry and feels for the backpack and presses it hard against his heart.

Lou is wrapping Christmas presents and tying them with frosted gold ribbons that she loops into shimmering rosettes. She bends the ribbon around her fingers and counts—ten turns, ten petals—then she twists, knots, cuts, and fluffs out the folds. She has six presents, each wrapped in a different-colored foil, each with its starburst of gold. She tucks a Christmas card under each ribbon. The cards are delicate, printed on parchment and embossed with gold leaf. On each card, Lou writes the same thing:
To Samantha: wishing you the perfect Christmas, with all my love.
When she piles the presents under pine boughs, needles brush her skin and the room smells fragrantly of resin and spice.

Mulled wine simmers. Lou dips in a ladle and tastes. More cloves, she decides. Another cinnamon stick. She checks the turkey. Perfection is what she is after: perfect setting, perfect food, the perfect moment. When the perfect moment comes, she will know. She does not expect fanfare, but she does believe she will know. She will tell what needs to be told.

After that, life will be different.

She checks her watch.

She puts on a new CD—
Hodie, Christus natus est
, the choir of King’s College, Cambridge—and pours some eggnog for herself. She stands at her sixth-floor window and looks up Lexington Avenue, studying each taxi that stops. Hooded figures alight or climb in. Very likely Lou knows them, knows some of them at least, but from her sixth-floor vantage point, all identities are cloaked against the snow.

Secrets are corrosive, she thinks.

Her fingertips drum an anxious bass riff on the sill.

The telephone rings.

“Hello?” she says. “Oh, Sam!” A smile transforms her. “I was beginning to worry. Where are you?”

“I’m still in Washington,” Samantha says. “I’m still at the airport. Apparently the problem is snowstorms in the Midwest. All the flights are very late coming in. They said we’d board in thirty minutes, so I guess that means about another hour and a half, plus the taxi from La Guardia. I’m sorry, Lou.”

Lou leans back against the wall and closes her eyes. “Not to worry,” she says, though her anxiety is acute. Lou herself has no fear of flying, but she is deathly afraid for others when they fly.
Wait right there
, she wants to say.
Stay safe. I’ll drive down and bring the turkey and trimmings and everything else that we need. I can be there in four hours. I’ll bring Christmas.

If she says this, she will irritate Samantha.
Stop trying to keep me in cotton wool
, Samantha will say edgily.
Stop acting as though I can’t take care of myself.

You’re not my mother
, Samantha might say. (Samantha has often said this.)
Stop trying to smother me.

“I’ll cover the turkey,” Lou says, “so it won’t dry out. Everything will keep. Just get here safely.”

She adds a shot of brandy to her eggnog. She turns the oven off and wraps the turkey in foil. She turns off the heat beneath the wine. Restless, she studies the street from the window. Snow is falling, and a walk, she thinks, yes, a walk will help pass the time, coat, hat, mittens, scarf, boots, folding and tucking in, pushing loose hair beneath the toque, knotting the scarf, because solitude is less
interminable
when one is brisk and moving through city streets, yes, even when those streets are eerily deserted, because look, there are others out walking, there are friendly dogs who snuffle at the snow on one’s boots. She nods and smiles at the passersby who walk singly—all of them—hands in pockets, heads hooded or toqued, faces barely visible within rings of satin or fur or woolen scarf, eyes fiercely insisting they have somewhere to go.

She sits on a park bench—the park is pocket-handkerchief-sized—and watches children at play. Snow amazes them. They scoop it up and throw it like confetti. Snow makes them laugh and dance. On a swing, a child in hooded parka, mittens, and boots is barely swaying as snow gathers on her shoulders and boots. The child extends her little legs and watches with wonder as fragile white palaces rise like smoke. She kicks energetically at air and the snowflaked towers and turrets fall. The child laughs and claps her mittened hands. Snow settles on her nose and on her cheeks.

The child’s baby-sitter is talking to a boy—a Christmas cousin? a boyfriend, perhaps?—and the swing is becalmed. The little girl now bucks at it earnestly, trying to generate motion, frowning with exertion, bewildered, not ready to give up. Lou smiles to herself and rises, arms ready to push, but just then the baby-sitter gives the wooden seat an absentminded shove, and goes on talking, and gives another shove, and lets a few arcs take care of themselves, then indifferently reaches out and pushes again. She does not pause in her conversation with the boyfriend. She does not really look, except peripherally, at child or swing.

Lou returns to her bench and watches. The baby-sitter, preoccupied with examining the buckle on the boyfriend’s belt, has forgotten the swing again. The child shakes the chains. She is puzzled. She tries sucking them. She begins to wail. “Stop that!” the baby-sitter says irritably. Lou imagines the baby-sitter wandering off with the boyfriend and abandoning the girl on the swing. The child will grow fretful. At first she will cry quietly and then she will sob. Lou will comfort her. She will carry the child to her own apartment and call 911 and then she will tell the little girl fabulous stories till her parents come.

A man sitting at the other end of the bench stares so fixedly that Lou can feel the pressure of his gaze. “Excuse me,” he says, when she turns. “Can I ask you something?”

“Sure. I guess so.”

“Are you lonely?”

“Excuse me?”

“Lonely. I thought you seemed … aren’t you?”

“No, not at all,” Lou says sharply. “I’m waiting for someone whose flight has been delayed.”

“Oh,” he says. “Well. I hope he makes it.”

Lou lets that one go.

“
I’m
lonely,” the man confesses.

“I’m sorry.”

“I’ve got two grandchildren. You got kids?”

“Sort of,” Lou says.

“Give my right arm to have my littl’uns visit for Chistmas, but my son’s never even sent a photograph. Can you understand that?”

“People do strange things,” Lou acknowledges.

“I can’t get my mind around it, I just can’t. I’m not saying I was the perfect father, far from it. But not even a photograph. What am I supposed to make of that?”

“People are toughest on their relatives, I think,” Lou says. “Especially this time of year. I don’t understand why.”

“Don’t even know what state they live in now. My last Christmas card was returned with one of those yellow post-office stickers on the envelope:
Moved. No forwarding address
.”

“I’m so sorry.”

“Christmas sucks,” the man says. “Worst fucking day of the year.”

“It can be rough,” Lou acknowledges.

“Want to come up to my place for a drink?”

“Oh, I can see my niece’s taxi now,” Lou says hurriedly, and runs, with indecent relief, around the corner in the wake of a cab. She finds she is trembling. A plane drones high overhead, humming toward La Guardia, and she holds her breath, watching the winking lights along the wing. The plane does not burst into flame. Another aircraft does not fall from the sky. Lou breathes a sigh of relief and walks fast enough to keep it balanced on updrafts of air. She walks for an hour, uptown to Central Park and then across to the East River, then back south on First Avenue. As she takes the elevator up to her apartment, she thinks: Sam should have landed by now. She has probably called.

There are, however, no messages on Lou’s answering machine.

She puts the turkey back in the oven without removing the foil. She turns the oven to moderate. She pours herself a glass of wine and goes to her desk. At her computer, she brings up the website for Delta and types in the number of Sam’s flight.

FLIGHT DELAYED
, she reads.

NO FURTHER INFORMATION AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME.

She stares blankly at the screen, seeing nothing, until there is nothingness—quite suddenly—to see, a moment which startles her, the moment when the screen turns empty and densely black and goes into screensaver mode. Blink. Focus. Stardust is coming at Lou, handfuls of it hurled from somewhere deep inside the microchip core, shooting stars, meteors, glowing fragments of comets, the skyrocketing end of the world, the Milky Way pelting her with hailstones. She stares into them, hypnotized.

She sees an airplane at the upper edge of her screen. Zoom shot. Close-up.

From the forward door, at the top of the emergency hatch, a child appears. The eyes in the face are huge with fear. Behind the child hulks a masked form, shadowy, a machine gun cradled in its arms. The child looks back over her shoulder, reluctant, but a gun butt pushes her, thumps her, so that she spreads her frail little arms and half flies, half skids, half falls down the chute, all cartwheeling limbs. Lou cries out and folds her arms around the desktop monitor. She holds it tightly. She feels a tiny heart beat against her own.

LIFE DELAYED
, she types onto the screen.

NO FURTHER INFORMATION AVAILABLE AT THIS TIME.

The lives delayed float like amoebas in limbo. She stares at them until
Stargazer
mode kicks back in.

She moves with asteroids. She is star-stormed. She is flying backwards through time and Françoise is saying, “
Je déteste Noël. C’est le jour le plus dégueulasse de l’année
,” which Lou translates loosely as
Christmas sucks. Worst fucking day of the year.

“Well, 1987 will be better,” Lou proffers, not believing it.

“Better than this year. Has to be.”

“To be worse,” Françoise says, “it is not possible.”

Their apartment on Avenue des Gobelins is stark. There are no smells of Christmas, not in the apartment. The air is rank with stale tobacco and misery. An unpleasant odor of cooked fish rises up the stairwell, drifts under the door, settles in their hair. This is the smell of Christmas 1986 in gay Paree.

The telephone rings and Françoise leaps at it. “
Oui?
” she whispers, breathless. “
Bonjour? C’est toi, Tristan?

“Oh,
je m’excuse …

“
Qui?
” Her face turns blank. “Who?

“It’s for you,” she says. “From America. Your sister.”

Lou’s eyebrows lift. “Rosalie? What a lovely surprise.”

“Hi,” Rosalie says. “Merry Christmas. We miss you, Lou.”

“Miss you too.”

“Listen, I do have a surprise, a
real
surprise.”

“You’re all coming over?”

“You’re going to be an auntie again.”

“I’m going to be …? Oh, that’s—Congratulations. That’s great, Ros.”

“My baby’s due in May.”

“That’s great,” Lou says. “That’s …”

“Here’s Sam to wish you Merry Christmas,” Rosalie says. “Sam, say Merry Christmas to Lou.”

“Merry Christmas, Lou,” Sam says, with an adorable five-year-old’s lisp.

Lou is unable to speak.

“Lou? You still there? Lou?”

“Merry Christmas, everyone,” Lou says.

“Mom and Dad want a turn.”

“Hi, Dad,” Lou says. “Hi, Mom. I’m doing fine. No, really, it didn’t make sense to come home. Paris is incredibly beautiful in December. You should see the lights. It’s a Christmas Wonderland, it really is.”

Françoise leans over and cuts off the call with her index finger.

Lou stares at her. “What did you do that for?”

“I thought you would prefer.”

“I do,” Lou says, “now that I think about it. How did you know?”

“If my father calls from America, I want you to do this for me.”

“I remember,” Lou says gloomily, “one Christmas when I was little, our cat had kittens. I remember my father drowned them in a sack.”

“There are other ways,” Françoise says. “There are many ways. There is alcohol. There is Mohammad.” She dials a number. “
Moi, je suis un grand bleu
,” she says. “You too. You are one big bruise. Mohammad has friends. You want?”

“I’m going for a walk,” Lou says.

“Do not walk by the Seine,” Françoise warns, but Lou does. She stands on the Pont Neuf and stares at the brown swirling water. When she gets back, hours later, the boyfriend is there.

“Mohammad and I, we are going to Marseilles,” Françoise tells her. There is a dangerous glitter in the eyes of Françoise.

“Are you mad?” Lou whispers.

Françoise touches Lou on the arm. “The kittens, they feel nothing,” she assures. “
Joyeux Noël, ma chère Lou
.”

“Merry Christmas,” Lou says.

When Françoise returns three days later, there is a dark bruise under one eye.

On New Year’s Eve 1986, Françoise and Lou get drunk together, seriously drunk. By midnight, they are maudlin, and by the early hours of the new year, confessional. They weep drunkenly in one another’s arms.

Lou is hurtling through cyberdust and time.

Her hands on the keyboard touch something inadvertently.
Stargazer
quivers and retreats. Lou clicks on a search engine and types in “Air France 64”. In one split second, she is offered 842 websites. She chooses
phoenix.com
—“the official website for survivors of Air France 64”—and when the home page appears, she clicks on “chat room for survivors and relatives”. She scrolls through messages till she finds one from “Françoise”.

I would be interest to make contact
, the message reads in imperfect English,
from others who had ticket but did not fly. Françoise.

Lou clicks on “reply”.

Françoise
, she writes.
Did you ever live on Avenue des Gobelins? Do you remember a miserable Christmas? Remember New Year’s Eve 1986? Are you the one? Hope your New Year’s wish came true. Merry Christmas. Lou in America
.

The telephone rings.

“Sam!” Lou says. She holds her right hand tightly over her mouth and holds her breath, then releases it. “You’re here at last,” she says.