Due Preparations for the Plague (3 page)

One month after the funeral, Lowell receives a letter of sorts and certain documents in his father’s handwriting. Dr. Reuben delivers the package, and the circumstances are strange.

“I’ve just flown up from Washington,” Dr. Reuben says. “Your father wanted me to do this personally.”

Lowell tries to put a face to the voice on the telephone. “Do I know you?”

“No, you don’t, and I’m afraid I don’t know Boston. We need to meet somewhere central and very public. Where do you suggest?”

“I don’t understand,” Lowell says later. They are walking side by side in the Public Garden. Lowell marvels at the shine on Dr. Reuben’s black leather shoes. His own sneakers are badly scuffed.

“I was your father’s psychiatrist,” Dr. Reuben explains.

“I see. I didn’t know he—I never thought he had any time for that sort of thing.” Lowell is mesmerized by the flash of black leather alongside his own paint-spattered joggers. He and his father’s psychiatrist are out of step. His sneakers do a quick-step, skip-step, to bring themselves into alignment, but Dr. Reuben stops abruptly—startled or perhaps affronted by the maneuver—and looks back over his shoulder. When they move forward again, they are still not in step.

“Precautions had to be taken,” Dr. Reuben says. He seems to be embarrassed, and is seized by a fit of coughing as though the words are too peppery in his mouth. His eyes water. “At least,” he says, “your father believed so.” He gives way to another short paroxysm of coughing and then laughs in a self-deprecating way. “Your father was very convincing. You know what I’m talking about?”

“I’m not sure,” Lowell says.

“To tell you the truth, I can’t tell if all this is necessary, or if I’ve been swept up into his condition.” Dr. Reuben looks sideways at Lowell, waiting.

“His heart condition? Congestive heart failure, they said—”

“No,” Dr. Reuben says. “I mean paranoia.”

Lowell thinks: This is a trap. My father has arranged for this. He’s paid someone to keep tabs and report on me. He’s keeping postmortem files.

“He believed he was to be murdered,” Dr. Reuben says. “Does that surprise you?”

“What?” Lowell says.

“Murder wasn’t his word for it. Eliminated, he said. I actually tried to get hold of the police report, you know, to see if brake lines were cut, anything like that. But just as he always said, the police reports were classified. Still, I think suicide is equally likely.”

“He had a heart attack at the wheel,” Lowell says. “There was a medical report.”

“Hmm. Maybe. I was unable to see a copy of that report.”

Lowell frowns. “Well, I saw it.” Then he thinks about it. “Maybe I didn’t. I guess they told me and it didn’t occur … It was classified too?”

“Classified.”

“Did you know it was the anniversary—?”

“Of course. That’s why I believe it was suicide. I’ll tell you what I think. I think he made the arrangements I’m about to discuss with you, and then his conscience was clear. It was the thing he had to do, and then he could eliminate himself. But either way, it’s … well, really, I’m ethically bound. There are only two sacrosanct relationships, aren’t there? Priests and shrinks. He might have been mad, or he might have been right. I’m supposed to be the one who can tell.” There is something plaintive about the laugh this time.

He made arrangements
, Lowell thinks wearily. Surprise, surprise. So there will be conditions. There will be expectations. And still Lowell will not measure up.

For a month, one calm month, he has been almost at peace.

“This is not a situation I have ever encountered before,” Dr. Reuben says. In the Public Garden, the trees are turning red and gold. “And even now I can’t swear that I haven’t been infected with his … condition. I mean, I can observe myself becoming paranoid, which is an interesting and curious thing for a psychiatrist to observe in himself. Do you see that man staring at us?”

“Where?”

“The man on the bench over there.”

“The one reading the newspaper?”

“He’s staring at us.”

“He’s watching that little kid on the tricycle.”

“Maybe,” Dr. Reuben says. “But you see what I mean? Now that he’s gone, I’ve started to think like your father. Just the same, it seems better to err on the side of caution. And I made your father a promise. I did make him a promise. And I could tell that once I had made that promise, something shifted within him. His conscience was clear. Or as clear as past events would ever permit. Let’s sit here for a while.”

From a bench beside the pond, they watch the swan boats with their cargo of tourists rock gently in one another’s wakes. Willows trail in the water. Families throw crumbs to the ducks. “You will make of his message what you will,” Dr. Reuben says. “Even I haven’t seen the tapes or the journal, you understand.”

“You’ve got something to give me from him.”

“Indirectly. I have a key to give you. I will leave it on this bench and I want you to put your hand over it, very casually, and stay like that for a full ten minutes after I walk away.” He gives another embarrassed laugh. “I am quoting your father’s directions verbatim. If nothing else, he had a finely developed sense of the dramatic.”

Lowell thinks about this. A phrase comes back to him suddenly, falling out of a willow tree:
the necessary rituals of risk
.

Where are you going, Daddy?

I can’t tell you that, son, but I’ll bring back a present. One for Mommy and one for you.

When will you be back?

I can’t tell you that, Lowell.

For show-and-tell, we have to share if our daddy is on a trip and we have to show pictures.

I’m sorry, Lowell, but I can’t tell you where I’m going.

What will I say in show-and-tell? Will I say that my daddy is not allowed to tell where he’s going?

No, no, you mustn’t say that I can’t say.

What will I say?

You could tell them that your daddy’s on a business trip to Hawaii.

You’re going to Hawaii?

No, I’m not going to Hawaii, but that’s what you can say in show-and-tell.

I can tell them a lie?

Sometimes, when you have to look after the whole country, a lie is not really a lie. These are the necessary rituals of risk, Lowell. Do you understand? If you say anything, you could put lives in danger.

It was a catechism that Lowell often rehearsed to himself.
I must never never say that I’m not allowed to say.

“This key?” Lowell asks. This damned key to a Pandora’s box of secrets that he has no wish to know.

“It’s the key to a locker at Logan Airport,” Dr. Reuben says. “International terminal. Locker B–64.”

Lowell chokes.

“Are you all right?”

“That was the flight number,” Lowell says.

“Air France 64, yes. You can see a great deal of planning went into this. Don’t drive or take a taxi, take the subway. I’m quoting your father again.”

“And I must never never say why I’m not allowed to say.”

“Excuse me?”

“His rules,” Lowell says. “The necessary rituals of risk.”

“He felt hunted. I can tell you that. He was a man in mortal agony. That might make it easier to forgive him. Planning this gave him a little peace at the end.”

“So what is in the locker?”

“I don’t know precisely. A journal, I believe. And some papers, possibly classified ones. And some videotapes—I don’t know of what—but the tapes are of crucial importance.
Crucial
, your father said. I haven’t seen any of this material. I didn’t put it there. Your father put it there and gave me the key, and made me promise to hand-deliver the key to you.”

“When did he put it there?”

“I don’t know exactly. But recently, obviously.”

“My father was in Boston recently?”

“Yes. He saw you, he said.”

Lowell feels an oceanic surge of rage and grief. “He was good at watching. It was the thing he did best.”

“He himself always felt watched.”

“He was a control freak,” Lowell says. “A spook. A puppeteer. I don’t know why I thought the grave would stop him.”

“He was a tormented man,” Dr. Reuben says. “I think the key will tell you everything you need to know.”

Lowell sighs. “The key is to lock me in for life. I’m shackled to him.”

“You have a lot of anger locked inside you.”

Lowell laughs. “Oh shit. Wow. That’s clever. People pay you for that?”

“The key is under my hand on the bench now.”

“What if I throw the key away?”

“That, of course, would be up to you. But I would advise against it.”

“Sacred last will and testament. Honor thy father.”

“No. I would advise against it for much more pragmatic reasons. Because a message sent from beyond the grave, but thrown away unread, is going to haunt you. If you’re in an unstable state already, and I sense that you are … well, I know that you are. I know a great deal about you, naturally, because your father … Anyway, that sort of reactive impulsivity could be the coup de grâce, it could drive you over the edge. I’m going to put my hand back in my pocket now and I’m leaving. Please put your own hand over the key. There should be no need for further contact between us, but can I recommend strongly that you seek professional help?” He takes six steps and returns. “I would also request, however, that if you seek professional help, as you certainly should, you never mention my name.”

He walks away and does not look back.

Lowell places his hand over the key and sits watching the swan boats until the light fades.

Locker B–64 has taken up ghostly residence in Lowell’s bedroom. Sometimes, in dreams, he is inside it, banging on the door for the key holder to let him out. Sometimes, mathematically and malevolently, the walls of his room shift subtly, they pleat and grid themselves, and a steep honeycombed arrangement of locked boxes forms a canyon around his bed. Steel cubes, serried ranks of them, skyscraper upward, each with its own keyhole and small system of vents, while he, Lowell, falls downward, faster and faster, down and down, clutching at handles that come away in his fingers and never getting below or beyond the endless doors. He falls down through basements, through underground library stacks, through caves that are ten storeys deep and hold camouflaged tanks and burning planes, he falls, he continues to fall, but he can never get to the bottom of the riddle of Locker B.

In sleep, many times, he has parked his car near Union Square Station in Somerville, taken the Red Line, and then the Blue, and finally the free shuttle bus. When the driver asks, “Terminal?”—usually speaking without moving his lips—Lowell always says, “Yes. It would seem so. That’s the crux of the Locker B riddle, isn’t it?” and the driver always laughs: “That was terminal, all right, yes sir, and where would you like to be blown up?”

Lowell has also made the trip awake, and by day. He sits facing the bank of steel lockers in the international terminal and stares at Number B–64. Inside the pocket of jacket or of jeans, his fingers play with the key, dextrous games, sinister games, increasingly complicated games. He passes the key over and under his fingers and back again, a woven password. At first he goes once a week, on Sundays, then on Saturdays too, except on those weekends when the children are with him. In the Amy-and-Jason weeks, he goes on Wednesdays instead, then on Wednesdays and Thursdays, and finally every day.

“Where are we going, Daddy?” Amy asks.

“To the airport,” he says. He has not taken the children before, but Monday is too far away. “You can watch the planes taking off and landing.”

On the flight observation deck, he leaves Amy with strict instructions. “You stay here with Jason, okay, till I come back? I have to go do something. I won’t be long.”

“We want to come with you.”

“No, you can’t. I have to see a man about a painting job. I won’t be very long, and I’ll come back here for you, okay?”

“How long will you be gone?”

“Ten minutes,” he says. “Fifteen at the most. You stay right here with Jason and watch the planes.”

But when he rises from his vigil before Locker B–64, he sees them watching him, half hiding behind a water fountain. He knows himself to be the guilty party.

“Amy,” he says reproachfully, “what did I tell you?”

“Jason was crying,” she says. “Didn’t the man come?”

“What man?”

“The man you had to see about the painting job.”

“Oh,” he says. “No. He didn’t show up.”

“Why were you staring at the lockers, Daddy?”

He says slowly, “I left something in one of them, but I’ve lost the key.”

Amy watches his hand, hidden under denim, clenching and unclenching itself. “Maybe it’s in your pocket,” she suggests.

“What do you know?” he laughs. “Little Miss Magic. You’re right. Here it is after all, down in the lining. There’s a little hole and it’s almost … You want to open the locker for me?”

“Okay.”

He has to lift her. Her lips are parted; the tip of her tongue draws tiny arcs of concentration as she inserts the key into the lock and turns. She tips herself back to open the door. “It’s a bag,” she says. “Is it yours, Daddy?”

“Yes,” he says. “Well, no. But I’m looking after it for someone.”

“For the man who didn’t come?”

“Right.” He pulls out a blue sports tote with a Nike logo on the side. The bag is surprisingly heavy. “Amy,” he says. “Wait here with Jason. I have to go to the bathroom.”

“Jason wants to go with you,” Amy tells him.

“Daddy, I come with you,” Jason echoes in his two-year-old lisp.

Lowell kisses the top of Jason’s head. “Daddy’s in a big hurry,” he says. “You stay with Amy, okay? I’ll be back in a minute.”

Jason wails loudly. “Come with you,” he insists.

“No,” Lowell calls over his shoulder, running. “Daddy’s in a big, big hurry. Wait there.”

He intends to lock himself into a stall, but there are too many people present and this makes him nervous, though he does not wish to draw attention to himself by leaving without taking a leak. He is afraid to set the bag down. Indecisive, he moves into a space between a businessman and some drifter who reeks of gin. He stands with the bag between his legs, feet close together, and unzips.

No one pays him the slightest attention and he picks up the blue tote and leaves.

“Daddy, Daddy!” he hears Amy call, and he turns. The children are running after him, breathless. Jason is crying. Dear God, Lowell thinks. What is happening to me? He sweeps Jason up with his right arm. He holds the blue tote in his left. “You didn’t think I’d forgotten you, did you?” he asks, smothering Jason with kisses. “Silly Jason. Okay, let’s go home now. First the shuttle bus, then the subway, then home. Who remembers where the shuttle stop is?”

“I do,” Amy says.

“Okay, Captain. I’ll follow you.”

Why the international terminal? a voice buzzes inside his head. He tries to picture his father on the shuttle up from New York, the elegantly dressed professional man. He cannot visualize his father with a blue sports tote. Had it been inside something else? Did his father disappear into a men’s bathroom at the domestic terminal, change into jeans and baseball cap, and carry the blue tote to the lockers at international? Is there some suggestion that Lowell will be required to embark on a journey after he sees the contents of the bag? Or is this purely memento mori for the flight that never reached its intended destination, the flight from which Lowell’s mother never disembarked? Unless she was one of the hostages. Unless there
were
hostages, ten hostages, as the hijackers claimed.

The hostage hoax
, the State Department said,
is the final ruse of a handful of desperate terrorists
…

Lowell remembers that. He remembers watching the news when that statement was made.

There is no evidence
, the president told the nation in September 1987,
of any survivors of Air France Flight 64, apart from the children who were disembarked in Germany. The final landing was somewhere in Iraq where the plane was blown up. Although Iraq has not permitted the Red Cross … nevertheless our Intelligence sources have confirmed …

Lowell finds himself pausing at an arrivals monitor, scanning for flights due in from Paris.

“Daddy.” Amy tugs at his sleeve. “Come
on.
”

“Just a second, Amy.” Air France seems to have changed its numbering system. He sees AF 002, AF 006 … but of course flight AF 64 was going to New York, not Boston.

“Hey.” Someone bumps into him. “People been coming through yet?”

“What?” Lowell says. The man who has collided with him is disheveled and out of breath. He points to the monitor.

“Flight from Frankfurt. It’s landed. People through yet?”

“I don’t know,” Lowell says.

“What flight you waiting for?”

“I’m not. I’m just …”
Why is he interrogating me
? “Look.” Lowell points to the large automatic doors of frosted glass. “There are people just coming through now.” But he cannot resist looking back over his shoulder as he leaves the terminal, and the man waiting for the flight from Frankfurt is not moving toward the glass doors, but is still watching Lowell. This means nothing, of course.

Though it
could
mean something.

It might mean something.

Lowell decides he will not go direct to the subway with the children, in case he is being watched. “Here’s our bus,” he tells Amy, and they get on the free shuttle that moves between the terminals and they get off again at terminal C.

“This isn’t our stop,” Amy says. “The subway is two more stops.”

“Jason’s hungry,” Lowell says. “Want some French fries, Jason? Want a Coke?”

“French fries!” Jason grins. “Yummy yum.”

“Yummy yum yum,” Lowell chants. “Want some French fries, Amy?”

“Okay,” she says, wary.

There are numerous fast-food stands, none of them appealing, but he buys fries and Cokes for the children, a coffee for himself. He sets the blue bag on the floor and keeps it tightly between his feet, though an inordinate number of people seem to knock it in passing. He tries to imagine his father, with a sports tote between his ankles, having coffee from a Styrofoam cup. He cannot visualize this.

“Okay, kids,” he says. “Let’s go.”

They take the shuttle to the MBTA stop, then the Blue Line to State. They change to the Green Line, change again at Park Street, take the Red Line to Union Square.

Lowell’s car, a slightly battered pickup with a steel hold-all across the back, is where he left it in the parking lot. He unlocks the steel coffer. Nothing missing. He puts the sports tote inside, turns the key in the padlock, changes his mind, unlocks it, takes the tote with him into the cab. “Footrest,” he says. “Pillow for your feet.”

“What’s inside the bag, Daddy?” asks Amy, clicking her seat belt shut.

“Just stuff. Can you do up Jason’s belt?”

He could take one quick look, he thinks, and then, if necessary, if he deems it necessary, he could toss the blue container and its contents into a dumpster. He sits there, his hand on the ignition key, thinking. The owner of the car in the next parking space arrives and the door of his white Nissan taps the side of Lowell’s car. Is it deliberate? The Nissan driver wears a plaid shirt and has a bald patch. Lowell waits for him to leave, analyzing the plaid: vertical stripes and horizontal, green, black, gray, a thin vertical red line.

“Daddy,” Amy says. She is pulling at her hair.

“Right.” He starts the car. “Amy, sweetheart, don’t do that to your hair.”

The soundtrack of
Babe
comes softly through the bedroom wall.

“Excuse me,” the little pig is saying to the sheep in his gravelly-sweet voice, “but would you ladies mind …?” And then Jason’s high-pitched laughter, and Amy’s voice-over in her big-sister tone: “He thinks he’s a dog.” This must be the fourth time this weekend, but the children never tire of the video of the little pig that could.

Outside, from the Somerville night, come the sounds of horns, brakes applied almost too late, fights, shouts, the bells of St. Anne’s on the hill. Lowell has the glazed look of a man masturbating in the cinema. He stares at the wall. His hand, inside the blue sports tote, itemizes three objects, angular, bulky, hard-edged: two thick ring binders and something unstable and irregularly shaped in a drawstring bag that could have been, that was once, a pillowcase. Lowell pulls out the pillowcase bag and stares at it. Rows of knights, with lances poised and pennants on their helmets, gallop toward each other in the lists: this was his own pillow until he was six years old and started school. At the mere touch of the worn cotton, he can smell his bedroom, feel the weight of his father sitting on the end of the bed, smell his mother’s perfume as she bends over to kiss him good night.
Once upon a time
, his father begins.
Once upon a time, in the springtime of the world, when Persephone, the beautiful daughter of Zeus and Demeter, was gathering flowers with her maidens in the field, she was kidnapped and carried off by Hades, King of the Underworld …

Lowell examines the pillowcase.

Attached to the drawstring at its neck is a luggage tag, crudely lettered in black felt marker. He recognizes his father’s handwriting.

Broadside. Blunt weapon, Lowell thinks, with a sense of having absorbed the explosion of Air France 64 in the gut. He bends forward over the sports bag and the zipper jams and the tapes refuse to be crammed back in, slithering around in their fabric casing—how many? how many are there? five? six?—clacketing, plasticking, live inside the pillowcase, miles of nylon ribbon, they are videocassettes, he can tell that through the cloth, but confessions? obscene revelations? death scenes? what? The pillowcase is damp and clammy to the touch now, revolting. He shoves the whole toxic blue bundle under his bed and paces the room. He counts slowly to ten, forward and back, breathing deep. His heartbeat is fast and erratic. Through the wall, he hears climactic music from
Babe
, the film nearly done. Supper, he thinks. They’ll want supper. I can’t take them out. I can’t leave the bag in the house. Pasta, he decides.

He has spaghetti, he has a jar of Ragú sauce somewhere at the back of the fridge.

How can he leave the room with the bag unguarded? He lies on the floor and pulls the wretched thing out from under the bed. Its limbs sprawl, its heavy end lolls like a broken neck, the drawstring bag containing the tapes juts from the slit. He pulls at the stuck zipper and gets the bag open again. His hands feel bloodied. He pushes the ungainly pillowcase properly inside the sports tote and takes note of the two other items, ring binders, both black, both barely able to contain the thick wad of pages inside them. He takes one out and opens it.

It is labeled, on the first page,
Report Dossier: Classified
. He flips through the pages. Almost all are typed, but there are often just one or two paragraphs to a page. In the bottom right-hand corner of each page is a brief notation—
report filed
—in his father’s handwriting. At the top of each page is a date. He reads one at random: