Due Preparations for the Plague (4 page)

And on the next page, in his father’s handwriting, a brief note:

Lowell flips through pages and more pages, and Sirocco leaks through the volume like spilled black motor oil. So does Salamander.

He was tormented by Sirocco
, Elizabeth said.

Nightmares
, she said.
Toward the end, every night. Arguing with Sirocco. Or with Salamander. They stalked him. They terrified him. Especially Sirocco.

Lowell closes the ring binder nervously and puts it back in the bag. He opens the cover of the second volume and reads on the title page,
Journal of S: Encrypted.
He riffles through pages. All are written in some sort of code, in vertical columns of Greek letters and numbers, unintelligible. He pushes the journal back into the blue bag and zips it shut. He pushes it under the bed. He wishes he had not opened the locker. He wishes he had thrown away the key.

“Daddy!” Amy calls.

“Coming.” He almost stumbles over the children at the door. “Guess what we’re having for supper?” he says brightly.

“Macaroni and cheese.”

“Wrong.” He puts a large pot of water on the stove. “But close. Okay, who’s going to get the spaghetti for me?”

“Me,” Jason calls, excited. “Me, me, me.”

“And who’s going to get the spaghetti sauce?”

“I’ll get it,” Amy says. There is reproach in her voice. “Don’t you like spaghetti?”

“It’s okay.”

But she does like to be the one who holds the colander and the one who dispenses Parmesan from the Kraft shaker.

“Okay,” Lowell says. “Enjoy. I’ll be back in a minute. I have to make a phone call.”

In the hallway, he takes a small black address book from his pocket and looks up a name. He dials his stepmother’s Washington number and waits. If he gets her answering machine, he thinks, he will not leave a message but will simply eat supper with the children, then take them to Blockbuster, then watch another movie with them (yes, he will stay with them in the room), and then they will all go to sleep,
to sleep, perchance to dream
, and therefore no, he thinks he will avoid sleep for a night or ten, but if Elizabeth does not answer, he will surely have to pace, he will surely have to do violent push-ups on the living room carpet, he will surely have to take the children to the gym at the Y.

“Elizabeth,” he says. “Thank God. This is Lowell.”

“Oh, Lowell. Hi.”

“Are you all right?”

“I suppose so, more or less. I can’t seem to … I feel strange, mostly. Strange things have been happening.”

“Strange how?”

“Oh, just … it’s nothing, really. How are your children?”

“Fine. They’re fine. Well, Rowena thinks I’m a health hazard for them right now, and she’s right, of course. Jason wets his bed all the time.”

“Oh dear, I’m so sorry. And you? How about you?”

“At this moment, very shaky,” he says. “Actually, at this moment, I feel as though …”

“Lowell?”

“… set up for something.” Yes, that was it. “One of his pawns again. He hasn’t stopped.”

“What’s happened?”

“You asked me about Sirocco, remember? And Salamander? I’ve found out who they are. Should’ve realized. They’re code names for secret agents.” He can hear an intake of breath. “Elizabeth?” He hears a click and then her line goes dead. He dials back immediately and gets her answering machine.

Now he wishes more urgently than ever to be back at yesterday.

He half expects the blue Nike bag to have vanished, but it is there, under the bed. He stashes it inside a plaid pillowcase and hides the whole thing at the back of his linen closet with another pillow in front of it, and in front of that he places a small stack of folded towels.

His phone rings and he stumbles to reach it before Amy does.

“Lowell?” Elizabeth’s voice trembles. “I’m calling from the pay phone at the gas station near me. A few days ago, two men came to the house. They said they were from Security, and when I asked what kind of security, which agency, they said national. They said they just had a few questions to ask, but they were here for hours. It was grueling. It was like Mather was a suspect in some crime and that made me a suspect too, or an accomplice or something. I mean, they didn’t say that, but that’s how it felt. I’m probably being paranoid, but I think my phone might be tapped. That’s why I didn’t want you to, you know, say any more. I’ll try to call back later, but don’t call me, okay?”

“Elizabeth,” he says. But she has already hung up.

Amy is pulling at her hair. “I want to call Mommy,” she says.

The phone rings again and Lowell leaps at it. “Lowell?” a woman’s voice says. “This is Samantha. Can we talk about the hijacking?”

Lowell hangs up. “Don’t answer that,” he says to Amy when it rings again.

“Look, just hear me out, okay?” Samantha says to his answering machine. Lowell closes his eyes. He believes he could sleep standing up. Exhaustion, he thinks, is about running out of energy to resist. “I was
on
Air France 64, which gives me some sort of right, okay? I was six years old and both my parents were killed. This is just so you’ll understand why I’m obsessive about it. Okay?”

She seems to be waiting for him to pick up, but he simply stares at the blinking light on his machine.

“Thanks for not cutting me off,” she says. “I’ve been burying myself in Freedom of Information applications, anything and everything declassified, which is precious little, needless to say …” She takes a deep breath. “I’m certain that American Intelligence had information before it hap—” The digital timer chops her off midword, but Lowell already knows that Samantha is not easily deterred. She calls again. “We were disposable pawns for a sting operation, but now we’re chickens coming home to roost. Just think about it, okay, because you probably hold clues that you don’t even know you hold.”

Lowell pushes the erase button on his machine.

Amy says, “I want to call Mommy.”

“Yes,” Lowell says. “Okay. Perhaps that’s best.”

While Amy talks to her mother, Lowell sits on the sofa, Jason in his arms, and stares at the wall.

Fear death? To feel the fog in

my throat,

the mist in my face …

Robert Browning

He leans in close to the bathroom mirror and his words come back lush, fully orchestrated, thick with toothpaste and shower fog. He squints and sees galaxies: bright floating points, moons, multiple planetary rings. He has the eyes of a fly or a god. The things that he knows, weighty matters of life and death—not natural death, or swift death—orbit his consciousness, but he must not speak of them.

This is the way Samantha imagines him. She has constructed him, like a trick question, from undeleted half lines in documents. Morning exhausts him, she imagines. His eyes, in the bathroom mirror, would be bloodshot. Dreams, dispersing though still opaque, would cloud the room. He would not recall the dreams, though they would leave a layer of unease that he would scrub at under the shower and slough off.

In the trade, and to those who do research in previously classified files, he is known as Salamander, or S, and that—for the time being, and to Samantha’s chagrin—will have to suffice.

He is all of the above, Samantha believes, closing the dictionary. She imagines him in front of his bathroom mirror. He would watch himself without blinking as reptiles do.

Unobtrusive, soft as a snake, he slithers under and around many lives. Around Samantha’s life. Around Lowell’s. Around yours. Around mine. We deposit data ceaselessly. He gathers it: phone conversations, e-mails, airline tickets, credit card purchases, income and taxation information, websites visited, buying habits, tastes and eccentricities. He has photographs: from banks, retail stores, elevators, public bathrooms, pedestrian crossings, parking lots, airports.

Those whom he chooses to observe are known to him intimately.

Their nerve systems are digitally mapped.

As flies to wanton boys are the chosen to Salamander.

When it pleases him, he nudges them in this direction or that, according to his game plan. He makes up the rules as he goes.

Samantha is one of his subjects. In the beginning, this was inadvertent, but then he became obsessed with her and she with him.

She deposits data. He gorges on it.

She studies the patterns of his gorging, and posits him.

She posits him because her own existence requires it. Her own existence? From day to day, it feels to her an uncertain thing, without stable landmarks or fixed signs. Some days, when she watches children playing in the park, she can feel the ground giving way. You have no idea, she wants to tell the children. The swings, the sandbox: they are all illusions. You have no idea how unreliable things are, or how suddenly the sky can turn to fire. The playground dips and sways in front of her. In fog everything shifts with the light, everything floats.

On other days, in her classes at Georgetown University, she looks around the seminar table at fellow students and thinks: We live on different planets.

She is nineteen years old, majoring in American history and government, but how could she even begin to translate her life, her inner life, so that it would be intelligible to her peers? They take safety for granted, she knows, and they are certain that two and two always make four, but this could change. She thinks of it this way: that we are composed of a frail string of learned sequences (we recognize our own face in a mirror, we know our own name, we can put on our shoes without thinking, we know how to make love, and we know what to do—more or less—when we feel acute physical pain), and these pieces which make up the puzzle of the self are held together by the glue of memory. Certain solvents can dissolve this glue: a stroke, catastrophic events. Then we are forced to become scavengers of our own past, searching, finding, relearning, reassembling the self.

Samantha tracks different threads of light, painstakingly, one by one, and she follows their beams into the haze. Here and there, little by little, events can be catalogued and flagged, and eventually she hopes she will be able to recalculate the unknown quantities of herself and of Salamander who made and unmade her. She constructs him from the traces he leaves in other lives. She puts him together like a jigsaw puzzle in order to explain what happened in September 1987 and how it happened and why.

She is mapping her way out of fog.

Look at Samantha: here she is, the day the world changed, on the border between
Before
and
After
, in fading color on Kodak paper. She is six years old. She is wearing a blue woolen coat with a darker blue velvet collar and a cotton dress (it is white, prinked with forget-me-nots, and has a smocked bodice and puffed sleeves; it is visible through her unbuttoned coat). She is also wearing white lace-edged socks and black patent-leather shoes. The sign above her head says
PORTE
12
because this photograph was taken at Charles de Gaulle Airport in September 1987. Framed by the doorway to the boarding tunnel, she is turning back to wave. Her left hand clutches the hand of a young man, not a good-looking man, not particularly, but a man whose skin barely seems to contain him. Even in the photograph, an aura of intensity comes off him. The man is her father, Jonathan Raleigh. A one-armed teddy bear, once Samantha’s but given to her baby brother weeks earlier, dangles from her right hand, and when she waves, the teddy bear swoops about like a flag. She is laughing, and there is a dimple just to one side of her mouth. She can feel the fire passing from her father’s hand to her own. There are high mad notes in the pressure of his fingers, messages she is picking up but cannot translate. Her father is also laughing and waving. Beside him, a woman, perhaps weary, her smile slightly tense, holds baby Matthew up to the view of those who have come to see the family off.

“Your mother made your coat,” Samantha’s aunt tells her.

“She did?”

“She made all your clothes. She was that kind of mother.”

That kind of mother
. Samantha saves this phrase. She saves every fragment, every splinter of information.

“The bodice of your dress was hand-smocked,” her aunt says. “These days, you have to go to a museum to see that sort of thing.”

“I still have the dress,” Samantha says.

“Your mother was not afraid of being old-fashioned.”

Sometimes at night, when Samantha cannot sleep, she takes the dress out of its tissue paper and holds it against her cheek, but it keeps its secrets. “It’s torn,” she tells her aunt. “There’s a rip in the skirt.”

“Yes. I remember.”

“From the hem right up to the smocking on the bodice. But it’s not torn in the photograph.”

“No.”

“It must have caught on something when they put us on the escape hatch.”

“Or later, perhaps,” her aunt says.

“I can’t remember tearing it.”

“We couldn’t get that coat off you, you even wanted to sleep in it.”

“I must have taken it off, though,” Samantha says. “Eventually. My mother must have talked me into it.” She studies the woman in the photograph—her mother, Rosalie Hamilton Raleigh—with a magnifying glass. Her mother is not much more than a girl, really, twenty-six years old, at the time of the photograph. “It must have been in the overhead locker.” Samantha thinks she can remember her father putting the coat there. Sometimes she can remember. It all depends on which way she tells the story to herself. “Perhaps during the first landing,” she says.

“Morocco,” her aunt says.

“We didn’t know where we were.”

“Morocco. Every landing is imprinted on my brain, up to the final one in Iraq. They kept showing us maps and flight paths on TV.”

For some reason, this makes Samantha feel giddy. The room tilts. She closes her eyes and grips the arm of the sofa because a curving hall of mirrors seems to be sloping away from her and at the far end, very tiny, she can almost see her mother with a baby in her arms.

“It was horrible,” her aunt says. “Just watching and watching, completely helpless. It was horrible.”

“Was it?” Samantha cannot keep an edge of anger from her voice, and something else too, a low buzz of excitement which her aunt detects and which Samantha will not let go. Like a terrier, she works at her aunt’s growing agitation. “Was it, Lou?” she needles. She never says
Aunt Lou
, only Lou. She watches her aunt the way a cat watches: tense, ready to pounce.

“Sam,” her aunt says. She sounds very tired. “I am not trying to compete. It goes without saying that it was far, far more horrible on the plane.”

But it is the different angle of vision that excites and disturbs Samantha. If she could see the little girl in the blue coat in someone else’s frame, if she could study her, would the puzzle solve itself? “Tell me about watching us on TV.”

Lou clenches her interlocked fingers and the knuckles give off soft cracking sounds that make Samantha wince. Lou’s hands turn the color of sunburn. Then she lifts her elbows like wings and her fingers stretch and pull at each other, her hands involved in a tug-of-war. Neither hand lets go. Her elbows droop at her sides. “Sometimes, especially during the Morocco landing, the camera would zoom in close,” Lou says in a low voice, “and you could see someone’s face through a window.”

“It was very hot,” Samantha says. She undoes several buttons at the neck of her cotton dress. “People were fainting from the heat, I remember that.” She remembers, across the aisle, a tiny woman with gray hair.
I have a granddaughter who’s just your size
, the little gray-haired woman told Samantha. That was before anything unusual had happened. The woman was wearing a black dress. Later, when the plane was on the ground again, when it grew hotter and hotter, Samantha remembers that the gray-haired woman reached over and tugged at her sleeve.
Water
, the woman said,
water, water
, although she did not make any sound. It was the shape of the words that Samantha heard. “My teddy’s thirsty too,” Samantha told her, and the tiny woman opened her mouth and then she went soft and slithered down to the floor like a towel falling into a pool and Samantha’s mother said,
Heat prostration
, and
Sam, if you don’t take off your coat
, and she took it off then, she thinks, and maybe her father put it up in the overhead locker or maybe Sam kicked it under the seat. Wherever it was, the coat remained on the plane. It did not slide down the escape hatch with Sam.

More than thirteen years later, the lost coat still gnaws at her days and her nights. It has eaten her. In dreams, she looks under the seat and she opens the overhead locker, but her coat has gone, and a salamander with sluglike skin and a smell of blocked drainpipe slithers out. Its eyes are bloodshot. How much do you know? its eyes ask.

I know more than you think, Samantha tells the bloodshot eyes, and what I don’t know yet, I’ll find out.

“For days, I never turned the TV off,” her aunt says.

“You’ve never told me this before.”

“You’ve never wanted to talk about it.”

“Now I do,” Samantha says. “Tell me about watching us on TV.”

“I didn’t sleep. I ate in front of the set. But I never saw you. I never saw any of you; at least, not while you were on the plane. When the children were being off-loaded, I watched for you like a hawk. You were almost last. I was afraid you weren’t going to get off.”

“I didn’t want to. They had to push me.”

“The camera got you in close-up at the top of the chute. I’ll never forget your eyes.” Lou touches her niece’s cheek and then throws her arms around Sam and hugs her tightly. “I’d been so afraid,” she says. “I burst into tears when I saw you. I couldn’t stop.”

Samantha disengages herself and moves away. “It was so hot on the plane. It was so hot. We couldn’t breathe.” She feels feverish. “Do you have something cold? Iced tea or something?” She fans herself with one of her aunt’s magazines. The paper feels damp. “Don’t you have air-conditioning?”

Her aunt is startled.
In October?
she does not say. “I’ve got the heat set low, Sam, because we’re supposed to be conserving energy, but I can turn it right off, if you like. The mayor will thank me. In Manhattan, there’s always risk of outages.”

Samantha feels faint from the heat, but when Lou lowers the thermostat, she starts to shiver. “Can you turn it up again?” she asks. She can hear a baby crying fretfully. “Doesn’t that get on your nerves?” she asks. “Is it from next door?”

“I can’t hear anything,” Lou says.

“It sounds like Matthew.” On the plane, her baby brother’s crying went on and on and on. Her mother crooned to him and put her lips against his burning cheeks, but he wouldn’t stop. “He had a heat rash,” Samantha says. “He’d drunk all his formula and they wouldn’t give us any—”

“Don’t,” her aunt says. “Samantha, please don’t.”

Don’t worry, there’s a blind curve just ahead, Samantha could have told her. She cannot finish any of her stories, they are full of holes. As for the connecting tissue: she cannot tell if she remembers the thing itself, or the newsreel clips, or the events as she has pored over them in previously classified documents, obtained through much diligence and cunning on her part. A lot of the past comes back at her in print, with lines and half lines and whole paragraphs blocked out.

That is where she met Salamander. In a document. It was a case of obsession at first sight.