Due Preparations for the Plague (6 page)

“Is that why I was born in New York?”

“Yes. And that’s why your mother had to give up her Charleston wedding, which broke your grandmother’s heart. That’s why your parents were married in a registry office in Manhattan, and why they moved to Atlanta immediately afterwards, and why I stayed in New York.”

“Hurricane Sam, that’s me,” Samantha jokes, to hide her disturbance. “Cause of wholesale evacuation of Charleston”—and perhaps, she has always irrationally feared, of her parents’ deaths.

“That’s pretty much the way it was,” her aunt says. “Certainly as far as our parents—your grandparents—were concerned.”

Samantha studies the three people in the photograph, her mother Rosalie and her aunt Lou and her own invisible self.

“Who’s this?” she asks, pointing to a photograph of her aunt and another woman in front of the Tour Eiffel. The woman is frowning.

“That’s Françoise. The one I shared the apartment with.”

“She looks pretty glum.”

“I put up with her because I only had to pay a pittance for rent. She paid most of it, and she paid all utilities. Of course there was a downside. Sometimes her boyfriend would show up and I’d have to find somewhere else for the night.”

“Françoise,” Samantha says. “That’s a funny coincidence. There’s a Françoise who just contacted me through the website, the Flight 64 website. She lives in Paris.”

“It’s a very common name.”

“Did I meet her? Your roommate? Did we visit your apartment?”

“No, you stayed in a hotel.”

“Would she have known—
your
Françoise—that you had relatives on the flight?”

“It was her TV set that I was glued to for days, but then I moved out anyway to collect you in Germany.”

“And then we flew back to Charleston,” Sam says.

“You remember that?”

Sam remembers verandas, porch swings, jasmine. She remembers planes that exploded every night. She remembers tantrums. She remembers throwing things at her grandparents and at her aunt. “I remember we didn’t last long in Charleston.”

“No.”

“And then you and Grandma Hamilton had a big fight, and you brought me here to New York.”

“Yes,” Lou says sadly.

“You should have known it would never work,” Samantha says.

She remembers years of shuttling between her aunt Lou in New York and her grandparents in Charleston, fighting with all of them, always moody, always in trouble at school, until her grandparents paid for a boarding school in Vermont, which seemed to them an institution both sufficiently distinguished and sufficiently far away, and there Samantha discovered American history and American government, and then she discovered obsession. She became obsessed with the politics of hijacked planes and with the capacity of press and public for quick forgetting, and with the quiet erasure of events from government records. She decided that Washington, D.C., was where she needed to be, and she applied to Georgetown University and was accepted.

Samantha holds the magnifying glass again to the shot of the family boarding the plane. “Why is my father watching you like that?”

“I had the camera,” her aunt says.

“Why is my mother watching my father like that? She’s worried about something. What is she worried about?”

“Your mother never liked traveling much,” her aunt says.

Samantha jumps up and walks out to Lou’s kitchen and looks in her fridge and rummages there as though a different possible past is hidden somewhere behind the milk carton. Her head is deep inside the white-enameled cold. “If she hadn’t begged them to come to Paris, we would never have been on that flight,” Samantha says in a low voice to the back wall of the refrigerator, trying out the words. They bounce back from a tub of butter. She shuts the fridge door. She goes back into the living room and picks up the photo album and puts it down and goes out to the kitchen again. She goes to the sink. She turns on the cold tap, then the hot. She lets both of them run full blast. She watches her life running down the drain.

Her aunt follows and puts her hands on Samantha’s shoulders. Samantha has a sudden violent wish to push Lou’s hands into the Cuisinart and turn it on. “Grandma Hamilton calls you the black sheep of the family,” she says, wanting to draw blood. “You slept around.” The tap water is plunging ferociously down the drain. “There would even have been a baby, Grandma says, if the family hadn’t taken care of the matter.”

Sam can see the sudden pain in Lou’s eyes, but nevertheless the eyes rest on her niece’s face, calm and assessing, disappointed perhaps.
Is she embarrassed for me?
Sam asks herself. This makes her furious. She puts her head under the rush of water and hears chance. It roars like Niagara. She can see the fog, angry-colored, that hangs over Porte 12, between her aunt’s camera and herself. There is something about the camera that sends rockets of anger scudding under the surface of Sam’s skin. This anger beats in and out like a bass drum in her ears and it signals war, but the truth is, she does not really understand why she is so furiously angry with her aunt and the awkwardness of being in the wrong makes her angrier.

“Let it go, Sam,” Lou says. “Let them be. Let them rest in peace.”

“I can’t,” Samantha says.

She wants to show the world photographs that don’t exist. Look at this, she wants to say: my mother’s eyes. These are my mother’s eyes at the moment when Matthew finally stopped crying altogether. And here is something else, she wants to say: here are the eyes of the children all around me, some time later (days later, airports later, negotiations, ultimatums, deadlines later) when we huddled together watching TV—we were crowded on makeshift cots in some vast room, I think it was a high school gym, I know it was somewhere in Germany—forty pairs of eyes, opened wide, unblinking, watching the fate of their parents on one small screen. The plane, before it turned into an underwater sun, before it branched into red and orange coral, seemed to swim in blue haze like a fish. We knew we had been dropped like tiny eggs from its belly, we were vague about when.
Pow, pow
, one little boy said, pointing his fingers at the screen. No one cried then. All the eyes were so dry, they prickled. There was an eerie silence in the room.

Here is a photograph, Samantha wants to say to the world. Here is a photograph, never taken, which I would like you to see: the eyes of forty frightened children as they step off the lip of an abyss.

Onstage, back in Washington, D.C., Samantha blazes with light and looks into the dark. Chien Bleu is murkily lit. This is a basement dive, thick with perfume and blues and jazz and the hot scent of illicit assignations. Chien Bleu caters to the lower levels, so to speak, but the baseness is exclusive. Inside the Washington Beltway, all sex is costly and the Chien Bleu’s cover price is high. Tables are so close that the waiters must pass between them sideways, trays held aloft. Couple by couple, even one by one, clients sift in past the bouncers. No standees are allowed. In the heat of the overhead spotlight, Samantha dabs at her forehead—she has tissues tucked into her bra—but she can feel her makeup melting on her face. She waits for the sax backstage to well up and flow over the din of conversation and she rides the wave.

“Hi,” she says huskily, floating herself out on an arpeggio. The soft curl of attention washes back toward her.

“I can’t sing,” she tells them, almost touching the mike with her lips. “I’m the entr’acte between musical sets.” She makes this sound like a proposition, low and sultry.

She takes a clasp out of her hair and lets it cascade around her shoulders. She unbuttons the cuffs on her long white sleeves. (She is dressed like a schoolteacher or a librarian: prim white blouse with high collar, a plain gray skirt which is ankle-length and severe.) She gives a quick tug to each sleeve, and as each pulls away from the armhole, she discards it, tossing it into the crowd. “Ahh,” she says languidly. “That feels better.” There is a thin scatter of laughter as men reach for the floating sleeves and then a heightened attentiveness that even in the dark she can feel. She unbuttons her blouse very slowly. From backstage, a riff of cool jazz rises like mist. “No, I don’t sing,” she says. “I’m the stand-up comic.”

In one quick move, she steps out of blouse and skirt. Underneath, she is wearing a filthy sleeveless undershirt and gray flannel long johns from a Salvation Army bin. “I’m a bag lady,” she says. “I live a few intersections from the Capitol. You know that crossover point where the property taxes plummet and there’s a kind of sea change in the type of human being you see? Someone offered me twenty bucks to strip while the trumpeter pours the spit out of his horn. Throw in a meal and a bed, I told them, and it’s a deal. So here I am.

“Now the question is,” she murmurs into the mike, stepping down off the stage and feeling her way between the tables, “the question is: whose bed is it going to be? Who’s going to be the lucky man?” She taps this man and that on the shoulder. “Not you, not you, not you,” she says. There is laughter at each table as she passes. “I’m rather particular,” she says, “about the men whose bed I’ll crawl into. I’m partial to the smell of power. Well, it’s the local aphrodisiac in this town, isn’t it? Can’t get up without it.”

As faces loom out of the candlelight, Samantha sniffs at them with elaborate show. Sometimes she sees one of her professors from Georgetown U, but not often. It’s more a hangout for congressmen, senators, lobbyists, publicists, Pentagon brass, the whole Capitol Hill tribe. “This man,” she says, tapping him on the shoulder, and suddenly the spot swings toward them and highlights a well-known face, “this man has more government secrets tucked into his jockey shorts than you have bees in your honeysuckle. But we’ve got our little secrets here too.” And the spot moves slightly to bathe in white light the pillowy-lipped young woman at his side. She is expensively dressed—perhaps
wrapped
is a better word—in something clingy and silver. “Tinfoil,” Samantha announces, crumpling a little of the cloth in her hand. The metallic sound of foil comes from the speakers. People laugh. “Luckily for our patrons,” Samantha says, “we don’t allow cameras in here. If we did, they might have to pay dearly for their pleasures.” The spot lingers on the bare shoulders of the young woman and pans along the slit that runs from the hem of her skirt to thigh-high. “Anyway …” Samantha pauses dramatically, and the spot turns back to the senator’s face. “I’m sure he’s paid enough for her already.” Much laughter, as the spot and Samantha move on.

She weaves between tables, she moves between dark and light. Each stretch of dark is immense. She slides her foot forward on the tiled floor and feels for the void. It can open up anywhere with no more than a second’s warning. Sometimes she has to steady herself by catching hold of a chair back or someone’s shoulder. She believes that Salamander may be present. He is her compass and her magnetic North Pole. She will find him. She believes she will know him by his smell. She has fantasies of causing Salamander pain, and when he is screaming, she will make him lead her to Sirocco, because Sirocco may have been the one who lit the fuse. But both of them
knew
, both of them
planned
, and the knowing is not something that Sam will forgive. “Halloween was a week ago,” she says, “but it’s always Halloween here, isn’t it? The place is always full of spooks. Trick or treat, that’s the question. Who’s the spook of the week?

“Not you, not you, not you,” she says, tapping shoulders as she passes by. “When the lights go out in Washington, the powerful play musical secrets and musical beds. Did you hear the one about the guy in Intelligence who made his own lie and went to bed with it? Gave birth to an international incident but the CIA and the NSA pressured him to put it up for adoption. It grew up to be a full-sized war and then—because this is the way things go these days—it went looking for its birth father. There were blood tests, DNA, the whole works. Everything pointed to someone high up in Intelligence, who denied all on the grounds that he never fucked with the lie of the land. Turned out he was a double agent so they tripled him and packed him off to Pakistan and arranged for another double agent to accidentally on purpose bump him off.”

This is the way it goes. Samantha loves the nervousness of the laughter. She gets high on it. “Who’s going to make the honor roll tonight?” she croons. She likes to tantalize. The spotlight roams and picks out faces here and there. “All sinners together, isn’t this cozy?” she asks. “All in the same boat. It’s like being crammed into the same hijacked plane.

“You know,” she confides, “I only go to bed with men powerful enough to have code names. I went to bed once with a man whose code name was Goliath, but he was too much of a Philistine for my taste. Another time, I had sex with Arctic Fox, but it left me cold. And then there was Salamander, whoosh, what a slitherer, what a firecracker, comes like a rocket. I had to turn the hose on him, but it didn’t douse his flame for one second. That guy is burning, burning, burning, first cousin to a desert wind. Keep your fire extinguisher handy when Salamander’s around because he knows about explosions before they come, and he knows where the hot sirocco blows.

“Did you hear the one about the former head of the CIA who made a deal with bin Laden? ‘Look,’ he says to bin Laden, ‘it’s the year 2000, and we know you’ve got a millennial itch. You need global publicity and global sympathy. We need to nail your ass. Neither of us can make a move, because we know everything you plan to do before you do it, and you know every countermove we plan to take. We’re both stalemated. So here’s a proposal. How about we bankroll a movie,
Getting Osama
, with a look-alike actor? In the movie, your cave stronghold is infiltrated by Bruce Willis and Harrison Ford. Your guys catch them. Our guys survive barbaric Islamic persuasion. They get their hands cut off, then their ears. They don’t talk. They escape and blow your compound and the entire Taliban army to smithereens. In the movie, only your little son survives the blast, and Harrison Ford gives him his pack of baseball cards and takes him back to California. When your son asks Sammy Sosa for his autograph, there’s not a dry eye in the house. Your little boy becomes an icon like Elian Gonzalez. Think of the public relations coup. As far as global opinion is concerned, depending on political allegiance, of course, you die a tragic hero or you got what was coming to you. Either way, the violence ends, the famine ends, the suffering ends, and the whole world loves your little son.’

“‘What’s the catch?’ bin Laden wants to know.

“‘The catch is, we film on location in Afghanistan.’”

And so it goes, and so it goes.

Even by candlelight, there are men who murmur comments into handheld dictaphones. But stand-up comics are like jesters in the court of medieval kings. They can take liberties. They can get away with murder, so to speak. They can make fools of those who walk in the corridors of power, and the powerful love them for it. The powerful court them. They offer proposals and enticements. They seek occasions to compile a photographic dossier in case the need for future blackmail should arise.

“My dear,” a silver-haired gentleman says, stroking Samantha’s thigh. “What a wickedly delicious mind you have. May I buy you a drink?”

(
Will you walk into my parlor? says the spider to the fly.

There’s a microphone behind me and a hidden camera eye
.)

“You may buy me anything you please,” Samantha says, low and sultry, making sheep’s eyes and sitting on his lap.

“Excuse me,” some clumsy lout says, lurching against her. She is doused in ice cubes and scotch, and the drunken bungler catches hold of her wrist.

“Sam,” he says, low and intense, “are you out of your mind?”

“Jacob,” she murmurs, her lips against his ear, “mind your own damn business.”

“I’m minding it,” he whispers.

“You are sabotaging
weeks
of preparation.”

“I’m saving your skin. I’ll meet you out on the street in fifteen minutes. Be there.” Samantha shakes her head in a gesture of incredulity. “Can you believe this?” she says to the silver-haired gentleman, brushing scotch from her bag-lady shirt. “I’m soaked. I’ll have to go change.”