Due Preparations for the Plague (7 page)

“You’re sailing way too close to the wind, Sam. It’s stupid and it’s dangerous.”

“Part of the fallout, isn’t it? We’re all addicted to risk.”

“Is that so?” Jacob lines up cardboard drink coasters, three round ones on his left, two diamond-shaped ones on his right. He moves a round one from the left side to the right and places it between the two diamonds. He frowns, considering this equation, then moves it back. The tavern they are in is small and dimly lit, which suits them. Ironically, they seem to need confined spaces.

“It’s well known,” Samantha says flippantly. She is at pains to be flippant with Jacob, to stop herself sliding into him. Sometimes their edges match so exactly that a waiter will bring them only one drink. Nutrient fusion, Jacob calls it. No; ego confusion, Sam insists. Phoenix One and Phoenix Two are the names they are known by in their circle—sometimes for particular kinds of communication, sometimes for a grim private joke—but they are Siamesed from the same charcoal pit, two barbecued peas in a pod. Their circle is small and exclusive. The members call themselves the Phoenix Club, and they mostly make contact via the Web.

“Risk addiction’s commonplace for our lot,” Samantha says. “For all survivors. Earthquake survivors, rape survivors, whatever. There’s a special section in bookstores now: survival lit. Articles all over the place. You must have read some.”

“Not my cup of tea.”

“Well, I’m telling you, whether you want to know about it or not, risk addiction’s part of the syndrome. There’s statistical evidence, conferences, papers, proceedings, God knows what. Interesting to speculate on the reasons, don’t you think? And if you want to know why I’m babbling on like this, it’s because that disapproving look of yours upsets me.”

“There are certain kinds of risk that you don’t have the right to take.”

“Why not?”

“Because they put all of us in greater jeopardy, that’s why.”

“We’re all in perpetual jeopardy anyway. Don’t we take that as a given?”

“That’s why we have a certain understanding.”

“Right,” Samantha snaps. “We understand that all of us manage in whatever way we can and we don’t sit in judgment on each other. I don’t judge, you don’t judge, he doesn’t judge, we don’t judge—”

“But we do keep an eye out for each other. That’s part of the deal.” He touches Samantha’s cheek. “You’re manic,” he says uneasily. “What are you on?”

“On getting somewhere. On the trail getting hot. On nailing down answers.”

“Sam, Sam. There aren’t any answers. Or none that will make the slightest difference.”

“It’s amazing what I’m learning from next-of-kin. It’s amazing what the website brings in.”

“You’re burning yourself up.”

“I’m on fire,” she acknowledges, “but I’m learning plenty. I’m doing this for the future. I’m doing this for the historical record. As well as for my thesis in American history, don’t forget. It’s like a map coming into focus.”

“The Phoenix Club’s one thing. We need each other. It helps, keeping contact, it helps us all. But you’re casting your net too wide. You’re drawing dangerous attention.”

“I
need
to draw fire. I know exactly what I’m doing and I’m careful.”

“You’re reckless.” He clenches his hands together. He leans across the table, his forearms over the line-up of coasters. He looks like a gambler shielding a spread of cards. “We need each other to survive, Sam. We need each other too much. If something happened to you—”

“It won’t.”

“If something did—”

“What can happen to someone who’s indifferent to what happens?”

“Enough.”

“We’re immune to harm, Jacob, or we wouldn’t be here. You can’t snuff a phoenix out.”

“Unfortunately, you can.” He pulls at his fingers and the knuckles make an ominous sound. He looks more ravaged than usual. “I went to see Cassie yesterday.”

“Ah,” Samantha says uneasily. “How is she?”

“Getting worse, I think.”

“So that’s what all this is about.”

“Not only that.”

Jacob blinks, slowly and heavily. He makes Samantha think of an owl and the thought trips a nervous tic in her hand. Her thumb, of its own free will, does a little series of calisthenics. “You had that look on your face,” she says, “when the news broke—”

“Why are you whispering? I can’t hear you.”

“You were sitting on the cot across from me. In Germany. When we watched the plane go up. That’s how you looked.”

“Stop it, Sam.”

She hasn’t meant to go there, but all roads lead back to the airstrip on the TV screen.

Jacob turns a coaster around and around in his hands.

The cots and the blankets smell musty to Samantha. They must have been pulled out of storage in a damp basement. This must have been hurriedly done. There is a boy next to Samantha sucking a blanket, there is another boy across from her, an older boy whose eyelids droop and who plays with the lid of a screwtop jar. Samantha does not yet know that his name is Jacob. He turns the lid around and around.
We interrupt this program to bring you a news alert …

Samantha takes the coaster roughly from Jacob’s hands. “You’re making me edgy.”

“You should be edgy. You’re drawing fire, Sam. You know what’s going to happen? Someone will get nervous and clamp down on access to documents again, but that won’t be the worst of it.”

“What will be the worst of it?”

“More of us will start meeting up with accidents.”

“More of us? What do you mean?”

“Stick to finishing your degree at Georgetown,” he says. “Stop this crazy moonlighting stuff. As a stand-up comic, you’re not funny.”

“Students have to moonlight to survive, and this pays better than waiting tables. What did you mean,
more of us
?”

“More dead phoenixes. Chien Bleu is not a good way to go. I have an ominous feeling about it.” He turns to signal for the waiter. When he turns, his jacket sleeve rides up on his arm. The cuffs of his shirt are unbuttoned and turned back, pale blue cotton against his faint tan, and the tracks on his forearm look to Sam like the footprints of the beast.

“Oh, Jacob.” She catches hold of his wrist in blind panic. “What are you doing?”

“It’s no more dangerous than what you’re doing,” he says. He pulls his wrist away and buttons his cuffs. “And a lot less stupid.”

“How can you say that?” When she closes her eyes, she feels the nothing under the table. Her sense of balance goes. “You’re right,” she concedes. “We’re not safe.”

Jacob leans over the table and takes both her hands in his. “Look at me, Sam.”

“How’s that going to help me when you’re covered in needle tracks?”

“So governments do shady things when national security’s at stake. They make mistakes. Is this news to anyone?”

“Oh, forgive me. I thought accountability for shady activity, even in wartime, was one of the pillars of our democracy. I thought I remembered learning that in high school. Silly me. I thought a secret service accountable to no one was Nazi Germany and evil-Soviet-empire stuff.”

“Oh for God’s sake, get down out of your pulpit,” Jacob says. “Governments make mistakes and they cover them up and they do not appreciate exposure. We stand a better chance of making it if we take that as the starting point.”

“Oh, right,” Samantha says bitterly. “I can see where that starting point is getting you.”

“It’s been a bad week,” he concedes. “And it’ll get worse if you don’t put on the brakes.”

“You said that before. More of us will have accidents, you said. What did you mean,
more of us
?”

“We lost another one.”

She stares at him.

“Another phoenix. We lost him in August, but I just found out about it.”

“Wait,” Samantha says. It is not as though they are not used to bad news, but due preparations must be made. “Wait. I have to—I’ll just …”

She goes to the bathroom and locks the door. Her hands are shaking. She starts counting backwards from one hundred. She counts down through ritual layers, down through the Cenozoic and the Mesozoic and the Paleozoic and the Precambrian. Under the Precambrian is the time before the plane disappeared in a ball of fire, and there’s a space there, a space that Samantha can think her way into if she counts backward far enough. In that space, everyone is still alive. She imagines it with chandeliers and a dance floor. Her mother is in a strapless dress of pale blue silk, her father kisses her mother on the neck. The dancers move in slow motion, the future casts no shadow at all, and there is music. Samantha can wind it in like a ribbon from the violin of Jacob’s father, Avi Levinstein, who plays with his whole body; and Jacob, he says, bending over his instrument and his bow, Jacob, I am so happy that you and Samantha … and Samantha, he says, I have pleasure to present to you some of our friends on this flight, and the inventory unscrolls itself, a gold-leaf list of the gifted, the flamboyant, the intense, the cellist Izak Goldberg and his wife Victoria, bel canto soprano, and Cassie, their daughter; Yasmina Shankara, the Bombay movie star, and Agit, her son; and so on and so forth until Samantha turns to Jacob and asks: Does your father know
everyone
? and she watches the patterns that people make with the swirls of their lives, brushing one another in passing, sometimes knowing it, sometimes not. She can see everyone who was on the plane. She holds them that way in her mind.

When she gets back to the table, Jacob has his head down. His hair brushes a small jigger of mustard. “Hey,” Samantha says. “You asleep?”

“We lost Agit.”

Samantha holds herself still.

“Agit Shankara,” he says. “We lost him August eighth, exactly a month before the anniversary of the hijacking.”

“No.” Samantha has a sudden memory of huddling on a cot with Agit in Germany. They were watching children’s cartoons until the interruption came. They had to share a blanket, and Agit had one corner balled up into his mouth though his quiet little sobs still leaked out.
We interrupt this program for the latest bulletin …
When they saw the plane, Agit turned quiet. He took the blanket out of his mouth and wiped his nose with it and then put it back in his mouth. Samantha hit him. That’s dirty, she told him.

“Agit drew attention to himself,” Jacob says.

“How did he draw attention?”

“He published a book of short stories. Not here. In India. But just the same.”

“Stories?”

“A collection called
Flight into the Dark
.”

“No one in government circles or Intelligence pays any attention to fiction.”

“It was published in June. He sent me a copy in July and I haven’t heard from him since. He stopped answering e-mails.”

“Is that all?” Samantha asks, euphoric with relief. “He’s gone into withdrawal. I’ve done that, you’ve done that. It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing. I found out what happened.”

“I don’t want to know.”

“I’m not going to tell you.”

“How’d you find out?”

“On-line, from the
Indian Express
. Just a filler item. Took me hours of scrolling to find it.
Son of beautiful
former movie icon Yasmina Shankara who perished in the tragic hijacking
, et cetera.”

“That makes six of us.” Samantha wraps her arms around herself. She feels cold.

“This affects us,” Jacob says.

“Yes. What happened to him?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I know I don’t. But tell me.” Samantha leans across the table and takes hold of the lapels of Jacob’s jacket. His jacket is worn at the edges. He looks scruffy, Jacob. He is an assistant professor of mathematics and looks like it. In mathematics, he says, unknown quantities can be calculated. Answers are morally neutral and can be nailed down. Chance can be predicted and fractally expressed.

“Tell me what happened to Agit,” Samantha insists.

“He threw himself under a train, the newspaper said. Hundreds of people saw him. At the central railway station in Bombay.”

“Threw himself? Or was pushed?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

They don’t know which ending they’d prefer. What kind of operation, they ask themselves, goes on wiping out survivors and witnesses so many years after the event? They hold each other, Jacob and Samantha.

“You’re shivering,” she whispers.

“I’m cold.”

“But you’re burning,” she says. “You’ve got a fever.”

“Come home with me.”

“All right.”

In Jacob’s apartment, they lie for a long time, side by side, staring up at his bedroom ceiling. Jacob has painted it black, and has added to it in phosphorescent white and with absolute accuracy, the star map of the northern September sky. “I could see Polaris through my window,” he says. “That first landing.”

“Morocco.”

“Wasn’t Egypt first? Then Morocco.”

“It was Morocco. According to my aunt.”

“Wherever. I could see Polaris the whole time. And I knew that everything would go on. Because Polaris was there when Jericho fell, and when Troy fell, and when Rome fell, and when Hitler fell. I knew everything would go on.”

“And here we are,” Samantha says. “Going on. Two phoenixes.”

“The random chosen,” he says.

“But still the chosen.”

“Except that doesn’t mean anything. Or if it does, we’ll never know what it means.”

“This means something,” Samantha says, turning to him, and they bite and moan, ravenous, and then they sleep. They dream.

“I dream everyone,” Samantha tells Jacob. “I know them so well now, I dream their dreams.”

The abandoned boathouse where the local members of the Phoenix Club meet is sparsely furnished. Samantha and Jacob find it beautiful. Sometimes they sit in the rowboat and sometimes they climb the ladder and sit on the weathered boards of the loft where gulls nest. The gulls fly off across Chesapeake Bay with shrieks and a great hullabaloo of wings and outrage that they do not let go. Patrolling in pairs, they wheel past the gable window and the open A of the roofline where the boat winch used to be. They hurl imprecations. They fix Jacob and Samantha and Cassie with their black beady eyes, but the members of the Phoenix Club are used to being watched. How to live under and around surveillance is something they know about. They settle into the rotting piles of fishnets. Ropes and wooden floats and one anchor hang from the rafters. There are assorted oars lying about, smooth as soapstone, lovely to the touch, mapped with the wood grain’s sinewy curves.

Cassie buckles herself into a life vest, though all of these are moldy and torn and have discharges of flotation stuffing poking from seams. Cassie’s vest is Day-Glo orange, faded now, and crusted in a latticework of salt which smells of boating disasters averted. Cassie finds the smell comforting. The three of them laze there, cradled in fishnet heaps, listening to the soft slap of water against the pylons below. Sometimes they spend hours like this without speaking. No one disturbs them, because this is the unfashionable part of the bay, an unstable landscape of salt marsh and mudflats that even most fishermen avoid.

They chose the place for its isolation, but also because they like enclosed spaces. They like to have water nearby. Fire could touch them here, but they would hear it coming across the salt marsh and due preparations could be made. Intruders could reach them, but the gulls would give warning, and they would descend into the boat and glide away, soundlessly, through the tall brown stubble of the marsh, a labyrinth for which few know the code. For those not intimate with tides and rushes, boating is dangerous. The narrow channels change shape and direction by the hour. The members of the Phoenix Club are safe here. Cassie knows this intuitively. Jacob found the boathouse, and they bring Cassie from time to time because it is the only other place besides her room in the psychiatric hospital where she is calm. Hunched into themselves in the loft, they can close their eyes and enter that state they call
Before
.

“When Papa has the boat …” Cassie says. The others turn to her and wait, but she usually finishes her sentences internally, or perhaps she forgets where they were going.

“Cass?” Samantha prompts, but she is far from them, absorbed by marsh birds.

“I think her parents had a cottage on the bay somewhere,” Jacob says. “She used to spend summers here.”

“How do you know?”

“I remember visiting once, when I was small. I don’t remember where, of course, but my father’s agent told me it was somewhere around the bay. He was agent for Cassie’s parents too, for the string quartet and for her mother’s concert performances.”

Cassie says suddenly, “My mother has a beautiful voice.”

Jacob leans over to take Cass’s hand and he holds it between his own and strokes her arm. “Yes,” he says. “Your mother did have a lovely voice. An extraordinary voice.” He has recordings of Cass’s mother singing Renaissance and troubadour songs, accompanied by Cass’s father on cello, and by his own father on violin. He has newspaper clippings. He has the memories of relatives and family friends. Nevertheless, his eyes quicken—Samantha can see it—because there is a chance, slim, unpredictable, that he might pick up a new chip for the mosaic. Cass is twenty-seven: three years older than Jacob, who is five years older than Sam. Cassie has—when it is not completely fogged in—more memory of Before.

But Cass’s memory comes in single thin beams of light that touch on an image for a second or two and then extinguish themselves. She watches Jacob stroking her arm with an air of abstracted curiosity. She begins to hum, a sound that comes from low in her throat and gets stronger though the melody is in a plaintive minor key. Samantha recognizes the song from Jacob’s recordings. Jacob blinks in his heavy-lidded, owllike way. He begins to hum in harmony with Cass. Samantha closes her eyes and lets the duet float around her, and Victoria and Izak Goldberg and Avi Levinstein—she knows them from photographs and newsreel clips and from the jacket of an old LP—rise from it like wraiths.

There is a long long silence when the humming ends, and then Jacob says, “They did make such good music together.” But his voice is uneven. He is as skittish as Cass when it comes to connecting one bead of the past to another.

Cass says, “Papa said, don’t hurt the cello, but the man with the mask smashed it with his … what do you call it, Jacob?”

“Kalashnikov.”

“Kalashnikov. It’s a funny word.” Cass begins to keen on a high note and to rock back and forth.

“Oh shit,” Samantha murmurs. “What triggered this?” She remembers the smashing of the cello. She remembers how it seemed to happen in slow motion, how it seemed to float like a kite before it fell to the runway, and then Cassie screamed and spread her arms and flew after it, and catapulted down the chute headfirst.

“Cass,” Jacob says. He strokes her hair. “I’m so sorry, Cass.”

“I saw photographs,” Cass says. “When we were in Paris. Your father had no clothes on, Jacob. And Lowell’s mother had no clothes. The man with the photographs told Papa he was a detective and he would give Papa money if Papa could tell him things. But Papa tore up the photographs and the man said,
You will regret that.
”

Samantha stares at Jacob. “What is that about?” she wants to know.

“It wasn’t my mother on that flight,” Jacob says curtly. “My father was with another woman.”

“Why have you never told me?”

“Why should I have to? I try not to remember.” The worst thing he has to live with, he thinks, is that his father was in love and he resented it. He resented his father’s happiness. He felt left out. “I was upset. After takeoff, I wouldn’t sit with them.”

“
Lowell’s
mother,” Sam repeats in astonishment. “You wouldn’t sit with your father and Lowell’s mother?”

Jacob starts combing his skull with his fingers, a tic Samantha recognizes: first sign of one of his migraines coming on.

“Your father and Lowell’s mother,” Cass says. “In a photograph. With no clothes on. Papa tore it up but I saw.”

“Cass,” Samantha says gently. “Do you know Lowell? How do you know Lowell?” But Cass’s mind is off with the birds in the marsh.

“Her name was Isabella Hawthorne,” Jacob says. “I know she was leaving a husband and son. I know nothing else about her and never wanted to.”

Samantha can feel heat rising, she can feel the low thrilling hum of new data coming in from new directions, which means new curves can be plotted on the graph. “This is so strange,” she says. She knows the airline’s passenger manifest by heart:
Isabella Hawthorne. Next-of-kin: Lowell Hawthorne, son.
“It’s strange because I tracked down the son a few weeks ago. I’ve tracked down Lowell Hawthorne, but he won’t return calls.”

Jacob stares at her. “Don’t touch this, Sam.” He begins massaging the front of his skull at a frantic pace. “Oh God,” he moans. “Have you got something I can tie over my …? I need to block out the light.” He rocks his head against one of the beams.

“This might work.” She takes off the linen jacket she is wearing and folds it, once, twice, a thick bandage. She puts it over Jacob’s eyes and uses the sleeves to tie it behind his head. “Does that help?”

“Mmm,” he moans. “Thanks. Can you drive us?”

“Yes, of course,” she says. “Jacob? Do you think if you met with Lowell Hawthorne, it would help?”

He pulls the jacket from his eyes and stares at her in anguish, his left eye horribly bloodshot. “No,” he says. “I don’t think it would help. The repercussions of what you’re doing terrify me, Sam.” With a groan, he re-covers his eyes. “You might as well post a sign on the Internet:
I’m going after classified secrets. I’m stirring up trouble. Come and get me.
”

“But they can tell us things, all the next-of-kin can. There are things they don’t know they know.”

“I know more than I want to know already. I’m in agony, Sam.”

“It’s unresolved grief, you know it is. Just listen to me, Jacob. It’s weird how many links and cross-connections there were between passengers, and between the families of passengers. It defies statistical odds. It has to mean something.”

“I don’t want to know what it means,” Jacob says. “Sam, Sam.” He is rocking his head in pain. “I need my medication. I’m begging.”

“Sorry,” she says. “Oh God, sorry. Let me help Cass down first, and we’ll go.”