Streams of Babel (25 page)

I want to type an e-mail to Uncle Ahmer. It strikes me all at once that
he
is the missing ingredient to my nerve here in America. While he does not have the convictions of my father, Uncle has the sense of humor that steels me. When known
subversives would visit our café, he would stand right over them and say in Urdu, which they do not understand, "
These men stink worse than my shoe, Shahzad.
" He would use a tone similar to "Mop up this floor now, Shahzad." So, I would jump up and mop, and we would have a big contest to see who could keep the most straight face. If I had scripted dangerous men well and they gave a tip upon leaving, Uncle would howl and wheeze over the coins until his laughter became infectious.

Uncle's humor cuts the edge off the darker sides of life. He fears no man. Now I have no one who has any humor. This Tim is just a voice, and the blur of other agents I met yesterday seem equally serious. If I start Uncle an e-mail, Tim will see it on my captured screen. So I pretend to make busy while Catalyst stares until my face is breaking with sweat.

Someone is getting up behind me. I glance over my shoulder, and it is Tyler Ping. He is leaving. I glance at Catalyst and realize he has been looking at Tyler, not me.

It is dark outside, and I am looking through a tinted glass front, but I will swear that Tyler followed Catalyst out. And when they got into the street, Tyler dropped something that Catalyst picked up and handed back to him.

I cannot think of the implications of this immediately. My heart is still banging too hard. I turn quickly around to face a message from Tim. And Tim's IM creates further distraction.

"Go home and watch TV," he repeats. "Be normal."

Normal?
In Pakistan, we have less than a dozen TVs in our village, but I never watched much. I do not like images without HTML support. They seem arbitrary and groundless. We would not even have had Internet in our village if Hodji and Roger had
not gotten to know my father way back when he was a Karachi policeman. Our whole café is discarded FBI hardware.

Tim was intentionally not at my USIC meeting yesterday, because Michael wants him to remain unknown to me by sight. He must know I am new to this country, though I'm not sure he knows I am here less than forty-eight hours. Agents only know what they have to. He adds into my ear, "You should start with cartoons. My daughter Trish is seventeen and loves
The Ren & Stimpy Show.
"

But if I were in Pakistan, I could fight Hodji on the hacking issue and wear him down until he tried for a hacking warrant. Or I would surf until dawn. I would try to align the flulike symptoms of Red Vinegar with any local health news around the world.

But here, I must do meaningless mathematics problems and write a paper about some book in English. I had looked for it online so I can simply highlight and translate it to Arabic, but as Uncle often says,
Life is never so easy.

And while reading in English, I will surely reflect on this sick girl who is suffering, and where I should be hacking to find Red Vinegar, this other new poison Omar is developing, Colony One, and Omar himself—

Maybe because it is time to face the dark street, I suddenly remember what Inas and her friend Amy have told me about Tyler Ping. They say he is a computer cowboy, and he can hack like nobody at any age. If my eyes haven't just deceived me, he knows Catalyst ... maybe he is part of their group ... maybe he hacked into my terminal tonight and will tell Catalyst everything he saw—

I sit back down quickly and type like mad. "
I must talk to someone in person.
"

But that fast, I receive the message "Tim is not online right now," and when I turn around, all the seats behind me are empty. The door is slowly closing, and only a shadow cuts the sidewalk outside. I pull the cell phone they gave to me out of my pocket, but it is not yet connected, and they were bickering in my meeting yesterday about which phone numbers to give me for an emergency. I surmise they did not expect me to have emergencies so quickly.

I run outside to look for Tim and do not see anyone. I do not even hear an engine start, though I wait for several minutes. It is like nothing is moving on Long Island. Nothing at all.

CORA HOLMAN
THURSDAY, MARCH 7, 2002
7:50
P.M.

I'D BEEN TAKEN to the hospital around four o'clock, on the very gurney that I knew had carried Aleese away one week ago. I was surrounded by Scott's same squad, same ambulance.

The problem started with such a small accident that I couldn't believe I ended up in an ambulance. I was coming out of the bathroom for the fourth time in three hours when Bob Dobbins banged into me and stepped hard on my foot.

The pain subsided quickly, though Scott put ice on it and kept looking at it. The top of my arch swelled like a football and turned purple. Yet every time he told me to wiggle my toes, I could do so without any pain.

This flu had been bothering him, too, but if he had any symptoms besides the bright cheeks and zombielike conversation, he kept them to himself. But after half an hour, he punched a number in his cell phone and said, "Can you just come get her? This is over my head." He finished the conversation in the bedroom but forgot to shut the door, and I heard "possible blood clot" and "dangerous" and "turn into some weird stroke."

So, five minutes later, I was seated on a stretcher. I let myself cry, loudly for once. But as usual, what tears I shed were mistaken for meaning something else. I was terrified, but not really having thoughts about dying. My thoughts came right from this "sick house" that had sprung up so suddenly. Rain's one clogged sinus and slight earache had become a full-blown head cold yesterday, but she watched Aleese's tape with me a few more times and bragged about her and Jeremy Ireland to Scott. She could still talk up a storm about school, and I liked to listen. Whether she was plotting how she would find a date to the prom or talking about some funny incident that happened at a party, I was hypnotized.

As the paramedics took me, I felt cut adrift. Scott realized this, I think, and taking my face in both hands, he said, "You'll probably be back tomorrow ... I'll pop in on you tonight."

"What time?" I blurted.

"After I sleep" was all he said.

And he didn't come that night. It implied that he was much more symptomatic and exhausted than he had been letting on.

After his mother's funeral Tuesday, which we all managed to attend, we were led out a back church door away from the crowds. Scott said it is not the most common memorial practice, but it often happens when relatives are not up for talking to hundreds of people immediately after an emotional service. We were brought back to my house, and we slept on and off, day turning to night without us really noticing. I figured word must have gotten out that we were ill, but I had no clue what Mr. Steckerman had said to keep people from either gossiping in panic about a mystery germ, or showing up at my house to extend more condolences. I can only say that nothing made the local news station except brief coverage of what was said from the pulpit at the funeral. Whatever Mr. Steckerman had told people was not repeated around me, and I only knew that he visited every couple of hours, leaving his house full of USIC people, to invent small talk with us and insist USIC's presence here was routine and unrelated. Dr. Godfrey came twice yesterday and once today to be sure we didn't have symptoms outside the normal range for flu. I was too tired to ask questions.

Bob Dobbins stayed with us all day yesterday and came directly after school today, agreeing to wear a surgical cap, mask, and gloves. If he thought Scott's theory of a waterborne germ becoming airborne was crazy, he kept it to himself. Tannis, Jon, and Adrian found the mask-and-gloves concept either too frightening or too ridiculous—I don't know which—and instead they telephoned every fifteen minutes for Owen. Scott was always snatching the phone and making them swear not to repeat his dark suspicions to a soul. They would swear back that they understood his visions of "community panic," and would not betray him, though perhaps the secret made them feel important, and they guarded that sense of importance as much as anything. It seemed to me that it was a lot to ask of three boys. However, it could be that they thought Scott was insane and were protecting his reputation with the secrecy. I thought that people expected to see us on the street in a few days and, with the exception of Scott, we all felt the same way.

It was the first time since seventh grade, when Aleese arrived, that I'd been so close to anyone, and I liked having house-guests more than I would have dreamed—even as Bob Dobbins stepped on my foot.

Hospital X-rays revealed no broken bones, and I was put in a semiprivate room for observation, though the other bed was empty. They left me hooked to an IV that gave me some sort of blood thinner, and planned to do some minor surgery in the morning to "drain" whatever caused the swelling. With no roommate, a television with an actual remote that worked, and food served up to me on a tray for the first time in my life, I settled into my aloneness. I came out of a peaceful doze around a quarter to eight, when Adrian, Jon, and Tannis came through the door.

They had submitted to the mask and gloves, which the nurses must have given them. But Tannis has one of those smiles that reaches to his hairline.

"The nurse said that if we come see people without a diagnosis, we have to wear these outfits," he said. "We're Batman, Robin, and Spider-Man. We've been ordered by the Incredible Hulk and, uh, Superman to come tend to the Princess."

He held out a marsh daisy he'd obviously picked from a vacant lot on his way here. It was the first flower I'd ever received. So despite the world tumbling sideways over their presences, I found myself smiling and reaching for it.

"I'd have brought a huge bouquet if I knew you could woo the woman with a marsh daisy," Jon Dempsey said, and I supposed they'd walked down on a last-minute decision, probably with Scott or Owen's foot in their backsides.

"It's a
magic
marsh daisy..." Tannis leaned over the bed
bars and held the flower halfway between his masked face and my own. "You know how you blow all the fuzz off a marsh daisy and your wish comes true?"

"Yes." I had blown marsh daisy fuzz with girlfriends when I was in sixth grade, because blowing it off in one breath meant you would catch the boy you liked.

"Well, this one doesn't blow." He blew through his mask and the flower didn't move.

I laughed hard enough that it surprised me. "Thank you ... sit down ... please..." I gave a typically awkward speech while reaching for the button that makes the bed sit up.

I answered all the usual questions: How are they treating you, how badly does the food stink, when are you getting out...? It was only after fifteen or twenty minutes that a headache struck. I thought it was anxiety.

I was taken by my usual horrors—that they had found me alone. I could have called even one girl from choir or one teacher, just to mention that I was here. Somebody calling or visiting would have been better than having nobody here when the school legends walked in. But everything lately spoke of my lonely, pathetic state of existence.

I figured they would leave as quickly as they came, bidding done for the Eberman superheroes. But Adrian climbed onto the empty bed, grabbed its remote, and started switching around TV channels. Jon sat between us in a chair and became engrossed in an episode of
Law & Order.
I found the sense to ask Adrian about a football scholarship I'd heard he was getting, and he went on and on about the University of West Virginia. I asked questions to keep the talk on something other than me.

But the safety net of their lives could only hold for so long. It broke around eight thirty, with a question from Jon Dempsey, stated in his unabashed way. "So, Cora. Did your dad get here?"

I'd totally forgotten that I'd told them my father lived in Belfast, and he was coming ...
yesterday?
I was losing track of the days.

"He's coming," I blurted, and when they cast me confused glances, I added, "He had a layover."

Tannis nodded hard, indicating relief. "You shouldn't be here by yourself, you know."

I'd think of something to cover my tracks by the time they left. Meanwhile, I faked interest in the TV episode, but I was horrified with myself for lying ... and for being alone. Both seemed unforgivable and drove me into some sort of weird hot flash.

When
Law & Order
ended, Jon chattered on about the Trinity Falls Utilities Department, mentioning how the water still hadn't been cleared for drinking.

"Scott's convinced that the water is the problem. And ever since his mother's service, he's gotten more and more focused on it. And tonight? Dobbins caught him staring at the faucet in your kitchen, Cora. Just staring and staring. It was dripping a little. He was muttering, 'Looks so bloody harmless, doesn't it? Clear as a crystal lake.'"

I didn't know what to make of Scott's poisoned-water theory, but it distracted me from wondering if my hot flashes were making my face shiny with perspiration.

"I thought maybe he had gotten crazed because he's got that flu, too," Tannis said. "He doesn't like being help
less
instead of the help
er.
"

"He's better when he's busy," I forced myself to say. "What can we do?"

"We're trying different things." Jon leaned toward me in his chair. "Dobbins told us about their visit to the shoe place. You knew they broke in there, right? The day before Mrs. Eberman's service?"

I nodded. I got the news from Rain yesterday, though Scott wasn't talking about too much in front of Owen.

Jon went on. "Being that Scott handed over to USIC the scribble sheets he got off the desk, we tried to break back in and get him new scribble sheets. He seems sorry to have given USIC his only copy, since they don't want to include him in anything. We had a pencil and blank sheets of paper all ready to go and went down to that shoe store."