The Cookbook Collector (35 page)

28

A
sh fell. A fine gray powder covered everything. Ash coated burned-out cars and traffic lights. Ash infiltrated apartments, graying books and dishes, smothering house plants, clouding windowsills. Ash smogged streets and soiled papers, loose and lost, invoices and receipts, canceled checks, business cards, appointment books, memoranda unremembered. Black dust, black ink, black banner headlines in
The New York Times
. Black articles about firefighters, rescue workers, schoolchildren, orphans. Black bordered ads from ExxonMobil, Allstate, Prudential, Home Depot, OppenheimerFunds, Fleet, Lufthansa—
to our friends in America
, AOL Time Warner, Merrill Lynch.
Our hearts go out to everyone who’s been touched by the tragic events … our thoughts and prayers … our gratitude for the tireless efforts of the emergency and rescue workers
. Condolences from Israel and Egypt, the city of Berlin, the Iranian-American community—
profoundly saddened
, the Red Cross, the Ministries of New York—
we’re here to pray for you
.

Museums opened free of charge. Oases of deep color: Rothkos, Rembrandts, Egyptian tombs, Roman glass, iridescent bottles outlasting their perfume. Amulets, silk gowns, and Grecian urns. Those young girls with parted lips, those haystacks, those stone angels taking flight, those paintings of fruit and full-blown flowers.

Classical-music stations broadcast elegies, and listeners stopped what they were doing to hear Fauré’s
Requiem
or Barber’s
Adagio for Strings
. To breathe again.

Churches opened doors for candle-lighting, singing, sermons, vigils. In the nave of the National Cathedral, President Bush said, “We are here in the middle hour of our grief …” and he told the American people to keep on living, to travel, to attend the theater, to go out and buy. Alas, buying did not appeal. Only American flags sold out. Great flags hung from walls and firehouses. Smaller versions adorned shop windows and front doors. Drivers clipped miniature flags to car antennae where they fluttered in the breeze.

A flag was tangible. Its stars and stripes were real, unlike the dot-com bombs of yesterday. Who remembered those? The upstarts, overhyped and overfunded. When the Nasdaq reopened on September 17, even Cisco hovered at twelve dollars a share. Vaporizing into usefulness, online shopping, e-mail, and instant news, the Internet lost its mystique, and suddenly it was everywhere and nowhere, like the air. A flag had value. A leaf blower made sense. Unprofitable companies with huge growth and huge debt did not. Few bought Veritech at two. Fewer wanted ISIS, even at eighty cents.

None of that mattered to Emily. For the first time since Veritech’s IPO, she did not check her company’s share price. She didn’t look; she didn’t care. When Alex called, or Bruno, or Milton, or Laura, she let Jess answer the phone. With each ring, she expected Jonathan. She couldn’t talk to other people.

When Dave invited her to Jonathan’s memorial service, Emily told Jess to thank him and say no.

“Maybe you should think about it,” Jess said when she put down the phone.

“No, I don’t want to think about it.”

“You don’t have to decide right away. You don’t have to say anything yet.”

“Okay, don’t say anything.”

For days she did nothing. She didn’t even open her computer. She sat at one end of the couch with her legs tucked under her, and then sometimes, for a change of scene, she moved to the other end.

Jess reminded Emily to get dressed in the morning. “You can’t wear pajamas in the daytime.”

“Why not?”

“Your circadian rhythms will get out of whack. I read an article about it. You shouldn’t work in your bedroom, you shouldn’t wear pajamas in the daytime, and you shouldn’t exercise or eat at night, or work too long in the dark. So put these on.” Jess pulled out a shirtdress and a sweater. Obediently, Emily changed into clean clothes.

Laura came bearing Emily’s dry cleaning along with a loaf of homemade pumpkin bread. The condo association left a giant fruit basket wrapped in cellophane. Emily’s cleaning service, Maid for You, sent her a condolence card and refused to charge her for the week of September 11. Orchids proliferated on the coffee table. She had been in all the papers.
He leaves his fiancée, Veritech cofounder Emily Bach
, and so everybody knew.

Jess shopped and prepared meals: oatmeal, or brown rice with broccoli, or avocado-and-sprout sandwiches on cracked-wheat bread. Like an old married couple, the sisters completed the
New York Times
crossword puzzle each morning. They played Scrabble, backgammon, cribbage, even checkers, and then sometimes they didn’t play anything at all. Emily did nothing, and Jess was the perfect companion, fielding phone calls, nibbling cashews, scribbling on dog-eared papers in red pen.

Waking up was hardest, because each day Emily had to teach herself that Jonathan was gone, and the life she might have had with him was gone, their conversations and their fights. That was the worst part. Her struggle against Jonathan was over, all their arguments and their competing claims for time. The person she had been with him was gone, and the man she’d hoped he would become was lost, and she was left with the words Jonathan had said, and the things he’d actually done. Her ideas for him, and her future with him would never come to pass. She hated him for that, for rending her world, ruining what might have been.

After waking, she was careful to stay still. No sudden movements or long conversations. No newspapers, no radio. Brimful, she was afraid of tipping.

She slept poorly, and once, she woke crying with bad dreams. Then Jess lay down at the foot of the bed.

“I’ll stay here,” Jess said.

“Are you comfortable?” Emily asked anxiously.

“Mm-hmm.”

“Are you going to sleep here all night?”

“Yes.”

“Jess?” said Emily.

“Stop waking me up.”

“What about the Tree Savers?”

“Don’t worry about them.”

“What do you mean?”

“They’re fine without me.”

Emily took this in, and then asked delicately, tentatively, “Are you done with them?”

“Done.”

“Oh, good,” Emily said, but with sleepless, worried interest, she pressed, “What about Yorick’s? Isn’t George wondering where you went?”

Jess hesitated. “He knows.”

“Did you tell him when you’re coming back?”

“I’m not coming back.”

“You quit? You just left?”

“Well …,” said Jess, “I had to stop.”

Emily roused herself a little, as though she wanted to see her sister’s face, and Jess was glad that it was dark. “What do you mean?”

Don’t tell her now, Jess reminded herself. She mustn’t say anything now. “It’s not important.”

“What happened?”

“Nothing. Nothing happened.” Jess meant nothing happened compared to what you’re going through. “I got a little bit … involved with him.”

“Jessie!”
Emily sat up in bed.

Jess couldn’t help laughing.

“It’s not funny!”

“I know,” said Jess, wiping her eyes. “But it’s so good to hear you sounding like yourself.”

“Did you … did you really …?”

“Well …”

“You slept with him? Jess, how could you?”

Jess confessed, “Actually, it wasn’t all that difficult.”

“I can’t believe you!”

“Please.”

“You know that he’s too old.”

Jess said nothing.

“It would be totally—”

Jess cut her off. “I told him that we can’t see each other. I explained to him that I’m going to be with you.”

“So that’s over too.”

Jess hedged, “We’re still friends and all.”

“You have the strangest idea of friends,” said Emily.

“I love my friends,” protested Jess.

“That’s the problem.”

“It doesn’t matter. It’s not important,” Jess reassured her sister. “Don’t worry.”

“It’s over,” Emily reassured herself.

She tried out those words, but she did not believe them. Jonathan’s absence weighed on her, his disappearance clouded her mind. How could he vanish so completely? She longed for a body, a clue, a sign.

And yet he persisted in the world. Jonathan still worked his will at ISIS, in ways she never guessed. With share prices hovering at thirty-two cents, the executive committee met in secret in Oskar’s office in the new cheaper building. They dragged in their swivel chairs to speak of Jonathan’s pet project, his magic bullet, the October rollout, the surveillance system based on the secret Emily had told him, the plans she’d whispered for electronic fingerprinting.

“He left us with a revolutionary product,” Dave murmured to Orion, Jake, Aldwin, and Oskar. “We got it built. We got it tested. We’re ready.”

“But is this the time—would anybody notice now?” Orion asked.

“Yes! This is the time,” said Aldwin. “Think like Jonathan.”

“What do you mean, ‘think like Jonathan’?” Orion retorted.

“Think smart,” said smart old Oskar.

Dave nodded. “Exactly. If you think like Jonathan, you seize the moment.”

Aldwin explained, “Our dot-com customers are folding, but government contracts are huge. With the new antiterrorist initiatives, surveillance is the perfect space for us.”

“We’ve got the goods,” Dave said.

“And we’ve got the name from Marketing,” Aldwin announced. Standing at Oskar’s whiteboard, he uncapped a green dry-erase marker. “Operational Security and Internet Surveillance.” Carefully he lettered the new name: OSIRIS.

Hushed, they stared at the new acronym, their new god.

Jake mused, “Osiris was the brother of Isis, right?”

“Right,” said Aldwin. “The brother of Isis and her husband too.”

“I love this,” Oskar said.

“Fantastic,” Dave chimed in.

Orion sat up abruptly, and the back of his swivel chair snapped upright. “Wait.”

“We can’t,” said Aldwin. He was wearing a suit jacket with his tie folded in the pocket. ISIS was holding its memorial service that afternoon.

“Now is the time,” Dave said sonorously. “Thanks to you and your team, we’ve got the firepower we need.”

Orion protested, “We never said the surveillance tools were for government apps.”

“Oh, come on,” Aldwin said.

“What do you mean, ‘come on’? Our new customer is the Bush administration? We’re supposed to be the eyes and ears of the War on Terror?”

“Exactly,” Dave said.

“But you do see what this means. Loss of privacy, loss of civil liberties…. The Feds could access e-mail, and search everyone’s transactions—and we’d be the instrument! This is not what Jonathan was thinking.”

“It’s what he
would
be thinking,” Aldwin said.

Orion closed his eyes. He saw Jonathan’s playful smile at the river.

“Take a breath,” Dave advised, and Orion understood what that meant: “We all know you’re from Vermont and you went to Quaker schools.”

Orion did not take a breath. He blurted, “I built Fast-Track.”

“OSIRIS,” Jake corrected.

“Whatever. OSIRIS. I don’t want to see it co-opted for dubious political …”

“Not co-opted. Marketed,” Dave told Orion gently.

“This is what Jonathan would have wanted,” said Jake. “To take the competition by surprise.”

“To make new opportunities where there were none,” said Dave.

Orion muttered, “To boldly go where no start-up has gone before.”

“Yes!” said Aldwin.

“What about free information?” Orion asked the others. “What about free enterprise? Do you think Jonathan built this company to sell out to government agencies? You’re stealing my work for your own mercenary purposes.”

“If you believe in free exchange of information, why are you so worried about stealing?” Aldwin asked.

“I’d share my work with anyone. The point is, I don’t want you to sell it to the government.”

“Selling is what we do,” Dave said in his most patient voice.

“Do you really think Jonathan wanted to become part of somebody’s counterterrorist agenda?”

“It’s an important agenda,” Dave said. “It’s tracking killers, maybe Jonathan’s own.”

“No,” said Orion. “That’s not the way Jonathan thought.”

“Of course not. How could he have known?” Dave soothed. “But in our position, sitting here right now …”

“If he were here right now, we wouldn’t be in this position, would we?” Orion said.

“We all miss him,” Aldwin said. “We all want him back.”

“We need some time,” Dave said, “but we don’t have time right now. We’re hemorrhaging, and even though we’re hurting, we have to act.”

“Jonathan would not have done this.” Orion spoke definitely, but what he meant was more complex: The Jonathan he loved would not have wanted this. He had been too independent. “He was a researcher at heart.”

“Before he was a researcher,” Dave pointed out, “he was a Marine.”

“This is my project,” Orion reminded the others, “and I say no.”

Dave looked at him steadily. His steely eyes softened. “We want you to be ready, but if you’re not, we understand.”

We? Orion looked at the others surrounding him, and he understood that they were all against him.

“Look, this is very, very difficult,” said Dave. “We’re all grappling with this thing. We’re all emotional. We have the … the memorial service this afternoon. It’s a terrible time, the worst possible time, and Orion, you have your issues, and I understand that, so we’re leaving this up to you, whether you want to participate in this initiative or not.”

“It’s amazing to me,” Orion said slowly, “how my leadership becomes conditional, and my team becomes collective property, and Jonathan’s memory”—his voice broke—“even his memorial service becomes something you can use for your agenda, which is now and has always been solely about money.”

“This is not art we’re making here,” Aldwin shot back indignantly.

“This is my friend you’re talking about,” Orion said. “Don’t tell me what he would have wanted.”

“Orion,” Dave chided, “we loved him too.”

He would say this at the memorial service as well. Orion knew exactly what Dave would say that afternoon. We loved him. We all loved him. Oh, and Mel too. We all loved Mel too.