Due Preparations for the Plague

by Janette Turner Hospital

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.”

  4. Phoenix Three

  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.”

  5. Lowell

  Even before Lowell speaks, Samantha has an intuition that the phone call will be momentous, but that is because she is already in a state of febrile and heightened alert. She hears the under- and overtones when people talk. She imagines an aura of electro-magnetic feelers extending invisibly from her skin and waving about her like angel hair, like the sustenance system of certain sea creatures on tropical reefs: as water rakes through their unseen silken mesh traps, all that is needed stays. Information is falling toward her. It adheres.

  “Samantha?” Lowell says, and she recognizes his voice instantly. She has heard it often enough on his answering machine. She has scripted future conversations they will have.

  An avalanche starts with a pebble. Samantha thinks of the random searchlight of Cassie’s lucidity as setting scree tumbling, loose drifts of it that pull scattered data along in their train. They gather density and speed. Clusters of detail roll over each other and cling. They generate force and the force intensifies. Disparate pieces of information cohere, connections pick up momentum, new facts are exposed. Samantha has a premonition that critical mass has been reached, that the accumulation of data has hooked up isolated circuits, that currents are fizzing around the elaborate latticework and traplines of her research, sparks jumping gaps, missing information being sucked into the black hole of her intense need to know.

  “Um … it’s Lowell,” he says.

  Samantha holds her breath.

  “This isn’t easy,” he says.

  “I know.” She can barely speak, and an inner catechism warns: Don’t breathe. Don’t frighten him off. “Not for any of us. It’s like picking a scab.”

  “Yes,” he says. “Yes, that’s what it’s like.” That is exactly what it is like, he thinks. As soon as he starts to think about the hijacking, fresh bleeding begins.

  It is strange how a silence can suck at two people and how it can vibrate between them and how much information can be sent and received through the mere sound of air moving in and out of lungs. And because something is already understood between the two of them, that the thing itself—the blown-up plane, the horrible deaths—is beyond comprehension and beyond language, because of this, they do not feel any awkwardness in a prolonged silence.

  Samantha waits.

  “In my case,” Lowell says, “the death was … the death itself … the death of my mother was not the major thing.” His breath, turning labored, is loud in Samantha’s ear. “Look,” he says. “I don’t think I can manage this, after all. I don’t think I can talk about it.”

  Samantha listens to the plosive beat, rapid and uneven, of air entering and leaving his lungs. She risks saying, “Is that because of Avi Levinstein?”

  Lowell makes a small violent sound—he is hyperventilating—and Samantha is afraid he will hang up.

  “How do you know about Levinstein?” he asks at last.

  “I know his son. I only just learned that the woman Avi Levinstein took with him to Paris was your mother, so I know this must be a painful�
��”

  Lowell hangs up. A week passes and then he calls again.

  “You have no idea how angry I was,” he tells Sam without preamble. “I wanted both of them to die.” His voice is faint, and Samantha has to strain to hear. “To make a wish like that and have it come true. Do you see what that makes me?”

  Samantha says nothing.

  “Do you understand what that makes me?” he persists.

  “I understand what you fear it makes you. But it was natural for you to be angry—” She can almost hear Lowell twisting in the fires of his own savage guilt. “Look,” she says, “I don’t know if this might help, or if you’ll want to do this. And I’m not at all sure he’ll want to do it either. But I know Jacob Levinstein well. He’s a phoenix. I mean, he’s one of us, the children who survived. We have an Internet club. We call ourselves phoenixes because we rose up out of the ashes, so to speak. Jacob’s the son of Avi—”

  Lowell makes a strangled sound, somewhere between laughter and pain. “Are you crazy?”

  “He feels pretty much the same way as you do, I think. It might clear the air for both of you if you—”

  “I didn’t call to talk about my mother.”

  Samantha suddenly wonders if Lowell’s mother was one of those who caressed her as she passed, when the hijackers were pushing the children along the aisles, when the children were being herded, prodded with rifles, when the rough hands of gunmen slapped them, when the gunmen stuffed rags into sobbing mouths. Samantha finds herself wondering which hands might have belonged to Lowell’s mother, because hands had come from everywhere as the children passed, hands stroking them, touching, giving blessing, sending messages that she bears in her body still.

  “I’m really calling,” Lowell says more calmly, “because you said you had information about my father—”

  “It may not be the kind of information that you want.”

  “I’m sure it won’t be,” Lowell says. “But you said there was a woman in Paris who knew my father, who claims to be—you said I have a half-sister.”

  “I think so, yes.”