Due Preparations for the Plague

by Janette Turner Hospital

  “I turned around and walked away,” Lowell says. “I refused to kiss her goodbye. That was in May. May 1987. I never saw her again.”

  Four months later, she called from Paris to say they were flying home. The fall term had just begun and Lowell took the call in the hallway of his boarding-school dorm, a bleak brown tunnel with no light at either end. His mother sounded rapturously happy. She gave Lowell her flight number and date of arrival, and Lowell hung up on her. He dialed Washington and left a message on his father’s answering machine. He said only, “They are coming back.”

  Two days later, he took another call in the same hallway. “How are you, Lowell?”

  “I’m fine, Dad.”

  “I have handled my life very badly,” his father said.

  Lowell said awkwardly, “No, you haven’t, Dad.”

  “Don’t make my mistakes, Lowell,” his father said. He sounded agitated. Then he said, “Would you do something for me?”

  “Sure,” Lowell said.

  “It’s very important,” his father said. “It’s very, very important, Lowell.”

  “Sure, Dad.”

  “I want you to call your mother and tell her not to come back. Not yet. Not at this particular … It’s a very bad time for me. Tell her it’s a very bad time.”

  Lowell said doubtfully, “I don’t think she’s going to pay much attention, Dad.”

  “She has to,” his father said. “You have to make her pay attention, Lowell. Tell her to wait another month. This is very important, Lowell.”

  “Okay, Dad. I’ll try.”

  Lowell called his mother’s hotel in Paris to leave a message, and was disconcerted to be connected with her direct. “Dad’s very upset,” he said icily. “He doesn’t want you to come back. He wants you to wait another month.”

  After a small silence, she asked him, “What do you want, Lowell?”

  “I want you to stop hurting Dad.”

  “All right,” she said. “I’ll do that, Lowell. Tell your father I’ll change our flights. We won’t come back till October.”

  Lowell called his father’s office immediately. “Your father’s out of the country,” the secretary said, “but he checks for messages every day. What would you like me to tell him?”

  “Tell him she agreed,” Lowell said. “She won’t come back till October. He’ll know what that means.”

  The secretary repeated the message. “She agreed. Won’t come back till October. I’ll let him know.”

  “Where is he?” Lowell asked.

  “You know I’m not supposed to tell you that,” the secretary said. “But I did book his flight to Paris.”

  “Do you know where he’s staying? Do you have a number?”

  “They never let us know that,” the secretary said. “You know that, Lowell. For all I know, he might have flown on to Moscow or Timbuktu. I never know where they’re calling in from, they have a code. But he’ll get your message,” she promised.

  Not until days after the hijacking did Lowell receive the note scribbled down by someone else in his dorm. Your mother called and wants you to call her back. Says she can’t change the flight because ** (sorry, couldn’t catch name)** because someone-or-other has concert scheduled.

  Lowell could never bring himself to show this note to his father. He was too shocked, too stunned, when he saw Mather next. His father seemed to have aged twenty years in a single week. Gaunt, Lowell thought. His father was the very embodiment of the word. There was a swatch of white hair at one temple. His face seemed to have shrunk back against the skull, the cheeks sunken beneath the bones.

  “You said she agreed.” His father’s voice broke. Almost, Lowell sensed, his father was going to hug him. His father swayed, then steadied himself and extended his right hand.

  Lowell shook it. “Dad,” he said.

  “Son.”

  “I would rather be a serf in the house of some landless man,” his father said, “than king of all these dead men. Do you recognize that, Lowell?”

  “The Odyssey,” Lowell said.

  “This is a dreadful thing,” his father said. “A dreadful thing.”

  “Yes,” Lowell said.

  “Bear, O my heart; thou hast borne a yet harder thing. You said your mother agreed to wait till October.”

  “She did,” Lowell said. He felt as ill as his father looked. He was vertiginous with guilt. “She did agree. I just don’t understand what happened.”

  “I tried,” his father said. “I did what I could.”

  It was the only time Lowell ever saw his father weep.

  Book III

  CODE NAME: BLACK DEATH

  There have been as many plagues as wars in history; yet always plagues and wars take people equally by surprise.

  Albert Camus, The Plague

  Death has only given every one of us a jog on the Elbow, or a pull by the sleeve as he passed by, as it were, to bid us get ready against next time he comes this Way.

  Daniel Defoe, A Journal of the Plague Year

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  In the week of 12–19 September 1665, in the city of London, 7,165 persons died of the plague, the worst single week of the epidemic called the Black Death. Daniel Defoe was five years old. All his life, he remained obsessively afraid that the plague would return.

  1. Code Name: Tocade

  The policeman studies Tristan’s passport. “You are Monsieur Charron?”

  “Yes.”

  “Tristan Charron?”

  “Yes.”

  “Your ticket and boarding pass, please.”

  Tristan takes his travel wallet from the pocket inside his jacket and the two gendarmes ask him to step aside. They study his ticket closely: Air France, vol 64. Paris (CDG) à New York (JFK). 8 Septembre, 1987. Embarquement: Porte 12. Their eyes move from his passport to his face and back again. Evidently, his identity does not convince. They leaf through pages, studying stamps and dates. “You travel very much,” they say, “Monsieur Charron.” There is something odd about their tone, something odd about the innuendo with which they seem to invest his name. Mock deference, he decides. But why? He has been stopped at random in the airport concourse, seemingly at random. He has thought of demanding to know on what grounds—after all, he is in Paris, not Prague—but he knows that this tactic, when deployed with the French gendarmerie, will not be helpful.

  He cranes his head in order to see the Silk Route shop, he sees someone spinning the wheel of scarves, he sees a little girl in a blue coat with a woman who, for a moment, looks vaguely familiar to him, though he cannot remember why, he sees several men looking for last-minute presents for wives and girlfriends, but Génie—or the woman who looks like Génie—is no longer visible.

  She has a gift for disappearing, a genius for it.

  When she resurfaces in dreams or in memory, she is always leaving the little hotel on rue de Birague and crossing the Place des Vosges, which is why, when he saw her there two days ago, he did not trust his senses. The fourth arrondissement is permanently imbued with her presence, and so he thought he had magicked her up, particularly since he is still disoriented and jumpy. He has just returned from Prague where a manuscript hidden in his suitcase was found. The manuscript was confiscated. The writer of the manuscript, a novelist, is now in prison. Tristan himself was detained for a night and interrogated, but then released. Nevertheless, he is still shaken, and high-anxiety levels spawn fantasies. He knows this. He knows how shining messengers can appear and point to a doorway. DELIVERANCE, the doorway is marked.

  Hence, when a vision of Génie appears as soon as he is safely back in Paris, he knows better than to follow phantom temptation. Even so, watching her cross the Place des Vosges, he restrains himself with great difficulty.

  Instead, in the afterglow of his vision of her, he dropped into the tiny office out of which he runs Editions du Double. He tried to check galleys, he worked on drafts of new press announcements, he gave his assistant a list of bookstores to call. His
assistant handed him a week’s worth of messages—faxes and telephone memos—but he stuffed them into his briefcase without looking at them. His ability to concentrate was poor. He needed sleep. In Prague, he had spent the entire night harshly illuminated, looking into a sunspot from which questions had streamed like electrons. He had to go home and sleep. He dreamed he was back in the interrogation cell and Génie appeared like a patch of shade on the sun. Follow me, she said, vanishing.

  He woke the next morning feeling light-headed. He shaved and went to his office and worked for several hours. He left for a midmorning espresso in Place des Vosges and saw Génie again (or saw her double.) This time, he followed discreetly, but in the crowded Métro station of Bastille, he lost her. That was yesterday.

  Today he saw her for the third time.

  “We must ask you to step aside,” the policemen say, “into this room.”

  They ask questions, he answers. Is Interpol involved in this? he wonders. Is this coincidence, or is this about Prague? He tries to watch the concourse through a slender glass panel. The police are waiting for an answer. “Monsieur?” they prompt.

  “There must be an explanation,” he says, pondering the triple apparition of Génie. Perhaps, given the oddities of time and space, given surreal linkages that have been scientifically vouched for, perhaps molecules of past events continue to coalesce around their original points of occurrence, although in some other dimension. He believes a trick of the light or the memory can reassemble them.

  “You seem very agitated, monsieur. Something distracts you?”

  It was the way she walked, that was what caught his eye, that strange lopsided gait, the way she could never quite keep to a path or straight line, the way she veered left. It’s a political compulsion, she used to joke, though she was embarrassed by seeing everything on the slant. It’s your genius for going astray, he always countered, ton génie pour t’égarer. On her passport, an Australian one, she is Genevieve Teague, but he has always called her Génie. She can materialize like smoke from a dream. He can rub a memory and there she is. So now, three days in a row, three times in the same place: he has to admit this is improbable, though even so he has postponed returning his passport to the locked safe in his room. The passport has remained in his vest pocket ever since Prague in case he sees her again, in case he needs suddenly to take a taxi to the airport and shadow her to London or Rome or Timbuktu.

  His third sighting has been less than—what?—three hours ago (if he were to measure time in the normal dimension): he saw her crossing the Place des Vosges pulling behind her a small carry-on suitcase with wheels. In the stone arcade on the southern side, near the Victor Hugo museum, she stopped to listen to a black musician playing jazz. A small crowd had gathered. Tristan watched from behind a stone pillar. The man was playing Duke Ellington’s “Caravan” on tenor sax. Tristan found this coincidence so extraordinary—his first gift to her had been a Duke Ellington cassette, her first to him had been Thelonious Monk, and “Caravan” had been on both tapes—that the music seemed to him proof positive his grasp on reality had slipped. He saw Génie step forward and drop coins in the sax player’s hat, and then he followed her down the rue de Birague, past the little hotel, two stars, at Number 12, where they first made love. She paused there. Or was this something his own wishful thinking made her apparition do? He saw her enter the bistro on the corner of rue Saint Antoine. He hovered behind a fruit and vegetable barrow and watched as a waiter brought an espresso. Just as he was working up the courage to cross the street and sit at the vacant table next to hers, someone took a photograph. Probably, to the tourist, the scene seemed quintessentially French—interior of a bistro in the Marais—but Tristan had the uneasy and no doubt illogical sense that the intention was to keep a record of the woman who looked like Génie. Apparently the woman thought so too. She slid a twenty-franc note under her saucer and left abruptly. Tristan followed her to Place de la Bastille. When she descended into the Métro and then up into the street again at Place de l’Opéra, he was a discreet shadow. He watched covertly as she boarded the Roissybus. He hailed a cab.

  “Airport,” he said, agitated. “Can you stay close to the bus?”

  A flashbulb popped. A tourist leaned in close to the rear window. There was a video camera in the tourist’s hand and it spoke with a soft clicking whir.

  The cabdriver laughed. “Is it a movie?”

  Was it? Tristan wondered. He felt dizzy. He had an uneasy sense of déjà vu. But whose movie was it?

  “You’re not at risk of becoming a star,” he said irritably. His hands were sweating. He needed to know whether he was hallucinating or not. Simply that. His heartbeat had gone erratic. He felt light-headed, he felt something like a clamp above his ribs. “My heart,” he said, clutching at his chest in alarm. “Cas d’urgence. Don’t lose the bus.”

  The driver laughed again. “Vraiment une affaire de cœur, monsieur? Ou de queue?” Either way, the cabdriver promised—truly a matter of the heart, or one of lust—he was the right man for the occasion. He drove through every red light. He reached the Air France terminal as the Roissybus was spilling travelers and luggage like swill.

  “She is there, monsieur?” he asked.

  Tristan could not see her. Then he could. But was it Génie?

  From some angles, Tristan felt quite certain; from others, less so. She had changed her hairstyle. She was thinner. Five years had passed since he had seen her—since they lived together; since she vanished—yet often during those years, especially in the beginning, he would think he saw her. He would follow a woman through crowded streets, and then … Excuse me, he would say, but the woman never resembled Génie at all, not up close, and he would feel worse than a fool. Pathetic, he would think. I’m pathetic. He did not want to make a public clown of himself at the airport.

  He tipped the cabdriver lavishly and then hovered near the Air France desk watching as the woman who looked like Génie checked in. She did not check her bag. When she moved off to study the big departures/arrivals board, he tried to stay discreetly close but mishap derailed him. Fifty Japanese tourists surged like floodwaters rising. Tristan was awash. He was trapped. The tourists gazed up at the monitor. Aah, aah, aah, they sang in little high-pitched riffs as the numerals blinked and changed. The tourists all wore matching red shoulder bags and each bag bore the logo of the rising sun. Tristan found himself face-to-face with a woman wearing white gloves. She was dressed in a bright red suit with a rising-sun pin in her lapel and she held a sign high above her head with her white-gloved hands. FUJI TRAVEL, it said in Japanese characters and in English. WE FOLLOW THE RISING SUN. Her dawn-seekers pressed close in a jostling circle.

  “Excuse me, excuse me,” Tristan said.

  “You should not be with us,” the woman reproved. “You do not have a Fuji bag.”

  “I’m not with you,” Tristan assured her, fighting free. But he had lost sight of the woman who looked like Génie.

  He felt foolish. All he had with him was his briefcase. He bought himself an espresso, sat on a high stool at a coffee counter in the upper concourse, and began going through the week’s messages. He ignored the phone memos—anyone important would call back, he figured—and turned to the faxes. When he got to the third item, the demitasse in his hand lurched violently and a cord of black coffee rose like a question mark. It quivered in the air for a second, then made a dark asterisk on the fax.

  Tristan, the fax read. Arriving Friday. Same return flight as you. Génie. He noted the date and time of reception. When the fax arrived, he was in Prague. He was in a cell in Prague, dreaming of Génie. Same return flight as you. What on earth did she mean?

  He looked at the next fax: from his printer in Singapore. He thumbed quickly through several more: from his distributor, from a magazine running an article on one of his authors, from a translator, and then …

  The fax had reached his office that very morning. Tristan, he read. Sorry you did not show up for the rendez-vous at our
hotel, no. 12, rue de Birague. Am flying back to New York on September 8, AF 64, which leaves at 1600 hours. If you can make it to CDG in time, we could have a drink for old times’ sake.

  The message was unsigned, but Tristan knew what he knew.

  Who else but Génie could use the hotel on rue de Birague as code?

  He looked at his watch: ten minutes past noon. Why would she come to the airport so early? Why would she come here four hours before her flight? He shoved everything back into his briefcase and ran to the Air France desk, bumping into people, slipping on squashed pommes frites, being frowned at and rerouted by someone in uniform. A red sea of shoulder bags parted, and he passed through unscathed.

  There were, he discovered, only five seats left on Flight 64 to New York. “Grâce à Dieu,” he said fervently and bought a ticket. How many bags was he checking? None. “Je n’ai pas de bagages. I have nothing but my briefcase,” he said.

  “Only a briefcase, monsieur?” The ticket girl laughed and shook her head. “C’est étonnant!” she said. “You are not the first. These days people travel around the world with almost nothing. I do not understand at all. The Australians especially.” She shook her head. “I do not understand these Australians. I ask myself if they spin clothes out of air.”

  “You have someone else on this flight who travels light?”

  “There was a woman with an Australian passport and nothing more than a carry-on. For me,” the girl said—she made a fetching little moue with her lips—“for a Frenchwoman, this is not possible. Chez nous, la mode compte trop, n’est-ce pas?”