Oh, certainly, my fellow upholders of the principles we hold most dear, certainly there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of in your average understanding of what a man or a woman can survive, and in this career that you have chosen, in this career which has chosen you, it is your mandate and your duty to survive; to survive not only the horrors to which the course of duty may subject you, but the horrors you may be called upon to inflict.
To return to the subject in hand: in situations of chemical warfare that outlast the protective equipment, I can assure you (by historical precedent, by the abiding principles of literature and art, and by personal experience in the field) that statistics signify nothing.
Consider Boccaccio.
In 1348, as he tells us, the plague came to Florence and killed off one-third of the populace in months. Between March and the following July, Boccaccio wrote, what with the virulence of that pestiferous sickness and the number of sick folk ill-tended or forsaken in their need … it is believed for certain that upward of a hundred thousand human beings perished within the walls of the city …
At night, corpses were thrown from the windows and the death carts bore them to mass graves. Boccaccio, thirty-five years old, lost his father, his stepmother, and a host of peers and friends. Reflecting on so many miseries makes me melancholy, he wrote, and therefore he curled up into himself and took refuge from despair, and it came to pass, in the venerable church of Santa Maria Novella, he overheard Pampinea as she spoke to her circle of close friends: “My dear ladies,” she said, “each of us is in fear for her life. If we go forth from here, we see the dead and the dying in the streets. Therefore what are we doing here? What are we waiting for? What are we dreaming about? Let us flee the city and take refuge in the country and build a safe house of stories in which to hide and shelter ourselves,” and they all gave inner and urgent assent, and so ten young aristocrats (plus the eavesdropping Giovanni Boccaccio, the father creator, the voyeur, the devoutly penitent purveyor of bawdy tales), all eleven left the horror of the city behind them and traveled up into the high places of the imagination where Boccaccio wrote the Decameron and lived to tell the history of surviving the plague.
Plagues come and they go. They mutate and return in different form. Camus, covertly publishing for the Resistance and running interference with Nazi blight, knew this. He might not have specifically foreseen hijackings, sarin, and mustard gas, but he knew the rodents and their toxins would reappear. And, like his narrator, Dr. Rieux, he knew that the tale he had to tell could not be one of a final victory. It could be only the record of what had had to be done, and what assuredly would have to be done again in the never-ending fight against terror … by all who, while unable to be saints but refusing to bow down to pestilences, strive their utmost to be healers. He knew … that the plague bacillus never dies or disappears for good; that it can lie dormant for years and years …
But it will return, my fellow keepers of the public safety. It will return.
Are you surprised that I expect you to know Boccaccio and Camus in this class? That I expect you to familiarize yourself with their work? That I expect you to memorize them? Let me tell you something: in the course of this career, you will remember many things you wish you could forget. You will find immeasurable comfort in reciting the words of other men in the effort to crowd unwanted words offstage.
Let me explain one further thing.
Do you think it was the plague—the plague itself—that Boccaccio, Defoe, and Camus all sought, with such frantic scribbling, to keep at bay? Were their stories to ward off the buboes, the excruciating swellings of the lymphic nodes, the bright ring of anthrax scabs that so many medieval and seventeenth century parish registers describe?
No. I can attest to this: no.
What is the brief agony of the body that comes with its own anesthetic of shock? It is nothing. Believe me, Boccaccio, Defoe, and Camus were haunted by their own nightmares, by their own betrayals, and by their dead. Like the Ancient Mariner, they were condemned to tell the stories of those who haunted them as an act of propitiation, to keep their Furies at bay.
The dead never stop telling us stories.
Those whom we have betrayed, no matter how pure our intent, how scrupulous our reasons, they tell their tales to us night after night, which is why some of you will lose all capacity to sleep.
8.
There is not much time left, Dr. Reuben. I know that.
I have selected you as the midwife, so to speak, to deliver something to my son. This is not because I trust you. It is not because I don’t trust you, I hasten to add, but I know what I’m up against. I know you are watched and followed. I know your files on me will probably disappear. This is not without precedent in recent political history, is it? the theft of psychiatric files. For this reason, even to you, I cannot speak frankly, but I must speak passionately.
I have only this one thing of value to leave behind—the truth.
All my planning, including my offering myself up to you as a patient, is geared toward this single end: the preservation of what I am leaving behind.
Truth will out, I believe that, even though not one living person can be trusted as its bearer. You will think my lack of trust is part of my condition, and it is part of my condition, of course, but my condition is not one that is listed in your Dictionary of Mental Disorders. I see by the twitch of a nerve at the edge of your mouth that you are convinced otherwise. I let that go. I can’t trust you. Nevertheless, I believe you will be sufficiently constrained by professional and ethical requirements to carry out my last will and testament to the letter.
I want you to hand-deliver to my son the key to a locker. This locker will contain a certain package.
I do not have much time.
Tonight, I will need to see Anna, and then—
Have you any conception, Dr. Reuben, of the physical pain of moral torment?
It needs leeches, Dr. Reuben. It needs to be bled. It needs flogging …
I’m sorry, what was I …?
There are certain things, Dr. Reuben, that once seen …
Scipio wept at Carthage, did you know?
I can put my finger, now, on the moment where I should have … on the crucial moment. But the trouble is, we don’t recognize that moment until it is past. I should have stood there with Nimrod. That should have been the turning point. Here I stand, I should have said, against unacceptable risks, against unconscionable collateral damage. But if I had said that then, I’d be where Nimrod is now.
Would we have achieved anything?
Could anyone have stopped Sirocco? Can anyone stop him?
And then there is the major problem of the evidence that cannot be put in code for its own protection. How can I keep the videotapes safe? I’ve been obsessed with this question. We do not yet know how to code such things. We know how to interfere with transmission, how to scramble signals … but we don’t know how to preserve them. We don’t know how to damage-proof a tape.
The originals I had to surrender thirteen years ago, but the copies that I made, the illegal copies …
What a poor frail vessel nylon tape is, magnetic tape, when what I need is a Rosetta Stone to go through time.
Let me ask you something, Dr. Reuben.
Have you ever worn …? No, of course not. Of course you have not. But I make the recruits wear the masks and decontamination suits for six hours straight while they unload heavy equipment, not that six hours will give us any reliable gauge of anything much, but that’s the maximum permitted in training routine. Wipes out half of them, and I’m speaking of the cream of the crop, perfect physical and mental specimens. Hallucinations, drowning in their own sweat and vomit. It’s like being wrapped alive in your shroud.
It’s a … it’s not a fate that …
Needs to be bled. Needs flogging.
I will need to see Anna tonight.
Are you taping me, Dr. Reuben? If you’re taping me, I want to say this for the
record: Sirocco is not the worst of it. The worst is seeing and not intervening to stop. The worst is that this happened under hi-tech surveillance. The worst is those who watched and monitored and voted: acceptable collateral damage.
After certain kinds of knowledge, it is not possible to …
Will you give me your word?
I don’t know how to impress on you the importance, given that I am automatically tongue-tied, given that certain words, if I were merely to say them, would damage the chances of the evidence being preserved. If there is a single word that I wish I could chisel into stone, it is hostages, but I dare not say it. I dare not risk saying it.
I think, Dr. Reuben, that this will be the last time I see you.
I’m too big a risk now, and I have to be erased. I know the rules, and I’ve always played by them until now.
I know I don’t have much time.
I want to give you this key. Will you give me your word and your hand in return?
Book VI
IN THE MARSH
The name of the slough was Despond.
John Bunyan, Pilgrim’s Progress
For what is water … but a liquid form of Nothing? And what are the Fens … but a landscape which, of all landscapes, most approximates to Nothing? … Every Fenman suffers now and then the illusion that the land he walks over is not there …
Graham Swift, Waterland
1.
On the dock of the Saltmarsh Motel, under cover of dark, Samantha and Lowell half push, half pull the boat through sea grass and mud. “We’ll pay cash,” Samantha says. “That way, we leave no trail.”
“Have we got enough?”
Between them, they have fifty-seven dollars.
“Should be plenty,” Sam says, “for off-season. There won’t be anyone else here.”
“Forty-nine ninety-five,” the proprietor says. “Cash on the barrel, half price, and no questions asked. Never get no one this time of year.”
“We got lost in the marsh,” Sam says. “Staying up the bay from here.”
The proprietor is an old leather-faced fisherman who hires himself out to guests as an oystering guide in the season. “Marsh is tricky,” he admits. “You can’t go messin’ around with ’er, you gotta know ’er.”
“I figure we’ll find our way out of the channels by daylight,” Sam says. “Do you have a room with a VCR?”
“All our rooms got VCRs. And digital. Got our own video library over there.” He jerks his thumb at two rows of shelves beneath the window. “You seen Air Force One? No? Seen it six times, my personal pick. Extra two bucks to rent.”
“Thanks. We’ll take your recommendation.” Sam hands him the extra two dollars and takes Air Force One from the video rack.
The proprietor gives her a key attached to a plastic card. “Room 8,” he says. “To the left when you go out the door.”
In Room 8, they draw the curtains. Lowell slides the backpack from his shoulders and Sam sees that the drawstring bag inside it is made from an old pillowcase, a child’s pillowcase, sprinkled with castles and knights-in-armor and maidens with long tresses who watch from towers.
There are six tapes, numbered in black felt marker from one through six. When they open Cassette Number One, they find a thick letter inside it, instead of a tape.
“That’s my father’s handwriting,” Lowell says.
2.
The Confessions of Salamander
In the middle of the journey of my life,
I came to myself in a dark wood,
Where the straight way was wholly lost and gone.
Like Dante, I have traveled down to a terrible place, the pit of nightmare, but my guide was not Virgil. I had no guide. The wood is blacker than dark, and more dense. It is impenetrable. Worse than that: no footstep is safe because the ground is soft and gives way. Funnels of quicksand wait like wet-lipped mouths.
There was—there is—no way out.
All I can do is hold up a dim lantern to show you where I have been. In all fairness I should also caution you not to look. I should urge you to draw back from this dread quagmire. Sucking foulness will cling to you. This is the worst journey you will take.
I am condemned to be your tour guide. We will travel down through the circles of Sirocco’s inferno as he choreographed them. Choreographed? Choreographed and recorded. That is the sort of sick thing Sirocco does. He is a gifted designer of the custom-made hell and he enjoys a visual record of his power. I do not doubt that he watches and rewatches his own tapes. He likes to imagine us watching.
No one should underestimate the devious intelligence of Sirocco. I am, from time to time, momentarily flattered that he went to such lengths, to such extraordinarily personal lengths, in maneuvering certain people onto his chosen flight and into the hostage bunker: my wife, my daughter, the man my daughter loved (a man whom Sirocco saw, inevitably, as a sexual rival; a man, therefore, whom it gave him great pleasure to smash).
Did I too not fantasize about punishing my wife Isabella?
Did I not wish to make Charron pay for his stubborn defiance and pride?
Did I not seek to control—lest she be in danger; lest she be a flashpoint of risk—the life of my resentful and prickly daughter who, at the eleventh hour, was saved for breakdown and psychic collapse?
Did I not place all three under surveillance?
I plead guilty.
Such is the malevolent brilliance of Sirocco, who knows how to add guilt and complicity to grief. He could flay a human being alive with the utmost gentleness and finesse. Today I saw a man flayed, you might say. You would not believe how it altered his appearance for the worse, and yet he reported to his superiors, he filed his reports, he ate lunch and dinner and went to bed and slept and rose and went to his office for many years and married again and kept fearful watch over his son whom he was terrified of losing and filed his reports and kept his secrets and adhered to the code he was sworn to, but he was no longer among the living and he had no skin.
He passed his days and nights in perpetual terror that his son and his saved-but-lost daughter and his young third wife would come to harm. To protect them, he withdrew from them. He withdrew, even, from inside the shell of himself; from me, that is to say, and I from him. We strove to keep our thoughts separate and private. I see him now, beside me, not looking at me: Salamander, encased in ice.
Which of us is writing this confession, I do not know.
Which of us Sirocco most enjoyed playing with, as cat plays with bird, I do not know; but his single-minded dedication to tormenting both of us—his split-twin counterpart in covert operations—sometimes gives comfort for minutes at a time. It surely counts as a credential of sorts, or so I try to convince myself. It confers—it seems to confer—the distinction of hand-to-hand combat with evil. It therefore makes me dare to hope that I am, after all—that perhaps I am—the knight who wears the white plume, and it buttresses my vow to preserve the damning evidence through time. These tapes, I dare to hope, are my Rosetta Stone and my Dead Sea Scrolls.
I cannot ever re-create the horrible effect of receiving Sirocco’s transmissions live, but three of the tapes (those labeled #4, #5, #6) preserve the interminable descent to the seventh circle in real time: for future historians; for those who can bear to watch.
Cassette #1 holds this document.
Cassette #2 is a collage of public footage of newsreel tapes.
Cassette #3, the crucial one, is my edited version of the raw primary evidence. It contains the Last Words. From this tape I have excised the agonies that will not bear watching, I have cut and spliced, I have kept the Illuminations, I have inserted subtitles and I have memorialized the dead. I call it the Decameron tape, and it is my act of propitiation, my rite of mourning, my wailing wall, my monument to those who perished so terribly, my Kyrie eleison, my prayer.
It is also my indictment. (The leaden weight of my sins pulls me down. Oh, I’d leap up to my God, but no forgiveness is possible. There is no way ou
t.)
Making the Decameron tape is the most important thing I have ever done; preserving it, the most dangerous.
Transmissions came in live from AF 64, and then from the bunker in Iraq. Sirocco had brilliant minds at his disposal, trained to the highest pitch (by us, of course) in information technology, biochemical warfare, and explosives.
Transmissions came in live, and I was by no means the sole monitor.
The first transmission, made available to global news services, was broadcast in a dozen countries, including ours, without censorship. Why has this footage disappeared? It has not, in fact, disappeared; it has been elided by subsequent editorial construction and slant. Its impact has been diluted. It is history lost; or rather, temporarily mislaid, as history so frequently is. For this reason, I include an exact transcript of Sirocco’s ultimatum, though it is readily available (both visually and in transcript) in public archival footage.
Throughout the twenty-four hours in the bunker, desperate negotiations were being carried on. I record below the transcripts of telephone conversations that took place between myself and those higher in the decision-making process than I.
Transcripts
Transcript of Sirocco’s ultimatum
(Transmitted as audiovisual on September 13, 1987; monitored by Salamander; patched on to, and viewed by, unknown number of unknown individuals in higher levels of command; also broadcast globally on CNN and national newscasts on September 14, 1987; subsequently—with all due and deliberate intention to deceive—construed as hoax.)
Voice of Sirocco:
You have seen what has happened to Flight Black Death, formerly Air France 64. Before the plane was blown up, we removed ten hostages. They are safe.
By refusing us landing rights in Paris, by ignoring our ultimatum on the imminent fate of the passengers, you treated our demands lightly. Now you know that we are not to be trifled with. We therefore give you this one final chance.
Due Preparations for the Plague Page 26