A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (16 page)

She studied them as well. They had secrets, they had plans. Quite suddenly it occurred to Viola to ask herself why it was that if she and Victor spent one weekend with her mother they would see only their father the next. She had taken this ar
rangement for granted, as a detail in the way the universe was constructed, but she forced herself now to take another view, to overcome the constraints on her imagination. She thought hard: parents of other friends saw their children every weekend. This observation was, in itself, a revelation, and it spawned another: Victor was simply too difficult to be with two weekends in a row. But Viola had to be with him every weekend and every day, and nearly the whole day. The only solution—and this, she thought, must be the subject of her parents’ secrets, their frustrations, and their bad moods—was to remove Victor from the household. He would have to be adopted.

The next day Victor took the rubber band in which the mail had come bound. He pulled at it and giggled as it pulled back. For hours he sat on the floor, almost
drooling
as he studied its elasticity, as if the rubber band were the greatest invention since…since snot, his other fascination. He smelled the rubber band and put it in his mouth. He brought it close to his face. He learned how to pluck it and demanded that she listen. He repeatedly flicked at it with his thumb but, pathetically, didn’t know how to shoot it off. When she was three she had certainly known. It wasn’t something you had to be taught.

DR. NANCY CONTINUED
to ask questions. She was searching for something, also trying to figure what was up. But she asked the wrong questions—how do you feel? what is it like to be with your father? what is it like to be with your mom?
never
what is it like to be with Victor,
never
if you could choose to have any superpower, which would it be?—so their answers made little sense. She took notes in a green spiral book, frowning. Observing her frustration this week, Viola told her that her mother hit Victor. The effect was very good, at first: the doctor was jolted, she sat upright and looked at her as if for the first time. Then she wanted to see Victor’s arm and,
gently cooing, began inspecting other places all over his body, even his bottom. Victor giggled for a while, until he started crying, and Viola felt weird, as if she had asked her to look there.

When their mother picked them up, Dr. Nancy said nothing about it and her mother didn’t notice how red-faced Victor was. He behaved on the walk to the subway, holding hands, keeping pace and ducking properly under the turnstile, and not flinging himself onto the tracks, but once the train arrived and they had rushed to their seats, she saw him working the tip of one sneaker against the heel of the other. Just as she was about to warn her, her mother flinched. She cried to the stranger sitting alongside her:

“Agent Robbins!”

The man didn’t respond right away. He was slumped in his seat and slumped, too, within his suit. His face was bristly and gray and he stared at the floor of the train with sad droopy eyes. Viola was unnerved that her mother had spoken to a stranger.

He turned slowly, taking another moment before he looked at her. She blushed. Pressed against her arm, Viola could almost feel her body temperature rise. As quick as an EZ Pass, the man’s eyes scanned the children’s faces. He didn’t smile.

“It’s me, Joyce Harriman!”

Now Viola’s ears burned. Other passengers watched them. They heard her mother pronounce her name: the passengers knew it now; her name belonged to them, another fact. What would it mean? The man looked at her mother intensely, baring his teeth in pain. He must have been thinking hard, but not about them.

Her mother said, “From the anthrax scare?”

He opened his mouth but some time passed before a word was dropped from it. “Right,” he said without conviction.

“You took a nose swab. I called you…” She stopped, unsure
what to say. Her face was still dark. “I guess you never found who sent the real anthrax.”

The man’s sigh was nearly a groan and he turned to watch his reflection in the window opposite their seats. The tunnel’s walls and pillars sped behind the ghostly image. In the window he was nearly handsome. “No, I guess not.”

“That was silly, I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to blame you—”

“It’s all right. We should have got him.” He dropped the back of his head against the glass behind him and showed his Adam’s apple. “Five people dead. We collected plenty of intelligence, with every agent in every office working hard. Our best guys are still on the case, studying the material and the facts and the clues, employing the most advanced forensics. We
have
all the evidence we need, I’m sure of that—in a certain file, in a certain test tube, in a certain evidence bag, on a phone log, and in an e-mail. We have supercomputers crunching data right now, trying to get these pieces of evidence into alignment. But we’re missing something, something big and obvious…”

“I know, I know,” her mother said, as if he were one of her children. Her eyes had become soft and warm. She offered him a tiny smile. He didn’t see it.

“This case is all I can think about, and thinking about it puts it even further out of reach. Ach,” he said wearily, straightening up and waving his hand as if to swat a fly, “it’s been a bad week for the agency. You’ve seen the News, it turns out we had good intelligence about al-Qaeda before 9/11…The Phoenix office reported that Arabs connected to bin Laden were taking flying lessons there; in Minnesota they arrested Moussaoui, but didn’t search his computer, which had Atta’s phone number on the hard drive. Two other guys on the foreign terrorist watch list were let into the country. The French sent us warnings. But we couldn’t collect that intelligence in a single place. We couldn’t communicate it from
one office to the next, or between agencies, or to the local police. And every new corrective system we establish, every overseer or liaison or central collection office, adds to the data dump. We monitor al-Qaeda, the other crackpots…But there’s too much chatter in the system, so we report only on the
volume
of the chatter, rather than its content. Then the volume becomes another piece of data…On my desk I have tons of intelligence—about another terrorist plot, the importation of illegal drugs, some ex-army gun nut in Washington State who may go on a rampage someday, the presence of extraterrestrial visitors at a mall in Piscataway and the Second Coming of Jesus Christ. But I can’t know which of this is worth acting on. I send it upstream and it clutters the desk of someone trying to decide what to do with
his
intelligence. And no one in the government has the ability to look at this mess in its entirety and make sense of it. Do you know what I mean?”

Her mother nodded and she too gazed into the opposite window. From where Viola sat, the attenuated reflection didn’t include either her or her brother. The two adults rested, not looking directly at each other, yet aware, she thought, of being framed in the window together. Two worn-out people. It was as if the man had suddenly become their father. The thought cut her open like an ice pick. Her mother murmured, “Yes. My life’s like that too.”

The roar of the train abruptly dropped in pitch as they entered a station. The train shuddered and slowed. “Oh,” her mother cried. “This is our change! I’m sorry, Agent Robbins—”

“Please, call me Nathan.”

“Shit!”

Victor had kicked off both his sneakers and they had slid beneath the legs of a sleeping man who held a brown paper bag to his chest. Her mother had already collected their things and had taken Viola’s hand. She crouched to pick up the
sneakers just as the train slammed to a stop, making her fall against the man’s knees and then to the floor. “Shit,” she said again.

The man woke to examine her through traffic-light yellow eyes, but he didn’t move his legs. The door to the train opened and new passengers rushed in around them, taking their seats while she jammed the shoes onto Victor’s feet. A scuff mark showed up near the hem of her dress. Agent Robbins rose, unsure how to help. Someone took his seat. Without looking back, a child in each hand as the doors started to close, her mother propelled them from the train.

THERE WAS
a flat slapping sound, a little hum, the whirring, whistling, trilling insectlike beating of nearly microscopic surfaces against the rushing air, and then she was stung on the back of her neck. The rubber band fell to the floor, dead on impact.

Victor sat cross-legged in the corner of the living room designated for his use, playing with marbles and trying, incompetently, not to look at her. His eyes darted; he fought a smile. She stopped herself before she could rub her neck where the burn was fading. She hesitated to summon her mother, who was determinedly busy, walking through the apartment with a clipboard. She halted at each thing—a piece of furniture, a lamp, a picture—paused to contemplate it, and then wrote something on the clipboard. She was being very serious. Absent blood, she wouldn’t have been impressed. This wasn’t the right time. Viola was surprised by her own exercise of self-control, which felt like a physical exercise, stretching muscles and enlarging her body. She felt bigger already.

Victor later recovered the rubber band and examined it for damage. She expected to be hit again, but he seemed to have lost interest in her. He continued his investigations, first
maneuvering the rubber band around bits of tinfoil and a blue glass marble. He seemed preoccupied with the challenge of wrapping small objects in it. He didn’t know how to make a slingshot yet.

This went on for days. He found other toys and bounced them against the rubber band: a model soldier, a plastic doll shoe, a hardened wad of chewing gum. It was only a matter of time before he launched one. She observed as his babyish mind labored to grasp the rubber band’s operating principles. Victor’s world was composed of entirely random elements, and any connections they made were ephemeral and arbitrary. He pressed the shoe against a taut segment of rubber band, but he held his fingers in an awkward position behind the rubber band, preventing him from stretching it. Then the shoe slipped out and he found himself holding two unrelated objects.

Suddenly their parents were arguing with tremendous violence. She hadn’t been paying attention and hadn’t even noticed that they were, unusually, both in the living room. She couldn’t distinguish the words they were flinging, shooting, spitting at each other, but her mother had become rigid and her father was jabbing his finger at the air. He said something and abruptly stormed away and her mother said something and he came rushing back, running halfway across the apartment to say something else. He walked away again and came back. They were shouting at once. The air in the apartment seemed hot enough to catch fire.

Her father grabbed the clipboard out of her mother’s hands. Her mother screamed, one short, loud yelp. He pulled out the paper on which she’d been writing, threw the clipboard onto the carpet, and ripped the pages, first in halves, then in halves of halves, and so on. Viola wished he were making confetti but knew he wasn’t. His jaw was clamped so that you could see the muscles straining against the side of his face. Her
mother’s eyes were set deep in their sockets. He worked intently on tearing the paper into small pieces and finally threw them, like confetti after all, into her face. She didn’t blink and allowed it to fall into her hair and onto her shoulders and stick there.

He went into his bedroom and slammed the door. He opened and slammed it again, and again several more times. Afterward, with the door silenced, the glassware in the living room cabinet continued to chime and tinkle in a ringing angelic chorus.

Her mother walked away from the confetti and went to the chair by the window. Viola had been wrong in assuming that she didn’t see anything from this window. She
was
seeing: not the city, but above the roof of the next building a slender slice of impeccably cloudless daylit sky. She contemplated the blue for some time as if it held some all-explaining vital secret.

The roaring of the atmosphere subsided to silence and then the rubber band made a new sound, a charged, humming, deep-bellied twang. From Victor’s hand sprang the little pressed-tin airplane that had come with a board game they had never learned to play. The plane swiftly gained altitude as it crossed the living room. It flew steadily, without tumbling. The three of them watched it arc a few inches beneath the ceiling. The flight ended, bull’s-eye, in the princess vase’s midsection.

When the toy piece struck, the glass changed color top to bottom, from purple to a bright, pinkish white, and the vase iridesced before it crashed and returned to its original elements so that not a single piece of it could be recognized. Her heart leaped in the moment before it came down. There had been disorder in her analysis of what Victor was going to do, order in the vase’s final fluent form, disorder in its dissolution, and a return to order in her comprehension of what had happened.
She had never seen anything as beautiful as this series of transformations.

“Oh!” her mother said, her cry feeble. She put her hand to her face.

Her father opened his door and took a half step from the bedroom. His face was drawn, its fire quenched. He saw the smashed vase at once. He peered at the debris for a while and turned, simultaneously with her mother and in a rare parallel orbit, to look at Victor. Victor wasn’t trying to hide a smirk now as he struggled to appreciate the rubber band’s cause and effect. Gaping, he seemed older now, no longer a baby or a toddler: hurled into full childhood. Her father and mother were both still. Viola expected them to hit him, but she was wrong—again. They studied the boy from a distance, as if asking themselves where he had come from and how he had gotten into the apartment.

And yet another mistake. Viola thought that the smashed vase had ended something, but no. Her parents swept it up together, her father on his knees with the dustpan, her mother with the broom. Either could have done the job alone. Something else was going on. They spoke to each other now in quiet, urgent tones—not exactly arguing, which, she realized from the absence of argument, was how they usually spoke. She couldn’t understand what was being said. Both of them seemed tired. Her mother’s face had gone soft and tender. Every few minutes they looked back at the children. They seemed to have come to an agreement. Viola wondered if tonight was the night.