A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (25 page)

A flash camera flamed beside him. As the photographer watched the picture come up on the digital monitor, he held the apparatus several inches in front of his face, the camera’s silvery curves as smooth and tactile as a sexual surface. He was one of the guys who had been hanging back in the shadows. Poised to take the next shot, the man bent at the knees. His mouth was open like a gash. A blister of spittle floated at the edge of his lower lip. Marshall didn’t need to see the monitor. The flash immobilized the image in his eyes: Miss Naomi’s face
closed around the youth’s rigidity pushing against the inside of her mouth, its form shadowed on the outer surface of her cheek. Her eyes were open, staring at the camera and knowing exactly what it saw.

When she removed her mouth the boy was hard, his dick lifting well above the horizontal. This was met by raucous applause and laughter. More hoots and ribald remarks were directed at the kid: mock admiration for his good fortune, mock praise for his hardness, mock wonder that he hadn’t already ejaculated, disdain for the size of his hard-on.

Miss Naomi laughed too, her eyes searching for Nick’s sunglasses. She found them and pointed to the boy’s cock with both hands. She said, “Mission accomplished.”

More photographs were taken, each accompanied by yips and cries and bursts of dazzling, excavating, absolute illumination. In the intermittent glare Marshall found his coat in the hall closet, piled halfway down a pyramid of stacked outerwear. Carrying the coat in his arms and leaving the gloves and scarf that had separated from it, he pulled open the front door and passed into the early morning gloom as if through an air lock into interstellar space. The cold penetrated his clothes and made him as sober as he had ever been. He allowed it to reach every hollow and pore before he wrestled himself into the coat. Streetlamps up the block burned steadily under the indigo, overcast sky. Cheers indicated something great had just happened within the house, something amazing and earnestly hoped for. Marshall’s soft footfalls took him down the cracked sidewalk past unlit homes onto the next street and then onto another, a mixed-use boulevard in which the shops had been abandoned for years. He walked for hours. Police cars and other vehicles glided by soundlessly, but in a night that would never end he didn’t once see a bus or train that would carry him home, if home was still worth going back to.

EVEN WITH JOYCÉS DIVORCE IMMINENT
, finally, this was the season of ashen foreboding. The first morning of February saw the
Columbia
’s destruction, after NASA’s unequivocating, hard-faced experts ignored warnings that repeated damage to the shuttle’s foam insulation made it unsafe to fly. A portent. The world waited for the invasion of Iraq in despair, warned of its consequences. Joyce received e-mail from her colleagues in Europe—stylish, well-read Belgians, Dutch, and Italians who always brought gifts when they visited the States and invited her into their homes and lives when she went abroad. They asked, Has America gone crazy? Are you bewitched by propaganda? Do you believe, with 69 percent of your fellow citizens, that Saddam was involved in 9/11? Can’t we stop this rush to war?

As if they had no errands to perform on their days off, no hair that needed to be colored, and no kids who grew out of their winter boots with just one month left to winter, the Europeans demonstrated every weekend. Joyce watched on television as they surged through medieval landscapes that had suffered war and now knew the postnational, remunerative, touristic pleasures of peace. She too was moved to declare herself a woman who sought peace—a woman who could be reasonable, conciliatory, and kind. Although she had never before been politically active, and wasn’t even sure that a war to disarm Saddam wasn’t necessary, she understood that her new situation as a soon-to-be-divorced woman required a new mode of thought. She would have to break the restraints that had shaped her former, failed life. In the process of redefining her character, Joyce could no longer assume that she wasn’t a woman who went to antiwar demonstrations. Perhaps she was.

Demonstrations had been called around the world for Feb
ruary 15: in Berlin, Paris, Prague, Seoul, Cape Town, and even at the American research base in Antarctica. Joyce asked coworkers to join her at the protest in Manhattan (she no longer knew anyone she could honestly call a friend; she was waiting for Marshall to move out before embarking on anything, including new friendships), but they wouldn’t ride the subway that weekend. The Department of Homeland Security had just raised the terrorism alert level to Code Orange, gravely advising Americans to stock up on duct tape and plastic sheeting as protection against a chemical or biological attack. Tom Ridge went on TV to say these were “the most significant set of warnings since prior to September 11. The threat is real.” He repeated, “The threat is real.” Officials speculated that a new Osama bin Laden tape contained coded messages to terrorist sleeper cells. CIA director George Tenet appeared midweek at a congressional hearing. Testifying under oath, Tenet said, “The intelligence is not idle chatter on the part of terrorists or their associates. It is the most specific we have seen.”

When Joyce called Nathan to ask him how seriously to take these warnings, another man answered the phone. His flat, middle-of-the-country accent was immediately distinguishable from Nathan’s. “Yeah,” he said.

“Is this Nathaniel Robbins’ office?”

The man asked sharply, “Who’s calling?”

“I’m a friend.”

The long pause that followed was accompanied by tiny electronic gurgles beneath the hum of the wires.

“Joyce Harriman,” he announced, unable to subdue the note of triumph in his voice. Clipping his syllables, he went on to reveal that he knew the address of her apartment, or rather the house number of the adjacent building; her phone number, with the last two digits reversed; and the name of the company for which she had worked six years ago.

“Yes,” she said, wondering if she should correct him. Hurriedly, she asked, “Is Agent Robbins there?”

“You have the wrong number.”

She read him the number off Nathan’s card.

He said forcefully, “There’s no one here with that name.”

Now Joyce paused so that she could consider the man’s phrasing and his curt manner. He sounded much more like an FBI agent than Nathan ever had. She would have hung up the phone if she hadn’t already been identified. “This is the FBI, right?”

“How can I help you, Mrs. Harriman?”

“I’m trying to reach Nathaniel Robbins.”

“Why?”

“It’s personal. Personal reasons. I’m a friend.”

After a pause he spoke with cold deliberation. “There’s no Nathaniel Robbins here.” He added, “Mrs. Harriman.”

“Okay, well, thank you then,” she rushed to say.

“And how do you know Nathaniel Robbins?” he asked.

“From around.”

“What was the nature of the relationship?”

“It wasn’t a relationship. We were friends. Really, more like acquaintances.”

“Did he ever speak of bureau matters?”

“You mean about the FBI?”

“Please answer carefully, as this may or may not be the subject of a federal investigation.”

“Of course not. The FBI? He
never
talked about the FBI or anything about work. Thank you. It’s been a pleasure speaking with you,” she said. This time she did hang up and stared at the phone for a long time, expecting it to do something.

She had written Nathan’s home phone on the back of his card but she was too discomposed to call it. She wondered if her name had just been fed into a computer, her name more data to be crunched before being placed into intimate conjunction
with other pulverized identities. She sensed now that her calls were being monitored and perhaps had been listened to for some time.

She did not attend the demonstration after all. She remained home with the children, the three of them watching the news on TV, where the worldwide protesters were an image shrunk within the screen to make room for the “War on Terror” logo, the Homeland Security Threat Bar, and the news crawl. The crawl scurried: you had to have quick eyes to catch it—UN resolutions…troop movements…terrorist attacks—and still follow the stories being told by the live images. You could never catch it.

When Marshall arrived Joyce looked up and for a moment she believed that a dangerous stranger had broken into their apartment. Then she couldn’t help staring. Marshall was unshaven, his hair matted and uncombed and glinting with frost, and his coat was open to a sweater begrimed by ice that hadn’t thawed in the elevator. He hadn’t come home last night, not that she cared, not that she cared the single most infinitesimal jot, but still. He looked as if he were about to fall over. The children were frightened by the apparition, as if it were a promise of their own futures. Their father was blind to them and stank of vomit. He staggered into his bedroom, leaving the odor behind him.

THAT DAY
in the middle of February was gravid with imminent war, but weeks passed as diplomats clashed in the United Nations and alternate plans of action were proposed, debated, rejected, and revised. American and British troops dug in at Iraq’s border with Kuwait. In a television interview with Dan-Rather, Saddam Hussein denied that he still held weapons of mass destruction and disavowed any links to al-Qaeda. Bush, Blair, and the Spanish prime minister met in the Azores.
Thousands of candlelight vigils were held throughout the world in mostly silent hopeless self-affirming protest. The Department of Homeland Security, having quietly dropped its terrorist threat assessment to Yellow, returned it to Orange. Every day seemed like the last before the first battle’s onset, yet another day would pass, narrowing the distance to war by half again. Despite the bluffs and feints in the Security Council, the failure to get a pro-U.S. majority for a second resolution, and the last-minute antiwar appeals by the pope and other world leaders (which were rebutted by Elie Wiesel and Václav Havel), the war loomed as inevitably as a date of execution. You went through your daily life in a haze, knowing that fellow Americans were preparing to race across deserts and jump from planes and kill and die and elsewhere a man or woman just like you, with kids just like yours, was waiting for this violence to wreck the fabric of a life already as tenuous and complicated as yours. You could watch the TV with the sound off. By now the arguments for and against the war had been repeated so many times they could be inferred from the commentators’ facial expressions and hand gestures.

In the same gathering moment, even though they remained unpersuaded by the administration’s arguments, Joyce and Marshall secretly and impatiently wished for the invasion of Iraq to begin. They couldn’t stand the increasingly repetitive, circular political debate: had anyone said anything new in weeks? The nation’s military muscle tensed. After years of tantalizing America with the potential of war, Iraq had finally aroused the nation’s patriotism, its fighting spirit, and the pleasure it took in the exercise of new technology. Now the nation was ready and even those who opposed the war tasted that longing. To their television screens they whispered,
Let’s get it over with
. When the war finally did begin, with a surprise air strike at a bunker where Saddam was believed to be hiding and then the shocking, awesome air raid on Baghdad, broadcast
live, Marshall and Joyce were visited with relief, watching from separate TVs in the same apartment.

The divorce was imminent too. Marshall knew the judgment would go against him, but he was eager for it. By the time the decision was mailed to their lawyers he was no longer capable of being surprised and he wasn’t surprised when Thorpe announced merrily that he would have to give up all rights to the apartment whose mortgage he had paid for the past seven years. Marshall was given thirty days to Vacate the Marital Residence. Thirty days seemed unbearably long, an expanse of time on a cosmic scale: he was determined to get out in three.

The prospect of having the apartment to herself delighted Joyce, at least for a moment, until her lawyer fully explained the judge’s decision. Joyce made her go over it again, from top to bottom, all sixty pages. It was evident that Marshall’s stipulated support payments were more than he could afford, yet they would amount to nowhere as much as she would need. Flushed, her voice rising girlishly, the lawyer spoke as if she had won a big victory, a veritable
Brown v. Board of Ed
. When Joyce made a modest demurral, the lawyer said, tartly, that it could have gone much worse.

Marshall rented a studio apartment in Flatbush, on a street that was probably safe in strong, direct sunlight. Unable to pay movers, he rented a small van and took only what he could carry away in cartons. He told himself that he wanted to start over.

He made many trips up and down the elevator, wordlessly letting himself into what was now Joyce’s apartment. In the living room Joyce and the kids watched the news, which that day was very good. After racing ahead of their supply lines, coalition military forces had seized Baghdad with hardly a fight. American forces were now consolidating their hold on the capital, met by grateful, celebrating Iraqis inhaling their first breaths of freedom. Today a forty-foot statue of Saddam in the
center of the city had been pulled down. The networks repeated the film clip many times, each time in dramatic slow motion. Although the newscasters reported that U.S. marines had provided and operated the tank and cables that wrecked the monument, you couldn’t see their equipment in the clip: it appeared that the jubilant Iraqis were toppling the statue themselves. The image was indelible.

Marshall stood behind the couch and watched for a moment, a box of CDs in his arms. The statue wobbled on its multistory pedestal, Saddam’s stiff, outstretched arm trembling, while onlookers threw shoes at it, a gesture of disrespect. Suddenly the statue fell halfway off the pedestal, still attached by internal cording to the concrete. Now it looked like Saddam’s arm was trying to brace his fall. After dangling for a few moments, he broke at the knees and crashed in pieces into the street. The crowd roared and swept over the figure. Then the clip ran again.