A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (5 page)

Nothing was heard from behind the door. How did he spend his hours in his shadowed bedroom? Was he putting more baby powder in envelopes or doing something worse? She had to take the children away, right now, tonight. She couldn’t risk keeping them in this apartment—but
could
she take them, without court permission? The lawyers were still arguing over custody terms. Any precipitous action could be used against her. She was sharply wounded by this gross unfairness—she just wanted to protect her babies! Again, for the second time that day, she had been put in an impossible position. What could she do?

Joyce lay on her couch that night anxious and frustrated. In the morning she would be going to the FBI. She wondered if she should tell them about the envelope. It was crazy to think that you could identify someone’s handwriting from a brief glimpse of it on television. Perhaps she had been the one who had lost reason and perspective after September 11. Or perhaps not. She listened for stirrings in the bedroom, or for footsteps, or for the hissing release of poisonous gas. She pondered the ways in which Marshall’s mind might have become deranged.

YES, MARSHALL
was
disturbed; even, he would admit, a bit deranged that autumn. Thousands of photographs had been
taken near Ground Zero on the eleventh of September and he had not appeared in a single one. In his bedroom’s perfect solitude he had studied the papers, the magazines, and the special commemorative issues that had been published in the past month. He looked for himself and for people he might have encountered during the evacuation. He carefully passed a magnifying glass over the pictures, especially those taken of the office workers fleeing the site after the south tower collapsed. He found no documentary evidence that he had been at the World Trade Center that morning, nor evidence that he had survived.

He looked too for photos of Lloyd among the few that had been taken in the plaza before the buildings fell, but they were from another part of the plaza or he was simply unable to recognize the body. He could barely remember the man’s face, which had in any case been obscured by dust, grime, and shock. In the published lists of the dead appeared several men whose first names were Lloyd. Every morning Marshall checked the “Portraits of Grief” in the
Times
. Some of the entries included head shots. So far he hadn’t recognized Lloyd among them, and none of those Lloyds whose obituaries had appeared had fathered a daughter named Sarah or Sofia or anything like that.

Marshall had searched for Lloyd’s face on the “Person Missing” posters that had been attached to lampposts and advertising hoardings throughout the city in the days after the attack. He had hoped to contact his widow and daughter, to offer them some words of comfort, though what these words would have been he didn’t know. He wouldn’t even have been able to explain his strong attachment to Lloyd. All he had was that odd, ambiguous moment in the plaza. How would he have explained what happened? It could be argued—by Joyce, for example—that Marshall was indirectly responsible for Lloyd’s death: if he had pulled him from the building at another moment, or perhaps had let him come out on his own, Lloyd wouldn’t have
been killed. Marshall imagined himself arguing back: no, regardless of what happened two minutes later, through no fault of his own, at the moment he reached Lloyd inside the building, he had been performing heroically.
Can’t you see that! Damn you, can’t you see that!

He stared at the bedroom ceiling in the dim evening light, looking to read something in the faint patterns that had been left by the paint rollers years ago: elegant spirals and coils, labyrinths of kinks and vortices, the entire ceiling in a heavenly gyre. He thought he might read something within these convolutions. He thought he might learn from them, as he had nearly learned when the buildings fell, the exact lines and patterns that connected him occultly to every stranger in the world.

JOYCE DOZED
for a few hours before daybreak, but rose early to get the children ready for preschool and to dress herself for the FBI. Pulling clothes from the hall closet, she moved with an alert, muscular determination, as if she had already consumed several cups of coffee. The third outfit she tried on was a gray-black suit she often wore to the office. It was a bit severe, but these were severe times she lived in: post-9/11, the papers said, fashion would be held in abeyance. No spectacle, nothing ironic. Marshall remained in his bedroom, or had already left the apartment or even fled the country. She brought the kids to school and continued on to the City Hall subway stop in Manhattan.

Emerging from the station, Joyce followed the signs to the federal buildings at Foley Square. Although it was morning rush hour, the neighborhood seemed oddly hushed. She was only a few blocks from Ground Zero. There was hardly any traffic except for emergency vehicles. A police car was parked at an intersection, its roof lights flashing. The way ahead was defended by a formation of black Humvees and a gray army
tank. Concrete barriers lined the sidewalks, and sandbags were piled high at certain mysteriously strategic positions. Policemen crisply ordered civilians onto the sidewalks or off them according to unknown distinctions, while soldiers stood by with their rifles raised. It was all very thrilling. At the checkpoints pedestrians displayed their driver’s licenses for identification and passed through metal detectors. A soldier ordered Joyce to stand in a line that stretched halfway down the block. She was about to explain that she had important information about the anthrax attacks, but another soldier, swarthy and intense, came up and stared into her face as if to remember it and she remained silent. She wondered where Marshall was now and what he would do next.

“Mrs. Harriman?”

She turned, surprised and eager: her name had been spoken by the agent who had rescued her pocketbook the day before, and she realized that since then, whenever she had contemplated the FBI, she had been thinking of him. He had just come from around the corner with a cup of coffee in a paper bag. Evidently his night hadn’t been any more restful than hers. Perhaps he had never gone home. His skin hung loosely from his face; the haircut seemed a single day less stylish. He hadn’t smiled yesterday when he brought out her handbag. After waiting for her sobs to subside, he had asked again for a photo ID.

Now Joyce explained, “They said we should come in for interviews.”

The agent frowned. “Yeah, yeah. Don’t just stand there, look busy.”

“It won’t be useful?”

“Come with me,” he said, pulling her from the line. Several people had already joined it behind her. They watched her go with fierce interest. The agent’s light tap on her shoulder echoed up and down her arm. “We have a bioterrorist out
there and no leads at all,” he said. “So we’re checking everything, including pranks. They do enough damage anyway and we’ll press felony charges. But you’re absolutely right, this is a total waste of time.”

They walked along the curb on the other side of the barriers. The queuing office workers gave Joyce dirty looks, but she stared ahead. At the first checkpoint the police waved them through. It was like being taken past the velvet ropes at a nightclub.

She felt emboldened. “I don’t even know your name.”

He didn’t respond at first, as if considering this declaration a piece of evidence. He replied reluctantly, “Special Agent Nathaniel Robbins. I’ll give you my card when we get inside. Now, please, Mrs. Harriman, can you tell me what’s your position in the company?”

“Please call me Joyce,” she said.

“Right,” he said. He asked the question again, and also for the name of her immediate supervisor and who she in turn supervised. She was definitely being interrogated, but he was distracted. The cover to his coffee cup had come loose and the bottom of the bag was wet. He kept it away from his body like a ticking bomb. He asked her who their main competitors were, who might benefit from the company’s temporary shut-down, and if she knew of any individual who might bear a grudge against the firm. She paused significantly before she answered the last question, inviting further interrogation, even though she feared it. He didn’t follow up. As they approached the last checkpoint, Joyce saw Alicia waiting to be wanded. Her bare, lathe-turned arms were up. She too was wearing black, an above-the-knees crepe sheath. She looked impatient. She turned at just the right moment to view Joyce glide past. Joyce had assumed a very serious, collegial expression. When they entered the building, Agent Robbins gently took her elbow, guiding her through the door.

“Am I under arrest?”

He laughed, briefly but easily, and his face shed years. A toothy, crooked smile remained there. At the elevator lobby he disposed of the paper bag, letting it drop from the cup into the trash. He refastened the cover, still chuckling. The success of her remark gave Joyce a surge of warmth. And then Agent Robbins said, “Not yet.” That was thrilling too.

His office was a medium-sized cubicle with very few personal items: no pictures of children. Joyce had noticed that he didn’t wear a wedding band—she had noticed it
yesterday,
in fact; observing it was a kind of reflex. The observation didn’t necessarily encourage her: she had yet to formulate, at this fairly hopeless point in her life, what it meant for her to be interested in a man. But she wondered if there was something wrong with him if he’d never had children or didn’t keep their relics. She knew Marshall had at least displayed pictures of Victor and Viola on his desk. The desk assigned to Agent Robbins was mostly occupied by piles of green-and-white computer printouts that sloshed over the keyboard of a new-looking PC. The only object hanging on the movable orange-fabric wall was a map of the New York metropolitan area. Circles radiated from the still-locatable World Trade Center at progressive intervals, starting at a tenth of a mile.

He pointed to a black vinyl-covered chair and said, “Please. This will take a minute.”

“Do you want me to repeat what I said? You didn’t take notes.”

“I don’t believe in taking notes,” he murmured, half to himself. He put down the cup. “Too much information jams the system.”

He opened his desk and removed a ziplock bag that contained an empty glass bottle and several long Q-tips. On a filing cabinet beneath the map rested a large jar with a clear liquid inside it. He unscrewed the cover and dipped two of the swab
sticks. He held them in front of his body as he came around to the front of his desk.

“This is all I have to do,” he said, abruptly dropping to his knees by Joyce’s chair, so that their heads were level and very close. “We’re collecting as many samples as possible.”

“You’re taking samples?” she asked anxiously. He was wielding one of the swabs between them.

“Inhaled anthrax spores. In case the hoaxer has a link with the bad guys. Who knows.”

He reached out and gently cupped his hand around the side of her face.
Oh!
He brought her to him. His fingertips carried the aroma of coffee. In a single fluid movement he raised one of the swabs to her nose and pressed it against the inside of her lower right nostril. She had nowhere to look but into his eyes, which were focused on her nose. The swab was wet and oddly warm, and his touch was sure. The swab did a half turn inside her nostril, pulling at the short hairs before he removed it. He dropped the stick into the empty bottle and applied the second swab to her left nostril. He seemed to hold this one a moment longer and in that moment he looked up and caught her gaze. There was nothing wrong with him, Joyce saw, nothing at all. She could feel his pulse transmitted through the swab stick. The swab was withdrawn, again with a lingering half rotation.

“Don’t worry about this,” he said, handing her a tissue as he got up from his knees. “We won’t find anything. But thanks for coming in.”

She was rooted to the chair. “Thank
you,
” she said, idiotically.

He nodded. Getting to his feet had brought a soft blush to his face.

“I can go?”

Agent Robbins himself seemed disappointed. Then he smiled. “That’s it. No rubber hoses. If we suspend habeas corpus, you’ll be notified.”

“I hope you find the guy.”

Using a thick felt-tip pen and big block letters, he was printing her name on a sticker attached to the ziplock bag. “Yeah, me too. Let me have your number.”

“By all means,” she said, but he wrote the digits on the sticker and disposed of the bag in an open canvas satchel next to his desk. The satchel was stitched with the letters
FBI
.

Joyce contemplated her next move as she collected her pocketbook. This was her last chance. She looked as if she were strategizing how to get out of the chair. Halfway up, she reversed her ascent and dropped back.

“Are you sure it wasn’t anthrax?”

“What wasn’t?”

“The powder sent to our office.”

“It’s been ionized, fluoroscoped, and put under an electron microscope. It’s talc, Johnson and Johnson’s. We know the lot number, we know where and when it was manufactured. But it doesn’t get us any closer to the killer.”

She wondered if she should leave now and forget the whole thing. Once she spoke events would spin beyond her control. The Q-tips had left her unsettled. She wanted to go to a bathroom and vigorously blow her nose.

“Agent Robbins,” she began, and wondered if she could go on. She thought for a moment and decided she could. “You asked if there was anyone who might have a grudge against our company. And I can’t think of anyone who does. But I know who has a grudge against
me:
my husband. I told you yesterday, we’re getting divorced, it’s an ugly situation. He was in the World Trade Center September 11 and survived, but, I don’t know, he’s seemed a bit disturbed since then. I thought he was disturbed before September 11—what he’s put me through—but now…September 11 may have sent him over the edge. He may have done this to get back at me somehow.”

The FBI man looked away, as if eager to move on to the
next interview. She regretted the phrase
what he’s put me through
. It made her sound like a whiner. “Yeah,” he said.