Due Preparations for the Plague (19 page)

“I’m not,” Samantha says. “I’m afraid I’m not. They finally canceled our flight, and doubled us up on another one, but they didn’t have quite enough seats. They asked for volunteers, and, um, well, I thought it seemed a bit pointless this late in the day, so I volunteered. I figured you wouldn’t mind too much.” Sam laughs awkwardly. “I know I’ve wrecked a few Christmases. I can be a pain in the ass, I know that.”

Lou’s head is back against the wall, her eyes closed. She does not trust herself to speak.

“Lou? You don’t mind, do you? You said it takes weeks to recover when I visit.”

“Hey,” Lou says lightly. “That was then. You’re getting more bearable all the time. I hate to think of you all by yourself in D.C. D’you have any …?”

“Oh yeah, I’ve got Jacob. Since he doesn’t keep Christmas, it’s kind of a blue time for him. We’d lined up New Year’s, but I’m worried. I’ve called him from the airport five times today and he isn’t answering, so this gives me a chance. I get antsy about him and it’s pretty much a phoenix rule that we, you know … It’s a high priority. We check in on each other. What’ll you do?”

“Oh, you know me,” Lou says. “Six invitations on the fridge door. I’ll toss a coin.”

“The party animal of the family,” Sam says. “Have yourself a merry little disreputable.”

“You too. Merry Christmas, Sam.”

Lou replaces the receiver as though she were stacking eggs. She turns off the oven. She siphons off a mug of cold mulled wine and buzzes it in the microwave. She adds a large shot of rum. She goes to the window and watches the lights coming on, up and down Lexington Avenue. Then she checks her telephone directory and calls Social Services of the City of New York.

“I’ve got a roast turkey and all the trimmings,” she says. “And I’ve got presents. Is there a family somewhere …? Preferably a family with kids?”

She scribbles down details, packs a hamper, descends to the street, and hails a cab.

“You sure?” the driver says, when she gives the address.

“Sure, I’m sure. I’ve got a Christmas hamper to deliver.”

“You’re the one paying,” he says.

The farther they drive, the more frequently they pass vacant lots full of rubble and the remnants of walls that have been left by a wrecker’s ball. Shells of half-demolished brownstones gape at the sky. Windows are boarded up, and groups of young men stand on corners. The cabdriver, a middle-aged African-American man, is nervous. Virgil Jefferson, announces a license which is screwed to the Plexiglas divider.

“Mr. Jefferson,” Lou says, leaning forward, “maybe we should—”

Sounds that might be firecrackers, or might be gunfire, drown her words. Virgil Jefferson drives grimly and fast. When he stops and pulls hard against the curb, the crunch of broken glass can be
felt
. Virgil Jefferson swivels around and slides the partition open. “Okay, lady, this is the place, but I ain’t going to leave you here. No way.”

“I realize I was rather naive about the … but there’s a family in there,” Lou says. “With kids and no dinner.”

Virgil Jefferson takes a deep breath. “You want to go in?”

“Not exactly,” Lou says. “But I will, I think. Yes, I will. I’m glad you’ll wait. I appreciate that.”

“Look, lady,” he says, half angry. “Tell you what. I’ll deliver your basket, but I’m going to leave the engine running and the doors locked. You got that?”

“Thanks,” she says. “Oh, thank you.” She finds she is shaking. “Do you have children?” she asks him when he opens the back door.

“Three,” he says curtly. “We already had Christmas dinner, but they’re counting on me coming home tonight.”

“Here’s the hamper, and this is a gift.”

“Lock the doors,” he says. He leaves the hazard lights blinking. Once he climbs the low porch steps, the darkness gulps him down whole. Not a chink of light comes from the building, though Lou can see, by the dim glow of a lone street lamp, that each window is boarded with thick ply. She hears a rat-a-tat-tat and thinks he must be using a rock against the door.

A cluster of young men, maybe ten of them, is moving toward the car. Lou scrunches low, but keeps her eye on the porch where the cabdriver stands.
Bang, bang, bang
, she hears, knocker against wood, and the door opens three inches, the length of a chain. Someone shines a flashlight out and for a moment she sees the cabdriver’s face. Words are exchanged. The chain is unhooked, the door opens, an arm reaches out, grabs the basket, and slams the door shut. The driver takes the porch steps in two leaps, stumbles, and sprints to the curb. The young men swarm closer, a multicelled creature with one intent.

“Hey, man!” voices call to the driver. “What’s the rush?”

“What you got there, man?”

Virgil Jefferson hurls himself into his seat and locks the door. The engine roars. The car leaps forward, then seems to pause. A thunder of hands drum threat on the roof and fish-faces flatten themselves against the windshield and against the side windows. Bodies drape themselves over hood and trunk like encrustations. Eyes everywhere, staring at Virgil, staring at Lou. Lou presses the back of her hand against her mouth to stop a scream getting through. She can see Virgil’s eyes, huge, in the rearview mirror. She can see his hands shaking on the wheel.

The engine roars. The bodies and eyes fall away.

The back of Lou’s hand feels wet, and she sees that she has bitten through a vein. There is blood all over the cuff of her blouse and down her sleeve.

Back on Lexington, where the streetlights are as powerful as suns or the eyes of God, the cab stops in front of Lou’s building. They sit in the dark without moving.

“It was a kid, a boy,” Virgil Jefferson says, staring forward through his windshield. “That came to the door. ’Bout the age of my son.”

“Did you see inside?”

“Squatters,” he says. “No plumbing. No power. Couldn’t see a thing.”

“I don’t know,” Lou says, “how people keep going. I don’t know how they do it.”

“When you have to, you do what you have to,” Virgil says. He turns around then and slides the partition open. His hands are still trembling. “I’m going home to my wife and kids.”

“Yes,” she says. “Yes, you must.” She is pulling twenty-dollar bills, double the meter plus a lavish tip, from her purse, but Virgil Jefferson will not accept a fare.

“No way,” he says. “We both already got our Christmas present, ma’am. We got more than our share.”

“Yes,” she says. “You’re right. We’ve got nothing to complain about, have we?”

“Nothing,” he says. “We already blessed.”

“Just the same,” she says. “I’ll agree to pay no fare on one condition. You have to take these.” She passes the bag of five remaining presents, with their shimmering gold rosettes, through the window. “For your wife and children,” she says. “Merry Christmas, Mr. Jefferson.”

“Something good going to happen to you,” Virgil Jefferson promises. “This is your year. I got the gift of reading signs, and I know it.”

“Thank you,” she says. “I hope you’re right.”

She feels lighter, less desolate. It is only seven o’clock, but she is ravenous and it occurs to her that she has not really eaten all day. She opens a can of soup and heats another mug of mulled wine in the microwave. She listens to carols from the King’s College Choir. This is definitely better, after all, than Christmas ’86 on Avenue des Gobelins, she thinks. Paris. It’s after midnight there. She wonders how Françoise spent this Christmas. She wonders what happened to Françoise.

She goes to her computer and clicks her way into the chat room for obsessive survivors of the hijacked flight.

Lou in America
, she reads.
Oui, c’est moi. I am the one. Incroyable, n’est-ce pas? How it is strange to meet again like this. As you say in America: what goes around, comes around. We have passed Noël 86 in that apartment, toi et moi. Quel Noël affreux, but 87 was after all worse. I remember the secrets of the New Year’s Eve. Love sucks. Did you ever find your BB? Do you come ever to Paris? Françoise.

Lou holds her left thumb against the pulse in her other wrist. Her blood is bucking. She takes deep breaths. She makes the thump of her heartbeat slow down.

Françoise
, she types.
I may come to Paris. (I have not been back since then.)

Re: BB. Yes I did, but I have not told. (Too afraid.)

And you? Did T come back to you? Do you still mourn?

Did you escape from M? Did he stalk you?

You knew my sister was on AF 64, but you never said anything. You never told me you had a ticket too. Why didn’t you? Lou in America.

For several days there is no response from Françoise, but on New Year’s Eve a message comes:

Lou in America. It is again the night for confessions.

M bought my ticket for the black flight. He knew.

My father said: Do not fly. Your life is in danger. He knew.

My father knew M, M knew my father.

How could I tell you this?

Now you understand why I could not watch the terrible thing on television.

I could not speak to my father again. I could not speak. I hid from my father.

For many years, I had a sickness of the spirit and mind. I have been in a hospital many years. I have talked with therapists. I have talked with priests. Now I have things that must be told for absolution. When do you come to Paris? Françoise.

Sam tells the taxi not to wait. She buzzes Jacob’s apartment from the lobby and puts her ear to the intercom. She hears nothing. She buzzes again and a crackle of static comes from the panel in the wall. “Jacob?” she says, her lips close to the metal mesh. “It’s Samantha. My flight was canceled. Can I come up?”

Muddled sound comes from the wall.

“Jacob? I hope you can hear me, because I sure can’t hear you. It’s Sam.” A prolonged hum, both high-pitched and raspy, rises from the heavy inner door, and Sam says, “Okay. Thanks. I’m on my way up,” pushing at the door with the bottom of a tissue-swathed bottle of wine. In the hallway, she grimaces at the beige steel elevator panels, both closed. The building is old and the elevators excruciatingly slow. According to the lit monitor, one car is down in the basement garage at Level 2B and seems to be stuck there. The other is descending slowly through the tenth floor, ninth, eighth, seventh, and there it stops. Impatient, Sam opts for the stairs and takes them two at a time. On the third-floor landing, slightly breathless, she pushes
UP
. The elevator is still at the seventh floor. Sam runs up another flight of stairs. She pushes
UP
on the fourth-floor landing. The elevator is moving from sixth floor to fifth to fourth. The doors open and a man, coated and scarved, looks out at nothing. He is attached to a dog on a leash.

“Merry Christmas,” Sam says.

“On the contrary.” The man appears to be conversing with his dog. He stares straight ahead and Sam thinks he must be blind, though the dog is not a seeing-eye dog. “I would argue,” he says, picking up an ongoing thread, “that the need for solitude runs deeper. I would say it is the primary thing.” The dog—a small shaggy mutt—trembles and whimpers, barely able to contain a rebuttal.

Sam pushes button 8.

“We’re going down,” the man explains to the dog, but the elevator rises directly to the eighth without stopping.

“Sorry,” Sam says.

“We’re going down.”

“They’re unpredictable.”

“Things devolve,” the man insists. “All things devolve.”

As though the elevator mechanisms are deliberating, as though they are weighing competing rights and claims, the doors quiver for several seconds but fail to move. When they open, the dog bounds into the hallway and the man of necessity follows and looks blankly about. “We are not at street level,” he says reproachfully, his eyes sliding at Sam and away. He is not blind, then, she sees. “The problem,” he tells the dog, “is one of focus.”

Wild barking ensues and changes pitch in an intricate slide: glissando of joy notes; syncopated yaps of confusion; three sharp pips of outrage; then a dying fall through the lower registers of dismay, each full-throated note bouncing and ricocheting and multiplying itself against the walls.

“What the hell is going on?” a voice demands, and 807 opens to the length of a chain. Renaissance music billows out: lutes, viols, shawms, the soft thump of a drum.

“Someone got off at the wrong floor,” Sam says, as man and dog retreat behind the elevator doors and the hullabaloo dwindles away from them like a spent rocket. “Jacob, I’ve got wine and truffles. Let me in.”

“Sam?” One-eyed Jacob, peering through three inches of space, blinks slowly. “What are you doing here?” He unhooks the chain, pondering the dimensions of this riddle. “I thought you were going to New York.”

“You have a lousy intercom system in this building,” she says. “Even worse than your elevators. Who did you think you were letting in?”

“I wasn’t planning on letting anyone in.”

“Why’d you buzz me, then?”

“I didn’t buzz anyone. The call system’s been playing up for months. Someone else must have buzzed the door.”

“Well, here I am anyway. Happy holidays.” She hands him the wine and a gift bag frothing with tissue. “Lots of goodies under there,” she says. “Truffles, figs, sugared almonds, a surprise or two. To go with the music.” She tosses her snow-dusted coat and scarf across the back of a chair and stands in front of him, waiting, like a child expecting a star on her activities card. “My flight was canceled,” she says. “Anyway, I’d rather be with you.” She rests her cheek against his chest and locks her arms around him. It always seems to her that she sinks into him, that she has come home to their skin. “The music’s glorious,” she sighs.

Jacob, who still has the wine in one hand and the gift bag in the other, folds his arms, somewhat awkwardly, across her back. She feels the wine bottle bump against her thigh. She looks up at him and he makes her think suddenly of the man in the elevator. He is looking at the music, at something in the air.

“What’s wrong?” she asks quickly.

He looks at her then. “Nothing. Nothing’s wrong.”

“I
know
when something’s the matter,” she says. “You can’t hide anything from me, Jacob. There’s a telepathic connection, I always know. My anxiety level’s high as a kite—feel my heart.” She takes the wine bottle out of his hand and sets it down, pulls her sweater up, and places the palm of his hand just above her breast. “That’s you,” she says. “Making it jump and race like that. What’s wrong?”

“Nothing’s wrong,” he insists. “Quite the reverse. I’m very calm. I have finally come to a place of calm.” He picks up the bottle of wine and frowns slightly, as though trying to recall what comes next. He goes to the kitchen, Sam following.

“I called you from the airport five times. Where have you been all day?”

“Arlington Cemetery,” he says.

“What? Are you kidding me?”

“No. I took Cass.” He takes a corkscrew from his drawer and opens the wine.

“Why?”

“We like the company there. We know a lot of dead people. Cass finds it soothing.”

“That’s so morbid,” Sam says. “You were there all day?”

“Not all day. An hour or so.”

“Where were you the rest of the time?”

“I was here.”

“Why didn’t you answer the phone? You didn’t even have the answering machine on.”

“I’ve unplugged the phone. I keep it unplugged. I don’t need a phone anymore.”

The apartment is full of the lush soft sounds of Early Music. The glorious voice of Cass’s mother envelops them, accompanied by the Levinstein String Quartet. Jacob extracts the cork from the corkscrew, but seems uncertain about what to do next. He opens a drawer and closes it again.

“You want me to pour the wine?” Sam prompts.

“Yes,” he says relieved. “Good idea.”

He returns to his living room and sits cross-legged on a cushion on the floor. He lifts one of his feet and tucks it under the crease of the other knee.

“You look like the Buddha,” Sam says.

“Ssh. Listen to what she does with this phrase. It’s remarkable. It’s quite remarkable. It’s musically and mathematically perfect.”

Sam waits for the voice of Cass’s mother to fade away from its mellow final chord. “Jacob,” she says. “Tell me what’s wrong.”

“Ssh.” He changes the disk in the player. “Schubert’s String Quintet in C. My father’s playing first violin.” He closes his eyes and listens raptly.

Very quietly, Sam returns to the kitchen for the glasses of wine. She takes them back to the living room. She sets one down on the coffee table in front of Jacob. She sits opposite, on the sofa, and studies him. In the second movement, the adagio, when the voice of the violin breaks, when the violin weeps, Jacob rises like a sleepwalker and leaves the room. Sam follows. In his bedroom, he opens a closet and takes his father’s violin from a shelf. He lays the case on the bed. He takes out the violin.

“Jacob?” Sam murmurs.

He turns to look at her. “What are you doing here?” he says. He could be looking at a total stranger. He cradles the violin in his arms and returns to his cushion on the floor. He holds the violin as though it were an infant in his arms.

The second movement ends. The quiet sob of the violin falls into silence.

Jacob touches a button on his remote and repeats the track.

When the adagio ends for the second time, he presses
STOP
.

“I’ve looked after it for him,” he says. “I saved it. It wasn’t easy. Especially not on the chute. Remember the way they pushed us down? They weren’t gentle.”

“Jacob,” Sam murmurs, stricken. “Where are you going? Where have you gone?”

“I’m safe, Sam. I’m in a safe place. After Agit’s death, I knew it was crucial to find one.”

“Agit’s death,” Sam says. “So that’s what this is about.”

“That was the writing on the wall.”

“That was depression and anniversary time coming up. It’s the mission of the Phoenix Club to stop any more of those from happening.”

“If they could get to Agit because he published a book, if they can reach out and pull strings in Bombay, it’s just a matter of time. One by one, they’ll get us all.”

“Unless we get to them first,” Sam says angrily. “What am I saying? What’s
them
? Who’s
they
? You’re fucking with your own mind, Jacob. Like Agit did. You’re making up your own mindgame and losing.”

“There’s been a game master right from the start. We’re pawns on his board.”

“Bullshit! You’re not the only one who lost Agit. We both lost him, the Phoenix Club lost him, we all lost him. And now you’re going off with the fairies too. How’s that going to help us? How’s that going to keep the rest of us alive and sane?”

“I had to find a safe place,” Jacob says.

Sam is furious. She grabs Jacob’s hand and pushes up the sleeve of his shirt. “Fuck!” she says. “
Fuck
you!” A road map of needle tracks graphs his forearm. All the tracks lead to the same dead end. “Why don’t you just jump under a train like Agit did?”

“You think he jumped?”

“If he was pushed, he should have fought back. We have to fight. Don’t you dare quit on me, don’t you dare.”

Jacob returns to his bedroom and takes the bow from the violin case. “Listen,” he says. He tucks the violin under his chin and plays. “I couldn’t do it for a long time,” he says. “I couldn’t play it. But it’s where I belong.”

He plays Schubert, the String Quintet, the second movement. He is not a maestro like his father, but he does play well.

“You have to find a safe place too, Sam. The key is being invisible, you understand?”

“Never,” Sam says.

Jacob puts down his father’s violin. He takes Sam’s face between his hands. “We need each other,” he says.

“Exactly,” Sam says. “Exactly. Don’t do this to me.”

“You’re dangerously naive,” Jacob says. “You think you lead a charmed life.”

“I don’t,” Sam says. “I don’t think that for a minute. That’s why I fight. If I stopped fighting for a minute, I’d go under.”

“It’s the people who struggle that drown,” Jacob says. “They’re the ones who go under. You have to stop fighting the current. You have to give yourself to it, go with it. I want you to promise me.”

“Okay,” Sam says, humoring him. “I promise.”

“Listen,” he says. “I’ll take you somewhere safe.”

He tucks the violin under his chin and she sits beside him and strokes his hair as he plays. On Christmas night, they sleep in each other’s arms.