Due Preparations for the Plague (30 page)

Four bodies lie beneath the red eye, laid neatly, their shoulders touching. Six shadow-beings kneel and touch the bodies with the foreheads of their masks.

One stands. He removes his headpiece as though he were a priest removing vestments. His motions are full of dignity and grace.

The hair of Avi Levinstein, violinist, is sodden with sweat. It drips rain on his face.

“I am a secular Jew,” he says to the red eye. He explains this earnestly. He speaks as though taking thoughtful part in a discussion, after dinner, say, or over sherry. “I don’t have a religious bone in my body—at least, that is what I have always believed. I have always said that my only religions are music and love.”

“Avi, wait!”

The embrace of Avi Levinstein and Isabella Hawthorne is long and passionate, or seems long, though in fact it lasts for less than half a minute. Avi presses Isabella to himself, his hand on the back of her head, her cheek on his shoulder.

“I discover, after all,” Avi Levinstein says, “and very much to my own surprise, that I am a religious Jew. I see now, I understand, that the religious impulse begins in awe, and awe begins at death.

“It’s very strange. My father was a devout man and he often exasperated me and I argued with him and rejected everything he stood for, but I see I was wrong. I feel the need, the compulsion, for
ceremony
. I want to say something for these four—for us ten. I want to say something formal. I need to. We are joined in such an extraordinary bond …”

He steps closer to the red eye. “You think you have forged this bond, Sirocco, but it no longer has anything to do with you. You are nothing. Do you understand?

“Something is happening here and I need ritual to contain the feeling.

“Words of my father are welling up in me, words I had no idea that I remembered.” He lifts his arms to the invisible opening above him and sings in Hebrew, then in English:

“All flesh is grass …

surely the people is grass.

The grass withereth, the flower fadeth:

but the word of our God shall stand …”

“Avi, Avi.” Isabella is pressing her fingers around the sockets of her eyes. Her breathing is labored. “There are things I have to say. Be quick, Avi—”

“
The word shall stand
,” Avi sings. “
For ever, amen
.”

“My eyes!” Isabella says. “You must speak to Jacob, Avi. Be quick.”

“My message to Jacob is music. You speak.”

“Lowell,” Isabella says, but she cannot get her breath. She presses her right hand against her breastbone as though trying to dislodge something—mucus, a blood clot—and Avi Levinstein begins to play his violin. He moves his imaginary bow across the strings, his fingering is intricate, he sings the melody with his body and with his lungs.

“Lowell,” Isabella says again, offering her cupped hands to the camera and the red eye. “Here are white doves. Do you remember that bedtime story? When you were little, you used to ask me to tell it over and over again. Here are white doves, Lowell.”

Avi Levinstein hums, and the slow movement of the Bach Violin Concerto in A Minor rises lushly around Isabella.

“There was a dove …” she says, and her voice rattles unevenly, “there was a dove who was kept in a cage with a black cloth over it. In the house where the cage was kept lived the father and the mother and little Boy Blue.

“Boy Blue watched doves from his window and he heard their soft calling. ‘Why doesn’t our dove sing?’ he asked his mother.

“‘Our dove is sad,’ his mother said. ‘Because of the cage and the black cloth.’

“‘Why do we keep our dove in a cage? And why do we cover her?’

“‘The cage is to keep her safe,’ his father said. ‘And the black cloth is so no one will see her and wish to steal.’

“But the cage and the black cloth saddened Boy Blue. Secretly, when his father was at work, he removed the cloth and opened the door of the cage. ‘Fly away,’ he whispered. ‘You are free.’

“But his dove cooed sadly from her perch. ‘It has been too long. My wings have grown weak. I can’t fly.’

“Day after day, Boy Blue removed the cloth and opened the door of the cage, and his dove’s silence and stillness broke his heart. He grieved for her. He grew thin and sad and his Boy Blue wing feathers drooped. The child and his dove both languished and grew ill.

“And then, out of the blue, one unnoticed day, another dove settled on the windowsill and called. Boy Blue’s dove fluttered and fell from her perch.

“She picked herself up and flew clumsily to the sill.

“She steadied herself …

“… and the two doves flew off into the sky.”

Avi Levinstein has laid down his imaginary bow to hold his hands over his eyes, but the strains of the slow movement continue. The music has a life of its own. Sometimes there is a break in a phrase. Sometimes there is coughing.

“Jacob,” Avi Levinstein says. He is gasping now. “Here is something your grandfather told me. This is the way to say Torah.
You must be nothing but an ear which hears what the universe says.
Hold on to my violin, Jacob, because my violin is my way of saying Torah.”

“Lowell,” Isabella says, “here are doves,” and she lofts them into the air. “Mather, forgive me. I send my blessings to you both.”

Even when the convulsions start, Avi and Isabella hold each other, and fragments of the A Minor seem to drift through the room.

CUT

Victoria Goldberg inverts her gas mask and offers it like a chalice to the dead.

“I too will speak in music,” she says. “In memory of my beloved Izak, who died on the plane, and to my darling child Cass, who was saved, and to my parents, and to the memory of Avi Levinstein, with whom I have so often made music, and to Isabella, who brought him such great happiness in these last few months, I offer a song which Izak and Avi and I have often performed together.

“In fact, just last week, we performed this trio in Paris in a concert in La Sainte Chapelle.

“The music is by Orlando Gibbons, court composer to Elizabeth I.”

Victoria Goldberg begins to sing and brightness falls from the air. You listen. You are transformed. The air in the bunker turns green and gold. You step into the cramped space of the dream and you offer Victoria Goldberg your hand and the wall opens and she takes you away.

She begins to sing the short ballad a second time, and then a third, folding her wings over her streaming eyes until her voice falters and chokes—

CUT

“The seventh one sang herself to death and then there were three,” Homer Longchamp says. He busies himself with making a small cairn of the seven discarded gas masks and adding his own to the top. “The mind astonishes me,” he says. “What a search engine. Two completely disparate associations come fizzing along the synapses, the way they only do in dreams or during the flow of the creative act—or facing death, I suppose—and you realize, yes, there’s a meaningful link between the two: between a Mother Goose jingle about Ten Little Niggers and Pol Pot’s small mountains of skulls in Cambodia.

“Of course, it’s easy to trace the lines of association in this instance. If anyone is going to get mass deaths and nursery rhymes tangled up, it’s going to be the only nigger in the room. But how did one dazed nigger from New Orleans get himself into the middle of this?”

He shakes his head at the red eye and at his two companions in genuine bafflement, as though they are sitting in a seminar room, as though not one of them has noticed that the class has gone an hour overtime because they are held spellbound by the intellectual conundrum pulled like a rabbit from a gas mask.

“To whom are we speaking?” he asks his two companions. (They have moved together and stand holding each other. They hold each other, but their bug-eyed heads are turned to the speaker.) “To whom are we speaking?” He raises his outstretched arms, palms up, in a gesture that implies an unanswerable question. “Who is watching? Who is listening? Are we speaking to the world on television? Are we speaking to Intelligence agencies?” He gestures at the red eye. “We know that God, if He’s there, and if He watches and listens, never answers. He’s turned a deaf ear and a blind eye to suffering for millennia. But at least we’ve always had the devil to talk to, to rail against or cozen up with. And now nothing. Why has the devil fallen silent? We’ve learned to manage without God, but how can we deal with the death of Satan?

“To whom are we speaking?

“Sirocco? Are you there? No. If you were, you wouldn’t be able to resist cutting in. Nobody’s there.

“The plain truth is: we are talking to ourselves, which is where all arguments begin and end. Life is a monologue that we tweak and edit every day. We take in the big questions”—he feeds a question from his cupped hand into his mouth—“and we chew them like cud. And here’s one worth chewing: how can we account for this spontaneous outbreak of ritual,
religious
ritual—this reverence for death itself, and for life itself, and this grief for the death of strangers—how can we account for this arising from the death of Satan and the silence of God?

“I don’t know,” he says, puzzling at it, absorbed, “which of the three great mysteries can be considered the most impenetrable. Life. Or death. Or randomness. But I think randomness, the maddening neatness of randomness. Yes, I think the geography of chance is the ultimate teaser, intellectually and morally, because of the sheer enormity of divergence that results from a micro-change here and a micro-change there. It’s almost a commonplace now, with mathematicians: the Lorenz discovery—an accidental finding in itself—that minute changes in weather systems can have catastrophic results.

“So the precise geometry of chance gets my vote, because here’s the thing: if the fluke event which led to my being on Air France 64 had not happened, and instead I had ten more years to live out, say, or twenty, teaching in this university or that, arguing with colleagues and graduate students, would I have gotten any closer to a solution of the patterning of thought processes in creativity? Could I ever have set up a thought experiment that would concentrate the mind as intensely as this one does?

“Consider the puzzle of my own existence: Homer Longchamp, born in New Orleans, descendant of slaves on one side, and of a seventeenth century French plantation family of stupendous wealth and great classical scholarship on the other; heir, therefore, of ancient Greece, Europe, Africa and the New World. I grew up in New Orleans, I consider jazz a religion and a passion, I spent two years in jail in Mississippi in the turbulent years, and now I live in New York. I teach philosophy at Columbia, though my research and my doctorate are in psychology. I sometimes think of myself as a philosopher of psychology and sometimes as a psychologist of comparative philosophies or of comparative systems of cohesion. I play jazz saxophone. This year, I’m a visiting professor at the Sorbonne, but I really come to Paris for the jazz.

“The randomness of my life and the tangential changes in direction never cease to astound me. They’re my primary research field, although of course I have been taking into account the information that Billy Jenkins gave us: the volatility of the gases, their settling low …

“I noted less eye inflammation, less skin corrosion in the last two deaths. The secret may lie in breathing only the upper levels of air—good to be tall—but the risk will shift to oxygen deprivation.” He licks his index finger and holds it up. “Faint current of air from somewhere …”

He is pacing the room. He has forgotten the red eye, his two companions, the dead hostages.

“I have a confession to make to myself: my dominant emotion at this moment is intense curiosity; my secondary emotion, very close in intensity to the first, is an oceanic sense of love and connectedness to the nine people with me in this room. This second feeling is so intense that it is intellectually suspect; it seems hysterical, pathological, related to the shortage of air, the shortage of time, and the murk in which I can now distinguish at least twenty shades of brown. If I have another lifetime—and perhaps I will; I have come to take the unexpected turn of events for granted—I will devote it to understanding the psychology of fusion and its biological links to swarm and herd behavior: the sort of thing that happens in football stadiums, or that happened at Hitler rallies, and that happens in black gospel revival meetings, and that has been happening here. There can be good fusion and bad fusion; revival fervor, Hitler fervor.

“What sets it off?

“What set of chances drew the ten of us together?

“Have we bonded
because
we don’t know each other? Because we won’t ever meet again?

“The mathematical philosophers have decoded chance for us: a series of seemingly nonsequential events within a deterministic universe.

“A butterfly fluttering its wings in the Amazon rain forest can cause a tornado in Texas.
And may not imagination trace the noble dust of Alexander till he find it stopping a bunghole?
And might not a boy whose father hauls garbage in New Orleans turn into a thinker? This is how it happens: the garbage man takes his son with him on a certain day when the father’s route includes the federal courthouse. The boy climbs on a ledge and looks through a window. He doesn’t know he’s looking into the judge’s chambers, but he sees a room that fills him with awe: oriental carpet, mahogany desk, books stacked to the ceiling. The man at the desk has a book in his hands, but he is not reading. He stares into the middle distance and thinks.

“‘I want a room like that,’ the boy decides. ‘I want books. I want to sit at a desk and
think
.’ The wish has the force of a vow.

“Pure chance, and it brings me here instead of driving trucks in the Big Easy and hauling garbage.

“And here’s another puzzle.

“Yesterday in Paris—yesterday? four days ago? five?—in a restaurant in Paris, I’m watching two men at a nearby table. They’re not close enough for me to overhear, but body language fascinates me. Analyzing it is one of the games with which I amuse myself: I note how revealing it is, but also how subject to misinterpretation. If we get the translation wrong, the Lorenz effect kicks in: small errors, big consequences.

“One of the men is stocky and Egyptian-looking, but I can tell they are both speaking English. An acute observer can deduce any language from the movement of lips and cheeks. The other man is American. (No prizes for that guess. In Europe, Americans stick out like sore thumbs. You spot them by clothing, by the way they walk, the way they sit, what they order for a drink, and the way they drink it.)

“The American is fifty or so, the Egyptian man younger, forty perhaps. I’ll call them Mr. A and Mr. B. Mr. A is fiercely angry, but his anger is kept tightly under control. His wineglass and his silverware obey strict geometrical rules. Mr. B is also a control freak, but he is enjoying himself. He is greatly amused. It is clear to me that whatever their quiet but intense argument is about, Mr. B is holding an ace up his sleeve and is savoring the moment when he will play it.

“What holds my attention in particular is this: Mr. A, though intensely involved in discussion, is keeping the room under surveillance. His glance is covert and quick, but he takes note of each entry and exit, each movement. Mr. B, on the other, seems oblivious to the room. His laser focus on Mr. A is intense. When a sommelier passing close to their table stumbles a little, causing a wineglass to teeter dangerously on his tray, Mr. A starts and leaps to his feet and saves the glass. Mr. B, around whose lips a slight smirk plays continually, seems unaware of the passing waiter, though his eyes follow Mr. A’s reach for the tray. He watches Mr. A with the concentration of a cat observing a bird.

“And then, suddenly, Mr. A becomes noticeably agitated, so agitated that the stem of his wineglass snaps and there is red wine all over the linen cloth and blood on Mr. A’s hand. Mr. B smiles serenely and signals the sommelier, though his focus never wavers from Mr. A. Their intense discussion is resumed for a few minutes and then Mr. B leaves the table nonchalantly, pauses at the door, returns to the table, and this time I hear what he says: ‘Oh, I forgot to tell you. I collect on forfeits. Always. Every time.’

“It is Mr. B’s obliviousness to everything except Mr. A that engrosses me, because in his concentrated predatory gaze I recognize one of the telltale signs of the psychopath.

“How could I not yield to a research temptation like that?

“I followed him.

“I followed him, eventually (it took several hours) into a Moroccan coffeehouse in the eighteenth arrondissement, the Arab quarter of Paris. It was the kind of crowded smoky place where a non-Arab is instantly conspicuous and is instantly aware of a cloud of suspicion and hostility, hardly an unfamiliar experience for an African-American.

“I have a little Arabic, not much, but enough to order my coffee. A murmur spread like a breeze through the room. I ignored it. I did not look at Mr. B. I took
Le Monde
from my jacket pocket, unfolded it, and began to read.

“Mr. B came to my table and sat down.

“I ignored him. I did not look up. It was discount psychology. It was like taking candy from a baby, because people like Mr. B cannot tolerate being ignored. They are magnets and they take this for granted. They are white-hot bulbs who make sport of collecting moths. They are irresistibly aroused by those who fail to respond to their charm.

“‘Where are you from?’ he asked me in excellent French.

“I replied in French, without looking up, ‘Is that any of your business, monsieur?’

“He waited. I went on reading
Le Monde
. It was a contest of wills.

“I finished my coffee—it was an espresso, Moroccan-style, a thimbleful blacker than tar—and folded my newspaper, tucked it under my arm, and left. I knew he would follow me. In fact, I did not get as far as the door.

“‘I have a proposition for you,’ he said. ‘Are you looking for a woman or drugs?’

“I did not answer.

“‘Perhaps you would like something a little stronger than coffee?’ he suggested. ‘I have an office behind the shop and some very good scotch.’

“I said, ‘I thought the Prophet forbade alcohol.’

“‘I am not a good Muslim,’ he said. ‘Can we talk business?’

“‘Okay,’ I said.

“And in the small room at the back, he asked me, ‘You are Haitian? Or from Guadeloupe?’

“‘I’m American,’ I said in English.

“He raised his eyebrows, then switched to an English joke: ‘Ahh. So, you are CIA.’

“I laughed. ‘Close,’ I said. ‘I’m on their blacklist. Spent two years in jail in Mississippi.’ I could see the electrical zap of interest on his part. ‘I’m a jazz musician,’ I said, ‘trying to make ends meet. Funny how I can’t get gigs in New York or New Orleans, but I can play in any club on the Left Bank.’

“He leaned forward. ‘Do you have a
carte de séjour
?’

“‘Good grief, no,’ I said. ‘Strictly illegal moonlighting. I play for cash.’

“‘I could get you a
carte de séjour
,’ he said.

“‘Really? And how much would that cost?’

“‘We could make an arrangement,’ he said. ‘You could do something for me.’

“‘And what would that be?’

“‘I need someone to take a package to New York,’ he said. ‘A friend was going to take it tomorrow, but at the last minute, he finds he is unable to go.’ He reached into an inner pocket of his jacket and pulled out a travel folder. ‘I have a round-trip ticket. If you take the package for me, when you come back, I will have a
carte de séjour
waiting for you. Are you interested, monsieur?’

“The ticket was for an Air France flight, Paris–New York, Flight Number 64, leaving the next day, September eighth. The name on the airline ticket was Khalid Waburi. ‘I’m not going to be permitted on the plane with a ticket that doesn’t match my ID,’ I pointed out.

“‘I have a passport that matches the ticket,’ he said. ‘Of course, we’ll need to insert your photograph, but that’s easily done.’

“He lifted his arm and signaled to someone unseen and then there was a flash and my picture was taken.

“‘I don’t think I look like a Khalid Waburi,’ I said.

“‘If there’s any questions, you can say you are a Black Muslim.’

“I laughed. ‘You think that would get me smooth passage?’

“‘You will say your father was a refugee from Idi Amin, and you were born in the USA.’

“‘I see. Then I am assuming that the package you wish me to deliver is something I may have trouble getting through customs?’