Streams of Babel (39 page)

"Where is it?"

"Where is what?" Catalyst asks.

"This house is dirty," Hodji says. The word "dirty" in this case means that USIC believes something dangerous is hidden here. "We can look at every inch of every item in here under a microscope, and you can rot in jail while we go through all that. But I know this house is dirty."

As the other two agents point guns at Catalyst, Hodji turns and looks into the cabinet right behind where Catalyst is seated. It appears to be empty now. Above it on the counter sits a bottle of blue glass cleaner. Hodji takes it carefully in his gloved hand and smells it. The cap has been removed and it has already been smelled by the agent who was sniffing everything in here.

"You were reaching for this when I came in," Hodji says, eyeing him.

"Yes," Catalyst agrees with ease.

"You were going to clean the window, I suppose?" Hodji asks, kicking at a sponge that had fallen out of the cabinet and lay by the stove.

Despite the invitation, I am very amazed when Catalyst says, "I get the impression you find glass cleaner dangerous"

Somehow, Hodji returns his smugness equally. "I'll tell ya what. I don't believe it's glass cleaner."

I stare at the blue liquid. It looks like glass cleaner to me, but I am used to reading atrocious things about terrorist germs in liquids, and I don't have the nerves of steel that Hodji has. The thing swiftly becomes to me as threatening as a bomb, and I cannot peel my eyes from it, despite that Catalyst laughs in that good-natured way I am utterly sick of.

"Mr. USIC agent," he says. "Your little monkeys asking me to drink this and inhale that, they underestimate my commitment to our goals. I am a willing sacrifice. You cannot believe that those items are not tainted, simply because I took them."

I tear my eyes from the blue liquid to find them gazing at each other, trying to seek something from the other as instinctively as jaguar cats. Catalyst is looking to see if he can dismay Hodji, I gather. Hodji is trying to read his mind, as to what in this house of millions of molecules is dangerous, and what is not.

He finally replies, "I don't believe there was poison in the canister or in the soda can. But I believe it's in this room"

"And why do you believe that?" Catalyst asks.

"Because. Death is like bungee-cord jumping, even for people who are trained not to be scared of it. There's a look on the face before a person leaps—and you didn't have it when you just drank or inhaled, my friend. Or I wouldn't have let you do it."

He pointed a finger toward the glass-cleaner bottle but did not touch it this time. "What's in there, Raoul? You can be a drama queen and rot in the can until the CDC figures it out, or you can tell me and save us all a lot of time."

Another long silence follows. I hear a handgun cock over my head. Hodji puts his hand out to warn the agent to be careful, while casting a glance at me and Tyler. Hodji does not want a skirmish wherein a minor could get shot, but he is also aware of things, I sense, that are slightly beyond my comprehension. "
They're beyond dangerous. You have no idea what you're tangling with.
" Michael's words yesterday strike at my heart. USIC agents never miss. Yet I feel exposed and vulnerable somehow, and to something I know not of.

"Fine. I will be honest with you," Catalyst says, though I doubt his sincerity. "There is a very dangerous chemical agent in this house, and in fact, it is in this room."

"Don't waste my time," Hodji goes on. "Tell me where it is, or don't."

"It is under my fingernails"

I glance at his shiny nails. It is an absurd lie to annoy the agents. Still, I focus on the strange cut of those nails, into sharp points, but it is beyond my comprehension until it is too late.

Two seconds later, Catalyst is dead on the floor with at least three bullets in his head. I have been pushed around somehow, but I don't realize what Catalyst did until I see Tyler's face. He has four bloody scratches down one cheek. From the way mine burns, I am certain I've suffered the same.

I spin in amazement to look at Catalyst's pointy little nails. They are relaxed now forever, but they are pulpy with blood on his nail tips ...
nails which were not manicured, but wet with something.
I jerk my gaze to the bottle of glass cleaner, which Catalyst had been reaching for as the raid started, and the sponge now on the floor ... He must have wet the sponge, dug those strange nails in, and...

My asthma shuts my chest, and I drop into a dead faint with my cheek stinging.

CORA HOLMAN
FRIDAY, MARCH IS, 2002
NOON

I TENSED, LOOKING into eyes that were getting to be very familiar. Out of nowhere, a familiar gaze could shift to something frightening, alien. I had gotten to know Jeremy Ireland rather well over these past six days and had enjoyed watching many tapes of my mother either feeding the world's poor or filming stunning violence in her attempts to stop all wars. As her cameraman, he had much to tell. But then suddenly, I would be overcome with the few memories I had of the ICU, when I first came out of my coma and thought another man was Jeremy Ireland. Then I would think,
The first assassin was caught ... but is there now a second one? If this man is only pretending to be Jeremy Ireland, how would I know? Maybe he's been slowly poisoning me this week with ... what?
I would totally freeze and be unable to speak.

Jeremy Ireland stood at the foot of my hospital bed and
brought a VHS tape out of his pocket. "Here it is. As requested. How are you feeling today? Better than yesterday?"

"Better today, thanks..." I kept staring at him. I was still myself in the sense that guarding my words was second nature. I had not revealed to him, not once in six days of visits, that I could often forget how much I liked him and out of nowhere suspect he was an assassin. And once the suspicion overcame me, it did not go away easily.

He came up beside me, avoiding my IV lines with a respectful pause, and reached around them with the tape.
Is it a bomb?

"I appreciate it," I said, and forced myself to take it. Nothing happened. Just a tape. Same as yesterday.

I had given him a key to my house, so he could get beta tapes, transfer them to VHS at the local news station, and bring them to me. But on a bad paranoid moment like this, I wondered if I had been stupid.

I tried to divert myself from my fear by reflecting on what I liked about him. Jeremy Ireland wore designer clothing and had blond shoulder-length "journalism hair," as I call it, and spoke the King's English. His father was in the House of Commons, and they owned a small castle in Tetbury, Gloucestershire, where Prince Charles has a home. I was shocked at first, trying to picture him with Aleese. It's hard if I'm remembering the Aleese I lived with for four years—or if I'm wondering if he's an assassin. But as I watched the tapes I often forgot about that Aleese, and my suspicions would melt away. We watched videos Jeremy shot or Aleese shot in war zones, and I kept being introduced to this daring, courageous pirate lady, who had an
idea in her head that photography and video could cancel the concepts of war and starvation on the planet Earth.

I turned the tape over absently, and saw it was marked
MOGADISHU.

"You're
certain
you want to see this?" he asked.

"Yes."

"It's quite brutal. Some things are better left unseen."

Perhaps it could bring a lot of painful flashbacks to him. But I defended my stance. "I watched
Black Hawk Down
this morning. I saw the Mogadishans jumping up and down on top of the killed American marines. I saw them strip and drag that man."

"Well, the marines are not one's mother. You already know that four journalists were stoned the day your mum was injured ... beaten with rocks until they were dead."

And my mother would have made five.

She'd been injured in several of the tapes I'd watched with Jeremy. She took shrapnel in her arms once, and got her back singed running from an explosion in an Israeli marketplace. This is the one that proved to be too much—the one that created her great metamorphosis, much like that of Gregor into the cockroach in Kafka's story.

He put the tape in the machine and hit
PLAY.
I had already decided I wanted to start my own journal, and I would write each day of this illness until I was better, and maybe it would be useful to someone ... somewhere, someday. Maybe if there were ever another terror attack on a small town.

But I decided upon watching this that I could never do justice to my mother getting injured. It was a torture scene that had basically taped itself from the dashboard of a Reuters car,
in which she and Jeremy were escaping the same enraged mob that was stoning four journalists somewhere in the dusty background.

Jeremy had thrown the camera onto the dashboard so he could help Aleese, and most of what was filmed was chaos, but the situation came clear. Four huge, angry Somalians broke the passenger window of the car as the driver yelled helplessly. Aleese was in the passenger seat. The car was surrounded. The men pulled her out the passenger door to do god knows what—but Jeremy jumped over from the back into her seat and grabbed her left arm. You could hear the engine screech and men screech, bones being crushed under the wheels. Jeremy refused to let go. So did the four huge men. As the driver picked up speed, the men dropped off one by one, but it took a while. The worst was my mother screaming in agony. It was endless. As one man dropped off it would subside long enough for her to gulp for breath, but it would start up again.

They were mad at her for taking pictures of a bombing site where little children had been hurt—I think. Nobody made a very clear case for why they were attacking her. But after five minutes of hearing my mother yelling, "
AhhhhhAHHHHHH-HahhhhhAHHH,
" steadily, I thought I would lose my mind.

The camera managed to bump hard once and turn to a different angle. Most of the footage had been of the top of my mother's head and on the road behind it and the back fender. The men were blurry but still terrifying, holding on to her legs, biting her in the back, biting her in the legs, clawing at her waist. And finally, the last one let go of her ankle. They didn't seem to mind getting road burn. Something big jolted the car and the camera moved to catch Jeremy's chest and a higher
view of the window. He gripped my mother's arm still, and blood streamed from where he'd been gripping with his fingers. Her shoulder was right at the top, but where her head and body should have been was nothing. You would have thought Jeremy had hold of an arm ending at the shoulder.

He screamed, "Stop the car! She's losing her arm!" near the end.

The car banged to a halt, and the camera swerved again, showing nothing but the seat between Jeremy and the driver. The driver screamed madly, "Hurry! They're not done! They're coming back!"

And my mother's body flew into view—just the back of her. She lay with her face in the driver's lap and the rest of her on Jeremy. I could see bites and bruises and hear her voice, alive as ever: "Go! Go now! Jesus, Jeremy, don't you ever stop whining?"

As the driver stepped on the gas, the camera toppled into her and went to black.

Jeremy had been standing beside me, and he stepped quietly to the machine, hitting
STOP.
He didn't look at me. I could find nothing to gaze at but the floor.

"We did manage to get away," he finally said. I was surprised to hear him laugh, however sadly. "But we didn't get to a hospital for two days. We'd no idea how bad the damage was. I think your mum knew. But in her usual style, she only wanted to berate the loss of her oldest and best camera."

I sat for the longest time, just staring at the foot of the bed. I was having what Rain had termed a "four-star day," which is when you feel no symptoms at all. I didn't feel peaceful, however. The Aleese in the footage is starting to meld in my mind with the mother-monster who existed in my home for four
years. The end result of her was starting to make a little sense. It's linked to something—something courageous, something that counted—despite that it had torn her to shreds.

Jeremy cleared his throat. "Your mother detested violence, for all that she sought after it. She watched this footage over and over once we got back to Beirut. I should never have let her see it."

I wanted to say, "Don't blame yourself," but my voice had left me.

"I think what really killed her," he went on, "or killed her will to live, was the situation more than the men. The Americans went to Somalia intent only on feeding the starving people. There was endless civil war there, and many dangerous men looking to, uh, become king. The warlords would steal the children's food to feed their militias."

My eyes floated up in horror. Life in Trinity Falls gave me no preparation to understand this.

"The U.S. militia decided that to feed the poor, certain warlords had to be done away with. It was a mistake. To fight wayward power with wayward power does not work out. The bombing inflated the mob, which stoned the journalists, and almost got your mum." He sucked in a breath and let it out again. "Many people thought after the
Black Hawk Down
business that we should not feed people in countries experiencing civil unrest. They said we should let those countries argue it out among themselves, and maybe the starvation will snap them into disciplined action. The feeling was, when we feed the poor, we end up devoured by the hands we try to feed. Feeding the poor and ending violence had been Aleese's life. I don't think Aleese could quite argue with herself as well after Mogadishu.
She'd seen violence before, but none that took away her ability to photograph. She told me back in Beirut that her life was meaningless and, for all intents and purposes, over."

"I wish I had been more kind to her," I said, and shut my eyes, but tears built under my lids, and I felt Jeremy brush a tear off my cheek.

"When I said good-bye to her, just before she came home to you, she was sharp and unruly, and I don't suppose that ever got any better."