Terrorist (15 page)

Beth takes another step, leaving the people on television to stew in their own abundant juices, and totters to the table by the wall and plucks up the telephone. The new style of telephone stands upright in its cradle, and a little panel below the perforations to listen at supposedly gives you the name and number calling. It says out of area, so it's either Markie or her sister in Washington or some telemarketer calling from wherever they call from—it can be as far away as India. "Hello?" The perforations at the other end of the receiver don't come to her mouth the way the old phones did, the hefty simple ones of honest black Bakelite that rested face-down in a cradle, and Beth tends to raise her voice because she doesn't trust it.

"Beth, it's Hermione." Herm always sounds ostentatiously brisk, busy, as if to shame her younger, indolent, self-pampered sister. "What took you so long? I was about to hang up."

"Well, I wish you had."

"That's not very nice to say."

"I'm not like you, Herm. I'm not still fast on my feet."

"Who's that talking in the background? Is somebody there?" Her words jump on things, one after another. Yet her bluntness, almost rude, is a welcome leftover from the Pennsylvania-Dutch manner of their girlhood. It reminds Beth of home, of northwest Philadelphia with all its humid greenery and trolley cars and corner grocery stores stacked with Maier's and Freihofer's bread.

"It's the television. I was looking for the clicker to turn it
off"—she doesn't want to admit she was too lazy and unwieldy to bend over and pick it up—"and couldn't find the gosh-darn tiling."

"Well, go find it. It can't be far. I can wait. We can't talk with all that babbling. What were you watching anyway, in the middle of the day?"

Beth puts the receiver down without answering.
She sounds like Mother,
she thinks, plodding over to where the remote—curiously similar to the telephone in look and feel, matte black and packed with circuitry: a pair of mismatched sisters—lies on its back on the pale-green wall-to-wall. The salesman called it celadon. With a groan of effort, gripping the chair arm with one hand and reaching down with die other in an exertion that reawakens in her little-used muscles the sensation of an exercise, an
arabesque penchee,
learned in ballet lessons when she was eight or nine, at Miss Dimi-trova's Studio, above a cafeteria downtown on Broad Street, she retrieves the thing and points it at the television screen, where
As the World Turns
is winding up on Channel Seven, under a cloud of tingling, ominous music. Beth recognizes Craig and Jennifer, in heated conference, and wonders what they are saying even as she clicks them off. They turn into a little star that lingers less than a second.

In ballet class she had been the more lithe and promising sister; Hermione, Miss Dimitrova would say in her scornful White Russian way, lacked
ballon.
"Light,
light,"
she would shout, the ligaments jumping in her scrawny throat.
"Vous avez besoin de legerete!
Conceive that you are
des oiseauxl
You are the creatures of air!" Hermione, gawkily tall for her age and already, it was clear, destined to be plain, was the heavy-footed plodder then, and Beth the one who felt,
enfaisant des pointes,
birdlike, whirling with her skinny arms extended.

"You're panting," Hermione accuses her when Beth returns to the phone and drops her body with a grunt onto the little hard chair that came in from the kitchen table when Mark was no longer around to eat with his parents. A maple reproduction Shaker, the chair has such a narrow seat that she has to aim her bottom at it; a few years ago she half missed and the chair tipped and dumped her onto the floor. She could have broken her pelvis if she weren't so well upholstered, Jack said. But he wasn't amused at first. He rushed over to her horrified and, when she made clear she wasn't injured, looked disappointed. Hermione asks sharply, "You weren't watching some special announcement, were you?"

"On the television? No—is there one?"

"No, but"—her hesitation is fraught, like the pauses in soap operas—"there are leaks. Things get out before they should."

"What's getting out?" Beth asks, knowing that bland ignorance was the way to open up Hermione, with her itch to lord it over her sister.

"Nothing, darling. I of course can't say." But, unable to bear Beth's silence, she goes on, "Internet chatter is up. We think something's brewing."

"Oh, dear," Beth says docilely. "How's the Secretary taking it?"

"The poor saint. He's
so
conscientious, the whole country on his shoulders, I'm honestly afraid it might kill him. He has high blood pressure, you know."

"He looks pretty healthy on TV. I wonder, though, if he could use a slightly different haircut. It makes him look belligerent. It puts the Arabs and the liberals on the defensive." She can't chase from her mind the image of one

more oatmeal-raisin cookie—how it would crumble in her mouth, her saliva leaving the raisins for her tongue to find and fiddle with before she bites down. She used to settle with a cigarette for a phone chat; then the Surgeon General kept telling her it was bad for her, so she gave it up and gained thirty pounds the first year. Why should the government care if the people died? It didn't own them. That many less to govern, she would think they'd be relieved. But, oh yes, lung cancer was a drain on Medicare, and cost the economy millions of productive work-hours. "I suspect," Beth offers helpfully, "a lot of this chatter is just high-school and college kids making mischief. Some of them, I know, call themselves Mohammedans just to annoy their parents. There's this boy at the high school Jack has been advising. He thinks he's a Muslim because his deadbeat father was, at the same time ignoring this hardworking Irish-Catholic mother he lives with. Think of what our parents would have said if we'd brought home Muslim men to marry."

"Well, you did the next-best thing," Hermione tells her, paying her back for the haircut criticism.

"Poor Jack," Beth continues, rising above the slur, "he's been knocking himself out to get this boy out of the grip of his mosque. They're like Baptist fundamentalists, only worse, because they don't care if they die." A born peacemaker—maybe all younger sisters are—she reverts to Her-mione's favorite subject. "Tell me what he's especially worried about these days. The Secretary."

"Ports," came the ready answer. "Hundreds of container ships go in and out of our American ports every day, and nobody knows what's in a tenth of them. They could be bringing in atomic weapons labelled Argentinean cowhides or something. Brazilian coffee—who's sure it's coffee? Or
think of these huge tankers, not just the oil, but, say, liquid propane. That's how they ship propane, liquefied. But think of what would happen in Jersey City or under the Bayonne Bridge if they got to it with just a few pounds of Semtex or TNT. Beth, it would be a conflagration: thousands dead. Or the New York subways—look at Madrid. Look at Tokyo a few years ago. Capitalism has been so
open
—that's how it has to be, to make it work. Think of a few men with assault rifles in a mall anywhere in America. Or in Saks or Blooming-dale's. Remember the old Wanamaker's? How we used to go there as children with such happy hearts? It seemed a paradise, especially the escalators and the toy department on the top floor. All that's gone. We can never be happy again— we Americans."

Beth feels sorry for Hermione, taking everything so much to heart, and says, "Oh, don't most people just bumble along still? There's always some kind of danger in life. Plagues, wars. Tornadoes out in Kansas. People keep going. You go on living until you're made to stop, and then you're unconscious."

"That's it, that's just it, Betty, they're working on stopping us. Everywhere, anywhere—all it takes is a little bomb, a few guns. An open society is so
defenseless.
Everything the modern free world has achieved is
so fragile."

Only Hermione still called her Betty, and only then when she was miffed. Jack and her college friends called her Beth, and after she was married even her parents tried to switch over. To erase the little slip-up, Hermione courts her, trying to enlist her in her own infatuation with the Secretary. "He and these experts we have try to think day and night of worst-case scenarios. For instance, Beth, computers. We've built them into the system so that everybody's dependent,
not just libraries but industry, and banks, and brokerage houses, and the airlines, and nuclear-power plants—I could go on and on."

"I don't doubt it."

Hermione entirely misses the sarcasm, going on, "There could be what they call a cyberattack. They have these worms that get by the firewalls and plant these applets, they call them, that send back covert messages describing the network they've penetrated and paralyzing everything, scrambling what they call the routing tables and getting by the gateway protocols so that not just the stock market and traffic lights but everything freezes—the power grids, the hospitals, the Internet itself, can you imagine? The worms would be programmed to spread and spread until even that television you were watching would go on the fritz, or else show nothing but Osama bin Laden on all the channels."

"Herm, honey, I haven't heard anybody say 'on the fritz' since Philadelphia. Aren't these worms and viruses being sent out all the time, and the source turns out to be some pathetic maladjusted teen-ager sitting in his grubby room in Bangkok or the Bronx? They make a little mess for a while but they don't bring the world down. They get caught and put in jail, eventually. You're forgetting all the clever men, and women too, that design these firewalls or whatever. Surely they can keep ahead of a few fanatic Arabs—it's not as if they invented the computer like we did."

"No, but they invented zero, as you may not know. They don't need to invent the computer to wipe us out with it. The Secretary calls it cyberwar. That's what we're in, like it or not, cyberwar. The worms are already out there running around; the Secretary every day has to sift through hundreds of reports that tell him about attacks."

"The cyberattacks."

"That's right. You think it's funny, I can tell from your voice, but it's not. It's deadly serious, Betty."

This Shaker chair is beginning to hurt. They must have had different body types back then, the Quakers and the Puritans: different philosophies about comfort and necessity. "I don't think it's funny, Herm. Of course very bad things can happen, some already have, but—" She forgets what the "but" was to preface. She thinks of walking with the portable phone into the kitchen and reaching into the cookie drawer. She loves the texture of these particular ones; that only one old-fashioned corner store left on Eleventh Street sells. Jack picks them up for her. She wonders when Jack will be back; his tutorials seem to take longer than they used to. "But I'm not aware of too many cyberattacks lately."

"Well, thank the Secretary for that. He gets reports even in the middle of the night. It's aging him, it honestly is. He's getting white hairs above his ears, and hollows under his eyes. I feel helpless."

"Hermione, doesn't he have a wife? And umpteen children? I saw them in the paper, all going to church at Easter."

"Yes, of course he does. I know that. I know where I stand. Our relationship is purely official. And, since you're being so provocative—and this is
very
confidential—one of the areas we get most reports from is northern New Jersey. Tucson, and the Buffalo area, and northern New Jersey. He's very tight-lipped—he
has
to be—but there are some imams, if I'm pronouncing it right, that distinctly bear watching. They all preach terrible things against America, but some of them go beyond that. I mean, in advocating violence against the state."

"Well, at least it's imams. If the rabbis start in, Jack'll have
to join up. Though he never goes to temple. He might be happier if he did."

Hermione's exasperation breaks out:
"Really,
I wonder sometimes what Jack makes of you; you don't take
anything
seriously."

"That was part of the attraction," Beth tells her. "He's a depressive, and he liked my being such a lightweight."

There is a pause in which she feels her sister resisting the obvious rejoinder: she is no lightweight now. "Well," Hermione sighs down there in Washington. "I'll let you get back to your soap opera. My other phone is blinking red; he wants something."

"It's been good to talk," Beth lies.

Her older sister has taken the place of her mother in not letting her forget how much is wrong with her. Beth has let herself, as they say, "go." A scent rises to her nostrils from the deep creases between rolls of fat, where dark pellets of sweat accumulate; in the bathtub her flesh floats around her like a set of giant bubbles, semi-liquid in their sway and sluggish buoyancy. How has this happened to her? As a girl she had eaten what she pleased; it had never seemed to her that she ate more than other people, and still doesn't: the food just sticks to her more. Some people have bigger cells than others, she has read. Different metabolisms. Maybe it was being marooned in this house, and the house before it—on Eighteenth Street, and the one before that, a half-mile closer to the downtown, before the neighborhood became too bad—marooned by a man who abandoned her without appearing to. At the high school each day earning his living, who could fault him for that? As a young wife she used to sympathize, but as she aged she came to see how he dramatized everything, leaving in the winter dark and not home
until long after dark with his extracurricular duties, his problem students, his emergency sessions with delinquent parents. He would come home depressed because of all the problems he couldn't solve, the poor lives lived in New Prospect to no purpose and now being passed on to the children: "Beth, they don't give a fuck. They never knew structure. They can't imagine a life that goes beyond the next fix, the next binge, the next scrape with the cops or the bank or the INS. The poor kids, they've never had the luxury of being kids. You see them come into the ninth grade with a little hope left in them, a trace of that eagerness second-graders have, a belief that if you learn the rules and do the drills you'll be rewarded; and by the time they graduate, if they do, we've knocked it all out of them. Who's 'we'? America, I suppose, though it's hard to put your finger exactly on where it goes wrong. My grandfather thought capitalism was doomed, destined to get more and more oppressive until the proletariat stormed the barricades and set up the workers' paradise. But that didn't happen; the capitalists were too clever or the proletariat too dumb. To be on the safe side, tiiey changed the label 'capitalism' to read 'free enterprise,' but it was still too much dog-eat-dog. Too many losers, and the winners winning too big. But if you don't let the dogs fight it out, they'll sleep all day in the kennel. The basic problem the way I see it is, society tries to be decent, and decency cuts no ice in the state of nature. No ice whatsoever. We should all go back to being hunter-gatherers, with a hundred-percent employment rate, and a healthy amount of starvation."