Читать книгу Due Preparations for the Plague - Janette Turner Hospital - Страница 16

“You’re sailing way too close to the wind, Sam. It’s stupid and it’s dangerous.”

“Part of the fallout, isn’t it? We’re all addicted to risk.”

“Is that so?” Jacob lines up cardboard drink coasters, three round ones on his left, two diamond-shaped ones on his right. He moves a round one from the left side to the right and places it between the two diamonds. He frowns, considering this equation, then moves it back. The tavern they are in is small and dimly lit, which suits them. Ironically, they seem to need confined spaces.

“It’s well known,” Samantha says flippantly. She is at pains to be flippant with Jacob, to stop herself sliding into him. Sometimes their edges match so exactly that a waiter will bring them only one drink. Nutrient fusion, Jacob calls it. No; ego confusion, Sam insists. Phoenix One and Phoenix Two are the names they are known by in their circle—sometimes for particular kinds of communication, sometimes for a grim private joke—but they are Siamesed from the same charcoal pit, two barbecued peas in a pod. Their circle is small and exclusive. The members call themselves the Phoenix Club, and they mostly make contact via the Web.

“Risk addiction’s commonplace for our lot,” Samantha says. “For all survivors. Earthquake survivors, rape survivors, whatever. There’s a special section in bookstores now: survival lit. Articles all over the place. You must have read some.”

“Not my cup of tea.”

“Well, I’m telling you, whether you want to know about it or not, risk addiction’s part of the syndrome. There’s statistical evidence, conferences, papers, proceedings, God knows what. Interesting to speculate on the reasons, don’t you think? And if you want to know why I’m babbling on like this, it’s because that disapproving look of yours upsets me.”

“There are certain kinds of risk that you don’t have the right to take.”

“Why not?”

“Because they put all of us in greater jeopardy, that’s why.”

“We’re all in perpetual jeopardy anyway. Don’t we take that as a given?”

“That’s why we have a certain understanding.”

“Right,” Samantha snaps. “We understand that all of us manage in whatever way we can and we don’t sit in judgment on each other. I don’t judge, you don’t judge, he doesn’t judge, we don’t judge—”

“But we do keep an eye out for each other. That’s part of the deal.” He touches Samantha’s cheek. “You’re manic,” he says uneasily. “What are you on?”

“On getting somewhere. On the trail getting hot. On nailing down answers.”

“Sam, Sam. There aren’t any answers. Or none that will make the slightest difference.”

“It’s amazing what I’m learning from next-of-kin. It’s amazing what the website brings in.”

“You’re burning yourself up.”

“I’m on fire,” she acknowledges, “but I’m learning plenty. I’m doing this for the future. I’m doing this for the historical record. As well as for my thesis in American history, don’t forget. It’s like a map coming into focus.”

“The Phoenix Club’s one thing. We need each other. It helps, keeping contact, it helps us all. But you’re casting your net too wide. You’re drawing dangerous attention.”

“I need to draw fire. I know exactly what I’m doing and I’m careful.”

“You’re reckless.” He clenches his hands together. He leans across the table, his forearms over the line-up of coasters. He looks like a gambler shielding a spread of cards. “We need each other to survive, Sam. We need each other too much. If something happened to you—”

“It won’t.”

“If something did—”

“What can happen to someone who’s indifferent to what happens?”

“Enough.”

“We’re immune to harm, Jacob, or we wouldn’t be here. You can’t snuff a phoenix out.”

“Unfortunately, you can.” He pulls at his fingers and the knuckles make an ominous sound. He looks more ravaged than usual. “I went to see Cassie yesterday.”

“Ah,” Samantha says uneasily. “How is she?”

“Getting worse, I think.”

“So that’s what all this is about.”

“Not only that.”

Jacob blinks, slowly and heavily. He makes Samantha think of an owl and the thought trips a nervous tic in her hand. Her thumb, of its own free will, does a little series of calisthenics. “You had that look on your face,” she says, “when the news broke—”

“Why are you whispering? I can’t hear you.”

“You were sitting on the cot across from me. In Germany. When we watched the plane go up. That’s how you looked.”

“Stop it, Sam.”

She hasn’t meant to go there, but all roads lead back to the airstrip on the TV screen.

Jacob turns a coaster around and around in his hands.

The cots and the blankets smell musty to Samantha. They must have been pulled out of storage in a damp basement. This must have been hurriedly done. There is a boy next to Samantha sucking a blanket, there is another boy across from her, an older boy whose eyelids droop and who plays with the lid of a screwtop jar. Samantha does not yet know that his name is Jacob. He turns the lid around and around. We interrupt this program to bring you a news alert …

Samantha takes the coaster roughly from Jacob’s hands. “You’re making me edgy.”

“You should be edgy. You’re drawing fire, Sam. You know what’s going to happen? Someone will get nervous and clamp down on access to documents again, but that won’t be the worst of it.”

“What will be the worst of it?”

“More of us will start meeting up with accidents.”

“More of us? What do you mean?”

“Stick to finishing your degree at Georgetown,” he says. “Stop this crazy moonlighting stuff. As a stand-up comic, you’re not funny.”

“Students have to moonlight to survive, and this pays better than waiting tables. What did you mean, more of us?”

“More dead phoenixes. Chien Bleu is not a good way to go. I have an ominous feeling about it.” He turns to signal for the waiter. When he turns, his jacket sleeve rides up on his arm. The cuffs of his shirt are unbuttoned and turned back, pale blue cotton against his faint tan, and the tracks on his forearm look to Sam like the footprints of the beast.

“Oh, Jacob.” She catches hold of his wrist in blind panic. “What are you doing?”

“It’s no more dangerous than what you’re doing,” he says. He pulls his wrist away and buttons his cuffs. “And a lot less stupid.”

“How can you say that?” When she closes her eyes, she feels the nothing under the table. Her sense of balance goes. “You’re right,” she concedes. “We’re not safe.”

Jacob leans over the table and takes both her hands in his. “Look at me, Sam.”

“How’s that going to help me when you’re covered in needle tracks?”

“So governments do shady things when national security’s at stake. They make mistakes. Is this news to anyone?”

“Oh, forgive me. I thought accountability for shady activity, even in wartime, was one of the pillars of our democracy. I thought I remembered learning that in high school. Silly me. I thought a secret service accountable to no one was Nazi Germany and evil-Soviet-empire stuff.”

“Oh for God’s sake, get down out of your pulpit,” Jacob says. “Governments make mistakes and they cover them up and they do not appreciate exposure. We stand a better chance of making it if we take that as the starting point.”

“Oh, right,” Samantha says bitterly. “I can see where that starting point is getting you.”

“It’s been a bad week,” he concedes. “And it’ll get worse if you don’t put on the brakes.”

“You said that before. More of us will have accidents, you said. What did you mean, more of us?”

“We lost another one.”

She stares at him.

“Another phoenix. We lost him in August, but I just found out about it.”

“Wait,” Samantha says. It is not as though they are not used to bad news, but due preparations must be made. “Wait. I have to—I’ll just …”

She goes to the bathroom and locks the door. Her hands are shaking. She starts counting backwards from one hundred. She counts down through ritual layers, down through the Cenozoic and the Mesozoic and the Paleozoic and the Precambrian. Under the Precambrian is the time before the plane disappeared in a ball of fire, and there’s a space there, a space that Samantha can think her way into if she counts backward far enough. In that space, everyone is still alive. She imagines it with chandeliers and a dance floor. Her mother is in a strapless dress of pale blue silk, her father kisses her mother on the neck. The dancers move in slow motion, the future casts no shadow at all, and there is music. Samantha can wind it in like a ribbon from the violin of Jacob’s father, Avi Levinstein, who plays with his whole body; and Jacob, he says, bending over his instrument and his bow, Jacob, I am so happy that you and Samantha … and Samantha, he says, I have pleasure to present to you some of our friends on this flight, and the inventory unscrolls itself, a gold-leaf list of the gifted, the flamboyant, the intense, the cellist Izak Goldberg and his wife Victoria, bel canto soprano, and Cassie, their daughter; Yasmina Shankara, the Bombay movie star, and Agit, her son; and so on and so forth until Samantha turns to Jacob and asks: Does your father know everyone? and she watches the patterns that people make with the swirls of their lives, brushing one another in passing, sometimes knowing it, sometimes not. She can see everyone who was on the plane. She holds them that way in her mind.

When she gets back to the table, Jacob has his head down. His hair brushes a small jigger of mustard. “Hey,” Samantha says. “You asleep?”

“We lost Agit.”

Samantha holds herself still.

“Agit Shankara,” he says. “We lost him August eighth, exactly a month before the anniversary of the hijacking.”

“No.” Samantha has a sudden memory of huddling on a cot with Agit in Germany. They were watching children’s cartoons until the interruption came. They had to share a blanket, and Agit had one corner balled up into his mouth though his quiet little sobs still leaked out. We interrupt this program for the latest bulletin … When they saw the plane, Agit turned quiet. He took the blanket out of his mouth and wiped his nose with it and then put it back in his mouth. Samantha hit him. That’s dirty, she told him.

“Agit drew attention to himself,” Jacob says.

“How did he draw attention?”

“He published a book of short stories. Not here. In India. But just the same.”

“Stories?”

“A collection called Flight into the Dark.”

“No one in government circles or Intelligence pays any attention to fiction.”

“It was published in June. He sent me a copy in July and I haven’t heard from him since. He stopped answering e-mails.”

“Is that all?” Samantha asks, euphoric with relief. “He’s gone into withdrawal. I’ve done that, you’ve done that. It’s nothing.”

“It’s not nothing. I found out what happened.”

“I don’t want to know.”

“I’m not going to tell you.”

“How’d you find out?”

“On-line, from the Indian Express. Just a filler item. Took me hours of scrolling to find it. Son of beautiful former movie icon Yasmina Shankara who perished in the tragic hijacking, et cetera.”

“That makes six of us.” Samantha wraps her arms around herself. She feels cold.

“This affects us,” Jacob says.

“Yes. What happened to him?”

“You don’t want to know.”

“I know I don’t. But tell me.” Samantha leans across the table and takes hold of the lapels of Jacob’s jacket. His jacket is worn at the edges. He looks scruffy, Jacob. He is an assistant professor of mathematics and looks like it. In mathematics, he says, unknown quantities can be calculated. Answers are morally neutral and can be nailed down. Chance can be predicted and fractally expressed.

“Tell me what happened to Agit,” Samantha insists.

“He threw himself under a train, the newspaper said. Hundreds of people saw him. At the central railway station in Bombay.”

“Threw himself? Or was pushed?”

“That’s the question, isn’t it?”

They don’t know which ending they’d prefer. What kind of operation, they ask themselves, goes on wiping out survivors and witnesses so many years after the event? They hold each other, Jacob and Samantha.

“You’re shivering,” she whispers.

“I’m cold.”

“But you’re burning,” she says. “You’ve got a fever.”

“Come home with me.”

“All right.”

In Jacob’s apartment, they lie for a long time, side by side, staring up at his bedroom ceiling. Jacob has painted it black, and has added to it in phosphorescent white and with absolute accuracy, the star map of the northern September sky. “I could see Polaris through my window,” he says. “That first landing.”

“Morocco.”

“Wasn’t Egypt first? Then Morocco.”

“It was Morocco. According to my aunt.”

“Wherever. I could see Polaris the whole time. And I knew that everything would go on. Because Polaris was there when Jericho fell, and when Troy fell, and when Rome fell, and when Hitler fell. I knew everything would go on.”

“And here we are,” Samantha says. “Going on. Two phoenixes.”

“The random chosen,” he says.

“But still the chosen.”

“Except that doesn’t mean anything. Or if it does, we’ll never know what it means.”

“This means something,” Samantha says, turning to him, and they bite and moan, ravenous, and then they sleep. They dream.

“I dream everyone,” Samantha tells Jacob. “I know them so well now, I dream their dreams.”