Due Preparations for the Plague

“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.