Due Preparations for the Plague

“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.”

4. Phoenix Three (#ulink_34c555e3-486e-5be9-8391-ef89ba606257)

The abandoned boathouse where the local members of the Phoenix Club meet is sparsely furnished. Samantha and Jacob find it beautiful. Sometimes they sit in the rowboat and sometimes they climb the ladder and sit on the weathered boards of the loft where gulls nest. The gulls fly off across Chesapeake Bay with shrieks and a great hullabaloo of wings and outrage that they do not let go. Patrolling in pairs, they wheel past the gable window and the open A of the roofline where the boat winch used to be. They hurl imprecations. They fix Jacob and Samantha and Cassie with their black beady eyes, but the members of the Phoenix Club are used to being watched. How to live under and around surveillance is something they know about. They settle into the rotting piles of fishnets. Ropes and wooden floats and one anchor hang from the rafters. There are assorted oars lying about, smooth as soapstone, lovely to the touch, mapped with the wood grain’s sinewy curves.

Cassie buckles herself into a life vest, though all of these are moldy and torn and have discharges of flotation stuffing poking from seams. Cassie’s vest is Day-Glo orange, faded now, and crusted in a latticework of salt which smells of boating disasters averted. Cassie finds the smell comforting. The three of them laze there, cradled in fishnet heaps, listening to the soft slap of water against the pylons below. Sometimes they spend hours like this without speaking. No one disturbs them, because this is the unfashionable part of the bay, an unstable landscape of salt marsh and mudflats that even most fishermen avoid.

They chose the place for its isolation, but also because they like enclosed spaces. They like to have water nearby. Fire could touch them here, but they would hear it coming across the salt marsh and due preparations could be made. Intruders could reach them, but the gulls would give warning, and they would descend into the boat and glide away, soundlessly, through the tall brown stubble of the marsh, a labyrinth for which few know the code. For those not intimate with tides and rushes, boating is dangerous. The narrow channels change shape and direction by the hour. The members of the Phoenix Club are safe here. Cassie knows this intuitively. Jacob found the boathouse, and they bring Cassie from time to time because it is the only other place besides her room in the psychiatric hospital where she is calm. Hunched into themselves in the loft, they can close their eyes and enter that state they call Before.

“When Papa has the boat …” Cassie says. The others turn to her and wait, but she usually finishes her sentences internally, or perhaps she forgets where they were going.

“Cass?” Samantha prompts, but she is far from them, absorbed by marsh birds.

“I think her parents had a cottage on the bay somewhere,” Jacob says. “She used to spend summers here.”

“How do you know?”

“I remember visiting once, when I was small. I don’t remember where, of course, but my father’s agent told me it was somewhere around the bay. He was agent for Cassie’s parents too, for the string quartet and for her mother’s concert performances.”

Cassie says suddenly, “My mother has a beautiful voice.”

Jacob leans over to take Cass’s hand and he holds it between his own and strokes her arm. “Yes,” he says. “Your mother did have a lovely voice. An extraordinary voice.” He has recordings of Cass’s mother singing Renaissance and troubadour songs, accompanied by Cass’s father on cello, and by his own father on violin. He has newspaper clippings. He has the memories of relatives and family friends. Nevertheless, his eyes quicken—Samantha can see it—because there is a chance, slim, unpredictable, that he might pick up a new chip for the mosaic. Cass is twenty-seven: three years older than Jacob, who is five years older than Sam. Cassie has—when it is not completely fogged in—more memory of Before.

But Cass’s memory comes in single thin beams of light that touch on an image for a second or two and then extinguish themselves. She watches Jacob stroking her arm with an air of abstracted curiosity. She begins to hum, a sound that comes from low in her throat and gets stronger though the melody is in a plaintive minor key. Samantha recognizes the song from Jacob’s recordings. Jacob blinks in his heavy-lidded, owllike way. He begins to hum in harmony with Cass. Samantha closes her eyes and lets the duet float around her, and Victoria and Izak Goldberg and Avi Levinstein—she knows them from photographs and newsreel clips and from the jacket of an old LP—rise from it like wraiths.

There is a long long silence when the humming ends, and then Jacob says, “They did make such good music together.” But his voice is uneven. He is as skittish as Cass when it comes to connecting one bead of the past to another.

Cass says, “Papa said, don’t hurt the cello, but the man with the mask smashed it with his … what do you call it, Jacob?”

“Kalashnikov.”

“Kalashnikov. It’s a funny word.” Cass begins to keen on a high note and to rock back and forth.

“Oh shit,” Samantha murmurs. “What triggered this?” She remembers the smashing of the cello. She remembers how it seemed to happen in slow motion, how it seemed to float like a kite before it fell to the runway, and then Cassie screamed and spread her arms and flew after it, and catapulted down the chute headfirst.

“Cass,” Jacob says. He strokes her hair. “I’m so sorry, Cass.”

“I saw photographs,” Cass says. “When we were in Paris. Your father had no clothes on, Jacob. And Lowell’s mother had no clothes. The man with the photographs told Papa he was a detective and he would give Papa money if Papa could tell him things. But Papa tore up the photographs and the man said, You will regret that.”

Samantha stares at Jacob. “What is that about?” she wants to know.

“It wasn’t my mother on that flight,” Jacob says curtly. “My father was with another woman.”

“Why have you never told me?”

“Why should I have to? I try not to remember.” The worst thing he has to live with, he thinks, is that his father was in love and he resented it. He resented his father’s happiness. He felt left out. “I was upset. After takeoff, I wouldn’t sit with them.”

“Lowell’s mother,” Sam repeats in astonishment. “You wouldn’t sit with your father and Lowell’s mother?”

Jacob starts combing his skull with his fingers, a tic Samantha recognizes: first sign of one of his migraines coming on.

“Your father and Lowell’s mother,” Cass says. “In a photograph. With no clothes on. Papa tore it up but I saw.”