A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (22 page)

“Can I help?” Victor asked.

“Not now, sweetie.” Joyce dropped to her knees to better examine the mechanism, her face at Marshall’s hip. The kids crowded around their parents. Victor was resting against his father with one of his tiny hands on a dynamite cap. This was how the family once looked to the outside world, how it had once been: a compact unit, loving and intimate. Marshall was suddenly fatigued.

“Forget it,” he said abruptly.

“Wait, I think I see the problem. I don’t think this cap’s plugged in.”

“It doesn’t matter.”

“Just give me a minute.”

“I said forget it.”

Joyce was still on her knees, trying to force the cap. Viola’s hands were on her back, completing the circuit: Joyce touched Marshall at the hip, Marshall touched Victor, Victor’s shoulders made contact at Viola’s arm. Joyce worked to fasten the cap as if success would resolve every single one of their problems. She said, “You don’t follow through with anything. That’s what’s wrong with you.”

“Oh, great, one more thing. I’m keeping a list.”

He tore away, leaving her on her knees. Victor nearly lost his balance.

Marshall didn’t look back. He went to his bedroom, closed the door, and stripped off the robe and bomb assembly. She was probably right about everything that was wrong with him:
he
should
keep a list. He tossed the dynamite onto the floor next to his unwashed laundry and fell on the bed. He could hear Joyce and the children move away from where they had been in the kitchen, and the machinery of the apartment’s daily life eventually resumed operation: lunch being made, TV. He buried his face in his pillow and quietly sobbed until it was soaked.

T
HAT WINTER BEFORE
the war the snow was prodigious, inches piling upon inches that were already packed down and had turned to ice the week before, followed by sleet. School was canceled and offices were closed, further complicating Marshall and Joyce’s efforts to stay out of each other’s line of sight. A court date, promised to be the absolutely climactic hearing, was postponed; the next simultaneously available openings in the judge’s and lawyers’ calendars were foretold to occur in March. One weekend Marshall took the children to his parents, buying time away from Joyce. On Sunday afternoon he raced the next blizzard back to New York. In his rearview mirror he could see billowing, sparking black clouds gaining on him. By the time they reached the FDR Drive—not quite 5 p.m.—the storm had struck. Traffic slowly tunneled through a dense midnight obscurity. The children had fallen asleep, but Snuffles was awake and had begun to whine, probably needing another walk. Marshall felt immeasurably alone—and not only in the rented car; also in the cosmos. Behind the wheel he had been reduced to a simple
organism, a pair of feverish, noctilucent eyes attached to a single foot that tapped the brake in response to the flickering of the taillights ahead of him. The lights eventually led him off the highway. He headed for a gas station, to fill up before he returned the vehicle.

The local streets were in even worse shape than the highway, with cars sliding out of their lanes and some intersections blocked. The children woke, groggily surprised by the storm, and announced that they had to go to the bathroom too. “Hold it in, we’ll be home in a minute,” Marshall said anxiously, aware that the mark of a great mind was the ability to entertain two competing ideas at once. In this case the first idea was the devout belief that they would be home in a minute, and the second was the certain knowledge that filling up, dropping off the car, and getting home in the blizzard with two small children, a dog, and a suitcase would occupy a full hour.

No, more than an hour: the Amoco station was a self-serve mess. Cars sucked at the pumps from every direction. Others milled behind them, tentatively forming and re-forming lines and blocking the exits. A single attendant brooded within a glass-walled bunker at the center of the lot, unable or unwilling to intervene. Drivers punched their horns; Marshall too, pointlessly, only because the others did. Snuffles barked. The public radio news came on but Marshall couldn’t follow what was being said about terrorism and war any more than he could understand the crooked, wandering anecdote Victor had begun telling him, a complaint that Viola had tricked him into giving her his toy soldiers. For twenty minutes he rocked the car forward, on a line feeding into two pumps. When one of them finally cleared he darted in alongside it.

A red Nissan stopped with its bumper just inches from Marshall’s. Marshall wasn’t sure where it had come from, but
the car hadn’t been on any line that could reasonably have claimed his pump. Yet now a new line had somehow formed behind the Nissan, demanding priority. The swarthy, mustached driver made a face. Marshall jerked his head impassively:
up yours
.

“Kids, wait here.”

He opened his door.

“But I have to make pee-pee!” Victor said.

Marshall stepped into the wind and oily New York ice blew down his neck. He would have remembered to put on his scarf if the other driver hadn’t distracted him. The guy was still making a face and jabbing his finger in the direction of his car. Then he spun his finger around in a half circle, signaling something foreign and offensive. It was going to be another New York moment. What a fucking city. Marshall flicked his hand at him, like brushing away an insect.

He read the directions at the pump. He was just about to put his credit card into the slot when the other driver rapped hard at the inside of his windshield. Marshall wondered if they were going to fight. He almost hoped so: he needed to punch out someone tonight—something he had never done before, yet an action that seemed now like the most direct response to every irritation and frustration of his daily reality. He squeezed his right hand into a fist and even through the glove it felt strong. He wanted to lay the guy out across his hood. One punch. Unless of course the guy had a gun. Then it would take just one shot, to end Marshall’s life and leave his kids alone in a driverless rented car on a frigid night on the Lower East Side. It could happen, anything could happen. Marshall grimaced to show that he was ready for him, but the man smiled as he pointed toward the back of Marshall’s car, to the side near the pump. Marshall looked. There was no door to the gas tank. It was located on the other side.

Marshall returned to his car, glowering. The other driver motioned that he should pull back and turn around to the pump, demonstrating with complicated gestures how to maneuver between the other cars. Marshall made no sign that he saw him. He would leave the kids and the dog home with Joyce and come back in an hour, by which time this entire lunatic population of the Amoco station would have been replaced, but his vision was still misted by the anger that had coursed through his blood moments earlier, soaking his brain tissue with the specific mix of chemical compounds that produced the thought processes characteristic of anger. He took a deep breath and rested his head against the steering wheel for a moment. He couldn’t think straight anymore. His brain was just a damned vat of tissue soaked in solution, his mood, mind, and identity dependent on minute changes in the solution’s composition. The other motorists were waiting. Marshall was
still
angry. The transformation from anger to non-anger lagged behind the sequence of chemical ions passing through his nerve cell membranes that had signaled the realization that he had been wrong. You could be dead certain of something one moment and then sure of an entirely contradictory fact the next. And still be mad. He put the car into gear and threaded his way out of the gas station.

THORPE HAD BEEN WRONG
about Nathan and Joyce. There had been no romance or anything like a romance. They had simply met for drinks that evening last summer, her mascara not quite right despite some emergency repairs, her head spinning.
Wow, you look nice
—Marshall always knew how to fuck with her head. Agent Robbins also seemed preoccupied, as if Marshall had gotten to him too. He thanked her for coming and hurried to say, “Mrs. Harriman, you understand, this isn’t part of the investigation.”

“Of course,” she said brightly, trying to regain the enthusiasm she had first expressed when he called her. They were in a quiet bar on the East Side, neither trendy nor romantic enough to be an obvious date spot. She had ordered red wine; he had taken an immediate gulp of his bourbon, not even making a toast. She added, “It’s a social thing. Please, please call me Joyce. That’s what you do when it’s a social thing.”

He nodded at his drink, avoiding her eyes. “Right, though in fact the bureau has certain procedures and prohibitions governing external social activities. Um, people you meet in the course of fieldwork…”

She smiled warmly. She knew she had a great smile and intended to use it tonight as often as possible. “Well,” she said, trying to sound flirtatious, “I’m sure they’re wise rules, but I’m glad you thought we could bend them a little.”

He threw up his hands. “My therapist told me I should get out more.”

Joyce was dismayed. He went to a therapist! Another loser, another broken personality, another midlife nutjob…This confirmed what she had heard, that the only men she’d meet now would have something wrong with them—just like she did, of course.

“Oh,” she said, unable to summon another smile.

“He said I’m working too hard. It’s true. The FBI’s my whole life. I don’t have a family, Joyce. I hardly have friends, only colleagues, all of them overworked. It’s all 9/11 all the time—we’re overwhelmed. We took thousands of Arabs into custody and can’t even keep their names straight. We’re months behind in translating intercepted communications, and half the time the translations don’t make sense. I bring home files that aren’t supposed to leave the building. I stare at them for hours, trying to figure out what they mean.” He confessed, “We’re just spinning our wheels. So I’m depressed. That’s why I have a
therapist. He tells me to get out more. He’s also from the bureau.”

“I’m sorry you’re depressed,” she said. “It’s been a rocky couple of months for me too. Actually, years—”

“It’s the interrogations,” he interrupted, whispering. “We hold so many guys now—not only the prisoners in civilian custody, but also the CIA and military detainees—you have to figure at least one of them knows where bin Laden’s hiding. That’s the reasoning. So we take these guys and ask them, do you know where bin Laden’s hiding? Simple as that, but not so simple. You have to ask them repeatedly, for example. In varying tones of voice. In varying circumstances, in varying environments. You have to take a man and break him. Do you get me?”

Nathan’s dark eyes blazed now. He was hunched over his drink, looking up at Joyce as if from inside a well. She was frightened by his attention and his talk of terrorists, and also aroused. She nodded slightly.

He said, “The key to breaking a man is making him aware that you control his environment—everything in his environment. So we take a guy, we mislead him about the time of day and the day of the week. We mess up his sleep, meal, and toilet habits. His prayer routine too, so he can’t remember whether he just did his noonday prayers or whether it’s time for the morning ones. This takes a couple of weeks. After a while he doesn’t know which season it is or even which year—and he depends on you to tell him. First you become his father and mother. Then you become his God.”

“Does it work?”

“No, of course not. It’s completely idiotic.”

“You don’t know where bin Laden is?”

Nathan forced out a sad laugh. “No one knows where bin Laden is. I’m not even sure he ever existed. We’ve had prisoners who swear that he doesn’t. They swear it on the lives of
their mothers, their fathers, their sons, and their daughters. They swear they’ll gouge out their own eyes if they’re proved lying. After a while you start to believe them…”

“But he was seen on TV!”

“Yeah, right,” Nathan said, unconvinced. “I’ve been interrogating this one prisoner now for weeks, or maybe it’s been months, I forget. Listen, we have sixteen interrogation techniques approved by the Department of Justice. I’ve tried every one of them. And guess what? He’s not a terrorist, he has nothing to do with terrorism, even if he’s broken just about every immigration law from here to Mars. But we found in his cab a video camera with pictures of the Brooklyn Bridge, the Lincoln Tunnel, Grand Central…Yet we know he’s not a terrorist. He’s a poor dope from Yemen who came to New York to drive a cab. In Yemen he dreamed of driving a cab in New York. That’s all he ever wanted from life. In Yemen he studied the Koran and he studied how to get to LaGuardia during rush hour. He’s a gentle, sweet man, ignorant as shit, no,
more
ignorant than shit, shit is a genius next to this guy, excuse my language. Yet when I say I
know
this, I don’t really know this. I think I know it. Perhaps he’s fooling me, manipulating
me
with his sixteen resistance techniques approved by al-Qaeda. Maybe I know he’s innocent like he knows it’s seven a.m.”

“I don’t understand. Do you want to free him? Can’t you free him?”

He leaned over his drink, speaking in a near-whisper. “I think I have control over him. I regulate every aspect of his existence—his sleeping, his eating, his sobbing. And he knows that everything in his life revolves around me. But he’s the one
I’m
thinking about day and night, the one who keeps me from eating and sleeping. And maybe he knows that. I think I’m controlling him but he may want me to think that. He may have the power to break
me,
Joyce. When I’m in the inter
rogation booth with this man, it’s like we’re the only two people in the world. He’s on one side of a cheap Formica table and I’m on the other, and it’s not obvious which of us is the prisoner.”

Joyce smiled again. “Nathan, I don’t know what to say. But I’m glad you feel you can confide in me.”

He looked at her as if she were crazy. He said, “You’re not the first person I’ve told. I’ve told everyone: the old woman who lives next door, the dry cleaner, the Chinese food delivery boy. Find me someone else to tell. I have to talk. I have to prove that there’s a world outside the booth, outside the bureau. Something bigger than me and this guy.”

After that night Joyce saw Nathan from time to time, usually in a bar or at a restaurant—and on one occasion at her prompting they went to the Guggenheim, where he stared at a Rothko for about ten minutes and said, “How do we know this isn’t a con job?”—but so little romantic chemistry developed that she would have been embarrassed if he had tried to kiss her hello or good night, which he didn’t. He continued to talk about the FBI probably beyond the bounds of bureau regulations and certainly beyond the limits of her interest. Once when she arrived five minutes late at P. J. Clarke’s she found him half leaning over the bar and insisting to the bartender, “The less they know, the harder they are to crack.” The bartender was trying to bring drinks to some other patrons. Nathan made her nervous.

THROUGH THAT WINTER
diplomats convened, troops massed, and battleships steamed to their classified positions. A space shuttle broke apart over Texas. The world prepared to turn. Joyce was telephoned by her lawyer, who told her that the next hearing, now scheduled for late March, would resolve every outstanding issue in her favor. The lawyer
sounded almost girlish on the phone, giddy with relief. “You’ll get your bedroom back!” Joyce didn’t understand how the lawyer could be so sure, but these days she welcomed anyone’s optimism.

The ether was electrified that season as men and women in television studios prosecuted matters of fact and principle. Joyce was awed by the strength of their convictions. They spoke gravely in simple declarative sentences without hedging or equivocation, their faces hard. They
knew,
because they were smarter than she was or possessed greater moral clarity or had access to military intelligence. The strength of their contempt for the doubters—you
don’t
believe Saddam has WMD? you
don’t
think Saddam has links to al-Qaeda?—was a pro-war argument in itself. Joyce was stirred to encounter, even on television, anyone who had this certainty at his core. She remembered when Marshall had been like that, a young man driven by conviction. When he had issued a political or moral judgment, or simply a judgment about the way he and Joyce would conduct their lives, the declaration had reverberated down to her loins. And then at some point along the timeline, his convictions had become wrong, loony…