A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (6 page)

“And that envelope shown on the news last night…Do you have a copy? I know my husband’s handwriting and, I swear, it’s the same exact penmanship. They’re his
g
’s, for one thing…”

Robbins grimaced, removing an enlarged copy of the hoax anthrax envelope from under some printouts.

He asked, “
Would
you swear it?”

It took her a moment to understand the question, and then she wasn’t sure what her answer should be. Would she
swear
it? Did she really believe Marshall had sent the baby powder? On the enlarged copy, the handwriting didn’t seem as similar to Marshall’s as she had first thought. The ascending loops of the cursive
h
’s and
l
’s were too round; the crossbars of the
f
’s were too long. She opened her bag and pulled out the sheet of paper on which Marshall had scrawled last month,
Newark–SF Un. 93 8:02 Berk Best West
. There were no
g
’s.

“This is a sample,” she said.

She passed it over to Agent Robbins. He handled the gift of actual physical evidence as if it were a strand of pearls. He turned it one way and then the other and then lined it up against the photocopy.

“I’ll give it to forensics. It’s close, all right.”

“My God.”

“What’s his name and where can we find him?”

“Are you going to arrest him?”

Now he didn’t laugh. He hadn’t looked at her like this before, not even yesterday when she had explained about her keys. His gaze was as attentive as a predator’s. He was noting every aspect of her dress and bearing, every mannerism, every parsing of her accusation. “Would you like me to?”

“No,” she said hurriedly. He was frightening her. “Not unless you think it’s necessary.”

“We’ll see. What’s his name?”

“Marshall Harriman. I don’t know where he spends his days, but he still lives with us. I have his cell phone, his lawyer’s number…”

Agent Robbins wrote the numbers in a spiral notebook and slowly read them back to her. Now Joyce felt like an informer. She wanted to leave.

“Has he done anything like this before?”

“No. I mean, in college he was a bit of a goofball, but not like this…”

“Tell me about your marriage.”

“My marriage,” she said. The specter of her marriage rose up before her, a tower one hundred stories high. So high, you can’t get over it. So low, you can’t get under it. She didn’t know where to begin. That had been the problem with counseling: neither of them could decide what to tell the therapist first. So wide, you can’t get around it. “That’s personal,” she concluded.

He scowled. “I’m the FBI.”

“Right. Well,” she started again, trying not to hear herself speak. “My marriage—”

“We’ll do tests,” he said, suddenly relaxing his posture. He smiled and gave her his card. He had decided that he didn’t want to hear. “Call me if you think of anything else, or if something happens.”

She studied the card without comprehension. “What could happen?”

“Nothing,” he said, unreassuringly. “Nothing can happen. This is probably nothing, Mrs. Harriman. If I need anything, I’ll call.”

EVERY WEEKDAY
Marshall rose at his usual time, put on a suit, and left the apartment with the kids, if it was his day to bring them to preschool, or without them, if it wasn’t. He went
to Borough Hall and took whatever train into Manhattan was running. He exited with the other passengers at the first stop downtown, walked over to Ground Zero, and looked in at the cleanup. He wasn’t sure why he was there: he was drawn to the spectacle, he supposed, the cranes and the trucks, or perhaps he was simply attached to the habits of his morning commute. His usual coffee and bagel guy, who had lost his truck in the rubble, had come back with a new truck. Marshall would have his breakfast alongside the firemen and construction workers. The mornings were uniformly, monotonously fine. And then he would spend the rest of the day in the streets, looking hard into other people’s faces.

He had no plan nor specific direction. Some days he remained downtown, shuffling along the shadowed, narrow streets, which even in this straitened time a month after the attacks churned with people. They churned too with commerce and history. Other days he walked to midtown. He spent hours in Barneys without buying anything. He went into bookstores and ran his fingertips along the spines of books he would never read. Sometimes he crossed back into Brooklyn over the bridge. One day he discovered that simply walking east, through neighborhoods as foreign as Mazar-e Sharif, you could reach Nassau County by late afternoon.

In some of these hours, on some of these days, he was so consumed by grief he could barely take another step forward. He would stand on a randomly selected street corner and think of Joyce and how thoroughly their lives had been ruined. What had he done to her? Why did he deserve this? Why did she hate him so?

But these questions occupied only a few hours, hours in which the events of September 11 had vanished from human memory. In other hours he was keenly aware that he was living in October 2001, under a wartime regime, traversing a battlefield terrain, in a city that bore the standard of one civilization
under attack by another.
This
civilization comprised Barneys, the
Times,
MetroCards, a raven-haired woman in tears standing in the street hailing a cab, yellow cabs, mojitos, divorce lawyers, and Derek Jeter, the elements in constant commotion and collision with each other. It was a civilization defined by the phenomenon of collision and consequent phenomena: he was in collision too, with every unfamiliar face and sight that presented itself on the sidewalk, each encounter generating another observation, thought, or idea about something or other. That autumn Marshall was buffeted within a maelstrom of ideas. Yes, it was a very fine autumn, this was a very fine day, the sky a pulsing, lucid membrane and beyond it something too wonderful to even speak about. He bought himself a midmorning lunch, a hot dog with mustard and relish.

Marshall had lived in New York for years and had never by chance met on the street, beyond the immediate surroundings of his home and office, a single person he knew. The city was too large, its citizens’ movements too unpredictable: here, another distinguishing characteristic of
this
civilization. Marshall didn’t doubt the cultural richness of rural, traditional societies, but he knew that the ideas generated within, say, an Afghan village involved interactions between families, or between cousins and longtime acquaintances, or between an individual and his predictably seasonal natural environment. Those ideas were rooted in history and familiarity. In the city of New York the content of human consciousness was usually drawn from strangeness, the chaotic interplay of individuals: a young man in a wrinkled black tux came down Third Avenue; two teenagers emerged from a cloud of steam alongside an open manhole blocked off by Con Ed trucks; policemen on horseback; a woman in a tight ankle-length skirt, on her cell phone discussing some dangerous male. She announced that she was taking the week off.

At the corner, chewing the frankfurter, whose oily, gamy
texture he barely noticed, Marshall reflected on this promiscuity that threatened the society on which it thrived. He could be killed. His
children
—. Somebody was at work right now. Bacterial grains were being milled and coated with silica to minimize their electrostatic properties. Pentaerythritol tetranitrate was being molded into the bottoms of running shoes. Turbaned men were even now double-clicking obscure, awesome icons.

And yet we lived hardly aware of our connections with each other. We maintained elaborate fantasies of our autonomy, the idiotic belief that we created meaning in ourselves. He understood very well now. The automobile traffic, the subways, the telephone, e-mail, the fuel-laden jetliners dangling above our heads, the U.S. Postal Service: all this held us in a fragile, shimmering, spidery web of meaning. A single act of malice could rip it apart. We held each other’s significance in our hands.

AGAIN JOYCE TOOK
a long shower when she arrived home. She was worried by her encounter with the Federal Bureau of Investigation, of course, but also intrigued, and she was also consumed by a roaring, elemental avidity that she had not yet explained to herself. Again the heat from the shower was delicious, both soothing and arousing, but the mood it conjured didn’t promote another attempt at masturbation. She uncharacteristically investigated her true sentiments; it was a rare moment in which she had the opportunity to ask herself what she wanted to do. The answer came to her: what she was most in the mood to do this long, empty, anxious day—it was just past noon—was to paint her nails. Yes, she would paint her nails. She finished toweling off and opened the medicine cabinet. From the top shelf, spinning end-over-end, a container of baby powder dropped into her hands.

She captured it cleanly. She
never
bought baby powder; she had read once that talc was suspected of being carcinogenic. She never caught things in midair either. This meant something, she thought.
Johnson and Johnson’s
: well of course it was Johnson and Johnson’s, everyone bought Johnson and Johnson’s, but still—

She heard the door to the apartment open. She immediately turned the lock to the bathroom door, hoping he wouldn’t hear it click.

“Joyce? Are you home?”

Marshall had seen the closed door. Joyce was struck by a bolt of terror, almost knocked down on the tiles by it. She looked at her towel-wrapped self in the half-steamed bathroom mirror, holding the baby powder in her hand. Her mouth was dry and she was dizzy. Shit, her clothes were in the living room. The dog began to howl.

“Joyce?” Marshall repeated.

“Yeah,” she said at last.

“What are you doing home?”

“I’m taking a shower.”

“Now?”

“Free country.”

Thank God! Thank God!
She had brought her pocketbook into the bathroom, with her cell phone and her BlackBerry. How long before he guessed she had discovered the baby powder? Agent Robbins’ card was in her wallet. Marshall was too near for her to use the phone, but the card offered the agent’s e-mail address in the lower left-hand corner. Hardly able to breathe, she listened for Marshall to step away from the door. She didn’t want him to hear her punch the keys.

Snuffles was howling.
Walk him,
she prayed. Marshall moved away from the door. Clicking the BlackBerry with her thumb-nail, she wrote in the subject line: “urgent anthrax.”

The dog had stopped howling, but Joyce was sure that Snuffles and Marshall were still in the apartment. She held the baby powder in one hand and the BlackBerry in the other, staring at both before placing them carefully on the vanity. She closed the lid to the toilet and sat on it. She wondered if Marshall was suspicious. He shouldn’t have left the baby powder in the medicine cabinet; he should have thrown it in the trash—in the street, in the Bronx. He was possibly realizing his mistake at this very moment. At the same time, Agent Robbins was very possibly not at his computer, not checking his e-mail. He could be eating lunch. She imagined him in the FBI cafeteria, his laminated identification badge swinging from his jacket as, sighing, he placed on his tray a bowl of vegetable soup. He took a piece of bread with it and would finish neither. He was anxious, he was frustrated. He was probably not thinking of her. He must have done a dozen swabs that morning. But they had made some kind of connection. It was not necessarily a romantic connection; very likely he was attached, or too dedicated to his work to get attached. But it would not be useless right now, not useless at all, for her to have a friend. And it
could
have been a romantic connection, there had been heat in those dark eyes, anything was possible. And meanwhile she
needed
him, right now. He needed her to break this case, and she needed him to get her out of the bathroom. How often did he check his mail? She checked hers. There was nothing.

She heard Marshall and Snuffles moving through the living room and Marshall’s low murmurs to the dog. They weren’t
going out. She would have heard the rustle of the leash and Snuffles’ four-legged tap dance of expectation on the parquet. A plastic dish scraped against the slate-tiled kitchen floor; even through the closed door the sound irritated her. Marshall was feeding the dog.

How long could she remain in the bathroom? Joyce tried to calm herself and prepare for a long wait. Marshall had gone away. Good. She stood to rearrange the towel and left it off for a moment to view herself in the mirror, which was still obscured by steam in parts. It wasn’t a bad body, no, not for a thirty-five-year-old mother of two, especially above the waist. Lovely breasts. Nice, soft skin; slender ankles. Now she looked at herself hard, but from an imaginative distance. She willed herself to see her naked body through Agent Robbins’ eyes. His eyes were by turns mournful, lonely, thoughtful, generous, and predatory.

She heard Marshall’s steps. She checked the lock again. He said, “Joyce, are you coming out? I have to use the john.”

That was what her marriage was like: this bathroom. She had been locked in this tiny, humid, windowless room for years, trying to protect herself from a madman.

She said, “Go to Roger and Linda’s.”

It was a poisonous remark. She recalled—and now so would he—the evening years ago when their entire apartment building had lost its water supply for several hours and they had gone to Roger and Linda’s new, just-painted, unfurnished coop three blocks away to brush their teeth and wash. It had been a weekday night and they all had work the following morning. So what: this was before kids. They consumed two packs of cigarettes and several bottles of wine that night, ordered in pizza, and sat on the floor in a circle, talking nearly all the way to dawn. Their eight feet and legs had knocked against each other from time to time. Joyce remembered the paint’s lingering aroma. At one point she had stretched out on her back,
stared at the ceiling, and allowed the conversation to wash over her. At that moment she had thought how lucky she was to have these stylish and witty friends and such a clever, go-getting husband, and to be young and bright and living in New York. And then these friends had betrayed her, persuaded by Marshall to take his side against her.