A Disorder Peculiar to the Country (7 page)

“Joyce?” Marshall’s voice was hardly inflected. He was restraining himself. Because he knew she had found the baby powder or because he didn’t?

“Go to Roger and Linda’s,” she repeated. She grabbed one of the towels and covered her face with it, pressing hard against her eyes so that she wouldn’t start sobbing. Marshall went away again.

She checked her mail again, and there it was, Re: urgent anthrax, from Robbins, Agent Nathaniel. She clicked on it but only a blank screen came up. She scrolled down and found a lengthy legal admonishment warning against unauthorized use of the message. She returned to the menu and tried calling up the message once more. It was still without text.

Marshall came back. She heard him pacing near the door.

“C’mon, Joyce,” Marshall said, his voice both pleading and exasperated. “I need to use the john. Badly. Very badly. Okay? Joyce?”

Joyce stared at the BlackBerry. Another message arrived from Agent Robbins. It too was blank. Shit. The third message had text, finally, but consisted of a single letter:

H

“Joyce?”

“Go away,” she said.

“Joyce?”

“What?”

He didn’t respond. She wasn’t sure he was still there. She leaned forward, listening. And then he said:

“Joyce, are you all right?”

Her mouth fell open and she stared at the place in the door from where the question had originated. He thought she was sick. Perhaps he thought she was even suicidal, and perhaps that was true, she was. She had thought more than once about cutting her wrists in the bath. There was genuine concern in his voice. It was like recognizing an old friend in a crowd.

“I’m fine,” she said. It came out harder than she intended.

She heard him stay in place. He didn’t speak. She could picture him now: his lips pursed, his fingers snagged at his front pockets. He too was staring at the door. She regretted her tone. The question had been asked sincerely and she wished to be civil. Maybe she was wrong about the baby powder; maybe she was wrong about everything.

His next question was asked in evident pain:

“Is there someone with you?”

“Yeah,” she snapped. “A fireman.”

“Joyce—”

“Go away.”

He did go away; she hadn’t expected him to. She put her ear to the door. He was doing something in the kitchen, moving a chair, laying out dishes on the counter. Then there was a series of explosive, hydraulic sounds. With a start, she realized what they were: he was defecating into the kitchen sink. She fell back to her place on the closed toilet seat and closed her eyes. How did they get here, to this shameful point? Had this moment been predetermined by the inborn flaws in their characters? Or had their marriage been destroyed by chance, by external events and fortuities that had reconfigured their personalities and made them profoundly, ridiculously, disgustingly incompatible? They didn’t even have a garbage disposal. She heard him running water.

After a while he came back.

“Come out, Joyce,” he said. He sounded exhausted. He might have been in tears. “Come out now. Do you want me to bring you your clothes?”

“Don’t touch my clothes.”

“What do you want then?”

“I want you to go away. What do
you
want?”

He said, “I want to know what you’re doing in the bathroom. You’ve been in there more than an hour.”

“Go away.”

“Open it. Open it
now
.”

He was trying the knob. It was an old door, with a loose, rust-spattered lock. It was probably one of the few prewar artifacts left in the apartment. They had never replaced it because they had supposed—without actually talking about it—that the kids would eventually contrive to lock themselves in. They had assumed they would have to force it open, but now the mechanism held. Marshall began pulling and pushing the door violently, rattling the screws. Joyce shrieked.

“Come out!” he bellowed. He gave the door a powerful punch. Everything in the bathroom was shaken by the blow. The container of baby powder tumbled off the vanity onto the tile, spilling and testifying to its anomalous presence in the household. Of course those
g
’s were his. Everything in Marshall’s sad, twisted life pointed to his guilt. Had the container’s clatter reached him?

“Leave me alone!” she cried. She picked up the container, twisted it shut, and put it in her bag.

He pounded against the door again. He was certain to break the lock or the entire door. This was a man who had just crapped in the kitchen sink.

“Joyce!”

“You’ll be sorry.”

“I can’t be any sorrier than I am now,” he said.

He was working the knob back and forth. It was coming loose. She desperately checked her messages. There was another from Agent Robbins. She opened it—and this one had a full text:

“I swear, Joyce,” Marshall was yelling. “I’m calling my lawyer. The agreement calls for each of us to have full access to the bathroom, the kitchen, and the TV. Do you hear me?”

“Go away!”

“Don’t think I’m going to forget this!”

She said, “That would never have occurred to me.”

A screw fell from one of the hinges. She stared at the screen, not even hearing Marshall. She ran her thumb feverishly over the BlackBerry’s keys. She wrote back:

Marshall started banging on the door again—a steady drumbeat. Joyce ignored it and launched the message into the ether. She calmly rewrapped her towel, taking care to make it as neat and prim as possible. She looked at her face in the mirror and brushed away the signs of upset. One of her contacts had slid off-center and she blinked a few times to put it right.

“Joyce, I’m calling my lawyer! I have the phone in my hand! I’m dialing!”

She breathed deeply and forced a smile at the mirror, only to reassure herself, and then she just as forcefully took it away.

“Okay, okay,” she said.

She opened the door. Marshall did indeed have his phone, holding it in the air like a loaded pistol. His face was flushed and he had allowed his shirt to come halfway out of his pants. He looked perfectly capable of terrorizing the city.

“Can’t a person have some privacy?” she said quietly. “I’m going to ask my lawyer about
that
.”

And then she scooped her clothes from the couch and went into the kids’ room to change.

B
ACK WHEN JOKES
were made, a running joke in their household was that neither Marshall nor Joyce could properly pronounce or spell the vowel-packed name of their doctor, a burly sad-eyed general practitioner from some mysterious country of the East. “I’m going for a checkup with Dr. Mouiwawaa—” Marshall would begin, and Joyce would giggle. Before she had children Joyce had come down with bronchitis three winters in a row, but otherwise they saw him only once every several years, when he would take their blood pressure, check their urine, and listen to their hearts, which had not yet shown signs of breaking, and write scrips for blood tests that they often put off until the week before their next checkups. The doctor hardly ever spoke to either. They were unsure whether he recognized them from one visit to the next.

The surgical thread in Marshall’s scalp had been stitched and removed at the local emergency room, but he felt compelled to see his own physician when a strange condition inflamed the right side of his body, running all the way from mid-thigh to his lower abdomen. The skin had become painfully tender and the center of the rash was moist and scaly. The doctor’s examination was brief.

“How long have you had it?”

“About a week and a half. It started three days after September 11.” The doctor looked at him blankly and Marshall was embarrassed. Everyone was dating everything now from September 11, regardless of whether they or anyone they knew had been at Ground Zero—when was that going to stop? Marshall explained, “I was there. In the World Trade Center. I escaped.”

The doctor bunched his eyebrows and frowned. “Really?” he said, momentarily disbelieving. “How did you escape?”

Marshall preferred not to speak about the terrorist attacks and had spoken very little about them with other people, but he understood that September 11 was now part of his medical history. He told the doctor everything that had happened from the moment the first plane hit the twin towers, omitting only the mention of Lloyd, the man who had fled the buildings with him and been killed. That little incident, of no significance to anyone, he kept to himself as a secret part of himself. Marshall parceled out the rest of his account in small, concise pieces, in case he was giving too much detail, while the doctor interrupted from time to time, his interest growing: “Where was that?” “And then what?” “And what did that feel like?” In the waiting room patients were accumulating.

When he was finished, the doctor shook his head. “Well, that was something terrible, Mr. Harriman. Now you know what it’s like to live in history.”

Marshall wondered if he could put his pants back on. He was sitting on an examination table with a paper sheet over his privates. “Do you think the rash has something to do with it?”

The doctor rubbed his face thoughtfully. “All sorts of debris products were put in the air when the towers came down: asbestos, PCBs, dioxin…Toxic material, or something you may
be allergic to. Perhaps it’s an infection. I’ll write you a prescription for an antibiotic. Come back in a week. Give it air and don’t let it chafe. If it gets worse, call me. Here’s my service number.”

“Could it be contagious?”

He shrugged. “Does your wife have symptoms?”

“I was thinking about my kids. I have two, four and two years old. They seem fine.”

The doctor nodded his big, bald head. “That’s right, I remember: a girl and a boy.” Marshall smiled, gratified that he remembered. “No, I wouldn’t worry unless you see something. And if your wife’s okay—”

“I don’t know,” Marshall blurted. “I wouldn’t know. We’re not talking, we’re not sleeping together. We’re getting divorced. We’re virtually separated except I’m still living in the apartment. She wants to force me out and then charge me with abandonment, or something like that. It’s been the worst year of my life.”

He threw up his hands, stricken by bewilderment. This was even more painful to speak about than September 11. His gaze was imploring.

“Well,” the doctor said gravely. His forehead darkened like a thundercloud. “She always seemed a bit high-strung.”

Marshall bobbed his head in agreement, but he was so surprised by the doctor’s remark he could hardly speak. Commenting on the personality of another patient must have been against every principle of professional ethics. This lapse, by a distinguished physician with a Clinton Street brownstone and a wall of degrees, could have been provoked only by the most extreme and obvious circumstances.
High-strung?
Of course Joyce was high-strung. Marshall had always known it. Now he had received expert confirmation.

He had never before left a medical office feeling so satisfied. He closed the door behind him and, standing on the top step of the hall stairway, turned to look at the doctor’s
nameplate. The letters in the name swam in front of his eyes, a hydra of vowels in a pool of murky consonants. There was what seemed to be a mid-syllable hyphen and two
q
’s flagrantly
u
-less. Marshall put his lips together, accomplishing the name’s initial
m
-sound. He made a soft, feminine moan, trying to breathe life into the characters that followed. It was impossible. Nor would he ever succeed in recalling this specific arrangement of letters. He frowned and went on his way.

The inflammation didn’t respond to the antibiotics and within a few days its edges had become painfully itchy. “Don’t scratch,” the doctor warned at their next appointment, prescribing an ointment. Over the next month they tried several treatments on the rash, which hardly diminished. They talked, mostly about September 11; Marshall waited for the doctor to issue another observation about his wife. None came, as if the word “high-strung” had adequately dispatched her. The doctor’s limping, doe-eyed assistant—his daughter, it turned out—often brought the two men small sweet cups of tea, a regular service at the doctor’s first medical clinic, in Kunduz, Afghanistan, before the Soviet invasion. While they sipped, the doctor described his family’s terrifying yearlong passage to America, through Iran and Pakistan. The girl had been hurt by a land mine. After being told this, Marshall would have been embarrassed to ask him how to pronounce his name.

Looking for razor blades in the drugstore one afternoon, he impulsively purchased a container of baby powder. He doused himself with the talc every morning for a week and the rash finally disappeared. He returned for another follow-up visit anyway. He found ease in the brownstone and its muted, dimly lit waiting room. The doctor impressed him with his sobriety and quiet heroism. The daughter smiled shyly. He was congratulated for his pink and healthy skin.

“I wish talc would work on my other problems,” Marshall said sourly.

The doctor made a clucking sound. He was very much a New Yorker in dress and comportment. His accent was mid-Atlantic. The clucking sound, however, was unmistakably foreign. “No resolution yet?”

“I’m afraid not.”

“Be strong, my friend,” he said, smiling more warmly than he ever had before in Marshall’s company. “You’ve survived worse.”

The doctor put his hand firmly on Marshall’s shoulder. Marshall had hoped his remark would elicit a personal comment. He could have remained there, sitting on the examination table, for the rest of the day.

THIS WAS
the month the U.S. pressed its military campaign against the Taliban, using intense aerial bombardment and its special forces to assist the Northern Alliance, which, after some initial hesitation, began its march toward Kabul and laid siege to Kunduz and Kandahar. Every day brought news of another U.S. raid; also, of missed targets and slain civilians. Joyce studied the maps in the
Times
intently, so that she soon knew the country’s arid, high-relief terrain, swept by an ocher Martian dust, and how its ethnic groups, the Pashtuns, Tajiks, Hazaras, and Uzbeks, were distributed across it. She located the big cities, as well as the Taliban and anti-Taliban strongholds outside and within them. She attended the warfare’s fits and starts, which were dependent on shifting alliances, treachery, and the question of whether the U.S. would need to commit ground troops. She savored the beauty of the Afghan people who stared into the cameras: blue-eyed, dark-browed, sultry, fierce. The women wrapped themselves in purple and maroon robes, gold-threaded kerchiefs, and lacy
paisley scrims. One evening when Marshall had the kids Joyce went through her jewelry box and found an old Middle Eastern bracelet, inlaid with lapis lazuli, which she had often worn until her first pregnancy, when her wrists had swelled. Now she fastened it to her right ankle and took herself to a local Afghan restaurant for dinner. She ordered a fragrant yellow rice and lamb dish,
qabili
. It was delicious. A large American flag hung above the entrance to the kitchen and red, white, and blue car-dealer pennants garlanded the front door, but she felt continents away, and also exotic and gritty-real.

She was fascinated by the Afghan warlords and the inconstancy of their allegiances. No militia was immune to betrayal or an invitation to a new alliance; the blood-oath affiliations of entire families and clans were shifted without their members’ awareness. Great sums of cash—American dollars, in twenties—were airlifted into the mountains. Top-of-the-line military equipment and transport were liberally dispensed. But the militias never made it to their appointed posts, or if they did, they refused to fire their weapons. Their chiefs fingered their opponents as Taliban only to settle old scores, directing the U.S. military to bomb civilian convoys, schools, and, just this week, a wedding party. The bride, the groom, their brothers, a sister, and several family elders had been killed, eliciting oaths from the grieving, seething survivors: blood for blood, forever. Real Taliban and al-Qaeda melted into the population. To ensure the Afghans’ cooperation in liberating their own country, the Americans were forced to look the other way as opium production soared; they knew that the same Afghans would eventually have to be paid off to curtail it.

As Joyce became aware of the particularities of Afghan life through newspaper and television reports, she saw that Afghans hardly related to each other as individual men and
women. They were each more significantly part of a clan, and each clan’s relations with other clans operated through fundamental calculi of conflict. Entire decades of Afghan history were explained by simple communitive equations like “the friend of my friend is my friend,” “the enemy of my enemy is my friend,” “the friend of my enemy is my enemy,” and so on. She took note of the position of Afghan women, observing that they were not merely property, but valuable objects with mystic attributes. The Afghan woman’s sexuality, for example, was a vessel that retained the honor of her father, brothers, and husband. It was handled gingerly, swathed and cushioned in the bubble wrap of tradition. A man could be ruined by a female relative’s behavior or even by another man’s behavior toward her. In Faryab province earlier this month, Pashtun raiding parties had attacked several Tajik villages only to rape, the forced sex act (perhaps performed, she thought, not much less romantically than among Tajik husbands and wives) promising to disgrace marriages, families, and clans for generations. In Afghanistan sex wasn’t “fun” or an expression of “love”; it was a weapon.

Yet Joyce felt increasingly drawn to the Afghan people, for their beauty and primitive dignity, even if that dignity seemed contradicted by their brutality, untrustworthiness, and venality. It was commonly held that September 11 had changed America forever. Joyce wondered if the real transformation would come now, in America’s close embrace with warlords and peasants, fundamentalists and mercenaries. Would American wealth and the expediencies of its foreign policy corrupt the Afghan people? Or were we being corrupted by their demands for cash, their infidelities, and their contempt for democratic ideals?

Meanwhile her life hadn’t changed. She was still not divorced and she had lost hope of ever being divorced; or, more precisely, her marriage was a contest governed by one of Ze
no’s paradoxes, in which divorce was approached in half steps and never reached. After the long post-9/11 interregnum, Joyce and Marshall had resumed meeting with the lawyers, who themselves seemed wearied by their disputes despite the cornucopia of billable hours. Now Marshall had come up with a new tactic: worry for the children, as if his previous concern for the children had ever been sufficient to allow him to spend time alone with them without putting on the TV, or to remember to bring home milk for them without being specifically asked, or to take them for a walk while she cleaned the apartment, or to ask his company for a raise so that they could save a little money in advance of the financial Armageddon of private school, or to be a good husband, or to be a good person. Marshall claimed now that Joyce’s intransigence was damaging the kids. Before she could deny that she was being intransigent—after all, for her to be intransigent required an exactly equal and opposite intransigence on his part, a slightly complicated thought that she wasn’t able to fully articulate at the moment—the lawyers had moved on to the question of how they would establish how much damage she had done.

The phone rang. The kids were on the floor, playing, in their fashion. Viola was trying to get Victor to give her a truck he was using mostly to drive up and down a bump in the rug. Victor had refused; Viola had complained; viewing this as an instructive moment, Joyce had told them to resolve the issue between themselves. She clicked down the live television report from behind the Northern Alliance lines and picked up the receiver.

“Mrs. Harriman!”

It was a friendly voice, a familiar voice. It belonged to a man and he sounded delighted to be speaking with her.

“Yes?”

“It’s Jerry Boyd!”

Jerry Boyd. The name fell into a well, but there was no iden
tifying echo in response. It sounded like somebody she should have known. Clients, colleagues, old friends…She flipped her mental Rolodex. His voice was optimistic and smoothly modulated.

“Jerry Boyd,” she repeated, trying to recall whether she had ever spoken the name before.