Due Preparations for the Plague (25 page)

There is not much time left, Dr. Reuben. I know that.

I have selected you as the midwife, so to speak, to deliver something to my son. This is not because I trust you. It is not because I
don’t
trust you, I hasten to add, but I know what I’m up against. I know you are watched and followed. I know your files on me will probably disappear. This is not without precedent in recent political history, is it? the theft of psychiatric files. For this reason, even to you, I cannot speak frankly, but I must speak passionately.

I have only this one thing of value to leave behind—the truth.

All my planning, including my offering myself up to you as a patient, is geared toward this single end: the preservation of what I am leaving behind.

Truth will out
, I believe that, even though not one living person can be trusted as its bearer. You will think my lack of trust is part of my condition, and it
is
part of my condition, of course, but my condition is not one that is listed in your
Dictionary of Mental Disorders
. I see by the twitch of a nerve at the edge of your mouth that you are convinced otherwise. I let that go. I can’t trust you. Nevertheless, I believe you will be sufficiently constrained by professional and ethical requirements to carry out my last will and testament to the letter.

I want you to hand-deliver to my son the key to a locker. This locker will contain a certain package.

I do not have much time.

Tonight, I will need to see Anna, and then—

Have you any conception, Dr. Reuben, of the physical pain of moral torment?

It needs leeches, Dr. Reuben. It needs to be bled. It needs flogging …

I’m sorry, what was I …?

There are certain things, Dr. Reuben, that once seen …

Scipio wept at Carthage, did you know?

I can put my finger, now, on the moment where I should have … on the crucial moment. But the trouble is, we don’t recognize that moment until it is past. I should have stood there with Nimrod. That should have been the turning point.
Here I stand
, I should have said,
against unacceptable risks, against unconscionable collateral damage.
But if I had said that then, I’d be where Nimrod is now.

Would we have achieved anything?

Could anyone have stopped Sirocco? Can anyone stop him?

And then there is the major problem of the evidence that cannot be put in code for its own protection. How can I keep the videotapes safe? I’ve been obsessed with this question. We do not yet know how to code such things. We know how to interfere with transmission, how to scramble signals … but we don’t know how to preserve them. We don’t know how to damage-proof a tape.

The originals I had to surrender thirteen years ago, but the copies that I made, the illegal copies …

What a poor frail vessel nylon tape is, magnetic tape, when what I need is a Rosetta Stone to go through time.

Let me ask you something, Dr. Reuben.

Have you ever worn …? No, of course not. Of course you have not. But I make the recruits wear the masks and decontamination suits for six hours straight while they unload heavy equipment, not that six hours will give us any reliable gauge of anything much, but that’s the maximum permitted in training routine. Wipes out half of them, and I’m speaking of the cream of the crop, perfect physical and mental specimens. Hallucinations, drowning in their own sweat and vomit. It’s like being wrapped alive in your shroud.

It’s a … it’s not a fate that …

Needs to be bled. Needs flogging.

I will need to see Anna tonight.

Are you taping me, Dr. Reuben? If you’re taping me, I want to say this for the record: Sirocco is not the worst of it. The worst is
seeing
and not intervening to
stop.
The worst is that this happened under hi-tech surveillance. The worst is those who watched and monitored and voted:
acceptable collateral damage.

After certain kinds of knowledge, it is not possible to …

Will you give me your word?

I don’t know how to impress on you the
importance
, given that I am automatically tongue-tied, given that certain words, if I were merely to say them, would damage the chances of the evidence being preserved. If there is a single word that I wish I could chisel into stone, it is
hostages
, but I dare not say it. I dare not risk saying it.

I think, Dr. Reuben, that this will be the last time I see you.

I’m too big a risk now, and I have to be erased. I know the rules, and I’ve always played by them until now.

I know I don’t have much time.

I want to give you this key. Will you give me your word and your hand in return?

The name of the slough was Despond.

John Bunyan,
Pilgrim’s Progress

For what is water … but a liquid form of Nothing? And what are the Fens … but a landscape which, of all landscapes, most approximates to Nothing? … Every Fenman suffers now and then the illusion that the land he walks over is
not there …

Graham Swift,
Waterland

On the dock of the Saltmarsh Motel, under cover of dark, Samantha and Lowell half push, half pull the boat through sea grass and mud. “We’ll pay cash,” Samantha says. “That way, we leave no trail.”

“Have we got enough?”

Between them, they have fifty-seven dollars.

“Should be plenty,” Sam says, “for off-season. There won’t be anyone else here.”

“Forty-nine ninety-five,” the proprietor says. “Cash on the barrel, half price, and no questions asked. Never get no one this time of year.”

“We got lost in the marsh,” Sam says. “Staying up the bay from here.”

The proprietor is an old leather-faced fisherman who hires himself out to guests as an oystering guide in the season. “Marsh is tricky,” he admits. “You can’t go messin’ around with ’er, you gotta know ’er.”

“I figure we’ll find our way out of the channels by daylight,” Sam says. “Do you have a room with a VCR?”

“All our rooms got VCRs. And digital. Got our own video library over there.” He jerks his thumb at two rows of shelves beneath the window. “You seen
Air Force One
? No? Seen it six times, my personal pick. Extra two bucks to rent.”

“Thanks. We’ll take your recommendation.” Sam hands him the extra two dollars and takes
Air Force One
from the video rack.

The proprietor gives her a key attached to a plastic card. “Room 8,” he says. “To the left when you go out the door.”

In Room 8, they draw the curtains. Lowell slides the backpack from his shoulders and Sam sees that the drawstring bag inside it is made from an old pillowcase, a child’s pillowcase, sprinkled with castles and knights-in-armor and maidens with long tresses who watch from towers.

There are six tapes, numbered in black felt marker from one through six. When they open Cassette Number One, they find a thick letter inside it, instead of a tape.

“That’s my father’s handwriting,” Lowell says.

Like Dante, I have traveled down to a terrible place, the pit of nightmare, but my guide was not Virgil. I had no guide. The wood is blacker than dark, and more dense. It is impenetrable. Worse than that: no footstep is safe because the ground is soft and gives way. Funnels of quicksand wait like wet-lipped mouths.

There was—there is—no way out.

All I can do is hold up a dim lantern to show you where I have been. In all fairness I should also caution you not to look. I should urge you to draw back from this dread quagmire. Sucking foulness will cling to you. This is the worst journey you will take.

I am condemned to be your tour guide. We will travel down through the circles of Sirocco’s inferno as he choreographed them. Choreographed? Choreographed and recorded. That is the sort of sick thing Sirocco does. He is a gifted designer of the custom-made hell and he enjoys a visual record of his power. I do not doubt that he watches and rewatches his own tapes. He likes to imagine us watching.

No one should underestimate the devious intelligence of Sirocco. I am, from time to time, momentarily flattered that he went to such lengths, to such extraordinarily
personal
lengths, in maneuvering certain people onto his chosen flight and into the hostage bunker: my wife, my daughter, the man my daughter loved (a man whom Sirocco saw, inevitably, as a sexual rival; a man, therefore, whom it gave him great pleasure to smash).

Did I too not fantasize about punishing my wife Isabella?

Did I not wish to make Charron pay for his stubborn defiance and pride?

Did I not seek to control—lest she be in danger; lest she be a flashpoint of risk—the life of my resentful and prickly daughter who, at the eleventh hour, was saved for breakdown and psychic collapse?

Did I not place all three under surveillance?

I plead guilty.

Such is the malevolent brilliance of Sirocco, who knows how to add guilt and complicity to grief. He could flay a human being alive with the utmost gentleness and finesse.
Today I saw a man flayed
, you might say.
You would not believe how it altered his appearance for the worse
, and yet he reported to his superiors, he filed his reports, he ate lunch and dinner and went to bed and slept and rose and went to his office for many years and married again and kept fearful watch over his son whom he was terrified of losing and filed his reports and kept his secrets and adhered to the code he was sworn to, but he was no longer among the living and he had no skin.

He passed his days and nights in perpetual terror that his son and his saved-but-lost daughter and his young third wife would come to harm. To protect them, he withdrew from them. He withdrew, even, from inside the shell of himself; from me, that is to say, and I from him. We strove to keep our thoughts separate and private. I see him now, beside me, not looking at me: Salamander, encased in ice.

Which of us is writing this confession, I do not know.

Which of us Sirocco most enjoyed playing with, as cat plays with bird, I do not know; but his single-minded dedication to tormenting both of us—his split-twin counterpart in covert operations—sometimes gives comfort for minutes at a time. It surely counts as a credential of sorts, or so I try to convince myself. It confers—it seems to confer—the distinction of hand-to-hand combat with evil. It therefore makes me dare to hope that I am, after all—that perhaps I am—the knight who wears the white plume, and it buttresses my vow to preserve the damning evidence through time. These tapes, I dare to hope, are my Rosetta Stone and my Dead Sea Scrolls.

I cannot ever re-create the horrible effect of receiving Sirocco’s transmissions live, but three of the tapes (those labeled #4, #5, #6) preserve the interminable descent to the seventh circle in real time: for future historians; for those who can bear to watch.

Cassette #1 holds this document.

Cassette #2 is a collage of public footage of newsreel tapes.

Cassette #3, the crucial one, is my edited version of the raw primary evidence. It contains the Last Words. From this tape I have excised the agonies that will not bear watching, I have cut and spliced, I have kept the Illuminations, I have inserted subtitles and I have memorialized the dead. I call it the Decameron tape, and it is my act of propitiation, my rite of mourning, my wailing wall, my monument to those who perished so terribly, my
Kyrie eleison
, my prayer.

It is also my indictment. (The leaden weight of my sins pulls me down.
Oh, I’d leap up to my God
, but no forgiveness is possible. There is no way out.)

Making the Decameron tape is the most important thing I have ever done; preserving it, the most dangerous.

Transmissions came in live from AF 64, and then from the bunker in Iraq. Sirocco had brilliant minds at his disposal, trained to the highest pitch (by us, of course) in information technology, biochemical warfare, and explosives.

Transmissions came in live, and I was by no means the sole monitor.

The first transmission, made available to global news services, was broadcast in a dozen countries, including ours, without censorship. Why has this footage disappeared? It has not, in fact, disappeared; it has been
elided
by subsequent editorial construction and slant. Its impact has been diluted. It is history lost; or rather, temporarily mislaid, as history so frequently is. For this reason, I include an exact transcript of Sirocco’s ultimatum, though it is readily available (both visually and in transcript) in public archival footage.

Throughout the twenty-four hours in the bunker, desperate negotiations were being carried on. I record below the transcripts of telephone conversations that took place between myself and those higher in the decision-making process than I.

I knew then, instinctively, that nothing would be done, that there would be a cover-up, that all evidence would be destroyed. I knew, as I replaced the receiver in its cradle, that my own days were numbered from that moment.

It was not long after this that my telephone contact with my own superiors ceased altogether. My calls were not answered. I have never known, of course, what level of the administration my pleas and proposals reached, though I have made hypotheses based on after-effect, and based on the insistence that the tapes be surrendered and destroyed. I have been aware of repeated attempts to search for any possible illegal copy I might have made.

At about the same time that I lost contact with our own people, I also lost contact with Sirocco. The break was abrupt. Both visual and sound transmissions were cut. Perhaps that was ordered and controlled from our end, perhaps from his. I do not know. I do know that the silence of the devil is more alarming than the silence of God because we ask ourselves fearfully: what is the Evil One planning, beyond the range of our ability to listen and observe?