Due Preparations for the Plague. Janette Turner Hospital

to Blockbuster, then watch another movie with them (yes, he will stay with them in the room), and then they will all go to sleep, to sleep, perchance to dream, and therefore no, he thinks he will avoid sleep for a night or ten, but if Elizabeth does not answer, he will surely have to pace, he will surely have to do violent push-ups on the living room carpet, he will surely have to take the children to the gym at the Y.

      “Elizabeth,” he says. “Thank God. This is Lowell.”

      “Oh, Lowell. Hi.”

      “Are you all right?”

      “I suppose so, more or less. I can’t seem to … I feel strange, mostly. Strange things have been happening.”

      “Strange how?”

      “Oh, just … it’s nothing, really. How are your children?”

      “Fine. They’re fine. Well, Rowena thinks I’m a health hazard for them right now, and she’s right, of course. Jason wets his bed all the time.”

      “Oh dear, I’m so sorry. And you? How about you?”

      “At this moment, very shaky,” he says. “Actually, at this moment, I feel as though …”

      “Lowell?”

      “… set up for something.” Yes, that was it. “One of his pawns again. He hasn’t stopped.”

      “What’s happened?”

      “You asked me about Sirocco, remember? And Salamander? I’ve found out who they are. Should’ve realized. They’re code names for secret agents.” He can hear an intake of breath. “Elizabeth?” He hears a click and then her line goes dead. He dials back immediately and gets her answering machine.

      Now he wishes more urgently than ever to be back at yesterday.

      He half expects the blue Nike bag to have vanished, but it is there, under the bed. He stashes it inside a plaid pillowcase and hides the whole thing at the back of his linen closet with another pillow in front of it, and in front of that he places a small stack of folded towels.

      His phone rings and he stumbles to reach it before Amy does.

      “Lowell?” Elizabeth’s voice trembles. “I’m calling from the pay phone at the gas station near me. A few days ago, two men came to the house. They said they were from Security, and when I asked what kind of security, which agency, they said national. They said they just had a few questions to ask, but they were here for hours. It was grueling. It was like Mather was a suspect in some crime and that made me a suspect too, or an accomplice or something. I mean, they didn’t say that, but that’s how it felt. I’m probably being paranoid, but I think my phone might be tapped. That’s why I didn’t want you to, you know, say any more. I’ll try to call back later, but don’t call me, okay?”

      “Elizabeth,” he says. But she has already hung up.

      Amy is pulling at her hair. “I want to call Mommy,” she says.

      The phone rings again and Lowell leaps at it. “Lowell?” a woman’s voice says. “This is Samantha. Can we talk about the hijacking?”

      Lowell hangs up. “Don’t answer that,” he says to Amy when it rings again.

      “Look, just hear me out, okay?” Samantha says to his answering machine. Lowell closes his eyes. He believes he could sleep standing up. Exhaustion, he thinks, is about running out of energy to resist. “I was on Air France 64, which gives me some sort of right, okay? I was six years old and both my parents were killed. This is just so you’ll understand why I’m obsessive about it. Okay?”

      She seems to be waiting for him to pick up, but he simply stares at the blinking light on his machine.

      “Thanks for not cutting me off,” she says. “I’ve been burying myself in Freedom of Information applications, anything and everything declassified, which is precious little, needless to say …” She takes a deep breath. “I’m certain that American Intelligence had information before it hap—” The digital timer chops her off midword, but Lowell already knows that Samantha is not easily deterred. She calls again. “We were disposable pawns for a sting operation, but now we’re chickens coming home to roost. Just think about it, okay, because you probably hold clues that you don’t even know you hold.”

      Lowell pushes the erase button on his machine.

      Amy says, “I want to call Mommy.”

      “Yes,” Lowell says. “Okay. Perhaps that’s best.”

      While Amy talks to her mother, Lowell sits on the sofa, Jason in his arms, and stares at the wall.

Book II

       FOG

      Fear death? To feel the fog in my throat,

      the mist in my face …

      Robert Browning

1. Salamander

      I spy.

      With my manifold eye.

      This is Salamander’s morning canticle.

      He leans in close to the bathroom mirror and his words come back lush, fully orchestrated, thick with toothpaste and shower fog. He squints and sees galaxies: bright floating points, moons, multiple planetary rings. He has the eyes of a fly or a god. The things that he knows, weighty matters of life and death—not natural death, or swift death—orbit his consciousness, but he must not speak of them.

      This is the way Samantha imagines him. She has constructed him, like a trick question, from undeleted half lines in documents. Morning exhausts him, she imagines. His eyes, in the bathroom mirror, would be bloodshot. Dreams, dispersing though still opaque, would cloud the room. He would not recall the dreams, though they would leave a layer of unease that he would scrub at under the shower and slough off.

      In the trade, and to those who do research in previously classified files, he is known as Salamander, or S, and that—for the time being, and to Samantha’s chagrin—will have to suffice.

      Salamander: a mythical creature having the power to endure fire without harm; an elemental being inhabiting flames in the theory of Paracelsus; any of numerous amphibians superficially resembling lizards but scaleless and covered with a soft moist skin and breathing by gills in the larval stage.

      He is all of the above, Samantha believes, closing the dictionary. She imagines him in front of his bathroom mirror. He would watch himself without blinking as reptiles do.

      Unobtrusive, soft as a snake, he slithers under and around many lives. Around Samantha’s life. Around Lowell’s. Around yours. Around mine. We deposit data ceaselessly. He gathers it: phone conversations, e-mails, airline tickets, credit card purchases, income and taxation information, websites visited, buying habits, tastes and eccentricities. He has photographs: from banks, retail stores, elevators, public bathrooms, pedestrian crossings, parking lots, airports.

      Those whom he chooses to observe are known to him intimately.

      Their nerve systems are digitally mapped.

      As flies to wanton boys are the chosen to Salamander.

      When it pleases him, he nudges them in this direction or that, according to his game plan. He makes up the rules as he goes.

      Samantha is one of his subjects. In the beginning, this was inadvertent, but then he became obsessed with her and she with him.

      She deposits data. He gorges on it.

      She studies the patterns of his gorging, and posits him.

      She