I want to say something to Allah, so I face the east. "Perhaps I am a coward, Great Allah," I whisper. "Perhaps I should feel ready to reach past the Internet and mere images of reality. So if you please, maybe I would like to be a bigger part of reality, as my father would have wished. Perhaps I would like to taste a ballpark frank, view a cathedral, use chopsticks, visit a theme park, wear Gap jeans, smell a Jew, go to school, see a good doctor, eat Kentucky Fry, watch the Yankees, own an ATM card, touch a piano, read the Shakespeare in the English...
"I would like to remember my father's dreams without anguish. I would like to find his courage and take up his course. I would like to visit for him the Angolans, Algerians, Nigerians, British ... Spanish, South Americans, Icelanders, Swedes ... Finlanders, Poles, Norwegians, Russians, Canadians, Texans, Brazilians, Argentineans, Afghans, Australians ... Or perhaps you can supply me with the courage to go to the one place on Earth where they all converge. I suppose that in your ironic ways, Great Allah, you have fulfilled my father's every dream when he went only to one country. Allahu Akbar..."
I raise my head, but in a trance. The great sun is still not mine, though I sense a bigger truth—it belongs to everyone, which might be why I picture it shining brightly on this far-off bad dpi, which contains the fragmented pixels of courage from every country on Earth.
"Great Allah, my father is a fallen, precious memory. Our dreams are in the recycle bin. But if you would be pleased to recover them ... Though there is one other thing: I would like to live to be old. Amin..."
TWENTY-ONE
SCOTT EBERMAN
MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2002
6:30 P.M.
AS DOBBINS PULLED into my street, I decided to stop at the Steckermans' to get Rain a toothbrush. I could see a lot of lights on inside their house. In fact, four cars lined the driveway, which I'd have thought were people coming to my house, except for one thing. They were all say-nothing cars—the types so devoid of personality that they have to be airport rentals.
"What the hell..." I stared. "Those cars belong to USIC people. From, like, Washington or..."
I grabbed the door handle as Dobbins parked.
"I'm going in there. You better let me go by myself," I said. Maybe I could find a way to get info if we didn't overwhelm them. "Go over to our house and tell my uncles I'm right behind you. We'll take this night one step at a time."
Dobbins whisked the keys into his pocket and we headed in separate directions. From the Steckerman porch, I saw maybe six silhouettes behind the drapes in the living room. The front door was locked. I banged, and Alan came so fast that I almost clanged my fist in his noggin. He stepped out and asked what was wrong.
Big secret meeting, yup. I was trying to look after his kid, like I didn't have enough on my plate, and he was acting like he didn't want me in the house.
"Rain wants me to get her something to sleep in. What, do I have to know the USIC secret handshake?"
He looked sheepish as he stuck his head back inside. "Friends! I'd like you to meet my neighbor from across the street!"
He spoke loudly, as if it were a warning, and this houseful of people turned quiet as I came in. They were all dressed in suits. I shook hands numbly all around when Alan introduced me, and I accepted their condolences, which let me know that at least the name Eberman was clear in their minds. I counted six faces, heard one or two more voices in the kitchen, and spotted a man sitting at the head of the dining room table, surrounded by papers. He was talking on two cell phones at once in what sounded like a different language for each phone. He had hair that seemed almost too blond for an adult's, so I leaped to the conclusion he was speaking something like Swedish and Swiss. Sophisticated, yee.
"Sorry to disturb you. I'm collecting a toothbrush and a pair of sweatpants." I clomped up the stairs, went into Rain's bathroom, and grabbed her toothbrush. But before I could come back downstairs, Alan met me in the hallway.
"Scott, if Rain is asking to stay with you guys again tonight, I feel like I ought to say no. You probably need some sleep."
I wasn't sure of how much to say. "It's fine. She keeps Owen sane."
"Well, some of these people might be here until all hours, and she could actually get more sleep if I just leave her alone. How is she right now? And what's happening over at your house?" A look of concern wafted through his general distraction. But I called him on it.
"What's happening at your house?"
"I was supposed to be at a meeting in New York today, but with Rain sick and your mom's service tomorrow, I had them do some flight rearrangement."
My heart melted slightly. Just a routine meeting. So, why the frosty reception?
I rambled, "Look. I know next to nothing about your job, Alan. But if you and your, uh, friends have any idea how some bizarre sickness could take my mother, bounce over nine houses, get the Holmans, then jump back and make Rain and my brother sick ... I think I'm entitled to know."
"Your brother is sick?" Alan forced his fingers through his hair. "Did you see Charlie O'Dell? He said he was going over to your house today."
"He's sending Dr. Godfrey over later, though he's not taking it as seriously as I am. I'm trying to think of the half the town that's been in my house for the past three days without even a snivel. I'm trying to tell myself that two neighborhood deaths of brain aneurysms with flulike symptoms is a coincidence. And most of the town remaining perfectly healthy—that's the evidence. But ... it doesn't make sense."
He put a hand on my shoulder and urged me down the stairs with him. Part of me wanted to take him by the throat, shake him, and scream, What the fuck are all these suits doing here? But the presence of USIC, if related, made even less sense than the presence of an emerging infectious disease. Diseases can't reason. They show up where they show up. And if it's true that terrorists are not exactly psycho, then they would have to understand that Trinity Falls would be a goddamn stupid place to terrorize. If they wanted to start poisoning people with slow-working germs, there would be more satisfying targets up in central Jersey, with its dense New York suburbs and huge industries. South Jersey was crude in comparison—little more than the Pine Barrens, beach sand, and meadow grass stubble.
I wandered back to the living room as Alan went to get Rain's clothes. The blond-haired man at the dining room table was exchanging cell phones with a woman in a blue suit, as if he were finishing one of his calls and jumping right into a third. Another man dropped a cup of coffee on the table in front of him. Sophisticated and important, my local-yokel mind rolled, especially when the cell phone he'd handed to the woman started to ring, and she answered it, saying, "He's talking to them now overseas."
A man came out of the kitchen who hadn't been out here for my introduction, but whose face I recognized. The guy had been standing behind Alan at the televised press conferences about the water-tower testing back in January.
I said, "Imperial ... James Imperial. You're the new director of USIC in Washington."
He shook my hand with polite disinterest. "But we haven't met."
I told him I remembered his face from the television two months ago, and he grinned. "Your memory is that fine-tuned? You want a job?"
I wasn't in the mood to joke around. Alan came back, handed me a bag of clothes, and said, "James, Scott's mother is one of the two women on the street who died."
He seethed in air through clenched teeth. "I'm so sorry. How are you doing?"
I could only nod before Alan went on. "And I've just been informed ... his brother, Rain's good friend, has come down with a flu also..."
James Imperial's Adam's apple bobbed into his necktie so hard that I thought it would stick there. That almost blew me backward. It looked like ... guilt or remorse or responsibility ... but I didn't have much chance to wonder about it. The guy at the dining room table stood up, held both phones out from his ears, and said something to Imperial in Swiss/Swedish/ Whatever.
Imperial turned to me. "He would like to say hello to you and exp
ress his condolences, if you can just wait a minute."
He... Mr. Switzerland looked like the center of attention around here. When Alan said he would get Rain's antibiotics from her bathroom, I didn't follow. I watched the man continue to talk on the second phone, though after a few more foreign phrases, he handed that phone to Imperial. Then, he dashed through the kitchen without saying anything to me.
Imperial kept the foreign conversation going through the cell, so I figured I ought to just wait by the door. I'd kept myself focused enough to be somewhat sane this afternoon, but the past three days had taught me that nightfall could turn it all around, and it was already dark. I'd heard this about grief: that it comes and goes without rhyme or reason but you can count on a train wreck at sundown. My train wrecks had lasted well into the mornings.
The blond-haired man appeared from the kitchen and came right toward me. I'd heard him speak every language under the sun but my own. So I was stunned to hear him say in perfect English with a trace of Boston slang, "Potty break. Sorry. I've accepted every bit of ease that comes with modern electronics, but I still can't use the facilities while I'm on a cell phone."
I figured potty humor might cut my tension. "I can't zip up without dropping the damn thing into the toilet. Been there, done that."
"A man after my own heart." He grinned at the woman who had come up to us along with Imperial. The blond man's eyes grew serious above his smile. "How are you doing? Alan told all of us, of course."
"Good. For the moment." I can rarely say how it is that I know what I know, but I sensed it would be seriously in my best interests to appear on top of my stress. I forced a grin. "How many languages did you just speak on the phone?"
"Uh ... three," he said. "French, Punjabi, and Arabic. The French was my wife. She knows English, but you know the French ... She has to pretend she doesn't."
He laughed easily, so blasé about his French wife and multilingualness.
"So, how many languages do you speak altogether?"
While the others laughed, he groaned, like they had some private joke going, and he said, "Not enough, believe me. Did you know that there are over a hundred languages spoken in the Middle East alone?"
I hadn't known that, but before I could ask more, Alan returned with the prescription and dropped it into the bag.
"Scott, this is the USIC director of operations in Pakistan, who's visiting the states this week. His name is Roger O'Hare."
I knew Alan and I had talked about Pakistan recently, but with my memory falling down, I only remembered one interesting thing.
"Pakistan ... that's where the online informant is who's younger than my brother?" I asked.
"He's talking about the Kid," Alan prompted him. "I told him about that recent Newsweek article that mentioned him."
"Ah, yes. The Kid keeps my life colorful." Roger chuckled, but something seemed amiss. Like his pupils were having a hard time staying on me, and maybe he was going through this small talk as an exercise in discipline or something. I'd say his phone calls were making him nervous.
"So, he's real?" I persisted. "He's really a teenager?"
"He's real, and sixteen. Going on forty-five," he said, maybe too casually. "He loves Drake's, Gatorade, and Bazooka Bubble Gum. And while he's sitting in his uncle's Internet café, busting a gut on Drake's Apple Pies, he'll capture the screen of some bloody, dangerous guys sitting two terminals away from him, and he'll script them for us."
I didn't know what scripting was, but I figured it was some serious part of spying. "Sounds dangerous," I said. "I mean, sixteen and all..." I couldn't help but imagine Owen being in that much of harm's way.
His smile faded. "As Americans, we can't force citizens of other countries to behave in certain ways if they don't want to. If they want to sell us intelligence, all we can usually do is watch their backs as best as we can. But the Kid is being relocated. He's not happy with us, but if he didn't wind up with his head sliced off, his health was about to get him. He's got asthma from hell."
"Asthma?" Why the details of legendary people intrigue us normal folk, I can't say, but sometimes even I am a sucker for it. It was sort of like hearing a locker-room story told by a friend of Shaquille O'Neal's. And I could feel the paramedic in me rising up, too. It makes me twitch to hear about people in third world countries with health problems.
"So ... can he come over here? There's a thousand hospitals in this country that could clear up the worst case of asthma. In fact, we've got a specialist right here in Trinity Falls, Doug Godfrey, who was with a team in Rome that operated on the pope. Why don't you send the Kid to us? He could stay at our house. Doug would take care of him..."
I trailed off, as a polite grin came over his face. "Thanks, Scott. He's still working, so we're keeping his whereabouts under wraps. But I'll be sure and tell him of your generous offer next time I see him. He'll be touched by that" O'Hare stuck his hand out and gave me an exit line. "Listen, you're in our thoughts and prayers, Scott. We'll be sure to keep up with you via Alan."
As for leaving, I felt like I was passing up a smorgasbord of info. Yet, I'd lived across the street from Steckerman for years, and I knew how tight-lipped the FBI was about case information. These USIC guys would be ten times worse.
But the concept of give-and-take was right there for me. I figured I'd play my only card. Surely I wouldn't end up in the slammer before my mom's service and with my brother feeling sick.
I pulled the pieces of paper out of my pocket, and let my eyes fall onto the hieroglyphics and the only discernible English words I could make out. "You guys aren't looking for someone named ... Uri Gulav, are you?"
I could feel the temperature drop about fifty degrees: Paramedic student thinks he can help out USIC. Oh Christ, how do we be polite? A couple of people turned their backs and moved awkwardly to the couch, and Imperial turned and raised his eyebrows in this condescending way.
"No, we're not."
I ignored him, focused on this piece of paper. "You're not looking for an Omar, are you?"
I would have felt utterly stupid, except for one thing: This Roger O'Hare actually stopped dead in his tracks on his way back to the table. His neck did this thing that looked like a one-inch whiplash. He turned around and looked at me.
"Omar..." I looked on the sheet, thinking maybe I ought to shut up, but I couldn't. "...Hokiem. And some phone number. The last three digits are 0324, but I couldn't make out the first three. Must be local, though, because—"
I stopped as O'Hare took the paper from my hand and stared at it. He didn't laugh at the pencil lines running across it or try to call me Dick Tracy. I pointed to the goblet thing with the eight lines running down. They looked almost like an upside-down sunrise from a kid's drawing. And one of the lines was crossed over by a thicker line. I mentioned I thought it looked like a water tower. A few of the agents got interested and came up behind O'Hare and Imperial to look at the thing.
O'Hare finally said something, but it wasn't in English. Though just from the tone, I'd swear it was "Jesus Christ Almighty."
Fifty-five questions later, I'd told them about Dobbins and the celebration he'd seen at the discount shoe store while ordering the New Year's keg. I'd told them about the soaped-over windows the day after New Year's. I'd told them about me and Dobbins going down there, though I called it "to see what we could see" instead of "breaking and entering."
I was trying for a give-and-take thing that wasn't really going my way. They thanked me with necktie politeness, and Imperial finally gave me "The Speech" on please don't break and enter. I ignored it.
I said, "Right now, I'm watching over three kids who have a very strange flu. If there's anything I should know to keep them out of harm's way, I'm sure you'll tell me."
The room was quiet and even more awkward. "I'm sure you'll tell me," I fought on as I grabbed the doorknob.
I figured if there was nothing wrong, one of them—Imperial or O'Hare or my neighbor of fifteen years—would have said som
ething like "Not to worry; we promise there is nothing to tell."
But I left under the same weight of silence that I'd first walked into.
TWENTY-TWO
OWEN EBERMAN
MONDAY, MARCH 4, 2002
6:42 P.M.
SOMETIMES I THINK I don't want to see people, but I can be wrong. A smile crossed my face on seeing Moran and Dempsey and Tannis come through that door. I could have done without Dempsey's stupid remark, "What are you guys doing here?"
But Cora still looked absorbed in her mother's tape. I don't think she even heard Dempsey.
I countered his rudeness with "What're you guys doing here?"
"We spied," Dempsey confessed, looking more proud than ashamed. "Or, I should say Tannis spied."
Tannis bowed. "Dobbins was just having a convo in the kitchen with Dr. O'Dell. And he was leaving a message for some other doctor to come over here because you three are here with some ... flu thing. What do you have? The Ebola virus?"
"Hopefully, all we have is my brother being his usual cautious self. Hopefully...," I repeated, and pushed the smile across my face again. "Rain's had the thing for five days, and it's now down to a stuffed-up nose."
"Well, I ain't gonna French-kiss you." Moran shrugged. "If it's so contagious, how come more people don't have it?"
"No clue," I told him honestly. "Put it this way: If it was highly contagious, I don't see how you guys wouldn't catch it from me before Cora and her mom would."
"We don't care what you have," Tannis said. "You're stuck with us. Food?"
I realized he'd brought in a couple of grocery bags and laid them on Cora's dining room table. I didn't need the smells wafting out to tell me that it was something chicken.
"If it's bland," I said.
"I'm starved!" Rain added, and Cora just kept staring at the TV, engrossed with the foul-language speech her mother was giving this Jeremy person again. I didn't call her out of her daze.