LITMIR.BIZ

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bloodshot eyes, and what I don’t know yet, I’ll find out.

      “For days, I never turned the TV off,” her aunt says.

      “You’ve never told me this before.”

      “You’ve never wanted to talk about it.”

      “Now I do,” Samantha says. “Tell me about watching us on TV.”

      “I didn’t sleep. I ate in front of the set. But I never saw you. I never saw any of you; at least, not while you were on the plane. When the children were being off-loaded, I watched for you like a hawk. You were almost last. I was afraid you weren’t going to get off.”

      “I didn’t want to. They had to push me.”

      “The camera got you in close-up at the top of the chute. I’ll never forget your eyes.” Lou touches her niece’s cheek and then throws her arms around Sam and hugs her tightly. “I’d been so afraid,” she says. “I burst into tears when I saw you. I couldn’t stop.”

      Samantha disengages herself and moves away. “It was so hot on the plane. It was so hot. We couldn’t breathe.” She feels feverish. “Do you have something cold? Iced tea or something?” She fans herself with one of her aunt’s magazines. The paper feels damp. “Don’t you have air-conditioning?”

      Her aunt is startled. In October? she does not say. “I’ve got the heat set low, Sam, because we’re supposed to be conserving energy, but I can turn it right off, if you like. The mayor will thank me. In Manhattan, there’s always risk of outages.”

      Samantha feels faint from the heat, but when Lou lowers the thermostat, she starts to shiver. “Can you turn it up again?” she asks. She can hear a baby crying fretfully. “Doesn’t that get on your nerves?” she asks. “Is it from next door?”

      “I can’t hear anything,” Lou says.

      “It sounds like Matthew.” On the plane, her baby brother’s crying went on and on and on. Her mother crooned to him and put her lips against his burning cheeks, but he wouldn’t stop. “He had a heat rash,” Samantha says. “He’d drunk all his formula and they wouldn’t give us any—”

      “Don’t,” her aunt says. “Samantha, please don’t.”

      Don’t worry, there’s a blind curve just ahead, Samantha could have told her. She cannot finish any of her stories, they are full of holes. As for the connecting tissue: she cannot tell if she remembers the thing itself, or the newsreel clips, or the events as she has pored over them in previously classified documents, obtained through much diligence and cunning on her part. A lot of the past comes back at her in print, with lines and half lines and whole paragraphs blocked out.

       Approximate time frame known XXXXXXXXXXXX anticipated strike at major airport XXXXXXXXXX Paris or London XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX flight bound for New York City, passengers Americans and Jews XXXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXX XXXXXX XXX XXXXXX XXXX codes broken, connections engineered XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX sting operation, code name Black Death, controlled damage XXXXXXXXXXXX XXXXXXXXXXXX Salamander in charge of operations XXXXX XXXXXXXX XXXXX XXXX XXX XXXX

      That is where she met Salamander. In a document. It was a case of obsession at first sight.

      But Salamander’s number is unlisted.

      Your call cannot go through as dialed, the recordings say. Please check your information and try again. This is the answering service, a voice advises. Please leave a message and we will get back to you. That is not our department, people say. That person is no longer with us. That happened before our time. All matters falling within the purview of national security are beyond the scope of our … We have no records, we are unable to confirm, we cannot release that information, we cannot be answerable for acts of God, acts of terrorism, acts of double agents, acts of rogue elements of foreign powers, acts of war.

      Rogue agent, she reads in other documents, following Salamander’s trail. Salamander to negotiate with Sirocco XXXXXXXXXXXX arrangements for payment to be made in XXXXXXXXXXXX Sirocco dangerous and unreliable but usable XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX loose cannon, Salamander warns, but as rogue agents go, we can use for Black Death XXXXXXXXXX backstairs contacts in the palaces and has usable information on the princes that not even XXXXXXXXXXXXXXX

      Sometimes people Samantha is talking to thin out into block capitals and blacked-out spaces before her eyes. At other times, images with torn edges, scraps of them, flicker without warning across the screen of her mind: butt of machine gun, severed arm, child on inflatable slide, gas masks (bug-eyed), breathing snouts. She slaps at them feverishly, she brushes them away, but they dart and sting. Her dream-films are always jump-cut. They do not add up. When she and Jacob—with whom she first collided at the bottom of an airplane chute, with whom she huddled on a camp cot in Germany—when she and Jacob find someone, when they track down some new link, they treat the pieces like chips from a precious mosaic—from Byzantium say, or Pompeii or Ravenna—from some lost world, fabulous and perhaps impossible to reconstruct. Samantha searches for fragments of cobalt, hunting for the child in the forget-me-not outfit, but the blue notes always disappear. She and Jacob piece together faces but their edges are never sharp and they drift into fog. The task gives them vertigo.

      They are inside us, Jacob tells her. We could find them if we concentrated long enough. The brain is a massive retrieval system, he insists, a mainframe of electronic impulses. Everything is there, he assures her, if we could nudge the right nerve ends. He rakes his fingers through his hair and across his skull. He clasps hanks of his curls and pulls as though pulling will give relief. I have a crowd in my head, he says.

      “I can’t put my baby brother’s face back together,” Sam tells her aunt. “I’ve tried. I can feel him in my arms. I have certain kinds of physical memory that are quite intense, but not a visual one. I can remember the weight of him, and the sound of his crying, and the fever coming off him, and the way his skin felt bumpy like a plastic bubble-sheet used for packing, but when I look, he doesn’t have a face.”

      Her aunt straightens a photograph in the album. “Please don’t do this, Sam.”

      “Believe me,” Sam tells her, “I’m working on improving the ending. We’re all working on it. Jacob’s migraines are getting so bad, the medication can’t help him anymore.”

      “Who is Jacob?”

      “Jacob Levinstein. He’s one of us.”

      “One of …?” Lou’s eyes widen. She closes the photo album. She seems distressed. She seems angry. She moves away from Sam as though Sam might be infectious. “I would have thought,” Lou says in a strained voice, “that contact … that it would exacerbate …” She hugs the album to her chest. “I read somewhere,” she says reproachfully, “that survivors of the Titanic avoided each other. Reporters tried to arrange reunions, but survivors resisted. I found that easy to understand.”

      It is easy to understand, Samantha thinks, especially for the survivors, especially for the children of Air France 64, but the kind of intense connection that her lot shares—physical proximity is irrelevant—is not something Sam is likely to discuss. “We don’t care to be circus acts for the media,” she tells her aunt. “But we tend to link up. There’s a website now, and we find each other. We need to do it, the same way that war vets do.”

      “A website.” Lou paces from one window to another, the photo album pressed against her chest like a shield. “This is amazing to me, Samantha. Of course I can see … when I think about it, I can see how necessary, how inevitable …”

      “It’s just that there are things I don’t know,” Samantha pleads, “and they drive me …” You have to be extremely careful, Jacob warns, about what you reveal. “The gaps keep me awake sometimes,” she says. “That’s all. Well, they keep me awake a lot, actually. I hoped you might fill in some blanks.”

      Lou’s hand is shaking. Lou is Samantha’s mother’s sister and Sam knows everything and nothing about her.

      “For

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