Due Preparations for the Plague by Janette Turner Hospital Page A

critical mass has been reached, that the accumulation of data has hooked up isolated circuits, that currents are fizzing around the elaborate latticework and traplines of her research, sparks jumping gaps, missing information being sucked into the black hole of her intense need to know.
    “Um … it’s Lowell,” he says.
    Samantha holds her breath.
    “This isn’t easy,” he says.
    “I know.” She can barely speak, and an inner catechism warns: Don’t breathe. Don’t frighten him off. “Not for any of us. It’s like picking a scab.”
    “Yes,” he says. “Yes, that’s what it’s like.” That is exactly what it is like, he thinks. As soon as he starts to think about the hijacking, fresh bleeding begins.
    It is strange how a silence can suck at two people and how it can vibrate between them and how much information can be sent and received through the mere sound of air moving in and out of lungs. And because something is already understood between the two of them, that the thing itself —the blown-up plane, the horrible deaths—is beyond comprehension and beyond language, because of this, they do not feel any awkwardness in a prolonged silence.
    Samantha waits.
    “In my case,” Lowell says, “the death was … the death itself … the death of my mother was not the major thing.” His breath, turning labored, is loud in Samantha’s ear. “Look,” he says. “I don’t think I can manage this, after all. I don’t think I can talk about it.”
    Samantha listens to the plosive beat, rapid and uneven, of air entering and leaving his lungs. She risks saying, “Is that because of Avi Levinstein?”
    Lowell makes a small violent sound—he is hyperventilating—and Samantha is afraid he will hang up.
    “How do you know about Levinstein?” he asks at last.
    “I know his son. I only just learned that the woman Avi Levinstein took with him to Paris was your mother, so I know this must be a painful—”
    Lowell hangs up. A week passes and then he calls again.
    “You have no idea how angry I was,” he tells Sam without preamble. “I wanted both of them to die.” His voice is faint, and Samantha has to strain to hear. “To make a wish like that and have it come true. Do you see what that makes me?”
    Samantha says nothing.
    “Do you understand what that makes me?” he persists.
    “I understand what you fear it makes you. But it was natural for you to be angry—” She can almost hear Lowell twisting in the fires of his own savage guilt. “Look,” she says, “I don’t know if this might help, or if you’ll want to do this. And I’m not at all sure he’ll want to do it either. But I know Jacob Levinstein well. He’s a phoenix. I mean, he’s one of us, the children who survived. We have an Internet club. We call ourselves phoenixes because we rose up out of the ashes, so to speak. Jacob’s the son of Avi—”
    Lowell makes a strangled sound, somewhere between laughter and pain. “Are you crazy?”
    “He feels pretty much the same way as you do, I think. It might clear the air for both of you if you—”
    “I didn’t call to talk about my mother.”
    Samantha suddenly wonders if Lowell’s mother was one of those who caressed her as she passed, when the hijackers were pushing the children along the aisles, when the children were being herded, prodded with rifles, when the rough hands of gunmen slapped them, when the gunmen stuffed rags into sobbing mouths. Samantha finds herself wondering which hands might have belonged to Lowell’s mother, because hands had come from everywhere as the children passed, hands stroking them, touching, giving blessing, sending messages that she bears in her body still.
    “I’m really calling,” Lowell says more calmly, “because you said you had information about my father—”
    “It may not be the kind of information that you want.”
    “I’m sure it won’t be,” Lowell says. “But you said there was a woman in Paris who knew my father, who