“Clearly you are not restrained by a sense of decency.”
“Clearly, neither are you,” he said with more bitterness and energy than he’d intended. “Of course, none of this publicity will be necessary if we have your cooperation.”
“Oh, now we get to the point of all this. Now we get down and dirty. My cooperation in what?”
“In our ongoing inquiries into the activities of Abukir.”
She pushed the stack of photographs raggedly toward him. “Am I free to go?” she asked quietly. “Or do I spend the night here?” Her dignity was intact but strength was ebbing from her, switch-flow in full flood. He thought she might be in shock. He was aroused.
“Abukir must be quite a fuck,” he said. “You don’t even cheat when he’s AWOL.”
Leela met his eyes levelly.
“I regret,” Cobb said, “that we can’t say the same for him.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“Perhaps you’d like to see some more photos?”
“If you had any, you’d have shown them.”
Cobb studied the clenching of her interlaced hands. Her white knuckles made his body heat rise. “I’m saving them,” he said. The words were husky, like a declaration of love. “A little treat for the next time we meet.”
Slowly, he pulled off his glove and laid it on the table between them. She stared first at the glove and then at the thumb of his left hand, the nail of which was deeply scored by a blackened groove. Their eyes met and held above the photographs.
“Cobb?” she said uncertainly.
He pulled off the ski mask. He would have liked to fuck her violently.
“Cobb! It
is
you.” Spontaneously she leaned across the table and touched or almost touched his wrist but malaise caught up with her unguarded pleasure and her hand wavered like a bird bucked by an updraft of air. Her body also wavered before curling back into the chair. “I often think about you. I often wonder…”
He met her gaze with intense coldness.
“From Promised Land, you know, the only news…” She looked behind her, as though hearing the click of a shutter. Cobb’s attention returned to his folder. He leafed through photographs, absorbed. He ignored her completely. “My little sister and I—you remember Maggie?—we talk on the phone. I hear your father’s quite frail.” Leela’s voice faltered and fell silent then rallied again. “Would you believe I had a call from Benedict Boykin not long ago? He was in Boston on leave and we met for drinks in Harvard Square. Hadn’t seen him since high school either.”
Cobb extracted a black-and-white image from his folder and played it, without emotion, like an ace.
“I see you knew about that already,” Leela said. She curled into herself the way a sea creature does. She looked smaller. She looked like a sand dollar, Cobb thought. She looked sick. She hugged herself with folded arms to keep herself warm.
Cobb lifted the photograph and held it in front of her face and she saw a man and a woman in joyful embrace, the logo of the Harvard Coop above their heads. The man, who was black, was in uniform. His white teeth flashed. There was a small jagged scar, that showed pale, below his lip. Leela’s chin rested on his shoulder.
“Benedict said you were in the same unit in Iraq.” Her voice sounded strangely drowsy. Cobb believed he could make her skin smolder and blister if he wished. He could make her twist in the wind and float away. Her voice was barely more than a whisper. She could have been talking to herself. “He said you were both with Special Forces.” Cobb focused on the pulse in her neck. “Of course, you would know what he told me.”
Cobb felt slightly and dangerously drunk. He kept his eyes on the hollow above her collar bone. He saw the bleat of a pulse beneath her skin and the way a blue vein throbbed and jumped about. He knew that Benedict would say as little as possible about Iraq. Benedict played by the book. He reported only to his superior officer, Cobb Slaughter.
Sir, I have to report, sir, that gross irregularities are taking place.
Gross irregularities, sergeant?
Yes, sir.
You have observed these irregularities yourself?
Yes, sir.
Are you making charges, sergeant?
I am reporting incidents, sir.
If charges were to be laid, sergeant, would any kind of evidence exist?
Some of the men have taken videos, sir. And there are photographs.
Have you seen these photographs?
Yes, sir. Whenever I could, I confiscated them. There’s a stack in this envelope, sir.
I see. Thank you, sergeant. Leave the photographs with me. The matter will be investigated.
“Benedict said you were awarded a Bronze Star in Afghanistan. That’s wonderful, Cobb.”
Cobb was absorbed in the photographs of Benedict Boykin and Leela. He picked up the magnifying glass and studied segments of the images closely.
“Benedict heard…” Leela’s voice was faltering. “After Iraq, he heard you’d left the army.”
“Is it true what they say about black cocks?”
Leela asked quietly: “Why can’t you look at me, Cobb?”
He did then. He held her gaze icily until bewilderment made her drop her eyes. Then he pushed up one sleeve to reveal the tattooed snake on his arm.
Don’t Tread on Me.
Leela pondered the rattler. It might have been a trick question or a rune. “I don’t understand,” she said. “Is it possible you feel I’ve trodden on you, Cobb?”
Cobb placed one more photograph in front of her: two young men were talking in front of a mosque. The sign at the street corner was Prospect Street. “You’ll recognize your lover, Mikael Abukir,” Cobb said, pointing. “The other one is Jamil Haddad, yesterday’s subway bomber. Which would make your
lover, at the very least, material witness for an atrocity and possibly accessory to mass murder. Which, in turn, makes your mathematical transcriptions of your lover’s musical compositions of interest to us.”
He smiled and walked out of the room and locked the door behind him and left her there.
A
FTERWARDS
.
After the night spent talking to Cobb Slaughter…
The black car stopped but Leela could not open her door. She would not ask. She waited. Through the thick glass partition, she saw the driver’s hand move, heard the click of central unlocking. She opened her door and stepped into wet forsythia. The blossoms were massed on the sidewalk, thick as pillows. This seemed of immense but obscure significance as she stood there, uncertain, the car door open.
The driver did not cut the engine, but his window rolled silently down. “Close the door quietly,” he ordered. He did not move on.
Leela wrote a question mark in wet petals with the toe of her shoe. The brick paving, exposed and interrogated, gave no answer. With her foot, Leela prodded at the heave of the sidewalk over tree roots: she knew this particular tree, this sprawling beech, this humped wave of brick. She had walked these undulating cobbles yesterday and the day before. She had walked this street day after day for several years.
You cannot step into the same street twice, she thought.
She was several blocks from her Cambridge apartment. She had not been asked for directions. The driver, not Leela, had chosen this stopping point. It was at precisely this spot that a
different driver had forced her into a different car the night before. Her digital watch said 5.20 a.m. It was still dark. The purring car had not moved. Under the streetlight, she studied its license plate. The registration was Massachusetts. There was a bumper sticker displaying the coiled image of a rattlesnake and beneath it were the words of the early South Carolina flag:
Don’t Tread on Me.
This could be a bad dream, Leela thought. She considered possible tests. She bent over and touched the black outline of the snake. Immediately, the driver got out of the car. “What are you doing?” he demanded.
“Nothing,” Leela said. “I was just wondering what your bumper sticker meant.”
“It means we bite.” The driver laughed with a short barking sound. He wore dark glasses. He wore a cap pulled low over his eyes. “When your boyfriend asks where you’ve been,” he said, “remember that we’ll be listening in.” He got back into the car. “Now that you’ve followed your boyfriend to the mosque, you’re radioactive. Every Boston incident, from last year’s Prudential bombing to this week’s big bang at Park Street, has been traced to that mosque. Think about it. We’ve got you both under surveillance.”
The car moved off without a sound.
Leela stirred the wet forsythia petals with her foot as though this might reveal the laws of what to do next. She felt dizzy. She reached for the tree and leaned against it. Black circles floated across her vision in small clusters and the edges of things were frayed. There were odd jags of light, like fireflies or fizzy atmospheric disturbances, off to one side. She blinked rapidly and turned but the fireflies turned too. The street looked utterly foreign. She did not recognize any of the houses. It was as though something had changed overnight. It was as though the
laws of mathematics had defaulted. She could no longer remember which apartment was hers but she thought that if she started to walk, she would find it. She thought that if she could re-establish a fixed point in her life—a known intersection, perhaps, or the routine comfort of one of her classes, or a debate on prime number theory—she could calculate her angle of deviance from the norm.
She walked until an outline of sunrise touched the trees and then she recognized a STOP sign, she identified the oak that lightning had struck two years ago, she saw a set of stairs leading up to a front porch, the door to a triple-decker house, the third-floor gable that was her living-room window.
When she let herself into her apartment, Mishka stirred and sat up in bed, half awake. “You’re safe,” he said. “Thank God for that.”
Am I safe? Leela wondered.
“Where have you been?” he wanted to know.
“I don’t know how to answer that,” she said. She moved slowly around the bedroom, running her fingers along the windowsill, opening and closing the Venetian blind, probing the potted fern. Where were the microphones? Where was the digital eye?
“I was afraid something dreadful—” Mishka said. “I had a horrible dream.”
“Really?” She did not want to look at him. She did not want to talk. Cobb Slaughter’s final photograph still assaulted her: two men in front of the mosque.
You’ll recognize your lover…The other man is Jamil Haddad, yesterday’s subway bomber.
“Where were you?” Mishka asked. “Why didn’t you call?”
Leela opened the sash window and leaned out into the dawn. She could smell late hyacinths. She felt Mishka behind her, trailing a sheet. He pressed against her, naked, and kissed
her on the nape of the neck. She felt her body seal itself up to ward him off.
“It was one of those dreams where you hope you’re dreaming and you prove to yourself you’re awake,” he said. He ran his fingers through her hair. He covered her neck with kisses. “I was so afraid.” He bit her shoulder.
“Don’t,” Leela said. She moved away from him, into the kitchen.
Mishka followed. He left the sheet on the bedroom floor. Leela was conscious of his sweet-smelling skin, of the hair that fell across his eyes, of his erection. She would not look.
“What happened?” he demanded. “What’s wrong?”
“Isn’t that what I should be asking you?”
“What do you mean?”
“I think you know,” she said.
She felt Mishka’s withdrawal like a drop in temperature and she felt instantly, paradoxically, bereft. He said nothing. She realized how rarely they needed words. They were more like a convergence of atmospheric fronts: they made a new and turbulent weather.
“Are you leaving me?” he asked quietly.
She stared at him. I have no idea who he is, she thought. I have no idea if he means what he says. She filled a mug with water and opened the microwave door. She pressed the one-minute tab. She studied the shelf of teabag packets with great concentration: lime blossom, chamomile, green tea, ginseng, mint.
“Something’s happened,” he said. “Something’s changed.”
Indeed
, Leela thought. She took her cup from the microwave oven. “Tell me your dream,” she said.
Mishka left the room and picked up the sheet and wrapped it around himself. He closed the bedroom door. After a little
while, she heard his violin, low and plaintive, and the apartment was billowing with Gluck:
What will I do without Eurydice
? Extravagant sorrow fogged the kitchen and leaked under the door and down the hall. Leela steeped the chamomile sachet in boiling water.
The music changed.
Now he had switched from the violin to the oud: a low intense plea, a ghazal love song, or else one of Rūmī’s mystical poems, one of Mishka’s own settings, a hymn of abject religious devotion which nevertheless sounded erotic. What seduced Leela was not the mood but the convoluted math: it was like Western notation on mescaline, a whirling dervish of song. Now the music was mournful again. Now it wept.
The chamomile teabag steamed with exasperation, but when Leela moved jerkily, angrily, hot mug in hand, to pull open the bedroom door, she saw that Mishka was sitting huddled on the bed like a child with a stomach ache. She saw the violin case in its usual place: on top of the bookshelf. She saw the big-bellied oud propped in the corner of the room. She saw his totemic objects in his hands: the two diptyches, the two hinged frames of family portraits. They were as much a fetish as his instruments.
She had intended to say:
Why do you have to play tragic hero to the hilt? And why do you keep playing Gluck and those neurotic hymns on the oud? And why do you go to that mosque in Central Square?
She blinked, disoriented, and asked instead: “Where’s your violin?”
“My violin?”
“I thought I heard you playing.”
“I wasn’t playing.”
I am having hallucinations, Leela thought with panic. And last night?
A wave of chamomile tea splashed the floor.
Mishka stared at the puddle. “You’ve spilled your tea.”
I’m no longer sure of what’s real, Leela thought. I’m contaminated. Mishka’s stories have seeped into my brain. I’m having his fantasies.
We kept Uncle Otto in the attic
, he had told her so often
. He played for us after dinner every night
.
Was he real
? she would ask.
Extremely real. I had to tiptoe around him all through childhood.
And then Leela would lick the chord calluses on Mishka’s fingers, one by one.
You’re crazy
, she would murmur.
I’ve always been partial to crazy
.
You’ve hit the jackpot
, he would tell her.
Did you dream Uncle Otto up
?
I sometimes think Uncle Otto dreamed me
.
Leela had heard theme and variations. She had heard Uncle Otto doubling and tripling himself in descant, in ornamentation, in counterpoint bass. She had almost heard Uncle Otto play. She studied Mishka warily: the way he sat hunched on the bed, the way the violin and the oud were not in his hands.
“I heard you playing,” she said stubbornly.
“You’ve spilled your tea.”
“So this dream then.” She was irritable and aggressive. “This dream that you had last night.”
“It was a nightmare. No, worse than that. A night terror.”
“Well?”
“We were coming home from Symphony Hall—”
“
We
. Who’s we?”
“You and I. We were coming home on the T. We’d just left the Park Street stop.”
He put one diptych back on the dresser and pressed the other one—the one that displayed his Hungarian grandparents and his great-uncle Otto—against his forehead.
“Yes?” she prodded, annoyed.
“There was a sound like a bass string snapping and the train lurched like a shot animal. It was an explosion.”
Leela looked at him sharply then looked away. She moved to the window and set her mug on the sill. “There
was
an explosion yesterday, as you well know.”
“Of course I know. In my dream, it was close, the next car, but
our
car reared up like a horse and we all slid into a writhing heap like eels. It was horrible.”
“They’ve identified the bomber’s body,” Leela said. She looked at him now. She kept her eyes on his. “He’s a Harvard grad student. Engineering, but apparently he audits a course in music. He has connections to that mosque in Central Square.”
“What?” Mishka snapped the diptych shut and pushed it under his pillow. “How do you know that?” He looked wild-eyed. He began to feel for the chords on an unseen violin. He was agitated. His fingers moved on invisible frets at frantic speed. “How do you know they’ve identified the bomber?”
“I heard it on the news.”
“No you didn’t,” he said. “There were no details last night. Not even online. I went looking.”
“Why?”
“Why what?”
“Why’d you go looking?”
Mishka’s fingers reached for the chords of a turbulent passage. In Gluck, no doubt. He was playing the moment of the snakebite perhaps, the first death of Eurydice. His right hand swept the bow back and forth, his head was bent low. He rocked himself on the bed like a frightened child.
She did not understand why the rocking made her so angry. “Why are you doing that?” she asked.
Mishka finished whatever passage he was hearing in his head and laid his ghostly instrument down. “I got a call from that store on Tremont yesterday,” he said. “The one across from the Common by the Park Street stop. My sheet music arrived. I went in after teaching my class, picked it up and got the next train back. I’d just got home when I heard the news. I kept flipping channels. How many were killed? Where were
you
? I called your office and got no answer. I was afraid you’d already left. I was afraid you were on that train. I wanted to know where you were. I wanted to know which train…And I wanted to know how close I’d been to death.”
“How close were you?”
“I must have been on the train before the death train. What if I’d missed that one…? And I almost did. It was such a close thing. The doors were closing when I got on the platform. I could have been dead.”
“But you had no idea.”
“Death breathing hot air in my face. I’m still—” He felt his cheeks. “I feel as though I shouldn’t be alive. And then I was terrified that
you
were on that train.”
“And you didn’t hear that they identified the bomber’s body?”
“No! There was nothing. I kept flipping channels. I went online. Nothing.”
“But you were expecting—”
“I didn’t know what to expect. When I couldn’t get hold of you, I was too shaky for anything except my violin. I played for hours. I must have played till I fell asleep.”
“And fell into your nightmare.”
Mishka’s fingers were frantic, racing across frets that were not there. “The train was full of street musicians, scores of
them—in my dream, I mean—all playing cellos or basses or percussion.” He jumped up and paced the small bedroom. He took his violin case from the bookcase and lifted the instrument out. The
actual
instrument, Leela noted. “There were drums, tympani, cymbals.”
“Must have been noisy.”
“I have the sound of the whole thing in my head. It’s writing itself. I’m calling it
Incident in a Nightmare.
” Leela listened to the low violent notes. “It was pitch dark. There was a meteor coming at us down the tunnel.” Leela closed her eyes. Mishka’s music came thudding down the tracks, the chords sharp and discordant, as though the strings of the violin had snapped. “And then
boom
! Arms and legs everywhere, it was like wrestling an octopus, and gouts of blood. I couldn’t breathe. I kept hearing your voice, I kept hearing you calling
Mishka, Mishka!
but all I could see was a leg with your sandal on it. I grabbed at your foot and I pulled, but what came free was your leg. Just your leg. I woke and you weren’t in bed. I was terrified.”
“And then you realized it was just a dream and went back to sleep.”
Mishka went to his desk and scribbled notes onto the lined staves at a furious pace. “What?” he asked, distracted. “Sleep? Are you kidding? I was calling your office and leaving messages from the moment I got home. I was calling your cell phone.” He was blacking in notes with a lead pencil, feverish and intent. “I kept calling your cell. I spent the rest of the night working on this.” He finished setting down the sounds that he heard in his head—“Got it!” he said—and then went to her and took the cup of tea from her hand and set it down. “Why didn’t you answer?” He did not wait for her to speak before closing his mouth over hers. Leela felt her body turn soft, she felt herself
yield and respond. Then, as his tongue met hers, she imagined the blink of a shutter. She saw the two of them in a black-and-white photograph in someone’s folder: Mishka’s buttocks and thighs in the glow of the streetlight, herself leaning into him with want.