Due Preparations for the Plague. Janette Turner Hospital

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СКАЧАТЬ the crowd. “Ahh,” she says languidly. “That feels better.” There is a thin scatter of laughter as men reach for the floating sleeves and then a heightened attentiveness that even in the dark she can feel. She unbuttons her blouse very slowly. From backstage, a riff of cool jazz rises like mist. “No, I don’t sing,” she says. “I’m the stand-up comic.”

      In one quick move, she steps out of blouse and skirt. Underneath, she is wearing a filthy sleeveless undershirt and gray flannel long johns from a Salvation Army bin. “I’m a bag lady,” she says. “I live a few intersections from the Capitol. You know that crossover point where the property taxes plummet and there’s a kind of sea change in the type of human being you see? Someone offered me twenty bucks to strip while the trumpeter pours the spit out of his horn. Throw in a meal and a bed, I told them, and it’s a deal. So here I am.

      “Now the question is,” she murmurs into the mike, stepping down off the stage and feeling her way between the tables, “the question is: whose bed is it going to be? Who’s going to be the lucky man?” She taps this man and that on the shoulder. “Not you, not you, not you,” she says. There is laughter at each table as she passes. “I’m rather particular,” she says, “about the men whose bed I’ll crawl into. I’m partial to the smell of power. Well, it’s the local aphrodisiac in this town, isn’t it? Can’t get up without it.”

      As faces loom out of the candlelight, Samantha sniffs at them with elaborate show. Sometimes she sees one of her professors from Georgetown U, but not often. It’s more a hangout for congressmen, senators, lobbyists, publicists, Pentagon brass, the whole Capitol Hill tribe. “This man,” she says, tapping him on the shoulder, and suddenly the spot swings toward them and highlights a well-known face, “this man has more government secrets tucked into his jockey shorts than you have bees in your honeysuckle. But we’ve got our little secrets here too.” And the spot moves slightly to bathe in white light the pillowy-lipped young woman at his side. She is expensively dressed—perhaps wrapped is a better word—in something clingy and silver. “Tinfoil,” Samantha announces, crumpling a little of the cloth in her hand. The metallic sound of foil comes from the speakers. People laugh. “Luckily for our patrons,” Samantha says, “we don’t allow cameras in here. If we did, they might have to pay dearly for their pleasures.” The spot lingers on the bare shoulders of the young woman and pans along the slit that runs from the hem of her skirt to thigh-high. “Anyway …” Samantha pauses dramatically, and the spot turns back to the senator’s face. “I’m sure he’s paid enough for her already.” Much laughter, as the spot and Samantha move on.

      She weaves between tables, she moves between dark and light. Each stretch of dark is immense. She slides her foot forward on the tiled floor and feels for the void. It can open up anywhere with no more than a second’s warning. Sometimes she has to steady herself by catching hold of a chair back or someone’s shoulder. She believes that Salamander may be present. He is her compass and her magnetic North Pole. She will find him. She believes she will know him by his smell. She has fantasies of causing Salamander pain, and when he is screaming, she will make him lead her to Sirocco, because Sirocco may have been the one who lit the fuse. But both of them knew, both of them planned, and the knowing is not something that Sam will forgive. “Halloween was a week ago,” she says, “but it’s always Halloween here, isn’t it? The place is always full of spooks. Trick or treat, that’s the question. Who’s the spook of the week?

      “Not you, not you, not you,” she says, tapping shoulders as she passes by. “When the lights go out in Washington, the powerful play musical secrets and musical beds. Did you hear the one about the guy in Intelligence who made his own lie and went to bed with it? Gave birth to an international incident but the CIA and the NSA pressured him to put it up for adoption. It grew up to be a full-sized war and then—because this is the way things go these days—it went looking for its birth father. There were blood tests, DNA, the whole works. Everything pointed to someone high up in Intelligence, who denied all on the grounds that he never fucked with the lie of the land. Turned out he was a double agent so they tripled him and packed him off to Pakistan and arranged for another double agent to accidentally on purpose bump him off.”

      This is the way it goes. Samantha loves the nervousness of the laughter. She gets high on it. “Who’s going to make the honor roll tonight?” she croons. She likes to tantalize. The spotlight roams and picks out faces here and there. “All sinners together, isn’t this cozy?” she asks. “All in the same boat. It’s like being crammed into the same hijacked plane.

      “You know,” she confides, “I only go to bed with men powerful enough to have code names. I went to bed once with a man whose code name was Goliath, but he was too much of a Philistine for my taste. Another time, I had sex with Arctic Fox, but it left me cold. And then there was Salamander, whoosh, what a slitherer, what a firecracker, comes like a rocket. I had to turn the hose on him, but it didn’t douse his flame for one second. That guy is burning, burning, burning, first cousin to a desert wind. Keep your fire extinguisher handy when Salamander’s around because he knows about explosions before they come, and he knows where the hot sirocco blows.

      “Did you hear the one about the former head of the CIA who made a deal with bin Laden? ‘Look,’ he says to bin Laden, ‘it’s the year 2000, and we know you’ve got a millennial itch. You need global publicity and global sympathy. We need to nail your ass. Neither of us can make a move, because we know everything you plan to do before you do it, and you know every countermove we plan to take. We’re both stalemated. So here’s a proposal. How about we bankroll a movie, Getting Osama, with a look-alike actor? In the movie, your cave stronghold is infiltrated by Bruce Willis and Harrison Ford. Your guys catch them. Our guys survive barbaric Islamic persuasion. They get their hands cut off, then their ears. They don’t talk. They escape and blow your compound and the entire Taliban army to smithereens. In the movie, only your little son survives the blast, and Harrison Ford gives him his pack of baseball cards and takes him back to California. When your son asks Sammy Sosa for his autograph, there’s not a dry eye in the house. Your little boy becomes an icon like Elian Gonzalez. Think of the public relations coup. As far as global opinion is concerned, depending on political allegiance, of course, you die a tragic hero or you got what was coming to you. Either way, the violence ends, the famine ends, the suffering ends, and the whole world loves your little son.’

      “‘What’s the catch?’ bin Laden wants to know.

      “‘The catch is, we film on location in Afghanistan.’”

      And so it goes, and so it goes.

      Even by candlelight, there are men who murmur comments into handheld dictaphones. But stand-up comics are like jesters in the court of medieval kings. They can take liberties. They can get away with murder, so to speak. They can make fools of those who walk in the corridors of power, and the powerful love them for it. The powerful court them. They offer proposals and enticements. They seek occasions to compile a photographic dossier in case the need for future blackmail should arise.

      “My dear,” a silver-haired gentleman says, stroking Samantha’s thigh. “What a wickedly delicious mind you have. May I buy you a drink?”

      (Will you walk into my parlor? says the spider to the fly.

      There’s a microphone behind me and a hidden camera eye.)

      “You may buy me anything you please,” Samantha says, low and sultry, making sheep’s eyes and sitting on his lap.

      “Excuse me,” some clumsy lout says, lurching against her. She is doused in ice cubes and scotch, and the drunken bungler catches hold of her wrist.

      “Sam,” he says, low and intense, “are you out of your mind?”

      “Jacob,” she murmurs, her lips СКАЧАТЬ