He forced his neck muscles to work, he turned his head till he stared upward. The man still stood there, huge and dark against the morning sky, head turning back and forth, looking for something more, something more.
“Help.” His voice was a croak, it was scarcely a voice at all. “Help me.”
The man looked down, as though surprised to see him there. “Yes, of course,” he said, with great gentleness, and came down to one knee. He leaned forward, eyes soothing, arm outstretched. His large warm comforting hand moved downward over Joshua’s face, and Joshua Hardwick exhaled his last breath.
39
Susan awoke again this morning in Andy’s arms, and again this morning it was the most blissful possible way she could imagine to come awake. Especially this morning. Of all times, this morning.
This was the day after her FBI interview. Identification of only two of the band of insane terrorists who had taken over the Green Meadow Nuclear Power Plant upstate had so far been made, but one of them was Grigor! Susan hadn’t been able to believe it at first — not humorous, sensible, calm, inoffensive Grigor — and even when she’d come to accept it she hadn’t realized what it meant for her. She hadn’t thought about the fact that she was, after all, the person who had brought Grigor to the United States.
Yesterday morning, she and Andy had been eating their minimal breakfasts together — coffee, orange juice, English muffins — and watching a special report on Today about the siege at the nuclear plant, when the doorbell rang. Well, no; Andy had been watching the report, with that intense interest he sometimes displayed and which she found so impressive, as though he were some incredibly vast energy system harnessed just for her, and she had been ignoring the television set to gaze around instead in quiet satisfaction at how pleasant and appropriate Andy’s possessions looked in her apartment — they’d been living together less than a week, and she was not at all used to it yet — and that was when the doorbell rang.
They frowned at one another, in surprise; nobody ever rang the bell this early in the morning. She said, half whispered, “Who could it be?”
“I’ll bet you,” Andy said, nodding at the TV set, “it has something to do with Grigor.”
So she was already half-prepared when she asked who it was through the intercom and the nasally distorted voice said, “FBI, Miss Carrigan.”
Two of them came up, one white and one black, both male, both about thirty-five, both smooth and affectless, as though they’d perfected their characterizations by watching fictional FBI men on television. They showed identification, and asked both Susan and Andy to do the same, the black one copying down their driver’s license numbers into a small notebook while the white one verified Andy’s guess that the subject of their visit was Grigor Basmyonov.
Susan briefly described how she’d happened to meet Grigor, and how she’d happened to describe his case to her doctor cousin, and at first they seemed satisfied, but then they asked her if she could come down to the FBI office to make a statement. “But I have a job,” she protested, feeling the first flutters of panic. “I should be leaving right now”
“That’s all right,” the black one said. “Any time today. How about four o’clock?”
So that was agreed, and they told her which office to go to in the building, which they said was at 26 Federal Plaza, an address that meant nothing at all to Susan (nor would it have to any other New Yorker). It turned out to be one of those made-up addresses, and to actually be a building on Broadway, downtown, between Thomas and Worth streets.
After they left, Susan said, “You don’t think they think I’m one of them, do you? Andy?”
“Of course not,” Andy assured her. “They just want to know everything they can find out about Grigor, that’s all. Maybe something you tell them can help them negotiate with him.”
“Poor Grigor,” Susan said, thinking again how she’d abandoned him since meeting Andy. “And poor me.”
“It won’t be bad,” he said, stroking her arm, encouraging her. “You’ll just tell them the truth, and that’ll be the end of it.”
“I’ll hate every second I’m down there.”
“I’ll be with you in spirit,” he said, and grinned. “If that helps.”
“It does,” she told him.
And it did.
At work, Susan explained the situation — her co-workers already knew about her connection with the doomed Russian fire fighter, but hadn’t made the link with the terrorist in the nuclear plant — and at four o’clock she kept her appointment.
Those two hours with the FBI agents — not the original pair but three new ones, two of them women, but all with that same impersonality — were grueling and frightening and bewildering, and left her with a terrible case of the shakes. It soon became obvious they didn’t actually suspect her of anything, didn’t believe she was part of some vast conspiracy to bring Grigor Basmyonov to America just so he could run a hijacked nuclear power plant, but they couldn’t help their manner, which kept signaling Susan that she was guilty, she was in their power, her only hope was to confess all and throw herself on their nonexistent mercy.
They asked a million questions, many of them repetitive, and when at last they were finished she was as drained and limp as vegetables that have been used for soup stock. She left 26 Federal Plaza like a shell-shock victim, and there was Andy! Waiting for her, on the sidewalk, on the real world’s Broadway.
“How long have you been here?” she asked, delighted and unbelieving and warmed and restored by the sight of him.
He shrugged it off. “Not long.” But he must have been there for a long time, to be sure he hadn’t already missed her.
She let it go, accepting the gesture for the loving kindness it was, and let him lead her through a restorative evening of a good dinner out, a movie — a comedy this time, called Mysterious Ways — and lovely love back in the apartment.
The word “love” had not passed between them yet. Susan was afraid to say it, afraid it might scare him away, and maybe he too was uncertain how to move the relationship to a deeper level. But that was all right, they had time. All the time in the world.
Waking this morning when the radio alarm started playing its golden oldies — “All things must pass a-way” — finding herself still in his arms, she smiled as she snuggled closer to his chest, their combined warmth in her nose like the aroma of the nest: home. Her eyes closed again. She floated with him in warm space.
He stirred. Sleepily, he mumbled, “Time to get up.”
Oh, well; yes. Moving around, freeing herself from the covers, she rose up onto one elbow and smiled at his grizzly face. His eyes were still half-closed. “Still here, I see,” she said.
His smile was as lazy as she felt. “I don’t disappear that easily,” he said, and tousled her hair.
Ananayel
“I don’t disappear that easily,” I said, and tousled her hair.
But I do, don’t I? Or I will. Or she will, in fact. I’ll still be around, but she’ll disappear very easily indeed.
Per our agreement, she got up first, since she takes longer in the bathroom, and I lay a bit longer in bed, brooding. (Already we are working out these fine points of cohabitation.) But what am I going to do with her, what am I going to do with Susan? It’s absurd, I know it’s absurd, but I want to go on pleasing her, watching her reactions. I have never felt so enjoyably at service before.
I even want to go on inhabiting this body, which, for all its oafish awkwardness, has been serving me well. And the fact is, the way the humans have structured their civilizations, their bodies aren’t even that much of a liability. Chairs, automobiles, restaurants; they have worked out fairly ingenious and even enjoyable ways of overcoming their limitations.