Due Preparations for the Plague by Janette Turner Hospital

Author:Janette Turner Hospital
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Published: 2013-10-15T04:00:00+00:00

3.

Sam tells the taxi not to wait. She buzzes Jacob’s apartment from the lobby and puts her ear to the intercom. She hears nothing. She buzzes again and a crackle of static comes from the panel in the wall. “Jacob?” she says, her lips close to the metal mesh. “It’s Samantha. My flight was canceled. Can I come up?”

Muddled sound comes from the wall.

“Jacob? I hope you can hear me, because I sure can’t hear you. It’s Sam.” A prolonged hum, both high-pitched and raspy, rises from the heavy inner door, and Sam says, “Okay. Thanks. I’m on my way up,” pushing at the door with the bottom of a tissue-swathed bottle of wine. In the hallway, she grimaces at the beige steel elevator panels, both closed. The building is old and the elevators excruciatingly slow. According to the lit monitor, one car is down in the basement garage at Level 2B and seems to be stuck there. The other is descending slowly through the tenth floor, ninth, eighth, seventh, and there it stops. Impatient, Sam opts for the stairs and takes them two at a time. On the third-floor landing, slightly breathless, she pushes UP. The elevator is still at the seventh floor. Sam runs up another flight of stairs. She pushes UP on the fourth-floor landing. The elevator is moving from sixth floor to fifth to fourth. The doors open and a man, coated and scarved, looks out at nothing. He is attached to a dog on a leash.

“Merry Christmas,” Sam says.

“On the contrary.” The man appears to be conversing with his dog. He stares straight ahead and Sam thinks he must be blind, though the dog is not a seeing-eye dog. “I would argue,” he says, picking up an ongoing thread, “that the need for solitude runs deeper. I would say it is the primary thing.” The dog—a small shaggy mutt—trembles and whimpers, barely able to contain a rebuttal.

Sam pushes button 8.

“We’re going down,” the man explains to the dog, but the elevator rises directly to the eighth without stopping.

“Sorry,” Sam says.

“We’re going down.”

“They’re unpredictable.”

“Things devolve,” the man insists. “All things devolve.”

As though the elevator mechanisms are deliberating, as though they are weighing competing rights and claims, the doors quiver for several seconds but fail to move. When they open, the dog bounds into the hallway and the man of necessity follows and looks blankly about. “We are not at street level,” he says reproachfully, his eyes sliding at Sam and away. He is not blind, then, she sees. “The problem,” he tells the dog, “is one of focus.”

Wild barking ensues and changes pitch in an intricate slide: glissando of joy notes; syncopated yaps of confusion; three sharp pips of outrage; then a dying fall through the lower registers of dismay, each full-throated note bouncing and ricocheting and multiplying itself against the walls.

“What the hell is going on?” a voice demands, and 807 opens to the length of a chain. Renaissance music billows out: lutes, viols, shawms, the soft thump of a drum.

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